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one hand he drew his chair closer to the bedside.
"Mark?" he questioned quietly.
It seemed as if Howard responded to the sound of Smith's voice. The young
man's head rolled over on the pillow, eyes still closed. He began speaking,
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softly at first. Smith strained but couldn't hear the words. But as he
listened, his assistant's voice grew stronger.
"I did this," Mark Howard whispered. "I shouldn't have- Should have left him.
I have to tell... warn..."
Standing now, Smith pressed his hand to Howard's shoulder. "Mark," he
repeated, giving a gentle push. With great slowness the young man's eyes
fluttered open. There was confusion at first as they focused on the gray face
hovering above.
"Dr. Smith?" Mark asked weakly.
He was disoriented. Trying to soak in his surroundings.
"I'm at Folcroft," Howard said, confused.
"Something happened in Florida," Smith said, a hint of relief in his lemony
voice. "You lost consciousness at Benson Dilkes's apartment. Do you remember
what went wrong?"
The memories flooded back. The corkboard maps.
The two red pins. The blond-haired man hovering in the corner, hiding in the
cobwebs of consciousness. Howard sat upright in bed. He grabbed Smith's wrist
so hard, the older man winced.
"Where's Remo and Chiun?" Howard demanded.
"Remo was supposed to be on his way back here from Russia," the CURE director
replied. "However, he never made his flight. Chiun is in Sinanju."
"We have to call him," Howard insisted.
"We can't," Smith said. "Unless the phone is working again. It was out of
commission earlier." Howard released Smith's wrist. His eyes darted to the
corners of the room, searching for answers. "What's wrong, Mark?" Smith
pressed.
When Howard glanced back up at his employer, there was a deadly earnestness in
his greenish-brown eyes.
"He's back," the assistant CURE director pleaded. "And it's all my fault."
Chapter 30
Remo ignored the whine of the lowering landing gear. Across from him on the
jet, Rebecca Dalton chatted away on her cell phone in yet another foreign
language. On her lips and tongue, even Arabic sounded sexy. The young woman
seemed to know every dusty dialect of every country they had been to in the
past two days.
Two days. It seemed like a month.
Remo had spent the past forty-eight hours bouncing around the Middle East like
water on a griddle. True to her word, Rebecca Dalton had streamlined the
Sinanju Time of Succession to move with assembly-line efficiency.
Turkey-which was still listed in Sinanju's out-of-date guidebook as the seat
of the Ottoman Empire-had been a breeze. Rebecca handled all the details. Remo
merely had to show up. A quick meeting with the prime minister, a trapdoor
assassination pit in the belly of an ancient citadel, finally another dead
assassin to satisfy the Master of Sinanju and back on the plane by breakfast.
Then the real trial began. Mostly it was a challenge to Remo's patience. So
far he was holding up okay. But it had been a steady drumbeat for two days
now. Before they returned to the airport in Damascus after meeting with the
Syrian president, Remo was shot at by that country's top assassin. He'd also
been assaulted by lancers on horseback in the Jordanian desert, fed poison
fruit in Lebanon and had a basket of asps thrown into his cab in Israel. Aside
from Remo, the only living things to get out alive in all those attacks were
the snakes. Any Arab he could find in the West Bank who grinned when Remo
mentioned the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers got a snake
down the pants, a cracked kneecap and an eye poked out with a sharp stick.
Remo kept the stick as a happy souvenir.
He was tapping his stick against his ankle as he stared out the small window
of the jet.
Thanks to Rebecca, Remo had left in his wake a whole passel of dead would-be
assassins in rapid succession.
On several occasions he asked her what her real interest was in all this. She
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continued to insist that she was a unique public-relations expert who had been
hired by a collection of governments working in their own self-interest. Their
only concern was streamlining the Time of Succession process.
Remo knew that was a crock. Even Madison Avenue PR firms weren't cutthroat
enough to deal with assassination. And it wasn't as if he didn't notice
Rebecca's conspicuous absences. She was constantly disappearing to talk on her
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