Killing Time

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pace, while Dobbins sped past them like a black bul­let. He was ahead of all of them.

He checked his rear-view. Not all of them. There was one pair of headlights behind him, going at his pace, no slower, no faster.

Dobbins cursed under his breath. Those Fords had to be built with Maserati engines in them. Well, it was going to take more than a hot engine and a car full of youngsters just barely off the tit to catch him.

"Try and follow this, you suckers!" he shouted as he spun into the inside lane. With one momentous burst of power, he jumped the median strip and headed full speed in the other direction.

"A trick, boys," he roared, coughing with laughter. They must have been asses to think he was going to Bethesda in the first place, Dobbins thought. Who screws in Bethesda, anyway?

Out of his rear-view he watched the green Ford skid and spin out into an uncontrollable donut across four lanes of traffic. It hit two vehicles superficially while siting toward the far side of Connecticut Avenue. Several cars braked behind it, sending them into her­ringbone patterns along the roadway. The green Ford crashed into a guardrail and at last lay still.

Dobbins hooted with delight. It was clear sailing now. He put the car on cruise control at 60 and glided down Connecticut Avenue back toward the city. His thoughts filled with Rhonda. Rhonda, in a transparent pink negligee, with maybe the black garter belt he'd given her for Valentine's Day underneath. Rhonda of the deliciously foul mouth who knew just how to bring his wildest fantasies to life. Rhonda... if Rhonda was awake. Otherwise, he might as well be at home with Hilda. He cut the cruise control and gunned the pedal.

Back in the city, he made his way toward the north-

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east section of town. Traffic was light and he made good time. He didn't notice until he'd reached Six­teenth Avenue that the same headlights had been be­hind him since the crackup on the highway.

Damn it, if it wasn't the Secret Service boys, it was the turd-eating reporters. Although no official word about the assassinations of the secretaries of the Air Force and the Navy had been given, the press boys had noticed the added security around Dobbins and took every opportunity to grili him about it. Ever since the advent of the Secret Service guards, he'd denied all press interviews and eschewed them with a hurried "No comment" when they ran up to him on the street.

Oh, that's all I need, Dobbins thought as he checked the rear-view again. It certainly looked like a tail. The crud-mongers. He could just see the head­lines now: "ARMY HEAD ELUDES SECURITY TO RENDEZVOUS WITH WASHINGTON MISTRESS." And there would be a picture next to it of Rhonda in her flamingo-pink negligee with the black garter belt underneath. Read all about it in the Pentagon Report. Details in Clive R. Dobbins's dishonorable discharge papers.

"Get off my ass, you wang-wavers!" he shouted as he turned into a narrow sidestreet. He slowed down at the entrance to an alley. If it wasn't a tail, the car that had been driving behind him for the past twenty min­utes would pass by harmlessly.

But it didn't. It turned into the same side street with a deliberation that sent a sudden involuntary chill down Dobbins's spine. He entered the alleyway, roll­ing slowly to avoid the stacks of piled-up garbage on either side. Then he turned onto another side street. And after that, another alley.

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The car was still behind him.

Rhonda's plush apartment building was less than two blocks away. If he was going to get his portrait snapped, it sure as hell wasn't going to be in front of that building. He ground the Lincoln to a halt.

Fine. Snap away, boys. Think you're so damned smart. The only picture you're getting of me is going to be right here in this alley, while I give you the news that my lawyer's going to slap a harassment suit against your muckraking paper.

Stick that in your turd-eating notepads.

He got out slowly and walked toward the car behind him with kingly grandeur. They were going to see who's boss around here, by God. The car was a non­descript Chevy, as battered and dented as every other car in Washington. Something was poking out of the driver's window. In the darkness of the alley, Dobbins guessed it was the ubiquitous press credentials, which reporters seemed to think gave them access to every skeleton-filled closet in America. Well, he'd show them where they could stow their toe-sucking press cards.

Only it wasn't a press card. And the boys inside weren't jumping out like hyenas with their questions and their flashbulbs. Dobbins frowned as he moved closer, hearing nothing but the gritty sound of his own footfalls on the dirt and snow-covered brick of the alleyway. They certainly didn't act like any Washing­ton reporters he ever saw.

Rookies, probably. Independents. Trying to get their first big public expose, and not knowing a don­key's fart about how to get it. Well, here's your scoop, boys. And the subpoena will come in the morning to verify it. He pulled himself up to full height. He jutted

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an accusing finger at the car to throw a little scare into them. He put on his most authoritative general's voice. "What the hell are-"

The words choked off as the dark object poking through the driver's window lengthened and another, just like it, elongated sleekly out the rear window. And then he knew what they were as the men in the car- what were they wearing?-raised them to their shoul­ders and sighted through them and then the things bellowed bright fireworks in a deafening crash that sent brick flying off the walls behind Dobbins, and the general gasped once in red bubbles of blood, and his feet splayed out beneath him and the car was gone.

As he lay in the alleyway, riddled with what would later be determined as more than 100 wounds deliv­ered from a Chinese copy of a Soviet AK-47 subma­chine gun at point-blank range, Clive R. Dobbins's last thought was that the Secret Service boys could never have stopped the men in that car. The president him­self couldn't have stopped them, just as the president wouldn't be able to stop them the next time.

And the next time was going to be worse. Much worse.

Chapter Thirteen

DESTINATION 2ADNIA.

The Folcroft computers spewed out another piece to the puzzle of Felix Foxx. Dawn was peeking in through the Venetian blinds of Smith's office, and the light stung his eyes. He'd stayed awake in his office for two nights now, trying to sort out the tangled mess the computers had brought to him.

it was all there, he knew. Somewhere. During the past 48 hours the Folcroft Four had given him a million pieces of information. In Smith's weary brain, he be­gan to see the trusted computers as four diabolically wise beings from some unearthly plane, who gave him ail the parts to a machine and then said with a wink, "Okay, Smitty. Now you make it run."

But he hadn't been able to make it run. A hundred times over Smith had written down the salient points of the case. The overflowing wastebasket full of scraps of paper were testimony to his efforts. But nothing had jelled. The parts of the machine were as disparate as oranges and apples. With a sigh, he drew out another sheet of notepaper and began again.

First, there were the murders of the Secretary of the Air Force, Homer Watson, and the Secretary of the

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Navy, Thornton Ives, both killed in strange ways that reflected combat conditions. Every branch of the mili­tary had launched full-scale investigations on their own, without turning up so much as the smell of a lead. CURE'S own man, Remo, had come up almost as empty-handed. The only thing Remo had locked onto was some middle-aged diet doctor named Foxx who, for some unknown reason, the computers had decreed to be a ninety-four-year-old man named Vaux who was last heard from some fifty years before in connection with a scandal involving the youth-re­storing properties of a drug called procaine.

"2," Smith wrote neatly. Point Two was that Foxx/ Vaux had last been seen in the company of a woman who was found-murdered, her body drained of what might have been an unusually high level of procaine. The New York police were after Foxx on that one, but they were looking in the wrong places. Foxx was at a so-called aging clinic in Pennsylvania called Shangri-la with Remo, and Smith wasn't about to turn the information over to standard law enforcement agencies until Remo had found what he had gone after.

Shangri-la was Point Three. Apparently this was no ordinary massage-and-mud-bath resort. Remo had re­ported guests to the clinic, who were in their seven­ties, even though they looked barely old enough to buy a drink. The procaine connection. Large amounts of the drug might keep them young. At least that was the theory advanced by Vaux in the thirties before he disappeared off the face of the earth. That would ex­plain Foxx/Vaux's advanced age, but little more. So far, there was nothing to connect the strange goings on with the two military murders.

Secret Service guards had been posted around

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Clive R. Dobbins, the secretary of the Army, since he was the next logical choice for an assassination team bent on eliminating the country's military leaders, but if the hit team got through the Secret Service to Dob­bins, who would be next? The Folcroft Four had an­swered with chilling efficiency, flashing the names of the next three possible victims: the secretary of De­fense, the Secretary of State, and the president of the United States.

Time was running out. It was still eminently possible that Felix Foxx, for all the interesting revelations about him, had nothing to do with any murders except for that of the gir! in New York City, and even that lead was circumstantial at best. Remo might have been on the wrong track all along. In the interests of time, Smith was on the verge of pulling Remo out of Shang­ri-la and having him start over.

And then, at 4:51 A.M., Smith wheedled Point Four out of the computers. Point Four was DESTINATION ZADNIA, and the words were printed on the console screen four times. Foxx, under the name of Felix Vaux, had traveled to Zadnia three times during the past year, and purchased an open ticket to the same place two months before.

That was the stickler. Why would a nationally cele­brated diet doctor want to make four unpublicized vis­its to an unstable country in the north of Africa? Zad­nia had nothing-no technology, no arable land, not even enough overweight people to fill one of Foxx's lectures. All Zadnia possessed was a power-mad dic­tator named Ruomid Halaffa who would buy arms and secrets from any source at any time in order to fuel, in­discriminately, the terrorist forces of the world. That and just enough oil to buy Halaffa's weapons from the lowest bidder.

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"Zadnia," Smith said, bewildered. Across from him, the Folcroft Four seemed to be smirking. The last of the machine's parts had been handed over. Now you make it run.

He would have to call Remo. Maybe Remo had dis­covered somehting during the night that would shed some light on this Zadnia business. He called the Shangri-la number. The line was dead. No ring, noth­ing. He called the operator and asked her to dial the number for him. She told him that the line was out of order, possibly because of some violent snowstorms going on in that part of the country.

