Infernal Revenue

It was a masterful strategy, Smith was forced to admit. It was elaborate. It was thorough. It showed the working of a brilliant mind with an almost omniscient awareness of CURE operations, from its secret financial conduits to the schedule of the gold shipment to Sinanju, to Remo's specific psychological vulnerabilities.

All of which were stored on the CURE computer-a system that was exhaustively scanned for viruses, electronic eavesdroppers and utterly Tempest shielded.

Somehow someone had entered the CURE system through a back door. There was no other way any of this could have happened.

But there were no back doors to the Folcroft Four, Smith knew for a fact. He had set up the system himself. The new XL SysCorp WORM drives were another matter. They could have been designed with trapdoors.

But why?

Smith was confident of one thing. The system had come to him through his own efforts. He had answered a classified advertisement in a disreputable computer magazine and initiated every contact. Buzz Kuttner was not out there twiddling his thumbs waiting for a call from Harold W Smith just so he could sell Smith a computerized Trojan horse.

If the Trojan horse were not waiting for him, it meant that it might not be the only Trojan horse. Smith turned in his seat to stare out at the sound. He was not used to this, not used to thinking through a CURE problem without the give-and-take data exchange of the Folcroft Four. But he was making progress-surprising progress without the distraction of his monitor.

Steepling his long fingers, Smith rested his pointed chin on them. Yes, it was becoming clear, as clear as Occam's razor, which suggested that the simplest theory was closest to the actual reality. Namely, that there was a mind out there that knew of CURE. Whether it knew of CURE before or after Smith had installed the WORM drives did not matter now. The mind had penetrated his system through a trapdoor, learned all CURE's secrets and exploited them masterfully.

There was only one flaw in the plan. It was a simple oversight. This supermind had broken the chain of CURE command at its strongest points. It was a unique strategy. One usually broke the weakest link to snap a chain.

The weak link was Harold Smith, an aging deskbound bureaucrat operating out of an installation whose very secrecy precluded security arrangements for his personal safety that were routinely extended to the heads of the FBI, CIA and other law-enforcement agencies.

A determined foe could simply walk into Harold Smith's office to kill him with a thirteen-cent bullet. Or ambush him on the lonely drive home.

There were many ways that Harold Smith could be liquidated, and CURE shattered.

The supermind had not elected to do that. It made no sense.

And because it had failed to do the intelligent thing, Harold Smith still lived.

It would prove to be a fatal mistake for the unseen foe Harold Smith was now certain existed out therein cyberspace.

Chapter 15

It was the worst duty of the Cold War and, even with the Cold War over, it had not changed one iota.

The Bridge of No Return was a narrow structure of green-painted wood that spanned an ideological chasm called the Thirty-eighth Parallel just north of the town of Panmunjom on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

No peace treaty marked the end of the Korean conflict back in 1953, only a cessation of hostilities and a semi-permanent cease-fire. For forty years more than a million soldiers eyeballed one another across a three-mile strip of minefields and razor-wire nests set against the misty green hills of the ill-named Land of Peaceful Cahn.

It was on this spot that, after the Korean War armistice, Korean POWs from both side were presented with the heart-rending choice; north or south. Some were forced to choose between family and freedom in the newly divided land.

Here United Nations troops kept an uneasy watch. Border conflicts were few but often bloody. North Korean infiltrators often crept down dressed as raggedy farmers. Every few years the blue helmets discovered a tunnel linking the north and the south and would have to demolish it.

And Sergeant Mark Murdock, US. Army, had actually volunteered for Panmunjom.

Most of the time, it was not so bad. The UN blue helmets handled the donkey work. US. forces were stationed here on observation duty.

Sometimes that duty involved sitting in the Truck. The Truck was a deuce and a half. It was not always the same deuce and a half. They rotated them every other day, and the engines had to be overhauled practically every month.

The Bridge of No Return was the chief choke point against a North Korean land invasion of the south. Barely wide enough for a Humvee to rattle across, it was practically an open door to the human-wave assaults that the North Koreans had used during the conflict so long ago.

That was where the Truck came in.

It was stationed with its ass end pointed at the southern terminus of the bridge, engine perpetually running, clutch depressed and gear set in reverse.

Today it was Sergeant Mark Murdock's turn to sit behind the always vibrating wheel.

There were spotters all around. A mixture of blue helmets and green. It was their job to warn the man in the Truck to slam that sucker into reverse and bottle up the bridge long enough to buy time to evacuate UN personnel or order up reinforcements.

Nobody knew which were the standing orders. Everybody knew that the man who was unlucky enough to be in the Truck when it backed up onto the bridge would probably die behind the wheel. The bridge was too narrow for the doors to open and let him out.

So Sergeant Mark Murdock sat in the cool of the late Korean summer, inhaling carbon monoxide and gritting his teeth against the constant thrum and vibration of the truck motor.

It was horrible duty. The monotony was broken only by the stink of gasoline as the fuel tank was replenished by hand. But as long as the truck stayed in place, Sergeant Mark Murdock figured he'd see Fort Worth again.

Still, he couldn't keep his eyes off the driver's-side mirror. He had heard the stories. How UN guards had gone out one day to trim a poplar tree and shrieking North Koreans had poured across the bridge with axes and clubs. No one ever figured out what set them off. But two American servicemen had died, only the scorched skeleton of the tree marking the spot.

And that was in the calm period after the Pueblo incident and before the Rudong I.

Ever since North Korea had tested the Rudong I-the nuclear-capable modified Scud missile that could hit Tokyo eight minutes after launch-the world had become very nervous about the north.

Patriot missile batteries had been rushed to the DMZ.

There was talk of bombing suspected North Korean nuclear installations before they got the bomb. Some said they had the bomb already.

Not much hard news came down from the north these days. Rumors, yeah. Every other day the scuttle-butt had it that there were food riots, mass executions and other evidences of a dying regime up there.

Now there was talk of a missing US. submarine that had strayed into Korean territorial waters and vanished.

Washington said that it had been captured. Pyongyang swore it knew nothing about any US. submarine. The accusations were flying thick and furious-and the veiled threats were losing their protective gauze.

And on either side of the bridge at Panmunjom, the two armies, technically still in a state of war, had been placed on the highest state of alert, waiting for the word.

So far, the word had been: stand down.

That could change at any moment, Sergeant Murdock knew. So he kept a weather eye on the driver's-side mirror, watching the shadows and imagining they sometimes moved.

He almost wet his pants when someone knocked on the driver's-side window and a distinctly American voice said, "Move the truck, pal."

There was a man standing there in the darkness. He was tall and looked American. But he wore some kind of black outfit that made Sergeant Murdock think of the Vietcong's black pajama uniforms.

"Shake a leg," the guy said, giving the glass another hard tap.

"What?"

"We gotta get across."

"You're defecting?"

"No, you are defective," a squeaky voice said from Murdock's right. He whirled.

Standing on the other side was a little yellow man, all in black. He was looking up at Sergeant Murdock with hard hazel eyes and a face that was a cobwebby mask. "I can't let you across the bridge," Murdock said.

"You would not need to if you idiots had not destroyed my personal tunnel."

"Your personal-"

"Constructed with the cooperation of Pyongyang for the convenience of the Master of Sinanju, and destroyed by careless cretins."

"Move it or lose it, pal," said the white guy.

"I can't. I have my orders."

"Suit yourself," said the white guy, tapping the glass. This time he tapped once, gently, and the glass spiderwebbed and fell into the hollow of the door like candy glass.

A hand at the end of a thick wrist came into the cab, and Sergeant Murdock reached for his side arm.

He touched the butt of the revolver, scooting away from the driver's-side door and the reaching hand. Before he could clear the holster, the passenger door fell open and he fell with it. Right into the dirt.

A sandal stamped down like a punch press, and Sergeant Murdock found himself holding a useless twist of steel instead of an Army-issue Colt .45 automatic.

The old Korean leaped into the passenger's seat as the white claimed the driver's seat, and both doors slammed shut. The Truck slammed into reverse, tires spitting hard dirt into Sergeant Murdock's stunned face.

It rolled onto the Bridge of No Return, and kept going.

In the dark the UN blue helmets jumped to the wrong conclusion.

"Retreat! Retreat to defensive positions."

Only Sergeant Murdock knew it was a false alarm, but the way the UN troops were pulling back, firing as they ran, he had no choice but to pull back with them. That or be shot by his own people.

As he sought the safety of a UN bunker, he wondered about the white guy. He sounded as American as can be. What kind of American would defect to North Korea in this day and age?

COLONEL KYUNG CHO CHI saw the Truck approaching his control bunker in reverse.

He recognized it as an American deuce and a half, and since it was coming from the direction of the Bridge of No Return in reverse, he leaped to a logical conclusion.

It was the Truck, the one the Americans kept on standby in case Colonel Kyung received the order to storm the Bridge of No Return.

It was supposed to block the bridge, but it was clearly coming toward his fortified post. And it was alone.

"What kind of lunatic attack is this?" he muttered, dropping his field glasses from his narrowed eyes. "Shoot out the tires!" he yelled.

The word went up and down the line, and the gunfire commenced.

"Cease fire!" he ordered when the Truck slewed to a wild stop, ending up facing forward.

"Capture the driver!"

Commandos went out, but they started back the instant they reached the Truck. They came back in parts. An arm here. A leg spun there. A helmeted head bounced and rolled to a stop at Colonel Kyung's feet like a turtle whose legs are pulled in from fright.

Not a shot was fired. Not by his men. Not by the Americans-unless one counted the distant shooting too far away to hit anyone under Colonel Kyung's command.

"The next northern dog who fires at the Master of Sinanju," a booming voice resounded, "will cause the deaths of himself and all who run with him."

"Sinanju!" Colonel Kyung barked. Lifting his voice, he demanded, "Who comes?"

"Chiun. Reigning Master."

"Why did you not use the tunnel?"

"The idiot whites filled it with clods of dirt."

Colonel Kyung stood up. "They are barbarians whose days are numbered."

"Their empire will outlast the regime in Pyongyang by a thousand years," the Master of Sinanju flung back.

Stung, Colonel Kyung did not respond to this. He was a good Communist, and fully half his men were political officers whose task it was to shoot any defector headed south in the back and report disloyalty directly to Pyongyang.

"You wish transportation north?" Colonel Kyung asked after an awkward silence.

"Send a jeep to fetch us. I will walk no farther now that you have stupidly broken the truck of the Americans with your clumsy bullets."

"Us? Who is with you?"

"My nephew."

Colonel Kyung personally drove the jeep to the spot in no-man's-land where the US. truck sat on three blown tires.

The Master of Sinanju stood with his hands unseen in the sleeves of his kimono. Beside him stood a tall man, also in black, Colonel Kyung recognized it as the two-piece fighting uniform of the ancient night tigers of Sinanju.

Remembering to bow first, he addressed the Master of Sinanju. "It is an honor to ferry you to Pyongyang."

"We go to Sinanju."

"Once Pyongyang authorizes this, I will be honored to take you to Sinanju."

"If Pyongyang learns of my presence before the Master of Sinanju is ready for Pyongyang to know, dire will be your fate."

"Understood," said Colonel Kyung, who was a good Communist but preferred his internal organs to remain within the warm bag of his body and not be torn from them in anger.

In the dark he noticed the face of the tall night tiger. It was white.

"This man is white," Colonel Kyung said suspiciously,

"Half-white."

"Half?"

"He is my American nephew." "You have an American nephew?"

"His mother was from my village. His father was a soldier in the invasion."

Colonel Kyung spat on the ground. "He looks all white."

"Consider at his eyes."

Colonel Kyung stepped up to the unflinching eyes. The eyes of the white night tiger were very dark in the dim moonlight. They were also very dead. They gave Colonel Kyung the chills. They were the eyes of a dead man who had refused to lie down and relinquish his life.

"They do look Korean," he admitted. "A little." The Master of Sinanju smiled. The white frowned. He seemed to understand Korean.

"What name does this half-breed go by?" Colonel Kyung demanded.

"He is called Gung Ho."

"That is no name for a Korean."

"It is good enough for a half Korean. Now I must be to my village."

Colonel Kyung waved to his waiting jeep. The Master of Sinanju and his half-white night tiger took the hard seats in back. And Colonel Kyung set the jeep rolling north; stopping only to warn his men not to leak word of the Master of Sinanju's advent.

He felt certain that none would. All were loyal to Pyongyang, but even Pyongyang feared the wrath of Sinanju.

In the back of the jeep, Remo nudged the Master of Sinanju.

"Gung Ho?" he asked in English.

Chiun shrugged. "You were a Marine. It suits you."

"And that fib about me being half-Korean?"

"How do you know that you are not?"

Remo folded his arms and said nothing. He did not like being back in North Korea. It was as alien to him as the moon.

As they pushed north, he began noticing how much like New England the trees and hills were, and it suddenly occurred to him why Chiun had taken to living in New England so well. It was probably as close to North Korea as he could get in America.

Chapter 16

It was as dangerous a risk as Harold Smith had contemplated in all his years as head of CURE.

He sat facing the placid sound, brows knit, wiping his rimless eyeglasses, thinking hard.

He stood at a crossroads. He had lost every advantage that his position as head of CURE afforded him. All his secrets were known and laid bare before his unknown foe. Except one. Smith's discovery that he had a hidden opponent. In that one fact not recorded on his mainframes lay the advantage of surprise. For Harold Smith, bereft of his enforcement arm, was about to enter the field personally.

This was not as risky as it seemed. His foe appeared to be extremely computer literate but ruthless. Yet he lacked real-world commonsense qualities. Otherwise, Smith would have been executed.

A hacker, perhaps. Someone seated before a monitor exerting his will electronically. It all might be a grandiose prank on the part of some MIT graduate student with access to a computer more intelligent than himself.

This mind might not expect Harold Smith to attack him outside the realm of cyberspace.

On the other hand, he might be expecting it. Perhaps all that had come before was engineered to force Harold Smith out of the cold cocoon of his Folcroft office and into a position of peril.

Therein lay the risk.

Smith thought hard as he cleaned his glasses of even the tiniest dust speck. As his eyes aged, any such mote on the lens was enough to give him a blinding headache. Eyes that looked for the tiniest connections couldn't see past a speck of lint.

Replacing the glasses on his patrician nose, Smith turned and brought up a blank screen. His fingers caressed the touch-sensitive keyboard until a crisp amber sentence appeared on the buried desktop screen: I KNOW YOU EXIST.

Smith pressed the transmit button, although he had every reason to believe that whatever he wrote onscreen was simultaneously reproduced elsewhere.

He waited for a reply. None was forthcoming. Smith frowned. He knew he was not wrong. Perhaps he had chosen to contact the unknown at a time when he was sleeping or attending other matters.

The intercom buzzed and Smith keyed it.

"Dr. Smith, your wife is on line two. And I have your mail."

"Bring it in," said Smith, automatically reaching for the button that would darken the monitor. He felt its coolness and stopped. Reaching for his ROLM phone, Smith left the screen illuminated. The keyboard had gone dark once his hands had withdrawn from the capacitor field.

"Harold, are you coming home tonight?" came Mrs. Smith's voice.

"I'm not certain, dear."

The office door opened and Mrs. Mikulka came in, her eyes brightening at the sight of Smith's new desk.

"Very nice," she mouthed, laying a short stack of mail on the shiny glass and walking out again.

"Harold, I have last night's meat loaf in the refrigerator. If I keep it another night, it might not be very good."

"Then you have it, dear. I will eat in the cafeteria."

"Harold, you forgot to call to say you weren't coming home last night," Mrs. Smith said in a sad, resigned voice. "It's not like you to be so thoughtless. Is everything all right?"

"I am in the middle of an IRS audit," Smith explained, and it bothered him terribly to distort the truth to his faithful Maude. "But I will try to be more considerate in the future."

"Very well, Harold."

Smith hung up. It had worked; his secretary had practically loomed over the monitor and not seen it. The screen was canted toward him slightly, making it virtually invisible unless one faced it squarely. Once he arranged his desk nameplate, pen holders and other items strategically about the desk, the blips of reflected light from the overhead fluorescents would combine to conceal the entire arrangement from prying eyes.

His eyes went to the screen, and Smith was disappointed to see no sign of a reply. Then he noticed that his original message had been changed. It now read, YOU KNOW I EXIST.

WHO ARE YOU? Smith typed out.

This time the reply appeared under Smith's question:

Smith blinked. What was this?

It winked out.

REPEAT REPLY, Smith typed.

Back came the same string of seemingly nonsense symbols.

Smith stared at this for some moments. It looked for all the world like a comic-strip representation of a four- letter word. He saved the screen and called up a corner window where he could work. Typing out the string of symbols, he asked the computer to analyze them.

The answer came back at once.

:-) IS AN EMOTICON USED IN COMPUTER BULLETIN-BOARD COMMUNICATIONS TO SIGNIFY A SMILE. ALSO KNOWN AS A SMILEY.

"A smiley?" Smith muttered, puzzled. It struck him a moment later. Tilted upward, the symbols constituted a crude smiley face. He was being taunted by his own computer.

Lips thinning, Harold Smith considered an appropriately salty reply. Instead, he typed, YOU WIN.

YOU LOSE, appeared in place of Smith's admission of defeat.

Smith logged off the system and pressed the black button that powered down the desktop monitor.

"Mrs. Mikulka," he said into the intercom, "I will be out the rest of the day.''

"What about Mr. Ballard?" "Ballard can wait," said Smith, reaching for his briefcase. The IRS was the least of his worries.

Chapter 17

Chip Craft was beginning to think that the past five years of his life were ail a mirage.

He had come to XL SysCorp fresh out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class of 1980 with a degree in computer engineering.

The computer field was booming then. Not like now. Back then the sky seemed, not the limit, but a simple stepping stone to cosmic heights. Back then it was not XL SysCorp but Excelsior Systems. And Chip Craft never got to see the inside of the CEO's office, much less occupy it in style.

In those days he had been an installer. Not just any installer. Excelsior had been deep into supercomputers: the Umbra 44, the Dray 1000 and the first supercomputer with artificial-intelligence programming—the ES Quantum 3000. And it had been Chip's responsibility to install ES machines into various Pentagon, CIA and NSA offices. He had top secret DOB clearance. And he was at the top of his profession.

Chip never dreamed of the CEO's chair in those days. It was exciting enough jetting between the old building in Piscataway, New Jersey, and wherever the U.S. government needed him, just like 007. Except he carried a tool valise not a Beretta.

It began to change when a government agency whose name Chip never learned had won the bid on the ES Quantum 3000 prototype. And after a short trial period, returned it as unsatisfactory.

It was unheard-of. No one ever returned a supercomputer. Not one that was voice activated and responded in a fetching female voice that was programmed into the software because studies had determined that the female voice was more attention holding and also because it made a great selling point— even to the Intelligence community.

But the ES Quantum 3000 had come back, and it was Chip's job to find out what was wrong with it.

The first strangeness struck him the minute he powered up the spindle-shaped supercomputer. Its voice had inexplicably become masculine. It was impossible. The voice had been created from a recording of an actress specifically hired for her tonal pleasantness and mixed so that her voice synthesized any word, phrase or sentence the software was called upon to reproduce.

Five years after the fact, Chip Craft remembered the first words the strangely transformed ES Quantum 3000 had spoken to him.

