Market Force

Destroyer 127: Market Force

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

The blood was everywhere. On the floor, on the bed. It had even splattered into the hallway outside the hospital room. God, it looked as if someone had stomped on a blood-filled balloon.

Given the condition of the two bodies discovered so far, the fact that the blood had shot out as far as the hall didn't surprise Detective Ronald Davic. Not with the inhuman force that had been employed against the poor dead doctor.

"Damn, what a mess," Detective Davic muttered as he circled around the far side of the corpse.

This was definitely one for the books.

The body was hanging from the wall. Actually hanging, like a cow on a slaughterhouse hook. That was a twist Detective Davic had never seen before. And it wasn't as if he was new to this sort of thing. Before coming to town, he'd spent fifteen years working homicide in New York City.

Fused. The back of the dead doctor's head had been fused with the wall. There was no other way to describe it.

The body hung in defiance of gravity. The dangling toes brushed the floor. The skull had hit so hard it had split at the back, creating suction that was proving difficult to pop. The police were through examining the body. At the moment, the coroner's boys were trying to pry the head loose. They were hoping the body would drop once the head popped free.

It was all too much. When he'd first stepped into the hospital room, Davic was forced to walk on tiptoes to avoid the grisly puddles of sticky blood. The floor, the far wall, the nightstand, the bed. God, it was everywhere.

Like nothing he'd ever seen before.

"Jesus, what could have done this?" Davic muttered as the men from the coroner's office worked around the doctor's suction-stuck skull.

"Some of these crazies have strength like you wouldn't believe. Like superstrength or something. This is one for the books, though. At least it's new to me."

Detective Fred Wayne was trying to put on a nonchalant front. Davic ignored his partner.

The kid didn't really need to point out that this was beyond his police experience. Even if Davic didn't already know it to be true, he could have figured it out by the way Wayne blew his lunch out in the hallway the moment he'd gotten his first glimpse inside the room.

Wayne was trying to mask his earlier loss of control with phony bluster. It wasn't working. He still looked green around the gills. The younger detective was looking everywhere but at the body as he talked. "Uniform is searching the grounds," Wayne said.

"Jackson and Javez are keeping an eye on them. Making sure they don't make too big a mess."

"The guy who runs the place back yet?"

"Not yet," Detective Wayne replied. "He phoned his secretary yesterday to say he was on his way. Some kind of business trip. But that was long before all this. She said she has no way to reach him. Guy doesn't even know what he's coming back to."

"What about the assistant? He was supposed to be at work, right? He turn up yet?"

Wayne shook his head. "We're still searching inside. He could have left the building for something, maybe didn't tell anyone. Or he could be another victim. I guess we won't know until he turns up."

"If, " Davic muttered to himself.

A sucking crack came from the rear wall.

The coroner's men had managed to unstick the body from the wall. They tried to catch it, but it lurched forward, falling facedown in a heap on the floor. The blossomed head cavity yawned up at the cold fluorescent ceiling lights.

Detective Wayne immediately grabbed his mouth and ran out the door. The sound of dry-heaving came from the hall.

Detective Ronald Davic decided the kid might have a good idea. He needed some fresh air.

Leaving the men in the room to load the doctor's body onto a stretcher, Davic stepped into the hallway. Another coroner's crew was at the end of the hall rolling a gurney with the second body-this on a nurse-through the fire doors.

"Hold up," Davic called.

A man in white held the door for him, and Davic slipped into another short hallway.

They rolled the gurney past a few windows that looked out over water. A left from this hall and they were in the main basement corridor. At the end were fire doors. Once through them, they carted the stretcher up the stairwell to the first-floor landing.

Davic scooted ahead. He held the door for the men as they rolled the stretcher out into daylight.

A silent ambulance was parked at the side of the building, its back door open.

The men loaded the sheet-draped body of the unlucky nurse inside. As they strapped it in, Detective Davic tapped a cigarette from the pack in his pocket.

He had misplaced his lighter days ago and hadn't yet picked up a new one. Davic was afraid for a minute that he had lost the book of matches he'd scrounged from the back of a kitchen cupboard. He found them in his raincoat pocket.

As the men were closing the door on the dead nurse, Detective Davic lit up. He pulled in a deep, thoughtful lungful of smoke as he watched them move to the front of the ambulance.

The ambulance drove slowly from the side parking lot. Davic walked along behind it. He stepped into full daylight when he rounded the front of the building.

There were three other ambulances there, as well as two fire trucks, five police cruisers and a handful of unmarked cars.

Davic wondered why it was that men in official cars always seemed to park where they'd cause maximum inconvenience for everyone else. Probably just because they could.

The ambulance had a hard time threading its way through the traffic jam of parked cars. The driver bumped the right tires through the snow of the front yard to get around the landscaped rotary. It was clear sailing after that.

Lights off, the ambulance with the dead nurse drove down the great gravel driveway and passed through the wrought-iron gates. Siren silent, it drove slowly away.

Back up the driveway, Detective Davic dropped his cigarette. The wind whipped his thinning hair. He ground out the butt under his toe. Cursing the habit and the job that had forced it on him, he turned back.

The building loomed high above him. On one of the windows, someone had taped a cardboard angel, ringed with holly. A pathetic attempt to welcome in the season.

Alone in the main driveway, the police detective shook his head. "Merry Christmas," Ronald Davic grumbled.

His words were blown away in a swirl of winter wind.

With a deep frown on his doughy face, the Rye, New York, police detective trudged slowly up the broad front steps of Folcroft Sanitarium.

Chapter 1

When the plane touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the tired passenger at the very back of the coach section released a silent sigh of relief.

With weary eyes the bland man in the gray suit watched the tarmac speed by. When the glass-encased terminal building rolled up to meet the plane, he exhaled once more.

Dr. Harold W. Smith was grateful to be home. When the plane had fully stopped and the passengers were given permission to deplane, Smith stayed in his seat. Not wanting to fight the crowd or draw attention to himself, he let others grab for their bags and cram the aisles. Only when the crowd had thinned did Smith get wearily to his feet.

Smith had been pressing a battered briefcase between his ankles for most of the flight from South America. Picking it up, he set it onto his seat. Reaching up, he unfastened the overhead compartment. He pulled out a small black suitcase.

Age had worn the frayed plastic corners of the once sturdy nylon bag. The zipper on the small side pocket no longer worked. It was stuck permanently shut, a few strands of black nylon thread jammed firmly in the metal teeth.

For years now Smith had kept the same carry-on at work just in case he was called away on emergencies. Of course, the types of emergencies that would likely pull Harold Smith from his desk were the kind for which packing was most times impossible or pointless. Impossible because he never knew what sort of climate he might land in, pointless because he might never return. How could one pack for every conceivable climate on the planet and why would one need a spare pair of underwear if one was dead?

In the bag were three pairs of socks and underwear, a spare white shirt, a shaving kit and a toothbrush. The toothbrush was a promotional item Smith had gotten from his dentist. For decades now after each of his yearly dental appointments, Harold Smith had made certain to collect the free toothbrush and small tube of toothpaste Dr. Rohter, his dentist, supplied his patients. One time back in the 1970s Smith had forgotten to collect the free items and had driven all the way back to the dentist's office to get them. He wasn't embarrassed in the least to do so. After all, the dentist got them for nothing from his suppliers. As a patient in good standing, Harold Smith was as entitled to his free toothpaste and toothbrush as any other patient.

In the bathroom cupboard of Smith's tidy little home at the edge of the Westchester Golf Club was a shoebox filled with free toothbrushes and tiny tubes of toothpaste. The contents of some of the toothpaste tubes had liquefied from sitting unused for so long.

Smith placed his carry-on next to his briefcase as he pushed shut the door to the overhead compartment. The bag was a nuisance that he hadn't really needed to bring with him on this trip.

A pragmatic soul, Smith had at one point considered bringing the bag home for good. It was only taking up space in his office closet. But in the end he had decided that it would be more suspicious to board an international flight with only his battered leather briefcase. And one thing Harold W. Smith did not crave was attention.

Smith picked up his two pieces of luggage. Before the crowd had thinned completely, Smith fell in with it. He left the plane without the flight attendant at the door even making eye contact. Few people ever took notice of Harold W. Smith. He was just a nondescript gray man with a worn overnight bag and briefcase.

Smith walked briskly through the terminal and out into the cold winter day without a single person glancing his way.

The sky above New York was a sallow gunmetal gray. The color of the day seemed reflected in the gaunt man with the worn bags who hurried up the broad sidewalk.

Everything about Smith seemed tinged in grays, from his three-piece gray suit to the pallor of his skin. The only splash of color that stained his otherwise absolute grayness was the green-striped Dartmouth tie coiled around his neck like a knotted snake.

