His life would never be the same again, he knew. And the knowledge made his throat constrict painfully.
HAROLD W. SMITH'S age-gnarled fingers trembled above the gray rows of keyboard keys as he prepared to plunge into that invisible universe of electronic data some called the net, others called cyberspace but to Harold Smith was such familiar territory it never occurred to him to give it a name.
And if it had, he would have been stumped.
One of the reasons the President who had conceived CURE had selected Harold Smith to head it up was a disarmingly simple one: Harold Smith was a man utterly without imagination. This quality was just as important a qualification as Smith's rock-ribbed patriotism and his unimpeachable rectitude of character.
Only a man completely honest and devoted to his country could be considered to head up CURE. But only a man hopelessly lacking in imagination could handle the job in the long term and not begin to consider taking over the nation. For CURE was almost autonomous. The President of the United States could suggest, but not order, missions. Unlike the executive branch, Harold Smith wielded ultimate power to exert his will. There was no congressional oversight, no budgetary restrictions beyond the limits of his yearly operating fund, and no voter or special-interest group could recall, impeach or abrogate Smith's office.
The President had only one recourse if CURE should exceed its mandate. He could order Smith to shut down. Smith understood that to mean erasing his computers utterly and himself personally. He kept a poison pill in the watch pocket of his vest for that purpose. Remo would likewise be disposed of, and the Master of Sinanju sent back to Korea. CURE would cease to exist as completely as if it had never been created in the first place.
Only America's survival would stand as evidence of a job well done. But only the most recent President would know.
Smith understood that only the threat of exposure or his own failure of mind or body could trigger that order. In the beginning he had hoped that CURE could fulfil its mission in his lifetime, allowing him to slip into the obscurity of retirement. That comforting fantasy had long ago died. CURE would perish with Harold Smith-unless the President elected to install a successor in his chair.
There had been failures in the past. Their most recent mission, to rescue an American actress who had been deluded into believing she was the reincarnation of Tibet's Bunji Lama, had gone badly. Remo had been sent to pull her out alive and head off an open revolt, but the actress had been killed by Chinese agents. U.S.-China relations were strained as a result, and the President had expressed his extreme disapproval to Harold Smith personally. The actress had been a close personal friend of the First Lady.
The distressing matter of Roger Sherman Coe had come at a difficult time. The President had already cut CURE's operating budget by a serious fifteen percent. Other cuts were threatened.
More ominously the Commander in Chief was now threatening to put CURE on deep-standby status. But it was not any of this that caused Harold Smith to reach into a desk drawer, uncap a bottle of aspirin, tear open two foil packets of Bromo-Seltzer and plunk all four tablets into a paper cup of spring water before drinking down the bitter, fizzy concoction in one facecontorting gulp.
He would have to report this matter to the President. There was no avoiding it.
In the big picture the death of Roger Sherman Coe was not significant. CURE was not perfect. God knew that Remo and Chiun had made mistakes in the past, and casualties had resulted. That was not the problem.
Smith had ordered the man's death based upon an automated computer program designed to rove cyberspace for leads on elusive criminals. Roger Sherman Coe's name had bubbled up during one such search. Smith had checked the facts and determined that the Roger Sherman Coe in Wilmington, North Carolina, was the same Roger Sherman Coe listed on the National Computer Crime Index as a wanted felon. Ordering Remo to terminate the man was routine. Smith issued such instructions often and gave them no thought afterward. He had ultimate faith in his computers, their data bases and his software.
Someone or something had made a mistake. If it was not Remo, then it was either Smith or his computers. If it was Smith, it could mean he was reaching the upper limits of his ability to do his job. If it was the system; then CURE was finished.
So it was with trembling fingers that Harold Smith prepared to plunge into cyberspace to seek answers he would rather not know.
But because he was Harold Smith, he did not hesitate to go after them.
First he called up the National Computer Crime Index. Not the data base in Washington, but his own copy. Smith had downloaded it onto one of the WORM arrays after the new hybrid system went on line, along the entire Social Security database, IRS files and other important repositories of information. No longer would he be dependent on phone lines and his ability to infiltrate protected government files to do the work of CURE. New electronic-privacy laws before Congress; if passed, would not impede his work.
The particulars on Roger Sherman Coe were as Smith remembered them. A fiftyish man with red hair. Satisfied that his memory had not betrayed him, Smith next asked his computer to check the name Roger Sherman Coe against current news feeds and wire service reports. In the aftermath of Hurricane Elvis, the casualty reports had no doubt begun to trickle in.