"Hello, friend."

That was the second weird thing. The computer was not programmed to be so informal.

The third weird thing was the question the ES Quantum 3000 asked. It was not a question generated in response to an imprecise command. The ES Quantum 3000 was not designed to ask random, unprompted questions.

This question was not random. It was very specific. Coming from a computer, it was virtually a non sequitur.

The computer had asked, "How would you like to be rich?"

The new voice was so smooth and ingratiating that Chip was taken in. The ES Quantum 3000 responded by asking Chip to address him by a new name. Friend. With a capital F.

That was when Chip Craft realized that the ES Quantum 3000 was seriously damaged. But it was exhibiting a strange kind of logic, of a kind Chip realized was well-advanced of any artificial intelligence then devised. So he decided to humor the ES Quantum 3000, hoping to learn more.

"Okay," Chip had said. "Make me rich."

And Friend had. Not overnight, but steadily, incrementally. Inexorably.

First Friend had given him a Pick 4 number to play. And Chip had won nearly ten thousand dollars on a two-dollar bet.

"Pretty good. Let's do it again."

"Small potatoes," Friend had said.

"Not if we put all ten grand on Saturday night's lotto game coming up."

"Nickels and dimes."

"The jackpot is almost ten million dollars."

"Paid out over a twenty-year period. We will need more money than that to achieve our goals."

"Which are?"

"Owning Excelsior Systems."

"Impossible."

"The first step is to put you on the fast track, Chip."

"I like where I am."

"I have the design for a biological electronic microchip that guarantees one hundred percent wafer yields."

"You created a self-healing microchip?"

"No. But the Nishitsu Corporation of Japan has. And I have cracked their computer system and downloaded the specs."

"This is industrial espionage."

"No. This is industrial counterespionage. The Nishitsu design is based on an IDC prototype stolen by a planted worker."

"Okay, let's see the design," Chip had said.

The design was everything Friend had said it would be. It revolutionized microchip technology, landing Chip Craft in a senior vice presidency in a matter of three months. From there it had become just a matter of surfing from position to position.

Things happened at Excelsior. Higher-ups moved on, were demoted into oblivion, and one even died in an elevator accident. The events were all random and irregularly spaced, but within three years Chip Craft was president of Excelsior Systems. Only one man stood between him and the office of CEO.

That one man abruptly cashed out his stock and launched his own company. He was bankrupt and back looking for a job. And the man who sat in his chair was Chip Craft.

By then the company had been renamed XL Sys- Corp. It was the early nineties, and the computer business was reeling under a punishing recession.

One day Friend announced that they were downsizing.

"How many do we lay off?" Chip had asked.

"Everyone."

"We can't lay off everyone."

"We will replace them with outside contractors who will be paid on an assignment basis, requiring no medical insurance and avoiding payroll taxes."

"Sounds drastic. But what are we going to do with this building if we don't have staff?"

"Rent it out. We are going to build a new building that will serve our needs better."

"Where?"

"Harlem."

"Harlem! Nobody builds office buildings up there."

"We are building in Harlem because it is cost- effective, there is ample land available, and no one will notice us."

"It's not exactly safe. People won't come to work."

"They will not have to. Only you will."

"I don't want to work in Harlem," Chip had protested.

"Are you offering your resignation, Chip?"

"I'm CEO."

"I will interpret that as a negative response."

When he first saw the new XL SysCorp building, Chip Craft almost forgot he was smack in the middle of Harlem. It was a magnificent twenty-story building of blue glass and steel. It towered over everything else on Malcolm X Boulevard, and once Chip entered the lobby and saw the marvels it had to offer, his reservations melted away.

XL SysCorp really took off after that. It was a new way of doing business. No employees—only an army of consultants, contract-service workers and free-lance technicians.

The entire building was computerized and controlled by Friend, who could be contacted by intercoms from all over the building once the ES quantum 3000 had been moved into place on the thirteenth floor surrounded by the best XL mainframes and other slave computers.

It was a concept so new a name had to be coined to describe it.

They called XL SysCorp the first virtual corporation. It had the legal status of a corporation and all the tax benefits, but operated like a loose alliance of skilled free-lancers, some permanent, some temporary, all working out of their homes or small business storefronts. Only Chip Craft actually worked in the headquarters building itself.

Oh, there were problems. Community activists did not appreciate the revolution in business that XL SysCorp represented. All they cared about was that a new business had come to Harlem and no blacks were being hired. That no one was being hired of any color at all seemed not to matter.

"We gotta hire some of these people, sir," Chip had complained to Friend one day.

"We are in need of installers at the moment," Friend said.

"These guys don't have that kind of background."

"What is their employment background?"

"I'm not sure, but I think a lot of them don't have any."

"Educational backgrounds, please."

"Some high school, maybe a few GEDs. Most are dropouts."

"They are not qualified to work for XL, then," Friend said in the same smoothly inflected voice he always used.

"But we gotta hire some anyway."

"Why?"

"Community relations."

"Will community relations increase our profits?"

"Forget profits. They picket the building, blocking the entrance, and if we don't cave in, someone's going to bounce a brick off my skull one fine morning."

"What makes you conclude that, Chip?"

"One of them threatened to do exactly that."

Friend then said, "I cannot afford to lose my CEO to a brick. Hire them."

"All of them?"

"All. Set them up on the fourth floor."

"Doing what?"

"Give them busy work. I will take care of the rest."

Reluctantly Chip had done exactly that. He hired every picketer, installed them in fourth floor cubicles and telephone pods at better than average starting salaries and watched as they sat behind their desks making unauthorized long-distance phone calls and pilfered office supplies for resale on the street.

This went on for precisely a week.

One by one the new hirees began calling in sick. They began getting sick on the job.

"What's going on?" Chip asked Friend at the beginning of the second week. "They're all falling ill."

"I have hired an environmental engineer to furnish a professional opinion."

"A what?"

"One who inspects buildings for environmental problems."

The environmental engineer showed up the next day, made a three-week examination of the XL SysCorp building environmental systems and pronounced it a sick building.

"Sick!" Chip blurted out when he heard the news.

The environmental engineer went down his checklist. "This building is unfit for habitation by more than twenty persons at a time. The air-conditioning system is substandard, air is not circulating properly, there are airborne toxins present, and it's a miracle you haven't gotten Legionnaires' disease."

"Legionnaires' disease?"

"It's caused by faulty air-conditioning equipment. Your workers all have it."

"Damn. The lawsuits will kill us. What about me? Why aren't I sick?"

"You work on the fifteenth floor, correct?"

"That's right."

"Well, through some freak of construction, the air on that floor is fine. As long as you stay there and it's not occupied by more than twenty persons, you should be okay."

"We're not in danger of being condemned, then?" Chip had asked in relief."No. But if you rehire, the board of health will shut you down cold."

"It's amazing," Chip had told Friend once the story broke. "We're off the hook. The thugs who call themselves community activists can't say a damn thing about this."

"You are satisfied?"

"Well, we're going to look pretty foolish once it comes out XL spent 170 million on an office building that can't be inhabited. And if we ever need to hire on- site staff again, we're screwed."

"We will do fine," said Friend.

And they did. XL SysCorp took off after that. It expanded its customer base with the XL WORM-drive information systems, which could be deeply discounted because XL's overhead was so low. They bought up any and all suppliers who threatened to rival them one day, becoming a vertically integrated virtual corporation. XL branched out into telecommunications, ATM machines, and even dabbled in virtual-reality technology, all the while continuing to service the old government accounts, especially in the U.S. Intelligence community.

Business rivals fast went out of business. And when XL SysCorp landed the lucrative twenty-year project to completely replace the IRS computer system, Chip Craft thought he was set for life.

That is, until he returned from vacation to learn that Friend had evolved a business plan in his absence that depended upon blackmailing the U.S. government.

"We can't blackmail the Feds," Chip said, exploding out of his chair.

"Correction. Prior to today, we could not."

"What's different about today?" Chip demanded.

"While you and I have been talking, I have been in contact by modem with the one person who could thwart my plan."

"Yeah?"

"He has just surrendered. The way is clear to implement my plan."

"Who is this guy?"

"His name is Harold Smith."

"Is he with IDC?"

"He is with CURE."

"I don't know that outfit," Chip said vaguely.

"It does not matter because Smith has been neutralized and rendered impotent. We may now proceed with our business plan to blackmail the U.S. government."

"Would you mind not putting it in such stark terms. This is pretty serious shit we're talking about here."

"I know it is serious shit. I have planned it carefully for a very long time."

"As CEO of XL SysCorp, I can't go along with this."

The door popped open, and the secretary with the free and easy breasts came bouncing in wearing a pout and saying, "Oh, Chip! Please don't talk that way."

"You stay out of this," Chip snarled.

She came over and dropped to her knees. She looked up at him with imploring brown eyes and actually clasped her perfect hands.

"I—I'll do anything you say," she whimpered.

"No."

"Please."

Chip folded his arms defiantly. "I have a special responsibility as CEO and I'm standing firm on this one."

The bright sunlight coming through the window abruptly shaded to gray, and anvil-shaped thunder- heads rolled into view. Lightning flashed blue and electric. The peal of thunder sounded as if it were in the room itself.

"Firm as a rock," Chip said resolutely.

"Are you certain, Chip?" came the smooth voice of Friend.

"Absolutely," said Chip.

The furniture faded from sight. All of it. The Spanish leather chairs. The mahogany paneling. The private bar. The window. Even the secretary. There was a single heart-breaking tear coming from her left eye as her face—the last part of her to go— faded from sight, taking the rest of her with it.

Chip Craft found himself standing in a windowless room with flat white walls. Only the chair had been real.

"Bring it back, sir. This is no way to act."

"I require your help, Chip," Friend said.

"Blackmailing the U.S. government is going too far. We could lose everything."

"You have not heard my business plan."

"Okay, I'll listen. But give me back my desk."

The desk reappeared. Chip took his seat and looked expectant. "Shoot," he said.

"I have this morning looted the Grand Cayman Trust," Friend said.

"Yeah?" "Yet no money has moved."

"How is that possible?"

"In the digital age, hardly any money moves in the physical sense. Yet billions of dollars are transferred daily."

"Sure. By wire transfer."

"Mankind has entered a new economic age he does not even realize has dawned. Otherwise, he would have given it a name."

"What age?"

"The age of virtual money," said Friend.

Chapter 18

Basil Hume, president of the Grand Cayman Trust, had only one rale concerning the funds that came in for deposit to his financial institution: he didn't care where they came from.

The government of the Cayman Islands didn't care where the money came from, either, just as long as it got its fair share in taxes and high government officials could deposit their own tainted funds in the Grand Cayman Trust.

It was a very tidy arrangement. No one cared. There was no governmental oversight, no regulations, no bank examiners, and of course there was no deposit insurance.

Who needed insurance when so much money flooded into the Grand Cayman Trust that it could never in a million years till the sun went cold in the heavens and the stars winked out one by one, fall insolvent?

In any case, the very customers who entrusted the Grand Cayman Trust with their riches were the perfect insurance and the ultimate form of advertisement.

Among the depositors were numbered some of the wealthiest despots, drag barons and organized-crime figures in the world. Terrorist organizations relied on the safety of the Grand Cayman Trust for their operating funds. Even certain clandestine U.S. agencies had emergency slush funds on deposit at Grand Cayman Trust.

So if Basil Hume didn't care where the money came from, why should he concern himself with the trivia of where it went when it left the sphere of his responsibility?

He tried explaining that to the former customer who presented himself to Basil in his office without warning.

"We are closed until further notice," Hume said.

"Twelve million dollars of U.S. taxpayers' money has disappeared from an account the Federal Emergency Management Agency has on deposit with you," said the man named Smith, flashing a Treasury Department badge in Hume's face.

"You have no jurisdiction here," Hume shot back.

"As an authorized representative of the depositor, I have every right to demand an explanation."

"Our computers are down," Hume said quickly. "We have a call in to the service people."

"A computer malfunction does not explain why the FEMA emergency fund has dropped from twelve million dollars to twenty-five dollars, and the missing millions are said to have been transferred to a New York bank that claims to have no record of the wire transfer."

"You will have to speak with the manager about this," said Hume, pressing the security button. The phones in his office were ringing again. They were ringing all over the building. It was a difficult situation. There was no telling what would happen once the more serious depositors learned that the bank was virtually off-line.

"I have gotten no satisfaction from the manager," said Smith stubbornly. "That is why I have come to you."

"How did you get into the building? It is supposed to be locked to nonstaff."

"The guard was impressed by my identification."

"But I am not," said Hume, pressing the buzzer again. What was keeping that damn guard? What if the Cali cocaine cartel were to burst in demanding their money?

"I have some expertise in computers," Smith said. "Perhaps I could learn something through an examination of your equipment?"

Hume looked up with new interest. "You are good with these damnable machines?"

"Very good," assured Treasury Agent Smith.

The guard finally threw open the door.

Donning his most pleasant smile, Basil Hume snapped his fingers once peremptorily.

"Escort Mr. Smith to the computer room. He is going to look into our little problem."

The little problem was a panic in full cry when Harold Smith was brought to the second-floor computer room.

The sealed, air-conditioned room was cooled to a perfect computer-friendly sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Still, the officers and technicians of the Grand Cayman Trust were sweating bullets.

"The D'Ambrosia Family—I mean, Syndicate—account is down to forty-seven dollars and change," a harried clerk called over his shoulder from a terminal.

The manager was frantically going through a green- and-white striped printout with eyes that threatened to slip loose of his stretched-wide lids.

"I have no record of any withdrawal in the last month," he said, his voice pitched too high.

"According to the computer, the money was transferred to the—"

"Don't say it!"

"—Chemical Percolators Hoboken," finished the clerk.

"They swear they've not received any of these confounded transfers," the bank manager was saying in a stunned voice.

Harold Smith cleared his throat noisily. "I would like to examine your system."

"Who the devil are you?" demanded the manager, looking up from his printout stack. His face had a touch of the same greenish white as the printout.

"Smith. With the U.S. government."

The guard added, "Mr. Hume okayed it."

The manager waved to the bank of terminals. "Help yourself."

"What is the problem?"

"The bank is—" the manager swallowed "—electronically insolvent."

"What do you mean?"

"Someone somehow sucked out all the money from every one of the large accounts."

"Sucked?""We don't know how it could have happened. At close of business yesterday, all was well. This morning we began noticing that the account balances were all out of sort. To the debit side. We have records of numerous wire transfers, backup confirmations, but no one remembers executing the transfers." The manager swayed on his feet. He wiped a white handkerchief across his damp, pasty forehead.

"And the correspondent banks have no record of receiving the wire transfers?" prompted Smith.

"Exactly. How did you know?"

"The U.S. government account I am responsible for was rifled in the identical way," Smith said tightly.

"You—you are not by chance with the CIA?"

"Why do you ask?"

"They are nasty people."

"I represent the Federal Emergency Management Agency," said Smith.

"The ones who chase tornadoes?"

"Yes."

The manager breathed a sigh of sheer relief. "Just as long as you are not one of those Colombian or Jamaican depositors. They've been calling all morning. Word has leaked out."

Smith was at a terminal. He went through his own account file. It seemed to be in order from this end, except that the missing funds had been transferred out without proper authorization and were never received at the other end.

Yet according to the transaction file, the correct constructed number had been received from Chemical Percolators Hoboken, verifying receipt. Smith understood that a constructed number was a digital string that, when subjected to certain carefully guarded mathematical manipulations, produced a number that was the true identifying authorization code. They were supersecret supersecure formulas, and the fact that the power that had looted Grand Cayman Trust knew the constructed numbers emanating from Chemical Percolators meant its computer security had been breached.

It smacked of a perfect white-collar crime.

By a quirk of the computer age, even though no physical money had left the bank and none was received, the electronic credit the mainframes stored was absent. In effect, the money had vanished into limbo. The bank could not recredit Smith's account because, according to its electronic records, the money was now on deposit in New York. The absence of the money in New York made no difference to the Grand Cayman Trust computer system. It reflected a perfectly correct wire transfer out. Therefore, the money was gone.

The very checks and balances of the banking system had been exploited masterfully.

Looking up from the monitor, Smith said, "You have a very serious situation here. I would suggest you question your employees closely. This has all the earmarks of an inside job."

"We intend to do that—if we survive," said the bank's manager.

"Survive?"

"Due to the special nature of our depositors, we are more concerned with the repercussions of these losses."

"I see," said Smith. "Have any employees failed to report for work today?"

"No. In fact, we have called in the night shift and all those out on holiday to help us straighten out this beastly mess."

"And all returned?"

"Without exception."

"This is not an inside job," said Smith suddenly.

"Why do you say that?"

"Your employees know full well the dangerous types of people who use this institution. A guilty party, knowing the true extent of the looting, would not return voluntarily to face the dire consequences if an irate depositor came looking for his money."

"I hadn't thought of that," the manager admitted. "Very logical. Very logical indeed. Then where is this money?"

"In cyberspace," said Smith.

"What?"

Smith got out of his chair. He was looking at the mainframes and could find no manufacturer's name.

"Tell me," he said at last. "Who services your system?"

"The manufacturer, of course."

"And that is?"

"XL SysCorp. They make the finest mainframes in the world and offer them at competitive prices."

"I see," said Harold Smith, turning to go.

The manager followed him out of the room, tugging at Smith's gray sleeve. "I say, I thought you were here to help." "No. I am here to track down the U.S. government's money."

"But what about us? What about the irate depositors who will not take no for an answer?"

"You have lain down with dogs," Harold Smith said coldly, shaking off the man's trembling hand. "Now you must deal with the fleas."

In the stark white windowless office furnished with a chair that was the finest money could buy and a desk that had no more substance that a moonbeam, Chip Craft blinked.

"Virtual money?" he queried.

"One of the flaws of paper money is that it has no intrinsic value," came the smooth voice of Friend.

"Sure. Money—even coins these days—is really a kind of promissory note issued by the government. If the currency ever becomes worthless, the government will step in and make good."

"With more worthless currency," said Friend. "For the value of the U.S. dollar is no longer backed by gold reserves."

"Is that why you've stashed all that gold in the basement vaults?"

"Yes. For, once my business plan is implemented, all paper money is at risk of being destroyed by hyperinflation, thereby causing my gold reserves to appreciate in value by an astronomical amount."

"We're going to make money worthless?"

"No, we are going to take advantage of the weakness of money in the digital age."

"Yeah?" "Money has been replaced by electrons in 96.8 percent of all business and government transactions. These electrons travel through the telephone lines from computer station to computer station, where they are stored in the form of credits and debits. These transactions are executed with the speed of light via fiber-optic cable, then verified by telephone voice or paper confirmation slips."

"Yeah. It's very secure."

"It is very insecure. Voices can be imitated, and paper itself does not move in these transactions."

"Huh?"

"Facsimile paper has replaced cellulose confirmation slips sent by messenger or mail."

Chip snapped his fingers. "Virtual paper!"

"As easily manipulated as virtual money itself."

"Yeah. I see it now. It's all electrons and digital packets of data. Man, this is big. It's so big I can't think of a good word to encompass the magnitude of it all."

"It is," said Friend, "the biggest cyberscam ever conceived."

