“Sir, I assure you this is a finely rebuilt camper, and my brother puts in extra reinforcements to make it extrastable.” The salesman placed his hand on the wall and shoved. The wall didn’t budge.
“It is flimsy!” Chiun stamped his foot. The Spartan trembled and rattled as if it were in the midst of a tornado. The pink champagne glasses toppled and shattered.
“We could do better!” the salesman pleaded. “Extra reinforcing foam in the walls and triple-paned windows and we’ll weld steel reinforcement bars under the floors!”
Chiun glared around him. ‘Too small. Show me another.”
“This is the largest model we have complete at the moment…”
“What caravans await refurbishment in your scrap heap?”
“Oh. Uh. I would have to ask my brother—”
“Take me to him!”
The brother was a night owl who had to be prodded out of bed, and he came outside with wild hair and one unbuttoned flap on his overalls. He started out peeved, but became excited as he showed the old Korean the ancient hulks strewed about the salvage yard.
“He’s an intense gentleman,” the salesman mentioned to Remo as he glugged a can of lemon-lime Fanta and sat on the stoop of a rusted-out GMC camper trailer that stank of mouse droppings. The salesman had been excused from Chiun’s presence. “I admire a man who knows what he wants,” he added hastily.
“He knows what he wants this afternoon,” Remo clarified.
“Tomorrow he’ll want to live in an Austrian sod hut or some crazy-ass thing.”
Two hundred feet away, Chiun paused midsentence and looked at Remo balefully, then went back to his conversation.
“He actually have enough money for this?” the salesman asked, finally getting the nerve.
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“He rich or something?”
“Theoretically, it’s me who’s the master of the money, not him.”
Chiun glared again, and Remo could swear his flesh started to singe. He added, “But that’s only a theory.”
When Senator Herbert Whiteslaw had embarked on his recent excursion to the Middle East, it was ostensibly under the authority of the President of the United States, who asked him personally to continue the undercover work he started years ago, before the last Iraq war. The President had sent him on that first mission, too.
But on his first mission, Whiteslaw had turned traitor. He sold highly sensitive war plans to one of the region’s worst dictators. Amazingly, somebody had gotten hands on first-rate incriminating evidence against Whiteslaw. Even more amazingly, the evidence had been doctored by somebody as a tool to use against the meteoric rise of presidential contender Orville Flicker.
After Flicker’s messy demise, Whiteslaw knew that
Soon enough, the grapevine was ringing with the news that a federal indictment was being prepared against Whiteslaw, and he went into hiding.
But Whiteslaw wasn’t waiting around to see what happened. His political machine was hard at work, putting together a political campaign unlike any other.
Herbert Whiteslaw was going to be President of the United States, and soon. The election was approaching. The candidates were campaigning. Senator Herbert Whiteslaw was not looming large in the consciousness of the American people. But soon he would be the only popular electable face in the race.
First he would convince the two big political parties to yank their candidates. Then he would get their endorsement—both parties, behind the same man, and he’d be a sure winner.
There would be an outcry, of course. The partisans would hate him, even the partisans in his own party. How could you be on the right side when the wrong side endorsed you, too?
Whiteslaw knew just how to handle that: he would promote himself as the one President who could really, truly, finally work through the incessant party bickering and actually get something done. That would take the wind out of their sails.
Not that he cared what anybody actually thought of him. Sincerity wasn’t his strong point. He would have promised every American a new Chevrolet if that’s what it took to get elected.
The truth was he wouldn’t need to promise anybody anything. If he was the only viable candidate, he’d be elected, simple as that.
The people who were going to make it simple, however—Jacob Fastbinder III and his American son, Jack Fast—had turned out to be an eccentric and unreliable pair.
“But we did get the job done,” Jack Fast said without concern. “We gave you exactly what you asked for—evidence of a great scandal.”
“True, but—”
“And it wasn’t exactly easy, either, Herbie,” Fast said. “Almost killed Pops.”
“I appreciate the danger it has put you in….”
