American Obsession

Destroyer 109: American Obsession

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

From the top of the white granite campanile, a great bell tolled twice. The quavery tones echoed around the wide brick quadrangle that formed the core of the Purblind University campus. With its lecture halls' stately parapets, steeply sloping roofs, tall windows and ivy-covered walls, as well as its broad, curving walkways, Purblind seemed an idealized vision of an American institution of higher learning. Under the whistle of the winter wind, one could almost hear a sweater-clad glee club humming a rousing drinking song.

But appearances could be deceptive.

There was no glee club at Purblind University. Nor was there a tower bell. The peals came from a digital recording of a sixteenth-century church clock in Bruges, Belgium, and the recording was amplified and played through huge audio speakers concealed in the top of the campanile.

Likewise, Purblind had no athletic teams. No school paper.

No school colors.

Purblind University was a research institution. A knowledge factory. Which meant it was devoted to the study of one subject: the making of money. Students, and particularly undergraduate students, were considered a regrettable annoyance by professors and administrators because they drained away time and energy that might have been more profitably spent on the development of patentable products and processes. Products and processes that could be licensed to commercial interests. The name of the game at Purblind was royalties.

Most of the university's funding came from faceless corporate donors or research partners. The AgroChemical Information Council. The National Cybertronics Consortium. The American Meat Board. The Dairy Consumption Task Force. The International Society for Pharmaceutical Advancement.

In its ten years of existence, P.U.'s basic-research successes had produced a parade of well-known consumer products: One Million Flushes Toilet Bowl Cleaner; Perpetu-Wrap, an infinitely reusable synthetic gift-wrap material; Your New Face, a noninvasive, do-it-yourself home-plastic-surgery kit based on Perpetu-Wrap technology; All-White Chicken, genetically engineered to have vestigial legs and thighs; and PG-5, widely used as a freshness stabilizer for processed food, as a UV protectant for outdoor house paint and, in high concentrations, as a chemical-warfare nerve agent. The school's individual triumphs could have easily stocked the shelves of a gas-station minimart.

As the recorded bell tones faded into the distance, professors and their graduate-student assistants singlefiled, like so many families of white ducks, out of the cafeteria in their lab coats and into the chill, dark February afternoon. Inside the steamy warmth of the cafeteria, a few undergraduates lingered over the dregs of their cafe mochas. As they commiserated over the trials of life at old P.U., a scrawny, balding scarecrow of a man entered via a side door and passed through the turnstile into the food-service area. His skin was pale as milk and liberally dotted with brown moles of various sizes. The skinny scientist carried with him a truly awesome odor. Not quite as meaty as skunk. Not quite as fecal as civet cat. It crept through the cafeteria like a noxious fog.

"Jee-zus!" one of the students gasped as he clamped a hand defensively over his nose and mouth. "How can that dweeb stand himself?"

"Why don't you go over and ask him?" suggested the undergrad sitting on the other side of the table. "Uh-uh," the first student replied, sweeping his notebooks into his day pack and scraping back his chair. "If I don't get out of here quick, I'm gonna hurl."

The sentiment was universal.

Breathing through their mouths, the lunchtime stragglers rushed past the cash register for the exits. The hapless cashier remained trapped at her post. Her face flushed deep red as she watched the scarecrow man mull over the day's hot selections. The cafeteria servers, plump middle-aged women in disposable plastic hair caps and gloves, had already made themselves scarce, as they always did whenever "Professor Polecat" appeared.

The scientist's campus nickname was, in fact, doubly erroneous. Carlos Sternovsky was a research assistant, not a professor, and he didn't work with Mephitis mephitis, the striped skunk, but rather with Gulo gulo, the wolverine. Same taxonomic family, Mustelidae, but different subfamily and species.

Sternovsky helped himself from the stainless-steel tray of simmering pork goulash, then to steamed brussels sprouts, to a whole-wheat dinner roll and a dish of Jell-O fruit salad. For him, the food had no aroma and virtually no taste. A childhood virus had destroyed his sense of smell, and with it, the ability to distinguish complex flavors. Despite the loss, he still felt hunger, and he appeased it every five or six hours in as rational a way as possible, based on the prevailing theory of proper diet composition: the food pyramid.

The cashier grimaced as he took the time to count out exact change. Her expression said, God, don't you ever wash? She was a simple, ignorant undergrad. Of course he washed. And he changed his lab coats daily. But washing and changing never did any good because of the chemical nature of the odor. The oil-based, superconcentrated musk spray had to wear off his skin, like layers of paint-and because he was constantly reexposed to it, that never happened.

She took the money from him but didn't put it in the register. It went first into one airtight bag. Then that sealed bag went into another. As he turned away with his tray, she was looking frantically under the counter for something to wipe off her hands with.

Though he could have sat down anywhere, Sternovsky took his usual seat at his usual table. He felt no anticipatory pleasure as he stared down at the paprika-seasoned meat stew. He got no enjoyment from chewing and swallowing the meat, either, but he did feel relief as the gnawing pains in his belly gradually subsided. The only sound in the cavernous hall was the scraping of a cheap metal knife and fork against a thick, institutional-ceramic plate. He finished the last spoonful of lime Jell-O and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. When he looked around, the place was deserted. The cashier had slipped away while his back was turned. That didn't surprise him. He was used to being shunned. For the year and a half he'd been employed by Purblind, he'd endured official and unofficial scorn on a daily basis.

Six more months remained on his contract with the school's biochemistry department. According to the fine print in that eight-page, single-spaced document, for the princely sum of $16,500 a year the university held title to every thought in his head. Never mind the fact that his research supervisor had undermined his work from day one, and through funding cutbacks had tried to force him to abandon his chosen line of inquiry and move on to something more "promising."

Sternovsky had swum alone and against the current for more than a year before achieving the initial breakthrough in his research. Despite the encouraging results, despite his monumental solo effort, on the recommendation of his supervisor the biochem department had flatly refused to underwrite the cost of a primate testing program. For Sternovsky, it was a teeth-rattling slap in the mouth.

In the end, he had paid for Arnold, his pygmy chimpanzee, out of his own pocket, this by downgrading his transportation, by spending the last of a small inheritance and by maxing out all his credit cards. When the primate study began to bear fruit, the embittered scientist had kept the news from his supervisor. He knew if the department got interested in his research at this late stage, Purblind U. would steal all credit for the discovery. His doubting Thomas overseer would claim the Nobel. The university would suck up the commercial royalties, which could, over time, run into billions of dollars. And for all his trouble and pain, he would be put onto the street without so much as a thank-you when his employment contract ran out. Or even before, if they could prove he'd misappropriated so much as a rusty paper clip. Sternovsky bussed his tray and tossed his napkin into the recycle bin.

It was his last lunch at good old P.U.

AS THE BIOCHEMIST TREKKED back to his lab, an icy wind flapped his khaki slacks against a pair of calves as thin as flagpoles. On either side of him, columns of steam billowed like Yellowstone geysers from grated vents set in the sprawling lawns. Beneath the soggy sod and the winding brick walkway was an anthill of underground levels that housed the university's main laboratories.

Because of the oppressive stench of his research animals, Sternovsky had been consigned to a temporary trailer on the outermost fringe of the campus, in the farthest corner of Parking Lot ZZ. Following the recent winter storm, the university's snowplow had scraped the asphalt clean, leaving piles of dirty snow heaped in the shade around the base of the trailer, blocking access to the wooden steps. Days had passed since the plow operator's little joke, but the compacted snow had yet to melt. To reach the trailer's door, Sternovsky had to follow the path he'd beaten through the waist-high slush.

Though he normally kept his laboratory scrupulously neat and as sterile as an operating room, today the long, narrow room looked as though a whirlwind had swept through it. A tricolor of gore, excrement and yellow-green musk splattered the walls and tracked the aisles between worktables. Steel cage doors stood ajar, and already-sacrificed wolverines lay sprawled on countertops or in heaps on the sheet vinyl floor.

The dead animals were roughly three and a half feet long, counting their short, thickly furred tails. Their coats were blackish brown, with light brown bands along both sides of the body from shoulder to rump; the light-colored bands joined each other across the base of the tail. The creatures had short, massive legs and wide feet tipped with huge claws. With their bony skulls, small, rounded ears and stubby muzzles, their heads looked almost bearlike. Native Americans referred to them as "skunk bears," for reasons obvious to anyone with a functioning nose.

Before his lunch break, Sternovsky had harvested all but three of his lab subjects. Now it was time to finish the job. He donned a gray rubber smock and knee boots, a plastic face shield and leather gauntlets. From the steel sink, he retrieved an enameled tray that held a half-dozen loaded syringes. The fluid in the disposable hypodermics was the palest of pale blues. Blue as a cloudless summer sky.

Heart-stopping blue.

He moved gingerly down the slick aisle toward the last two cages in the row. Excited by the smell of blood and the sound of his approach, the surviving animals growled and screeched. The sixty-five-pound male wolverine he'd named Donny was well into his second hour of mating with the much smaller Marie. It sometimes took as long as two hours for the animals to complete the reproductive act. Prolonged and vigorous mating caused female wolverines to ovulate; as it turned out, the accompanying changes in levels of hormone production were the key to Sternovsky's breakthrough. To pin and hold the knotted wolverines hard against the inside of the bars, he pulled the lever on the cage's built-in trap, which provided safe access for superficial examinations-and injections.

Donny kept humping even as Sternovsky slid the needle into his shoulder. When the scientist pushed in the plunger, the wolverine let out a scream, arched his matted tail and sprayed yellow-green gunk from his anal gland. Donny's wickedly curved fangs and four-inch claws scored the steel bars with fresh, bright scars. Like a wind-up doll ticking down, his frantic hip movements slowed, and his tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth. Then he began to quiver all over; not in ecstasy, but in the convulsive throes of death. Sternovsky made a luckier hit on Marie, injecting her in a vein, and she gave up the ghost at once.

After moving their limp forms from the cage to the nearby countertop, Sternovsky quickly shaved their heads with an electric razor, doused the bare white skin with orange disinfectant, then sliced their skulls open with a battery-powered autopsy saw, leaving the cap of bone to hang back by an attached flap of scalp. The treasure he sought lay at the base of their brains, a bit of differentiated tissue called the hypothalamus. He deftly scooped out the tissue with a sterilized melon-baller and plopped the pair of warm, bloody gobbets into prelabeled plastic jars. He would trim away the unnecessary tissue later, at his leisure.

The scientist paused in front of the last cage. He was breathing so hard he fogged up the inside of his face shield. He had to flip it out of the way in order to see the huddled, hairy form of Arnold at the back of the steel pen. Though Gulo gulo were powerful and fearsome creatures-on a whim, evolution had made dachshunds out of grizzly bears-the pygmy chimpanzee was the test animal that really scared him; in fact, he had recurring, wake-up-screaming nightmares about Arnold getting loose in the gradstudent dormitory.

Barely three feet tall, the chimp currently weighed in at 160 pounds-twice the normal size for his species. Arnold was neither cute nor cuddly. He was a nearly perfect cube of densely corded, evil-tempered muscle. With Arnold, there was none of the sign language, sensitive-fellow-primate, Discovery Channel doo-dah. The glint in his squinty, root-beer brown eyes said only one thing: I want to hurt you.

Sternovsky didn't reach for the cage's lever. Compressing the chimp with the built-in trap was no longer possible, as he'd learned to resist such efforts with his tree-trunk legs. Sternovsky didn't attempt to use a prod to administer the lethal injection. No hypodermic needle could penetrate Arnold's thick muscles without breaking off.

And yet the job had to be done.

The scientist put the tray of syringes down on the countertop and picked up a yard-long piece of Parkerized steel pipe he'd borrowed from the university's marine-sciences department. It was a bang-stick-a bare-bones, stockless 12-gauge designed to serve as an underwater defense against attacking sharks. The weapon had no visible trigger; instead, it fired one high-brass shotgun shell when the muzzle was rammed against its intended target. Holding the bangstick by its Hypalon grip, Sternovsky pulled the cotter-pin safety and let it dangle by its thong. From the back of the cage, Arnold glared at him.

The scientist felt suddenly queasy. This chimp was no dim-witted shark. When you stuck something into his cage, he grabbed for it. And he was quick. His forearms were easily as big as Sternovsky's thighs; with hand strength alone, he had bowed the cage's braced, 440A stainless-steel bars. If he decided to, the chimp could easily pull the offending bang-stick away-or worse, use it to jerk his keeper within reach. The scientist didn't doubt that Arnold had the power to tear a human arm from its socket, and that he would do so with relish, if given the opportunity.

From the side pocket of his rubber apron, Sternovsky took a large, misshapen fast-food sandwich. The grease on Arnold's favorite treat, long since congealed, had melted the bun to mush and turned the wrapping paper translucent. As Sternovsky waved the three-quarter-pound, triple-bacon-and-cheese burger back and forth, the chimp sniffed the air with keen interest.

When Arnold stirred himself from the back of the cage, eyes on the prize, the scientist thrust the bangstick through the bars. Before the chimp could seize the barrel and bend it into a pretzel, Sternovsky rammed the muzzle between his burly pectorals. A rocking blast lifted the huge ape, bounced him off the bars at the rear of the cage and sent him crashing face first to the mesh floor. Amazingly, even though it was a contact wound, there was no through-and-through, no grisly splatter across the trailer's wall. Arnold's massive back muscles contained all the double-aught buckshot.

With profound relief, Sternovsky watched the blood drain from the motionless body. He didn't open the cage door until he was certain that the beast was dead and his own hands had stopped shaking. Dragging the corpse from the cage, he quickly shaved and sawed open the skull, then used the power tool to make a Y-shaped incision below the powder-blackened entry wound. Working quickly, he took minute samples of various organs and tissues for later analysis.

The lab seemed eerily quiet as he emptied the refrigerator, transferring small racks of glass vials of wolverine hormones-extracted for certain targeted neuropeptides-and the chimp-tissue sampler into a six-pack cooler marked Biological Specimens. After packing the cooler with dry ice, he sealed the lid with duct tape and affixed the necessary prestamped export documentation from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

After stuffing his backpack with a six-inch-thick stack of floppy disks that held all his experimental data and research notes, he began erasing his laboratory computer's hard drive. While the autodestruct program was running, he stripped down to his jockey shorts in front of the sink and, using a gallon of tomato juice, scrubbed himself raw. Washing with tomato juice supposedly countered the stench of musk spray. Because he couldn't tell if it had worked or not, he doused himself liberally with Old Spice before putting on baggy tan corduroy pants, a rumpled brown cord sports jacket, a blue polyester dress shirt and a skinny red knit tie. Before Sternovsky left the trailer, to make extrasure that no one at Purblind could recover his research data, he reloaded the bangstick and blasted the drive tower into a thousand pieces.

His Toyota was the only car in Parking Lot ZZ.

Rust spots on hood, roof and fenders bled through the silver blue paint of the 1978 Celica two-door, which had replaced the three-year-old Saturn he'd sold in order to fund his primate study. Opening the driver's door, he leaned in and put the cooler and backpack on the rear bench seat, beside a small canvas suitcase. As he carefully folded himself into the blue-faux-furcovered bucket seat, the top of his skull brushed the headliner, disarranging his thready comb-over. The Celica was a tight fit for him--even with the front seat as far back as it would go, his knees bracketed the steering wheel. The windshield resembled the view slit of a World War II artillery bunker.

After an uncomfortable forty-minute drive, Sternovsky arrived at the Philadelphia airport. He parked the Toyota by the curb, in the passenger-unloading tow-away zone. As he entered the terminal, he dropped the car keys into a trash can. Once inside, Sternovsky followed the overhead signs to the Pan Asian Airlines ticket counter. There was no one ahead of him in the roped-off queue.

On the other side of the service counter a button-cute Oriental female in a blue blazer chirped a sneeze into a Kleenex before asking for his travel documents. She displayed efficient two-handed work at the computer keyboard, cheerily confirming his seat assignment and checking through his small suitcase. Sternovsky, the smell-leper, was not used to such cordial treatment from strangers. It made him feel a bit giddy.

The ticket clerk handed him his passport, export papers and boarding pass. Despite her heavy head cold, she smiled brightly and said, "Enjoy your visit to Taiwan."

Chapter 1

Naked but for a gargantuan jockstrap, Bradley "the Fighting Vehicle" Boorntower stood in front of his spanking-new locker. Its hooks and shelves held the tools of his trade: shoulder pads, knee pads, elbow pads, a selection of size-18 cleated athletic shoes, a pumpkin orange helmet and matching uniform shirt with the number 96, front and back, and ninja black uniform pants.

The garish team colors, also evident in the locker room's paint and carpet, were no mere accident of bad taste. The owners of the L.A. Riots, professional football's most recent expansion franchise, had shelled out big bucks in order to develop an organizational image that was marketable right out of the box. The Halloween theme was further underscored by the team's official motto, Trick Or Treat.

With two hours until kickoff, Boomtower's fellow Riots were obsessively focused on "Trick." As harried trainers taped up their ankles, wrists and hands, they bellowed dire threats against the opposing players. This while Boomtower drifted, alone and oarless, in "Treat." On the floor at his feet lay a pile of crumpled plastic wrappers and a litter of green-and-white waxed-paper boxes. The sides of the boxes read Manteca, a Spanish word that sounded much classier, and more dietetically correct, than the English equivalent. Boomtower's eyes slitted with pleasure as he sucked at the nub end of what had once been a one-pound block of white lard.

Between muttered mantras and reciprocal helmet-to-helmet head-bangs, the other Riots stole furtive looks at Number 96. Over the course of a week, Bradley Boomtower had undergone a most startling physical transformation. The six-foot-five-inch, 370-pound nose tackle, whose midsection-circling, jiggling mass of blubber had been a personal trademark since his college days, had gained more than a hundred pounds. Strange, yes.

Unheard-of, yes.

But stranger still was the fact that in just seven days his more than thirty percent body fat had all but disappeared. With his skin suddenly shrink-wrapped over layers of bulging muscles, Boomtower had acquired the "cut" look of a world-champion bodybuilder. Only he was bigger. Hugely bigger.

Beyond Mr. Universe. Beyond Animal.

During the week's final practice, there had been no stopping his pass rush. It didn't matter if he was triple- or even quadruple-teamed. Like a man playing with small boys, he mowed down the offensive line. He did it so many times that the head coach had to yank him from the scrimmage for fear someone might be seriously hurt. Since then, for the very same reason, the L.A. Riots had given their nose tackle an extrawide berth.

As gametime approached, only Boomtower's locker neighbor, a high-draft-pick, rookie running back, had the nerve-or lack of good sense-to directly address the changed man. Unable to restrain his curiosity about all the green-and-white boxes, Regional Parks said, "Hey, F.V., what's that nastylooking stuff you're eating?"

By way of answer, Boomtower toed one of the empty cartons toward the running back. Parks picked it up. When he read the label, his jaw dropped.

"Man, have you lost your mind?" the star running back exclaimed. "This crap is nothing but sweepings. It's the hog fat that falls on the butcher-shop floor."

"What's your point?" Boomtower said as he inside-outed the plastic wrapper so he could lick it clean.

"Jeez, everybody knows it's artery-clogging poison. It's heart-attack city."

"Nah, it's energy food."

Number 96 mopped his grease-ringed mouth with an orange-and-black towel, then pulled his L.A. Riots jersey over his head. Since high school, his XXXL uniform shirt had always been stretched as tight as a sausage casing. It still was, only now it conformed to a different shape. Instead of hanging like a halfinflated truck tire around his waist, the main mass of his torso had taken a two-and-a-half-foot jump to his chest and shoulders. Under the tortured Lycra-blend orange fabric, the topography of monstrous lats, delts, abs and pecs was clearly visible.

With the ice broken by the rookie, other players in various stages of battle dress began to gather around the nose tackle's locker, admiration and awe on their faces. At five hundred pounds-stripped weight-Bradley Boomtower was easily the heaviest man ever to play professional football. And in football, heavy was good, if not God. The more you weighed, the harder you were to move or deflect-by the fourth quarter of a game, a ten percent weight advantage could reduce opponents to quivering lumps of jelly.

One of the linebackers pointed at the gear still hanging in Boomtower's locker. Half-laughing, he said, "Say, F.V., didn't you forget something?"

