Failing Marks, page 24
Not a scrap of the Nibelungen Hoard remained.
Chapter Twenty-eight
One week later, Remo was on the phone in the kitchen of his home back in the United States.
“The fluid buildup was causing severe pressure on my brain,” the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith said over the phone. “The doctors assure me that with it drained, my recovery will be complete.”
“That’s great, Smitty,” Remo said. “What about those headaches you were having?”
“They were a symptom of the pressure that was building up. I have not had one since the operation.” Remo heard a relentless tapping in the background.
“What is that noise?” he asked, annoyed.
“My laptop computer,” Smith explained. “My ill health may require a certain amount of bed rest, but it does not mean I have to be completely indolent while I am here.”
Remo tried to picture Harold W. Smith—head swathed in bandages—banging away at a laptop computer in the bed of his hospital room. Oddly it was a mental image that didn’t stretch Remo’s imagination.
“As long as you’re working anyway,” Remo said, “is there any sign of Chiun’s money?”
“No,” Smith admitted. “And I find it more than a little alarming that one person could control that much raw wealth. You said her name was Heidi Stolpe?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“There is no one of that name anywhere in the world that fits the description you gave me,” Smith said. “The castle in the Harz Mountains is virtually abandoned. The family who owned it died out in the 1960s. Nearby villagers will occasionally ferry tourists up there for sight-seeing expeditions, but it is otherwise empty. You are certain you found nothing on your subsequent search?”
“Chiun and I went through the place with a fine tooth comb for days. Heidi wasn’t there, and neither was the loot.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Smith told him. “I will do my best, but you must tell Chiun that I think it unlikely he will see the Nibelungen Hoard again.”
At that moment, Remo heard the front door open hastily and slam shut. The Master of Sinanju’s ninety-pound body sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants coming down the hallway to the kitchen.
“I’ve got to go, Smitty,” Remo said hastily. He hung up the phone just as Chiun burst excitedly into the kitchen.
“Oh, joy of joys! Oh, happy day!” Chiun announced. His face beamed pure bliss. It was a marked change from his sulking behavior of the past week.
“What is it?” Remo asked, happy at anything that could change the Master of Sinanju’s mood.
“Only this,” Chiun said, his voice elated. He raised high a piece of mail.
Chiun had kept a mysterious mail drop for years. Today was the day of the month he had its contents transferred to their current residence. He received a bizarre assortment of mail there, which he generally shielded from Remo. This letter, however, he waved like a trophy above his bald head.
Remo had to snatch the letter from Chiun’s hand. As he scanned it, he saw that it was written in a language he didn’t understand.
“Care to fill me in?” he asked. Chiun snatched the note back.
“It is from the enchanting Valkyrie,” he said, “The delightful daughter of Gunther of the Nibelungenlied.”
“Heidi?” Remo asked. He tried to grab the letter again, but Chiun spirited it out of his reach.
“She tells how she has secreted half of the Hoard in something called a storage facility in Bonn.” Chiun reached into the folds of his kimono. He held aloft a single shiny silver key. “Behold, the passkey to the wondrous unit number 18. Therein we will find both gold and keys to chambers 19 through 22. We need only find a way to transport the Hoard out of Germany.”
“If that doesn’t cause Smith to throw an embolism, I don’t know what will,” Remo said dryly.
Chiun didn’t even hear Remo. He was practically singing. “Apparently my gold has taken up many spaces at this repository. The dear girl has even paid expenses on this place of storage from out of her own sweet pocket.” Chiun sighed wistfully. “Do you think, Remo, that at my age it is possible to find true love?”
Remo was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed in disgust. “Don’t ask me,” he said sourly. “Check your bank book.”
Epilogue
Heidi waited three months before returning to the castle of her ancestors. She made certain first that Remo and Chiun had moved their half of the gold from Bonn.
The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with either Master of Sinanju. Kluge had made that mistake. It was his mismanagement of IV that had brought the organization crashing down around his ears.
Heidi had chosen a secret location beneath the ancient chapel to hide her half of the Hoard. Beneath the shifted stone altar, two huge oaken doors that otherwise meshed with the hardwood floor had been flung open.
She watched as the few remaining Numbers carried her portion of the Hoard down into the treasure chamber hidden deep beneath the Harz Mountain castle. There were only thirty of the blond-haired men left. Thirty of her brothers.
Numbers. The term was so dehumanizing. Not fitting for the men who were supposed to be the future masters of the world. She would have to come up with something else to call them.
When they were finished hiding the treasure, one of the Numbers came over to her. It was the same man who had followed Remo from Berlin months ago. The one who had been on his way to report to Kluge when he was spotted by Heidi. He had instantly recognized her as the genetic superior to them all. He had been the one to tell her where the IV village was located. It wasn’t a betrayal of Kluge. She was superior to the dead IV leader. The Number recognized that.
Everything after their chance meeting had been easy. Including the massive undertaking of moving the entire Nibelungen Hoard.