His sheer ordinariness was the perfect camouflage.

No one would have guessed that this shivering gray man hurrying through the parking lot of John F. Kennedy International Airport was more than just the sum of his gray parts.

Harold Smith was much more.

Smith was director of CURE, a secret agency whose existence was known only to the highest level of the executive branch of the United States government. CURE's mandate was to work outside the Constitution in order to protect it. As head of CURE, Harold W. Smith controlled forces far greater than any other man on the face of the planet. The fact that he looked even more boring than the average dull, gray businessman hurrying to his car on a shivering winter day was Smith's greatest shield. His ordinariness turned away prying eyes, preventing discovery of America's greatest, most terrible secret.

At the far end of the airport parking lot was Smith's trusty station wagon. Like its owner, the old car was showing signs of wear but, like its owner, it stubbornly kept on going. The station wagon had seen Smith through myriad crises, political and social upheaval, seven presidents and just over thirty New York winters.

Unlocking a rusted door, Smith put his suitcase on the back seat near his neatly folded overcoat and scarf. He'd known he wouldn't need the garments in South America, so he'd left them in his car. He was grateful to shrug on the heavy coat and draw the scarf around his thin neck.

He placed his briefcase on the passenger seat beside him as he slid in behind the wheel.

The parking slip was in the sun visor where he'd left it five days earlier.

When he'd left on his trip, Smith knew there existed a very real chance he might never return. Since the car wasn't even worth its weight in scrap metal, he figured he'd just abandon it at the airport. Someone would eventually notice the rusted car and have it towed somewhere for disposal.

But Smith was alive, his car was waiting for him on his return and--even on a cold December day like this-the engine turned over on the first try.

Smith allowed himself a rare smile. Just because a thing was old did not automatically mean it was no longer useful.

He backed carefully from the space and drove to the booth. After paying his parking fee, he headed for the exit.

The traffic from the airport was no worse than normal. Smith scarcely noticed. So bone tired was he, he allowed himself to drive on automatic pilot. Before he knew it, he was driving through the center of his own town.

There was no need to go directly home. Before assuming the reins of CURE, Smith had worked for the CIA. His wife was accustomed to mysterious absences. Still, he had one thing to check on before going to work.

He drove through the congested center of town. A new street built in the 1980s led to the rear entrance of a big apartment complex. A dozen four-story buildings squatted on what had once been farmland. Smith parked his car in front of Building B. Briefcase in hand, he headed for the door.

A row of doorbells was lined neatly on a panel. Smith ran an arthritic finger down the list of names next to the door. He stopped at the one labeled Mark Howard.

Smith pressed the bell.

Howard was Smith's assistant. The younger man was supposed to have been filling in for his employer at work these past few days. But Smith had phoned the office a few times while he was away, and Howard had failed to answer.

At first Smith thought something might be wrong. But he had used his briefcase laptop to check the phone lines and the CURE mainframes for tampering. The agency was secure.

Smith was going to phone his secretary, but decided against it. He didn't want to involve her if it turned out to be a CURE problem. She had no idea what her employer actually did for a living. Besides, Smith suspected he knew what the problem was.

Mark Howard had not been feeling well these past few weeks. He seemed to be suffering from some form of mental exhaustion that was affecting his work. Smith had even given Howard some time off, but when the crisis in South America came he was forced to call his assistant back to work.

Smith wound up staying in South America longer than he had expected, to make certain the danger that took him there was completely eliminated. If Mark's condition had worsened in the five days Smith was away, the young man might have gone home to rest.

At least that's what Smith had assumed. But if Mark was home, he should have answered his door. Smith rang the bell again. When there was still no answer, the CURE director frowned. A tingle of concern fluttered deep in his belly.

He picked a name at random on another floor and pressed the glowing yellow doorbell.

"Yeah, what is it?" a gruff male voice asked after an agonizingly long moment.

"Exterminator," Smith replied. His lemony voice was crisp and precise. "Maintenance called about a cockroach problem in-" he read the name and apartment number from the tag "-the Robertsons' apartment next to yours. I'm here to spray."

"Why didn't maintenance let you in?"

"I was given the passkey to the apartment, but the custodian failed to give me the key to the front door," Smith said into the speaker. "He was called away on an emergency in another building. It doesn't matter to me if you don't let me in. However, the insects are in a breeding cycle right now. If I have to leave now, this entire building could be infested by the time I get back."

The unseen man exhaled angrily. "Those people are animals," he grunted.

There was a buzz and the security lock opened. Smith slipped inside. He took the stairs to the second floor and hurried to Howard's apartment.

The door was locked. However, unlike the security door downstairs, this one was just a standard dead bolt. Smith took out his wallet and removed a small set of burglary tools. With a few deft wiggles he picked the lock.

The apartment was dark. The curtains were drawn on the dreary morning. Smith shut the door behind him, feeling on the wall for the light switch. "Mark?" Smith called.

No answer. Smith wasn't carrying a weapon. Stepping cautiously, he did a quick search of the apartment.

He found no one. However, there were droplets of water in the shower stall. In the kitchen, a banana peel in a bag under the sink had not yet fully blackened. A cereal bowl in the sink had a small amount of milk in the bottom that had not yet soured. Clearly, his assistant had showered and eaten breakfast in his apartment that morning.

Mark Howard was a hardworking and conscientious young man. His condition had to have worsened after Smith had left, necessitating the need to take a few days off. But he was obviously feeling better, for he had to have returned to work.

Smith shut the lights off and let himself out.

The older man didn't feel any guilt for breaking into Howard's apartment. Such things came with the job.

Outside, Smith climbed back behind the wheel of his car and headed off to work.

He found no traffic on the isolated road that ran beside Long Island Sound. A wall rose beside the car. Beyond it loomed the familiar ivy-covered building that had been Smith's true home for the past forty years.

As he turned into the drive of Folcroft Sanitarium, Smith noted that the bronze plaque on the main gate had begun to lose its luster. He was making a mental note to send someone from the custodial staff out to polish it when he spied the police cars parked in front of the building.

What little natural color Smith possessed drained from his ashen face. His thudding heart rose into his constricting throat.

With an outward calm that belied his inner panic, he pulled his station wagon onto the shoulder of the main drive. He retrieved his cell phone from his briefcase.

He dialed with shaking hands. It was his secretary, not Mark Howard, who answered the ringing phone. "Dr. Smith's office."

"Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said, trying to keep his voice even, "is there something wrong at Folcroft?"

"Oh, Dr. Smith. Thank goodness you finally called." Mrs. Mikulka sounded desperate. "I didn't know how to reach you. It's one of the patients. He went-I don't know what. Homicidal. He killed three people. The police are here."

Smith felt some of the tension drain from his shoulders. It was a Folcroft matter. Nothing to do with CURE.

"I know they are," he said.

"Oh," Mrs. Mikulka said. "Where are you?"

"In front of the building. Where is Mr. Howard?"

"He's missing," Mrs. Mikulka said, her voice tight with apprehension. "He wasn't feeling well these past few days, so he stayed home sick. He came back just this morning, before all this happened. Now he's missing and the police are saying- Oh, Dr. Smith, I hope he's all right."

Mrs. Mikulka was clearly distraught. Smith was surprised at himself for the level of concern he felt for his young protege. But there were matters more important than Mark Howard or Harold Smith. "Which patient was it?" Smith pressed.

"One of the ones from the special wing," Mrs. Mikulka said. "They're saying he must have gone berserk. He killed a doctor and two nurses before he disap-"

Smith didn't give her the chance to finish. He clicked his phone shut and dropped it into his briefcase.

He knew exactly which patient it was.

With wooden movements he put his car in gear and continued up the driveway. Skirting the emergency vehicles, he steered around to the side of the building. He parked his car in his reserved space in the employee lot.

He left his suitcase in the back seat. Taking his briefcase in hand, he ducked inside the side door of Folcroft's executive wing. With calm, deliberate steps he climbed to the second floor.

When Smith stepped into her office from the hallway, Mrs. Mikulka's broad face brightened with relief. There was a man waiting in his secretary's office. "Dr. Smith," Mrs. Mikulka said. "Oh, thank goodness. This is a detective with the Rye police. I'm sorry," she said to the man, "I forgot your name."

"Detective Ronald Davic," the policeman replied, offering Smith his hand. "I'm glad you're back, Dr. Smith."

Even as he shook the detective's hand, Smith was gesturing to his office. "I understand there has been some difficulty," Smith said. "Please step inside."

Leaving his flustered secretary alone in the outer room, he ushered the detective through to the inner office.