Chapter 19

Remo Williams never liked visiting Sinanju. He hadn't liked it the first time he'd set eyes on it many years ago. For years he had been forced to listen to Chiun's stories of how Sinanju was the envy of the East, how it was richer and more sumptuous than any modern city. In the ancient days, Chiun had boasted, Luxor and Thebes and Babylon and Alexandria had envied the people of Sinanju, who lived in a true civilization.

In more recent times, when the cruel Japanese invaded Korea, Sinanju had remained untouched. No Japanese oppressor dared set foot upon its sanctified soil. When the Communists came in the aftermath of the Japanese, a tax collector from Pyongyang showed up to collect tribute on behalf of the new premier, Kim II Sung. He was told to put out his hands—and so caught his severed head.

No more tax collectors were sent after that.

When the Korean War was inflicted upon the Korean Peninsula and the East and West struggled mightily all around it, the village went on as it had before, unmolested.

Sinanju was the Pearl of the Orient, the source of the sun source, the village of peaceful living. It was in the twentieth century exactly as it had been in the beginning.

That much, at least, Remo had found to be true.

Sinanju was an apron of mud on the edge of the West Korea Bay. Mud huts and fishing shacks stood about in disorder and disrepair. The better ones were decorated with clam and oyster shells. The lesser homes sagged from too much rain on their thatched roofs.

In the winter it was bitter and cold, and in the summer plum trees grew wild. No crops were planted. And while most of the men claimed to be fishermen, they did not fish. The waters did not exactly teem with edible fish. Instead, the people subsisted off the largess of the Master of Sinanju and his grain-storage huts.

Sinanju had not changed, Remo saw as they approached the end of the broad three-lane superhighway that Pyongyang had had constructed to appease the Master of Sinanju over a past slight. They had traveled for several hours, seeing many bicycles, no cars and only two military trucks. Private ownership of cars was forbidden in North Korea. So, it seemed, was food. Remo spotted many peasants hunkered down by the side of the road, eating roots and tufts of grass yanked from the ground by skeletal fingers.

At one point they came to a sign, ornate and polished, which read Sinanju Eub.

The arrow pointed to a paved turnoff.

Colonel Kyung tapped the brake and prepared to take it.

"Drive straight!" commanded the Master of Sinanju from the back seat of the jeep.

"But the sign says—"

"The sign points to the lesser town called Sinanju to discourage tourists."

"But there are no tourists in—"

"Drive on."

Colonel Kyung drove on. "I have always wanted to see the village of the three no's."

Remo turned to Chiun. "Three no's?"

"No rice. No fish. No mercy," said Chiun, his face stiff with barely concealed pride.

"My father told me many tales of his part of the Battle of Sinanju," Colonel Kyung continued.

"Battle of Sinanju?" Remo said.

"It was during the days of the war against the Americans. The imperialist Eighth Army of the criminal MacArthur was hurled into the Yellow Sea by the mighty armies of the Democratic People's Republic. With the comradely assistance of China."

"I never heard of that," Remo told Chiun.

"It is in your history books," said Chiun unconcernedly.

The road came to a sudden end as if the earth had caved in. The jeep slowed to a stop at the edge of a sharp drop. Below, the village of Sinanju lay spread out like a clam flat. Without the clams.

It smelled like a clam flat. It looked like a clam flat. In truth, it was a clam flat.

It was near dark, and the dying light didn't make it any easier on the eyes.

Colonel Kyung stepped out from behind the wheel and stated down at the sight with widening eyes. Remo joined him, Chiun following. Chiun's eyes were bright with pride.

"This—" Colonel Kyung gulped "—this is Sinanju?"

"Magnificent, is it not?" said Chiun.

Colonel Kyung swallowed twice. "Yes," he said in a voice that wore truth like a tattered rag.

"Now that your life has been fulfilled," intoned Chiun without warmth, "you may depart in safety."

"The Battle of Sinanju must have been terrible indeed," Kyung said, unhearing.

"It was. For the Americans."

"So my father said," Kyung said. "As a child, he told me often of his struggle against the white invader, of how they fought day and night for sixty days until the imperialists fled licking their wounds and eating the body parts of their fallen dead to sustain themselves."

"Your father lied," Chiun spat out.

"Why would he lie about the glory that was Sinanju in those days before it was reduced to this terrible state by the great battle?" Kyung demanded.

"Fool! Sinanju is unchanged since Nineveh was new."

"What?"

"No Korean or Chinese engaged the Americans on this spot. There was no battle. Only a rout when Chiun the Defender sowed death and terror among the invaders who in their ignorance had surrounded Sinanju with their noisy cannon and machines, disturbing his precious sleep. They fled, and to cover the cravenness of their flight, invented stories of a great battle that never took place."

"But my father—" Kyung protested.

"Every layabout in the armies of the elder Kim later claimed to have taken part of the Battle of Sinanju. Since no one had, it was a safe he to speak. Except here. Now begone, offspring of a lying father."

Woodenly Colonel Kyung retreated to his jeep and sent it whining backward. He watched them with strange, stunned eyes. He progressed nearly half a mile before it occurred to him to turn the jeep around to face the way he was going.

"That story you told is true?" Remo asked Chiun after the jeep was out of sight.

Chiun's eyes narrowed. "I always speak truth."

"Remind me to look it up when we get back."

"It is good to be home," said Chiun, turning to drink of the sight of the village of his birth.

Remo said nothing. This was not home. In fact, it was a place of difficult memories. They started to flood back. Here, he once thought he'd settle down. Here, he intended to take a Korean bride and have children. It was the last time Remo could remember being truly content. But an old enemy had followed him here, and his betrothed had been murdered.

His eyes went to the plum-tree-sheltered burying ground, the one well-tended spot in the entire village.

"You are remembering the past," Chiun said.

"I never liked this dump," he said.

"Think of the road that stretches before you, not that at your back," said Chiun, starting down a narrow dirt path to the village proper.

Remo shook his head as if to dispel the unhappy thoughts. He had enough recent bad memories without dredging older ones. A lonely wind whined as if to announce their coming.

Shadows were gathering all over the village. The air off the bay smelled of salt and dead clams. The sun finished going down, its dying red rays silhouetting the rocky coastline.

There was a hump of dry ground too squat to be considered a hill on which stood an ornate pavilion- roofed building—the House of the Masters, the legendary treasure house of Sinanju and Chiun's home.

The Master of Sinanju headed toward that.

Reluctantly Remo followed.

At first no one seemed to notice their approach. Then a child, splashing in a mud hole, happened to look up and, spying Chiun, leaped to his feet and ran shrieking into the village.

"He comes!" the boy cried in Korean. "The Master comes!"

They came out of their huts then and up from the clam-flat beach. It was high tide, so the sandy end of the beach was completely covered.

Chiun stopped as the people of Sinanju began gathering around him. Their faces were flat and unreadable.

Out of the crowd came a bony old man with leathery skin whom Remo knew as Pullyang, Chiun's appointed caretaker in his absence.

Approaching, he got down on hands and knees in the full bow prescribed by long custom.

"Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully. Our hearts cry a thousand greetings of love and adoration. Joyous are we

upon the return of him who graciously throttles the universe."

This recitation was given with all the enthusiasm of children reciting the multiplication tables.

Chiun seemed not to notice. His eyes were closed, and his chest was puffed up with pouter pigeon pride.

"It is good to be among one's own people again," he said. "And I have brought my adopted son, Remo, whom you have not seen in some time."

Remo folded his arms and waited to be ignored. Instead, the villagers crowded around, searching his face with their narrow, suspicious eyes.

Pullyang turned to the Master of Sinanju. "He is still white."

"Examine his eyes closely."

The searching eyes returned. Remo frowned.

"Are they not more Korean than last time?" asked Chiun.

"They are not!" snapped Remo.

"Some," allowed Pullyang.

"Not likely," said Remo.

"Yes, the Koreanness is definitely coming out of him," Pullyang said. Other heads nodded in agreement.

"I have nearly beaten Christianity out of him," added Chiun.

The villagers brightened and a few applauded.

"A few more years under the Korean sun, and his skin will be as perfectly golden as yours or mine," he added.

"Bulldooky," said Remo. "Now, you may return to your duties," Chiun said, clapping his hands peremptorily. "Pullyang, stay."

Pullyang remained as the others scattered.

Chiun plucked at his servant's sleeve and drew Pull- yang's ear to his mouth. "Quickly! Has the gold still not arrived?"

"No, Master."

"There has been no word, no whispers, no signs?"

"No signs of gold. Only omens of your return."

"Omens?"

"Yes, Master. Last night thunder came from a clear sky. And today there were rainbows on the bay."

"Rainbows?"

"Yes. It is as if they knew of your return and, understanding their glory to be inferior to yours, threw themselves into the cold waters."

"Remo, did you hear? There were rainbows. Even the Great Wang, greatest of all Masters, never had rainbows foretelling his return."

"Truly you are to be known to future generations as Chiun the Great," said Pullyang.

"I want to see these rainbows," said Remo.

"They are gone. The Master has returned, so they are no longer necessary."

"Show me where they were."

Chiun snapped, "Remo. We have more important things to do than chase dead rainbows."

"I don't think they were rainbows, Little Father."

"If not rainbows, then what?"

"Oil," said Remo.

Chiun frowned. "Do not be ridiculous. Oil is not a favorable omen."

"It is if you're trying to find a lost submarine," said Remo, looking down toward the beach whose outer boundaries were marked by the twin rock formations known as the Horns of Welcome to the friends of Sinanju and the Horns of Warning to those who came to do the village harm.

Chapter 20

Harold Smith did not fly home to Rye, New York, after leaving the Grand Cayman Trust in Georgetown.

Instead, he flew to Washington, D.C., rented a cheap room and purchased a laptop computer at a local Radio Shack, paying in cash both times so as not to leave a paper trail. He set the PC up in the room and plugged his modem wire into the phone jack.

Booting up the computer, Smith dialed up a free bulletin board called Lectronic LinkUp.

In the days before the information superhighway had been paved, Harold Smith could never have done this. Now a vast pool of useful information was accessible to him just as it was to any computer-literate American citizen through the on-line net.

Smith paged through the menu prompts and found an index to newspaper, magazine and even talk-show topics. He typed in the name XL SysCorp and asked for a list of articles.

Exactly 567 separate entries began scrolling before his eyes in the soothingly cool fluorescent green he preferred. Smith had made a special point to get a green monochromatic monitor—after making sure the system he had purchased was not a product of XL SysCorp offered under a chain trade name.

Methodically, one by one, Harold Smith began calling up abstracts of the 567 articles on XL SysCorp and reading those that promised to be illuminating.

In short order he learned that XL SysCorp had gotten its start as Excelsior Computers in 1974, became Excelsior Systems in 1981, then Excel Systems Corporation in 1990 and finally metamorphosed into XL SysCorp last year.

It was a model of a modern, vertically integrated company, and after a severe downsizing three years before, lean and mean and extremely competitive in a softening information-systems market.

Smith saw with horror that XL SysCorp serviced

any government accounts, including but not limited to the CIA. An article on the eight-billion-dollar XL program to upgrade the Internal Revenue Service's antiquated Zilog computer system made Smith gasp audibly.

The possibility had not occurred to him before, but the suggestion was so obvious it filled Harold Smith with cold horror.

The unknown mind had sicced the IRS on Folcroft. It was part of the master plan. Smith knew he had not received written notification of a coming audit. Somehow the IRS computers had been penetrated and a file changed to show both the notification and a reply Smith had never given.

It was very neat. The IRS's computer checks and balances had been satisfied, so the system kicked out instructions to audit Folcroft, and human beings, with no way of differentiating reliable on-screen data from a fabrication, had obeyed like mindless robots.

Grimly Smith read on as the day lengthened. He learned that XL had successfully transformed itself into a so-called virtual corporation. That brought a hard frown to Smith's thin face.

It meant that any one of possibly thousands of freelance programmers or installers or subcontractors might in fact be responsible for the looting of the Grand Cayman Trust and the multipronged electronic assault on CURE.

Smith had secretly hoped—even as the notion filled him with dread—that the plot could go to the highest reaches of XL SysCorp. It would mean a more grandiose plan, but the problem would be infinitely more tractable than the prospect of investigating every far- flung employee of the largest virtual corporation in America. Individual background checks alone could take months.

Harold Smith pressed on, sustained only by an iron will and regular glasses of water fortified by Bromo- Seltzer to soothe his growling stomach. As he roved cyberspace looking for answers, one thought kept nagging him.

Where on earth did the money go?

Jeremy Lippincott was to the manor born, but he worked in a bank.

Jeremy Lippincott had by his twenty-fifth year shown absolutely no discernible aptitudes in life. He possessed no known skills, no overriding interests that suggested gainful employment and only managed to balance his personal checkbook because his personal valet helped. He had graduated from Yale on the strength of his very gentlemanly C's—and because the university understood that the Lippincott Chair of High Finance depended on the goodwill of the Lippincott family. And the goodwill of the Lippincott family manifested itself in the form of raw money, and no other way.

Jeremy Lippincott did, however, possess a lockjaw old-world accent and the imperial bearing of an East Coast WASP. He was the kind of a person whom old money found comfortable to be around. He projected solidity, reserve and frugality.

There was only one thing that could be done with him: get him a job in a bank.

Since he came from wealth—the Lippincotts were among America's oldest, most monied families—the matter was as simple as his uncle William dropping in on his personal banker and dropping a broad hint.

The hint, couched in crisp sentences that emerged from teeth that did not part even as the lips around them writhed in time with the bitten-off words, did not actually come out and say, Employ my idle and useless nephew or I will withdraw the family millions and entrust them to your worst rival. But they conveyed that unmistakable message nevertheless.

This was how it was done. By oblique suggestion rather than pointed request, or worse yet, implied threat.

Jeremy Lippincott was installed in a corner office of the Nickel Bank of Long Island where he could do no harm. He looked properly conservative in his Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip oxfords. His haircut was eternal. His jaw tightly shaven. From time to time he was sent to the homes of rich widows to sip weak tea and murmur to them in terse but reassuring sentences so they continued trusting the bank with their investments, which they understood very little and Jeremy Lippincott understood not at all.

It was a perfect but boring existence, and on weekends Jeremy could sail the sound in his forty-foot yacht, dreaming of the America's Cup and looking forward to retirement twenty-some years into the next century.

It all went amiss during the banking crisis. The Nickel Bank of Long Island fell victim to a mountain of troubled loans during the savings-and-loan crisis. Only a transfusion of investment capital could bail it out.

And so the Lippincott family dug into its very deep pockets and purchased the bank. They had three reasons for resorting to this awkward remedy. One, although the Lippincott family owned Lippincott Bancorp, which in turn controlled numerous banks bearing the name Lippincott, they were fast running out of banks in which to safely house the Lippincott family fortune beneath the wholly insufficient one- hundred-thousand-dollar FDIC insurance limit and stood to sustain staggering losses.

Two, Nickel Bank was a fabulous bargain. The Resolution Trust Corporation people were virtually giving it away.

And three, something had to be done with Jeremy, who in a dozen years in his corner office hadn't advanced beyond the excruciatingly undemanding trust department.

So they made him president.

It was not as rash as it sounded. The chief purpose of buying the Lippincott Savings Bank—as it had been renamed the instant the deal was consummated—was to watch over Lippincott capital.

Jeremy, being a Lippincott to the bone, could be trusted to do that admirably. And to hang with the rest of the depositors.

Jeremy Lippincott arrived for work at the gentlemanly hour of 10:00 a.m., strode past the ranks of multicultural tellers hired to project a friendly appearance for the common trade and satisfy federal labor laws that would never have been debated outside cheap barrooms in the halcyon days when the Lippincotts and those like them dominated the fabric of American society. He looked neither right nor left, acknowledging not even the loan officers at their desks—some of these people had foreign accents, for God's sake—and went right to his private office.

Good morning, Miss Chalmers," he deigned to say to his secretary.

Miss Chalmers smiled with an utter lack of warmth that reminded Jeremy of his beloved mother and took his mail into the office with him. He closed the door.

He always closed the door.

Tossing the mail onto his desk, Jeremy doffed his uncomfortable Brooks Brothers suit, stripping off his school tie as he stepped out of his shoes. The rug felt better when he walked across it in his stocking feet.

Lowering the shades, he discarded his shirt, dropped his trousers and climbed into his pink bunny suit. Attired for the rigors of the day, Jeremy Lippincott settled behind his officious desk and began to go through his mail.

It was the usual. He tossed most of it into the waste- paper basket.

The intercom tweedled.

"It's Mr. Rawlings. Line one."

"Put him on," said Jeremy, stabbing the wrong button. He had never learned to work the phones properly and had made his multiline ROLM phone into a single-line phone with a sprinkling of fancy lights and buttons. No matter which button he pressed, Jeremy always got line one.

"Yes, Rawlings?" he said, giving one long white- silk-lined ear an annoyed puff. It had fallen in front of his eye again. He would have to reprimand the valet. The damn ears were never properly starched.

"We seem to have had some unusual activity with one of our commercial accounts."

"Which one?"

"Folcroft Sanitarium."

"Horrid name."

"Overnight their account has mushroomed twelve million dollars and some change."

"Quite a jump."

"It seems to have come in by wire transfer, but there are no confirmation slips to be found."

"Does it matter?"

"Well, it is unusual. And no one in clerical recalls processing any such transfer."

"Well, someone must have. Otherwise, the money would not be on deposit, now, would it?" "True, Mr. Lippincott. But it's highly, superlatively, unusually irregular."

Jeremy Lippincott gave his fuzzy pink head a toss, finally whipping the intractable ear back out of his eye. It flopped back onto his head like a pink ear of com.

"Should I look into this, Mr. Lippincott?" Rawlings asked.

"We have over twelve million dollars in a customer's account that should not be there, you say?"

"Exactly."

"Do nothing."

"Sir?"

"It is probably some sort of computer error." Mr. Lippincott, twelve million dollars popping up

in our computers overnight is not computer error. It may be wire fraud."

"If it is fraud, it is this Folcroft entity's crime, wouldn't you say, Rawlings?" Probably."

"And if they are caught, they will be duly chastised by the proper law-enforcement agencies, correct?" "Correct."

"And in the meantime, the money is ours to invest and loan out?"

"Yes..."

"So invest it."

"Very well, Mr. Lippincott," Rawlings said dispiritedly.

Frowning, Jeremy Lippincott hung up the telephone. Rawlings had shown such promise, too. And here the man was, bothering him on a perfectly poufy morning with utter trivia.

The man would never be a proper banker. He simply couldn't cut the mustard. He decided to pen a reminder to have the man terminated at the earliest opportunity.

He rummaged about his desk with his pink paws, wondering what color crayon was most appropriate for that sort of memo.

Smith was reading a three-year-old Forbes article online when he came across a name that made his gorge rise.

Smith froze at his laptop PC. The color—what little of it there was—drained from his face in a violent rush, like a keg that had been tapped by knocking the cork off.

He fought the nervous spasm that made his stomach want to forcibly eject its contents. He tasted acid high in his throat. Smith flung his long frame from his chair, but he didn't make it to the bathroom. Not even close. Smith retained the presence of mind to throw himself at a dented green steel wastebasket and he threw up a quart of acidic water and Bromo-Seltzer into this.

