Killer Chromosomes

"I respect you, Chiun."

"Quit smoking."

"I will."

"Good."

"Tomorrow."

In front of Chiun a pair of gymnastic rings hung from ceiling ropes. Without turning toward Remo, he swiped his hands at the hard plastic rings. They swung past him, their speed a blur, aimed at Remo's head like a boxer's one-two punch. Remo saw the one coming from the right side first. He slipped to the left to avoid it, and was hit in the forehead by the ring moving from the left. As he straightened up, the right ring, returning to its starting position hit him in the back of the head.

Chiun looked at him with disgust.

"Keep smoking. When they come for you, they will have you like a pork chop."

"You that sure they'll come for me?" asked Remo, rubbing his head.

"They will come. You are without hope. And don't ask me to help because I can't stand your breath."

He walked past Remo, out of the gymnasium. Remo, still rubbing his head, looked at the gently swinging rings and wondered if he had lost that much of his edge already.

Smith posted extra guards in the corridor outside Remo's room and distributed photos of Dr. Sheila Feinberg to be posted on the wall of Folcroft's gatehouse. If the woman appeared, she was to be admitted without question but Smith was to be notified at once.

Smith thought of assigning a personal bodyguard to Remo to stay with him all the time, but realized Chiun would regard it as an insult. Assigning a guard to Remo, with Chiun around, would be like adding a Boy Scout patrol to the Seventh Army for added firepower.

There was nothing to do but wait. Smith did, in his office, reading the latest reports on two more deaths in Boston during the night. The governor had just declared martial law, which meant the city would be almost as well protected and patrolled as it had been before policemen were required to practice psychiatry, social work, and redemption. If Dostoyevsky were alive today, he thought, he would have entitled his masterpiece just Crime. Crime and Punishment would have no meaning to most of the general public. They had never heard of punishment.

Smith waited.

There had been nine years of hard decisions, made cleanly and promptly. Now, when it had all been done and had come to this, Jacki Bell couldn't decide whether to wear the man-tailored brown suit, which had the virtue of being professional-looking, or the yellow scoop-neck dress, which had the virtue of being cool.

She opted for cool and as she dressed thought how lucky she had been. Lucky enough to get out of a debilitating marriage, lucky enough to stay afloat financially during school years, lucky and smart enough to tough it out and become Jacki Bell, B.A., Jacki Bell, M.A., and finally Jacqueline Bell, Ph.D.

Dr. Jacqueline Bell.

Her luck still held, right up to reading the American Psychoanalytical Journal and finding the advertisement for a job at Folcroft Sanitarium. There had been many applicants but she'd been lucky enough to get the job from Doctor Smith.

If anybody asked her who she thought should be her first patient in therapy at Folcroft, she would pick Harold W. Smith without hesitation.

Throughout the interview he had spoken without looking at her. He had been reading some kind of reports that came in over a computer terminal on his desk. He had stared at a telephone as if expecting it to leap in the air and try to strangle him. He had drummed pencils, looked out his strangely brown-tinted windows, and finally, after asking her the same question three times, told her the job was hers.

As she inspected herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door in the three-room apartment she'd been lucky to find, she shrugged. There were worse cases in the world than Doctor Smith, she supposed. At least he had enough sanity left to hire her.

She had tried to find out what his doctorate was in because he did not have M.D. after his name on the door. But he had not volunteered any information, except to tell her she would be on her own. He would not look over her shoulder. He would not question her professional decisions, and in fact would be most happy if he never had to talk to her again.

That would be okay with her too. He'd get no complaints from her. She counted herself lucky to get the job.

It used to be that a bachelor's degree would guarantee a job. Then college classrooms turned into places that ladled out "relevant education"-like courses in soap opera for students who could barely read and write-and the B.A, was devalued. It took a master's degree to get a job. Then the same thing happened to the master's degree.

So it took a Ph.D. to get a job. But only for awhile. Soon it too was considered worthless. People who hired others went back to using Tennessee Windage and simple reading and writing tests to determine what potential employee might be able to find his way to work in the morning without a keeper. No degree guaranteed a job any more because no degree guaranteed that its holder had an education that went beyond one-two-three-many.

The only good thing about it all, Jacki Bell reflected, was that the doctors of education who started it all were in the same bag. They found their doctorates were meaningless too and they had trouble getting work. Of course, being educated men, they decided they had nothing to do with it. It was all the fault of the evil, corrupt, capitalist society.

She remembered something she had read once in a book of political essays: "He who creates the deluge often gets wet."

Dr. Jacqueline Bell approved of her image in the mirror and brushed imaginary lint off her left shoulder.

The doorbell rang.

She was not expecting anyone but it might be someone from the sanitarium. Because she had not grown up in New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, she went right to the door and opened it without asking who was there.

A woman stood there, a beautiful woman with long blonde hair, eyes that slanted in an almost feline fashion, and a body so breathtakingly and breakneckedly poured into her clothes she made Jacki feel instant-tacky. The woman smiled showing the most perfect white teeth Jacki had ever seen.

"Doctor Bell?" the woman asked.

Jacki nodded.

"I'm glad to meet you. I'm Doctor Feinberg."

"Oh. Are you from Folcroft?"

"Yes. They asked me to stop by and pick you up on my way in this morning."

"This is my lucky day," Jacki said. "It's so hot out there I don't relish the walk." She stood aside and waved Dr. Feinberg into the apartment. "We're early by the way," Jacki said. "Have you eaten yet? Why not have a bite with me?"

Sheila Feinberg's smile broadened as she entered the apartment.

"Exactly what I had in mind," she said.

Chiun said "Why are those people in blue uniforms in the halls? Did you put them there?"

"That is correct, Master of Sinanju," Smith said formally.

"Why?" asked Chiun. He had stopped calling Smith "emperor." It seemed appropriate when he was away from Folcroft and met Smith infrequently. But close up, Chiun dropped the convention lest Smith think it was an acknowledgement that Smith was of higher rank than Chiun.

"Because I am worried that those people might find Remo. I want him protected."

"How could they find him here?" asked Chiun.

"Because I have told them he is here," Smith said.

"That is a very good reason," Chiun said slowly.

"Chiun, we have to get these creatures. I know you may be upset because I'm possibly endangering Remo's life. But I have to look at more than that. I have to think of the whole country."

"And on its own, how many Masters of Sinanju has this wonderful country produced?" Chiun asked.

"On its own, none," Smith said.

"And you think the country is worth Remo's life nevertheless?"

"If you put it on those terms, yes," Smith said.

"Worth Remo's and mine?" asked Chiun.

"Yes."

"Remo's, mine, and yours?" Chiun persisted.

Smith nodded.

"How many lives does it take before it is no longer worth those lives?" Chiun spat on the floor of Smith's office. "Remo's life just because some fat people in some chilly city got themselves eaten?"

"It's not just them and not just Boston. Unless we can stop these... these creatures, it could spread nationwide. Worldwide. Perhaps even to Sinanju."

"Sinanju will be safe," Chiun said.

"They can even get to Korea, Chiun."

"But Sinanju exists where Remo and I exist. Where we are, there is Sinanju. I will see that Remo stays safe," Chiun said. "For you and your emperor there may be no safety, but Remo and I will survive."

For a moment, the two men's eyes locked, until Smith turned away from Chiun's burning hazel eyes.

"I wanted to ask you something," he said. "Remo just doesn't seem right. It's not just that he's injured," Smith said. "He's smoking. And last night he ate a steak. When was the last time he ate any meat besides duck and fish? What is happening to him. Chiun?"

"His body has suffered a shock from his injuries, a shock so great his body has forgotten what it is."

Smith looked puzzled. "I don't understand."

"Sometimes, when someone suffers mental shock, they have what you call the forget disease."

"Amnesia," Smith suggested.

"Yes. The body may suffer the same illness. Remo's has. His body is returning to where it was before I undertook his training. There is no way of stopping it from happening."

"Does that mean... does that mean that's it for him? That Remo's done? His special skills are done?"