As the man stood, stone-faced, before her, Heidi smiled. She nodded her pleasure at his work. “Seal it off,” she said, indicating the chamber. The men across the room flung down the massive wooden doors. They landed with a crash, upsetting a huge plume of dust. It rose up into the dim light that filtered in through the stained glass of the castle room.
“From now on, Four will move cautiously,” Heidi said with a smile. “And swiftly.”
Read More
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Maybe you’ll like some of the others in the Destroyer series, too. There’s a lot to like, and the odds are this isn’t the first one you picked up, anyway, so you know what you’re in for. Get the straight skinny from Warren Murphy et Fils at destroyerbooks.com.
Total Recall
HIS NAME WAS REMO, and people had to be taught that only he could get away with murder.
Murder belonged in the hands of someone who could do it right, for the right reasons, and that someone was Remo. He was in the resort town of Little Ferry, Virginia, to teach this lesson to retired police chief Duncan Dinnard.
Chief Dinnard had built up a fortune at the expense of the residents and tourists of Little Ferry and had now retired to sit back and enjoy it. He had turned the small Virginia town into the kind of place where if you had enough money—and paid him enough of it—you could literally get away with murder.
“Don’t be fooled by the fact that he’s retired,” Dr. Harold W. Smith had told both Remo and Chiun. “He still rules that small town with an iron hand. It’s time he was retired for good.”
Smith could be no plainer than that.
. . .
Duncan Dinnard had no fear. He was a multimillionaire, with a mansion and a yacht, both of which suited his position. In addition, his property and his person were protected by the best people and the best security devices that money could buy.
At the moment, the obese Dinnard was in his mansion, entertaining the best female companionship that money could buy. The farthest thing from his mind was his own death.
If need be, he could buy that off too.
. . .
“Very impressive setup,” Remo said to the wispy-haired Oriental beside him as they examined Dinnard’s defenses.
“It is not necessary to compliment a man whom one is about to assassinate,” the elderly Korean said loftily. “It is considered bad form.”
“Oh, I see,” Remo said. “Murder’s okay, but tackiness can never be forgiven.”
Chiun snorted. “If that were true, you would have no friends at all. Please proceed.” He waved an imperious hand at the front gates. “I wish to dispense with this trivia quickly.”
“What’s the matter? Afraid you’ll miss one of your TV soaps?”
“The Master of Sinanju no longer wastes his time on sex-laden daytime dramas.”
“Oh, no?”
“No,” Chiun said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just begun work on an epic poem. An Ung poem. The finest piece of Ung since the Great Master Wang.” The old Oriental swaggered as he walked. “It is about a butterfly.”
“Oh,” Remo said.
“I’ve already completed the first one hundred and sixty-five stanzas of the prologue.”
“That’s okay, Chiun. I’m sure it’ll flesh out in the final draft.”
“Insolent lout. I should have known that a white boy untrainable in the subtle arts of Sinanju would lack the refinement to appreciate beauty as well.”
“I’m as refined as the next white lout,” Remo said.
Chiun’s complaints about Remo’s shortcomings no longer bothered him. He had been hearing the same complaints for more than ten years, since the first time Remo was introduced to the old master in a gymnasium in the sanitarium where Remo found himself the morning after he died.
Actually, he never died in the first place. It would have been nice if someone—anyone—had gone to the trouble of informing Remo that he wasn’t really going to die in the electric chair he was plugged into, but bygones were bygones.
During those terrible moments in the chair, Remo’s life didn’t flash before his eyes. The only thing that did register was the ridiculous, laughable injustice of recent events. Remo Williams had been a rookie cop with the Newark Police Department, who had been sentenced to fry in an electric chair because a drug dealer he’d been chasing had had the misfortune to die. Remo hadn’t killed the pusher, but he’d been the most convenient person to blame at the time. So he’d gone to the chair and tried not to think about anything too much, and when he woke up, he was in a windowless hospital room in a place called Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
For a brief moment Remo thought he must be in heaven, but the face peering into his own disabused him of any otherworldly notions. It was Harold W. Smith’s face, a pinched, lemony face spanned by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and a permanent scowl. Dr. Smith was, as always, wearing a three-piece gray suit and carrying an attaché case. He never asked Remo how he felt about coming back from the dead. He didn’t have to. Dr. Harold W. Smith had engineered everything, from the false arrest on.
Remo complained that since he was officially dead, he had no identity. Dr. Harold W. Smith seemed pleased. At least, he had shuffled his papers with a little more gusto than before. It was as close as Smith got to acting pleased.
He took Remo to the gymnasium to meet Chiun. The eighty-year-old Oriental would, he explained, make a new man of Remo. And he did: Remo became, through the years, a man who could live under water for hours at a time. Who could catch arrows in his bare hands. Who could climb up the sheer faces of buildings without the aid of ropes or ladders. Who could count the legs on a caterpillar as it inched across his finger. Who could walk with no sound and yet hear the heartbeat of a man a hundred yards away. For what Chiun taught him was not a technique or a trick, but the very sun source of the martial arts.
