The Last Dragon, page 6
“Sorry,” Remo said.
“I’ll hold my breath.”
“Let me hold it for you,” said Remo, reaching out for her throat. He found her throbbing carotid artery and squeezed until the blood stopped flowing to her brain. After twenty-two seconds, she was out like a light.
Remo hit the stewardess call button and explained to the new stewardess that Stephanie had fainted, “or something.”
She was carried to a first-class chair, checked for signs of injury, and allowed to sleep the rest of the flight away.
· · ·
In Boston, Remo made a point of being the first one off the plane.
He was not surprised when Harold W. Smith met him at the gate. Smith was seated in an uncomfortable plastic chair looking uncomfortable. Harold Smith always looked uncomfortable. He probably looked uncomfortable sleeping in his own bed.
It was early spring, but Smith wore the same ensemble he wore summer or winter, rain or sun. A gray three-piece suit. The only splash of color was his hunter green Dartmouth tie.
He was a tall, thin man of Ichabod Crane proportions. His hair, thin as the first dusting of autumn snow, was grayish white. His skin was actually grayish, as were his weak eyes.
He might have been an accountant or a college professor or a retired undertaker. He was none of those things. He was Harold W. Smith, ostensibly head of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, secretly the director for CURE, the supersecret government agency that didn’t exist–officially.
Smith was reading The Wall Street Journal.
Remo padded up to him on silent Italian loafers.
“Uncle Smitty!” Remo cried. “It’s been–what?–years. Am I still in the family will?”
Smith looked up from his paper with genuine horror on his patrician features. “Remo. Please. Do not make a scene.”
Smith got up, folding his paper. He pushed back on the bridge of his rimless glasses, restoring them to correctness.
“You old softie,” Remo said. “Still shy in public.” Then, in a quieter voice he asked, “Where’s Chiun?”
“He will be along shortly.” Smith was tucking the newspaper under his arm. He clutched a worn leather briefcase in one bloodless hand. It was so scuffed that no self-respecting thief would lower himself to steal it. It contained the computer link to the hidden CURE mainframes in Folcroft’s basement.
They started walking.
“So, tell me about this castle,” Remo prompted.
“It might be better if you see it without any prejudicial preconceptions.”
“Has Chiun seen it?”
“No.”
“You pass papers yet?”
“Yes.” Smith avoided Remo’s eyes.
“Which means if Chiun doesn’t like it, you eat the mortgage, right?”
Smith actually paled. Although he had at his disposal a vast black-budget superfund of taxpayer dollars, he spent it as if the copper in every penny came out of his own bloodstream.
“Master Chiun stipulated a castle,” Smith said. “Castles are not exactly plentiful in America. I have found him a perfectly good equivalent. Please do not spoil it.”
Remo eyed Smith doubtfully. “You trying to pull something here, Smitty?”
“No,” Smith said hastily.
“We’ll see,” Remo said slowly. “Let’s find Chiun.”
“He is coming in on Kiwi Airlines.”
“Wonderful,” Remo said. “That means either he’ll be six hours late or he went down in flames over Pittsburgh.”
“It was the most reasonable flight I was able to book for him on short notice.”
“And they have the most wonderful frequent flier program in the air,” Remo added. “Right?”
“Er, that is true.”
“Which no one has ever managed to collect on, because they either ate tarmac or couldn’t stomach flying Kiwi a second time.”
“Those stories are exaggerated,” Smith said defensively.
· · ·
They found the Master of Sinanju in the baggage area, patiently waiting for his luggage.
He stood regarding the unmoving baggage conveyer belt like a tiny Asian idol carved from amber and dressed in scarlet silk. His face, in repose, might have worn the accumulated lines of his combined ancestors, the previous Masters of Sinanju, heirs to the House of Sinanju, the oldest line of professional assassins in human history and discoverers of the sun source of all the martial arts, which was also known as Sinanju.
“Hey, Little Father,” Remo called. “I see you made it in one piece.”
Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, turned. At the sight of Remo his wrinkled little face broke out in a beaming smile. His wise hazel eyes brightened.
“Remo! I am so happy to see you!” he squeaked.
“Great,” said Remo, quickening his pace. It was true what they said. Absence does make the heart grow fonder.
“For now I have someone to carry my trunks,” Chiun added.
Remo’s face fell. He struggled to keep his voice light. “How many’d you bring this time?”
“All.”
Remo’s eye went wide.
