Deadly Genes

Destroyer 117: Deadly Genes

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

They held a press conference to introduce it to the world.

It was smaller than the crowd expected, tipping the scales at just over 120 pounds. It was compact, but not in a menacing way. Its designers hadn't been worried about style; they were more concerned with practicality. And of its practicality, all were certain. Their success offered hope, so they said, of feeding all who were hungry in the world. There was only one real question that vexed the assembled press corps.

"Can we pet it?"

Dr. Judith White of BostonBio, Incorporated, smiled. "Of course you can. She's quite docile."

"She?" the Boston television reporter asked.

Dr. White nodded. "This one is female. We have four more like her and three males. Enough for a limited, controlled-breeding population."

The reporter worked for one of the three major Boston stations as the entertainment and human-interest correspondent, which meant that-unlike an anchorwoman-she could afford the extra forty pounds that cushioned her midriff and backside. The added weight had the effect of making her appear both nonthreatening to viewers when she was reviewing movies and hysterically funny any time she went white-water rafting or tried to saddle a horse.

The entertainment correspondent reached out and touched the creature on its broad nose. It blinked. She jumped back, startled.

"It's perfectly harmless," Dr. White assured her. For the brilliant Judith White-the star of BostonBio's genetic-engineering department-affability was a supreme effort. She did not suffer fools gladly.

With the blessing of the higher-ups at BostonBio, Dr. White had called the local TV stations and newspapers in order to introduce what she called a "significant scientific achievement" to the world. She was surprised that of the few TV reporters who showed up to cover the great unveiling at BostonBio, all were human-interest correspondents. The greatest breakthrough in the history of science was being given the same treatment as a boat show or Star Trek convention. The only way it could have been worse was if the stations had sent the Boston weathermen, a collection of freaks so bizarre P. T. Barnum would have balked at exhibiting them.

"Oh, my. It has the saddest eyes I've ever seen," the female reporter said over her shoulder, smiling into her station's camera. She stroked the creature's nose.

"Yes," Dr. White agreed, without emotion. "Remember that its eyes are really irrelevant. Bos camelus-whitus is a laboratory specimen. It is no more a real living thing than any other human creation."

"Bos what?" asked the reporter.

"Camelus-whitus. That's its name."

The animal was in a low, straw-filled pen. Its head jutted out through a wide space in the metal bars. "Someone around here called it a BBQ earlier." The reporter pointed over her shoulder to where a group of white-coated technicians stood.

The name made Dr. White stiffen. She wanted to glare at the men in the lab coats but kept her anger in check.

"An earlier incarnation of the animal was part horse," she admitted through clenched teeth. "That would make it a member of the Equus genus. BostonBio Equus. BBQ. I never much liked that appellation, however. Particularly since it has no relation to the animal standing before you."

The creature let out a low, mournful moan. The reporter moved her hand away in surprise. Hesitantly, she returned to stroking the animal's nose.

"It sounds like it's alive to me." The reporter smiled.

Dr. Judith White closed her eyes. Her patience was wearing thin.

"What you are touching is technically referred to as a transgenic nonhuman eukaryotic animal. Yes, it is alive. But it has been brought to life by artificial means."

She went on to discuss the method by which BostonBio had isolated the DNA strands specific to certain traits in particular animals and piggybacked them on a simple bacteria. This bacteria-which, like all bacteria, furnished the raw material and chemical machinery for its own reproduction-was injected into the fertilized egg of an ordinary dairy cow. The result was a creature that was a combination of several animals.

The reporters paid no attention to the technical lecture being given them by Dr. White. They were all too busy lining up to take turns petting the animal, which regarded each of them with the same dreary pair of wide brown eyes. Occasionally, it would let out another doleful groan. Those television reporters who were petting the creature at these moments nearly squealed in delight, thinking how it would look on the evening's newscast.

One of the reporters turned to Dr. White. It was the same woman who had first touched the Bos camelus-whitus.

"It's adorable," she gushed. "Are you going to market them as pets?"

"I can't believe this." Dr. White exhaled, finally showing her exasperation. "I was careful to breed anything that could remotely be considered 'cute' out of them. The last thing I wanted was for people to think of these things as anything other than food"

The reporter looked at the animal.

It stood about three feet high on short, stumpy legs. The body appeared too long for a creature so low. It looked almost like a huge basset hound. It had a mild hump, somewhat like that of a camel. The coloring was that of a cow-white with patches of black. But the black seemed washed out, as if the animal had stood too long in the sun. Unlikely, for according to Dr. White this creature had never seen the outside of the BostonBio laboratory. The wide head was a cross between cow, camel and something else vaguely sinister.

"It's so ugly it's cute." The reporter grinned.

"It is not cute, you fat imbecile!" Dr. White snapped, finally unable to contain herself. "It is lunch."

The vapid smile faded like burned-off mist. The reporter's change in attitude sent ripples through the crowd. At her cue, the others began consulting their notes.

"BostonBio has had its problems with its genetic research in the past," the female reporter announced brusquely. "How do you respond to the allegations that your little experiment represents a danger to the human race?"

"Does it look dangerous to you?" Dr. White asked, exasperation showing in her flushed cheeks.

"My feelings are irrelevant. Please answer the question."

Dr. White sighed. Taking a deep breath, she began, "There have been precedents established on how to conduct this sort of research. I assure you that everything is perfectly safe. The literature I've passed out to you shows the applications of similar technology. For instance, more than a decade ago, the Supreme Court of the United States permitted the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to grant a patent to a nonnatural, man-made microorganism that eats oil. This bacterium is not unlike the kind we used to create the Bos camelus-whitus. And I am sure you all know of the famous patented lab mouse that is being used in cancer research."

"That doesn't answer my question," said the reporter, who was never this zealous when her station was cramming her puffy white body into a bathing suit for its annual winter "getaway to the Bahamas" segments. Dr. White's outburst had turned her briefly into a real reporter. "Does this have any connection to BostonBio's troubles of two decades ago?"

Dr. White's mouth thinned. This was not the way she had wanted this press conference to go. "I know what you're talking about, and that was another corporate entity of BostonBio. No one even remembers what happened back then. We are talking about research that can save the human race, not harm it, and I am frankly more than a little annoyed that you would dredge up something from the past which could tarnish what we've achieved here. Now."

She pointed past the gathered press to the Bos camelus-whitus. "That animal can go for long periods of time without water. We can thank the camel for that. Thanks to the cow, there is enough milk and meat to feed many. And we can be grateful to the snake for its slow digestive process."

Some of the reporters recoiled, thinking that they might have been touching a relative of the snake. "Yes, the snake," Dr. White repeated, relishing perhaps a bit too much their discomfort. "It can go for as long without food as it can without water. And we can thank above all else the brilliant minds here at BostonBio for bringing everything together in that one, dumpy, pathetic, world-saving animal."

She gestured grandly to the BBQ. As if in response, the animal burped loudly. Eyes hooded morosely, it began languidly chewing its cud.

"One of those brilliant minds being yours, no doubt," the female reporter snipped sarcastically.

"Yes, actually," Dr. White admitted. "This is my project. From start to finish."

The reporter smiled tautly. "Would it cripple your genius ego to learn that this is a nonstory?"

Dr. White seemed stunned. "What?" she demanded.

"Well, this is Boston after all," the reporter replied with confident pride. "We're pretty used to scientific breakthroughs around here. Maybe if you could slap a saddle on that thing and take some kids for BBQ rides around Boston Common, maybe then it'd get on the news. You know, human interest and all. As it is it's all kind of ho-hum."

"Ho-hum?" Dr. White asked, stunned.

"Sorry," the reporter said with a superior smirk. Turning, she began looping the cord from her microphone around her long slender hand.

"You stupid, stupid bitch," Dr. White muttered, head bowed. She said it so softly few people heard the words.

"What?" asked the reporter blandly. She was handing her mike off to her segment producer.

"You stupid, fat, empty-headed, gluttonous cow!"

She moved so quickly no one could stop her. In an instant, Dr. White had sprung across the brief space separating her from the reporter. The gathered press blinked at the image. It was as if she had gone from one spot to the next instantaneously.

One strong hand grabbed the reporter by the throat. The other hand swung around and cuffed the reporter in the side of her softly bleached head.

"Stupid, fat cow!" Dr. Judith White growled. The reporter blinked in uncomprehending pain. A glimmer of fear registered in the back of her eyes as she watched Dr. White bring her hand back once more. The scientist's teeth were bared maniacally. More hands suddenly reached around, grabbing Dr. White, holding her arms, preventing her from striking out again. Men in white lab coats tried to drag her away from the female reporter. Struggling in a blind rage, she seemed to hold them off for a moment. All at once, the fight seemed to drain from her, and she allowed herself to be pulled backward.

The reporter staggered back, as well. She fell into the concerned arms of her segment producer. "You-you're insane!" she stammered, panting. She felt the side of her head where the blow had registered. Her fingers came back smeared red. A trickle of blood seeped from her thin blond hairdo. It rolled down one overly made-up cheek.

"I'm bleeding!" the reporter shrieked. She wheeled on Dr. White. "You crazy animal, you mauled me!"

Dr. White was amid a protective gaggle of her subordinates at BostonBio. Some had released their grip on her; others still held her arms. She took several deep, steadying breaths.

"I'm fine," she assured her lab team. Hesitantly, the last few men let go of her arms.

"You are not fine!" the reporter screamed. "You're a psycho! This is unbelievable!" Her cameraman had found a clean handkerchief. She pressed it to the wound above her left ear.

Dr. White closed her eyes, patient once more. "This is all an unfortunate misunderstanding," she said slowly.

"What, you didn't just attack me?" the reporter screeched. She waved the bloody handkerchief at the rest of the gathered reporters. "You're all witnesses! I'm suing this whack job's psycho ass! I'm suing BostonBio! I'm going to own you, lady!" she yelled at Judith White.

Flinging the handkerchief at the feet of Dr. White, the reporter spun on her heel. She shoved her way past her producer and her cameraman, storming out into the hallway. She was followed by the rest of the Boston press corps.

Dr. White was left alone with her staff. No one said a word for a long time. The men remained around her, seeming to not want to disturb a single molecule in the room lest they stoke the ire of their famously volatile boss. At long last, it was Judith White herself who broke the silence.

"Well, that could have gone better," she commented softly. She pushed through the group of men, walking across the lab to her private office. She closed the door so gently it made the rest of the scientific team jump.

TEN HOURS LATER, Judith White quietly shut off the small television that rested on a shelf in her laboratory office. She tossed the remote control to her desktop, where it landed with a loud plastic clatter.

They'd ripped her to shreds. One of the stations had even gotten the assault on video.

She had not yet heard from her superiors at BostonBio, but it went without saying that they would not endorse her conduct. This was supposed to be the company's shining moment, and her temper had completely overshadowed the great press announcement. It was now unlikely that the networks would pick up the story. And even if they did, the story would feature a sensationalized look at Dr. Judith White herself and not her magnificent Bos camelus-whitus.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Judith muttered. The lab beyond was dark and empty. No one heard her words of self-recrimination.

Judith reached to her waist. She found a set of keys on a retractable cord. Pulling one free of the rest, she inserted it into the lock of a side desk drawer.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she repeated as she pulled the drawer open. She let the keys jangle back up to her waist. They sounded like clattering dog tags.

Reaching into the drawer, she pulled out a black plastic box with both hands, resting it reverently on her desk blotter.

She lifted the lid, revealing a soft foam interior. It was a drab gray and fashioned in the uneven eggcarton design. A series of vials rested in the box.

Judith removed one of the vials. It had a waxy corking substance in one end. The brown-tinged liquid in the vial appeared to be gelatinous.

With her free hand, she found a plastic bag containing an ordinary syringe inside the same drawer the box had been stored in. Tearing open the plastic with her teeth, she thrust the business end of the needle through the cork on the vial. She drew the viscous substance into the syringe.

Redepositing the half-empty vial inside the case, Judith rolled up the sleeve of her lab coat. She found a nice, fat blue vein at the crook of her arm and without a second's hesitation thrust the needle into it.

She depressed the stopper and watched carefully as every last drop of the gelatin substance disappeared from the clear syringe.

Quickly, Dr. White pulled the needle loose, dropping it inside the case. She flipped the lid closed and sat back in her chair, waiting for blissful nirvana.

The rush hit more quickly this time than last. She shivered from the sudden cold. Her arms drew up tightly beside her body in spastic reaction. Everything-her eyes, her hair, her toenails--everything trembled wildly as the frigid sensation passed through her system like a melting glacier.

She could feel it. Could feel the raw sensation of fresh, surging power. The special treatments she had been giving herself made her feel invincible.

Judith White knew that she was almost there. She had more than touched the plain; she had crossed it. It was only a matter of stabilizing what she now felt. And she knew that moment was almost here.

She never wanted to come down. A crash.

Sudden. Shocking.

Not from the euphoria she now felt. The noise was real. Out beyond the lab.

Someone complaining. Softly. The sound of rapid footsteps on shattered glass.

"Not now," Judith murmured to herself. She wasn't ready.

More voices. Hushed, nervous.

She got to her feet. She had to steady herself against her desk as she made her way around to the other side. It was a challenge to stay upright as she staggered across the space between desk and door.

Her head was reeling. The voices seemed far away.

No. Close up.

She pulled open the door.

There was a narrow room off the rear of the main laboratory. It was supposed to be an extrawide corridor and storage area, and connected to another laboratory. Dr. White's team had redesigned the long chamber to house the BBQs. In her hallucinatory haze, Judith could see a faint amber strip of light coming from beneath the closed door to this room. "Quiet, " a hushed voice insisted.

"There's no one here," another rasped.

"Just be quiet, anyway," ordered the first. "Here, start with the ones nearest the door."

Dr. White heard the distinct, dejected lowing of the BBQs.

Not now, she thought. I'm not ready for this. Holding on to metal lab stools and desks, she made her way across the laboratory to the closed door. The single BBQ that had been brought into the lab for the press was still in its pen. The animal blinked at Dr. White as the scientist passed by, crawling hand over hand along the small fence that held the sad-eyed creature in place.

It seemed to take forever, but she finally made it to the door.

There were more than the original two voices by now. She could hear several more inside, grunting and swearing.

Judith fumbled for the doorknob. A distant, lucid part of her mind was surprised when she managed to catch it on the first try. She flung the door open wide.

The startled eyes that looked out at her from the long corridor did not belong to the BBQs.

There were a dozen of them. They wore skintight black mime leotards. Black gloves and black sneakers covered their hands and feet. Their heads were shielded by solid black ski masks. White eyes stared out through rough triangular holes in the masks.

The black-clad figures had been busy.

Most of the BBQs were gone. The last two creatures were even now being herded down the hall to the adjoining lab.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Judith demanded. Her voice was a guttural snarl. Through her blurry, surreal vision, Dr. White could see that one of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass in the next room had been shattered. More figures in black hefted a BBQ out the broken window. There was a fire escape beyond.

The figures nearby seemed paralyzed for a moment.

Judith staggered into the room.

If the injection would only clear... It didn't take long. Once it did, she'd be able to...

"I'll take care of her," snapped a gruff female voice.

One of the leotard-clad figures ran over to Dr. White. Judith held up one hand in an odd defensive posture. Her back arched visibly as she readied for the attack.

But the injection she had given herself was just too strong. Disoriented, she swung down at her attacker's head.

And missed.

She didn't get a second chance.

Something appeared in the hand of the dark figure. A flashlight. The beam played wildly across the wall as the intruder's arm swept up and then down viciously across the side of the scientist's head.

The pain was sharp and bright. It exploded from around the point of impact, racing through her already numb brain.

Judith dropped to all fours on the cold floor. Weakly, she tried to push herself up. No good. She collapsed over onto her side.

A wave of blackness bled through her mind.

"There's another one in here!" she heard the woman who had struck her exclaim. The voice echoed.

Judith's distorted vision caught a final glimpse of black sneakers scuffing past her and into the main lab. They seemed fuzzy, far off.

There was a final, plaintive moan from the last BBQ.

Then a night shroud of warm oblivion swept in. The wave of intense darkness engulfed Dr. Judith White.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he was explaining to the inmate that he had just masterminded a prison break. It was a tough sell, considering they were sharing a tiny solitary-confinement cell in the Supermax maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado.

"What are you talking about?" Todd Grautski blinked, his voice thick with sleep. He was a gaunt man with a face that appeared to have been tied in a knot at one time and never completely unloosened. Wild eyes darted beneath a mop of uncombed, graying hair. His gray beard was like an unkempt ostrich nest.

It was dark in the small cell. A silvery pool of dull light spilled in through a barred panel in the door of the cell. The closed door.

The solemn red numbers on the cell's new digital clock told Todd Grautski it was after midnight. Grautski was suspicious of the clock, just as he was of all things mechanical. Unfortunately, the timepiece was not his.

"Keep your voice down," Remo whispered. He held a finger up to his lips. In the darkness, his deepset dark eyes gave him the appearance of a shushing skull.

Remo was sitting on the edge of Grautski's bunk. The inmate tugged his blanket toward his chin as he sat up.

"What are you doing in here?" Grautski asked fearfully. His voice was stronger now that he was more awake.

Remo rolled his eyes. "I told you," he said, even more quietly than before. "I just engineered a prison break."

"So what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be outside?"

"Ohh," Remo said with a smile. "Now I understand the source of your confusion. You don't get it. I didn't break out. I broke in."

Grautski looked at the door. Still closed. There was no evidence that it had been opened since it had been locked with a chillingly mechanical click more than four hours before. However, there was still the vexing problem of the thin young man sitting on his bed. He wasn't a ghost; therefore he was real. He must have gotten in somehow.

Grautski wasn't sure if he should call a guard. "Don't call a guard," Remo suggested, as if he had read Todd Grautski's mind. "They only get in the way. We want this to be neat, don't we?"

"Want what to be neat?" Grautski asked. He pulled the covers more tightly to his chin, as if the wool might protect him. There were a lot of people who wanted Todd Grautski dead. He had a sudden sinking feeling that his skull-headed visitor might be one of them.

The stranger's reply surprised him. "Our escape, silly," Remo said.

"You're getting me out?" Grautski asked doubtfully. "Thanks but no thanks. I'll take my chances on appeal." Fearful of his guest, he pulled the blankets over his head.

"Don't you want to be free?" Remo asked Todd Grautski's trembling bedcovers.

"Go away," came the muffled reply.

"Don't you want to soar like an eagle over these prison walls?" Remo gestured grandly to the wall of the solitary-confinement cell. It was plastered with magazine pictures of naked women. He paused, studying the photographic images. "You know, when I was in prison they didn't allow dirty pictures," he commented.

"They're not mine," Grautski mumbled.

"They mine," interjected a voice behind Remo. Remo had been aware of the second inmate since before he'd even entered the cell. But the man had been snoring softly until now. Remo turned to the speaker.

The face peering from the adjacent bunk was as black as the darkest cell shadows. Bloodshot white eyes stared at Remo.

"Do you mind?" Remo asked, irked. "This is a private prison break."

"You gettin' out?" the other inmate growled. He glanced at the closed door.

"No!" Todd Grautski mumbled through his blanket.

"Yes," said Remo.

"I comin', too," the other prisoner insisted.

"No," Remo said.

"Yes," Grautski stressed. "You can go instead of me. And take your damn soul-stealing clock with you."

The second convict sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his bunk. "Don't mind him," he said, waving dismissively at the Todd Grautski-shaped mound of blankets. "He don't like any o' that technology stuff. You realize that is the one and only Collablaster you talkin' to?"

A flicker of something dark and violent passed across Remo's stern features. "I was aware of that," he said icily.

The second prisoner nodded energetically. "They call him the Collablaster 'cause he mail all kinds of dumb-ass bombs to all kinds of college types. Twenty years an' he only killed three guys."

"Allegedly," the Grautski blanket squeaked.

"I did more than that in one day," the inmate boasted.