"No one knows that," said Chiun. "His body may return all the way to where he began or may stop only part of the way there. It may stop anywhere and never again change or may reach bottom then return to what it was before his injury. There is no way to tell because each man is different."

"Yes, I know."

"I would think you forgot," Chiun said, "since you regard Remo as just another man, just another target for these tiger people, without considering he is a Master of Sinanju too."

Chiun's eyes narrowed with intensity. Smith could feel, as he so often did when dealing with Remo and Chiun, that he faced an elemental life-and-death force. Smith suspected he was on a swaying bridge.

"Fortunately, he's Shiva, the Destroyer God, isn't he?"

He essayed a small smile, pushing it into the conversation like inadequate seed money.

"Yes, he is," said Chiun. "But even the dead night tiger can be victim to the tiger people. What happens to him will be on your hands, and your head. Now, if you would be wise, you will keep those guards and their guns away from Remo's room because I will be there."

Chiun had stood during the conversation. Now he spun and walked away, red robe trailing behind as if he were a bride racing down the aisle of a church because she was late and they'd started the wedding without her.

He turned back at the door. "When Remo is well enough, he and I are leaving. You will deal with your tiger people yourself because he will be elsewhere."

"Where will you go?" Smith asked glumly.

"Anywhere. Out of your employ."

Sheila Feinberg restrained herself from laughing aloud when she saw the picture of herself in the guard's building just inside the large, stone wall surrounding Folcroft Sanitarium.

It was a picture of the old Sheila Feinberg with hook nose, saggy eyes, and the desperate hairdo. It told Sheila clearly, and not without some shock, how ugly she had been before the changeover. It told her too that Folcroft was one giant trap waiting to spring shut.

"Who's that, your wife?" Sheila asked the guard, a gaunt man with a disproportionate beer belly and sweat rings showing on his blue shirt under his armpits.

"No, praise God," he said, smiling at the beautiful buxom blonde standing in front of him. "Just some dip we're supposed to keep an eye out for. Maybe an escaped patient or something. Look at her. She won't be back. Probably went and joined the circus." He smiled harder at Sheila. "Anyway, I'm not married," he lied.

Sheila nodded.

"Those kind of people will be your responsibility now, Doctor, I guess," the guard said. He looked again at the letter of appointment to the psychoservices division.

"This is all in order. What you do, Doctor, is go inside. Your division is in the right wing of the main building. When you get yourself organized, go get yourself an ID card. Then you won't have any more trouble at the gate. Of course, when I'm on, you won't have any trouble 'cause I'm not likely to forget you."

He handed back the letter. Sheila moved in closer to take it from him and brushed her body against his.

The guard watched her walk away and felt a tingle in his groin he hadn't felt since his second year of marriage, eight emotional centuries ago, a tingle he thought was no longer possible. Who knew? One thing he had learned from working at Folcroft was that shrinks were nuttier than the people they were supposed to treat. Maybe this one liked old skinny guards with big beer bellies. He looked at her name again on the sign-in sheet. Jacki Bell. Dr. Jacki Bell. It had a nice ring to it.

A white coat and clipboard are passports in any healing institution in the world. When she got them from a hall closet, Sheila Feinberg was free to roam Folcroft as she wished.

She quickly realized the big L-shaped main building was divided into two parts. The front section of the old brick structure was given over to the sanitarium's main business, treating patients. But the south wing, the base of the L, was different.

It housed computers and offices on the first floor. Upstairs where hospital rooms. On a lower level, built into the natural slope of the land, was a gymnasium that stretched almost to the back of Folcroft's property, where old boat docks gnarled like arthritic fingers into the still waters of Long Island Sound.

And sealing off the entire wing were guards.

At a different time in her life, Sheila Feinberg might have wondered just what was going on that required such security in a sanitarium, but she no longer cared about that. She cared about finding Remo, and she knew he was in the building's south wing.

Sheila went back to the main building and posed in the Special Services office for a Polaroid picture.

"Interesting place," she said to the young woman clerk who ran the office.

"Not bad. They leave you alone, which is better than some jobs I've had."

"My first day," Sheila said. "By the way, what's in the south wing that they have so many guards? Something special?"

"It's always like that. I hear from the grapevine they've got a special rich patient there." The girl cut the photograph's edges with a paper cutter and mounted the picture on a heavy card, using rubber cement. "They do some kind of government research over there, computers and stuff. I guess they don't want to take a chance on damaging the equipment."

Sheila was more interested in the special rich patient. "That rich man over there? Is he married?" she asked with a smile.

The young girl shrugged as she placed the photo card into a machine that looked like a credit card printer. She pressed a switch and the top of the machine lowered. There was a faint hiss of air and Sheila could smell the acrid fumes of heated plastic.

"I don't know if he's married. He's got his own servant with him. An old Oriental. Here you are, Doctor. Pin this on your coat and you can go anywhere."

"Even the south wing?"

"Anywhere. You can't treat your nut cases if you can't get to them," the girl said.

"Yeah," Sheila said. "Let me get at them."

Sheila skipped lunch in the main dining room and strolled down the rocky ground behind the buildings, leading to the old docks. They were obviously unused but still looked sturdy enough. She filed that information away in her head.

Looking back at the main building, she was surprised to see the glass in the south wing was mirrored one-way glass. People inside could see out, but no one outside could see in. She thought for a moment that the white man might even be watching her. The thought, instead of frightening her, made her tingle with anticipation. She yawned, a big cat's yawn, then smiled at the second floor windows over the gymnasium building.

After lunch, her badge got her past the guards outside the second-floor entrance to the south wing. She was in an ordinary hospital corridor, exuding its traditional scent, Clorox and dead air.

She did not have to see Remo to know where he was. She smelled him as she walked along the narrow corridor. She followed the scent to a room near the end of the hall. The scent was Remo's but was somehow different. There was an acrid smell of something having been burned. She recognized it as cigarette fumes.

She neared Remo's door. For a moment the urge to push the door open and walk in was almost overpowering. She caught herself when she sensed another scent. It was the smell of jasmine and herbs. It came from the old Oriental. She had smelled it in the Boston attic apartment after she had cleared her nose of the pepper that had been sprinkled in the hallway.

The room number was 221-B. She went down another corridor and found a stairway that opened onto a fire escape leading down the outside of the building. At the corner of the building, the fire escape platform split and ran all around the outside of the patients' rooms on the second floor.

Perfect, she thought. Perfect, and she went back to the psychoservices department in the main building to kill some time and draw a plan.

In room 221-B, Chiun said to Remo, who was puffing gently on a cigarette, "They are here."

"Now how do you know that?" Remo asked. He was a little weary of Chiun's alarms about tiger people. What would be nice, he thought, would be a Caribbean vacation. And a large piña colada.

"The same way you would have known it but a week ago," Chiun said. "With my senses."

"Forget it," Remo said.

"They are here nonetheless," Chiun repeated dully. How could he save Remo from the tigers when Remo was not only unable to protect himself, but didn't even seem to care? Moments ago, footsteps in the hallway moved toward the door, stopped, then retreated rapidly. They were not the footsteps of a normal human. Instead of the infinitesimal time lag between putting down the heel and putting down the sole of the foot, these footsteps had come down with one faint, but continuous sound, as if the bottom of the foot were round and padded. Like a tiger's.

"You take care of them," Remo was saying. "I'm thinking about pork chops. And applesauce and mashed potatoes. Yeah, pork chops."

Three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack who had accompanied her to Rye, New York, entered Folcroft that night by going over the wall she told them at precisely the time she told them. Eight P.M., sharp.

At 8:12 P.M., they hit the corridor leading to Remo's room. The guard who had been stationed inside that hallway had been pulled off duty by Smith, at Chiun's demand. No one was there to stop the three as they sniffed and growled their way down the corridor toward Room 221-B where Remo lay in bed, his belly full of lobster and pork chop.

But the three were not unseen or unheard.

In Remo's room, Chiun rose from his small grass mat and moved so quietly toward the door, Remo did not hear him stir.

Dr. Smith in his office directly below the corridor, glanced at a television monitor and saw two women and a man walking down the hall. What he saw gave him a chill, the kind he had not felt since witnessing the results of Nazi atrocities in World War II.