“All fourteen!”
Chiun brought a yellow hand like an eagle’s claw to the wisp of beard that straggled down from his chin. “Of course. For it is moving day. No more will I have to bear them hither and yon, like a vagabond.”
“Vagabonds usually settle for a change of clothes, knotted in a ball and hanging off a stick. Not fourteen freaking trunks.”
And before the Master of Sinanju could reply to that, the trunks began bumping through the hanging leather straps.
The first was a gray lacquer monstrosity in which scarlet dragons vied with golden phoenixes for hegemony.
Chiun gestured with a hand whose long fingernails were like pale blades, and said, “Remo.”
Unhappily, Remo took hold of the trunk and lifted it free of the conveyor belt. He set it to the floor, and at once the Master of Sinanju drifted up and began examining the lacquer and brass trim for nicks and other blemishes.
“It has survived unscathed,” he announced sagely. The overhead lights shone on the amber eggshell that was his skull. Tiny puffs of cloudy white hair enveloped the tops of his ears.
“Only thirteen more to go,” Remo muttered.
Then next trunk was mostly mother-of-pearl. It had collected no scratches.
And the others began coming, in a colorful sequence like a toy train.
One by one, Remo hefted them off the belt to join the growing pile. In a corner, Harold Smith buried his long nose in his newspaper and gave off a studied “I’m not with them” air.
“Smith tell you anything about this castle?” Remo asked Chiun.
“Only that it is in an exclusive area in an historical town.”
“It would have to be if there’s a castle involved.”
“This is a good area, Remo,” Chiun whispered.
“Since when?”
“It is one of the older provinces in this young country. It is very British.”
“Since when are we Anglophiles?”
“The House has worked for Great Britain,” Chiun pointed out.
“And sometimes against them.”
“But more for them,” said Chiun, dismissing the unimportant detour in historical truth.
The thirteenth trunk was green and gold, and after Remo set it down, the conveyor belt came to a dead stop.
“Hey? Is that all of them?” he asked.
Chiun’s wrinkled features stiffened. “No. There is one missing.”
Remo snagged a skycap.
“My friend here is missing a piece of luggage,” he explained.
The skycap looked at the preposterous pile of trunks and commented, “How can you tell?”
“Because we can count. Why did the belt stop?”
“Because they finished unloading all the luggage.”
“You’re not saying it’s lost,” Remo said in as low a voice as possible.
“I’m not saying anything, but you better file a lost luggage claim before you leave the airport otherwise it’s your tough luck.”
“Lost!” Chiun squeaked, flouncing up. “My precious trunk cannot be lost!”
“I didn’t say lost,” the skycap repeated.
“He didn’t say lost,” Remo said quickly. “It’s probably misplaced.”
“The lackey who misplaced my trunk would do better to misplace his head,” Chiun said in a stentorian voice.
“He talks that way sometimes,” Remo told the skycap. “Let me handle this.”
“Remo, I will not countenance this,” Chiun warned.
“And you won’t have to.”
“And if my trunk is truly lost?”
“We’ll get it back. Come on, let’s find a way into the luggage loading area.”
“Follow me,” Chiun said, and stepped into the dead conveyor belt. He passed through the fall of leather straps and as Harold Smith called his name in a frightened voice, Remo ducked in after the Master of Sinanju.
· · ·
The other side was a maze of chutes, tunnels, and self-propelled luggage trucks.
Chiun looked around, his clear hazel eyes cold.
“Uh-oh,” Remo said. For one man was driving one of the trucks away from the area. A glossy blue trunk sat in back. Unmistakably Chiun’s.
“Thief!” Chiun called. And flashed after the truck in a flurry of scarlet silk.
“We don’t know that,” Remo said, hurrying after him.
But they knew it for the truth a moment later. The man stopped the truck beside an open van. Two other luggage handlers were shoving stuff into the back of the van. Shoulder bags. Cameras. Videocams. Even a boxed VCR.
The man with Chiun’s trunk got off and motioned for the others to give him a hand.
They noticed Chiun at that point.
“Hey!” one shouted. “This is a restricted area. Get out of here!”
“Thief!” Chiun cried. “To touch that trunk is to die!”
“And he means every word,” Remo called.
The Master of Sinanju looked like a harmless wisp attired in his silk robes. His age could have been anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty, but in fact he had passed the century mark some time back.
The three luggage pilferers ranged from perhaps twenty-five to thirty-eight years. They were tall, and muscular from hoisting heavy luggage forty hours a week.