While the operator was talking, the special red phone on his desk, the one with the direct hookup to the president, rang. He immediately hung up on the operator and picked up the red phone on the first ring.

"Yes, Mr. President," he said. He listened for sev­eral minutes while the president spoke, and during those minutes Smith felt as if he'd aged five years. He could almost feel the flesh of his face sagging with each dreadful word on the other end of the line.

"Thank you for the information, Mr. President. We're working on it," he said and broke the con­nection.

Dobbins was dead. The killers had won again.

There was only one thing to do. Smith checked the special portable phone in his attache case and locked the clasps. Then he memorized the coordinates of Shangri-la, which Remo had given him, pulled on his galoshes and coat, and fixed his brown felt hat on his head. There was no time to wait for snowstorms. If Remo couldn't get out of Shangri-la, Smith would go there himself.

Chapter Fourteen

As Harold Smith was closing the catches to his attache case, Remo was sitting in a pine lean-to some­where in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

He should have known that Chiun would get bored with his new toy before they had gone even forty miles on their skis. But that had put them on a drivable main highway, and a truck driver had barreled them into Chicago.

Chicago itself, despite the arctic winds off Lake Michigan, was a blessing. O'Hare Airport was used to terrible weather and they managed to catch a flight as far as Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Naturally, Chiun insisted on sitting in the seat next to the left wing, which was occupied by a Chinese widow who was nearly as boisterous as Chiun. After twenty minutes of mutual castigation, the rest of the passengers had demanded that both the strange old skinny Chinese guy and his wife be bodily ejected from the aircraft. Chiun made the point that he was neither Chinese nor crazy, which was what any person married to the Chinese lady would have to be in order to tolerate her dog-eating ways. He emphasized the point by knocking out the window above the left wing

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seat, causing the 727 to fall into a shrieking spin as oxygen masks dropped into the fusilage and several loose articles of clothing got sucked out into the at­mosphere. The temperature inside the plane plum­meted.

The plane climbed out of the spin only after Remo managed to stop up the open window with someone's red American Tourister weekender, which had hereto­fore not been collapsible. Then he'd had to give all three stewardesses a good sample of the 52 steps to ecstasy before they would agree that the missing window was a quirk of fate.

At Sioux Falls, Remo stole the first available auto­mobile, a pink 1963 Nash Rambler, which puttered as far as Belvidere in Jackson County before giving up the ghost in a cloud of greasy black smoke. He'd kept the owner's registration card so that whoever usually drove the old fossil could be reimbursed. Smitty was going to love that. In his book, stealing cars was defi­nitely not a desirable function of CURE, and paying for them was even less so.

They still had twenty miles to hike before even arriv­ing in the right county, then eighty more skimming the 2,000-foot high cliffs of the South Dakota Badlands in the back seat of a souped-up '55 driven by suicidal teen-agers, before reaching Deaver Airport. Which, as the man said, was closed. A wonderful trip.

Now he sat under the pine lean-to, watching the morning sun blaze in full glory, while he wondered what to do next. The storm had quit about an hour after dawn, and the snow glistened, trackless, on the ground around him. A few feet away, Chiun slept quietly on a mat fashioned from twigs.

Chiun had led them to this spot in the middle of no­where, based on nothing more than the fact that the

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area they were in was the least inhabited. Remo tried to argue that Felix Foxx was even less prepared than they were to brave the desolate countryside alone dur­ing a snowstorm, but Chiun had insisted. He heard echoes, he said. And, actually, Remo had heard them, away-faraway, disconnected echoes through the mountains that seemed to have no point of origin. But by that time he was too exhausted to know whether the echoes were anything more than the soughing of the wind in the trees.

Once they made camp, Chiun had slept immedi­ately. The most Remo could do was to lower his heartrate and will his body into a simulation of basal metabolism. It was fake sleep, with all his senses keenly aware, but he had felt a little better afterward.

Suddenly Chiun sat up, bolt upright, his head cocked. Remo opened his mouth to speak, but the old man held up a restraining hand. He listened for a few more seconds, then said, "Prepare."

Remo heard it too. He burst out of the pine lean-to like an explosion.

There were six of them, very young, armed to the teeth and in uniform. American Army uniforms, Remo thought, although the garments didn't look much like the combat fatigue he remembered from Vietnam in his pre-CURE days. There was something strange about the lot of them, something bizarre yet familiar. It was a feeling. ... No, a smell. A smell that reminded REMO of death and decay and falseness.

Chiun took out two of the soldiers at once with a twisting kick that sent them splattering against the trunks of two huge trees. REMO caught one of the men, a handsome youth of nineteen or twenty, in the solar plexus. Then he let fly with a right that wedged the fourth soldier's nose inside his brain.

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It happened in a flash; four men were dead before the other two could even register what was going on. Here were two civilians, one a five-foot-tail Oriental about a hundred years old and the other a lunatic who slept outdoors in twelve-degree weather in a T-shirt, and they were obliterating the Team.

The Team, Sergeant Randall Riley thought as he saw the old Oriental circling with Davenport. Daven­port was one of the Team. Like the other Team mem­bers, Davenport was unbeatable. Davenport was the best thing with a knife since Geronimo. That was why Foxx had recruited him. Davenport's prowess with a knife was too good for the regular army.

The army was an organization that told you to go out and kill, and when you killed they gave you medals and called you a hero. Until the war ended . And once it ended, you didn't get any more medals for killing. Oh, no. Suddenly, with the signing of a piece of paper, good knife men like Davenport weren't allowed to kill anymore. Suddenly there were rules that said that if you killed, you got martialed and thrown in the slammer till the worms ate out your eyes.

That was what the regular army did to Davenport. He'd still be rotting away in prison, his knife-arm used for making wallets, if it hadn't been for Foxx.

And the Team.

And now the Team was down by four, and this crazy old chink was taking on Davenport and his Bowie with his bare hands. Riley cocked the safety off his S & W Centennial Airweight and waited. Let Davenport have his fun with the old fool. Then he'd polish off the skinny guy with the Centennial.

For the Team.

He watched as Chiun and Davenport circled one an­other, Davenport's Bowie knife swiping the air sav-

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ageiy. The old man barely seemed to move, and yet each time the knife slashed downward to where the old man's face was, or his chest, or his belly, the old man was somehow gone from the spot.

Riley blinked. His eyes must not be working right, he decided. And then Davenport was on the gook, right, on top of him, and the knife was singing through the still morning air and shining in the bright morning sun, and then. ... It wasn't possible! The knife was sailing over the tops of the trees, traveling like it had been shot out of a cannon, and attached to it was something pale and long with one end red and ragged that spilled a rain of blood. And then Davenport was screaming and his eyes were rolling like the eyes of a shot horse and he was pointing to the bloodied stump that used to be his shoulder and, Christ, it was just like Guadalcanal all over again, with men moaning while their arms and legs rolled like broken toys down the hills around them, oh, Christl

Riley opened fire. A blur came toward him, and then he screamed as the bullet aimed for the thin man in the T-shirt missed and exploded into Davenport's guts. But by then the Centennial was somehow out of his hand, anyway, and there was nothing to do but run.

The Team. Got to tell the rest of the Team, Riley told himself, his thoughts blurred with the urine smell of fear that he hadn't known since the first days of World War II. Just running was a victory. He would never have even gotten the chance to run if he hadn't fallen down the twenty-foot cliff. The skinny guy in the T-shirt already had his hands on him after he'd knocked the Centennial out of his hand. Fortunately, the skinny guy only had hold of the cuff of Riley's trousers, and when Riley skidded off the edge and down the snow-

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covered drop, the fabric had torn. So now half of Rifey's right pantleg was torn off and all that stood be­tween the freezing air and the skin of his calf was a set of woolen BVDs, but he was free. For the Team. For Foxx. Got to tell Foxx.

"Let him go," Chiun said. "He will not be hard to fol­low." He pointed to the wide indentations Riley's body had made in the snow, during his descent down the steep hill. Beyond, at the base, his footprints clearly etched the way.

REMO walked back to where the five bodies lay and opened the collar of one. "Something's funny here," he said as he read the man's dogtags. "It says that he was born in 1923. That would make him fifty-nine years old. But he's a kid. And look at this one. . . .

"They are none of them children," Chiun said.

Remo looked at the five again. Chiun was right, he saw with amazement. They weren't the same men he remembered killing. The dead men possessed the same features, but all had the grizzled and aged faces of well-conditioned, middle-aged men.

"But they were young," Remo said, feeling a chill inside his bones. The smell was stronger now. It was the death-smell, but different, more stale, as if the death in these men's bodies had been sealed into a bottle for decades and finally exposed to air.

Remo bent over the soldier again. He was undenia­bly who the dogtags said he was: a man nearing sixty years of age. How would Remo ever explain to Smith that he had killed a nineteen-year-old boy whose body was replaced by that of a sixty-year-old man in the span of five minutes? There was something else he wanted to see. He tore the man's uniform and long un-

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derwear up to the armpit, and found it. The man's arms were covered with needle marks.

The same marks Posie Ponselle wore.

"Chiun."

They were all marked, every one of them.

"Leave them. I hear the sound of an engine." They hurtled at top speed through the snow, following Riley's footsteps. But before they reached the copse of dense pine forest where the footsteps led, the en­gine noise gunned to a roar and then a small Cessna appeared behind the copse. It was a low takeoff, and in the bright morning light Remo could see the pilot's face clearly. Foxx looped around in a wide circle, then buzzed directly over Remo and Chiun. As he started his ascent, he saluted Remo with two fingers and a smirk. He looped wide again and was gone.

