Timber Line

Chapter Two

His name was Remo and the air was cold.

But what bothered him was that he felt the cold and he shouldn't have. Feeling cold or feeling hot was simply a matter of letting your body and senses control you, instead of you controlling your body and senses.

And as the heir apparent to the House of Sinanju, Remo was closer than any other Westerner to achieving control. For more than ten years, he had studied and trained until his body was no longer just a shell that housed the man; instead, it had become the man, and the man had become his body. Ten years. Ever since that day they had put him in the electric chair and turned the juice on, then brought him back to life to be trained as the official enforcement arm of CURE. A professional assassin for a secret agency of the United States government. The Destroyer who destroyed to save the Constitution of the United States when no other method would work.

Ten years of training, and still he was cold.

His concentration was faltering. And that was bad, because when one thing went, everything was in danger of going.

He tried to put the cold out of his mind and to keep the rhythm of his movements smooth. Not that walking on water was difficult. Especially when the water had gotten cold enough to freeze but had not yet crystallized into ice. It was actually easy, if your concentration didn't falter. Usually, walking on water required nothing more than synchronizing your body's movements with the crests and troughs of the waves. And all bodies of water, even those in bathtubs, had waves, no matter how slight.

Remo concentrated on moving with the energy currents as they built to a wave crest, and then just before they tumbled over into the trough he slid along to the next crest. Nothing to it. Especially with cold water. Cold water was easier because it was denser. Just about any clod with half a mind in working order could feel the energy pulses in dark, dense, cold water. It was the warm, light water that had once given him trouble.

But now he felt his shoes getting damp and that meant his concentration was wavering. Bad. Sloppy.

He sighed, even as he kept moving. It was one of those days. The dirty gray sky and the dirtier gray of the water were seeping into his dirty gray soul, but maybe it was just the dirty gray nature of his work that was getting to him. He was a killer of men. And now, because he was not what he had been years before, he had no choice. It was what he did.

He slowed down slightly to get his bearings. The heavy stench of oil refineries and coking furnaces told him that the Cuyahoga River was still a half-mile up the shore of Lake Erie to his right. He scanned the shoreline to the left until he picked out his target. He was a hundred yards offshore on Super Bowl Sunday, and no one in Cleveland was watching the water. That suited him fine because it made his job easier. He wouldn't have to eliminate any witnesses.

Remo began walking again with the half-loopy, half-gliding motion that walking on water requires. It took him only fifteen seconds more to get to the massive stone pier.

At the end of the pier was a large, squat wooden building with red neon beer signs in its windows. The Venetian blinds were closed. This was the place.

The assignment had been in the making for weeks. The Cleveland mob was having a summit, which meant that all the local gangs — the Mafia, the Jews, the Irish, and the Lebanese — were getting together in a sort of United Nations of mobdom to work out some problems they were having. And each of the gangs in the mob had called in cousins and in-laws and brothers who operated the feudal dependencies for them: feudal dependencies called Detroit and San Diego and Buffalo and Arizona and Central Florida and Louisville and Indiana.

Word of the meeting came to CURE in the usual fashion — isolated bits of data that individually meant nothing, until some intelligence had arranged them into a pattern and a picture: The secretary to the head of a large holding company in Southern California made airline reservations for her boss to fly to Cleveland for a two-week winter' vacation, then quietly tipped off the publisher of a financial insiders' newsletter; the publisher thought he was working for the CIA and passed the information along to a bland, well-mannered voice at an 800 area-code telephone number. A pimp in Las Vegas was told to send an assortment of two dozen of his prettiest boys and girls to Cleveland for a convention, and he mentioned it in passing to the cop he had on his pad; the cop informed an assistant district attorney he was reporting to; and the assistant D.A. thought he was reporting to the FBI when he passed this item along to a well-mannered voice at an 800 area-code telephone number. A Cleveland distributor of fine wines received a rush order for several cases of a particularly rare, typically expensive French wine, and to get the wine quickly, he bribed a customs inspector; another customs inspector reported the bribe to an 800 area-code telephone number, thinking that the number was a direct link to the White House.

And the information all found its way into the massive secret computer banks at the Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. There, a tall, lemony man with a dry, well-mannered voice — Dr. Harold W. Smith, the public director of the sanitarium and the secret head of CURE — one morning pushed some buttons on his desktop computer console and watched the pattern emerge.

