“Ingenious,” Smith agreed sourly.
“How many pieces of abandoned ordnance were you tracking, Dr. Smith?”
“Six,” Smith said rely. “He salvaged all of them.”
“But the thief took a lot more than six pieces—”
“I’m aware of that.”
Mark Howard nodded and began shifting the image again. “What’s this? Who’s this?”
“Who is where?” Smith tapped in to the image Mark Howard was manipulating, and for a moment he experienced grave concern. Had Smith missed seeing another person in the image? That would have been a substantial lapse.
“Do you see it? Here.” Howard zoomed in on the earth under the earth drill, before it had started to move.
“Fingers?” Mark posed.
“Perhaps,” Smith said, sounding doubtful. They looked like a couple of exposed roots to him. But when Mark advanced the image and rotated it, the thing protruding from the ground was undoubtedly a human hand.
“Maybe that’s Fastbinder,” Mark suggested.
“Maybe,” Smith said, shaking his head. “There are a lot of unanswered questions here, Mark. Let’s see what we can dig up.”
“At least Remo and Chiun are already on the job.”
Smith nodded. The irony of the situation hadn’t escaped him. He hadn’t believed Fastbinder could have been responsible for the killings in the depths of the nuclear waste dump, but now it seemed likely that he or his protégés were.
“Whiteslaw,” Smith declared grimly. “He may be the one calling the shots if Fastbinder is out of the picture.”
“I guess Remo was right. We should have been dedicating more CURE resources to tracking him down.” Smith chewed on that, and he didn’t like the taste of it He chewed on a few antacids, which didn’t make the taste any better, and then told his assistant that Remo and Chiun had not yet returned from the depths of the Pit.
Sarah Slate asked no questions. When the phone rang in the deep of the night and Mark Howard told her he needed to get to work, she helped him dress and wheeled him to the end of their hallway. Then she returned to Mark’s room and tried to go back to sleep, distracted by the empty place beside her.
What was she getting herself into?
She was a very young woman, with more money than she knew what to do with. The world was wide open to her, and yet she had holed up miserably in the family home, living without purpose, weighed down by her family history. It took the intrusion of not one but two Masters of Sinanju, and Mark Howard, to shake off some of the dust.
Ironic, wasn’t it? She would never have known about the Sinanju if it had not been for the reckless adventuring of her family, which was exactly the irresponsible behavior she despised. If an ancestor had not once befriended a Master, and written about it in his diaries, she would never have allowed them to enter her home, expose her to danger and introduce her to Mark Howard. Even more ironic was that the danger had been of her family’s construction. It had been Ironhand, the miracle of engineering created by family patriarch Archibald Slate a hundred years earlier, that had come to the Slate home just a few weeks ago to shake her down for more, of Archibald’s engineering developments.
So, if she had been a woman born to a normal family, she never would have been in that danger—and she never would have needed saving.
Funny thing. While the Masters had defeated Ironhand, it was Mark Howard who had sacrificed himself to protect Sarah Slate.
Was he in love with her? She didn’t know. Maybe he simply had Florence Nightingale syndrome, falling in love with the woman who nursed him back to health.
Was she in love with him? Surely not Probably not She was attracted to him, and caring for him while he recovered from his wounds was the least she could do. But she wasn’t in love. Was she?
And what if she was? Mark worked for some sort of a secret organization. The funding had to be substantial if they employed the Sinanju Masters. Mark had hinted that the organization was tiny and she would be in grave danger if she ever learned much about it. Mark was concerned that she already knew too much.
But Chiun would protect her from harm.
Chiun. She smiled in the darkness. Maybe it was Chiun she was in love with. “You’re the Korean grandfather I never had,” she had told him. He had been momentarily ecstatic until she explained she had been joking—she wasn’t really Korean.
Chiun had her eating rice morning, noon and night. “It will keep you healthy,” he told her.
“Is rice the secret to Sinanju?”
Chiun smiled, eyes shining. “Some secrets of Sinanju have been stolen, but they are never given away. Eating rice is simply common sense.”
“So why do the Sinanju villagers roast pigs?” Remo had interrupted, just before Chiun dismissed him.
Then there was Remo. He didn’t seem interested in her, and yet there were times when she would run into him and feel an almost overwhelming physical attraction to him, however brief.
“Oh, sorry,” he said once when they met in the hall. “Still trying to figure that out.”
What had he meant by that?
Sarah had heard conversations indicating that Remo was the Reigning Master. A white American Reigning Master of Sinanju? She had sparse secondhand knowledge of Sinanju, but it still didn’t seem likely. Maybe it was a joke. Chiun never behaved as if Remo was the one with the authority, that’s for sure. The two bickered incessantly.
And yet there was such great love between them, like the strongest bond between any father and a son. Sarah would never forget the sorrow in the old man’s eyes when he thought Remo was gone forever. Nor would she forget the joy she saw when Chiun knew Remo was on the road to recovery.
Just remembering it made her smile as she drifted off to sleep again, in Mark Howard’s private suite, deep in an isolated wing of Folcroft Sanitarium. Her last thought was of Chiun. When would he return?
Chapter 22
“Cheer up,” Remo told the albino. “A little crushed dignity never hurt anyone.”
The albino flinched and squatted, groveling with pitiful mews and grunts. “Oh no, you don’t. Get up. Come on. Go home. Go.”
The albino whimpered.
“Don’t make me bring out my finger again, Whitey,” Remo warned, holding out his hand as if to flick the albino’s ear. The creature squeaked and fled down the corridor. Remo and Chiun followed.
“He thinks he still has ears.” Remo grinned. “Wonder what he thought he was eating for dinner.”
“Enough,” Chiun said. “I prefer not to remember it, thank you.” Remo had subdued the murderous albino by snapping his ears repeatedly until the confused creature was too terrified and exhausted to fight anymore. By then his ears had been flicked away in tiny chunks of flesh. The albino wasn’t so beaten that he didn’t sniff them out and pop them in his mouth as he was herded away from the grotto. Hours later, the albino was nearly dead, and Remo knew he’d pass out on his feet from exhaustion before long.
“Might as well sleep,” Remo decided. “Who knows how much farther we’ll have to go.”
They found an ideal spot soon enough, with a wide, shallow lake being fed by cool and thermal springs. The albino fell panting on the warm stone floor. Remo waded into the water up to his waist, waited a minute, then snatched up a couple of eyeless fish.
“Cousins of yours, Whitey?” Remo asked. The fish were albinos, too, just as colorless as their captive, who sniffed at the fish smell and began salivating.
“This must be a rare delicacy among you No-Seeing Friend-Eaters,” Remo said, tossing the first gasping fish into the air and snicking at it with economical hand movements. His one extended fingernail made quick work of the fish, severing the head and tail, slicing it up the middle, scooping out the insides, and depositing a neatly butterflied pair of fillets in his hand.