Neither Chiun nor Remo broke the silence for sev­eral minutes. Remo held his eyes to the sky, watching the Cessna's contrails puff into fat clouds and fade away. They'd come so close. So damn close.

In a clearing in front of the airstrip Foxx had just used, Remo found the remains of an abandoned camp. Oh, sharp, Remo, he said to himself. A camp, soldiers, Foxx, the works. Right here at your finger­tips. And you let them slip away. A fine assassin you are.

He went from tent to empty tent. Everything was in perfect order. Except that there were no people, any­where. There were no vehicles, no tracks, no foot­prints leading out of the clearing, nothing. It was as if a small army base had just dematerialized.

"Remo." Chiun's voice came high and clear in the still air. From a distance, the old man looked as if he were dancing, prodding at the earth beside a huge

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pine, first with one dainty foot, then the other, his face creased in concentration. "This ground is hollow," he said.

With the heels of his hands, Remo tested the four-by-four-foot-square area Chiun had marked. Sure is," he said, clearing away the foot and a half of snow that covered it. Beneath the snow was a thick carpet of moss.

"Hah," Chiun shrieked.

"Hah? It's moss."

"It is not moss, o dim one," Chiun declared with an­noyance. "This is the south side of that tree." He pointed to the towering pine. "Moss grows on the north side. This is transplanted moss. A camouflage." With one grand sweep, he yanked the patch of moss from the ground. The steel casing and combination lock of a safe lay beneath it.

Remo's face broke into a grin. "Well, I'll be. Not bad, Little Father."

"Not good," Chiun said. "Behold."

The soldiers were in the trees. There were more of them this time, armed with everything from close-range pistols to a flame thrower. The flame thrower at­tacked first, sending a tunnel of fire straight toward Remo.

He tore the door off the safe and held it up to the orange stream just before it reached them. Bullets pinged off the steel shield. The smell of spent ammu­nition filled the air. "Hold this," he said, handing the safe door to Chiun.

The safe contained a sheaf of papers-bills of sale, communications with European pharmaceutical com­panies, and charts. They appeared to be medical charts of some kind. At the top of each chart was a man's name, followed by a serial number. The dog-

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tags, Remo remembered. The charts must be for the soldiers firing at him now, soldiers who had somehow found their way into Foxx's care. They detailed sev­eral years' worth of resting heart rates, stress toler­ances', and a section labeled "Blood Levels" was fol­lowed by a long list of items. The first on the list was procaine. On every single chart, the procaine level of the soldier had risen dramatically during the course of the charting.

Under the last of the charts rested four manila fold­ers. In the first was a series of photographs and a biog­raphy of General Homer G. Watson, the now-dead Secretary of the Air Force. Clipped to the biographical sheet were scores of notes detailing the general's schedules, standing appointments, and favorite res­taurants. On the upper right corner of the folder was a small black X. The next folder contained information on Admiral Thornton Ives. The Secretary of the Navy's folder had an X on it, too. So did the third, belonging to Clive R. Dobbins.

"They got the Secretary of the Army," Remo said, disspirited.

"Read the news some other time," Chiun snapped. "They are boom-shooting at us, fool. Get me out of this place."

But Remo didn't move. The last dossier belonged to the president of the United States. It didn't have a black X on its cover. Not yet.

Remo dug back into the safe. Nothing was left in there except a series of glinting objects at the bottom. Remo reached in and pulled one of them out. It was a glass vial, about ten inches long, filled with a clear liq­uid and stoppered at the top by a cork. Foxx's formula, Remo thought, holding the vial up to the light. A burst of machine gun fire smashed the vial to shreds. Noth-

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ing else happened, except that someone up in the trees started wailing.

Keening, Remo thought as the high, mournful sound passed over the din of gunfire. It was more than some crazy soldier's war yell. It was a lament, high and terrible.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing stopped. "You see?" Chiun said. "You have taken so long with your library that they ran out of booms."

"I don't think so," Remo said uncertainly. "But it had something to do with this stuff." He pulled out the case at the bottom of the safe, in which the rest of the vials were stored.

"Stop!" came the high, keening voice again. "Don't break them."

Remo set the case on the ground. "What's that?"

"Don't break them. Please," the soldier shouted, scrambling down from the tree, his Centennial Air-weight waving overhead. Remo recognized him as the soldier who had run away from the ambush at the lean-to. Riley threw down his gun. "Please. Leave the formula alone and we'll all come down unarmed." There was pleading in his voice.

Remo gaped in astonishment as the soldiers threw their weapons to the ground and scrambled down from the trees, each pair of eyes riveted on the case filled with glass vials.

Chiun was not surprised. "Obviously they have dis­covered that I was in their presence," he said smugly.

"You were behind that door," Remo objected. "They didn't even see you."

"Excuse me, o learned one. O fierce assassin. I am sure it was your excellent reading that struck fear into their hearts."

"I'll explain everything," Riley said. "Only please

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. . ." He cast a baleful eye at the glass vials. "The case." He ventured toward it.

Remo snatched it away. "Uh-uh. Explain first. Then you get the goodies."

Riley hestitated. "Do you promise?" he asked. "Do you give your solemn word that you won't harm us or the case?"

Remo looked at him. The man knew where Foxx was. He could also tell a lot about the bizarre military establishment in the frozen Black Hills, where overage soldiers with the faces of kids were bivouacked. But not harming them?. . . . "Will you dump all your weapons?"

"Done," the soldier said quickly. "But it's your word, right?" He stared with something like despera­tion at the case in Remo's hands.

"Do you know where Foxx went?"

"Yes, I do," Riley said.

"How do I know you'll tell me the truth?"

"You've got my word on it. I'll have yours, and you'll have mine. Mine is good. What about yours?"

After a moment Remo said, "All right. We won't hurt you or the stuff. Tell your buddies to get into parade drill formation."

Riley nodded. "I'm trusting you," he said. He rounded up the apprehensive-looking young soldiers into a shambling unit in the middle of the clearing. They stood there in utter silence, every eye trained on the metal case filled with Foxx's formula.

That's what you call parade drill?" Remo said. "Even the volunteer army looks better than that."

Riley looked up, his eyes filled with anger and pride. "This is no parade unit, mister. This is the Team.

Chapter Fifteen

Randall Riiey joined the Team in April 1953. He'd re­tired from the army with a twenty-year pension at the age of thirty-eight. At a time when most men's careers were just beginning to take off, his was over. After twenty years and two Purple Hearts, he landed a job as a dishwasher in Chicago's South Side. . Then Foxx appeared. Foxx had been in the army, too, but an earlier army, the fighters of which were now old men, far older than Foxx himself. He had flown some of the earliest American aircraft in the dog­fight days of World War I.

The information came out a little at a time. During the first brief meeting at the hash joint in Chicago where Riley was working, Foxx revealed little more than a smiie along with a handshake of understand­ing. Riley was drinking then, and fading fast. The bot­tle had seemed like the last refuge of a used-up com­bat soldier, and Foxx had understood.

"I'll be back," Foxx said. "I have a deal for you." And then he was gone.

The second time Foxx came into the restaurant was a week later. This time he arrived in a long limousine, with a hundred dollars in cash, which he handed to the

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besotted ex-Sergeant Riley. "This is yours whether you come with me or not. But if you come, there will be more. I plan to give you something worth more than all the money in the world."

"Whazzat," Riley asked as the two images of the man wafted in front of him in an alcoholic haze.

"Your self-respect," Foxx said.

"You from the Salvation Army or something?"

"I'm a doctor," Foxx said. "I don't belong to any or­ganization. There's just me. If you jom me, there will be two of us. But after that, there will be many, be­cause what I am offering is a chance for you and men like you to do what they do best, for the rest of your lives." He turned to leave. "Yes or no?"

Riley put down his dishrag and followed the strange, ageless looking man. He never saw Chicago again.

That evening, they sat in the lavish dining room of the mansion near Enwood, Pennsylvania, after a meal of duckling and asparagus, hearts of palm, sole meuniere, caviar, and baked Alaska. It was the grand­est meal Riley had ever eaten. Afterward, he was of­fered a fine Havana cigar, while the butler poured a snifter of Napoleon brandy for his host.

"Think I could have a snort of that?" Riley asked pathetically.

"Absolutely not. If you agree to my contract, you'll never be permitted to drink again. It will interfere with my purpose."

Riley rose to leave. He didn't think he wanted to live in a world where every day started with a Blue Law. The butler restrained him.

"Hear me out," Foxx said, swirling the brandy temptingly in the snifter. The fire in the fireplace crac­kled. Through the open windows, the crisp smell of a

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cool April evening billowed in. "I have taken great trouble to find out about you, Sergeant Riley."

"Mr. Riley," he said bitterly. "I'm no sergeant anymore. That's over. I'm nothing but a dishwasher now. An ex-dishwasher."

Foxx raised an eyebrow. "Things are not always as they seem," he said. "As ! was saying, I believe I know quite a bit about you. I know, for example, what it is you want more than anything else in life."

"Easy. A tall one with ice." He guffawed roughly.

"I'm serious, Riley. Do you know? Think. If you could have anything you wanted, anything, barring no consideration whatever, what would it be?"

Riley thought a moment. Then he answered with perfect honesty. "A war," he said.

Foxx smiled. "Yes. I knew you were the man I wanted."

Riley passed ten days locked in a room in that house in Pennsylvania, while imaginary bugs crawled up his legs and elephants danced on the walls. Ten horrible days that left him senseless and drained and wishing he were dead. On the eleventh day, when Riley was too weak to sit up in his vomit-covered bed, Foxx came again.

He had a hypodermic needle in his hand. "With this, you will feel better than you ever did with alcohol," he said, and injected the needle into Riley's wasted arm.

