Power Play

Chapter seven

By the time their ambulance had reached the Pruiss residence, Theodosia had decided. She was keeping the other three bodyguards on the payroll. She twisted her hands together nervously as she told Remo.

"That's not necessary," Remo said.

"No," said Chiun. "Not necessary. If you have money to throw away, I know this nice little village where the people..."

"Chiun," said Remo.

Theodosia shook her head. Dark curls splashed around her shoulders.

"No. This is the way I want it. I'll just sleep better."

"Suit yourself," Remo said. "Just keep them out of our way."

"You do it," she said. "I don't want to deal with anybody tonight."

Remo had the three bodyguards meet him in the old ground floor golf pro shop of the former country club.

They came in as if expecting an ambush, scanning the room cautiously with then eyes, glancing behind the glass counter and the doors

Remo was practice putting with a putter he had pulled from a sample bag of clubs.

"Nobody hiding in the golf bags either," he said, looking up.

"Now listen, Yank, what's this all about?" the mercenary colonel said. "We're supposed to be on duty." He was a husky man with a mustache twirled into points so precise that only a sadist would have inflicted that kind of discipline on his facial hair.

The small arms expert and the karate man nodded.

"Theodosia's decided to keep you on," Remo said. "Don't ask me why."

"The 'why' is because we're the best there is," the colonel said.

"Sure," Remo said. "Right." He putted a ball across the room and stopped it twelve feet away on a little dark spot in the green rug. Pro shops always had green rugs, he realized. "Anyway, I just wanted to tell you to stay out of our way. Work outside or something."

He inspected the soft rubber grip of the putter.

"Do you know what a drag it is being able to one-putt every green?" he said. "I liked golf better when I used to miss a shot once in a while."

"You know, Yank," the colonel said with a faint sneer. "When this is all over..."

"If you guard yourselves the way you guarded Pruiss in that hospital," Remo said, "when this is all over, you'll be lucky to be alive."

"You Americans are always pushy," the colonel said. He fingered the stock of his submachine gun. "When this is over, just you and me."

Remo smiled at him, then putted another ball across the floor. It stopped, touching the first practice putt.

"You don't seem worried, Yank," the colonel said.

"I told you," Remo said. "I never miss. One putt all the time."

"I'm not talking about your bleeding golf game," the colonel said. "I'm talking about big things. Life and death."

"If you want something big, you ought to try a twenty-dollar Nassau with presses on the back nine," Remo said.

"Life and death," the colonel insisted. "You know how many men I've killed?"

Remo putted another ball. It stopped touching the first two.

"I've seen what you killed," Remo said. "Untrained ninnies who couldn't tie their own shoes. People who signed up to be soldiers so they could eat anybody they captured. The Cubans are probably the worst fighters in the world, except for the French, and when they got to Africa, they kicked your ass and sent all you make-believe field marshals home."

The colonel took a step forward and put his foot in the line of Remo's putt.

Remo dropped another ball on the floor and putted it across the carpet, with a chopping up and down stroke. The ball squirted off the putter head and skidded across the floor. When it reached the colonel's shoe, the back english took effect and the ball hopped into the air, over the shoe, and stopped dead still on the far side, next to the three other balls.

"Will you put that bloody putter down?" the colonel snarled.

"Don't have to," Remo said.

The colonel growled in anger, reached down and snatched one of the golf balls from the carpet. He flung it across the ten feet of space separating himself and Remo. The white, rock-hard ball sped in on Remo's face. He turned his body slightly toward the left and raised his left hand in a buzz-saw motion. The ball was intercepted by Remo's hand. It hit the hand without a sound and seemed to hang on the side of Remo's open palm for a moment. Then he dropped his hand and two halves of the golf ball fell to the floor, sliced neatly in two as if by a surgical laser beam.

The three men looked at the golf ball in shock.

"Guard outside," Remo said again softly.

They turned toward the door.

"Colonel," Remo said. The mercenary officer, his face drained of color, turned to meet Remo's eyes.

"That was a good ball," Remo said. "A Titleist DT. I'm docking your account a dollar thirty-five."

Theodosia had put Remo in a bedroom on one side of Wesley Pruiss and Chiun in a room on the other. Her room was down past Remo's and Rachmed Baya Barn's was the farthest down the corridor.

