Father to Son

Destroyer 129: Father to Son

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

She was called Sonmi.

No one in the village knew much about her. She was from one of the older families, but since none had moved into the village in many generations, they were all members of the older families by now.

Her mother had died giving birth to her more than seventy years ago. Her father had died only recently. Some said the old man was a powerful shaman. All in the village stayed away from him and his daughter. When he died, only Sonmi wept.

On this day, as the cold sun peeked above the eastern horizon, old Sonmi picked her careful way down the rocky shore. A small fishing boat of fine Egyptian cedar was tied to a wood post. Sonmi unhooked the rope and climbed aboard.

It took a long time to row. Her withered arms were sore by the time she made it far enough out into the bay.

From a pouch on the belt of her coarse dress she produced some blessed herbs. She scattered them upon the black water, reciting the mystical chants passed down to her from her father and his father before him, all the way back to before the time of the Forgotten One.

Once she was done, she stood at the edge of the wobbling boat and jumped overboard. The cold waters of the West Korean Bay accepted her body with barely a splash.

Beyond the empty boat, across the bay and up the rocky shore, the village of Sinanju where the dead woman Somni had lived all her life, stirred awake. The sun rose.

The boat bobbed on the gentle waves.

In time an elderly fisherman noticed the boat out in the bay and sent his son out to retrieve it.

Days passed. No one thought much of old Sonmi. Eventually someone noticed she was gone. None knew where. No one looked for her. No one cared.

The few thoughts people had soon faded and the old woman disappeared from memory.

As if she had never existed.

Chapter 1

The water was warm, but not from the sun.

The sun never warmed the waters of the West Korean Bay. Summer or winter, it was always the same. Cold. Like the emptiest heart or the farthest point in the bleak night sky.

But that one spot, way out in the middle of the bay-only as wide across as a man's arms could stretch-was warm. And though cold waves lapped all around, it remained warm within. No one knew why.

It was a new occurrence. Everyone was certain of that. The village of Sinanju had been founded on that barren shore more than five thousand years before. In all that time there was no record, written or oral, to indicate that the warm spot in the water had been there at any time in history.

It was dark, too. Like blood.

The spot had been warm for more than a year. Even though Sinanju would have been dismissed by most as a typical rural Korean fishing village, few fishermen actually lived there. Those who fished were mostly old men who kept up the tradition, coming to it later in life.

The healthy young men who should have been fishermen-would have been if Sinanju were like any other poverty-stricken village on the inhospitable coast of North Korea-did not toil in boats with nets until their hands became tired knots of arthritic bone. They sat in the village, fat and lazy, living off the sweat of another man's brow. Some day, when they grew old, some of them would take to fishing out of boredom, out of some need to connect to their past.

But for now, the young were young, the old were old and it was the old who fished. Sometimes. When the men who fished first found the warm spot in the water, they tried to cast their nets in it. Maybe it was a gift from the gods. Maybe that warm spot was put there to draw in the fish, for in truth the fishing in the bay was generally poor and the catch was always meager.

The nets came up empty.

Time after time they tried, always with the same results. The area was dead to life.

In the summer a few young men tried to swim down to see if there was something on the bottom that was making the spot warm. But the water was too deep and the undertow too strong. They gave up and swam back to the surface.

After that the area was left alone. The old men cursed and spit upon the waves even as they rowed wide around the spot. All avoided the evil warm blot, which, as time went on, grew more and more like the color of human blood.

The spot was there for many months. Then one night it vanished.

The supernatural stain on the waves was erased, consumed by cold and tide.

Not a soul was there to see.

When it happened, the village of Sinanju was asleep.

The rock walls of the bay were a black void, swallowed by the moonless sky. A jagged lip of stone formed the line between earth and air. Stretching up before the twinkling stars was a pair of upthrust basalt rocks. The artificial rock formation formed a pair of horns.

The white starlight cast the inky shadow of the horns across the bay. They rolled up and down across the waves like a pair of pinching black fingers. Far out, between the most distant, curving points of rock, they framed the spot where the water had been warm but had suddenly grown very, very cold.

In the hour after midnight there came a flash. It was brilliant, white. The white flash was the flash of a meteor. But it came from sea, not sky. From the dark depths of the bay. A bright pop of something otherworldly from beneath the waves.

No one saw it. Sinanju slept.

The water grew hot once more. Then boiling.

The air was cold. Steam rose white over the icy bay, rolling into shore like sweet-smelling fog.

The water churned. Hotter than blood. A swirling, frothy red foam bubbled to the surface.

The waves stained the shore red.

Three hours after midnight, something screamed. A single cry, like the shock of birth.

And as the swirling water leveled off, a hand rose through the foam, fingers clutching.

Then came another hand.

All at once, a face broke the cold surface, the gulping mouth gasping for air.

The hair was black and clung to the scalp. Streaks of blood ran down, framing the face. The face of a dead man.

The pain was too great.

With feeble kicks, the figure rolled over onto his back.

He floated there for a long time as the warmth dissipated and the water cooled around him. Hazel eyes stared up at the cold, thankless sky. It had been many years since those eyes had glimpsed the sky.

For a long time, the man just lay there, naked and alive. When the cold began to sting like life, he rolled over. Testing reborn limbs, he began swimming for shore.

For Sinanju. For home.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he could feel a thousand sets of eyes following his every move even though he was alone.

When the sensation first manifested itself all those months ago, he hadn't known what it was. For Remo Williams, the not knowing had been a frightening thing.

Remo was a Master of Sinanju, the most ancient and deadly of all the martial arts. The other, lesser martial arts were but splintered rays. Sinanju was the sun source.

The very hum of life was white noise to most people. Their senses were dead to the world around them. As a Master of Sinanju, Remo was trained to the pinnacle of human perfection. His environment was alive. He was able to see and sense things the rest of the world tuned out.

One of the things Remo was able to detect were the telltale signs that signalled to him he was being watched. As a professional assassin, this honed sense was oftentimes the difference between life and death. The ability was as much a part of him as hands or eyes or breath itself. And so when he'd gotten up that morning almost a year ago and felt an audience crammed into his small bedroom alongside his sleeping mat, he thought his senses were going screwy. There was no one else with him. He was certain of it. No heartbeats, no nothing. He was alone. Yet not alone.

With great worry he sought the counsel of the man who had taught him everything important in his life. "Little Father, something's wrong," Remo said, the worry evident in his voice and on his face.

The very old Asian to whom he spoke was in the process of packing. They were scheduled to move soon.

The tiny Korean had skin like ancient leather, dry and weathered. Twin puffs of yellowing white hair clutched the age-speckled flesh above his shell-like ears. He looked frail. He was anything but.

Chiun, Remo's Master and teacher in the ancient art of Sinanju, understood his pupil's unspoken question.

"Your senses do not lie," the wizened Asian explained in his singsong voice. "That which you feel is called the Hour of Judgment. It is the time when the spirits of masters past scrutinize the Transitional Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju. As my successor, they will judge if you are worthy to become Reigning Master."

It was unnerving. The invisible eyes had trailed Remo from his sleeping quarters out to the common living room he shared with his teacher.

There was no one there. Remo was certain of it. But he had seen much in the many years since his training began. He had grown to grudgingly accept things that in his youth he used to dismiss as hocus-pocus.

"The spirits are all here?" Remo asked worriedly.

Chiun tipped his head. "There are probably a few dawdlers who have yet to arrive."

Remo felt his flesh crawl, cold and clammy. As if a too close spirit had just brushed the exposed skin of his arms.

"Can you feel them?" Remo asked.

"No. This is your time, not mine."

Remo exhaled. The knowledge of what was happening didn't bring him the relief he'd hoped for. "So this is normal? It feels like I'm the Super Bowl half-time show for a stadium full of Peeping Tom ghosts."

"You are being watched with great interest. After all, you are the first outsider to achieve such greatness."

Sinanju the discipline had originated in the North Korean village of the same name. In its five-thousand-year history, Remo was the only individual born outside the village to reach this level.

"Swell," Remo had said. "So should I just stand here, or do they want me to do a little dance or something?"

"If you want me to die of embarrassment, go ahead."

Remo folded his arms and studied his surroundings with forced casualness. The basement rooms with the painted cinder-block walls were empty. He and Chiun were all alone. Yet his senses screamed otherwise. "This happens to all Masters?"

"All who reach your level."

"And what if they don't judge me worthy?" Remo whispered from the corner of his mouth.

Chiun had returned to his packing. "There is little they can do now," the old Korean had admitted. He dropped his voice low. "But when you die, they can make your life miserable. If the Masters' Tribunal judges you unworthy, you will be banished with the other outcasts of the Void."

"Great," Remo muttered. "I had to join a heaven with a caste system. I guess I can stand this for a couple of days."

The days stretched into weeks. Moving day came and went. Remo and Chiun settled into their new lodgings, yet still the weird sensation that he was being watched didn't go. When Remo couldn't take it any longer, he again approached his teacher.

Chiun was watching television.

Of late, the Master of Sinanju had developed a fondness for Mexican soap operas. Remo wouldn't dare interrupt the programs themselves. Years ago, when his teacher used to watch American daytime dramas, fatal results came to anyone foolish enough to intrude on the old man's moments of joy. A Spanish-language commercial for Crest toothpaste came on, replacing the bright colors of Mexican TV studio sets and ultraclose close-ups that made the actors' pores look like flesh-draped lunar craters.

"So how long does this judging thing go on?"

"It depends," Chiun replied, his eyes glued to the flickering television set. "It could be brief or long."

"It's been weeks," Remo complained. "I feel like a freaking zoo exhibit."

"Said the monkey to the chimp."

"Ha-ha. It's gotten so I can't even go to the can in peace. Did it take this many weeks for you?"

"For me?" Chiun bristled, insulted. "Of course not. Why would the ghosts of my ancestors need to waste their precious time watching for a mistake from someone who obviously doesn't make mistakes? The dead have better things to do, Remo."

"So how long will they watch me?"

"Ten million years," Chiun replied. "Shush." The old man's program was back on.

It wasn't ten million yet, but it was right around one year since he'd first awakened to his supernatural spectators and they hadn't left him alone for a minute. Even though it had gone on for what seemed like an eternity, it remained a feeling Remo doubted he'd ever get used to.

They were with him always. Watching, judging. Remo had thought his teacher's gaze during training was bad. After all, Chiun hadn't been the most forgiving instructor. Multiplied by a thousand, it was worse than he'd ever imagined.

The invisible eyes were there morning, noon and night.

They were with him earlier that afternoon when he was watching the twelve-o'clock news in the Stamford, Connecticut, duplex he now shared with the Master of Sinanju.

As a rule, daytime reporters and anchors were usually even more frivolous and dim-witted than their evening counterparts. But for some reason this day, everyone seemed very businesslike. Remo soon learned why.

There was a breaking news story out of nearby Milford.

An office worker at a small software company had gone berserk an hour before. According to the reporter on the scene, the heavily armed man had entered the building where he worked, guns blazing.

There were a dozen confirmed dead, seven more wounded.

The killer was holed up in the rear of the building. A handful of office workers were unaccounted for. The police had not yet stormed the building, fearing for the safety of any survivors that might still be inside.

And so began the strange dance of camera and helicopter that seemed to capture American interest every few months.

The film crew showed stock footage of the killer's car a dozen times. It was a red Pinto with Bondo on the hood and rust chewing away the doors. The name Munchie was emblazoned on the lopsided vanity plate. A reporter mentioned repeatedly that this was the killer's nickname.

They flashed pictures of the killer on-screen. It was the sort of face not easily forgotten.

Remo needed only one look.

He had put on the news only for the weather report. But the weather forecast was suspended in favor of shock news. For Remo, enough was enough. He was sick of seeing this sort of thing erupt on his television with disgusting regularity.

When Remo switched off the TV and headed for the front door, the ghostly gaze of his invisible entourage was with him. The eyes trailed him out to the car and remained with him for the drive up to Milford.

"Could you back off today, fellas?" Remo muttered. "I'm trying to work here."

Asking around, he found the cordoned area around Soft Systems, Inc. with relative ease. At the line of police cars he doubled back, parking his car down the street in a Shop-Rite supermarket lot. He returned to the office complex on foot.

Remo was a man of average height and weight. The only thing outwardly unusual about him were his wrists, which were thicker than a normal man's by far. Most women found his face-with its high cheekbones and deep-set eyes-appealing, although even they would have described it as vaguely cruel.

No one saw the cruelty on Remo Williams's face this day, for no one saw the face of Remo Williams. He slipped up the sidewalk, past crowds and reporters and police without raising a single eyebrow. Avoiding the front of the building and the gaggle of press still crammed beyond the parking lot, Remo slipped around the back.

Even though it was broad daylight, the police at the rear of the building didn't see the thin man slip between them. Their eyes always seemed to be where Remo wasn't. The uniformed men milled about anxiously, guns drawn.

Remo found a caged window in the alley near a Dumpster. The metal mesh popped in silence. He lifted the window and slipped soundlessly inside without a single living eye tracking his movements.

He found himself in the downstairs ladies' room. There were two bodies in the bathroom. One was near the sink; another had been sitting in a stall. The woman near the sink had lived for a time after she'd been shot. She had crawled on her side to the wall, only to die near a trash can. The blue tiled floor was streaked with congealing blood. The other woman had been luckier. A shotgun blast through the flimsy stall door had delivered her a speedier, if grislier, end.

Face steeling, Remo slipped from the room. Another body in the hallway. The man wore a suit with no jacket. The back of his white shirt was stained red. Papers that had been so important in the last moments before his violent death were now scattered on the drab green carpet around his prone body. Unlike the women, the man hadn't been felled by a shotgun blast. This one was a bullet, not a shell. The newscast had mentioned this. According to eyewitnesses, the killer carried an arsenal.

There were vending machines in the hallway. They had been blasted open, their contents looted.

The building was still. The only activity came from the small room in the distant back.

Remo followed a trail of bodies to a rear office. When he peeked around the corner, he saw the face that had been plastered across his TV set an hour before.

Paul "Munchie" Grunladd looked like Satan's Santa. The killer had a wild, untamed beard that clung to his face like a tenacious porcupine. Long, mottled hair stuck out in every direction. What looked like cornrows were merely tangles of dirt and grease.

Munchie was six foot five and weighed more than four hundred pounds. His great, ponderous belly stretched the fabric of his flannel shirt. Buttons strained to bursting.

A shotgun, two rifles, handguns and sacks of boxed ammo sat on the desk, surrounded by a pile of candy from the blasted-open vending machines.

The killer was leaning back in his chair. One finger was digging deep in his ear. In his other hand he clutched a phone. It looked like a toy in his big, meaty paw.

A pair of crisscrossing bandoliers ran over his shoulders and across his chest. Munchie munched casually on Butterfingers and Pay Days as he spoke into the phone.

"No way," the killer was insisting. "You make me so mad, Jane Pauley. I'm warning you, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters are already in a hairpulling contest over my story over on ABC." The line clicked. "Hold on a sec, I think that's 60 Minutes calling back."

Munchie unplugged finger from ear and tapped the phone.

It wasn't 60 Minutes. In fact, it was no one. Scowling, he tried to switch back to Jane Pauley. He found that she was gone, too.

"Hang up on me, will you?" he groused. "That's it, I'm going with Barbara."

When he tapped the cradle again, he was surprised that no dial tone sounded in his ear. Maybe the jack had come loose. Face growing puzzled amid his big beard, he traced the line to the wall.

He found that the jack had come loose. Along with a fair-sized chunk of the wall. There was now a gaping hole where once phone cord had met wall plate. The saw-toothed section of extracted wall dangled from the end of the cord now in the hand of a very thin man with a very unhappy look on his face.

"Holy Jesus!" Munchie cried, clutching his chest. "You scared me half to death."

Remo's face was cold. "Not to worry," he said. "The next half's on the house."

Suddenly remembering just exactly how he'd spent his morning, Munchie released his flabby man bosom and jumped for his pile of weapons.

The first gun he grabbed up was an AR-18 rifle. He was surprised to find the weapon knotted up like a metal pretzel. He was reasonably certain it hadn't been like that when he'd used it to shoot Doris from accounting.

He threw down the rifle and snatched up a shotgun. It disintegrated in his hands, clanking in a dozen fat pieces to the surface of the desk.

He grabbed a handgun that somehow suddenly became a ball of fused metal with bullets dropping out. When he pulled the trigger, it pinched his finger. Yelping in pain, Munchie threw the worthless gun to the floor.

"I surrender!" Munchie cried, throwing up his hands.

Remo took a step back from the stink clouds that emanated from Munchie's armpits.

"What kind of job do you do around here that they'd let you come in to work reeking like that?" Remo asked.

"I do Web designs, mostly," Munchie replied. He saw Remo's blank face.

"For the Internet?" Munchie offered.

"Oh," Remo nodded, as if that explained everything. "Let's go, Buttercup. You're late for your own funeral."

Grabbing Munchie by a shell-filled bandolier, he yanked the killer toward the door. On his way out of the room, Remo picked up something from Munchie's desktop arsenal.

"What the hell were you just doing on the phone?" Remo asked as they made their way down the hall.

"Negotiating," Munchie said nervously. His belly jiggled as he huffed and puffed to keep up. "You know, my first television interview, post-tragedy. They've been calling like crazy ever since my story went national. The network-TV people have been very sympathetic to my problem."

They were stepping over the body of a forty something male with salt-and-pepper hair and a hole in his forehead.

"Your problem," Remo said, his voice flat.

Munchie nodded. "I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," the killer explained. "It makes me tired and irritable all the time. Are you with the police? You don't look like you're with the police. What did you mean about my own funeral?"

"You're claiming you killed two dozen people because you were sleepy?" Remo asked.

"Well, yeah," Munchie said. "I also had Attention Deficit Disorder as a kid. Could have contributed. Oh, and I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"From what?"

"Vietnam," Munchie insisted.

"I saw the news, genius. You're forty-one years old. You were barely out of diapers when Vietnam ended."

Munchie bit his lip. "I suffer from low self-esteem...?" he suggested tentatively.

"You ought to. You're a murderer," Remo replied, shoving the killer along.

"I have a bad body image," Munchie argued.

"Join a gym."

They were at the fire exit at the end of the hall. Munchie's face grew hopeful. He had gotten the impression that this dead-eyed stranger was actually planning to do him bodily harm. "Will I be able to?"

"I meant in Hell. Don't let Hitler hog the exercycle."

With one thick-wristed hand he slapped open the stairwell door and shoved Munchie through.

"My mother didn't hug me enough," the killer panted as he stumbled up the stairs. He had to grab the metal railing repeatedly to keep from falling.

"If the baby you was anywhere near as ugly as the adult you, you're lucky she didn't beat you to death with a rake."

They climbed three stories to the roof door.

"I have Repetitive Stress Syndrome!" Munchie cried as Remo propelled him through the door and onto the roof. He landed on his gelatinous belly, his hands scraping pebbles.

"Sick Building Syndrome!" the killer gasped as Remo took a mittful of blubber and hauled him back to his feet.

"Psychologica Fantastica!" Munchie pleaded as he was dragged to the edge of the roof.

"Male menopause!" he tried desperately as Remo picked him up and stood him on the ledge.

The parking lot was below. The lot and the street beyond it were filled with police and emergency vehicles. Men ran for cover when Munchie appeared three stories above. The police trained weapons on the teetering figure. The crowd gasped.

Remo stayed behind the killer's bloated body, hidden from the view of the crowds and passing helicopters.

Munchie felt something being slapped into his hand.

"That's what bugs me about you run-of-the-mill maniacs these days," Remo grumbled.

