"I want to make a deal with the ambassador. Please."
"Idiot! This is too great for an ambassador. If this is what you say, I must deliver this tape to Moscow in person."
"Take me with you, then."
"No. Understand me, American. You live or die at my whim. First, you will transcribe the words contained on your tape. In Korean, and in English."
"I'm never going to see the ambassador, am I?" asked Sammy Kee, who broke into tears again.
"Of course not. Your discovery will be my passport out of this backward country. Perhaps to great rank and responsibility. I will not share it with anyone outside the Politburo."
"What about me?"
"I will decide later. If you set foot outside this room, I will turn you over to the military police. They will shoot you as a spy. Or I may shoot you myself."
"I am an American citizen. These things don't happen to American citizens," Kee said.
"Not in America, young man. But you are in North Korea now and the rules are different."
Ditko left the room and Sammy Kee began to weep. He knew he would never see San Francisco again.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he had returned to Detroit to destroy an American institution.
In any other city in America, arson was not an institution, but a crime. However, in Detroit, since the 1960's, the institution known as Devil's Night had resulted in destruction of property only a little less costly than the firebombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II.
Devil's Night had started as a Halloween prank, when trick-or-treaters had torched a row of warehouses. Because the warehouses were abandoned, no one took the arson seriously. But then it was repeated the next year. And every year after. The torchings grew into a Detroit tradition, and when the city ran out of warehouses and other abandoned buildings in the early 1970's, the tradition spilled over into residential areas. Then people began to worry. By that time it was too late. The animals had been allowed to run free too long. Now Devil's Night was an institution, and no one was safe in Detroit on Halloween night.
This year the city council of Detroit had instituted a dusk-to-dawn curfew. It was an unprecedented move. Curfews, Remo had always thought, were stuff you found in banana republics. Walking down the deserted streets of Detroit, it made him angry that a major American city would be reduced to this, just because of a small lawless minority.
"This is barbaric," Remo said to his companion. Remo was a trim, good-looking man with deep-set dark eyes and high cheekbones. He wore black. Black slacks and a T-shirt. There was nothing unusual about him except for his strangely thick wrists and the fact that he moved like a dark panther. His feet, happening to walk across the windblown pages of a discarded newspaper, did not raise even a crinkle of sound.
"This is America," said Remo's companion. He did not wear black. He wore smoke-gray silk, trimmed with pink, in the form of a kimono. "Barbarism is its natural state. But tonight is very pleasing. I cannot put my finger on it, but it is very pleasant here-for a dirty American city."
"We're the only ones out in the entire freaking city," Remo said.
"We are the only ones who count," said Chiun, the latest in the unbroken line of Masters of Sinanju. His shiny head, adorned with white wisps of hair above each ear, came only to Remo's shoulder. His parchment face was a happy web of wrinkles, dominated by bright eyes. They were a clear hazel, and they made him seem younger than his eighty-plus years.
"This isn't the way it should be, Little Father," Remo said, stopping at a street corner. No traffic moved. There were no pedestrians. Every storefront was dark. In some of them, the dim figures of storeowners waited and watched. Remo saw a shotgun in one man's arm.
"When I was a kid, Halloween wasn't like this."
"No?" squeaked Chiun. "What was it like?"
"Kids walked the streets safely. We went house to house in our trick-or-treat outfits, and every porch was lit. We didn't have to be kept indoors because parents were afraid of razor blades in apples or Valium hidden in chocolate bars. And we didn't set fire to buildings. At worst, we threw rotten eggs at people's windows if they were too stingy to give us candy."
"You were a child extortionist, Remo. Why am I not surprised?"
"Halloween is an American tradition."
"I like silence better," said Chiun. "Let us walk down this street next."
"Why this one?" asked Remo.
"Humor me."
Remo heard the clinking of metal against stone before he had taken three steps.
"This may be them," Remo whispered. "The arsonists Smith sent us to find."
"Were you an arsonist as a child too?"
"No, I was an orphan."
"A fine thing to say to one who has been as your father."
"Cut it out, Chiun. I don't want to spook these guys."
"I will wait here, then. Alone. Like an orphan."
Remo slid up against the brick wall of a tenement building in downtown Detroit. The wall was smudged black from a fire years before. The dead smell of burned things still clung to the building. The sounds were coming from an alley around the corner. There were three figures kneeling back inside the alley, only dim outlines in the colorless moonlight. To Remo, whose eyes had been trained to gather up and intensify any available light, the scene was as bright as if he had been watching a black-and-white television picture. He watched silently.
"You lose," said one of the youths in a small voice. Remo caught the flash and clink of a penny bouncing off brick.
"What are you guys doing?" Remo asked suddenly, using the same authoritative voice that, in the days when he was a beat patrolman, was as important as his sidearm.
The three teenagers jumped as one.
"Pitching pennies," one of them said. "What's it to you?"
"I didn't know anyone pitched pennies anymore," Remo said in surprise.
"We do."
"I can see that," Remo said. The sight took him back to his childhood, in Newark, New Jersey. He had pitched pennies all over Newark, even though Sister Mary Margaret of Saint Theresa's Orphanage warned him that it was a sinful waste of time as well as pennies which could help feed the poor.
"Don't you guys know there's a curfew on tonight? You could all go to jail."
"Don't make me laugh," the oldest of the three said. "We're underage. They don't send kids to jail." He had black hair cut in a punk chop and wore a studded collar around his pale throat. The legend "CTHULHU RULES" was written with red Magic Marker across the front of his dungaree jacket. Remo figured Cthulhu must be a new punk rock group.
"Okay. Let me show you how we used to pitch pennies in Newark."
Remo dug into his pocket, producing a few brown coins.
"The object of the game is to pitch the pennies so they bounce as close to the wall as possible, right?" Remo said.