No Contest

CURE used dirty tricks, too, which worked much of the time. It rooted out the lies behind the Mafia countersuits. It exposed judicial bribe taking. It ferreted out evidence other law-enforcement agencies couldn’t get their hands on. In the end, the good it did wasn’t enough, and Smith decided to take on an enforcement arm.

He intended to hire one man, an assassin, working beyond the laws of the land. Through a strange series of events, one of the trainers hired for the new CURE assassin was an old Korean man, Master of an obscure martial art named after his home village of Sinanju. The old Master proved to be extraordinarily skilled, and in the end the other trainers were dismissed. The old Korean, Chiun, became the sole trainer of Remo Williams, the CURE assassin.

Remo did well under Chiun’s tutelage. Harold W. Smith was surprised, and even Chiun was surprised at Remo’s aptitude. Smith learned, much later, that no adult and no non-Korean had ever absorbed the full scope of the teaching of Sinanju in all the long history of the village. Somehow, Remo Williams did absorb the full scope of it. He became a Master of Sinanju himself.

Smith should have seen years ago just how odd this was, but he turned a blind eye—and he stayed blind for decades.

Remo was in fact a descendent of Sinanju himself. Although raised an orphan in New Jersey, chosen seemingly at random by CURE for this assignment, there was nothing random about it. Remo was eventually proved to be the son of a Hollywood stuntman who came from a small Native American tribe that dwelt near Yuma, Arizona. The tribe had been founded centuries ago—before the European incursion into North America—by a self-exiled Sinanju Master.

Smith learned this very recently, and he was still troubled deeply by the implication. CURE was not what brought Chiun and Remo together; CURE was the mechanism used to bring Remo and Chiun together.

The question that echoed like thunder in Smith’s head was this: who, or what, had used CURE?

The agency was so secure and Smith’s confidence was so absolute that he knew, incontrovertibly, that no human being or organization could have made it happen without him knowing. That pointed to something bigger and less easily explained. Smith’s mind retreated when he ventured into those shifting, unsettling mists of conjecture.

Now it looked as though it might all unravel. The supersecret agency was seemingly being exposed in some new way every time Smith turned around. The blame for most of it lay squarely on the shoulders of Remo Williams, who had become as obstinate and rebellious as a teenager in recent months. And right now, with anti-American sentiment at its highest peak in decades, somebody was adding fuel to the fire. These ridiculous sporting events were damaging U.S. relations around the world.

Smith had never been too big on the sports section of the newspaper. He was concerned with crisis, not games. He did not have the time to follow sports.

But these days there seemed to be a real crisis in the world of competitive sports—a crisis above and beyond the drug addiction, egotism, sexism, racism and wholesale greed that was endemic in all sports, starting with Little League.

These days there seemed to be a lot of murder.

At least, it looked like murder. A lot of people were dying, anyway, and Dr. Smith’s probability models indicated they were too numerous to be coincidence.

It started with yacht races. A series of deaths on a transatlantic kayak race had wiped out the five frontrunners just hours before the race was won by the sixth-place contestant, who was now a familiar face on boxes of breakfast cereal across the country.

When person or persons unknown began picking off the leaders of a round-the-world sailboat race, Smith dispatched Remo Williams to the very tip of South America to join up with the sailor who was now leading the race. Within hours the sailboat was attacked by well-equipped, professional assassins. Unlucky for them they ran into the most skilled assassin on the planet. None of the three survived their meeting with Remo Williams.

But neither did Remo come home with a wealth of data on the killers. Smith was not even convinced that they had been connected to the killers in the kayak race. Maybe they were just copycats.

Other times in recent months Smith had noticed a peculiar frequency of deaths during high-purse sporting events, but he simply couldn’t tell if there was cause for alarm. These were, after all, risky sports, which was why they were all carried on the fledging cable television network, the Extreme Sports Network. That link was obvious.

But it didn’t mean ESN was the cause of the deaths. After all, it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation running hundreds of sports shows a month. Many of them it produced, but most it didn’t The kayak race and the round-the-world sailboat race weren’t organized by ESN.