Destroyer 035 - Last Call

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Red Peril

"Just a minute," Stantington began.

"We may not have a minute, thanks to your bumbling," Smith said. "Did the President authorize closing

down Project Omega?"

"Not exactly," the CIA chief said.

"Weren't you aware that there is a notation in the CIA's permanent records that Project Omega can be

closed down only on the specific written authorization of the President of the United States?"

"Never mind that," Stantington replied. "Since it's been closed down, two Russian

diplomats have been killed. The Russians are blaming it on us. They say that both

assassins were on our payroll."

"That's right," said Smith. "They were." He spun around in his chair and looked out

the one-way windows. "And that's not the worst of it. The Russian premier is on the

hit list, too."

"Oh, my god," Stantington said. He slumped back in the couch. "How can we

stop it?"

Smith turned back. His face still showed no emotion.

"We can't," he said. "Once Project Omega has been set in motion, it can't be stopped."

THE DESTROYER SERIES:

#1 CREATED, #22 BRAIN DRAIN

THE DESTROYER #23 CHILD'S PLAY

#2 DEATH CHECK #24 KING'S CURSE

#3 CHINESE PUZZLE #25 SWEET DREAMS

#4 MAFIA FIX #26 IN ENEMY HANDS

#5 DR. QUAKE #27 THE LAST TEMPLE

#6 DEATH THERAPY #28 SHIP OF DEATH

#7 UNION BUST #29 THE FINAL DEATH

#8 SUMMIT CHASE #30 MUGGER BLOOD

#9 MURDER'S SHIELD #31 THE HEAD MEN

#10 TERROR SQUAD #32 KILLER

#11 KILL OR CURE CHROMOSOMES

#12 SLAVE SAFARI #33 VOODOO DIE

#13 ACID ROCK #34 CHAINED REACTION

#14 JUDGMENT DAY #35 LAST CALL

#15 MURDER WARD #36 POWER PLAY

#16 OIL SLICK #37 BOTTOM LINE

#17 LAST WAR DANCE #38 BAY CITY BLAST

#18 FUNNY MONEY #39 MISSING LINK

#19 HOLY TERROR #40 DANGEROUS GAMES

#20 ASSASSIN'S PLAY-OFF #41 FIRING LINE

#21 DEADLY SEEDS #42 TIMBER LINE

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PINNACLE BOOKS . LOS ANGELES

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to

real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

DESTROYER #35: LAST CALL

form.

An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

First printing, December 1978 Second printing, October 1980

ISBN: 0-523-41250-9

Cover illustration by Hector Garrido

Printed in the United States of America

PINNACLE BOOKS, INC.

2029 Century Park East

Los Angeles, California 90067

For Alice B. in Boston

last call

CHAPTER ONE

It would have seemed like a crime against nature if Admiral Wingate Stantington (USN Retired) had not

risen to a position of great prominence in the United States. The new head of the Central Intelligence

Agency was the sturdy, clean-faced epitome of the best of all his schools. He had gotten his character from

Annapolis, his computer efficiency from Harvard Business School, his culture from Oxford. He had been a

Rhodes scholar and a second-string ail-American halfback for the Navy.

His ice blue eyes twinkled with wit and strength, exuding a certain happy courage

that had shown America over its television screens that brains and pluck and a new broom

were now sweeping our intelligence agencies into a lean, clean top-flight group that not

only America but the whole world could be proud of.

Sixty minutes before he was to make an offhand decision that could trigger World War

III, Admiral Stantington was arguing with a man who obviously had not read the New

York Times Sunday magazine article about Stantington's ir-

resistible "he gets what he wants but always with a smile" charm.

"Shove it, Stantington," the man said. He was sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair in the middle of a

bare room in a federal detention center outside Washington, D.C. The man wore light, plastic-framed, round

eyeglasses that were too small for his face, the big sturdy round open face of an Iowa farmer.

Stantington walked in circles around the man, his tall, trim athletic body moving as

briskly as if he were on a parade ground. He wore a light blue shadow-striped suit that

accentuated his height and whose color went well with his eyes and his impeccably styled

sandy hair with the faint touch of gray distinction over each temple.

"That's not really the tack to take," Stantington said in his soft Southern accent. "A

little cooperation now might help you in the future."

