The looseness of the yellow silk kimono with the gold brocade hid that Chiun was sitting lotus position on the large flat rock as he looked out toward the sea. To his left lay a chaotic smattering of lottery tickets, their silver painted squares unmarred as they piled up in the sand. To his right, stacked neatly, were winning tickets ready to be cashed in. A light breeze blew in off the water as Chiun, eyes closed, passed his palm over another ticket.
“A-ha!” he cried. “Another worthless piece of paper.” He discarded the ticket, letting it litter the sand beside him with its other untouched brethren. “Why do you not buy just the tickets that are worth more money?” he asked Remo.
“Because, Little Father, that would be considered stealing,” Remo explained patiently as Chiun slowly slid his palm over another ticket. He had checked into the Grand Merlot Valeton hotel under the name Remo Robespierre, then picked up a newspaper at the gift shop, which was where Chiun found the roll of scratch off tickets and insisted Remo buy the entire set.
“They charged you a fee for their goods, and you paid it, did you not? Is it stealing when they say they are giving you money and you gratefully accept it?” Chiun asked. “If they were not giving the money away, then that would be stealing.”
“They’re not giving it away, Chiun,” Remo said. “There’s a risk that you won’t win. That’s supposed to be the thrill of gambling, the idea that you might lose your money.”
“There is no risk,” Chiun said serenely in his chiding, sing-song cadence. He lay the current ticket carefully on the stack, having scratched off only the three matching squares indicating a 5 Euro win. “There is money, and there is no money. The wise Master of Sinanju chooses the path leading where there is money.” He opened his eyes and glanced out at the ocean as if just noticing it. “This is a nicer place than you usually take me, Remo. Why have you avoided this place before?”
“Because this isn’t Jersey in the US of A, it’s Jersey off the coast of France,” Remo said. The newspaper he was flipping through made no mention of the peace talks currently underway between representatives of the Palestinians and Israelis, due to the fact that the talks were supposed to be secret. As Remo understood the current situation, the Israeli leader was offering terms that would grant the Palestinians land in strategically debilitating areas, while the Palestinian leader was miffed because the Israelis wouldn’t accept their one simple demand to lay down and stop breathing.
“Typical of white Americans,” Chiun said. “You covet that which your betters have, then create an inferior copy and call it ‘new.’ You do not have a York, you have a New York. You cannot have a Jersey, so you make a New Jersey. And the ‘new’ is meant to fool people into thinking they have something that is somehow better.”
Remo was not looking for news of the talks in the paper. Rather, he was scouring the personal ads, looking for anything that would seem like a possible communication between would-be terrorists. Smitty was pretty sure of himself that there was going to be a strike, and he even had an inkling of the group behind it. The trick was finding out when. At least they knew the talks were being held at the Grand Merlot, and it only took an obscene amount of money to get Remo registered there, and then double that amount to get the penthouse floor (“As befitting of a Master of Sinanju,” Chiun declared). The tip to the bellhop alone would probably buy him dinner for a week, but by the time he had lugged all of Chiun’s steamer trunks to their suite, he knew he’d been swindled.
“What wisdom is it you expect to find within the sheets of that dung-smattered pulp that passes for news?” Chiun asked. “Do you think your enemies will announce their plans where everyone might read them?”
“You never know,” said Remo. “They’re not always the brightest bulbs on the tree.”
“Ah, then you are at least challenged by your equals.”
“That’s why I brought you along, Little Father,” said Remo. He had to admit Chiun was right, though. The odds of the terrorists sending some sort of coded message through the personals were very low. Besides, he had enough trouble deciphering “BBW SEEKS SAME 4 RP BDSM.” Any one of these could be a message from one mooj to another, for all the sense it made. Remo folded the paper and tossed it onto the glass-topped table. The headline story was about a small tremor in Indonesia, and it reminded Remo of the events in Archway City.
“So you never told me,” Remo said. “Did you get close to Cheeta Ching in Archway City?”
Chiun smiled beatifically. “Just to be within the same city as one with such grace and beauty is to be considered close,” he said, then turned to Remo. “I could count the stitches on the hem of her impeccable dress.”
Remo whistled, despite knowing Chiun could do that from fifty yards. “That close, huh? That explains why you were a little wobbly when I found you.”
“What wobbly!” Chiun spat. “A Master of Sinanju does not ‘wobble!’” He glowered at Remo, but there was just a hint that something, indeed, was very wrong. Chiun calmed, his demeanor deflating. “You will notice it soon enough,” he said quietly.
“Notice what?” Remo asked, mildly concerned. “What’s going on that you’re not telling me, Chiun?”
Before Chiun could reply, a kind of a roar, like a mosquito on steroids, came from the street above, as a pale green Volkswagen Beetle careened toward the plaza in front of the Grand Merlot.
“Looks like the mountain is going to come to Muhammad after all,” Remo said, sprinting up the steep sandy incline from the beach to the hotel. He could see the Beetle now, pinging off of trashcans, vendor carts, and some of the slower pedestrians. Human screams mingled with the tiny car’s whine, and Remo crested the incline just in time to see several men lounging about in casual dress suddenly spring to attention and draw concealed weapons on the Bug.