But the Master of Sinanju fell among them like a crimson typhoon hitting a palm oasis.
The man who had frozen with his hands on the trunk suddenly took his hands into his mouth. Not by choice. Choice had nothing to do with it.
From his personal perspective. his own hands had acquired a life of their own. Like frightened pink tarantulas they leapt into his own mouth for protection against the crimson typhoon.
The man had a big mouth. But his hands were bigger. Still, they went down his gullet as if the bones had melted–where they clogged his windpipe so completely that his last ninety seconds of life consisted of hopping about in circles trying to yank his hands out of his mouth and trying to breathe through nostrils that no longer functioned.
In a way, he was lucky. He lived longer than the others, who made the mistake of drawing personal weapons.
Remo and Chiun gave them no time to use them.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Remo muttered and took the nearest man by his head. Remo simply grasped and began shaking the man’s head as if it were a milkshake container. He got about the same result. The man’s brain, having the natural consistency of yogurt, was pureed in the receptacle of his skull.
He dropped his box cutter, never having gotten the blade extended.
It was quick, silent, and actually painless to the victim. Remo dropped the limp-boned man to the oil-stained concrete and caught the last few seconds of the third man’s death throes.
The man had produced a switchblade. He used it with great skill. The blade darted toward the Master of Sinanju–and abruptly changed direction to carve out a flowing script on the wielder’s own forehead.
Then it split his nose clear to the brain pan.
The man was on his back, dead, before the word THIEF began oozing blood off his forehead.
“Now you did it,” Remo said, looking around at the carnage.
Chiun’s hands clasped his wrists. Interlocked, they retreated into the joined sleeves of his kimono. “I did nothing. It was their fault. These carrion started it.”
“Smith is gonna to have a shit fit.”
“I will reason with Smith. Come.”
And the Master of Sinanju floated away.
Grumbling, Remo brought the trunk up on his shoulder and hurried after him.
“This whole trip had better be worth it,” he muttered.
· · ·
When Remo emerged from the baggage area, Harold Smith’s complexion looked as gray as a battleship. And as lifeless. His eyes were staring.
“All is well, Emperor Smith,” Chiun said in a loud voice, and went on to recount the other thirteen piled trunks.
“We gotta move fast, Smitty,” Remo said, adding the blue trunk to the stack.
“What happened?”
“Luggage thieves.”
“They’re not–”
“Alive? No. Definitely not.”
“Oh, God.”
“Just hold your water. We gotta get outta here before anything breaks. Where’s the rental car?”
“I had planned on taking the subway into town.”
“With fourteen freaking trunks!” Remo shouted.
Smith adjusted his tie. “Actually, I had not expected this.”
“Okay, I’ll rustle us up some transportation.”
· · ·
There was a rental agency that provided vans, and Remo soon had one parked in front of the terminal.
After Remo had got the last of the trunks into the back of the van, he slipped behind the wheel and tried fighting his way out of the stubborn traffic congestion.
“Maybe the subway wasn’t so bad an idea, after all,” he muttered darkly.
He took the Callahan Tunnel and emerged near the North End, Boston’s Italian district.
“I know this place,” Chiun muttered.
“We were here about a year ago. That Mafia thing, remember?”
“Pah!”
“Where to, Smitty?”
“South. To Quincy.”
“We were there, too. That was where the Mafia don had his headquarters. Come to think of it, weren’t you interested in a condo there, Little Father?”
“I will settle for nothing less than a castle, as befits my station as the royal assassin in residence,” Chiun sniffed.
Remo took the Southeast Expressway to the Quincy exit, where they pulled three G’s holding a curved ramp that took them up over a bridge.
“Go straight,” said Smith. Remo ignored the left-hand fork of the bridge.
They passed condos, office buildings, and a pagoda-like structure that made Remo grip the wheel with sudden queasiness, but to this relief it turned out to be only a Chinese restaurant, and continued on.
At an intersection dominated by a high school, Smith said, “Take this left.”
Remo drove left.
“Stop,” said Smith, just as the high school fell behind.
“Where?”
“There!” said Chiun.
Remo stopped and looked out the window. And he saw it.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Remo said.
“It is magnificent!” Chiun said rapturously.
Chapter Five
The plan was simple, as Nancy Derringer explained it.
“We block all the jungle trails except the one we hacked out of the Kanda Tract. Are you with me so far?”