Within minutes Riley felt stronger-so strong that he thought he could snatch the sun right out of the sky.

Foxx led him outside, into the garden. "Run as far as you can," he said. "But come back. If you don't re­turn there will be no more injections."

Riley ran. He ran for miles, past ponds and forests and a farm, which, in later years, Foxx would buy and

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then destroy to ensure privacy. He ran to the nearest town, some thirty miles away, and, in less than two hours after his arrival, got a job loading produce for the Enwood Market. That evening Riley started to weaken. He began to sweat profusely, and a deep feeling of panic invaded every cell of his brain. He looked in the mirror. All of the newfound vitality offered by the shot was gone, replaced with a spectral emp­tiness.

The next day at work his boss complained that Riley was laying down on the job, but in truth he could hardiy raise his arms to lift the crates of melons and carrots. By mid-afternoon, Riley thought he was going to die.

He hitched a ride to Foxx's mansion. The driver of the car had wanted to take him to the hospital, but Riley said that his "uncle," Foxx, was a doctor. He crawled on hands and knees to the front door.

Foxx opened it, the hypodermic poised in his hand. "I thought you would come back," he said.

Riley was brought back to life, grateful and terrified. "Say, what is that stuff in that needle, anyway?" he asked, feeling his limbs come back to their former power.

"A special mixture of mine. It's based on a drug called procaine."

Riley learned that Foxx had been working on the for­mula for the past thirty years. With it, the ravages of time could be stopped. The young would stay young forever. Those on the brink of old age could hold off the final victory of death for all time.

"Holy cow," Riley said, filled with~ awe for the strange man with the magic needle. "You could make a fortune with that."

"I have," Foxx replied. "I've opened a clinic in

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Europe, where rich matrons and dandies afraid of growing old come to feed their vanity. But just as you have your dream, Riley, so do I have mine."

it was then that he told the soldier about the plan that began over the skies of Europe during the war to end all wars, before Foxx had even taken his name- he was Vaux then, a pilot.

Vaux had learned, through some recovered intelli­gence reports, that the U.S. Army was beginning some experiments using procaine as a base for injec­tions that would increase the effectiveness of soldiers in combat.

He knew immediately that such a drug would change the course of history. His family, with wealth of their own, had provided for his schooling, including a diploma from medical school. But the healing of the sick held no attraction for him. What Vaux wanted to do was to fly. Flying was fun, and flying was how he passed his salad days.

But by the end of World War I, Vaux was thirty years old, and flying-what there was of it after the great ae­rial combats had stopped-was for the young and the foolish. Barnstorming, aerobatic displays, and the rest of the carnival-scented options open to wartime pilots during the early 1920s impressed a man of Vaux's breeding and upbringing as humiliating, akin to the plight of a great boxer forced to earn a living as a wres­tler in rigged matches. Suddenly flying was no longer fun, and at thirty, the long road that stretched ahead of Vaux seemed to be filled with petty maladies and the interminable complaints of his future patients.

Like Riley, he missed the thrill of combat. His jaded appetite needed nothing less than total war to satisfy it.

And then he remembered the captured dispatches

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about the procaine experiments. Procaine. The very word held a sort of magic. A drug that wouid form an army of ageless soldiers. A drug that would take an or­dinary foot slog and keep him in peak physical condi­tion for thirty years, until his long training made him the greatest soldier who ever lived. A drug that would prevent the weakening of a man's body, while his mind absorbed decades of experience. A battalion of these men, fed on procaine and trained constantly, could rule the earth.

His credentials got him into the research program almost without question. Vaux was a rich man with an impeccable background, the right training, a medical degree, and a combat record on top of it. He was a welcome addition to the staff.

But the experiments at the research center near En-wood, Pennsylvania, were progressing too slowly to suit Vaux. No one was willing to take any chances with human subjects. A guinea pig, which demonstrated remarkable capacities for stress and physical depriva­tion, was not enough for those scientists. Oh, no. A hundred guinea pigs were not enough. Nor a hundred cats, dogs, and Rhesus monkeys. Oh, no. Not a hu­man, not yet. The kinks weren't ironed out, they said.

Their fears filled Vaux with unbridled disgust. The only "kink" that Vaux could see were certain unpleas­ant effects on the subject once the drug was with­drawn. Ail right, he admitted. The guinea pigs had died. But that was minor, minor! The procaine formula could change the face of warfare for centuries to come! He wanted to scream it.

But nothing happened. He became the most senior member of the research team, and still nothing hap­pened. The Pentagon wanted the "kinks" to be ironed out before the drug was tried on human subjects. He

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was at a dead end. The army would never accept the drug unless there was a war. And then it would be too late.

"Fine," Vaux said finally in resignation after the Pentagon turned down his last request to escalate the experiments. If the army didn't want the formula, the army wasn't going to have it. The procaine-and its promise-would be his alone.

Vaux began to remove the vials of the precious mix­ture a little at a time from the laboratory. He was fright­ened of the first theft, but when no one even noticed, he took more and more. By 1937, he had removed some 1200 cases of the drug and stored it on his fami­ly's estate in upstate New York.

Then, in 1938, Germany invaded Poland, and the Pentagon now wanted procaine. It was too late, as Vaux knew it would be. A clerk with a penchant for in­ventory figures discovered that 1200 cases of the drug were missing. In a eolossally stupid move, the govern­ment took action against Vaux, and the affair mush­roomed into a fiasco that ended with Vaux's expatria­tion and the end of the procaine research program. The experiments were abandoned, and the research facility in Enwood sold.

It was sold, through intermediaries, to Vaux's fami!y. And while Vaux himself was in Geneva, starting up the procaine age retardant clinic that would begin his fortune, the family quietly shipped the 1200 cases of the drug to him.

Thus began the career of Felix Foxx. With his new name and the clinic in Switzerland, he was making enough money to start an army. And if the small avail­able supplies of procaine had to be augmented by an occasional "horse" or two like Irma Schwartz, no one would notice. His dream had begun. By the time he

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moved his operation back to the house in Pennsyl­vania, he was ready to make it a reality.

Riley trained for six weeks alone at the mansion. When he was in peak physical condition, Foxx sent him out to recruit the others for the Team.

The other members of the Team were much younger than Riley, but superior combat men, every one of them. They came from different branches of the military, and for different reasons. There was the ma­rine who was busted for insubordination; the sailor who could outfight every man in his platoon with his bare hands; the Air Force cadet who got booted out for attacking his D.I. Later, there was the Green Beret who lost it somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam and went on a spree of indiscriminate murder from one end of the Mekong to the other. There was Davenport and a lot of guys like him. And the mercs. The merce­naries were the best of the lot. They killed because kill­ing was what they did, and they did it without question.

Killing was the one thing that held the Team to­gether. Every one of the men Foxx had selected knew how to kill. More important: They wanted to kill. In five years, Foxx had developed the beginnings of the greatest combat force in the world. The Team. And the Team belonged to him, body and soul.

Interested countries had financed Foxx and his Team right from the beginning, with shipments of gold. By 1960, the Team was ready for its first real mission. Panama hired Foxx's Team to attack the U.S. embassy on September 17. In 1963, Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. The Team was there. In 1965, a prominent Cuban dissi­dent met the Team on a back street in Havana. His body was found three weeks later, mutilated beyond recognition. In 1968, the dictator of a small island

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power carried out his own counterrevolution against his Soviet superiors. The Team stayed long enough to see a new puppet regime placed in power on the day of the funeral.

The decade passed, and then another. And when­ever the leaders of a nation had required some messy business that had to be taken care of in the swiftest way possible, Foxx and the Team were called in. Ev­ery country in the world knew of the Team except the United States of America, where the Team was based.

America never knew because Foxx kept clean in America. So clean that he had written two books about diet and exercise under his new name to allay any possible suspicions and to give him a record with the IRS.

The books were a good cover. The best, and noth­ing but the best would do now, because a new mission had come in. The most interesting mission of them all.

Ruomid Haiaffa, the strongman leader of Zadnia, had commissioned Foxx and his Team to assassinate the military leaders of the United States. This, Haiaffa said, would weaken the country's military organiza­tion. Haiaffa stipulated that the Secretary of the Air Force, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of the Army were to be first on the list of hits.

"What about the Secretary of Defense?" Foxx asked.

Haiaffa dismissed the thought with a contemptuous wave. "A businessman," Haiaffa said with a smirk. "We will leave him to his graphs and his charts. I wish to eliminate the men of might in the United States. Not a pencil pusher with his head in his behind."

Haiaffa had frightened him. He was a big man, with a demented strength that seemed to emanate from his madman's eyes in waves.

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"You will do this for me," Halaffa said, and it was not a request.

"Yes," Foxx answered. "I-will. Is that all?"

Haiaffa burst into laughter. He laughed so hard that Foxx started to laugh, too, a small hysterical titter of a laugh, until Halaffa stopped suddenly and there was nothing on his face but rage. "Fool! It is only the be­ginning. The real assassination will only come after you have liquidated the first three men."

"The-the real assassination?" Foxx asked.

"The president. You will kill the president of the United States. And then, when that odious nation has become too crippled to fight back, I will come to rule the garbage that infests that huge country and show them what a true leader is like."

Foxx shivered. Later, when he related the story to Riiey, he shivered again. "His eyes," Foxx said again and again. "Crazy eyes."

"That's about it," Riley said. "He's going to Zadnia now. He'll switch to a commercial flight in Boston and reach Zadnia by tonight." The wind was gusting through the pines now, and for the first time Remo felt the chill in the air. "Can we have the drugs now?"