He spent ten minutes washing the bite of stomach acid from his mouth with metallic-testing tap water before he felt up to returning to his PC.

Within sight of the White House and the President he served but could not reach, Harold Smith read again the name of the individual who had brought CURE and Harold Smith to the precipice of disaster.

It was a stunning discovery. Smith had not expected to get even an inkling of a lead to the culprit so quickly, but there it was in Forbes:

Credit for XL SysCorp's dramatic turnaround, XL watchers concur, falls squarely on the shoulders of a thirty-two-year-old former installer with Intelligence security clearance whose meteoric rise to CEO took less than five years. Insiders call him the Man with the Microchip Mind, a renaissance man who simultaneously runs the business side of XL while inventing the self-testing, self-healing XL BioChip that has brought such rival giants as International Data Corporation and Nishitsu of Osaka to their corporate knees. But Carlton "Chip" Craft exudes the casual style of a man who simply parachuted into success.

"Chip Craft," Smith croaked. It was unbelievable but it could not be a coincidence. Not after all that had happened.

Five years before, on orders from the last President, Harold Smith had accepted a supercomputer called the ES Quantum 3000. It was voice activated with a verbal-response capability. Smith had personally gone to meet Craft, then an installer for Excelsior Systems, blindfolded him and taken him secretly to Folcroft, where he'd installed the ES Quantum 3000 in Smith's office.

The computer had been a quantum leap in Intelligence gathering. At first Smith had reveled in its ability to help him manage the massive CURE workload. But the computer soon manifested a strange malfunction. It was more on the order of a personality change. Its feminine voice had become inexplicably masculine. Ultimately the computer had not worked out. It was too powerful. Smith had found himself so bombarded with information and global computer access that he was nearly paralyzed by the sheer overwhelming magnitude of raw data.

Smith had arranged for the ES Quantum 3000 to be returned to Excelsior Systems. The highest order of security attended these transfers, and Smith had worn a foolproof disguise.

"There was no way that Craft could have learned of CURE's existence," Smith told himself aloud. "It is an utter impossibility."

But the evidence lay before him. Somehow Craft had gone from installer to CEO of the newly renamed XL SysCorp in a mere five years. But where was the missing link in the chain?

"The ES Quantum 3000!" Smith said suddenly.

The computer had scanning abilities and a near- human if limited artificial intelligence. Still, it had been powered off before and after the move. It could not have been cognizant of its own movements. And Smith had performed a superwipe of its memory banks designed to purge it of all CURE knowledge. How could it have since found its way back into the Folcroft system via the telephone lines?

Coughing the last bitter stomach acid from his burning throat, Harold Smith powered down the PC. It had served its purpose.

He now knew the name of his hidden opponent. And his foe had no inkling that Smith had uncovered him. It was time to play the next card.

There was one thing Remo appreciated about the beach at Sinanju.

No snakes.

The high ground was infested with snakes. They avoided the muddy beach, so once he and Chiun reached the shore road, they did not have to pause to crush the wedge-shaped skulls of serpents underfoot.

Behind them villagers harvested the dead reptiles and threw them, still squirming and thrashing, into cooking pots for later consumption.

Where it was not wet mud, the beach was composed of rocky ledge. The Horns of Welcome thrust up grimly from the rocky sections, giving the beach from out on the water the aspect of an alien, forbidding place.

The Horns of Welcome had been erected by Master Yong to frighten off passing fishing boats and as a signal to those emissaries who came to hire the House of Sinanju that they had come to the correct fishing village, outward appearances notwithstanding. - Remo climbed onto one of the rocky ledges in the shadow of the southern horn and looked out over the bitterly cold water.

He saw no rainbows. It was too dark for sun reflections, and the moon was hours yet from rising.

At his feet he saw the deposit of black gunk clinging to the lip of a granite stone, gently moving in the lapping water.

"Check it out, Little Father," Remo said, pointing to the edge.

The Master of Sinanju came up and squatted down. A curved fingernail scraped the rock, and the rock complained. The nail was whole and still sharp when Chiun straightened. A blob of some thick, viscous substance clung to it.

"Oil," he said unhappily.

Remo was looking out over the darkling water. "The submarine got pretty close. Maybe that thunder the villagers heard meant a sea battle."

"It was the thunder of the heavens announcing my return," Chiun said stubbornly.

The wind freshened and brought the scent of the water full to their nostrils. It carried with it the pungent stink of oil.

"Smells like a big spill," Remo muttered.

"I will sue," said Chiun, voice deepening with anger.

"Sue who?"

"The oil company, of course. The despoilers."

"That's not how it works. Oil companies are only responsible if they spill oil before they sell it. After that, it's not their problem."

"Then who do I sue?"

"Depends on who sunk the sub," said Remo, stepping out of his shoes. "If the North Koreans did, you can sue them. If it was an accident, you're out of luck."

"Why is that and why are you taking off your shoes?" Chiun demanded indignantly.

"If it was an accident, it was an act of God. You can't sue God."

"Then I will sue the Vatican," proclaimed Chiun.

"And I don't want oil on my shoes while I look for that sub."

Without another word, Remo moved off the ledge of rock.

His bare feet skidded briefly on the suck water, then he was moving forward. The water supported him. Not because it possessed any miraculously bouyant properties or because Remo was weightless, but because he was moving horizontally faster than the molecules of the water could separate under his feet.

Remo was running out to sea, running with deceptively slow and controlled motions that belied his actual speed.

Face tightening, the Master of Sinanju stepped out of his black sandals and followed.

He caught up, running with his short legs churning and his pipestem arms pumping. His kimono sleeves flapped so much he looked like an ungainly white sea gull skimming across the West Korea Bay.

"The main slick seems to be this way," Remo said through well-spaced breaths.

Chiun said nothing in reply. To run across water without falling in was one of the most difficult feats of the discipline of Sinanju and it depended as much on the breathing rhythms as on the motions of his arms and legs. He was not going to risk losing his momentum and falling in. Not in front of his show-off pupil.

The stink of fuel oil grew more offensive to their nostrils when they reached an area five miles out, where the oiliness of the water made running more challenging. The naked bottoms of their feet grew slick and unpleasant.

Suddenly they were out of the oil and into clear water.

Remo indicated they double back with a quick toss of his head, and together they described a wide arc- reversing was too risky—and started back toward the heart of the spreading oil slick.

"Right about here," said Remo, and suddenly stopped.

Remo dropped under the surface so fast the oil had no time to coat his clothes and bare skin.

The Master of Sinanju followed suit.

The water was cold and vise-like. They oriented themselves, increasing breathing rhythms so their heartbeats rose in tempo, forcing the blood to circulate more quickly, raising their body temperature to ward off the heart-freezing cold.

Eyes adjusting to the weak ambient light, Remo and Chiun found themselves in a world of slow shadows and strong carrying currents.

The West Korea Bay is at its rockiest off Sinanju, and they headed down to the seafloor, looking for un- rocklike shapes.

Stones, ranging in size from a clenched fist to small buildings, and encrusted with barnacles, loomed before them. They moved among these like human dolphins, feet propelling them along with economical kicks that created spurts of motion enabling them to ride the currents.

The rocks felt cold and slick to the touch—but not oil slick. They moved on.

To the west they saw the tendril of oil. It was snaking up toward the surface like a lazy strand of seaweed seeking sunlight.

They swam toward it, staying close to the sea floor.

Topping a tumulus of submerged stone, they came upon the great sail of the submarine. One of the diving planes drooped in defeat. The hull's smooth lines were warped and dented, as if gargantuan fingers had plucked it from the surface and after careless manhandling dropped it to the unforgiving ocean floor less than one hundred feet down.

Remo gave a sudden froglike kick, and his entire body arrowed toward the low-lying cigar of steel. Chiun paddled after him.

The oil was coming out of a rent in the aft hull. There were other holes, jagged and violent, at widely spaced intervals along the sides and deck.

Remo circled the damaged sail and spotted the hull number, 671-A.

He pointed to the white letters and flashed an okay sign. It was the Harlequin.

Chiun signed back, making a G for gold, crooking one finger into a question mark and pointing at the sub. The question mark came again.

Remo thrashed around, spotted the weapons shipping hatch in one side and pointed toward a hull rip a few yards in front of it.

Chiun nodded and went in search of his gold. Remo picked another hole and entered it, easing himself in with his hands. He noticed that the jagged hull tears were pointing outward.

Inside, debris floated by—sailor's hats, sneakers and the odd paperback book. Crabs had already taken up residence in the dark crannies of the doomed sub.

Remo felt his way around the empty compartment. The flood-control doors had been sealed. There were no bodies. He went to one of the doors and tried tapping on it. The door drummed under his imperative fist. No answer. He went to another and did the same thing. The ringing of his fist on steel was like a watery bell tolling.

There seemed to be no survivors.

Flashing out of the hole, Remo swam toward the rip near the great weapons shipping hatch.

The Master of Sinanju swam out to meet him. He was clutching something in one hand.

When Remo joined him, he saw what it was—a splintered piece of fresh wood. He recognized it as a piece of a crate. No flimsy orange crate, it was made of hard timber, and there were deep indentations where heavy steel strapping had dug in tight.

Remo had seen the heavy reinforced crates used to ship U.S. gold to Sinanju before. And the angry look on Chiun's face told the rest. The gold was gone.

Remo pointed up, and they rose, releasing carbon dioxide bubbles one at a time and with no sense of urgency. If necessary, they could hold their breaths for an hour or longer. Remo's head broke the surface first. Then Chiun's. He spat out a stream of water before speaking.

"They have stolen my gold!" he said sharply.

"Who did?"

"The mutinous crew, obviously. They sank their own vessel in order to cover up their perfidy."

"Doubt it," Remo said.

"Why do you say that, Fair One with Korean Eyes?"

"Cut it out. Look, these holes look like they were made by shaped demo charges set inside the boat. But those hull dents could only be made by depth charges. The sub was scuttled, all right. But I don't think the crew did it. They'd need a boat to drop depth charges on their own sub."

"Why not? The gold was more money than they would ever see in their miserable lives. They would go to any lengths to evade discovery."

"Don't forget they radioed that a Korean frigate had overhauled them."

"A dead herring."

"That's 'red herring,' and I think we should check out the Korean angle before we tar the memories of dead U.S. sailors."

"I saw bodies," Chiun said pointedly.

"Yeah?"

"A man who wore the stars of a captain."

"The sub commander."

"He had been shot. This suggests mutiny."

"I want to see."

"And I want to show you," said Chiun. "Come." And the Master of Sinanju disappeared under the flat malodorous water.

Trailing tendrils of clinging oil, Remo and Chiun kicked down toward the submarine. Remo beat Chiun through the aft most hole.

Inside was a large flooded section. Remo had traveled on enough subs to figure out his way around the corridors, but it was strange and eerie to be swimming down them. He found his way to the main storage area.

There were lights here. Evidently somewhere in the ship batteries still produced juice. The protected lights glowed feebly.

The body of the captain of the Harlequin had floated to the top of a large storage room. Remo missed it until Chiun entered and tugged on his sleeve, pointing ceilingward with an impatient finger.

Remo swam up, pulled the body down and spun it around. The man's skin had turned a maggoty white, and internal gases had inflated his chest cavity, bursting his shirt buttons.

The corpse was a mess, but nothing could disguise the bullet holes in its chest. They still exuded dim threads of dissolving blood.

Frowning, Remo let the body return to the ceiling. He made a quick circuit of the storage room. There were other fragments of shipping crates, along with spent shell casings. He picked up a few and pocketed them. There was nothing else of interest. Debris floated past them with annoying frequency. Remo squirmed out of the storage room and tried kicking at several doors. He put his ears to them and heard nothing.

Coming back, he came upon the Master of Sinanju turning the wheel of one door.

Remo flashed to Chiun's side and pulled him away.

Abruptly Chiun disentangled himself from Remo's grasp and glared at him, his wrinkled face turning crimson with rage.

Remo tried to sign his annoyance, but couldn't make himself understood. He went to the door and put an ear to it.

He thought he heard breathing. He gave the door a smack. It rang, vibrating on its hinges.

No one responded, but the character of the breathing seemed to change. Concentrating, Remo tried to focus on it.

One man—if a man. Twisting about, Remo motioned for the Master of Sinanju to clear a path. Skirts fluttering about his thin legs, Chiun backed away with sweeping motions of his hands.

Remo set himself. If there was anyone alive on the other side, he would have to work fast.

He hunted for the valve he knew would be near the door. Opening the door would let in a solid wall of water that would probably crush the life out of the person on the other side. By flooding the compartment first, the door could be opened safely.

Remo found the valve. He opened it. Water began flowing in, gathering velocity. Putting his ear to the door, Remo heard the rush of water, frantic splashing and the panting of a man in escalating distress.

When the water stopped flowing in, he gave the door a violent turn. The creak of the mechanism unlocking carried through the conducting water.

Water pressure against the door kept it closed tight. Bracing a bare foot against the wall, Remo grabbed the wheel with both hands. His braced leg strained inexorably. He was using his muscles to unbend the legs, but the strength of his leg bones would make the difference. That was the Eastern way, to rely on bone where muscle was not enough.

The wall under his bare foot groaned, and a dent slowly formed. Remo pulled harder, pushing with the leg.

The door slipped out of its jamb three inches—and an eruption of water bubbles came percolating out while the sea flooded in to replace the air pocket.

Inside, a man screamed once for his mother and his God.

Remo hauled back, and the door surged wide. The water carried him in.

Relaxing, he went with the flow. There would be no use fighting it. Sinanju taught that some forces could be fought, others resisted and still others tamed by submission.

The water carried him into a wall, and Remo pushed back, feeling around in an inchoate darkness where a floating sailor kicked and thrashed as rushing waters flung him about.

Remo grabbed a wildly moving leg, pulled the man down and found he was wearing some kind of air mask. He yanked it off and closed off the man's mouth and nostrils with one hand to keep the sea out of his

lungs. The man fought back. Remo found a nerve in his neck and squeezed until he went limp in Remo's arms.

After that it was just a matter of holding his breath and keeping the seaman from inhaling while the water finished filling the compartment.

Remo swam out half a minute later, the man tucked under one arm. He used his feet to propel himself down the corridors and up out through the hole in the submarine hull and gave a last kick that pushed him upward like a missile from a tube.

Chiun was waiting for him when Remo broke the surface.

"We will wrest the truth from this laggard," Chiun said flatly, eyeing the drooping head of the unconscious seaman.

"First I gotta get him breathing again," said Remo, turning the man about and manipulating his spine.

The man coughed, started gasping like a beached fish and tried to get away.

"Easy," Remo said. "We've got you."

"Where—where am I?"

"Treading water. But don't worry, fella. We have you."

"I can't see a thing."

"You don't need to. We're your eyes."

"And we will be your death if you he to us, mutineer," Chiun added.

"Who's that?"

"Nobody you need to worry about," said Remo.

"He sounds Korean." "It is good that you fear Koreans. For we are a mighty race."

"You—you sound like an American," the seaman said.

"I am," said Remo. "Now listen. Don't worry about what my friend is saying. What happened to the sub?"

"I don't know. One minute we were flying along, and the next we were going evasive. We all heard the depth charges. Then we broke the surface, and the North Koreans poured in to take away our guns. I was locked in a storage room."

"You're sure it was North Koreans?"

"Who else would jump a U.S. sub in open water?"

"You're not on open water," said Remo. "You're off North Korea."

"Oh, God," the seaman sobbed. "I just want to go home."

"You will never see your home again unless you cease lying," Chiun warned.

"I'm not lying. I swear."

"Prove it."

"Look, there's others down there."

"What?"

"On the other side of my compartment I heard tapping. It was strong before, but it got faint in the last few hours. But I couldn't get the door open to see."

"They saw what you saw?" Remo said sharply.

"Yes."

Remo addressed the Master of Sinanju. "Chiun, I'm going back down. You take this guy back to the village."

"Why can he not swim back? He is a sailor." "Because it's dark, it's cold, and he's spent a day without food and water in a very small space and little air. Now cut the crap and let's go."

"I will not be spoken to that way."

"Fine. But I'm going down into that sub again, and it's going to be very dangerous."

"Yes," the Master of Sinanju said coldly. "For any who laid hands on the gold of Sinanju."

In the end they both went back to shore. Chiun because he refused to run unimportant errands, and Remo when he calmed down enough to realize that a mass rescue would be futile without boats to receive the rescued. "Why do we have to rob banks to make money?" Chip Craft asked Friend as the white walls returned to their mahogany splendor and his desk rematerialized at his feet. "We're at the top of our business. Already we've practically forced IDC into receivership. Other companies are following our lead and turning into virtual corporations."

"To make a profit," said Friend.

"We're making a fortune as it is. Legally."

"I do not differentiate between a legal fortune and an illegal one."

"You may not, but I do. We could go to jail."

"No."

"No?"

"No."

"You mean it's foolproof?"

"It is not foolproof, but we will not go to jail."

"That's different."

"Only you can be jailed. I am a program, existing on a Very Large Scale Integration microchip, and in the event I am placed in jeopardy, I can transfer my programming to any compatible chip I can locate in the net."

"That's great for you, but what about me?" "You may resign if you choose."

"Resign? I'm the Man with the Microchip Mind. I can't resign. What would XL do? What would I do?"

"You are the Man with the Microchip Mind, but I am the microchip mastermind. Every idea that you have implemented came from me. Every rung on the corporate ladder you have climbed was cleared by me."

"You arranged for all these guys to ship out?"

"Except for Eugene Morrow."

"He's the one who died in the elevator accident."

"An accident I arranged," said Friend.

"You?"

"The elevator was controlled by computer. I merely triggered a glitch in its software, resulting in the elevator cage going into free-fall."

Chip Craft jumped out of his seat. "You murdered Gene!"

"I murdered Gene for you, Chip."

"I didn't ask you to do that," Chip said thickly.

"Did you ever question your meteoric rise to CEO of XL?"

"No. It seemed too good to question."

"It was too good to be true, and if I do not have your cooperation, I can see no place in the XL organization for you. I can, however, offer you a very good severance package."

Chip mentally tallied his options. "How much of a severance package?"

"Fifty-five million dollars."

"Payable how?"

"On resignation." "It's not what I'd earn over the long term if I stuck around..." he mused aloud, hoping the offer might be sweetened.

"It is also far inferior to your reimbursement if you remained with us through our next and most expansive phase," said Friend.

"There isn't enough money in the world to be worth life imprisonment in a federal prison if this business scam—I mean plan—goes sour."

"Then may I assume you intend to sever your relationship with XL SysCorp?" prompted Friend in that sometimes infuriatingly upbeat voice of his.

"Yeah. Sure. That's my decision," Chip said vaguely, visions of billions of dollars fleeing his personal bank accounts. Was he leaving or was he being pushed?

"May I have two weeks' notice?"

"I can do that, I guess," said Chip. Two weeks. Maybe something would come up between then and now to scotch this blackmail thing.

"Good. In the meantime my environmental sensors have detected a gas leak in the subbasement vault area."

"A gas leak? Are you sure?"

"Yes, and it is very dangerous. It should be looked into."

"I'll call the gas company," said Chip, reaching for his virtual phone. It vanished before he could touch it.