All eyes shifted from the locker to Boomtower's shoulders. Given his grossly overdeveloped deltoid muscles, it was difficult to tell whether he was wearing any protection under the jersey.

"Fuck the pads, you know what I'm sayin'?" Boomtower replied.

The L.A. Riots exchanged uncomfortable glances. The physical transformation they'd witnessed was not natural. Boomtower had to be taking something. As professional athletes, they knew all about performance-enhancing drugs and their side effects, which included irrational behavior.

As Boomtower reached for his uniform pants, the fearless running back pointed at his backside and said, "What's that stuck on your butt? It looks like a time-release patch. Are you on some new kind of steroid? Human growth hormones?"

Boomtower patted the two-by-two-inch square of pink adhesive bandage, "It's magic, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"What kind of magic is that?" Parks asked.

The players edged in closer, straining to hear. "Cutting edge. I eat nothin' but fat and I get thin. The more fat I eat, the thinner I get. Thinner and bigger. And I got my mind on the game, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Uh, not exactly," the rookie admitted.

Moving quick as a cat, Bbomtower provided a demonstration. He snatched hold of a 275-pound defensive end by the back of his trouser waistband. Then, with one hand and a seemingly effortless upward thrust, like he was hoisting nothing more substantial than a broomstick, he bashed the man's unhelmeted head through the gridwork of orange acoustic ceiling tiles. With nightcrawler-sized veins popping out on his massive right arm, Boomtower held the guy trapped there while he helplessly thrashed and kicked. "Now, do you know what I'm sayin'?" he asked his teammates.

There was a stunned silence in the locker room. Boomtower carefully set down the defensive end. Flecks of orange paint stuck to the man's face, and a trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead ran down and off the tip of his nose.

"Who'd you score it off?" the Riots' center asked.

The Fighting Vehicle shook his head. "That's a secret. "

"You got any more?" demanded the confettispeckled, bloody-faced defensive end.

"Yeah, I got more, but this stuff ain't cheap, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"How much?"

"Twenty-five hundred a pop. One pop a day. Run you around one mill a year to stay on the program." The players made a mad dash for their respective lockers. In a matter of seconds, thick wads of cash appeared from all sides; Boomtower's teammates fanned him with greenbacks like an Oriental emperor.

"Fuck that shit!" said Regional Parks as he removed both of his diamond ear studs. He slapped the pea-sized gems into Bradley Boomtower's open palm and said, "I'll take all the extra magic you got."

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he knew he was being stalked.

A late-model, four-door gray sedan crept along the city street thirty yards behind him. Relying on his years of training in Sinanju, the oldest of the martial arts, Remo crossed with the traffic light, taking the briefest of sideways looks as he passed the car. There were four heads inside, and beneath the heads were four extremely large bodies. In that same blink of an eye, his mind registered the car's proximity to the pavement, a function of overloaded shocks and springs.

Under similar circumstances, a normal person would have been alarmed, if not panicked. What with its indigenous ethnic gangs and freelance psychopaths, Los Angeles had a well-deserved reputation for violence, senseless and otherwise. Yet this Remo, this wiry man in a faded black T-shirt and baggy tan chinos, strolled through Koreatown as if he didn't have a care in the world. With his whole being, he sucked in the beautiful, mild October evening and admired its smog-created, fire-orange-and-turquoise sunset. Along the parking strip to his left, 50-foot-tall palm trees jutted up from rectangular openings in the sidewalk, like widely spaced hairs on a concrete scalp.

Remo turned into a small strip mall that divided the block of two-story apartments and cut through the small parking lot. From the accumulation of stains on its asphalt, the mall was, by mall standards, ancient. No amount of scrubbing by the shopping center's current owners could remove the rainbow residue of decades of illicit midnight oil changes. The signs above the freshly repainted, chain-link-fenced storefronts were all written in Korean ideograms. The minimall housed a dry cleaner, a discount-jewelry-and-electronics store, the Kimchi Noodle Palace and Mr. Yi's fish market.

"Ah, the venerable pupil of the venerated Master of Asian cooking," said Yi as the second-greatest assassin on earth entered his narrow, spotlessly clean shop. The fishmonger had decided that these two customers were master chefs, and neither of them bothered to correct this misconception. He was short and squat, with a perpetual smile on his face. Yi smiled even when he was angry. His thick black hair was stuffed under a white golf cap; his uniform and apron were likewise white. A totally assimilated resident of central Los Angeles, he wore a belt holster clipped to the small of his wide back, and in the holster was a compact, 8-shot pistol. Like ninety-five percent of his fellow citizens, Yi had no aspirations to assassinhood; he just wanted to survive to see the weekend.

It was always cool inside Yi's shop, thanks to the white tile floor and the open beds of heavily iced seafood along the walls. The smell was of salt, bleach and iodine. Behind the glass of the refrigerated display case sat heaps of whole and filleted tuna, bonito, mackerel, sole and sea bass. Stuck in each pile of fish was a little plastic sign with Korean characters on it. In addition to the standard fare, Yi stocked some of the oddities of the Asian table. Sea cucumber. Urchin. Bloodworm. A selection of chichi bottom-crawlers for the quesadillas and frittatas of discerning, jaded Los Angelinos.

In the reflection of the refrigerator case's glass, Remo saw the gray sedan pull into the mall's lot and stop, parking sideways across the painted stripes on the asphalt. All the car doors opened, and its occupants piled out, on the run.

"I put aside for you something special," Yi told him, opening a stainless-steel cooler behind the display case. As he turned back with the prize, he said, "Today fresh from Yellow Sea."

The pewter-colored sea creature the fishmonger held up so proudly was more than three feet in length and weighed less than two pounds. But for the greenish fin that ran from behind its head to the tip of its pointed tail, it would have looked like a snake. A snake with a wicked set of upper and tower fangs and an underslung bottom jaw.

"You like for Master's dinner?" Yi said, showing Remo the firm white belly, then smoothing his hand along it.

The cutlass-fish, or hairtail, was a stone bitch to clean-imagine trying to fillet the meat from a shoestring-but it was one of Master Chiun's special favorites. The skinny fish was native to the waters around Sinanju, the Korean village where the Master had been born, nearly a century ago. Even in the late sixties, before the Korean government's rapid push to industrialization, the vicious, delicious predator had been plentiful. Due to the current availability and quality problems, the two assassins' mostly rice-and-fish diet rarely featured Yellow Sea hairtail.

Remo looked over the entire skin, checking for telltale clear blisters and weeping, bloody ulcers, evidence that the fish had been taken from polluted waters. And, to his delight, found none. "I like very much," he said to the fishmonger. "Please wrap him up."

With a matador flourish, Yi tore a sheet of white butcher paper from a big roll mounted on his cutting table. "You make Master happy meal tonight," he said as he passed the long, slender package over the counter.

As Remo stepped out of Mr. Yi's fish market, a gruff baritone voice barked, "Hold it right there."

Remo stared down the barrel of a blue-steel Beretta. It gleamed with fresh oil. Three more men stepped up on the storefront sidewalk, bracketing him with raised weapons. One held a snub-nosed nickel-plated revolver, another had a stubby-barreled combat-type pump shotgun, and the last brandished a Taser stun gun. All four were Baby Hueys, big and doughy, and dressed in what looked like official SWAT uniforms-black armored vests, black skintight leather gloves, black T-shirts and BDU pants. They had communications headsets clamped on their wide heads, and shiny gold badges hung on cords around their thick necks.

Not LAPD, Remo thought.

Stenciled in bright yellow across the front of their body armor were the words Bail Recovery Enforcement Agent.

Bounty hunters.

"Don't move," said the guy aiming the cocked 9 mm pistol at the middle of Remo's forehead. The bounty hunter's own skull was shaved to the skin, leaving a dark shadow of receding hairline. He sported a black goatee, and the tattoo on his hairy forearm bragged I Make Shit Happen. From a distance of six feet, he smelled like a cross between a burned-out coffeepot and an old cigar butt.

Remo smiled at him. Not an inscrutable smile-mask like Mr. Yi's; this baby came straight from the heart, radiating generous sympathy and warmth, and a patience that matched the serenity of the evening. Sometimes, once in a while, he found himself slipping into this persona and he wasn't quite clear why. But it made him feel as though he were floating above all problems, without taking anything from his lethal edge.

While the other three covered Remo, Goatee referred to a flimsy sheet of fax paper, holding it up to compare the blurred, virtually useless photo with the thick-wristed, 160-pound guy holding the long package. "William M. Ransom," he said.

"That's not me," Remo told him. "Whatever this is about, I think you've made a mistake."

The bounty hunter with the .357 snub-nose got a chuckle out of that.

"According to the bench warrant, Mr. Ransom," Goatee went on, "you're wanted in the state of Oregon for a little over twenty-three thousand dollars in outstanding traffic tickets. Seems you skipped bail. The contract you signed with the bondsman, a Mr. Tretheway of Portland, authorizes us to return you to that jurisdiction, by force if necessary."

"You've got the wrong guy. I'm not a bail jumper."

"You drive a 1994 white Camaro Z28 with the personalized Oregon license plate WEIRDMAN."

"No, I don't."

Goatee flicked at the fax with his Beretta's muzzle. "The police report's all right here in black-and-white. Your whole rap sheet. Says you fancy yourself some kind of big-time Dungeons ole-player." Grinning, he aimed the pistol at the parcel under Remo's arm. "What've you got in there, Ransom? Is it your Singing Sword?"

"Maybe it's his Magic Wand," the bounty hunter with the Taser stun gun snickered. "Ooooooh, Mr. Wizard, are you going to turn us all into toads?"

"Unfortunately," Remo said, "somebody's beat me to it."

"For a skinny little shithook, you've got a real smart mouth," Pump-gun snarled. He wore his black ball cap backwards, and the adjustable white plastic tab cut deep welts into the meat of his forehead, after the style of the day. "Smart mouth's something we can fix...."

"Why don't you take a look at my ID?" Remo suggested. "That'll straighten everything out. It's in my hip pocket."

Goatee deftly removed his wallet, scanned the New Jersey driver's license, then passed it over to his colleagues.

"Well?" Remo said, holding out his hand to the last man for the return of his property.

Taser made no move to give the billfold back. "This license looks like a phony to me, and not a very good one," he said. "And the last names on these credit cards are all different. 'Remo Ito,' `Remo Kalin,' 'Remo Barbieri.'" He checked the driver's license again. "Why don't you explain what that means, Mr. Remo?"

"Means we just scored a grand apiece," Pump-gun chimed in gleefully.

Remo felt the first stirrings of annoyance intrude on his calm. Of course the license and credit cards were fakes. They had to be. That was one of the problems with being declared dead prematurely: your real name got buried along with the empty coffin. Officially, Remo Williams was a former Newark cop who had been electrocuted more than two decades ago by the state of New Jersey for a murder he didn't commit. Electrocuted and then resurrected so he could serve as a roving hitman for CURE, an ultrasecret, virtually autonomous intelligence-gathering, crimefighting organization. The fact that the ID he now carried was so laughably poor could be laid at the feet of his one and only boss for all those years. Recently, Dr. Harold Smith had refused to pay for any more top-quality documents, accusing his assassin-employee of going through assumed identities "like Milk Duds." Remo suspected that Smith had started doing the forgery himself, to save money. To make matters worse on the annoyance front, the long package was starting to leak; hairtail slime was slowly dripping down the inside of Remo's arm.

"I say we cuff him nice and tight," Goatee said, "stick him in the trunk and haul his sorry ass up to Portland to collect our dough."

The quartet of Baby Hueys began to close in. Remo decided it was time to make his excuses-and his exit. "The road trip sounds great, a real hoot," he told them, "but I've got to get home to cook this puppy." He opened the end of the package and showed them the green-fanged snake head.

"Christ on a crutch!" Snub-gun exclaimed.

"It's probably part of one of his twisted blackmagic rituals," Taser said.

"I think we ought to pound the little bastard flat and fold him twice before we stash him in the trunk," Goatee suggested. "I think it'd do him a world of good."

At this point, Mr. Yi appeared in the shop doorway, smiling as big as all outdoors.

"Stay back, this is official business," Snub-gun growled, holding up his phony gold badge for Yi to see.

Remo spoke a few words of fractured Korean, asking Yi to please not concern himself with this unimportant matter, that it was under control.

"I call 911?" Yi offered.

"Ask for two ambulances," Remo said. "These guys won't all fit into one."

"What was that mumbo jumbo you laid on the gook?" Taser snapped as the still-smiling Yi retreated into his shop.

"I told him you're mistaking me for somebody else. Better take a closer look, before something bad happens..."

"The shrimpboat's trying to tell us he works out," Pump-gun scoffed.

"Looks to me like he does wrist curls, big time, and forgets about the rest," Goatee said. "Some reason for that?"

"It's all in the wrist," Remo confided.

"Did this peckerwood threaten us?" Snub-gun said, outraged as the idea finally sank in. "I think he just threatened us!"

"Let's take him down," Pump-gun urged.

Taser had a better suggestion. "Shit, let's do a Rodney on him."

While Taser kept Remo covered, the others put away their guns and pulled out black rubber truncheons.

Snub-gun waggled his foot-long sap under Remo's nose and said, "Role-play this...." The bounty hunter thought for sure he had a solid grip on his trusty truncheon, but then it was gone, vanished, his hand empty. Just as suddenly, the blunt weapon reappeared out of the ether, its lead-weighted tip violently colliding with the point of his chin. With a bone-splintering crunch, his jaw hinges gave way and flying teeth skittered across the sidewalk.

"Muhhhh!" he cried, clutching his face in both hands.

It all happened so quickly that it caught the other bounty-hunters flat-footed.

Taser recovered first. He aimed the stun gun at Remo's chest and fired from a can't-miss distance of six feet. With a phut of compressed air, the microdarts launched, trailing the fine copper wires that connected them to the hand-held power source.

Remo could see the little darts racing for his chest. At just the right instant, he blew a quick puff of breath. As the burst of air escaped his lips, it cracked like a small-caliber gunshot. The chi-powered gust veered the tiny missiles wide of their intended target.

Goatee shrieked as the twin darts caught him in the top of the right thigh, sending fifty-thousand volts coursing through his body. For a heartbeat, he went bug-eyed rigid, then his head drooped. As his chin dropped to his chest, his knees went rubbery soft. In slo-mo, he slumped down to his hands and knees, then to his face on the sidewalk. He lay there motionless, except for the kicking, solo dance of his right leg.

Pump-gun discarded his truncheon and made a grab for his shoulder-slung side arm.

A bad choice.

Without apparently moving from the spot on which he stood, the hairtail still safely tucked under his arm, Remo threw the bounty hunter fifteen feet through the air. Pump-gun landed with a hollow thunk, belly first on the car's hood, caving it in. Unconscious, he slid off the right front fender like a 250-pound over-easy fried egg.

Remo reached out for the guy with the stun gun. With a downward slash of a single razor-sharp fingernail, the assassin neatly slit through the front of the Kevlar body armor. Before the bounty hunter could get his hand on the butt of his pistol, Remo groped inside the foot-long gash for his pound of flesh. And catching hold of it, he wrung it out like a fistful of wet socks.

"Yeeee, Mama!" yelped Taser, dropping to both knees on the sidewalk with a shuddering thud.

"Who am I?" Remo asked him.

"You're a fucking maniac!"

"Who am I?"

Desperation filled the man's eyes. "Think, think," Remo urged him.

"You're not William Ransom," the bounty hunter wheezed.

"Bingo." Remo slightly loosened his grip. "Now, what am I?"

The man with the Taser squinted up at him, teeth clenched, anticipating more pain.

Remo smiled. "I YAM WHAT I YAM."

"Huh?"

"A wrist joke. Forget it. Time for night-night." Cocking his middle finger against his thumb, Remo delivered a precisely measured snap to the side of the bounty hunter's head. The man's eyelids fluttered shut, and he went limp. Remo eased the unconscious man onto his back.

As Remo retrieved his wallet, Yi reappeared in the shop's entrance. He seemed pleased by the sight of all the downed bodies, but then again, he always seemed pleased.

"You come tomorrow," Yi said in English, "I have sand eel for Master. Very fresh. No parasites, or money back."

Remo left the parking lot, whistling. As he crossed Olympic Boulevard, the sounds of approaching ambulances made a seesawing counterpoint to his offkey hornpipe.

REMO AND CHIUN'S vacation rental was on a side street a few blocks from Mr. Yi's shop. Since its inception, the surrounding neighborhood had passed through three sets of ethnicities-white, black and Latino-before becoming largely Korean. Remo would have preferred Malibu or even Santa Monica; the location had been Chiun's choice. Although the Master of Sinanju often claimed to enjoy being around "his own people," the farther they got from the fishing village of Sinanju, the less use he had for them. A person from Seoul might as well have been born in Namibia. Or Afghanistan. For Remo, the whole "my neighbor, my brother" thing was made even more laughable by the fact that in the ten days since their arrival, Chiun had left the house only once.

Remo turned down the narrow concrete walkway that divided a double row of clapboard dollhouses. The little court of eight bungalows had been built in the 1930s. All the houses were white, and they'd been painted and repainted countless times without proper sanding between coats-nowhere on the siding was there a square foot without a spall, a burst blister or a painted-over dust ball. Stunted orange trees decorated the walkway. A sign of the times, every front door had a black steel security screen, and every window was barred.

As he put the key in the lock, Remo heard the blare of a TV commercial through the door. Though he couldn't make out the words, he knew the spot had to be selling either trucks or beer, the cornerstones of "Friday Night Football." He opened the door onto a cool, dark, postage stamp of a living room that seemed even smaller because of the projection TV that covered the entire rear wall. At Chiun's insistence on the day of their arrival, Remo had arranged delivery of the seventy-two-inch Mitsuzuki Mondiale from a local Rent-to-Own appliance and furniture store.

Three-foot-high beer bottles danced the Macarena in the gloom of the window-draped room. In front of the Mitsuzuki, a little man with a face like a yellow raisin sat on a La-Z-Boy recliner. In a long silk kimono, with his TV tray at his side and the TV Bible opened to the night's playbill, reposed the deadliest killer on earth.

"You haven't moved a muscle since I left," Remo complained as he shut the door.

A slender hand appeared out of the cuff of the silk robe. The Master of Sinanju raised a long-nailed finger to his lips and shushed his inconsiderate pupil. In the erratic light of the TV, he was flipping through the little magazine's full-color-insert section.

"You're not reading that godawful gossip crap again?" Remo said. "Can't you see all the stories are just unpaid ads for upcoming shows? The whole damned magazine is self-congratulating boosterism run amok."

Chiun pressed the TV Bible over his heart and said, "Only a fool scolds a cat for licking its own behind." There was no arguing that one.

So Remo didn't bother trying.

He turned for the tiny kitchen. After depositing the hairtail on the counter, he set the lightly oiled wok on the gas burner to heat and started a pot of jasmine rice. As the Mondiale's enormous quartet of speakers blasted an all-too-familiar theme, he stuck his head back out of the doorway.

With an opening montage of fireworks, Lycra-clad, gyrating cheerleaders, superb computer graphics and raucous country-rock fanfare, "Friday Night Football" was under way. Huge helmets in the competing teams' colors-pumpkin orange for the L.A. Riots and crustacean red for the Maine Lobsters--collided and exploded into a sea of glittering fragments.

Which dissolved into a three-shot of the show's hosts in the stadium broadcast booth. As if anyone with a functioning brain didn't already know who Chunk, Sal and Freddy were, the network superimposed their first names under the live picture. Chunk was the former offensive lineman and now the color commentator, Sal was the canny play-by-play guy and Freddy the brainy statistic-and-trivia king. All three of the media personalities wore matching navy blue blazers, but there the similarity ended. Sal and Freddy could have used Chunk's sports coat as a two-man tent.

In Remo's opinion, Chiun's long-running fascination with the boob tube had taken a decided turn for the worse. The Reigning Master of Sinanju had become a pro-football junkie. Though his understanding of the fine points of the game left much to be desired, Chiun had caught the fever.

"We've got a good one for you tonight, folks," said Sal. "A real grudge match between two of the league's newest expansion teams...."

"If anything, that's an understatement," Chunk said. "If you don't believe me, just take a look at some tape we shot during warm-ups. Even the team mascots hate each other."