"Are you nuts?' Remo said. "After what you've told me you're going to do?"

"We can't do anything," Riley said quietly. "Foxx is gone. He didn't bring us any new supplies. Guinea pigs aren't the only things that die without the injec­tions."

Remo looked over at the group of soldiers. They were trembling with cold. Their eye sockets looked hollow and dark. Some of the men had fainted during Riley's story. Remo thought of Posie back at Shan­gri-la. "Are you telling me you're going to die?"

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Riley shrugged. "Maybe not. Maybe Foxx'll come back."

"Then !'d be crazy not to kill you now," Remo said.

One of the soldiers seemed to be strangling on his own spittle. Two others dropped to their knees, their eyes rolling. "You gave your word," Riley said.

Remo turned to Chiun. "Watch the case," he said. He went to the soldiers and methodically destroyed every weapon in sight. Then he made a body search of each man and smashed the concealed knives and guns. That still didn't eliminate the possibility of a hid­den cache of weapons somewhere on the grounds.

"How long will the stuff in the case last?" Remo asked.

"Maybe five days," Riley said.

"What happens after that?"

"I don't know. Maybe there's a program some­where, like a methadone clinic." He grinned bitterly. "More likely, we'll die. But I'd rather die five days from now, if I've got a choice." Remo studied him. "Your word," the soldier reminded him. "I kept mine."

With a wrench of indecision, Remo handed the case over. "Take off. All of you, together, up that hill." He pointed to a rounded knoll, where he could see clearly to the top. "And then keep on going. No breaks for a quickie, nothing. Just go."

"Yes, sir," Riley said. He picked up the case. Remo saw that the man's knees were wobbling. Those left standing in the crowd of sick soldiers helped those on the ground to walk, and the group shambled off to­gether.

"You could have killed them," Chiun said.

"I know." His mouth was grim.

"You should have killed them."

Remo nodded.

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"Does your word hold such importance to you?" Chiun asked, disgusted.

After a moment Remo answered, "Yes. I suppose it does."

They walked through the snow in silence. Remo knew he might have made the biggest mistake of his life. If he didn't get Foxx now, the president of the United States was going to pay for that mistake.

Chapter Sixteen

Harold Smith arrived at Shangri-la in a Grumann Air Force helicopter that touched down just outside the building. Its huge engine idled as Smith went inside.

The smell hit him as soon as he walked in the door. He gagged and blinked back the automatic tears that sprang into his eyes. Holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, he propped open the door, then made his way through the darkened mansion.

The place was perfectly still, silent except for the hum of the helicopter outside. The rooms were empty, their draperies drawn closed. Probably to conserve heat, he thought, eyeing the piles of ashes in each of the fireplaces. His breath came out in white plumes. But even with the cold, the stink of the place was over­powering, and growing stronger as he neared the heart of the house.

At least it wasn't summer, he thought. The last time he'd known this smell was in Korea, in a village where the North Koreans had slaughtered every man, wom­an, child, and article of livestock within five miles in or­der to "save" it from the devil Yanks. Smith was with the CIA then, and traveling with a platoon of regu­lar army toward Pyongyang to rescue a handful of

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stranded agents with vital reports that couldn't be transmitted through normal channels. By the time the Americans reached the Korean village, the dead had been festering in the August sun for three days or more. The reek of death pointed the way to the village more accurately than any road sign.

In the middle of the village stood a squat mud hut. It was the only building among the strewn rubble and straw that was still standing. When Smith kicked open its woven reed and bamboo door, he was greeted by the sight of two dozen bodies, their eye sockets filled with maggots, their tongues lolling black out of their bloated faces as flies swarmed like living flesh over them.

The stink of Shangri-la brought back the image of the inside of that mud hut with a vividness that caused Smith's hands to shake. Was Remo in there? Was Chiun?

"Do your job," he muttered aloud as he hesitated a few feet in front of the arched doorway leading to the banquet hall. This was it, he knew; the smell was com­ing from here. He prepared himself, but as he walked inside, he knew that nothing could have prepared him for the sight in front of him.

It looked like a mausoleum. The remains of thir­ty people of incredible age lounged on the elegant pieces of furniture like party guests at some macabre celebration of the dead. They were dressed in finery from a dozen different eras: A flapper from the twen­ties, her face now a mask of withered leather beneath her bright cloche hat, sat demurely beside a World War I army major in full dress uniform, his nose a trian­gular hole like a jack-o-lantern's in his skeleton's face. A man in tails stared up through eyes puckered like raisins from a copy of The New Yorker on his lap, his

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bone-fingers clasped around a fresh glass of green Chartreuse. Near him, the last embers of a fire smol­dered in the fireplace.

A crypt, Smith thought, taking in the rest of the room. A repository for the long dead. Except for the terrible odor of death that spewed from every crack, there was nothing to indicate that these people hadn't died decades ago. It was as if every person in the room had ceased to live long before death had actu­ally come to claim their bodies.

in the corner, slumped over the keys of a highly pol­ished grand piano, was a woman dressed in a shim­mering white satin evening gown. An ermine stole was draped over her shoulders, and her blonde hair cas­caded over the gleaming wood. Her fingers were still resting on the piano's keys.

She looks so young, Smith thought, going over to her. Maybe there was a survivor. If this one girl could remember. . . .

He lifted her by her shoulders. With a brittle snap of her neck, her head lolled back to reveal the papery, veiled face of a mummy.

With a gasp, Smith let her go. Her hand dropped again to the keyboard with a little ping of music that seemed to echo forever.

Rattled, Smith picked up his attach^ case and bolted into the next room. It was empty. The kitchen was empty, too, as were the upstairs bedrooms. He was grateful. The shock in the ballroom had been enough.

He set the case on an eyelet-covered bed and used his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his clammy palms. When the phone inside the case rang, the handkerchief flew into the air. His stomach felt as if it had turned a complete revolution inside his body

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as he wiped the dried spittle from his lips and fumbled with the catches on the case.

"Yes," he said, hearing the hoarseness in his own voice.

"It's Remo. I'm at a ranch somewhere near the South Dakota Badlands." He capsulized Sergeant Riley's story, leaving out the fact that he'd released all the members of the Team. Smith would never have understood that part. "Foxx'll be in Zadnia by tonight. I've got to get over there. Now."

"Can you get me the exact coordinates of your loca­tion?" Smith asked.

"I've got them." he rattled off the coordinates.

"Hold your position," Smith said. "I'll have a plane pick you up."

"Make it a fast one," Remo said. "While you've been at home snoozing, I've been freezing my butt off in the mountains."

"I'm at Shangri-la," Smith said.

"Oh?" There was a deliberate casualness in Remo's voice. "How are the folks there?"

After a pause Smith said, "They're dead."

There was silence on the line. "All of them?" Rerno said quietly. "The blonde?. . ."

"All." Smith swallowed. "We'll talk about it later. Hold your position." He hung up. His next call was to the president. Then he made an anonymous call to the local county morgue, alerting them to the presence of thirty bodies in the mansion near Enwood.

Outside, he scrambled into the helicopter and signalled the pilot to lift off. The pilot had been given instructions to follow the lemony-faced man's orders to the letter. He was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base who had flown every experimental aircraft

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brought into the base and dealt with every manner of off-the-wall order handed down by the brass, so he didn't so much as blink when he was given emergency top-security clearance to fly the Grumann to a destina­tion known only to his civilian passenger. And he ex­hibited no surprise when the passenger told him to re­route the helicopter to the nearest airbase housing su­personic jets. Nor did he offer up any questions when he arrived at the base and was immediately handed a new set of top-security clearance papers to land a massive F-16 on a stretch of barren ground some­where in western South Dakota and pick up two other civilian passengers who would direct him to his next destination. The pilot took one look at the amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide fuel being pumped, boiling and steaming, into the F-16, and knew it was going to be a long flight, wherever he was going.

But it was all in a day's work. The pilot didn't much care who gave the orders, as long as they didn't try to fly the plane. He sat back in the flight lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee as the lemony-faced man called a taxi to take him to the nearest airport. He was probably some bureaucrat, sent to check out the efficiency of emergency operations, or some kind of nonsense like that. The two guys in South Dakota were probably doing the same thing.

The F-16 was going to be a ride and a half for them. Well, what the hell, the pilot thought. Let them have their thrill. It'll probably be the high point of their entire boring, ordinary lives.

Civilians, he thought, nodding off for a quick nap. They'll never know what real excitement is. He felt sorry for them.

Chapter Seventeen

Felix Foxx lit a slim cheroot in the anteroom to the Prince's Chamber in the Great Palace of Anatola in Zadnia. Prince Anatole had built the palace and named it, like his country's capital city, after himseif. During the corrupt and pagan days of Anatole's reign before Ruomid Halaffa and a handful of treasonous soldiers deposed him in the name of justice and de­cency, the Prince's Chamber had been shamefully misused as a playpen, where Anatole and his confi­dantes carried on affairs of state through orgies of drinking and gambling and wenching with a bevy of girls imported from the deserts of the south.

Halaffa heaped scorn on the playboy prince for his wanton ways. After Anatole's execution, when the prince's bloodied head was impaled atop a minaret tower for all to see and despise, Halaffa announced the roster of sweeping changes he would bring to Zadnia. One of the main points of his stirring speech that day was that never again would the urgent mat­ters of state be discussed in an atmosphere as besot-ten and sinful as the notorious Prince's Chamber.

He fulfilled his promise. During Halaffa's own orgies of drinking and gambling and wenching, absolutely no

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affairs of state were discussed. Discussion of affairs of state were limited to Monday morning between 10:00 and 10:30 A.M., immediately following the morning executions and just before the palace's mid-morning hashish break.

