THE MAN WHO WAS THE LAST DOT on Lithia Forrester’s yellow pad was at that moment at Dulles Airport outside Washington, trying to find a way to explain to his employer, Dr. Harold K. Smith, just why he was quitting.
“This is a very special case,” Smith said. “Perhaps the most important we have ever faced.”
Remo Williams, known to Lithia Forrester as Remo Donaldson, decided on the direct approach.
“Blow it out your ears,” he said. “Every time you people lose a paper clip somewhere, I end up running my ass off at a moment’s notice. I just don’t think you realize that I take two weeks to come up to peak.”
He sipped his water and pushed the rice away from him. It was not natural unhusked rice, but the mass-produced imitation guaranteed not to cling to other grains and to stand up fresh within one minute of cooking. One time-saving minute. It also had the nutritive value of spit. He would be as well off eating cotton candy.
The water was also a chemical concoction of which one ingredient was water. He remembered a line he’d read once: “the water contained all the necessary nutriments including chow mein.” Chiun’s teaching had become part of him and water was important, even if he sometimes longed for a Seagram’s Seven and beer chaser and on a very rare occasion allowed himself a cigarette.
The waiter asked if there was anything wrong with the rice. Dr. Smith answered for Remo. “No, the rice is fine. Just peculiar taste of some people.”
“Like wanting to see tomorrow,” mumbled Remo, glancing at the arriving and departing planes.
When the waiter had left, Remo, without taking his eyes off a 747 that seemed suspended in air just above the ground, like a horizontal hotel that hadn’t decided it should fall, said:
“What is it this time?”
Dr. Smith leaned forward across the table. He whispered: “The United States government is for sale.”
Remo turned back to the table, eyed the water balefully, contemplated the edge of a shiny brown roll, then said laconically, “So what else is new?”
“I mean for sale on the world markets.”
“Oh, it’s going international. Well, that’s been the way for the last quarter of a century,” Remo suggested.
“I mean,” said Smith, “that someone is offering control of the key departments of the United States government for sale. The defense department, national security, treasury department, espionage systems. For sale.”
“What can I say? Buy.”
“Be serious,” said Smith.
“I am, damn you. I am serious. I’m serious when I take off some guy’s head. Some guy I never knew. I’m serious when the only thing a person means to me is his move right or move left. I’m serious when I say it all doesn’t really matter that much anymore and never mattered that much to begin with. And we were all pretty stupid to think it ever did.”
Remo turned back to the airplanes, and added:
“I’ve been thinking about this a long time, Smith. I’m through.”
“Okay,” said Smith. “Okay. Let’s walk out of here. I want to tell you something.”
“If you’re going to try to remove me, don’t bother,” Remo said. “You can’t.”
“I wouldn’t be foolish enough to try, Remo.”
“Nonsense, You’re loose enough to try anything when it comes to this country. You’d try to outswim a tidal wave. I ought to put you out right now and then see what triggers those computers at Folcroft try to pull.”
“I just want to talk to you, Remo. I want to talk to you about a man named Clovis Porter.”
“Clovis Porter?” said Remo smirking. “You wasps sure do have a way with names.”
“You may be a wasp yourself, Remo.”
“Probably. It’d be my luck. Clovis Porter? C’mon. I wouldn’t tell a Clovis Porter story to a hooker with a whip. Clovis Porter?”
“Clovis Porter,” said Smith. “Just let me tell you about him.”
But he did not speak in the cab from the airport and it was only later as they walked along the streets of Washington, D.C., that Smith opened the file on Clovis Porter, even to the dissolution of the century-old Porter fortune.
“You see, Porter invested his life’s fortune to find out just what was going on. Like some other men you’ve known, he thought America was worth not only his fortune but his life.”
The two white men crossed the invisible line into Washington’s black ghetto, a line not marked by deteriorating houses, but by a growing absence of Caucasians, a border that contracted with the sun and expanded with the dark. A few people looked from their windows, startled to see two white men strolling through their neighborhood as if the sun were noon high.
Remo kicked a beer can.
“So that was Porter,” Smith said. “And that was MacCleary. You remember MacCleary?”
“Yes, very much.”
“He believed America was worth a life. Mine, yours, his own,” Smith said.
“Where does it stop?” Remo asked.
“Where did it stop for MacCleary?” Smith asked.
“When you killed him,” he said, answering his own question. “And he knew why you had to do it.”
Remo placed a hand on Smith’s shoulder and Smith looked up, a parched face mirroring his parched life. Remo’s first assignment had been to kill MacCleary, the man who had recruited him, because MacCleary had been injured and under drugs he might have talked.
“I never killed MacCleary,” Remo said. “I never killed him.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t. He begged me to and I couldn’t do it. So he did it himself.”
“Oh, no,” Smith said.
“Yeah. And when I read about it I figured okay, one assignment. For MacCleary’s stupidity.”
“I didn’t know,” said Smith and his voice wavered. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, one assignment became another and then another and what with Chiun’s training, it was like I was meant to do this and nothing else. And then it became like punching a time clock. You know what I feel when I kill a man?”
“No,” said Smith softly.
“Not a damned thing. Half the time I’m thinking about my technique. And they’re human lives, and I just don’t care.”
“What’s bothering you?”
“I’m telling you, dammit.”
“No, you’re not. Why all of a sudden now?”
“It’s not all of a sudden. It’s all of an accumulation.”
“The new faces bother you, don’t they?”
“You better believe it,” Remo said.
“We’ll bring you back close next time.”
“Unless you tell the surgeon to slip because I’ve suddenly become highly unreliable.”
“Unless I do,” said Smith.
From the streetlight above, insects swirled a storm of buzzing life as Remo said, “I could go through an operation like that without anesthesia.”
“I imagine you could.”
“I know that Chiun is one of your triggers if you push the button against me.”
“That’s obvious.He’s a professional,” Smith said.
“Even that’s more of a reason than I have,” Remo said.
Smith propped his briefcase against a street light and flipped it open. Remo made an imperceptible set, ready to move if necessary. But Smith brought out only a tape recorder.
“I want you to listen to this,” he said, and flipped the switch.
The next voice was Clovis Porter.
And on that corner in Washington, D.C., under streetlights swimming with bugs, Remo heard an Iowa farmer say goodbye to his wife for the last time—goodbye to the wife he loved because he loved his country more.
And Remo finally said, “Okay, you sonofabitch. Just one more.”