When Remo got upstairs, the Indian had already gone to bed because he said his nerves had been shattered by the American propensity for violence. He could easily, sirrr, have been killed before his mission in life had been accomplished.

Chiun hissed to Remo, "That means as long as there is still a dollar loose in this country."

Theodosia had put Pruiss to sleep and Remo and Chiun headed for their separate rooms.

"Which one of you is staying with Wesley?" she asked.

"I don't like sharing a bed," Chiun said. "I sleep on my mat."

"But somebody's got to stay in his room," she said. She looked at Remo helplessly.

"No, we don't," Remo said. "Nobody can get within a hundred feet of this room without us knowing it. Don't worry about it."

She did not look convinced.

"Look, if you want to do something," Remo said, "pull down the shades in his bedroom. If that makes you feel better."

When she came back out of Pruiss's room, she told Remo: "You forgot your weapons."

"No, we didn't."

"Where are they?"

"They're always with us," Remo said.

"Show me," Theodosia said.

"They're secret," Remo said. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black chinos.

"Let me have a good night's sleep," she said. "What kind of weapons do you use?"

Chiun paused at his bedroom door.

"The most deadly weapons known to mankind," he said. He went inside.

Theodosia looked at Remo.

"The same weapons we used to get through those steel windows at the hospital," Remo said.

"You've brought them?"

"Yes. Never travel without them," Remo said.

Theodosia looked at him suspiciously. "You're sure you can tell if Wesley's in any danger?"

"Sure I'm sure. If it makes you feel any better, I'll sleep with my door open tonight."

He smiled and she shrugged.

"I hope you're worth what I'm paying you," she said. She sounded sure he wasn't.

He took his hands from his pockets and held her soft hands in his, stroking the knuckles with his thumbs.

"More," he said. "Go to sleep. It's been a long day."

Almost reluctantly, she started down the hall, then stopped and went back to Pruiss's room and peeked inside.

"He's sleeping," she told Remo.

"Good," said Remo.

"I want you to kill anybody who tries to go into that room tonight," she said sternly.

"You got it," Remo said. "Go to sleep."

He entered his own room, undressed and lay on the bed. There had been a time, years before, when he had had trouble sleeping. Going to bed was just another struggle in a day filled with struggles and he would turn and toss on his bed until his drained and exhausted body reluctantly accepted sleep.

But that had been years ago, back before CURE, back before Chiun had transformed him into something different by giving him control of his own body, able to make it do what he wanted it to do.

He had once mentioned the change in his sleeping habits to Chiun, who laughed one of his infrequent laughs.

"You have always been asleep," Chiun had said.

When Remo finally came to understand the gifts Chiun had given him, he reflected that the ancient Korean was correct. He had been asleep, never in touch with his body. Most men used only a small fraction of their bodies and an even smaller fraction of their senses. Remo was man pushed toward the ultimate, using almost all his body, almost all his senses. And Chiun? Chiun wasthe ultimate. The secrets of centuries of Sinanju were stored in his mind and body and it explained why that frail old man, less than five feet tall, weighing under a hundred pounds, could bring physical forces to bear that had to be seen, and still were disbelieved.

Now, for Remo, sleeping was just another function of living and Remo was in control of those functions. He slept when he wanted to and for as long as he wanted to and the totality of rest he twisted from sleep was so great that a few minutes rest to him was the same as hours of sleep to a normal man.

And to go to sleep was the simplest thing of all. It did not require consciously willing the body to sleep. It simply meant letting the body do the natural thing, which was to sleep. "A lion never has insomnia," Chiun had once said. Sleeping became a thing done more by instinct than by conscious desire. But Remo controlled the instinct.

He thought of none of these things as he lay on the bed, because one moment he was awake, and the next moment he was asleep. Not the "little death" of sleep that most men suffered through. Because Remo lived a life without tensions racking his mind and body, because he was not in conflict with himself during the day, he did not have to escape that conflict at night in the deep coma that most people called rest.

Thirty minutes later he heard it and was fully awake. There was a sound in the hall. Chiun too would have heard it, he knew.