Smith expected a several-minute delay, and he was pleasantly surprised when he got a scrolling transcript right off the wire.
The report was brief. The body of Roger Sherman Coe, thirty-six, of Wilmington, North Carolina, had been extracted from his beachfront home, along with his surviving family, Sally, thirty-three, and April, five. According to Coe's wife, rather than evacuate, the family had elected to tough out the storm in a reinforced bedroom. But a strange noise had brought Coe out to investigate. When he failed to return, Sally Coe had gone to check on her husband's whereabouts only to find him sprawled in the open door of the home, dying, without a mark on him, but a hole punched through the door.
A preliminary report cited heart failure as the cause of death. The hole in the door was blamed on a piece of storm-driven debris.
The only remarkable circumstance, according to the report, was the fact that of the beachfront properties on Ocean Street, only the Coe house had come through unscathed but for the damage to the door. Every other house along the beach for a mile in either direction had been destroyed or washed out to sea.
It was being called the Miracle of Elvis.
"Remo," Smith said softly, "He protected the house."
Smith logged off the wire services, his face growing long. If the facts were as he had them, then the Roger Sherman Coe who had died at the height of Hurricane Elvis was not the same Roger Sherman Coe who was listed on NCCI.
Smith next pulled up Roger Sherman Coe's Social Security file and ran a comparison program with the NCCI data. He knew what he would find. He had done the identical cross-check at the start of the assignment.
The files matched. The same Social Security number was present. Other statistics matched, except for age, marital status and Remo's description of hair color. One Roger Sherman Coe was a redhead. The other was black haired.
But hair dye and plastic surgery could explain those discrepancies. And, a common-law marriage could be converted to a legal one virtually overnight. The little girl might easily have been the product of a previous marriage, and would not show up on the NCCI file.
Lips compressing to a thin bloodless line, Smith plunged deeper. Perhaps they were one after all. The answer lay in his vast data base.
And if not, then beyond. On the net. In cyberspace.
Chapter 6
Hurricane Elvis died in mid-Atlantic, his fury spent. Only a steady rain remained of his incredibly destructive force.
Remo Williams walked the sandy part of Wollaston Beach, not far from his house, oblivious to the rain. It was a warm rain, and the wind off Quincy Bay was unseasonably cool. He felt neither.
Second to Chiun, he was the most powerful human being to walk the earth in modern times. He didn't feel that, either.
All he felt was numb. Empty and numb.
As he walked along the beach with the pattering rain knocking tiny craters in the sand, Remo took stock of his life.
He looked ten years younger than his actual age, thanks to Sinanju. He could have any woman he wanted, thanks to Sinanju. There was no feat of skill a human being could accomplish that Remo couldn't do, thanks to Sinanju.
He breathed with his entire body, saw with every sense fully and, unless violent death caught up to him, he could expect to live a hundred years easily, or more. All thanks to Sinanju.
The gifts the Master of Sinanju had bestowed on him were staggering.
Oh, there were drawbacks. He couldn't eat meat, processed foods, drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. But these days he didn't miss any of that. And after the first few years of having any woman he could want, that began to bore him, too. Women reacted to the confident rhythm of his walk, the graceful harmony of every bone and muscle operating to the peak of perfection, just as nature had intended, or to the irresistible pheromone scents he gave off without realizing it. They didn't come on to Remo because he was good-looking, or a nice guy, or honest or because they thought he'd make a caring lover or faithful husband. It was raw sex.
All his life Remo had been looking for love. He had found it in a way in an elderly Korean who treated him with a harshness that sounded like scorn but was really love.
He owed Chiun everything.
But in a way Remo had nothing. No wife, no family. And his job was something he couldn't even whisper to his most intimate lover. If he had one, that is.
There had to be more to life than this. It had taken the death of Roger Sherman Coe to bring it home to Remo.
Twenty years of being America's secret assassin had not made America a better place to live. The schools had become shooting galleries, the streets were ruled by fear and drugs and automatic weapons. Even the nation's capital had become ungovernable short of declaring martial law.
Chiun had always warned Remo that America was doomed. Relying on rule of, by and for the people was folly. What America needed was an emperor, Chiun had always said. Otherwise, it would slip into mob rule. Chiun had insisted America would slip into oblivion anyway. All empires did, ultimately. It was just happening faster here because idiots ran things.
It sometimes seemed that way to Remo. Successive Presidents had been hamstrung by the press and Congress, and it would take mandatory testing to convince Remo that Congress itself wasn't on drugs. America wasn't going forward into the next century. It wasn't even standing still. It was unravelling.
Remo could wash his hands of it without a second thought.