"Good. Contact me when your assignment is fulfilled."
"That'll be within the hour. I can't wait to get out of Detroit. It's got some bad memories for me."
Smith, remembering that Remo's last major assignment was in Detroit, said, "I understand." Remo had been assigned to protect Detroit's auto executives from an assassin. For a while, Remo had believed that the assassin was his own lost father. Now Remo knew different, but the experience had reopened a wound that Smith had thought healed over long ago.
"Any luck on the search?" Remo asked.
"I am working on it. I promise you," Smith said. "But it's an immense task. We know nothing about your parents, Remo. Whether they were married. Whether they are dead or alive. There are no records. This is one reason we chose you as our enforcement arm."
" 'Every life casts a shadow,' as Chiun likes to say," Remo told Smith.
"But shadows don't leave tracks."
"That sounds familiar. Who said that?"
"Chiun. In another context."
"He's got an answer for everything," Remo growled, and hung up.
Chiun was still there when Remo left the phone booth. His head was cocked like an inquisitive swallow's, his eyes fixed on some indefinite point in the night sky.
"Little Father, answer me a question. If every life casts a shadow, but shadows don't leave tracks, what is the lesson?"
"The lesson is that words mean what you want them to mean. And do not disturb me, orphan. I am contemplating the rising of the sun."
"Huh?" said Remo. "It's not even midnight."
"Then what is that pink glow beyond yon building?" Remo looked up. There was a pink glow. As he watched, it grew redder, with flickers of orange and yellow shooting through. Smoke boiled up.
"Fire," Remo said. "Come on."
"Are we firemen now?" demanded Chiun. But when he saw that Remo was running without him, Chiun lifted the hem of his kimono and ran like an ostrich.
"You are running with a special grace tonight," Chiun said when he caught up.
"Thank you."
"A grace like a fat lady sitting on a cat," Chiun added. "Save the compliment. Your mind is not on your breathing. I am glad there is no one about to see how the next Master of Sinanju wheezes. Not that I care what whites think of you. It is important they do not judge Sinanju by your example, but by mine."
"Blow it out your backside."
And, their pleasantries exchanged, the Master of Sinanju and his pupil concentrated on their running. If there had been anyone with a stopwatch on hand, they would have been clocked at over ninety miles per hour.
It was a wood frame building. The first floor was almost completely involved. Fire shot out of every window. It roared.
On the upper floor, people hung out of the windows. A family. There were three children that Remo could see. Smoke was pouring out behind them, forcing them to hang their upper bodies out the windows just to gulp in breathable air.
"Help us! Help us!" they cried.
A crowd stood helpless on the sidewalk. Remo and Chiun shoved through them. The heat was intense. Remo felt the slight film of sweat from his run suddenly evaporate.
"I'm going in, Little Father."
"The smoke, Remo," Chiun warned.
"I can handle it," Remo said.
"I doubt that. I am coming with you."
"No. Stay here. We wouldn't be able to carry them back through that smoke. When I get to the second floor, I'll throw them down. You catch them."
"Be careful, my son."
Remo put a hand on Chiun's shoulder and looked down into the old man's young eyes. The bond between them had grown great and the warmth of it made Remo smile. "I'll see you later, Little Father." And Remo was gone.
Fire was a bad thing, Chiun knew. But Sinanju knew how to deal with fire. For what concerned Chiun was not flames, but the thick billows of smoke ascending into the sky. Smoke robbed the breath, and in Sinanju, the breath was all. It was the focusing point for the sun source that was Sinanju, first and greatest of the martial arts.
Remo ran with his eyes closed. His vision would be useless once he was inside, he knew. Instead he concentrated on charging his lungs with air. He took in the oxygen rhythmically, feeling for his center, attuning himself to the universal forces that enabled him to achieve total harmony within himself. This was Sinanju. That was what Remo had become under Chiun's tutelage.
As he raced for the open, smoke-gorged front door, Remo seemed to see it all unfold before his mind's eyes.
Remo had been a beat cop in Newark. Just a foot-slogging young patrolman with a tour of duty in Vietnam behind him. No one special. In fact, less special than most, because he had no family. His name was Remo Williams, but after a black dope pusher had been found murdered, Remo's badge conveniently beside the body, Remo's name became mud. Remo knew nothing about it. His badge had simply disappeared one night while he slept. The next morning he was being fingerprinted at his own precinct, and none of his fellow cops could meet his eyes.
The trial was swift. Politically, the city wanted to bury this rogue cop who had beaten a black to death. It was a time of great social consciousness, and Remo's rights seemed to be the only ones that didn't matter. Remo could remember his lawyer trying to make a case for insanity by reason of sleepwalking. Remo had refused to lie on the stand. He'd never walked in his sleep in his life.
They sentenced Remo to the electric chair. Just like that. Remo knew he was innocent. It didn't matter. His friends turned their backs on him. No one visited him on death row. Except for the Capuchin monk in brown robes. The monk had asked Remo a simple question:
"Do you want to save your soul or your ass?"
And he had given Remo a black pill to bite down on just before they strapped him in the chair and clamped the metal helmet, a wire leading out the top, to his shaven head.
Thanks to the pill, Remo was unconscious when they pulled the switch. When he woke up there were electrical burns on his wrists. At first, Remo thought he was dead.
He was assured that he was, but that he shouldn't let it get in his way. The assurance came from the monk in the brown cassock, only now he was in a three-piece suit, a hook sticking out of his left cuff. In the man's good hand there was a photograph of a tombstone. Remo saw his own name cut in the plain granite.
"It's there waiting for you," said the monk, whose name was Conrad MacCleary. "If you say the wrong word."
"What's the right word?" Remo wanted to know.
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, I'm going to work for you," said MacCleary. And MacCleary had explained it all. Remo had been framed. MacCleary's handiwork. He was proud of it. MacCleary explained that he was ex-CIA, but now he worked for a U.S. government agency that officially did not exist. It was known as CURE. It employed only two people-MacCleary and a Dr. Harold W. Smith, also ex-CIA, not to mention ex-OSS. Smith was ostensibly retired, running a place called Folcroft Sanitarium. Folcroft was CURE'S cover.
Remo had looked around the windowless hospital room:
"This is Folcroft, right?" Remo had asked.
"You got it."
"I don't want it," Remo had said wryly. MacCieary offered Remo a hand mirror. The face that stared back was not Remo's own. The skin had been pulled tighter, emphasizing the cheekbones. His hairline had been raised by electrolysis. The eyes were more deeply set, and hinted of the East. The mouth thin, almost cruel, especially when Remo smiled. He was not smiling then. He didn't like his new face.
"Plastic surgery," MacCleary explained.
"What'd they use? Silly Putty? I don't like it."
"Your opinion doesn't enter into it. You no longer exist. The perfect agent for an agency that doesn't exist."
"Why me?" Remo asked, working his stiff facial muscles.