The prisoner looked up at Stantington and his eyes narrowed behind the thick-lensed

glasses.

"A little cooperation?" he said. "A little cooperation? You've got thirty-five years of my

cooperation and what did I get for it? A jail sentence." He turned his face away

and crossed his arms stubbornly, covering the printed number on his chest. He wore twill

prisoner's fatigues.

Stantington walked around him again until he was in front of the prisoner and the

man could see the new CIA director's winning smile.

"That's all water under the bridge," Stantington said. "Come on. Why don't you just

tell me where it is?"

"Go to hell. You and that peckerhead you work for."

"Dammit, man. I want that key."

"Will you please tell me why a forty-nine-cent key is so important to you ?" the prisoner

asked.

"Because it is," Stantington said. He, wanted to grab the man by the throat and wring the truth out of

him. Or call in a CIA goon squad and have them apply electrodes to his testicles and shock the answer out of

him. But there was no more of that. That was the old CIA, the discredited CIA, and it was probably

knowing that the CIA had changed that made this prisoner so truculent and unreasonable.

"I threw it in a sewer so you couldn't get your manicured hands on it," the prisoner

said. "No. No, I didn't. I had a hundred copies made and I gave them away to

everybody and when you're not looking they're going to sneak into your office and go

into your private bathroom and piss in your sink."

Admiral Wingate Stantington took a deep breath and clenched his hands behind his

back.

"If that's the way you want it," he said to the prisoner. "But I just want you to know I

won't forget this. If I have anything to say about it, you can kiss your pension

goodbye. If I have anything to say about it, you'll serve out every goddamn last day of

your term. And if I have anything to say about it, people like you will never again

have anything to do with this country's intelligence apparatus."

"Go piss up a rope," the prisoner said.

Stantington walked briskly toward the door of

the bare room. His pedometer, which measured how many miles he walked each day, clicked against his

right hip. At the door, the prisoner called his name. Stantington turned around and looked back into his eyes.

"It's going to happen to you too, Stantington," the man said. "Even as dumb as you

are, you're going to try to do your best and one day they'll change the rules in the

middle of the game and your ass'll be grass, just like mine. I'll save you a spot in the

prison chow line."

And the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency smiled at Stantington, who

walked out of the room without comment, a deep sense of disquiet and irritation flooding

his mind.

Admiral Wingate Stantington brooded in the back of his limousine, all the way back to

CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just a few miles from Washington, D.C. He had

wanted that key to the private bathroom in his office. Time magazine was coming the next

week, probably to do a cover story on him, and he had already written the lead of the

story in his mind:

Admiral Wingate Stantington, the man chosen to lead the beleagured Central

Intelligence Agency, is both brilliant and budget-minded. In case anyone doubts

that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found

the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the

that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found

the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the

possession of the former director of the CIA, now serving a five-year jail term.

Rather than call a locksmith and

put in a new lock ($23.65 by current Washington prices), Admiral Stantington

drove by the prison on his way to work the next day and got the key from his

predecessor. 'That's the way we're running things around here from now on,'

Stantington said when he reluctantly confirmed the story. 'A tight ship is one

that doesn't leak and that includes not leaking money,' he said."

To hell with it, Stantington thought. Time magazine would have to think of some

other lead for its story. He couldn't be expected to do everybody's job for them.

The admiral was in his office at 9 A.M. He called his secretary on the intercom and

told her to get a locksmith tout de suite and get a new lock for his bathroom door.

"And get two keys," he said. "And you keep one."

"Yes, sir," the young woman said, slightly surprised, because she hadn't thought it took

a CIA command decision to get two keys for a new lock.

When he clicked off his intercom, Stantington checked his pedometer and found that he

had already walked one and a half miles of his ten-mile daily quota. It gave him his first

warm feeling of the day.

The second warm feeling came twenty minutes later when he met with his director of operations and chief

of personnel and signed an order terminating the employment of 250 field agents and, thus, with a stroke of

the pen, accomplishing the kind of decimation of the CIA's field forces that

the Russians had lusted after for years but had always been unable to accomplish.

"Have to show them up on the Hill that we mean business," the CIA director said.

"Anything else?"

He looked at the two men. His chief of operations, a round man who sweated a lot and

had yellow teeth, said "Here's something you'll like, Admiral. It's called Project Omega

and it's ours."