At first, Remo had been irritated by the man's interruption. But as the other convict continued to speak, something familiar about him tweaked the back of Remo's consciousness.

"Do I know you?" he asked, eyes narrowed.

"Kershaw Ferngard," the prisoner announced proudly. "I in here for shootin' up a railroad car full of white folks. Allegedly," he added quickly. He winked knowingly.

Remo nodded. It seemed like an eternity ago, but he remembered the images of Ferngard on TV. His lawyers had attempted to use a "black rage" defense, his racial anger thus excusing him for the six people he'd killed and the other nineteen he had injured in his shooting rampage on the Long Island Railroad. Like Todd Grautski, Ferngard had dismissed his lawyers, opting to represent himself.

"What are you doing here?" Remo asked. "This is supposed to be solitary confinement."

"They paintin' my cell. I didn't like the color. Damn racist prison overcrowding." Ferngard hopped to the floor. "If we gettin' outta here, I needs my toofbrush."

"I'm not going anywhere," Todd Grautski's muffled voice insisted.

"Don't listen to Mr. Anti-Technoholic," Ferngard instructed Remo. He was fumbling in the medicine chest. "He be afraid ever since I plug my clock in this mornin'. When I turn on my razor, it took two guards wit mop handles to pull him out from under his bunk."

Ferngard turned. A bright pink toothbrush was clamped in his mitt. The handle was shaped like Porky Pig. He clicked the business end between his molars. "Ready," he mumbled.

Remo looked from the eager face of Kershaw Ferngard to the quivering pile of wool that hid the infamous Collablaster. Remo was only here for Todd Grautski, but opportunities like this one rarely knocked.

Under the blanket, even though he was in his underwear, Grautski was beginning to sweat. It had gotten too quiet all of a sudden. He didn't like the sense of claustrophobia he got beneath the bedcovers. Solitary was one thing. He could handle that. He'd spent years alone in a cabin in rural Montana with nothing to keep him company save a battered secondhand bicycle and a vast stockpile of bombmaking paraphernalia. But this was too much.

Grautski was biding his time beneath the childhood safety of his covers when he felt a sudden coolness. As soon as the blanket was lifted, Kershaw Ferngard was dumped onto Grautski's prone form. Before they knew what was happening, both men were being knotted up like a bundle of rags inside the fuzzy prison-issue blanket.

"What you doing?" Ferngard demanded from inside the makeshift sack. "I drop my Porky Pig. Hey, get yo knee outta me eye," he snarled at Grautski.

"Shh," Remo whispered.

Beneath the 180-pound pile of wiggling Long Island Railroad Shooter, Todd Grautski tried to shove his hands out through the edge of the blanket. He encountered a tangle of thick knots. The intruder had used the four corners to tie them up inside the blanket.

Grautski suddenly heard a tiny ping of metal strike the concrete floor. "What was that?" he asked, panicked. "Was that an oven timer? I hate those."

"Shut up," Ferngard hissed from somewhere near Grautski's shins. He was straining to hear what was going on beyond the blanket. As he did so, the inmate had the abrupt sensation of rising into the air.

There was not a grunt from the man who was obviously carrying them. It was as if both men were no heavier than a duffel bag full of cotton laundry.

It took but a few steps for Kershaw Ferngard to know they'd gone too far to still be inside the solitary cell. By now they were gliding out through the open door to the small room.

"You really did break in," Ferngard said from the tangle of blanket, surprise and wonder in his muffled voice.

"Quiet," Remo replied in a whisper. "Try to act like a pair of smelly gym socks."

Ignoring the complaints that issued from the Collablaster, Kershaw Ferngard shifted inside the bundle. He jammed his fingers into one of the tangled knots. After a little jimmying, he managed to pry it open a few inches. He stuck one big eye up to the opening.

They were in the solitary-confinement corridor, slung over the stranger's shoulder like a hobo's bindle. Their combined weight was over three hundred pounds, yet the man moved with a confident glide through the deep shadows.

The place was eerily dark and silent. One wall was lined with closed metal doors. Beyond some of them, Ferngard could hear wet, muted snoring.

The concrete-walled corridor ended at a closed door. Beside it was a sheet of shatterproof Plexiglas. As they moved past the window, Ferngard saw a pair of guards beyond the thick pane. Both were sitting in chairs, heads back, mouths open. They weren't moving.

"You kill the guards?" the inmate asked, owl eyed. As he struggled to get a better look, Todd Grautski grunted.

"They're sleeping," Remo explained. "It's easier to break out that way." He held his finger to his lips for silence once more.

For the first time, Ferngard noticed how thick his wrists were. The man reached for the bolted door. "That'll set off the alarm," Kershaw warned.

"I hate alarms," Todd Grautski moaned. Quieter now, he seemed resigned to whatever fate this stranger had in store. "I should have said so in my Collablaster Declaration in the New York Times. They make a terrible electronic noise."

"Not if you treat them nicely," Remo said. Remo tapped a single finger around the locking mechanism for a tiny moment. Impossibly, the door popped obediently open. Just like that. The green light beside the panel didn't light up, nor did the loud buzzing noise that ordinarily accompanied the opening of the door echo through the hall. They were through the door and inside the narrow adjoining hallway in seconds.

"How'd you do that?" Ferngard asked, amazed.

"Like this," Remo said.

They were at the second security door to the solitary-confinement area. Repeating the motion, Remo sprang the second door as easily as the first.

"He didn't use any electronic gadget, did he?" the Collablaster asked worriedly.

"Yeah, he use a can opener," Ferngard replied, annoyed.

Ferngard felt the tension in Todd Grautski's legs. Mainly because they were wrapped around his neck. "Ack," Kershaw choked amid the knotted tangle of Collablaster limbs.

"Hey, Frick and Frack, keep it down," Remo whispered. "This is where it gets tricky."

As Ferngard fought to disentangle himself from Todd Grautski's extremities, they slipped out into the general prison area. Skirting the main cells, Remo carried his bundle past the metal-railed lower tier of cells around to the hallway leading up to the cafeteria.

At several strategic points along the way, Ferngard saw more sleeping guards. Others were still awake, however. He could see them patrolling distant sections of the prison as they made their way inside the cafeteria.

"That was amazing," Ferngard whispered as Remo closed the door to the dining hall. "How come they didn't see us?"

"The eye sees only what it expects to see," Remo said.

"But the cameras do the rest," Todd Grautski cautioned. "They're everywhere."

"Don't worry," Remo assured him. "They missed us."

"What about the satellites?" the Collablaster begged.

As he spoke, he felt the sudden impact of a hard surface beneath him. The knots in the blanket were unraveled. Grautski and Ferngard spilled out onto the cold cafeteria floor.

"Think galactically, act terrestrially," Remo told the Collablaster.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Grautski asked. He rubbed his bruised backside.

Free now, Ferngard blinked hard. A small piece of fuzz from the blanket had gotten stuck in his eye. "It mean you crazy for always worryin' 'bout satellites and microwaves an' shit like that."

All around was the airy mess hall. The big windows high above on one wall were covered with steel mesh. Occasionally, a searchlight would rake across the translucent glass.

"Bring your security blanket," Remo whispered as he walked to the window wall.

Grautski hesitated. Ferngard didn't. Scooping up the blanket, he ran after Remo. Grautski followed reluctantly.

"Who are you, man?" Ferngard asked hoarsely.

"Just a friend of humanity," Remo answered softly. The underlying tone of menace was lost on both prisoners.

"You really mean what you say to hair-dryerpuss?" Ferngard asked. "You was in prison?"

As he spoke, he glanced up at the windows. They were far away. Layers of imposing mesh coated them. The glass interior was crisscrossed with even more threads of steel.

"A long time ago." Remo nodded grimly.

"You don't look like the jail type," the inmate said. "You seem pretty damn straitlaced."

"I was framed," Remo said. "The guy who's my boss now set me up. I was sentenced to die in the electric chair. It didn't work. But as a dead man-at least officially-I was able to go places and do things that a living person would have a hard time doing."

They were at the wall.

"You really got the chair?" Ferngard asked, amazed.

"I don't like the electric chair," Todd Grautski said, wandering up behind them.

"You don't like de 'lectric toaster," Ferngard snapped, peeved.

The Collablaster glanced from one man to the other. "The same technology produced them both," he argued weakly.

They ignored him.

"Sat, strapped, bagged and burned," Remo told Ferngard. He pressed his hands to the wall. It was cool to the touch.

"Wow. How many people you kill?" Ferngard asked.

Remo looked at him. His eyes were invisible beyond the deep shadows of his eye sockets. "Today?" he asked.

"No, back then. When your boss set you up."

"One. But I didn't kill him."

"You got the chair for doing one guy?" Femgard sputtered derisively. He tried to contain his laughter.

"It was a different era," Remo said. "People were punished for doing wrong. Not like now when any bored psycho with an automatic rifle can shoot up a whole railroad car full of commuters and end up in a cell crammed full of digital clocks and nudie magazines."

"Oh." Ferngard missed the sarcasm completely. "So what's the stuff you can do now that you couldn't do before?"

"This, for one," Remo said.

Remo reached out and grabbed Kershaw Ferngard by the collar of his white T-shirt. He flipped Todd Grautski up onto the same shoulder. Remo pressed his free hand against the wall of the cafeteria. Neither prisoner was quite sure what to expect. Even prepared thusly for the unexpected, both were still surprised when Remo's feet left the floor. Ferngard's eyes grew wide. The one abraded by the tiny wool fragment was a watery red.

The cafeteria began to grow smaller. Row upon row of empty tables stretched out into the thick shadows at the far side of the large room.

He looked to the wall for some alternate explanation for this bizarre act of levitation. He saw only Remo.

Graceful in the precise way that spiders were not, Remo was using one hand and the toes of his leather loafers to carry them all up the smoothly painted cinder-block walls of the mess hall. There was not a hint of strain on his face.

"How you doing that?" Ferngard asked, astonished.

"You ask a lot of questions," Remo commented. The words came easily. It seemed that he should have at least grunted.

"If you could do this stuff, why'd you let your boss put you in the chair?" Ferngard pressed. He wiggled his toes. They moved through empty air.

"I couldn't do anything remotely like this back then," Remo explained. "Once I was officially dead, they turned me over to the Master of Sinanju."

"Sinanju?" Ferngard asked. "That like kung fu?"

"Think kung fu times about a billion," Remo said, "and you'll be scratching the surface. The Master of Sinanju trained me to be his heir. There's only one Sinanju Master and pupil per century, roughly. After bitching at me like a supermodel on a location shoot for about ten years, he made sure I was up to snuff for my mission in life."

"What's that?" Ferngard asked.

They were at one of the large windows. Ferngard was sure they'd have to go back down and find another way out once Remo realized that there was no breaking through. But to the inmate's surprise, Remo began working on the pane as he spoke.

"I'm an assassin," Remo said. "I work for an organization called CURE. It doesn't exist officially, and only me, my boss, my trainer and the President of the United States know it's around."

"A government conspiracy," the Collablaster breathed.

"The granddaddy of them all," Remo agreed. Remo pressed Ferngard to the wall. Somehow the suction that brought them this far seemed to work straight through the Long Island Railroad Shooter's body. Remo used his free hand to pop the bolts around the securing cage at the corner of the window. He slipped each small bit of metal into the pocket of his chinos while he worked. Somehow he did this without dropping Ferngard or toppling Grautski off his shoulder.

"Yeah," Remo said, warming to his story. "CURE was set up years ago to work outside the Constitution in order to protect it. We take care of the cases that can't be handled in a strictly legal fashion."

He grabbed the mesh and peeled it back. There was a distant, soft creak of metal as the tiny links tore from concrete. The peeled-back section of mesh exposed a wide triangle at the corner of the window.

Remo went to work on the pane. He used the sharp edge of one index fingernail, which was slightly longer than the rest of his nails. The nail scored both glass and the interwoven fibers of metal sandwiched inside the thick pane.

With a soft pop, the large pane came free. "Hang on for a minute," Remo said to Ferngard. He hefted the prisoner higher, hooking the back of his shirt onto a twisted bit of metal. With both hands now free and only the weight of Grautski on his shoulder, Remo slid sideways across the windowsill, bringing the large section of glass with him. He settled the triangular pane inside the triangular section of wire mesh. It was a perfect fit. He coiled the bottom metal links to hold the glass in place. Once the glass was safe, he moved back over to Kershaw.

Slipping the inmate down from the makeshift hook, Remo carried both men out through the window.

There was a narrow ledge rimming the upper portion of the cafeteria building. It wasn't nearly wide enough for someone to stand on. Yet Remo walked along the ledge as if it were the Coney Island Boardwalk.

"What really burns me is that if I did know how to do this stuff years ago, I could have escaped," Remo continued. "But the paradox is, if I'd escaped I never would have learned how to do this stuff." The brisk night wind blew through Remo's short dark hair. "You know what I mean?"

Neither man really heard Remo. They were too busy looking down at the empty prison courtyard three stories below. Todd Grautski muttered unintelligibly. Kershaw Ferngard clutched the prison blanket tightly to his chest.

"Less talk, more walk," Ferngard hissed.

They were at the corner of the building now. Remo began to descend the outer prison wall as easily as he climbed the interior cafeteria wall. He shifted the weight of the men.

"It's just funny how life is sometimes," Remo commented as they descended. "When I was in jail, the walls seemed so high, the bars seemed so thick and the guards seemed to be everywhere. I thought it was impossible to get out, so I just resigned myself to accepting the punishment I didn't deserve. Now it's a whole different ball game."

Ferngard felt the soles of his feet touch blessed terra firma.

Remo set Grautski beside him.

The Collablaster opened one eye. They were at the edge of the courtyard. In the daylight, a strip of brown grass and packed earth rimmed the space between the building and the exercise yard. At this time of night, all was awash in shades of black.

Remo beckoned the men to follow him across the paved yard. "Everything hasn't changed, though," he confided as they walked. "Chiun-he's the guy who trained me--he's become a real pain in the neck lately. He's locked himself in his room and won't come out. Says he's 'realigning himself with the forces of the cosmos,' or some kind of malarkey. But he doesn't fool me. Since when does cosmic realignment require you to yap on the phone all day and night? And our last bill had a ton of calls to Hollywood."

"Maybe you shouldn't talk so much," Todd Grautski said quietly as the main wall of the prison came closer. He never thought they'd make it this far. Now that they were so close, he allowed himself a flicker of hope. He wondered if the Feds had found all his bomb-making material when they'd searched his Montana property.

"I know this has something to do with that dingdong movie of his," Remo pressed, ignoring the Collablaster. "Did I tell you he had a movie deal? At least I think he does. He told me about it a while back and then dummied up about the whole thing. He could be yanking my chain. He likes to do that. I can guarantee you, our boss isn't going to like it if he does have one."

They made it across the yard with ease. Whenever a yellow searchlight threatened to drag across them, Remo pulled the men from the path of the beam. It was as if he had some unwavering instinct for avoiding light.

At the wall, the drill was the same as before. The prisoners were deadweight as Remo scaled the smooth surface.

"If he does try to have some stupid movie made, my boss is going to go ape-shit. He's a nut for secrecy. Chiun's name on the big screen would probably give him four simultaneous heart attacks. It'd certainly send him over the edge. Which, ironically, is where you two are going."

They were atop the main wall. A narrow passage between two raised sections on either side of the wall connected the distant guard towers.

Beyond the wall, the convicts saw the first of the pair of concentric chain-link fences that encircled the prison. Once they were through the fences, they were home free. And this remarkable, heaven-sent stranger would have no problem with a couple of mere chain-link fences. Visions of guns and bombs and bloody corpses danced like sugarplums in the twisted brains of both men. There was only one thing wrong.

"What did you just say?" the Collablaster and the Long Island Railroad Shooter asked in unison. For some reason, they both felt as if they'd missed something very important.

Remo's deep disappointment was evident on his stern face. "You mean you weren't paying attention?" he asked.

"We heard most of it," Ferngard promised. "The secret organization and your boss and trainer and all. We just missed that last bit." He looked to Grautski, who nodded.

"The part about sending you over the edge?" Remo asked.

Ferngard smiled. "Yeah, that was it." The smile evaporated. "Huh?"

The inmate felt a strong hand press solidly against the center of his chest. Simultaneously, another hand shoved Grautski. Toppling over backward, neither killer had much time to consider his predicament. Their rekindled dreams of murder popped like pierced red bubbles.

As the inmates fell back to the prison courtyard, they fought for possession of the blanket as if it were a life preserver. The woolen corners flapped in the strong wind for the full three seconds it took them to strike concrete.

They hit with twin fat splats. The blanket settled like a heavy parachute onto their bloodied frames. Remo looked down at the bodies of two of the most infamous murderers of the past decade. There was little satisfaction. It would have been nice to finesse these two.

He'd been told by Upstairs to make it look like a prison break, hence the blanket. Authorities would assume they'd somehow used it as a rope to scale the walls.

Someone had heard the bodies hit the courtyard. Searchlights raked the area, quickly settling on the prone corpses.

Up on the walkway, the bright yellow floodlights avoided Remo entirely.

A Klaxon on the main prison building blared to life, joined quickly by others. As lights switched on rapidly both inside and outside the prison, Remo slipped like a shadow over the wall. The next streak of light to pass where he'd been standing found empty air.

Chapter 3

In the shadow-drenched administrator's office of a sedate, ivy-covered sanitarium on the shore of Long Island Sound, the man who had dispassionately framed a young Newark beat patrolman named Remo Williams for murder so many years ago was at the moment reading about another murder.

The man Remo had allegedly murdered had been an anonymous drug pusher, chosen precisely because he had been a blight on society who wouldn't be missed. The dead man this day was the owner of a small bookstore in Boston, Massachusetts. He had a wife, two children and a baby on the way.

Dr. Harold W. Smith read the AP report as it scrolled across one portion of his computer screen. He used the screen-in-screen function on the monitor, which was buried under the surface of the gleaming onyx slab that was his high-tech desk. With this function, he was able to read several reports at once. All were the same. None were good. There had been a break-in at BostonBio, a company at the vanguard of the genetic-engineering field. Reports were sketchy as yet, but the director of BostonBio's most promising new experiment had been assaulted in her lab. The prototypical animals that had been created by the company had been stolen. By whom and for what reason, no one seemed to have a clue.

In the dark isolation of his office, Smith read the scant details of the BBQ project. It was truly remarkable. The Boston press might have thought the news uninteresting, but Smith found it fascinating. And a bit frightening.

To think that Man had achieved a level of sophistication so great that he could now create a new and unique life-form...

There were moral implications, to be sure. But Smith had the soul of a bureaucrat, not a philosopher. While he understood why there would be trepidations for some when it came to the BBQ project, he saw it more as a practical matter. If the creatures were, as Dr. Judith White boasted, the solution to world hunger, then the project could not be jeopardized.

Smith paused at his work. The glowing keys of the capacitor keyboard, which was buried at the lip of his desk, grew dark as he removed his arthritisgnarled fingers from the surface. He spun in his old leather chair, looking out through the one-way picture window behind him.

His gray face was reflected in the glass. All about Smith was gray, right down to his three-piece gray suit. The only hint of color in his entire gray-tinged spirit was a green-striped Dartmouth tie, which was tied to four-in-hand perfection beneath his protruding Adam's apple.

It was well after midnight. Long Island Sound was dark and foreboding. The few lights visible on the water at this time of night were startling in contrast with the depth of darkness. They almost seemed ethereal-angels beckoning the faithful home.

It was an oddly poetic thought for Harold W. Smith. One he would not have entertained when he'd first come to work in this plain administrator's office. The truth was, Smith held few such illusions in his youth. But the world had changed vastly since Smith had been appointed to this lonely post.

Smith was director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the secret headquarters for the organization known only as CURE. In his position, he had seen much that was bad in America. It was CURE's charter to deal with each national crisis as it came along. But as Smith stared out into the inky blackness of eternity-a man in the twilight of his life-he thought that it might be nice for a change for CURE to be involved in something good.