With the fingertips of one hand he worked a knot of muscles in Munchie's shoulder. They were hard to find, buried as they were amid thick, sagging sheets of blubber.

"Used to be a guy killed because he was nasty or nuts or he just plain wanted the other guy's stuff. Now you're all bed wetters and bully bait. Excuses, excuses."

The muscles in Munchie's shoulder tightened and his arm shot out in front of him, aimed at the parking lot. For the first time he saw what Remo had put in his clenching hand.

The Browning automatic pistol was trained on the nearest Milford police cruiser. Sweat broke out on Munchie's forehead. Below, police yelled for him to drop his weapon.

"It's not my fault!" Munchie yelled desperately. "I've got cognitive dissonance!"

"Yeah, and all I wanted was the goddamn weather forecast," Remo said. "Boo-hoo for you."

A tiny squeeze on Munchie's back and the killer's finger tightened on the trigger. A single shot pinged harmlessly off the hood of a parked police cruiser.

That was all the gathered police needed. Weapons' fire erupted from the parking lot. Shots sang up at the man with the gun on the ledge.

Unfortunately, the killer was so fat none of the bullets that struck him managed to penetrate any vital organs. Lead piercing blubber, Munchie bounced and jiggled in place.

"Ow! Ow! Eee! Ouch! Ow!" Munchie yelped as bullets pelted his ample frame.

"Ah, hell," Remo said, shoving Munchie off the ledge.

The killer dropped three stories to the ground. Just before he hit the pavement, he was screaming something about a repressed childhood trauma and a molesting neighbor. Then he and his entire sackful of excuses went splat.

On the roof Remo turned to the invisible army that had trailed him all this way. They were still hovering nearby.

"Was that good for you?" Remo asked the air. The air didn't respond.

With a sigh Remo hurried from the roof and the area before he could be discovered.

In the supermarket parking lot down the street, a tired-looking young woman with five kids had parked next to his rental car. She was stacking groceries in the back of her minivan. Four of the five kids were screaming and fighting.

"Let us give you a hand with that," Remo said. He helped the woman load her groceries in the van. Once they were done she shook her head in exasperation.

"Thanks so much. I've got to get to the post office for stamps and bring the church bingo money to the bank. Plus there's homework, then the kids have swimming lessons and basketball practice. Every little bit helps."

"No problemo," Remo said. "We're glad to help."

The woman wanted to ask who the "we" was. But the friendly man with the thick wrists and the nice smile had already climbed into his car and driven away.

Chapter 3

Gusts of cold air rattled the frosty windowpanes. For many years instinct had awakened him at the same early-morning hour. The old man was generally the first to arise in the village. But for the first hour after dawn on this particular day, the sleeping man didn't hear the sound. He was tired and old and, after all, the howling, buffeting wind was nothing new for someone who had lived every day of his long life on the West Korean Bay.

Only when the sun began to brush the sill and cast evil yellow beams across his pillow did he finally, reluctantly draw open his tired, rheumy eyes. Another day in Sinanju.

It was a beautiful morning. A surprising thing given the uneasiness of the previous night. Although he was old and had earned the right to sleep late, Pullyang generally didn't stay in bed so long. But this day was different.

The elderly man had been awakened during the night by an awful sound-a wail of pain as loud as thunder and as clear as the night sky. The terrible sound had snapped him from a deep sleep.

When he heard the noise, Pullyang didn't go outside.

He slept in a warm bed, off the floor. Feeling his heart tremble, Pullyang had climbed out of bed. His weary bones creaked like the bare wooden floor. He crept to the window and peeked out at the dark.

It was late. The house lights were off in the village. Coal-fueled braziers burned on posts, their dying light illuminating the cold main square.

There was no one there. None of the other villagers had come out to investigate. They were fat and content and slept with the certainty of their own safety.

Pullyang's wrinkled face studied the night for several long minutes, but still he saw nothing.

Probably a plane. The Communist government in the capital city of Pyongyang sometimes practiced their games of war out over the Yellow Sea. By agreement their planes didn't fly over Sinanju itself, but the North Korean aircraft didn't have to be overhead to be heard.

After five tense minutes, night wind rattling the panes in his face, Pullyang left the window. He retreated to the warmth of his bed to await the coming dawn.

It was now hours later, and he was surprised that the sunrise found him back in such a deep sleep. Wiping the sleep from his eyes, Pullyang climbed out of bed.

He got dressed with great deliberation. Everything he did these days seemed to be done slowly. At his advanced age there was little vigor left. But eventually, like every morning, he managed to get dressed and find his way outside.

The coal in the square lights had burned to ash. He would put in fresh coal and relight the braziers in the evening. As he had every night for the past thirty years.

Pullyang's house was directly on the main square. He stepped carefully down the single wooden step to the road. He didn't want to trip and break a bone. In time the morning sun warmed his tired body, and his stride lengthened.

Cooking fires had been lit in some of the homes. Smoke rose from crooked little chimneys. The scent of cooked fish and soup floated to his upturned nose.

Although his stomach rumbled, Pullyang put thoughts of food from his mind. Breakfast would come later, down the road at the house of his daughter, Hyunsil.

Hyunsil's husband was dead. Pullyang had lost his wife and son-in-law within six months of each other ten years ago. His daughter was old now, too, nearly in her seventies.

It was nice that they could share their meals. She would prepare him some curdled-beef-blood-and-intestine soup, as well as some rice and kimchi. And they would sit and eat and talk about their family and their village. About tradition and about the great Master of Sinanju who worked to keep the entire village safe and fed.

He was glad that his daughter shared his reverence for the Masters of Sinanju. These men, only one in a generation, left their beloved village in order to sustain it. They would go, sometimes for years, toiling for faraway emperors. And the tribute they were paid was returned to the village.

For their labors and their sacrifices, Pullyang revered the Masters of Sinanju, and he had passed on this great respect to his only child, Hyunsil. He only wished the others in the village shared their reverence. The other villagers didn't respect the Master. Oh, they didn't show him open disrespect. They wouldn't dare. The villagers feared the Master of Sinanju. The current Master had spent much of the past thirty years away from home, but on those few occasions when their protector returned to the village of his birth, the men and women whom his labors supported stayed from his path.

Of course, they knew he wouldn't kill them. For it had been passed down since the time of the Great Wang, the first true Master of Sinanju of the Modern Age, that a Master couldn't harm another from the village. And this current Master was slavish to the teachings of the past. But he had a foul temper and little patience and-despite his respect for tradition-there was always the hint that something furious could explode from him at any moment. The people didn't want to risk injury, and so stayed away.

Pullyang didn't stay away. He loved the Master for all he had done and for all he represented. And this was the reason that Pullyang had been chosen from all others in the village to be caretaker for the Master of Sinanju when he was away. It was an appointment he accepted with great pride.

Pullyang had been a much younger man when he was elevated to the post of caretaker.

As he shuffled up the long road, the simple houses fell away behind him.

Pullyang walked down the path to the bluff whereon sat the home of the Master of Sinanju when he was in residence.

The House of Many Woods looked as if it had grown from seeds planted at a dozen different architectural ages. Egyptian, Roman, Carpathian, Victorian and other mismatched contributions combined in a melange of styles that had grown along with the history of the venerable house of assassins.

Most of the clashing styles were functional gifts from grateful employers. Marble and mahogany, granite and teakwood fought one another at angle and arch. But there were also some more individual touches from the men who had taken up residence in that house. Some were of a practical nature, like chimneys and furnaces, plumbing and a telephone line. Others were of a personal nature.

There were the golden lamps presented to Master Noo's wife by the wife of King Ashurbanipal of Assyria in 650 a.c. The gold still gleamed like it had the day they were first hung alongside the front door.

A fresco around the back depicted a heroic Master Tho, the first Master to travel to China and whose work opened up a vast, untapped market for the House of Sinanju.

Nine hundred years ago Master Jopki's young son had fastened seashells around the door. Nine hundred years later, they were still glued in place. Preserved like shards of frozen time by methods unknown in the West.

The house wasn't just a piece of history; it was many pieces. As unique as the men who called it home.

Pullyang opened the wooden door and went inside. The first thing he checked was the basement Stones from Roman quarries lined the walls of the main chamber beneath the big house. In a private area was a labyrinthine series of off-limits rooms, as well as tunnels carved in rock that Pullyang was forbidden to enter.

The main room was open around the furnace.

Stacked high against the far walls were hundreds of mismatched crates and trunks, as well as a few boxes carved from solid stone. Each case was marked. with a different symbol.

Pullyang felt a swell of pride every time he saw those piled boxes. No outsider had ever seen them. Few in the village had been granted the privilege of glimpsing them.

Pullyang understood that he was gazing upon history.

Contained within those many cases were the personal belongings of each Master of Sinanju who had ever lived.

The old man moved among the boxes, making certain there was no water on the floor. Given the age of the house and its nearness to the bay, the current Master was worried about seepage. The floor was dry. As it was every morning.

The water was shut off, so the pipes hadn't frozen during the night. Everything in the basement seemed fine.

Pullyang shook the old spent coal and ash out of the slow-burning furnace and added new coal. Afterward he went upstairs. The floor warmed beneath his feet as he began to take his daily inventory.

Most of the Sinanju treasure was stored in the upstairs rooms. This was the tribute paid to the Masters over the years by employers the world over. Originally the riches accumulated by the Masters of Sinanju were meant to sustain the village in times of strife. Over time the Masters' tribute became the sole income of the entire village.

There were silver coins minted for Master Lik. They had been stamped with the symbol of the House by Themistocles-thanks from the Greek statesman for Sinanju's aid in his success in battle against the Persians at Salamis. Twelve bronze urns filled with flawless diamonds showed the gratitude of the Roman Emperor Vespasian for a Sinanju service. Bolts of uncut silk from every Chinese dynasty were rolled tightly and bound with gilded ribbon.

On a corner shelf sat gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, presented without condition to a Master two thousand years before by a trio of Zoroastrian mystics. A reward to Sinanju for a prophesied vision, as yet unfulfilled.

Pullyang passed through room after room, making certain nothing had been disturbed. As he did evry day, he took special care at the door of the library. A few years before someone had entered the house and stolen an old wood carving from that room.

As his tired eyes searched the corners of the library, Pullyang's heart sang a quiet song of thanksgiving. Everything was where it should be. Feeling great relief, the old caretaker left the Master's House.

It was two hours since he had awakened. There was life in the village now. Men and women were in the square. As he walked along, Pullyang smiled at the playing children.

A group of people had clustered together in front of the cobbler's house. In the middle of them stood one of the women of the village. She seemed greatly disturbed.

"I saw it when I took my washing down to the shore," the woman was insisting. She was out of breath.

"What did you see?" a man asked.

"The shore," the woman said fearfully. "The shore is like blood. It stains the rocks. Come quickly! It is already washing away."

She grabbed the man by the wrist and began dragging him along. A few others went along with her. Such idle time-wasting was common in Sinanju. The people had nothing better to do than invent foolishness to occupy their days. Pullyang alone had important work to do.

While the group led by the agitated woman went to the shore, Pullyang headed out of the village. At the outskirts he left the main road. He shuffled up a weed-choked path into the black hills that overlooked the shore.

At his age it was rough going, but he eventually made it to the top. The hill became a plateau. Behind him the West Korean Bay stretched out to greet the cloud-smeared sky. Two curving columns of rock framed the bay.

The Horns of Welcome had been placed above the bay centuries ago so that visitors searching for the glory of Sinanju would know that they had reached their destination. The twin stones raked the sky above frail old Pullyang.

At the top of the plateau opened the black mouth of a deep cave. Pullyang was not permitted to enter the cave, for it was a sacred place. Indeed, he rarely ventured up this high as part of his professional duties.

There were three trees at the cave's entrance. Bamboo, pine and plum blossom. It was Pullyang's responsibility to keep them healthy throughout the changing seasons.

The three trees had survived the windy night intact. Bending, the old caretaker swept some needles from the ground around the pine into his coarse hand. Shuffling over to the edge of the plateau, he brushed them away.

He was slapping the dirt from his hand and was turning back to the path when something caught his eye.

Squinting in the weak sunlight, Pullyang peered down the far side of the hill.

The hill rolled more quickly down to flatland on this side. A short distance from the bottom was a plain stone hut. It was far away from the main village.

The family that had lived there for centuries had died out. The house had been abandoned for almost two years.

And yet, on this cold morning, old Pullyang saw a thin wisp of smoke slipping from the stone chimney. For a moment the old man hesitated.

His stomach grumbled loud from hunger. By now Hyunsil was probably wondering where her father was.

He was hungry, but in the end duty won out. Pullyang picked his careful way down the short side of the hill. He was relieved when his sandals reached flat ground. He hurried across the frozen mud to the hut.

He felt his will dissolve with every step. The house was a place of evil.

A wicked family had lived there. It had for countless years been residence to shaman. More recently Nuihc, the current Master of Sinanju's nephew and the greatest enemy of modern Sinanju, had been born and raised there.

For some reason lost in the mists of ancient time, the family that had lived there had rejected direct assistance from the Masters of Sinanju. The shamans took payment from the other villagers for their spells and tonics.

Pullyang was certain that the Masters of Sinanju knew why the occupants of this house alone in all the village rejected the generosity of their protectors, but the reason was never told. If the family of the last shaman who had lived there knew, the secret had died when his daughter disappeared two years ago.

The hut was in disrepair. Here and there the mud-and-thatch roof was falling in.

Pullyang no longer saw smoke coming from the chimney. The warming sun burned steam from the rotting roof.

Maybe he had been mistaken. His eyes had remained strong all his life, but it was possible he had confused the steam with smoke.

The path to the front door was overgrown with weeds. There was no indication that a single human foot had touched the ground from the old road to the dilapidated house since the dwelling had been abandoned two years before.

Old Pullyang felt his nerve grow stronger.

He had to have been mistaken. He had exerted himself too much this morning. He was hungry. That, coupled with the strangeness of the night before, had caused his tired old eyes to leap to flights of fancy.

It was time for breakfast. He would take a single peek inside the hut before heading back to his daughter's home.

His belly growling at thoughts of food, Pullyang rested a shrunken hand of bone on the door frame and leaned his face inside the open doorway.

Nothing. As he had now expected.

No one lived there any longer. He was foolish to have imagined seeing any sign of life in that unholy place.

The fireplace was black.

Wait. There was something. Specks of orange glowing amid the ash. They became clearer as his eyes adjusted to the dark interior of the hut.

Someone had been here. Pullyang's heart tightened. Movement. Something to his right.

Startled, Pullyang whipped his head to the source. He saw something in the dark. A flat face. Sinister eyes drawn up like those of a cat.

And then Pullyang's turning head kept going. It was off his neck before he knew what had happened. The decapitated head hit the frozen floor of the hut with a dull thud.

Shocked old eyes already growing dull in death, the head of the Master of Sinanju's loyal caretaker rolled into the corner of the abandoned hovel.

The body fell. Slowly. With great and lingering purpose. As if reluctant to leave the life it had clung to for so many years. The clutching old hand slipped away from the wooden door frame, and the body toppled forward.

For a moment all was still.

A scratching sound came from within the hut. Pullyang's body shook as an unseen hand took hold of his clothing.

Toes dragging in the dirt of the abandoned front path, the body of the Master of Sinanju's caretaker disappeared inside the squalid hut.

Chapter 4

Remo turned off the city street. A wooden barrier across the road blocked his way. Slowing to a stop before the lowered gate, he leaned out the car window, passing the security card he retrieved from his dashboard through the scanner. The gate lifted and he drove onto the private main road of the development complex that he and the Master of Sinanju were currently calling home.

The roads were laid out as carefully as a Monopoly board. The street names strained to be cute. Remo turned down Gingerbread Lane to Hopscotch Road.

Half of the community was for rent, while the rest were condos for sale. Every building looked exactly like the one next door. Remo's rented town house was a simple duplex with absolutely no distinguishing features whatsoever. It was a plain gray-sided number with tidy white trim, a green-turning-to-brown lawn and a private one-stall garage.

As places went, it wasn't so bad. It beat the old hotel ritual Upstairs used to make him engage in back in the early days. A few days or a week in one place and he had to move on. But, thank goodness, that had eventually changed. He and the Master of Sinanju had lived in two houses for a number of years without incident. The last had been home for a decade and, even though it fell victim to arsonists, the burning of that house hadn't really been work related.

At first Upstairs resisted the idea of another more-or-less permanent home, but Remo insisted. In the end he won out. Remo, for one, was grateful. He hadn't looked forward to living out of suitcases again. Not that he ever actually technically owned a suitcase, but it was the principle of the thing.

Remo parked in the garage and headed around to the side door of the duplex.

The Master of Sinanju wasn't in the living room. The big-screen TV was off.

He didn't need to call out. There was a pulsing vibration in the air, like the plucked string on some musical instrument in tune with the very forces of nature.

Remo followed the thrum of life through the kitchen and out the sliding doors to the small garden patio.

Chiun was sitting cross-legged on the colored flagstones. The old Korean had been sitting in the same spot when Remo had left for Milford earlier in the afternoon. His shimmering scarlet day kimono was arranged carefully around his bony knees.

"Hey, Chiun. Anything happen when I was out?" The Master of Sinanju's leathery face was upturned to catch the dying rays of the cold white sun. He did not bother to open his eyes.

"No," the wizened figure said.

"You sure? Everything was quiet while I was gone?"

"The only time that it is quiet around here is when you are gone," the old man replied.

"It's just that when I was heading down the street I thought I saw what's-her-name. Becky? Barky? Binky? That woman that keeps trying to show the place next door."

The complex had been trying to rent the vacant side of their duplex ever since Remo and Chiun had moved in six months before. The woman who had rented them their place had tried showing the adjacent town house a number of times.

The first time she made the mistake of trying to rent to a Japanese businessman and his family. The afternoon they came for a look, Chiun stood on his tiptoes on the stone birdbath, his nose thrust over the fence that divided the property. In flawless Japanese the old man offered something in calm and certain tones that at first might have been mistaken for a welcome to the neighborhood. Becky wasn't sure what Chiun had said to them-after all, she didn't speak Japanese-but by the time they left, the wife and children were in tears and the husband was shouting a stream of what could only have been Japanese obscenities.

The next two times she tried to show the place to American couples, each of whom had mysterious, unexplained problems with their cars while they were inside the house. The first car had all its tires flattened and its seats ripped out. The second couple's vehicle had somehow rolled down the hill and landed upside down in the complex swimming pool.

Each time when they asked the old man who had been sitting on the lawn out front the whole time if he had seen anyone suspicious, Chiun replied that the only suspicious people he had seen recently in the neighborhood was a family of Japs.

"Check their embassy," he suggested. "But leave your wallets at home."

After the last time, word got out. Becky ran the other way whenever she saw Chiun, and no one else came to see the little duplex at the lonely end of Billy Goat's Bluff.

"So was she up here, or what?" Remo asked.

"She might have stopped by," Chiun admitted. "That's what I was afraid of. Was she showing next door again? You've got to stop scaring everyone off, Chiun."

As he spoke, Remo peeked over the fence. He didn't see any severed arms or legs.

The Master of Sinanju finally opened his eyes. "I?" Chiun asked, his voice straining with insulted innocence. "I? What makes you think I would scare, nay that I could scare anyone? Me? Scare? I am but a humble, sweet and kindly old man. Scare? How could I scare? My heart is filled to overflowing with goodness. I do not scare anyone. People like me. I, Remo, am a people person."

"I don't exactly see them flocking to you in droves," Remo commented. There weren't any bodies in the small yard. Maybe Chiun had stuffed them in a closet inside.