Everyone said yes.
“We know the reptile eats fronds and creepers. Probably he prefers so-called jungle chocolate. We’ll harvest some and leave a trail.”
“Ha!” King scoffed. “What happens when he gets his fill?”
“It takes a lot of jungle chocolate to fill a belly the size of a cement truck,” Nancy told him coolly.
The Bantus smiled among themselves to see the mzungu woman who was smarter than the mzungu man.
“But to keep him moving we will intersperse toadstools whenever he seems to be losing interest.”
“What makes you think he eats toadstools?” King wanted to know.
“A deep knowledge of sauropod dietary habits and a brain I’m not afraid to use.”
Even taciturn Ralph Thorpe laughed out loud at that one.
· · ·
They got to work. The Bantus, who had earlier been easygoing if not torpid when Skip King had been giving the orders, now found their enthusiasm.
They hacked down trees all along the jungle paths, blocking them so that even a ten-ton dinosaur would find them daunting.
The Kanda Tract was full of the wild mangos known as jungle chocolate. Much of it was untouched because the forest had been too thick for the Apatosaur to do much more than snake his long neck between the trees to bite off pieces of the scrumptious melon.
They harvested only as much as would stay fresh for a four-hour interval. And placed them in quickly woven baskets.
Every hand was needed to make baskets, because they had to carry as many toadstools as they would need.
“I’m not weaving baskets,” King snarled when the subject was broached. “That’s woman’s work.”
The Bantus all looked at him with their smiles on automatic pilot and their soft eyes steady as buttons on a coat.
King failed to notice. “I didn’t go to Wharton to weave baskets, and that’s final.”
“Fine,” Nancy told him thinly. “Then you may go toadstooling.”
The Bantus formed a circle around him, leaving a space in the direction of the escarpment.
Angrily, King nested stacks of baskets together and went off to fill them.
· · ·
It was approaching sundown when the great Apatosaurus began to stir.
Its leathery, black-rimmed nostrils twitched and blew out a snort. Slowly, the orange eyelids picked themselves up.
Lifting its long banded neck, it craned its masked head about in a semicircle as if seeking an explanation.
The goatlike eyes fell upon a fallen melon.
It made a sound. Harruunukk. It was a questioning sound.
“I’ll hold my breath.”
“Let me hold it for you,” said Remo, reaching out for her throat. He found her throbbing carotid artery and squeezed until the blood stopped flowing to her brain. After twenty-two seconds, she was out like a light.
Remo hit the stewardess call button and explained to the new stewardess that Stephanie had fainted, “or something.”
She was carried to a first-class chair, checked for signs of injury, and allowed to sleep the rest of the flight away.
· · ·
In Boston, Remo made a point of being the first one off the plane.
He was not surprised when Harold W. Smith met him at the gate. Smith was seated in an uncomfortable plastic chair looking uncomfortable. Harold Smith always looked uncomfortable. He probably looked uncomfortable sleeping in his own bed.
It was early spring, but Smith wore the same ensemble he wore summer or winter, rain or sun. A gray three-piece suit. The only splash of color was his hunter green Dartmouth tie.
He was a tall, thin man of Ichabod Crane proportions. His hair, thin as the first dusting of autumn snow, was grayish white. His skin was actually grayish, as were his weak eyes.
He might have been an accountant or a college professor or a retired undertaker. He was none of those things. He was Harold W. Smith, ostensibly head of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, secretly the director for CURE, the supersecret government agency that didn’t exist–officially.
Smith was reading The Wall Street Journal.
Remo padded up to him on silent Italian loafers.
“Uncle Smitty!” Remo cried. “It’s been–what?–years. Am I still in the family will?”
Smith looked up from his paper with genuine horror on his patrician features. “Remo. Please. Do not make a scene.”
Smith got up, folding his paper. He pushed back on the bridge of his rimless glasses, restoring them to correctness.
“You old softie,” Remo said. “Still shy in public.” Then, in a quieter voice he asked, “Where’s Chiun?”
“He will be along shortly.” Smith was tucking the newspaper under his arm. He clutched a worn leather briefcase in one bloodless hand. It was so scuffed that no self-respecting thief would lower himself to steal it. It contained the computer link to the hidden CURE mainframes in Folcroft’s basement.
They started walking.
“So, tell me about this castle,” Remo prompted.
“It might be better if you see it without any prejudicial preconceptions.”
“Has Chiun seen it?”