Smith noted as he rounded his desk that nothing looked out of place. With police snooping around Folcroft, he had been concerned that they might have found their way in here. He would have to do a search of the room once he was alone.

"I spoke to my secretary on the phone a few minutes ago," Smith began as he settled into his chair. "I have the rough details. What is the current situation?"

"You've got three on your staff dead-a doctor and two nurses-one man missing and the killer still at large."

"Do you believe he is still on the grounds?"

"We're searching. We've turned up nothing yet."

"When did this happen?"

"About three hours ago. Just after seven this morning. Dr. Smith, you realize it's your assistant director, Mr. Howard, who's the missing staff member?"

"Yes," Smith said.

"Did he have any kind of special relationship with the patient? Friend, relative, anything like that?" Smith's brow formed a dark V. "No. Mr. Howard has only been on staff here for a year. The patient has been in a medicated coma for the past decade. Why?" Davic fished in his pocket, producing a folded piece of paper. When he opened it up, Smith saw it was a standard Folcroft medical chart. They were normally left on a clipboard in a patient's room so that sanitarium staff could log test results and keep track of medications. With a finger yellowed from years of smoking, the detective tapped one of the top lines on the paper.

"Your patient's sedatives were canceled five days ago," Davic said as he set the paper before Smith. "I talked to one of your staff doctors. Your assistant isn't medical staff, so he shouldn't be messing around with which patients get what drugs. But he's the one who signed off on the change. Now, since you say he doesn't even know this guy, can you guess why he'd do something like that?"

Smith blinked behind his rimless glasses. The detective was right. According to the logs, Mark Howard had changed the prescribed medications for the patient in Polcroft's special wing. And in so doing had set free one of the greatest threats CURE's personnel had ever faced.

Smith was stunned to silence. He felt as if he should do something. As he reexamined the paper, he shifted in his chair. For the first time he noticed that the chair no longer squeaked. It always squeaked. Smith had been meaning for years to have it oiled but had never gotten around to it.

Somehow, in a moment when a missing squeak should have been the last thing on his mind, the silence of his chair roared like thunder in his ringing ears.

"I am at a loss," Smith finally managed to say.

"Really." It was a statement, not a question. "Well, with luck we'll find him alive and ask him." The detective held out his hand for the paper. Smith surrendered it reluctantly. His mind reeled as he considered how Mark Howard might deal with being questioned by the police and what it could mean to Smith's covert organization.

"Wait a moment," Smith said abruptly. "What was the name of the doctor? The one killed?" Davic supplied him the name from a small notebook in his jacket pocket.

"Oh, my," Smith said quietly.

"What? Is something wrong with the doctor?" Smith looked up with worried eyes.

"A few months back he asked me about the sedatives that were being administered to that particular patient. He had wanted to cut the dosage back then. He was adamant, but I overruled him. I am afraid he might have used my absence to convince Mr. Howard to sign off on a change in the patient's treatment."

Of course it was nonsense. A hasty cover concocted on the spur of the moment.

One day months ago the doctor in question had indeed questioned Smith about the meds for the patient in the special wing, but he had not pressed the issue since then. The man had always done exemplary work at Folcroft. But the doctor was now dead, and Smith was willing to sacrifice the man's spotless reputation for the sake of Mark Howard. Not that he would hesitate to take harsh action against his young assistant if Howard had betrayed CURE. But that was a matter to be handled internally-away from prying eyes.

The detective seemed to accept Smith's story. "About this patient of yours," Davic said as he folded the chart and returned it to his pocket. "Just what's his story exactly? What he did to those people downstairs-" Davic shook his head "-I've never seen anything like it."

"He is a unique case," Smith explained. "He is a John Doe remanded to our custody by the federal prison system. There was some hope that we might be able to treat him. We couldn't. His brain is completely unable to regulate the release of certain chemicals in his body. As a result, he is able to display what would be seen as incredible physical feats. But this only lasts for short spurts. He was kept medicated for his own good. Like a subject who ingests PCP, he is oblivious to the damage he is causing himself. He will continue to push and push until he tears his body apart."

Lies piled on lies. Smith was amazed at how easily they came. Not that he could very well tell the truth. He was grateful that he'd had the foresight to concoct a cover for the patient in question years ago. A check of federal prison records would corroborate his story.

"It's not his body I'm worried about, Dr. Smith," Detective Davic said.

"I share your concern," Smith said. "Our John Doe is a special case. I advise against any physical confrontation with him. Bullets might not be enough to stop him. I'm sure you're aware of cases where police have had difficulty subduing men who were shot multiple times. I'm afraid this could happen here. Do you have tranquilizer guns?"

Davic thought the old man was joking. But there was nothing but deadly earnestness on that gray face. "No," the detective admitted.

"Get some. Try the local animal control. In the meantime you may use ours. There are two air dart handguns locked in a security locker in the basement. I will retrieve them for you. Also, I'm uncomfortable with many police in the building. I understand your need to search, and clearly you must be thorough given the circumstances, but the needs of this institution's other patients cannot be ignored. When you are finished looking, please remove your men at the earliest opportunity. Their presence will only alarm patients and visitors. Ultimately, I believe a search of the building is pointless. Offered his freedom after all this time, our Mr. Doe would not dawdle. It's my belief that he has already fled the grounds. And I would appreciate it if you removed the police cars and other vehicles from the drive at once. I could barely fit past them."

Detective Davic wasn't used to being given orders from a civilian. The way this Dr. Smith barked them out, it sounded as if he were used to being in command during times of crisis.

"I'll see what I can do," Davic offered cautiously. As the detective spoke, one of the phones on Smith's desk jangled to life. There were two phones, one black and one blue. They were both old rotary sets. None of the lights were lit on the black one.

Smith didn't look at the ringing blue phone. "Thank you, Detective," the Folcroft director said. He made not a move toward the telephone.

"Aren't you going to answer that, sir?"

"Yes," Smith said. The strained smile he plastered across his face made him look like a grimacing corpse. "Of course I am." Heart pounding, he picked up the blue phone's receiver. "Dr. Smith here," he said stiffly.

"Took you long enough," the voice on the other end of the line growled. "What, were you out frisking the nurses for swiping copier paper again?"

"Oh, hello," Smith said, scarcely hearing the caller's words. "Yes, that is fine. But I'm busy right now, Aunt Mildred. I'll have to call you back."

"Smitty, maybe you should drop the Aunt Mildred thing. At your age, any aunt you'd have would have to be a hundred million years old. Listen, we're done in Europe, but Chiun's acting screwier than usual. I need some busywork just to get a break from him. Gimme another assignment."

"That's wonderful news, Aunt Mildred," Smith replied. "Thank you for calling. But I really must go now. Give my regards to Uncle Martin."

He hung up the phone.

"I apologize for that," Smith said to Detective Davic. He held his unnatural smile. "You were saying?"

The instant Davic opened his mouth to speak, the blue phone began ringing once more.

Smith grabbed the receiver. "Hello?"

"Are you on drugs?" demanded the caller angrily. Without saying a word, Smith pressed the phone to his gray vest. He felt the outline of the poison pill that he kept in his pocket press against his narrow chest.

"Forgive me," Smith said tightly, "but this is an important business call that I need to take. Will you excuse me for a moment?"

"Yes, sir," Davic said. The detective left the office, pulling the door tightly shut.

"I can't talk at the moment," Smith said into the phone. "There's a crisis here."

"Crisis shmisis," the voice on the phone dismissed. "Are you gonna give me another assignment, or do I have to scrape one up on my own? And believe me you wouldn't like that. I'm in an 'international incident' kind of mood."

Smith hesitated. This was one of only two men on Earth who might be able to help right now. On the other hand, with the police here, he might just invite more questions.

Smith booted up his computer. He found an active file at the very top of CURE's target list. Spitting out a few rapid commands, he hung up the phone.

Quickly shutting off his computer, he headed back out to find the detective. When he entered his secretary's office, he found Davic talking excitedly on a cell phone.

"I'll meet you out front," he was saying. He clicked off the phone, stuffing it in his pocket. "We found another body," Davic said to Smith. "Out in the woods near the north wall. They think it might be your assistant."

Mrs. Mikulka gasped. Pressing one hand to her open mouth, she fell back into her chair. She looked up at Smith with frightened, tear-filled eyes.

Standing next to her desk, the Folcroft director put an arthritic hand on her shoulder. He gave a comforting squeeze. It was a greater show of emotional support than he'd given her when her husband had passed away of a sudden heart attack eighteen years before.

"I am going with you," Smith insisted to Davic. It was clear by his tone that there would be no arguing.

Detective Davic made a quick decision. "Let's get those tranquilizer guns," he said, spinning for the door.