"They used to," Chiun sniffed. "Then I met you, and the droves started flocking in the other direction." Remo decided that there probably weren't any bodies. If people had been looking at the next-door unit, there would have been some cars parked out front. The pool at the bottom of the hill was already covered for winter. No one had been fishing out any runaway cars when he drove by.

"Okay," he said, turning back to his teacher. "If she wasn't showing the house, what was she doing up here?"

"Not everyone is like you, Remo Williams," the Master of Sinanju said. "Some people are givers, not takers. They are more than happy to do favors for the Master."

"Are you kidding? She ducks and covers every time she sees you. How'd you get her to do favors for you?"

"Because, unlike you, Remo, I take an interest in my community. Had you attended last week's rental board meeting as I did, you would know that the board unanimously voted that I was a wonderful human being and that, because I am old and frail and have a son who would rather run off all afternoon without even bothering to tell me where he is going, I have special needs that require special attention."

Remo knew Chiun had started to attend the informal Tuesday-night board meetings in the rec hall a month ago. Remo figured there was an angle. For weeks Remo had been worrying about intimidation and hospital bills. Now he realized Chiun had been pulling a slow con job on the board members.

"I get it. You went and whined for elderly privileges and managed to get poor Becky gofering for you."

"Poor nothing," Chiun sniffed. "She is rewarded handsomely as an employee of this complex. My rent money pays her salary. Therefore she works for me."

"I'm paying our rent," Remo pointed out.

"And I am paying every day of my life for putting up with you."

"Let's call it square," Remo conceded. "So what was she doing here? Light dusting? Typing? Stacking bodies?"

"She was delivering my mail," the Master of Sinanju said. There was a strange lilt in his voice.

Remo frowned. "I already got today's mail."

"Not the garbage mail," Chiun said, waving a weathered hand. "This was my own personal mail." Remo understood. For years the Master of Sinanju had kept a post-office box for special correspondence. Remo mostly didn't pay attention to that stuff, but he got the impression that Chiun had moved into the cyber age, hiring someone to collect and forward mail for him from a special Internet address. That mail was printed and sent along with all other personal correspondence to Chiun's P.O. box.

"You got them to make her do the post-office run for you?" Remo asked, impressed. "Wow. You must've really laid the snow job on thick with the board." He crossed his arms. "So what did you get? I'm guessing not another hardware-store flier."

A smile toyed just beneath the surface of the Master of Sinanju's wrinkled lips. When he nodded, the tufts of hair above his ears did a soft dance of weighty appreciation. When he finally opened his mouth, he spoke only three words.

"It is time," the Reigning Master of Sinanju announced.

His reverent tone caught Remo off guard.

In their many years together there were only a few times in training-very few in Remo's memory-that the Master of Sinanju had shown true pride in the way his pupil performed a given task. Words of praise, or even something as simple as a smile or a nod, were rare indeed. They came only when the Master of Sinanju was so overwhelmed by pride that he dropped his cynical guard and lost himself to the moment.

Those three simple words, delivered on the patio of their small town house, were spoken with just such pride. And with a touch of quiet reverence thrown in for good measure.

Remo slowly uncrossed his arms. "Time for what?"

In reply Chiun reached deep inside a billowing kimono sleeve. The old man pulled out a single white envelope, which he held aloft like some great and treasured prize.

Remo took the offered envelope.

The paper was heavy. The envelope wasn't a cheapie. On the back was a wax seal. A shield topped by what looked like a knight's helmet was flanked by a lion and a unicorn. A banner at the bottom read Dieu Et Mon Droit.

The seal had not been broken.

There were no mailing or return addresses on the envelope. If it had come to Chiun's post-office box, it had to have been sent inside something else.

Remo looked up, puzzled. "Open it," Chiun encouraged.

Still confused, Remo did as he was told. Inside he found a single sheet of folded parchment. The paper felt old to the touch. In the center were written four simple words: "We are expecting you."

Nothing more.

It was a woman's handwriting. The script was crisp and sure. The woman who had written the words was obviously confident and unused to making mistakes. She had used an old ink-dipped quill, not a disposable instrument. Remo knew the difference. He had seen the same sort of strokes used by Chiun when recording the Sinanju histories.

"Okay," Remo said, looking up. "I give. What's this supposed to mean?"

"It means, O dim one, that it is time. That is the last. It will be the first." Chiun rose in a single fluid motion that barely disturbed the hems of his flowing robes. "Call Emperor Smith," he instructed. "Inform him the time is at hand and that we are leaving." He swept for the sliding glass patio doors that led into the kitchen.

"Whoa, Chiun. Where are we leaving to? What time is this supposed to be? What the ding-dang is going on?"

"Must everything be spelled out for you?" Chiun said impatiently. "The Time of Succession is finally here."

Remo felt an anxious thread in his belly.

"Okay, that sounds bad. Chiun, I've had to put up with the Sinanju Rite of Attainment, the Night of the Salt, the Dream of Death and about a hundred other rites of passage over the years. None of them were any fun. Are you telling me you're dumping another one on me? 'Cause if you are, I'm telling you right now, I can't take it."

"You can and you will," Chiun insisted sternly. "Those other passages were times of difficulty. This is merely a formality. It is your time of reckoning. By the end of our journey, your long apprenticeship will be at an end and the House of Sinanju will have a new Reigning Master."

The words hit Remo like a fist to the chest. He stood there for a long moment, unsure of what to say.

He could feel the eyes of Chiun's ancestors burning through him.

"You sure about that, Little Father?" he asked finally.

He winced at the old man's withering look. "Okay, you're sure," Remo muttered.

"As sure as I am that you will bring honor to the House and will not embarrass me in front of all the Masters who have come before," the old man announced to the small stone courtyard. He pitched his voice very low, leaning in to his pupil. "If you embarrass me in front of my family, you will rue the day, Remo Williams," he threatened.

Turning on his heel, he marched into the house. "Not much pressure, right, guys?" Remo asked the air.

His words were lost on a chill late-afternoon breeze that was like the breath of a thousand lost souls.

Chapter 5

For Dr. Harold W. Smith, the day began with no fanfare.

It was the same as the previous day and the one before that, stretching back over years and decades. Other men longed for the limelight. Harold Smith opted for the exact opposite. Recognition, accolades-a fanfare for his arrival-would have meant a failure on his part of colossal proportions. Brass bands to greet his day would have sent Smith scurrying for shadows where he could have a very personal, very private fatal heart attack.

But, thankfully, when he drove through the gates of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, no one was there to record his arrival except the same sleepy guard who had been on gate duty nearly every day for the past twenty years. And that guard never seemed overly interested.

Not that anyone would find any reason to be interested in Harold W. Smith. Even those who knew him found him exceedingly uninteresting.

Smith was uniformly bland and gray. His three-piece suit was gray, his overcoat was gray, even his skin tone was gray. The only splash of color in his dreary appearance was the green-striped school tie that was knotted with machinelike precision just below his protruding Adam's apple.

Smith was gray enough to be an escaped background character from a 1940s movie. That he would have been a background character on film was certain. Smith could never have had a speaking part. With the blandness he exuded, a single spoken line would have sent moviegoers stampeding for the bathrooms and concession stand.

For those who encountered the very real Harold Smith as he went about his life's business, Smith was a man the equivalent of an ice cube on an August sidewalk. He might be remembered for a little while, but he would sooner or later melt from memory and be gone forever.

Which was all well and good with Harold W. Smith. The man who craved no less than complete anonymity had been blessed by nature with the perfect camouflage. And so it was that in his living disguise he could drive onto the grounds of the facility that he ran and not garner more than a single glance from the guard at the main gate.

Folcroft was a private mental health and convalescent care facility nestled away amid the maples and birch on the shore of Long Island Sound. The trees had mostly lost their leaves as Smith steered up the long drive and parked his rusted old station wagon in his reserved space in the corner of the employee lot. He picked up his battered leather briefcase from the passenger seat.

There were only a few cars in the lot. Smith noted the one belonging to his assistant in the adjacent space. The remaining vehicles belonged to regular

sanitarium workers and were scattered throughout the large lot.

The night shift had come on duty at midnight and would not be relieved until eight o'clock. Since his earliest days at Folcroft, Smith had carefully set his own schedule, timing his arrival so that he would not encounter any sanitarium staff on his way to work.

As usual, he made it from the parking lot to the building without bumping into a single soul. Folcroft was a big, ivy-covered building built in an age when the pride of the American worker was evident in every carefully measured line and stacked brick. Though a century of cold and rain, wind and snow had howled and raged across the Long Island Sound, Folcroft's solid construction had weathered time and the elements. It, like its director, was a rock that only herculean intervention would dislodge. But no such effort had been raised against Folcroft, nor, it would seem, was any effort under way to dislodge Harold W. Smith from his lonely post. And so the gaunt gray man in the heavy overcoat hustled up the same path he had trodden on for forty years. Untouched by time, unperturbed by the vicissitudes of a cruel and changing world.

Through the door and up the stairs, Smith found his way to his office suite.

The outer room was empty.

For years Smith's secretary had made certain every day that she was at work a few minutes before her employer. But she ran the office with such efficiency, Smith had lately decided to relax her schedule somewhat by reducing her hours. The woman was edging closer to retirement age and this was one of the ways Smith hoped to persuade her to remain past sixty-five.

She was too valuable an asset to lose. Eileen Mikulka came in at eight now, not 5:55 a.m.

Alone in the semidarkness, Smith entered his office. Shutting the door at his back with a muted click, he crossed to his desk. He set his briefcase in the well at his feet and settled in his leather chair.

While the rest of the office was a throwback to the 1950s, the desk was a high-tech addition to a decidedly low-tech environment. The gleaming black desk drew the focus of the Spartan room like an onyx altar.

Some might have wondered how a modern desk had found its way into so old-fashioned a room. The secret of the desk was a window into the secret life of Harold Smith.

Reaching beneath the lip of the desk, Smith's finger found a hidden stud. When he pressed it, a square of light grew to glowing life beneath the surface of the desk.

The computer screen was angled so that it was visible only to whoever sat behind the desk. On the screen appeared a few lines of text that were set to appear automatically first thing every morning. Smith read them daily as both habit and reminder.

Only after reading every word to the preamble to the United States Constitution did Smith close out the window. Feeling the weight of the world on his thin shoulders, Smith began his day's work.

Those people who found Smith not worthy of a second glance would have been stunned to find out just exactly what was the work of the boring gray man in the drab gray suit.

Director of Folcroft Sanitarium was merely a cover. Smith's true work was as director of CURE.

CURE wasn't an acronym, but a dream. An agency set up by a President of the United States-long dead-who, in a time that would seem innocent by modern standards, had seen the seeds of anarchy and division already beginning to bear fruit. Rather than allow the nation to be torn apart, this President had created an agency to work on behalf of America. An agency that would ignore the Constitution for the express purpose of saving it and, God willing, America.

To head this most covert of organizations, a man of great courage, personal strength and moral rectitude would be needed. After an exhaustive search, just such a man was found toiling far from the spotlight in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency. Harold Smith had accepted the presidential appointment with a flinty resolve and settled down to the work of saving the nation that he loved.

Forty years later, he was still on the job. Adjusting his rimless glasses on his patrician nose, Smith scanned the window that opened up beneath the one he had just closed. There were several items sent up to him by his assistant, Mark Howard. The young man had forwarded them for Smith's attention from his own office down the hall.

Smith quickly looked them over. He saved two for closer inspection and dumped the rest in the main CURE files. After that, he lost himself in the comfortable realm of cyberspace.

Behind a secret wall in the basement of the sanitarium, four mainframes kept an ever watchful eye on domestic and foreign affairs. Throughout day and night, anything that might require attention was pulled and collected in a special file. Although Mark Howard had a heightened instinct for identifying matters that might call for CURE manpower, the young man did not yet have the eye of experience honed over years by Harold Smith. Smith and his mainframes were a team that was still more comfortable working alone.

The CURE director threw himself into his work with the vigor of a man half his age. After all, this was the business for which he had been born.

He only realized two hours had passed when a soft rap sounded on his door. His drumming fingers retreated from the capacitor keyboard that was buried at the edge of his desk. The glowing alphanumeric pad faded from sight.

"Come in."

A matronly woman entered the office, a plastic cafeteria tray balanced on her forearm.

"Good morning, Dr. Smith," his secretary said.

"Good morning, Mrs. Mikulka."

The woman brought the tray to his desk, setting down a cup of coffee and a plate of dry toast. "How are you this morning, Dr. Smith?" Eileen Mikulka asked as she picked up the tray again.

"I'm fine, thank you."

It was the same ritual every day. Smith could have set a tape recorder on his desk to give the same responses.

"Will there be anything else?"

"No, thank you, Mrs. Mikulka."

"I'll be at my desk if you need me."

With a courteous smile Eileen Mikulka left the room.

Only when the door was closed once more did Smith return to his computer. Fifteen minutes later he was still engrossed in his electronic reports when the telephone rang.

It was the blue contact phone. He reached for it even as he continued scrolling down his screen. "Smith," he said crisply, tucking the phone between shoulder and ear.

"We're leaving, Smitty," Remo's voice announced glumly on the other end of the line. Frowning, Smith tore his eyes from his computer screen.

"What do you mean leaving?" the CURE director asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing wronger than usual," Remo replied. "Chiun and I are going on some trip somewhere. Of course, we can't tell Remo where that somewhere is. That'd make life too easy for him. Gotta wait until the last minute to maximize the chances of bugging the crap out of him."

Smith breathed a silent sigh of relief. Remo had never felt completely fulfilled as CURE's lone enforcement arm. He periodically quit the agency in search of the happier life he sometimes thought had eluded him. Smith had thought that this was another of those times.

"You are not due for vacation time," the older man pointed out as he returned attention to his computer.

"No vacation, Smitty. By the sounds of it I'm off on some ritual that'll end in me taking over from Chiun. I don't think I really believe it, though. He pulls one of these rites of passage out of his kimono sleeve every other week. I think it's his way of keeping me focused."

Smith had been absently scanning data on his screen. Remo's last words finally got Smith's undivided attention. He took the phone from the crook of his neck, gripping it tightly in his arthritic hand. "Is this the Time of Succession?"

Remo sounded surprised. "You've heard of it?"

Smith tried to keep his tone casual. "Chiun, er, mentioned something of it last year while you were recuperating from your burns here at Folcroft."

"Huhn," Remo grunted. "Everyone knows about it but me. Anyway, Chiun told me to tell you the time was at hand, destiny awaits, blah-blah-blah. Upshot is, we're leaving."

"You haven't any idea where you're going?"

"Nope. I'll find out at the airport, I guess. The old skinflint isn't gonna pay for our tickets, that's for sure. I'll let you know what it's all about when we get back."

"Very well." Smith hesitated. "Remo," he called the instant before the connection was broken.

"Yeah?"

"Good luck." There was a strain in his voice, yet the words were sincere.

"Thanks, Smitty," Remo said.

The phone went dead in Smith's hand. With great care he replaced the receiver in the cradle.

Hand snaking from the blue contact phone, he picked up the black desktop phone. He dialed a three-digit number for the interoffice Folcroft line.

The nasal voice that answered was youthful. "Mark Howard."

"Mark, please come to my office at once."

Once he had hung up the black phone, Smith reached into his pocket and pulled out his key chain. With a small key he unlocked the long drawer at his belly. A few pens rolled along with the opening drawer.

Smith reached over paper clips and a sandwich bag filled with rubber bands. Far back in the drawer his fingers closed around an envelope. He pulled it out.

The thick envelope was gold. There was a seal on the back, broken open months ago. A simple trapezoid divided by a bisecting line. The symbol of the House of Sinanju.

Considering their working relationship, he was surprised that Master Chiun had been so formal in his invitation. But, he realized, Sinanju had managed to last for thousands of years in part because of the strict adherence to ritual.

Opening the golden flap, he pulled out a sheet of carefully folded parchment. The letter was written in Chiun's familiar florid script.

Dear Emperor Harold W. Smith, Secret Ruler of the United States of America, Protector of the Eagle Throne and President-in-Waiting,

You are cordially invited...

Smith stopped reading. He couldn't bear to go further. He folded the letter and tucked it back inside the envelope.

It was ludicrous. At first he had balked at the very idea. But Chiun insisted the ritual could not be avoided.

The Sinanju Time of Succession. The end of the line for Remo's training.

The ritual put Remo at risk. But the greater risk for Smith was to CURE and, therefore, to America.

He put the envelope to one side on his desk and returned attention to his computer. Smith closed out all the CURE files, dumping them into the mainframes. They would still be there when he went back for them. In spite of all that might need his attention, he had a feeling that the coming days would be occupied with work unrelated to CURE.

Once he was done, he turned in his chair. There was a picture window of one-way glass behind his desk. As he awaited the arrival of his assistant, Harold Smith watched Long Island Sound roll to shore. He was suddenly very tired.

Chapter 6

Remo was right. When they got to John F. Kennedy International Airport, Chiun shoved him and his credit card to the front of the proper ticket line. When Remo saw that they were heading to England, he had just one question.

"Why are we going to England?" Remo asked unhappily.

"Because," Chiun replied. And said nothing more.

Over the Atlantic, Remo tried again. "What's in England?"

"Beef eaters with pasty skin," Chiun said as he looked out at the clouds. "You should fit right in."

"I doubt it. English beef is just ground-up bull horns and pickled horse assholes. And I haven't had a steak or a burger in thirty years. And you're just dodging the question. What are we going to England for and what does it have to do with the Time of Succession?"

Chiun's face puckered. "Are you a child?" he clucked, turning unhappily from the window. "For once in your life can you not demonstrate patience?"

"Whatever we're doing there, it has to do with me becoming Master of Sinanju. I think I have a right to know."

"When you are Master, then you have a right to know. Until then, enjoy the clouds." A long finger tapped the window. "Look. That one looks like a bunny."

Remo slouched back in his seat. "I hate clouds," he grumbled.

"I don't know why. You have much in common. You are both puffy and white and cast gloom wherever you go."

Remo sank even further into himself, muttering about how much he hated sarcasm, too. He was still complaining when their plane touched down in London.

They took a cab from the airport. Chiun gave directions to the cabbie from the back seat. The driver eventually stopped outside a high wall. Remo had glimpsed the building beyond from the back seat of their taxi.

"Chiun, what are we doing at Buckingham Palace?" he asked once they were standing on the sidewalk.

The most famous residence of the British monarchy stretched like a panoramic postcard beyond the wall. "Looking for an entrance," Chiun replied. Twirling, he marched up the sidewalk.

He stopped at a palace guard standing before a gate. The man wore the familiar red uniform jacket and high bearskin hat, tied under his chin. He stared out over Chiun's bald head. Pedestrians continued to pass by.

"Chiun, they're not just going to let you waltz in here," Remo whispered. "Now, will you come clean, please, and tell me what the heck we're supposed to be doing here?"

But the old Korean wasn't paying attention. He marched up to stand toe-to-toe with the palace guard. Remo had seen jokes for years about how unflappable the guards were at Buckingham Palace. How the men stood at rigid attention at their posts and couldn't be made to flinch or blink despite the best efforts of nuisance tourists.

Remo was a little disappointed that the guard Chiun had chosen wasn't quite as imperturbable as the movies made them out to be. Of course, Remo reasoned that this probably had something to do with the fact that the Master of Sinanju had yanked the man's gun from his hands and thrown it out into London traffic while simultaneously stuffing the soldier's furry black hat down over his head.

As the soldier stumbled away, the old Asian sent a hard heel into the unguarded gate. The lock shattered and the gate swung wide. He turned back to his pupil.

"It is open," Chiun announced before slipping inside.