He shook his head slightly and almost allowed himself a look of satisfaction. If he was right, CURE would be able to take a major step against one of the most powerful organized-crime groupings in the country. He punched instructions into the computer for more information.

Then he sat back and waited.

The normal quitting time for most people came and went. Dr. Harold W. Smith stayed at his desk.

The normal dinner hour passed.

As he had countless thousands of times, he ordered a prune-whip yogurt with lemon topping from the sanitarium kitchen and quietly nibbled at it while he waited. Early evening turned into late night, and late night into early morning before the small amber indicator light flashed on his desk.

He raised the console from the center panel of the desk, depressed a handful of keys, and watched as pale green letters and numbers began appearing on a dark green background. Smith studied them for a moment, then reached for the telephone.

That had been more than a week before, and at the end of the line was Remo and his assignment. Mass murder.

That was what depressed Remo. Not the killing itself. He had long since stopped thinking about the taking of a target's life in any terms other than whether or not his technique was as clean and pure as it should be. Remo was an assassin, nothing more, nothing less, the Destroyer, Shiva incarnate, and a professional.

Killing did not bother him. But having to kill did. Having to live in a place and time where so many truly deserved to die horrible deaths, where so many had well earned their terrible fates, was what depressed Remo.

And he knew with certainty that he was going to botch this assignment. He felt it inside. His rhythms were not tuned in to what he must do, and so he knew that he would do the job badly.

He was alongside the pier now, and with no apparent effort he leaped from the water's surface to the roadway that ran along the top of the structure.

There were tiny shards of ice coating his black skin-hugging T-shirt and his black chino slacks. Remo brushed the evidence of his walk from his clothing and looked around.

A hundred yards away, half a dozen men stood guard at the entrance to the pier. Though it was public property, the pier today was off limits to all but invited guests.

Remo shook his head. Guards never turned around.

Told to watch a road, they watched a road. Told to look up, they looked up. But they never turned around to check if anything was sneaking up on them from some other direction.

Remo strolled over to the low building with the red neon beer signs in the window. A small enclosed porch shielded the door from the cold and the wind. Two more guards huddled together inside the porch, trying to keep warm.

When they saw Remo, they jumped apart, and their hands reached toward their pockets, fingers curling around their guns.

"Hi, guys," Remo said with a smile.

"If you don't have a reason to be here, you're dead," one of them growled.

"Bye, guys," Remo said. Still smiling, he leaped lightly up the two steps, between the two men. Their hands, wrapped around big, heavy automatics, were out of their pockets now, but they couldn't fire without hitting each other. Each had the same brilliant idea. They raised their automatics overhead, planning to slam them down on Remo's skull. Remo immediately shot his two hands upward, catching each man in the armpit. Like twin Lake Erie versions of the Statue of Liberty, the guards' arms froze in position over their heads. Before their arms came down, Remo's did. And he buried them quickly and deeply into the guards' sternums. Their bones cracked inward, and the two men began to tumble forward. Remo caught each man and lightly pushed him back into place, so that both were leaning against the wall — but on either side of the door. They looked like a matched set of bookends, Remo thought, as he slipped inside the building and walked toward the bar.

The room was crowded wall to wall with people.

As he approached the bar, Remo waved to get the bartender's attention, but two oversized men blocked his way. They dwarfed him. Remo was not truly large, perhaps six feet tall, perhaps not, and lean, weighing less than 160 pounds. He had a dark, ordinarily good-looking face and dark, tranquil eyes that women found captivating. The only sign that Remo might have been more than he seemed were his wrists, which were extraordinarily thick.

Remo faced the men who blocked his way to the bar. "Excuse me," he said to the bigger of the two.

The man turned and belched in Remo's face.

Remo shook his head. "I was afraid you'd do something like that."

"What's that?" the big man asked, and belched again. The smell of bourbon and half-cooked red meat poured from his mouth.

"Never mind," Remo sighed, and touched the middle of the man's chest with his index finger. The man fell to the floor, screaming. "Help me, help me. It's my heart; it's my heart."

The second big man bent over to tend to him, and Remo moved to the bar.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asked.

"Make mine sarsaparilla, pardner," Remo drawled. When the bartender went to get it, Remo realized the man was the type to take everything literally. No sense of humor. "Never mind," he called out. "Just make it ice water."