As the two men hurried from the office, Smith already had his key chain in hand. And etched in the lines of his patrician face were equal parts determination and dread.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he wasn't quite sure of the correct spelling of the word traitor.

Remo had bought the newspaper at the airport in Miami, taking it with him when he boarded his plane. He had dropped into the seat and opened up to the entertainment section. Forced to bum a pencil from a flight attendant because he'd forgotten to buy one of his own, he had settled down with the crossword puzzle on his knee and a very determined look on his face, and he got stuck on his very first word.

Traitor should be an easy word to spell. But from taxiing to takeoff, he just couldn't seem to get it right. Was it e-r or was it o-r? He wrote it a bunch of times in the margin around the otherwise blank crossword puzzle. He wrote it so many times that both versions were starting to look just as right to him.

The plane was flying over the Gulf of Mexico and Remo still hadn't gotten it. He decided that it was high time he got some help.

"Hi," Remo said enthusiastically to the passenger in the seat next to him. "Could you tell me the proper spelling of traitor?"

Diet Pepsi launched out both of the man's nostrils.

"What?" he gasped, nearly dropping his soda can.

"Traitor, " Remo repeated. "I can't seem to get it right." He held the newspaper out for inspection. Remo's seatmate saw the word in question. It was written in between every available column space and all around the margins of the paper. Over and over. In script, printed out. In capitals and in lowercase letters.

As he read that carefully written word, Alex Wycopf's world collapsed. His mind whirled. His nostrils burned from Pepsi. The knees of his white cotton pants where he'd spit his mouthful of soda were stained brown.

"You know how you get stuck on a word and you just can't seem to get it?" Remo asked. He smiled a disarmingly innocent smile.

"I ... what? Oh. Yes."

Alex Wycopf didn't know how he'd even managed to say that much. His blood sang a concert in his ears. For some reason his eyes were watering, even though he was too afraid even to cry. And through Wycopf's near-panic attack, the man sitting next to him continued to stare that vacant stare and smile that little knowing smile and hold out that scrap of paper with that incriminating word emblazoned a hundred times over for all the world to see.

"So do you?" Remo asked.

"Do I what?" asked Alex Wycopf, his face turning as white as a crisp sheet of first-grade notebook paper. "Do you know how to spell traitor?" Remo asked.

"Oh." Wycopf blinked. "Um, no. No, I don't."

Remo's face grew disappointed. "No? Oh." He returned to his crossword puzzle.

A passing flight attendant noticed that Alex had had some kind of trouble with his drink. He offered the shaken man a napkin to dry his pants before going off in search of a towel.

"I don't like traitors," Remo announced abruptly once the flight attendant was gone. "Whether or not they're with an e or an o. I happen to love America. Don't you love America?"

"I, um, sure," Alex Wycopf said. He was dabbing at the knees of his pants. His slick wet palms soaked the flimsy paper napkin.

"I don't mean as an angle or a dodge or a way of making a quick buck selling her out," Remo said. "I mean really love America. In the patriotic sense. That's the way I am." He tapped his pencil on his newspaper. "It's funny that I still do. I've seen so much over the years, you'd think my attitude would have changed. But I've been doing a little soulsearching these past few months and when I think about it-really think about it-I do still love America. Funny."

The flight attendant was back with a wet towel. Remo shifted in his seat, and the man cleaned the sticky soda off the back of the seat in front of Wycopf. He took a few swipes across the floor before retreating to the galley.

Alex Wycopf didn't know what to do. He just sat there looking dumbly ahead. He was staring at a rivet on the back of the seat in front of him. Suddenly that rivet was the most interesting thing on the face of the planet. Nothing else mattered-not the plane, not this trip, not his seatmate who somehow knew the truth even though no one should have.

"Crossword puzzles are hard," Remo observed, shattering Wycopf's brief moment of terrified solitude. "I remember the nuns used to make us do them sometimes back in grade-school English class. They did it at the very end of the year, just before summer vacation. It was supposed to be fun. Most of the year wasn't fun, and I guess crossword puzzles were their way of letting us let our hair down. Some of the kids seemed to like it. The ones like me in the back of the class would rather have been pounding erasers out in the recess yard than doing crossword puzzles. Hey, there's another one. Eraser. Does that have an o or an e?"

By now Wycopf had regained composure enough to speak. "That's an e," the traitor said.

"So you're certain eraser has an e but you're not sure how to spell traitor?" Remo said. "That's funny. You'd think you of all people would be able to spell traitor."

Alex Wycopf couldn't believe it. He had held out some hope that this was all a bizarre fluke. That he hadn't really been found out. He wanted to leap out of his seat. He wanted to run for the exit, kick it open and take his chances jumping out over the Gulf of Mexico.

But his seatmate was no longer paying attention.

Remo was engrossed once more in his crossword puzzle.

Maybe Alex was getting worked up over nothing. Maybe this was an innocent mistake after all. Maybe the guy sitting next to him was just someone doing a crossword puzzle who happened to be stuck on the word traitor. Maybe he didn't know anything at all about the treasonous acts Alex Wycopf had performed in the past and was about to perform again. Maybe his world wasn't about to come crashing down.

All at once, his seatmate looked up from his newspaper.

"I know," Remo said firmly.

And as he looked into those deep-set brown eyes, Alex Wycopf knew with cold certainty that he was staring into the very eyes of his own death.

"'Mother on The Brady Bunch,'" Remo said, reading another clue from the puzzle. "Do they mean her real name, or her name on the show? And what about those of us who've never seen an episode? Who writes this stuff?"

He scribbled something on the page, thought better of it, then erased it.

Alex Wycopf gripped the arms of his seat. His knuckles ached from clutching so hard. The whine of the propellers was so loud he thought he'd go deaf.

"Gee whiz, you sure sweat a lot, don't you?" Remo said.

Beside him, Alex Wycopf's face had gone from white to red. He was panting now, his heart thudding madly in his chest. It was as if he were suffocating. There was plenty of air. He was pulling it into his lungs, but it wasn't doing any good. Hyperventilating, Wycopf was on the verge of passing out when Remo tsked unhappily.

"Now, now," Remo warned. "This isn't the time for anxiety attacks. I need you around a little longer." Remo stuck his hand behind Wycopf's back, manipulating a cluster of nerves at the base of the man's spine. Alex felt the breath return to him. He filled his lungs with air. The deafening propeller noise receded to its normal hum.

Alex Wycopf was himself again. Alive, breathing and terrified out of his mind. He moaned pathetically. "How do you know?" Wycopf whispered sickly.

"Hmm?" Remo asked, looking up from his puzzle. "You mean how do I know you've betrayed not only your country but the entire Western world? That's a long story."

This was the God's honest truth. It was a long story. It had started a couple of decades before when an innocent beat cop named Remo Williams was sentenced to die in the electric chair for a murder he didn't commit. The chair hadn't worked, and Remo awoke in Folcroft Sanitarium with a new face and a new life. He was to be the enforcement arm for CURE, America's extralegal last line of defense.

At Folcroft, Remo was remanded to the custody of the Master of Sinanju, a Korean martial artist whose wizened form was the perfect camouflage for the most dangerous man on the face of the planet. The skills he imparted to his young student changed Remo Williams, heart, mind and soul.

With Sinanju a man could perform seemingly impossible feats of strength, speed and skill. For those blessed to view life through the prism of Sinanju, it was as if the normal world were slowed down and slightly warped.

Remo had learned and learned well, eventually attaining full Masterhood himself. At the moment his official title was Transitional Reigning Master. It was only a matter of time-a short time if his teacher could be believed-when Remo would become the Reigning Master of Sinanju. The one man in a generation permitted to accept that proud mantle.

Surprisingly, Chiun-Remo's mentor and the current Reigning Master of Sinanju-was okay with surrendering his title to his pupil. Remo was okay with it. Everyone who mattered was okay with it, and all was right with the world.

Until two days ago.

For the past few months Chiun had been writing and mailing some sort of mysterious letters. Every time Remo had asked what they were all about, he was told by his teacher to mind his own business. Remo knew in his gut it was going to be bad news for him. Everything was always bad news for him. And Chiun certainly hadn't been skulking around these past months planning a surprise party.

Of course Remo was right.

Two days ago he had seen one of Chiun's shiny silver envelopes on the table of an assassin in Switzerland.

There was no mistaking it. This killer-for-hire who Remo had never met before had for some reason received a note in the mail from the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun confiscated the letter and killed the killer before Remo had a chance to find out what was going on.

On their way out of the country, Chiun mailed five more envelopes, said they were the last, told Remo not to ask again or else and then lapsed into some kind of weird melancholic funk. It was almost as if he had decided his work on Earth was done. Now that he had an heir apparent in Remo, there were no more challenges for the old man to face.