On the sidewalk Remo hesitated. The nearby tourists were watching the guard whose hat had inexplicably swallowed his head. As the man stumbled and swore, cameras clicked.

No one was paying attention to Remo. He didn't know what else to do. Sliding reluctantly from the sidewalk, he followed the Master of Sinanju inside. He caught up to the tiny Korean near the palace. "What do you think you're-"

Chiun silenced him before he could say another word.

"Follow close and keep your mouth shut."

The wizened Asian spoke with great seriousness. With a furrowed brow, Remo did as he was told.

They entered the palace undetected.

Remo had been in royal and presidential palaces before. The trappings of royalty did nothing to impress him. He saw high ceilings and fancy paintings that were there because someone in the hazy past had decided they were royal just because they'd mounted more Viking heads on their walls than the guy next door, and enough of their countrymen had bought into the kingly con job to make it stick.

"Do not let your low-bred eye be bedazzled by the opulence of this place," Chiun hissed over his shoulder as they slipped up a corridor. "After all, you are American and therefore unused to good taste."

"Good taste, schmood taste. Give me the local mall over this snob smokehouse any day of the week."

"And the ugly American rears his ill-bred head yet again," Chiun whispered in reply. "Not that I entirely disagree with you. The palaces of ancient Persia. Now, they would have impressed even your Visigothic eye. Still, for a Western palace this is not without its charms."

"Yeah, I'm really impressed," Remo said aridly. "They invent indoor plumbing around here yet or do they still hang the royal arses out over the Thames?"

He was surprised that they hadn't encountered anyone yet. They had traveled deep in the palace without seeing another living soul. Remo figured they'd be armpit deep in butlers, falcon trainers and ladies-in-waiting by now.

In a hallway off the beaten path, the Master of Sinanju stopped at a gilded tapestry on which was depicted the Battle of Agincourt. Outnumbered English archers with longbows were slaughtering French knights. Henry V stood amid the chaos, resplendent in gleaming armor. At the king's side stood another man. The face caught Remo's attention.

He peered closer. The man had Korean features. "Relative of yours?" Remo asked.

Chiun wasn't paying attention. He had pulled up an edge of the tapestry. Manipulating the molding of the paneling beneath, he swung open a section. The old man slipped through the secret door.

Unable to hide his curiosity, Remo followed him inside.

The long passage beyond was dusty. Thick ropes of cobweb hung across their path. On one side grimy windows overlooked a courtyard that time had apparently forgotten. Overgrown vines swallowed stone benches and an ancient shed while shrubs and weeds grew wild.

"Okay," Remo said as the secret door swung shut behind them. "I've been patient long enough, but this is getting too weird. Wanna tell me what we're doing here?"

They had come to the end of the long hallway. Even as Remo was finishing his question, the two of them were stepping out into a larger room.

Remo stopped dead. "Oh," he said, his voice small.

The chamber they had come to was some sort of throne room. At least Remo assumed it was a throne room. He had two very good reasons for thinking it was. For one thing there was a pretty damned ornate throne standing on a small platform against the far wall. For another-and this almost assured him that this was indeed a throne room-the queen of England was sitting on the throne.

"Um, Chiun?" Remo whispered.

But the Master of Sinanju had swept ahead of him, gliding up to the throne. He offered a deep bow. "Your Majesty," Chiun intoned. "Sinanju bids most humble and undeserved greeting to Elizabeth II, Defender of the Faith and Queen by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas. We stand before you as wretched and unworthy servants to your glorious crown."

"Greetings, Master of Sinanju," the queen replied. She wore a simple blue dress and silver crown. In her white-gloved hands she clasped the strap of her omnipresent purse. "You do us honor with this visit. We trust your journey was safe and bid you welcome to our shore."

Remo was still at the door, uncertain what to do. There were two men standing beside the queen. Although he had never met the man to the left of Her Royal Highness, Remo recognized the teeth, chin and hair. Britain's prime minister stood like a confused rat.

On the queen's right was a man Remo knew all too well.

Sir Guy Philliston was the head of Source, Britain's top spy agency. Sir Guy was a little older now, with graying temples and soft wrinkles around his eyes, but he still had male-model good looks. Philliston was so handsome that women regularly lined up beside his bed. They were invariably disappointed by the Men Only sign nailed to the headboard.

Remo sensed something was different when, unlike their usual encounters, Sir Guy didn't leer at him. Standing beside the queen, the Source head looked more businesslike than ever, if somewhat ill at ease. This was too much for Remo to comprehend. He was actually in a secret throne room with England's queen and prime minister. What's more, he and Chiun had obviously been expected. As he tried to make sense of the scene, Remo thought he heard someone call his name. When he looked up, he saw that Chiun was glancing back at him.

"Remo, approach the throne and be recognized," the old man repeated, a tight smile plastered across his face.

"Oh, sorry." Stepping forward, Remo wiped his dry palm on his thigh and offered it to Her Highness. "Hiya."

Thinking better after the dirtiest of dirty looks from Chiun, he dropped the hand to his side and offered a formal bow. He felt foolish.

"This is the one who will succeed you?" the queen asked the Master of Sinanju.

Although her use of language was precise in the extreme, she didn't speak with disapproval or disappointment. It occurred to Remo that, even though she had been famous all of his life, he had never before heard her voice.

"He is my son and heir, Your Majesty," Chiun replied.

The queen turned her regal gaze to Remo. "In that case, we welcome you, son of the awesome Master of Sinanju."

Still seated upon her throne, the queen offered a slight bow of her head.

At a nudge from Chiun, Remo returned the bow. The instant his head was down, he felt a sharp displacement of air beside his throat.

"What the?" Remo said, jumping back.

In the queen's gloved hand was a long needle that she had hidden behind her purse. The instant Remo bowed, she'd tried to jab him in the throat. When he jumped, she missed.

Forward momentum kept the needle going. Before she could stop it, the needle swept around, burying deep in the thigh of the prime minister.

The PM let out a yelp that was all jutting teeth and bugging eyes. He slapped a hand to the spot where the queen had harpooned him. For a moment he just stood there. Then he pitched forward on his pale face.

"What the cripes was that all about?" Remo demanded.

Sir Guy Philliston rushed over to check the pulse of the deceased PM.

Chiun tsk-tsked. "That is not permitted, Your Majesty," he scolded the British monarch.

"Bet your ass it's not," Remo snapped. "The frickin' queen of England just tried to kill me. That pin had some kind of poison on it. Lookit. What'shis-face is dead." He pushed a toe against the late prime minister.

Chiun's face grew mildly impatient. "Didn't you hear me? Didn't you hear me tell her it was wrong of her to do so?"

"We beg forgiveness," the queen interjected.

"Pipe down, hairdo," Remo growled at Her Majesty. To Chiun, he said, "Let me guess. This has something to do with the Sinanju Time of Succession."

"What else would it have to do with?" the Master of Sinanju replied in Korean. "Now be still. You are embarrassing me in front of the queen."

"Fine. In that case, I'm gone."

He started to march away. In an instant he changed his mind and wheeled around.

"Screw it," he said. Dodging Chiun, he marched up to the throne and snatched the queen's purse from her hands. "I've always wanted to know what the hell's so important you gotta schlep this around all the time."

Flipping the purse upside down, he shook it out over the steps.

He expected snotty hankies or some secret lease that would turn Boston over to the redcoats in 2076. Instead, a single, small framed picture dropped out. Remo grabbed up the silver frame. He looked at the picture.

He looked at Chiun.

He looked back at the picture.

When Remo looked once more at the Master of Sinanju, astonishment had overtaken anger.

"It's you," he said in amazement.

The picture was of a Chiun much younger than Remo had ever known him. The man in the photograph had black hair and an unwrinkled face. But there was no mistaking who it was.

The old Korean snatched the picture from his pupil's hand. A faint blush had risen in his cheeks. He handed purse and picture back to the queen. With a bow and an embarrassed goodbye, he quickly left the throne room.

Remo didn't know what to do. He didn't bother to bow to the queen or glance at Philliston. He left the small throne room and hurried back into the hall after his teacher.

As soon as they were gone, Sir Guy Philliston fumbled a cell phone from his pocket.

"They are on their way," he said. "Yes, just the young one. Be alert. He is better than anything you've ever seen." He clicked the phone shut. "Source's top agent will be in position momentarily, Your Majesty."

The queen said nothing. She was staring at the picture in her hands. After a lingering moment, she dropped the silver frame back inside her purse, snapping it shut with a crisp click.

Chapter 7

The elegant man in the black bowler hat had parked in the no-parking zone in front of Harrods department store in the heart of London. The car the man leaned against as he waited was a yellow classic Bentley that looked like a shiny wheeled lemon in the bright midday sun.

He had been parked there for some time. A manager from the store who had spied him through a window was going to send someone to chase him away. But when the store employee saw how elegantly the man was dressed and how regal was his bearing, he had second thoughts. The stranger was so lordly it just seemed wrong to disturb him. So even though it was hip these days to scorn the landed aristocracy, the upper classes were in full cultural retreat and the hereditary peers in the House of Lords had been downsized back to the Dark Ages, the Harrods manager had given special instructions to ignore the man next to the gleaming yellow Bentley.

When a policeman walking up the sidewalk paused to question the man, the bobby was offered a cool smile and a glass of Dom Perignon champagne from the bottle that was chilling on ice in the Bentley's back seat. The officer accepted the smile, refused the drink and-by the time he headed up the sidewalk-was apologizing profusely for disturbing the well-dressed man.

The man waiting at the car was used to such reactions. Thomas Smedley had been getting them all his life.

Smedley was a true gentleman. In a world that had been surrendered to the coarse and profane, he exuded the once common and laudable Britishness that had gone out of vogue long before the dying days of the previous century.

"We Smedleys were gentlemen when the rest of the lower orders were still eating fleas out of each other's fur," his father was fond of saying. "Which, by Smedley time, was about quarter to three yesterday afternoon."

Even as a lad in kneesocks and knickers, Thomas Smedley was already a gentleman.

He was a gentleman at Eton, a gentleman during his stint in the British army guards regiment and a gentleman into his life's work as a top spy for Her Majesty's government.

Most people who knew him as a spy suspected he worked for MI-5 or MI-6. People connected with those agencies, who knew perfectly well Thomas Smedley didn't work for either, joked that he must be employed by MI-6 and a half. Only a handful knew that Thomas Smedley was the top counterespionage agent for the highly secret British organization known only as Source.

Those who passed him on the street this day had no way of knowing that beneath that cool exterior beat the ice-cold heart of Britain's most lethal killer.

Smedley couldn't count the number of times he had killed for queen and country, nor did he care to venture a guess. The fact that they were all dead meant that he was still alive and that was just fine with Thomas Smedley.

Smedley sipped champagne as he waited.

In addition to his black bowler, Smedley wore an impeccably tailored double-breasted navy-blue suit with brass buttons. A neatly knotted blue tie with white polka dots hung over his lavender shirt. In spite of the fact that the sun had decided to put in a rare and welcome appearance above London, a black umbrella dangled from Smedley's forearm.

As he sipped his champagne, he checked his pocket watch. A single raised eyebrow showed his displeasure.

The instant the eyebrow went up, the front door of the store opened. A thin, curvaceous woman, her arms stacked high with colored boxes, strode into the sunlight.

At the woman's appearance, every man on the street stopped and stared. They couldn't help it. She had the kind of beauty that could only be described as dangerous. Perfect smile, perfect cheekbones, perfect nose. Her eyes were brown pools flecked with green. As she walked, her shimmering black hair skipped across her proud shoulders. The men who saw her wanted her. The women envied her. As she marched from Harrods, she scorned them all. Silver shoes were matched by a silver clasped belt that hung around the waist of her burgundy, long-skirted top. Her red silk palazzo pants shimmered with every step as she stepped coolly over to the waiting yellow car.

"You're late, Mrs. Knight," Smedley said as he popped the rear door for her.

"Mr. Smedley," the woman said liltingly in reply, "threats to the crown come and threats to the crown go, but a sale like this is a once-in-a-year event."

Mrs. Knight dumped her boxes in the back of the car. As Smedley returned his champagne glass to the bar, she passed her lips very close to his cheek in something that might have been a kiss or a whisper. With a devilish smile, she dropped, giggling, into the back seat.

Leaving her in the rear, Smedley marched crisply around to the driver's side and slipped in behind the wheel. He set his umbrella on the seat beside him. In another moment he was pulling out into London traffic.

In the back seat Mrs. Knight wriggled out of her loose-fitting outfit. She pulled a change of clothes from a valise she'd stashed in the car before her side trip to the store.

In the rearview mirror, Smedley watched as Mrs. Knight slipped her long legs into her tight-fitting outfit. To do so she had to slide her bare bottom to the edge of the seat.

"I have never wanted more to be a leather seat, Mrs. Knight," Smedley commented.

"Perhaps later I'll tan your hide for you, Mr. Smedley," she replied as she tucked her pert breasts inside the top of the one-piece outfit. With slender fingers she lovingly drew the zipper that ran from crotch to neck.

Mrs. Knight was fastening the button at her collar when a cell phone purred to life in Smedley's vest. He popped it open as he drove.

"Smedley," he announced. "We've just left Harrods. We'll be there momentarily." He paused to listen. "Are you certain just the young one?"

He made a face at the response. Without a goodbye, he clicked the phone shut and slipped it back in his pocket.

"Philliston says they're on the move," Smedley said, mild irritation in his voice. "Warned me that they're better than anything we've seen before."

"Do you believe it?" Mrs. Knight asked.

"Better than anything I've seen?" Smedley scoffed. "After what I just saw in my mirror? Doubtful, Mrs. Knight. Very, very doubtful."

The lemon-yellow Bentley continued up the road to Buckingham Palace.

"SO, DID YOU DO the queen of England or what?" Remo asked as they marched out of Buckingham Palace.

Chiun's brow was dark, his gaze dead ahead. "You have done it again," the Master of Sinanju said in hot reply. "I continue to hope. I pray to my ancestors that each last time will be the last time. Yet you have managed to take a moment of great importance to your House and to me-yes, forgive me, Remo, for having selfish feelings this one time-and turn it into something embarrassing."

"Not that I need to defend myself here, but she did try to jab me in the head with a poison pin."

"Yes, that was not permitted," Chiun admitted grudgingly. "What passes for royalty these days. I shudder to think what is in line to follow her."

"So did you?" Remo pressed as they walked.

"Did I what?"

"You. The queen. She had that picture of you. That was you, wasn't it?" He held up his hands, warding off the foul look his teacher shot him. "Hey, not a problem here. I'm open-minded. Maybe she was a looker back in her day. Which, if she's like most Englishwomen, was the twenty-four hours just after her eighteenth birthday and just before the Crooked Tooth Express plowed full-steam ugly into her mush."

Chiun would not be drawn in. Outside, they scaled the wall and hopped to the ground. As soon as their feet touched the sidewalk, they were walking briskly down the street.

Remo was no longer surprised by the lack of guards or palace personnel. The pedestrians in whose midst the two men suddenly appeared seemed unfazed. None was aware that the two Masters of Sidanju had come from the palace grounds.

"I expect so little from you, Remo," Chiun said as they strolled along. "Is it too much to ask you to behave yourself at least in front of royalty?"

"As soon as royalty starts behaving better, I will. It's all a joke anyway. They build places this big just to distract the people on the other side of the gate. If they keep the commoners busy oohing and ahhing, maybe they won't realize the people inside are about as fit to rule as the winner of last year's Twit of the Year Contest."

"Your powers of perception are great, O insightful one," Chiun droned. "Do you think all of the Masters of Sinanju who have come before you did not know that? Do you think I do not know that? Of course that is so. But as long as they continue to rule, we will go to them. For no matter what nobility you place in the man who collects the garbage, he will never have the means to retain our services."

Remo shook his head, uncaring that the past Masters were watching him. "Some family we are. Always mercenaries."

"Yes," Chiun replied. "And the children back in Sinanju thank us daily for that fact."

Remo had been to Sinanju. Not once had he heard so much as a single word of thanks from the inhabitants. He had heard backstabbing and sniping. He had heard slander and toadying and fear, followed by a break for lunch and an afternoon free for more sniping. But he had never once heard anything remotely approaching a sincere thank-you. He was about to bring this up when he was suddenly distracted by something up ahead.

A garish yellow car had pulled to the curb.

Remo didn't know what triggered the sense. It was experience honed in training. All he knew was that the person behind the wheel seemed interested in him.

The windshield was strangely reflective. Even his sharp eyes had a difficult time seeing through it. Sunlight gleamed from the mirrored glass. Remo thought the driver was a man. At least he assumed so, given the fact that he could make out just the faintest outline of a bowler hat.

"We've got company," Remo said as they walked. For the moment he was more curious than concerned. Chiun said nothing. His slivered eyes were fixed on the car that was still a hundred yards away.

People on the street passed by the parked Bentley with the idling engine. No one seemed terribly interested in it.

As Remo and Chiun continued up the sidewalk, a hand slowly reached out the driver's window of the Bentley. Clutched tight in the pale fingers was a cylindrical metal object the size of a small can of spray paint.

Although the eyes were hidden by the glass, Remo could sense that the driver's gaze never wavered from him.

Remo knew something was wrong. Before he could speak his words of sudden concern, the driver pressed a tiny button on the top of the canister and let the metal device slip from his fingers. It bounced to the sidewalk with a sharp clank.

The instant the canister hit, it began spinning. A cloud of purplish gas erupted from both ends, shooting up into the faces of stunned pedestrians.

Panic came at once. As the cloud grew; people screamed.

Remo had started to run when the first body fell. It was a woman with shoulder-length black hair in a skintight leather cat suit. She crumpled to the sidewalk, screaming and writhing in her death throes. As soon as the driver had dropped the canister, the car tore away from the curb. As the gas can spit and people scattered in fear, the Bentley flew across lanes of traffic. Tires squealed and horns blared angrily. Remo wheeled. "Little Father," he snapped.

"Go," Chiun commanded. "I will see to the device."

As Chiun flew up the sidewalk to the hissing gas canister, Remo bolted into traffic after the fleeing Bentley.

They had walked nearly to the Royal Mews on Buckingham Palace Road. Directly across the wide road from the Doric archway that led into the Mews was the four-star Steen Hotel.

The Bentley didn't attempt to flee very far. After cutting across rows of traffic, it bounced the sidewalk in a sideways squeal that slid it on smoking rear tires to the entrance of the hotel's subterranean parking garage. Tearing down a strip of black rubber, it flew into the darkness.

Remo raced to follow. Though cars sped along, he dodged and jumped and somehow managed to be wherever they were not. In a few great strides he was across Buckingham Palace Road. On flying feet he raced down the incline into the Steen Hotel parking garage.

It was two levels deep. When Remo didn't spy the Bentley on the upper level, he ran down the ramp to the lower. The yellow car was nowhere to be seen.

He paused, clenching and unclenching his fists. The exit was located up near the entrance. There was no way a banana-colored car could have slipped past Remo undetected. It couldn't possibly have gotten out.

At the far rear wall of the lower level were several slight indentations in the concrete. Each was about the size of a garage door. They all looked solid. But as Remo walked past the last one, he felt something not quite right. Despite the solidness of the wall, he sensed hollowness beyond.

It was then that he noticed the fresh tire marks imprinted on the oil-softened floor.

He stomped his foot. The vibrations that came back confirmed his suspicions. He ran to the wall. Pressing the flat of his palms against the surface, he pushed. With a creak of protest and a single snap, the false door popped open, sliding up into the ceiling-The secret panel opened on another parking garage.

Remo slipped inside.