Foxx tipped the ash off the cheroot onto the floor, where it joined the mound of butts already deposited at his feet. Behind him, the gilded double doors lead­ing to the Prince's Chamber reverberated with rau­cous shouting and singing and the high screams of Halaffa's concubines.

"But it's important," Foxx had told the guard at the gate, who had received instructions to send away any­one who didn't bring a bottle. "It's an affair of state."

"Come back Monday," the guard said in a nasal singsong. "Affairs of state between ten, ten-thirty."

"It's an emergency."

"Emergencies between one, one-thirty," said the guard, sounding like an Eastern bagpipe.

"This could mean world disaster," Foxx said in des­peration.

"World disasters between three, three-thirty."

Foxx was frantic. "Look, I've got to see him. Aren't there any circumstances where Halaffa would see me before ten o'clock Monday morning?"

"Only super-duper emergency-casualty-world-destruction priority come before Monday morning, ten o'clock," the guard said.

"Fine. I'll take that."

"Monday morning, nine-thirty," the guard said.

At last Foxx managed, with the help of a fifty-dollar bill, to persuade the guard to escort him to the ante­room. That was six hours ago. Since then, Foxx's agi­tation had blossomed into the beginnings of a nervous breakdown. His hands trembled. He saw spots in front

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of his eyes. His mouth was dry. With every swallow the membranes of his throat stuck together like two pieces of Scotch tape.

it was blown! The whole beautiful, foolproof cover of Shangri-la had been discovered and somehow infil­trated by some lunatic in a tee-shirt. The man named Remo had gotten as far as the Team itself. Of course, the Team would have made short work of the thin young man and his ancient Oriental partner, but it was the principle: They knew. After almost thirty years, someone knew about the Team. And if they knew, who else might know?

It was time to go underground, to hole up in Zadnia for a year, until things blew over. He'd brought enough procaine in his plane to last him as long as it was nec­essary to hide out. Of course, the Team didn't have enough to get them through the next week, but he couid form a new Team. It would take work, but it was possible. As for the fools at Shangri-la, there would al­ways be more people with money, willing to trade their millions for Foxx's fountain of youth. The guests at the house in Pennsylvania were dead by now, anyway. He couldn't afford to waste time, worrying about them.

The double doors opened a crack, filling the ante­room with noise and the scent of stale smoke and whiskey fumes. Halaffa stood inside the doors, his back to Foxx, laughing and shouting in Arabic to the others in the Prince's Chamber. He was still laughing when he stepped into the anteroom.

"Your Highness," Foxx said, bowing on his knees before Halaffa. Halaffa's smile broke off and was re­placed by a scowl.

"What do you want that is important enough to dis­turb me from the responsibilities of high office?" he bellowed.

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"I seek asylum, Magnificence," Foxx squeaked. "There is a madman who has learned of our plans. He pursued me to the secret lair of my soldiers. He knows all. Perhaps he has communicated with others. The plan has been ruined. I come to you now to ask, not for payment for the three assassinations already per­formed perfectly, but only for a place where I may hide from the authorities of my pig-governed country until we have disappeared from the minds of those capital­ist buffoons."

"I beg your pardon?" Halaffa asked.

"They're onto us. We have to-"

"Us? We?" Halaffa roared. "Your idiot plan goes up in smoke, and you dare to implicate me, Halaffa himself?"

"But it was your pla-"

"You are stupid enough to get caught performing treacherous acts against your country, and you expect me to grant you asylum?"

"Well, I only thought-"

"Where are your soldiers?"

"They're at my base, sir, your Highness, sir."

"You left them?"

"Well, this man was after me, sir, quite an extraordi­nary man, really. He hung out of a window-"

"You are a bigger ass than I thought. By Allah, you must be the biggest, roundest, reddest ass in the world! Are you mad? Do you think I would give even one moment's consideration to a man who would de­sert his own soldiers, while he flees to safety?"

"Actually, it wasn't quite that dramatic," Foxx tried to explain.

"Would I trust for one second a man who, without hesitation, would expose me and my country in a scheme that would cast us as villains the world over?"

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"Oh, I think it'll all blow over in a few weeks-"

"Guard!" Halaffa screamed. "Take this vermin away. Place him before the firing squad at dawn tom­orrow."

"The firing squad?" Foxx wriggled vainly to free himself from the iron grip of the two giants on either side of him. "But, Your Excellency . . . Your Worship ... I have worked for you."

"You have failed."

"Prison, then," Foxx shouted frantically. "I'll take prison. You can't murder me just for making one mis­take, can you?"

"No," Halaffa said thoughtfully. "Guards, halt." The giants stopped in their tracks. Halaffa rubbed his chin, deliberating. At last he said, "You are right, Dr. Foxx. I cannot in good conscience have you executed for abandoning your mission. After all, I am a fair man. A merciful man. A man who treads in the steps of Allah to bring peace and prosperity to Zadnia."

"Thank God," Foxx whispered. He fell to his knees. "Praise be to you for a thousand years, Your Perfect-ness."

"So it is my decision that you shall not be shot to­morrow morning for making a mistake."

"Your Splendidness, Your Divinity ..."

"You will be shot for interrupting my festivities this evening. Good-bye."

"No! No!" Foxx screamed as the burly guards led him down the filthy stone stairwell into the dungeon, where rats picked clean the bones of those who had preceded him to the courtyard in which he would stand tomorrow.

After the crusted iron bars of his cell slammed shut, one of the beefy guards shook a finger at him. "Next time, wait till Monday morning," he said.

Chapter Eighteen

The pilot of the F-16 put on his best aviator's smile for his two civilian passengers as the sleek craft screamed over the Mediterranean.

"Sure sump'in' up here, idn't it?" he said in his avi­ator's fake Southern accent.

Chiun shrugged. "No movies," he said.

Remo focused in on the city of Anatola through the pilot's powerful binoculars. The mission. Don't think about anything but the mission now, he told himself. Posie was dead, and he might have been able to save her if... but don't think about that. It was over. She was dead. Period. From this distance, the city's white stucco walls and winding streets seemed almost washed clean of filth and dung and disease-bearing flies that were Zadnia's trademark the world over.

"Okay," Remo said. "You can park anywhere."

The pilot smirked behind his proteptive headgear. Civilians. Nonpilots. Well, who expected the lower forms of life to know beans from barnacles?

"Sorry, pal. That's Zadnia," he said.

"We know what it is," Chiun snapped. "Do you think we would fly in this noisy machine without even in-flight movies if we were going to Cleveland?"

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"Fine," the pilot said, "but you can't land in Zadnia. They'll blow us up before we hit the ground."

"All right," Remo said. "That makes sense. Where do you keep the parachutes?"

"We don't have parachutes," the pilot said.

Remo shook his head. "And you'd probably iose our luggage if we had any. All right. How low can you take this thing?"

"Low?"

"Weil, of course, low," Remo said. "Low."

"Right down to wave top," the pilot said.

"You don't have to go that low," Remo said. "Any­thing inside a hundred feet or so is good."

"What for?" the pilot asked, even as he pushed the control forward and moved the plane down toward the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

"What do you think for?" Remo asked. "Are your belts fastened?"

"Yes."

"Good-bye forever," Remo said. He punched out the plane's canopy, and then spilled out of the plane in a tumbling free fall, that quickly turned into a smooth eagle-soaring toward the white waves below.

"Sloppy," Chiun said. He moved up in his seat.

"You're not jumping, too, are you?" the pilot shouted over the scream of the wind.

"If you'd rather land. ..."

"Can't." It was the CIA. It had to be the CIA. Some kind of nutty suicide mission, with these two ninnies the victims.

Chiun stood up.

"I wish you could take a chute," the pilot said.

"Keep your advice on my bodily functions to your­self," Chiun said, then slipped gracefully out of the

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jet, his yellow robe billowing in the wind like a sail.

The pilot looped once to observe the final disap­pearance of his two former passengers into the Medi­terranean. The brass was going to want a report-and-a-half on this one and the details would be important.

Somehow, he noticed, the old guy in the bathrobe had managed to bring himself to the same level as the thin guy in the T-shirt.

The pilot looped again, and came in close. The two men were talking. The old one was waving his arms and shouting, while the young one shrugged and pointed up at the jet. The pilot could hardly believe it. Here they were, sailing toward the ocean, and these two loonies were having an argument. Then, without even taking time to scream in panic, the two crazy ci­vilians sank into the sea at precisely the same mo­ment.

Well, that was that, the pilot said to himself. Maybe two nuts the CIA had to get rid of. They had guts, though, he'd have to hand it to them. Neither of them had shown a trace of fear when they augured in. It had been a death worthy of an aviator.

He climbed into the sky and out of sight. Twenty seconds later, two heads bobbed out of the sea. "No movies, no lavatories, no free cakes of soap, no tea, and a foul-mouthed driver on top of it all!" Chiun shrieked. "I have had better rides in New Jersey taxi-cabs. How can you subject one of my delicate sensibil­ities to such a primitive mode of travel?"

"It was the fastest way," Remo explained for the fourth time since they'd left the F-16.

"Hurry, hurry," Chiun grumbled. "You have cast aside all the pleasures of life in the empty pursuit of

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speed. You have rejected the fragrance of the lotus in favor of the stench of the public bus. You have-"

"The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can get back to your TV," Remo said.

"Can we make the eleven o'clock update?"

"Maybe."

"Stop dawdling," Chiun commanded, slicing through the water like a torpedo.