“No.”
“You pass papers yet?”
“Yes.” Smith avoided Remo’s eyes.
“Which means if Chiun doesn’t like it, you eat the mortgage, right?”
Smith actually paled. Although he had at his disposal a vast black-budget superfund of taxpayer dollars, he spent it as if the copper in every penny came out of his own bloodstream.
“Master Chiun stipulated a castle,” Smith said. “Castles are not exactly plentiful in America. I have found him a perfectly good equivalent. Please do not spoil it.”
Remo eyed Smith doubtfully. “You trying to pull something here, Smitty?”
“No,” Smith said hastily.
“We’ll see,” Remo said slowly. “Let’s find Chiun.”
“He is coming in on Kiwi Airlines.”
“Wonderful,” Remo said. “That means either he’ll be six hours late or he went down in flames over Pittsburgh.”
“It was the most reasonable flight I was able to book for him on short notice.”
“And they have the most wonderful frequent flier program in the air,” Remo added. “Right?”
“Er, that is true.”
“Which no one has ever managed to collect on, because they either ate tarmac or couldn’t stomach flying Kiwi a second time.”
“Those stories are exaggerated,” Smith said defensively.
· · ·
They found the Master of Sinanju in the baggage area, patiently waiting for his luggage.
He stood regarding the unmoving baggage conveyer belt like a tiny Asian idol carved from amber and dressed in scarlet silk. His face, in repose, might have worn the accumulated lines of his combined ancestors, the previous Masters of Sinanju, heirs to the House of Sinanju, the oldest line of professional assassins in human history and discoverers of the sun source of all the martial arts, which was also known as Sinanju.
“Hey, Little Father,” Remo called. “I see you made it in one piece.”
Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, turned. At the sight of Remo his wrinkled little face broke out in a beaming smile. His wise hazel eyes brightened.
“Remo! I am so happy to see you!” he squeaked.
“Great,” said Remo, quickening his pace. It was true what they said. Absence does make the heart grow fonder.
“For now I have someone to carry my trunks,” Chiun added.
Remo’s face fell. He struggled to keep his voice light. “How many’d you bring this time?”
“All.”
Remo’s eye went wide.
“All fourteen!”
Chiun brought a yellow hand like an eagle’s claw to the wisp of beard that straggled down from his chin. “Of course. For it is moving day. No more will I have to bear them hither and yon, like a vagabond.”
“Vagabonds usually settle for a change of clothes, knotted in a ball and hanging off a stick. Not fourteen freaking trunks.”
And before the Master of Sinanju could reply to that, the trunks began bumping through the hanging leather straps.
The first was a gray lacquer monstrosity in which scarlet dragons vied with golden phoenixes for hegemony.
Chiun gestured with a hand whose long fingernails were like pale blades, and said, “Remo.”
Unhappily, Remo took hold of the trunk and lifted it free of the conveyor belt. He set it to the floor, and at once the Master of Sinanju drifted up and began examining the lacquer and brass trim for nicks and other blemishes.
“It has survived unscathed,” he announced sagely. The overhead lights shone on the amber eggshell that was his skull. Tiny puffs of cloudy white hair enveloped the tops of his ears.
“Only thirteen more to go,” Remo muttered.
Then next trunk was mostly mother-of-pearl. It had collected no scratches.
And the others began coming, in a colorful sequence like a toy train.
One by one, Remo hefted them off the belt to join the growing pile. In a corner, Harold Smith buried his long nose in his newspaper and gave off a studied “I’m not with them” air.
“Smith tell you anything about this castle?” Remo asked Chiun.
“Only that it is in an exclusive area in an historical town.”
“It would have to be if there’s a castle involved.”
“This is a good area, Remo,” Chiun whispered.
“Since when?”
“It is one of the older provinces in this young country. It is very British.”
“Since when are we Anglophiles?”
“The House has worked for Great Britain,” Chiun pointed out.
“And sometimes against them.”
“But more for them,” said Chiun, dismissing the unimportant detour in historical truth.
The thirteenth trunk was green and gold, and after Remo set it down, the conveyor belt came to a dead stop.
“Hey? Is that all of them?” he asked.
Chiun’s wrinkled features stiffened. “No. There is one missing.”
Remo snagged a skycap.
“My friend here is missing a piece of luggage,” he explained.
The skycap looked at the preposterous pile of trunks and commented, “How can you tell?”
“Because we can count. Why did the belt stop?”
