"My heart bleeds for good King Herod," Remo said dryly.
"As it should."
"I was being sarcastic."
"Of course you were."
"I like Jesus," Remo said.
"You would," Chiun replied.
There was a long moment during which the only sound was the wind that sang between them. "Okay," Remo said finally. "Here's the deal. I'm done with hanging around out here. My arms are like rubber and I'm halfway to total dehydration, so I'm coming in and if you want to stop me you can push me off this cliff. At this point it'd come as a welcome relief."
Reaching up, he grabbed the bar. Hand over hand he climbed to the flat top of the butte. He dropped to the soles of his feet next to the seated Master of Sinanju.
"It is about time," Chiun said. He rose to his feet like a swirling desert dust devil.
"What's about what?" Remo asked warily. He rubbed gingerly at his shoulders. They were far beyond ordinary pain. His arms felt as if they'd just been plugged into his sockets from someone else's body.
"I was wondering how long it would take for you to realize the pointlessness of this exercise. Most Korean boys have sense enough to see it for what it is at the outset." He marched to the edge of the butte. "We have wasted enough time playing games. Recess is over. It is time to start the day's training."
His pronouncement made, the old man slipped over the mesa's edge and was gone.
Remo stood alone for a moment. The desert morning was clear and beautiful.
"Look on the bright side," he muttered to himself. "Maybe on the way down I'll fall and break my neck."
Cradling both sore arms, he trudged reluctantly to the edge of the mountain.
Chapter 15
MacCleary brought the manila envelope Smith had given him back to his quarters at Folcroft.
During the four months of planning that culminated in Remo's staged execution, Smith had overseen the remodel of Folcroft's old, abandoned psychiatric isolation wing. In the 1920s, the closed-off basement corridor had been home to Folcroft's most dangerous patients. It was now CURE's security wing. This was where Remo was brought after his execution, where the plastic surgery was performed and where CURE's enforcement arm had recovered.
Conn had taken over another room in the otherwise empty hall. Once Remo had sufficiently healed and was remanded to Chiun's care, MacCleary had the run of the special wing.
Alone in his small room, floor cluttered with empty liquor bottles, MacCleary studied the data Smith had collected. There wasn't much. They already knew that the new Mob enforcer was somebody named Maxwell. Somehow this Maxwell was tied in with Norman Felton, a suspected hit man with ties to New York's Viaselli crime Family.
Other than a few photographs of Felton and Viaselli, that was pretty much it.
Conn was disappointed there wasn't more to go on.
In this business, the more information you had going in, the more likely you were to come out alive at the other end.
Once he was up to speed, MacCleary brought the envelope down to the basement furnace. As he fed the papers into the fire, he noted the latest addition to the virtually empty cellar. A plain metal box was tucked away in the shadows behind the furnace.
Smith had mentioned the box to MacCleary in passing, as if discussing the weather forecast.
The coffin had arrived at Folcroft a few months back, the day Smith had finally connected the White House line.
This was part of the ultimate fail-safe. Together with the cyanide pills, this was how CURE's secrets would remain secret. If the agency was ever compromised, Harold Smith would calmly descend the cellar stairs, climb into his specially ordered coffin and swallow his suicide pill.
Standing in the heat of the furnace, Conn noted that there was only one coffin.
In spite of the CURE director's earlier crack about their age, Smith was still planning a different kind of death for each of CURE's original agents. For Smith, this would be the way. Quiet, neat, alone. For MacCleary-the old field hand-it would be something away from Folcroft.
He tried not to think about what or when that might be.
With his hook, Conn flipped shut the cast-iron door of the furnace and turned for the stairs.
He met no one on his way outside.
When MacCleary pushed open the heavy fire door that opened on Folcroft's employee parking lot, thin fingers of drifting snow twisted around his ankles. Though winter was still hanging tough in the northeast, Conn smelled just a hint of spring on the breeze that blew off the sound. He held the aroma for a lingering moment before climbing behind the wheel of his dull green sedan.
The engine purred and he drove down the gravel drive and out through the main gates. The solemn stone lions watched in silence as he steered out onto the tree-lined road.
It felt good to be leaving Folcroft. It always felt good to leave. For Conrad MacCleary, leaving a place-any place-was always preferable to staying. He had an apartment in Rye. There wasn't anything there except four walls and an empty fridge. It felt good to leave there, too.
Someone else would have considered him a man without a country. MacCleary knew better. Sure, he might not have a real home or a family or anything remotely approaching a normal life, but the one thing he always would have was a country. More, he had the best damned country ever to grace the face of God's green earth.
"Give me your beatniks, your hippies, your bigmouth feminists yearning to burn bras," he muttered as he drove down the lonely road. "Dammit, she's still worth a life."
The patriotism of Conrad MacCleary was so strong a thing that no power in heaven or on Earth could have shaken it. Not even the knowledge that the life that would soon be forfeit to protect America would be his very own.
THE TWELVE-STORY APARTMENT complex stood in majestic contrast to the dingy three-story buildings of East Hudson, New Jersey. Norman Felton, Don Viaselli's man, lived in the sprawling twenty-three-room penthouse of Lamonica Towers. Since CURE's only link to Maxwell was Felton, MacCleary started there.
For three days MacCleary studied the comings and goings of Felton and his men. The first thing he realized was that this Felton was connected. Conn took care to avoid the police cars that patrolled with the regularity of a private security force outside the big building.
MacCleary spotted Felton several times. Viaselli's likely enforcer was a powerfully built man in an impeccably tailored suit. With him at all times-like an angry shadow-was Jimmy Roberts, his manservant bodyguard.
There was a handful of others Conn could tell belonged to Felton. They had the look. They dribbled in and out of Lamonica Towers at irregular intervals. Unfortunately, Conn couldn't see every entrance at all times. There was no way of knowing just how many men Felton had up there.
On the morning of the third day, Felton appeared through the front door with his bodyguard. When the two men got into a limousine and drove away, Conn decided he had waited long enough.
Conn had spent the past few days studying the habits of the doorman. The fat man vanished each day for five minutes at nine o'clock. Felton's limo was barely out in the street when the doorman checked his watch. Like clockwork, the man whirled in his blue-and-red uniform and disappeared inside the gleaming glass doors of the apartment building.
MacCleary was out of his car and across the parking lot in twenty seconds. Through the front door in twenty-two.
Keeping his left sleeve pulled low to conceal his hook, he crossed the lobby as if he belonged there. Through a door beyond the lobby reception desk, Conn caught a glimpse of the doorman and a few other Lamonica Towers employees drinking coffee. They failed to notice MacCleary as he crossed to the stairwell entrance.