Images of a man-size velour dog-thing with a huge head, and a man-size red foam lobster with one big claw flooded the screen. A nose-to-claw shouting match ended with a flurry of blows exchanged and the two mascots rolling around on the artificial turf.

"Ol' Lootie the Coyote is really giving it to Clawboy," Freddy said.

"The bad feeling goes from the bottom up, folks," Sal said into the camera as it switched back to the booth, "from the towel boys to the general managers. Like I said, we've got a humdinger tonight. Stay tuned."

The network switched to a commercial break: halfton pickups danced the Macarena.

"Haven't you noticed that those three bozos always talk that grudge-match stuff before the kickoff?" Remo said. "And that no matter what they say, the game always sucks royal. Why on earth are you watching it? Even the shopping channel is less predictable."

"I'm doing it for your sake," Chiun admitted.

"Why doesn't that surprise me?"

"Because my selfless regard for your betterment is nothing new," Chiun answered. "I make many sacrifices so that you will be prepared to take up the mantle of Master when I pass on."

"And how, pray tell, is 'Friday Night Football' going to help me become a better assassin?"

"Surly One, games are the yin and yang, the living, beating heart of a people. By watching your professional sport, I'm able to study the inner workings of the American mind. I do this so I can understand you, my pupil, more completely. Only then can I raise you beyond the limits of your native-born mediocrity. Only then can I help you be all you can be."

"Face facts, you're rotting your mind, Chiun." The Master dismissed Remo's concern with a toss of his hand. "Western culture cannot harm me. I observe with great detachment, from a high perch of wisdom. Besides, this entertainment of yours is very weak compared to the excitement of Korea's national games...."

"Teeter-totter and kite flying?"

Miffed at the tone of Remo's remark, Chiun pulled his hands into the baggy cuffs of his kimono and ducked his chin down into its round collar, a turtle retreating into its brocaded shell.

Back in the kitchen, Remo checked the rice, which was already filling the room with its fragrance. Before he took the hairtail from its package, he opened the kitchen window. He pried the fish's jaws apart and hooked the upper fangs over the edge of the windowsill. Then, holding the hairtail out straight with his left hand, he used the point of his razor-edged fingernail to make a slit in the skin all the way around the head, just behind the gill plate. In a single motion, he stripped the entire skin down to the tail, turning it inside out like a sock.

Remo flopped the skinned fish back on the counter and started the tedious separation of the greenish meat from the backbone with flicks of his guillotine nail. He sliced the resulting twin fillets into two-inch chunks, dipped them in beaten egg and dredged them in seasoned flour. As he drizzled a little more peanut oil in the wok, a cry came from the living room. "Aieeee!"

Remo abandoned the stove. "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Orange team has poked the peach."

"Pooch," Remo corrected.

Chiun waved impatiently for silence. Moses returned from the Mount, the color commentator was speaking.

"Well, guys," Chunk said, "let's hope that first-play fumble doesn't set the tone for the rest of the game. Otherwise, we could be in for a long evening."

"So what else is new," Remo muttered.

"That muffed catch on the kickoff turns the ball over to the Lobsters on the Riots' ten-yard line," Sal announced.

The camera cut to the Lobster sideline, where the Maine cheerleaders, known as "the Tails," cavorted with highly choreographed enthusiasm as their offensive squad took the field.

While the squads changed, Freddy started adding stats and gossipy trivia tidbits to the list of players' names that appeared on the screen. When he got to the Riots nose tackle, he said, "Whoa! That's got to be some kind of a typo. The roster has Boomtower weighing in at 502 pounds!"

"Can we get an iso shot of him?" Sal asked.

The camera zoomed in on the defensive players as they waited for the Lobster offense to come out of their huddle. Amid the milling orange uniforms, Number 96 loomed large indeed.

"What's happened to the Great Pumpkin?" Freddy said.

"Tonight he looks more like the Incredible Hulk," Sal quipped.

"I gotta tell ya, folks, I've never seen a physical transformation tike this," Chunk said. "You know we like to poke some fun at the overweight players from time to time. And we've stuck it to Mr. Boomtower on more than one occasion. But tonight against the Lobsters, he's really turned it all around. Folks, no exaggeration, Bradley Boomtower is truly enormous. Look at the thighs on him! They're as big around as my waist!"

"The only question is," Sal said, "what can he do with it?"

Remo decided to watch one play to find out.

Of course, it was typical FNF. At the snap of the ball, Boomtower took one step and slipped, falling on his face, and before he could get up, the play was over-the Lobster deep corner-end-zone pass had floated way out of bounds.

"Wow, that's a sorry start for the Great Pumpkin," Freddy said. "Flat on his mug on the carpet. I don't think he even made contact with an offensive player...."

"He's calling the head linesman over," Sal said. "There's something wrong with the Astroturf," Chunk added.

All the officials gathered at the line of scrimmage, apparently examining the playing surface. Whatever they were looking at was concealed from the camera by their huddled backs.

"Let's replay that in slo-mo," Sal suggested, "and see if we can pick up what happened."

The slow-motion replay did in fact show why Number 96 had lost his footing. With his initial burst of speed, with a single push of his forward leg, Boomtower's cleats had ripped up a yard of green carpet. That's what had tangled his feet and tripped him. "How'd he do that?" Freddy said.

Which was exactly what Remo was asking himself. While the grounds crew made a quick, temporary repair to the artificial turf, Boomtower took off his shoes and threw them to the sidelines.

"He's playing barefoot," Sal said, with his trademark firm grasp of the obvious.

"There have been quite a few barefoot kickers, but never barefoot nose tackles," Freddy said. "We may have a major story in the making here tonight, folks."

"The oil is starting to smoke," Chiun declared without taking his eyes from the big screen. "You must clean the wok and start over."

"Yeah, yeah," Remo said, but he made no move to return to the kitchen. The players were lined up and ready to go.

At the snap of the ball, Number 96 surged between the center and the tackle, and as he did so, he delivered a left-handed blow to the middle of the center's back, dropping him like a load of bricks. Effortlessly, Boomtower sidestepped the offensive tackle's attempted block. He was well into the backfield as the Lobster quarterback rolled out for another pass. With Boomtower charging in his face, the quarterback reared back for a second throw to the end zone. He got the ball off, a wobbly, wounded duck that dropped incomplete, and for all his trouble took a tremendous square-on hit from the Riots nose tackle. Like it had been rocket launched, the quarterback's helmet flew off and sailed downfield; he crashed to his back under a quarter ton of Boomtower.

Number 96 jumped up at once and started doing his pelvic-thrusting, head-juking sack dance.

"What a hit!" Chunk gasped.

"Hoo-wee, that had to cost the Lobster eight-figure bonus baby some brain cells."

"It'll make this year's highlight film for sure," Freddy said.

Sal was less sanguine about the situation. "Uh, the center's still down and he's not moving," he said. "Neither is the QB. I think they're both hurt. Yep, here come the trainers."

The camera closed in on the fallen center. The trainer crew rolled the big man over onto his back, and then they did something the football-viewing audience had never seen before: they started giving him chest compressions to try to restart his heart. Meanwhile, players from both teams were yelling excitedly, waving at the sidelines and pointing at the downed Lobster quarterback.

"What's going on over there?" Freddy said. "Get a tighter shot."

They did. In middle of the man's shoulder pads, the neck hole of his uniform yawned. It was empty. "Oh, Jesus, where's his head?" Chunk cried. "Where's the quarterback's fucking head?"

"Look in his hat," Chiun suggested, snuggling deeper into the La-Z-Boy.

The camera zoomed in on the missing helmet, which rested top side up on the carpet at midfield. There was a face inside it, and remarkably the chin strap was still buckled. The angle of the shot produced a disturbing illusion: it looked like the QB had just poked his head up through the Astroturf for a quick peek around.

From his expression, he didn't like what he saw. The feeling seemed universal.

Players from both teams turned away from the red helmet, some of them slack jawed with horror, others bent over at the waist, puking through their face guards. This while Bradley the Fighting Vehicle Boomtower continued to strut his stuff: slow-motion moonwalking, he struck classic bodybuilder poses to the beat of the sideline photographers' flashguns. Understandably incensed, the Lobster bench rose up en masse and attacked the showboating nose tackle, burying him under a heap of bodies. Not to be outdone, Boomtower's whole team rushed onto the field to try to defend him. The roar of the hometown crowd drowned out Chunk, Sal and Freddy as the stadium police surrounded the wildly shifting, hundred-man dog pile.

Then, abruptly, the network cut away from the live-action melee to a row of triple-bacon cheeseburgers dancing the Macarena.

"Fifteen yards," Chiun proudly announced. Remo shook his head to clear it. Smoke from the burning wok hung heavy in the room. "What's fifteen yards?"

"The penalty for roughing the passer."

As Remo opened his mouth to speak, the telephone rang. It was the scrambled line.

Chapter 3

Like the tire of some gigantic earthmover, the landmark sign loomed over the flat white cinder roof of the Big-O doughnut shop. Dramatically lit from beneath on both sides, the dimpled stucco ring could be seen for blocks up and down busy Sepulveda Boulevard. No doughnut known to man was ever so huge, so pink, so utterly indigestible.

Chiz Graham stood under the Big-O's red awning, watching through the service window as a plump, short Latina girl in a white paper hat and long braids finished pulling together his order from the rolling racks of freshly baked treats. The clerk was so short she had to reach up to push the pair of wide, flat boxes across the counter to him.

"Por, favor, Senor Cheez... " she said, straining on tiptoe to stick her bare arm through the service window. Fingers gloved in clear plastic offered him a black permanent marker.

Chiz uncapped the broad-tipped markie, and with big, looping flourishes, autographed the inside of her brown forearm from wrist to elbow. He wrote, "Warmest wishes, Chiz Graham."

"Muchas gracias, " she cooed, cradling her autographed arm to her bosom like a newborn babe.

"De nada," said the movie star, scooping up the boxes.

As he turned for the waiting limo, the girl clawed herself above the level of the counter so she could watch the action-film Adonis walk away. At his broad, densely muscled back, she aimed a shrill, undulating cry: the same hair-raising sound voiced by female ballet folclorico dancers-and chickadees in heat. She punctuated the "I am Woman" yodel with a heartfelt "Estupendo!"

Long accustomed to having girls go glassy-eyed at the sight of his massive, jutting buttocks, Graham paid her no mind. All he was thinking about was the fragrant burden-the forty-eight oven-fresh doughnuts-he carried. His jaws ached in anticipation of their succulent, deep-fried goodness. He felt a ferocious urge to sit down on the curb and eat every single one of them himself.

But he knew if he did, there would be pure hell to pay.

As he reached far the limo's rear door, it swung open. Crouched inside, in the midst of the litter of empty paper bags from the BurgerMeister up the block, in her black Gucci tank top, matching leather micromini and stiletto-heeled ankle boots, was Puma Lee, the movie star's even bigger movie star of a wife. The ravishing, tawny-skinned, raven-haired grade-school dropout pronounced her screen name "Poo-mah," not "Pew-mah," and everyone in the show-biz know followed suit.

Without a word, the leggy beauty snatched one of the boxes from him. Before he could get the limo door shut, Puma was stuffing heavily sugar iced cinnamon-apple fritters into her face with both hands. Chiz sat in one of the jump seats, as far away from her as he could get. Hunched protectively over his own flat of treats, he started ramming assorted glazed doughnuts into his mouth. For Chiz and Puma, the act of eating had become an athletic event, in this case, the twenty-four-doughnut sprint. Neither wanted to be the last to finish, because neither wanted to share the stub end of the final cruller with the other. Rainbow sprinkles and shards of icing glaze flew left and right, as did the grunting, gulping sounds of their frantic swallowing.

The noise was such that the uniformed limo driver lowered the one-way privacy window to make sure his passengers were both all right. In his rearview mirror, he watched the highest-paid actors in motion-picture history make total pigs of themselves.

It was common knowledge in Tinseltown that between the two of them, Chiz and Puma pulled in a minimum of thirty million dollars per film. Puma invariably commanded a good deal more money than Chiz-and the salary gap was a touchy subject. He had been typecast by the industry as an action-adventure star who showed his bare behind; Puma had a much wider dramatic range. She was perfectly believable taking off all her clothes not only in summer shoot-'em-ups, but also in historical romances, modern-relationship pictures, cancer tear-jerkers, disaster flicks and Shakespearean rehashes.

The driver wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of something dank and musky floating through the window from the back. He'd read the tabloid stories about how the celebrity couple always bathed in vintage sauvignon blanc. He decided that whatever liquid they soaked themselves in, they didn't use soap. Having hauled around Hollywood types for half his adult life, the driver thought he'd witnessed every conceivable eccentricity of the filthy rich. But even a bingeing Orson Welles couldn't hold a candle to these two. Like wild animals, Chiz and Puma sought out and gobbled the lowest forms of junk food. And the question the chauffeur kept asking himself was how could people who ate so bad look so good?

By the time the limo driver exited the parking lot and merged with oncoming traffic on Sepulveda, four dozen assorted doughnuts were history. He started to accelerate in order to change lanes for the freeway ramp.

"No, pull in there," Chiz told him, waving to the right.

"Excuse me, sir," the driver said, "but we're going to be late for the benefit if we stop again-"

"He told you to pull in!" Puma snarled.

End of discussion. "Yes, ma'am," the driver said flatly.

Their new destination was Tito's Tacos, another fast-food landmark of West Los Angeles. It lurked in the shadow of an elevated section of Interstate 405. With the double-parked limo blocking half the small lot, Chiz trotted up to the outside service window.

"Aue quieres, senor?" asked a guy with pomaded salt-and-pepper hair, long sideburns and a pencil-thin mustache. For forty years he had been folding tortillas at the same location, and in an identical white polyester guayabera shirt. Awaiting Chiz's response, he held the stub of a pencil poised on a paper pad. Over his shoulder, one of the cooks-a shorter, wider version of the counterman-lowered stainless-steel baskets of tacos into boiling vats of dark amber oil. A peculiarity of Tito's cuisine, the picadillo meat was already packed inside the folded tortilla shells when they were plopped into the deep fryer. This meant that as the meat was heated, it soaked up oil like a sponge.

"Give me a dozen beef tacos with double guacamole," Chiz said. Then he thought better of it. "No, wait a minute. Hold the tacos. I'll take a couple of quarts of that, instead."

The taco bender seemed irritated as he used what little was left of his pencil's eraser on the order pad.

Looking up, he said, "Que quieres frijoles, menudo?"

"No. Dime la grasa."

Chiz's unusual request confounded the seasoned counterman.

"Yeah, you heard me right," Chiz assured him. "I want the deep-fry oil. Pour it in a couple of those jumbo drink cups. Make them to go."

Puma scowled at her husband when he returned, practically empty-handed. "Where's the tacos? You were supposed to get tacos!" She wasn't just disappointed; she was furious. And venting her fury, she seized handfuls of the back seat's gray Corinthian leather, which parted under the points of her long red fingernails like so much pebble-grained tissue paper.

Chiz would never have admitted to actually being afraid of his better half. Such a thing ran counter to his image, public and self. After all, it was he who had carved out a celluloid career by battling armies of terrorists, mutant zombies, hair-shirt barbarians, and it was he who had whipped their evil butts, all by his lonesome. But of late, whenever Chiz considered thwarting Puma's expressed wishes, he thought about it long and hard.

He handed her one of the big cups. "Try this instead."

Puma tried to sip through the straw and got nowhere-it was already soundly plugged with congealed grease. She took off the plastic lid, cracked the white film of beef fat with a long nail and daintily sipped at the brownish picadillo-spiced oil underneath.

The sip quickly became a gulp.

"I figured, why not cut to the chase?" Chiz told her as he raised his own cup to his lips.

They were licking away their fry-oil mustaches as the limo climbed the 405 on-ramp, heading for Hollywood. Two exits from Sunset Boulevard, they passed a freeway billboard advertising Chiz's new action flick. The movie's title, Big Bore, was supposed to refer to weapon caliber, as in elephant gun. That no one had caught the unfortunate double entendre until after the picture was in distribution was a prime example of Murphy's Law.

The billboard's airbrush painting showed a threetimes-life-size Chiz stripped to the waist with a massive chromed Magnum revolver braced on his inner thigh. The yard-long, vent-rib barrel was raised in a highly suggestive fashion. Across the top of the billboard, huge letters proclaimed Tougher ...Bigger... Harder. Beneath the banner, a row of infinitely smaller type credited the review quote to Nigel Plimsole, of the Agoura Weekly Advertiser.

As the billboard zoomed by, Chiz couldn't help but recall the strain of getting into shape for Big Bore. Prior to the filming, he'd spent six hateful months with personal trainers and holistic-diet consultants. It wasn't just vanity that drove him to buff out for his movie roles. His fans expected it of him. His fans and his producers. When your bare ass was up there on the screen, twenty feet tall, you'd better be able to bounce quarters off it, baby.

The problem was, Chiz Graham was slipping into his mid-thirties. Forget about bulking up-it took more and more effort just to keep in shape what muscle he had. Between films, he had taken to hiding his burgeoning layer of flab under loose shirts and baggy slacks.

No more.

A shit-eating grin spread over the movie star's internationally recognized, square-chinned mug. His flab-hiding days were done. Tonight all he was wearing above the waist was a custom-tailored red leather vest with extralarge armholes designed to showcase his deeply tanned and monumental biceps and lats. Thanks to a miracle of modern science, without having lifted so much as a finger, Chiz was totally megabuffed. His body fat was under ten percent. Muscle mass up by thirty percent. Strength more than doubled. And it all came from a two-by-two-inch adhesive patch. Which, as far as he was concerned, was worth twice its million-dollar-a-year price tag.

Chiz wasn't wearing the drug-dispensing bandage stuck on his bum, where it would certainly have shown through the skintight seat of his red cycling shorts. He'd applied it below the shorts's waistband in front, where it blended nicely into the gridwork of his abs. Puma wore her patch as high as possible on the inside of her right thigh.

The dark-haired screen queen sat there, alternately flexing her arms, transfixed by the pop of her own sleek, powerful muscles. After the quart of warm taco grease, Chiz could almost see his own biceps growing in size, too. He felt the pleasure-pain burn in the core of the muscle, like he'd just done 150 reps of dumbbell curls.

A few minutes later, the limo pulled up in front of the Venom Club. On the marquee, a pink-and-green neon rattler coiled and struck, coiled and struck every few seconds. At Tinseltown's newest in spot, it was said, the creme de la creme could let their hair down among their own kind. The assembled paparazzi and crowds of fans on the sidewalk were kept behind a velvet-rope cordon by a phalanx of bouncers.

The nightclub's ponytailed head of security opened the limo door for them. In his trademark black leather trench coat, leather pants and cowboy boots, Pismo Pete quickly ushered Chiz and Puma through the entrance, beneath a huge banner that said Oxfam Benefit Gala.

Inside on an elevated stage, under a huge rotating glitter ball, tall, thin and beautiful people boogied to retro seventies rock. The main body of clubgoers surrounded the long buffet table in the center of the room. Chiz and Puma said their hellos, waving, air kissing cheeks, moving quickly through the mob to the front of the food line.

Without bothering to pick up a plate or utensils, Puma plucked a big sticky gob of blue cheese from the top of a spinach-salad mountain. She only had it in her mouth a second before she spewed it back over the heaped greenery. "What was that crap?" she gasped, wiping her lips with the back of her hand.

A guy in a white uniform and chef's hat scurried over at once. "It's Virtual Gorgonzola," he told her. "A cheese-flavored tofu product. Not to worry. It's completely fat free, like everything else we're serving here tonight. So, just enjoy..."

But Puma's attention-and her anger-had already wandered.

Chiz looked over his shoulder and saw whom his wife was staring at with such focused malice. Vindaloo.

The tall, blond, former world-class model turned movie actress was Puma's only real competition for global box-office supremacy. The baby-smooth Swede had piled her plate high with a rich-looking chocolate dessert. When Vindaloo smiled at Puma, there was no-fat mousse cake all over her perfect white teeth.

Right off, Chiz knew there was going to be trouble.

Chapter 4

"The illustrious Emperor beckons," Chiun announced as the scrambled link to CURE's headquarters continued to chirp. The Reigning Master of Sinanju made no move to get up to answer the phone himself, even though he was closer to it. With his words, Chiun was just pointing out the existence of the irritating noise, on the off chance that his one and only pupil had somehow failed to notice.