“Because they finished unloading all the luggage.”
“You’re not saying it’s lost,” Remo said in as low a voice as possible.
“I’m not saying anything, but you better file a lost luggage claim before you leave the airport otherwise it’s your tough luck.”
“Lost!” Chiun squeaked, flouncing up. “My precious trunk cannot be lost!”
“I didn’t say lost,” the skycap repeated.
“He didn’t say lost,” Remo said quickly. “It’s probably misplaced.”
“The lackey who misplaced my trunk would do better to misplace his head,” Chiun said in a stentorian voice.
“He talks that way sometimes,” Remo told the skycap. “Let me handle this.”
“Remo, I will not countenance this,” Chiun warned.
“And you won’t have to.”
“And if my trunk is truly lost?”
“We’ll get it back. Come on, let’s find a way into the luggage loading area.”
“Follow me,” Chiun said, and stepped into the dead conveyor belt. He passed through the fall of leather straps and as Harold Smith called his name in a frightened voice, Remo ducked in after the Master of Sinanju.
· · ·
The other side was a maze of chutes, tunnels, and self-propelled luggage trucks.
Chiun looked around, his clear hazel eyes cold.
“Uh-oh,” Remo said. For one man was driving one of the trucks away from the area. A glossy blue trunk sat in back. Unmistakably Chiun’s.
“Thief!” Chiun called. And flashed after the truck in a flurry of scarlet silk.
“We don’t know that,” Remo said, hurrying after him.
But they knew it for the truth a moment later. The man stopped the truck beside an open van. Two other luggage handlers were shoving stuff into the back of the van. Shoulder bags. Cameras. Videocams. Even a boxed VCR.
The man with Chiun’s trunk got off and motioned for the others to give him a hand.
They noticed Chiun at that point.
“Hey!” one shouted. “This is a restricted area. Get out of here!”
“Thief!” Chiun cried. “To touch that trunk is to die!”
“And he means every word,” Remo called.
The Master of Sinanju looked like a harmless wisp attired in his silk robes. His age could have been anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty, but in fact he had passed the century mark some time back.
The three luggage pilferers ranged from perhaps twenty-five to thirty-eight years. They were tall, and muscular from hoisting heavy luggage forty hours a week.
But the Master of Sinanju fell among them like a crimson typhoon hitting a palm oasis.
The man who had frozen with his hands on the trunk suddenly took his hands into his mouth. Not by choice. Choice had nothing to do with it.
From his personal perspective. his own hands had acquired a life of their own. Like frightened pink tarantulas they leapt into his own mouth for protection against the crimson typhoon.
The man had a big mouth. But his hands were bigger. Still, they went down his gullet as if the bones had melted–where they clogged his windpipe so completely that his last ninety seconds of life consisted of hopping about in circles trying to yank his hands out of his mouth and trying to breathe through nostrils that no longer functioned.
In a way, he was lucky. He lived longer than the others, who made the mistake of drawing personal weapons.
Remo and Chiun gave them no time to use them.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Remo muttered and took the nearest man by his head. Remo simply grasped and began shaking the man’s head as if it were a milkshake container. He got about the same result. The man’s brain, having the natural consistency of yogurt, was pureed in the receptacle of his skull.
He dropped his box cutter, never having gotten the blade extended.
It was quick, silent, and actually painless to the victim. Remo dropped the limp-boned man to the oil-stained concrete and caught the last few seconds of the third man’s death throes.
The man had produced a switchblade. He used it with great skill. The blade darted toward the Master of Sinanju–and abruptly changed direction to carve out a flowing script on the wielder’s own forehead.
Then it split his nose clear to the brain pan.
The man was on his back, dead, before the word THIEF began oozing blood off his forehead.
“Now you did it,” Remo said, looking around at the carnage.
Chiun’s hands clasped his wrists. Interlocked, they retreated into the joined sleeves of his kimono. “I did nothing. It was their fault. These carrion started it.”
“Smith is gonna to have a shit fit.”
“I will reason with Smith. Come.”
And the Master of Sinanju floated away.
Grumbling, Remo brought the trunk up on his shoulder and hurried after him.
“This whole trip had better be worth it,” he muttered.
· · ·
When Remo emerged from the baggage area, Harold Smith’s complexion looked as gray as a battleship. And as lifeless. His eyes were staring.
“All is well, Emperor Smith,” Chiun said in a loud voice, and went on to recount the other thirteen piled trunks.