The old Korean was the Master of Sinanju, and possibly the most dangerous man alive. Harold Smith had hired him to train a man for a mission so secret that even Chiun himself could not be told about it. The mission was to work as the enforcer arm of an organization so illegal that its discovery could well mean the end of the United States. CURE belonged to America, but America could not claim the organization because CURE worked completely outside the Constitution. CURE blackmailed. And kidnapped. And killed. Because sometimes those methods were necessary in fighting crime.
Remo Williams was trained to kill. Silently, quickly, invisibly, as only a master of Sinanju could kill. Harold W. Smith directed Remo to the targets, and Remo eliminated them.
The target this time was Duncan Dinnard, whose mansion loomed now in front of Remo and Chiun. The house was surrounded by guards, obviously armed.
“Okay, everybody up. Rise and shine,” Remo shouted, clapping his hands and whistling.
“Who goes?” one of the guards called out, holding his handgun in firing position.
“White garbage,” Chiun said under his breath.
“What did he say?” the guard demanded.
“He said we’re here to collect the garbage,” Remo answered.
“He’s a garbage man?” the second guard asked, looking at Chiun suspiciously.
“Civil service,” Remo said, as if that explained everything.
“He don’t look like no garbage man I ever saw,” the first guard said.
“Besides, we don’t have any garbage left. It was picked up yesterday.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Remo said.
“Whadaya mean?” the first guard asked.
“You do have some garbage left.”
“Like what?” the second guard asked.
“Like you,” Remo said.
The bars on the gate were very close together, much too close for a human body to fit between them under ordinary circumstances.
Remo’s hands sped between the bars, took hold of each man by the throat, and pulled. By the time the two men had been squeezed between the bars, they were dead, crushed to death or electrocuted, whichever came first.
“Sloppy,” Chiun said, shaking his head in disgust.
“It worked, didn’t it? I’m going over.” Remo opened his hands and let both men slump to the ground.
He vaulted the twelve-foot high fence from a standing position, and when he landed on the other side, Chiun was standing there waiting for him.
“Between the bars,” Chiun said, smirking. “Some of us are above cheap and flamboyant displays.”
“Cheap—”
“Let us get this over with,” the old Oriental interrupted. “I’ll go to the boat. You try the house.”
“First one to find Dinnard gets to do the dirty deed,” Remo said.
Chiun closed his eyes and said, “One does not refer to one’s profession as a ‘dirty deed.’”
“Come on, Little Father. Do you think I’m a complete idiot? Wait, don’t answer that.”
“A wise decision,” Chiun said, and headed for the dock where Chief Dinnard’s yacht was moored.
Remo started for the mansion, came across ferocious guard dogs twice, reasoned with them, and left them unconscious but unhurt. There was no reason in the world to kill a dumb animal.
Remo approached the house, having passed by countless TV security cameras without being seen by one. Thinking invisible, as he had been taught to do by the Master of Sinanju, could work wonders for a body.
His next decision was whether to simply force the door and enter or ring the doorbell. He decided that it would be more interesting to ring the bell.
“Whadaya want?” the man who answered the door asked.
“Do all you fellas have the same manners?”
“What?”
“Never mind. Is Chief Dinnard in?”
“Who wants to know?”
Remo looked left, right, behind him, then back at the big man and said, “I guess I do.”
“Funny man,” the guy said, and started to close the door.
Remo put one finger on the door and it stopped cold. No matter how hard the other man tried to push, it wouldn’t budge.
“Hey,” he said, staring at Remo’s finger. “How’re you doing that?”
“Leverage. Is the chief at home?”
Still impressed, the man replied, “Yeah, he’s home. Hey, could you teach me that?”
“What?”
“That,” the man said, pointing to Remo’s finger. “Leverage.”
“You want to learn leverage?”
“Sure.”
“Watch,” Remo said. He took his finger from the door and held it up in front of the man’s face, catching and holding his eyes. In one quick motion the finger flicked forward, the man’s eyes rolled up into his head, and he slumped to the floor.
“Well, if you’re not going to pay attention…” Remo said, stepping over the prone body of the sleeping man. “Don’t worry, I’ll find him myself.”
The house was huge, but Remo’s instincts were operating one hundred percent, and he felt as if he could smell Dinnard’s presence in the house. He smelled something else too. Perfume. A woman—there was a woman in the house with Dinnard, which could be a complication.
Following his nose through the huge house, Remo finally came to an opulently furnished bedroom, with mirrors and pillows and a huge bed. On the bed was an equally huge man, being ministered to by a lovely blonde woman with big, smooth, pink-nippled breasts, delicate hands, and a full-lipped mouth, all of which were in use at the moment.
Neither the woman nor the chief noticed Remo as he entered the room and approached the bed. She was grunting and moaning with effort, while Dinnard was grunting and moaning with pleasure.
“Excuse me, miss,” Remo said, looking over the woman’s bare shoulder.
“Huh?” she said, staring at him in surprise. He placed his hand on her smooth back and exerted pressure on her fifth vertebra. A blank look came over her face as she experienced more pleasure than she had ever before felt in her life. Slowly the corners of her generous mouth curved up, and then she keeled over on the bed, oblivious to what was going on around her. She would remain that way for some time.