Remo moved quietly from the bed toward the open door of his room. The sound was footsteps, soft footsteps. It was someone barefooted moving down the thick carpeting of the hallway, and while to most people the movement would have been soundless, that was only because they were used to listening to the hard clicks of hard shoes on hard floors. Anything less than that was silent. But Remo could hear the soft crinkle of the wool carpet as it was pressed down by the bare feet stepping along it, and then the slight release as the foot lifted and took the next step. It was a hissing sound. The footsteps were coming closer to him. He heard no sound of clothing rustling.

A small person. Perhaps five-foot-six or seven. One hundred and seventeen pounds. Long legged. Chiun seemed to know something about the person who had thrown a knife into Wesley Pruiss's back. Did that make the assassin an Oriental? Remo wondered. An Oriental might fit the physical description of the person coming slowly and softly down the hallway toward Remo's room. Toward Pruiss's room.

Remo waited until the steps were only three feet from his open door and then walked out into the hallway.

Staring up at him was Theodosia. She was dressed only in white panties and bra. She looked up at Remo in surprise.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I was testing you," she said. "Just to see if you were on the job."

Remo shook his head. "You'll never know how lucky you are."

"Why?"

"Because you gave instructions to kill anybody trying to enter Pruiss's room. If you had touched the knob on that door, Chiun would have put you away before you could blink." Without raising his voice, Remo said, "It's all right, Chiun. It's Theodosia. Go back to sleep."

The faint Oriental voice squeaked back from inside Chiun's room. "Sleep? How can I sleep with herds of elephants thundering down the hall at all hours of the night? I will never get any rest on this job. Woe is me."

"Come on in here," Remo said. "Unless you want to hear him kvetch all night." He led Theodosia into his room and closed the door behind them.

"I thought I was being very quiet," she said. She seemed not at all self-conscious about wearing nothing but her lingerie.

"You were," he said. "Most people wouldn't have heard you."

"You did."

"We're not most people," Remo said. He realized Theodosia was standing close to him, her body pressed against his. She seemed so small, so vulnerable that he lifted up her chin with his hand and leaned over to kiss her on the mouth.

Her lips stiffened momentarily, then relaxed and were rich and pulpy as they slid against Remo's. He moved his hands down her bare back, which felt smooth and oiled, and toyed with the elastic waistband of her nylon panties. Theodosia pressed against him with the middle of her body and clapped her arms about his neck.

She released her lips, leaned her head back and smiled at him.

"What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?" she asked.

"Just lucky, I guess," said Remo, drawing her close to his body again by wrapping his arms around her bare back.

He allowed his body to stir and when it did, he remembered how pleasant it had once been. It was all too easy for him now and he would never recapture the lustful joys of scoring when scoring was hard to do. Still the woman in his arms pleasured him. He fiddled with the little metallic clip on the back of Theodosia's bra but couldn't open it, just as he had never been able to open them, so he nipped the elastic strap between his right thumb and index finger and with a small twist of his hand, broke the elastic in two. The bra slid down the front of Theodosia's chest as she shrugged her shoulders and Remo felt her hard-pointed breasts touch his chest.

He raised a hand to her breast and she pressed her lips against him again, hard, demanding, insistent, and pushed him backwards toward the bed. He felt her fingers slide against the muscled flesh of his hard stomach and her long fingernails traced lazy circles about his navel.

She wore a sweet perfume but it was sweet with the smell of the outdoors and not with the sweet of sugar and chemicals. It wafted into Remo's nostrils and he savored the aroma as he let her body carry him down onto the bed. She was feverishly clawing at the waistband of his undershorts and Remo said, "Easy, easy. What's the hurry?"

"Easy, my ass," Theodosia said and somehow twirling around on the bed, she had both their undergarments off and she was climbing over him.

Even though he did not want it to happen, it had become too much a part of him to ignore and Remo remembered all the steps ingrained in him by Chiun's training, and without thinking of them, he went from step one to step two to step three.

Chiun had taught him twenty-seven progressive steps for sex. Chiun had called it a beginner's course "but adequate for most of your needs, especially since you whites rut like cows in a field." Twenty-seven steps and Remo had never found a woman with whom he could get past Step 13 before she was turned into a flesh-covered mass of quivering jelly.

