"It was disgraceful," Smith said.

"See? See?" Chiun jumped up and down in the boat delightedly. "I would be most grateful, Emperor, to accept a new pupil at your command. Maybe someone young. The right color."

"You could have been caught, Remo. You know what that would mean. The end of CURE." Smith turned his head in disgust.

Remo said nothing. He knew Smith didn't bring him out in the middle of a lake to slap his wrists.

And Smith was right. Not that Remo was bound by loyalty to CURE, as Smith was. CURE was what sent Remo out to kill people he did not even know, against whom he held no grudge. CURE was responsible for the thousand motel rooms instead of one home, for the near certainty that he would never have a woman of his own to love, or children to bear his name, for the plastic surgery that had changed his face and the unending stream of paper to change his identity.

Who was Remo Williams? Nobody. A dead policeman with an empty grave and a marker somewhere in the eastern United States. Only the Destroyer remained. And CURE.

But the end of CURE would mean the end of Smith, too. It was arranged that way. To Smitty, the prospect of his own death was just another item of information in his orderly file clerk's mind. If the president ordered CURE to be disbanded, Smith would press one button on his computer console to destroy all of CURE's information banks in sixty sec-

27

onds. Then he would descend unhesitatingly to the basement of Folcroft sanitarium, where his casket and a small vial of poison waited.

For Smith, suicide was just another routine thing he would do one day when he was ordered to. But somehow, and Remo would not have been able to say why, he would miss Smitty's bitter face and acidic ways.