The BBQ project seemed on the surface to be nothing but good. What could be more noble than a desire to feed the hungry? Smith wondered who might want to thwart such a plan.

According to a media report, Dr. White had attacked a reporter earlier in the day. Reading between the lines, Smith determined that it might have been frustration that drove her to do it. Perhaps whoever had stolen the animals was in collusion with the reporter. Perhaps it was partly vengeance, partly a desire on the part of the reporter to create a story. It had happened with the press before.

Whatever the reason, Harold W. Smith had made up his mind that CURE would do something good even before the blue contact phone rang atop his desk.

"Remo?" the CURE director said crisply into the receiver. His voice was squeezed lemons.

"Smitty, it's one o'clock in the morning. Who else would it be?" Remo's familiar voice replied. Smith drew his eyes away from the black waters of the Sound. "I need not remind you that Chiun also has this number," he said.

"Chiun is still locked away meditating like some freaking Korean monk," Remo said, irked. Somewhere close behind him, a car horn honked.

"You are not home?" Smith asked.

"No way," Remo answered. "I'm hiding out at the airport. I've been getting this creepy Norman Bates feeling every time I look up at his window."

Smith didn't understand the cultural reference. He chose to ignore it. "What of your assignment?" he asked.

"You got a twofer, Smitty," Remo said. He actually seemed pleased. "You didn't tell me Kershaw Ferngard was in the same prison as Grautski."

"Yes," Smith said. "I heard he had been moved from New York. Minister Linus Feculent had been working to have him freed as a victim of racial injustice. The authorities thought it would quiet things down if he was not in close proximity to Feculent or network cameras."

"Well, if Dan Rather wants to interview either of them, he's going to have to bring a sponge and a pail."

Smith nodded in satisfaction. He swiveled in his chair, looking back out across Long Island Sound. There were no lights visible now. No angels guiding anyone home.

"I have another assignment for you," Smith said as he stared out into the lifeless black night.

"Fine with me," Remo said affably. "So long as it keeps me away from home."

Smith went on to quickly brief Remo about the genetic creations at BostonBio and the opportunity to use them as a cure to world hunger. He finished with the mysterious theft of the creatures.

"And you want me to go find them?" Remo asked once Smith was finished. He sounded surprised.

"It is not an ordinary CURE assignment, granted," Smith said "However, the world stage is quiet at the moment. And it sounds as if the local authorities could use the help."

"Hey, you don't have to sell me on the idea, Smitty," Remo remarked. "It'll be nice to be involved in something that's sort of for the good of the world for a change."

Smith was surprised that Remo shared his sentiment on the subject, but said nothing.

"There might be an added problem," he cautioned. "There was a murder in Boston a few hours ago. It was in the vicinity of the lab where the Bos camelus-whitus was created. The body of a local merchant was found mauled in an alley. His throat and abdomen had been shredded, and most of his organs had been removed."

"Eaten?" Remo asked.

"Presumably."

"So these things are vicious."

"I am not certain," Smith admitted slowly. "I saw raw video footage of the creatures posted on the home page of one of the local network affiliates. They seem docile. But as we both know, looks-as far as the ability to kill is involved-can be deceiving."

"So much for helping out mankind," Remo said, dryly. "Sounds like these dips have turned Bean Town into Jurassic Park III."

"It is possible that this attack has nothing to do with the lab specimens," Smith said. "There have been cases of wild animals in urban areas before. Wolves and coyotes in Central Park and moose running loose in Boston, for instance. This could be a big cat that has somehow made its way into the city. It might have nothing at all to do with the BBQs."

"Within walking distance of the lab?" Remo said doubtfully. "Don't bet the sanitarium on it, Smitty."

"Be that as it may, I want you to learn what you can and report your findings back to me."

He gave CURE's enforcement arm the address of BostonBio and the full name of the director of the BBQ project.

"Dr. Judith White," Remo said. "Got it." Smith was about to hang up.

"And Smitty?" Remo offered hesitantly.

Smith paused. "Yes?"

"If you hear from Chiun, don't tell him I was itching to stay away from home. If it puts him on the snot, he'll say I misaligned him again. I can't take another two months of him locked away straightening out his pretzeled psyche."

"Very well," Smith agreed. He severed the connection.

After he had replaced the blue receiver, Smith's gaze strayed back to the window behind him and the water beyond.

It was very late. He should begin to think about going home for the night.

As he stared off blankly into space, a light suddenly appeared like a sparkling diamond on the surface of the water far away.

One of Smith's angels?

Smith sat up more alertly in his chair. He stared at the distant light. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished from sight.

Sitting behind his comfortable desk in his familiar Spartan office, Harold W. Smith got a sudden, unexplainable twinge of concern. Though he tried to dismiss it, he could not. Frowning, he turned back slowly to his computer.

Chapter 4

By the following morning, Boston's local media outlets were all eagerly linking the gruesome death of bookstore owner Hal Ketchum to the theft of the BBQs from the genetics laboratory of BostonBio.

Mutant Monsters Panic Hub! screamed the headline of the Boston Messenger, a paper not famous for its temperate reporting of the news. In an editorial, the more sedate Boston Blade managed to link the entire series of events to supply-side economics. Not surprising. The paper regularly blamed everything from teen pregnancy to the JonBenet Ramsey murder on the devil decade of the 1980s. For their park, the local television stations were no less gleeful to throw gasoline on the raging fire of hysteria.

A BostonBio security guard was scanning a bored eye along the lines of typically vitriolic Blade text when Remo Williams stepped through the gleaming glass doors of the corporation's main office complex. Sunlight streamed in across the floor as Remo approached the desk.

The guard didn't look up from the paper. "I am not a spokesman for BostonBio. I am under contract not to discuss anything that occurs within the buildings or complex of BostonBio. No one at BostonBio is granting interviews at this time. Please leave me the hell alone."

His nasal voice was bored as he ran through the speech he had repeated at least three dozen times since his shift started at seven that morning. When he was finished, he crinkled the paper, folding it to the sports section. He didn't get a chance to check on any of Boston's chronically losing teams.

"I'm not a reporter," Remo explained to him. The guard looked up, surprised the visitor hadn't left. His nose bumped a laminated ID card. "Remo Post. Department of Agriculture," Remo said, holding out the ID. "I'm here about last night's theft."

The guard snorted, putting his paper aside. "You and everybody else." He took Remo's identification, inspecting it carefully. "You don't look like an agriculture agent," he said eventually, looking up over the card.

"The corn-husk hat gave me dandruff, and my sorghum pants chafed," Remo said.

Peering across his foyer desk at Remo's tan chinos and white T-shirt, the guard seemed doubtful. He finally shrugged, sliding the card back to Remo.

"What the hell. After yesterday, we'll all be out on our ears anyway. Third floor." He picked his paper back up, jamming his nose back inside the sports pages.

"I'm gonna take a leap and chalk this all up to crummy security," Remo muttered to himself. Leaving the vigilant security guard to read his paper, Remo crossed over to the elevator.

THREE STORIES ABOVE the BostonBio lobby, Dr. Judith White was throwing a fit. According to the tally kept by her lab staff, it was her seventh that morning.

"I can't believe this shit!" she screeched. She waved a copy of the morning paper that one of her staff had had the temerity to bring in that morning. "You're all a pack of sniveling Judases! You're buying into this character assassination! I'm the one responsible for this project, not any of you! I could have fired every last one of you, and the Bos camelus-whitus project would have gone on!"

With angry fists, she balled up the newspaper, flinging it at the man who had pulled it from his desk drawer when he thought Dr. White was busy in her office. It struck him loudly in the forehead. She'd thrown it with such ferocity, he hadn't even had time to duck out of the way.

"You people all make me sick!" she screamed. Spinning away from the guilty-faced staff, she marched back inside her office. The high lab windows shook with the violence of her slamming door.

The lab staff didn't seem to know how to react. It had been this way all morning. Dr. White had refused treatment for her injury from the night before. It was probably a mistake, since the blow to the head she had received seemed to have made her even more vile-tempered than usual. Of course, her mood might not be the result of a concussion. Dr. Judith White had been perched on the edge of sanity for a long time. The stress of the BBQ theft might just have been the thing that finally toppled her over.

In any event, without their lab specimens, there was nothing much for the lab technicians to do. No BBQs meant no work. The lab staff had merely stood around for the past two hours, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from their project director.

It was into this tense atmosphere that Remo strolled.

Inside the lab, Remo flashed his bogus Department of Agriculture ID at the first unoccupied white coat he met. The man was a microbiologist with a pronounced overbite, a receding hairline and a name tag that identified him as Orrin Merkel.

"Post," Remo said, tone bored as he repeated his alias. "Investigating the theft of the cookouts last night."

"Of the what?" Orrin asked, perplexed.

"Those animal jobbies in the paper," Remo said, himself confused. For a moment, he thought he was in the wrong lab. "Didn't you build them here?"

"Oh," Orrin said. "The BBQs. " There was an angry snort from behind a distant closed office door. "That's not their real name," he said, pitching his voice low. "And Dr. White doesn't approve of the nickname."

"She's the one who was here when they were stolen?" Remo queried, jabbing a thumb at the door. Orrin nodded. "Thanks."

Remo headed for Dr. White's office.

"Uh...I don't think you want to see her," Orrin said, hurrying up beside Remo. "Guys? Help?" He glanced around for support, but when Remo's purpose became clear, the rest scattered from the room like frightened cockroaches. Orrin was left alone with the agriculture man.

Remo was steering a beeline for the door.

Orrin had to leap across a desk to get in front of him.

"You really don't want to see her," he insisted.

Remo stopped. "Why not?"

Orrin shot a worried look at the door. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "For one thing, she's a drug user," he confided. "Heroin, I think."

"The director of this lab uses heroin," Remo said skeptically.

"She shoots up after hours. Some of us have seen her. So far it hasn't affected her work." Orrin considered. "Although I guess it could account for her mood swings. Sometimes she's a real B-I-T-C-H, if you know what I mean."

"Nope, I don't," Remo said. "But then, spelling's not my strong suit. After ten years with the department, I still spell agriculture with two Ks."

"There's a whole psychiatric textbook back there," Orrin whispered, nodding to the door. "Aside from the drug use, she exhibits strong antisocial tendencies and, as far as anyone here can tell, she is one hundred percent, completely and totally amoral. Possibly sociopathic, as well."

"Doesn't sound like the woman who's going to cure world hunger," Remo said.

Orrin bit his lip. "There's some good in everybody, I guess. Dr. White might be a lot of things, but she's also a genius. Maybe she's just misunderstood."

"I'll be sure to put that in my report to the undersecretary for husking and threshing," Remo said. He sidestepped Orrin. Despite frantic gestures from the microbiologist, Remo knocked on the closed office door. Orrin was across the lab and out the front door before Dr. White even had a chance to respond.

"Hurry up and come in already!" a gruff female voice barked in response to Remo's knock.

After the impression he had gotten from the young scientist, Remo wasn't sure precisely what to expect beyond the door. When he pushed the door open, any preconceived notions he might have had melted in a stunned instant.

Dr. Judith White was beautiful. Her black hair was long and full around her face, shaped vaguely in the tousled, confident manner of a lion's mane. Her nose was aquiline, her dark red lips full and inviting. The teardrop shape of her green eyes was vaguely Asian.

As far as her body was concerned, the parts Remo could see as she sat behind her desk would have turned a Playboy model green with envy. When she stood in greeting, he realized that the same model would have gone from green to blue before dropping dead from terminal jealousy. In Dr. Judith White, the female form had achieved a level of physical perfection unheard-of on Earth.

When she smiled, a row of dazzlingly white teeth gleamed brilliantly, framed between perfect lips. The smile was not one of politeness. It was more a perturbed rictus.

"What do you want, Mr. Post?" Judith asked. Remo was confused at her use of his cover name.

"Have we met before, Dr. Boobs?" he asked absently. He was staring at her ample chest.

"What?" she said, voice icy. Her eyes could have cut diamonds.

"Hmm?" Remo asked. He pulled his gaze up to her face. It was an effort. They liked it where they were.

For some reason, Judith seemed annoyed. She scowled as she retook her seat. "I heard you mention your name to Orrin, the Dweeb." She waved a hand toward the lab. "These morons haven't figured out yet that I can hear everything from this office."

Remo looked through the open door to the spot where he had spoken to Orrin Merkel. It seemed too far for her to have heard his conversation with the microbiologist. He was frowning when he turned back to her.

"Washington sent me to investigate the theft of your BBQs," Remo said. He took a seat before her desk.

Cluttered bookshelves lined the walls behind Dr. White and to her left. To the right, half-raised miniblinds opened on the well-tended grounds of BostonBio.

She shuddered, closing her eyes with overemphasized patience. "Please don't call them that," she said.

"Isn't that what everyone's calling them?"

"Everyone's wrong. They are Bos camelus-whitus. BCW would be more accurate than that other ridiculous appellation."

"But nowhere near as lunchbox ready," Remo pointed out.

His smile was not returned.

"Yuck it up, Post," Dr. White said, flat of voice. "In the moment it takes you to chuckle, hundreds of human beings starve all around the world."

"If the alternative's getting mauled by one of your Boss cactus-whiteouts, maybe they're better off," Remo suggested.

Dr. White snorted. "That bookstore owner, right?" she said skeptically. "I'm sick of hearing that one, too. I don't know who killed that guy, but I can guarantee you it wasn't one of my BCWs. They literally would not harm a fly."

She was passionate about the animals, Remo could see. And that passion was possibly blinding her to the fact that the animals she had created might actually be killers. He chose to drop the subject. "Any idea who might have taken them?"

"I already told the Boston police who did it," Judith said crisply. "But in case you didn't know, the mayor in this town is about as dumb as a WB sitcom. He's barred the cops from looking where they should. All because of stupid political correctness. The world is going to starve because of PC politics."

"I'll bite," Remo said. "Where do you think they are?"

This time Judith White's smile was sincere. "HETA," she announced.

Remo frowned. "Where have I heard that before?"

"It's a wacko animal-rights group," she explained, sinking back in her chair. "Humans for the Egalitarian Treatment of Animals. They have an ad campaign on TV I'm sure you've seen. They sponsor all sorts of animal-adoption stuff, fight animal testing in labs, that kind of thing. Celebrity endorsers line up around the block for them."

"Oh, yeah." Remo nodded. "What makes you think they're the ones who stole your animals?"

"Someone in this lab has loose lips," Judith said. "Whoever it is must have bragged about my breakthrough. Since the birth of the first Bos camelus-whitus eight months ago, HETA has been stepping up activity against BostonBio."

"Maybe it's a coincidence," Remo suggested.

"No way, sugar," Dr. White insisted. "BostonBio has a good record with animal testing. There are much bigger, more well-known targets in the area for them to go after. The timing was just too perfect. No, if you want my advice, brown eyes, you'll go after HETA."

"They have a local office?"

Dr. White nodded. "In Cambridge," she said.

"Can I borrow your phone book?" Remo asked. Dr. White's eyes narrowed.

"What for?"

"My ability to channel addresses is on the fritz." Judith closed her eyes and leaned her head back, exposing her long, white neck. She lowered her head back down, slowly opening her eyes as she did so.

"I'll take you," she said with a heavy sigh. Pushing off her desk for support, she rose to her feet.

"That isn't necessary," Remo told her.

"Look, I've got nothing better to do. I'm facing suspension and possible criminal action for assaulting a ditzy reporter yesterday. The only thing that'll keep me here are those animals. I was planning to take a spin over to HETA myself. You can be my muscle."

Skirting her desk, she stepped from the office, stripping off her white lab coat as she walked. Her chest bounced purposefully.

"Do I have a choice?" Remo asked the empty room.

He was surprised to get an answer.

"No," replied the distant voice of Dr. Judith White.

Chapter 5

Sadie Mayer joined HETA because that nice lady from The Olden Girls told her to.

Not personally, of course. Sadie had never met a celebrity in her life. And if she did, good gosh, whatever would she say to them? No, Sadie had been encouraged to join the organization by a thirty-second commercial spot featuring The Olden Girls actress run by the animal-rights group during Wheel of Fortune.

Sadie wasn't an activist. She made this clear to anyone who said so. She always associated real activism with those dirty people from the sixties. Also, activism seemed to mean burning something. Either underwear for feminists or draft cards with hippies. Sadie didn't like to burn things.

No, her brand of activism was simple and flame free. It involved a big yearly check, occasionally stuffing and sorting envelopes and twice a month volunteering to man the phones at the local Cambridge headquarters of Humans for the Egalitarian Treatment of Animals.

Today was Sadie's Thursday to sit behind the HETA reception desk licking envelopes. Her hands and tongue were deeply involved in her work when she spied a vaguely familiar figure step through the front door of the building. The woman was in the company of a young man.

The woman seemed very businesslike in her smart blazer and tweed skirt. Very much like Hillary Clinton. He, on the other hand, looked like a typical bum. Sadie considered anyone who didn't dress like Lawrence Welk on Saturday night to be a bum. By her definition, all three of the sons she had raised were bums.

Sadie held her disdain in check as the pair strode across the small lobby to her plain schoolmarm's desk.

"Can I help you?" Sadie asked, drawing the flap of a business-size envelope across her dry-as-dust tongue. The sealing gum tasted vile. She put the envelope in a box with the other five dozen she had sealed. Thanks to her inability to produce saliva, they were all already coming unglued.

"We want to see-" Remo began, Department of Agriculture ID in hand.

"Where's that weed Tulle?" Judith interrupted. Remo shot Judith a withering look.

Sadie paused in midlick. "Mr. Tulle?" she asked scornfully. "Is that who you mean?" She drew the envelope the rest of the way across her tongue. It popped open as she placed it in the Out box.

"If he's the guy in charge," Remo supplied.

"Oh, he's in charge, brown eyes," Judith snarled to him. "He's the biggest cashew in this can of assorted nuts."

"Crazy woman make nice-nice now," Remo suggested through tightly clenched teeth.

Judith wheeled on him. "Well, I don't hear you saying anything," she snapped.

"That's because you haven't given me a chance," Remo replied sharply.

"Look, is he here?" Judith demanded, spinning back to Sadie.

She moved so quickly that it startled the old woman behind the desk. Sadie jumped in the middle of licking an envelope. The paper edge sliced at an angle across her parched and bumpy tongue, opening up a thin bloody crease.

"Look what you made me do!" Sadie complained.

Angry, the old woman stuck out her tongue, pressing her dentures at the center. She could feel the pain of the paper cut across the whole width of her tongue. Turning her eyes downward, she tried to see the small wound.

"Dith ith goin to hur fo daith," Sadie griped. As she sat examining her wound, Sadie was startled by a hand reaching for her. She looked up to see that the woman who had caused her to injure herself was actually reaching out a hand as if to touch Sadie's tongue.

Sadie jumped back.

"What the hell are you doing?" Remo asked Judith. He placed a firm hand on her forearm, arresting it in space.

Judith paused, as if startled. She looked at her own hand, suddenly thinking better of whatever she had intended to do. Quickly, she withdrew her arm.

"I'm sorry," she said curtly to Sadie. She glanced over her shoulder at Remo. "It's all right, you know. I am a doctor, after all."

That's when it hit Sadie.

"You're her!" the older woman cried sharply, forgetting her injured tongue. "The one from the TV. The lunatic from BostonBio who assaulted poor Sally Edmunds."

Judith rolled her eyes. "I give up. His name is Curt Tulle," she said to Remo. "You do better." Stepping back, she crossed her arms over her ample chest.

"Thank you." Remo nodded.

Without another word to Sadie, he sidestepped the old woman's desk and walked up the hallway that stretched away behind her seat. Surprised but obviously pleased at his decisiveness, Judith fell in behind him.

"I'm starting to like you, brown eyes," she said.

"My name is Remo," he said, peeved.

