Remo checked the next ICU room. A child. Not Smith.
"You know you're avoiding arrest?"
"Later," said Remo. The next room was an old man. Then the empty room where Smith had been, and, finally, in the last room in the corridor, a middle-aged man. But not Smith.
"All right, buddy, you're under arrest," said the officer, out of breath from following Remo.
"Good," said Remo, not listening. "Fine." He looked for the nurse. The stairwell was empty. He looked for another nurse. None to be found. In an in tensive care unit, to boot, not one nurse in sight. There was a gray metal swinging door that led to another corridor. More rooms. A maternity ward. No Smith.
"If you don't stop, I'm going to shoot," gasped the perspiring officer. His partner leaned against a wall, catching his breath at the other end of the corridor. Remo saw an elevator. Maybe the bed had been rolled into the elevator. He pressed the button. The elevator doors opened. Two green-coated men with green hats stood beside a table on wheels. The patient was covered by a sheet. Remo looked under the sheet while rubber-gloved hands tried to stop him. The head was bandaged. People yelled furious things at him while he made sure it wasn't Dr. Smith under the bandages.
The officer pointed the gun. Remo flicked on the safety catch of the .38 police special while the officer squeezed the trigger. Then Remo felt a fatty burden on his back. The officer was trying to wrestle him to the ground.
Remo put the officer outside the elevator doors and pressed "up." The men in green were on him. They went into the soft side padding of the elevator. The elevator was very slow. At each floor, Remo asked if anyone had seen an intensive care unit bed with a middle-aged man. No. Thank you. One of the green-coated men said he was a surgeon and demanded to be taken to the second floor. It was an emergency, and who was this lunatic, anyway?
"Shhhhhh," Remo said. "I'm busy."
When they reached the second floor, after checking the sixth, seventh, eighth, fourth and third, Remo let them out with their patient. Even the basement with the laundry room was bare. When Remo left through the parking lot, squad cars with brightly lit cherries on top were pulling in. Two patrolmen, guns drawn, ran into the hospital. Remo took their car and sped out into the town streets. The gear stuck in low. Other police cars skidded around and followed Remo.
He crashed through a barrier onto the beach. Churning sand, he drove the car into the surf, where he could slip out into the cool evening waters. The salt water enveloped his body, his legs and arms moving with the flow. The discarded doctor's robe floated, and he moved down to where the sand brushed his chest, his whole body snapping with the sharp rhythms of some large fish. In this way, he swam parallel to the shore and was seventy yards north when he surfaced and moved quietly to the darkened beach. Men fired plinking shots at the floating white coat back where he had left the car. Bathers on the beach saw the police firing, saw the coat floating and began shouting "Shark. Shark. Shark." By tomorrow the shark sighting would be covered by the press coast-to-coast, and the tourist business at Cape Cod would boom like it never had before.
"We're in trouble," said Remo, when he reached the small white cottage.
Chiun gestured that the situation was nothing. "I forgive you for being late. If I were not capable of forgiving, I could not endure you. It is my nature to forgive. But I warn you, no Persian king will be as forgiving. A Persian king will always demand the appearance of prompt service. But you know this."
"We're not going, Little Father," said Remo.
"Rest. You are wet from something," said Chiun.
"I said we're not going, Little Father. Smith is in trouble."
"And what trouble is that?"
"He's been injured. And kidnapped."
"Ah," said Chiun. "Then we must show that the House of Sinanju will not tolerate this. We will execute his bodyguards, and then we will leave for Persia."
"He didn't have bodyguards."
"Then why are you surprised by his misfortune? It was inevitable. It is quite clear he is mad and not even the House of Sinanju could save him. You recall that thus I have already written it in the records. The archives know of the Mad Emperor Smith. There is no worry. No blame will attach to us."
"The organization is without a head."
"Beware," said Chiun. "You are an assassin, not an emperor. You have assassin's tools, not emperor's tools."
"I don't want Smitty's job."
"Then what concern is it of yours who is emperor?"
"It's the organization I care about. CURE."
"Why should you care about this organization?"
"Because I'm part of it, Little Father."
"Quite correct, and you have done your part, far beyond what anyone could expect." The long fingers rose, making a final point.
"It's not enough," said Remo. "If you want to go to Iran, go. I've got work here."
"The best thing a flower can do is bloom. It cannot plant seed or harvest seed." But Chiun's reasoning did not prevail. Every so often the lunacy of Western thought surfaced in this young man, and the Master of Sinanju, decided he had better watch his pupil, lest in this insanity he hurt himself, squandering the wealth of knowledge that was the teaching of Sinanju.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dr. Harold Smith had seen Remo go for the coat just before the nurse returned to the room.
"We are moving you," she had said, and he felt the bed glide to the door. The whole support system moved with him. Apparently it was a new bed, because the nurse moved it easily, as if it were a light wicker wheelchair. The overhead lights in the hallway looked like fogged moons because of the distortion of the oxygen tent's plastic. He heard elevator doors open and saw the ceiling of the elevator come over his bed. He felt the elevator lower.
"Am I going to be operated on, Nurse?"
"No," came the voice from behind his head. It was flat and mechanical.
Smith had felt fear before. The numb tension before a drop over France in World War II, when he was with the OSS. The silent scream of his mind in that Bucharest basement, when the NKVD passed overhead searching the houses, and Smith was with a professor torn between fleeing to the West and saving his life by turning in Smith. It was different fear then. Some things had still been in his control. And death could be quick.
Now he was helpless. His mind was trapped in a crippled, pained body to which any passerby had more access than himself. He could not move his left arm, and he knew that if he tried to raise his head he would pass out. His chest felt as if it had caught a pot of boiling lye, and his left eye throbbed.
He saw the elevator ceiling recede, and then he was in a basement of some sort. The nurse returned to the elevator, and he was alone.
It seemed like no more than a few minutes before she returned and wheeled him out into the cool spring-evening air that felt momentarily good on his body.
When he felt his body slip away as if he were floating under a sparkling lake, he heard cars screeching and police sirens. But that was far away. He was in a truck and the doors were shut behind him, because it was black all around him. Or was that because he could not see?
When the lights came, the very harsh lights that even shone into his bandaged eye like leaves of exploding orange, he heard no more cars. He smelled oil nearby and heard the sound of the sea coming up against rocks. His shoulder burned again.
"Well, Doctor Smith, I see that you are in pain." The voice sounded like the nurse. It was very flat. Smith could not see where it came from.
"Yes. Who are you? What am I doing here?"
"You are here to answer questions."
"I'll tell you anything," said Smith. "Why did you move me, though?"
"To get the truth, Wasp."
"What wouldn't I tell you, Nurse?"