Theodosia moved around Remo as he went through the steps, the pressure touch on the small of the back, the fingernail scrape three inches from the center of an armpit, the tug and release of the small hairs at the back of her neck. He felt guilty about getting ready to turn the woman into jelly, but he knew nothing else to do in sex now except the things he had been taught. He wondered for a moment if Theodosia's continuous exposure to rampant, kinky sex at Grossmagazine and as Pruiss's mistress might somehow render her immune to his processes.

He performed Step 13, deciding to use the left elbow instead of the right, but there was no visible response from the woman and for the first time, he moved to Step 14, involving both his hands and the inside of his right ankle and the back of Theodosia's left knee.

He paused, waiting for her to scream in a paroxysm of ecstasy.

She smiled down at him and said, "You're tickling me."

Remo lay back on the bed, for a moment totally relaxed, and then went on to Steps 15 and 16 and 17. At 18, Theodosia began to purr and he got all the way to step 22 before they joined together in a mingling outpouring of warm wet bliss that left Theodosia apparently dazed and Remo relaxed and calm, lying naked on his back on the bed.

Gallantly, he said "Congratulations."

"For what? You're not going to tell me I rescued you from homosexuality are you?"

She was already sitting up in bed, almost businesslike, as if the passion of the last few minutes had had nothing to do with her. He wondered at her resiliency.

"You're kind of remarkable," he said.

"Aren't you nice to say that?" she said. "Ah owes it all to living clean, eating right and going to bed early."

"And often," Remo said.

Theodosia laughed. "All right. Going to bed early and often. You're not exactly untrained yourself. Where'd you learn all those things you were doing?"

"It's a long story," Remo said.

"I've got time, now that I know Wesley's in good hands," Theodosia said.

Remo changed the subject. "What about Wesley? I guess we keep this our little secret. I can't stand jealous lovers."

"Lovers? Jealous? Wesley?" Theodosia broke into a long full-throated laugh.

"What's so funny? You are Wesley's woman, aren't you?"

"Sure I'm Wesley's woman. I handle the books. I handle the business. I advise him on business and investments. I do the labor negotiations for Gross. That's it."

"That's it? You mean that Wesley would let a natural resource like you go to waste?"

"Dear one," she said. "Wesley's impotent. He can't make it. That's why he keeps me around all the time. I'm his excuse for not performing with somebody else."

"What a shame," Remo said.

"It is. More than you know. He was like anybody else when he was driving up. But when he got to the top with money and power and women climbing all over him, his sex drive vanished. To tell you the truth, I think sometimes he's a little bit happy about that assassin's knife 'cause it gives him an excuse not to have to perform."

"And you know how many men in America dream of being in his shoes?" Remo said.

"And do you know how many times he wishes he were in the shoes of some drunken truckdriver who swills beer all night and then comes home and cops the wife's nookie?" Theodosia said. She fumbled in the drawer of the end table next to the bed and found a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and lay back next to Remo, inhaling deeply.

"You know, I saw the first issue of Gross," Remo said. "You and the bull?"

"Funny. I wouldn't have picked you to be a Gro-Gru," she said.

"'Gro-Gru'?" Remo asked.

"Grossie-Groupie. A reader."

"No," Remo said. "I was waiting for a man. He wasn't home yet. He had a copy of the magazine on his desk. I read it until he came."

"If he had a desk, he doesn't sound like one of our readers either."

"Yeah," Remo said, remembering. "He had a desk. I left him in one of the drawers. Anyway, I remembered you. But with a bull?"

"It gave me good training for you," Theodosia said. She dragged again on the cigarette and put her hand on Remo's thigh. "Only fooling. It's all posed."

"Even posed," Remo said. "How the hell'd you get involved in that? What goes through your mind when you know you're going to have the picture published and your family and all's going to see it?"

"Half the models are hookers who aren't junked up yet." Theodosia said. "The others who do the freaky stuff wanteverybody to see it. It's a way of getting even. Most of them were rejected kids and now they just want to show everybody what they were missing when they rejected them. They're just working out their problems. If you're Jewish and rich, you go to a shrink. If you can't handle that, but you're good-looking enough, you can pose naked with a bull."

"So you did that and then what?"