The smaller garage had room for only about twenty cars. A private elevator was at the rear, its door open. The tiny lot was full. Most of the cars were Bentleys painted different loud colors, although there were a few sports cars and a single white Rolls-Royce. A powder-blue Lotus Elan S3 was parked in the space nearest Remo.

The yellow Bentley Remo had followed from the street was parked in the spot farthest from the secret entrance. And standing calmly before it was Thomas Smedley.

The Source agent wore a coolly superior smile. His black bowler was tipped slightly toward his left eye. His umbrella was hooked to his forearm.

"Very good," the British agent said, impressed. "Being American, I assumed I would have to wait until you summoned fifty thousand troops with surface-to-air missiles to blast apart greater London to locate me. Jolly good show."

"Stuff the twaddle, Jeeves," Remo said as he marched across the garage. "You wanted to get my attention. Who are you and what do you want?"

"I, sir," Smedley said, "am your killer. As for the rest of your question, one hopes you can work it out from there. But, then, one hopes so much with Americans."

His gloomy tone and sadly shaking head made clear his disappointment on that front.

As he spoke, Smedley unhooked his umbrella from his arm. Continuing to shake his head, he aimed it like a weapon.

Remo barely had time to note the tiny hole at the silver tip when a trio of sounds like three clapping gunshots rang through the big basement room. Three bullets fired from the tip of the umbrella.

Although surprised, Remo's instinct took over. He dodged the first two bullets. The third he caught with the hardened tip of one index fingernail. With a flick and a snap, he sent it zinging back from whence it had come.

Remo had directed the bullet back down the barrel of the umbrella gun. But at the last moment it seemed to get a mind of its own. A few yards before it reached the Source agent, the bullet banked upward, impacting hard into the front of Smedley's bowler. It hit with a loud ping.

The bullet didn't tear the fabric. It made a little dent, but failed to penetrate.

Smedley seemed stunned. The impact of the bullet knocked him back against the Bentley. Blinking back his surprise, he quickly got his bearings.

"Magnetized," he explained to Remo's puzzled look. "And bulletproof. Handy to have in our business. Just one tool in an arsenal, my good man."

The umbrella was aimed again. With a slight manipulation at the handle, he sent another missile flying from the tip. This one was round and hard and came in slower than the bullets. Remo was still a few dozen yards from Smedley. The pellet arced to the floor and struck at Remo's feet. When it hit, a cloud of gas exploded up around Remo.

Across the garage Smedley yanked the brim of his bowler. A plastic gas shield came down, covering his face. He offered a sympathetic smile.

"Gas mask," the Source agent said. "Pity I only have the one. And I'm not keen to share. You'll find the gas is quite lethal. I shouldn't want to get much of it on my skin if I were you. Seeps in through the pores. Floods your lungs. The pain is excruciating, I've observed. You'll be dead in five or six seconds, if that's a comfort."

As he spoke, Smedley pulled on a pair of gloves that he had fished out of his pocket. As he awaited the American's inevitable death, he smiled behind his plastic shield.

The smile began to fade when the American didn't grab his throat and drop dead on the garage floor. In another second, as the American persisted in his stubborn refusal to die, Thomas Smedley's smile of success melted completely away.

For the first time in his professional career, he felt a fluttering hint of deep concern.

Across the room Remo stood in the smoke. Even though it kissed his bare arms and face, it seemed to have no ill effect. He shook his head in disgust.

"What is it with you people and gadgets?" he complained. "All the time gadgets, gadgets, gadgets."

Stooping, he picked up the smoke-spewing pellet. There was no risk of the poison seeping into skin. As soon as the danger was detected, his pores had shut down, closing out the harmful effects of the gas cloud.

Remo flicked the pellet off his thumb. It launched up into the ceiling vent, there to hiss and die harmlessly.

Near the rear wall, Smedley's jaw hung slack. He quickly recovered.

With the tip of his umbrella, Smedley poked a button on the wall near the elevator. Fans above their heads kicked on, sucking the gas from the parking garage.

"Hmm. I am loath to admit it, but I believe I might require a spot of assistance here, Mrs. Knight," the Source agent called over his shoulder.

The reply came from the open elevator doors. "I thought you'd never ask, Mr. Smedley." Remo had sensed another person lounging inside. From his angle he couldn't see inside. He was surprised when it was a woman's voice that spoke. Even more so when he saw who it was that stepped casually out to join Smedley.

Her long legs and thin arms were wrapped in tight black leather. Her neck was a porcelain pedestal for a perfect face. She was the same cat-suited pedestrian who had fallen to the ground in agony on the sidewalk near the Royal Mews.

As Smedley tucked up his bowler gas mask and pulled off his gloves, the woman stopped in a karate crouch beside him.

"You recognize our Mrs. Knight, I see," Smedley said. "Her performance on the sidewalk was just a cunning plan to lure you to your doom. The other pedestrians were frightened but unharmed by our little game. Well done, Mrs. Knight."

"Did you expect anything less, Mr. Smedley?" she asked.

Remo was nearly on the two Source agents. When he was close enough, Mrs. Knight made her move. Her attack was surprisingly quick. A graceful back flip and she was before Remo, her hands flashing like mallets in killing blows.

"You sure you're English?" Remo asked, tipping his head to examine her face even as he deflected her blows. "You're pretty okay looking. What passes for sexy in England is usually 'yikes' in the brush-and-floss parts of the world."

She tried launching a crushing knee into his sternum. Remo took the occasion to feel her up. "Nice," said Remo.

"Arrggghhh!" screamed Mrs. Knight.

Behind her, Thomas Smedley still had one trick left up his sleeve. As his partner fruitlessly fought Remo, the Source agent slipped the fabric off his umbrella, revealing a long stainless-steel sword. Its deadly sharp blade gleamed in the fluorescent light. He tested the weight of the blade over his head once before extending the sword before him.

"En garde!" Smedley challenged.

Mrs. Knight was still kicking and punching. By now she was sweating in her cat suit.

Remo looked at the sharpened tip of the umbrella sword. It was directed at his chest. He turned to Mrs. Knight.

"You work for him or is it the other way around?" he asked.

"I work for Britain." She tried to gouge his eyes out.

"Hey, here's a tip," Remo said. And, taking Smedley's wrist, he plunged the sword through Mrs. Knight's heart.

"Oh, dear," Smedley said as his dead partner slipped off the end of the sword. "Bad show."

"Worse movie," Remo said.

He flicked the sword from Smedley's hand. The Source agent seemed surprised to see it flying away. It buried two feet deep in the concrete wall. The sword wobbled in place.

"Now it's question-and-answer time," Remo said.

Smedley wanted to bolt, but before he could even take a single step, Remo had grabbed him by the hand. Remo pinched the fleshy web between Smedley's thumb and forefinger.

The pain was awful. Blinding. Worse than anything Thomas Smedley had ever experienced in his entire life.

"Eeeeeeaaaahhhh!" Thomas Smedley shrieked.

"That's level one," Remo explained as he squeezed. "It goes to one hundred. If you make it to fifty, you get a bonus of an umbrella suppository. Who do you work for?"

Remo increased the pressure. He made it as far as level one and a half before Thomas Smedley fell blubbering to his well-tailored knees.

"Source!" Smedley shrieked. "I work directly on order from Sir Guy Philliston."

"Philliston sent you to kill me?" Remo asked.

Smedley nodded. "I believe he was following orders from higher up." He gasped at the pain in his hand. "Please, go down from level one hundred. I can't bear it."

Remo scowled. "One hundred? I backed off before I reached two. What kind of girlie spy are you anyway?" He released the Source agent's hand.

With a disgusted look on his face, he collected the two sections of Smedley's umbrella. He wondered briefly after pulling the sword from the wall if it meant he now had to rule this damp sponge of a country. He hoped not. The climate was hell on leather loafers and he doubted he could get used to the stench of haggis blowing in from Scotland.

He slipped the gleaming silver sword back in the standard umbrella with a click.

Panting, Smedley pulled himself up on the Bentley's grille. "I've got a slight problem with pain," he admitted as Remo toyed with the umbrella. "It showed up on some of my early Source tests. Never had cause to worry about it before. Nasty bit of luck."

"No kidding?" Remo said. "How'd you score for getting umbrellas stuck through the head?"

He stuck Smedley's umbrella through Smedley's head.

If dying with a dumb look frozen on his face could have been judged high on the Source entrance exam, Thomas Smedley would have gotten perfect marks.

Remo opened the umbrella and gave it a little spin. It was still spinning above the head of Britain's former top assassin when he left the secret garage.

Chapter 8

Remo found the Master of Sinanju waiting for him in the back seat of a taxi out in front of the Steen Hotel. The driver was of Middle Eastern descent. He wore grimy white pajamas, a swatch of cloth on his head that looked like he'd mugged a dog for its sleeping blanket, and a surly, suspicious expression. When Remo slid in beside Chiun he noticed that the cabbie seemed to take particularly keen interest in him in the rearview mirror.

"Okay, what's the deal here?" Remo demanded of the Master of Sinanju as the car pulled into traffic. "If you are referring to the cost of this carriage ride, you may work out the details with our driver," Chiun said. "I forgot my purse at home."

"Bull," Remo said. "And don't get cute. That hat bastard said he was sent by Guy Philliston to kill me."

"Really? How interesting."

"Yeah, real interesting. Interesting, too, how that babe who was dying out on the sidewalk-you know, the one you went to help by stopping that can of spraying poison-showed up downstairs as healthy as a horse."

Chiun waved his hands in praise before his weathered face. "Thank the awesome ministrations of the Master of Sinanju, deliverer and banisher of death, for restoring life to her ravaged body. All hail splendiferous me."

"Ditch the sales pitch. She was fine and you knew it. This is part of the game. We didn't fly all the way to England just so you could look up an old girlfriend. That guy in the bowler said Source was getting orders to kill me from someone higher up." He tapped the back of the driver's seat. "Hey, Gunga Din. Drop us off at Buckingham Palace."

They were heading away from the palace. The cabbie gave no sign that he even heard Remo.

"I have already told him to take us to the airport."

"No way I'm leaving without an explanation. First the queen tries to kill me, then she has Philliston send someone to do it for her. If you won't spill the beans, she will. Buckingham Palace," he ordered the driver. "And don't spare the camels."

"He cannot understand you," Chiun stated. "He speaks Pushtu and understands very little English." The Master of Sinanju said something to the driver in a language that Remo didn't understand. The man didn't nod, didn't say a word. He continued to stare at Remo in the mirror. There was a look of hate in his dark eyes.

"Did you just say 'Heathrow' in the middle of that gobbledygook?" Remo demanded.

"We are going to the airport."

"No way, Jose. Not unless you're willing to let me in on what's going on." He noted the look of determined silence on his teacher's face. "Okeydoke."

He smacked the driver on Fido's bed linen. "Buckingham Palace. You've gotta speakie enough English for that. Big house? Nice old lady in a frump dress lives there? Take us there now."

Across the seat, the Master of Sinanju pursed his lips. "Why must you always be so difficult, Remo?" he asked, a hard edge creeping into his voice. "Why can you not simply sit back and enjoy our most holy tradition?"

"Our most holy tradition is cash up front," Remo said, annoyed now with both the Master of Sinanju and the cabdriver, who was still ignoring his orders.

Remo was about to order the cabbie back to the palace once more when the taxi suddenly swerved sharply in traffic.

They were on Westminster Bridge. Traffic hummed along. Remo looked up in time to see the driver leaping over the seat at him, a wild glint in his dark eyes.

The cabbie had a knife in his hand, clutched in white knuckles. That wasn't all.

The man had lit a match a moment before. When Remo absently noted the sound, he had assumed it was for a cigarette that he was going to have to pluck from the stubble of the man's face and toss out the window. But he saw now it was not a cigarette between the driver's lips. A fat red stick of dynamite was clenched between the cabbie's yellowing teeth. The lit fuse sputtered rapidly down.

"What the hell?" Remo snarled as the driver tried repeatedly to stab him. Remo dodged the thrusting blade. The knife made a mess of the upholstery of the back seat.

"Death to the infidel!" the driver yelled in garbled English. He slobbered around his stick of dynamite. "I thought you said he couldn't speak English," Remo demanded of the Master of Sinanju.

"That?" Chiun asked. "Oh, they pick that phrase up like litter off the streets of Kabul."

The cab began to slow in traffic. The instant it did, a bounce came hard from behind. The rear bumper of the taxi had been tapped by a fast-moving truck, propelling the taxi forward in a more-or-less straight line. Tires squealed. A horn honked angrily.

In the rear Remo hardly noted the noise or the jostling. His face had grown very cold.

"Kabul?" he asked. "Like Afghanistan Kabul?"

"Death to America!" the driver said, saliva dripping from the end of his dynamite. When he spoke, he almost lost the hissing stick. He had to pause in midstab to reposition the dynamite. He clenched the far end in his molars.

"There is only one Kabul," Chiun answered. "The world has not excreted enough dung that it has need of another."

The driver was frustrated beyond understanding. Face glistening sweat, he continued trying to stab Remo, but only managed to shred the back seat. His frantic mind realized it didn't matter. The American was seconds from death. There would not be satisfaction from seeing him die by the knife, but the explosive would do the job the blade could not.

Even as the man was attempting to stab him, Remo noted the burning fuse. The driver gave one last jab with his blade when Remo finally nodded.

"Okay, that's long enough," Remo announced when the fuse was mere seconds from burning completely away. He promptly plucked the stick of dynamite from the cabdriver's mouth.

He plugged it hissing-fuse-first down the man's throat. Grabbing the cabbie by his dirty pajamas, he heaved him out the window and over the bridge. The gagging driver couldn't even scream. He was halfway to the Thames when his fuse burned down deep in his gullet and his body went boom.

Afghan meat splattered silvery waves.

Up on the bridge, Remo scrambled up over the seat and dropped in behind the taxi's wheel.

He hit the gas and pulled away from the honking truck. Swerving through traffic, he left the truck and its angry driver in their wake.

"What the hell just happened?" Remo demanded over his shoulder as he sped off Westminster Bridge.

"You killed our driver, that's what happened," Chiun clucked unhappily. "What is wrong with you?"

"He tried to kill me first," Remo snarled.

"Yes, but he had not taken us to the airport yet. You could have waited until then to remove him. Now we will need to find another. Pull over."

"Like hell."

"Remo, in this country they drive on the other side of those little lines in the street. I do not trust that you will stay on the proper side of the little lines in a coloring book, let alone on the streets of a foreign land."

"Screw the lines," Remo said. "I want to know why that guy just tried to blow my head off."

Chiun's weathered face grew annoyed. "Apparently the British learned from you Americans how to keep a secret, that's why," he muttered. "And now, thanks to their loose lips, we need to find another taxi. Stop the car."

"No. And for the record, U.S. security only started to suck once we turned over all our national secrets to the ACLU and People for the American Way for safekeeping. What did that guy learn from the British?"

Chiun folded his arms, irritated. "That you were going to be here, obviously." He released a long, weary sigh. "You are going to make this difficult for me, aren't you?"

"If you mean am I going to go tra-la skipping along like nothing happened after two attempted murders in less than a half hour, no, I'm not."

And because he saw now that his intransigent pupil would not be persuaded to continue without an explanation, the Master of Sinanju reluctantly agreed to offer one.

"Although it is against my better judgment to betray one of our most beautiful traditions," the old Korean warned.

"Nothing beautiful about people trying to kill me."

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Chapter 9

Chiun instructed Remo to turn the cab around. They headed back over the Thames into the tourist heart of the city. Remo ditched the cab near Hyde Park. It was just as well. After the incident on the bridge, the car had probably been reported to the police by now.

The two Masters of Sinanju strolled along the paths of Hyde Park, sitting in the brown grass in the shadow of a great spreading ash. Children played in the sun.

As he sat cross-legged on the ground, Chiun fussed at his silk kimono, smoothing it at the knees.

"As part of your training in the awesome magnificence that is the art of Sinanju, I have taught you the lessons of the Masters who have come before us," the Reigning Master of Sinanju began without preamble.

Remo felt an involuntary chill. For years Chiun had hammered home the legends of his ancestors. A lot of the information Remo had been forced to memorize had to do with who begat whom, what they ate for lunch, as well as every little niggling detail about how they managed to score an extra denarius from a certain emperor of Rome. Because of this, Remo had become expert in avoiding listening to the tales. But it was different this day.

Those men were with him now, in death forming the Masters' Tribunal. The eyes that had been with him for the past year crowded around him in Hyde Park. The Masters who had bequeathed their hard-won lessons to the ages watched from some other realm. In the heart of London, Remo Williams felt the history of Sinanju all around him.

Feeling the weight of hundreds of disapproving stares, all Remo could do was nod.

Chiun accepted the silence with understanding. "Of all the tales you have learned, most important is the tale of the Great Wang," the old man said. "For though other, lesser Masters preceded him, Wang towered above them all. The truth of the Sun Source was his to discover and explore, and so he is remembered as the first. Know you, Remo, the tale of Wang?"

Remo was surprised to even be asked the question. "Of course I do, Little Father. You've drilled it into my head over and over practically since the day we met."

Chiun raised his chin, stretching his wattled neck. "Tell it to me," he commanded.

There would be no argument. Remo knew his teacher thought it important for him to speak the words. Feeling self-conscious about his invisible audience-one member of which was doubtless the Great Wang himself-Remo began.

"Wang lived at a time when there were many trained in the art of early Sinanju," Remo said. "These were called night tigers, the soldiers of Sinanju. Now, even in that age of many students, there was still only one Master who was head of the village. When the time came for him to retire, he would choose from the night tigers the one who would succeed him as Master. One day the older Master died before choosing a successor. There was fighting among the night tigers to see who would assume the mantle of Reigning Master. As the others fought, Wang went off to the wilderness to seek guidance from his dead ancestors. While there, legend says that a ring of fire descended from the heavens and, in an instant, gave Wang enlightenment. With a new vision and strength, Wang returned to the village and slew the quarreling night tigers. Afterward he assumed the title of Reigning Master, establishing the tradition of one pupil, one Master that has survived for millennia, all the way down to the modern age. Which brings us to this afternoon, Hyde Park, London, 5:17 p.m. Greenwich mean time."

Chiun had listened to his pupil's recitation in silence.

"Is that all?" he asked once Remo seemed finished.

"Pretty much. That's the Reader's Digest version. I can give you the director's cut if you want."

The old Korean shook his head. "For the time being I will forgive you the glaring omissions, for you have gotten the basic elements of the story. However, in the near future we must go over that lesson again, for it is likely your wandering mind needs to be refreshed. Remind me."

"I'll make a note of it," Remo promised, swearing silently to himself to never bring it up again.

"Very well," Chiun said. "Now, while it is plain you know some of the beginnings of Wang's masterhood, you do not know all of what followed his ascendancy to his lofty position as first Master of Sinanju of the New Age. It is true that Wang was given in an instant the knowledge of true Sinanju, knowledge that took the remainder of his life to master. But not everyone believed in his newfound gifts."

The old man's singsong voice settled back into the familiar cadence of teacher.

"Not long after Wang had slain the lesser night tigers, an adviser to a Japanese shogun did come to the village to seek the counsel of the Master of Sinanju. He was greatly disappointed to find that the old Master had died and that Wang had taken his place, for he had dealt on several past occasions with Wang's predecessor. Still, Sinanju's reputation was already old by this point, and so the adviser did explain his master's problem to the young Wang.