From decades of experience, Remo knew there was no purpose served by standing fast. His butt cast in concrete, Chiun wasn't going to budge from the La-Z-Boy, even if the phone rang all week. Remo crossed the smoky room and turned on the speaker phone. "What's up, Smitty?"

Without preamble, a very distraught Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Turn your television to 'Friday Night Football.'"

"Exalted One," Chiun warbled, "it is already our privilege to be witnessing that glorious contest."

"Then you saw what just happened to the Maine quarterback?"

"If you ask me," Remo said, "it was a little over-the-top, even for sweeps month."

"We have the makings of a major problem on our hands," Smith continued. "Please switch to Channel 8."

Chiun picked up the Star Trek Next Generation Phaser remote-control unit from the arm of the recliner. The Master of Sinanju didn't question the purpose of the order or grouse about missing the rest of the game as he would have done if Remo had made the request. After all, his Emperor had spoken. According to the ancient code of Chiun's predecessors, the generations of highly sought master assassins from the Korean peninsula, fealty-and the choice of light entertainment-invariably went to the guy with the most gold. Like a good and faithful servant, Chiun pushed the channel-change button.

The Mitsuzuki's giant screen blipped, and a man and woman appeared. They were seated behind a stylishly modern desk that conspicuously lacked a modesty panel. More annoying than their perfectly sculpted hairdos, than his impeccably tailored gray Armani silk suit or her red Adolfo, more annoying even than his reliance on dimples to drive home a point or her habit of crossing and recrossing her long legs under the table, were their matching, synthetically earnest expressions.

"Peephole USA" was one of those tabloid-news magazines that specialized in "T and T." Titillate and Terrify. And its producers were only truly content when they accomplished both objects in the one-minute feature story. With respective dimples and upper thighs bared, Jed and Molly were doing their standard chitchat wrap-up of a tale called "When Easter Bunnies Attack-the Texas Day Care Nightmare."

Chiun immediately read the handwriting on the wall. "You wish these two people dead for unspeakable crimes against the Emperor? Say no more. Consider it done."

"Off with the talking heads," Remo concurred.

"Shh. Just listen for a minute," Smith instructed them.

With a whirlpool flourish of computer graphics, "Peephole USA" plunged into its next feature, which was entitled "What's Got into Great-Great-Grandpa?"

"By now," began Molly's giggly voice-over, "all of America's heard about the past-ninety Southern senator and his beauty-queen girl toy. Well, this time tomorrow, Senator Ludlow Baculum and Bambi Sue Stimple will be on their honeymoon. It's her first, and his thirteenth. Last night's 1-900 viewers' poll tells us you think old Lud's robbing the cradle, but is little Bambi robbing the grave?"

As the screen filled with a panning shot of poolside at a Malibu Beach mansion, the "Peephole USA" reporter offered a few tidbits of pertinent background: that this was the May-December marriage to end all, Bambi being sixty-nine years her intended's junior, and that Baculum was the chairman of the powerful Term Limits and Election Finance Reform Ongoing Investigation and Research Committee.

To the strains of "Baby Love" by Diana Ross and The Supremes, the camera closed in on the pool's shallow end, where the former Miss Nicotine, glowing with youth and health, splashed around in her black thong bikini. At the deep end, Senator Baculum swam in slow, deliberate circles with his eyes and nose just above water. His bald, liver-spotted head bobbed like the top of a well-pickled egg. A fine fringe of silver hair brushed the tops of his large, protruding ears-ears with unusually pendulous lobes. The camera tightly framed the senator as he dog-paddled to the ladder and made his dripping exit from the pool.

"My, oh, my!" gushed Molly breathlessly. "What's got into great-great-grandpa?"

The crepe of the senator's chin formed a kind of international date line. Below it, Ludlow Baculum was neither stooped nor sagging nor withered. He was, in fact, a different man.

He was Tarzan.

To Remo, it looked like one of those computervideo morph tricks he'd seen a hundred times on MTV. The ancient Sunbelt legislator appeared to have monumentally broad shoulders, huge, densely chiseled muscles and zero body fat. In his zebra-striped Speedo, he padded across the pool deck with the animal grace of a teenager. As Baculum toweled himself dry, the camera lingered a fraction of second on the zebra stripes, just so Molly could gush, "My, oh, my..." one more time.

"What exactly is the problem here, Smitty?" Remo asked.

Chiun snorted at his pupil's impossible thickheadedness. "Obviously," he announced, "our Emperor wishes to make this Bambi creature his private concubine. Is the old man with a young man's body an impediment to Emperor Smith's pleasure?"

"Just watch!" Dr. Smith barked through the speaker with uncharacteristic impatience.

Then "Peephole USA" ran the "before" tape. It was a segment of a video taken eight months before, at the wedding of Baculum and his twelfth wife, a twenty-three-year-old part-time waitress at a highway restaurant outside of Mobile, Alabama. The ceremony took place in the honeymoon suite of the Holiday Inn next door to the girl's place of casual employment. On the tape, Ludlow looked every one of his ninety-plus years. Hunchbacked, sallow skinned, his shirt collar a mile too big, the senator used a walker to make an excruciatingly slow approach up to his wedding cake. As he did so, he leered, rheumy-eyed, at his gum-snapping bride's round bottom. Behind the wedding cake, along the wall, a row of oxygen tanks and a full-size defibrillator unit were visible.

"Until two weeks ago, that was Senator Ludlow Baculum," Smith declared.

"Peephole USA" cut back to Jed and Molly, who half turned in their chairs in order to react to the freeze-frame comparative shots behind them.

"Has Ludlow Baculum found a fountain of youth?" Jed asked his national audience. "That's what everyone on Capitol Hill wants to know, but so far the good senator is keeping his own counsel on the subject. Molly, you have to admire the guy for wanting to die with a smile on his face."

"From what I just saw, he isn't going to be the only one smiling tomorrow morning," Molly said as she did her scissor-leg shtick, extraslow.

Jed fanned himself with his blank sheets of copy while dimpling for the camera.

"I still don't see a problem," Remo said.

"Ah-hah!" Chiun exclaimed. "At last all becomes clear. You wish to trade this old man's young body for your own, and he is resisting the chance to be of service. Tell us where you want him delivered, Exalted One. Be assured there will be no further delay." A noise came through the speakerphone.

Remo would have sworn it was the sound of grinding teeth, only it was much, much too loud.

Chapter 5

Puma Lee had blood in her eye as she stalked her nemesis through the shifting press of the club crowd. Lanky in a hot lime spandex minidress, Vindaloo walked with an infuriating little-girl hop in her gait that set her shoulder-length white-gold hair a-swish and her various rounded baby-fat parts a-jiggle.

There was no longer any jiggle to Puma.

Bands of steel and cables of Kevlar interlaced under her almost transparently thin skin. Her breasts had lost a full cup size; once luxuriantly soft and resilient, they had turned to granite. Beneath her rock-hard bosom burned a desire more terrible than any she had ever felt.

And what she felt, felt so right.

People said things to her as she passed by, showering her with greetings, salutations and praise, fawning shamelessly because of who she was. She couldn't hear their words over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears. Their bright, eager faces meant nothing to her, either. Her fellow party-goers might as well have been stalks of tall, dry grass-spindly things to be pushed aside and walked over.

Ahead of her, the Swedish actress passed the entrance to the men's room, which was marked with a sign that said Hiss. Vindaloo pushed through the other swinging door, the one marked Not Hiss.

Only when Puma Lee entered after her quarry, stepping into the blindingly white tiled bathroom, did her sense of hearing return to normal; as the door swung shut, it came back with a rush of pressure against the sides of her head. The bathroom she surveyed was deserted; the Swede was nowhere in sight. To Puma's left, the brushed-steel stall doors were all closed. It was so quiet that she could hear the sawing, sixty-cycle hum of the fluorescent lights above the mirrored sinks.

Then, from the end of the row of doors, it began. Sudden. Thunderous.

The ralphing bark of the sea lion echoed in the narrow, tiled room.

A sound Puma recognized at once. Recognized and expected. Like most successful high-fashion models, Vindaloo was a puker. Had the Swede not been so thoroughly addicted to the hurl, her sylphlike form would have quickly assumed the waistless sausage shape dictated by her Scandinavian-fishwife genetics. Again, the sea lion called.

Oxfam's buffet spread might have been no-fat, but that didn't mean it was no-calories. Which left a figure-conscious individual with two options: lose it or wear it home. From the upchuck arpeggios raging in the bathroom's last stall, Vindaloo was hell-bent on getting rid of every last smear of that chocolate mousse cake.

Puma Lee sympathized with the need to vomit after taking one's absolute fill. And not simply to void unnecessary calories, as Vindaloo was doing.

One also vomited to make room for more.

As she closed in on her unsuspecting enemy, for the first time in her charmed life, Puma Lee knew exactly what she wanted.

She wanted it all.

Money. Possessions. Adoration. Acclaim. Power. Not just the mixed grill, the polite taste of each entree that untold thousands of wanna-be actors would have gladly sold their souls for. Puma Lee already had the fattest lamb chop, the biggest prawn, the juiciest filet, and it was not enough.

Puma wanted it all.

She even wanted the wanting.

The raven-haired actress had decided on her course of action the instant she'd laid eyes on her blond counterpart. There was no final straw, as such. No smirky expression from the Swede at the buffet table had tipped the balance. No ultimate, unforgivable stab in the back. No unfairly bestowed Academy Award. No plum lead role recently stolen.

Like other corporate giants, like auto makers or hemical companies, the two female megastars competed head-to-head for sales in the world market. As with other international conglomerates, when there were big profits and substantial losses on the line, industrial espionage ran rampant. Puma's underpaid screenwriters and sacked script doctors routinely fled to Vindaloo's studio, and vice versa, their heads bursting with ideas already under development, if not in production. Scripts appeared as if by magic on executives' desks in both camps, leaked by the competition's CPAs, security guards and night janitors. With the opposite camp's material in hand, a team of skilled hacks could quickly pound out a new star vehicle, and one just different enough to avoid successful legal action.

Which went a long way to explaining why every year the movie mills released two "flight attendant in jeopardy from terrorists" films, or two "just passed the bar woman lawyer in jeopardy from clients" films, or two "Las Vegas dancer in jeopardy from the mob" films. Whichever actress had started the process of cloning the other's work, up until tonight it had become the common practice of both, in order to hedge their box-office bets.

After tonight, all bets were off. What Puma had endured in the past, the irritating threats to her territory, she would endure no longer.

Puma stepped to within a foot of the door of the last stall. She reached for the door handle and gave it the lightest of tugs. The lock latch rattled in its striker plate.

"Occupied!" Vindaloo groaned from the other side.

Through the sizable gap between the door and its frame, Puma could see the Nordic princess on her knees before the porcelain god. She tugged at the handle a little harder.

Removing her finger from down her throat, Vindaloo cried, "For Christ's sake, didn't you hear what I said? Go away!"

That was not in the cards. Puma made a flat blade of her right hand and, as if the door had been made of two layers of aluminum foil instead of two layers of eighth-inch sheet steel, she thrust her fingers through to the other side.

At the shriek of splitting metal, the Swede twisted around and saw the woman's hand poking through the rip in the door, the long, perfectly manicured fingers turning the inside lock button.

"What do you want?" Vindaloo bawled as the door slowly swung open. When it came to a full stop and she saw who the intruder was, she had her answer. And it was murder.

Even though the door was no longer a barrier to Puma's desires, in her rage she stripped it off its hinges, and in the same motion sent it crashing sideways into the line of mirrors behind her.

Like a spooked rabbit, Vindaloo scuttled under the dividing wall between toilet stalls. Puma lunged for her, but not in time. The Nordic model's slim ankle slipped out of reach.

Undaunted by the steel partitions, Puma pursued her prey, cleaving through the intervening walls with downward slashes of her arms. She made the astounding feat look easy, as easy as the way a circus poodle breaks through a paper-covered hoop. But there was no mistaking the difference. In the tiled room, the impacts of her arms flailing upon the steel boomed like a squadron of jets breaking the sound barrier. And instead of bits of brightly colored tissue paper fluttering about, shards of red-hot metal sang through the air.

Somewhere, under the din of Puma's singleminded attack, Vindaloo squealed desperately for help.

CHIZ STOOD at the end of the buffet table, staring at the women's-room door as he waited for the shit to hit the fan. He hadn't tried to calm his bride or to divert her from her purpose because he'd known it wouldn't have done any good. Her strength was such that he could no longer dominate her physically. As an icon of alpha-maleness, he understood Puma's need to control her own turf, to have free range within boundaries of her own making. He also understood-and shared-her lust to destroy something living, to rip it apart for the best of all possible reasons: because she could do it.

The mob milling around the party food practically begged to be torn to shreds. But as luck would have it, Chiz could find no one to focus his homicidal urges upon. No Vindaloo counterpart. Like a school of bait fish, the benefit crowd was a shifting, dizzying mass of virtually identical targets. And on top of that, unlike his wife, Chiz still felt caution in the presence of so many. He wanted to do bad things, but was held in check by the fear of being caught and punished. The action-adventure star considered his new desires a consequence of the bigger, better body he inhabited. As his power and muscle mass increased, so had his contempt for those who were weaker.

A noise cut through the vintage rock and roll, the rumble of talk and laughter, and froze every person in the room. It sounded like someone had rammed a truck into the bathroom wall. A very big truck. The club's floor rippled underfoot as the noise boomed again and again.

When the disk jockey cut off the music, everyone could hear the shrill screams.

Then Chiz smelled it. Over the spicy aromas of the buffet table and the various costly unguents and perfumes of his fellow guests, he caught the odor of freshly spilled blood. And lots of it.

Before anyone else could connect the dots, and with a speed no one in the club could match, he raced for the women's bathroom. The door opened as he reached it, and Puma Lee stepped out, spattered from head to foot in blood.

People standing close by saw her like that, and with the sounds that might have been explosions fresh in their minds, began to yell, "Bomb! Bomb!" Panic spread like wildfire through the crowd.

Chiz took advantage of the general pandemonium and replayed a scene that had appeared in virtually every movie he'd ever made. He scooped the damsel in distress in his bared, bulging arms and rushed her to safety-in this case, the fire exit.

WITH HIS CREW OF BOUNCERS busy calming and evacuating the crowd, it fell to Pismo Pete to be first to enter the women's bathroom. He didn't want to do it, but he had no choice. Even though there was a possibility of another explosion, the job couldn't wait for the Hollywood cops and the paramedics. If a bomb or bombs had been set off by terrorists or some lunatic fan, somebody had to go in at once and check for survivors. After all, a big-time celeb could be down and hurt, even dying inside.

As he pushed open the door, the ex-outlaw biker and sometime stunt double thought he was prepared for what he might find, but he was wrong. He'd never seen so much blood. It was spattered everywhere on the white floor and walls, making them look pink. And every toilet-stall partition had been jaggedly breached down the middle, as if slashed by a chain saw.

What kind of a bomb was precise enough to do a thing like that?

Equally puzzling was the absence of any lingering odor of explosives, no pall of smoke in the room, no sign of heat scorching anywhere. Glass from the shattered mirrors crunched under the stacked heels of his cowboy boots, but amazingly the lavatory's high, narrow windows remained intact.

Behind him, the bathroom door swung open a crack, and one of his bouncers said, "Need any help, Pete?"

"Stay the fuck out," he growled over his shoulder. "This is a one-man job until I say different." Something dripped from the ceiling onto the cuff of his ankle-length leather trench coat.

"Shit!" he said, wiping off the splat of blood with the heel of his hand. Then he looked up. Beads of red clung to the ceramic-tile ceiling like a nightmare dew. One of the ruby droplets broke free and hit him square on the chin.

"Jesus," Pismo Pete gasped, quickly rubbing it away.

"Don't think about it, just fucking do it," he muttered to himself as he hurried down the line of stalls, hoping to find a survivor, expecting to find a body or bodies.

He found no one, no grisly litter of body parts, either, but he did notice that each of the toilet-tank tops was slightly askew and he couldn't miss the bloody handprints all over them. Water ran in all the toilets, like they'd just been flushed. Or their tank balls were stuck.

Cautiously, the security chief entered the last stall and, doing his best to avoid the gory smears, he swung aside the tank's heavy porcelain lid.

Long blond hair swirled in the pink water, momentarily obscuring the pale face that lay beneath, trapped under the arm of the tank float.

Evidence that sunk the bomb theory, once and for all.

Chapter 6

"What would you like, Dr. Smith?" asked the woman behind the serving counter at the Folcroft Sanitarium cafeteria. The clock on the wall behind her read 10:49 p.m., eleven minutes until the food concession shut down for the night.

"I'd like to be home," Smith told her as he surveyed neatly arranged dishes of orange Jell-O, fruit salad and vanilla pudding sitting on a bed of flaked ice. It was another one of those nights. No home cooking for him. No delightful "Matlock" rerun to settle his meal. And later, as he drifted off to sleep, there would be no wide, warm, wifely backside in a flannel nightgown pressed against his own. Once again, in the name of duty, Dr. Harold W. Smith had been forced to sacrifice his simple comforts.

"I don't see any prune whip," he complained.

"If it isn't already set out, Dr. Smith, I'm afraid it's all gone until tomorrow."

Smith scanned the cafeteria case until he located his second choice. "Then I'll just have the shredded beets."

"That's all you're going to eat?" the counterwoman said, aghast. "Good grief, you're not a caterpillar. You can't live on beets. You need something more substantial under your belt. Look over here, we've still got some of tonight's special beef stew...."

Smith followed her plastic-gloved finger to the wide stainless-steel serving pan. Embedded in pasty, dark brown sauce were yellow bits that might have been potatoes, orange bits that might have been carrots, green bits that might have been peas and gray, gristly chunks that were most probably meat. The woman picked up the serving spoon and stirred in the shiny golden grease that had floated to the surface.

"How 'bout a nice big plate of piping-hot stew?" she asked him. "If you're going to work late again, it'll help you keep up your strength."

The doctor shuddered at the idea. Past middle age, he was a spare-looking man who had given the best part of a lifetime to the enjoyment of Spartan pleasures. His ideal main course was his wife's famous meat loaf, which consisted of five parts uncooked oatmeal to one part ground chuck, all bound together with her own family-secret moistener of corn starch dissolved in warm tap water. Maude precooked this confection in the microwave on high for twenty minutes to fully render the fat and juices. After a thorough draining, which included some manual compression, she baked the loaf in her conventional oven at four hundred degrees until it gave off a noise like a snare drum when she thumped it with the back of a spoon.

"I'll just have the beets, thanks," he said.

"You're going to turn into a beet one of these days," the counterwoman warned him as she filled a small ceramic bowl with a heap of dark purple shreds. "Or a puddle of prune whip."

"I do appreciate your concern," Dr. Smith said as he accepted the dish from her. "But I'm afraid I have a very sensitive stomach. I have to be extremely careful what I put in it."

Sitting down in the deserted eating area, he took three paper napkins from the dispenser, flattened them one on top of the other, then tucked the triple layer into his collar. With the front of his gray suit thus defended from accident, Smith ate quickly and confidently, tipping the bowl so he could spoon up every last drop of the ruby juice.

After bussing his single dish, Dr. Harold Smith trudged back down Folcroft's well-waxed hallway. He'd been doing the same job, in the same location, for more than three decades. His work had nothing to do with the business of the sanitarium, which existed largely, if not completely, to conceal the nature of his work. From his second-floor office overlooking Long Island Sound, Smith tracked current events both at home and abroad, ever alert for any threat to the republic. His secretary and the mainframe computers deep in the bowels of the brick building were his only company. And that suited him just fine.

Computer science had been his chief passion for better than thirty-five years. At the height of the Cold War, as a midlevel CIA programmer, he had combined the then fledgling field with his innate skill as a forecaster of future events. His predictions were not only based on mind-boggling rows of numbers, reflecting shifts in industrial production, annual rainfall and immigration rates of certain insect pests; they also factored in reports from CIA field operatives on the ambitions and mental states of key political figures. Sometimes it turned out that the critical element in an equation wasn't a dictator's relationship with the Kremlin, but how he got along with his live-in mother-in-law.

