“Remo, listen to yourself if not to your father in spirit. You fear even to summon the memory lest it bring on a relapse. What would happen if you were to experience the actual thing yet again?”
The veins were standing out on Remo’s freakishly thick wrists. He was pacing now, clenching his fists and grinding his teeth. Chiun’s eyes grew hollow as he watched his protégé fight the inevitable memory. He heard Remo’s pulse race, then plummet, then race again. The skin of the Reigning Master flooded with hot blood, then the circulation sank deep into the extremities and he became cold.
Remo did all this consciously, engaged in hard battle with his own mind, and Chiun didn’t dare distract him further. Or should he? Would it be better for Remo to face this memory now? Surely he would have to do so eventually.
For good or evil, Chiun couldn’t be the one to do it. He carried his own fresh scars of guilt for bringing that harm upon the one he loved best in all the world. If the Slate child had not been there to insinuate herself, Remo might never have returned to the world of consciousness.
Remo’s internal discord finally waned, and he came to sit on his own mat on the floor, facing Chiun.
“You’re right about one thing. I am afraid, Little Father.”
Chiun nodded.
“Being afraid means I can’t allow you to face this alone, because then you’d be at greater risk of facing what I’m afraid of.” Remo’s explanation puzzled himself. He tried again. “A mother jaguar who is traumatized of the water will still go with her cubs into the river, to protect them from drowning.”
“Now I am an infant cat?” Chiun asked, trying to sound indignant, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“You see what I mean.” Remo insisted.
“I see,” Chiun admitted.
The airfield was dark except for the tiny jet waiting for them. Remo thought the thing looked like a steel mosquito, but it got them into Alamogordo in a big hurry. Another rental car took them to a BP truck stop near the missile test range, and from there they went on foot. Almost exactly twenty-four hours after the earth drill left the scene, Remo and Chiun arrived at the place. They bypassed the five-point guard perimeter. The final protective barrier was a web of pressure-sensitive wires buried to form an electronic moat almost twenty feet wide. The wires would trigger an alarm if any creature heavier than a desert hare crossed it, so Remo and Chiun thought like desert hares and skimmed over the sand. The alarm never noticed them.
They found the place littered with fluorescent yellow tape and tags. The Air Force forensic team had found out nothing from their investigation of the site, but they sure were making a good show of it.
“I do not, and now seems an odd time to bring it up.”
“I thought you were sending a message before. Just before we parked the car.”
“I was just reading the latest entry from a lascivious woman in Montana.”
“Oh.” Remo sniffed. “Smith was right about a body. Let’s see if it’s anybody we know.”
Sarah Slate woke up early and was surprised to find a blog appearing on the laptop Mark had provided her. It had been directed to her from Chiun, but she had never known him to record his own entries, only to read others’. Then she realized it had secure status— it was for her eyes only.
She smiled. Maybe a love poem?
But there was just one word, meaningless, but somehow it disturbed her.
The entry was simply “Song.”
“I don’t know him. Do you know him?” Remo asked.
“Of course not,” Chiun said nasally. They had both ceased to breathe near the stench of the corpse, that of a middle-aged, underfed man with a dark complexion. His head and one reaching arm were all that had survived mutilation.
“You know this guy, Junior?” Remo asked. He was holding a phone with a built-in camera, which he had reluctantly agreed to carry to the scene.
“Yeah, he’s this guy I work with,” Mark Howard replied sarcastically. “Look at the display.”
Remo glanced at the three-inch screen and found his own face on it.
“This thing’s broken, Junior.”
“Is it possible you were simply pointing the wrong part?”
Remo had to admit it was possible. He turned over the phone and clicked the green button until the face of the dead man showed up on the screen.
“How’s that?”
“Great, Remo.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t being sarcastic. It’s a perfect image.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve already got an ID. Jesus Merienez. He’s got a INS record twelve feet long. He’s an alien smuggler, dope smuggler, you name it. He’s made a career of illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico.”
“So he’s camping here to stay off 1-10 and gets squished by the earth drill?”
“Looks like it. We’ll get better results after a more thorough search, but so far he’s strictly minor-league compared to Fastbinder.”
