A half mile down the road Miss Maluuna was sitting on the bench in front of the Burger Triumph, getting a little irritated at the tardiness of her date. She sipped her soda—she got them for free, one soda a day. Well, she’d give him five more minutes and then, forget it.
The first time that Mark Howard had the pleasure of meeting the white Master of Sinanju, Remo Williams, he was pretty sure he was in the presence of some sort of assassin, and he was pretty sure the man had skills beyond the ordinary and he was pretty sure the oddly talented killer was about to assassinate Mark Howard. He was scared.
Now he felt that kind of scared again.
“Is it the stuff from Scotland?” Remo asked for the second time, and for the second time, Harold W. Smith said he didn’t know.
“Find out.” Remo said the words and he pointed with his finger. This was a man who could kill with his finger. He looked mad enough to kill Smith and Howard and just about anybody else who got in his way.
Remo was very, very angry.
“There is no way to know for sure,” Smith replied. “Figure out a way to know for sure.”
“How am I supposed to do that, Remo?”
“Listen, Smitty, you figure out a way. Because if it is the stuff from Scotland, the stuff that you wouldn’t let me go back to make sure was gone, then I’m going to get really angry.”
Angrier than this? Mark Howard thought.
“And I’m going to take it out on you. If you don’t figure it out, I’ll assume it is. Got it?”
“Calm down, Remo.”
“Calm down?” Remo said, not loudly but barely in control. “You turn on the TV today, Smitty? You see what’s happening?”
“I’ve seen it.”
‘People are dying.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Lots of people. If it’s the stuff from the burned-up castle in Scotland, then it is blood on my hands and yours.”
“Not true,” said Chiun, coming into the office in a hurry. Yet he appeared at Remo’s side as if he had been standing there quietly for five minutes. “The blame lies not with you or with Emperor Smith.”
“If it’s the shit from the castle, the blame lies with both of us. I’ll have to kill us both.”
“Remo!” Chiun squeaked, but there was a strange lilt to his voice. “Such words are for fools and madmen.”
“I’m pretty fucking mad.”
“And yet you are mistaken.”
“You don’t know that. Smitty doesn’t know that. Smitty didn’t know what was left in the castle when he told us not to go back there. I didn’t know that when I went along with him. What I should have done is say ‘Go to hell, Emperor Smitty, I’m going back to Scotland to clean up the mess.’”
“Instead, you went to Sa Mangsang, to clean up a mess you were certain existed,” Chiun exhorted. “This is the wise choice.”
“Wise?” Chiun called him a lot of things, but wise was a new one and it took the wind out of his sails.
“It was wise to attend to the catastrophe at hand rather than the catastrophe that might come on the morrow,” Chiun said. “From whence comes this anger?”
Remo fell into a chair carelessly. “Have you looked at the television? It’s like Africa’s 9/11. Only with commercials, because it’s only Africa. Not nearly as important as Americans. And all the reporters are getting the hell out, because you know, they’ll hang around to report on an American in distress but they’re not going to risk their necks on some Africans.”
“And the blame falls to me?” Smith asked.
Remo considered that. He couldn’t come up with a way to blame Smith for that one. Come to think of it, why was he trying to blame Smith for that?
Remo sighed. “We’re responsible. If this stuff came out of that pile of rocks in Scotland where they were brewing nanobots, then we let them get out. We should have stopped it from happening.”
“And how would you have done so?” Chiun asked. “How would you have known if these things were spirited away from Loch Tweed Castle prior to our arrival? Recall that when we arrived there were none of the researchers even left alive. There were only the local rabble, infected with the sickness caused by Sa Mangsang.”
Remo glowered.
“What of secret chambers?” Chiun asked.
“What of them?” Remo asked. “We didn’t find any. We didn’t have a lot of time to look, either, before it got too hot to stick around.”
“The explosives staged at the scene were put there as a safety precaution. They were designed to destroy everything in the lab,” Smith explained. “Including the antechamber.”
“If it worked right,” Remo muttered. “If nobody screwed up and put a tube in the wrong cabinet. If all the bombs went boom exactly how they were supposed to.”
“What if they had?” Smith asked. “The castle site was sterilized soon after the fire. I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say, the very soil upon which Loch Tweed Castle sits was heated until it melted. Nothing could have survived that, Remo, and if it did, it’s encased in a block of glass as big as a city block.”
Remo nodded. “And before that? After the fire, before the place was sterilized?”