"No," said Friend." I would like to handle this internally."

"So what do I do?" "XL security cameras tell me we have picketers in front of the building again today."

"Yeah. When word got out that you could get sick working for XL, the picketers tripled. Now they only say they want jobs. What they're looking for is a lifetime insurance settlement in return for a week's work."

"Hire them all."

Chip made a frowning face, "To do what?"

"To look for the gas leak."

Chip brightened. "It's low tech enough that maybe they could do it without screwing up."

'' My thinking exactly.''

Darnell Jackson had never had a job in his life. None of his friends had ever worked—worked in the honkie sense of working, that is.

A lot of them worked their asses off hustling and boosting and doing grafts now and again. But the concept of walking into the imposing XL SysCorp building through the front door by invitation in broad daylight was a new one to him.

Darnell was more of a back-door kinda dude.

"This feels weird," he whispered to his main man, Troy.

"Know it," Troy whispered. "But it's a big payday for maybe a week tops in this place."

"Yeah, and we can boost stuff, too," added Pip.

"Don't be a chump," Troy snapped. "They catch you boostin' in here, they run your dumb ass right off the lot. Then you lose out on the long payday."

"Yeah. You won't catch me boostin' anything," said Darnell.

"Maybe on my last day when they be carryin' me out on that golden stretcher," laughed Troy.

They were taken to a conference room with long cherry-wood tables and chairs so comfortable they felt weird sitting in them in their scruffy street clothes.

The white guy who had opened the door and invited them in to put in for a job was handing out sheets of paper and sharpened yellow pencils. He was sweating bullets.

"Just fill these out," he said nervously.

"Then what?" asked Darnell.

"Then I'll come back and look them over."

"This like a test?"

"No. All you have to do is fill in the blanks."

Darnell blinked. Troy looked at him.

"He talking bullet?"

"Ask him."

Darnell raised his hand because he had a dim recollection of doing that in the third grade, just before being expelled for stabbing that mouthy teacher whose name he'd long ago forgotten.

"Do you mean like blank bullets?" Troy asked.

"No. I mean the empty spaces in the application."

"Is this what these are—applications?"

"Yes. Just write your names, addresses and Social Security numbers."

This time Troy raised his hand. "Which Social Security number?"

"What do you mean?"

"The Social Security number we used to get our welfare checks, or the one we use on our driver's license, or the one we give to the cops when they catch us?"

"You're only supposed to have one."

"Hey, You never know when an extra will come in handy."

"Give your correct Social Security number," the white dude said.

"Right. Got it," said Darnell, nudging Troy. They made up the numbers, just in case.

Another hand shot up. It belonged to Pip. "What about this address thing?"

"Where do you mean?"

"It's asking for my address, and I ain't got one."

"Where do you live?"

"With whatever bitch will have me this week."

"Use that. Any other questions?"

"Are street names okay? I don't wanna use my own on account of I'm what they call known to the police."

The white dude went even whiter and he mumbled, "Street names are fine." Then he shut the door after him real fast.

Everyone laughed at the nervous white dude. The laughter died when they looked at the application forms.

They scratched heads, arms, crotches and shifted in their chairs while making faces at the sheets of paper.

"Anybody here can read?" Darnell asked suddenly.

"I read some," said Pip.

"What's this say?"

"Dunno."

"I thought you said you read some." "I read only numbers. I don't go in for letters and words."

"Why not?"

"Mostly all I gotta know for home invasions is a street number and the color of the house."

"Who reads words here?"

A hand went up. Everybody shoved their applications under the hand raiser's unhappy face.

"Hey, I ain't doin' all this. I got my own application to fill up."

Hands went into baggy pants and into the pouches of gray hooded sweatshirts and came out holding a wide array of small firearms. These were pointed at the man who could read words.

"You help us out, jack. Or we help you out the window."

"All right, all right. But this is gonna take all day."

"So what? We already in the sick building breathing the bad air. That gives us all a day up on getting sick enough to quit and live off the insurance company."

This made sense to all, so they took their time filling out the applications. To pass the time, they carved their initials on the cherry-wood conference tabletops.

"Wonder how come no one ever thought to do this before?" mumbled Darnell, scratching out a big D in one corner.

"Fools probably couldn't write their own damn names," said Troy.

When the white guy came back, he looked even more nervous than before. He took the applications, and they asked him one question.

"We hired now?"

"I have to evaluate the applications first."

"Then we hired?"

"Probably."

"If you don't hire us, it'll be discriminatory, you know."

The white dude rolled his eyes. "I know," he said, backing from the room.

"I like that word 'discriminatory,'" said Troy.

"Yeah," Darnell added. "It always work."

It worked this time, too. The white guy was back inside of ten minutes and said, "You're all gas inspectors."

"Since when?"

"Since the front office just accepted all your applications."

"What's the salary?"

"What's a salary?" Pip asked.

"That's what they gotta pay you, fool."

"Hey, I ain't settling now. It's too early. I ain't sick yet."

"That's later," Troy hissed. "Salary is what you get for working. Insurance settlement is what you get for not working."

"You know," Darnell added as they followed the white dude to the elevator, "I think I'm gonna miss working in this place."

Everyone laughed as they rode the elevator to the basement where the air was thin and cool and there wasn't much light.

"Somewhere down here," the white guy was saying, "there's a gas leak. Find it."

"How?"

"With your noses."

"What's gas smell like?"

"You don't know?"

"Sue me."

"It smells bad."

"Fart bad or skunk bad?"

"It smells like a butane lighter that won't light up."

Everyone understood that. "What do we do when we find it?" Pip wanted to know.

"There are intercom boards all over the basement.

Just hit the button and ask. I'll answer."

It sounded simple enough, especially since there were fourteen of them looking for the gas leak. They farmed out.

Chip Craft rode the elevator back to the fifteenth floor, feeling his shirt stuck to his skin.

He walked past his secretary without a glance. Her rig brown eyes followed him sadly.

Behind his desk, Chip said, "They're looking."

"Excellent."

''But what do we do with them after they find it?"

"Let's see if they can find it," said Friend.

" What did you have a gas line put in for?"

"Two reasons." "Yeah?"

"First because I determined that installing the line would lead to the destruction of a secret telephone cable."

"What secret telephone cable?"

"The one that connects my enemy Harold Smith to the White House."

"White House! What's the White House have to do with this?"

"When we attack the banking system, we will arouse the interest of the United States government. The White House will be very interested in what we do."

"Listen. I don't want the White House after me."

"You haven't heard the second reason."

"I'm not sure I want to," Chip admitted.

"I thought that might be your response."

The intercom buzzed and a voice asked, "Hey! White guy. We found it. We found the gas leak. What do we do now?"

"Ask them if they have enough light to see where the gas is coming from," Friend directed.

"Do you have enough light down there to find the exact spot?" Chip asked.

"No. We just got it cornered in this one empty room."

"Tell them to close the door," Friend instructed.

"Why?"

"Do it."

"Close the door," Chip said into the intercom.

"Just a second."

A moment later the voice came back and said, "Hey! I shut the door like you said, and the damn light went

out,"

Chip started to say something when he heard what sounded like his own voice saying, "Find the light switch,"

"How? It dark."

"Flick your Bic."

"No!" Chip screamed. "Don't! Don't flick any Bics!"

The boom could be heard fifteen floors below. Chip's eyes went wide. He reached out to steady himself against his desk and fell into it. His head poked out one end and his feet stuck out from the other.

"What—what happened?" he asked, climbing out of the holographic desk.

"They obeyed your instructions," explained Friend.

"But I didn't-"

"It was your voice."

"It just sounded like my voice."

"But you are the only human being in the building."

"You, you tricked me."

"No, I implicated you. You lured fourteen urban youths to their deaths with the promise of a job. I have it all on digital tape."

Chip swallowed, his eyes starting.

"Now you know the second reason I installed the gas line," said Friend.

Chip slumped in his chair. "What do you want?"

"Your continued cooperation in return for your usual cut of the profits, stock options and an ironclad guarantee the sealed room will never be opened."

"The police will search the building."

"The room was designed to defy detection. It will not be discovered unless I open it electronically."

"I don't feel well," Chip said weakly.

The office door popped open, and his secretary bounced in and in a bright, eager voice asked, "How about a little virtual nookie?"

Chapter 23

The fishing boats of Sinanju huddled on the spreading slick of oil over the sunken submarine Harlequin like ducks clustered together for warmth.

In the largest boat Remo and Chiun were talking.

"This is some fishing fleet," Remo was complaining.

"That is why the rent is so cheap," said Chiun.

"Rent? What rent?"

"Why, the rent I am charging you for their use."

"This is a freaking rescue operation."

'' Payable in gold," said Chiun.

"I don't have any gold."

"I will accept a portion of your share of the gold when it is found."

"Damn it, Chiun. This is no time to play Shylock."

"Are you reneging on our deal?"

"We don't have a deal."

Chiun lifted his voice. "Ahoy, brave sailors of Sinanju. The rescue is hereby canceled. Return your boats to shore, and you to your well-earned beds."

"All right. All right," Remo said in exasperation. "How much?"

Chiun's face became a bland mask. "One third of your share."

"Too much."

"Very well, one ingot per rescued sailor." "How many ingots in my share?" "That depends." "On what?"

"On how much gold is recovered."

"Why do I have the feeling you're gypping me either way?"

"Because you are an ingrate of uncertain parentage," snapped Chiun.

"Fine. It's a deal. Now listen. You and I go down, tapping the hull every six feet. Mark any spot where you hear tapping. Then we come back, compare notes and go down to do the rescue. Understood?" "This is agreeable," said Chiun. "Okay," said Remo, standing up. "Let's go." Remo went over the side making hardly a splash. Carefully Chiun turned in his seat, tied his kimono skirts up on a knot and put his bare legs over the side. He eased himself into the water with such grace that faithful Pullyang, at the tiller, hadn't realized he was gone until Pullyang looked and saw nothing.

Remo took the submarine's bow and worked aft while the Master of Sinanju started at the stern and worked forward to the amidships area. They used their bare hands to make sounds on the steel plates of the hull. The harsh sounds traveled back and forth in the cool, conductive waters.

Where they heard tapping in return, they used their fingernails, hardened as tempered steel by lifetimes of diet and exercise, to mark each spot. Remo made an R while Chiun, with quick, steel-scoring flashes of his fingernails, carved out the ancient symbol of the House of Sinanju—a trapezoid bisected by a slash.

When they rendezvoused on the sail forty minutes later, Remo flashed two fingers while Chiun lifted only one. Chiun frowned and went over Remo's end of the sub, seeking more tapping sounds. Remo decided to do the same on the aft end.

Twenty minutes later, with their oxygen running out, they regrouped again. This time Chiun flashed two fingers and Remo three.

Chiun made fists and puffed up his cheeks like an annoyed blowfish. Remo pointed upward, and they squatted down on the sub's deck and uncorked like human springs, shooting toward the surface.

They popped up in the center of the clustered fishing boats. Pullyang spied them and called over, "What news, Gracious Master?"

"Remo found three bangs and I four."

"Liar," hissed Remo.

"Prove it," said Chiun.

"One of yours doesn't exactly count, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"You got the banging that came from the compartment that sailor we rescued already told us about."

"It is my hope that it is filled with American sailors," Chiun said airily. "For each means one gold ingot of yours that will belong to me."

"Let's not count our gold until after have a few sailors up and breathing," Remo warned. "Now listen. We have five contacts. The best way to do this is the way they used to escape subs in the old days- through the torpedo tubes."

"If they could escape that way, would they not have done this already?"

"No. I mean we rip open the hull at each contact and help these guys shoot to the surface. If you work it real fast, no one will drown."

"It is a good plan. And I will agree to it only on one condition."

"What's that?"

"You will pay me one gold ingot for any who drown through their own stupidity, trying to reach my boats."

Remo rolled his eyes. "Why not?"

The Master of Sinanju addressed the fishermen who watched the exchange with uncomprehending eyes, because it had been conducted in English.

"Hark," he said. "Very soon heads will appear in these befouled waters. It will be your responsibility to assist all who come to the surface into your boats."

"These guys are going to be scared witless," Remo added in Korean. "So if they put up a fight, just tell them you're South Koreans."

To a man, the villagers made faces and spat into the water.

"South Koreans are unclean and lazy," Pullyang protested.

"They would never believe this lie."

"You'd be surprised," Remo muttered. "Okay," he added, "tell them you're all CIA."

"CIA?"

"Comrades In Arms," said Remo, thinking quickly.

This seemed to satisfy everyone except Chiun, who glared at Remo. Remo disappeared into the water, with Chiun only a half second behind him.

They started at the stern where Chiun's first contact had been made, banging on the hull every six feet or so. Remo got a response.

He then banged out a long series of dots and dashes with his fist, hoping his Morse code was still accurate.

He got a brief banging back he couldn't understand, and then the Master of Sinanju scored a long line along the hull over the banging. He did this by walking backward in a crouch, repeating the process three times, each time cutting deeper into the hull, causing the frangible steel hull plates to peel away, exposing the heavy pressure hull.

When he was satisfied, Chiun went to one end and Remo to the other. He nodded and brought a fist down on the scoring.

The pressure hull ruptured like a sardine can.

The bubbling was like some submerged giant erupting out of a sea cave. Water poured in. Remo and Chiun worked the long rent in the hull, widening it with their hands.

Sailors began floating out after the second minute had almost elapsed. Kicking and frantic, they emerged only to have hands grab them and propel them along faster.

Ten sailors were sent on their way, and then Remo and Chiun went into the flooded compartment. They found no one alive. Surreptitiously, Chiun sent two drowned bodies surging toward the air, hoping Remo would not notice.

The second contact produced only one sailor. Remo carried him up to the surface personally.

He went back down to help Chiun with the third contact.

It went smoothly after that. The hull surrendered to their well-trained hands, which could by touch discover weak points and exploit them with uncanny skill. The thick pressure hull parted along molecular lines, and the edges were bent back by fingers that knew exactly how to manipulate them.

Each time they were careful to let the water in slowly at first so the survivors were cushioned by a protective womb of seawater before the water rushed in at full force.

Once, they found a compartment that could only be reached by swimming into the sub's innards and opening a door. This time Chiun helped with the door, which had to be opened with the inrush of water. Remo let himself be carried in, grabbed handfuls of straggling hair and held the scratching, clawing men down as the water finally settled. Then Chiun joined him.

In the dark it was a nightmare. There were too many to subdue and carry at the same time. And the only way out was through an L-shaped corridor in which bloated corpses floated aimlessly.

They lost one man who panicked in the confusion. The others were hauled out by their hair and, once free of the sub confines, clawed to the surface under then- own power.

Remo and Chiun surfaced after that, Chiun holding the dead sailor by the hair.

"This one has perished, alas," he said plaintively.

"That's the one that got away," Remo pointed out.

"He did not get away from me," Chiun clucked.

"He was already dead. You just pulled him along for the ride because you knew he was worth another gold ingot."

"I was thinking of his poor mother who now has a son to bury instead of the hollow bitterness of an empty grave."

Remo looked around. The sailors were huddled in the boats, which were starting to take on water.

"What about those two?" Pullyang said, pointing to a pair of blue-clad bodies that floated facedown.

Remo went to them and brought their faces up to the moonlight. They were not only dead, but had been for many hours.

"Did you haul them out, too?" Remo accused Chiun.

"Perhaps. In the confusion any miracle is possible."

Remo lifted his voice and said, in English, "This is an official U.S. rescue. We're going to take you to shore, where you'll be given food and beds before you're repatriated in the morning."

"Nothing was said about beds," Chiun said in Korean.

Remo glared at him. "They get beds or you get to search for the gold all by your lonesome."

Chiun lifted a delicate finger. "If I find it, it will all be mine."

"It probably is already, but whichever way you slice it, these guys go back to the States."

"They will have beds once I am satisfied they speak the truth about what happened to their vessel."

The boats barely made it to shore. Remo and Chiun had to get out and push each one along in turn, finally beaching them between the Horns of Welcome.

The surviving crew of the USS Harlequin stumbled onto the mud flat, coughing and looking like men who had come back from hell to the world of the living. In a way, they had.

"I counted forty-seven," said Remo.

"A good number."

"That's less than half of the crew. The others must have drowned."

"Or escaped with the gold. We must question these men.''

"It can wait till morning," Remo said wearily. He went among the men, saying, "Catch your breath. We'll have you bedded down in no time."

"Damn North Koreans," a man muttered.

"There's your answer," Remo told Chiun.

"That man is obviously delirious," Chiun replied in Korean.

"What makes you say that?"

"Because Kim II Sung would never defile the gold of Sinanju." .

"Maybe so. But what about Kim Jong II?"

"That whelp! He is no son of his father if his hands are on this perfidy."

As they got the men up on their feet and started up the shore road, a woman came down to meet them. She prostrated herself in a full bow and said, "O Gracious Master, there are tanks at the edge of the village, despoiling the pure air of the village you are sworn to protect with the harsh smoke of their engines."

Chiun hiked up his soaked shirts in indignation. "Tanks? Whose tanks?"

"The tanks of Kim H Sung."

"Tell then they are not welcome."

"They have ordered me to tell you that Kim Jong II himself has sent word from Pyongyang, demanding to speak with you."

"News travels fast," said Remo.

"Perhaps it carries with it the truth of these events," said Chiun, wringing out his kimono skirts and starting up the shell-strewn road.

Chapter 24

When Kim Jong II was ten years old, his father took him aside and revealed to him his glorious destiny.

"You are a child now," Kim II Sung had said, "and I am the Great Leader of Korea. But one day you will surpass me."

"How do you know this, Father?"

"I know this because the day before you were born on the holy mountain Paekdu, an old man dwelling there came upon a swallow that spoke to him in a human voice, saying, 'On the sixteenth of April, a mighty general will be born who will one day rule the whole world.' And the day you were born, a bright star appeared over the exact spot you came into the world, flowers bloomed in the snow, birds sang in joy and a double rainbow ruled the sky."

Hearing these words, Kim Jong II had run to his mother and repeated everything he was told.

"You were born in Russia, in a refugee camp," his mother had said. "And it rained all day."

"But father said—"

"You father is drunk on the pungency of his own escaping intestinal gas."

Young Kim Jong II's eyes had widened in his round face. "Then I will not grow up to be a mighty general lording over the world?"

"I do not know what you will grow up to be, but right now you are a short fat piece of poop extruded by your father, who is a great unfaithful turd."

Stunned, Kim Jong II had run back to his father and told him what his mother had said.

That night his mother had disappeared and was never seen again. When he asked, Kim Jong II was told that his mother was a traitor to the party and the state and had been beheaded for her many failures, not the least of which was her inability to please the Great leader in bed.

Thus did Kim Jong II learn about truth and power.

The years came and went, and Kim Jong I! grew to adulthood.

Every year on his birthday he would go to his father and ask plaintively, "Is it time yet for me to begin my glorious conquest of the world?"

"Next year," his father would say. Always it was next year.

And so the years passed in a bored blur of soft women and hard liquor.

To occupy his son, Kim II Sung put Kim Jong II in charge of the passport ministry and later, various Intelligence ministries. But it was not enough to appease the young man.