"According to the Japanese, his master, the shogun, had three wicked sons whom he had recently learned were plotting against him. The father was concerned, for all three sons had been tested in battle many times. All three were possessed of great physical strength, all three had powerful armies and all three were popular in the lands over which they ruled, lands given them by their father. Even after dividing his land among his sons, the father's kingdom remained the largest in the region, and was thus coveted by his heirs. They planned to kill their father and divide his land between them. To neutralize the threat to his kingdom and regain the land he had mistakenly turned over to his ungrateful offspring, the shogun wished to hire ten of Sinanju's greatest night tigers.

"'Summon them and they may return with me this day,' the adviser said, 'to deal fluttering death blows to the wicked children of my master.' But Wang-who was still Wang at this point, he having not yet earned the title 'Great'-did shake his head. 'This I cannot do,' he said.

"The adviser did not understand. 'My master will pay you well,' he promised. 'This you already know, for he has paid tribute to Sinanju five times for past services.'

"But Wang did explain that it was not the tribute that was the problem. He told the adviser that Sinanju no longer used night tigers. The skills and reputation of the art of Sinanju were now invested in but a single man. In Wang himself. And when the adviser protested, Wang did instruct him, 'Go and tell your master that the tribute will be double, for such is the cost of skills unequaled. Further, inform him that the threats to his kingdom are already bound for the grave. This is the promise of Wang of Sinanju.'"

Chiun paused in his recitation. This was long past the point in a story where Remo should have interrupted with an ill-timed and inappropriate remark. But Remo didn't interrupt. Sitting on the grass of Hyde Park, the younger Sinanju Master listened with rapt attention to the words of his teacher.

Nodding his satisfaction, the old Korean continued. "The adviser was not convinced that Wang was all he claimed to be. But he had no choice, for the shogun had commanded that he seek help from Sinanju, and this young man with the eyes of joyful death was now the Master and head of the village. The adviser went on his way by boat to give the shogun the news. A day later, after the rituals of departure were complete, Wang did follow.

"When he reached Japan, Wang did travel to the lands once controlled by the shogun. The kingdom of the eldest son was nearest, and so Wang did venture there first. On the road to the first son's palace, Wang was stopped by a group of five brigands who had been lying in wait for him. These highwayman did not demand his purse or tunic. Without a word they fell on Wang with clubs, intent on relieving him of his most valuable possession, his very life.

"In an earlier time five men might present a threat to a mere night tiger of Sinanju. But the Sun Source was known to Wang, and so his swift hand did fly left and right. Thwack, thwack. Faster than the human eye could follow did Wang deal with the brigands, until all five spilled their blood on the road. And verily did Wang continue to the palace, whereupon he slew the first wicked son of the mighty shogun."

Chiun paused again in his storytelling. Remo was still watching him intently.

"Then what happened?" Remo asked.

"You do not have any questions?" the old man asked.

"No, I'm fine," Remo promised. "Go ahead." Nodding, Chiun opened his mouth to speak. "Except," Remo interrupted.

"Yes?"

"You said Wang was young. I thought you told me before he didn't become Master until he was in his fifties."

"Fifty is a child still learning," the Master of Sinanju replied. "Sixty is the beginning of understanding. Seventy is the application of knowledge. It takes many years for a man to shed the false promises of youth, for the child only slowly becomes father to the man. Even for a Master of Sinanju who has reached his full physical peak, it takes time to shed the vestiges of youth."

Remo's brow grew troubled. "How long?" he asked.

"In your case? Ten million years," Chiun replied. "Do you have any other stupid questions?"

Remo crossed his arms. "None that I'd dare ask after that," he grumbled. "And you're the one who asked."

"You were silent for more than three seconds. I was afraid you were dead."

The old Asian resumed his tale.

"Now Wang did travel farther into the lands once owned by the shogun. And on the route to the palace of the second son he did encounter a small army of men. There were ten in total, all dressed in armor, all carrying heavy swords of forged iron. These were the men who would one day become samurai, but at this time they were merely hired killers without a name. Now these ten men did not order Wang to stop. They did not command him to turn around or step off the path so that they might pass. When Wang appeared on the road, they simply attacked without provocation.

"And though their swords were fast, Wang was faster. Iron blades snapped and shields yielded soft to Wang's striking hands, and when he was finished the ten soldiers lay dead on the path. Wang viewed the bodies for a moment with suspicion before forging on to the palace wherein lived the second son. When Wang was through, the second son lived no more. After this second service was completed, Wang did venture on to the home of the third son.

"While he was still a way off from the third and final palace, Wang was set upon by a group of men who had hidden in the shadows of the woods that lined the path. And when the attack came this time, Wang was not surprised.

"There were twenty of them. Ninja they were, for it was after the time of Master Sam, who had recorded in the scrolls the theft of some of Sinanju's rudimentary skills by these Japanese. They were skilled in the art of death, these ninja. With fearsome speed they did hurl their shuriken and strike with their ninja swords. But although their numbers were great, the skills of the Master of Sinanju were greater. Wang did go among the ninja and through them, delivering death to them one by one, as only one of true Sinanju can. And when he was finished, the path was littered with ninja dead. Once the road was safe from ninja vermin, Wang did hasten to the near and final palace, where he did slay the last son of the shogun.

"Once his task was complete and the three sons no longer lived to threaten their father, Wang did travel to the castle of the man who had hired him. There was he welcomed at court, for word of his victory over the shogun's three treacherous offspring had preceded him. And this powerful feudal lord did offer great praise to Wang for the skill and strength he had demonstrated. And as reward the shogun did offer three times the amount that was customarily paid to the night tigers of Sinanju, rather than the agreed-upon two.

"But when the tribute was brought forward, Wang refused it. 'You will pay thirty and eight times the old amount,' Wang insisted, his voice calm and clear. And at his words a great silence descended on the shogun's court.

"The Japanese lord did balk at such a grand sum. 'Are you mad?' the shogun demanded. 'That is more than it would have cost to raise a whole army against my wicked sons. The amount agreed upon was two times the original fee. And see? In my generosity I have made it three. One for each of my sons.'

"'Yes,' replied Wang, 'but you forget the five brigands you hired to test me on the way to your first son's palace. And the ten warriors you paid to prove my abilities on the way to your second son's palace. And remember the twenty ninja you sent to verify I was what I claimed to be while I was on my way to your third son's palace. All these were sent by you because of your lack of faith. These nuisance hirelings of yours impeded me on my journey. Sinanju does not work for free. Their disposal will cost extra.'

"At this there were protests in the court. But as men denounced the Master of Sinanju for his arrogance, the shogun kept his tongue. It was true that he had been troubled by the report of his adviser who had returned from Sinanju with word that the fabled night tigers were no more. It was also true that, unbeknownst to even his closest advisers, he had sent men to test the skills of this new boastful Master.

"The shogun was no fool. The men he had dispatched to test Wang were some of the most feared in his kingdom. While collectively they were not strong enough to go up against the armies of his sons, none had ever been beaten in individual combat. And now all were dead. The shogun saw that this Master Wang's word was true. Sinanju-which had always been worthy of respect and awe-had indeed entered a new realm. It had become something to truly fear. And with a clap of his hands, the shogun did silence his chattering court. 'I was wrong to question you, O great Master of Sinanju,' the shogun said. 'I beg forgiveness for my impertinence. Your awesome skills are the sun that burns brighter than the flames of all the night tigers who came before you.' And the shogun did order men to his treasury to collect the new sum, which was thirty and eight more than it had been in the days of the night tigers. Servant girls and slaves did the shogun give to Wang, to aid this new and frightening Master on his journey back to Sinanju. And long after Wang had gone home, the shogun did proclaim to all who would listen that something new had been born among the fabled assassins of Sinanju, and the very gods themselves did tremble. But none believed, for men are always doubtful of things they have not seen with their own eyes.

"And it came to pass a little while later that Wang was summoned to perform a minor service in Egypt. While there he was trapped in a chamber with a secret sect of soldier priests, for the pharaoh wished to see if the tales he had heard were true. Wang, being Wang, easily vanquished the men. But that was not the end. He encountered the same problem in China, Assyria, Babylonia and several lesser kingdoms. None believed that he could be what he claimed."

"Wait a second," Remo interrupted. "Wasn't this what started the Master's Trial? People challenging Wang like he was the best gunslinger in Dodge?"

Chiun's gaze grew hooded. "I am certain as he looks on this very moment, the Great Wang appreciates being compared to a shooter of boomsticks," he said dryly.

Remo had been so drawn in to Chiun's story that for the first time in a year he had forgotten about his invisible company. He shrugged an apology at the vacant air.

"But that was part of the reason for Wang starting the Master's Trial, right?" he asked. "Don't tell me I have to go on that trip again, 'cause if you remember last time it went massively wrong in about a million different ways."

"You went through that ritual long ago. The Master's Trial is an honorable contest between ancient peoples. While the origin is similar, this is something different."

"Yeah? Just so long as this ends different, I'll be happy."

The Master of Sinanju pursed his wrinkled lips. "Are you going to listen or are you going to waste the rest of the day drying your flapping tongue in the sun?"

"I'm listening, I'm listening."

Chiun seemed skeptical. After a moment of fixing his pupil with a gimlet eye, he continued.

"And Wang, who was frustrated that the first years of his masterhood had been spent proving himself to disbelieving rulers, did return to the village deeply troubled. Even from its earliest days Sinanju had always been an art of assassination. But this new age he had ushered in was threatening to turn his most sacred calling into little more than a spectator sport. For many days he did think on the problem. And when the solution finally came to him, Wang's heart soared, for he knew it was right. Hiring runners from neighboring villages, he did send them to the corners of the Earth. The runners carried letters in every language known to man and were delivered to the rulers of every land.

"The letters were an invitation to king and pharaoh, emir and emperor. These leaders were encouraged to send the greatest assassins in their respective lands into battle with the Master Wang. In the ensuing years, when Wang traveled on business to a particular region of the world, the invited thrones sent their chosen combatants to kill the new Master by whatever means and specialities they could devise. The world was smaller in those days, but the journeys were longer. It took ten years' time, but in the end Wang had met the greatest champions of all who questioned the strength of our House. With the end came the dawning of the New Age of Sinanju, for all had seen and all believed. All hail Wang the Great, founder, protector and nurturer of the modern House of Sinanju."

With a proud smile, the Master of Sinanju rested his hands to his lap, fingers interlocking. His pose indicated that he was finished the tale.

"Hail Wang, all right," Remo droned. "He skinned that shogun for thirty-eight big ones more than he was supposed to get, then took the show on the road. He must have scammed a bundle for racking up that ten-year body count."

"The only tribute Wang collected in that time was for the normal services he would have performed as Master anyway," Chiun explained. "He did not charge for the removal of his would-be assassins."

The world seemed to grow very still around Remo. Even the branches of the ash above his head appeared to still in the cold breeze, as if the hand of Wang himself had quelled their gentle movement.

"He killed them for free?" Remo asked, astonished.

"It was a pure ritual, baptized in blood. Wang did not want the taint of money to corrupt it."

Remo blinked. He opened his mouth to speak. He closed his mouth and blinked again.

"Let me get this straight," he said finally. "Free?"

"He deemed the tribute unimportant," Chiun said. He seemed uncomfortable with the notion. "Wang had discovered something almost as vital as tribute itself-the importance of advertising. Have you never wondered, Remo, why in our travels in this, what you would call the modern world, Sinanju is not known to the general population, yet is whispered about by kings in throne rooms and cutthroats who hide in the dark corners of taverns from Marrakech to Taipei?"

"Our reputation," Remo replied. "We've been doing this job for years."

"Yes, and the clown who flips cowburgers and the man with the donkey who picks coffee beans have been about their business for far less time," Chiun replied. "Yet they are known to all. We are known only to those who need to know about us. Thank the wisdom of Wang for this. He understood that ours is a service that is oftentimes rendered in secret. Even before Wang we lived among the shadows, always running the risk of being forgotten when came the dawn. With no night tigers and only one Master of Sinanju in all the world, Wang understood that this new Sinanju ran the risk of being forgotten. Especially with the rise of civilizations and the armies that came with them. And so, lest the world forget, Wang did issue a decree that each generation must embark on the same journey he undertook. The new Master is introduced by the retiring Master at court, after which the court's designated killer may strike. The end result proves to the leaders of the world that Sinanju is the power to be sought by every throne. For a reasonable fee, of course."

"Wait a second," Remo said, snapping his fingers. "Those letters you were sending out last year. This is what they were for. That's why that Swiss assassin who was chasing us around during that fiasco with those oxygen-sucking trees had one in his house when we caught up with him. It was an invitation to try to kill me."

Chiun allowed a tiny nod. "The main letters in the larger gold envelope go to the head of the government. Inside there is a silver envelope, which goes to the assassin of their choosing. That man happened to have received an invitation by the German government to enter the contest."

"What about that Afghan who just tried to blow me up? Shouldn't we have had an audience with the head of the Junior Towelband, or whatever-the-hell backward rock worshipers we've installed to run that dump now?"

"As I said, the Afghans deviated from the rules," Chiun replied with distaste. "Hardly a surprise. Those people have been in a state of decline ever since Mongol rule fell apart in the hundred years after the death of Genghis Khan. Their deception has lost them the chance to participate."

"Good," Remo said. "Because I sure as hell wasn't going to work for them no matter what. And since someone broke the rules, does that mean the game's off and we can go home?"

Chiun fixed him with a baleful look. Unscissoring his legs, the old man rose fluidly to his feet. Remo's head sank. He let out a protracted sigh.

"So you're saying I've gotta hump my way around the globe killing the best assassins money can buy?" The Master of Sinanju raised a haughty brow.

"We are the best assassins money can buy," he sniffed. "Well, I am. You are whatever it is you are. But it is too late to do anything about that now." He clapped his hands. "Come!" he commanded. "We must hie to the airport, for France awaits." With that he turned on his heel and marched across the grass. For a long moment, Remo just sat there.

"Well, could be worse," he mused to himself, his voice a tired sigh. "At least I get to kill a Frenchman."

Rising reluctantly to his feet, he followed the Master of Sinanju from the park.

Chapter 10

"I saw your father this morning. I said to him, Mr. Dilkes, where are you going so early? Can you believe it, he was going out for the paper? I've told him a dozen times he can get it delivered, but he says the walk does him good. It must be doing something, because he looks wonderful. I think it's amazing how he's able to get around at his age. He's got to be-what-eighty? Eighty-five?"

"He'll be ninety-two in April."

"Ninety-two? Imagine that. Ninety-two."

As Francine Standish and Mr. Dilkes's son rode up on the elevator in the King Apartments in Boca Raton, Florida, she clicked her tongue and shook her head in quiet amazement.

Francine was forty-five, with a pretty smile and hips that were starting to grow a little too wide. She had probably turned her share of heads in her glory days. But too much blond dye had turned her hair to straw and too much makeup now filled the subtle lines of her aging skin. Still, she was an attractive woman. There was more to her chatter than the awkward talk of neighbors on a shared elevator ride.

She offered the smile. It was the same one women always gave him. The smile that told him she didn't care whether his father fell down the front steps and cracked his skull open on his way to get the morning paper.

Benson Dilkes had gotten that smile a lot in his life. Even now, at a time of life when virility was in retreat for most men, women still flirted. It was no surprise. Dilkes had retained his rugged good looks into his early sixties. Although his dark hair was peppered with gray, there remained a boyishness about him, amplified by the crimping laugh lines that creased his eyes when he smiled.

In the rear of the car, Benson Dilkes pretended he didn't see Francine Standish's leering smile.

"Yes, ninety-two," he said politely as he watched the floor numbers light. His voice was a soft rasp, with the twang of his native Virginia. "The other day Mr. Freeman on the third floor asked if we were brothers. I hope he was joking. It made Dad pretty happy."

Francine snorted, as if this were the funniest thing she had ever heard. The laugh was cute when she was homecoming queen. It was the same laugh that-among other things-had finally driven her husband away five years before.

Unlike her ex-husband, who had once liked her snorting laugh, Benson Dilkes found it instantly irritating. So much so, he nearly killed her right then and there.

It would have been easy enough. Just a simple blow to the temple. Right where the blue veins throbbed beneath a curl of lacquered hair. Oh, there were other, more exotic methods. There were a hundred different options open to him. But he'd always preferred simplicity.

Despite the urge, he didn't crack his fist to her temple. A murder in the building would have inspired too many questions. Benson Dilkes didn't like questions. Instead, he waited for the car to stop on the sixteenth floor. When it did, he gave his fellow tenant a courteous "nice talking to you" before stepping off the elevator. The doors slid shut on Francine's disappointed face.

Dilkes headed up the blue-carpeted hallway. His apartment was at the far corner.

Corner apartments were always preferable. They only shared a single wall with one immediate neighbor. The other walls in Dilkes's apartment were exterior walls, with one facing the hallway. The building narrowed at the floor above, so there was no apartment over him, just a flat roof.

Dilkes unlocked his door with two keys. One for the standard lock, the other for the explosive charge that, if not deactivated properly, would have blown the floor and most of this side of the building across Boca Raton.

Stepping inside, he closed the door.

The apartment looked like any other in the building. It was an important charade to preserve. When he had guests over-which he sometimes did to maintain a cover of normalcy-he didn't want anything to seem out of the ordinary.

The drapes were drawn on the daylight.

Dilkes had recently heard a reporter compare Florida to Rick's Cafe in Casablanca. The Sunshine State, with its porous border to the open sea, was a welcoming haven for illegal immigrants, drug runners and terrorists. Dilkes liked it for the fresh-squeezed orange juice.

When his father had retired here, Dilkes leased two apartments. One for the old man, one for himself. Despite the fact that Benson Dilkes had himself retired to a ranch in Zimbabwe, leasing a second apartment that remained largely unused was still preferable to staying with his father during visits to Florida. Even though Benson Dilkes generally only used the apartment a few weeks each year, he knew he wouldn't have lasted long under the same roof with his father.

Dilkes really only pretended to have a relationship with his father, mostly out of obligation to his dead mother. The truth was, Benson Dilkes wouldn't have cared if the nasty old bastard was buried under ten tons of collapsed building.

In his darkened apartment, the thought made him smile.

When he came to visit this time, people were as polite to Dilkes as they always were. He had been coming to the King Apartments yearly for the past few years. Most of the permanent residents knew him. They assumed that, like usual, he would stay for a short time and then head back home.

But one month became two, became three. People eventually realized that this time he was here to stay. The other tenants didn't know much about their new neighbor. They knew that he paid the rent on his father's apartment. The old man lived on the fourth floor. From the father they learned that the son had been some kind of businessman who had spent much of his time in Africa.

Dilkes allowed his father to perpetuate the lie. If the other tenants of the King Apartments ever learned the truth, Benson Dilkes would have to kill them all. He had gone the mass-murder route before. Hotel and apartment fires were easy enough to arrange. They worked better in Third World countries, where few questions were asked and everyone could be bribed, but the same techniques could have been applied to the King Apartments. Fortunately no one really asked questions of any consequence, and so Benson Dilkes wasn't forced to kill all of his neighbors.

As Dilkes passed through the living room of his darkened apartment, he fished something out of his jacket pocket.

The small plastic case rattled in his hand. He had gone to collect it from the storage room in the basement.

Most of the items downstairs had been shipped from his Zimbabwe ranch. They were seemingly innocuous items from his old African office that he had stored out in the loft of his garden shed. When he had closed his office five years before, he had assumed the stuff would collect dust forever.

Bright red thumbtacks clattered inside the case. Dilkes had hoped to never see that case again. But the world had dragged him from his life of well-earned leisure.

He noted the change in his skin tone as he brushed some grime off the cover of the plastic case.

Back home in Zimbabwe he grew rosebushes for pleasure. His work in the sun had given him a dark tan. In the months since he'd left Africa, the tan had begun to fade.