On one level Remo felt guilty. After all, in a way it was his fault that Chiun was feeling his productive days were over. Of course it was silly to think such a thing. Remo couldn't very well stagnate, locked in a state of perpetual apprenticeship for the sake of his teacher's ego.

Whatever Chiun was feeling right now would pass. After he and Chiun landed back in the States, Remo phoned his employer for another assignment. It didn't have to be big, just something to get him out of Chiun's hair for a little while. Maybe alone the Master of Sinanju would be able to sort through whatever baggage he needed to.

Remo's boss had been strangely terse on the phone. Almost as if he were afraid to talk, even on a secure line. Something about some piddling little crisis. He had given Remo the Wycopf assignment and hung up quickly.

And so Chiun returned to Folcroft Sanitarium by taxi while Remo boarded a plane for Mexico. Although he felt selfish admitting it even to himself, Remo was grateful for this side trip. It gave him a chance to recharge his batteries and escape the funereal air that had descended on his teacher of late. Beside Remo, Alex Wycopf had fallen into frightened silence. He remained mute for the rest of the-trip to Mexico. When the plane was ready to descend over Cancun, he had to be told three times to buckle his seat belt. He heard the stewardess talk, but the words didn't seem to register.

Alex Wycopf prayed for a bumpy landing. If they crashed, maybe he could escape in the confusion.

It was a picture-perfect landing on a sunny Cancun day.

When the plane stopped and the door was sprung, Remo tapped Alex Wycopf on the knee.

"Time to depart."

"Don't you mean deplane?" Wycopf asked hopefully.

This time it wasn't a crossword question, and this time Remo wasn't smiling. He folded his newspaper under his arm and ushered a weak-kneed Alex Wycopf up the aisle.

Off the plane and through the terminal, Remo hailed a cab outside.

"You're giving directions," Remo said to Wycopf. He pushed the traitor into the back seat.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, Remo let the newspaper fly out the window. The crossword puzzle that didn't contain any clues about six letter words for "one who commits treason" landed facedown in the dirty Mexican gutter.

GENERAL ZHII ZAW of the People's Liberation Army sat in a big, comfortable chair in the living room of the elegantly furnished Mexican hotel suite.

A pall of choking cigarette smoke filled the room. The sun blazed hot and white over Cancun. Had the balcony doors been open, a delicate breeze off the ocean would have refreshed the stale air of the room. But the sliding glass doors were closed, the drapes tightly drawn. The air conditioner worked overtime to remove the smoke and human odors from the sprawling suite of rooms.

General Zhii Zaw was not alone. A dozen other men were in the suite with him.

Most were Chinese security forces, although there were one or two scientists thrown in the mix. They had arrived singly or, at most, in groups of two over the past three days. They had come to Mexico via South America and they had assembled in these rooms. To wait.

The scientists were there to make certain they were getting what they paid for. The security personnel were there to see to it that the data got back to China safely.

The general's mission was absolutely critical. He had been told by no less than the director of state security that China's entire future was at stake. Thanks to a program of stunningly successful espionage, for a few years America's secrets had been wide open to the People's Republic of China. Spies in Washington and in the American nuclear program had been more than willing to betray their country, their loved ones and the security of the entire free world for thirty pieces of silver.

But that was all over now. These past few years it had become next to impossible to procure new technology. And China needed American technology.

China couldn't produce anything of value on its own. Everything it possessed had to be procured elsewhere. Without its ability to steal and reverse engineer, China was little more than a clumsy, overpopulated Third World power. The premier knew it, the leaders in the National People's Congress knew it and General Zhii Zaw knew it.

The general stabbed out his cigarette in a candy dish that sat on the end table next to his chair. "What time is it?" he demanded.

"Eight forty-two," an aide replied. Like the other Chinese agents, he wore a plain blue suit. "The plane landed twenty-five minutes ago. I called the airport to confirm."

"He should be here soon. Radio to our man in the lobby. I want to know the instant the American arrives."

"There is a problem with communications, General," the aide said nervously. "I tried to call down stairs a moment ago and there was no response. His radio must be broken."

The general's waxy face normally sagged like melting bags of flesh at his big jowls. The jowls sank even deeper as he frowned.

"Must I do everything?" he demanded. "Send a man down with a replacement."

"Yes, General."

The man in the lobby wasn't really necessary. Even without his early warning, General Zaw wasn't worried that anyone other than the American traitor, Alex Wycopf, would get through. In the hallway just outside the hotel room door stood General Zaw's personal bodyguard, Luo Pong.

Luo Pong was only five feet tall and nearly as wide, all muscle. In the name of state security, Luo Pong had been known to dismember uncooperative prisoners with his bare hands and, on occasion, eat the remains. Anyone in his or her right mind steered clear of that squat, terrifying man with hands like catcher's mitts and a taste for human flesh.

The general's aide had scraped up a replacement walkie-talkie for the lookout in the lobby. He was reaching for the doorknob when the hotel-room door suddenly sprang open.

Startled, the aide jumped back as something big and round rolled into the room.

The rolling round something had eyes.

When Luo Pong's severed head came to a stop at the toes of his shoes, General Zhii Zaw was already leaping to his feet. At the same instant, Alex Wycopf came stumbling into the room, propelled forward by a thick-wristed hand.

"What's a four-letter word for 'what you're all about to be'?" Remo announced to the gathered Chinese agents.

The agent near the door pulled a gun on Remo. Remo planted the man's own barrel so deep in his face loose brain matter dribbled out the back of his head like gray oatmeal.

"That's right," Remo said to the security officer with the revolver in his face and the gun-barrel blossom out the back of his head. "The correct answer is 'dead.'"

The reaction of the others in the suite had been slow until now. But when their comrade with a gun instead of a nose fell to the floor, nine hands flew to holsters.

Before a single weapon could aim for the man at the door, Remo was whirling into the crowd of Chinese agents.

"How about a four-letter word for 'how Chinese spies who steal American secrets will wind up from now on'?" Remo asked.

A pair of guns drew a bead on him. Remo ducked as the men squeezed their triggers. The two Chinese agents inadvertently blew each other's face off.

"That's right," Remo said. "Same answer. Dead." He was up in the air. His heel caught the top of a Chinese agent's head and with a twist he sent the man's chin cracking down through his own sternum. Even as brittle bones compressed, Remo was launching himself from the collapsing man. Two toes took out the throats of a pair of Chinese soldiers while simultaneous flashing hands reduced the beating hearts of another pair of soldiers to gurgling paste.

The final two security agents didn't even have time to process the sudden, brutal deaths of their comrades before Remo was on them. They saw black. Then they saw red. Then they saw nothing at all.

Remo turned from the last dead security agents. All that remained was General Zaw and the pair of scientists. The latter had been brought along to confirm as genuine the schematics and other data Alex Wycopf had stolen from his job as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of Energy. For good measure Remo mashed the heads of the two Chinese scientists through a wall. Their skulls cracked the porcelain tub in the adjacent bathroom in two.

In a matter of seconds, General Zhii Zaw of the People's Liberation Army saw his entire entourage of highly trained agents reduced to a pile of bloodied, twitching limbs.

The American who moved faster than the general's eye could follow turned his level gaze on General Zaw.

"You General Seesaw?" Remo asked.

The general pulled himself up tall. No American-no matter how fast-could make him surrender his pride.

"I am General Zhii Zaw," the general said, sneering. His jowls waggled with proud defiance.

"I kind of figured. Why is it all you big Chinese commie mucky-mucks look like you've taken the slow boat from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum?"

"Your insults are nothing to me," the general insisted. "Do what you came to do, and let it be done." The old man puffed out his chest, awaiting the end.

Remo shook his head. "It's not gonna be that easy," he said. "I've got a little mission for you."

The general laughed. "You are mad if you think I will do anything for you, imperialist running dog."

At that, Remo smiled. It was a cold, evil smile. "Here is the message you will deliver. Tell those thieving rice herders in Beijing the next time they screw with America-" He thought carefully, trying to remember the exact phrase he'd been told to use. "'The Yangtze flows red with their blood.' Yeah, that's it. And tell them this isn't a threat. Tell them it's a promise. To them from me, personally."

General Zaw scowled derisively. "I will do no such thing," he mocked. "Who are you that you make such demands?"

And for Remo Williams, the words came, easier now than they had in the past. They were filled with pride of history and humility of responsibility.

"I am the soon-to-be Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju, duck droppings," Remo said. "And you live this day only because Sinanju requires a messenger."

The general's jaw dropped lower than his jowls. Eyes of brown grew very wide, stretching the big pouches that sagged beneath them.