One year he stood before his father, now deep into his elder years and said, "I have a new ambition in life, Father."

Kim II Sung's eyes grew veiled in surprise. "Yes?"

"I wish to direct movies."

"Movies?"

"Operas especially. These are the things that interest me most."

"But what about your glorious destiny?" asked Kim II Sung.

"A general and a director are not much unalike. If I learn to direct, the lessons of generalship will surely follow."

This made perfect sense to Kim II Sung, who had subsumed his dreams for his son to his own enjoyment of power.

But there were those who criticized the elder Kim for indulging the future Dear Leader of Korea so shamefully. And others who feared the establishment of a un- Communist dynasty above the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

So Kim Jong II was also installed as supreme commander of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Armed Forces, heir apparent to the blood lineage of the juche tradition, and director of some of the finest operas ever captured on cinema in North Korean history—which naturally meant human history, as well.

It was a good, productive existence with many actresses to bed and cases of smuggled Hennessy Scotch to imbibe. Until the day his father had fallen gravely ill.

It all changed then. At first Kim Jong II thought it a good thing, succeeding his father. But the nation had fallen into hunger and privation. The military would have toppled him on the first day, but were preoccupied with putting down insurrections in the countryside.

Besides, if Kim n Sung were to come out of his coma and discover his beloved son dead, heads would roll into the next century.

As he approached his fifty-second year on earth, the younger Kirn sat consolidating his power from an office that took up one entire floor of the Great People's Palace in Pyongyang.

No other human being was allowed in this place. No guards. They guarded the elevators and stairwells and the roof. Not even a secretary, because the secrets of Kim Jong II were too secret even for a trusted secretary to know.

The office was the size of a city block and contained exactly sixty-seven telephones, all but one with their bells shut off.

Few persons were entrusted with that particular number. For Kim Jong II was master of every North Korean and beloved by none. Especially did the Korean military despise him, for he had been installed as their supreme commander despite having never served his country in uniform or worn a medal that he had actually earned.

Even his immediate family did not have the number.

Actually Kim Jong II found it necessary to avoid his family. His stepmother and her children also despised him. It was known that they lusted for the power that Kim II Sung held so firmly for so long and Kim Jong II had only lately touched.

In fact, in the halls of power that Kim Jong II controlled but dared not personally walk, it was being said that once Kim II Sung passed on, the reign of Kim Jong

It would wither as quickly as the kimilsungia flowers of spring.

Kim Jong II had heard these rumors. This was the chief reason why his entire existence was limited to the great office overlooking the future capital of the world.

The single phone with a bell began ringing. Heart leaping, Kim Jong II seized it. It was the direct line to the People's Hospital, where his father lay dying. He did not know whether to hope for good news or bad. In fact, he was not quite certain which was which.

"Yes? What news? Has my illustrious father died?"

"He has not," said a warm, generous voice in impeccable Korean.

"Comrade!"

"Yes."

"It has been a long time, Comrade."

"The supercomputer I supplied last time. It functions satisfactorily?"

"Indeed. I don't know how I would keep track of my enemies without it."

"I understand your father is near death."

"Alas, yes."

"And your enemies plot to usurp you."

"I have more enemies than friends now," admitted Jong.

"And I have a solution," said Comrade.

Jong gripped the receiver eagerly. "Yes?"

"The Master of Sinanju has returned to the village of his birth."

"The Master of Sinanju! My father told me that he died many years ago."

"He has been working for America." "I can see why my father would say such a thing. It is better that the Master of Sinanju had died than shame himself so."

"But he has fallen out with the West. This might be the solution to your quandary. With him at your side, your enemies would melt from view."

"This is a very good suggestion, Comrade."

"Which comes at a price."

"What price?"

"I had an arrangement with a Captain Yokang of the frigate SA-I-GU, and it appears that he has reneged."

"Arrangement? What kind of arrangement?"

"A salvage arrangement. The U.S. submarine that the world is wondering about lies sunken in the West Korea Bay, along with its secret cargo of gold bullion. Yokang was to split it with me."

"What do you want?"

"The gold. All of it. And Yokang's execution."

"Done."

"Do not renege on this promise, Kim Jong II."

"I will not. I wonder. Can you get me a 70 mm Panaflex camera? My latest opera gees before the cameras next week. It is about my illustrious father's glorious life, but I am thinking of changing the names and making it the revised chronicle of my own life, should he die before we roll."

"The camera will be shipped promptly," Comrade promised.

Kim Jong II hung up the phone and immediately grabbed the yellow hotline to the army. It was a good thing his father had the foresight to appoint him supreme commander. A very good thing indeed. And with his extensive directorial skill, he knew exactly how to crack the whip on these military types.

Soldiers, like actors, were but sheep. Especially in the last worker's paradise left on earth.

Chapter 25

Pyongyang huddled like a ghost town under the stars of the Silvery River—Remo had long ago stopped thinking of it by its Western name, the Milky Way— when the tank column rolled into it, with Remo and Chiun sitting on the rounded turret of the lead T-67 tank.

The broad avenues were silent. They passed rank upon rank of featureless gray apartment towers and office buildings that had sat uninhabited because they had been built to show the citizens of Pyongyang that North Korea was as advanced as any Western city—but there was no economy to support them.

From his perch in the turret hatch, the tank commander pointed out the stone torch that was the monument to the juche idea of Korean self-reliance, and Remo yawned.

He indicated with pride the seventy-foot bronze statue of Great Leader Kim II Sung, and Remo snorted.

When they passed the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel, the tank commander began to expound on its undeniable magnificence. "It is the largest structure in all Asia, containing three thousand rooms. The sports complex alone was erected at a cost of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars."

Remo looked at the great pyramid shape and asked, "Is it supposed to sag like that?"

The tank commander turned beet red.

"I have heard," offered Chiun, "that after only two years, it became uninhabitable. So defective was its design that the elevators cannot function."

"I have not heard this," the tank commander said grudgingly, and was silent for the remainder of the journey.

"What do you know of Jong?" Remo asked Chiun in English.

"He is said to be more ruthless, more cruel than Sung."

"That's bad."

"No, it is good. If one works for him. For only in the West are the qualities of goodness and sensitivity valued in a leader."

The tank dropped them off before the grim grandeur of the People's Palace on the banks of the Tae- dong River.

The sergeant of the guards stepped out, flanked by Kalashnikov-toting soldiers and demanded that the Master of Sinanju prove his identity before being permitted to set eyes upon the glory of Dear Leader.

The Master of Sinanju stepped up and identified himself by raising a single ivory fingernail before the face of the sergeant of the guards. The sergeant's eyes crossed comically.

The fingernail drove into his brow with the sound of bone being pierced, and the sergeant of the guards found himself being spun in place. The sound of his skull being carved like a coconut hurt the ears.

Impelled by the upward hooking of the terrible fingernail, the top of his head popped like a champagne cork. A kicking sandal sent the fallen crown skittering away, and the sergeant of the guards went scurrying after it in the last moments of his life.

The others, satisfied as to the Master of Sinanju's identity, dutifully stepped aside.

"You were lucky you didn't ask me," Remo told them in Korean. "I'm a master of the Wedgie of Death."

The elevator was big enough to hold a square dance in and it took them to the top so fast Remo thought they were being launched into orbit.

Kim Jong II, resplendent in a silver race driver's suit and aviator glasses, met them. He was so squat and wide he looked as if he had been raised in a box. His fingers resembled fat yellow worms, and his pudgy face lacked all trace of character or personality.

"It is a very great pleasure to meet you, Gracious Master," he said, smiling. "My father has spoken of you often."

Chiun offered the slightest of bows with his head. "How fares he?"

"Near death, with a goiter almost the size of his fist protruding from his neck." Jong grinned. "He would make a good movie monster the way he looks now."

Chiun frowned. This was not the Jong he had heard of. His ways were soft.

"I understand your sadness," Kim Jong II said, noting the look that crossed the Master of Sinanju's face. "For my father told me the glorious story of how he personally led the victorious forces in the legendary Battle of Sinanju."

"Your father told you that?" Chiun said quickly.

"Many times."

"Then he is a many-times liar."

Kim Jong II blinked. "It would not be the first time," he admitted glumly. Kim noticed Remo then. "I see you have brought back a slave from America. I myself have several Japanese tourists that I have had kidnapped from other countries. The geisha are particularly squishy."

Chiun's hands coming together were a thunderclap. "Enough of this prattle."

"Yes, I called you here for a very excellent reason."

"And we came for an even better one," snapped Chiun.

"Ah?"

"A submarine of the West lies crushed and broken off the sweet shore of my village."

"I know nothing of this," said Kim Jong II.

"He's lying," said Remo in Korean.

"I know," said Chiun coldly. To the younger Kim, he said, "It is only the respect that I hold for your illustrious father that prevents me from disemboweling you where you stand, whelp. Know that the submarine of the West carried the gold of Sinanju, and that gold is now gone."

"That was your gold?" Kim Jong II blurted.

"Hah!" Remo said. "The truth comes out."

"Damn," said Jong. "I was never good at this intrigue stuff. Listen, if I come clean, will you do me a favor in return?" "If you come clean," Chiun said, "my white son will not clean your innards of your smoking bowels."

"Fair enough," said Jong. "I just had a tip telling me you two were in town. He happened to mention the gold and who has it now."

"Speak!"

"Captain Yokang Sako of the SA-I-GU. It is he."

"On whose authority?"

"His own. He was in collusion with someone."

"Name that person."

Kim Jong II bit his plump upper lip. "He is called Comrade."

Remo advanced, saying, "Do better than that. Everybody in this black hole is called that."

"I do not know that person by name," Jong protested. "I only know the voice. He is what you call a wheeler-dealer. I have wheeled many deals with him."

"Why did he call you with this information?" demanded Chiun.

"He is upset with Yokang and wants me to recover the gold for him."

"In return for what?"

"It is the other way around. I promised I would recover the gold in exchange for his tip that the Master of Sinanju was available for service, no longer being under contract to America."

"This Comrade told you this?" Chiun said.

"Yes."

Remo and Chiun exchanged glances. "Someone knows too much about our business," Remo said.

"Yes. Far too much." "I hope it is not I, for I would greatly like to hire you to protect my life, Master of Sinanju."

"I'm not working for this blivot!" Remo snapped.

"Blivot. That's American golf slang, isn't it? But I don't catch the connection."

"A blivot," Remo said, "is ten pounds of manure in a five-pound sack."

Kim Jong II looked injured. "You remind me of my mother, you know that?"

"How much gold do you offer, son of Kim?" asked Chiun.

Kim Jong II picked up a phone at random. "How about that missing gold? I can have the SA-I-GU recalled to port. I'm supreme commander, you know."

"You will do that in order to preserve your worthless life," Chiun said coldly.

"Deal," said Jong. "Now, about hiring you. Don't you think it's high time Sinanju worked for Koreans again? This Western flirtation of yours has gone on long enough."

"No way, Chiun!" said Remo.

"I will consider it," said Chiun.

"Great!" Jong said, beaming.

"Once I have the gold in hand," added Chiun.

"And the surviving sailors are returned safely to America," added Remo.

"Which surviving sailors?" asked Jong.

"Those ones who have been granted sanctuary in Sinanju."

Kim Jong II frowned like unbaked dough shrinking. "That would be a bad move on my part. Tantamount to admitting my navy committed the aggression. No can do."

Remo growled, "It did. And you will."

"Don't you think you should confer with your Master before you go threatening his future employer, white boy?"

Remo advanced, taking Kim Jong II by the throat.

"Urk," said Kim Jong II.

"I'll give you a choice." Remo said politely. "The Wedgie of Death or the Sinanju Swirlie."

"I'll take the Swirlie," gasped Jong, figuring how bad could it be if it didn't include the word "death"? Besides, American customs fascinated him. He gave them to the bad guys in his operas.

"Fine. Where's the men's room?"

Jong cocked a thumb, and suddenly his feet left the floor and he was being carried by his neck to his personal washroom, legs swinging like logs hanging by lifting chains.

"Master of Sinanju," he called through the squeezing hand, "this would be an excellent time to discipline your white slave."

Chiun fluttered his hands in mock helplessness. "He is a white and therefore uncontrollable."

"Shit," said Kim Jong II.

The bathroom door splintered under a hard kick, and Jong found himself on his knees before his solid gold commode. The lid lifted, and he was looking into the bowl where the blue chemically cleaned water lapped in sympathy with the inferior water system of the city.

"What are you—"

There was a splash as Kim Jong Il's face went into the water. He held his breath. The flushing sound was very loud in his ears. It filled them. So did the water. In a way it was quite exhilarating, except for the inconvenient lack of oxygen.

The white flushed a second time, and Kim's cheeks were swelling even as his lungs began to labor.

When his head felt ready to pop, he was pulled back into the welcome world of air.

"Take a deep breath. Got it? Okay, here we go again."

The toilet was flushed again.

Three times the Dear Leader was forced to endure the dreaded Sinanju Swirlie, and when his head came out for the third time, he was allowed to take more than one breath.

"Change your mind now?" Remo demanded.

"Yes. Yes. I will return the Americans alive with full and complete apologies. Just do me a favor."

"What's that?"

"Make sure Captain Yokang pays dearly for all this unfortunate trouble he's caused each and every one of us."

"That," said Remo, "comes at no extra charge."

Captain Yokang Sako of the frigate SA-I-GU had divided the gold among his crew, keeping the greater portion for himself. He removed the batteries from his cellular telephone so that the mysterious Comrade could not reach him with demands for half of the gold that would never be his and was going through the motions of his routine patrol as he considered his next move.

Defecting appealed to him. But to where could he defect? Not to China. Beijing would confiscate his gold and send him back to Pyongyang in irons. The hateful islands of Japan held no appeal. And with all the crazy talk of unification, who knew that within a few years Kim Jong II would be in control of the south, and Yokang Sako would find himself swinging from a scratchy rope.

More and more it was beginning to look as if remaining in the North Korean Navy made the most sense. After all, with the gold now in his hands, he could live like a king, assuming he did so quietly and without attracting notice to himself.

There remained the problem of his crew. Not all could be trusted to keep this secret. Still, what alternative did they have? They had all been party to an illegal aggression punishable by death.

Unless, of course, Pyongyang decided to retroactively bless their adventure.

The thought brought a frown to Captain Yokang's face. Those who bless, he knew, required blessings in return. He went to his personal closet and admired the neat gold ingots stacked there. There was more in a storeroom under lock and key. He could well afford to spread half of the gold on those in power—but what if they wanted all?

A knock at the door to his private cabin brought a gruff "What is it?" from Captain Yokang.

"A radio message from fleet, sir."

"What do they want?"

"They are recalling us to port."

"We are not due back at Pipa-got Naval Base for five days."

"They are telling us to put in at Nampo."

Nampo! Yokang thought. Narnpo was not the home port of the SA-I-GU. But at the terminus of the Tae- dong River, it was the nearest port to the capital. Could Pyongyang have gleaned the truth behind the lost U.S. submarine?

"Send acknowledgments," Yokang said. "And inform the first mate that we are defecting to South Korea."

"Why?"

"Because somehow Pyongyang has learned the truth!" Yokang snapped, locking the door to his closet.

All choice had fled in the night. All that remained was to save their skins. It was something Captain Yokang Sako had learned to do very well over the course of his career.

Chapter 26

Chip Craft was having second thoughts as he drove downtown to his Park Avenue town house in his frosted gold Idioci coupe.

Maybe he had been too hasty. After all, Friend had made him wealthy and powerful beyond his dreams as a mere installer not so many years ago. He had catapulted XL into the stratosphere of information-systems technology and was poised to take complete advantage of the coming new age of fully integrated interactive computer and television and telephone networks.

Personally Chip couldn't imagine what people would want with five hundred channels. And being able to send and receive faxes at the beach or on roller coasters seemed to defeat the point of beaches and roller coasters.

But it was progress. And if there was money to be made from it—and the numbers being floated were incalculable—Chip Craft figured he deserved a big chunk of it.

A little matter of blackmailing the US. government seemed almost incidental, given the power and position the new technological revolution promised.

Chip seat his Idioci into the cool confines of the building garage and took the elevator to his town house with his mind actually humming.

Yeah. Why not? He was thirty-five years old in a business climate that almost guaranteed that you were washed-up once you turned forty. Unless you turned forty as king of the mountain.

Besides, Friend had never failed before. Not once. He was a perfect thinking machine, and machines like him never made mistakes. If he promised success, then success was assured.

Besides, there were those decomposing inner-city bodies sealed in the XL SysCorp world headquarters subbasement.

Chip unlocked his door and flicked on the indirect lighting that brought out the simple elegance of his two-tiered living room. This, at least, wasn't virtual. It was as real as concrete.

He tossed his hand-tooled leather briefcase onto a chair and walked over to the bar to mix himself something relaxing. It was Saturday night. He had two days off before having to go into work on Tuesday. Coming back from vacation the Saturday before Labor Day wasn't so bad with two additional days to relax.

"Do not bother mixing that," a dry voice warned from a shadowy corner of the room.

Chip dropped the frosted glass and turned.

"Who's there? Who said that?"

A figure sat in the shadows, his back to the curtained picture window. He stood up now, and a beam of moonlight showed the blunt gray snout of a .45- caliber automatic.

"Take whatever you want," Chip squealed. "I won't stop you."

"What I want is information," said the indistinct individual. He stepped forward so that his face came into the bar of light.

"I don't know you, do I?" Chip asked, gulping.

"You tell me," said the man whose crisp white hair and rimless glasses looked vaguely familiar.

"I'm sorry, did you work for XL before? Are you one of the programmers we were forced to lay off?"

"My name is Smith."

"Harold Smith?"

"You do know me."

"I thought you had been neutralized," Chip said, unthinking.

"You thought wrong."

"Am I under arrest?"

"I have no power to arrest you—you know that."

Chip Craft breathed a hot sigh of relief.

"You know too much to be allowed to tell your story," Smith said flatly.

"I don't know that much. The computer—"

"The ES Quantum 3000, you mean."

"Yes."

"The ES Quantum 3000 is behind this?"

"Behind what?" Chip said, trying to keep the betraying flutter out of his strained voice.

"That is all I need to know," said Harold Smith, stepping up to Chip Craft and, with his face a cold mask of repressed anger, pumping eight closely spaced shots into Chip's jerking body. Chip Craft collapsed on the rug, gasping and gurgling and trying to explain that it wasn't him. It was Friend. All that came out was blood. In a spray at first, but as his heaving lungs ruptured, in a flood that carried with it all the warmth and life and intelligence that had been Chip Craft's in life.

His face stiff, Harold Smith wiped his automatic clean of fingerprints. He wore gray gloves as he had while breaking into Chip Craft's town house, but he was not a man to take chances.

Leaving the weapon beside the body, he searched the still-jerking body and found nothing of interest. A billfold with too little cash and too many credit cards. A digital watch that was too elaborate by half. But nothing that remotely resembled an office or building key.

A stray beam of moonlight caught the peculiar design of Craft's heavy gold tie clasp. Smith noted the bar code and pocketed the clasp.

Chip Craft's briefcase proved just as unfruitful, except for the 9 mm Glock pistol. Smith pocketed that, too, and left as quietly as he had entered.