The three tiger persons hunched over, their fingers almost touching the floor as they moved from closed door to closed door, sniffing. One turned, directly in front of the stationary, hall television camera. Her lips were pulled back exposing her teeth. Her eyes glinted inhumanly. Smith realized for the first time just how much animal and how little human these tiger people had become.

He yanked open his center desk drawer, grabbed a .45 caliber automatic and ran from his office to the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs corridor.

Chiun waited inside the door of the hospital room while Remo started to sit up in bed.

"They are here," Chiun said.

"I gathered that," Remo said.

"So what are you doing?" asked Chiun.

"Going to help."

"Help who do what? Rest your bloated belly."

"Just because I ate something good doesn't mean I can't help you," Remo said.

Chiun turned away in disgust, dismissing Remo with a wave of his hand.

Outside the door, the three tiger people scratched on the fire-retardant metal covering the wooden door. All they had to do was turn the knob to enter the room, but they did not. They scratched at it. Their fingernails made a soft insistent noise, like the mewing of cats left outside by mistake with night coming on.

They purred.

Smith pushed through the set of double fire doors leading to the corridor. He choked back a gasp at the sight of three persons scratching on the door. He moved to the corner of the hallway where he could not be surprised by anyone who might follow him through the doorway. He raised his gun and called out, "All right, all of you. Away from that door. Down on the floor."

The three turned to him. The expressions on their faces would have been appropriate only if Harold W. Smith was a lamb chop.

Inside the hospital room, Chiun and Remo heard Smith's voice.

"What is that idiot doing here?" Chiun said.

The three members of Sheila Feinberg's pack moved away from the door toward Smith, their arms raised over their heads, fingers curled in imitation of deadly claws, mouths open and drooling.

"That'll do," Smith said coldly. "Hold it right there." The gun was unwavering in his right hand, near his hip.

The two women and a man kept moving toward him. Smith waited until they were away from the door and repeated his command.

"The three of you. Down on the floor."

But instead of dropping, the three separated and came at Smith, breaking into a run, charging, growling. Smith fired a shot which hit the man's chest and lifted him off his feet before plunking him back onto the marble floor.

In Room 221-B, Remo started up again from bed.

"That's Smitty. He needs help," he said.

"Get back in bed"

"Screw it, Little Father. I'm helping."

"You?" said Chiun disdainfully. "I will go." He pushed his way out into the hall, and left Remo sitting, strangely tired and empty, on the edge of the bed.

On the fire escape outside Remo's room, Sheila Feinberg rose to her feet from the position in which she had lain for the last four hours. She stretched once. Her muscles were loose and ready.

She looked through a tiny scratch she had found in the corner of the mirrored window in Remo's room and saw Chiun going out into the hallway.

As the door closed behind him, Sheila, with a running start, threw her body against the window, crashed through it, and landed gently on her feet alongside Remo's bed.

Remo looked at her with shock.

She purred at him.

"Hello, sweet meat," she said. "I've missed you."

In the hall, the two women crouched in front of Smith, separated from each other and from him by five feet. Smith seemed reluctant to fire. He covered first one, then the other with his automatic, and again ordered them to lie flat on the floor. They hissed.

Chiun saw tensing of the calf muscles protruding from under the women's skirts. The attack leap was impending.

Like a cold blue wind, he moved between the women and Smith.

He slapped the gun away from Smith's hand. It hit the floor with a loud metallic clank, like a hammer dropped onto ceramic tile. The women leaped at Smith but Chiun was between them and their target.

A raised left hand stopped one of the women as completely as if she had impaled herself full speed on a spear. The second woman turned her head to give her open mouth a clean bite at Chiun's throat. He merely slid below the woman's head and came up, almost casually, with an elbow into a point slightly above the pit of the woman's stomach. The air went out of her with a sibilant hiss and she fell onto the other woman.

Smith brushed past Chiun and knelt over the two women.

"They're dead," he said.

"Of course," said Chiun.

"I wanted them alive," Smith said.

"They wanted you dead," said Chiun. "Maybe they were wiser than you." He looked at them. "Neither is the one who was here earlier."

Chiun ran toward the hospital room, Smith following at his heels.

When they entered the room, it was empty.

Broken glass from the window cluttered the floor. Chiun ran to the window and looked out. On the ground below, running toward the docks behind Folcroft, was a woman. She carried Remo's body over her shoulder, seemingly without effort, like a big man carrying a small rug.

"Aiiiieee," Chiun screamed and leaped through the jagged glass of the window.

Smith leaned out the window in time to see Chiun leap over the fire escape railing, drop two stories to the ground and land, running. Smith clambered onto the fire escape, careful not to slash himself on the glass shards, and followed down the stairs.

Ahead he saw, docked at the pier, a twenty-nine-foot Silverton cabin cruiser, with outriggers and a Bimini top.

The woman dumped Remo into the back of the boat and slipped the bow line from a rusted old cleat at the end of the dock. Then she jumped aboard.

Chiun was now forty feet from the dock.

He was on the dock when the twin engines of the big boat roared and the craft skidded forward, its nose in the air, into the darkness dropping over the chill waters of the Sound.

A few moments later, Smith stood alongside Chiun, watching the boat, running without lights, vanish into the deepening night.

Smith felt required to put a hand on Chiun's shoulder.

The old man seemed not to feel it and, looking at him, Smith realized how small and frail was this eighty-year-old Korean who knew so much about so many things.

Smith squeezed Chiun's shoulder in friendship and in the sharing sense of comradeship that comes to people who have suffered a mutual loss.

"My son is dead," Chiun said.

"No, Chiun. He's not dead."

"He will be dead," Chiun repeated. His voice was flat and soft as if shock had robbed his vocal cords of the ability to register even the slightest emotion. "Because he can no longer protect himself."

"He won't be dead," Smith said firmly. "Not if I have anything to say about it."

He turned and strode purposefully back to Folcroft headquarters. He had work to do and the night was young.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Remo, who had been knocked unconscious by a right hand blow to the head by Sheila Feinberg, a right hand he never saw, came to as the power boat reversed its engines to bring itself to a stop. He felt the boat bump against another boat.

As he shook his head, trying to clear his vision, he felt Sheila's strong hand grip his right biceps, squeezing hard. It hurt.

"Come on," she said and pushed him to the rail of the Silverton cabin cruiser.

It was dark now and the salt smell from the Sound was stronger, as if the daylight's passing had removed a lid from it. Sheila helped Remo across the railing of her boat to another, smaller speed boat. All the while, she held his arm.

Remo decided enough was enough. He yanked his arm away. But it didn't work. Her fingers, like talons, still bit into his muscle.

Was he really that weak, he wondered. He tried again and Sheila said, "Keep that up and you'll be back asleep. Is that what you want?"

"No. What I want is a cigarette."

"Sorry. No smoking."

In the darkness, Remo could see the outline of some large box on the back of the boat.

"Over here," she said, steering Remo. As he got closer, he saw the box was an iron-barred cage, almost the size of a side-by-side, washer-dryer combination. Piled on top of it were black drapes. With her free hand, Sheila opened the door of the cage and pushed Remo toward it.

"In there."

"Is this really necessary?" Remo asked.

"I can't spend my time worrying about you trying to hop overboard. Get in."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'll put you in anyway," Sheila said. "I'm really very strong, you know."

Even in the dark, her teeth and eyes glinted, picking up the faint glow of faraway lights and turning them into sharp, shining dagger beams.

Remo decided to try it. He yanked his arm away, this time spinning his body while he did it, to put the full force of his weight behind the move. It was the kind of move he knew so well. He never thought about it before. But now he found it necessary to plot each step as he did it. Muscle memory, the ability of the body to do routine tasks without the brain being called in to direct, had deserted him. It was this skill that characterized and united the great athlete, the great typist, and the great seamstress. Memory of what the body must do was stamped into the muscles and bypassed the brain.