"Sinanju," the general hissed. "You are legend." His voice trembled with the beginnings of fear. Remo fixed him with an icy stare.

Alex Wycopf was shivering in fright on the floor where Remo had first tossed him. China's top nuclear spy in the United States cringed as Remo dragged him up off the floor. Remo stood Wycopf before the People's Republic general.

"Here's a little visual aid," Remo said. "Paint this picture for those pajama-wearing Mr. Magoos you work for."

Remo placed his hand on Alex Wycopf's face, fingertips fanned out and pressed lightly to flesh. Wycopf inhaled fearfully.

Remo's hand remained still for a moment, so that the general could get a good clear mental image. With a sudden spin of his fingers, Remo proceeded to scramble Alex Wycopf's face.

Bones broke swiftly and cleanly, allowing Remo to shift them with delicate nudges. Thumb and fingertips kneaded flesh, shifting soft muscle beneath.

When Remo was through seconds later, General Zaw gasped in horror.

The general had no idea how the American had done it, but the traitor's nose was now on his chin, bracketed by a pair of misplaced ears. An eye was on the forehead, while the other eye butted up against the mouth, which was now where the nose had been. Remo had rearranged the features without even breaking skin. Wycopf looked like a living Picasso painting.

Alex Wycopf's misplaced lips puckered. Only one of his eyes still possessed the ability to blink. It did so, to freakish effect.

"Picture the entire Commie leadership in Beijing singing 'Nearer My Mao To Thee' from their kneecaps," Remo said.

He finished Alex Wycopf with a slap to the forehead so hard it made the traitor's entire brain splat like a wrinkled gray snowball against the balcony windows.

As the shell of Alex Wycopf dropped to the floor, General Zhii Zaw joined him.

"Master of Sinanju, forgive me!" the general cried. As he crawled on his knees, his hands encircled Remo's ankles. His dry tongue tried to lick the toes of Remo's loafers.

Remo kicked him away.

"A Master," Remo said. "Not the Master. Not yet. Consider yourselves warned. Next time, no Mr. Nice Guy."

His last word delivered, Remo slipped out of the hotel room and was gone.

Still on his knees, General Zaw looked around at the room smeared with blood and brains.

It had all happened in the wink of an eye. As the realization sank in, his terrified stomach clenched. General Zhii Zaw puked his breakfast onto the sensible blue carpet. Afterward he bowed his head deep into the puddle of his own stomach contents. In supplication to the awesome power of the glorious Masters of Sinanju.

WHEN REMO STEPPED off the elevator downstairs, he found a bunch of very pale vacationing American college kids crowded around the lobby television set. They were watching a show about a group of people who had been stranded in a remote location and were forced to use their wits to survive.

On the screen were printed the flashing words "You will not change the channel."

As Remo passed by, he paused, frowning at the words of command on the screen.

"You come all this way on Christmas vacation, presumably on daddy's dime, and all you do is sit and watch TV?" Remo asked one of them. "What's the matter with you? Why aren't you drunk and getting herpes like normal college kids?"

The nearest student turned to Remo. He was ghostly white and could have benefited from a few hours in the sun. By the looks of it, he'd been in front of the television his whole Cancun vacation.

"Shh," he insisted, pointing to the television.

On the screen Becki had just confided to an offscreen interviewer that her alliance with Jojanna was just a scheme to get Curt voted off the show, where he would have an inevitably short-lived career as a cheesy product spokesman or B-list actor. At least this had been the most common career for most of those dismissed from the popular survival program.

"It's days like this," Remo mused, "when I actually see what I'm out there protecting, that I almost wish it wasn't my job to keep Western civilization from collapsing around all our ears."

When the chorus of "Shut ups" came, Remo had already vanished out the hotel's front revolving door.

Chapter 3

As he hurried through the snow, the wind from Long Island Sound sliced Harold W. Smith to the bone. The tails of his overcoat blew out behind him like a gray cape.

The well-tended grounds of Folcroft Sanitarium were surrounded by several acres of pristine woods. At one time a hiking path through the woods had been maintained for patients. However, so few of Folcroft's residents had used it, Smith eventually ordered the groundskeeping service to let it fill in. In the warmer months it was overgrown with brush, but by this time of winter the rough outlines of the old trails slowly reappeared.

The old path was covered with a foot of snow. The footprints of the police who had gone before were clearly visible, broken through the snow's crusted surface.

It was slow going for Smith and Detective Davic. Each man held a tranquilizer gun.

The CURE director could see that the Rye police officer was anxious. Every few feet the middle-aged detective would switch his air gun from one hand to the other, wiping perspiration from his palm onto his trousers.

Smith's palm was bone dry. He held his own air gun loose in his hand. Clenching the weapon as if it were some sort of magic talisman was pointless. When the time came, Harold Smith would be ready. Not that he had any delusions about the certainty of success.

There was every possibility they would fail. The man they were looking for was possessed of abilities like no one else on the planet.

No. Check that. There were two others, but at the moment they were far away. Smith had seen to that. As they made their way through the woods, the CURE director wondered if he had made the right decision in not calling Remo directly back to Folcroft. The moment the self-doubt came, Smith banished it.

The police were here. On the grounds of Folcroft. It was not a CURE matter that had brought them here, but their presence raised the omnipresent specter of discovery.

Smith had lived with the risk of exposure for many years now. Most times it lurked at the fringe of conscious thought. It was a canker sore. Sometimes you missed it for a time, but it could never be entirely forgotten.

At other times risks to CURE's security had almost brought about the end of the secret organization. This situation was threatening to become one of those times.

No, Remo couldn't be involved in this. At least not until the police were cleared out. CURE's enforcement arm had never been as cautious as he should. To bring him here could raise even more questions.

"Here," Davic announced all at once. His breath was labored, his cold-seared lungs scarred by years of smoking.

A fork split the path. The heavy footprints they were following broke to the left.

Smith and Davic followed the left fork. It carried them away from the Sound and toward the road. As they trudged along, Smith thought of the events that had brought him here.

He had known long before today that the escaped patient they were looking for was dangerous. Yet Remo and his teacher had refused to eliminate him. Something to do with some silly superstition that Smith had never fully understood. Despite his misgivings, the CURE director had acceded to their request that the patient be allowed to live out his life in a perpetual medicated coma in CURE's isolated security wing.

A mistake. Smith's fault for allowing it. And it wasn't the only mistake. After the events of that morning, there was another that would soon need to be addressed.

More than a year ago circumstances had deposited Remo and his teacher on Smith's doorstep. The two men had been living at Folcroft ever since. No more. It was just too risky. Once this was over, that arrangement would have to end. He would bring it up with them at the earliest convenient time. Assuming, that is, Smith survived the day.

The path they were on angled up a small hill. Long Island Sound was barely visible through the tangle of trees. In the past few minutes, the weak winter sun had begun to break through the bleak cloud cover. Just a few glimmers of yellow morning light could be seen on the white-capped waves. As they climbed the hill, the water disappeared, obscured by brambles and bushes and thick woods.

Smith saw the body the instant they crested the hill. It was lying in the snow, surrounded by four other men. Three were uniformed police; the fourth was a detective.

Smith and Detective Davic hurried over to the body.

The uniforms stood around Detective Wayne as he crouched over the body. When Davic's young partner saw the gun in Smith's hand, he glanced questioningly at Davic.

"This is Dr. Smith," Davic explained, breathless. "He offered to help, and at this point I'm not refusing. What have you got?"

Detective Wayne turned his attention back to the body. "Young male," he said. "Looks to be around the right age. The only man missing is your assistant, Dr. Smith."

The dead man was the right build for Mark Howard. His face was pressed in the snow where he'd fallen. The man had been stripped of his clothes.

Whoever had taken them had failed to disturb the crusted snow around the body.

"Let's see him," Davic ordered.

Detective Wayne gently turned the head to give Smith a better look. They all saw the blood for the first time. It wasn't as it had been back inside Folcroft. There was barely any here. Just a small stain of red in the clean white snow.

Smith's features were pinched as he glanced at the dead man. The youthful face was familiar.

But it was not the one he had expected to see. "That's not Mark Howard," Smith said. He exhaled a relieved cloud of bile-scented air.

Davic seemed disappointed. "Do you know who it is?"

"Yes," Smith said, nodding. "He's the grandson of Mrs. Sudbury, one of our patients. He frequently stops by in the mornings to bring his grandmother pastry."

"Perfect," Davic grumbled. "Our boy's got street clothes now. Wayne, get back to the building. See if anyone there saw this guy this morning. What he was wearing."

With a sharp nod, Detective Wayne turned. "C'mon, Javez," he barked at one of the uniformed men.

