Chinese Puzzle

CHAPTER SIX

"How do you know I've been set up?" Smith asked as their taxi sped down the multi-laned highway to San Juan Airport.

"How're the kids?"

"The kids? What do…? Oh."

Remo could see the driver's neck tense. He kept whistling the same dull tune he had begun as soon as they had left the Nacional. -He undoubtedly thought the whistling would show he was relaxed and carefree and not at all part of the set-up Remo had seen form, first in the casino, and then in the nightclub. They had all telegraphed, just as the driver was telegraphing now. With them, it had been never letting their eyes settle on Remo or Smith, while continuing to move as though Remo and Smith were at one of the loci of an ellipse. It was a feel Chiun had taught Remo's senses. Remo practiced in department stores by picking up objects and holding them, until he sensed that feel from a manager or a sales clerk. The difficult part wasn't really -sensing when you were the object of scrutiny. It was knowing when you were not.

The driver whistled away in his classic telegraph. The same tune with the same pitch over and over. He had dislocated his thoughts from the sound; it was the only way he could reproduce the same sound over and over. His neck was red with dark potholes like tiny moon craters, filled with perspiration and grime. His hair was heavily greased and combed back in rigid black sticks that looked like the framework of a germ nursery.

The new aluminum highway lights cut through the humidity like underwater flashlights. It was the Caribbean and it was a wonder that the poured concrete foundations of the large American hotels did not go moldy along with the will of the people.

"We'll wait," Dr. Smith said.

"No, that's all right," Remo said. "The car's safe."

"But I thought…" said Smith, glancing at the driver.

"He's all right," Remo said. "He's a dead man.".

"I still feel uncomfortable. What if you should miss? Well, all right. We are compromised now. The fact that I am followed shows we are known. I'm not sure how much these people know, but I do not believe it is everything. If you understand."

The driver's head had begun to twitch, but he said nothing, intimating that he was not listening to the conversation behind him. His hand reached slowly toward the microphone of the two-way radio Remo had spotted on entering the taxi. He had been sure it was off.

Remo leaned forward over the seat. "Please don't do that," he said sweetly, "or I'll have to tear your arm out of its socket."

"Wha?" said the cab driver. "You crazy or something. I gotta phone in to the dispatcher."

"Just make the turnoff to the side road without telling anyone. Your friends will follow you."

"Hey, listen, Mister. I don't want trouble. But if you want it, you can have it."

His black eyes darted to the mirror, then back to the road. Remo smiled into the mirror and saw the man ease his right hand away from the radio to his belt. A weapon.

It was the new sort of taxi now being introduced into New York City with a bullet proof glass slide that the driver can move into place by pressing a button near his door. The doors locked from the front, and only a little microphone and a money slot connected the driver and his passengers.

Remo saw the driver's knee move and touch the hidden switch. The bullet proof shield slid quickly up into place. The locks clicked on the rear doors.

The bullet proof window had one flaw. It ran inside a metal track.

"I can't hear you too well," Remo said, and with his fingers peeled off the aluminum track from the body of the cab. The window dropped and Remo carefully set it at Smith's feet.

Remo leaned forward again. "Look, fella," he asked, "can you drive with just your left hand?"

"Yeah," said the driver. "See?" And with his right hand, he brandished a snub-nosed.38 caliber pistol.

Smith appeared mildly interested.

"That's nice," said Remo, as he grasped the driver's shoulder in his right hand, insinuatklg his thumb into the mass of bunched muscle and nerve. The driver lost control of his arm, then his hand, then his fingers, and they opened, dropping the gun quietly onto the rubber-matted floor.

"That's right," Remo said, as if talking to a baby. "Now just turn off where you're supposed to turn off so the cars behind can ambush us."

"Uhh," the driver moaned.

"Listen," Remo said. "If they get us, you live. A deal?"

"Uhh," responded the driver through clenched teeth.

"Yes, I thought you'd feel that way." He squeezed the driver's shoulder again, evoking a shriek of pain. Smith looked upset; he did not like these activities except on written reports. "This is the deal," Remo told the driver. "You stop where your friends want you to stop. And if we die you live. Okay?"

He lightened the pressure on the shoulder and the driver said "Right. You got a deal, gringo."

"Are you sure that's wise?" Smith asked.

"Why kill someone you don't have to?"

"But he's the enemy. Perhaps we should just dispose of him, grab the car and run?"

"You want me to get out now and let you handle it?"

"No," said Dr. Smith.

"Then if you would, sir, shut up."

Just before a green sign directing them to the airport, the driver turned right onto what appeared to be a long black unlit road, penetrating a misty green swamp. He drove for a mile, then turned off onto a dirt road underneath hanging trees. It was a dark green misty night.

He stopped the engine. "This is where you die, gringo."

"It's where one of us dies, companero," Remo said. Remo liked him, but not so much that he didn't knock him out by releasing his shoulder, leaning forward, and driving a hard index finger into his solar plexis. Okay, Remo thought. Good for at least two minutes.

Two sedans began to pull up behind them, parking ten feet behind the cab, side by side.