"I've never heard of it. What's its function?"

"That's just it. It doesn't have any function. The biggest damned no-show job I've ever seen." The

operations director spoke in a crackly Southern accent. He was a lifelong friend of Stantington's and had

formerly headed the highway system of a Southern state. He got the CIA job, out-of a large group of other

close political friends, because he was the only one who had never been indicted for taking construction

kickbacks.

"They don't do a damn thing," the operations director said. "They sit around and

play cards and the only thing even vaguely worklike they do is make a phone call once a

day. Six agents. Nothing but one phone call a day."

Stantington was pacing the perimeter of his office, making neat 90-degree turns at each

corner.

"Who do they call?" he asked.

"Somebody's aunt, I think. A little old lady in Atlanta."

"And their budget is how much?"

"Four million nine hundred thousand. But it's not all salaries of course. Some of it gets

hard to trace."

Stantington whistled, a small sip of noise. "Four million nine hundred thousand," he said aloud. "Fire

them. Imagine if Time magazine found that one out."

"Time magazine?" said the director of operations.

"Forget it," Stantington said.

"Should I check the old lady out?"

"No, dammit. Check her out and that'll cost money. Everything around here costs money. You can't even

go to the toilet without it costing you twenty-three dollars and sixty-five cents. No. We check her out and that

pushes the cost of this Omega whatever-it-is up to five million. And that's a bad number. Nobody's going to

remember four million nine hundred thousand, but give them five million and they'll notice that. And then

they'll start, five million here and ten million there and they'll nickel and dime us to death. Let that happen

and we'll be crapping in the hallways."

The director of operations and the chief of personnel looked at each other quizzically. Neither understood

the admiral's obsession with bathrooms, but both nodded at the Omega decision. The project, whatever it

was, had no linkage to any program anywhere. The group was connected to nothing but the old lady in

Atlanta and she was nothing. Without notifying anyone, the personnel director had checked. She was nothing

and knew nothing or nobody. He had checked because he thought she might be related to the President.

Everybody in that part of the country

seemed to be. But she wasn't. It was agreed wholeheartedly. Fire them. Toss them

overboard.

At 10 a.m., the six Project Omega agents were notified that they were separated from the service as of that

minute.

None of them complained. None of them knew what he was supposed to be doing

anyway.

Admiral Wingate Stantington continued to pace around his room when the two men

left. He was composing a new lead for the Time cover story.

Between 9 and 9:20 A.M. last Tuesday morning, Admiral Wingate Stantington, the

new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, fired 256 agents, saving America's

taxpayers almost ten million dollars. It was just the start of a good day's work.

Not bad, Stantington thought. He smiled. It was just the start of a good day's work.

In a small frame house just off Paces Ferry Road on the outskirts of Atlanta, Mrs.

Amelia Sinkings stood at her kitchen sink, peeling apples with stiff arthritic fingers. She

glanced at the clock over the sink. It was 10:54 A.M. Her telephone call would come in a

minute. They came at different times each morning and she had a plastic laminated chart

that told her what time to expect the call on each day. But after twenty years of getting

the telephone calls, she had the chart memorized, so she'd put it in the closet under her

good dishes. Ten fifty-five A.M. That's when the

call would come. There was no question about it, so she turned off the faucet and dried

her hands on the ironed cotton towel she kept on a rack over the sink. She walked slowly

over to the kitchen table and sat there, waiting for the phone to ring.

She had often wondered about the men who called her. Over the years she had

gotten to recognize six separate voices. For a long time, she had tried to engage them in

conversation. But they never said anything more than "Hi, honey. All's well." And then

they hung up.

Sometimes she wondered if what she was doing was . . . well, was proper. It seemed

like very little to do for fifteen thousand a year. She had expressed this concern to the

dry little man from Washington who had recruited her almost twenty years earlier.

He had tried to reassure her. "Don't worry, Mrs. Sinkings," he had said. "What

you're doing is very, very important." It was during the atomic bomb scares of the

1950's and Mrs. Sinkings had giggled nervously and asked, "What if the Russians bomb

us ? What then,"

And the man had looked very serious and said simply, "Then everything will take care

of itself and none of us have to worry about it."

He had double-checked again with her. Her mother had lived to be ninety-five and her

father ninety-four. Both sets of grandparents had lived into their nineties.

