Helena stumbled out into the hallway after Remo.
"We're soul mates, don't you see? Since I first saw you through binoculars, I knew we were soul mates. Don't leave me. I'll throw myself off the bridge. I'm a sick person. I need you. I'll make you rich."
"You've known me five minutes and if I leave you're going to kill yourself—and you think I need to be told you're sick?"
Remo found another stairway and while some people were not that helpful in aiming him toward the Iranian consulate, others, when properly asked, offered to lead the way themselves. Properly asked required releasing the thumb from the person's thorax. It was either ask that way or depend on someone's honest goodwill, which might have left him wandering around the floating city for weeks.
When he got to the Iranian consulate, Helena was waiting for him.
"Liar. I don't like liars," said Remo.
"What?" said Helena, her face like shattered porcelain, her eyes two worried drops.
"You said you were going to kill yourself."
"I was, but I decided to live."
"Rash judgment," Remo said.
He finally got rid of her by entering his apartment, where Chiun was talking to the ambassador. Zarudi had been receiving many inquiries about his two new security men. There had been rumors that someone had encountered the Scythian terrorists and defeated some of them. Was it either Chiun or Remo?
"The hand is silent as the night," Chiun said, and the ambassador bowed.
After he left, Remo said, "The hand is silent as the night. What the hell does that mean?"
"It's good for the customers," Chiun said. "They like it."
"I don't know," Remo said.
"You will wash the pain from your blood."
"What are you talking about?" Remo asked.
"You have not left America easily."
"I don't mind leaving America," Remo said heatedly. "I don't mind not working for a place that is so fouled up. I just don't care."
All that night, Remo kept repeating that he did not care.
He did not care that night when he and Chiun went to the first night of the two-evening celebration and shipwarming party. He even allowed someone to put a glass of champagne in his hand, until he realized what it was.
"You know, it's good to change around employers," Remo told Chiun.
"Then why have you poured that drink in that man's pocket?" asked Chiun.
"Oh," said Remo. But he didn't care. He certainly didn't care about leaving America's employ.
He didn't care when he saw Helena sitting in the main box on the balcony, overlooking the giant auditorium-stadium. She nicely filled a fine black dress with a single silver and diamond pin just below her soft rising breasts. She was alone and Remo wondered what she was doing in a box seat that was obviously designed to be the royal box.
From the Iranian box forty feet away, Remo yelled, "I thought you were going to commit suicide."
"I have a reason to live," yelled back Helena.
"Sorry to hear that," said Remo.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Under the new Freedom-of-Information Resolution by which the United Nations had abolished press coverage of its activities and barred all journalists from Ship of States, there was no television coverage of the shipwarming party.
But cameras were at work. From hidden locations around the stadium, they zeroed in on Remo and transmitted his image to the secret city of rooms deep inside the body of the ship. At least one camera kept transmitting back television images of Chiun.
The ship had initially been flooded with TV cameras so that delegates could be spotted anywhere and marked against daily progress sheets. Observers had been told that when all the sheets were programmed after just a few days' observation, computers could then calculate where anyone would be with a high probability of being correct. People followed rhythmic patterns with as little imagination as a tree, the difference being that trees never thought they were anything but servants of the weather, growing leaves by the sun, dropping them at frost. People, however, thought they acted from free will. Yet there were times of the day when they would need company and other times when they needed to be alone, times when they felt alive, and other times when they felt drowsy, and all these came from an internal clock that they could not read.
Except for Remo.
Since the incident at the elevator and in the passages, Remo had been given a constant track, eye observed and taped, because it was possible to get a rhythm on someone from an intense four-hour observation.
Oscar Walker believed that. He was betting his life on it. Number One had said he wanted it and Oscar Walker had promised it and now, deep in the ship, Oscar tried to organize all the information taken since midafternoon when there was the first warning report on Remo.
The problem for Oscar Walker in the twenty-seventh year of his life was that there was too much information on this person and much of it clearly did not read out properly.
Cambridge University had been nothing like this. They had never told Oscar that there were human beings walking around with a breathing rate more akin to a three-toed sloth than to an apparent thirty-year-old man. More confusing was that the breathing rhythm was exactly that of the old Oriental in the Iranian section, an apparent eighty-year-old. Two new security men, Iranian hired, high potential.
Oscar Walker went over Remo's record personally. Yes, he trusted his computers but there was nothing like human eyes reading human messages in print.
The first man Remo had met in the elevator that day and then taken his gun away… the gunman had had three years of training in Britain's Special Air Service. Well, so much for his being careless or a stranger to difficult service. SAS were just the finest commandoes in the world. Even if Oscar were British himself. He was not so British as to get himself killed by a miscalculation.
Oscar went through the records of others lost to the Iranian-employed killing machine, Remo.
This Remo had a cume average of 2.7 years per on the K which translated to mean that every person he had killed from the secret units on the ship had had an average of 2.7 years of anti-personnel experience. This average was lowered because he had killed several inexperienced television monitors in the melee. Moreover, he had not used weapons but his hands. All right. No trouble. Oscar Walker could deal with that. Remo's whole body was a weapon. That read out fine and took care of the peculiar breathing rate.
But why hadn't Iran reported through any of the normal channels the ship within a ship? Nothing. All the messages in and out had decoded normal.
Yet the recorded conversation between Remo and the old Korean of similar breathing pattern, had shown Remo was aware that the inner ship had been the secret access route of the Scyth group to get anywhere in the ship to perform terrorist acts. Yet Remo only told the old Korean… his name, Oscar saw, was Chiun… and the old Korean had done nothing.
Number One himself had ordered a special attack on Remo that afternoon. An assault had been arranged. He had been followed by a team, moving with him and waiting. In the corridor, the cameras were running and microphones were working, and the team came out through the wall and assaulted Remo. Oscar Walker had watched on television. A monitor told him: "They'll kill him, so I don't think you've got to worry about analyzing his movements, O.W."
Oscar not only had trouble analyzing the movements he had trouble seeing them. The cameras were well-lit, aimed from many angles. But the subject had not been attacked in the hallway; he attacked himself, and Oscar Walker had never seen such an attack.
He played the tapes and then replayed them, and then replayed them in slow motion and all he saw were flashes of hands. He slowed the pictures down even more and still all he saw were the flashes of moving hands, moving, even in super slow motion, in a blur too fast to focus on. And then the attack team had seen the girl and fled.