Dawn was rising in Anatola, casting pink halos around the white sun-baked buildings. Below the ha­los, the city's fat flies were beginning to stir, preparing themselves for another day's feasting in a land that seemed created just for them. They buzzed into the fetid streets, stopping to drink at the stagnant, sew­age-laden streams that ran freely along the narrow walkways. They lit undisturbed on the delicious three-day-old cow meat, already veiled with the thick scent of decay, hanging from the hawkers' stands. For des­sert, they swarmed over a tempting display of rotting fruit that would eventually be fed to the children of the wealthy after the flies had taken their fill. Another good day.

Remo swatted at the flies that buzzed in the city square like a cloud. The meat hawker scurried over to them, waving a stinking gray slab and burbling something through a mouthful of loos© brown teeth.

"You've got to be kidding," Remo said, and walked on. Chiun was silent. At the gates to the city, he had slowed his breathing to a point that wouldn't even reg­ister on a life-support system. He explained that it was preferable to experiencing Zadnia and the Zadnians at full consciousness.

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In the distance, the twelve towers of the Palace of Anatoia stood out like needles against the reddening sky.

"Guess that's where we're going," Remo said. "You might as well bring yourself up to capacity, Little Father."

"I'd rather not," Chiun croaked.

A high wail punctuated the endless drone of the flies. At first Remo thought it was one of the vendors on the street, beginning his day's supplication to what­ever idiots were desperate enough to buy the food in Zadnia, but it wasn't the call of a Middle Eastern sales-pitch. It was a cry of terror, and it was coming from in­side the walled boundaries of the palace.

"He can't shoot me," the voice cried. "It's not fair. I've done everything he wanted. Be reasonable. Take the hundred. Please."

As Remo listened, a second voice, high and sing­song, came from within the wall. "When you dead, we take hundred dollah anyway. We take rings off finger. We take gold from teeth. You not have to pay us now, very welcome."

Remo scaled the palace wall and peered over. Fac­ing the wall were twelve men in Zadnian uniforms, their weapons pointed at the solitary blindfolded figure in front of them.

"Ready," squeaked the commanding guard. The men raised their rifles.

"Inside line?" Remo whispered.

Chiun shook his head. "A waste. There are only twelve of them. We use the double-spiral air blow series."

"What for? That's a trick, shot."

"Aim."

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"All right," Remo sighed. "Whatever you say." He vaulted over the wall.

"Fi-aghhh." The commander's windpipe lodged into his nose as he twirled end over end above the heads of the firing squad.

"Higher," Chiun said. He grasped the rifles of two of the guards and, with a flick of his wrists sent their owners hurtling upward before they could release their weapons. The guards, looking like khaki-colored pinwheels, flew in two different directions up to twenty feet before their trajectory curved into two huge parab­olas. They met head-on in the air, their skulls cracking on impact. Chiun smiled. "A little art," he said.

"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Remo said, hefting the fattest soldier he'd ever seen into the air, while another attacked him from behind. "Personally, I'm getting a hernia." An inside line would have been so much easier, he thought as a soldier charged him with his AK-47. At the moment when the machinegun would have made contact, Remo was behind the guard, and then the guard was shooting forward and smashing into another, and then with a light blow to the man in front they were both airborne. Three others spiraied into the air like footballs, deflating as they im­paled themselves on three of the palace's towers.

"You see now the double-spiral air blow is not so easy," Chiun said with smiling triumph.

"Who said it was," Remo grunted, propelling an­other guard into the palace walls.

"You did. You told all those people that I was not re­sponsible for the beautiful attack on the two men at Shangri-la. You gave me no credit whatever."

"Chiun, look out!" Three men stood directly behind the old Oriental, their rifles leveled.

"It was masterful work," Chiun groused on without

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missing a beat, as the weapons in the hands of the sol­diers were suddenly buried in the dust and the men sailed upward, one after the other, in a giant oval. As each of them neared the ground, Chiun struck him up­ward again, bringing each blow in faster until the three men were nothing more than limp, boneless pulps, which Chiun juggled like boiled eggs.

"Okay, it's a tough attack," Remo panted, con­ceding the point. He flung an arm into the oval and the men crashed into a fleshy pile on the ground.

"What's going on?" came a muted, panic-filled squeak from in front of the wall.

Remo went to Foxx and pulled off the blindfold and the ropes that bound his wrists. Foxx took a look at the carnage in the courtyard, then at Remo. "You," he said, awestruck. "But I thought you were going to kill me."

"Naw," Remo said. "What's a little murder, trea­son, and assassination between friends? Your next target was only going to be the president of the United States. A little money in your pocket, a new govern­ment for America, run by a terrorist. What the hell?"

"I'm glad you see it that way," Foxx said, smiling.

"Just one question. Where's the procaine formula manufactured these days?"

Foxx winced. "Well, there's just a teeny problem with that," he said apologetically. "The lab in Switzer­land that was producing it burned down three weeks ago. But we can get around that. Smali amounts of the drug can be extracted directly from certain people. Horses, they're called, people with-"

"Yeah, I know. Like Irma Schwartz."

"Exactly." Foxx's face brightened. "They're rare, but not that rare, and it only takes six or seven bodies to produce the extract used in the mixture. It's easy,

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really. We can make it right at Shangri-la. I was plan­ning to, anyway. The Schwartz woman was the first. With your skills, we can have the rest in no time."

"Great to hear," Remo said. "Just knock off a few strangers, and there you have it."

"The fountain of youth."

"Except for the poor suckers you murder just to get at the juices in their bodies."

"Nobodies," Foxx said dismissively. "Never be missed. What do you say?"

"I say there are too many amateur assassins in this world," Chiun said.

"I agree," Remo said.

"What are you two talking about?" Foxx said. "We don't need assassins. We don't need anybody, now that the three of us are a team." He gestured expan­sively. "The New Team, that's what we'll be. First we'll approach Halaffa and see if the deal with the president is still on. You two can take care of that one with both hands tied, I'll wager. Halaffa will love us after that."

"Wonderful," Remo said. "It'll make my whole day."

"And then I'll go to the Soviets. God knows, there are a million people the Russians want bumped off. And then there are the Red Chinese, of course."

"Of course."

"We'll make a fortune. The New Team. It's the best idea I've ever had. Think of it. Just think of it!"

"Think of this," Remo said, crushing his skull.

Foxx reeled and slumped to the ground. "So much for the New Team," Chiun said.

And then the two of them were silent, their mouths dropping open in disbelief as they watched death work

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a transformation on Foxx that had never been per­mitted in life.

As the last breath rasped out of his body, the man seemed to shrivel in front of their eyes. His skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, growing translucent and spotted with age. His eye sockets darkened and deepened to ghoulish hollows. One by one his teeth fell out, gray and cracked, and his lips whitened and puckered and sank into his flesh, like the discarded skin of a snake. In seconds, the mass of wavy dark hair on his head turned white and fell to the ground in tufts. His spine bent. His hands curled into gnarled, arthritic fists. His flesh seemed to melt away, leaving only a thin shell of withered skin over the frail bones. Foxx was suddenly old, older than anything Remo had ever seen, as old as the earth itself.

"Come," Chiun said softly. The corpse was crum­bling into decay now, the bones turning to dust be­neath the papery gray flesh, the eyeballs congealing into black jelly. A host of flies swarmed over it, feeding on the putrid remains.

Chapter Nineteen

Halaffa's palace was eerily still inside. There were no soldiers anywhere. No guards. The gaudy Palace of Anatola was as silent as a desert rock.

"I don't like this," Remo said as they passed through room after empty room.

"The silence of a thousand screams," Chiun mused.

The Prince's Chamber, still reeking of the festivities of the previous night, looked as if it had been aban­doned in haste, its occupants vanishing in a moment of riotous merrymaking. The shouts and coarse laugh­ter seemed still to ring in the shadows of the empty room. The stairways were empty, too. As Remo and Chiun walked up to the upper floors of the palace, the only sound was the soft flapping of Chiun's robes be­hind him.

There were no stirrings of life until they reached the level of the twelve towers. Chiun cocked his head at the top of the stone stairway and listened. "He is here," he said.

Remo nodded. He, too, had sensed the rhythmic ex­pansion of air that signaled the presence of a breath­ing human being.

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"Over here, gentlemen." The voice sounded loud as a cannon's boom after the weird stillness.

Halaffa stood in a library housed in one of the cylin­drical towers. Instead of the Zadnian military uniform, which he usually wore, Halaffa was dressed in the tra­ditional flowing robes of Zadnia's ancient nomadic tribes. On his head was a white turban with a sapphire in the center. He was a handsome man, young and swarthy, bursting with a kind of exaggerated male-ness that gave an air of confidence and strength to him . . . except for the eyes.

Madman's eyes, Remo thought. They held the same look that other eyes had carried once the lust for power overcame their sanity. Idi Amin's eyes, as he starved his people to slow death. Hitler's eyes as he ordered the extermination of millions. Eyes of fire, burning with death.

"I have been preparing to welcome you," he said softly. He took a leather-covered volume from a high shelf. "Your exhibition in the courtyard was most im­pressive." He looked at them approvingly. "I take it you have traced the unpatriotic activities of our de­parted Dr. Foxx to me?"

"We have," Remo said.

Halaffa read from the book, seemingly uncon­cerned. "I see," he said at last. "And what, may I ask, is your purpose here?"

"We are assassins," Chiun said.

"A noble career. Then you have come here to the tower to kill me, I trust?"

"Right again," Remo said. Anytime now. His mus­cles screamed in readiness. Beside him, he could feel Chiun's energy coiling like a spring.

"Then step forward," Halaffa said coldly. "Make

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your attempt." He slammed the book shut with a bang.