"Blame your parents for that," Judith suggested. As they strolled down the hallway, Sadie shouted loud protests, threatening to call the police. Remo and Judith ignored her.

There were a few doors lining either side of the short corridor. Most were closed.

"That one." Judith pointed to the second office from the end.

Remo had sensed the steady heartbeat coming from beyond the closed door. He assumed Judith had been here some time in the past to know Tulle's office.

Remo didn't bother to knock. He pushed against the chipped, green-painted surface of the old wooden door. It creaked painfully open on the cramped office of the Boston director of Humans for the Egalitarian Treatment of Animals.

Curt Tulle looked up from his desk. At least Remo assumed that's who it was. He couldn't quite tell if the thing he was looking at was human under all that fur.

Curt wore a raccoon hat, the kind made popular during the 1950s. A long, draping woman's mink coat was buttoned tightly up to his neck. The neck of the HETA director was wrapped, in turn, by a dark ermine stole. The clasp holding the wrap in place made the head of the hapless creature appear to be biting the animal's tail.

To Remo, there was no more accurate a phrase to describe the look on Curt Tulle's face as that of an animal caught in headlights. It was sheer, blind, frozen terror.

"Keep the windows rolled up and your hands in the car," Remo suggested over his shoulder to Judith.

As Remo spoke, Curt Tulle finally found his voice. "Who are you?" he demanded angrily. "Who let you in here?"

The ermine stole was already stuffed inside the drawer. He seemed to remember the raccoon hat abruptly, snatching it from atop his head. The drawer opened again, and the hat was flung inside. Curt slammed the drawer loudly shut a second time. A few shimmies of his shoulders loosed the mink coat. He kicked it into the well under his desk.

"I guess the only thing about fur that's murder is the price," Remo commented.

"Filthy hypocrite," Judith snarled, her voice a low growl.

When she moved toward Curt, Remo had to intercept her.

Her passion gave her extra strength. Remo had to exert surprising force to pull her away. He scooted her back behind him.

"Let's put the good-cop-psycho-cop act on hold, shall we?" he suggested to White. To Curt, he said, "We're investigating the disappearance of the BBQs from BostonBio."

"BCWs," Judith hissed angrily.

"BMWs," Remo corrected.

"Hey, I know you." The HETA director squinted. He was looking at Judith White. His deer's eyes grew even wider. "You're the crazy scientist who's trying to play Mother Nature."

This time Remo didn't move quickly enough to stop Judith. She darted around him, leaping and sliding across Curt Tulle's desk in a single fluid move. Along the way, she scooped up a letter opener that had been lying next to a banker's lamp. The greenshaded lamp went flying as Judith kicked around, dropping in beside the startled HETA director. With one hand, she grabbed a clump of thin hair, pulling back his head. The other hand aimed the business end of the letter opener into Curt's Adam's apple. "Where are my animals?" she screamed.

Curt choked fearfully. "I don't know!" he cried.

"You're lying!" she snarled.

"No! No, I'm telling the truth!" His desperate eyes sought out Remo.

"Say something!" he pleaded.

"I'm not cleaning up the body," Remo cautioned Dr. White. Stepping back, he settled comfortably into a chair, pleased for a change to farm out the heavy lifting.

Curt was sweating. Judith's voice was close to his ear, hot and menacing.

"I know there are HETA-funded terrorists who live for this crap. You paid them to break into my lab, didn't you?" She jerked his head back harder. "Didn't you!"

"Possibly!" Curt admitted. Perspiration had broken out across his upper lip.

"Possibly?" Remo asked from across the room.

Curt tried to shrug. "We do disperse funds from this office," he admitted. "I can't always say for sure where the money goes to ultimately. Legal reasons."

"I'll legal you a blowhole," she barked, pressing the blunt knife into his flesh.

"Please!" Curt begged.

Remo interjected. "Who do you think took the animals?"

"No one knows for sure," Curt replied nervously. "But I was talking to a HETA sympathizer in Salem a few hours ago. A guy named Billy Pierce. He hinted around that he might know something. I told him I didn't want to know. Please. You've got to believe me. I don't know anything."

"Truer words have never been spoken," Judith growled.

She wrenched Curt's hair one last time before flinging the terrified HETA director face first onto his desk.

The letter opener had inadvertently punctured a small spot on Curt's neck. A drop of deep red blood clung to the end of the blunt knife. Judith seemed surprised at the sight of the blood. She held it before her eyes, as if shocked that she could have performed an act of such violence. She snorted once deeply-angry at herself-and then flung the knife away.

"Coward's blood. I can smell it a mile away," she announced contemptuously. She twirled away from the desk. "Are you ready to go, Hank Kimble?" she asked Remo.

Remo got slowly to his feet. "I'm guessing you don't get many Christmas cards," he ventured. Without another word to the shaking HETA director, the two of them left the office.

In the hall, they nearly tripped over Sadie Mayer. Rather than call the police, the old woman had opted for eavesdropping outside Curt Tulle's door. She dogged them to the lobby.

"Scumbag son of a bitch!" Sadie yelled. "Filthy bastard scum-sucking bum."

"You're sweet," Remo commented at the front door. "Do you French your father with that mouth?"

"Son of a bitch bum!" Sadie screeched. She stabbed an angry finger at Judith. "He who sleeps with dogs winds up with fleas!" This was apparently a caution to Remo.

"That reminds me. Honey, we're low on flea powder," Remo said to Judith.

"Shut up, idiot," the scientist snarled impatiently, shoving her way through the front doors.

"Goddamn son of a bitch bum!" Sadie shrieked at him.

"When did Boston start dumping testosterone in the drinking water?" Remo asked.

In response, Sadie tried to kick him. Avoiding her bone-and-bunion-filled Reeboks, he slowly trailed Judith White outside.

REMO AND JUDITH WEREN'T GONE more than one minute when a set of keys jangled outside the steel alley door near Curt Tulle's office. The fire door opened silently. A pair of dark-clad figures clicked the door shut behind them.

Stepping carefully, the two shapes moved swiftly up to the HETA director's office.

Curt had knotted his ermine stole around his neck once more and was stroking the soft fur in a gentle, soothing manner. Sitting behind his desk, he looked up with a start when the new pair of visitors slipped into his office.

The man and woman were both somewhere near forty. They wore jackets over their black leotards. Their ski masks were stuffed into their coat pockets. Dressed too warmly for the early-autumn day, both of them were sweating profusely.

The HETA man nearly jumped out of his skin when he first saw the couple. When he realized that he recognized them, his face relaxed somewhat.

"My God, you scared the hide off of me." He tugged off the ermine stole, stashing it away once more.

"What's the matter with you?" the man asked.

"Didn't you see them?" Curt said, agitated.

"We came in the back." This from the woman.

Curt took a deep breath. "Judith White was here."

"The Beast of BostonBio?" the woman asked, aghast.

Curt Tulle nodded. "She had some buck with her. They're looking for those whatever-they-ares. The BBQs."

The woman smiled smugly. "They'll never find them."

Curt looked up sharply. "You know where they are?"

"Of course we do," she retorted. "Who do you think liberated them?"

"You're going to love what we have planned for them," her companion declared excitedly.

The BETA director could think only of the crazed look in Judith White's eyes. When the man opened his mouth to speak once more, Curt Tulle fixed it so he didn't hear a word of what he said.

As the couple detailed their diabolical plan, Curt clapped his hands firmly over his ears. Rubbing his nervous bare ankles against the comforting fur of the mink coat beneath his desk, Curt drowned them out by screaming the words to "Puff the Magic Dragon" at the top of his voice.

Chapter 6

When he was fifteen years old, young Billy Pierce's mother assured her son that he'd grow out of his terrible case of acne.

"Don't worry, Billy," Mrs. Pierce had said, with the quiet confidence only a parent could muster. "It shows up for maybe a few years and then it's gone forever. And I don't know what you're worried about anyway. You're still the handsomest boy at Salem High School."

As far as looks were concerned, Billy deluded himself into thinking that maybe his mother was right. Perhaps underneath the layers of oozing pustules and bloody scabs was another Rock Hudson waiting to break out. Billy never did find out.

Handsome was in the eye of the beholder, and any girl who beheld Billy from freshman all the way to senior year saw only "Zit-Face" Pierce. The acne, as well as the nickname, followed him to Salem State College.

Even when Billy graduated from college with a degree in English, the name dogged him. Perhaps it was his acne, perhaps it was his attitude, but what-ever the reason, he couldn't find a good job in town. He settled for employment in a small local fast-food establishment. Leftover pizza and as many French fries as he could filch didn't help his cratered complexion.

When he finally couldn't stand it any longer, Billy went to see a doctor. He subjected himself to ten full minutes of poking and prodding by the middle-aged physician. Finally, the doctor sat down in a chair before the twenty-three-year-old acne sufferer. He stayed a safe distance from his patient, seemingly afraid some of the worst of Billy's sad affliction might erupt with Vesuvian violence.

"Billy," the old doctor asked seriously, "when was the last time you took a bath?" He tried not to inhale too deeply.

"Baths are for the Man," Billy retorted.

The doctor shook his head somberly. "No, Billy. Baths are for people who want to be clean. You are without a doubt the filthiest thing on two legs I have ever seen."

How could Billy explain it to the old, un-hip fossil? It was the early 1970s, and fashionable dirt was in. This lack of personal hygiene among the avant-garde was so chic it predated grunge by twenty years. In 1972 everyone who was anyone had long, scraggly hair and looked like they'd just crawled out a sooty tailpipe.

Billy decided at that moment that the doctor was a quack. He also resigned himself to a life of lingering acne.

Almost thirty years later, nothing much had changed for Billy Pierce.

He still had the same job. He still lived at home with his mother. And his face still looked as if it had seen the business end of an acid-filled squirt gun. But now his long hair was greasier and thinner, his forehead stopped somewhere near the back of his head and his belly hung hugely over his belt, completely obscuring his large peace-symbol buckle.

And the single major change for Billy Pierce over the years was his allegiance. Since, sadly, there was no longer a war in Vietnam to protest, he had to find something else to occupy the self-righteous part of his moral and political soul. Necessity had forced Billy to throw his support behind the liberation of animals from their human overlords.

But it wasn't like the old days.

When he was protesting the war in Southeast Asia, he felt like part of a larger community. There were songs and sit-ins and marches on Washington. As an animal-rights activist, he toiled mostly in isolation and anonymity.

That was what he was doing today.

He had gotten the special blueprints from the Salem city hall. They were a little old, but very detailed.

A cracked coffee mug his mother used for gardening held down one curling corner of the large roll of paper. Dirt had dried in the bottom of the mug. Water-damaged paperbacks that had been stored in the basement four years ago when the cellar flooded held down two other corners. Billy was using his hand and elbow, alternately, to keep the last corner from rolling up.

As he looked over the plans, the bare fluorescent bulbs above him cast weird shadows across the table. Billy was trying to figure out what he would need.

Wire clippers. Probably. Maybe bolt cutters. Would he be able to pick the locks? He doubted it. But if he couldn't pick them, he knew the bolt cutters probably would do him no good on the locks. Billy had never had much upper-body strength. Maybe they weren't locked at all. After all, the interspecies prisoners couldn't very well escape by reaching out through the bars. Maybe they were just hooked closed.

Of course! The keys would be on the premises! It would help to know where they were. Billy vowed to do a little more reconnaissance before D day.

As his fat, grimy finger traced a path through the rooms on the blueprints, Billy heard a noise upstairs. It was the sound of someone stepping lightly across the kitchen floor.

Billy was startled by the noise. His mother was supposed to be at bingo until ten.

"Ma?" he yelled in the direction of the creaky wooden stairs. "Ma, is that you?"

No reply. At least not a vocal one. The gentle, padding footfalls became more focused. They moved in a direct path for the upstairs hallway where the cellar door was located.

Billy instantly panicked. Someone had obviously learned of his plan.

His hand sprang away from the blueprints, which immediately curled up, rolling with such force that they pushed away his mother's soiled mug. It fell to the floor, breaking into a dozen large pieces.

Billy didn't care. He had already turned away from the table and was waddling frantically toward the musty-smelling bulkhead at the rear of the basement.

The upstairs cellar door opened. Precise footfalls struck the staircase behind him.

Across the basement, Billy stumbled on the first concrete step. Toppling forward, he skinned his hands on the third. He pushed his ample girth back upright.

It was cold inside the bulkhead, with a thick earthen odor.

Billy grabbed desperately at the latch, twisting it wildly. With a single, violent push, he attempted to shove the flat door up into the yard. He found that he wasn't strong enough to budge the door more than an inch. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the narrow crack for a tantalizing moment before the door clanged back loudly over his head, like the lid of a coffin.

He tried again. Too late.

A strong hand grabbed him by the shoulder. He felt his massive frame lift off the steps. Billy's feet rose from the short concrete stairwell, and he soared backward into the cellar, landing atop the very table where he had been sketching out his great mission. The old table shattered to kindling beneath his great bulk.

Billy rolled over onto the pile of debris, eyes blinking back shock and pain. For the first time, he beheld the face of his attacker. Attackers.

"Are you trying to kill him?" Judith White demanded. She stood, her face a mask of accusation, near Remo Williams at the dark opening to the bulkhead.

"I wouldn't have had to grab him if he hadn't heard you stomping around like a drunken bison upstairs," Remo countered.

"Stomping?" Judith retorted. "I'm as silent as a cat."

"How silent do you think a 115-pound cat would be?" he asked, irritated.

"A lot quieter than you," she replied angrily.

"Listen before you answer, lady. Have you heard me scuff my foot once since you met me?" Remo demanded. "Have you even heard one single footfall?"

Judith paused. Her temper seemed to dissipate somewhat.

"No," she conceded. The admission appeared to puzzle more than anger her.

"And while we're at it, you're not exactly a poster child for subtlety after that performance back in Boston," Remo pointed out. "So back off."

Leaving the cowed geneticist, Remo marched over to Billy Pierce.

The aging hippie was picking himself out of the rubble of his mother's shattered sewing table. As he dragged himself to his feet, he shook loose the remnants of one of the wooden legs, which had somehow gotten stuffed up the right leg of his bellbottoms.

The same hand that had thrown him halfway across the room now lifted him the rest of the way to his feet. Remo deposited Billy on the concrete floor.

"Okay, Wavy Gravy," Remo said, "what do you know about the stolen animals?"

"I didn't do anything yet!" Billy begged. The words tumbled out. "All I did was get the plans from the city hall. That's legal. You can't do anything to me if I haven't done anything yet. Besides, I wasn't going to steal them. I was going to free them. And I wasn't even going to do that 'cause you can't prove I was."

As he spoke, he indicated the curled-up blueprints on the floor. Remo raised an eyebrow. Silently, he gathered up the plans, drawing them open.

He glanced at Billy. "These are to the Salem dog pound," Remo said, reading the border caption. Judith bounded forward, snatching the blueprints from Remo.

"You put my BCWs in a dog pound?" she barked.

"B-whats?" Billy asked, confused. "I don't know what you mean. I was planning to liberate the Salem dog pound. That's what all this is about." His eyes narrowed. "You're not with the city?"

"No," Remo snapped, shaking his head.

Judith had had enough. She shoved Billy roughly in his flabby chest. "Where are the laboratory specimens you stole from BostonBio last night?" she ordered.

At the mentioning of the genetic firm's name, Billy Fierce's eyes grew wide amid his acne-flecked face. He tried to bolt again, but Remo held him fast. His legs kicked for a moment in air like a frozen cartoon character's. When he realized that he was making no progress, he reluctantly surrendered.

"Where are they?" Remo asked, his face hard. Billy was panting from his exertions. Remo had to lean back to avoid the foul vapor that oozed from his mouth.

"You won't turn me in if I tell you?" Billy asked hopefully.

"I'll turn you into hamburger if you don't," Remo warned.

Billy spoke quickly. "I don't really know about the BBQ liberation per se," he said.

"Liberation?" Dr. White scoffed.

He seemed surprised. "Don't you agree that all animals have a right to freedom?" Billy asked.

"The BCWs don't have a clue what freedom is," the geneticist snapped. "They were conceived in a test tube and born in a lab. They are things. Not animals."

"Where?" Remo stressed, steering Billy back to the matter at hand.

"I'm not really sure," he said. "I'm supposed to meet some people from the Animal Underground Railroad near the Concord rotary tonight. There's some farmland on Route 117 near there. They're going to smuggle the BBQs to freedom."

"Freedom!" Judith screamed, exasperated. "They're glorified lab rats! They have no natural instincts except for what I've bred into them. They've got no sense of how to survive in the wild. If you morons let them go off and fend for themselves, they'll starve to death in a week!"

Billy Pierce puffed out his wounded chest. "Says you," he said bravely. He instantly regretted his daring.

Judith's eyes squeezed to angry slits. Without any warning, she sprang into action.

One hand was held up and away from her body. The other was tensed in a fist near her abdomen.

The loose hand swooped down toward the dirtsmeared throat of Billy Pierce.

There was enough power behind the blow to sever the aging hippie's carotid artery. Her long nails could have shredded his neck to the point that he would have bled to death before the paramedics arrived.

Of course, to do this, she would have had to make actual contact.

The hand flew down. Billy's eyes widened in shock.

The vicious, fatal contact was inevitable.

Her hand mere inches away from the creased and crusty flab, Dr. White was stunned when her narrow wrist met something powerful and unyielding. A strong hand wrapped around her forearm, locking it in place. The hand had moved much faster than her own blow. She blinked back her surprise.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Remo asked. His hand was wrapped around her wrist. Her claws were frozen three inches away from Billy's filthy neck.

Though she said nothing, her eyes shot daggers at him. She looked back to Billy and snarled. Billy fell back in fear, stumbling into an unused workbench. He dropped loudly onto a wobbly metal stool, panting madly.

"Listen, lady," Remo growled. "I don't know what kind of junk you're pumping into your veins, but it's making you a real pain in the ass."

Her head snapped around to Remo. She regarded him coldly for a moment. With surprising strength, she wrenched her hand free. Remo let her.

"I was a pain in the ass before I started shooting up," she snapped.

"There's something to be proud of," he said aridly.

Without another word, Judith skulked off to a dark corner of the basement. She stood there in the shadows, her eyes trained suspiciously on the two men. Remo felt her gaze was directed more at him now than at Billy Pierce.

He had gotten a strange sense of calm from her back at HETA headquarters when she'd assaulted Curt Tulle. It was the same here. Her heart thrurnmed low and constant in her chest. It wasn't the erratic heartbeat of someone who had just attacked another human being.

The drugs. Had to be. Whatever she was injecting must have been a weird combination of both stimulant and calmative. Probably something she had synthesized herself.

It figured. The woman who was hell-bent on feeding the world was a certifiable lunatic.

Remo turned his attention away from the lurking shape of Judith.

"Can you get in touch with your friends before tonight?" Remo asked Billy.

"No," he admitted, gulping. His eyes strayed beyond Remo to the half-shadowed face of Dr. White.

Remo could sense that he was telling the truth. "Looks like we're going to have to wait until tonight to get your overgrown lab rats back," Remo called to the scientist.

"Tonight?" she said, suddenly shocked. "What time is it?"

"Five after four," Remo said.

"Damn!" She flew out of the shadows. "I have a Hot Copy interview at five. I have to get back to the lab. Let's go, brown eyes."

"Get a cab," Remo replied flatly. "I'm staying with Stink Boy. Besides, you scare me." He sank to a lotus position on the concrete floor.

Billy's eyes were sick when he realized his guest was staying.

"But I'll miss my interview," Judith complained.

"Reschedule. If you're nice, maybe he'll let you assault him tomorrow."

Judith scowled. "But this may be the last chance I get to ingratiate myself to these media jackals." Angrily, she raced up the cellar stairs. Remo heard her on the phone a moment later. Seconds later, the screen door to the kitchen slammed, and Judith left the house. Presumably to wait at the curb for the taxi.