With melancholy thoughts of his beloved rose garden, Dilkes went up the hall to his bedroom.

The curtains were pulled tight here, too. When he flipped on the lights his lips thinned unhappily. There was a collection of corkboard world maps standing on easels near the far wall of the bedroom. The countries had been painted in bright, clashing colors.

The maps, which used to hang in a back room in his old offices, were hopelessly out-of-date. They were made for Dilkes back in 1977. World maps were drawn differently now. Since that time, countries had come and gone, borders had been redrawn. An entire empire had collapsed.

But countries were always changing. Maps could never be completely accurate from year to year. Dilkes knew that well from the many years he had worked in Africa. But although man changed maps to suit his whims, the geography itself didn't change. Nor, Benson Dilkes feared, did tradition.

Red thumbtacks were pressed into spots all around the corkboard maps. Many were in Europe, while others were in the United States and Asia. A few were in Africa and South America. Each tack represented a life.

The one in Washington, D.C., was Dilkes's old associate Sylvester Montrofort. There was one in Rome for Ivan Mikhailov, a brutish Russian from the old Soviet-era Treska hit squads who was supposed to be impossible to kill. Lhasa and Gunner Nilsson were represented by a pair of tacks, one in New York's Catskills Mountains, the other in New York City. Hilton Marmaduke Spenser's life was marked by a lonely red tack pressed into Madrid. And on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean, a thumbtack showed where the body of Merton Lord Wissex had washed up on a beach way back in 1982.

All had been killers. Famous in certain circles for cunning or skill or strength or family reputation. Benson Dilkes had known most of them, either in fact or by reputation. And every last one of them was dead. Dilkes popped the lid on the plastic case and picked out two red tacks. Setting the case on his nightstand, he walked over to the map of Europe. Very carefully, he pressed the tacks side by side into London.

He had just gotten the news from an old contact in Source. Thomas Smedley and Mrs. Knight had been good. Not up to the level of Benson Dilkes, of course, but they were more than just run-of-the-mill killers.

Two more red thumbtacks. Each representing a life. Soon to be joined by many others.

"And so it begins," Dilkes said to the darkened room.

He wondered if, when the time came, someone would record the end of his life thusly. He doubted it. Few people in his business were as efficient as Benson Dilkes.

Taking his pipe from an ashtray next to the thumbtack case, he lit the bowl and sat in a comfortable chair. To wait for the world to contract around his neck.

Chapter 11

Remo and Chiun took the tunnel train from England to France. Their destination was outside Paris.

This meeting was much like the one at Buckingham Palace. This time it was a secret chamber in a part of Versailles that was off-limits to tourists, and this time it was the elected president of France instead of a monarch.

Remo had met the French president a few years before and hadn't been terribly impressed. For politeness's sake he shook the man's offered hand then stood back and let the Master of Sinanju do the talking.

Chiun bowed and pledged eternal loyalty to the Capetian House and the Valois and Bourbon dynasties, which made the French president more than a little uncomfortable. Much of what the Master of Sinanju said was in French. Remo knew he was being played up for the president when he saw the grand gestures the old Korean gave, as well as the knowing nods he'd occasionally make back in Remo's direction.

In all, the meeting took less than ten minutes. "That seemed to go okay," Remo said after they left the magnificent palace, which had started as a modest hunting lodge for Louis XIII and eventually metastasized into a display of the sort of vulgar opulence that got French kings' heads separated from French kings' bodies.

They were on the grounds of Versailles, walking past the Basin of Neptune fountain group. Mist spraying from the fountains chilled the crowds of evening sightseers.

"I suppose," Chiun said. "Not that it matters. These modern Gauls cannot afford our services. In order to hire us, some of them might have to work more than two days a week, which is as offensive a thing to them as warm bathwater. On top of that they have ugly notions of self-governance."

"No argument here," Remo said. "Nothing uglier than socialism in a beret." As he spoke, he turned left and right, scrutinizing everyone they passed.

"What are you doing?" Chiun asked.

"Isn't this the part where some guy jumps out of the bushes and tries to brain me with a baguette?"

"Just because the first two were obvious does not mean they all will be," the Master of Sinanju said dryly. "If they have planned well, it will happen when you do not expect it. Now, come. We have something more important than your impending attempted murder to worry about."

They took the cab into Paris. Remo didn't sense anyone following them into the city.

At Chiun's insistence, while waiting for the next assassin to attack they stopped for supper at a little cafe on the Rue des Ecoles. They were seated outdoors near the street. The place was nearly empty. Their corner table was tucked behind some potted plants away from the other diners.

Chiun ordered duck. Remo got fish. Both men asked for a side order of brown rice.

The waiter who returned to serve them was not the same one who had seated them. The first had been a tall, thin man in his twenties. This waiter was shorter, stockier and older. He had thick, callused hands that didn't seem to have gotten that way from carrying serving trays. The waiter's black uniform didn't fit him very well.

The waiter set their plates before them and produced a bottle of wine.

"Your wine, monsieur," he said in thickly accented English.

"I didn't order wine," Remo replied.

"It is with the compliments of the management." As he spoke, the waiter poured out a glass.

"I said I don't want wine," Remo insisted, irritated, as the waiter poured. "The only thing dirtier than a Frenchman's ass is his feet."

"Heh-heh-heh," said the Master of Sinanju.

The waiter's molars screeched. He forced a tight-lipped smile. "Monsieur obviously has a ready wit."

Chiun ignored the waiter's grinding teeth. "Did you know, Remo, that washing day used to come only once a year in France? It was canceled after the one Frenchman in the entire country who celebrated it died of syphilis. Heh-heh-heh. Frenchman's feet. Heh-heh-heh."

The old Korean turned his attention to his meal. Remo had picked up the stemmed glass. He sniffed the wine. The waiter looked on anxiously.

Remo didn't drink. He just sniffed. After a moment's sniffing, he looked up at the waiter with hooded eyes.

"It has a good nose, no?" the waiter asked.

"Yeah," Remo said. "Smells real swell."

The waiter was still waiting a little too eagerly for Remo to put the wineglass to his lips. Instead, Remo poured the wine onto the tabletop.

The table immediately began fizzing. The white linen tablecloth smoked. The wine proceeded to chew a hole straight through to the floor.

"Nice try," Remo said. "Next time try doing a little research, Frenchie. I don't drink wine, beer or spirituous beverages of any kind. You mind getting me some water?"

"Make that two," Chiun said, seemingly oblivious to the smoking crater in the middle of the table.

The waiter's smile tightened nervously to the point where his face looked as if it would shatter into little unctuous shards. His little mustache twitched. A creeping dark stain spread across the front of his uniform trousers.

"I do apologize," the waiter mumbled. "This wine has obviously gone off."

Leaving the bottle on the table, he marched woodenly into the back of the restaurant.

"And bring back a new table while you're at it!" Remo hollered at the retreating waiter.

The man offered a numb "oui." His entire body shaking, he disappeared into the kitchen.

"That's a relief," Remo said, chewing a forkful of rice. "For a minute I thought he was going to surrender."

"That is not permitted," Chiun insisted sternly as he ate. "The French contestant throws up his hands in surrender nearly every time the Time of Succession comes around."

"It happen to you?"

"No, but the Frenchman who tried to assassinate my father tried it."

"Bet that got him far."

"Actually," Chiun mused, "he was particularly sniveling, even by French standards. My father took pity on him and accepted his surrender."

"No kidding. What did he do with him?"

"He brought him back to Sinanju. Some of my earliest memories are of that smelly round-eye wandering lost around the village licking the worms from the undersides of rocks."

"Mmm?" Remo said, chewing slowly. "What happened to him?"

"He attempted to sully the virtue of my father's sister. His head is in the attic somewhere. I can show you when we next return to Sinanju."

"Pass," Remo said.

The waiter returned from the kitchen with their water.

He had gotten control of himself once more. His body no longer shook. His hands gripped the heavy crystal water glasses with determination.

"Your water, gentlemen," he said, setting down the glasses. "I apologize again for the problem with the wine. I am certain I do not know what happened."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Remo said. "If you're gonna keep up the waiter shtick, do it downwind."

"I will see now to moving you to another table." The man took a step back, out of Remo's line of sight.

Behind Remo the waiter pulled out a razor-thin garrote that was stitched into the hollow seam of his shirtsleeve. With a hiss he flung it around Remo's neck, pulling tight. He yanked, grunting triumphantly.

The wire should have sliced through flesh and bone. But to the waiter's intense frustration, his victim didn't appear to even notice that he was being strangled.

Remo didn't pause in his chewing. "I hope they get better than this," he commented to the Master of Sinanju as the French assassin tightened the wire even more.

"Are you going to eat that?" the old Korean asked, pointing at the fish on Remo's plate.

"You ordered the duck, you live with duck."

"I want duck," Chiun insisted.

"Good, because that's what you ordered," Remo said.

"Die!" growled the French killer. Muscles in his arms bulged. Sweat had broken out across his forehead.

"Are you still here?" Remo asked, irritated. Reaching up, he snicked the garrote with his index fingernail. The wire snapped and the waiter flew backward, knocking over two tables. Plates crashed to the floor and silverware flew everywhere.

"And I can do without the Jerry Lewis impression," Remo said.

As he spoke, Remo snagged the wine bottle from where it still sat on the table. While the waiter struggled to get up, Remo stuffed the bottle's neck far down the man's throat.

Burning wine came out the man's nostrils. The killer tried desperately not to swallow. Then he swallowed. He wiggled for a moment in furious death before growing still.

The instant the waiter's arms flopped to the floor, a group of men hurried efficiently from the kitchen, calming the other restaurant patrons. Thanks to the upturned table, no one had seen quite what had happened.

The waiter's throat and stomach were dissolving into open hissing sores. Someone posing as a maitre d' threw a clean white linen tablecloth over the body. The man bowed his head respectfully to the Master of Sinanju.

"I will inform the president, sir," he said crisply.

"Before you do that," Chiun said, "tell the serving staff that I would like this order to go." He pointed a long fingernail at his plate.

Remo noted that, in the confusion, his plate of fish had somehow found its way in front of the Master of Sinanju.

Chapter 12

Word of the dead French assassin found its way to Folcroft Sanitarium by the normal CURE means. Electronic tendrils extending from the basement mainframes collected the data in secret from an unknowing French intelligence computer. It was detected, translated and forwarded to the appropriate computer terminal for analysis.

For years the appropriate-indeed, the only-terminal with access to classified CURE files had been the one in the office of Dr. Harold W. Smith. But those days were gone.

Mark Howard read the report from Paris from the confines of his small office in Folcroft's administrative wing.

The centerpiece of the room was the large oak desk behind which Mark sat. The desk was so big that there was barely enough space for anything else in the office. So cramped was the room that for months after coming to work at Folcroft, Mark had regularly banged his head against the wall when he leaned back in his chair and bumped his shins on the desk's legs whenever he tried to get around it to the door.

If someone had walked by Mark's open office door, they might have laughed at the sight of such a big desk in such a small space. But few people strolled the halls of Folcroft. Besides, Mark kept his door closed and locked at all times.

In his early months at CURE, the size of the office used to bother Mark. These days he hardly noticed. His life had become far too serious in the past two years to worry about trivialities.

The rest of the room was plain and businesslike. In this Mark Howard had picked up his decorating habits from Dr. Smith. There was only one personal touch in the entire office.

For a time Mark's eight-year-old nephew used to draw pictures of Superman in flight. He would carefully color them in with red and blue crayons and have his mother cut them out with scissors so he could fly his little paper Men of Steel around the house. When Mark went home for the holidays the previous year, his nephew had grown out of that phase and Mark's sister was throwing a bunch of the little paper Supermen away. Mark saved one.

The cutout was in a little frame on Mark's desk. When Dr. Smith saw the picture, the older man frowned silent disapproval. Mark noted his employer's expression but hadn't removed the picture. The assistant CURE director couldn't express it in words, especially not to an emotionless man like Dr. Smith, but there was such great, wonderful innocence to the picture. Such hope. That simple pencil-and-crayon drawing reminded Mark Howard why he, why CURE, why America was here.

The picture stayed.

Mark wasn't looking at his nephew's masterpiece now. His greenish-brown eyes were locked on his computer screen.

He read the report from France with a determined frown.

Mark wasn't surprised at whom the French had selected. When Dr. Smith had briefed him in secret months ago about the rite of passage Remo would be going through, Mark immediately went to work sifting through CURE's files, compiling short lists of likely assassins from countries all around the globe. The man France ultimately selected as its champion was the name at the top of Mark's list.

It might have given another man satisfaction to have been right. Not Mark Howard. Pride at such a time was inappropriate. After all, a man was now dead.

Not that Mark objected to killing. Not when it was necessary. But the taking of a fellow human life was far too serious a thing to allow self-serving emotions to intrude.

Mark knew this from experience.

Although he did his best not to think about it, men had died thanks to him.

When he first came to CURE, there had been a patient at Folcroft by the name of Jeremiah Purcell. Purcell was a man with special psychic gifts. A psychotic, a murderer. The patient had manipulated Mark's receptive mind on a psychic level the assistant CURB director couldn't begin to understand. Mark had unwittingly freed him from his confinement. And people had died.

Although Mark hadn't been in control of his actions, that didn't lessen the guilt in the days and weeks after those terrible events. The patient was still at large. Purcell had gone silent after his escape from Folcroft. But there were probably others dead. All thanks to Mark Howard.

Those deaths had been at a distance. Other hands had done the actual deed. Maybe he could have lived with that. Gotten over the guilt. But they weren't the only dead.

Mark had killed. Personally. With his own two hands.

Only one man. Not that "only" could dismiss the horrible significance of such an act.

It was justified. The man with the gun on that cold December night had been about to shoot Dr. Smith. But that didn't matter. The guilt afterward had swelled to a point where it threatened to consume Mark. He had fought to hide it, to control it. But for months through spring and summer the anguish was almost more than he could bear. He came to work, did his job, went home. No one, not Dr. Smith, not anyone had guessed the crushing burden Mark Howard lived under all those months.

And then he stopped it. Just like that.

He remembered the day. September 10, 2001. Mark had finally gotten his nephew's drawing framed. He had just put the small frame on his desk. As he sat there in the yellow afternoon sunlight, he thought of the tiny hand that drew it, of the life of joys and heartaches that had not yet been explored, and of the lurking forces that threatened that young life, and the lives of all Americans.

Mark thought of his job at CURE. A frustrating, ugly, dangerous job. And a necessary one.

Guilt over what he had done, over what he had to do, was a small price to pay to help ensure the safety of those lives. And in that moment of realization, guilt was replaced by cold determination.

There were terrible events that took place the next day. Events that changed the world and America forever. But in a quiet moment the day before the world turned upside down, Mark Howard had already changed. The events of September 11 only helped to codify that resolve. Since that time, Mark had come to his small Folcroft office determined to toil and sweat and worry to the best of his abilities so that his fellow Americans did not have to.

For the moment his regular CURE duties were on hold.

Mark logged the death of the French assassin. The man joined the two English Source agents who had been reported dead earlier that day. He wondered briefly what country would be next. Most likely Germany.

Mark was pulling up his list of the best-known German killers when the phone at his elbow jangled to life.

It was the outside line.

Puzzled, he glanced at his watch. After 6:00 p.m. Mark had recently convinced Dr. Smith to relax his schedule. Now, two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the CURE director went home from work at 5:00 p.m. These days Smith's secretary generally left around the same time. After they were gone the calls were routed to an answering service.

This was the public line, not the one used by family or friends. Confused, Mark scooped up the clunky old phone.

"Folcroft. Mark Howard speaking."

The noise that issued from the earpiece was so loud, Mark immediately had to yank the phone away from his ear. For an instant it sounded like the electronic shrieks of an Internet connection. For a second he held out the phone, unsure if it was some sort of malfunction.

He was about to hang up when he heard a series of distinct sobs amid the horrible shrieks. Only then did Mark realize that the noise wasn't phone static. It was the sound of a woman in distress.

He drew the phone tentatively back to his ear. "Hello?" he asked uncertainly.

The woman cried, she screamed. She wailed full heart and soul in pain into the phone. All in a language that Mark Howard could not begin to understand.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment of listening to the crying woman. "I think you've got the wrong number."

He didn't know what else to say. He was about to hang up on the pitiful caller when she suddenly blurted out something that made Mark's hand grow white on the receiver.

"Sinanju," the woman bawled. Mark gulped. He hesitated.

Korean. Yes, the woman could be speaking Korean. He had heard Remo and Chiun speak it enough. He didn't know what to do. This was unprecedented in his CURE experience.

"I-I'm not sure what you want," he said cautiously, his heart beating faster.

"Sinanju!" the woman repeated, her frustration apparent. And then her voice failed and the gibberish she had been blurting was consumed by grief. She wept into the phone.

"Can you speak English?" Mark asked.

But the woman was no longer listening. She rebuffed all of Mark's attempts to question her. She finally hung up the phone in the middle of her pitiful sobbing.

Swallowing hard, Mark hung up his own phone. He grabbed it back up immediately. He held it there for an uncertain moment, halfway from desk to ear. He glanced at his watch. It was suppertime at the Smith household. Right about now Dr. Smith would be sitting down to a plate of his wife's rock-hard meat loaf. Mark Howard had been invited to supper with the Smiths on a number of occasions. He knew well of all the horrors it entailed.

"You can thank me later, Dr. Smith," Mark muttered.

From memory he began dialing his employer's home number.

Chapter 13

They didn't leave France.

Remo was surprised when Chiun flagged them a cab to the Left Bank. On a forgotten side street near the Hotel de la Loire, the taxi stopped in front of a small apartment building.

"Wait here," Chiun commanded the taxi driver.

"Why aren't we taking a train to Spain to kill someone on a plain?" Remo asked as they mounted the front stairs.

"Because everything in this world does not conform neatly to what you think it should be, that's why," the old man replied mysteriously.

Remo didn't like the sound of that at all. His teacher's words and tone screamed trap.

On a panel next to the door twenty old-fashioned doorbells were lined up in neat rows of ten.

Remo waited for the floor to drop out from under him when the Master of Sinanju pressed a doorbell. He didn't know if he should be pleased or not when it didn't.

There was a distant ring somewhere in the depths of the creaky old building. It took a long time-forever, it seemed-for someone to answer. When a voice finally did sound from the speaker, it was guttural and low. Satan's voice rising up from the dark Pit.

"Kahk vaz zavoot?" the disembodied voice asked. Chiun said something in the same language. Whatever he said seemed to do the trick. The sepulchral voice grumbled something else that Remo couldn't understand.

"That wasn't French," Remo said as they were buzzed inside. "Hell, that didn't even sound human."

"You are right," said the Master of Sinanju as he swept through the door. "It was not French."

"What about the human part?"

Chiun tipped his head. "More or less," he mused. Turning on his heel, he marched for the stairs. The building smelled like damp wood and cat pee. Remo followed the Master of Sinanju to the top floor. There was only one door on this level. Chiun rapped a knuckle on the warped veneer.

A long moment passed. Finally, with rusty deliberation, the grimy brass doorknob turned. The ancient door creaked open on pained hinges.

Remo had not sensed anyone on the other side. He was certain Chiun hadn't done some trick to open the door. On cautious feet he followed the Master of Sinanju inside.

The apartment looked like the dusty storage room of a forgotten museum. Antiques crowding the foyer had been stacked against the walls. There were mirrors of solid gold, candelabra of ornately carved and rearing horses and footstools of silk that had long since turned to rot.

There was no one in the hall.

A strange and sickening mustiness filled the air. Remo set his breathing low, tuning out the smell. He trailed the Master of Sinanju through the apartment.

