Brain Storm by Richard Sapir, Warren Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

eyes alighted on the building Chiun insisted on referring to as "Castle Sinanju," Remo's spirits were light.
    He paid the taxi driver and, grabbing the bag of rice he had brought with him from New York, bounded up the front staircase into the building.
    His finely tuned senses told him that Chiun was in one of the rear rooms on the lower floor. Remo deliberately steered in the opposite direction. He'd let Chiun find him.
    In the kitchen, Remo dropped the brown canvas bag on a low taboret and scooped the phone up.
    Moving to a safe spot across the room, Remo sat up on the counter and stabbed out the 1 button repeat-edly, activating the simplified code system that automatically rerouted his call through various dummy repeater accounts along the East Coast before leading finally to a small office in Rye, New York.
    "Yes," the lemony voice of Harold W. Smith said crisply over the secure phone line.
    "You know, you never say hello or ask me how I'm doing, Smitty," Remo remarked.
    Nor did Smith now. "Dominic Scubisci?" he asked.

    Remo sighed. "His goose is cooked/' he said, proud of his private little joke. His acute, Sinanju-trained hearing detected nearly silent footsteps in the hallway. He held the phone closer to his ear and pretended not to be looking at the door.
    "May I take that to mean the assignment was carried out successfully?" Smith inquired dryly.
    "Didn't you see it on the news?" Remo asked, disappointed.
    Smith suddenly sounded vague. "No," he admitted, "I was...otherwise occupied."
    "Counting beans again, eh, Smitty?"
    Chiun chose that moment to enter the kitchen. He was a frail figure in a bright green kimono. His skin and bones were seemingly as delicate as those of a newly hatched bird. He regarded Remo with a look that one would generally reserve for a persistent sidewalk beggar.
    Wordlessly he padded across the kitchen floor. He was very old, his face tracked with wise wrinkles, his eyes like the seams of walnut shells and his wrinkle-webbed mouth thin with thought. No hair sat on his shiny head. Wispy cloud puffs hovered over the tops of his ears, and something like the remnant of a beard clung to his chin. Despite his advanced years, his hazel eyes looked as youthful and mischievous as a child's.
    "I was actually not far from you," Smith said. "I was in Manhattan on personal business."

    "That's a bit daring for you, isn't it?" Remo said, watching Chiun from the corner of his eye. "You usually don't want to get within a country mile of me when I'm working. And sneaking away from the office on a school day to boot. Naughty naughty."
    The Master of Sinanju was sniffing around the bag on the squat table like a dog on a scent and, like a canine, he seemed fearful of close contact with the alien item. He hovered a safe distance from the bag.
    "Your assignment was far enough away from my location," Smith explained.
    "Yeah, well, about that. Dominic seemed like small potatoes," Remo said. "Especially with his brother sitting right there next to him. I could have taken the two of them out, no questions asked."
    Smith didn't agree and had had a difficult time explaining this to Remo the previous day. "The gears of justice are working against Don Anselmo,"
    Smith said. "Better to let the American people know their justice system works by convicting him in a court of law."
    "He'll beat any rap they hang on him, Smitty,"
    Remo complained. "Scubisci'll just go on Horrendo and claim he was molested as a kid or something.
    Not only will America forgive him, he'll probably get his own sitcom out of the deal."
    "Unlikely."
    Remo watched Chiun's back as the old man circled the taboret once more. "Listen, Smitty, if Dominic Scubisci was the only thing on the front burner right now, I'm going to get a little R&R."
    Smith agreed. "I will contact you if anything else comes up."
    With that, Remo replaced the receiver in the cradle.
    4'What is this?" The Master of Sinanju demanded the instant the connection was severed. He pointed