Amelia Sinkings had been sixty when she took the job. She was almost eighty now.

She watched as the second hand finished its sweep around the clock and the time neared

10:55. She reached her hand for the telephone, anticipating the ring.

Fifty-nine seconds. Sixty. Her hand touched the telephone.

One second after 10:55. Two seconds. Three seconds.

The telephone had not rung. She waited another thirty seconds before she realized

that her hand was still on the telephone and it was beginning to ache from being held

over her head that way. She lowered her hand to the table and sat there watching the

clock.

over her head that way. She lowered her hand to the table and sat there watching the

clock.

She waited until the time went past 10:59 A.M. She sighed and, with difficulty, rose

to her feet. She removed her gold Elgin wristwatch and placed it carefully on the table,

then opened the back door and tottered down the steps into her backyard.

It was a bright spring morning and magnolias filled the air with their honeyed

scent. The backyard was small and its little pathway was bordered with flowers, which

Mrs. Binkings had to admit to herself were not as neatly trimmed as they should be, but

it was so hard these days to bend down and work.

In the far corner of the small yard was a round slab of concrete, surrounded by a low metal fence. In the

center of the slab was a twelve-foot-high flagpole. The flagpole had been built by the strange dry man

from Washington with a crew that had worked all through one night to finish the job. It had never flown a

flag.

Mrs. Binkings started down the narrow path toward the flagpole, but stopped when a voice

called out, "Hi, Mrs. Sinkings. How you all feelin' today?"

She went back to chat across the picket fence with her neighbor, who was a nice

young woman even if she had lived in the neighborhood for only ten years.

They talked about arthritis and tomatoes and how no one was raising children

properly anymore and finally her neighbor went back inside and Mrs. Sinkings walked

to the flagpole, pleased that after all these years she had remembered to take off her

wristwatch as the man from Washington had told her.

She pushed open the small metal gate in the fence and stepped to the pole. She untied

the cord from the metal bracket on the side of the pole. Her fingers hurt from the

effort of loosening the dry, tired old knots.

She gave the cleat a ISO-degree turn. She felt it click. For a moment, she seemed to feel

the concrete whir under her feet. She paused for a moment, but felt nothing more.

Mrs. Sinkings retied the flag rope and closed the small metal gate. Then, with a sigh

and a lingering twinge of worry about whether what she was doing was all right, she

went back inside. She hoped that the apples she had been peeling in the sink had not

already turned brown. It made them look so unappetizing.

In the kitchen, she decided to sit at the table and rest for a moment. She felt very tired. Mrs. Sinkings

put her head down on her forearms to rest. She felt her breath coming harder and harder, until she

realized that she was gasping.

Something was very wrong. She reached out her hand for the telephone over the table

but before she could reach it, there was a piercing pain in the center of her chest. Her

left arm froze in position, then dropped back onto the table. The pain felt like a spear

had been stuck into her. Almost clinically, Mrs. Sinkings could feel the pain of her heart

attack radiating outward from her chest to her shoulders and stomach and then into her

extremities. And then it became very difficult to breathe and, because she was a very old

lady, she stopped trying. And died.

Mrs. Amelia Binkings had been right. When she had turned the flagpole bracket, the

concrete had whirred under her feet. A powerful, solar-fed generator had kicked into life

after twenty years and begun sending powerful radio signals into the air, using the

flagpole as an antenna.

In Europe, red lights went on. In a garage in Rome, in the backrooms of a Paris

bakery, in the cellar of a plush London home, and in the laundry room of a small country

house.

And all over Europe, men saw the red lights go on.

And prepared to lull.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and his ears hurt. He would have hung up the telephone but that would probably

prompt a personal visit and while Ruby Jackson Gonzalez could cause him unbearable pain by shouting at

him over the telephone, in person her voice brought him unbelievable agony.

Carefully, so she would not hear, Remo set the receiver of the telephone on the ledge in the booth and

walked back out into the luncheonette where an aged Oriental in a powder blue robe stood looking at the

covers of magazines on the rack.

"I can still hear her," the Oriental said, in a voice that seemed to have disapproval

built in.

"I know, Chiun. So can I," Remo said. He went back and closed the door of the telephone

booth, gently so it would not squeak. He rejoined Chiun, who shook his head.