He smiled to himself as it worked. As his body spun, he felt his arm slip from Sheila Feinberg's hand. He was free. But his back was toward her and that was something the art of Sinanju warned against. Be fore he could remember and move away, Sheila was on his back. Remo felt strong hands around his throat, pressing, searching for the arteries in his neck. Then he felt the pulse throbbing heavily in his throat as the blood flow to his brain closed off. Darkness spread into his head.

Remo dropped heavily onto the deck of the boat. He could feel his body hit as his eyes closed but then was done. He did not feel Sheila push him into the cage, lock the door with a padlock, then drape the sides with the thick black curtains.

As Remo slept, the boat started and Sheila sped away, leaving behind the big boat she had used to escape from Folcroft, leaving it to drift aimlessly with the current through Long Island Sound.

She turned due east and gave the boat full throttle. She roared through the night for the ninety-minute run to Bridgeport.

Remo woke again when the boat stopped. He felt Sheila Feinberg's hands reach through the bars of the cage and clamp around his throat.

She hissed. "Now, we can do this easy or we can do it hard. Easy is, you just be quiet and you can stay awake. Hard is, you make a sound and I put you back to sleep. But if I have to do it again, I'm going to leave you with some new scars."

Remo opted for easy. Maybe if he caused her no trouble, she'd give him what he really wanted in life.

A cigarette.

Then a steak. Rare, with juice running out, the kind called black-and-blue he had once gotten in a restaurant in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Remo remembered that steak for a moment, savoring its taste in his mind. Then he remembered where he was and who he was with and the idea of rare meat made him shudder.

Chiun supervised as Smith removed the bodies from the hallway outside Remo's room, then went to his own room, refusing to talk to Smith. Smith was too busy to talk anyway. He went directly to his office.

Smith's name was unknown in any government circle. In no Washington office did a picture of him hang on the wall, a photographic offering to protect the owner from lightning, flood and firing.

But in his anonymous way, he commanded more powerful armies than any other man in America. More of the levers that turned the wheels of government were brought together in his office than anywhere else. Thousands of people were on his direct payroll. Thousands of others worked for other agencies, but their reports came to CURE, even though not one of them knew it and none would have obeyed a direct order from Smith if it had been hand-delivered by a marine regiment.

The young president who had chosen Smith to head the secret organization, CURE, had selected wisely. He had picked a man to whom personal prestige and power meant nothing. He was interested only in enough power to do his job well. His character was constructed in such a way that he would never abuse that power. Now Smith was using that power. In minutes, military helicopters were crisscrossing Long Island Sound looking for a twenty-seven-foot Silverton with a Bimini bridge.

Federal agents were soon watching bridges, runnels and toll booths between Rye, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts. They had been told they were looking for a diplomat who had been abducted after being granted asylum in the United States. His name was secret but he had dark hair and eyes, high cheekbones, and very thick wrists. The rest was very hush-hush.

Airport security forces and maritime inspectors at seaports all over the East were put on the alert for the same kind of man. All they knew was that it was important to find him.

After putting all those forces to work, Smith sat in his office to wait He spun his chair around, looking out at the waters of Long Island Sound. He was not too confident because government was like the water at which he stared. The water's action could be predicted, because its ebb and flow was on its own schedule and its own clock. But control it?

It was that way with government. Sometimes you could predict its flow but only a fool believed he could control it. Just as the waters of the Sound. They had come and gone for hundreds and thousands of years. Hundreds and thousands of years from now, someone else would be sitting in Smith's chair, looking out at the waters. They would still be moving in their own rhythm, in their own time.

The telephone rang. It was the wrong phone and wasn't the call for which Smith had hoped. "Yes, Mr President," he said

"I didn't think I'd be making any more calls to you," the President said, "but just what the hell is going on?"

"What do you mean, sir?" Smith asked.

"I'm getting reports. It seems like this whole peckerheaded government has gone on some kind of alert. Are you responsible for that?"

"Yes, sir, I am."

"Why, when you're supposed to be doing something about that Boston mess?"

"This is part of that Boston mess, as you put it," said Smith.

"I thought your secret weapon would have resolved all that by now anyway." There was sarcasm in the President's soft, honey-coated voice.

"That secret weapon has been injured and captured, sir," Smith said. "It is important that he be found before-"

"Before he talks?" the President interrupted.

"Yes. Or before he is killed."

The President sighed. "If he talks, he brings down the government. Not just my administration, but the entire concept of constitutional government. I guess you know that."

"I know that, sir."

"How can we stop him from talking?"

"By locating him."

"And then what?"

"If there is any danger of his revealing what he should not, I will handle it," Smith said.

"How?" asked the President.

"I don't think you'd want to know the answer to that, Mr. President," said Smith.

The President, who understood full well that he had just heard a man promise to kill another if it became necessary for the country's best interests, said softly, "Oh. I'll leave it with you."

"That would be best. We have destroyed some of the Boston creatures. That should reduce the death toll there."

"Cutting back is small consolation. I don't think the American people are going to be comforted if I tell them we've managed to cut the murder rate from mutated people by sixty-seven percent. From six a day to two a day."

"No, sir, I guess not. We are continuing to work on it," Smith said.

"Good night," the President said, "When this is all over, assuming we survive, I think I would like to meet you."

"Good night, sir," Smith said noncommittally.

The next call was the one Smith wanted. A Coast Guard official, who thought he was talking to an FBI agent for Westchester County, reported a helicopter had found a twenty-nine-foot Silverton. It was empty and drifting through the Sound without lights. There was no one aboard.

The owner was a New Jersey dentist who said he had sold the boat only eight hours earlier for twenty-seven thousand dollars. Cash. The buyer was a young man who wore a gold sunburst medallion around his neck.

Smith thanked the man and hung up.

That was that. A dead end. The man with the sunburst medallion had been one of the tiger people. Smith had shot him in the upstairs hallway outside Remo's room. That trail was cold and dead.

Smith waited at his telephone for the rest of the night but it did not ring again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was still night when the small jet landed on a bumpy runway. After the plane had come to a full stop, Remo felt his cage being dragged to the cargo door, then dumped five feet to the ground.

"Hey, goddammit, that hurt," Remo yelled. His voice echoed inside the cage, rebounding off the heavy black drapes.

Then all was still until he heard the plane's motors start up again. The sound seemed to be right above his ears. At one time he had been able to block out noises, closing his ears the way other persons could close their eyes, but he could not do it now.

The screeching wail of the engines continued, reverberating over his head, setting his teeth on edge, growing ever louder. Then, mercifully, he could hear the plane move away, lurching along the runway, its motors burned to full power. Remo could hear the plane taking off, vanishing in the distance.

The night was still, except for the creaking of insects, who sounded as if they were holding a quorum call of all the bugs that ever lived.

Remo wished he had a cigarette. The side curtain was lifted and tossed on top of the cage. Sheila Feinberg stood there, outside the bars, wearing shorts that barely covered her crotch and a matching khaki top stretched taut over her enormous breasts.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"Fine," Remo said through the bars. "Time really flies when you're having fun."

"Do you want to get out of there?"

"Either that or send me maid service. Whatever makes you happy."

Sheila leaned on the bars of the cage.

"Look. I think you know by now I can take you. If you remember that and don't mess around trying to escape, I'll let you out. But if you're going to be difficult you can stay in the cage. Your choice."

"Let me out," Remo said.

"All right. That's better all around," Sheila said.

She fished a key from the pocket of her shorts, which Remo thought were too tight to allow the intromission of anything, and unlocked the padlock on the cage.

Remo crawled onto the chipped and broken blacktop of the runway, rose to his feet, and stretched. "That feels good," he said.

"All right. Let's go," Sheila said. She led the way to a jeep that was parked alongside the runway. Remo got into the passenger's side as she started the motor.

"One thing," Remo said. "You are Sheila Feinberg, aren't you?"

"That's right."

"Your photographs don't do you justice," he said.

"My pictures are of what I used to look like. That was a long time ago."

Remo nodded. "And where are we?"

"Dominican Republic. Eighteen miles outside of Santo Domingo."

"You've brought me a long way just to kill me."

