"The tower kinda helped out," Remo admitted.
"The plane crashed," Smith said.
"Crash-landed," said Remo. "It was a crash landing, not a crash. Nobody died."
"Except the pilots," Smith corrected.
"Yeah."
"And, of course, the man who murdered the pilots."
"Yeah. Chiun got him."
"I assume you interrogated this person?" Smith said.
"You assume wrong."
"How is that?"
"Because you're assuming a person, and not what tried to kill us," Remo said.
"What tried to kill you?" Smith parried.
Remo handed the receiver to Chiun, who was hovering nearby.
"It was a not-bee," Chiun explained.
"A bee brought down the plane!" Smith said, his lemony voice skittering high into the stratosphere of the musical register.
"No, a not-bee."
"Talk sense," snapped Smith.
"I am," said the Master of Sinanju in an injured voice. "It had the form of a bee, but it was not a bee.
"Put Remo back on," Smith directed.
"Why?"
"Because I need to speak with him," explained Smith tightly.
Face quirking up, Chiun surrendered the receiver to his pupil, sniffing, "The conversation has taken an unimportant turn, Remo. Emperor Smith wishes to speak with you."
"Not-bee theory didn't exactly go over well?"
"That man is old. No doubt his faculties are failing. It is the burden of the kingly. Nero was much like this in his snowy years."
Remo took the phone and said, "I can't tell what he's talking about, either."
"Remo, start at the beginning."
"Which beginning?"
"From the time you left the morgue."
Remo did. He told about the bumblebee that had followed him from the parking lot and all that had transpired at the airport.
"And he had the same death's-head markings as the morgue bee," Remo finished. "The outside morgue bee. Not the inside one."
"It could not be the same bee," Smith stated flatly.
"Why not?"
"Bees do not fly that fast."
"This one was pretty light on his wings. Speaking of which, we mailed you a wing from the first bee."
"I will be very interested to see that."
"That was the good news. The bad is that the second bee looked like it read your address when we mailed the package."
"Preposterous!"
"This bee was out to get us," Remo said heatedly. "I'm just letting you know what it knows."
"It knows nothing. It is dead. And I want the body."
"Well, that's going to be kinda hard," said Remo, looking out through a plate-glass window to where the 727 was awash in fire-retardant foam. "Chiun mashed it flat as a wafer, and the plane is crawling with airport personnel. The NTSB should be along at any moment."
"Then I will have the bee's remains requisitioned on my end," said Smith.
"Good luck," said Remo. "So what do we do now? Risk flying again or what?"
Smith was silent for a long space. "I want that bee's wing."
"It's on the way via Federal Express."
"Not soon enough. I want it today. Recover the package and bring it here. Wurmlinger can wait."
"If you say so."
"I say so," said Smith, terminating the connection.
Hanging up himself, Remo addressed the Master of Sinanju. "He sounds pretty P.O.'ed."
"I heard. We will bring him the wing of the not-bee."
They had their first stroke of luck that day when they went to the Federal Express pickup box. A driver showed up. He was in the act of unlocking the deposit box-which saved Remo the bother of ripping it apart with his bare hands in front of witnesses-when Remo tapped him on the shoulder.
"I need to get back a package I sent."
"Sorry. Once it's in the box, it's ours. Company rules."
Remo smiled pleasantly. "Sure. I understand."
And he and Chiun followed the man to his awaiting orange-and-purple-splashed white van. They were not at all secretive about it. In fact, they carried on a loud running conversation.
"Don't you hate it when big companies take your money and blow you off when you have a problem?" Remo told Chiun.
"Customer satisfaction is the soul of the professional assassin," Chiun replied. "So said Wang the Great, who understood such things."
The driver, knowing he was being followed, cast several nervous glances over his shoulder. He looked more worried each time. Just as he inserted his key into the door, he looked back again.
He saw no sign of the thick-wristed white guy or the old Oriental who had been following him.
Still looking back over his shoulder, he rolled the rear van door up.
Then he climbed aboard, threw his satchel in the back and lowered the door. It locked with a resounding chink of steel latching.
He drove out of LAX at a good clip, pausing only at the main entrance.
That was when the rear door unexpectedly rattled up, and he saw California sunlight beaming in from the back.
Braking and swearing, he ran back.
The cargo door was fully up, but there was no sign of whoever had opened it. He ran it down again and decided not to report any of what had happened.
But as he eased onto the freeway, he had the uneasy feeling that at least one of those two had been hiding in back of the van.
How was another matter. The only way into the van was through a locked side or rear door. And the rear door had been unlocked only long enough for him to check to see that the coast was clear and climb aboard.
Surely that was too short a time for a grown person to slip on board. Surely.
BACK AT THE TERMINAL, Remo was saying to Chiun, "That guy was looking everywhere except where we were."
"No," corrected Chiun. "We were everywhere his gaze did not fall."
Remo shrugged. "Same difference. Okay, let's get this thing to Folcroft."
"What of the bug man, Earwig Wormfood?"
"Smitty said he can wait."
"Thus, he waits."
Chapter 19
Harold Smith was deep in cyberspace when his secretary buzzed him that he had visitors.
"It's those two," she whispered.
"Send them in, Mrs. Mikulka," said Smith, looking up from his desktop screen. It was a relief, he thought, not to have to reach for the old concealed stud under the edge of his old desk to send the oldstyle monitor humming down into its concealed desktop well. That was in the days before he had the new system with its screen mounted flush under the black glass desktop. He still sometimes missed that system with its comforting green monochrome screen. It matched his Dartmouth tie.
When Mrs. Mikulka popped her blue-haired head in, Smith merely looked up and nodded his gray head. No one could see the buried screen except the man seated before it.
Mrs. Mikulka withdrew as Remo and Chiun entered.
Remo said, "Hiyah, Smitty," and tossed the FedEx envelope across the room.
It went sailing over Smith's head, out of reach. At the last moment, it abruptly boomeranged back to settle before him, square with the corners of the desk, unnoticed by Smith, who was still looking over his shoulder, expecting it to bounce off the office picture window.
Smith blinked, looked about and finally saw the package, resting on the desk as if it had been there all along. He cleared his throat, unimpressed with Remo's theatrics.
Stripping back the cardboard zipper, he emptied the contents on the smooth desktop.
A single wing fluttered to the black glass. It was backlit by the amber screen below. Touching a key, Smith reset the screen to a pure white. The light highlighted the outline and veins of the tiny wing.
Chiun was uncharacteristically silent as Smith studied the wing's delicate structure.
"You're being ignored," Remo whispered to him.
Chiun shook his head. "I ignored him first."
"Well, he's ignoring you back."
"He is too late. He is the ignoree, while I am the true ignorer. "