The accuracy of young Smith's analyses eventually came to the attention of a visionary new President, who had immediately sensed his patriotism, dedication and moral rectitude. Before his murder in Dallas, that President had done some oracling of his own. He had become convinced that, Cold War appearances to the contrary, internal threats not external ones were the real danger to the nation's survival. The limits of his constitutional powers prevented him from protecting democracy from its true enemies: the criminals eroding it from within. He created CURE as a temporary measure, a stop-gap to steer the country past the bad patch he was certain it faced. CURE was designed around the singular talents of Harold W. Smith. It was a one-man black-ops show with no direct support staff, no money trail leading back to Congress. Smith's task was to deploy his unique abilities to identify and defuse potential disasters. He had the authority to do whatever it took to ensure the survival of the nation, and his secret brief included the power to target selected individuals for assassination. Smith's only overseer was the Commander in Chief himself.

Since that bright late-November day so long ago, he had worked with a succession of Presidents, resolving a succession of do-or-die problems. Some of the Chief Executives had been pleased when they learned of CURE's existence; others had not. Whether they approved or disapproved, it changed nothing. The covert intelligence network Harold W. Smith had built had already acquired a life of its own. As is so often the case, what had been originally intended as temporary, had out of necessity become permanent.

As Smith shut his office door behind him, he decided he felt a little better for having eaten something. It had been a very frustrating day for the director of CURE. Like Chicken Little, he was having trouble convincing anyone of the danger he saw ahead.

The current President, when informed of the situation via CURE's direct line to the White House, had said, "So, let me understand you correctly, Dr. Smith. By taking this hormone drug you're talking about, I can eat all the french fries I want, and in the, process actually get thinner and more physically fit? And you want my okay to put the kibosh on it?"

To the Commander in Chief, the drug known as WHE-Wolverine Hormone Extract-had sounded like a hell of a deal.

To Smith, it sounded like a sign of the times. Painless self-improvement had been a growth industry in the U.S. for more than twenty years. Much of its dogma was based on the assumption that you are what you're thinking. According to its glib promoters, it was possible to restructure any or all parts of your life just by playing a tape loop of thoughts over and over in your head. I am happy. I am sexy. I am rich. Conveniently enough, these positive image-shaping thoughts didn't have to be original, and could be rented from those doing the promoting. In a society devoted to improvement by self-hypnosis, personal growth no longer required actual striving and real hardship. Therefore, change had no down payment, no sacrifices. It was easy and fun, and there were no irreversible dire consequences.

The prospect of instant, painless self-reinvention gave Smith cold shivers. To his way of thinking-and he was a man who had worn the same brand and color of suit, tie, shirt, socks and underwear to work for the past thirty-five years-a life without a center point was no life at all.

Historically, the failure rates of these kinds of bogus personal-growth schemes ran close to ninety-six percent, so their impact on society was largely indirect. They were time-wasters, energy sappers. Snake oil. But Dr. Smith saw in their very proliferation a disturbing long-term trend. The American people had somehow convinced themselves that an easy way out had to exist, and they were hell-bent on finding it.

Bottom line-the nation was primed for something like WHE. Unlike heroin, cocaine and methedrine, the drug was not illegal. It was too new for that. WHE produced neither euphoria nor hyperactivity; instead, it altered the basic chemistry of the human body, turning fat to muscle virtually overnight.

Painless self-improvement. The hard-body Holy Grail.

WHE not only made muscles bigger. It made the users more aggressive. More territorial. And, as had been demonstrated on "Friday Night Football," prone to outbursts of unimaginable violence.

Over the past few hours, Smith had run dozens of computer simulations, and the results always came out the same. As long as the drug was refined from its natural source, the endangered wolverine, the distribution and societal effects would be limited. Because of the expense, only the very rich would have access to it. The resulting epidemic of mayhem would be unpleasant, but containable. Once WHE had been successfully synthesized, however, it would be cheaper to produce than aspirin, and in short order, available on every street corner, if not in every corner health-food store. His most optimistic projections showed that within eighteen days of the synthetic variety's first appearance, every major city in the United States would be under martial law. After another eighteen days, society as we know it would have dissolved. Those not taking WHE by day thirty-six would be hunted down and killed by those who were.

Hearing the news, the President had heaved an audible sigh and said, "That bad, huh?"

Indeed it was.

Smith had first learned about the disruptive potential of the experimental drug over a year ago, while conducting a routine survey of academic-research activity. The director of CURE had tried to sink the Purblind University project through the usual channels-and thought he had succeeded by arranging for the suspension of all research funding. Most of Smith's behind-the-scenes manipulation of critical events was in this subtle, nonviolent vein-very promising careers just went belly-up, for no apparent reason. Hired assassins he saved as a last resort; among other things, they were expensive. In this case, Smith had waited too long to call in Remo and Chiun, CURE's enforcement arm. The biochemist in question had vanished with all his research, and set up shop somewhere offshore. So far, Smith hadn't been able to locate him yet.

A bell-like tone made the director swivel around in his chair. It came from a color television set bolted high on the wall. The Emerson was part of CURE's global Intel uplink, and was monitored by sophisticated computer programs that would alert Smith to anything truly newsworthy.

What he was looking at now was a news flash from Los Angeles about a movie star's murder at a chichi Hollywood club. The bulletin cut to dramatic video that showed the actor Chiz Graham carrying his bloodied actress wife, Puma, to a waiting limo. They both had bodies like comic-book superheroes. It was the effect of WHE; of that, Smith had no doubt. As the limo zoomed away down Sunset, the voice-over narration said, "Although she was first believed to be a victim in the brutal attack that has left megastar Vindaloo dead, police now confirm that Puma Lee is a suspect in the bizarre killing."

This is how it begins, Smith thought.

Chapter 7

Bambi Sue Baculum, her blue eyes as big as saucers, gazed at what lay across the palm of her new husband's hand and said, "I knew you were in good shape for your age, darling, but I never expected anything like this."

"Sweetheart, you ain't seen nothing yet," the senator assured her.

Without further fanfare, and for the fourth time in a little over an hour, ninety-something Ludlow Baculum mounted his apple-cheeked bride. They had already made love from one end of the Malibu beach house to another. Their violent coupling had tipped over lamps and end tables. Now they christened the ocean-view living room's sunken conversation pit, rumpling and disarranging the couch cushions in their bliss.

Not even in his early teens had Lud felt so magnificently potent. Like the rest of his body, his wedding tackle was totally buffed. It wasn't simply a matter of having the necessary rigidity. The desire was there, too. Overwhelming desire. It burned like a high gas flame under the saucepan of bubbling oatmeal that was his geriatric brain. He suffered no distracting thoughts. His mind did not wander. It was completely focused on the pleasure he was getting and giving. Senator Baculum had never felt so alive.

As had been the case with the previous encounters, it was over very quickly. And as before, satisfaction had left the senator undiminished-no Senor Limp Doodle here. Lud was famished, though. The adhesive patch on his jutting rump itched as he walked naked across to the kitchen counter. With his bare hands, he attacked the remains of a cold prime rib roast, stripping away the rind of dense white fat and gobbling it down. Melted by the heat of his overstuffed mouth, grease ran down his chin and over his massive white-haired pectorals.

From the edge of the conversation pit, Bambi Sue cleared her throat meaningfully. When he looked over at her, she said, "More please, darling..."

"You really like it, don't you?" the senator said.

"I'll never get enough of you," she cooed. "You are a miracle worker. You're Superman." As he climbed back down into the conversation pit beside her, she let out a gasp. "God, I don't believe it!" she said. "Honey, I'm sure it's gotten even bigger."

On an irresistible impulse, Ludlow grabbed his new bride by the neck and started shaking her about. That felt good, too.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, Ludlow Baculum stepped alone and nude out on the beach house's rear deck. In the pale light of the moon high overhead, the splashes of blood drying on the upstanding member of the U.S. Senate looked black. Bambi Sue had finally got enough sex. And so had he.

Lud stuck a fingertip in his mouth and, using the edge of his nail, tried to dislodge a piece of his late wife's neck that was stuck between two of his three remaining natural teeth. Failing to loosen the bit of trapped skin, he turned back for the house, walking through the broken slider door, past the shambles of overturned furniture and the bloody mess he'd left in the conversation pit.

He'd finally located some dental floss when a convoy of flashing red-and-blue lights started down the drive.

He paid them no mind. That's what lawyers were for.

Chapter 8

Carlos Sternovsky stopped for a much needed rest. After eight months in the Far East, he still wasn't used to the combination of high heat and humidity. He whipped out a cotton handkerchief, tipped back the broad-brimmed straw coolie hat he wore and mopped his dripping brow and cheeks. Ahead of him, trudging up the aisle between rows of elevated, shaded steel cages, a freshly drawn jug of wolverine blood in either hand, was a pair of half-naked Taiwanese laborers. They moved cautiously with their cargo; they knew to drop it might cost them their lives. Sternovsky's only burden was a notebook computer, a cybernetic log he used to keep track of which lab animals he had most recently phlebotomized. While he caught his breath, he watched the rag-diapered workers climb the shallow incline to where his electric golf cart sat parked.

All around him, covering the landscape in neat lines, were seventy rows of seventy cages each. The nearly five thousand live wolverines they contained had been imported illegally, and at tremendous expense, from Siberia by Family Fing Pharmaceuticals of Formosa. The cost of housing and maintaining the animals was equally staggering.

But the investment had already begun to bear fruit. Thanks to an ample budget, a large, well-trained laboratory staff and state-of-the-art equipment, Sternovsky had been able to chemically isolate the active neuropeptide agent from wolverine blood. Which made it unnecessary to sacrifice an animal to get the required raw material from its hypothalamus. At this stage of product development, the wolverines had become hormonal dairy cows, and were bled on a rotational basis. Long gone were the salad days of Donny and Marie; like prize Jerseys, the lab animals had code numbers tattooed into their ears.

Sternovsky stuffed his hankie back in his shorts and shuffled up the slope. As he approached the golf cart, the Taiwanese laborers set the rattan-wrapped jugs in the back, alongside a dozen others on a bed of flaked ice. When they turned toward him, he could see the plastic clothespins they wore clamped on their noses; the tips of which were tourniqueted a startling white against the brown of their faces.

Twenty-two acres of nothing but wolverines in sweltering tropical heat created a stench that was an instant emetic for most people. On top of that, a worker couldn't walk down the lines of cages without drawing a volley of musk spray-and the wolverines usually hit what they were aiming at. As Sternovsky got behind the steering wheel of the electric cart, the two laborers used a weak stream of water from a rowside hose bib to rinse the oily, yellow-green gunk off their arms and legs. The drawing of blood had become Sternovsky's job by default. No one else with the technical skill would go anywhere near the "Stink Ranch," as it was called. No one else was immune to the smell.

He putted the cart around the two men and up the hill, past the corrugated silo that held the wolverines' dry-pellet food. Everywhere he looked, he could see half-naked workers lugging buckets, shoveling, pushing wheelbarrows. Feeding, watering and excrement removal went on nonstop, from dawn to dark.

At the top of the low hill, the scientist drove around the trailer where he lived and did most of his work. He took the single-lane road down the other side of the slope. The company road was string straight. It ran along the top of a dike that separated two tracts of marshy scrubland. In the distance a mile ahead, the setting sun lit up the flanks of the main Family Fing Pharmaceutical complex, turning its alabaster walls, immense holding tanks and mazes of pipelines a rosy gold.

The Family Fing fortune had been built on sales of a product line called Imposter Herbalistics, which offered imitation black-bear gall bladder, white-rhino horn and Bengal-tiger pizzle in easily digestible, powdered form. The Fings specialized in making in quantity what nature or man had made scarce. They did this by first isolating the active agent in the folk medicine, then they used specially developed strains of bacteria as microscopic manufacturing plants. These bacteria were genetically tailored to give off the desired chemical compound as part of their ordinary waste. The synthetic end product was guaranteed to be chemically identical to the real thing and so, Family Fing's advertisements claimed, was just as safe and effective.

Imposter Herbalistics were sucked up on a daily basis by millions of Asians who could now afford to treat themselves with the best, and by holistically minded Westerners who were eager to sample the native cures of the Pacific Rim, but unwilling to have the death of a rare critter on their consciences. Of course no one asked where Family Fing got the raw material on which its bacterial magic depended. In point of fact, the company's ongoing experiments with endangered animals had pushed more than one species to the brink of extinction.

As Sternovsky and Family Fing well knew, the main difference between the Imposter Herbalistics line and WHE was that the new drug actually worked.

The research biochemist backed the golf cart up to a loading dock, where workers in crisp white jumpsuits and matching fiberglass hard hats were lined up, waiting to carry the blood to the preprocessing area. As the scientist got out of the cart, the foreman of the transfer crew stepped over to him and said, "Papa Fing, he want see you up top. He say you no wait. You go now."

Sternovsky nodded. But before he could enter the plant proper, he had to suit up. Inside a steel Quonset hut beside the front entrance, he kicked off his rope sandals and climbed into a sterilized jumpsuit with built-in booties and gloves. Since he sometimes made five trips between ranch and plant in a day, covering up the wolverine dirt was quicker than an antiseptic shower, and it accomplished the same thing. He traded his coolie hat for a white paper shower cap and headed for the complex's elevator.

The building's air conditioning was pure bliss, even through the plasticized-paper jumpsuit. He got out on the tenth floor. Though no pharmaceuticals were made in this part of the structure, the halls were kept spotlessly clean. The entrance to the office suite of Fillmore Fing, founder and CEO of Family Fing, was in the middle of the corridor and marked by an intricately carved ebony-and-ivory arch.

As he entered the reception area, Sternovsky could hear Fillmore Fing's voice booming from the boardroom. The biochemist understood very little of spoken Chinese, but he recognized these words because he had heard them so many times.

"What have I done to deserve this betrayal?" the elder Fing repeated as his private secretary ushered Sternovsky through the double doors. Dressed in a gray pin-striped suit from Savile Row, the plump drug tycoon stood nose to nose with his number-two son, Fosdick, who was the head research chemist for the family business. Except for the sad state of Papa's hairline, and the clear snot bubble blowing in and out of Fosdick's right nostril, their faces could have been mirror images.

Upon Sternovsky's arrival, Fillmore Fing ceased his tirade. He walked over to his desk and selected a massive Cuban cigar from a mahogany humidor. He immediately lit up, puffing hard.

Fosdick hurried to follow his father's lead. His hand trembled as he fumbled around in the humidor. "Hey, Fos, over here..."

Fillmore's oldest son, Farnham, sprawled on a white leather couch. He wore a gaudy Hawaiian print shirt under a baggy black silk sports jacket, baggy tan silk pants and a pair of handmade Italian loafers. Farnham Fing was the company's director of international sales. At present, he was enjoying being the son not on the hot seat.

Fosdick threw his brother a cigar, and when his father's back was turned, wiped his runny nose on the inside of his lab-coat cuff.

For a minute or two, the three Fings didn't utter a word. They concentrated on putting as much smoke into the air as they could. It was necessary because even a sterile jumpsuit couldn't contain the aromas of wolverine ranch that Sternovsky had brought with him.

Only when blue smoke hung thick in the boardroom did Fillmore lower his cigar and address the American. "We've had a major setback in the stage-three trials," he said in perfect British-public-school-accented English. "Thanks to the sloppy science practiced by my offspring..."

"But things were going so well at midday," Sternovsky said in shock. "What on earth happened?"

"Tell him," Fillmore instructed his younger son.

"There have been some unforeseen developments over the last few hours," Fosdick admitted.

"Show him, you idiot!" Fillmore prompted.

The head chemist, his head lowered in shame, switched on the boardroom's VCR.

At the bottom of the television screen, the time, date and title identified the segment as the surveillance-monitor tape of Test Subject Four. It wasn't for scientific-documentation purposes alone that Family Fing scrupulously recorded the progress of its drug trials; Farnham planned to use the evidence of rapid morphing as part of his global ad campaign. The tape showed a huge man pacing back and forth in his room in the plant's medical wing. His name was Toshi Takahara. A former professional sumo wrestler, he had been taking a synthetic form of WHE for three days. In that time, his voluminous flab had retreated like a melting glacier, revealing Himalayas of newly formed muscle.

"He seems highly agitated," Sternovsky said.

Farnham laughed at the observation. "You'd be agitated, too, if you started growing a tail."

"What? That's impossible!"

"That's what we thought at first," Fosdick said glumly. "Shortly after 2 p.m., Test Subject Four complained of severe discomfort and pressure at the base of his spine. We examined him and discovered a sizable nodule that had not been present at morning rounds. Because of its growth rate, we were pretty sure it had to be a cancerous side effect of the hormone. We did an immediate biopsy, of course."

"And?"

"It's not a tumor. It's healthy bone."

The video zoomed in on the Japanese man's broad backside, bared for an examination. His behind now sported what looked like the docked tail of a Doberman.

"I don't understand," Sternovsky said. "This can't be happening."

"There's more," the elder Fing told him. He waved impatiently, and Fosdick fast-forwarded the tape. When he stopped it, the sumo wrestler was on camera again. Holding the hem of his hospital gown out of the way with his teeth, Takahara carefully urinated in each corner of his room.

"He does that every fifteen minutes. More often if the staff tries to clean it up."

"Good God!" Sternovsky said as the realization hit him. "He's marking his territory."

"We seem to be losing Number Four," Fosdick said.

"We're on the verge of losing much more than that," Fillmore snarled. "All I have built in my life is about to come crashing down around me. Based on overoptimistic projections, I committed two hundred million dollars to the construction of a new pharmaceutical plant in Union City, New Jersey. Because of the sheer incompetence of my own flesh and blood, the new product will not be ready for distribution in the States by the December 31st deadline."

That deadline was key to Farnham's marketing strategy and Fillmore's financial house of cards. It was calculated to put the hormone on the shelves of health-food stores already retailing Family Fing products in time for the New Year's resolutions of seventy million overweight, out-of-shape, fat-loving Americans. The Fings' U.S. legal counsel intended to temporarily sidestep the need for FDA approval by calling the drug a "nutritional supplement."

Long enough for Family Fing to net a few billion dollars in clear, sweet profit.

"You," Fillmore said, pointing an accusing finger at son Fosdick, "have put a knife in your father's heart."

Even in the throes of a tantrum, the elder Fing always gave the impression that there was not a hair out place anywhere on his body. Sternovsky had noticed this curious trait the first time he laid eyes on the man, back in Pennsylvania. Fing had gotten wind of his work during a VIP tour of the university. Fillmore was a supporting member of the International Society for Pharmaceutical Advancement, which underwrote Purblind research to the tune of seventy-five million dollars a year. Though Fing contributed generously to the cause, it hadn't bought him what he wanted-the respect of his peers. The other pharmaceutical giants looked down on Fillmore Fing because he had made all his money on "ethnic homeopathics."

"What about the others in the test panel?" Sternovsky asked. "Are they having the same kind of negative reactions?"

"We're getting some behavioral problems," Fosdick answered. "Extreme irritability. Violent and destructive outbursts. The same things we've seen with the natural hormone, but the effect is much more exaggerated."

Sternovsky winced. Those side effects hadn't stopped Fillmore from prematurely market-testing the earliest form of the drug. By selling the refined natural product at an astronomical price to a few select international celebrities, he had managed to recoup some of his initial investment.

"There's got to be something wrong with the formulation of the synthetic," the American said.

"It's chemically identical to the natural hormone," Fosdick countered.

"It can't be," the biochemist told him. "You've miscalculated somewhere."

"Think!" Fillmore commanded his number-two son. "Think what the mistake might be!"

Fosdick swallowed hard before he spoke. "It's possible that there's an impurity we've failed to remove from the bacterial product, and that impurity is interfering with the desired reaction. If that's the case, we've been unable to locate it using our most sophisticated equipment. Another possibility is that a naturally occurring but vital impurity is missing from the manufactured compound. The synthetic hormone may be simply too pure for human consumption. This might explain why it seems to be taking effect so much more rapidly than the natural product."

Sternovsky had another idea. "It's also possible that we're getting a cascade effect that has nothing to do with the presence or absence of an impurity. The changes in blood chemistry related to sudden fat depletion could be bringing on a chain reaction of somatic and psychological effects."

"What you're both saying is, you haven't got a clue," Fillmore said.

"Yes, Father," Fosdick admitted.