"Who's going to kill you?" asked Sheila. I've got other plans for you." She turned to Remo and smiled, a smile full of teeth that did not make Remo feel at all good.

"What plans?" Remo asked.

"You're going into stud service," she said, and laughed aloud as she drove away from the runway onto a narrow dirt road, leading toward rolling hills a half-dozen miles away.

Remo sat back to enjoy the ride, if he could. He still wished he had a cigarette.

They stopped at a white farmhouse on the edge of a sugar cane field, the size of four, square, city blocks. The sugar had long ago been harvested. Most of the cane was cut and gone.

Only little patches remained, sitting in the field like random tufts of hair on a bald man. The cut husks were dry. When Remo stepped on one, it crackled under his foot as if he had jumped into a pail of cellophane.

The house was clean and well provisioned. A noisy gasoline generator outside provided electricity to run the lights and the refrigerator. The first thing Remo looked for and found were cigarettes in a cupboard in the kitchen. He lit one quickly and savored the taste of smoke rolling over his tongue, depositing droplets of tar onto his teeth, gums, and tongue on its poisonous way into his lungs.

The second thing he looked for and found was a package of Twinkies in the refrigerator. He ripped open the cellophane with his teeth and shoved the cake into his mouth. Two of life's great pleasures, he thought. A cigarette and a chocolate-flavored lump of refined sugar.

It hadn't been long ago that his diet was rice, fish, duck, and occasionally vegetables. How long had it been since he'd had something sweet? How had he gone without for all those years?

Remo had a second Twinkie in his mouth when Sheila appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She had changed into a gauzy white robe that left none of her body to the imagination but instead offered it to Remo as a gift. She opened .her mouth to say something, then clamped it tight, brushed past Remo and violently stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

"Hey, I was smoking that," he said.

"It's about time you learned smoking is bad for your health," she said. She turned to him again and brushed her breasts against his chest. "On the other hand, I might be very good for your health."

Remo, Twinkie in hand, felt something else he hadn't felt in many years-desire, burning, sexual desire for a woman. The art of Sinanju had made him a user of women's bodies when he wanted to be; it had taught him techniques to send women up walls in frenzy. But in making it an art and a science, Sinanju had made it dull. Remo couldn't remember the last time he had been aroused.

Till now.

He stuffed the rest of the Twinkie in his mouth and put his arms around Sheila Feinberg. His bodily urges made his mind not care that the woman had ripped open his stomach and throat only a few weeks before. He ran his hands down her slick back, feeling the tightness of smooth flesh through the flimsy nylon. Then he placed his hands on the rounded globes of her behind, pulling her to him and feeling, with pleasure, his body responding.

She raised her mouth to his and he covered it with his lips.

Then Sheila Feinberg lifted and carried him into the bedroom where she placed him gently on the bed.

"Does this mean we're going together?" Remo asked.

Sheila took off her wrap and lay on the bed next to him. "You're here to provide stud services," she said. "Now provide."

Remo did. For a full thirty seconds.

The same art that had killed desire was itself killed when desire returned. It was over before he realized it. He felt embarrassed at his lack of control.

"You're not much," Sheila said with a thin pursing of her lips.

"I'll get better," he said.

"You'll have plenty of practice," she said. Coldly, with no afterglow from the sex act, she rose from the bed and walked out the door. Remo heard it lock behind her.

"Go to sleep," she called through the door. "You'll need your rest."

Remo did not mind. He had put the pack of cigarettes in his trouser pocket before leaving the kitchen. Now he fished them out, lit one and lay back on the bed smoking, flicking ashes on the floor and considering that life was all a matter of timing.

Ten, thirteen years ago, before he joined CURE, he could think of few things better than being the captive love slave of a voluptuous blonde whose only demand was that he screw well and often. Now here he was, and all he felt was uncomfortable.

He smoked three cigarettes, stubbed them out on the floor, kicked the butts under the bed, and fell asleep. He slept hard and loglike. When he woke in the morning the bedroom door had been unlocked and left ajar.

Sheila stood naked at the kitchen sink, her body glowing with health and strength, an X-rated display of centerfold perfection.

"Do you want to make it before or after you eat?" she asked when Remo came in.

"After."

Remo saw the food on his plate. Uncooked bacon and a bowl of raw eggs.

"Before," he amended.

"After," she said.

"This stuff isn't cooked," Remo said.-

"I didn't want to fool with that stove," Sheila said.

"Who can eat this?" Remo asked, but saw that Sheila had sat down at the table and was eating it, dropping the strips of fatted, slick, white bacon down her throat like a finalist in a goldfish swallowing exhibition.

"I've done the best I can," Sheila said sharply. "If you don't like my breakfast, too bad. Eat cereal."

"I'll cook this," Remo said, lifting up his plate and bowl.

"You'll leave that stove alone. Eat cereal," Sheila said.

Remo had a Twinkie. When he was done, Sheila put a strong hand on his shoulder and led him into the bedroom.

"Come on, Ace," she said. "We'll see if we can get you up to the full minute mark today."

Remo followed, wondering dully what it was all about, but deciding not to worry. At least not until the cigarettes were gone.

It was the third day at Folcroft. Autopsies had been performed on the three tiger people killed and the results confirmed Smith's worst fears. The three had undergone chromosomal change. They were, in point of fact, no longer human beings. They were something else, something between man and beast. Smith worried that the thing they had become might turn out to be stronger and smarter, even more bloodthirsty than man.

The deaths in Boston continued but their number declined. It might have been the presence of the National Guard patrolling the streets. More likely, Smith felt, it was that he had decimated the tiger people's forces with the three deaths. That meant Sheila Feinberg-Smith was now convinced it was she who had carried Remo off-had not gone back to Boston. If she had, she would have by now created more man-eaters. The toll would have begun climbing again.

There was another thought gnawing at Smith, a thought at once so frightening and painful that he consciously tried to put it out of his mind. Yet it persisted. Suppose Sheila Feinberg had taken Remo to make him one of them? Remo, with all his skills, but coupled with brainless, animal savagery? He had been unstoppable before and now would be worse, therefore must be stopped. In those circumstances, there was only one man in the world who could stop him.

But how could Smith raise the subject?

Smith tapped lightly on the door of the second floor room. There was no answer. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Chiun wore a white purification robe and sat on a grass mat in the center of the floor. The room's two windows were heavily draped. Candles flickered at the four corners of the darkened room, which was bare of furniture. In front of Chiun, incense burned in a small porcelain bowl.

"Chiun?" Smith said softly.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry. There's been no word on Remo. He and that woman seem to have vanished off the face of the earth."

"He is dead," Chiun intoned dully.

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I wish it so," Chiun said after a pause.

"You? Wish it so? Why, for God's sake?"

"Because if Remo is not dead, he will become one of them. If he becomes one of them, one hundred generations of Masters of Sinanju will demand I send him home to the sea. Even if he is my son. Because I have taught and given him Sinanju I may never permit it to be misused. So, because I do not wish to..." Chiun could not bring himself to say the word "kill."

"... because I do not wish to remove him, I wish him to be already dead."

"I understand," Smith said. His question had already been answered. If Remo was changed, Chiun would dispose of him. He began to say "thank you" to Chiun but caught himself.

The old man's head had sunk low again on his chest. Smith knew there was no conversation left in him. He wondered how many more days the death rites of Sinanju must continue.

Remo had a good guess now why Adam and Eve made a deal with the devil to get out of paradise. It was too damned dull.

Six days. The weather was always perfect. Sheila Feinberg was always beautiful and available.

Remo had to do nothing but lounge around the farmhouse and perform when Sheila wanted him to.

He was bored.

To make matters worse, he had run out of Twinkies and was running low on cigarettes. The cigarettes might have lasted but Sheila had this annoying habit of running around and, whenever she saw a cigarette, jabbing it out in the ash tray.

Nor did she put it out like a civilized person, just squashing the end so later Remo could salvage the clincher and smoke what was left. No, she jabbed cigarettes out with as much power as if she were throwing darts and usually managed to bust them in at least two places. There was no way to smoke the butts later on. She also kept throwing away his matches which he had now taken to hiding under his mattress.