"That woman could broadcast from the ocean floor with no instrument but her mouth,"

Chiun said.

"I know," said Remo. "Maybe if we stood across the street?"

"That will not do," said Chiun. He reached out

a long-nailed index finger to riffle the pages of a magazine. "Her voice crosses

continents."

"Maybe if I wadded up some bread and shoved it into the earpiece of the phone?"

"Her voice would harden it into cement," Chiun said. He moved his hand to another

magazine and, with the long fingernail, flipped the pages. "So many books you people

have and none of you read. Maybe you should just do whatever it is she wants you to

do."

Remo sighed. "I suspect you're right, Chiun," he said.

Hands clapped tightly over his ears, he ran back to the telephone booth. He pressed

the door open with his shoulder. Without uncovering his ears, he yelled into the

mouthpiece, "Ruby, stop yelling. I'll do it. I'll do it."

He waited for a few seconds, then released his hands from his ears. Only blessed

silence came from the receiver and Remo picked it up, sat on the small stool in the booth

and closed the door.

"I'm glad you turned that buzzsaw off, Ruby, so that we can talk," he said. Before she

could answer, he added quickly, "Just kidding, Ruby. Just kidding."

"I hope so," said Ruby Gonzalez.

"Why is it these days that whenever I call Smith, I get you?" Remo asked.

"Because that man work too hard," Ruby said. "So I make him go out and play golf and

get some rest. I handle all the routine stuff, like you."

"And what about me? Don't I deserve any rest?" asked Remo.

"Your whole life be one vacation," Ruby said.

"Ruby, will you go to bed with me?" Remo asked.

"I'm not tired."

"I don't mean to sleep," Remo said.

"Why else would I go to bed with you, dodo?"

"Some women find me attractive," Remo said.

"Some women put cheese in their potatoes," Ruby said.

"You know, Ruby, this used to be just one big happy family. Just me and Chiun and

Smitty. And then you came along and ruined everything."

"You be the white man and I be the white man's burden," Ruby said.

Remo could picture her smile, even over the telephone. Ruby Gonzalez was not beautiful

but her smile was quick and happily blinding, a flash of white in her light chocolate face.

She would be sitting in her office outside Smith's, intercepting phone calls, making

decisions, lifting his workload to something small enough for four men to handle,

instead of the ten-man duties Smith had handled since Remo had known him.

"All right, Ruby," Remo said. "Tell me what dirty rotten job it is this time."

"It be them Nazis. They got that march there tomorrow and you got to stop it. It going to make America

look bad in the world, we let Nazis be marching all around."

"I'm not a negotiator," Remo said. "I don't talk people out of doing things." "You just do it," Ruby said. "How?"

"You think of something."

"You know, Ruby, in six months you're going to be running the country," Remo said.

"I figured five myself but I can live with six," Ruby said. "Call me, you need anything." Her abrasive voice

turned instantly to softly rippling chocolate milk with cornstarch thickeners. "Be good, Remo. Give my love to

Chiun."

Remo waited until he was sure she had hung up before he snarled at the telephone,

"You don't have any love to give, you hateful thing."

When Remo came out of the telephone booth, the luncheonette operator looked at

him with open curiosity. This was Westport, Connecticut, and he was used to having

strange people wander in, but someone yelling at a telephone booth across the room

would be strange anywhere.

Not that Remo looked strange. He was about six feet tall, with dark hair and deepset dark eyes. He was

as lean as a rope and he moved smoothly. Not quite like an athlete, but more like a ballet dancer, the owner

thought. Come to think of it, he was kind of built like a ballet dancer in that black T-shirt and black chinos,

but he had wrists that seemed as thick around as tomato juice cans. Remo had been coming into the store

almost every day for three months to buy newspapers and a copy of the Daily Variety, the show business

newspaper. The store owner didn't think much of his looks but one day his twenty-five-year-old daughter had

been working in the store when Remo was there, and when he left, she ran after him to give him change

from a ten-dollar bill.

"I paid with a five," Remo had said.

"I'll give you change for twenty."

"No thanks," Remo had said.

"Fifty? A hundred?"

But Remo had just driven away. His daughter had now taken to parking her car near

the luncheonette to catch a glimpse of him, so the store owner guessed that even if he

wasn't really handsome, he had something about him that women liked.

"You done with the phone?" he called to Remo.