"I have a suggestion," Sternovsky said. "We should immediately divide our test subjects into control groups. We can wean two off the drug completely. Reduce the dosage of two more. And maintain current levels in the last two."

"No," Fillmore said emphatically.

"No?"

"The real question here is commercial viability. Commercial viability and meeting our production deadline. What we need to know is, do the test subjects regard the worst of these side effects as so negative that they'd stop buying the drug in its present form? To answer that, we must maintain the current dose in all our subjects."

"But these are human beings, not lab rats!" Sternovsky protested.

"Wrong," Fillmore declared. "These are human beings who have agreed to act as lab rats."

"Do you really think anyone in their right mind would consider the growing of a tail to be an 'acceptable' side-effect?"

Fillmore shrugged. "If it were marketed correctly, it could easily become a fashion statement...." Sternovsky opened his mouth to speak, but he was so flabbergasted that no words came out.

From the luxurious comfort of the boardroom's leather couch, Farnham Fing laced his fingers behind his neck and in a cheery voice said, "Welcome to Family Fing."

Chapter 9

After driving around in circles in Simi Valley for twenty minutes, Remo took matters into his own hands. Every time his map reader gave him a direction, he headed the opposite way.

"Turn right," Chiun said. Remo went left.

"I said right." Chiun indicated the direction with a long-nailed finger.

"Sorry," Remo said.

Actually, the only thing Remo regretted was that he'd let the Master of Sinanju decide their route after they got off the freeway. Chiun's plan, it seemed, was that they stealthily spiral in on their destination from a distance of several miles, presumably so it could not escape them. The alternative-that Remo should read the map and Chiun should drive the rental car-was unthinkable. Chiun didn't drive. Which was a lucky break for the residents of Simi Valley and their insurance companies.

"Go left," Chiun instructed. Remo went right.

"We are going the wrong way."

"Oh, sorry..."

In three minutes, they pulled into the parking lot outside the L.A. Riots' sprawling training camp and general headquarters. The scheduled press conference was just starting as they pushed through the crowd of reporters and camera crews.

At the porticoed entrance to the main building, standing in front of a cluster of a dozen or more microphones, were three men: one huge, one large and one tiny.

"For those of you who don't know me," the little one said as he stepped up to the bouquet of mikes, "I'm Jimmy Koch-Roche, Mr. Boomtower's legal representative. I'm going to deliver a short prepared statement on behalf of Mr. Boomtower and the L.A. Riots organization, then I'll answer your questions, briefly."

"Is he standing in a hole?" Chiun asked Remo.

"No," replied the grizzled-looking reporter right behind them, "he is a hole."

The famous gunslinger attorney, even in five-inch lifts, only came up to his client's waist.

"What we've all experienced," Koch-Roche began, "the shock and horror of last night's tragic events on the football field, will live in our memories forever. But in the cold light of day, we, as a civilized society, have to ask ourselves two important questions. First, were these events unexpected, and second, who's really to blame?

"I don't have to tell you that football at the professional level is a violent and dangerous game, and one that quickly takes its toll on athletes. The average league career works out to a little less than twenty-two months. Most of the players have been in the sport since grade school-they know what they are getting themselves into. They play despite the danger, because they love it. And because they love it so much, they play even after they've been injured. That's the real tragedy here. The deaths of the Lobster quarterback and center were preventable. One hundred percent preventable."

"Don't ya just love the guy?" the grizzled reporter muttered.

On cue, head coach Dangler passed the attorney a large manila envelope.

"Thank you, Harry," Koch-Roche said as he opened it. He whipped out a sheaf of X rays and waved them at the camera lenses. "What I have here is incontrovertible proof that my client is innocent of any crime. These X-ray films were taken two weeks ago at the Lobster training center in Bangor. They indicate spinal weaknesses in both of the deceased players, weaknesses that should have kept them out of last night's game, if not out of professional football forever. Mr. Boomtower acted, as did the entire Riots organization, on the assumption that their opposition was to a man fit to step on the playing field. Unfortunately, that assumption was incorrect. We contend that the responsibility for what happened last night lies elsewhere. I'll take your questions now."

"What kind of weaknesses are you talking about?" one of the reporters asked. "Can you be any more specific?"

Koch-Roche referred to a slip of paper clipped to the top X ray. "In the case of the Lobster center," he said, "a congenital abnormality of the thoracic vertebrae at T-4. In the case of the quarterback, an untreated hairline fracture of the cervical vertebrae at C-1 and C-2. Sadly, these men were disasters waiting to happen."

"Do you expect an indictment for manslaughter soon?" another reporter called out.

Koch-Roche shook his head and then rhymed, "There's no crime, he'll do no time. Next question." He pointed at a guy wearing a network red blazer.

"What about the league?" the man asked. "Isn't it reviewing permanent sanctions, and a possible lifetime expulsion for your client?"

"I am confident that Number 96 will be back in orange and black for next week's game."

A rumble of shock passed through the crowd. "What do you say to the rumors about illegal drug use by your client?" was the next question.

"That's slanderous rubbish. He's random-tested like every player and has never shown a positive result for outlawed drugs."

The reporter shot back with a quick follow-up. "Then how do you explain the sudden change in his appearance and his enormous weight gain?"

"I don't have to explain it. Next question."

At this point, Bradley Boomtower bent over at the waist and whispered something into Koch-Roche's ear.

Watching this, it occurred to Remo that the football player's finger span, thumb to pinkie, was almost as wide as his attorney's shoulders.

"Okay, okay," Koch-Roche said, waving Boomtower off. Then he amended his previous remark. "My client attributes his added muscle mass to a new diet and herb regimen legally imported from Asia. All perfectly natural, I can assure you."

The grizzled guy had a question of his own. He shouted it through a cupped hand. "After seeing what Mr. Boomtower did to those two Lobster players last night, do you really expect people to swallow this crock about preexisting injuries?"

"Each person is free to make up his or her own mind, of course," the attorney answered. "But based on the evidence, I am confident that my client will be fully exonerated."

Something beeped annoyingly. Koch-Roche reached under the jacket of his three-piece suit and drew out his cellular phone. He turned away from the microphones before he spoke into it. The conversation was short. When he turned back to the audience, he announced, "That's all we have time for today. Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen."

Deaf to the protests of the reporters, the trio ducked through the smoked-glass front doors of the Riots' HQ.

"So, who're you guys with?" the grizzled newsman asked Remo. He was looking around their necks for the press IDs they didn't have. His photo ID indicated he was Us Johnson, from "National Sports Hotline."

"I'm Remo Wormwood, Folcroft News-Dispatch."

"Never heard of it."

"A biggish small-town daily. It's East Coast. Long Island."

"And you?" Johnson looked at Chiun, who said nothing.

"This is Dan Tien," Remo told him. "He's the sports editor from North Korea Today."

"Gee, I didn't know they followed pro football in North Korea."

"They get it on satellite TV now," Remo said. "Along with curling and bass fishing."

"Teeter-totter is very popular over there, too, isn't it?" Johnson said to Chiun. "I saw your national team in the Olympic trials. Very impressive legwork."

"It's all in the breath," Chiun confided. "Everything comes from the breath."

"I wouldn't presume to argue with you there, Dan."

"Say, Johnson," Remo said, "if a daring and enterprising reporter was of a mind to, how would he go about sneaking into the Riots' training center?"

The veteran newshound made a sour face. "Bad idea, Wormwood. The worst idea I've heard in a long time. Look around. Why do you think this pack of jackals is standing around, playing pocket pool, instead of rushing into that building and pursuing the biggest story of the year? Do you think we are a kinder, gentler media?"

"Yeah, I kinda wondered about that. There don't seem to be any guards on the entrance, either."

"Oh, there are guards, all right. They're on the inside, watching, waiting for the chance to bust some heads. The Riots' security staff is made up of proball wanna-bes and washouts. They're big and they're mean, but not nearly as big and mean as the players. Even if you managed to get close enough to ask them a question, the players won't say 'boo' to you without authorization from the team front office. What they will do if they catch you inside is break all your arms and legs and pitch you in a Dumpster. The gulls will pick out your eyes, Wormwood."

"We're talking purely hypothetical here," Remo insisted.

"You're sure?"

"Sure, I'm sure."

"Well, in that case, I'd go around to the delivery entrance and hide there until I could duck into the storage area. Say, wait a minute! Where are you two going? Didn't you hear what I said? Hey!"

The newsman watched Remo and Chiun disappear into the crowd.

Chapter 10

The tall man in the orange-and-black T-shirt tapped on the wall beside the warehouse's interior door. Something metallic clacked, the door opened and the security guard vanished through it.

Before the door closed, Chiun was up and moving. His one and only pupil sensed the opportunity, too. But sadly, after so many years of diligent instruction, a fraction of an instant later. The Reigning Master of Sinanju glided across the concrete loading dock like he was on roller skates. Behind him, he could hear the huffing of Remo's breath and the thundering clump of his huge feet.

Chiun heaved a sigh. Just when he thought his student had finally achieved a level of masterly perfection came the disappointment. The inevitable disappointment.

It wasn't the teaching that wore a man down, he thought.

It was the reteaching.

Three decades of experience with this pupil had confirmed his belief that whites could not retain knowledge for more than a few days. Of course, they could remember their Social Security numbers, their last names and the necessary procedure for opening a tube of toothpaste. The important things, the subtle things, were beyond their ability. Like breathing. And running. Perhaps it was time to once again drag out the long sheets of rice paper for poor Remo. First, he would have to relearn to walk barefoot over the flimsy stuff without tearing it. Then to run over it. And finally, to run in the ridiculous, stiff-soled Italian shoes he chose to wear.

Being the world's only teacher of Sinanju was a job requiring infinite patience, complete dedication and daredevil aplomb. In other words, Chiun thought, it was right up his alley. The problem was, and had always been, the pay.

There was never so much as a nugget of extra gold for all the overtime his student's limitless shortcomings forced upon him. No, it never counted when negotiations came up for a new contract and the payment in gold. They always divided the amount Chiun wrangled from Smith. Not an equal division, of course-what need did Remo have for gold when he enjoyed the honor of working with the Reigning Master of Sinanju? Also, Chiun had a greater responsibility-his birthplace, the entire village of Sinanju.

Years and years ago, at the start of Remo's training, the Master had tried to talk his employer into discarding the idea of his taking on a pupil. Chiun had argued that a pupil was redundant, that for the right price the Master himself could do all the assassinations. But Emperor Smith had foreseen a problem with Chiun's moving unnoticed through a society of whites-something an assassin had to do in order to succeed. Today the Emperor's wisdom had proved itself once again. It was because of Remo's overwhelming, all-reflective whiteness that Chiun had blended in so well with the reporters out front.

It was said that an acceptance of one's fate was the first step on the road to serenity. Though Remo had completed the rites that prepared him to be a master, he had lapses. Clearly, the fate of Chiun was to be joined at the hip to a perpetual student. Such a thing was not unheard-of in Korean culture. In the celebrated Pansori novels of his homeland, every noble hero was balanced by a comic footman, a Chongr-wook.

That was Remo. His Chong-wook.

With all due haste, the Master closed the distance between himself and the door that led from the warehouse to the training center proper. To the right of the door, set at chest height in the wall, was a ten-key touch pad that controlled the lock. It was very much like the keypad of his treasured Star Trek Next Generation Phaser TV remote control. Above the rows of numbers was an LED readout. Chiun held his palm close to, but didn't touch the keys. He moved his hand back and forth slightly, as if heating it over a candle flame.

"What are you doing?" Remo asked as he finally arrived behind the Master. "You couldn't have seen the code that guy used."

Chiun didn't waste time on a reply. The razor tip of his crooked fingernail clicked on the plastic pad. He tapped on three of the keys.

The warm ones.

"This could take all day," Remo complained as the words "No admit" blinked on the LED screen. Chiun tapped in the same three numbers, but in a different sequence.

"No admit. No admit. No admit."

"We don't have all day, Little Father." On the fourth try, the lock shot back.

"Dumb luck," Remo snorted.

Chiun shook his head. "Luck had nothing to do with it."

"Then how did you open it?"

"It would take me ten years to explain it to you, and a week later you would have forgotten it all. Instead of wasting time on lessons too complex for the simple whiteness of your brain, let us proceed to do as the Emperor has commanded."

Inside the training center, the halls were wide and low ceilinged. There were no windows to the outside, only doors leading to interior rooms. Some of the doors were made of glass. On the trot, Remo and Chiun passed a small surgery and an extensively equipped X-ray room. Beyond that was a hydrotherapy center. Remo looked through the porthole in the door. Two of the half-dozen stainless-steel tubs were occupied, but the player they sought was not there.

As they moved by an open office door, the man inside glanced up from the pile of papers on his desk. He wore the white uniform of a physical therapist. He looked startled to see them. They were already forty feet down the hall when they heard the sound of a chair scraping back. The therapist stuck his head out the door for a second, then ducked back in his office.

When Chiun saw the three big men in orange-and-black T-shirts charging down the hall toward them, he knew the man in white had called for help. The security guards filled the corridor as they lumbered, shoulder to shoulder. When they stopped a few feet away, the one in the middle raised a small black object to the side of his face and spoke into it.

"Yeah, we got 'em. Nah, we can handle it."

The security guard in charge was, even by the standards of his hirsute race, notably hairy. His pale face, except for a patch of forehead and the area under the eyes, was covered by a curly black beard, trimmed close. The hair on his head was long on the sides and in back, after the fashion of the new-country-music stars of the glorious Nashville Network. The hair on his forearms looked like his beard, but was untrimmed.

"What do you and Kung Fu there think you're doing?" the large hair-covered man demanded of Remo. The question immediately put Chiun's back up. "What does he mean by 'Gung Fu'?" the horrified Master asked his pupil. "Does he mistake me for a Chinese? Is he blind? How could he mistake this for the wide-nosed face of a barbarian?"

"I mistake you for a dumb shit," the security guard informed him. "About to be a dead shit."

"Kung fu's a Chinese martial art," Remo explained. "My friend here's Korean. To him, it's a big deal. Something to do with a thousand years of invading armies, domination, rape and pillage. Go figure..."

"Put a lid on the double-talk," the head guard said. "You two are trespassing on private property of the L.A. Riots. A crime punishable by the kicking of your butts."

"Look," Remo said, "we just want a word with one of the players. Two minutes and we're out."

"Buddy, you're already out."

At a silent signal, the other two security men closed in on Remo, a pincer move calculated to sandwich and overpower him. They didn't bother protecting themselves in a serious way, as they outweighed their target by a hundred pounds each. Because of the size differential, they were willing to absorb a punch or two in order to get their big hands on him.

Giving Remo first crack was their mistake.

And they only got one.

At the same moment, both guards lunged. It looked like a football play they had practiced thousands of times. Only they ran it at what seemed to be one-quarter speed. When the guards' fingers closed, they snatched only thin air. For an instant, the two men stood frozen, unable to grasp why they hadn't grasped the intruder's neck. With their arms extended straight out from the shoulder, the lengths of their torsos, from armpit to waist, were open to attack.

Ribs snapped like bread sticks, dry and crisp. Both guards dropped to their knees. As they clutched their sides, foreheads pressed to the floor, they wheezed and gasped for breath.

"Too slow," Chiun commented. He wasn't referring to the fallen guards, whose fighting skills were laughably childlike. The comment was directed at his pupil, Chong-wook, the ironic footman. Then the Master unleashed what might have been his ultimate insult. "If they had been Gung Fu," he told Remo, "they would have caught you."

"Hey, now, that isn't fair...."

The big hairy guy leaped, glomming onto Remo's back. Using all his weight, the security guard tried to drive the dangerous trespasser into the orange-and-black Congoleum.

"Whoop!" Remo said, twisting at the waist. Not a power twist. A timing twist.

The hairy guard flew over his shoulder and slammed headfirst into the wall with a mighty thunk. As the man's body slipped to the floor, it revealed a face-shaped indentation in the Sheetrock.

Chiun didn't give the remarkable depth of the concavity so much as a glance. "We've wasted enough time here," he said, stepping over the unconscious body.

"The weight room must be just up ahead," Remo said to the Master's slender back. "Hear the iron plates clanking? And the rap music?"

Chiun stopped short.

"What's wrong?" Remo asked him.

"An evil smell." Chiun fanned a hand in front of his slender nose. "It is the stink of a fatty-red-meat-eating urine-dribbler."

"Don't look at me like that."

"You don't eat red meat, so it couldn't possibly be you."

"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence," Remo said. "Given our present location, though, that nasty aroma could be coming from anyone or anywhere."

"This is no ordinary smell," Chiun countered. "It's like what rises from a low clump of bush after a gentle spring rain."

"You mean cat pee?"

Chiun glided ahead and turned the corner into the weight room, which was big enough to accommodate the entire Riots team. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the floor was taken up with great steel contraptions and racks of dumbbells and barbells. As Remo followed Chiun through the doorway, the starting offensive line of the L.A. Riots looked up at them from the bench-press area. Sweaty, towering men, whose combined weight was somewhere around three quarters of a ton.

Remo smiled at the men in orange and black. Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Chiun, "Johnson had said they were bigger and meaner than the security staff. He forgot to add younger."

A guttural growl came from beyond the offensive players. At the squat rack, a monster man held an Olympic bar balanced on his impossibly wide shoulders. The heavy steel bar was bowed in the middle by the tremendous weight at both ends. Bradley Boomtower let eight hundred pounds of iron crash to the deck.

"He is the one who smells," Chiun announced, pointing an imperious finger at the offender.

"Just the guy we want to see," Remo said.

As the second-most-dangerous man in the world took a step forward, the two guards, two tackles and the center spread out to block his path. A grove of redwood trees in numbered, XXXL sweatshirts.

"We've got business with your big guy, there," Remo said.

"And what exactly is your business?" the center said, testing the heft of a seventy-pound dumbbell.

"A glorious and time-honored trade," Chiun answered at once. "We are assassins."

Remo gave the Master a look of dismay.

Behind the offensive line, Boomtower howled with rage and began to advance.

"Stay back, F.V.," the right guard said, holding up his hands. "You're in enough hot water already. You get in any more trouble and you'll be out of the lineup next week."

"We need you against Portland, man," the right tackle said. "That Parakeet air attack will pick us apart without your pass rush."

The offensive linemen edged closer to Remo. "Our time in the gym is very special to us," the center said, still armed with the dumbbell. "We don't like being gawked at by geeks and gooks in our most private moments. You guys sound like you might be crazy, fucking escapees from Atascadero, but that doesn't cut you any slack with us. My friends here are going to hold your arms and legs down while I beat your heads to mush with this. From the chin up, you're gonna be nothing but a red stain on the carpet." He waggled the dumbbell.

"Hey, Chiun, I might need a little help here," Remo said. "Chiun?"

The Reigning Master of Sinanju slipped his hands inside the loose sleeves of his robe. A gesture that needed no further explanation.

There were only five of them.

The pupil was on his own.

"That's it, old-timer," the left guard said, "you just wait there, nice and still, and we'll see to you in a minute."

Remo meanwhile had picked up a football from a bin on the floor. Thick wrist flexing, he gripped it with his fingertips on the laces. His knuckles whitened, and his fingers dug deeply into the ball.

It exploded in his hand like a party balloon, only much, much louder.

The noise made the offensive line pause in their advance.

"Is that little trick supposed to scare us?" the left tackle said.

Remo selected another ball from the bin. "I'm asking you real nice to clear a path," he told them.

"What're you gonna do, hurt our ears again?" the center said, laughing.

Remo dropped back to pass, pumped once. The Riots didn't take the fake, so he let fly.

The offensive line thought it was another fake. Only Chiun saw the ball leave Remo's hand. It traveled twenty feet before the pointed end made contact with the middle of the center's heavy-boned chin. Again the ball compressed until its seams exploded. The impact snapped back the huge man's head, driving him into a watercooler, which tipped over as he dropped to the carpet. His fellow players ducked and used their hands to deflect the flying pigskin shrapnel.

Remo picked up another ball and slapped it into his open palm.

The right guard bent over the center. "Louie's out cold," he said. "That skinny little punk KO'd him with a pass. Jesus, he's spitting teeth."

"Assassinate this," the right tackle snarled, scooping up the object the center had dropped.

Remo ducked, allowing the seventy-pound dumbbell to fly over his head.