The two officers headed down the path.

"See if his car is still here," Smith called after them.

Davic nodded. "Right. You know what he drives?"

"I believe it is a red Ford Explorer."

"Red Ford Explorer," Davic shouted after Wayne. "Check with the guard at the gate. Javez, search the lot while he's asking."

He turned to Smith. "No offense, but I've talked to your security guard. He ain't exactly Columbo."

"I'm not sure if that will yield anything useful," Smith said. "If this is the path he took, I believe he would continue on it. After ten years of confinement, he would take the most direct route to freedom."

"You're the head doc," Davic said. "Stay with the body," he ordered one of the uniformed men. "And keep sharp. You're with us."

The other uniformed officer fell in with Davic and Smith as they continued on the path.

A dozen yards away they found a small mound of discarded linen. Smith recognized the blue-speckled johnny that was standard for Folcroft's bedridden patients.

Around the area a few cracks were visible in the ice-coated snow. Several delicate footprints marred the otherwise untouched frozen sheet of snow.

Smith was surprised to see the prints. It had been the CURE director's experience that men like his missing patient always walked without leaving a trace. But, then, the man they were tracking had been in a coma for ten years. No matter how skilled he might be, he could not possibly be at one hundred percent. And if his skills were stale, then maybe-just maybe-this could be ended this day after all. Fingers tensing around his air gun, the CURE director hurried along the path in the company of the two police officers.

The trail led directly up to the high north wall of the sanitarium. It would have been difficult for an average man to scale, but for the fugitive they were seeking, it would have been a simple matter to climb. But he hadn't gone over. He had gone through.

A massive hole gaped in the high wall. The old concrete veneer had shattered to dust. The heavy bricks beneath were exploded outward. They peppered the snow out in the direction of the lonely road.

To Detective Ronald Davic, it looked as if a stampeding elephant had broken through in its panic to flee Folcroft Sanitarium. As they approached the wall, the Rye police detective shook his head in disbelief.

"What the hell kind of inmates do you have locked in this loony bin?" he breathed, glancing over at Smith.

The Folcroft director didn't answer. His gray eyes were trained directly ahead. His lips pursed in concern.

When Davic glanced back at the hole in the wall, he saw that the landscape had changed. A lone figure was now framed in the opening.

When he saw the sudden movement ahead, the young uniformed officer whipped his gun up. "Hold your fire!" Smith commanded.

Too late. The cop had already squeezed off a round.

Luckily Smith managed to grab the gun at the last instant. Wrestling with the strong young man, Smith directed the barrel toward the ground. The revolver crackled and the bullet buried harmlessly in snow and earth.

The gunshot echoed off into the distance.

To Harold Smith, the fact that it was lucky he had managed to redirect the man's aim was not in question. Had the gun been aimed at the man standing within the remnants of the wall when it was fired, the police officer would have been dead already. As it was, the new arrival merely looked on with dark annoyance before returning his troubled gaze to the shattered wall.

"That is not the man you are after," Smith snapped at the uniformed officer. "This is another Folcroft patient."

The uniformed officer was panting fearfully. He looked over at Detective Davic, a frightened expression on his face.

"I'm-I'm sorry, sir," he managed. Davic waved an angrily dismissive hand.

Smith was already heading for the wall. Leaving the young officer behind, Davic hurried with the Folcroft director over to the man at the wall.

The stranger who stood amid the collapsed bricks was five feet tall and older than most of the trees in the surrounding woods. He wore a green silk robe that seemed able to capture light where none existed. Twin tufts of soft yellowing hair clung to the parchment skin of his otherwise bald scalp. His button nose was directed up to where the wall arched in a snaggletoothed collection of jagged brick.

"I thought you were away with your son," Smith said tightly to the wizened figure. A concerned eye darted to where Detective Davic stood, panting, beside them.

"I am back," announced Chiun, the Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju. His sharp hazel eyes scanned the contours of the damaged wall. "And he is finally free."

And the old Korean's singsong voice trembled with the grave tones of foreboding doom.

Chapter 4

Smith gave his spare tranquilizer gun to Detective Davic's partner, insisting that as director of Folcroft he had to personally escort the elderly patient to his room. Leaving the police to search the woods that lined the road beyond the sanitarium's shattered north wall, he hurried the Master of Sinanju back to the building.

Smith was grateful that the old Korean didn't try to engage him in conversation on the way.

By the time they reached the main building, there were even more police cars clogging the drive. Smith felt the watery acid in the pit of his stomach flare hot as he took note of the growing number of blue uniforms crisscrossing the snow-covered main lawn.

Chiun watched the many officers through slivered eyes as Smith ushered him inside. They quickly mounted the stairs, ducking past Smith's harried secretary and into the CURE director's office.

"This situation is very serious, Master Chiun," Smith explained after he had shut the door.

"I agree," Chiun said. "First we must scatter this army of constables that has had the temerity to roost on your palace grounds. I suggest you begin with boiling oil dumped from the parapets. Where do you keep your catapults? The Roman onager is a nice model. I'm sure you have some of those. Use your onagers to launch flaming garbage into their midst and then mow them down with ballista-hurled javelins."

"Master Chiun, please," Smith begged. "You know Folcroft has none of those devices. And we cannot interfere with the work of the Rye police."

"I strongly advise that you do not simply let them swoop in here unchallenged, Emperor Smith," Chiun said, his tone serious. "If you do not act, others will be emboldened by what they perceive as weakness. Soon you'll have Turkish goat herders wandering through your inner ward and Vogul horsemen squatting in the vestibule. If we stick the heads of a few of these pushy doughnut-gobblers on pikes along the walls of Fortress Folcroft, it will discourage the rest."

"No, Chiun," Smith insisted. "Please. I must ask you to avoid contact with the police while they are here. Allow them to go about their business unmolested."

The old man's shoulders sank in helpless confusion.

"You want them here?" he asked.

"No," Smith admitted.

"Quickly, then," Chiun said. "Let us pass out crossbows to your nursing staff. If you lead the charge yourself, I will remain at your side to insure that no harm befalls you."

He turned to go, but the CURE director bounded between him and the door.

"What I mean is that I accept their presence," Smith said hastily. "Try to understand, Master Chiun. Even more complications would arise if we tried to forcibly remove them. It is best for security to allow them to finish their business without interference."

The Master of Sinanju noted the look of pleading earnestness on his employer's face.

"So you want them here, even though you do not want them here," the old man spoke slowly.

"Precisely," Smith said. "You see?"

The old Korean saw exactly. This was obviously some inscrutable white madness, the nature of which he had long ago given up hope of ever understanding.

"Very well, O Emperor," Chiun said, resignation in his voice. "Though the shadows of the deepest cave in the darkest night are terrifying blind to the eyes of we mortals, they are pierced by the brilliance of the light that is your limitless wisdom. It is not up to a lowly assassin such as myself to comprehend the complexities of your dealings in matters of state. If you wish to let foreign armies clomp around your palace as if it were their own, I will not interfere. But might your humble assassin offer one piffling suggestion?"

"What is that?"

"Hide the silver before the Spaniards arrive."

As Chiun tucked his hands deep inside the voluminous sleeves of his kimono, Smith allowed a slip of relief to pass his thin lips.

"I am not concerned about invading armies," the CURE director said. "My main worry at the moment is Jeremiah Purcell. You are aware that he has escaped?"

Chiun nodded impatiently. "So I have said."

"He may have a head start of three hours."

"It is closer to four," Chiun corrected. "Judging by the prints he made in the snow and the condition of the body in the woods."

"Then you agree with my assessment," Smith said with a troubled frown. "I had hoped he might have doubled back in an attempt to throw us off the trail. But I thought that unlikely. It is my opinion that he would not stay here."

"I agree," the old Korean replied. "The footprints in the snow show that he is not what he once was. He knows he cannot face either me or Remo in his current debilitated state. He would go somewhere to recover."

For a moment Smith hovered in the middle of the office, hands clenched in helpless frustration. But all at once a light dawned.

"The castle where he was trained!" he exclaimed. "Maybe he'll go back to Saint Martin. He has fled to safety there in the past."

Whirling from the Master of Sinanju, Smith hurried around his desk, settling into his chair.

"It is possible he would return there," Chiun said. "But it is not the only possibility. After all, some of his training took place in other locations."

"Oh?" Smith asked, looking up over the tops of his rimless glasses. "I wasn't aware you knew of any other locations your nephew used to train Purcell." There seemed an instant's hesitation on the leathery face of the Master of Sinanju.

"I merely meant that his training would not be limited to one place," Chiun explained, averting his eyes. "It is likely there were other locations we knew nothing about." He made a show of settling crosslegged to the carpet. The air escaped with a gentle sigh from his collapsing robes.