"Yeah. You want to use it?"

The store owner nodded.

"Let the earpiece cool for a few minutes," Remo said. He walked to where the old

Oriental continued to flick through magazines with his fingernails.

"I have looked through all these magazines," Chiun said, glancing up at Remo. The

Oriental was aged, with white wisps of hair flitting out from his dried yellow skin. He

was barely five feet tall and probably had never seen the fat side of one hundred pounds.

"There is not one story in any of them that was written by a Korean. It is no wonder that

I cannot sell my books and stories."

"You can't sell your books and stories because you don't write your books and stories," Remo said. "You

sit there staring at a piece of paper for hours and then you complain that I'm stopping you from writing

because I'm breathing too heavy."

"You are," said Chiun.

"When I'm out in a boat in the middle of the sound?" asked Remo.

"I can hear your asthmatic snorting halfway across the country," Chiun said. "Come. It

is almost time."

"You going back there again today?" "I will go there every day for as long as it takes,"

Chiun said. "I can get nowhere with all your publishers prejudiced against Koreans, but

that will not stop me from writing a movie. I have heard about your Hollywood blacklist.

Well, if they have a blacklist to make sure that blacks get work, they can start a yellow

list and I can get work."

"That's not what they mean by blacklist," Remo said, but Chiun was already out the

door heading toward their car, which was parked illegally along the curbside of the busy

Boston Post Road.

Remo shrugged, took his morning quota of papers, and tossed a five-dollar bill on the

counter. Without waiting for change, he joined Chiun in the car.

"This is a natural for Paul Newman and Robert Redford," Chiun said. "It is just

what they need to make them stars."

"I know I'm never going to read it or see it, so I suppose you better tell me about it.

Otherwise, I'll never have any peace," Remo said.

"Fine. There is the world's foremost assassin, the head of an ancient house of

assassins."

"You," Remo said. "Chiun, reigning Master of the House of Sinanju."

"Shush. Anyway, this poor man finds himself, against his will, working in the United States because he needs

gold to feed the poor and the suf-

fering of his small Korean village. But do they let him practice his noble art in the United States? No. They

make him become a trainer, to try to teach the secrets of Sinanju to a fat, slothful meat-eater."

"Me," Remo said. "Remo Williams." "They found this poor meat-eater working as a policeman and they fixed

it up so that he went to an electrical chair but it didn't work because nothing in America works except me.

So instead of being killed, he was saved so he could go to work as an assassin for a secret organization

which is supposed to fight crime in America. This organization is called CURE and is headed by a total

imbecile."

"Smitty," Remo said. "Dr. Harold W. Smith." "And the story tells of the many

misadventures of this meat-eater and the many tragedies that befall him as he bumbles

and stumbles his way through life and how the Master, unappreciated and unloved,

always manages to save him at great risk to his own valued person, until one day the

Master's contributions are finally recognized by a grateful nation, because even stupid

countries can be grateful, and America showers him with gold and diamonds and he

returns home to his native village to live out his few remaining days in peace and

dignity, loved by all, because he is so gentle."

"That takes care of you," Remo said. "What happens to me? The meat-eater?"

"Actually, I have not worked out all the minor details of the movie yet," Chiun said.

"And for this you want Paul Newman and Robert Bedford?"

"Absolutely," Chiun said. "This is socko for Newman and Bedford."

"Who plays who ?" asked Remo.

"Newman will play the Master," Chiun said. "We can do something about those

funny pale eyes of his to make them look right."

"I see. And Redford plays me."

Chiun turned in his seat and looked at Remo as if his disciple had begun speaking in

tongues.

"Redford will play the head of this super-secret organization who you think resembles

Smith," Chiun said.

"Then who plays me? Remo asked.

"You know, Remo, when they make a movie, they hire a woman and they call her the

casting director, and she is in charge of finding actors to play all the small, unimportant

parts."

"A bit part ? That's me ?"

"Exactly," Chiun said.

"You got Newman and Redford starring as you and Smith and I'm a bit part?"

"That is correct."

"I hope you meet Newman and Redford," Remo said. "I just hope you do."

"I will. That is why I go to this restaurant, because I hear they eat lunch there when they are in town,"

Chiun said.

"I hope you meet them. I really do."

"Thank you, Remo," Chiun said.

