"He comes!" the boy cried in Korean. "The Master comes!"
They came out of their huts then and up from the clam-flat beach. It was high tide, so the sandy end of the beach was completely covered.
Chiun stopped as the people of Sinanju began gathering around him. Their faces were flat and unreadable.
Out of the crowd came a bony old man with leathery skin whom Remo knew as Pullyang, Chiun's appointed caretaker in his absence.
Approaching, he got down on hands and knees in the full bow prescribed by long custom.
"Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully. Our hearts cry a thousand greetings of love and adoration. Joyous are we
upon the return of him who graciously throttles the universe."
This recitation was given with all the enthusiasm of children reciting the multiplication tables.
Chiun seemed not to notice. His eyes were closed, and his chest was puffed up with pouter pigeon pride.
"It is good to be among one's own people again," he said. "And I have brought my adopted son, Remo, whom you have not seen in some time."
Remo folded his arms and waited to be ignored. Instead, the villagers crowded around, searching his face with their narrow, suspicious eyes.
Pullyang turned to the Master of Sinanju. "He is still white."
"Examine his eyes closely."
The searching eyes returned. Remo frowned.
"Are they not more Korean than last time?" asked Chiun.
"They are not!" snapped Remo.
"Some," allowed Pullyang.
"Not likely," said Remo.
"Yes, the Koreanness is definitely coming out of him," Pullyang said. Other heads nodded in agreement.
"I have nearly beaten Christianity out of him," added Chiun.
The villagers brightened and a few applauded.
"A few more years under the Korean sun, and his skin will be as perfectly golden as yours or mine," he added.
"Bulldooky," said Remo. "Now, you may return to your duties," Chiun said, clapping his hands peremptorily. "Pullyang, stay."
Pullyang remained as the others scattered.
Chiun plucked at his servant's sleeve and drew Pull- yang's ear to his mouth. "Quickly! Has the gold still not arrived?"
"No, Master."
"There has been no word, no whispers, no signs?"
"No signs of gold. Only omens of your return."
"Omens?"
"Yes, Master. Last night thunder came from a clear sky. And today there were rainbows on the bay."
"Rainbows?"
"Yes. It is as if they knew of your return and, understanding their glory to be inferior to yours, threw themselves into the cold waters."
"Remo, did you hear? There were rainbows. Even the Great Wang, greatest of all Masters, never had rainbows foretelling his return."
"Truly you are to be known to future generations as Chiun the Great," said Pullyang.
"I want to see these rainbows," said Remo.
"They are gone. The Master has returned, so they are no longer necessary."
"Show me where they were."
Chiun snapped, "Remo. We have more important things to do than chase dead rainbows."
"I don't think they were rainbows, Little Father."
"If not rainbows, then what?"
"Oil," said Remo.
Chiun frowned. "Do not be ridiculous. Oil is not a favorable omen."
"It is if you're trying to find a lost submarine," said Remo, looking down toward the beach whose outer boundaries were marked by the twin rock formations known as the Horns of Welcome to the friends of Sinanju and the Horns of Warning to those who came to do the village harm.
Harold Smith did not fly home to Rye, New York, after leaving the Grand Cayman Trust in Georgetown.
Instead, he flew to Washington, D.C., rented a cheap room and purchased a laptop computer at a local Radio Shack, paying in cash both times so as not to leave a paper trail. He set the PC up in the room and plugged his modem wire into the phone jack.
Booting up the computer, Smith dialed up a free bulletin board called Lectronic LinkUp.
In the days before the information superhighway had been paved, Harold Smith could never have done this. Now a vast pool of useful information was accessible to him just as it was to any computer-literate American citizen through the on-line net.
Smith paged through the menu prompts and found an index to newspaper, magazine and even talk-show topics. He typed in the name XL SysCorp and asked for a list of articles.
Exactly 567 separate entries began scrolling before his eyes in the soothingly cool fluorescent green he preferred. Smith had made a special point to get a green monochromatic monitor—after making sure the system he had purchased was not a product of XL SysCorp offered under a chain trade name.
Methodically, one by one, Harold Smith began calling up abstracts of the 567 articles on XL SysCorp and reading those that promised to be illuminating.
In short order he learned that XL SysCorp had gotten its start as Excelsior Computers in 1974, became Excelsior Systems in 1981, then Excel Systems Corporation in 1990 and finally metamorphosed into XL SysCorp last year.
It was a model of a modern, vertically integrated company, and after a severe downsizing three years before, lean and mean and extremely competitive in a softening information-systems market.
Smith saw with horror that XL SysCorp serviced
any government accounts, including but not limited to the CIA. An article on the eight-billion-dollar XL program to upgrade the Internal Revenue Service's antiquated Zilog computer system made Smith gasp audibly.
The possibility had not occurred to him before, but the suggestion was so obvious it filled Harold Smith with cold horror.
The unknown mind had sicced the IRS on Folcroft. It was part of the master plan. Smith knew he had not received written notification of a coming audit. Somehow the IRS computers had been penetrated and a file changed to show both the notification and a reply Smith had never given.
It was very neat. The IRS's computer checks and balances had been satisfied, so the system kicked out instructions to audit Folcroft, and human beings, with no way of differentiating reliable on-screen data from a fabrication, had obeyed like mindless robots.
Grimly Smith read on as the day lengthened. He learned that XL had successfully transformed itself into a so-called virtual corporation. That brought a hard frown to Smith's thin face.
It meant that any one of possibly thousands of freelance programmers or installers or subcontractors might in fact be responsible for the looting of the Grand Cayman Trust and the multipronged electronic assault on CURE.
Smith had secretly hoped—even as the notion filled him with dread—that the plot could go to the highest reaches of XL SysCorp. It would mean a more grandiose plan, but the problem would be infinitely more tractable than the prospect of investigating every far- flung employee of the largest virtual corporation in America. Individual background checks alone could take months.
Harold Smith pressed on, sustained only by an iron will and regular glasses of water fortified by Bromo- Seltzer to soothe his growling stomach. As he roved cyberspace looking for answers, one thought kept nagging him.
Where on earth did the money go?
Jeremy Lippincott was to the manor born, but he worked in a bank.
Jeremy Lippincott had by his twenty-fifth year shown absolutely no discernible aptitudes in life. He possessed no known skills, no overriding interests that suggested gainful employment and only managed to balance his personal checkbook because his personal valet helped. He had graduated from Yale on the strength of his very gentlemanly C's—and because the university understood that the Lippincott Chair of High Finance depended on the goodwill of the Lippincott family. And the goodwill of the Lippincott family manifested itself in the form of raw money, and no other way.