A big bang. Six bullets fired out of the thick binding directly at Remo. He dodged them, but it was a dis­traction. And as he was distracted, the shelf-lined walls of the tower swung open and a host of fierce-looking nomad warriors swarmed into the room, their sabers slicing through the air like lasers.

"Now we do the inside-line attack," Chiun said.

The sabers flew. Blood flowed like fountains over the intricate designs on the carpets in the tower room. The screams of the dying echoed down the stone stairways and empty corridors. And then all was still again.

Remo, Chiun, and Ruomid Halaffa faced one an­other. Halaffa's caftan was streaked with blood. His madman's eyes shone with terror and the knowledge of doom. For several moments he stood stock still, his eyes darling around the death-filled room, seeking an avenue of escape.

There was none. Only the small turret window be­hind him offered a way to the outside world, and that way was several stories straight down. He looked out the window. The pavement of the filthy street below was already teeming with people. They stepped lacon­ically over the fly-studded carcass of a dead dog lying near a vendor's cart filled with melons. The city was fully awake now, already blistering under the glare of the sun.

Halaffa faced his two assailants. "You will not take me!" he shouted, then turned and scrambled onto the window ledge. "My followers will smite you with wrath. They will finish you for the vile murderers you are. They will wreak vengeance on your paltry nation."

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Below, a few scattered onlookers glanced up to see their latest dictator ready to jump from a window ledge in one of the palace's twelve towers. He was shouting something. They were always shouting something. The last dictator, Anatole, shouted something before he died, too. So would the next one. The onlookers turned away and went about their business.

"Citizens of Zadnia," Halaffa bellowed. "The foes of our country have come to spread destruction and calamity in our midst. Rise up! Fight them! Fight them in the beautiful streets I have given you. Fight them in your comfortable homes, which have been my gift to you. Storm the palace and fight them as they stand ready to take your leader from you. Fight! Fight! Fight!"

"Enough of the pep talk," Remo said irritably. "Are they coming or aren't they?"

"Get up here and save my life, you miserable cre­tins," Halaffa yelled. "For the glory of ... glory of . . ." His arms windmilled. "Zad . . ." he shrieked, falling off the ledge.

He landed with a thud at the base of the melon ven­dor's cart, next to the dead dog. The vendor, seeing the wash of blood spray onto his pulpy fruit, screeched with annoyance at Halaffa's body. The flies on the dog quickly left their old meal and swarmed onto the new delicacy that had fallen into their midst. The people on the street stepped lazily over both of them.

"Thus dies the mighty rock," Chiun said. "Crum­bled to dust and lost among the forgotten sands."

Remo looked at him. "Say, that's pretty good," he said.

"An old Korean saying." He stepped across the bodies strewn around the room and lifted a large painting of Haiaffa framed in ornately carved gold.

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"This will do nicely," he said.

"You want a picture of him?"

"Of course not," Chiun said. With his thumbnail he etched four lines along the sides of the protrait, then punched it out. He handed the empty frame to Remo. "For you," he said.

Remo stared at the strange gift. "Well, thanks, Little Father, but! really--"

"It will make a nice frame for my picture of Cheeta Ching."

Remo groaned.

"In Korean dress," Chiun said.

Chapter Twenty

Harold W. Smith sat at his desk in front of the comput­ers at Folcroft Sanitarium, looking even more lemony than usual. In front of him was a tangle of green and white striped printouts.

"Where is Remo?" he asked, his voice acid.

"He wil! be here shortly," Chiun said.

Smith shook the sheaf of paper on his desk. "Fif­teen old soldiers dressed in World War II military uni­forms were found dead of various symptoms of old age in the Black Hills of South Dakota this morning," he said. "Do you know about this?"

"Should I?" Chiun asked innocently.

"They died of old age," Smith repeated.

Chiun shrugged. "We all have our time."

"This was the Team, wasn't it?" he sputtered. "Foxx's Team. Remo didn't kill them. They were under orders to murder the president of the United States, and he didn't kill them. That's the truth, isn't it?"

Chiun sighed. "What do I know," he said philosoph­ically. "I am but an old man, a being in the twilight of his years, who wishes only for a small ray of beauty to bring light into the weary darkness of his life. My one

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request to you, O mighty Emperor, was of a small pho­tograph of the lovely Cheeta Ching in the timeless garb of her native land. But lo, even that humble re­quest was denied. And I accept that denial. I am but an unworthy assassin whose knowledge is unwanted. I am but a small grain upon the pebbled beach of

life....''

"Oh, never mind," Smith said.

"Goddammit, I'm going to fry your ass," snarled Cheeta Ching as Remo tied the rope around her wrists into a neat square knot. Her feet were bound to the legs of the Bauhaus chair in Cheeta's living room fur­nished in early Gestapo. Remo still felt the bruises from that maneuver. The way the woman kicked, Remo reasoned she'd received her journalistic train­ing in the Viet Cong.

In the scuffle, he managed to drag her into the flow­ing red and yellow satin robes he'd rented from a cos­tume shop, but she'd slugged her way out of them three times, and by the time the newscaster was ade­quately restrained, the gown was a mass of tatters held together with several rolls of shiny scotch tape.

"I told you, I just want to get a picture," Remo said.

"Then call my press agent, asshole. From jail. Breaking and entering's a crime in this state, you tur­key."

"Yes, well, I'm sorry about that," Remo said, ad­justing his camera, "But I did ask you. And your agent. You both refused."

"Damn right, shitheel," Cheeta screeched. "Some pervert wants me to pose for him in this wierd getup straight out of a road show of Gilbert and Suliivan, what do you expe6t?"

"A picture," Remo said patiently.

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"I suppose you're going to rape me next."

"Wrongo," Remo said. "Smile."

"I know what you scumbags have on your minds. You see a gorgeous chick, all you want to do is whack it to her."

"I'll decide that if I happen to see one," Remo said. "You're drooling."

Cheeta seethed. "You know what you are?"

Remo sighed, advancing the film. He was going to get a whole roll of the harpy in all her glory, so that Chiun would have his choice of twenty-four different aspects of the nastiest human being on earth. And Remo wouid never have to return. "No. Tell me."

"You're a sexist, capitalist, imperialist, warmon­gering swine," she said, grinning triumphantly.

"Great," Remo said, snapping off two shots. The old man would like the smiling pictures. "What else?"

"Huh?"

"Tell me what else ! am."

She thought for a moment. "A foul, disgusting, loathsome degenerate?" she asked tentatively.

"Fine, fine," Remo said, snapping away. Those ex­pressions would pass for Serene Contemplation. "How about an obnoxious, offensive, vile, inhuman beast?" he offered.

Cheeta brightened. Her face came as close to inno­cent joy as it was ever going to get. "Hey, that's okay, really okay. You ought to go into the news business. There's lots of opportunity for creative writing in the news."

"So I've noticed," Remo said. "Go back to calling me an imperialist warmonger. You look better that way."

"How dare you talk to me like that, you seedy, re­volting, shit-brained clod."

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"Terrific," Remo snapped off a few more. " 'Seedy's' good. Works almost like 'cheese." "

"You don't know your pecker from a stick," Cheeta sneered.

Remo snapped. "Sure I do," he said pleasantly. "I'd touch you with a stick."

Cheeta emitted a high jungle yell. " "You sick, slimy, nauseating, vermin-infested, flee-bitten, loose-boweled, crap-eating jock-honkey-nigger-kike jerk-off!" she screamed.

Remo finished off the roll. "That did it. You're a nat­ural, Cheeta. You ought to pose as a centerfold. Sol­dier of Fortune might be interested. They like pictures of tanks. Be seeing you."

She strained on the ropes behind her back, jumping so hard that the chair thumped off the gouund. "Hey, you can't leave. Get me out of this thing. Untie me."

"I'll call your keeper," Remo said.

Chiun hung the picture in a place of honor directly in front of the window in the motel room. It blocked out most of the light.

"This way, when we seek the sun, we will find it be­hind Cheeta's bright visage," he said.

"Great," Remo said, squinting up from the book h© was straining to read. "She looks better in the dark, anyway."

He went back to his book. It was a history of the film goddesses of the thirties. The pages on Posie Pon-selle were worn and shiny. For the thousandth time, Remo stared at the old photograph of her, looking ex­actly as she did the last time he saw her.

"You have pleased me, my son."

"I'm glad, Little Father," he said quietly. Nothing was going to bring Posie back now. Maybe that was

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for the best. She herself had told him that there were worse things than growing old, and she probably knew what they were. But he missed her. He couldn't help that.

"You have gladdened my heart almost to perfec­tion."

"It's okay, Chiun."

"I say almost, because there is but one other thing, a small thing, a nothing, that would make my happi­ness complete."

Remo didn't answer.

"I said there is but one other thing," Chiun said, louder.

Remo looked up, disgusted.

"Of course, if you have no thought of an old man's final happiness in the twilight of his years . . ." He trailed off. Remo went back to his reading. "It would have been such a small request," Chiun went on. "A mere trifle. The humblest of insignificances-"

"Oh, he!!," Remo said, slamming the book. "What is it?"

The old man's face beamed with fresh anticipation, "I was just thinking, Remo," he said, bouncing as he spoke, "how Sovely it would be to have a picture of both of us. Of the lovely Cheeta Ching and the Master of Sinanju together. Perhaps with her small delicate hand clasping mine as she gazes up to me in adora­tion. Something simple. With the romantic shores of Sinanju in the background. Remo . . . Remo? Where are you going?"

"Ever hear of the Foreign Legion?" Remo asked at the door.

"No."

"Good."