Remo relaxed. Finally, some peace and quiet. He smiled placidly at Billy Pierce. Billy smiled weakly back, his broad face a sheen of sweat.

Remo took a deep, calming breath. And gagged. "Try to stay downwind, would you, pal?" Remo said to Billy.

Chapter 7

They had planned to rent the truck in New Hampshire so as not to draw attention to themselves, but someone pointed out that a rental truck driving around in Massachusetts with New Hampshire plates might draw more attention than one with Massachusetts plates. The conspirators had fretted over this for a time, finally deciding to pick up a truck in Massachusetts after all, but from far away. They chose one from an agency in Worcester.

"What's your destination?" asked the bored clerk at the Plotz truck-rental station. His pen was poised over the white rental forms.

"Omaha," blurted out Clyde Simmons.

"Seattle," said Ron DePew just as quickly. They looked at one another in horror.

"We're piano movers!" Clyde Simmons shouted, as if sheer volume could mask the obvious discrepancy in their cover story.

Since it happened to be his last day, the clerk didn't care. The story worked. With enough cash to cover the fee, they were on their way. They were expected to deliver the truck to the Plotz agency in Omaha-they had settled on Clyde's cover destination-by noon three days hence. Of course, the truck would never arrive.

"Smooth as silk," Ron boasted proudly as they drove the truck from the lot. He began peeling off the obvious false mustache he had picked up at a novelty store.

"Smoother," Clyde replied in a drop-dead-cool tone. Like an even cooler Barry White.

"Oww!" Ron screamed in response. When Clyde looked over, he saw that his partner was sitting in the passenger's seat holding what appeared to be a limp caterpillar. Bits of bloody flesh clung to it.

That day, Clyde and Ron learned two things. First, they were both cool as cucumbers. Second, it was not wise to stick on a phony mustache with Krazy Glue.

The blood on Ron's face had coagulated by the time they reached the Medford collective. Clyde had opted to leave his mustache on.

The farm was set back on a busy road. A thick stand of trees blocked the eight-acre spread from prying eyes.

Clyde and Ron turned at the familiar tin mailbox and steered onto the bumpy dirt road. They were bounced and jostled crazily in their seats as they drove beneath a canopy of trees toward the distant barn.

Twilight had fallen on New England. The faint smell of an illegal outdoor fire wafted in through the open cab window, carrying with it the hint of autumns long past.

Clyde broke through the copse of trees and got his first complete view of the barn. An excited tingle fluttered at the pit of his stomach. So focused was he on his ultimate destination that he didn't see the two black-clad figures standing in the middle of the path until the last second.

"Shit!" Clyde shouted, slamming on the brakes. The big truck skidded several yards to an abrupt halt. Ron was flung forward into the dashboard, smashing his forehead painfully. He fell back into his seat, teeth bared, clutching at his newest injury. A cloud of dust poured up from the rear of the truck, blanketing the cab, swirling in through the open windows.

Through the dirty haze beside Clyde, a black ski mask appeared. A gun muzzle poked in through the window.

"Hey! Whoa! Calm down," Clyde suggested, raising his hands. The truck continued to chug softly.

"Watch it," Ron warned from the other side of the cab. Another ski-masked figure had climbed up to the passenger's door. A rifle jammed Ron's ribs.

"State your purpose," the driver's-side ski mask insisted evenly.

"Jeez, Sam, you know our purpose."

Clyde promptly reached over and pulled off the man's ski mask. The cherubic face beneath was pale and startled.

"Hey, gimme that," the man whined. The gun withdrew.

Clyde held the mask away from Sam's grabbing hands.

"Are they ready for us?" he asked while waving the mask. He nodded to the barn.

"Yes," Sam said. He snatched at the ski mask once more, this time pulling it from Clyde's grip. His expression was angry as he dragged it back down over his face.

Sam's big nose stuck through the right eye hole. He tried twisting the mask back in place--a difficult feat with an automatic rifle in one hand. An ear popped through the left eye hole. He poked himself in the eye with his gun barrel and yelped.

"Keep practicing," Clyde droned. "Maybe someday you'll be able to dress yourself without Mommy's help."

In the passenger's seat, Ron snorted. The facial movement split his false-mustache scabs.

"We can't be too careful in this operation," Sam cautioned through a mouthful of wool. "Command has learned that forces are already aligning against us."

"Really?" Clyde asked. "Well, if they do show up, don't stand in the road like a couple of doofuses. I almost ran you over."

Clyde stomped on the gas, and the rental truck lurched forward. Sam and his leotard-wearing friend had to hop into a fresh cloud of dust to keep from being carried along to the barn.

Yet another man in ski mask and black leotard rolled open the main barn door at Clyde and Ron's approach. After they had guided the truck inside the big interior, the door was quickly rolled shut.

Clyde shut off the engine.

The men climbed down from the cab. Stale dry hay crunched beneath their work boots as they walked around to the front of the truck. Two familiar faces greeted them.

Clyde and Ron had met Mona and Huey Janner at a HETA rally several years before. They were a couple of renegade animal-rights activists who were in charge of the East Coast division of the Animal Underground Railroad.

The couple who had slipped into the Boston HETA office after Remo and Dr. White's departure still wore their black leotards, this time without concealing jackets. They carried their ski masks in their hands.

Mona was a mousy figure with intent, unblinking eyes.

"Were you followed?" she said. She spoke in an infuriatingly precise, overpronounced, snippy fashion. Eight parts Susan Hoerchner mixed with two parts Jeremy Irons.

"No," Clyde replied. "At least I don't think so."

Mona's thin mouth grew even thinner. Her lips all but disappeared in her grimace of disapproval. "There is an agent from the Department of Agriculture looking into the liberation," Mona instructed. "He was at HETA headquarters in Boston today."

"Did he find out anything?" Ron asked, concerned.

Mona laughed derisively. "You know Tulle. What do you think?"

"I don't like this," said Clyde worriedly. "Washington wasn't supposed to be in on this so soon."

"Actually, we're not sure what Curt might have told them," Huey Janner interjected.

"Them?"

Huey glanced at his wife for permission to speak. Her eyes didn't object. "Dr. Judith White was with him," he announced somberly.

All of their faces took on the expression of people who had just learned that Grandma had been dug up and fed to the dogs down the street.

"So what do we do?" Clyde blurted.

"Continue as planned," Mona said, voice steely. She turned abruptly, marching away from the truck. The rest hurried to keep up with her purposeful stride.

"Is that smart?" Clyde asked.

"The crisis is too urgent to worry about being smart," Mona said crisply.

Ron glanced nervously at Clyde. "What if we get caught?" he asked.

"Deny everything," Mona instructed.

They had reached another wooden door leading into a separate wing of the barn. At one time, the property had been a dairy farm. Mona dragged the door open, revealing a long, dimly lit interior. Dozens of hay-filled stalls lined either side of the oldfashioned walls. Most were empty. The nearest eight were not.

Mona took a gas lantern down from the wall. She led the small group to the closest stall.

For the first time, Clyde and Ron got a look at the new species of animal known as Bos camelus-whitus. Sixteen sad eyes peered out from the stalls all around them. Ron squatted down next to the nearest BBQ.

"Wow," Ron exhaled. He tipped his head thoughtfully. "It looks so harmless. Did one of these really kill that guy in Boston?"

"That's ridiculous," Mona snapped. "We had them with us the entire time. It's a media fabrication." She looped her lantern onto a hook next to the stall. "Take this one," she said, pushing the half-open gate wide.

Huey went inside and took a leash down from the wall. He snapped it onto the collar, which he had put on the animal earlier that afternoon. Not a choke collar. Mona had been clear about that.

"Only one?" Clyde asked, surprised. "What about the others?"

"They're too hot right now," Mona explained. "We get them out one at a time. All at once risks getting them all caught. And we don't want that to happen."

"No," Clyde reluctantly agreed, knowing that if the animals were caught, so was he.

Huey led the beast out onto the floor. It wasn't clear whether the difficult time it had walking was due to its stumpy, genetically engineered legs or to complete apathy. Judging by the look on the animal's supremely uninterested face, Clyde guessed it was the latter.

Mona's husband coached the lethargic animal out into the main barn.

"I've already set up a meeting with the Midwest Underground. By the way, Billy Pierce is going to be there to help with the exchange."

"C'mon," Ron complained, "not Zit-Face Pierce."

"He is a sympathetic biped and should be treated with respect," Mona chastised. "I contacted him when I thought we would have to move all eight of the creatures."

"Call him and tell him we don't need him."

"I tried, but there was no answer. He must already be on his way."

They were at the rental truck. Ron unlocked and opened the rear door. He and the other two men hefted the creature up into the hot interior. Although it only weighed about 110 pounds, the BBQ was awkward deadweight. It took a lot of grunting and straining from the three of them to put the oddly shaped animal inside. Once they were through, the BBQ stared out at them with its large, sad eyes.

Clyde pulled the door shut on the mournful animal.

Mona marched the men around to the cab. "The exchange will take place at the Concord checkpoint at nine o'clock sharp. Remember, obey all traffic rules. You don't want to be stopped for something stupid."

"Right, right, right." Clyde nodded. He thought he had been nervous about this operation before, but he was even more anxious now that he knew someone from Washington was already on the case. He was sweating profusely. Cold droplets spilled from his armpits down the interior of his flannel shirt.

"And wear your disguises," she commanded as they climbed inside the cab. In the lamplight, Mona Janner peered up at Ron DePew, as if seeing him for the first time. Her eyes narrowed. "What happened to your lip?" she asked.

In the rear of the truck, the BBQ moaned sadly. Up front, Ron also moaned.

Chapter 8

Remo knew what commuter traffic was like in this part of the state, so he had struck out early for Concord. It was a good thing, too. The methodical deconstruction of every crucial roadway in Massachusetts had reached its fourth straight decade. As a result, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper for much of the ride. The hour-or-so trip from Salem took nearly four hours.

Orange plastic safety barrels were spaced along every torn-up road. The breakdown lane had been turned into a regular traffic lane, and the regular traffic lanes had been turned into endless gravel riverbeds.

Massachusetts State workers were sluglike artists, and the highway was their canvas. Every road in the state highway system seemed to always be a work in progress.

Remo was grateful to find a stretch of relatively unscarred pavement starting about a mile away from Concord's medium-security prison.

He thought of Todd Grautski and Kershaw Ferngard as he drove past the high-walled facility. Remo regretted not picking up a newspaper. He would have enjoyed seeing the unfailingly inaccurate accounts of how the two men had met their end.

Steering onto the rotary near the prison, Remo circled halfway before heading off on Route 117. A few hundred yards beyond the rotary, Remo pulled his rental car over onto the soft shoulder of the road. Leaving the engine idling, he got out.

The pounding had stopped somewhere near Burlington. That was good. It was bad enough trying to steer through a million edgy Massachusetts drivers without the added distraction of the incessant drumming that had been coming from the rear of the vehicle.

At the back of the car, Remo pretended to be supremely interested in his taillights while waiting for a break in traffic. When there was enough space between yellow headlights coming off the rotary, Remo leaned over and popped the trunk. He was instantly enveloped in a malodorous cloud of body odors mixed with stale pizza.

A filthy, flabby hand grabbed at the lip of the trunk. A wide, balding head popped into view after it.

"I couldn't breathe in there, man!" Billy Pierce gasped. He gulped deeply at the cool night air.

"If you couldn't breathe, you'd be dead," Remo said, himself breathing shallowly at the edge of the cloud. "Which I'm going to be if I stand here one more minute."

Leaving the trunk open, Remo went back to the front of the car. He slid in behind the steering wheel. The massive shift of weight at the rear of the car a moment later told him that Billy Pierce had climbed out. The trunk slammed shut. Another moment and the door across from Remo opened. Billy slid in beside him. The car instantly listed to the right.

Remo had powered down all four windows before stopping the car. Billy's broad index finger immediately made a move to the window control switch on his door.

"Leave it," Remo commanded. He was looking over his shoulder, waiting for a break in traffic. "But I'm cold," Billy complained.

"Fat people are never cold," Remo argued.

"I'm cold," Billy repeated. "And it's glandular." The sweat from his long trip in the trunk dripped down his massive frame. It had chilled him the moment he had come in contact with the crisp night air.

"The window stays down," Remo said firmly. As Remo pulled back out onto the road, Billy Pierce crossed his arms tightly. The shivering, aging hippie settled into sullen silence.

THEY DIDN'T DRIVE FAR.

The farm came up quickly on the left. There were two large fields bisected by a dark public road that ran up between them. Remo pulled off the main route and onto the narrower side road. The black-shrouded road stretched off into darkness far ahead. Remo and Billy got out of the car.

"Where are they?" Remo asked.

"They wouldn't be out in the open," Billy said, rolling his eyes, as if Remo knew nothing of covert operations. "They want to do this in secret. There's an access road at the edge of the woods beyond the field. The trucks will be there."

Remo looked at the nearest field. It was thick with early-autumn corn. The stalks grew high above his head.

"Okay, east or west woods?" Remo asked.

Billy scratched his grimy head. "Um..."

Remo closed his eyes. "Great," he muttered with a deep sigh. "Okay, here's what we do. I'll take east you take west. If you even think you've found your little buddies, come back to the car. I'll meet you back here in twenty minutes. And in case you have any ideas about bolting..."

Remo reached out and tweaked Billy's ear. The pain was so horrific and engulfing, the animal-rights terrorist didn't have time to scream. When Remo pulled his hand away, Billy sucked in a deep breath. He nodded his understanding.

Standing in the middle of the road, Billy began scratching his head again. "Er... just one question," he began sheepishly.

Once Remo had aimed him west, Billy started out across the road. He vanished amid the corn a few seconds later. Remo heard him crunching and stomping and swearing his way through the stalks. "Give me strength," Remo groaned. Turning, he headed into the nearer stalks of tall corn on the opposite side of the road from the animal-rights activist.

A moment later, the field swallowed him up.

CLYDE SIMMONS HAD PARKED the rental truck at the end of the access road twenty minutes before. He and Ron DePew were standing outside the truck now. Waiting.

A small brook trickled off into the distance. The constant, nearby noise of running water coming from the intense darkness tensed Clyde's already jangled nerves. He checked the luminescent face of his watch. It glowed eerily green.

"They're late," he said.

"Just so long as they get here before Zit-Face," Ron replied. He was gingerly touching the sticky, coagulated mess beneath his nose where he had reglued his false mustache. He'd accidentally put it on upside down. The bristles had stuck up his nostrils and made him sneeze for much of the trip from Medford until he'd snipped most of them off with a pair of key-chain fingernail clippers.

"He's late, too," Clyde noted.

"Mmm," said Ron. He scratched at one end of the mustache. His face contorted in pain. "Ouch!" he yelped.

Clyde glanced at him. "Leave it alone," he said, annoyed.

"I can't," Ron complained. "It itches."

"Take it off, then."

"Mona told us to leave them on."

"Mona isn't here," Clyde said, a cold edge in his voice. "And even if she was, she doesn't know everything."

"You wouldn't say that if she was here."

"Yeah, well ... maybe," Clyde admitted, perturbed. He stared off into the night.

There was no sign of the second truck anywhere. Just the endless babbling brook. Occasionally, the sound of a car would echo across the gently bowing cornfield. Clyde sighed loudly, looking back to the rear of the truck.

He and Ron were standing near the grille. Together they had managed to get the BBQ out of the back. It was tethered at the rear of the vehicle, out of sight. Every few minutes, the creature would low plaintively. It was almost like a cross between a cow's moo and a sheep's bleat, without being fully either.

Ron stroked the mustache as if trying to massage the itch away. "You don't like Mona much, do you?" he asked.

"Yeah, right," Clyde mocked. "We get the grunt work and she gets the glory."

"There hasn't been much glory yet," Ron pointed out.

Clyde smirked derisively. "Are you kidding me? With what we've got tied back there?" He jerked his head to the rear of the truck. "She's about to go national. Without either of us."

Ron continued to toy with his mustache. "Still, it's worse for Huey. He's married to her."

Clyde looked at his partner as Ron played with his mustache. He had been doing it since they'd left Medford. Something in Clyde finally snapped. "Enough is enough," he growled.

Clyde grabbed one soggy end of sagging horsehair. With a mighty wrench, he ripped the mustache from Ron's face.

Ron DePew's shriek of pain was muffled beneath a pair of horrified, snatching hands. Ron's palms clamped firmly over the injured area as his body reacted to the blinding shock of sudden, intense pain.

"Shh," Clyde admonished. He dangled the false mustache between two disgusted fingers. Ron's discomfort had the instant effect of lightening Clyde's mood.

"That hurt," Ron's muted voice whimpered. "It's better to get it over with fast. Like a BandAid. Here." Clyde shoved the mustache back at Ron.

"Get that away from me," Ron complained. Removing his palms from his face, he felt at the raw flesh on his lip. His fingertips came away wet. Blood. "You ripped half my frigging face off!" he cried.

"Quiet," Clyde ordered. He cocked an ear to the cornfield. "Did you hear something?"

"No," Ron whined. He wasn't paying attention to anything beyond his injured upper lip. He continued prodding at his face.

After a moment, Clyde relaxed. "Nerves," he said, shaking his head.

"Who cares about your nerves?" Ron said, his lips twisted. He mumbled from the corner of his mouth. "Can you see teeth through this?" He pointed at the biggest lip hole.

THE FAINT AROMA of Ron DePew's blood carried back on the chill autumn breeze. Somewhere at the rear of the truck, unseen by the HETA activists, a pair of nostrils pulled in the heady scent of fresh blood. A primitive hunger stirred.

And as the two men stood, unwitting in the dead of night, confident, stalking feet began to slip silently through the darkness toward the cab.

REMO FOLLOWED the narrow path between the rows of corn. Crickets chirped loudly all around him. The aroma from the field was intoxicating. Remo had to concentrate to keep his mouth from watering. As a Master of Sinanju, Remo's diet was severely limited. But he'd been delighted to learn after more than twenty years of little more than rice, fish and duck that corn was an acceptable alternative to his customary staples. Acceptable to everyone, that is, save the Reigning Master of Sinanju. To appease Chiun, Remo had promised to strike corn from his diet forever. He only wished he could banish the desire.

Burying the urge to gorge himself, Remo plowed forward.

At the edge of the woods far away, a lone cicada screeched at the night. It was followed by a second, then a third. The symphony reached a crescendo before cutting off entirely. The short lull was broken as the first cicada took up its whine once again.

There were no signs of human life yet. The wind was blowing north to south, so no softer sounds or subtle smells were brought to Remo from either field. If the HETA trucks were at the edge of the dark woods that loomed ominously ahead of him, he wouldn't know it until he was nearly upon them.

Because of the direction of the wind and the limitations of his own senses, Billy Pierce had dropped off Remo's personal radar once they were an acre or so apart. The animal-rights activist's cursing, stumbling trip through the cornfield had faded into other background noise.

Nearby, Remo sensed a single, small heartbeat. Probably a raccoon or skunk. The creature waddled awkwardly through the rows of swaying corn a few yards away.

The wind shifted briefly once, doubling up on itself before switching southward once more. Skunk, Remo noted. Definitely a skunk.

But up ahead was still a blank slate. Even so, if the trucks were there, he'd know soon enough.

As silent as the very air itself, Remo pressed forward.

THE GROUND RACED UP to meet Billy Pierce. Muttering unhappily, he pushed himself to his feet.

His palms stung where he fell. Putting them up to his face, he examined them carefully in the moonlight.

They were bleeding. The scraping wounds he'd gotten while trying to escape from his bulkhead earlier that day had reopened. The right palm was worse than the left. He must have landed on a jagged rock.

He wiped the thin smear of blood and grime on his ragged bell-bottoms. It wasn't clear whether this helped to clean the dirt from his hands, but it seemed to satisfy Billy. He stumbled forward.