The rest of the rooms were like the hallway, all stacked with ancient bric-a-brac.

In one room Remo thought he saw a shadow move. But he sensed no life. Not even vermin. The dust didn't dance.

Keying up his senses, he followed Chiun to the far rear of the big apartment and into the main living room.

The big room was neater than the other rooms. The clutter extended in here, but there was more order to it. Unlike the rest of the apartment, it looked as if someone cleaned in here from time to time.

Sitting in the middle of the room was a chair.

It was made of dark, carved wood and plush cloth. The material was a little threadbare, but the wood retained a deep, just-polished finish. Remo realized it was more than a chair. Although it had nothing on the throne he had seen back in Buckingham Palace, it had that same regal feel as the seat from which the queen of England ruled.

Seated atop this plain throne of wood was a young boy.

The boy couldn't have been much more than thirteen or fourteen. His clothes had been rich at one time, but had seen better days. A few small holes peppered his shirtfront. Where the fabric was torn, Remo saw sparkling jewels.

The teenager didn't appear to be surprised at their appearance. With eyes that seemed lost in the dream of another age, he watched the two men approach.

Remo was about to question the Master of Sinanju, but the old Korean shot him a silencing glare.

With great reverence the old man approached the tawdry throne. He offered a deep, formal bow.

In a foreign tongue Remo now thought he recognized, the Master of Sinanju addressed the child. They spoke for a brief time, Chiun showing the boy the sort of respect Sinanju usually reserved for leaders of powerful nations. When the teenager spoke, his words were very slow coming. Even Remo with his supersensitive ears had to strain to hear them.

The boy's voice was not the same one that had growled at them from the downstairs speaker.

The audience was brief. Chiun offered another formal bow before backing from the throne. The boy watched him go with the same dreamlike eyes. He seemed like a lost and flickering memory, projected from another time.

Remo fell in step with his teacher on the way out of the big upstairs chamber.

"That sounded like Russian," Remo whispered as they made their way back through the maze of rooms. "Of course," the Master of Sinanju replied. "What else would you expect Russian to sound like?"

"So the kid's a Russian. Well, I know he's not their latest president, 'cause the kid's taller. So who the hell is he?"

"That was the czarevitch," Chiun explained. "He is the son of the last czar and crown prince of Russia."

Remo frowned. "Can't be," he insisted. "Didn't the Commies murder the last Russian czar and his entire family a hundred years ago?"

"That is what the world thought and is made to think to this day. However, two of his children escaped thanks in part to the intervention of my father. The rumors that they had fled to safety are well-known."

Remo only felt his confusion growing. "So what are you saying, that was his grandson?"

"No," Chiun said darkly. "I told you, that is Czar Alexis Romanov, youngest child and only son of the murdered Czar Nicholas II. Heir to the Russian throne."

Remo stopped dead. "Okay, you lost me. How can that be Czar Nickelodeon's kid if the czar was shot back at the end of the nineteenth century?"

"July 16, 1918," the Master of Sinanju corrected.

"Okay, twentieth. It doesn't matter. He'd still be, what, a hundred about now?"

"He is close to that venerable age."

"Right. There's where you lose me. That kid's barely out of junior-high school. How-?"

He didn't have time to finish his question.

There was a sudden compression of air behind him. It shouldn't have been there. Couldn't have been there. It was not mechanical. Nothing had launched from the wall. There were no panels popping or springs firing. This was a human stroke, yet Remo's senses had warned him of no human threat. All his instincts told him that all behind was air even as the knife lunged at him from the darkness.

Remo dodged just in time. He pivoted on his right foot, twisting out of the knife's path. The thrusting blade that had been aimed for his lower back slipped by harmlessly.

When Remo glimpsed his attacker, his first instinct was to call Universal Studios to see if any of their 1930s movie monsters had escaped.

The man wore a black robe with a cowl that encircled his head. His skin looked as if it had been drained of fluid. The face was sunken and pale, the deep creases filled with grime. His strings of ancient black beard were gnarled grease. The nails on the hand that clutched the dagger were long and twisted and caked with filth. He seemed shorter than he should have been, hunched as he was inside his robes.

But worst of all-the thing that would have sent children diving for cover under their beds and made otherwise sensible villagers form torch-wielding mobs to storm the local castle-were the man's eyes.

His eyes seemed twice as large as those of a normal man's. Pupils swam in seas of bloodshot whites. They never blinked. They just stared from the black depths of the man's cowl.

Remo had barely reacted to the first attack, barely got a glimpse of the demented man, before the stranger attacked again. Fingers clutching more tightly around the handle, the man jabbed hard at Remo's exposed belly.

This time Remo was prepared. When the knife was an inch away from slicing open his abdomen, he simply slapped the underside of the man's wrist.

The blade launched up and buried deep in the man's throat. The eyes bugged even wider, and the wretched creature dropped like a stone to the dusty floor.

Remo whirled on the Master of Sinanju. "What the hell was that?" he demanded.

The old Korean stood near a pile of ancient Russian knick-knacks, a bland expression on his face.

"The best old Russia has to offer. Pitiful," he tsked.

Remo sniffed the air.

"Pee-yew," he groused. "I thought the eyes were the worst, but the stink's got them beat by a country mile. It's not the building that reeks, it's him."

He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the corpse. Or, rather, where the corpse had been.

The body was no longer there.

"What the hell?" Remo asked, just as the knife jammed hard toward his back.

He jumped and spun.

The weird-eyed man was back on his feet, standing silently behind Remo, thrusting with his dagger. Remo strained his ears even as he dodged the blade.

There was not a standard heartbeat. Just a momentary fluttering. A faint gurgle of life deep in the man's chest.

Slapping the knife back again, Remo buried the dagger where the gurgle gurgled. It stopped gurgling. His clawlike hand fleeing the knife handle, the man fell to the floor once more, the dagger buried deep in his chest.

As his black robes settled, he grew very still. "All right," Remo insisted to the Master of Sinanju. "I killed that guy the first time."

"Probably," Chiun admitted glumly.

Remo opened his mouth to say more. Before the words could even come, he heard a faint squeak. His face growing shocked, he looked for the source.

On the floor, the dead man had taken hold of the knife handle once more. Metal squeaked on flesh as he slowly withdrew it from his lifeless heart. Once the blade was removed, the faint gurgle began again.

Remo wheeled on Chiun, his eyes wide. "What is this guy, freaking Freddy Krueger?"

"He is a monk," Chiun explained.

Warily, Remo glanced at the man on the floor. The man who, by all rights, should have been dead was slowly pushing himself up to a sitting position. So silent was he it was as if he existed in a soundless vacuum. This coupled with his near-nonexistent life signs accounted for why Remo hadn't heard him to begin with.

Remo appraised the cowl and the robe. The man did indeed look something like a monk.

"Monks are supposed to be nice. They aren't supposed to try to kill you."

"I did not say he was a very good monk."

"And maybe I'm a little rusty on my Baltimore Catechism, but aren't they supposed to die when you kill them?"

Chiun rolled his eyes. "Not this one," he said. "Believe me, we have tried. My father did, some Russian royals tried. I believe my grandfather might have killed him a few times. He has been poisoned, stabbed, shot and drowned. Yet he keeps coming back again."

Something about his teacher's words tickled a memory far back in Remo's brain.

The monk was standing again. He offered Remo a smile that was little more than bared teeth and bugging eyes. The dagger was up and out again, ready to slash.

"What do I do to kill him?" Remo asked, anxious for any tip, any weakness, any pointers that could help him stop this wild-eyed, unstoppable, knife-wielding Russian.

Chiun's hands were tucked deep in his kimono sleeves. "You already killed him twice," the old man said with a shrug. "You have bested Russia's champion in mortal combat. If he's still pestering you, take his knife away."

Surging forward, the monk swung the knife at Remo's throat, a mad glint in his wide eyes.

Remo wasn't sure what else to do. As the knife whizzed by, he plucked the dagger from the Russian's filthy hand.

The monk stopped dead.

Remo moved the knife left and right. The monk's unblinking eyes followed the silver blade. Remo tossed the knife into the dark recesses of the nearest junk-packed room. It landed with a distant, muted clatter.

As soon as the knife was gone, the monk faded back into the shadows beside the door. The darkness swallowed cloak and cowl until all that remained was a Cheshire cat vision, with naked eyeballs instead of smiling teeth.

Remo raised a suspicious brow. "That's it?" he asked.

Chiun nodded. "This is an unusual exception in the Time of Succession," the Master of Sinanju explained. "The monk was charged with protecting the life of the czarevitch by the boy's mother many years ago. For nearly a century, by spells and magic, he has kept them both safe for the time when he can return the child to the Russian throne."

Remo glanced skeptically at the eyeballs in the shadows. His own eyes were generally able to draw in ambient light, illuminating darkness. But light formed differently around the monk. It was difficult to make out the dark robes among the deep shadows.

"So he's just going to stand there until, what, my pupil and I come here in another forty years?"

"I think he is also paid to do the cleaning up," Chiun said, uninterested. "Not that he has touched a dust rag in eighty years. Typical Russian. And the Romanovs paid him in advance. Czar Nicholas must be spinning in his grave." He touched Remo's arm. "Come. We have dawdled long enough."

"Wait a sec." Remo was peering at the monk. The monk peered back. "What's up with his eyes?"

"He does that for the tourists," Chiun explained, clicking his tongue impatiently. "He is a hypnotist."

Remo jumped back. "Whoa," he said, slapping one hand like a blinder beside his eyes.

"We met a Russian hypnotist years ago. He anything like that?"

"This one is nothing to worry about," Chiun assured him. "That other one we met had full and terrible control of his dread powers. Whatever this one had he has squandered on dissolute living. He cannot affect the minds of those from Sinanju, for we are not weak-willed dullards." Squinting, he looked Remo up and down. "Maybe you should keep your eyes covered just in case," he suggested. He spun to go.

"Cram it," Remo suggested, lowering his hand cautiously. "There was a monk that hung out with the Russian royal family, wasn't there? I seem to remember hearing he was unkillable. Raspberry, Rasmussen, something like that?"

It was not Chiun, but a voice from the shadows that answered.

"Rasputin," growled the monk. It was the same funereal voice that had come from the downstairs speaker.

"Yeah, that's it. You him?" The eyes bespoke the truth.

The monk didn't respond to Remo. His words were directed at Chiun's retreating back.

"The night," Rasputin called to the Master of Sinanju. "Beware the night. Beware the false day. Beware the hand that reaches from the grave. Beware, Masters of Sinanju."

Chiun had been headed for the hall. When he heard the monk's words, he froze in his tracks.

"He ain't exactly Little Mary Sunshine, is he?" Remo asked, glancing over his shoulder.

He was surprised to see that a strange look had descended on his teacher's face. It was a look he had seen only rarely in all the many years they had been together.

It was a look of fear.

"Chiun?" Remo asked, suddenly worried.

But the Master of Sinanju wasn't listening to his pupil. He took a few cautious steps back across the room.

"Speak, monk," the old Korean demanded.

"What is it?" Remo questioned. "What's wrong?"

"Hush," Chiun commanded.

The monk's disembodied eyes floated in the black shadows. "The night draws near for you both," Rasputin warned. "Darkness comes from the cold sea."

"And the splendor falls on castle walls," Remo said, beginning to lose patience. "Can I kill him again, please?"

But Chiun was peering intently at the shabby Russian.

"What do you see, monk?" he demanded.

"What do you mean what does he see?"

"He is a healer, a hypnotist and a mystic," Chiun hissed impatiently. "The monk sees more than other mortals. He predicted the murders of the Romanov family."

"Fat lot of good it did them. Don't let him spook you, Little Father."

But Chiun would not budge. "Tell me more, monk."

The wide eyes remained fixed within the shadows. "You are stalked by death," Rasputin warned, his voice a croaking dirge. "Two from your order. Two will die. One will take your place. Another is dead already. Another lives who was dead. When comes the end, two Masters of Sinanju will die. Master and student, father and son."

Remo felt his own blood run cold. He shot a glance at his teacher. Chiun's eyes were as unblinking as the monk's. He stared in rapt attention at the man in the shadows.

Rasputin's voice was growing fainter.

"Two will die.... Two will die.... Two will die...."

The eyes faded. Flickering candles. "Two will die...."

The oversized orbs winked out.

Remo felt an emptiness swell in the darkness. He passed his hand through the shadow. There was no substance to it. Rasputin was gone.

"What the hell was that all about?" he asked. But when Remo turned a questioning eye to the Master of Sinanju, he found that he was alone. Chiun was gone.

Far off the apartment door clicked quietly shut.

Chapter 14

"Merci," Benson Dilkes said into the telephone. The word was a grunt in the dark of his Florida apartment. His own voice sounded odd to his ears. The foreign words sat heavy and out-of-place on his fat Virginian tongue. Nothing was right any longer. The entire world was out of alignment. Spinning out of control. Dilkes replaced the phone. Carefully.

With equal care he picked another red tack from the plastic case. The lid was open now. The way things were already going, he saw no reason to close it.

He stepped over to the corkboard map of Europe. The new thumbtack went in, this time in Paris. Jean-Pierre Sevigne.

The assassin had been good. A freelancer who split his time between government and the private sector. Sevigne didn't discriminate. He went wherever the money was.

He also knew of Sinanju. Dilkes had hosted him several times in the 1990s when work brought the French assassin to Africa. Talk inevitably turned to the reason Dilkes had left the United States years before. They talked of Sinanju.

The Frenchman was disdainful of most in his profession, but, like Dilkes, he held the House of Sinanju in high regard. He had heard of what was to come. Unlike Dilkes, the Frenchman looked forward to this time. Hoped he lived long enough to see it. Sevigne saw it as the ultimate challenge. He knew that he could not hope to best the greatest assassins in the world with weapons or brawn. He insisted that it would be cleverness, trickery, not guns or gadgets, that would finally overcome the vaunted assassins from the East.

His greatest fear was that he would falter. That he would somehow tip his hand.

"In no circumstance have I ever been nervous. Not in my entire career," Sevigne had said one lazy summer evening in the gazebo of Dilkes's Zimbabwe ranch.

The two men sat with their brandies and watched the African sky burn away to smoldering ash.

"But these men from Sinanju," Sevigne continued, shaking his head in awe. He took a deep, thoughtful breath. "There was a young American performer a few years back. He wanted nothing more than to sing in front of his idol, Frank Sinatra. It was his lifelong dream. If and when the moment came, he thought it would be magical. He became successful and, as fate would have it, ended up performing on a stage in front of Sinatra. It was not a magical night, Benson. He forgot the words. He stumbled, he stammered. He made a nervous fool of himself. That is my greatest fear. I am not afraid of meeting the men from Sinanju. I am afraid I will make a fool out of myself when I do."

Dilkes had dragged on his pipe, blowing a lazy smoke ring to the warm gazebo ceiling.

"Your fear is misplaced," he warned. "Fear them, and not what you'll do to embarrass yourself in your dying moments. Because if this legend comes to pass and we're all forced to meet them, there's no doubt that they will be your dying moments."

In the end Dilkes was right.

Jean-Pierre had tried being clever. But all clever got him was a belly full of acid and a thumbtack stuck in a shopworn corkboard map.

The futility of cleverness had already been proved to Dilkes months ago. Olivier Hahn had been particularly clever. The high-tech Swiss assassin was a Dilkes protege. For a time he was like a son to Benson Dilkes. The younger man loved to build elaborate traps for his prey.

Hahn's thumbtack was stuck in the Swiss Alps where his frozen body had been discovered in a remote cabin.

Clumsy, low-tech didn't seem to have an effect, either.

Dilkes had gotten a report out of London a few hours after England's two Source agents were killed. A third body. Killed by an explosion over the Thames.

Although most of the thorax had been blown open, the head and one hand had stayed intact. They had landed on the deck of a pleasure boat. The police had identified the dead man as Amwala Mohtat, an Afghan national.

Dilkes went to his computer. He found Mohtat in his detailed files of the shadow world. At the moment, there was no confirmation from his sources that this had to do with the contest. None was needed for Benson Dilkes. He just knew.

Another thumbtack. This one in the Thames River. Four dead in a matter of hours.

Still standing at the Europe map, Benson Dilkes suddenly wondered if he had enough thumbtacks. He might have to run out to an office-supply store to pick up some more.

He glanced absently over at the nightstand where the open case of tacks sat. It was only then that he noticed the man standing in the bedroom with him.

A sliver of shock. Quickly overtaken by instinct honed from years of experience.

Dilkes didn't panic, didn't run. His gun was on his bureau.

Duck, slide, grab. Out of a crouch, his fingers closed around the butt of the automatic. Spin. The gun was up. Smoothly, efficiently. Aimed squarely at the narrow chest of the small man who stood in his bedroom doorway.

"How did you get in here?" Dilkes demanded. The man in the black business suit didn't react to the gun. His eyes remained locked on those of Benson Dilkes. A spider eyeing a twitching fly.

"Your defenses are elaborate," the intruder admitted. "However, doors are made to be opened. If there is a right way and a wrong way, one merely has to use the right way."

If Dilkes was the sort of man who made mistakes, he would have been racking his brain to think of what he did wrong.

Maybe he left the door ajar, maybe he hadn't flipped the switch when he came home, maybe he hadn't wired the damn thing up right. But the door had been wired perfectly, he had closed it tight and he had made certain to reset the charges when he entered the apartment.

This man couldn't be here. Yet here he was. And that face. It couldn't be.

Benson Dilkes began to get a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. His bowels turned to water.

The stranger seemed to sense his apprehension. "Yes," the intruder said, nodding. "You are wise, Benson Dilkes. You understand that all doors yield to me."

It was true. It had to be.

Benson Dilkes was shaking. He lowered his gun. If he was right, it was pointless to even try to aim it. "Are you-?" Dilkes began weakly. "That is, who are-? I thought you were ...older. "

The intruder smiled a smile devoid of warmth. His hazel eyes remained as flat and lifeless as his Asian face.

"I am what you think I am, yet not who," he said. "Names are but air formed by lips that inevitably turn to dust. They are fleeting, forgotten things. However, if you must call me something-" the Asian smiled, this time with wicked pleasure "-you may call me Nuihc."

Chapter 15

Mark Howard was waiting anxiously by the window when he finally spied Dr. Smith's station wagon turning through Folcroft's main gates. Mark rushed down to the fire doors. When the CURE director came hustling upstairs a few moments later, his office keys were already in hand.

Smith didn't stop. "Did you trace the call?" he demanded as he hurried down the hall.

"Yes," Howard said, falling in beside his employer. "You were right."

Nodding crisply, Smith ducked into his office suite. Mrs. Mikulka's desk was empty.

"You are certain it was Chiun's number in Sinanju?" Smith asked as he unlocked the inner door, ushering his young assistant into his Spartan office.

"Double-checked," Mark said. "It was his. A clean line. No one tapped it. How did you know?"

"This is not without precedent," Smith explained. He shut the door tightly and hurried across the room, settling in his cracked leather chair. He booted up his computer.

"Should I have called back?"

"No, I'll handle this," Smith insisted.

Mark sighed relief. "Just as well," he said, taking up a post beside Smith's desk from where he could better see the canted monitor. "It sounded like she didn't speak English. I couldn't understand a word she was saying."

"That in itself is odd," Smith said. "Not the fact that you couldn't understand the language, but that it was a woman. I was led to understand that Chiun's caretaker is the only individual with access to the village phone line."

"She sounded like she was in hysterics," Howard said.

Frowning, the CURE director attacked his keyboard with certain hands. Amber letters burst soft in the trailing wake of his drumming fingers.