His name was Remo, and thought he had sworn off smoking forever.
He was ambling along a crowded sidewalk. It was quiet, eerily calm, as he passed storefronts boarded up the way he had seen businesses do in advance of a hurricane. But there was no hurricane bearing down on Archway City, which was a thousand miles from any coast. It was something worse: a mood, a hive mind mentality that created a tension that was almost tangible. There were several police on hand, but they were all barricaded in their vehicles. Remo tapped on one of the patrol car windows, and an officer rolled it down an inch.
“Yeah, what do you want?”
Remo put his palms up, keeping them in plain sight so the officer would feel there wasn’t a threat. “Just wanted to get a sitrep.”
“Sitrep?” the officer asked. “Oh, the situation. Nothing confirmed yet, but word is the grand jury is going to announce any minute. And if it goes the way I’m hearing, you might want to get inside where it’s safe.”
“Think it’s going to get that bad, huh?”
“Worse,” the officer replied.
Remo looked around. “So where are you guys hiding the riot gear, or the paddy wagons for all the arrests?”
“Arrests?” the officer laughed. “There won’t be any arrests. We’ve got orders to stand down and let the citizens express themselves. Any action on our part will be interpreted as an abridgment of their First Amendment rights to free speech.”
The Constitution wasn’t something the officer had to explain to Remo. He’d been defending it for some time now—usually by violating it. In what had seemed a simpler time, Remo had been a beat cop himself, back in Newark. Then one day he blinked, and found himself in prison on a trumped up charge that landed him on death row. As his fellow inmates served out decades, living on appeal after appeal, Remo was sent to the electric chair, where he was summarily executed.
Instead of awakening to Saint Peter and sweet angel harps, Remo woke up in a hospital bed from a medically induced coma to the irritating shrill insults of an ancient Korean. He learned from a dour man named Harold W. Smith that his identity had been eradicated so that he could serve as the enforcement arm of CURE, an agency created by the past President to exist outside of the Constitution in order to defend it in ways that it couldn’t do itself. To do this, he would be trained by Master Chiun, the Korean whom he was sure hated him for no good reason at the time, in the assassin’s art of Sinanju. And, for the good of the United States of America, Remo had accepted the offer.
Since that time, he had encountered a number of weird and unbelievable atrocities, but few of them ever topped human nature at its pure nastiest.
· · ·
Downtown, several miles from Remo, a battalion of media cameras and reporters were gathered on the steps of the courthouse. At this very moment, as the last sliver of sunlight slunk behind the western horizon, the special prosecutor was about to announce to the world that the grand jury had found no credible evidence to indict Officer Eric Ritter in the shooting death of eighteen-year-old Demond Wilcox. Despite the distance, those comments sparked a fuse that sizzled at the speed of social media, making a beeline for the northeast suburban neighborhood, almost directly to the mound of dead flowers, candles, and a rain-matted teddy bear—centrally laid out around a 40 ounce bottle of beer, marking the spot in the street where Wilcox breathed his last.
The fuse may not have been real, but the explosions were—very real. A shouting, angry mob appeared nearly spontaneously. The police officer Remo was talking to rolled up his window, and the rest obeyed their orders and sheltered in place while the protestors threw bottles, broke windows, flipped cars and chanted bad poetry at the top of their lungs.
The first building went up in flames within minutes, a bakery owned by an old man who gave out free cupcakes to the neighborhood children who came in on their birthdays. Remo stood on a corner against a light pole, disappointed that humanity didn’t disappoint him, as he watched the flames climb higher into the sky. The absence of sirens told him nobody was coming to save this structure, and the absence of screaming told him there was nobody inside—this time.
Remo glanced up and down the street, counting heads and giving a low whistle. It was painfully obvious that there were more people charging about than made up the population of the neighborhood.
This wasn’t protesting authority, Remo realized. Protesting authority was the sperm and egg of America. This was madness—with coordination.
He let out a deep sigh, and then tilted his head slightly to the right to allow a bottle of what Remo hoped was lemonade sail past him to smash on the sidewalk further away. The immediate ammonia and asparagus smell emanating from the bottle’s impact evaporated any hopes Remo had that it was merely a waste of a refreshing fruit drink. He turned, and saw even more insanity going on down the street behind him, with multiple plumes of smoke making columns against the blackening sky.
Across the street, Roland Perry was putting a flame to the t-shirt wick of his Molotov cocktail, before sending it in a high arc against the plywood planks boarding up the windows of the 24 hour Git-It-N-Go, which was closed for the first time in its thirty years in the neighborhood.
