No Contest

Remo refused to say. He enjoyed putting Chiun in the position of not knowing what they were up to. Chiun did it to Remo constantly. The problem was that Chiun, while he could dish out the silent treatment, couldn’t take it. Remo knew that the old Master would lose patience and demand to know what Remo was keeping from him. Remo couldn’t withstand an assault from Chiun.

No human could.

“I will tell you about Master Yeou Gang,” Chiun said after much time had passed. “He is known as Yeou Gang the Fool.”

“No, he’s not. He’s known as Yeou Gang. There’s no ‘Fool’ after his name.”

“You pretend to know the history of all the Masters?”

“Of course not, but I’ve done my homework. I know a lot of names, even if there’s nothing particular worth knowing about some of the Masters,” Remo said. “There’s about a thousand of them, and most of them were just your average, run-of-the-mill Master of Sinanju. That’s the point.”

“You have no point. You may have memorized the names on the scrolls, but the entire story is not transcribed. Some history is remembered only through our spoken tradition. Such is the tale of Yeou Gang the Fool.”

“This is where I start thinking you’re making it up as you go.”

“Yeou Gang was like you in some ways, Remo.”

“A sharp-dressed Caucasian?”

“Moody. Disinclined to accept advice. Headstrong and arrogant. Like you, he was young and immature when the Rite of Succession made him Reigning Master. Like you, he kept the companionship of his mentor, Master Ghu Ung, but did not give heed to Ghu Ung’s wisdom.”

“Why?” Remo asked.

“It does not matter why.” Chiun waved at the air, as if wafting the question away like floating dust.

“Why it does matter. Maybe Ghu Ung wasn’t so smart himself. It’s possible Yeou Gang was a genius but Ghu Ung made him the scapegoat for his mistakes.”

“Unthinkable. The Korean Masters are not petty egoists, because they were not raised in The Land of Not-Me and the Home of the Blame.”

“I get it. The Korean Masters as in everyone but me, right? Remo, the American Master, is one peg lower than all the other Masters because he’s an American?”

“Cease your prattle and pay attention.”

“Cease my prattle? Shouldn’t a Master of Sinanju deserve better than ‘cease your prattle’? Or do only non-Korean Masters rate a ‘cease your prattle’? What’s prattle, anyway?”

Chiun shook his head tightly. “Prattle is rambling speech devoid of meaning. For example, everything that comes from your gargantuan mouth qualifies as prattle.”

“My gargantuan American mouth, you mean?”

“Correct,” Chiun said.

“Go to hell.”

Chapter 5

In Rye, New York, a sour-looking old man was immensely perturbed.

Harold W. Smith was the director of a private hospital in Rye. Folcroft Sanitarium was an exclusive facility that took care of the well-to-do when they required private recuperation, and it handled special medical cases in an eclectic mix of obscure fields. Likewise, Folcroft doctors were considered first-rate, if not always mainstream. The facility went out of its way to maintain its reclusive demeanor, because that’s what the patients wanted.

Folcroft Sanitarium was also home to an agency of the federal government—probably the smallest agency in terms of total employees. Named CURE, it was so secret that even the United States President—who had oversight over the agency—knew little of its methods or resources. Former Presidents, who had previously had oversight over CURE, no longer thought about it. The memory was erased from their minds.

Since being formed by an idealistic young President decades before, there had been just one director of the agency, and he was the same man who served as director of Folcroft Sanitarium.

Harold W. Smith, retiring from a career in U.S. intelligence, was ready to enter academic life when he received a request from the young President that he lead the new agency. Instead of becoming a university professor he took the reins of CURE. These days Smith found himself wondering what life would have been like if he had turned down the young President.

Such thoughts were unproductive, but they came more often than he would have liked.

For its first years CURE was an intelligence-gathering agency, but with a huge difference. It ignored the laws of the United States.

CURE violated the privacy of its citizens. It spied on innocent people. It planted bugs without probable cause. It was accountable to no set of rules, least of all the Constitution of the United States.

CURE was created with the intention of violating the Constitution. That great document had a downside in that it created loopholes for the criminal world to exploit. The worst murderers and thieves and mobsters were often the very ones with slick lawyers and lots of dollars for buying off justice.