He wasn't aware how far he had actually traveled across the field until he was all the way through it. Billy tumbled over a raised lip of earth and fell with a heavy thud through the last row of corn. The stalks crunched loudly beneath his great girth.

"Damn," he griped, as his massive belly oozed in both directions, settling out on either side of his prone body.

He floundered for a moment, grabbing at the ground before him with his still stinging, bleeding hands.

Somewhere nearby, he heard the sound of a small river gurgling off into the night.

His hands sank into the earth. It was muddy to the touch.

"Great," he groused. "I fell in water." Although he was ordinarily averse to the thought of washing any part of his anatomy, the pain in his hands was so great as he pushed himself laboriously to his knees that, for a moment, he considered actually dipping his hands in the stream and swishing them around a little to cool the stinging sensation. But as he leaned his hands against his large thighs, Billy realized that the water sound was too far away for him to have landed in the river.

That was odd.

Kneeling at the edge of the cornfield and puzzling over the strange, unexplained wetness on his hands, Billy was surprised anew. As luck would have it, he had plopped out of the woods at the precise spot he had been looking for. No more than three yards away was the HETA rental truck.

It sat quiet and unmoving on the narrow access road. The rear door was open wide. The weak cab dome light was turned on.

Billy wasn't sure what to do.

There was no sign of his HETA confederates nor of the animal they were supposed to be moving. He was supposed to go meet Remo at the car, but there didn't appear to be anything to show him. And the last thing Billy wanted to do was to inspire Remo's anger yet again. Frowning, he decided to investigate a little before going off for his rendezvous.

Billy struggled to his feet.

He wiped the strange slick fluid from his hands as he stepped carefully over to the truck. Whatever it was, it felt sticky on his pant legs. Not like mud.

At the rear of the truck, he found the leash that had been used to tie the BBQ to the vehicle. It was snapped in half. Standing on tiptoes and leaning inside the rear of the truck, Billy saw none of the animals.

Frowning in confusion, he walked around to the cab.

He noted the ghastly stench as he approached the front of the truck. Far worse than the odor people claimed he made. This was like rotting roadkill.

Below the open cab window, Billy suddenly remembered the strange fluid on his hands. The dome light was weak, but good enough to see by.

He examined his hands. They were slick and red. Red?

Experimentally, he sniffed the substance. As he did so, he glanced over to the edge of the cornfield. And froze.

It was there. Near the edge of the field. He had fallen right next to it and hadn't seen it.

The body had been ripped to shreds. The face was ghastly white, the dead mouth open wide in shock. Billy recognized the man. Ron DePew.

It was blood on his hands. Ron's blood. Billy staggered back, falling against the cab. Away from the body. Get away!

Billy stumbled around the front of the cab. Another body. Flat on its back. Stomach open wide.

Blood. Blood everywhere.

On the ground, on the body. On the face.

Eyes looking up at him. Feral, angry. The creature had been feasting on the second corpse. It lifted its head out of the stomach cavity, entrails dripping from its slathering, crimson-smeared mouth.

Hideous, blood soaked. And familiar. Panic gripped his thudding chest. Billy twisted, tried to run. Too late.

The creature bounded toward him. A single leap and it was upon him. One curled paw lashed down toward his neck, talons curled in violent rage.

Blood exploded from his throat, spattering across the grille and windshield of the silent truck.

And in his last moments of life, Billy Pierce reacted to fear and brutal death with the same blind instinct used by the first ancestors of humanity to scamper down from the trees.

Billy screamed.

REMO HEARD the terrified shriek from the distant edge of the opposite field.

He had just given up his futile search at the edge of the woods and was turning back in Billy's direction.

The sound shocked him to action.

Rather than follow the paths through the high corn, Remo threw himself into the nearest stalks. While he ran, he slashed his hands left and right.

Corn stalks toppled and crumpled, falling back in his wake. He moved through the first field like a determined thresher, reaching the road's edge in less than fifteen seconds.

He broke into the open near his rental car. There was another vehicle parked up the road. Remo had no time to see who it might be. He bounded across the desolate street and plowed into the opposite field of corn.

His hands were slicing blurs as he hacked a beeline passageway through the tall corn to the point where Billy's scream had originated.

He exploded through the second field and onto the narrow access road.

The stench of blood was powerful, mixed in with the odor of digestive fluids and exposed bowels. Remo saw the gutted body of Ron DePew first. Eyes keenly trained in Sinanju followed the bloody path Billy Pierce had unwittingly left from the edge of the cornfield to the front of the rented truck.

Remo found Billy. What was left of him.

The body had been mutilated. The face and neck were ripped to shreds. The large chest was open. White ribs shone like orderly piano keys through the split casing of frail human flesh.

In spite of the gruesomeness of the attack, Billy had fared better than Clyde Simmons.

The other HETA member had been the main course in a grisly buffet. His stomach cavity had been split open wide. The spine was visible on the opposite side of the large hollow. There were no organs left.

Blood washed the area, turning the earth to sticky mud.

Remo tuned his senses to their limit. Obviously, an animal was responsible. And the HETA people were supposed to be exchanging the BBQs tonight.

The cicadas and crickets continued their nightly serenade. In the distance, a car engine coughed to life. But in all the night sounds, Remo could not locate those of even a single large predator.

Settling for the next-best thing, Remo went to the edge of the area soaked with blood. As expected, he found a set of tracks leading away from the bodies.

They were odd. A ball-shaped indentation preceded by a strange clawing hook. The imprint was nothing he was familiar with. A BBQ.

The path led back into the cornfield.

Loping, Remo followed the trail through the acres of soughing corn. The path ran parallel to the one he had made, though it was much clumsier than his own. He followed it out to the road.

By the time he reached the blacktop street, the dirt of the field had cleared the blood from the animal's foot pads. Once Remo reached the road, he was unable to determine where the creature had gone.

He looked up to where the road disappeared in the darkness. Nothing. Back in the other direction, he saw a lone car turning onto the main route toward the prison.

He'd lost it. The BBQ was gone.

RETURNING TO THE BODIES of the HETA men, Remo crouched down to examine the carnage.

It was a grim sight.

Now that he knew what kind of footprints the BBQs made, he could see the animal's imprints all around the body of Clyde Simmons. They were everywhere-one atop the other.

Remo traced them back to the original set. The last ones made before the initial attack. These ones ran up along side the truck.

At the rear, he found the snapped leash. The animal must have been left there. It had broken free before going on its violent rampage.

Remo's eyes narrowed as he examined the ground.

"What the dingdong?" he said, brow furrowed. Hands on his knees, he examined the ground carefully.

The imprints back here weren't the same ones as at the front of the truck. These were heavy, clumsy hoofprints. Not the cautious, delicate ones that had been made around the HETA bodies.

Remo bit the inside of his cheek in concentration. Try as he might, he couldn't come up with a suitable explanation.

He went around to the truck's cab. Leaning in, he pulled on the headlights.

The wooded area in front of the truck was immediately bathed in a wide yellow glow.

He went back to the bodies.

The tracks were still the same as before. And still different from the ones in the back.

Staring at the problem wouldn't bring a solution. There was nothing more he could do here. Let Smith try to sort out the mystery.

As he was turning to go, he noticed something odd about the body of Billy Pierce.

"What the hell?" Remo said, puzzled.

He squatted down next to the body. With careful fingers, he reached to the edge of the raking wound in Billy's chest.

An object clung to the flesh. It was hard and thin and shaped like a waxing moon.

Remo plucked the object free. He examined it in the glow of the headlights.

Going back to the cab, Remo found a few white envelopes with the HETA address embossed in the upper left-hand corners lying on the dashboard.

He took one and stuffed the unfamiliar object inside. A souvenir for Smith. Something else to confound the CURE director.

Shutting off the cab lights, he jumped down to the ground. Envelope in hand, Remo stole off into the night.

Chapter 9

As the first bleary streaks of dawn began to rake the gray-tinged sky over Long Island Sound, the light of the new day found Harold W. Smith already at work.

Smith had taken care of the day's sanitarium business in the predawn darkness. It was the work of CURE to which he now devoted himself.

After a scant ten minutes perusing the digests culled by CURE's basement mainframes during their sleepless night patrolling the electronic netherworld of the World Wide Web, Smith had determined that there was nothing that would require calling Remo off his BostonBio assignment.

Things were quiet in the world. What Smith saw now were the usual mundane, day-to-day affairs that the Folcroft Four-his name for the quartet of mainframes-collected from a wide variety of sources.

A crooked judge in Fresno.

A seeming new drug pipeline from South America.

Rival Mafia factions involved in a turf dispute at a New England fishing port.

Nothing worthy of Remo's particular talents. Smith accessed the latest information on the BBQ situation. As he expected, there was nothing new. It was early yet. If Remo had already found the creatures, it might not be reported to the press for several hours.

He hoped that Remo was successful. In his rockribbed Yankee soul, Smith could not fathom why someone would want to derail a project devoted solely to the benefit of mankind. But then, Smith's analytical mind had always had difficulty comprehending irrationality.

As he pondered the BostonBio situation, his computer emitted a small electronic beep. Smith adjusted his rimless glasses as he turned his attention to whatever it was the Folcroft Four had found. Nimble fingers accessed the new file. He was surprised to find that it was related to Remo and Chiun.

The program was part of a complex system Smith had established to keep track of CURE's operatives. It trolled the Net in search of their names, creditcard uses, bank withdrawals or anything else that might be of import.

Smith's bloodless lips pursed as he read the report.

Ordinarily, the computer system would disregard the telephone bills Remo received at the home he shared with the Master of Sinanju. It was only programmed to respond in the event of a large anomaly in any of the monetary transactions of either Remo or Chiun.

As Smith scanned down the lines of the phone company invoice, he was dismayed to see dozens of long-distance phone calls. All were to the same four numbers in California. Smith recognized the 818 prefix of Burbank and the 213 of Los Angeles. These showed up more than any other.

The total bill came to $587.42.

Smith knew Remo all too well. There was no way CURE's enforcement arm would have stayed on the phone with anyone that long. It had to be Chiun.

But whom would the Master of Sinanju be calling in California? Especially when Remo said the old Korean had been meditating in isolation the past several weeks.

Remo and Chiun's last assignment had taken them both to California. It was possible that Chiun had met someone there with whom he was now conversing. The thought troubled Smith. The wizened Asian had a habit of blurting out the nature of his work to anyone who would listen. Fortunately, the people who heard his claims of being a master assassin in the employ of America were either eventual victims of CURE or merely disregarded Chiun as a delusional old man.

The Master of Sinanju was up to something. What it was, Smith had no idea. But over the years, he had developed a keen sixth sense when it came to the wily old Korean. And whenever Chiun got involved in something new, it usually wound up costing Smith money. Reminding himself to ask Remo about the bill, Smith switched back to his regular work.

When his desk phone rang forty-five minutes later, however, Smith was so engrossed in his work that he forgot completely about the outlandish telephone bill.

"Smith," he said crisply, receiver tucked between shoulder and ear.

"Morning, Smitty."

In the kitchen of his condominium more than 150 miles up the East Coast, Remo kept his voice low. Since his return home the previous evening, there had been stirring sounds coming from the Master of Sinanju's bedchambers. Chiun's meditation phase seemed about to end, and Remo didn't want to be blamed for causing cosmic disturbances in its waning hours.

"What have you to report on the BostonBio situation?" the CURE director asked.

"You mean you haven't heard?" Remo said, surprised.

Smith got an instant sinking feeling in the churning pit of his ulcer-lined stomach. "What is wrong?"

"I guess that means you haven't." Remo took a deep breath. "Remember that little murder thing near the lab?"

"The bookstore owner? What of it?"

"Looks like BostonBio had better dust off its liability policy."

Smith's prim mouth thinned. "How can you be certain the creatures were responsible?" he asked.

"Because I saw what these things are capable of last night," Remo said, voice grim. "Let's just say they're not candidates for the petting zoo at Santa's Happy Village."

Before Smith could press for details, a screen-inscreen file automatically opened at one corner of his buried monitor. AP text appeared in even lines.

"One moment, please," Smith said to Remo. Using his keyboard, Smith clicked the window to full size. He quickly digested the wire-story report. "Remo, there was an incident last night west of Boston. Two trucks were found in the woods near Concord prison. Six mutilated bodies were discovered near the vehicles. They were flagged due to their similarity to the original death near BostonBio."

In his Massachusetts kitchen, Remo frowned. "I didn't know about the second truck or the other three bodies."

"They were found a half mile away from one another," Smith explained. "Obscured by woods."

"Hmm," Remo mused. "Anyway, looks like the BBQs are going postal. Oh, and HETA's in on the party, too."

"The animal-rights group?" Smith queried.

"It was their commandos who swiped the one eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eaters from BostonBio. The local HETA chapter had set up a switch last night with a group farther west. They were doing the whole Born Free thing until their cargo got the munchies."

In his Spartan Folcroft office, Smith removed his glasses. He massaged the bridge of his patrician nose.

"How many of the creatures escaped?"

Remo hesitated. "This is where it gets a little tricky. My best count puts it at one."

Smith paused for a moment before speaking. He lowered his spotless glasses to his onyx desk, hand rock steady.

"Remo, that is impossible, given the number of deaths. Surely while one of their fellows was being mauled at each truck, either one or both of the remaining two HETA people could have sought shelter in the cab or trailer. There must have been more than one."

"Should have been. Wasn't," Remo insisted. "Only one as far as I could tell." He hesitated to relay the next bit of information. "Although there were two sets of tracks."

"Explain."

Remo went on to tell him about the footprints at the rear of the truck and the distinctly different tracks that led into the cornfield.

"You could not be mistaken?" Smith said once he was through.

"No way, Smitty," Remo insisted. "Two sets of tracks. One animal. I'm sure of it."

Smith considered. "That is a mystery," he admitted. "However, we are dealing with what is essentially a new life-form. It is possible that this ability to alter its step is some form of self-preservation endemic to this species. Perhaps it only surfaces during a killing phase."

"Oh, and there was something else," Remo said. "I found something in a gash the BBQ made in one of the bodies."

"Oftentimes a tooth or claw is left behind after a particularly savage attack," Smith said. "Which is it?"

"Next mystery," Remo replied. "It's neither. Whatever it is, I overnighted it to you last night. You should be getting it some time this morning."

"I look forward to receiving it," Smith said, intrigued.

"Jeez, Smitty, you're awfully calm about all this," Remo complained. "These things have racked up a pretty hefty body count. I figured you'd want me to squash them."

"If it comes to it, that may be our only option," Smith said somberly, replacing his glasses. "For now we should concentrate on locating the creatures and returning them to BostonBio. Dr. White is the one person in the world suited to learning the true nature of what has transpired there."

Remo snorted derisively. "Humanity's destined for the short end of the food chain if we dump our fertilized eggs into that bottomless basket."

"I am aware of Dr. White's shortcomings," Smith admitted. "I have been studying her background information. She is quite brilliant but obviously unstable. Her assault against a local Boston television personality two days ago is just the latest incident in a long line of aberrant behavior. She has a police record going back to her college days. However, that does not make her any less important when it comes to understanding these animals."

"Is she on drugs?" Remo asked abruptly.

Smith frowned. "Most of the charges brought against her were drug or alcohol related. The last was two years ago. I believe police found PCP in her car."

"Bingo," Remo said.

"Is that significant?" Smith asked.

"No," Remo replied. "Just explains a lot."

Smith forged ahead. "In spite of her personal failings, Dr. White is your best ally in understanding these animals."

"If it's a choice between the lady or the tiger, I'll take my chances with door number two," Remo muttered.

Before Smith could respond, the text shifted on his monitor once more.

"Hold, please," he said, distracted.

Smith found that his computer had dragged yet another news story from the Internet. According to the identification code the CURE mainframes had given the latest data, it was cross-referenced with the two earlier suspected BBQ attacks. Smith scanned the report quickly.

"Oh, no," he said after he was through. His voice was hollow.

"What's wrong?" Remo asked.

"It appears we no longer have Dr. White's expertise to fall back on," Smith replied.

"Why not?" Remo asked.

Smith scanned the story again, on the chance that he had read it wrong the first time. He had not. "Another mutilated body has turned up," the CURE director said tightly. "This one on the grounds of BostonBio. The Boston Blade is reporting that the body is that of Dr. Judith White."

Chapter 10

Initial reports in the local press of the death of Dr. Judith White appeared to be greatly exaggerated. When Remo returned to the lab at BostonBio, he found the scientist upright, alert and in the middle of throwing a characteristic fit of temper.

"Get that thing out of here!" Dr. White screamed. Her beautiful face curled into wrinkles of intense displeasure as the forensic team attempted to heft the mangled body into a black-zippered morgue bag.

Remo was careful to avoid the wide area of drying blood that had spread out around the body.

As he walked by, he leaned in to get a glimpse of the ghostly white face of the latest BBQ victim. The glassy, frozen-in-death eyes of Orrin Merkel stared up at him.

Judith sat on a desk beyond the cluster of police and medical examiners. A cigarette dangled from between her perfect red lips.

"You're alive," Remo commented as he stepped over to her. There was a hint of undisguised disappointment in his tone.

Judith raised a single eyebrow as she peered over at him. Taking her cigarette between her slender fingers, she blew a huge cloud of smoke at the ceiling. "Isn't the Agriculture Department usually busy pimping out bees and stomping on boll weevils?" she replied sarcastically.

"I haven't graduated to bugs yet, so they assigned me to you. The papers had you dead," Remo pointed out. He glanced back, surveying the scene.

"The papers want me dead. Trust the Blade to screw up a free lunch. I'm the one who reported the body. They somehow twisted that into me being the body."

The police forensic team had succeeded in dropping the largest section of remains into the thick black bag. Remo saw that the stomach cavity had been ripped open. Like the corpse of Clyde Simmons the night before, the scientist's organs had been removed utterly. His abdomen was like an open, ghastly red bowl.

Remo nodded to the corpse. "Orrin," he said. Dr. White blew another cloud of smoke, this one from the corner of her mouth. "What's left of him." She didn't seem disturbed in the least.

"Shouldn't you ratchet down the Bette Davis act a few notches? After all, this does let your BBQs off the hook."

Although the freshly mutilated corpse of her lab assistant hadn't succeeded in agitating her, Remo's words seemed to. Judith stubbed her cigarette out on the desk's surface. Sliding to her feet, she beckoned Remo to follow.

They walked to a rear door of the lab, Judith allowing the last thin veil of smoke in her lungs to escape along the way.

She pushed the door open. The corridor beyond was lined with the pens from which the animals had been stolen two nights before. Remo was surprised to see one cage was occupied.

An odd-looking creature with huge, sad eyes looked mournfully to him as he stepped into the hall, which connected the two laboratories. The animal's foot-long legs were far too short for its large body. It moaned softly.

"A BBQ?" Remo asked, surprised.

Judith's face was serious. "I found it here this morning when I came in."

"These things have a homing instinct?"

Judith seemed hesitant to speculate. "I guess they must. Unplanned on my part. How else could it have gotten back here?"

"I went to the HETA meeting place last night. They were only planning on exchanging one animal. It got away."

"And this is it." She gestured to the BBQ. It backed away from her hand.

Remo shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know." He frowned. "If this is the one from last night, it would have had to travel twenty miles through pretty tough terrain."

"It might be something I didn't foresee," Dr. White admitted. "We've all heard stories about dogs and cats that travel clear across country in order to find their masters."

"Lady, that's not Lassie and you ain't exactly Timmy."

"It's possible," she stated firmly.

He pointed at the creature's stumpy legs. "This thing would have a hard time walking to the wall and back without collapsing. There's no way."

"Maybe it isn't the one from last night, then," she admitted. "Maybe it's one of the other ones."

"Yeah. And my vote it's the one that killed that guy near here the other night."

Dr. White no longer seemed as certain as before. "Possibly," she said. "But I'm not convinced," she added quickly. "These deaths could be the work of another animal. Or a human being." Inspiration struck. "A serial killer."