The other players followed suit and started chucking dumbbells at him. Remo didn't even try to get out of the way. As the heavy objects rained down on him, end over end, he swept them aside, deflecting them right or left with the backs of his wrists. Dumbbells clanged on the floor and bounced, rolling every which way as the Riots emptied the racks of weights.

"Get the fucker!" the left tackle cried, rushing over to the stacks of iron plates. "Flatten his ass!" He picked up a thirty-five-pound plate like it was a pizza pie and sent it spinning, discus style, across the room at Remo.

But to Remo, the plate moved through the air so slowly that even a small child could have avoided it. The spectacle bored Chiun. There was no subtlety to it. He withdrew his hands from inside his sleeves and covered his shell-like ears to protect them from the crash of weights hitting the floor. As the four big men used up all the metal plates, they grew visibly weaker. Patches of sweat appeared on their chests and under their arms. Their breathing became labored. They leaned on the steel contraptions for support. Chiun carefully watched the man Emperor Smith had sent them to interrogate. Number 96. Animal Man. Chiun had never seen a creature quite like him. A creature with such density of muscle. The corded flesh on the backs of his arms looked like the mooring lines of a freighter. And the covering skin was almost blindingly shiny, stretched tight, almost to the splitting point. Nothing the least bit subtle there, either; as such, he was hardly a worthy opponent for a Master of Sinanju.

Chiun could sense Number 96's desire to enter the fray. The man was chomping at the bit. What held him back? Not fear, certainly. Like the others, he was too ignorant to be afraid. Perhaps another desire, a more powerful one, kept him in check?

Even from across the room, Animal Man's smell was overwhelming. That Remo couldn't detect it didn't surprise Chiun. A man who had once indulged in the cheesy burger, the Camel, the Budweiser, couldn't be expected to have an undamaged sensory system. The aroma Number 96 gave off wasn't the smell of a human, not even a dirty human. This puzzled Chiun.

In point of fact, the Master hadn't paid much attention to the background details of the mission as laid out by Emperor Smith. Something about a drug. Such things were usually unimportant, mere trifles when compared with the truly significant-how he could leverage upward the gold payment for the next negotiation.

When Bradley Boomtower suddenly turned on his heel and headed for the nearest exit, Chiun was after him like a shot.

"Hey, get that guy!" the right guard wheezed. Before the offensive line could respond, the Master had slipped past them.

Chapter 11

Bradley Boomtower let the eight-hundred-pound load roll off his shoulders and crash to the weight-room floor. His intention was to snatch hold of the two intruders who had violated his territory with their ghastly fish smell and then tear their soft bodies into thin, bloody strips. His outrage at their presence inside his domain was too terrible to be held in check by the threat of league banishment or by the upraised hands of his fellow players. Boomtower could no longer think in terms of the future. As far as he was concerned, next week's game might as well have been next century's. There was no longer a barrier between what he felt like doing and what he did. The barrier that kept human society from ripping itself apart. In a way, what he possessed, or what possessed him, was absolute freedom; in another way, it was absolute slavery.

To get his hands on those who muddied his urine-marked perimeter, Boomtower would have thrown aside his teammates. He would even have killed them if they had tried to stop him.

The enormous nose tackle took a step forward, then hesitated as another, even more powerful need filled him. All around the squat rack were heaped empty boxes of Manteca. It had been eight minutes since his last "energy" snack. And already the hunger pangs were starting up again. These were no sudden cravings for a particular food. He wasn't responding to mouth-watering mental images of pork chops or rib roast. The feelings of aching emptiness were so intense that they were impossible to ignore. The inside of his belly clanked and shuddered like a length of steel chain caught up in the blades of a madly revving lawn mower.

A small bit of the pre-WHE Bradley Boomtower remained, self-aware, imprisoned in the giant body. And that man, who had earned a business degree from a Big Ten college, who had over eight million dollars in cash stashed in a Cayman Islands bank, was frightened by the intensity of the urge. And by the fact that he was eating more and more, and was never satisfied. Only for a second did this fragment of his original personality surface, then it was sucked under, down into the whirlpool of wolverine neuropeptide.

Boomtower spun away from the spectacle of flying dumbbells and pushed out the weight room's exit. Ahead of him was the Riots' deserted practice field. As he loped across the five-lane track that circled the playing area, he sensed someone or something behind him.

He turned and saw the old fish-eater. He wanted to turn and kill the intruder, but the ache in his belly would not permit it. At the back of the near end zone, he broke into a trot. A trot for Boomtower in his present physical condition was like an all-out sprint for anyone else. For a ninety-year-old Oriental, it should have been impossible.

Should have been.

The fish-eater not only matched his sudden burst of speed, but even gained on him.

Confidently, Boomtower increased the pace to a sprint. High-kicking, he could feel the huge muscles of his quadriceps shudder at each impact with the natural sod. His size-18 feet felt light and quick under him. And they were. Since he started using the patch, he was easily the fastest man on the team. Faster even than Regional Parks, the NCAA hundred-meter record holder.

The biggest and the fastest.

His superbody sliced through the air, which screamed around his ears. He passed the twenty-yard line, the fifty, and with the opposite goalpost looming large, took the opportunity to look back over his shoulder. He expected to see the old man falling back somewhere around seventy yards behind, or perhaps even collapsed on the field. Instead, to his shock, he discovered the old guy running right at his back.

Well, maybe running wasn't the right word.

It didn't appear that the Oriental geezer's legs were moving at all. And his arms weren't pumping, either. He had his hands tucked inside the baggy sleeves of his robe. Yet, there he was, serenely drafting in the wake the nose tackle left behind.

Boomtower blinked once, and like the pop! of a dream coming to a sudden end, the old man was gone. When Number 96 turned his head back toward the goalpost, he witnessed a vision that made his jaw drop. He saw the fish-eater descending, from a height of at least thirty feet, his robe flapping in the breeze. The old man's somersault ended as his slippered feet came down on the goal post's cross bar. He stood there, not waving his hands around for balance, but rock steady like he was standing on flat ground.

Boomtower didn't plan on stopping, but the fisheater dropped from his perch, light as a feather, right in front of him, blocking his path. The absolute strangeness of all this made the nose tackle skid to a halt.

"Get out of my way!" Boomtower said. The sweep of his enormous right arm sent a rush of wind that stirred the tiny old man's straggly beard. The Oriental did not so much as blink.

Beyond the end zone Boomtower now faced, beyond the track, was the training center's parking lot. From where he stood, he could see his white 500-class Mercedes two-door with its one-way windows, its gold-plated bumpers, side-trim molding and wheel covers. Two days before, he had had both the front seats ripped out. No bucket seat on earth could contain his five hundred pounds. He had had a specially designed leather-upholstered bench seat installed. Also, the frame and shocks on the driver's side had been reinforced to keep the vehicle from listing too much to the left. Boomtower wanted to get to his car and drive to the nearest source of dietary fat without further delay. Over the power lines, he could just make out the gaudy signs lining the main boulevard, signs that advertised All Things Fried.

Craftily, he inched forward on the little fish-eater. And when he was well within reach, with a mighty grunt he unleashed a backhanded swing at the old man's head, a blow intended to send him flying, if not kill him outright.

Between the start of the movement and its conclusion, something very unexpected happened: his fist made contact with nothing. Which sent him tilting off balance on the edge of his left foot. Before he could catch himself came a touch that felt like a hint of breeze. A touch so soft he might have imagined it. Just there on his right hip. Instead of knocking the old man into the cheap seats, it was Boamtower himself who went suddenly hurtling through the air. He landed with a sickening crunch, twenty yards away, near the sideline.

As he scrambled to his feet, he once again faced the slip of an Oriental.

"In you, I sense a great void, a terrible hollowness," Chiun told him, shaking his head.

"Hungry," Boomtower growled, starting to lunge forward, in the direction of his Mercedes. "Got to eat."

"No."

When the little man raised his slender hand, with its extremely long fingernails, the football player paused.

"This hollowness I sense is different," Chiun explained. "Not a vacuum of the belly that can be filled with material sustenance. This is a vacuum of the spirit. You are strong, but you are also weak. And your weakness is so great that your strength is more than negated."

"Hah!" Boomtower said, thumping his massive pectoral with a balled fist.

"Under all that flesh of yours, you are still a piddler."

"Why, I could pop your little yellow head like a pimple!"

"No, you couldn't."

Boomtower lunged for the scrawny neck in the Mandarin collar. Silk brushed his outstretched fingertips; of that he was sure. And then with a jarring starburst of impact, he found his face buried to the ears in the coarse sod. Spitting dirt and strands of Bermuda grass, he looked up.

"As I said," Chiun went on, "the animal power that you possess is chaotic, undisciplined. Ungrounded. It appears indomitable, but that is an illusion of physical form. Your strength lacks the focus of careful meditation and long study. It fails to tap the inexhaustible chi force of the universe. And because of that, it is as empty as a child's balloon. Perhaps it is good enough for your American football, but even the simplest strategies of teeter-totter would be beyond your grasp. The lesson here is that shortcuts do not always lead you where you want to go."

"Where I want to go is over there," Boomtower said, nodding in the direction of the parking lot. "Stand aside."

"I have questions for you, from my Emperor."

"Screw your Emperor. And screw you, you crazy motherfucker."

"Those options are not available. My Emperor wishes to know the source of your newfound animal strength."

Boomtower could wait no longer. His internal pangs were too powerful. They even overwhelmed his instinctive fear of this strange little man. Reverse pivoting, he tried to get the Oriental moving the wrong way. For his trouble, there was an explosion of pain in his shin, and a simultaneous and sickening crack of bone. Bradley Boorntower dropped to the turf, clutching his right leg below the knee with both hands.

"You broke it!" he moaned. "Jesus, you broke my leg!"

The fish-eater's strike had been so swift, he hadn't appeared to have even moved. He stood there completely relaxed, his high forehead unlined, a slight smile on his ancient, withered face.

"Perhaps we can talk now?" Chiun said.

The nose tackle dived for him, broken leg and all. Though the distance between them was less than a yard, Boomtower missed his target by a wide margin. And when he hit the ground, he had a shattered right forearm.

"I'm not enjoying this," Chiun assured the shrieking Goliath as he stepped closer. "I am an assassin by trade, not some ham-fisted torturer. Killing is what I do best. So you see, I would much prefer to kill you. And I will do so if you do not answer."

"Go to hell."

The nose tackle took a left-handed swipe at Chiun's ankles that didn't even come close. Then he struggled up on his one good leg. In his eyes was the naked fury of the jungle, of the wounded beast. Boomtower looked as if he would have gladly torn off his broken arm and used it to beat Chiun over the head.

"I do not understand your stubbornness," the Master of Sinanju said, clucking his tongue. "Have I not proven to you that your overwhelming strength is of no value in the face of my weakness?"

Growling from low in the pit of his stomach, Boomtower lunged with all his strength. And this time his fingers closed on silk brocade.

Chapter 12

"You guys had enough?" Remo challenged, tossing the football a foot or two in the air and catching it. The Riots offensive line lay draped over the weight-room benches, sweat soaked and panting. Only the left guard had strength enough to wave his hand in surrender. The four linemen had transferred every pound of movable weight from one side of the room to the other in their attempt to squash the dude in the black T-shirt and chinos. And now that wiry guy stepped, unfazed, over the resulting piles of iron plates, the heaps of dumbbells.

"That was fun," Remo said. He tossed the football back into the bin as he headed for the exit door. "We'll have to do it again real soon. I got to tell you something, though. It's no wonder you're always at the bottom of your conference. You guys are really out of shape...."

Outside, Remo quickly located Chiun, who stood at the far end of the practice field. He also saw a large form slumped motionless at the Master's feet. It was their quarry, Bradley Boomtower. Remo broke into a run. As he crossed the fifty-yard line, he saw Boomtower make a sudden grab for Chiun's ankle. Remo's immediate thought was Oh, shit!

To an untrained eye, the scene in front of the goalpost appeared to suddenly blur, as if obscured by heat waves rising from the earth. To an untrained eye, it appeared that two figures maintained their relative positions. As a student of Sinanju, Remo saw things much differently. He saw the huge man lifted by the small one, whirled around his head like an orange-and-black pillow, then bounced on the turf. Lifted, whirled, bounced. Five times. Boing. Boing. And when the bouncing stopped, the two were in exactly the same spot as when they had started.

Remo knew without taking a pulse that the football player was dead. Chiun stood in the center of a churned-up ring of sod. It looked like the turf had endured a twelve-play goal-line stand.

"Did you have to kill him?" Remo said.

"Stupid question. I wouldn't have killed him if I didn't have to."

"We needed information from him."

"His mind was confused. He couldn't answer even the simplest of questions. The chaos inside him was too strong."

"You couldn't have just knocked him out?"

"I did him a favor."

"Yeah, maybe. But where does that leave us?"

"Examine his backside."

"What?"

"Pull down his pants and you will find the source of his animal nature."

"Yeah, right..."

"It is a small plastic patch on his right buttock."

When Remo looked more closely, he could see the outline of the square through the tightly stretched Lycra fabric. "What is it?"

"It is where the bad smell begins."

"No doubt. But it has something to do with the drug, too?"

"Of course."

As Remo struggled to draw down the football player's skintight pants, he muttered, "God, I hope this little scene doesn't make 'Peephole USA.'"

He exposed Boomtower's behind and a two-by-two-inch patch of adhesive. Remo recognized it as a time-release drug-delivery system, like that used for nicotine.

When Chiun reached down to peel off the patch with the tip of a long fingernail, Remo brushed his hand away. "No, don't touch it!" he exclaimed. "If you get some of the active ingredient on your fingertip, it'll go straight into your bloodstream."

"Why do you shudder so violently?" Chiun asked him. "Is it because of your concern for my safety?"

"What else?" Remo said. And he forced from his mind the image of a five-hundred-pound, five-foot-nothing Chiun running amok in Los Angeles.

Chapter 13

When the homicide unit of the Hollywood police rang the doorbell of Puma and Chiz Graham's palatial mansion, it was answered not by a uniformed maid or butler, but by a very small man in a three-piece pin-striped suit.

"Good morning, Detectives," Jimmy Koch-Roche said.

The lead investigator, a burly man with a shock of snow white hair, produced two folded documents from inside his plaid sports jacket. "We have a warrant to search these premises, Jimmy," he said. "And a warrant for the arrest of one Puma Lee, also known as Harriet Louisa Smootz, on a charge of first-degree murder in the death last night of the actress Vindaloo."

Koch-Roche examined the papers, then handed them back to the officer. "All properly done, Detective Hylander," he said. "My client is prepared to surrender herself into your custody at this time. I caution you that she will make no statement to you outside my presence. And as to your search of the premises, I would like to remind you that this house contains numerous priceless works of art and irreplaceable antiques. Please instruct your forensics people to be very careful."

The tiny lawyer led the officers into the mansion's dizzying foyer, which soared three stories high to a domed greenhouse ceiling, and was quite warm and humid. The white marble floor and walls were lined with tiers of exotic plants. Among the green-and-yellow-and-pink-striped leaves, rare orchids hung from chunks of bark in the perpetual drizzle of an automatic watering system. Koi fish spattered with color swam in the dark blue garden pool.

"Your high-profile clients seem to be having a run of bad luck," Detective Hylander said as they filed into the mansion proper. "Sort of a mini-crime wave, in fact. This is the third time in less than twenty-four hours that we've had one of your people in on murder charges."

"Nothing I can't handle," Koch-Roche assured him.

Puma Lee and her husband rose from the Art Deco love seat as their lawyer and the police entourage entered the overfurnished but vast living room. It looked more like an art gallery or antique showroom than a place where people actually lived. Puma was dressed in stark contrast to her public image. Instead of revealing as much of her astounding figure as possible, she concealed it under a very conservative, past-knee- length beige silk suit. Chiz wore one of the extrabaggy shirt-and-pants outfits that had previously hidden his between-picture flab. The attempt to conceal their extreme muscular development, urged by their legal counsel, was only partially successful. If one looked closely, one could see the outlines of Puma's massive quads under the silk skirt, and Chiz's baggy Hawaiian shirt couldn't conceal the breadth of the shoulders and depth of the chest it hung from.

Detective Hylander read the movie star her Miranda rights, then asked her if she'd care to make a statement. It was all polite and routine.

Jimmy Koch-Roche replied for her. "No, she wouldn't care to make a statement," he said. "On advice of counsel."

"Then I guess it's time for a trip down to the station," Hylander said.

Puma glanced down at her attorney, who nodded in agreement. From the love seat, she picked up a large leather purse, which matched the color of the suit. The purse was so overpacked its sides bulged out.

"Better leave that here, ma'am," Hylander said, reaching for the shoulder strap.

For an instant, the eyes of the cop and the movie star met. And locked. Hylander froze like a rabbit caught in high beams. The tendons in Puma's neck twitched as her gaze held him fast.

Jimmy Koch-Roche interceded at once. "It's okay, Puma," he assured her, lightly touching the back of her hand. "You won't need the purse. If you take it, it will only prolong the booking procedure. Everything that's in there will have to be logged with the police clerk. And we want to get you out on bond as quickly as possible."

Knowing that its weight in junk food would have dropped him to his knees, the attorney let Chiz take the purse from her.

"Jimmy and I will follow you over there," Chiz told his wife as the police led her away. "Don't worry. We'll bring whatever you need."

After they'd gone, Chiz slumped back down on the love seat and said, "What a fucking mess!" Then he glowered at the tiny lawyer. "And it's all your fault."

"Wait a minute," Koch-Roche protested. "Didn't I warn you that the drug was experimental? I told you up front that there might be side effects. I sure as hell didn't put a gun to your heads and make you take it."

"So says the pusher man."

"Look," Koch-Roche snapped back, "strip the patch off your ass right now. Give me the rest of the supply you have. And I'll refund your money. I'll write the check right now."

Chiz considered this, then he dry-swallowed. "I'd go back to the way I was?"

"Fat and forty."

"Thirty-six!"

"Whatever. It's your choice. I gave the same option to your wife a few hours ago and, as you know, she turned me down flat. What do you say, Chiz? Wanna give up the new hard body?"

Chiz pulled at his world-renowned chin and grimaced. After a moment, he said, "Can you get her off the murder charge?"

"Piece of cake. And I can do it for under ten million."

"But her handprints are all over the crime scene!"

Koch-Roche tut-tutted his client. "This is the law, Chiz. Facts mean nothing. It's all in the interpretation. The right interpretation. I'll bring in a dozen expert forensic witnesses who will testify that Puma left those prints while struggling with the real assailant, who was in the process of ripping Vindaloo apart. I'll show that the prosecution's blood evidence came as the result of a valiant but failed attempt by Puma Lee to save her colleague's life. By the time I'm done talking, the mayor will award her a certificate of heroism. Maybe the city will even put up a statue."

"So there's really nothing to worry about?"

"What do you mean?"

"No reason to stop taking the drug."

"Like I said, that's completely up to you. A personal decision. If you don't want it, I'll buy it back. Believe me, there are plenty of others standing in line to get their hands on it."

"No, I'm talking about what's happened to Puma. The Venom Club and Vindaloo. I mean, what if I go berserk like that? What if I happen to kill somebody?"

Koch-Roche shrugged his narrow shoulders. "As far as legal consequences go, as long as you've got the bread to pay for a proper defense, conducted by yours truly, there won't be any."

Chapter 14

Before he drove out of the mansion's eight-car garage, Chiz Graham removed the convertible top of his custom-made, cream-colored Excalibur sports car. Jimmy Koch-Roche had suggested that he take his own wheels to the police station and drive Puma home personally. He'd also suggested that Chiz put the top down so the army of waiting photographers could record the happy event in its entirety. In the hope of coloring the water for potential future jurors, Koch-Roche wanted a public display of confidence from Chiz. Strong, committed husband supports wife's innocence. The usual drill.

Chiz made good time on the freeway. As he took the exit nearest to the station house and pulled onto the city streets, he realized that he was going to arrive a few minutes ahead of schedule. Because he was starting to get a bit hungry himself, and he figured that Puma would be famished after her ordeal, he decided to make a brief stop at a minimart to pick up some tasty snacks for the return trip.