Remo could see their onrushing headlights in the mirror and then they stopped. He pressed Smith's head down roughly. "Stay on ttie floor," he growled. "Don't try to help."

He slid out of the right hand door. Four men poured out of each car, one group approaching the back of the cab from the left, the other from the right. Remo stood behind the cab, between the lines of the eight men, his hands resting behind him on the cab's trunk.

"You're all under arrest," he said. The eight stopped.

"What's the charge?" one of them answered, in precise English. In the light of the headlamps, Remo could see he was a tall heavy man with a bony face, wearing a snap brim hat. His answer marked him as the group's leader. That was what Remo wanted to know. He had use for him.

The man repeated, "What's the charge?"

"Reckless dying," Remo said. He leaned his weight back onto his hands, then with a push of his arms and a leap his lower body flashed through the air. The polished tip of his right shoe crashed into the Adam's apple of the first man on his right. His feet hit the ground, his hands still on the trunk of the cab, and without stopping, he spun about on the trunk of the car and repeated the action, flashing out with his left foot at the man closest to him on the left. This shoe too was christened in the Adam's apple. The action had occurred so quickly that both men fell simultaneously, their throats crushed, death on its way.

Remo moved off the trunk of the cab in between the three-man rows, and the six men charged. One fired a shot, but Remo made it miss, and it landed in the stomach of a man charging from the other side. He teetered, then fell heavily.

The remaining men moved together in a kaleidoscope of arms and legs and bodies, flailing, reaching out for Remo. They dropped then- weapons in the close quarters, hoping to use their hands. But their hands captured only air, and Remo moved through them, in the classic patterns 1500 years old, as if travelling through a different dimension of space and tune. Their hands closed on ak. Their lunges enveloped each other. None touched Remo and he spun through them, performing the ancient secrets of aiki, the escape art, but aiki made deadly through performance by a killing machine.

He fractured a skull here, perforated a kidney there, with an elbow crazed a temple into shattered jaggers of bone.

Six were down and done. Two were left, including the leader. Remo moved directly now and faster because if they regained their composure, they would know he was a clear target for their bullets. Pulling his blows, he knocked out the two remaining men with Mraken blows to the side of the head.

He propped the two living men against the back of the cab and called "Doctor Smith."

Smith's head appeared in the rear glass of the cab, then he climbed out through the door Remo had left open.

"Look around," Remo said. "Recognize anyone?"

Smith looked at the two men that Remo had propped up against the trunk of the cab. He shook his head. Then he walked around, through the glare of the two cars headlights, turning over men's bodies with a toe, bending closer sometimes to see a face. He walked back to Remo.

"I never saw any of them," he said.

Remo reached up and touched his thumbs to the temples of the two men, and gave a rotating squeeze. Both groaned then: way into consciousness.

He allowed the leader to be aware of the man on his left. Then Remo leaped into the air, and came down full force with a steely elbow on the top of the man's skull. Just as quickly, Remo brought out gray bloodish matter in his hand.

"You want to go like this?"

"No," said the leader.

"Okay. Who sent you?"

"I don't know. It was just a contract from the states."

"Good night," said Remo and sent the man on his eternal way by driving a knee into the man's right kidney.

He and Smith walked to the front of the cab. The driver moaned.

"Can we let him live?" Smith asked.

"Only if we hire him."

"I can't do that," said Smith.

"Then I've got to kill him."

"I knew these things had to be done, but…"

"You wipe me out, sweetheart. What do you think those numbers I phone in mean?"

"I know. But they were numbers."

"They were never numbers."

"All right. Do what you must do. World peace."

"It's always so easy to say," said Remo. He looked into the driver's black eyes. "I'm sorry, companero."

The roan's addled mind began to sort the fact of the gringo still alive, and he said: "You deserve to live, gringo. You deserve."

"Good night, companero," Remo said softly.

"Good night, gringo. Perhaps another time over a drink."

"To another time, my friend." And Remo saluted the driver with death.

"Are you sure he's dead?" Smith asked.

"Up yours," Remo said, and pushed the driver's body out of the car and got behind the wheel. "Get in," he said roughly.

"You don't have to be rude."

Remo started the car and backed over a few bodies in steering around the two parked cars, back onto the black road. He picked up speed and turned onto the road to the airport. He did not drive as other men did, either too quickly or puttering slowly along. He maintained a computer-even pace on springs he did not trust and with an engine in whose power he had little faith.

The car smelled of death. Not decayed death but a smell Remo had learned to recognize. Human fear. He did not know if it had come from the driver, or if it came now from Smith who sat quietly in the rear seat.

When he pulled up to the airport, Smith said, "It's a business that makes you sick sometimes."

"They would have done the same to us. What makes you sick is that we live on others' deaths. I'll see you again, or I won't," Remo said.

"Good luck," said Smith. "I think we're starting without the element of surprise."

"Whatever would make you believe that?" Remo asked, and laughed out loud as Smith took his luggage and departed.

Then Remo drove back to the Nacional.

He would still have to face Chiun. And it might have been easier for him to die on the side road.

But again, as the little father had told him: "It is always easier to die. Living takes courage."

Did Remo have the courage to tell Chiun that he would be instrumental in bringing about peace with China?