“Not the most subtle approach,” Remo muttered. “No one ever said these bozos were smart, but I always figured them to be smarter than this.”
“Perhaps they are,” said Chiun, who was suddenly standing beside Remo. “Look.”
Chiun extended a frail-looking arm in the opposite direction of the car’s approach, where a lone figure wearing a bulky padded jacket was darting into an alley alongside the hotel’s service entrance.
“He doesn’t look like the caterer to me,” Remo said, as he crossed toward the man, taking quick strides. He saw the now no-longer-undercover guards firing bullets into the front of the VW. “The motor is in the back, you morons,” he called out helpfully, before slipping into the same alley his target had taken. He kicked off the wall and propelled himself to the top of a dumpster, silent as cotton falling on snow. He leaped toward the wall again, and his legs recoiled to push him toward the other side of the narrow alley, where he repeated the procedure at the opposing wall. In three strides, Remo was running silently down the alley, twenty feet in the air. When he was a few feet past the suspicious looking character in the padded jacket, he dropped to the ground in front of him.
“The hotel prefers all guests check in through the main lobby, sir,” Remo said, and then shrugged. “It’s policy.”
The man froze for a moment, panicked. This was not supposed to happen. Men did not just drop from the sky. He looked briefly upward to see if any more American angels were about to descend before reaching into his jacket and pulling a pistol.
“You will not stop me,” he said in a thick accent. The gun trembled in his hand as he aimed it at Remo. “Allah has blessed me to be his destroyer!”
Remo arched an eyebrow. “He’s doing that now? I’m going to have to have a chat with him someday.”
Before the gunman could pull the trigger, the disassembled gun was tinkling to the pavement in a shower of metal fragments. “You really didn’t think you were going to do much damage with that little pea-shooter, did you?”
Panic-stricken, the man opened wide his bulky jacket, revealing a device like Remo had never seen before, but the purpose of which he could easily deduce. It was all yellow plastic and wires, and belted around his waist. He produced a push-button remote in his other hand, holding it up. “I’ll set it off. I swear it!” he said, as sweat beaded up on his forehead.
Remo sighed and shook his head. As easily as he had taken the gun, the remote was suddenly in Remo’s grasp, leaving the would-be bomber open-mouthed and empty-handed.
“Now, why don’t we have a little talk about the nice people you work for?”
“I live to serve Allah!” he declared with a stutter.
“I already guessed that, but I don’t really need to go that far up the food chain,” Remo said. “How about you just tell me the name of the guy you get your orders from?” Getting no immediate answer, Remo pressed one finger into the hollow of the man’s left shoulder. “Any time now, if you don’t mind. I’ve got a beach chair and an expense account, and I’d like to get back to using both of them.”
The man tried to tell Remo off—that the army of ya Homaar would never submit to the infidels of the Great Satan, that the day was coming when American pigs would lie smoldering in the streets while his people took their rightful place ruling the world. He tried to say all this, but the only sound coming from his lips was one of girlish pain. “Aieeeeeee!” he cried, crumpling to his knees.
Remo removed the pressure. “Get the point?” he said. “Now, let’s try this again. Who…” A high pitched whining sound emanating from the man’s chest interrupted him.
“What? What are you doing?” asked the man, hearing nothing. Remo leaned in close, his ear turned toward the device still strapped around the terrified ya Homaar soldier.
The pitch intensified at a consistent rate. Remo looked at the remote. No, he hadn’t accidentally pressed any triggers. The remote wasn’t giving any indication that it had been activated. This was something else.
“I think it’s time to feed the seagulls,” Remo said, picking the man up by his belt loops and running him down the alley, toward the beach.
“Wait! Allah save me!” the man wailed. Remo exited the alley, darting around the crumpled wreck of the VW Beetle where it rested against a telephone pole, surrounded by men in baggy shorts and paisley shirts holding weapons drawn. The would-be bomber then had a brainstorm—the bomb around him must be about to go off! “Take it off me! Take it off!” he screamed, scratching at the device uselessly. But it had been locked on to him when he left the compound, so that even if he wanted to take it off, he could not.
“Sorry, Moe,” Remo said as he reached the edge of the incline that led down to the sand and surf. “You knew what you signed up for when you got this gig.” He spun once, twice, three times, holding the man by his belt loops before releasing him in a high arc out into the open air. The man screamed and flapped his arms desperately to avoid hitting the ground. He failed, and his body impacted the sand with a crunch at just the same time that his body became the core of an explosion so devastating that it shattered some of the windows of the Grand Merlot, knocking some of the armed guards and several photo-snapping bystanders to the ground.
Remo gave a low whistle, surprised at the magnitude of the blast. “That was no dynamite belt,” he said to himself, as chunks of terrorist rained down onto the beach and street. Had he known how large the explosion would be, he’d have hurled the exploding trash bag further out into the ocean.
The explosion sent a small flock of seagulls scattering for their lives, only to return moments later for the newfound feast that now littered the beach.