After Chiun left, there was a single knock at the door, and Dr. Smith entered without waiting for Remo to answer.
"Remo," Smith said in his emotionless way. It was supposed to be a greeting, but it came out sounding as though Smith had read an item off his shopping list. Usually Remo and Smith communicated over scrambled phone lines or through mail drops. The security of CURE depended on their keeping apart. But it had been some time since CURE's security had been breached, and when it had happened, the breaches had been the result of weak links in CURE personnel who didn't even know they worked for CURE or by mechanical malfunctions in Folcroft computers. These problems had been corrected, and because Smith was only the anonymous director of a New York State research institution, he had grown more confident about personal contact when necessary.
"Don't bother knocking, Smitty" Remo said as Smith brushed by, wearing the inevitable uniform of gray suit, white shirt, Dartmouth tie, and leather briefcase. He was a plain-looking man in his sixties, boringly balding, and the type of human being who considered sweating a serious lapse in self-discipline— in himself and others. Remo had never seen Smith sweat. He couldn't remember ever seeing him not wearing his gray suit, either.
"Chiun left the door open," Smith said, opening the briefcase on the breakfast nook table.
"Yeah, he's unhappy with me again."
"You should really treat him with more respect. He's your trainer and very valuable to us."
"He's more than my trainer. He's the only family I ever had, and he'll walk all over me if I let him, so can the advice. I'll handle him any way I want." Remo was more upset with Smith than he had been in a long time. The idea of a dry, emotionless bastard like Smith lecturing Remo on his personal relationship with Chiun had struck a nerve.
"He passed me in the lobby and said you had refused the next stage of your training. This is a serious matter. We pay Chiun's village an enormous sum of money each year to retain his services."
"First of all, it's not all that much money. A lot, yeah, but he could do better doing tricks on TV than working for you."
"Chiun would not do that. He belongs to an ancient line of assassins. He would do no other work, no matter what the payment. So why don't you take the next stage of your training?"
"Okay," Remo said cheerily. "You know what Chiun wants me to do now? He wants me to grow my fingernails as long as his. It's a stage of Sinanju reserved for Masters his own age, but he thinks I'm ready to try it now. I always wanted long nails. You'll love it, Smitty. I'll go around scratching our enemies' eyes out. Me and my fingernails. Chiun and his kimonos and steamer trunks. Maybe we'll all join the circus."
"I see your point," Smith said with a nervous cough. "I'll speak to Chiun. But right now we have a potentially serious situation on our hands."
"Don't we always?" said Remo. "What now?" He still wanted to argue about Chiun, and now they were talking about something new. Only Smith could be both agreeable and aggravating at the same time.
"Last night there was a raid on one of our nuclear missile sites," Smith said. "A group of about a dozen people, lightly armed, attacked the site and attempted to destroy a Titan missile. They damaged the silo roof and dropped a three-pound wrench into a flame-defector vent, which carried it harmlessly past the missile, fortunately."
"A three-pound wrench?" Remo said. "Why not a five-pound bag of potatoes?"
"You might remember. There was an accident several months ago. A Titan missile was blown out of its silo when a maintenance technician dropped a three-pound wrench socket, and it ruptured a fuel tank. The explosion tossed the warhead about 200 yards away. These people, for want of a more imaginative idea, were trying to imitate that accident."
"Just who are these clowns?"
"That's the worrisome part. They appear to be ordinary citizens with no criminal records or obvious motives for wanting to disable an American nuclear missile. Only two of them survived. They claim to have been acting upon orders of an individual whose name they don't know, who has some plan to bring peace to the world through forced disarmament. They call him the World Master. By Master, they seem to mean teacher."
"World Master?"
"Our computers have nothing on any person using that name," Smith said, and Remo thought he heard a trace of bitterness. Smith's computers were CURE's first line of offense, defense, and intelligence gathering. It upset him when they failed.
"I don't get it," Remo said. "Some kind of nuclear disarmament group gone bonkers?"
"No, these people have no such affiliations in their backgrounds. In fact, their only link is a strange one. They belong to an organization known as FOES."
"Terrorist?"
"No. It stands for Flying Object Evaluation Center... hmmm, that can't be right," Smith murmured, looking at the file again. "At any rate, their only known purpose is to gather and record sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects."
"Are we talking about flying saucers?" Remo asked.
"Precisely. A group of UFO buffs have taken it upon themselves to disarm America, missile by missile."
"You caught them all. So what's the problem?"
"As far as we know, we caught them all. But we found no trace of the van they used to reach the missile site. And there are other chapters of FOES in other states. If this is a national movement within that organization, we want to know about it. Your job will be to infiltrate the Oklahoma City chapter and discover if they are planning to attack SAC installations in that state."
"What's SAC?" Remo asked.
"Strategic Air Command," Smith said.
"Oh. Why Oklahoma City?" Remo wanted to know.
"Our computers worked out a high probability that if there is an unaccounted member of that group, and that person took off with the FOES van, he would probably have taken Route 40 out of the state and into Oklahoma, probably going to the nearest large city, which is Oklahoma City, where there is another chapter of FOES. The nearest one to Little Rock, incidentally."
"And suppose these loonies want to go eat our missiles or something?" Remo asked.
"You will disband that chapter permanently," Smith said coldly.
"Why don't you just come out and say, 'You will kill them to the last man'?"
"Because you said it for me. I'll leave an information package on UFOs so you can pass yourself off as an interested believer. And I'll speak to Chiun if I see him. About those fingernails."
"And suppose this group comes up clean?" Remo asked.
"Go on to the next one. They have chapters throughout the country, but most of them are in the Midwest— which is where our largest concentrations of defensive missiles are. "
"Great," said Remo. "Just what I've always wanted. To go on a nationwide nut chase. Sure I shouldn't grow my fingernails first?"
"Good day, Remo."
"Yeah, yeah. Well, at least I'll be able to leave this stupid city. Maryland is the only place in the country where they laid down the Mason-Dixon Line when they were drunk. The west half thinks it belongs to the north and the east is still waiting for the south to rise again."
But Smith wasn't listening. He had already gone.
* * *
When Chiun returned, he was no longer not speaking to Remo.
"Emperor Smith has gone mad again," he declared loudly.
"He explained how the fingernails would endanger the operation?"
"He said something of the sort. But I ignored him because he was obviously raving. He is sending us on some personal vendetta against throwers of whizzbees."
"Against what?"
"Whizzbee throwers. You know, Remo. You have seen them. In parks, on streets. There must be thousands of them, hundreds in this dirty city alone. They work in twos, throwing ugly plastic whizzbees back and forth. As a game."