"Back at the Agriculture Department, we call that grasping at straws," Remo said. "The only link between the murders are those things." He nodded to the BBQ.

"Deaths," she interjected.

"What?"

"If they are the work of the BCWs-and I'm not conceding they are-then the proper word would be deaths. An animal does not murder. It kills. Perhaps to eat, perhaps to survive. But an animal does not murder."

"That's a tortured exercise in semantics," Remo noted.

"No," Judith said firmly. "That's the law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest." There was passion in her eyes.

"I don't think natural selection has anything to do with anything that's gone on around here," Remo said, deadpan. "And I think the six dead HETA people would back me up on that."

"There were more deaths?" Judith asked.

Remo nodded grimly. "Last night. With the other two, it's human race, zero-BBQs, eight and counting."

"My God," Judith croaked, aghast. She turned away from Remo. Staring out one of the barred windows along the side of the room, she shook her head in slow horror.

"I'm sure mankind'll be touched you're finally coming around," Remo commented dryly.

"Screw mankind," she groaned. "Where does this leave the BCW project?" She bristled at his look of disgust. "I mean it," she complained. "The brass here is already riding me about the incident with that ditz reporter. The BCW project has been hit with major bad press and HETA sabotage. And to top it all off, I heard from my lawyer this morning. That Tulle twerp is suing me for assault. Can you believe it?"

"You shish kebabbed his carotid with a letter opener," Remo pointed out.

"There are some species that would see that as a mating ritual."

"Only the Klingons," Remo suggested.

She wasn't listening. "I was complimenting that hypocritical toad. Not that any of you males deserve it. There aren't any real men left in this world." She raised her hands before her as she spoke, palms open and fingers unfurled-penitent claws.

Remo was hardly listening. While Dr. Judith White's parts were all in the right place, her personality was more effective than a cold shower. A feminist lament at this juncture merely worked to clinch an already closed deal.

"Tell me when you're finished," he offered blandly. He wasn't even looking at her. He was peering down at the BBQ, trying to decide if it could be a killer. Big, guileless eyes looked back at him.

Still staring out the window, Judith snorted loudly. "You know what's really pathetic? You're the closest thing to a real man I've met in a long time."

"Look harder," he instructed.

Annoyed, she glanced at Remo again. All at once, her hard expression melted. It happened with bizarre rapidity. Something sparked in the back of her green eyes.

"You are a real man, aren't you," she growled. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact.

"I pee standing up." Remo nodded absently.

Judith bit her lower lip in deep concentration. Abruptly, she reached a clumsy hand out for him. Remo was still studying the BBQ when he sensed the hand swinging toward him. He ducked beneath it.

"I'm sorry," he said, forehead furrowed. "When did this turn into our first date?"

She didn't answer. Her hand snapped out again. As before, Remo ducked away. He was astonished to find that he had inadvertently moved directly into the path of her other swinging hand. He ducked out of the way an instant before she could cuff him in the side of the head.

Remo felt the tiniest brush of her fingertips at the ends of his dark hair.

"Let's get physical," she purred playfully.

It was amazing to him that her blow had nearly registered. Remo was long used to the attention he received from the opposite sex. His Sinanju training had made him alluring to women. They sensed he was somehow superior to other men. Like all animals, they wished to breed with the best their race had to offer.

But this time was different than normal. There were none of the "stirring of passion" signals from Judith. Her porcelain skin wasn't flushed. No increased perspiration. Her heartbeat even remained constant.

Remo took a step back, amazement giving way to annoyance.

"Lady, whatever you're on, cut the dose," he groused.

"Don't knock it till you've tried it," she replied. Briefly, Remo wondered if he shouldn't yell to the cops in the next room that there was an attempted rape in progress. It looked as if all the guns, Mace and billy clubs in town wouldn't quell Judith's animal lust.

But just as he thought he'd have to take drastic steps, an anxious face suddenly poked through the doorway at the end of the hall.

"Dr. White, come in here!" the man called urgently. The scientist ducked back inside the second lab.

Judith stopped her advances.

Just like that. Like flipping off a switch. Smoothing the wrinkles in her short skirt, Dr. White spun from Remo. Without a word, she stepped briskly down the hall to the adjoining lab. It was as if the previous three minutes had never happened.

"So that's what it's like to be a White House intern," Remo commented to the lone BBQ.

Not knowing what to make out of what had just occurred, he trailed Judith to the second lab.

As he walked away, Remo failed to notice that the BBQ had backed to the rear of its stall. There was fear in the backs of its sad eyes.

THE WINDOW THROUGH WHICH the HETA commandos had spirited the BBQs two nights before had been boarded up. It was scheduled to be replaced later that afternoon.

Remo noted that the janitorial staff had neglected to pick up all of the traces of broken glass on the floor of the lab. Tiny shards sparkled in dusty corners beneath lab tables and heat registers.

He found Judith and the rest of her white-coated team standing around a twenty-four-inch television that sat on the same shelf as a large coffeemaker. Half-filled mugs littered the shelf.

Remo instantly recognized the man on TV. A bandage covered the letter-opener wound in his neck.

Curt Tulle stood before a podium on which were arranged a dozen microphones, all bearing logos from various local and national news outlets.

"...was not involved. I want to make that absolutely clear," Curt intoned, his expression grave. "Nor was the national HETA organization. This creature was entrusted to us by an anonymous individual after news of the BBQ deaths was made known."

The camera shifted jerkily to one side. Remo spotted the familiar shape of a BBQ standing on a raised platform next to Curt. It chewed unconcernedly as a few camera flashes popped around it.

"They've only got one?" Judith demanded of her staff.

"That's all he's admitting to," said a woman in a white lab coat.

The camera swept dizzyingly back to Curt Tulle. "Reports say these things are killers," a reporter shouted.

"We are the killers," Curt said sadly. "Every helpless bunny, mouse or puppy that is killed in the name of so-called scientific research is the victim of government-sanctioned murder. If this creature before you kills, it is a fitting irony that it does. I wonder how many animals the butchers at BostonBio slaughtered in order to manufacture the very thing that might bring about their own end?"

"What about those who say these things are monsters and should be destroyed?" another reporter called.

"If they are monsters, they are our monsters," Curt said righteously. "If they need to feast on human flesh in order to survive, we should provide it to them."

"Are you actually recommending we feed human beings to these things?" the reporter asked, amazed.

"If it is necessary, yes." Curt nodded. "As I understand it, our nursing homes are overcrowded. Perhaps the BBQs would be satisfied with a diet of our elderly or infirm. At least until their ultimate release."

"Release?"

Curt nodded happily. "I have been in touch with Bryce Babcock, the secretary of the interior. He is quite keen on the idea of releasing them into Yellowstone or another national park. You recall he championed the wolf-release program of a few years ago."

"Wouldn't that endanger park visitors?"

"Again, a small price to pay. And if I am able to recommend an appetizer to Secretary Babcock, I will be certain to mention that Dr. Judith White of BostonBio would make a delicious meal. These are her babies, after all. She should share responsibility for feeding them." Absently, he touched the wound on his neck as he spoke.

In the BostonBio lab, Dr. White lowered her head. "Shut it off," she ordered levelly.

Her staff didn't move quickly enough. "Shut it off!" Judith roared.

Someone nearby fumbled with the remote. Curt Tulle collapsed into a single pixel. The tiny spot of white faded to darkness.

She stayed very still for a long time. Finally, she raised her head. Her eyes searched for Remo. She found that he was nowhere to be seen. He had slipped away while she was watching the conference.

"HETA says they're going to fight for ownership with us in court," one of her staffers-braver than the rest-offered. "Until then, he promises they'll keep the BCW safe," he added weakly.

Ever so slowly, Judith stared at the man, dead eyes locking on the nervous assistant, who suddenly looked like a hunter confronted by a grizzly.

"Like hell," she muttered.

Chapter 11

The office had been shrouded in oppressive, lengthening shadows, seemingly for hours. At long last, day finally collapsed completely into night. When the gathering darkness became too consuming, Curt Tulle was forced to turn on his desk light.

Pieces of the green glass shade were in the trash. The result of Judith White's attack. White light from the naked bulb spilled out across walls and ceiling.

Curt's weak eyes avoided the bare bulb. The light was just another thing to fear. He'd been an absolute nervous wreck since before the press conference.

If Mona Janner hadn't forced the lone BBQ on him, he would never have gotten involved in this. But she knew his Achilles' heel. The one thing that the HETA membership would have found completely unacceptable if it were to become public knowledge-his private passion.

Lost in thought, he stroked the nutria fur choker that was clipped around his neck. It always soothed him.

Until today.

With the bandage beneath it, the choker didn't fit as snugly as usual. It bunched up awkwardly at the side of his neck, chafing slightly.

Reminded once more of Dr. White, Curt shivered. It was all Mona's fault. Curt was content to quietly head up the Boston HETA office. He'd always protested the right things. Occasionally, he'd appeared on local television. All very quiet, very subdued.

Not like Mona. She was a doer. One of the passionate loudmouths who had invaded the movement in recent years. She'd do and say anything to further their cause.

Personally, Curt didn't like the new brand of activism that had flooded the movement. As far as yesterday's confrontation was concerned, Curt would have preferred to settle his differences with Dr. White and BostonBio in a court of law. Where there would be bailiffs with side arms to keep the halfcrazed scientist in line. Now Mona had even screwed that up. All for those stupid lab animals.

The whole BBQ business made Curt intensely uncomfortable.

The agitation he was feeling toward this whole sorry enterprise had clearly and distinctly cried out for the big guns. He had been forced to break into his personal store. Sitting alone in his Boston HETA office, Curt Tulle was decked out in full, glorious regalia.

In addition to the nutria choker, he wore a pair of alligator boots. Although they made his ankles sweat, the feel was exquisite. Well worth the exorbitant cost.

Specially made sealskin trousers gently caressed his thighs. He had insisted that his seamstress use the skins of baby seals. Everyone knew they made the best material.

A suede belt held the pants up. Again, young lambs were the best choice for suede-at least as far as Curt was concerned. And he was paying the bills, after all.

He wasn't wearing his favorite mink coat, opting instead for the long black sable-which he broke out only on special occasions. A pillbox hat made of the gorgeous fur of the Arctic blue fox perched at a rakish angle atop his head.

His ermine stole lay limp across his desk blotter. Curt stroked the fur carefully and evenly as he sat at his desk.

The animal didn't respond, which was how he liked it. For although he was head of the Boston branch of the most famous animal-rights group in the nation, Curt Tulle absolutely detested animals. From a personal perspective, the only good animal was a dead, skinned and processed animal. Ideally, one that excited a powerful tactile response.

The hypocrisy he displayed in his public and private attitudes was reconciled in his mind by the fact that he cared more deeply for the world than other people. Sure, he hated having living animals around him. But he fought tooth and nail to keep them everywhere else. And if a few random housewives were mauled by mountain lions while out jogging or a couple of kids were bitten by rattlesnakes while playing in the sandbox, Curt could live with it. Just as long as every last animal in his own backyard was caught, caged and crushed.

Curt was stroking his ermine and thinking about how nice it would be to live in a giant animal-free bubble when he heard a loud thud from the hallway beyond his closed office door. Sadie.

Curt exhaled. This was Sadie Mayer's second night this month to help out behind the front desk. The old woman was supposed to leave at nine.

Curt didn't like Sadie. He much preferred the energetic young college girls with leftist political leanings who migrated to town every fall. They were certainly easier on the eyes. But Sadie and her ilk were necessary to keep around if only to cover the phones during the long summer months.

Right now it was late September, the fall semester was well under way all around Boston and Curt Tulle absolutely did not need Sadie Mayer stomping around giving him a heart attack in the middle of the night.

Frowning, Curt pulled off his fox-fur hat. He left it on his desk, stepping out into the hallway.

It was cold in the hall. The alley door was open. Sadie.

"Stupid old bat." Curt shivered. He went to close the door.

He knew where she'd be. Ever since Mona and Huey Janner had dumped off the BBQ that morning, Sadie had been sneaking back to see the animal. He'd caught her a dozen times in the storeroom near his office, petting the dull-looking creature on its long snout.

The thought of actually touching a living animal gave him a further chill. He shuddered beneath his sable as he walked past the rear storage room on his way to the alley exit.

The storage room door was ajar. Of course he'd been right. Sadie had no sense of how valuable the BBQ was. To her, it was just another animal. She'd be knitting it a sweater next.

Agitated, Curt pushed the door. Something blocked the way.

The painted wood surface was rough to the touch as he pushed again. Harder.

Whatever it was shifted clumsily. The door pushed the inert object farther into the room as Curt shoved his way inside. Grumbling, Curt stepped inside.

He found Sadie instantly. She was the thing that had been blocking the door.

Curt gasped.

The old woman sprawled on her back in the shadowy room. Her eyes were open and milky. The bundles of slick, squishy organs that had-for the last seventy-six years-resided within the delicate shell of Sadie Mayer's abdomen were now spread haphazardly around the room. The wooden floor was awash in blood.

Horrified, Curt staggered back into the wall. His heel caught part of Sadie's liver. He skittered sideways. Feet slipping out from beneath him, he crashed to his side on the sopped floor. The train of his sable coat rolled through pools of viscera as he clawed at the wall, trying desperately to get back to his feet.

His alligator boots lost their footing again, and he fell once more, this time face first into the thick puddle of blood.

Curt screamed. The noise caught in his throat, and he choked on the sound. Whimpering, crying, he pulled himself to his knees. Fumbling at the door, he dragged it through the half-congealed ooze. Like a baby, Curt crawled on his hands and knees out into the hall.

Panting, heart pounding madly, he fell to the floor outside, hands coated with Sadie's blood.

He was sobbing now, unable to hold back the panic and horror.

The blood. So much blood.

Sadie. Petting the BBQ. He remembered chasing her out of that room earlier in the day.

Now she was dead. Alone in that room. And dead. In spite of the intensity of his hysterical attack, something significant dawned in the back of Curt Tulle's reeling, confused mind.

Sadie. In that room. Alone.

Alone.

The BBQ was gone!

The thing was a killer. Mona Janner had dumped a vicious monster in his lap and taken off.

He cried, whimpered. Blood everywhere. It wasn't in the supply room.

It was free.

Somewhere else in the building. He needed to get away. To safety.

The urge to flee swelled like a surging tidal wave in the mind of Curt Tulle, suppressing all other thoughts.

He pushed himself back to his knees. Too late.

He heard the footfalls-confident, focused. Felt the pressure on his back.

It came from the direction of the alley door. The open door. Too late to run.

A blow to the neck. No. Stronger than that.

Blood erupted onto the floor beneath him. No longer that of poor Sadie. It poured as if from a running faucet from the open gash in his neck.

Another blow. This one on his back. Clothes tearing. Claws ripping into flesh.

The world slowed to a distant, lazy pace. Like a film run in slow motion.

He felt himself being lifted from the floor. The ceiling came very close. Twisting, bleeding, he was flung like a rag doll down the corridor. He arced up to the ceiling, shattering a bare hanging bulb. He felt the pain from the broken glass in his cheek. More blood.

The floor raced up quickly to meet him. He plummeted down, crashing in a bloodied ball into the corner near the bathroom.

Footsteps padded closer again. Sniffing.

Another noise. This one at the front door. Everything vague, hazy.

A snort very close. Retreating footsteps.

Weakly, Curt lifted his head. He saw the familiar black-spotted flanks of the BBQ vanishing into the shadows at the end of the corridor.

Blood ran from his forehead into his eyes. He lost focus.

"I hate animals," he wheezed.

As the pain of death dragged slowly up his battered body, Curt allowed his head to thud back to the floor.

Chapter 12

Remo had to wait until the last of the straggling reporters had left before approaching HETA headquarters. Since he lived in the area, he didn't want to run the risk of being seen. It had been eight years since his last date with the plastic surgeon's scalpel, and he had no interest in going back.

On the sidewalk, Remo tested the doorknob. Locked.

With a tight twist and gentle shove, he popped the lock. Tiny shards of metal skittered across the floor as Remo stepped inside.

The moment he entered the foyer, he was assaulted by the familiar, distinct smell of human death.

Remo slipped around Sadie Mayer's desk. He found Curt Tulle's body in the hallway beyond. The HETA director lay twisted against one wall. A streak of blood lined the floor where he'd skidded to a final, fatal stop.

At first glance, Curt didn't appear to be the victim of a BBQ attack. His stomach cavity was still intact. As he approached the body, Remo sensed a thready heartbeat. Curt coughed once, lightly. Foamy blood bubbled out between his lips. Crouching down beside the HETA director, Remo checked his pulse. Almost nonexistent. And his wounds were extensive. Curt hadn't much time left. The HETA man seemed to respond to the delicate touch of Remo's hand. His unseeing eyes rolled around. His head shifting slightly even as he stared blankly at the ceiling.

White lips parted.

The word Curt repeated would have been inaudible to every human set of ears on Earth, save two. "...ona...Mona...Mona," Curt gasped.

"Is that who did this to you?" Remo prodded gently.

Curt coughed. A string of sticky dark blood dribbled down his chin.

He seemed to want to shake his head but could not. "BBQ," he whispered. "Mona's...gonna kill me," he exhaled.

Curt's head lolled to an awkward angle. A final trickle of blood gurgled up between his lips.

Face severe, Remo left the body.

There was more blood in front of the supply room. Inside he found the remains of Sadie Mayer. The old woman's wounds were consistent with the other BBQ attacks. She had been killed first and then methodically eaten. Curt looked more like the victim of a savage assault.

Remo concluded that the BBQ had had its fill with Sadie. By the time it reached Curt, it was sated. The creature had been playing with its food. Farther down the hallway, Remo found the same tracks he had seen in the Concord cornfield. They led into the alley.

He hurried outside.

As before, the blood faded after only a few yards. This time the trail seemed to end more abruptly than before.

The BBQ was gone.

As he crouched to examine the final, bloody print, Remo wondered once more what kind of animal could change its footprint when it killed. It was baffling.

The mark he looked at now was clearly a paw print. The BBQ left hoofprints.

The creatures from BostonBio were deliberate genetic mutations, so anything was possible under the circumstances.

Still...

Privately, Remo hoped that Chiun would be done with his meditations soon. He'd hit a stone wall on his own. Maybe the Master of Sinanju could shed some light on this mystery.

Remo turned away from the last print.

As he headed from the alley out onto the street, Remo failed to notice that the alley door to the HETA headquarters had been wrenched open. From the outside.

Chapter 13

When word of the latest deaths attributed to the escaped BBQs broke on the eleven-o'clock local news, a palpable panic settled over Boston and its surrounding suburbs.

Phone lines became tangled from eleven o'clock until the wee hours of the night as viewers called friends and relatives to warn them in case they hadn't heard the latest terrifying news. Police stations all across eastern Massachusetts were flooded with unconfirmed BBQ sightings.

Assurances from BostonBio that the animals were perfectly harmless were ignored. And rightly so. The death toll was now up to ten, including one of the crazed geneticists who had actually worked on the insane project. At the moment, there were more human casualties than there were BBQs. Under the circumstances, no one in their right mind would believe BostonBio.

HETA had grown silent on the location of the remaining animals in its possession. BostonBio had retrieved only one. For all anyone knew, the other seven could be God-knew-where eating God-only-knew-whom. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

With Curt Tulle dead, the authorities didn't even know whom in the HETA movement to arrest. But even if they'd thrown a net over the entire animal-rights group, it would still take years of court fighting, plea bargaining and actual prison sentences to get them to reveal the location of the creatures. In the meantime, Boston's citizenry hunkered down behind locked doors, fearful to even step outside lest they be attacked and consumed by one of the marauding beasts.

Nationally, the BBQ story had been backburnered the previous evening. But the latest developments would bring more notoriety. The deaths at HETA and the one confirmed at-large BBQ would doubtless be the lead story on all four networks the next day.