"I really hope you meet them," Remo said.

Chiun looked at him with curiosity. "Your feelings are hurt, aren't they?"

"Why shouldn't they be? You got two stars playing you and Smith. And me, I'm a bit

part."

"We'll get somebody good. Somebody who looks like you."

"Yeah? Who?"

"Sidney Greenstreet. I saw him in a movie on television and he was very good."

"He's dead. And besides, he weighed three hundred pounds."

"Sidney Greenstreet. I saw him in a movie on television and he was very good."

"He's dead. And besides, he weighed three hundred pounds."

"Peter Ustinov," Chuin said.

"He doesn't talk like me. His accent's wrong."

"If you're going to pick at everything, we're never going to get this movie in the

can," Chiun said.

"I don't want anything to do with this movie," Remo sniffed.

He was still sulking when he stopped his car in front of the YMCA in the center of

town. It was almost noon and, across the street, the luncheon line for a small restaurant

extended to the corner.

"See that mob?" Remo said. "They're all waiting to see Newman and Redford and

they've all got movies to sell."

"None as good as mine," Chiun said. "Raymond Burr?"

"Too old. He can't play me," Remo said.

"Well, if you're going to be difficult," Chiun said. He got out of the car and started across the street for

the restaurant's front entrance. While the line extended to the corner, Chiun did not have to wait in line.

His own table was reserved for him every day in the back of the restaurant. He had resolved this, on the

very first day, with

the restaurant owner by holding the man's head in a kettle of seafood bisque.

Halfway across the street, Chiun stopped, then walked back to the car. His face was illuminated with the joy

of one who is about to perform a great and good deed.

"I have it," he said.

"Yeah?" growled Remo.

"Ernest Borgnine."

"Aaaaah," Remo said and drove away.

Through his open window, he heard Chiun calling. "Any fat white actor. Everybody

knows they all look alike."

The head of the American Nazidom Party called himself Obersturmbannfiihrer

Ernest Sche-isskopf. He was twenty-two years old and still had pimples. He was so

skinny, the swastika armband kept sliding down the sleeve of his wash-and-wear brown

shirt. He wore his black trousers bloused into the tops of his shiny high boots, but his legs

were like sticks, without discernible thigh or calf muscle, and the impression the lower half

of his body gave was of two pencils shoved vertically into two loaves of shiny black

bread.

There was sweat on his upper lip as he faced the television cameras for his daily news

conference. Remo watched, lying on the couch in the small house he had rented near

Westport's Compo Beach, looking at the television.

"We understand that you dropped out of high school in the tenth grade?" a television

reporter said.

"As soon as I was old enough to find out that the schools were trying to stuff

everybody's head with Jew propaganda," Scheisskopf said.

His voice was as thin and boneless as he was. Two more Nazis in uniforms stood behind

him, against a wall, their arms folded, their narrowed hating eyes staring straight ahead.

"And then you tried to join the Ku Klux Klan in Cleveland," another reporter said.

"It seemed like the only organization in America that wasn't ready to give the country

to the nigger."

"Why did the Ku Klux Klan reject your membership?" he was asked.

"I don't understand all these questions," Scheisskopf said. "I am here to discuss our march tomorrow. I

don't understand why this town is getting so upset about it. This is a very liberal community, at least when

the rights of Jews and coloreds and other misfits are concerned. Tomorrow we are marching to celebrate the

first urban renewal project in history and the only one that is known to be an unqualified success. I think

all those liberals that like projects like urban renewal ought to be on the streets with us."

"What urban renewal project is that?" he was asked.

Lying on the couch, Remo shook his head. Dumb. Dumb.

"In Warsaw, Poland, twenty-five years ago," Scheisskopf said. "Some people call it the

Warsaw Ghetto but all it was was an attempt to improve the living conditions of

subhumans, just as all modern urban renewal projects try to do."

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RedPeril"Justaminute,"Stantingtonbegan."Wemaynothaveaminute,thankstoyourbumbling,"Smithsaid."DidthePresidentauthorizeclosingdownProjectOmega?""Notexactly,"theCIAchiefsaid."Weren'tyouawarethatthereisanotationintheCIA'spermanentrecordsthatProjectOmegacanbecloseddownonlyonthespecificwrittenauthorizatio...

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Destroyer 035 - Last Call

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