“How’s it going?” Remo asked amiably, startling Perry who hadn’t heard Remo slip up on him.
“Burn this mother down!” he shouted by way of response.
“Okay, but why?”
Roland Perry looked him up and down, taken off guard by this ignorant fool who didn’t seem to be getting into the spirit of the protest. He wore a dressy pair of chinos, which screamed military—maybe a National Guard soldier, but they were supposed to be across town—and his forearms, which were crossed loosely over his chest, seemed to disappear into his hands without bothering to taper into wrists. Despite the unassuming tone of his voice, the dark eyes shadowed by his pronounced brow communicated anything but friendliness.
“Why?” Roland repeated dumbly. “Why? Because these are our streets! This is our neighborhood!”
“So where do you plan to live tomorrow?”
“Where…?”
“Where are you going to get gas? Where are you going to buy cupcakes? You might have a few holdout heroin dealers, but the smarter ones are already on their way to safer pastures.”
The flames were licking higher up the side of the Git-It-N-Go, the plywood letting loose of the building, the plate glass shattering from the heat.
The destruction bolstered Roland’s courage. “Why you giving me shit?” he asked indignantly. “You ain’t from around here. These are our streets! This is…”
“I know, I know.” Remo repeated. “‘This is our neighborhood.’“ He sighed. “Tell you what, let’s take a walk, you and me.”
“Take a what?” But Roland was already moving, as Remo’s hand appeared almost magically beside Roland’s head, thumb and forefinger pinching a rather sensitive nerve cluster in his upper earlobe. “Ow! Ow! Hey, where we goin’?”
Inside the Git-It-N-Go, the flames were licking at the racks of cheese puffs and snack cakes, toxic plastic wrappers melting and molding to their contents, which didn’t cause the food-like substances to be any more toxic than they already were.
“What the hell, man,” shrieked a panicked Roland Perry, as Remo led him by the ear into the centermost area of the convenience store. “Are you out of your mind? Leggo my ear, you crazy cracker!”
“Sure thing,” Remo said cheerfully. “Soon as you show me where the sunflower seeds are.”
“The sunflower…what?” Roland’s eyes were wide with fear, and his face was a sheen of sweat. “Man, this place is gonna come down around us!”
“Then we should probably hurry,” Remo said. Roland noted that the heat wasn’t affecting his abuser—even his pants weren’t getting singed, as Roland frantically slapped away a few sparks from his gravity-defying droopy drawers. “I’d never find them on my own. Good thing you’re from the neighborhood, Roland.”
“Dude, we have got to…Ow! That’s my ear, man!”
“You have two ears, Roland,” Remo said. “When you have two of something, and you use neither, you can’t miss one if it’s gone.”
A wall of flame grew rapidly up the counter, strings of scratch off tickets curling, smoldering, and ultimately igniting with enough heat to crack the glass case. Roland squealed, then began to look hurriedly for sunflower seeds. He saw a row of candy bars that hadn’t attracted flames yet. “Over there! They’re over there!” he pointed.
Remo looked where Roland was pointing. “Are you sure, Roland? I’d hate to go on a wild goose chase. You know, what with the building burning down and all.” He tugged Roland’s ear, leading him in the general direction of the candy bars. “I’m not seeing them, Roland.”
“They’re here, they gotta be,” Roland said. He was starting to cough, and yet this crazy mother was still as calm and cool as if he were browsing a farmer’s market. He began to rake through the different boxes of chocolates and peanuts, spilling them to the floor.
“I thought this was your neighborhood, Roland?” Remo teased. “Maybe the store remodeled since you were here last?”
“Man, I don’t…” It was then that realization managed to wedge its way through a crack in Roland’s terror. “Hey, how you know my name, man? I didn’t tell you my name!”
“I’m impressed, Roland,” Remo said. “Maybe your ears are starting to get some use after all.” His other hand came into view. It was holding a wallet—specifically Roland’s. He let the wallet fall open. “Roland Perry, 344 Clinton Street…Oh, this can’t be right. This says Chicago on it. You know you’re supposed to change your license when you move, don’t you Roland?”
“Man, how you get my wallet?”
“Well, I have to tell you, you did make it a challenge,” Remo chuckled. “I mean, lifting a wallet, that’s almost child’s play. But the real trick was to get it out of your back pocket without knocking your pants to the ground. That, I don’t mind saying, took a little bit of finesse. But more to the point, what are you doing in Archway City? Because I think we’ve pretty much established that these are not your streets and this is not your neighborhood.”
