A man in a black CIA baseball cap and mirror sunglasses stepped out of the men's room and said, "You know too much, Pepsie Dobbins."
Pepsie whirled. She saw the cap and the sunglasses before she noticed the gun. Buck Featherstone stepped between them, and she heard the dull gunshot reports.
Buck dropped at her feet, his mouth bubbling blood like a dying drinking fountain.
His eyes were wide and full of disbelief. "But-you're my hero," he bubbled.
"Tough," said the man in the CIA cap, lifting his silenced .22 and taking aim at the notch between Pepsie Dobbins's stunned blue eyes.
The pistol went click-click-click, and Pepsie assumed she was shot. Her legs gave way, corkscrewing her to the floor.
She was grabbed up, thrown across a soft fleshy shoulder and carried out of the building. No one stopped them. No one dared.
"We record the news, we don't participate," a man said, hastily squeezing out of the way of the man with the silenced pistol.
Pepsie was dumped into the trunk of a blue car, and by the time her brain unblocked, the car was roaring from the curb and she found herself inhaling carbonmonoxide fumes coming from a faulty exhaust connection.
"I MYSELF HOLD that it was a joint Cuban Intelligence-Sicilian mafia hit," said the cab driver as he wrestled with the traffic at Dupont Circle.
"Mind paying attention to your driving?" Remo said from the back of the taxi.
"I can drive and talk fine. Like I was saying-"
A single ivory fingernail flicked out to depress a spot over the driver's neck vertebrae, and the driver continued moving his mouth, but nothing came out.
"Thank you, Little Father," said Remo.
A metallic blue Porsche came squealing around a corner and the cab driver evaded it by the width of a paint job. Remo caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver. His eyes had gone to the white letters CIA on the black baseball cap, so the face beneath made only a fleeting impression.
"You know," Remo told Chiun, "that guy looked familiar."
"Yes?"
"If I didn't know better, I'd swear that was Hardy Bricker."
"Who is Hardy Bricker?"
"You know, the paranoid film director. The one that made that movie a few years ago about the Kennedy assassination that claimed a government conspiracy of about twenty-two thousand people was behind it all."
"I did not see that movie," Chiun sniffed.
"It was called CIA."
Then Remo looked very, very strange. "Uh-oh," he said.
The Master of Sinanju saw the guilty look in his pupil's face and said, "What is it, Remo? Speak!"
"We may have to rethink the Sam Beasley angle on this," Remo said thickly.
Then the cab came to a screeching halt in front of the ANC News Washington bureau. The rear doors popped on either side, and Remo and Chiun came flying out.
They found a security guard lying dead in the entry and mass confusion farther back. And amid the confusion a man lay dying.
Three cameramen with Minicams on their shoulders were carefully recording his last painful minutes while a reporter held a microphone to the man's bloodied lips.
"What's it like to die senselessly?" the reporter asked.
The reporter came close to finding out when Remo lifted him off his knees by his neck and flung him into the men's room. Remo held the door open while the Master of Sinanju sent the three cameramen scurrying past, impelled by fingernails that found sensitive nerves in their bodies.
Remo smacked the lock, and there was no exiting the men's room short of a blowtorch.
Kneeling beside the dying man, he told Chiun, "This is the guy who was with Pepsie at the airport. Speak up, fella, what happened here?"
"Pepsie . . . kidnapped," the man said in a bubbling tone. "Bricker . . . my hero..." Then his head rolled to one side, and the blood flowed out of his mouth like red Karo syrup from a bottle.
Remo stood up. "That was Hardy Bricker. We gotta find him."
Chiun eyed his pupil suspiciously. "What is Hardy Bricker to you, Remo?"
"I'll explain later. Let's borrow a car. How many blue Porsches can there be running around Washington, D.C.?"
The police were arriving as they exited the building. Since they left their prowl cars unlocked, Remo availed himself of one.
Pulling away, Remo picked up the dash mike and pat out an all-points for a metallic blue Porsche.
After a minute the dispatcher came back with "Suspect Porsche seen crossing Memorial Bridge to Arlington."
"License plate?" asked Remo.
"Charlie Ida Adam. Repeat, Charlie Ida Adam."
"That's not the one," Remo told dispatch. "Keep looking."
Accelerating toward Memorial Bridge, he told Chiun, "We've got him all to ourselves."
Chapter 32
When the trunk door opened, Pepsie Dobbins poked her sassy shag out into the sunlight and gulped cool, reviving oxygen like a beached grouper.
A hand grabbed her by the hair, hauled her across several yards of well-tended grass to a circular terrace overlooking Memorial Bridge and the Potomac River. The Lincoln Memorial lay at the other end of the bridge. She was thrown to the ground. Pepsie looked up. Before her, set on a fieldstone platform, a gas flame burned orange and pure. On a marble tablet set in the slab was carved a name:
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY 1917-1963
The familiar soft voice said, "I told you that what is past is prologue."
Pepsie tried to struggle to her feet, but a foot pressing against the small of her back kept her down.
"Who . . . what . . . ?" she said dazedly.
"When . . . where . . . how?" said the soft voice. "Maybe this will answer your questions." And a ream of paper bound in a black laminated folder landed by her hand. Through a rectangular window cut in the cover, the top sheet showed white. On it was typewritten:
CURE
A Film by Hardy Bricker
Pepsie Dobbins looked over her shoulder and saw the man in the black CIA baseball cap. He had shaved his puffy checks. He removed his sunglasses. The name and face immediately connected. "You're Hardy Bricker! "
Bricker smiled thinly. "I told you the script had been written, and now you're part of the picture. Why did you have to spill my story line all over the place?"
"Story line?"
"Damn it! I needed you to supply me tape. Now CURE is going to have to silence you, too."
"What's CURE?"
"The real name for the black assassin operation I have been calling RX."
"Why not call it CURE?"
"Because someone might steal the title. Besides, I didn't want Smith to send his thick wristed assassin after me during shooting."
"You mean shooting shooting? Or filming shooting?"
"I mean both," said Hardy Bricker. "Since you know about Smith you must also know about CURE and the assassin with the thick wrists."
"I never heard of CURE. I got all my information from a little Asian man who called himself Chiun. I met him on the plane."
Bricker looked thoughtful. "The thick wristed man spoke about a house of assassins in Asia. Before he silenced me."
"Huh?"
Hardy Bricker took a deep breath. "I was lecturing at Harvard when he approached me. He told me that I had stumbled upon the truth. There was a secret shadow government that enforced its will through assassination and black operations. It was called CURE, he said. It was headed by a man named Smith, he said. I had been right all along. My film CIA was closer to the truth than even I dreamed. And then he did something to me. I lost my mind, I mean my memory. I wandered the streets of Cambridge for over a year, living out of garbage cans and the coins people dropped into my paper cup until a film student recognized me and called my agent. A brain operation unblocked my memory. I remembered that I was Hardy Bricker. But I also remembered what the man with the thick wrists had done to me. And I vowed to expose him and the evil, racist, fascist infraorganization that controlled him."