"Where are you!" Remo cried out.
"Hurry!"
"Where is he?" Remo shouted. "Just tell me where to find him!" But the wind gave no answer.
But from the fertile soil, Kojong looked up and said, "Chiun knows. Ask Chiun."
"Chiun the Elder?"
"No," said Kojong, his hands returning to the ritual drumming, "Chiun the Younger."
All around him the wind-troubled corn began to waver and roil as if a great spoon was stirring the Void. And Remo woke up.
HE ENTERED the adjoining hotel room without bothering to knock or turn the doorknob. The door jumped out of his way the second he smacked it with his palm.
"I just had a talk with your father about my father," Remo said angrily.
"Is he well?" said Chiun from his place on the floor.
"He's dead."
"Yes, but is he well?"
"He told me he knew nothing about my father. Then I met Kojong."
"There is no Master by that name," Chiun said thinly.
"Well, I met him and he said to ask you about my father."
"What were his exact words?"
"He said to ask Chiun the Younger. That's you."
"But my father is younger than I, having died in his prime years."
"Don't hand me that bull."
"Sit."
"No, I want answers. My mother said my father was someone I knew. Just now her voice told me he's in danger. You know who he is, don't you?"
"If you will sit, I will tell you how to find your father, just as I promised I would."
Fists tensing, Remo scissored to the rug before the Master of Sinanju, his face a thundercloud. Chiun regarded him blandly.
"When your mother first appeared to you, it was not an accident. It was because you looked into the mirror of memory, as I have urged you for years."
"So?"
"Looking into your own reflection summoned up her face in your mind's eye before her spirit found you. You saw there the eyes of your own daughter, and deep from your earliest memories came similar eyes. Those of the woman who bore you. It will be the same with your father, if you only have the courage to examine your own features for his likeness, for all who came before have left their mark upon you."
"You're playing games. I want answers."
"I have been your father in many ways. What kind of father would I be if I hand you this important thing and deny you the boon of discovering it for yourself?"
"Take me to my father, damn it!"
Chiun narrowed his eyes. "Very well. If you insist." And the Master of Sinanju led Remo out to the streets of Bangor, Maine.
They walked up and down the streets aimlessly for nearly fifteen minutes, with Chiun striking his gong often until Remo was ready to explode.
Just before that happened, Chiun stopped before a vacant lot beside an old brick building. He took up a position and, spreading his arms wide, proclaimed, "Behold Remo, your long-lost father."
Remo looked. There was just Chiun. No one and nothing else.
"You're not my father."
Chiun dropped his arms in exasperation. "Oh, you are so blind. I do not mean me."
And turning, Chiun gestured to a billboard perched atop the brick building.
Remo looked up. It was a movie advertisement. The film was The Return of Muck Man.
Remo started to say something harsh, when his eyes locked with those of the leafy green face on the poster. He froze.
"I know those eyes," he said half to himself.
"They exist in the mirror of your memory, which you refuse to consult."
Striding forward, Remo walked up to the billboard and began reading the credits.
He went as pale as a ghost, and his rotating wrists suddenly grew still. Hands fisting up, he spun on the Master of Sinanju. "You knew! You knew all along. All these years you've known, haven't you?"
Chiun said nothing.
"Haven't you?" Remo raged.
"And if you had looked correctly into the mirror of memory, you would have known, as well," Chiun said evenly.
"Bull!"
The face of the Master of Sinanju flinched, and Remo brushed past him, cold and angry.
Silently Chiun padded after his pupil, who neither heard nor sensed his presence.
There would be no stopping him now. All was in the hands of the unforgiving gods.
Chapter 23
The flight from Phoenix to Yuma, Arizona, was brief. Less than an hour. Nothing but trackless desert lay below.
They were carried through the early evening air by a nineteen-passenger Beech 1900. There was no stewardess. Remo sat in the front and Chiun several rows behind. A thick silence hung between them. Remo passed the time looking at the drawing of his mother's face thoughtfully.
When Yuma with its lettuce groves appeared, Remo's mind went back to an assignment several years before. Posing as a stuntman, he had infiltrated the making of a war movie about an invasion of the US. financed by a Japanese industrialist. There were labor problems, and because the famous American film actor Bartholomew Bronzini was starring, Harold Smith had sent Remo to look into matters. It was all a front. The weapons were real, and the extras were a Japanese paramilitary unit. They had seized the entire town of Yuma, which lay like an island oasis in the Sonoran Desert.
Wholesale executions had been undertaken and televised to the rest of the country. The objective was simple. To hold Yuma until the helpless US. military was goaded into nuking one of its own cities. The man responsible had sought revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It had almost worked. Remo had been nearly killed when he participated in a stunt involving volunteers from the Yuma Marine Corps air base. It had been a massive parachute drop. The Japanese had sabotaged the chutes. The Marines had all died, leaving Yuma undefended. Remo woke up in a hospital after it was all over, only to find that Chiun had saved the day without him. He couldn't remember anything that had happened to him after he'd bailed out over the desert.
A man Remo had worked with had died during the occupation, Chiun had said. Only now did Remo know different. Only now. Five years later.
At the tiny Yuma International Airport, Remo rented a four-wheel-drive Mazda Navajo and turned to the Master of Sinanju. "You don't have to come any farther."
"I must come. For I know the way, you do not." Remo said nothing. They drove out of the city and into the Sonoran Desert with its undulating dunes and saguaro cactus, where countless Hollywood movies, from Westerns to science-fiction extravaganzas, had been filmed.
Remo drove west. There was only one road west. The Japanese film had been shot west of the city, among the dunes. It was blisteringly hot. A red-tailed hawk hung in the sky, searching.
As they approached an unmarked access road, Chiun suddenly said, "Take this road."
Remo turned onto the road, and after fifteen more minutes of driving they reached a low corral-style fence. Braking, Remo got out.
The gate was closed. There was a red Quarantine sign hung on the fence. Remo noticed that the sign covered another.
Lifting the Quarantine sign, Remo saw the word Reservation burned into the wood. The name above was unreadable except that it began with an S.
Brushing sand dust off the burned letters, Remo was able to make out one word: Sun.
"'My people are the people of the Sun,'" Remo muttered. Turning to the Master of Sinanju, he asked, "Know anything about this?"
"I have been here," Chiun said thinly. "When you were thought dead."
Without a word, Remo threw open the gate and they drove in.
They passed three domed Indian huts before they were challenged. An Indian toting a pump shotgun stepped into their headlight beam and fired into the air. Remo braked and climbed out.
"Can't you read that damn sign, paleface?"
"I'm looking for Sunny Joe Roam."
The shotgun dropped level with Remo's chest, "You ain't answered my question, white eyes."