Behind Remo, a crowd started to form around the dead man on the floor; Remo heard their ugly muttering. The second large man pointed to Remo's back, and an arm reached over and grabbed Remo by the shoulder. Then the arm dropped with a loud thump. The owner of the arm still stood, until he looked down to the floor and saw his arm lying there, then he, too, fell to the floor.

"Don't anybody else bother me while I drink my water," Remo said. "All this exercise makes me thirsty." The bartender placed the water in front of Remo, gingerly, as if ready to bolt away as soon as glass touched countertop.

"Hold it," said Remo. "This water's not from that cesspool out there, is it?" He nodded toward the front of the building and Lake Erie.

"No, sir. Bottled water. Poland. Best there is, sir."

"Okay," Remo said. He took a sip. A woman behind him screamed. Remo stepped out of reach of another man's arm. To watch him, it did not look as if he had moved at all, but suddenly the other man was sliding along the length of the bar, knocking over drinks, and upsetting patrons as he went.

Remo finished his water to the accompaniment of eight guns being drawn and their safeties being clicked off. He asked the bartender for some matches.

"Yes, sir," the bartender said, tossing a pack of matches onto the bar.

"How do you like me so far?" Remo asked.

"Fine, sir. Fine," said the bartender.

"Well, if you like all that, you'll love what's next," Remo said.

But for all his offhand manner, Remo was not happy with himself. This should have been very simple: Walk in, get rid of them all, one by one, and then leave. But the bad walk across the lake had upset him, and now he was going to dispose of this whole building full of people at once. He knew he was going to hear about that.

Remo walked toward the door and stopped alongside some faded white linen curtains. Four men of various ages, but all the same mastodon size, charged at him, and the noise level in the room doubled.

Remo moved slightly and fluttered his left hand at two of them and they fell, forming a natural barricade in front of him and the door. Remo struck a match and set fire to two sets of curtains.

He started to blow the match out and drop it into an ashtray, then hesitated, and instead lit the ties of the two men who were still straining to reach him past the bodies of the two burly men.

While these two began to pay attention to their shirt fronts, Remo walked to the other side of the door and lit two more sets of curtains. Then he walked out the door. Outside, he stacked the bodies of the two guards against the door so it could not be forced open.

The fire was already coursing through the building.

Remo watched with a calculating eye. Every few seconds someone would try to crawl through one of the four small windows, and Remo would walk over to them, smile politely, then push a head, arm, or leg back inside.

Screams started coming from within the building as the people inside realized they were trapped. When they heard the commotion, the guards at the gate to the pier finally turned around. Four of them came running down the hundred yards or so from their posts.

A big, overweight, red-faced man with terror in his eyes was the first to reach Remo.

"Holy jumping Jesus," he said.

Remo was quiet.

"Holy jumping Jesus."

"You said that," Remo said, and picked him up and threw him through a window.

The second and third guards arrived, panting.

"Okay, buddy," one of them growled at Remo. "What the hell's going on here?"

Remo looked at the two of them, then back at the building.

"Looks like a fire to me," he replied.

"Don't be a wiseass," the man said.

"Okay," Remo said, then picked both of them up and threw them into the building. Then he turned to see about the remaining guards.

The fourth guard had almost caught up with his three colleagues as Remo disposed of the last of them. When he saw Remo look in his direction, he turned toward the pier and made a swan dive into the frigid waters of Lake Erie.

Remo started walking toward the street that fronted the pier. As he approached the gate, the last two guards ran off in opposite directions.

In the gloomy, chilly darkness, Remo walked up East Ninth Street, wondering why he felt so bad. It couldn't be just because there were so many people out there who deserved removal; there were always a lot of people who deserved removal. There had to be another answer, and it came to him as he neared Euclid Avenue. What disturbed him was that what he did made no difference at all. Today, sixty-three gang goons died. Tomorrow, there would be sixty-three new gang goons to take their places. Remo was just spitting into the wind, and no matter how hard he spat, the saliva didn't settle anywhere.

What he needed to pep himself up was a job that produced some provable public good, something to make him feel as if he and his work were worthwhile.

By the time he reached Euclid, the streets were filled with ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, and TV camera crews. The spinning emergency lights on top of the vehicles threw swirling splashes of red light across the faces of the nearby buildings. Remo turned right and kept walking, heading for the Terminal Tower and the Rapid Transit trains to the airport.