Already, the national press was circling. Nightline was devoting its entire program to coverage of the panic in Boston. A representative of the show had contacted BostonBio in order to get Dr. Judith White on the program. The genetics firm had bluntly informed the show that Dr. White was on indefinite suspension.

The premier geneticist of her generation had gone from brilliant genius to embarrassing outcast in just over forty-eight hours.

Flouting her suspension, Judith was sitting in her darkened lab hours after the murders at HETA HQ.

The bluish light from the flickering television screen bathed the room in uncertain shadows. Her eyes were at half-mast as she watched her name being dragged through the mud by troglodytes who couldn't even begin to grasp her genius.

On a rational level, Judith understood why BostonBio had suspended her. They had considerations separate from hers to deal with. Most of them legal. But on a visceral level, she hated every last one of the gutless imbeciles who was allowing this televised crucifixion to continue. It was not only bad for BostonBio and Judith White, but it was also bad for the world.

They'd hung her out to dry.

Management had decided that the best defense under the circumstances was to say nothing. The opposition had roared into the vacuum left by the company's absence. Without even token resistance from BostonBio, the media were having a field day.

In the wake of Curt Tulle's death, HETA sent in emissaries from its national offices to man the Boston franchise. Judith was watching some of them on the lab TV.

Three actresses from the The Olden Girls were among those who had been flown in. The feeblewitted women from the popular 1980s sitcom sat behind the temporary head of Boston BETA as he addressed reporters.

"Curt Tulle is a martyr to animals and all living things everywhere!" the man screamed. For some reason, he felt compelled to shout every statement. "I only hope that I can live up to his great standards!"

"Are you the permanent head of Boston HETA?" asked one of the reporters. Unlike the press at the previous news conference, this woman was a network correspondent.

"I am part of an interim ruling council! Since arriving earlier this evening, I have been ably assisted by Ms. and Mr. Janner, who have been more than helpful at this moment of great crisis!" He indicated a pair of figures standing at the rear of the crowd behind the podium.

Huey fidgeted uncomfortably. Mona glared defiantly at the home viewing audience.

"Will your group surrender the remaining BBQs?"

At the question, Mona's and Huey's eyes grew as wide as pie plates. They were visibly relieved an instant later to find that it hadn't been directed at them.

"This is a plot!" the national HETA man yelled, ignoring the question entirely. His arms flapped crazily. "The government-in league with the fiends at BostonBio-have made it their mission to wipe out HETA! For without HETA, there will be no opposition to them, and without opposition, dear friends, they will be able to come into your homes and take your pets for their horrible experiments! That is their ultimate goal! The animal Holocaust has begun!"

Judith White stared at the laboratory television, eyes level, face unreadable.

A reporter asked one of the women from The Olden Girls what she thought of the BBQ situation. The woman had also played the lustful host of a cooking show on the old 1970s The Sherry Taylor Hoore Show.

"I like kitties," said the elderly woman, her dull eyes wetly earnest.

Judith slammed her palm so savagely against the television the plastic chassis cracked. The TV winked off.

Her lip curled, revealing perfect white teeth.

The black box from her desk lay open on the table next to her. She had already filled one of the syringes with the brown gelatinous fluid from one of the vials that rested on the foam interior of the box.

She gathered up the syringe. With a lunge more appropriate to a game of darts than an injection, she jammed the needle into a pulsing blue vein in her arm.

With her thumb, she pressed the plunger down, forcing the brown liquid from the syringe. It oozed soothingly into her bloodstream.

Even as she felt the liquid enter her and mix with her warmly flowing blood, she knew it would be the last.

Judith shuddered wildly. The sensation was like that of hands of solid ice gripping her spine. Her back arched at the frigid sensation.

The liquid coursed through her. The last.

Her head spun. As before, but not like before. Far away, but not too far.

Light... spinning. The last.

The BBQs were the most important thing now. Important to her. And to the world.

Her final injection. She was there.

A jolt. Snapped back to reality. The icy hands flew from her spine. Her head cleared. The effect was not as it had been all the other times.

And there was something else.... "Dr. White?"

The voice came from behind her. She turned slowly, a smile curling the edges of her red lips. One of her geneticists stood at the mouth of the corridor that linked the two separate laboratories. Alone.

"I'm surprised you're here, Dr. White." His return smile was uncertain.

"Just finishing something up," she purred. She slipped down from the table on which she'd been perched. One hand snapped closed the lid of her special black box.

"I-that is to say, we heard. All of us. We think it's terribly unfair what they're doing to you." The scientist frowned somberly.

Judith's hand slipped across the smooth surface of the black case. One finger caressed the interlocking double-B BostonBio logo. Her eyes rose to meet those of the young man. They locked.

"Bullshit." Judith grinned.

The geneticist shifted uncomfortably. He hadn't expected to see his boss here so late. In fact, like most of his co-workers, he had prayed she would never return to her post at BostonBio.

"I...um..." the man mumbled.

"Shut up," Judith cooed. Her smile never wavered.

She slid around the table, revealing long, flawlessly tanned legs. Slowly, Dr. White sashayed over to the man. As she walked, her short skirt wrinkled up around her thighs.

The young scientist gulped, trying not to stare. "Um...there are two of them," he stammered. As he spoke, he looked at her ample chest. His own words seemed to startle him. Quickly, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Two BCWs, I mean. Two. In there."

Judith kept walking. "Mm-hmm." She nodded.

"It's just, I thought there was only the one. At least, there was only one earlier today."

"Now there are two," Judith agreed. "One plus one."

She was beside him. He jumped when her hand reached out to him. But this had nothing to do with Dr. Judith White's notorious vicious streak. Her warm palm gently traced the contours of his cheek. He shivered at her touch.

"Dr. White, this ...uh...probably isn't a good idea."

"Of course it is," she replied in a hoarse whisper. Her face came in close to his, sliding cheek-to-cheek. Beside his face, warm lips brushed softly against his ear. He felt a gentle tug of perfectly polished enamel as her teeth pulled lightly at his earlobe.

"Have you eaten yet?" Judith asked breathily. In spite of himself, the geneticist closed his eyes, surrendering to the seduction. Dr. White was an insufferable bitch, but she was also the most gorgeous female of the species he had ever encountered. But her non sequitur food question puzzled him back to reality.

"What?" he asked. "Yes. Yes, I have." She was still nibbling on his ear. He closed his eyes, trying to recapture the mood of a moment before.

"It's been a few hours for me," she exhaled hotly. Her breath tickled the soft hairs around his ear. "I'm hungry again."

The geneticist had closed his eyes, his head tipped invitingly to one side.

"Mmm. We can get something after," he moaned.

Judith's teeth chewed farther up his ear. She was beyond the lobe now, encompassing almost the entire ear.

"Maybe a little something to tide me over," she hissed.

Teeth became fangs. With a savage bite, she clamped firmly onto the young man's ear. A jerk of her face wrenched the ear from the side of his head.

Shock suppressed the urge to flee. Stunned, the scientist pulled away, falling to his knees. A frantic hand clamped the side of his head.

He found to his horror that his auditory canal was open wide to air. Blood poured across the gaping hole. The sticky liquid coursed around his shaking fingers.

Fear. Shock. He wheeled to Judith White.

He saw his ear for the last time. It was balanced on the tip of her tongue like a single red-tinged potato chip. She smiled as she flipped the clump of skin and cartilage back into her bloodred mouth. A few quick chews followed by a solitary gulp, and the ear was gone forever.

"I bet you can really hear my stomach rumbling now," she said with a broad grin. Blood filled the spaces between her flawless teeth. His blood.

He was too frightened to speak. Too scared to scream.

And as the young geneticist's eyes pleaded for mercy, Judith White padded forward. To feed.

Chapter 14

Remo stood alone, a silent sentry at the front window of his Quincy condominium.

The street beyond was eerily calm. Night shadows skulked near curb and corner.

Few cars traveled the roadways so late on a normal night. This night there were far fewer than usual. The BBQs. Fear of the beasts had rippled out from Boston into the outlying communities.

Of course, the odds were astronomical against anyone encountering one of the creatures, even if all of the remaining animals were at large. But that didn't matter to the population of Boston and its suburbs.

Even Remo wasn't immune to believing that he might actually spy one of them. In his case, however, it wasn't fear, but hope. He wanted more than anything to corral the BBQs and return them to BostonBio.

The BBQ project was on the verge of collapse, yet its original goal-to feed the starving worldwas noble. If the project was at all salvageable, Remo would do whatever he could to help.

And so he waited. Staring out at the dark and empty street. Half-expecting to see a herd of wild BBQs thunder past his home, yet knowing full well that he would not.

There seemed to be one silver lining in the events of late.

The noises had started filtering down from upstairs an hour ago. No more were they hushed, one-sided conversations. These were packing sounds. Whatever business Chiun had been up to, it appeared to be coming to an end. He was putting away his candles and incense.

After standing alone for what seemed like an eternity, Remo finally heard the door to Chiun's room sigh gently open. He didn't hear a footfall on the stairs, nor did he expect to. Only when he detected the familiar rhythmic heartbeat did Remo turn.

The Master of Sinanju sat angelically on the floor in the center of the living room, as if he'd been there since the floorboards were nailed in place. He wore a brilliant sapphire kimono, adorned with swirling purple peacocks. The flowing robes were arranged around his bony knees.

The wizened Korean seemed as old and wise as Time itself. His ancient skull was covered with a sheet of skin like thin, seared parchment. Twin tufts of yellowing-to-white hair sprouted out above each shell-like ear. A thread of beard adorned his chin. Youthful hazel eyes regarded Remo from amid knots of wrinkled lids.

Remo's smile was thin but genuine. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Little Father," he said.

"Thank you, my son," Chiun replied. "You managed to keep your screaking and clumping within acceptable limits during the weeks of my spiritual journey. You are to be commended." He tipped his head in an informal bow.

That Chiun should emerge from hiding in such a good mood was cause for concern to Remo. He pushed thoughts of their recent trip to Hollywood from his troubled mind.

"I have a problem," Remo said, returning the bow. When he lifted his head, he saw that Chiun was no longer looking his way.

The old man was craning his neck in birdlike curiosity as his gaze moved from one corner of the room to the next. When he looked back to his pupil, a confused shadow had settled over his bright eyes.

"Where is my gift?" he asked with simple innocence.

Uh-oh, Remo thought. He immediately racked his brain.

It wasn't Chiun's birthday, not that they celebrated it anyway, thanks to Remo. Christmas was three months away, though rarely were gifts exchanged between them on what Chiun considered a pagan celebration of the birth of "that nuisance carpenter." That left the Feast of the Pig and the anniversary of the day they'd met. But the Feast of the Pig was still some time off, and Chiun had never seen the day of their first meeting as something worth rejoicing over. Indeed, for the first ten years of their association, the only way Remo ever knew the date had roiled around yet again was from the appearance of a black armband over the Master of Sinanju's kimono sleeve.

He came up empty. Remo bit his cheek. "Gift?" he asked guiltily.

"It is customary after a journey, is it not?" Chiun replied, a creeping tightness to his singsong tone. Remo let the captured air escape from his lungs. "It's customary to give gifts, Little Father. Not get them. Besides, you didn't go anywhere."

The cloud of Chiun's brow darkened. "You are telling me you got me nothing?" he accused. Remo's eyes darted left and right. He was trapped.

"Nothing," he blurted, "except that I felt kind of sad without you here to talk to. And now that you're back, I'm sort of happy." His hesitant voice grew stronger. "So I guess that's what I got you. A son's love." He smiled hopefully.

In spite of himself, a spark of warmth ignited the old man's eyes. An upturned flicker brushed the vellum corners of his thin lips. He forced it away.

"In lieu of a brass band, I suppose it will have to suffice," Chiun sniffed. "Next time I return from a pilgrimage of self, however, I expect a present with a price tag." He fussed with the hems of his kimono.

"One Mylar balloon coming up," Remo promised, relieved to have dodged the bullet. "Anyway, a lot of junk's been happening since you pulled your 'Louisa May Alcott does Hollywood' routine."

Chiun's eyes instantly narrowed. "You have not been listening in on my telephone conversations?" he accused.

Remo sighed. "No," he said.

"Good," Chiun responded. "For there were none."

Remo didn't bother to mention the fact that the last phone bill he'd seen would have choked a horse. "Chiun, I have a problem."

"That is nothing new. Speak, O Giver of Cheap Gifts."

"Smith has given me an assignment. A genetics company has created an artificial animal that can feed the world. But it looks as if the animal is vicious. People have died."

"All people die," Chiun said, dismissing the last of what his pupil had said. "We know this better than any. As for the rest, I do not understand this nonsense of an artificial animal, yet I know well of many animals deemed vicious."

"The fact that it might be a killer isn't the only problem," Remo explained. "A couple million and a good PR firm could help BostonBio wiggle out of that. The weird thing for me is the tracks these things leave."

He explained to Chiun the stark difference between the hoofprints of the BBQ at rest and the paw prints it made following its murderous attacks. Chiun frowned thoughtfully. "A bird walks, yet it flies," he pointed out. "A duck does both, yet also swims."

"The BBQs don't have wings," Remo said. "And they'd need pontoons to float. They just have big clumsy feet that somehow morph into something delicate when they kill."

Chiun's frown lifted. "Do you remember, Remo, the riddle of the Sphinx?"

"Sure," Remo said. "You told me it back when you were dragging me all around the world during the Sinanju Rite of Attainment. The riddle is, whose face does the Sphinx wear? And the answer is the face of the Great Wang."

Lines of frustrated annoyance creased the old man's parchment skin.

"Why is it, Remo, that you appear never to listen to a word I say, yet apparently absorb just enough to aggravate me at a later date?"

Remo offered a confused half smile. "Luck?" he suggested.

Chiun's gaze was flat. "I refer to the Egyptian riddle. What is it that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs at night?"

"Everyone knows that one," Remo replied. "The answer is a man. He walks on four legs in the morning of his life because he's crawling. As an adult, he walks on two feet. And when he's old, he uses a cane. Three legs. But you told me that was a child's riddle."

"And I was correct. For I am aged by anyone's estimation, would you not agree?" Chiun asked.

"Only to those who don't know you like I do, Little Father," Remo said warmly.

"Do not be maudlin, Remo," Chiun chided. "There are those who think me old. Yet I do not require a cane. And so you see the true nature of all riddles." He nodded sagely.

Remo's face clouded. "I do?" he said.

"Yes," Chiun responded. "The answer is that riddles are a foolish waste of time." He rose from the carpet like a puff of escaping steam. "We will learn the true secret of this animal when we see it."

With that, the old Asian padded from the room. As he watched the frail figure pass out into the hallway, Remo felt his heart warm. Even though his mentor technically hadn't gone anywhere, it still felt good to have Chiun back.

"I know where we can find one," Remo called after his teacher. He hurried out into the hall. A moment later, the front door clicked shut.

They were not gone more than two minutes before the phone began ringing urgently.

The desperate jangling echoed into empty, darkened rooms.

Chapter 15

Smith let the telephone ring precisely one hundred times before finally replacing the receiver. Obviously, Remo was either out or was not answering his phone. As for Chiun, the old Korean rarely deigned to answer the telephone.

The CURE director was sitting in his cracked leather chair. Around him, his austere Folcroft administrator's office had been swallowed by shadows. A single drab bulb glowed atop his desk.

It had been many hours since last he slept. Gray eyes burned behind rimless glasses as he stared at the silent blue phone.

All but a skeleton crew remained at Folcroft so late after midnight. Without a major crisis for CURE, it was late even for Smith to be working. But he had been waiting for something specific.

The envelope sent by Remo had arrived late in the morning of what was now the previous day. Under the guise of an FBI investigation, Smith had immediately forwarded the mysterious object contained within it to the Smithsonian Institution for analysis.

He had then sat back and waited.

Day stretched into night and had moved on into the postmidnight hour of the following day before the results finally came back. When the answer was at last sent back along the circuitous electronic computer route Smith had established to ensure secrecy, the CURE director found it as puzzling as Remo's mystery of the BBQ tracks.

He had seen the object with his own eyes before sending it along to the Smithsonian. It was small and half-moon shaped. The tough material was cupped and came to a curving point at the far end.

The object Smith had seen jibed perfectly with the determination of the Smithsonian. He rebuked himself for not coming to the same, obvious conclusion.

Forensic scientists at the Washington institution had concluded that the item was nothing more than a woman's artificial fingernail. The kind glued on to increase normal cuticle length and strength.

In his report, the Smithsonian scientist who had forwarded his conclusions to Smith asked if the nail was part of an FBI serial-killer investigation. In his final e-mail, Smith issued nothing more than a blunt thank-you.

Smith reread the report displayed on his monitor as he considered whether or not he should try to call Remo again.

Pam Push-On Nail. The Smithsonian had even determined the specific brand of artificial nail.

Remo claimed to have found the fingernail in a wound of one of the BBQ victims. Smith considered briefly that Remo might be playing some kind of sick joke. He decided almost as soon as the thought occurred to him that this wouldn't be the case. Remo's sense of humor had never been so inappropriately ghoulish.

Which left Smith with a new baffling mystery. The six HETA people in Concord had been men. Only Remo and a single BBQ had been in the area. How and why was the fingernail left in one of the bodies?

Smith stared, unblinking, at the report, hoping somehow that some new insight would leap out at him. But it remained little more than words on a screen. Even so, for some reason, this new information gave him a feeling of inexplicable dread.

Tearing his eyes from his computer screen, Harold Smith snaked an arthritic hand to the phone. Maybe Remo was home by now.

Chapter 16

The parking lot of BostonBio was virtually empty. Remo assumed the few parked vehicles belonged to security guards or janitorial staff.

He expected he might find some resistance at the front desk due to the lateness of the hour, but the Department of Agriculture identification he had been using for the past few days got both him and Chiun onto the elevator. The lift carried them silently up to the third floor.

The impersonal silver doors opened into a long hallway, bathed in darkness. Remo led Chiun to the door of the lab where he had first met Judith White.

"No key," Remo said. "Guess we do it the old-fashioned way." He reached for the knob, planning to pop it open.

Reading his intentions, the Master of Sinanju held a staying finger to Remo's bare forearm.

"You are hopeless," Chiun muttered.

The old Korean inserted a long index fingernail into the space between lock and door frame. He wiggled it as a burglar would a credit card. The lock clicked obediently. Sliding his nail back out, Chiun pushed. The door swung dutifully into the room.

"Show-off," Remo said.

"If you would surrender to the inevitable and grow your nails to their proper length, you would not have to crash and smash your way through life," Chiun sniffed.

"Don't start," Remo warned.

They slipped inside the lab, silent wraiths.

The lights were on. Diffused fluorescent bulbs shone from fixtures all along the interior ceiling. More light spilled from the corridor that connected this lab to the next.

Judith White's office door was ajar. Although her lights were on, as well, they sensed no life signs. "Death stalks this place," the Master of Sinanju intoned.

Remo nodded. "A scientist was killed here yesterday."

Chiun shook his head. "No," he announced, button nose upturned. "This death is recent."

Remo pulled at the air. Immediately, the tang of human blood flooded his nostrils. It came from the corridor where the BBQs had been stored.

Exchanging a single tight glance, both men began to move across the silent lab. They were as stealthy as jungle predators when they reached the door.

The wide corridor where Judith had made her sloppy pass at Remo was well lit. The BBQ pens were to their left. As they moved into the long room, Remo was surprised to find more than one of the cages occupied.

Two BBQs looked up as they entered the room. "This is the creature of which you spoke?" Chiun said, his voice pitched low. His eyes were razor slits.

"Yeah." Remo frowned. "But there should only be one of them here." He glanced down the hall. The lights were on in the adjoining lab. Gliding weightlessly forward, their feet sliding in perfect concert, the two Sinanju Masters made their cautious way up to the other lab.

They saw the body instantly. Freshly dead, it lay in the center of the room. Their senses told them he was alone. Sliding into the lab, they hurried over to the body.