The food was nothing to speak of either. Sheila refused to allow the stove to be used. She would sit, eating raw meat in her bare hands, blood running down the sides of her mouth. When she was done she would lick her red fingers and eye Remo as if he were 165 pounds of ambulatory filet mignon.

Remo subsisted on package food and cake. He began to remember the good old days when the paddies were filled with rice for the world and the oceans were abundant and swollen with fish. But he did not miss rice and fish all that much.

He wondered occasionally about Chiun and whether he would ever see him again. Probably Chiun already had forgotten about him and was looking for somebody else to train. Well, Remo could live with that. He had had enough of training and bitching. He had had enough too of Smith and all those hours of work trying to do everything and be every place. Enough. Enough. Enough.

Remo went out to the porch surrounding the white farmhouse. There was a three-foot-high wooden railing along the front. Remo leaned on it with his hands. He remembered how Chiun trained him by making him run along narrow railings to improve his balance. Remo had run across cables on the Golden Gate Bridge, run along the top of deck railings on ocean liners in choppy seas. A porch railing? A breeze. Remo removed his hands from the railing and hopped into the air. As his feet came down on the railing, his right foot slipped. He hit his knee a sharp crack on the way down.

He was puzzled at that. He didn't usually slip. He jumped up again. This time he made it, but teetered, rocking back and forth, trying not to fall off. He extended his arms far out to the sides, curled his body like a ball and swayed back and forth, trying to stay on the railing.

"You really are a mess."

When Sheila's voice came from behind, Remo lost his concentration. Before tumbling forward into a bush, he pushed himself backward and jumped heavily to the aged, wooden floor of the porch.

"What do you mean by that?" Remo asked as he turned. Sheila stood in the doorway, naked as usual. It made it easier for them to couple at random moments.

"When I first ran into you, you were something exceptional. That's why you're here." she said. "And now? Just another young, out of shape nothing. With enough years, you might grow up to be an old, out-of-shape nothing."

She did not try to mask the contempt she felt for him.

"Wait a minute. What do you mean that's why I'm here?" Remo asked.

She smiled. "That's another thing. Your brain doesn't work either. If you can't figure it out, don't expect me to tell you. Come in and eat your breakfast. You need your strength."

"I'm tired of cereal and Twinkies," Remo said.

"Suits me. Eat grass."

Sheila walked back inside the house. When she and Remo first arrived, she watched him at all times to prevent his escaping. If he was not being watched, he was kept locked up. But now she ignored him, as if she had gauged his physical condition and decided there was no way he would be able to escape.

He wondered if he had really fallen that far. That a woman treated him with physical contempt? What good was Sinanju if it deserted you that quickly?

Or had he deserted it?

He leaned back against the railing and again felt the wood under his fingertips. Only a few weeks ago, he could have told in the dark what kind of wood it was, how dry, how old, how slippery it might be when wet and exactly what force might be needed to break it.

But now it was just a piece of wood, senseless, dead wood. It told him no story.

He had turned his back on Sinanju so it had turned its back on him. He had stopped the training, forgotten how to breathe, forgotten how to make his body something different from other men's bodies.

He had turned his back on other things too. What of Chiun who had for years been more father than father could be? Who had taught him out of love the wisdom of centuries of Sinanju? What of Smith and the mind-breaking tensions he worked under? His need to solve the tiger people problem in Boston? The pressure from the President?

Remo realized he had walked away from his only family, his only friends. In doing that he had walked away from the art of Sinanju which had made him, for better or for worse, what he was.

Remo paused and looked around the porch. He took a deep breath. The air was fresh and clean. He breathed again, reaching down deep, filling his lungs, then pulling the breath all the way into the pit of his groin as he had learned day after day, month after month, year after year.

Like a sluice gate being opened in flood time, the air poured through and triggered memories of what he once had been. He could taste the air as well as smell it. There was the sweetness of sugar and the rotten smell of decaying vegetation. There was humidity in the breath. He could smell the sea nearby, almost taste the salt, and there was a breeze corning from over the mountains.

He breathed again and could smell the animals of the fields. He could smell the meat from Sheila's kitchen table, the rotten sweet, flesh smell of dead meat. He could smell the dryness of the boards under his feet. It was as if he had been dead and was alive again.

Remo laughed aloud as life poured in through his senses. Sinanju was an art of death but to its practitioners, it brought only life, life being lived to its fullest, every sense alive and vibrant with feeling and power.

Remo laughed again. The porch rocked with the sound. Laughter bounced off the front wall of the house.

He turned and leaped high into the air.

He came down lightly with both feet on the narrow wooden railing. He stood motionless, his body as firmly balanced as if he had been rooted in the wood.

With his eyes closed, he jumped in the air, spun and came down with both feet, one behind the other, facing in the opposite direction. He ran forward along the railing then back, keeping his eyes closed, sensing the thickness of the wood through the soles of his feet, letting the power of nature flow from the wood into his body.

And he laughed again. It was over.

Inside, Sheila Feinberg did not hear him. She had just finished her breakfast of raw, bloody beef liver. She sat at the table and threw it back up onto her plate.

She looked at her vomit and smiled. The part of her that was animal had been giving her signals for thirty-six hours. Now the part that was woman seemed to be giving a signal. If it was the signal she had been looking for, she would have no more use for Remo.

Except as a meal.

On the porch, Remo took the pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, crushed it in his hand, and threw it toward the field of cut cane. He had no more use for cigarettes.

But he kept the matches.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It wasn't so much that the lady bartender at the Three Musketeers was beautiful, which she was, but that she had not seemed impressed by Durwood Dawkins. His Cadillac hadn't impressed her, nor had the large wad of bills he usually carried. But, she seemed to be impressed by the fact that he was a jet pilot for hire. Maybe, possibly, would he take her for a ride someday?

"Sure," he said, "Any day or night." Then he impressed her some more by telling her how quickly they could get to so many different places. Why, just last week it had taken only three hours to fly a private party to the Dominican Republic. And what a strange party. A great-looking blonde in short shorts accompanied by a cage. The cage, he knew, had a man in it because he heard him yell when the cage was dropped from the plane's cargo door.

These things did Durwood Dawkins tell the bartender. Because he had already had four martinis, he told most of the rest of the bar, too, including a man at the end who wore old gray chinos and threadbare shirts and had been able to support his terminally ill wife and family for the past four years only because he made a phone call once a week to pass on anything interesting he had heard. He made this call for $45 a week. The person he called told him only two days ago they were looking for a blonde woman and a dark-haired man with thick wrists.

Big Mouth Dawkins' story might not mean anything but then again it might. The man with the chinos finished the one beer he allowed himself on his way home from work every night and called that special telephone number. Perhaps this time there might even be a bonus.

An hour later, the lady bartender was getting ready to go off duty. Durwood Dawkins wished his apartment was cleaner. It would make for a neater score. But while she was in the back checking out, Dawkins was met at the bar by a man with a voice so dry it sounded as if his throat were lined with graham crackers.

"Are you Durwood Dawkins, the pilot?" the man asked.

Dawkins sized the man up quickly. He didn't look like much. An old suit. Unstyled hair. He wasn't a client or an owner. It was therefore safe to be rude.

"Who wants to know?"

"My name is Smith. Tell me about your flight last week to the islands."

"What flight?"

"The blonde woman. The cage with the man in it."

"Who told you about that?" Dawkins asked.

"That doesn't matter. I know about it," Smith said.

"Well, I don't feel like talking about it." Dawkins looked around to see if anyone was watching. The blonde woman with the cage had paid him extra well to keep his mouth closed. While there wasn't a chance in hell she'd get any of her money back, if she complained, word could get around that Dawkins wasn't as closemouthed as he should be. That might cut into business a little too much for comfort.

"I'm sorry. You'll just have to talk about that," said Smith.

"Are you threatening me?" asked Dawkins. Despite best intentions, his voice got louder. Martini volume.

