No Contest

Chiun looked away from the wing for a moment. “So. There is a hidden agenda. Remo the dramatist has more feats of tomfoolery up his undershirt sleeves.”

“Maybe I do.”

“You will tell me of your plans.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You will, lest you carry out more idiotic schemes that reflect upon me. I will not go into my retirement with the reputation of Sinanju sullied.”

“Go to hell, Chiun.”

Chiun didn’t respond. In fact, he was silent the rest of the flight. Remo tried to enjoy the silence, but he knew he was going to pay for it one way or another. He always did.

Harold W. Smith meditated on his computer screen, hidden beneath his glass desktop. Everything that he had ordered was now in place. He had but to issue one more command to use it.

He might be stepping over the line. What he did now could turn his rebellious enforcement arm into a vengeful rogue assassin. Was it worth the risk?

The problem was, Smith didn’t know what he was even trying to learn, but he was convinced the Sun On Jo could hold a part of the answer to the question that plagued him.

He had to know. He had analyzed the elements of the problem time and again, logically and dispassionately, and every conclusion was the same: he had to know who had pulled CURE’s strings.

Somehow, years ago, CURE was used to bring Chiun and Remo together. Only recently was Smith made aware of the fact that Remo Williams was himself a descendent of a Sinanju Master—the master who journeyed to North America before Columbus and founded the small tribe called Sun On Jo. The odds of CURE bringing these two incredibly unique persons on an intercept course out of sheer chance were immense. Smith had even tried to calculate these odds, allowing for ridiculous assumptions to weigh the chances.

They were still incalculably large. Someone or something must have made it happen. Whatever made it happen also made the Sun On Jo happen.

Smith had always prided himself on CURE’s independence. Even the commander in chief of the United States could not give orders to CURE, save the one order to dismantle the agency completely.

To discover now that the very core of CURE had been engineered in some way to be what it now was—this was deeply disturbing. What other machinations had been made? How else had Smith been manipulated? What was CURE being used for?

He had to know. The answer had to be important. Smith could not allow himself to be a pawn in a king’s crown.

Smitty issued his commands, then sat and waited.

Colonel Simonec was almost relieved when the command came through and ended the unbearable suspense of waiting.

Unexpectedly, he had taken delivery of two new airships today. He didn’t dare hope that he would get to keep them. Surely the faceless general would send him another incontrovertible order to throw these two new beauties away just as he had wasted the other airships.

“We’re sending up EBE 1,” Simonec announced to his ground crew chief.

“Aw, come on, Colonel. We just got her today! Can’t we have her even one day before they scrap her?”

“That’s an order, mister!”

“Yes, Colonel.”

But he knew how his close-knit crew felt about it. The EBE had arrived like a gift from heaven. None of them even knew there was such a thing as the Extremely Big Ear, and now two of them were sitting in their hangar.

The unmanned airship displaced little more than its predecessors, but the construction was different. The gas bag was some sort of extraflimsy Mylar that somehow collapsed itself into hundreds of tiny chambers. They couldn’t puncture the skin with a power saw.

“You shoot this, and it would probably absorb the round. If the round tears through it, it’ll damage maybe five or ten percent of the chambers and the thing will still fly,” one of the operators explained.

But the real art was in the electronics.

“It’s a laser,” the operator told the colonel.

“My toaster has a laser in it. So what?”

“We think it reads vibrations in gases in the 95–100 degrees Farenheit range. You know, like bouncing a laser off a glass to pick up the vibrations caused by the sound inside the room? If this does that using air, and only on the air that is coming out of the mouths of people, then think what the range would be. It could eavesdrop from fifty miles away. If you’re not in line of sight, it uses a wide-spectrum thermal sensor to identify targets that are vibrating with the spectrum of human speech, then points the effing laser at that thing.”

The colonel shrugged. “But will it work?”

“The bitch of it is, we might never know.”

They launched the EBE1 and watched her disappear into the Arizona desert. Sure enough, their remote control was overridden within minutes.

“Distend finger, insert in nostril,” an operator said despondently. “And wait for the thing to never come back.”

But it did come back. A message came in thirty hours later that signaled the return of EBE 1 control to Yuma.