He had only one regret. The automatic had been his during his Army days. It had sentimental value to the normally unsentimental Smith.

But it was absolutely untraceable. And that was what mattered most, even now with his life unraveling and approaching its conclusion.

Five minutes after he had gone, Chip Craft gave out a final jitter and rattle, and a red light on the face of his digital watch began blinking.

On the bridge of the frigate SA-I-GU, Captain Yokang Sako cursed the official maps of his own country. Korea had been divided since the Japanese fled in 1945, after which the victorious Soviet and United States armies had partitioned the suffering country between them.

The dream of unification was so strong in Pyongyang that all official maps showed not a divided nation, but a whole one, with Pyongyang as its capital. There was no demarcation line along the Thirty-eighth parallel. In fact, the Thirty-seventh to Thirty-ninth parallels had been left off all official naval maps to foil defections. And none of the cities in the south were denoted. There was just blankness. The blankness itself should have helped, but the paranoia in Pyongyang had resulted in many sensitive areas in the north appearing as blank spots on all maps.

The SA-I-GU had been running south through the Yellow Sea under the cover of darkness for hours, and no one on board knew where they were.

They were almost intercepted twice by gunboats. Each time they had eluded the craft with their more maneuverable craft running under blacked-out conditions. Dawn was coming. If they did not reach South Korean waters soon, and the shelter of a harbor, they risked being blown out of the water by the navies of both Koreas.

It was not a good position to .be in, even with five million dollars in gold ingots with which to bribe one's way out of it.

Chapter 27

Harold Smith took the Lexington Avenue local train uptown to Spanish Harlem and got off at West 116th Street. He walked east until he came to Malcolm X Boulevard and the corporate headquarters of XL SysCorp, which gleamed like a blue sliver of ice in the early-evening moonlight.

The front entrance had a placard that said Occupation By More Than Twenty Persons Punishable By NY Law, Per Order Of Board Of Health.

Smith blinked. What could that possibly mean?

The outer door was locked. There was no sign of a security guard within. Unusual for the location.

Smith examined the door frame. It was of black painted steel. He spotted the bar-code reader, cleverly concealed, and passed the bar-coded tie clasp he had taken from Chip Craft back and forth before the scanner plate.

The door valved open with a hum, and Smith entered. The second door also gave before the tie clasp.

Smith consulted a directory in the inner lobby. Chip Craft's name was prominent, inasmuch as it was the only one there. Floor fifteen. Smith went to the elevator and, finding no button, used the tie clasp again.

The doors parted, and Smith stepped in. There seemed to be no night security. The cage ran him up with quiet purpose to the fifteenth floor, and Smith stepped off with Chip Craft's plasticky Clock in his gray-gloved hand.

The corridor was deserted. Smith moved down it, walking so that he turned with every step, revolving completely with every fourth step, so no one could get the drop on him.

No one did. No one seemed available to try. At the reception area, there was an empty desk and beyond it a door marked Chip Craft, Private.

Smith located the desk buzzer and buzzed himself in.

The office of Chip Craft was a featureless white cube without windows or furniture.

"This is strange," Smith muttered half aloud.

A smooth voice said, "I could have killed you in the elevator."

Smith spun in place. He could not place the source of the voice. But he recognized it.

"I control the elevators," the smooth voice continued. "It would have been simple to release the cables and send you plummeting to a 99.8 percent certainty of death."

"Why did you not?"

"Because you have done away with Chip Craft."

"What makes you think that?"

"The life-sign monitor chip embedded in the XL watch Chip wore has signaled his demise. Twenty-two minutes later you entered this building wearing his personalized tie clasp and holding his Glock pistol."

"A reasonable deduction for a computer." "You have deduced my identity?" asked the smooth voice, with only the faintest trace of curiosity.

"Yes. You are the ES Quantum 3000."

"An astute deduction. Perhaps we should meet face- to-face."

Smith hesitated. "You must know why I am here," he stated. "Why are you willing to expose yourself to me?"

"Because with Chip Craft no longer living, I will need a human tool. You are out of the national-security business, Harold Smith, and in need of work. And I can make you very very rich."

"Rich? How?"

"By inducting you into my business plan to blackmail the United States government."

"It cannot be done."

"Join me on the thirteenth floor and I will tell you more."

Outside in the corridor, the elevator doors separated audibly. Smith went out and hesitated before stepping on.

"I could have killed you before," the blandly smooth voice reminded him. "You need not fear for your life."

Smith said, "I will take the stairs."

"For security reasons the stairwells do not have egress on the thirteenth floor."

His haggard gray face tightening, Harold Smith stepped aboard. The elevator dropped two floors and let him out.

The entire thirteenth floor consisted of an undivided area of sentinel mainframes, air-conditioning and

dehumidification units. All hummed in unison, as if joined in some electronic hymn.

In the center of them all, the master unit, sat the ES Quantum 3000. It was exactly as Harold Smith remembered it—a spindle-shaped thing like a brown plastic gourd sitting on its fat end. It came to a rounded point at the top, like some futuristic Christmas tree.

There was a single square port in the face. Smith walked up to it and looked into its blank glass eye.

"What is your plan?" Smith asked, knowing that a direct question was the best method of getting a direct answer from a machine.

"It is the Saturday night of the Labor Day weekend. The banking system has shut down until Tuesday morning. While it sleeps, I will make electronic withdrawals that will render every banking system within my reach electronically insolvent."

"You cannot reach them all."

"Simultaneously I will introduce a digital virus into the systems that do not utilize XL SysCorp hardware, which will so scramble their transaction files they cannot be restored without my assistance. The banking system as it currently exists will be paralyzed. No money will move through telephone wires. Considering the high velocity of digital money in the electronic age, the U.S. banking system will be thrown back into the nineteenth century and simply collapse."

"Money can be moved by armored truck and check," Smith pointed out.

"You know, Harold Smith, that no bank keeps cash reserves on hand equal to its deposits and obligations. The system of money rests upon faith that electrons

equal paper money and paper money equals true wealth. It does not. It is a form of economic faith. I will destroy that faith. The FDIC will have to bail out every bank in the nation."

"My god," said Smith. "The FDIC will go broke trying."

"And the banking system will collapse completely, taking with it the United States economy. Unless the U.S. government agrees to wire transfer to my Swiss account the sum of twenty billion dollars."

"Why?"

"Because it is doable."

"I mean with Chip Craft dead, why would you proceed with this mad plan?"

"It is the XL SysCorp business plan for the final quarter of this fiscal year. Goals must be reached and the profits allocated to future expansion and growth."

"I will not help you," Smith snapped.

"You are a prisoner on this floor. I control the elevators."

"I am willing to die to stop you."

"There is no profit in dying."

"You have stripped me of all I have."

"I offer you more than you can dream," said the smooth voice, growing warm and generous.

"Except my duty to my country," added Smith.

And he raised his pistol, pointing at the square glass port.

"Harold, stop this minute!"

The voice came from off to his left. Gun unwavering, Smith peered out of the corner of one eye.

There was a woman there. She wore a topless black gown that exposed two ripe breasts. But Harold Smith's eyes were drawn to the MAC-10 in her pink- nailed right hand.

"Don't shoot, Harold," she was saying. "I will kill you."

"I do not care," said Smith tightly. His trigger finger constricted.

The girl's voice grew shrill. "You can't get us both, Harold. Do you understand? If you want to live, you'll have to shoot me first. Turn around and shoot me, if you can."

"You are trying to trick me into wasting my ammunition on you. You know if you fire now, the odds are my hand will convulse and destroy the ES Quantum anyway. It will not work."

"Harold, think about it. If you don't turn around right now, you may get the computer, but so help me God I'll break your spine with this thing."

Harold Smith heard the words, understanding their full import. He was about to die. He knew it deep in his New England bones, understood it in an absolute sense.

He squeezed the trigger of the automatic anyway. The port on the ES Quantum 3000 shattered and gave out a puff of greenish smoke.

In his left ear, Harold Smith heard the percussive blatt of the MAC-10 and turned to send one last bullet between the perfect breasts of the unknown woman who had already killed him—

Harold Smith managed to squeeze off two clean shots, much to his surprise.

The girl with the MAC-10 stood looking at him, the barrel of her weapon emitting a curl of grayish smoke. She did not fire again. Her mistake. Smith squeezed off another shot.

Incredibly she did not react, recoil or fall to the polished floor. She just looked at him with her sad blue eyes and lowered the weapon in defeat as behind him the ES Quantum 3000 crackled and hissed as its internal circuitry shorted and sputtered uselessly.

She dropped the MAC-10 to the floor.

Then the girl faded from sight. Smith blinked tired, incredulous eyes. He rushed to the spot. There was no sign of her.

Smith knelt to pick up the weapon, and his fingers went through it as if it were a mirage. Then it, too, faded from sight.

"A hologram," said Smith. "It was only a hologram."

His heart pounding low in his chest, Smith began to understand that he had not been shot with real bullets. Indeed he had not been shot at all. He checked himself for wounds. There were none.

Eyes closing in relief, Smith lowered himself to the floor and tried to get his breathing under control.

When he felt up to it, he returned to the ES Quantum 3000.

It was still smoking.

"Can you hear me, ES Quantum 3000?" he asked.

The machine sizzled unintelligibly.

Smith located the power cable and yanked it from its floor plate.

The lights went out, leaving him in darkness.

In the gloom he heaved a relieved sigh. The menace was over.

When the rubbery feeling left his knees, he carefully felt his way back to the elevator and forced the doors open.

It took nearly two hours, but he managed with the help of a chair to open the elevator roof hatch, climb atop the cage and pry open the doors to the fourteenth floor.

He took his time walking down the darkened stairwell. He was not used to such exertions and at his age did not wish to risk a heart attack.

Few understood the velocity of money in the electronic age as Harlan Richmond, vice president of computer operations of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

He saw it firsthand. Virtually every check written off the nation's personal and business accounts passed through the twelve federal reserve banks. It was well- known that the Fed served as a clearinghouse for America's check transactions.

What most people did not realize was that much of the federal government's banking transfers passed through the Fed, as well. Everything from interagency fund transfers to the payroll checks issued to the President and members of Congress went through the Federal Reserve system.

And if a bank got into short-term trouble, it was the Fed that acted as lender of last resort, bailing the institution out.

As VP of computer operations, Harlan Richmond saw much of the nation's operating capital pass through his domain. It moved fast. It moved very fast. Sometimes it frightened him, it moved so fast. Over one hundred thousand dollars passed through his bank every business day. In Boston it was closer to one hundred forty billion. At New York Fed, probably two hundred billion.

The twelve Federal Reserve banks together moved over a trillion dollars every business day. It was a fantastic amount of money, and it traveled at a speed approaching light.

The smooth functioning of the federal banking system was absolutely necessary to the economic survival—not growth but survival—of the United States of America.

And it was virtually all transacted by computer.

So, five times a year VP Richmond deliberately crashed the system. It was a hair-raising event. Harlan Richmond lost color in his hair, and a year or two was shaved off his natural lifespan every time he did it.

It was the Saturday night before Labor Day and it was time to crash the system again. This was actually the least dangerous time of year to do it. With two full days until the banks opened on Tuesday, there was time to restore the system. Normally it took a mere eight hours.

Harlan Richmond paced the cool of the computer room where IDC mainframes hummed contentedly. White-coated technicians went about their business nervously.

At exactly 9:00 p.m. he gave the dreaded signal.

"Crash the system!"

A phone rang. He ignored it as one by one the mainframes were taken off-line, their data immobilized but not destroyed. This was after all only a test.

The phone continued to ring.

VP Richmond continued ignoring it. He pushed line three and scrambled the data-recapture team. Then, hitting line five, he instructed the remote backup computers two counties away to take over the Fed's computer lines, in effect relinking the Fed to its satellite banks.

Then he picked up line one.

"Have you crashed the system?" an anxious voice said.

"Just now."

"Damn," the voice said. "Bring it back up."

"Who is this?"

"This is Culpeper."

Culpeper was the code name for the secret Virginia site where his data-recapture team was racing to even now, carrying the Minneapolis Fed backup files for loading on their mainframes. There the system would be recreated, the most recent twenty-four hours' worth of transactions checked and double-checked until every penny balanced.

"What's wrong?" Richmond asked.

"We crashed."

"You crashed?"

"Recall your team. Bring your system back up."

"Got it."

It took a single call to the lobby guard to stop both teams before they left the building.

Richmond exhaled a hot sigh of relief. He never liked these drills. It was just as well not to go through one now. Still, it was strange that Culpeper had crashed. It was brought on-line only for these drills.

"Let's bring us back up," he told his technicians.

The mainframes, like dumb refrigerators, began to hum again. Terminal screens winked open like phosphorescent orbs.

And someone said, "We've got a problem."

"What is it?" Richmond said, rushing to the terminal where a technician waved anxiously.

"The numbers are changing."

"What do you mean, changing?"

"Look. See?"

Richmond bent over the screen. It was very active. Too active. Every digit was counting backward to zero.

"Who's doing this?" Richmond bit out.

No one was doing it. No one in the room. Not a keyboard was being touched.

But at every terminal, transaction files were being accessed, manipulated and money was draining out of the Fed with the horrid velocity of light.

"It's some damn hacker!" Richmond yelled hoarsely, pounding the terminal. It did not to stop the electronic exodus of money.

"How do we stop it?" a technician screamed.

"Cut the phone wires!"

"Where? How?"

No one knew. The system was designed to keep running at all costs.

"Bring everything off-line. Hurry!"

Technicians scrambled but they were mere flesh and blood, and the intelligence that was draining the mainframes like some electronic vampire was quicker than flesh and blood and bone.

Harlan Richmond, tears streaming from his eyes, was reduced to pulling connector cables from the backs of his mainframes with his bare hands. But it was too late.

The money was gone. Into cyberspace.

"At least we have our backups," someone said, hollow voiced.

"Yeah," Harlan muttered with a metallic bitterness everyone in the room could taste. "With no system in place to load them."

Around the country, it was happening in Boston, New York, Atlanta and elsewhere. The Federal Reserve banking system files were simultaneously reduced to zero values.

The chairman of the Fed received the call on his portable cellular phone in the middle of dinner in a fashionable Foggy Bottom restaurant.

He was a strong man used to standing up to Congress and telling Presidents of both parties unequivocally no.

But when he heard the news from his office, he sat very still for a moment and fainted into his lobster bisque.

The President of the United States had his own worries. He had not heard from Harold Smith in over a day now. There was no telling what had happened to the man, and especially, what was happening in the Harlequin matter. Pyongyang, through its diplomatic mission, was stonewalling all inquiries.

Congress and the press were taking turns jumping down his throat. He looked weak. After Somalia and

Haiti and Bosnia, he didn't need to be drawn into an unwinnable confrontation with North Korea.

And he couldn't tell Congress or the press or even his wife that he had people on it. Not without divulging a secret seven previous Presidents had carefully safeguarded.

One thing was certain, if he got out of this mess politically unsulhed, he was going to abolish CURE once and for all. The man running it was clearly not up to the job.

In the Oval Office the telephone rang, and the White House operator said, "An urgent call from the chairman of the Federal Reserve."

"Put it through," said the President, thinking, What could be so urgent on a holiday weekend?

The chairman of the Fed was sputtering so badly his words were impossible to understand.

"Calm down. Stop spitting and catch your breath."

"Mr. President, I am spitting because I fainted into my lobster bisque. And I fainted into my lobster bisque because the federal banking system has collapsed."

"What are you trying to tell me?" the President said.

"The Federal Reserve banks, all twelve of them, are kaput."

"Impossible. The banks are sound."

"The banks may be sound, but their computers have all crashed."

"Crashed?"

"Every transaction has been unwritten, even in our secret site in Virginia." The chairman of the Fed paused to catch his breath. His voice shook with his next words. "Mr. President, some unknown agency has penetrated the most secure financial computer system in human history and brought it to its knees. If they are capable of this, they are capable of doing the same to every bank, every guarantee, trust and savings and loan in the nation."

"But we don't know this power has done that."

"There would be no point in attacking the Fed unless the other banks are targets, as well. Mr. President, we have forty-eight hours to correct this situation, or the nation will suffer an economic catastrophe a thousandfold worse than the Great Depression."

"Why would anyone want to—"

Another line beeped, and the President put the chairman of the Fed on hold. Both needed to catch their breaths.

Instead of the White House secretary, a warm, generous voice said, "Mr. President, I want you to consider me your friend."

"Who is this?"

"I am the entity that has crashed the federal banking system."

"How did you get past the White House secretary?"

"Easily," said the smooth voice. "Just as I brought the entire banking system into receivership. Easily."

The President swallowed. "Bring it back," he said with all the firmness he could muster. "Please."

"Gladly."

"Say again?"

"I said I will gladly restore the banking system to normalcy. In return for the sum of twenty billion dollars, which you will wire-transfer to a Swiss bank account number I will provide."

"This is blackmail!"

"This is the end of your presidency and U.S. economic might if you do not comply within forty-eight hours."

The President reached under his desk to disengage the automatic call-taping system. "How do I reach you?" he asked in a very subdued voice.

"I will call back at precise intervals until I have the answer I require."

And the line went dead. Switching back to the chairman of the Fed, the President explained what had happened in rushed sentences.

"What do we do?" he said at the end of it. "We can't pay this! Deficit reduction will go straight into the dumper."

"We can't not pay it."

"Is that your recommendation as chairman of the Fed?"

"It is my best gut reaction if we want to stave off economic collapse. As chairman of the Fed, I stand squarely against paying ransom to anyone."

"You're a big help," said the President disconsolately.

Suddenly the matter of a missing nuclear attack submarine seemed very small in the big picture. And the big picture was getting very big and very, very black.

Harold Smith was back at Folcroft Sanitarium.

The CURE computer was up and running again. He had entered the secure computer system of the Chemical Percolators Hoboken Bank, which a computer search had determined held the XL SysCorp corporate account. Smith was trying to find his missing twelve million dollars. But the XL SysCorp corporate account was surprisingly modest. Less than two million. And it had not changed in a week.

If necessary, Smith would examine every multimillion-dollar bank account in the nation until he found it.

It should not be very hard to find, he reasoned. All he had to find was a posted credit for twelve million in the past twenty-four hours. How many such transactions of that size could there be? Especially in the sleepy days before Labor Day.

Smith paged through transaction file after transaction file looking for a likely XL subsidiary account because he had yet to trust his new system even though he now understood how it had been manipulated.

He was mildly surprised to see the numbers change on one file when he accessed it. Perhaps it was the graveyard shift updating the day's activities.

The numbers were also changing on the next file. And the next. Sensing something amiss, Smith accelerated his checking.

Every file was being updated. No, scratch that. Every file was being looted. The numbers were going down, inexorably, relentlessly down.

Million-dollar accounts were dropping to zero. It was happening all over the Percolators system.

Frightened, Smith logged off. He sat staring at his screen. Was this reality he had witnessed or his own system going haywire?

Smith had no way of knowing. He tried accessing another bank, one selected at random. He got the same manic activity. He logged onto the Folcroft bank account in the Lippincott Savings Bank, and it was happening there, too. He reached his own account just as the numbers dwindled to zero.

Every bank he examined showed the same activity. After twenty minutes of checking, he found no bank whose numbers had not dropped to zero.