"I was Wesley's first girl. He had a little three-man operation then. So I asked for a job and he found out I could do more than just flash at a camera. And then a little later, he started to have his problems so I was good camouflage for him too. So I hung on and survived and now I run everything for him."

"So who's trying to kill him?" Remo said.

Theodosia let out a long puff of smoke. It battled, futilely, in Remo's senses with her perfume, then lost. She still smelled sweet.

"Those goddamn oil companies," she said. "We started hearing a lot of crap right after Wesley said he was going to do that solar energy thing out here. I wouldn't put it past them. That's why I hired all you people."

She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and rolled over onto her side, toward Remo. Her right breast rested on his left bicep.

"Enough talk," she said. "Get busy. What do you think I pay you for?"

The assassin stood in the shadow of the trees behind the practice putting green of the country club.

It would be easy, he thought, as he watched the mercenary colonel march up and down in front of the entrance to the building, carrying his submachine gun, carefully checking to his left, to his right, behind him, over and over again, a narrow military man carrying out a narrow military operation.

There was this one here. The karate expert had the left side of the house and half of the back. The right side and the other half of the back of the building was being patrolled by the small arms expert.

The assassin had been told there were two new bodyguards, an old Oriental and a young American. They were probably inside the house. Just as well; he would deal with them later. First things first.

The assassin moved out of the shadows, cleared his throat, then slowly slipped behind a tree.

The colonel looked up at the noise and saw a figure moving behind a tree.

He went into a combat crouch and began moving across the putting green toward the spot he had seen the movement. But the assassin was already moving away from there, circling around to his left, and when the colonel approached the tree and extended his weapon toward it, the assassin was behind him.

He looked across the twelve feet separating them. He pulled a silver-bladed knife from the back of his belt and raised it over his head. His hand flashed down. This time, there was no calculated near miss. The knife burrowed into the back of the soldier, cutting through his clothes, flesh, muscles and severing his spinal cord. The colonel dropped without uttering a sound. His machine gun made a faint little thwopwhen it hit the night-dampened grass of the forest floor.

The assassin paused only long enough to retrieve his knife. He wiped it clean on fallen leaves, returned it to his belt, and moved across the putting green to the front door of the country club. There he waited in the shadows of the two large columns flanking the front door.

The guards were in a rhythm and the karate expert would be first. He had watched them. Every sixth time they prowled their section of the perimeter of the grounds, they came to the front porch to check. And they staggered the count so that the karate expert came first, then three rounds later, the small arms master, and three rounds later, the karate expert. Over and over.

The assassin had watched them for hours. His tradition was to know his enemy, because knowledge was not only power, knowledge was death. The assassin had also watched the shades pulled over the windows in Wesley Pruiss's room and he had caught through one of the uncovered hall windows a flash of movement in the hallway which seemed to be a woman walking, presumably Pruiss's assistant, since he knew of no other women in the house.

The assassin wore no wristwatch; he had no need of one. Time was a fact of his life and his internal clock never missed a stroke. He could count seconds without a miss up to ten minutes. He could sense the passage of minutes and not be wrong by so much as the tick of a clock at the end of the day.

He did not have to count here, however, to know when the karate expert would appear. The end of the house he patrolled was bordered by a heavier kind of grass, and to the assassin's keen senses, heightened by the fact that he was practicing his deadly art, the sound of the martial arts expert's unclad feet moving through that high grass would mean he was ready to turn the corner and check in with the colonel at the front of the building.

He waited in the shadows and listened. The quiet night roared with sounds. The beasts in the woods near the house chattered ceaselessly to each other. The wind had its own sound and some kinds of birds that flew at night made a different kind of sound as they soared through the air. The house, even though all were abed, was as noisy as if it lived. Water pipes continuously contracted and expanded and creaked gently in the U-brackets that held them to ceiling beams in the cellar. Electric clocks whirred. Radios hummed quietly. Refrigerators kicked on and off automatically. There were few places in the world that were really silent to one who but listened.

The breeze blowing toward the house was cool and had the taste of tree green on it as it reached the assassin. He tasted it on his lips and waited.

