Harold Smith got stiffly to his feet. He retrieved his battered briefcase from atop a gunmetal file cabinet and locked his office behind him.
He took the stairs to the first floor because he needed the exercise. It was one flight down.
Nodding to the night guard, Smith walked to his reserved space, his shoulders stooped. Thirty years had taken a toll on the ex-CIA bureaucrat who had neither asked for nor wanted the incredible weight placed on his rail-thin shoulders.
Smith tooled his battered station wagon through the lion's-head guarded gates of Folcroft Sanitarium, his briefcase bouncing on the passenger seat beside him.
The summer trees-poplars and elms-filed by like a towering eldritch army on the march. The fresh sea air rushed in through the open windows. It revived Smith's logy brain.
As he coasted into the center of Rye, New York, Smith searched for an open drugstore. His stomach had started to bother him. Some antacid would help. He looked for a chain store. They usually had the generic brands at the cheapest prices.
The briefcase beside him emitted an insistent buzzing. Smith pulled over to the curb and unlatched the case carefully, so as not to trigger the built-in detonation charges.
The lid came up, exposing a portable computer and a telephone receiver. Smith picked this up.
"Yes?" he said, knowing it could only be one of two people, the President of the United States or Remo.
To his relief, it was Remo.
"Hiya, Smitty," Remo said distantly. "Miss me?"
"Remo! Where are you now?"
"Phone booth," Remo said. "One of the old-fashioned ones with a glass door and the rank bouquet of passing winos. I thought they had all been put to sleep-or whatever they do to antique phone booths."
"Remo, it is time you returned home."
"Can't go home." Traffic sounds almost smothered his quiet reply.
"Why not?"
"It's haunted."
"What did you say?"
"That's why I left, Smitty. Everywhere I looked, I saw . . . him."
"You cannot run from the natural grieving process," Smith said firmly. He would be firm with Remo. There was no point in coddling him. He was a grown man. Even if he had suffered a great loss. "Confronting the loss is the first step. Denial only prolongs the pain."
"Smith," Remo said with sudden bitterness, "I want you to write down everything you just told me."
"I will gladly do that."
"Good. Then roll the paper up and cheerfully shove it up your constipated ass."
Smith made no reply. His knuckles whitened on the receiver. He adjusted his striped Dartmouth tie. The hand then drifted to the briefcase computer. He logged on.
"I can't go back to that place," Remo said tightly. "I keep seeing Chiun. I wake up in the middle of the night and he's staring at me, pointing at me like Marley's freaking ghost. I couldn't take it anymore. That's why I left."
"Are you saying that you literally saw Chiun?" Smith asked slowly.
"In the ectoplasm," Remo returned grimly. "It's like he's haunting me. That's why I'm hopping all over the map. I figured if he doesn't know where I am, he can't haunt me anymore."
"And?"
"So far, it's working."
"You can't keep running forever," Smith warned.
"Why not? Before we bought that place, Chiun and I lived out of hotels. We never stayed in one place long enough to break in the furniture. I can get used to the vagabond life again."
"What about the house itself?"
"Sell it," Remo said morosely. "I don't care. Listen, Smitty," Remo added, his voice dropping to a hush like a junkie begging for a fix. "Got anyone you need hit?"
"You promised me you would return after the last . . . er, hit," Smith pointed out as he slowly, carefully input commands into the silent mini-computer.
"I will, I will. I just need something to get me through the night. I'm not sleeping like I used to."
"And you promised you'd return after the hit before that."
"Sure, sure, but-"
"And the one before that," Smith said pointedly.
"How about Mad Ass?" Remo asked suddenly. "I caught him on the late news. He's just begging for it."
"We've been through this," Smith said with a trace of weariness. "That person is off-limits. At least until the President orders otherwise. Our hope is he will be overthrown by internal discontent."
"I could do him so it looks like an accident," Remo said eagerly. "There won't be a mark on him. I swear."
"Too risky. A palace coup would serve American interests in the region much more elegantly."
"I'll organize one," Remo said quickly. "How hard can it be to motivate those camel jockeys?"
"No." Smith's voice was frigid. "The President himself has declared CURE on stand-down in the Irait situation."
"We both know the President doesn't have the power to order you around," Remo said in a wheedling tone. "He can only suggest assignments. Or order you to shut the organization down."
"Which he may do if he learns that CURE's enforcement arm is unwilling to return for debriefing," Smith warned.
"If I do it right, the President will never know it was us." Remo's tone was hopeful.
Smith's retort was flat. "No."
Silence clung to the open line. Smith continued manipulating buttons. Soon he would have a back-trace. In the meantime, he would have to stall for time.
"Remo, are you still there?" he asked in a forced tone.
"What's it to you?" Remo said sourly. "All these years I worked for you, you can't find me a few people worthy of the boneyard."
"My computers are full of them," Smith said. "Regrettably, you caught me as I was driving home."
"Sorry. It's still light here."
Smith smiled tightly. Remo was in either the Pacific or the Mountain time zone. He hoped the back-trace program would not take much longer.
"You know what next Thursday is?" Remo asked, low-voiced.
"No, I do not."
"Chiun's birthday. His hundredth birthday. I had no idea he was so old. He was eighty when I first met him. I always thought of him as being eighty. I expected him to live forever." Remo paused. His voice cracked with his next words. "I guess I wanted him to be eighty forever."
Smith's eyes flicked to his computer screen. Why was it taking so long?
"You still there?" Remo asked suddenly.
"Yes, I am. I was distracted by a-"
"You're not trying to trace this call, are you, Smitty?" Remo asked in a suspicous growl.
Before Smith could answer, he heard a second voice coming over the line.
"Gotta use the phone," it said insolently.
"I'm in the middle of talking to my mother, pal," Remo shot back. "Take it down the street."
"Got to use the phone," the voice repeated, going steely with intent.
Smith's gray eyes narrowed. The screen began signaling "TRACE COMPLETED." The location code was about to appear.
"Smith," Remo said quickly. "Gotta call you back. I think I've found someone to while away a few minutes with."
"Remo, wait!"
The line went dead. It didn't click. It simply went dead.
The back-trace program winked out without reading off the all-important location code.
Frowning, Harold W. Smith closed his briefcase and went into the nearest drugstore. Hang the expense, he thought. He needed a roll of the best antacid tablets money could buy. And he would pay well for it.
Even if it meant spending more than a dollar.
Remo yanked the telephone receiver out by its coaxial cable and offered it to the impatient man with the scraggly Fu Manchu mustache.
"Here," he said, flashing the man a just-trying-to-be-helpful grin.
The man's frown became a glower. He had been hanging around this phone booth, glancing at his watch, for ten minutes. When his pocket pager went off, he impatiently accosted Remo. Since he wore a black silk running suit with red stripes and sniffed as if it were cold, Remo had him pegged as a drug dealer. A lot of them did their business through pay phones and beepers these days.