“I ain’t gotta tell you sh—” The tempered glass doors of the freezer shattered loudly, sending shards flying out and catching him across the face. When he looked back up, the man with his wallet didn’t have a scratch on him.
“Better hurry, Roland,” Remo said. “Things are starting to heat up.”
Blood ran into Roland’s right eye, stinging it, and the smoke was getting thicker. “A’right, a’right! We took buses, okay? We all got in last week.”
“Oh, I’m going to need a few more details than that, Roland,” Remo said calmly, as a rack of Flaming Hot potato chips ignited and crashed to the ground at the end of the aisle. “Who’s ‘we,’ for instance?”
“I don’t know, man!” Roland tried to yank his head away from Remo’s grip, and his vision went white with pain. “Leggo me, man!” he screamed in agony.
“But you haven’t found my sunflower seeds yet, Roland,” Remo said. “I’ll forgive you that if you tell me who came on the buses.”
“Seriously, I don’t know,” Roland whimpered. “We didn’t know each other. We just got word that the Reverend Bluntman…”
“Wait, Hal Bluntman?”
“Yeah, Reverend Hal, he put out the word that we was gonna teach this town a lesson. But that’s all I know man, I swear!”
Remo sighed. “Okay, I believe you, Roland.” He let go of the man’s ear. “Now get out of here. Go make something positive out of your life. Because if I see you again at another…”
Remo paused. His feet felt the pressure waves gently ripple under the floor of the convenience store. The sensation was imperceptible to anyone else, but that would soon change. Remo felt his stomach go a little queasy, like when he used to ride the tilt-a-whirl as a kid back on the boardwalk.
Roland Perry wasn’t going to ask questions. Seeing Remo’s attention had shifted to other things, he turned and bolted toward the door—only he didn’t know which way the door was now, since the building had filled with flames and smoke. He pivoted one direction, then the other.
And that’s when Roland became aware of what Remo already knew was coming, as the ground rumbled fiercely, upending one wall of the store while lowering another. With provident accuracy, one of the roof beams of the already weakened structure fell, its flaming mass striking Roland squarely in the head, caving in the side of his skull and knocking him to the ground.
“Well, hell,” Remo muttered, as he stepped lightly across the flaming wreckage. “Really didn’t mean for that to happen, Roland,” he offered in apology, as he stepped through the door, unharmed and into the night where chaos continued to reign up and down the street.
As he took in the scene of rampaging citizens and cowering cops, he smelled something burning that was different from all the other things that were burning. Looking down at his arm, he saw that the tips of a few hairs were glowing embers, sending up tiny, curling wisps of smoke. His already low brow ridge lowered further as Remo cursed himself mentally. “Clumsy,” he muttered, brushing the embers out with one sweep of his palm. “Thank God Chiun wasn’t here to see that.”
· · ·
When Remo made it back downtown to the justice building, walking past several idle National Guard troops protecting the expensive property from protests that weren’t happening, he found Chiun sitting beatifically on the top step of the courthouse, arms folded and eyes closed. He had felt no need to follow Remo into what he poetically called “the jungle.” Besides, the pool of reporters swarming the scene earlier would include the illustrious Cheeta Ching, who was, according to Chiun, the only newscaster worth watching because her beauty distracted from the pitiful quality of the information she was imparting.
“You were right Chiun,” Remo said, disgustedly. “They’re animals.”
“Say that first part again,” Chiun replied, not opening his eyes. “These ears are old, and frequently lie to me.”
Remo sat beside him. “I said you were right, Little Father,” he replied. “As always. At least I got a name for Smitty.”
“A pitiful use of Sinanju,” Chiun said, the vellum slits of his eyelids cracking open just the tiniest bit. “Nothing of value came from this needless trip.”
“Cheeta Ching didn’t even notice you, huh?”
“Oh, she was here?” Chiun asked, unperturbed. “I did not notice.”
“She was three feet from where you’re sitting, Chiun,” Remo grinned. “You were practically looking up her—”
“We should go now,” Chiun said, rising to his feet, “before you finish uttering a slander against one who has only ever put you before all other matters in his life.”
Remo smiled to himself, ready with a rejoinder, when he thought he noticed Chiun slightly stumble as he rose. Before he could reach out to right his Master, Chiun had recovered, as though it had never happened.
“Chiun, are you—” He was interrupted by the chirping of the phone in his pants pocket.
“It is the bird in the box again,” Chiun said. “Why do you not free yourself of it?”