He drove past the double row of gas pumps and parked out front of the SpeeDee Mart. When he walked through the automatic doors in his skinny, blue-tinted, wraparound sunglasses, no one recognized him. The store clerk, a rail-thin Pakistani, was preoccupied. From his station behind the cash register, he was nervously checking the antitheft mirrors along the back wall, trying to keep track of a half-dozen teenage shoppers. The do-rag sporting lowriders, ball caps backward, were gathered over by the dairy case, apparently comparing prices on whipping-cream aerosols. The clerk was trying to see if they were slipping the cans into their enormously baggy clothing.

A few yards farther down the wall, a trio of overweight Hollywood housewives in tentlike caftans was sucking down sixty-four-ounce, sugar-free, all-you-can-drink sodas while making moon eyes at the icecream case. Their facial expressions as they continued to sip their diet sodas all said the same thing: Well, maybe just one DoveBar, because I've been so good.

The SpeeDee Mart's only other customer, a salesrep type in a short-sleeved dress shirt, pocket protector and wide tie, was over by the coffee corner, tapping steaming brown fluid from a stainless-steel urn marked Irish Mint Mocha into a very large thermos cup.

Chiz took a wheeled cart and started down the narrow aisles. He was drawn at once to the hot-food section by its wonderful aroma. Under warming lights was a tray of chicken tidbits, deep-fried to golden perfection. The grease in the bottom of the pan remained liquid from the heat. Chiz dumped the entire tray of Gobs O' Chicken into a pair of foam containers, pouring the grease over the top like it was Sauce Bernaise.

He left one container open on the cart's little raised shelf and began to eat as he shopped. As he quickly discovered, the snack food contained a special surprise. Every time he crunched down on a gob of chicken, a squirt of warm grease was released from within. There was hardly any meat inside the nuggets-a minuscule speck of flesh surrounded by seasoned batter and fat.

Delightful.

He filled his mouth, packing his cheeks with them. SpeeDee Mart's other warm treats were less appealing to him because of their disappointing fat content. Hot dogs on rotisserie spits. Hamburgers overcooked by hours under the warming lights. There was no coating to hold in the succulent grease. And to make matters worse, the display units had screened floors that allowed the dripping fat to fall out of sight, and out of reach, into collectors somewhere below the counter.

As Chiz started in on the second quart of chicken gobs, he was no longer thinking about Puma wasting away in a jail cell. With a luxuriant glow in his expanding muscles, he was thinking about dessert.

About rows and rows of half gallons of full-fat ice cream waiting for him in the dairy case.

"Mister sir," said a reedy voice at his elbow. "No. No. You no can do that...."

Chiz looked around at the SpeeDee Mart clerk, who was in a most agitated state. The man was literally hopping from one entry-level jogging shoe to the other. The plastic name tag pinned to his red-and-white-striped shirt pocket said Hi! I'm Bapu.

"I weigh chiggen before you eat," protested Bapu. The movie star tipped his skinny sunglasses down his nose. "Do you know who I am?" he demanded, reaching for another gob.

Evidently not.

The clerk blinked at him, then, seeing another golden crusty nugget vanish between the big man's shiny lips, he moaned. "Oh, mercy me. You will stop, please. You will stop now, mister."

"Where do you keep the butter?" Chiz asked him as he licked the inside of the foam container.

Bapu answered automatically, "Aisle three, dairy case." Then, snapping out of robot-clerk mode, he clutched his curly mop of hair in both hands and said, "Oh, my, oh, my, you've eaten them all! What am I to do?"

Chiz rolled his cart toward the back of the store. There was considerable congestion around the wall of glass cases at the rear. The teenagers were huddled around the whipped cream and cottage cheese and had the refrigerator door standing open. The three fat women were jammed elbow to elbow as they comparison-shopped the quart prices of Ben nd Haagen-Dazs. The sales rep was examining the rows of shrink-wrapped, maxi breakfast burritos while sipping at his steaming mug of Irish Mint Mocha.

Over the infectiously cheery Muzak-"Hey, Little Cobra" as performed by the Vienna Philharmonic-came the sound of angry reptiles.

A chorus of hissing.

And the unmistakable smell of aerosolized animal fat.

If the teenagers had had the price of a huff between them, everything might have turned out differently. Chiz might have filled his cart, paid his bill and left for the police station without incident. But as it was, imminent disaster rode the minimart's air-conditioned air.

Chiz locked on to the source of the sweet and creamy aroma.

"What are you doing?" Bapu cried as, peering around Chiz's bulk, he saw the teens huddled around the discharging canisters. Whipped cream was all over their faces, the glass door, the floor. "Oh, please, please, let me by!" he told Chiz.

The clerk made the mistake of not only touching the movie star, but of trying to get between him and the mounds of delightful white fluff. To all outward appearances, Bapu was trying to beat him to it.

Without taking his eyes off the huff party, Chiz reached out casually and snatched hold of Bapu's neck. His hand completely encircled it. And when Chiz squeezed, it made the clerk's eyes bug out.

Seeing what was happening, the sales rep dropped his coffee mug and tried to back away. He bumped into the teenagers and the fat ladies, who completely blocked any path of quick retreat.

With a seemingly effortless flip of the wrist, Chiz both snapped Bapu's neck and flipped him in an arc over aisles three and four. Out of sight, he landed with a soft thud on the floor.

The sales rep opened and closed his mouth, but no sound came out. He looked to the other customers for help, but they were all too focused on what they were doing to pay attention.

On the other side of the teens, one of the fat ladies hefted a quart of Haagen-Dazs and, peering through granny glasses on a beaded cord, said, "Well, the label says the flavor is the same, but how do we know the taste is the same?"

Another woman held a quart of Ben and was likewise reading the ingredients. She shook her head. "I can't tell them apart from this," she complained.

The third woman took a quick look over her shoulder. Not seeing the clerk, she turned back to her friends. "There's only one way to find out," she said, grabbing for the lids.

The fresh scent of fat set Chiz to drooling. Profusely. Great ropy strands of saliva swayed from his chin. His breathing became short and ragged. Whatever the smell was coming from, he wanted it.

All.

The movie star reared back his cart, then rammed the front of it into the sales rep's shins, making him fall forward into the basket. Before the guy could cry out, Chiz had him by the throat. He likewise snapped the man's neck and sent him flying, out of sight, over the rows of shelves.

His muscles popping from the two quarts of gobs he'd just consumed, Chiz rammed the front of his cart hard into the mass of teens.

"Hey, butt-fuck!" said one in a knit cap and superbaggy plaid shirt. "Watch it! You're messing with our high." He had liquid white stuff all down his shirtfront.

Chiz backhanded him against the refrigerator case, driving his head and shoulders through the glass door. The teen bounced off the steel racks inside and flopped forward over the side of the cart. Chiz dumped his limp form off onto the floor.

The other five kids gawked at him, red eyed, foam nosed, propellant brained. As they did so, they lowered their Reddi Wip cans.

The fragrance was maddening. Fat without substance.

It was worthless to Chiz, and that infuriated him.

The movie star couldn't have stopped himself even if he'd wanted to. He jerked the steel cart over his head and brought it crashing down on the petrified youths. They had nowhere to run. Bellowing his rage, Chiz used the cart like a hammer to pound the huffers into the black-and-white acrylic tile. Brains and blood flew in all directions as the cart crashed into them repeatedly.

The three ladies, their granny glasses and caftans spattered with gore, just stood there, clutching the opened ice-cream containers to their bosoms. Each of them had an ice-cream finger and mustache.

Now, there was fat as fat was meant to be. An entire wall of it.

Like a knacker man in a slaughterhouse, Chiz brought his balled fist down on the closest woman's head. She dropped in the aisle, instantly dead. The other two suddenly found their feet and scooted around the corner, heading for the SpeeDee Mart's front exit.

Chiz paid them no mind. He filled his arms with half gallons of ice cream and moved out of the spray of carnage to enjoy his little feast.

When the police found him fifteen minutes later, he was sitting on the floor in the middle of aisle two, surrounded by a litter of empty Haagen-Dazs containers, eating almond-mocha fudge with his left hand and Ding Dongs with his right.

Chapter 15

In order to prepare himself for yet another press conference, Jimmy Koch-Roche had retreated to the relative solitude of the Malibu sheriff's substation men's room. Facing the washbasin counter's long mirror, but unable to see his reflection because the top of his head was two feet below its lower edge, he puffed out his chest and recited sotto voce, "The only crime of Senator Lud is that he was too much of a manly stud." Words echoed in a jumble in the tiled room.

The attorney sighed and shook his head. It wouldn't do. Too many syllables. If you wanted the media to pick up on a quote, it had to be both short and memorable. Once again, he referred to his well-thumbed rhyming dictionary.

After a moment of reflection, he tried again, this time opting for a slightly different vein. Picking up the tripod-tipped cane, a theatrical prop intended for his client, Koch-Roche gestured forcefully in the air. "Ninety years is too far gone, to hump your sweetie to the great beyond."

Ugh, Koch-Roche thought as his own doggerel resounded around him. That one wouldn't work, either. Not only was it too long, but it focused attention in a highly dangerous area. An area the attorney wanted at all costs to skirt. It would be much better, he decided, to play down the rough sex and work on the love angle. More words rhymed with love than sex, anyway.

He returned to his dictionary. He was still puzzling over the problem minutes later when a deputy sheriff stuck his head in the men's-room door. "Your client is being released from custody now, Jimmy," the officer said. "The animals are waiting for you out front."

Koch-Roche put away his rhyming dictionary. The senator would get no snappy verse at this juncture. As the attorney had learned the hard way, a bit of poorly constructed rhyme could do more damage to a case than a defendant's fingerprint on a murder weapon. Better to present no rhyme at all, even though the media crowd outside would be expecting it. And if Koch-Roche remained stumped for a way to put a poetical spin on the senator's legal position in the days ahead, he knew he could always call in a ghostwriter or two. The coffee-shop counters of Los Angeles were packed with out-of-work hacks.

Koch-Roche pulled out a small hand mirror and in its reflection smoothed down the sides of his hair. Then he checked his teeth for bits of spinach from his lunchtime salad.

"Jesus, Jimmy, don't you ever get tired of the goddamned circus?" the deputy asked him.

"Why would I?"

"Because it's always the same show."

"In case you hadn't noticed, Deputy," Koch-Roche explained as he put away his mirror, "I'm not the one shoveling up the shit out there. I'm the fucking elephant."

With that, the attorney left the bathroom and joined the newly freed Senator Baculum in the sheriff's substation hallway. Even Koch-Roche, who had witnessed the other recent miracles wrought by Family Fing Pharmaceuticals, was still amazed at the change the drug had made in the decrepit old man. Before taking WHE, Lud had been so stooped over that he and his lawyer had been almost the same height. Now he towered above his counsel. Koch-Roche found himself staring at the senator's jawline. Because there were no major muscle groups in the face to expand and fill out the voluminous, loose skin, as had happened all over the rest of his body, his head from the wattle line up still appeared very much ninety-plus years old.

Bizarre.

As Koch-Roche had requested, the senator was wearing a pair of blue silk pajamas and matching robe. The loose-fitting garments helped to conceal the enormity of his chest, arms and legs. Also adding to the sick-room atmosphere was the portable oxygen tank on wheels. A white-uniformed male nurse pushed the tank, which was connected by a clear plastic line to Lud's nostrils, and another male nurse carried an emergency medical case with a big red cross on the side.

"Remember, Lud," Koch-Roche said, "hunch over and wheeze for the cameras. And don't answer any questions. I'll do all the talking."

"I'm getting hungry again," the old man said. It was a warning, not a request.

"I have everything waiting for you in the ambulance," the attorney assured him. "We'll be out of here in two shakes, but for the sake of your defense we need some positive coverage to counter the press the prosecution has been getting about the crime scene. This is very important to our case." Koch-Roche handed his client the tripod cane.

The senator glowered down at the little man in the three-piece suit, but he accepted the walking stick. Then he let his back droop and his shoulders sag. The spring in his step faded, and as he moved, he shuffled along in his slippered feet.

"The mouth, Lud. Don't forget the mouth...." Senator Baculum let his mouth hang open.

Two deputies opened the substation's front doors, and the male nurses helped Koch-Roche's client through them. The senator immediately faltered for the cameras and was helped by his attendants into the waiting wheelchair. This was greeted by volleys of exploding flashbulbs and shouted questions from re porters. Raising his little arms for calm and order, Jimmy Koch-Roche stepped forward and faced the press.

Chapter 16

"This is deja vu all over again," Remo groused as, from the back of the throng of press types, he watched the shrimpboat lawyer step up to the very low, growing bush of taped-together microphones. Behind Koch-Roche, with a burly nurse at each elbow, Senator Ludlow Baculum sat slumped in a wheelchair, his hands on his knees.

A very strange looking ninety-plus-year-old, Remo thought. Not the least bit shrunken and frail, even though he was severely bent over in the chair. In particular, Remo was struck by the way Baculum filled out his silk jammies and robe. Even though he was seated, the legs stretching out the pj's were most impressive. Legs were always the first to go with advancing age, yet the senator's apparently hadn't gone anywhere-except huge.

"He's the same age as you," Remo said to Chiun. "Check the size of the calves on him."

"He has the stink," the Master announced, crinkling up his nose.

Then the miniature barrister spoke into the clustered mikes, his amplified voice booming over and hushing the restless crowd.

"I'm Jimmy Koch-Roche and I'm Senator Baculum's attorney," he began. "I'll be answering any and all questions for him today." The lawyer half turned to his client. "As you can see, the senator is in no condition to respond himself."

"Why did he kill poor Bambi?" shouted a reporter. His words hung in the air for a second, then the rest of the press took up the cry.

Koch-Roche waved his little arms. "Wait just a damned minute now! I'm going to set some ground rules. I won't answer stupid questions like that one. Every one of you knows that just because the sheriff arrested my client doesn't mean he did anything criminal."

Another reporter hollered, "Rumor out here is, Lud was found by the sheriff naked and covered head to foot in her blood."

"You should know by now I don't comment on unsubstantiated allegations like that."

Which only invited a shouted follow-up from the other side of the crowd. "Was rough sex involved in Bambi's death?"

The attorney pointed at his stoop-shouldered client once more. "For Pete's sake, all of you, stop mouthbreathing and take a look at the poor man. He's nearly a hundred years old. What kind of sex, rough or otherwise, do you think he's capable of?"

"Does that mean you're going to use the 'hero defense' again?"

Before the attorney could reply, another reporter restated the question. "Are you claiming that Lud tried to save Bambi from an intruder on their honeymoon?"

Koch-Roche shook his head. "I can't comment on what my strategy will be. Our time to talk is running out. The senator is clearly exhausted by his ordeal. I'll take one more question."

It was a doozy.

"If Lud is cleared of all charges," cried a woman wearing a network blazer, "does he plan to marry again?"

"As you can see, Senator Baculum is deeply grieved by his sudden and tragic loss. I can assure you he is not thinking about the future at this time. Thank you and have a good day."

A phalanx of uniformed sheriff's deputies parted the mob so Koch-Roche, his wheelchair-bound client and his attendants could reach the waiting ambulance.

Because Remo and Chiun stood well back, at the rear of the crowd, they were able to move quickly around its outer fringe and get very close to the ambulance's back doors. Not close enough to strike, but close enough to get a good look at the operation. It took both attendants and two deputies to lift the senator and his wheelchair inside. As they set his chair down, Remo got a glimpse of the ambulance's interior. Bags of burgers, literally dozens and dozens of them, were lined up on the floor. The reek of hot, semirancid animal fat coming from them made Remo's throat constrict and his stomach muscles clench.

As the ambulance attendants reached for the rear doors, the senator twisted around in his wheelchair. He already had one of the bags torn open and with both hands was mashing a greasy, four-inch-thick sandwich into his mouth. His eyes were slitted with pleasure. Drool and escaping grease glistened all down his chin and neck. Then the doors slammed closed.

With sirens blaring, the ambulance sped away. It had a three-cruiser escort.

"Come on, Little Father," Remo said, "we've got to follow him."

Because of the ambulance's spinning lights and wailing sirens, it wasn't in theory a hard thing to do. The problem was, every other member of the crowd had the same idea. All the reporters and their crews dashed for their cars and satellite-dished minivans. And in a matter of seconds, Pacific Coast Highway was like the Daytona 500 in pursuit of the speeding ambulance. The best Remo could do with the underpowered rental car was maintain position dead in the middle of the pack.

The ambulance turned onto the Santa Monica Freeway, and in short order led the honking, swerving entourage to the emergency entrance of Marshall Connors Memorial Hospital.

Immediately, some of the media vehicles turned off for the hospital's parking area. Other drivers pulled up onto the sidewalk and highballed it across the lawn for the emergency entrance. Amazingly, those daring souls skidded their vehicles to a stop without colliding with each other or with any of the madly scattering pedestrians. The car and van doors flew open, disgorging reporters and video cameramen, who raced to get a picture of the senator as he was carried from the ambulance.

"I'd better find a place to park," Remo said.

"No, wait," Chiun commanded. "All is not as it appears."

"Don't tell me. You're getting a news flash from the satellite dish in your head?"

Chiun clucked his tongue. "If your senses were not so impaired, you too would know that the man we seek is at this moment leaving by the building's side exit."

"And how would you know that?"

The Master reached a slender hand out the open passenger window and wafted the air to his flared nostrils. "Go that way," he ordered, pointing with a long finger. "And hurry!"

Remo leaned on his horn and turned right, forcing his way between the jam of backed-up media cars. He drove over the landscaped concrete island, onto the hospital front lawn and then around the side of the hospital. When he came to the wide red-brick entry walkway he turned again, this time for the street.

"What car did he get in?" Remo demanded. "What the hell am I supposed to be looking for?"

Chiun stuck his head out the window and, his scraggly beard flapping in the breeze, shut his eyes and took a deep, slow breath. "That way!"

Remo bounced over the curb and back onto the road, fishtailing around oncoming traffic.

"Are we getting closer?" he asked.

Chiun sampled the air. Then he opened his eyes and pointed again. "That one!" he exclaimed. "The stinker is in that one!"

The vehicle the Master had identified was a stretch limo, navy blue, with a silver TV antenna on the roof. "Gee, I wonder who the limo belongs to?" Remo said as he closed the gap between the cars.

The limousine's personalized California license plate read MY-T-MAUS.

Even though Remo sang a bar or two of the theme song for him-"Here I am to save the day!"-Chiun didn't get it. The cartoon show had been off the air for decades before the Master had picked up his nasty TV habit.

The limo turned onto an on-ramp for Interstate 5 North. After traveling six or seven miles, it exited the freeway and headed into the hills of Brentwood. Once they got onto the city streets, Remo dropped back a bit to avoid being seen.

"You realize we have a much more serious problem on our hands with this one," he said to the Master.

Chiun gave him a deadpan look.

"Ludlow Baculum is a U.S. senator," Remo explained. "His security team will most likely be either federal agents or enforcers from whoever is importing the drug."

"So?"

"So they will not wait to use deadly force against us."

"If they are in the employ of this inhuman monster, then they, too, must die."

"No, Chiun," Remo said. "Listen to me. If the security is federal, it works for the government, not the senator. We work for the government, too. Indirectly. We can't kill those guys for doing their job. And we can't kill the senator, either."

"But Emperor Smith-"

"He wants a live subject to interview. We can't have a repeat of what happened on the football field."

"It was I who captured the stink patch...."

"Yes, but that's all we got." Remo waited for the message to sink in, then he said, "And there's another thing. It's a crime punishable by death to kill a member of the U.S. Senate. If we do that and get caught, even Smith won't be able to save us."

"Do you suggest that I might be the one to lose control?"

Remo grimaced; no way could he miss the outraged tone of the Master's voice. "Lighten up, Chiun," he told his companion. "All I'm saying is, this time let's try and not slaughter the man we're after."

Chiun appeared to sulk, his hands and neck disappearing inside the cuffs and collar of his brocaded robe.

"Sheesh," Remo said.

Ahead, the limo slowed to a crawl as it approached a pair of tall white steel gates on the left. Gates that immediately opened, allowing the limo to enter a treelined asphalt drive. Remo kept on driving. The estate was ringed by a twelve-foot-high perimeter wall, which in turn was topped with tastefully rendered iron spikes. Remo continued on up the hill. As he rolled past the gate, he got a look at the men guarding the entrance. In suits, ties, shades, headsets and carrying mini-Uzis, they were Feds for sure.