"You'd be dead too," he said.
"It'd be worth it," she said.
"Take off your clothes," he said.
Later, he tried to decide who he would like to fire the first salvos, America or Russia.
He couldn't make up his mind, and to pass the time, he decided to finish off that New York problem. He was bored with Pamela Thrushwell and that bodyguard she now had, the one whose fingerprints didn't show up anywhere. The one who had refused to take money from the bank machine. Maybe something elemental would be real good, he thought. Maybe a fight to the death.
He turned to Marcia. Her clothes lay on the floor where she had dropped them.
"Would you like to see two people horribly murdered?" he asked.
"More than anything else in the world," she said.
"Good."
In the computer vaults of the Wall Street bank, Pamela Thrushwell had let out two screams. One of them was for the victory in getting into the vaults; the other was for the shock of seeing all the bank records vanishing before her eyes.
Even as she searched for the source of the commands that operated the money machines, the records were being erased. The source was defending itself and taking the bank's entire memory with it.
Two of the vice-presidents were having heart attacks. The others tried climbing over Pamela to get to the keyboard to somehow preserve the records.
"You have backups, don't you?" she asked indignantly.
"That's the backup. Going right now," said a pale and shaking vice-president.
"My God, we're going to have to go back to paper," said another.
"What's that? Paper?" another one asked.
"It's flat stuff like dollar bills but it isn't green and you make marks on it."
"With what?"
"I don't know. Things. Pens, pencils. Wedges."
"How do we know who owns what, though?" another asked, and all the vice-presidents looked accusingly at Remo and Pamela.
Pamela sat in front of a large television monitor as names and numbers flashed by her in a lightning-fast parade on their way to computer oblivion.
There was one final message. It lingered on the screen for a moment.
"ALL RECORDS CLEARED. GOOD NIGHT MALIBU."
And then the machine went blank.
The vice-presidents who were still standing groaned.
"I guess we've really done it," Pamela said.
"Would an apology do?" Remo asked. The three bankers who had been able to withstand myocardial infarctions at seeing an entire banking system disappear in a series of green blips all shook their heads numbly.
"We're ruined," one said. "All ruined. Thousands of people out of jobs. Thousands of people bankrupt. Ruined. All ruined."
"I said I'm sorry," Remo said. "What do you want from me?"
In Strategic Air Command headquarters deep within the Rocky Mountains, a safety report reached its ominous conclusion: nuclear war could not be avoided because someone or something had gotten into the command systems for both Russian and American missiles and was-- there was no other way to say it-- "playing around."
The President listened to his cabinet discuss the crisis and remained mute. Then he used the red dialless telephone in his bedroom to reach Dr. Harold W. Smith.
"Where do we stand on this-- this-- this thing with the atomic bombs?" he asked.
"We're on it, sir," said Smith. He looked carefully at his left hand. It was numb and could not move. He was still in a state of shock because only minutes before a publishing house in New York City had telephoned him. They asked him to verify a story about Folcroft Sanitarium being the training place of a secret assassin.
Smith had forced himself to chuckle. "This is an insane asylum," he had said. "It sounds like you've been talking to one of the inmates."
"It sounded crazy. People who had been killing others for thousands of years and then coming to America to work to train a secret assassin. Nice old man though. Was he a patient?"
"Might have been," said Smith. "Did he think he was Napoleon?"
"No. Just a Master Assassin."
"We have nine of those," Smith said. "I've got fourteen Napoleons, if that helps. Would you like me to talk to the man?"
"He's gone. Left his manuscript though. It's real exciting."
"Are you going to publish it?" Smith had asked.
"Don't know," said the editor.
"I'd like to read it," said Smith with all the control he could muster. "Of course, you know we would have to sue if you mentioned our name."
"We thought of that. That's why we phoned."
That was when the left hand went numb. The world was liable to go up in atomic dust and he couldn't reach Remo, who might not have understood the assignment to begin with, and now he couldn't reach Chiun, who might have understood the assignment, but couldn't be bothered with it because he was out trying to peddle his life story.
Chiun's autobiography. And just a few months before, it had been Chiun trying to create a national organization dedicated to "Stamping Out Amateur Assassins."
Either way, CURE would be compromised. The only redeeming thought was that probably no one would be around anymore to care whether one small band of men had tried to save America from slipping away into the darkness of lost civilizations. You couldn't be compromised when there was no one left to know.
Smith looked out over the sound behind his office. Despite the dimming effect of the one-way glass, the world was so incredibly sunny, so alive, so bright. Why did the world have to be so beautiful at this moment? Why did he have to notice it?
Because all he could do was notice. As with everything else. He was sitting atop the most powerful, most sophisticated agency in the history of mankind, served by two assassins who were beyond anything the West had ever produced, and he was helpless. He remembered for a moment about smelling the flowers as you go by. A golfer had told him that once: smell the flowers as you go by.
He hadn't done much of that. Instead, he had dedicated his life to making the flowers safe for others to smell.