“Smitty said we’re supposed to slide it left when it rings,” Remo said, as he swiped the phone in a leftward motion along his arm.
Chiun rolled his eyes. “Not like that, let me—”
“I’ve got it, Little Father.”
“Why does the mad Emperor Smith not send an envoy?” Chiun grumbled. “That would be more dignified for a Master of Sinanju.”
· · ·
In a remote, pastoral corner of Westchester County, looking out over the Long Island Sound, is a facility for housing and treating those who struggle with reality. The old timers in the area still used the term ‘sanitarium’ (with the really old timers calling it ‘the bughouse’), and indeed Folcroft Sanitarium hadn’t bothered to change its name for years, despite evolutions in polite language.
Now and again, you might catch a smirk from a few smartly-dressed employees having lunch at Ruby’s Oyster Bar & Bistro when asked how things were going out at the ‘hospital.’ These were the guys who knew that Folcroft Sanitarium was no mere rest home, but was in fact a cover for the National Security Administration’s top-secret software development laboratories. Certainly, it housed a great number of mentally ill, employed a platoon of nurses, and a team of the best doctors—as well as one cold-hearted administrator who everyone was fairly sure popped out of the womb with his lips pursed like he’d sucked on his first lemon.
It was the computer systems inside Folcroft that were the real reason for its existence—systems that played host to sophisticated, real-time data analysis software that would, in a few years or so, be the next level of cutting-edge technology for keeping the United States safe. Before that happened, however, it would serve as the bleeding edge analysis tool for what was actually the most secretive agency in America—so secretive that even the employees didn’t realize who employed them.
Folcroft’s chief of staff provided the perfect cover for the development project; the doctor was gray, boring, and showed an absolute void of curiosity. Even his name embodied an aura of bland homogeneity: Smith.
Harold W. Smith was also the head of CURE—was, in fact, one-half of the total organization, and one of only three people who knew of the organization’s existence. Every day, Smith would enter his drab office, hang his gray overcoat and hat, straighten his tie and adjust his American flag lapel pin, then sit down before the CURE computer monitor where he would begin to purse his lips even tighter as statistics and probabilities began to dance across the glass. The system monitored global events in real time, connecting the dots and stringing together links that, to human beings, would appear superficially disparate. These clusters of data floated on a rotating three-dimensional wireframe model. Items the computer deemed more important than others were displayed in glowing red letters.
Smith had long ago learned to trust the machine. But he also subscribed to the philosophy of one of the Presidents he had had the privilege to serve under: Trust, but verify.
Several events vied for his attention. Civil unrest in the Midwest threatened to escalate. Small, scattered groups in Texas were determined to press the issue of making assault rifles and grenade launchers as common a sight as backpacks and purses in preschools and grocery stores. Smith touched the screen and brushed each of these clusters aside for later scrutiny.
In prominent, thick letters, the CURE system insisted Smith give attention to the increase in global earthquake activity. Smith’s eyebrows scrunched together, and his lemony face puckered as he puzzled over this bit of information. The earthquakes weren’t focused in any one area, and he ultimately decided there was nothing to be done with this. He then pushed the dataset over into the digital wastebasket, making a note for future upgrades to place less weight on natural disasters.
This manual bit of cleanup made the next warning one Smith was more comfortable in handling: a third-tier terrorist organization, ya Homaar, had been on CURE’s radar for some time now, having displayed a spark of potential at evolving into the next Daesh or ibn Kalaab. What had been holding them back had been their lack of funding, yet the chatter stitched together by CURE’s Internet sniffers gave all indications that, even without money, the group had come into possession of several explosive devices which they were looking to put to use soon. Smith double-tapped the image of the data cluster, which began to unfold onto the screen, extrapolating the sequence of comments as the machine’s predictive engines began extrapolating likely targets and assessing threat levels.
Satisfied with the 98% probability factors, Smith picked up the phone—an archaic black rotary device—out of place in any other office but which fit right in with the timeless spartan decor of Smith’s domain. The phone ever only dialed one number, and only ever rang from two, so there was no need for it to have any other features.
Without needing to dial, Smith heard a connection begin to ring on the other end. After what had become the customary thirty rings, the connection was opened and he heard two voices arguing for several moments before he was finally able to speak.
“Smitty,” Remo’s voice came through the receiver. “You called this one. Someone’s definitely orchestrating these riots. I got one of them to pony up Hal Bluntman’s name. You want the usual?”
“We’ll have to table that for now,” Smith replied curtly. “For now, go to the airport. Your tickets will be waiting.”