All eyes turned to the man in the back of the room.
The old soldier was clearly uncomfortable with the sudden attention. As the crowd broke into applause, his back stiffened. The buttons of his Red Army uniform strained to the bursting point from the motion.
The uniform no longer fit as it once did. In the past fifteen years, his flat stomach had given way to a middle-aged paunch. Soft streaks of silver lined the dark hair that peeked out from under his hat. But the one thing that had not changed was the eyes.
Flat brown eyes looked out across the sea of blissful, dimwitted faces. A notch formed in his brow. As the applause grew soft with confusion, then fell to silence, General Boris Vanovich Feyodov looked from one corner of the room to the next. When he was through scanning the crowd, he turned from the room and was gone. Back out the door to the People's Hall.
A few more feeble handclaps trickled to silence. On the stage Zen Bower hid his anger with clenched teeth. He leaned over to Gary Jenfeld. "For what we're paying him, he'd better stop jumping at every shadow," he whispered.
Giving only passing thought to what might make his Russian general so twitchy all the time, the retired ice cream man quickly turned his attention back to making reality from his great socialist dream ...and America's nightmare.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he had lost faith.
It wasn't so much a religious thing, although he didn't know anymore if he towed the orthodox line like the nuns back at St. Theresa's Orphanage, where he'd spent his formative years. Experience had taught him that there was something bigger out there somewhere. He just wasn't sure if anyone-including himself-knew exactly what that something was.
It wasn't a loss of faith in himself or his abilities. Remo was a Master of Sinanju. To be Sinanju was to be at the peak of one's physical powers. To say that he was one of the two most lethal human beings to currently walk the face of the earth was neither boast nor delusion. It simply was. Like the oceans or gravity or the sky above his head.
It was certainly not a loss of faith in friends or family. For one thing, Remo didn't have any friends. And though the orphaned Remo Williams had discovered in recent years that he did indeed have some family, he didn't see them enough to lose faith in them. The only real family member he saw on a regular basis was more constant than even sea or stars. In this individual, he could never lose faith.
No, the thing that Remo had lost faith in was man. Both man as a species and men as individuals.
The sad erosion of trust that brought him to this state seemed to have taken many years. But on reflection, he realized it had been with him for a long time. So long that he didn't much think of it. And so, even though it had sat there as big as can be in the middle of his life for years, he had only just noticed his complete and utter lack of faith in all of humanity that very morning.
Truth be told, he had been nudged into this realization by a meeting with his employer earlier in the day.
Because of circumstances beyond his control, Remo was currently living at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. Folcroft was cover for CURE, a supersecret government agency set up outside the pesky confines of the Constitution in order to protect the American republic from those who would do it harm. Remo was CURE's enforcement arm, answerable only to his employer, Harold W. Smith.
The circumstance that had put Remo in such close proximity to his boss was a fire. Specifically, a fire that had burned to the ground Remo's home of ten years.
Remo had been planning a trip to Massachusetts to collect a few items in storage that he had left behind after the fire two weeks before. Since he was heading that way already, Smith had stopped by Remo's Folcroft quarters with a small assignment in the area. It was when he learned the nature of the assignment that Remo realized he no longer had even an ounce of faith in his fellow man.
Remo was pondering just how vast was this pool of personal disillusionment as he parked his rental car on the snowy streets of Lowell, Massachusetts.
The air was cold as Remo stepped onto the sidewalk. There wasn't a hint of the elusive February thaw that was spoken of by many New Englanders but hardly ever seen. Remo suspected that the alleged thaw was a comforting myth the people of the region told one another in order to get them through the last long months of winter.
Even though he was dressed only in a white T-shirt and dark gray chinos, Remo didn't feel the cold. As soon as he left his car, his body compensated for the extreme temperature. Indeed, if passersby had looked closely enough they would have seen just a faint heat shimmer around his bare forearms. Like a desert mirage on an open highway.
Without even a hint of a chill, he walked up the street, stopping on the sidewalk before an old brick structure.
The building was two stories tall with an open cupola sitting high on its slate roof. Three big whitewashed garage doors sat almost directly on the street. Above the middle door, the legend Engine No. 6 was etched into the brick.
The garage doors were all closed. To their right was a man-size door, also closed.
When Remo tried the door, he found it locked. Frowning, he rapped a knuckle against it.
It took two whole minutes of knocking, but a four inch-by-four-inch peephole finally opened in the door.
A pair of very tired eyes looked blearily out on the street. Below them, a giant handlebar mustache sagged out the opening like the paws of a dead ferret.
"What is it?" the fireman yawned. "It's two o'clock in the afternoon. We were all asleep."
Remo smiled. "Hi, I'm a corrupt and stupid mayor who wants to increase my fire department's budget," he said sweetly. "Is Firefighter Joe here?"
The eyes above the mustache grew skeptical. "Yeah, he's here. But he usually deals with fire chiefs, not mayors."
Remo's smile relaxed just a bit. "It's a very sad story about our chief," he confided. "He was with the department for eighteen years but, for some reason we still can't figure out, he went to see a fire last week. It was his first one. He was so scared at all the hot and the orange, he had a heart attack and dropped dead right then and there."
The man nodded. "I been with the department ten years this summer," he commiserated. "So far I been lucky enough to keep away from all that fire stuff."
And, having decided that Remo's story did indeed check out, the man opened the door.
Apparently Remo's knocking had awakened the rest of the firehouse personnel. As he entered, several men were lumbering down the wide staircase at the side of the building, wiping sleep from their eyes with pudgy fingers.
The name Bob was stitched on the T-shirt of the man at the door. He had been given the nickname "Burly Bob" by his fellow firemen. It was a sobriquet that hardly acted to distinguish him from his firefighting brethren, since most of the sleepy-faced men who were even now stumbling tiredly out into the main garage bays of the station house tipped the scales in excess of five hundred pounds.
Scanning the sea of ponderous bellies and sagging bosoms, Remo worried for the fate of any cat unfortunate enough to get caught in a Lowell tree. Come autumn, he envisioned a lot of bent ladders and crippled cherry pickers, as well as dozens upon dozens of feline skeletons clutching desperately on to naked maple branches.
"Hey, Joe!" Burly Bob yelled up the staircase. "Guy's here to see you! Says he's a mayor!" He stumbled away from the door to join his comrades at a big coffee machine.
As the men slurped coffee and devoured pastries from an aluminum-foil-lined tray near the coffeemaker, Remo crossed his arms patiently. He hummed quietly to himself.
Smith's computers had caught Joe Bondurant while tirelessly searching the Internet. Online, he went by the name "Firefighter Joe," offering via the electronic ether a service that was at once abhorrent and completely contradictory to the goals of his chosen profession.