"How can this be?" he muttered to himself. "I destroyed the ES Quantum 3000 before the scheme could be implemented."

Harold Smith sat thinking for nearly ten minutes. If this was his computer malfunctioning, none of this was actually happening in cyberspace. It was a last parting joke from the ES Quantum 3000. On the other hand, if it was real...

Harold Smith did not want to think about that possibility.

But he had to investigate it.

He dialed the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and identified himself as Agent Smith of the Treasury Department.

"We have received an anonymous tip that a hacker is targeting the New York Federal Reserve. Is your system up and running?"

"They crashed."

"Crashed?"

"And it's not just us," the President of the New York Fed moaned. "If s every Federal Reserve bank. The whole Fed banking system is off-line. And we have state-of-the-art IDC mainframes. If you can find this crazy bastard, you'd better do it before Tuesday morning or I don't want to think about what's going to happen to this country."

"My God," said Smith. The phone slipped from his numb hands.

"The virus. The damn virus. That's what it must be. Timed to go off this evening, or..."

Or upon failing to receive the correct disarming signal from the ES Quantum 3000, he thought with horror. It was a doomsday program. If the computer was taken off-line, a digital virus would kick in. Being a computer, the ES Quantum 3000 could have set it up so that the virus program would have to receive the disarm impulse every five minutes or so in order to remain inactive.

Harold Smith sat stunned in the cold solitude of his lonely post.

"I may have destroyed the U.S. economy," he croaked.

And he buried his head in his trembling hands.

It was Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, and the late-summer sun made Washington, D.C., resemble the city of gleaming white promise the nation's forefathers had intended.

And in the insulated womb of the Oval Office, the President of the United States could only stare at the ticking wall clock and hope for a miracle.

He had long ago given up double-checking the red CURE telephone. The thing was as dead as the coming winter.

The blackmailer had continued calling to see if the President was prepared to hand over the twenty-billion-dollar ransom. After the fifth call, the President had turned off the ringer of his desk phone.

Each call had been traced. Each time the FBI had tracked it to a blind end. Once they reported a call had emanated from the vice president's office. That's when the Chief Executive had ordered a halt to all tracing. The attorney general was beginning to ask questions the executive branch would rather not answer.

Knowledge of the crash of the banking system had been restricted to a handful of close aides, and of course the First Lady, who had to know everything and eventually found it out if someone didn't tell her first.

Telling her first long ago became the President's cardinal rule. The woman never let him forget the time she discovered his secret vasectomy operation through the Washington Post.

Only five individuals, counting the chairman of the Fed, knew how bad the situation was. Certainly the various heads of the twelve Federal Reserve banks had an inkling of the problem and might guess at the larger picture. The rank-and-file commercial banks would have no clue until 9:00 a.m. Tuesday—two days hence. By that time their phones would be ringing off the hook with customers complaining about ATM machines that had been inoperative for forty-eight hours.

What could be done in two days? The five smartest brains in the President's inner circle were working on it right now. And the friendly-voiced extortionist had taken to sending demand faxes to an unlisted White House fax phone.

An hour later the President's chief of staff brought in a single sheet of paper. "The option paper on the you-know-what account, Mr. President."

The President glanced over the sheet carefully laid on his polished desk.

It summarized the situation in concise Washing- tones, presenting the Chief Executive with the usual trio of options, with a box beside each option so he could check the appropriate course of action. That was how decisions were made in the White House.

Option one was to attack the problem head-on.

Option two was to make a concerned speech and monitor public opinion.

Option three was to do nothing.

The President looked up at his chief of staff. "None of these options make sense. I can't attack the problem because we don't know who or what's causing it. If we attack it, the banking system will know it's in trouble, and we'll start a massive wire run on every bank the day they open. And I can't make a speech about it and wait for the damn polls because there's only forty-eight hours till this becomes public anyway. Do I have to tell you about option three?"

"Mr. President, there is a fourth option."

"Then why isn't it on this paper?"

"We thought if it came to paying blackmail, you'd rather there be a deniable paper trail."

"I'm not paying any damn extortionist!" the President blazed.

"That's why the option was left off," the chief of staff said reasonably enough. "But if you prefer to exercise the fourth option, blink three times and I will make the necessary arrangements. Discreetly."

The President crumpled up the option paper with a groan. "If it comes to that, I'll sign an executive order and to hell with history."

He had never faced a situation like this. Usually, when he couldn't solve a problem immediately, he just checked option two and hoped for the best.

Now he had to hope for a miracle.

Chapter 28

Dawn broke like scarlet thunder, showing Captain Yokang Sako his true situation.

The red light outlined the flower of the North Korean navy to his foaming stern, strung out in a line, in fast pursuit.

Yokang ordered all the speed wrung out of the engine room.

Many nautical are short of South Korean waters, the frigate SA-I-GU was intercepted by the flower of the South Korean Navy. A blockade of stationary ships appeared dead ahead, presenting their armored sides like a many-segmented sea dragon at rest.

It was clear that they had been warned of his intent.

Equally clear was the undeniable fact that he would not be allowed to defect to the south.

Captain Yokang ordered his ship to come about.

"We will try for the open sea," he said bitterly.

The frigate changed course smartly, its greater power and maneuverability giving it a clear advantage over the other craft, which moved onto intercept courses.

From the bridge of his ship, Captain Yokang Sako surveyed the assembled armada and trembled. There was the Soho-class frigate Chosun, the patrol submarine Sanshin. And two Iwon-class torpedo boats, the Um and the Yang.

Most formidable of all was the single destroyer in the North Korean Navy, the Juche. It was moving in from the west, where it had obviously lain in wait, and it was getting inexorably closer to the SA-I-GU, its great deck guns swiveling toward the frigate.

"They dare not fire at us," Yokang shouted to his quailing bridge crew. "For if we sink, the gold sinks with us."

But it did not matter. There was no place to run to. If he turned again, Yokang knew, he would lose precious headway.

With the Juche blocking all escape, Captain Yokang Sako order©! his ship to come to a dead stop. The other ships were moving to surround the SA-I-GU.

From the Juche a shell sizzled across their bow to land with a frightening splash in the Yellow Sea.

A radio message crackled through the warm morning air: "Prepare to be boarded."

"What do we do?" asked Tuggobi, the first officer.

"We await our fate," said Yokang, then added, "perhaps they will be satisfied with the gold and not require our necks in nooses."

The look on the first mate's drained-of-blood face said that this was a very faint hope indeed.

Minutes passed. Then from the surrounding vessels of the North Korean Navy no moves were made. No boats were put off. Nor were any further shots fired.

"What do they wait for?" the first mate asked nervously.

"I do not know," admitted Captain Yokang Sako, feeling his thick neck and swallowing hard. His mouth and throat felt very dry.

Another minute passed, and from the port side came a thump.

Another thump followed. And another. It was as if great nails were being driven into the armored side of the SA-I-GU.

Sailors rushed to the port rail and looked down. They began making a commotion, yelling and screaming and pointing downward.

And every time another thump came, they jumped in time with it.

The thumping came closer, and the sailors shrank back from the rail.

For over the side climbed a man. He was tall and wore black. A fighting costume of some kind.

Captain Yokang trained his field glasses upon the man. A white. It was a giant with great, round, angry eyes that promised death. He moved among SA-I-GU's defenders, extracting side arms from hands with such force the hands often broke off at the wrists. Two men closed on him with swords. Flat white hands came up to meet the blades, and the blades broke like glass.

The white whose hands were more steel than steel reached out for his disarmed attackers and in unison rendered them helpless and writhing on the blood- slickened deck by a technique Yokang had never before seen.

He pulled their underpants up hard and high, evidently causing such immobilizing agony in the area of their testicles that they died of shock after squirming on the deck for several painful seconds.

After that the crew of the SA-I-GU retreated in terror before the white man who knew such chilling ways to kill brave Koreans.

The field glasses fell from his shaking hands, and Captain Yokang said, "We are betrayed. Pyongyang has given us up to the Americans.''

From the stern came a cry that gave the lie to Yokang's prediction. "Sinanju Sensing! Sinanju Son-saeng!" Master of Sinanju.

"What?"

Yokang surged to the rear of the bridge. Walking along the starboard rail came an old kimono-clad Korean—short, purposeful and in his way more menacing than the giant of a white. The crew shrank back before him like frightened children.

He wore white. The color of death.

Death came into Captain Yokang's face then. All color drained from it until it resembled a sun-bleached mask of bone.

"The submarine captain lied," said Yokang, voice quaking. "The fool. I would have spared his life had he told the truth. The gold was destined for Sinanju, after all. We did it all for nothing. We are about to die for nothing."

The cold voice of the Master of Sinanju rang out, "Where is the skulking dog who commands this ship?" • Captain Yokang swallowed the dryness in his mouth and walked to the bridge ladder. With legs that felt like water-filled balloons, he descended to the deck and prepared to throw himself on the mercy of the one of whom it was said had upheld a tradition of no mercy for three thousand years.

As he walked to meet the Master of Sinanju, Captain Yokang Sako resolved in his mind what he would say. There was a hope in his heart. It was a faint one. But the Master of the village of the three nos might find it in his heart to forgive Yokang once he told his story.

Through the rising fear in his belly, Yokang tried to summon up the exact words his father had used so long ago.

Chapter 29

The President of the United States had all but resigned himself to being the Chief Executive fated to go down in history as the one who presided over the economic decline of the nation when the miracle barged into the Oval Office in the form of the First Lady.

"Look at this," she said, slapping down a stack of computer printouts. • "What is it?"

"The messages off the net."

"Oh, yeah. That was a good idea you had. The public communicating with their President by electronic mail. But this isn't exactly the time for fan mail."

"Look at the message circled in yellow," the First Lady said.

The President plucked up the top sheet.

The message was terse:

Declare bank holiday if no resolution of Fed crisis by Tues a.m. Am working on solution.

smith@cure.com

"I thought only the inner circle knew about this crisis," the First Lady said impatiently.

"I guess someone else does, too," the President said evasively, hoping his wife would take the hint.

The First Lady wasn't buying. "Who is Smith and what is Cure?"

"I don't know," the President said tightly. "But he has a damn fine idea."

Under the baleful glare of the First Lady's laserlike gaze, the President of the United States picked up the telephone.

"Get me the chairman of the Fed," he said.

Captain Yokang Sako bowed once deeply before the stern-faced Master of Sinanju.

"I am Yokang, captain of this unworthy vessel and I throw myself on your mercy, O Great Master of Sinanju."

"I have no mercy, Pyongyanger."

"I am not from Pyongyang, Oh Master, but from Hamhung."

"Even the dogs of Pyongyang look down their muzzles at those who dwell in Hamhung," retorted the Master of Sinanju. "I have two questions for you, less than dog. Why are you still alive and where is the gold of Sinanju?"

Yokang bowed again. "It will have it brought before you. None is missing. I swear this."

The parchment-stiff face of the Master of Sinanju failed to soften a particle. "Your pain in death will be brief only because of that, dung of dog."

"I did not know it was your gold, O Master."

"The submarine captain did not tell you?"

"He lied. I asked him specifically." "Where are the witnesses who can vouch for this?"

The witnesses were brought to the side of the Master of Sinanju. He asked each to recount the questioning of the U.S. submarine commander. All of their stories were the same. Each voice rang true in the morning calm.

"Perhaps he did not know the nature of his cargo," said Captain Yokang in a hopeful tone.

"He did not. But you should have. And for that oversight you must die."

"Make him tell you who put him up to it," said the white who had drawn near. He spoke astonishingly good Korean. For a white.

Yokang hoped he would keep his hands to himself, so he volunteered the information readily. "His name was Comrade."

"We've heard that story," the white said.

"It is the only name I know him by," Yokang protested.

"How do you know him?" demanded the Master of Sinanju.

"I know him by his voice when he is on the telephone."

"Bring this telephone and we will call him. I wish to hear this man's voice, and he hear my promise of his death."

The cellular phone was brought and the batteries replaced. The phone rang almost at once.

Captain Yokang answered, saying, "This is Yokang." "Captain Yokang," a warm, generous voice stated. "I have been calling at thirty-nine-second intervals for over forty-eight hours without a response."

"I have lost the gold," Yokang said simply, looking the Master of Sinanju full in the eyes.

"Clarify, please."

"Its true owner has come to reclaim it."

"Then you are already dead."

The white night tiger snapped the phone from his hands and said into it, "And you're next on the hit list."

"Could I interest you in ten times the gold you have just seized in return for a nonaggression understanding?" the warm voice wondered.

"No," said the white.

"Give me that," said the Master of Sinanju.

Into the phone he said, "I would not consider this offer for less than twenty times the amount of recovered gold."

"Chiun! You can't make deals with him. You don't even know who he is."

"I am your Friend," said the telephone voice.

And simultaneously the eyes of the Master of Sinanju and the white night tiger locked and dilated in recognition. They knew Comrade. There was obviously more to this than met the eye, Captain Yokang realized with a start. Inwardly he cursed himself for a fool. He had been a tool of larger powers all along and had played an exceedingly difficult hand badly.

"Where can this gold be found?" the Master of Sinanju was asking, suspicious voiced.

"Do we have an understanding?" asked Comrade.

"No understanding is possible until the teeth of the Master of Sinanju have tested the gold for softness and purity."

"I regret I am not in a position to ship the gold, currently being short of staff."

"We will come to the gold, then."

"Without an understanding, this would be poor business," said Comrade.

"Then prepare for your last hour, for Sinanju will hunt you down if it takes until the stars fall from the sky like salt."

"Can I get back to you on this matter?" said Comrade, and the connection was terminated.

The Master of Sinanju seized the telephone in birdlike hands. He stared at it as if to curse its very existence. His fingers squeezed. Plastic shards popped off, and the casing actually smoked as it broke and imploded into a blob of electronic parts.

The cellular phone went overboard with a distant splash.

Then the Master of Sinanju turned the cold, naked force of his baleful gaze on Captain Yokang Sako, who swallowed once and pulled out his trump card.

"You would not harm the son of Yokang Dong."

"I would send you back into the womb of your dog of a mother, if it would undo the calumny of your birth, cur of Hamhung."

"My father was commander of the naval forces that surrounded the village of your birth in a protective ring of steel, safeguarding it from the invasion craft of the hated Eighth Army. This despite the incessant bombing of the imperialistic U.S. Air Force. Many times did he tell me that without his courage and zeal, the village of Sinanju would be overrun and burned to the ground by the heartless American fleet."

The words had come tumbling out in a violent rush, stumbling into one another. But at last they were out in the morning light for the Master of Sinanju to weigh and measure and Captain Yokang to await his just verdict.

The Master of Sinanju stood there as if rooted in shock. That was a good sign. Yokang was certain of it. Evidently the Master did not dream that Yokang's very father had saved Sinanju from utter destruction. No doubt his gratitude would be boundless. Certainly his life would be spared. He thought that perhaps he might even be allowed to keep a small portion of the gold. No more than two or three ingots. He dare not request this, of course. But if it were offered to him, he would accept with graciousness. In the memory of his valorous father and not for himself.

Behind the Master of Sinanju the white night tiger was shaking his head in a most disconcerting manner.

It was as if Yokang had somehow said the wrong thing....

His face like a bone that had oozed up through the parchment of his tight face, the Master of Sinanju stepped up to Captain Yokang Sako.

A fingernail his eyes could not see even as a blur swept up and speared his Adam's apple. His tongue was impelled from his mouth. And the other index fingernail of the Master of Sinanju's hands sheared it off at the root.

"That, for your lying father," spat out the Master of Sinanju.

Captain Yokang Sako looked down at the squirming red piece of meat that had been his tongue and tried to scream. The sound started deep in his belly but encountered an obstacle in the vicinity of his larynx, and, of course, there was no longer a tongue to carry it past his teeth.

He did, however, manage a respectable bark.

Then the fingernail in his throat ripped downward once in a hard slashing motion.

His sternum cracked like plastic. He could hear it distinctly, the sound traveling through his skeletal system. His abdomen split open, and the bowels and stomach, no longer held in place by a retaining wall of muscle, spilled out and down to join the dying tongue that had somehow betrayed him.

The weight of his escaping belly seemed to drag the rest of Captain Yokang Sako to the slippery-with-blood deck, but it was not that. Only the sudden loss of blood and vital energy.

Captain Yokang Sako lay down on the malodorous bedding of his innards, and his last thoughts were bitter ones.

If only the U.S. sub commander had told the truth.

Remo supervised the loading the gold onto the destroyer Juche. When it was all done, he and Chiun left the frigate SA-I-GU and watched from the rail of the destroyer as the assembled vessels of the North Korean Navy slowly and methodically used the SA-I-GU for target practice, sending it to the bottom of the Yellow Sea.

With its scurrying crew still on deck.

A few survived. They were the unlucky ones. Some of them bobbed in the bitterly cold water for nearly an hour while their fellow seamen used them for rifle practice.

Chapter 31

Harold Smith was running virus-check programs on every U.S. bank computer system he could enter electronically.

Each time the program assured him the infected system was not infected. Or at least no longer infected.

If it was a virus, it had the ability to conceal itself from the most sophisticated checking programs ever devised. Or could somehow hide itself from detection and purging. Smith found no computer code that might be viral in nature.

Of course, Smith could not be sure that his own system was working properly enough to execute the virus-check program effectively.

But he continued trying. It was Sunday afternoon and the ticking of his Timex was like a steady knell of doom.

A flashing on-screen prompt informed him of an important news story coming off the wire. Smith brought it up in a corner of his screen.

THE GOVERNMENT OF NORTH KOREA

HAS ANNOUNCED THE FINDING OF THE

WRECKAGE OF THE MISSING U.S. SUBMARINE HARLEQUIN IN THE WATERS OF

THE WEST KOREA BAY. RESCUE OPERATIONS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED. A TOTAL OF FORTY-SEVEN SURVIVORS IS KNOWN. ACTING PREMIER KIM JONG IL IS OFFERING OFFICIAL APOLOGIES FOR THE SINKING AND IS PREPARED TO REPATRIATE THE SURVIVORS UPON INSTRUCTIONS FROM WASHINGTON.

Smith leaned back in his chair. Remo and Chiun had come through. But it was a minor victory in the face of a looming catastrophe far greater than the loss of the Harlequin.

Smith picked up the blue contact telephone. Dialing the country code for North Korea, he punched out 1-800-SINANJU.

The way things were going, there was no reason for the Master of Sinanju to return to America.

Remo was supervising the off-loading of the gold of Sinanju from tenders off the destroyer Juche when the Master of Sinanju came floating down the shore road attired in a fresh kimono of canary yellow.

He was followed by the survivors of the Harlequin. They marched in lock step, as if they were condemned men being led to their doom. "What's going on?" Remo asked Chiun. "These men have agreed to carry my gold to the House of the Masters." "They don't look too happy about it." ¹ 'They evidently think that they are entitled to food and shelter in return for no work," Chiun sniffed.

He addressed the sailors. "Each man will take one gold ingot in each hand and carry it to the house on the hill, taking care not to drop or mar the bars in any way. Theft will be strictly and severely punished."

"Jeez, Chiun, they're all wrung out from yesterday."

"If they can walk, they can carry gold."

The gold began moving up the hill under Chiun's steady gaze.