Ninety seconds later, he heard the bare footfall touch the high grass, and a moment later, the karate expert turned the corner of the building and looked toward the porch. At that moment, the assassin stepped out from behind the column. Even as he moved, his hands were reaching behind him to his belt. The martial arts expert saw the unfamiliar man and, courageous and foolish, ran across the ground toward him. At ten-feet distance, the assassin threw the knives with both hands simultaneously. At nine feet they struck, one in the throat severing the windpipe, the other slanting between two ribs to pierce the heart muscle. The man dropped with no sound other than that of his body hitting the heavily-matted short grass of the practice green.

Quickly the assassin moved from the porch and removed the knives from the dead body. The man stared at him blankly, his eyes rolling up into his head like a fish dying on a gaffing hook. He recovered his knives, wiped them clean on the white gi of the dead man, then dragged the body across the practice green and into the small stand of trees where he dumped it next to that of the mercenary colonel.

He went back to the porch. The whole killing operation had taken less than two minutes. He no longer tasted the green of the trees on his lips; instead his mind dwelt only on the satisfying thwack of knives hitting target. He saw in his memory the two bodies lying, bloodied, on the ground and for the first time that night, he smiled.

He wanted to do it again. It would be only seconds before the small arms man came around the corner of the building but those seconds ticked in his mind like a clock heading for eternity. He could not wait.

He walked off the porch to the corner of the building. He squatted low as he peered around the corner. The firearms expert was only five feet away, just walking again toward the back of the building. The assassin withdrew another clean, unused knife from his belt. He never liked to use the same knife twice, before using the others. He felt it was wrong not to spread the work equally over all the machinery. Hefting it in his right hand, he stepped out into the short cut grass next to the flower bed.

The firearms expert carried a pistol in his hand so the assassin was silent. He did not want him to get off a shot to alert anyone else. He raised the knife next to his right ear and let fly. The blade bit flesh and the firearms expert dropped. His gun fell uselessly onto the grass. Again the knife was cleaned and the body dragged across the putting green to be deposited with the others.

The assassin walked back across the green. It would be easy to go on, he thought. A houseful of sleeping people. Pruiss. Theodosia. The Indian. The two bodyguards. More blood for his knives.

His hand touched the front doorknob, then released it. It would be nice but it would be unprofessional. He would do what he was paid to do. He walked off back to the woods.

Theodosia slept. Remo had again gone to Step 22 of his 27 but she seemed to climax only when she wanted to climax and it jarred Remo that she had been invulnerable to him.

She slept now on his arm, knowing that Pruiss would not be out of his bed to surprise them together. Remo had reopened the hall door. He was lying in bed, thinking, when he heard a hissing sound.

"Sooooo," came the voice from the door, in a high pitch of indignation.

"Yes, Chiun," Remo said with a sigh.

"Here you lie rutting, as all you people do so well..."

"Don't knock it," Remo interrupted. "Step 22 tonight. First time ever."

"I am not interested in the vulgar details of your vulgar activities. Your life is a vulgarity and nothing in it would surprise me," Chiun said. "But perhaps you can spare me a moment so I can tell you something concerning why you are here."

Remo dropped Theodosia from his arm and sat up in bed. Her head hit the pillow with a thud and she woke up also. She looked at Remo, then at Chiun standing in the doorway, wearing his brown sleeping kimono.

"What?" she began to say.

Chiun ignored her. He looked at Remo. "The assassin has been here," he said.

Remo looked at him in something close to disbelief.

"Yes, that is right, white thing," Chiun said. "Look at me with your mouth hanging open. While you two were behaving like rabbits in a box, he was here."

"What happened?" Remo asked.

"He did not enter the building. He moved outside. He moved many times in many different directions. He practiced his art. He is gone now."

"Is Wesley all right?" Theodosia asked. She started to get out of bed.

"He is as all right as one can be who has a faithless woman," Chiun said.

"The bodyguards," Remo said.

Chiun raised his hand. "There is nothing to be done tonight," he said. "What has occurred has occurred. We will deal with it tomorrow."

Remo slumped back onto the pillow.

"Now, if you two can find it in yourselves, I would suggest some sleep," said Chiun.

Without even a whisper of sound, he left the room. Theodosia stared at the open door.

"How does he know what happened outside?" she asked.

"Because he is the Master of Sinanju," Remo said. "Go to sleep."

But he did not take his own advice.