"No. I'm trying to avoid that," Smith said, lowering his voice to counter Dawkins' increased volume. "I won't tell you that if I want, you will have no pilot's license in the morning. I won't discuss the regular trips you make to Mexico and the unusual cargo you carry out. In little paper bags. I'd rather not get into those things. What I want to know is whom did you fly. Where did you set them down? Who paid you? Who were the passengers? Did they say anything?"

With alcohol-induced bravery, Durwood Dawkins refused to be intimidated, although his stomach did an Immelmann loop confronted with knowledge of his little drug-running trips from Mexico.

"You want answers, ask Dear Abby," he said. "She answers questions. I don't."

Forgotten now was the lady bartender changing her clothes in the back room. Dawkins said, "I'm leaving."

"Have it your own way," Smith said. "You would have done better to answer in here."

"Leave me alone," Dawkins said. Smith reached out to touch the man's shoulder. Dawkins pulled away before the older man could touch him and stomp toward the door.

The relief bartender asked Smith, "What can I get you, sir?"

"Nothing, thank you. I don't drink."

Smith took a pack of matches and a free pretzel from the bar. He followed Dawkins outside. As he neared the door there was a muted yell.

When he got to the sidewalk, Durwood Dawkins had just completed a merger with a parking meter.

His body was on the sidewalk side of the meter but his right hand had gone through the top of the meter. His fingers fluttered around on the street side of the instrument.

Chiun stood alongside him.

"He is ready to talk to you now, Emperor."

Smith cleared his throat. He stood so that his body shielded Dawkins' wildly fluttering hand from the view of passers-by.

"Now. Who and where and when and what?" he asked.

"I want my hand free first," Dawkins said.

"Where would you like it?" asked Chiun, moving close. "I can put it in your left pocket. I can leave it in the trunk of your car. If the emperor wishes, we can mail it to you. It is for you to decide, big-mouthed one."

"First I'll talk," said Dawkins to Smith. The pilot's eyes rolled in terror. "But you've got to promise to keep this guy off me," he told Smith.

"Just talk," Smith said.

Five minutes later, Smith and Chiun were heading for a helicopter which would take them to Westchester Country Airport, where a private jet was waiting. Next stop: the Dominican Republic.

And 1500 miles away in the Dominican Republic, Sheila Feinberg threw up her lunch, great chunks of raw steak that had stayed in her stomach only long enough for gastric juices to discolor the red a sickly greenish-gray.

She laughed. The part of her that was tiger had told her before, but now the woman part confirmed it. It was morning sickness.

She was pregnant. With the first baby of a new species.

Remo had done what he was designed to do and now, frankly, she found him a little tiresome. It was time to get rid of him.

Maybe she would be able to keep that meal down.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Remo, where are you? It's time again."

She was moving toward him but it was somehow different. Remo felt her motion through the floorboards of the old farmhouse, but she wasn't walking as she normally walked. Her movements were slow, deliberate, as if she were looking for the right spots to place her feet. Remo knew it for what it was. It signalled lie at her come-on-and-have-sex words.

She was stalking him. The time had come.

Remo hopped lightly over the porch railing and ran into the farmland in front of the house. New cane had started to grow, interspersed with high, thick, stringy weed. There were tufts of vegetation where Remo could take shelter and be unseen.

He ran through a half dozen of them, scraping his feet, rubbing himself against the weeds, then moved far off to the edge of the field and waited.

He heard Sheila's voice again.

"Where are you, bad boy?" she called. "Come to Mama."

The comic-book attempt to be seductive was out of character. Another time, Remo might have laughed aloud. But not now. She would be after him in a moment, and Remo wondered just how good he still was. Had he gotten back enough of Sinanju?

She had almost killed him once before when he was at the peak of his powers. What now when he was out of training and out of shape?

Sheila was on the porch. Remo could see her by peering around the edge of a clump of weeds.

She was naked. Her hands were in front of her, over her head, her fingers curled like claws. She stopped on the porch and turned her head to the left, then to the right.

She was sniffing the air. Then she caught Remo's scent leading to the cane field. From her throat came an angry, violent roar, a tiger's roar the ferocity of which freezes prey in their tracks, rooting them to the ground with fear.

She came off the porch, her hands back at her sides, her head bent low, smelling Remo's scent.

"You know, you can't get away," she yelled out. "Your trying to is just going to make it easier to eat you."

She moved along the line of Remo's scent, trotting briskly, moving so quickly it was as if she was following a paved path through the field.

Remo crouched low, keeping out of sight. He ran toward the house. He felt the breeze touch the right side of his body and knew his fresh scent was not being carried toward her.

At the side of the house, he found the gasoline generator that powered the house's lights and refrigerator. There were two full five-gallon, gasoline cans. Remo grabbed one in each hand and began to retrace his path to the field.

Sheila was still calling him. Her voice echoed in the still day with an almost inhuman volume.

She paused at the first clump of bushes where Remo had left his scent and sniffed around it.

"How did you guess," she called, "that your work here was done?" She straightened up and began following Remo's old path through the field. "No use hopping around," she called. "You can't hide from me."

As she reached the second cluster of greenery where Remo had paused, she said, "It's sort of a shame, isn't it, that you won't be around to see the race you helped create?"

Remo was pouring gasoline along the path he had followed near the far side of the field. Staying low, one gas can on its side under his arm, he ran along. The gas spilled out splashing bushes and dead, dry grass.

It took one full can and more than half the other. By the time Sheila had reached the sixth cluster of cane and weed Remo had scented, he had finished circling the field with gasoline and was back near the porch of the house.

He was out of shape. He could feel it. The ripped stomach muscles had knitted and the skin had healed without much of a scar, but muscle tone had deteriorated. He could feel strain from having run with the two five-gallon cans under his arms. Remo dropped the cans and shrugged.

He could see Sheila rising from the crouch where she had been sniffing his trail around the sixth cluster of bushes he had reached. Before she could follow him back to the house, Remo dashed forward into the center of the field and called out, "Hey, pussycat, where are you?"

Sheila stood up tall, a growl rumbling deep in her throat. She saw Remo and smiled, a broad predator's smile, that expressed neither happiness nor joy, merely satisfaction over finding the next meal so neatly served.

She moved toward him slowly, body bent from the waist, her full and shapely breasts pointing toward the ground, their tips hardened with a passion that had nothing to do with sex. They seemed smaller than they had been.

"I thought you'd give me a better chase than this," she said.

"It's too hot to play," Remo said.

"Even with the mother of your child?" Sheila asked.

The words hit Remo like a hammer, triggering years of frustrated knowledge that he would never have a home, never have children, never have a place of his own that he didn't have to pay for by the night.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I'm carrying your baby. That's what you were here for, stupid." Sheila was only twenty yards from him now.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to make more and more of my new people. Someday my son will lead them. He'll have the world."

It wasn't his baby, Remo thought. A baby was made by love between two people. Two humans. This thing, if it existed, would be a grotesque mimicry of an infant, half human, half animal, a snarling vicious beast of a killer.

If he ever had a baby with those traits, he wanted them to come from him, not from its mother. In that moment, for the first time, he hated Sheila Feinberg, hated her for the mockery she had made of his fatherhood, using him as a stud horse, not knowing or caring how much a child would mean to Remo.

In his anger Remo called back, "Have the world? He'll sleep in a tree, eat scraps from the butcher shop and be lucky if he doesn't spend his days in a zoo. With you, you half-witted, half-breed, half-assed alley cat."

Sheila shivered with anger. "I might even have kept you alive," she said. "But you just don't understand. I'm the new breed of man."

"You're the same old breed of lunatic," Remo said.

She was ten yards from him now and charged, ringers raised over her head, head tilted toward the side, mouth open and long, white teeth glistening with saliva.

Her speed surprised Remo, she was almost on him before he could react. Just as she closed the space between them, Remo ducked low, rolled on the ground to the left and came up running.

Sheila's charge missed Remo and carried her forward into the bushes. She pulled herself back and ran after Remo.

Remo knew. He was far from what he had been. He had hoped he was 100 percent, but he wasn't even 50. Sheila was an animal at the peak of her strength, in the prime of her power and youth.