“We gotta move fast, Smitty,” Remo said, adding the blue trunk to the stack.
“What happened?”
“Luggage thieves.”
“They’re not–”
“Alive? No. Definitely not.”
“Oh, God.”
“Just hold your water. We gotta get outta here before anything breaks. Where’s the rental car?”
“I had planned on taking the subway into town.”
“With fourteen freaking trunks!” Remo shouted.
Smith adjusted his tie. “Actually, I had not expected this.”
“Okay, I’ll rustle us up some transportation.”
· · ·
There was a rental agency that provided vans, and Remo soon had one parked in front of the terminal.
After Remo had got the last of the trunks into the back of the van, he slipped behind the wheel and tried fighting his way out of the stubborn traffic congestion.
“Maybe the subway wasn’t so bad an idea, after all,” he muttered darkly.
He took the Callahan Tunnel and emerged near the North End, Boston’s Italian district.
“I know this place,” Chiun muttered.
“We were here about a year ago. That Mafia thing, remember?”
“Pah!”
“Where to, Smitty?”
“South. To Quincy.”
“We were there, too. That was where the Mafia don had his headquarters. Come to think of it, weren’t you interested in a condo there, Little Father?”
“I will settle for nothing less than a castle, as befits my station as the royal assassin in residence,” Chiun sniffed.
Remo took the Southeast Expressway to the Quincy exit, where they pulled three G’s holding a curved ramp that took them up over a bridge.
“Go straight,” said Smith. Remo ignored the left-hand fork of the bridge.
They passed condos, office buildings, and a pagoda-like structure that made Remo grip the wheel with sudden queasiness, but to this relief it turned out to be only a Chinese restaurant, and continued on.
At an intersection dominated by a high school, Smith said, “Take this left.”
Remo drove left.
“Stop,” said Smith, just as the high school fell behind.
“Where?”
“There!” said Chiun.
Remo stopped and looked out the window. And he saw it.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Remo said.
“It is magnificent!” Chiun said rapturously.
Chapter Five
The plan was simple, as Nancy Derringer explained it.
“We block all the jungle trails except the one we hacked out of the Kanda Tract. Are you with me so far?”
Everyone said yes.
“We know the reptile eats fronds and creepers. Probably he prefers so-called jungle chocolate. We’ll harvest some and leave a trail.”
“Ha!” King scoffed. “What happens when he gets his fill?”
“It takes a lot of jungle chocolate to fill a belly the size of a cement truck,” Nancy told him coolly.
The Bantus smiled among themselves to see the mzungu woman who was smarter than the mzungu man.
“But to keep him moving we will intersperse toadstools whenever he seems to be losing interest.”
“What makes you think he eats toadstools?” King wanted to know.
“A deep knowledge of sauropod dietary habits and a brain I’m not afraid to use.”
Even taciturn Ralph Thorpe laughed out loud at that one.
· · ·
They got to work. The Bantus, who had earlier been easygoing if not torpid when Skip King had been giving the orders, now found their enthusiasm.
They hacked down trees all along the jungle paths, blocking them so that even a ten-ton dinosaur would find them daunting.
The Kanda Tract was full of the wild mangos known as jungle chocolate. Much of it was untouched because the forest had been too thick for the Apatosaur to do much more than snake his long neck between the trees to bite off pieces of the scrumptious melon.
They harvested only as much as would stay fresh for a four-hour interval. And placed them in quickly woven baskets.
Every hand was needed to make baskets, because they had to carry as many toadstools as they would need.
“I’m not weaving baskets,” King snarled when the subject was broached. “That’s woman’s work.”
The Bantus all looked at him with their smiles on automatic pilot and their soft eyes steady as buttons on a coat.
King failed to notice. “I didn’t go to Wharton to weave baskets, and that’s final.”
“Fine,” Nancy told him thinly. “Then you may go toadstooling.”
The Bantus formed a circle around him, leaving a space in the direction of the escarpment.
Angrily, King nested stacks of baskets together and went off to fill them.
· · ·
It was approaching sundown when the great Apatosaurus began to stir.
Its leathery, black-rimmed nostrils twitched and blew out a snort. Slowly, the orange eyelids picked themselves up.
Lifting its long banded neck, it craned its masked head about in a semicircle as if seeking an explanation.
The goatlike eyes fell upon a fallen melon.
It made a sound. Harruunukk. It was a questioning sound.