He had almost reached Public Square when he heard hoof beats behind him. He turned to confront two mounted policemen, their guns drawn, who were galloping toward him.

"They went that away," Remo said.

"Stand where you are, mister," the policeman on the lead horse said, reining his steed to a stop. Nobody in Cleveland had a sense of humor.

"Why?"

"Shut up your face. Stand where you are and raise your hands."

Later, neither of the mounted patrolmen could remember exactly what had happened. One moment, the suspect was raising his hands. The next, he was standing between their horses. And the moment after that, the horses were tearing and bucking, galloping hell-bent along the lakeshore highway half a mile away.

Watching them careen off didn't make Remo feel any better. So he had decided not to remove two nasty policemen. Big deal. What he needed was to do something good, really good, the kind of thing that would score him some points in heaven.

Remo crossed the street and entered the old, bronzed glass doors at the entrance to the Terminal Tower. He crossed the lobby and walked down the long, sloping pink-granite-lined ramp to the main concourse.

The concourse was a man-made granite cavern, the size of half a dozen football fields, and broken up here and there into little clumps of shops, most of which were now closed. The brightly lit center of the concourse was filled with people in evening dress and policemen.

Remo stopped at the bottom of the ramp and looked around. To his right were the stairs leading down another flight to the waiting platforms for the trains going to the airport. In front of the doors were two uniformed policemen, carefully eyeing everyone who went through. To his left were stairs leading to the trams destined for the eastern suburbs. Their entrance, too, was patrolled by a pair of cops.

Remo turned to go back up the ramp. Before he could take a step, he was stopped by the sight of two more cops at the top, checking out anyone who was trying to enter the concourse. He didn't want any policeman's blood on his hands; that would be all he needed to cap a lousy day. He turned away from the policemen and walked straight ahead, joining a crowd that was walking toward one of the darker corners of the concourse. Remo listened to the buzz of their conversation, trying to figure out what all these people in evening dress were talking about. But none of the words made sense.

"...cume potential..."

"...costs per mil..."

"...he's such a darling..."

"...then we zoomed in on all this water sloshing around in the toilet bowl and..."

"...we call it maize... I call it profit... units up eighteen percent..."

The crowd slowed down almost to a stop, and Remo moved to the front as quickly and as easily as he could. The crowd had stopped at a gateway. Beyond it, part of the concourse had been roped off and converted into a banquet hall with a long main table and a hundred smaller round tables, all covered with white tablecloths and set with china and silver. Candles glowed at each table, and eight giant television screens hung from the ceiling at strategic spots around the dining area. Strung across the middle of the room was a giant banner that read: WELCOME TO THE FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT ARTISTRY IN TELEVISION COMMERCIALS.

Remo paused at the ticket stand and looked around. There were dozens of faces he could recognize. Someone asked him for his ticket.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "The fellow in the back's got them," he said. He walked past the ticket table and wandered around the room.

They were all here, all the faces that had forced themselves into his consciousness by their ubiquitous presence on America's television screens.

There was a fat woman who thought the way to kill cockroaches was to hit them with a broom. There was another one with a flat face like a tanned pancake, who shilled for margarine. There was the Neaty-Bowl man who proved toilet bowls were clean by doing the back stroke in the toilet tank.

There was a British actor who had been out of work for 40 years and had been resuscitated to hawk records.

There was a man who sold stereos at the top of his voice, proving that mental illness was no barrier to finding work.

Remo looked at them all with the shock of recognition. They were all here, the greatest assortment of pests that America had ever had, all collected in one room, acting almost like normal human beings. But tomorrow, Remo knew, they would be back at their evil work. A pleasant thought came to his mind.

And all day long he had been grousing that he never did anything good — really good — for the United States.

He found the light switches in the back of the room, rather than try to figure them out, he pulled them all. The entire hall was plunged into darkness. There were a few screams before the master of ceremonies told everyone to sit calmly, that power would be restored in just a few minutes.

A few minutes was all Remo needed. He wended his way through the tables, seeing clearly in the darkness. Every time he found one of the more odious television pitchmen, he leaned over the person and, using his right thumb and index ringer, broke his or her nose.

It would be a long time before they posed for the cameras again. God Bless America.

Remo left the banquet hall whistling.