Buzz turned again. "I don't see you."
"That is because I am behind you," insisted the squeaky voice.
It was crazy. Buzz Kuttner was turning in place, repeatedly making 360-degree turns, and the voice was continually behind him. Therefore, it could not be behind him. It was coming from somewhere else. A hidden speaker or intercom. Kuttner stopped turning in search of the source.
"What did you mean, I'm trash?" he asked the disembodied voice.
"You are a thief."
"I'm an out-of-work media consultant and technical installer just trying to make payments on a house that's worth less than the mortgage. What do you expect me to do, walk the floor in a department store?"
"Your wife would not like that," the squeaky voice suggested.
"What wife? She walked when the severance pay ran out."
"You must miss your children terribly," the squeaky voice clucked sympathetically.
"No kids. That was my one break in life."
"That is good."
"I'll say."
"For without a wife or children, a thief such as you will not be missed."
"Missed?"
The squeaky voice grew deep and sonorous, as if telling a story. "Men such as you were chosen by the pharaohs of Egypt for the important tasks of palace building. Men who would toil long days and nights, their efforts unbroken by thoughts of family."
Buzz Kuttner didn't like the way this was going, so he began backing out of the ill-lit room. The voice seemed to follow him. Now it seemed near his left ear, but that was impossible. There was no one there.
"And when their tasks were complete," the squeaky voice continued, "they could be disposed of without a second thought, taking the pharaoh's secrets with them."
"I don't know any secrets."
"You have entered the sanctum sanctorum of the emperor I serve."
"Emperor! You're a nut. Wait a minute, this is a nuthouse. Of course you're a nut."
"I am not a nut."
"This is twentieth-century America, and you're talking about pharaohs and emperors and secret palaces. Of course you're a nut. And this is an asylum. Some crazy kind of asylum, but an asylum just the same. I can't believe you got me so worked up over a pipe dream."
So great was Buzz Kuttner's relief that he started laughing. It was a nervous laughter, and he let it go on a long time.
He never felt the bladelike fingernail that slipped easily into his back between two lumbar vertebrae, severing his spinal cord like a soft strand of spaghetti.
Buzz Kuttner was still laughing when he collapsed on the hard floor in the grit of shattered concrete. The laugh became breathy, then trailed off into a long exhalation and ending in a rattle that sounded like a broken continuation of his laughter.
After a silent minute the gaunt shadow returned to the room. He wore gray. His hair was white.
"Your will has been done, Emperor Smith," said the owner of the squeaky voice. He bowed slightly, and a slice of light captured a flash of orange silk whose pattern resembled the stripes of a Bengal tiger.
"Good. Please dispose of the body."
"Where?"
"The coal furnace. Place him inside,"
"If it is your will."
"I would help, but I must get rid of the truck."
A gnarled yellow claw with fingernails like ivory blades gestured toward the array of mainframes and jukeboxes. "All has been accomplished to your satisfaction?"
"Yes," said Harold W. Smith. "CURE is now ready to enter the twenty-first century."
"And once you have returned, you and I will be ready to enter negotiations for further service between your house and mine," returned Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo, and he was whistling into the teeth of the hurricane.
The winds had been clocked at seventy-five miles per hour, and Remo was walking against them. He was whistling "The Wayward Wind," and he could hear every note over the growing roar.
The waters off Wilmington, North Carolina, were flat and oily in anticipation of Hurricane Elvis making landfall as Remo walked along the Wrightville Beach beachfront, where plywood sheets covered the windows of upscale summer homes and cottages. People had spray-painted messages to Elvis on the plywood.
"Elvis Go Home!"
"Elvis, You're All Wet!"
"Go Back Where You Came From!"
As if hurricanes cared.
There was a mandatory evacuation along the beachfront, and almost everyone had left. Except Roger Sherman Coe.
Roger Sherman Coe had elected to ride out the storm in his beachfront home. That was just like Roger Sherman Coe. The law meant nothing to him. The hurricane warning had been posted while Remo was enroute to his rendezvous with Roger Sherman Coe. Remo had put a call to the man from his first-class seat on Flight 334.
"Is this Roger Sherman Coe?" Remo had asked.
"Yes."
"This is Bernard Rubble from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Coe. We're calling all citizens in your area to personally alert them about Hurricane Elvis."
"I'm staying," Roger Sherman Coe had snapped.