But Remo had something else. He had man's intelligence. It was that intelligence that enabled man to conquer the world by using the bestial instincts of animals as weapons against those same animals.

He reached the edge of the field, and turned to face Sheila's charge. He pulled the book of matches from his back pocket and waited. When she reached him she feinted left, then came right. He could feel her long nails rake down his left shoulder and knew he was bleeding. At the same time, he went down, under her body, and came up into the pit of her stomach with the stiffened heel of the hand.

"Ooooof," she hissed as the air rushed out of her body.

He had missed. The blow would have killed if he had been on target. Sheila hit the ground, rolled to her feet, and spun to face Remo. Her glistening white skin was now caked with dirt and bits of dried grass. She looked like an animal that had taken a mud bath, then rolled in straw.

Before she could charge again, Remo struck a match and threw it past her. It landed in the gasoline line Remo had spilled and erupted into flame with a whoosh. The dried cane and weeds crackled. Like a fuse lit in the center, the fire sped in both directions circling the two fighters in the field.

Sheila's eyes widened with fear and shock. Remo knew he had been right. Of all animals on earth, only man had conquered the fire fear. Her stubbing out of cigarettes, her refusal to use a simple, kitchen stove, had told him Sheila too feared the flame.

She jumped away from the fire crackling behind her. Now she was in a pocket, surrounded on three sides by flames with Remo standing in front of her.

She charged him again and Remo executed a slow rolling movement of his upper body that carried her by him. As he tried to back off again toward the flames, he was too slow. She slapped out a hand. It caught his ankle and tripped him into the dirt. Then she was on him. Remo could feel her weight on his back, her claws trying to tear out his neck.

Without panic, knowing what he was doing, Remo scurried forward, carrying Sheila Feinberg on his back. When he reached the ring of fire, she dropped off and fell away from him. Her eyes glistened with hatred as she faced him over a distance of only ten feet.

"That fire won't burn forever," she hissed. "Then you'll die. You can't keep running from me."

"Don't jump to conclusions," Remo said. "That's the trouble with you cats, always jumping to conclusions. Now I'm going to attack."

Remo had taken Sheila's three charges and knew the pattern now. She came in with arms raised, head tilted, belly an open invitation to attack. It was time to accept that invitation before she wore him down.

Remo darted out of the little cul-de-sac of flame, moving around Sheila, circling her, until there was no flame directly behind him and she felt safe to charge.

She came in again, arms raised, head tilted. As she neared, Remo went to the ground and came up with the heels of both feet, burying them deep into her soft white belly.

Sheila went into the air with the thrust of Remo's legs, turning a lazy half-somersault. Like a cat, she twisted her body on the way to earth, to land on her feet.

Instead she landed on a spike of cut sugar cane, which, like a spear, buried itself in Sheila Feinberg's stomach.

Almost in slow motion, as Remo watched, her body slid down the bamboolike spike. It exited from her back, bloodied, raw bits of flesh stuck to it.

She was dying and looked at him with not pain but bewilderment, the look unreasoning animals get when they encounter the reality of their own death.

Remo rolled to his feet and walked toward Sheila Feinberg.

She gestured to him with a hand, moving jerkily, like a pantomimist aping a robot.

"I've got to tell you something," she hissed. "Come here."

Remo knelt near Sheila to listen. As he did her teeth opened wide and she drove her mouth toward his open throat. But she was slow now. With the passing of life had gone her speed. Remo just leaned back and her teeth closed harmlessly on air. Her face fell back down into the dirt.

Remo stood and looked down as she breathed her last.

"Sorry, but that's the biz, sweetheart," he said.

Suddenly he felt fatigue wash over his body, like a giant wave engulfing a swimmer. He wanted to sleep, to rest, and when he awakened, to rededicate his body to Sinanju. But there was something he had to do first, or there would never be any rest for him.

The flames had died but the field still smoldered when Chiun and Smith arrived a few minutes later in the rented jeep that had met them at the airport. The rental agent for the jeeps on the island had remembered well the blonde woman with the cage and instructions to the farmhouse were simple and direct.

Remo was standing in the field, his back to them, as they approached.

The naked body of Sheila Feinberg lay on its back on the ground in front of him. The gash in her stomach had opened even wider, and when Remo turned to them, Smith saw his hands were red with blood.

Remo smiled when he saw Chiun.

"Are you all right?" Smith asked.

"I'm fine. She wasn't pregnant," Remo said and walked back to the farmhouse to wash.

Chiun walked along behind him, matching him step for step.

"Look at you," he said. "Fat. You're fat. Fat, fat, fat."

"I know, Little Father," Remo said. "I've learned something."

"It will be the first time. And do you know how much I spent on candles for you?"

Remo stopped and looked at Chiun. "Doing death rituals? I know something about Sinanju, Little Father. I know that's only for blood of your own blood."

"Your life was so worthless, I thought I would ennoble your death," said Chiun, peevishly. "Then you went and didn't die on me. All those candles are ruined."

"We'll get you some more," Remo said. "You know, Chiun, even though I'm not much, you're lucky to have me as a son. It must be good to have a son."

"It's good to have a good son," Chiun said. "But one like you is like no son at all. Really, Remo, you have no consideration at all."

"Fat, too. Don't forget that."

When Remo came out of the farmhouse, Smith had just finished inspecting the woman's body.

"Was this Sheila Feinberg?" he asked.

"That's her," said Remo.

Smith nodded. "Well, at least she won't be making any more tiger people. Did you, by any chance, find out the names of any of the ones still in Boston?"

"No," said Remo.

"Well, when you go back there, I guess you can clean them up kind of quickly. Especially now that you know how they behave."

"I'm not going back there, Smitty," Remo said.

"But they're still there. Still killing," Smith said.

"They'll stop soon. They're almost done."

"You sound sure," Smith said.

"I am. I told you, she wasn't pregnant."

Remo would say no more. He was silent riding in the jeep to the airstrip where Smith's private jet waited for them.

In the plane, Chiun spoke to him softly.

"She was changing back, wasn't she?" he said.

Remo nodded. "How did you know?"

"Her body. It had lost its grace. That thing could not move like the thing that took you from the sanitarium last week."

"You're right, Little Father," Remo said. "She had been throwing up her meals. She thought it was morning sickness and pregnancy. But it wasn't. It was her body rejecting the change. Her shape was changing too and she was losing strength. She was on her way back."

"So the others in Boston, they will change back too," Chiun said.

"That's right. So I guess we can just leave them alone."

Smith joined them as Chiun said, "Still it was not a bad attempt. If we could make it permanent, we could get some of this NDA..."

"DNA," said Smith.

"Correct," said Chiun. "Do you have some?"

"No," Smith said.

"Could you get us a bottle?"

"I don't think they sell bottles. Why?"

"I have been very busy practicing tolerance for inferior peoples quite a while. If you notice, I have not mentioned that either of you are white. This is part of my new program to tolerate the inferior of the world. But if we got some of this DNA, we could change the whites and the blacks to yellow. Then we could change the level to Korean. And then improve that to North Korean. Do you follow me?"

"So far," said Smith.

"Then we could refine all those North Koreans into the best of what anyone can or could aspire to be. A person from Sinanju. Do not be overwhelmed, Emperor, but is that not a wonder to conjure?"

"Yeah, Smitty," Remo said. "Just think. You'll have four billion. Just like Chiun."

"I can't get any DNA," Smith said rapidly.

Remo laughed. "He'll settle for a centrifuge," he said.

Chiun said even though he was tolerant, it was still just like whites to fritter away what was probably their last chance to improve themselves.

He told Remo in Korean that would be the theme of his next book.

"Next book?" asked Remo. "Where's your last book?"

"I have decided not to waste it on you people. You wouldn't appreciate it. But this next book might bring you to your senses."

"When are you going to write it?" asked Remo.

"I would have had it well underway by now if I had not had to waste so much time on you. If you will just leave me alone and keep things quiet, I will finish it in no time."

"I'll do my best," Remo said.

"That will not be good enough," said Chiun. "It never is."