"Oh, I see," Smith said, nodding. "You're probably right. However, since we know of no others, we have to begin the search somewhere. I will monitor flights to and from the island. The mainframes are already programmed to flag any deaths with a Sinanju fingerprint. I will broaden the search parameters. That is how we stumbled upon him the first time years ago." He began typing at his keyboard.

"I fear it will do you no good, Emperor," the Master of Sinanju cautioned. "Although Purcell is mad, he was never a fool. He was a gifted young man with a bright mind. He has escaped into the world. It is likely we will not see him again until such time he chooses to be found."

There was a note of sad resignation in the old Korean's voice.

"Perhaps," Smith said unhappily. "But we must make an effort." As he worked, he shot a quizzical glance at the tiny Asian. "I'm surprised to see you here, Master Chiun. When Remo called for another assignment an hour ago, I assumed you would go with him."

A cloud passed across the old man's face. "Remo does not need me any longer," he said.

Smith detected the bitterness in the Korean's voice. "Is something wrong between the two of you?"

''Nothing that was not anticipated."

The old Korean could see that Smith expected more. With a sigh, he shook his aged head.

"When a Master arrives at the level Remo has reached, he begins to look differently at those around him," Chiun explained. "He even sees as a burden those who raised him, who brought him up from despair and squalor, those who gave him the best years of their lives. It is this way with many Masters in transition. Not me, of course," he added hastily. "I was a joy to train. But the lesser pasty-skinned ingrates with ugly noses and big feet are notorious for this sort of behavior during the time of final passage to full Masterhood."

"Hmm," Smith said. "Your description makes it almost sound like Remo is going through a new adolescence."

"Remo never stopped going through his first adolescence," the Master of Sinanju replied. "This is different. I would not expect an outsider to understand."

Smith grunted acceptance. He finished up work at his computer.

"There," the CURE director announced. "I have updated the search function to include all suspicious deaths, not just those that seem to involve Sinanju characteristics. I have also alerted authorities in the northeast to be on the lookout for individuals matching Purcell's description. I have issued orders not to attempt to apprehend. It would be pointless to do so, and we do not need any more deaths on our hands. They will focus their attention on airports, as well as train stations and bus terminals."

For a moment his hands rested at the edge of his desk, fingers curled to attack his keyboard. He quickly realized that he had done all that he was able to do. Jeremiah Purcell was a free man now. If he was spotted, Smith's basement mainframes would let him know.

His hands withdrew from the hidden keyboard. "We must deal now with another urgent matter," the CURE director said ominously. "Mark has disappeared."

Chiun's eyes opened wide. "The Prince Regent has fallen victim to the evil Dutchman?" he asked, concern blossoming anew on his weathered face.

"Possibly," Smith said. "Unfortunately, that would be the more agreeable option. There is evidence that Mark is in collusion with Purcell."

The Master of Sinanju's face darkened. "Impossible," the old Korean insisted firmly. "Whoever told you this is lying, Emperor Smith. Point me to this untruthful adviser and I will award you the gift of his false tongue for daring to slander the character of your gracious and loyal prince."

"I know you are fond of Mark, Master Chiun, but I saw it with my own eyes. Mark is the one who issued the order to cut Purcell's sedatives."

Chiun shook his head. "Sinanju has long danced along the blade of palace intrigue," he said. "We can recognize the seeds of treachery in faithless underlings. Prince Mark does not possess a traitorous spirit. He would not betray you of his own free will."

"I hope you're right," Smith said. The weariness of the past few days suddenly began to catch up with him. He sank back in his chair, closing his tired eyes. "It would be easier if I could question him directly. So far the police have been unable to find him."

"He was not seen leaving?" Chiun asked.

"No," Smith said. "He may still be on the grounds. His car was in the parking lot when I arrived.-"

"In that case I will find him for you."

Chiun rose to his feet in a single fluid motion and went over to the wall. Sinking back to a lotus position, he pressed his back tight against the paneling. His papery eyelids fluttered shut.

For several long minutes he sat in utter silence-an ancient statue that not even a single dust particle would dare alight on for fear of breaking his trance.

Across the room Smith was engulfed by the waves of utter stillness. At one point he shifted in his chair to ease the discomfort in his lower back. For an instant he cringed, afraid that the squeak from his chair might intrude on the Master of Sinanju's thoughts. But then he remembered the squeak was no longer there.

After what seemed like an eternity, the old Korean's eyes sprang open wide. In a twirl of silk, he rose to his feet and bounded for the door, flinging it open.

Smith jumped to his feet and hurried after the Master of Sinanju. He caught up with him in the hallway. There were police in the hall of the executive wing. At first Smith was worried that Chiun would say something to them-or worse. But it was as if they didn't exist. The Master of Sinanju breezed past the officers they encountered.

Upstairs, they passed through the hospital wing. Smith noticed that it was unusually quiet for that time of morning. The only talking in the ward came from television sets. In every room the TV set was turned on. A dozen Folcroft patients stared, mesmerized, at the flickering images on a dozen separate television screens.

It was odd given the excitement of the morning. Smith had expected the residents of Folcroft to be disturbed by all that had been going on. He didn't have time to see whatever it was the patients found so fascinating.

Down the hall and through another set of doors, he and the Master of Sinanju found themselves above the administrative wing of the big building. Another hall led around a corner. When they got to the end, Smith found that he was looking up a dusty old staircase.

The stairs led to an old abandoned attic. Chiun had been using the room as a private hideaway during the time he'd been living at Folcroft. It was tucked so far off the beaten path that the police had so far failed to find it.

Kimono hems spinning crazily around his ankles, the Master of Sinanju mounted the stairs. Smith followed.

The enclosed staircase led to a warped pine door. Chiun pushed the door open and slipped inside.

At the far end of the long room, weak winter sunlight spilled through three ceiling-to-floor windows. Smith hadn't been sure what to expect. He realized his expectations needn't have been very high.

For once the Master of Sinanju's instincts had been wrong. The room was empty, save the collection of medical junk that had accumulated in the attic for the eighty-or-so years Folcroft had been in operation.

Smith was allowing the tension to drain from him even as the old Korean made his way across the floor to the window.

"I suppose we should allow the police to conduct the search for Mark after all," Smith said with a sigh. "You may return to your quarters if you wish. I'll let you know if they turn up anything. Master Chiun?"

Chiun seemed intensely interested in a bundle of old rags that had been dumped beneath the window. The rags rested in shadow, tucked up under the sill away from the sunlight.

Only when he squinted against the light did the CURE director see that the pile of rags was wearing shoes.

Holding his breath, Smith hurried over to join Chiun.

The man was lying in the inch-thick dust, curled up in a tight fetal position. His head and knees touched the wall beneath the grimy windows.

Smith's mouth opened in slow shock. "Mark?" he asked. Deep apprehension flavored his lemony voice. It was as if the voice were some intangible lifeline. The man on the floor rolled his head from the wall. Desperate, terrified eyes darted between the two standing men. The instant he saw Smith, the young man's eyes seemed to find focus. All at once the man lunged at Smith.

He grabbed the CURE director tight, wrapping both arms around the older man's neck.

Baffled, Smith looked at the Master of Sinanju. Great sadness filled the old Korean's leathery face. And the pleading voice warm in Smith's ear was filled with fear and incomprehension.

"Help me," Mark Howard croaked.

And with that his frightened eyes rolled back in his head and the assistant director of CURE passed out in the arms of Harold W. Smith.

Chapter 5

The Australian outback would have been a dream. A deserted tropical island? Heaven.

So what if there were snakes in the outback or if it was the kind of island where you had to eat rats and bugs? Paradise was in the eyes of the beholder. Right about now, even having to endure a backstabbing, overweight gay guy strutting around naked wouldn't have been so bad.

"When I signed on for this, I thought we'd be going somewhere tropical," R. Chappel said. "I worked out for two months straight. Got in the best shape of my life. I even bought a home tanning bed. For what? Look at this dump."

He waved an angry hand at the surrounding scenery. The hand was covered by a thick mitten. The mitten matched his heavy down jacket. A tiny patch adorned the breast of the winter coat, its logo recognizable to television viewers across the country and around the world.

"I mean it," Chappel concluded. "Did you expect this?"

"Could be worse," replied David Felder. He continued to forage on the ground for supplies.

That was typical Felder. Never wanting to complain, always trying to put on a good face. That was Felder's strategy. Keep his head down, stay quiet, don't make waves and-with luck-when this mess was over, walk away with the million-dollar prize.

That wasn't R. Chappel's strategy. Chappel was the official complainer. There was one every time. Everyone would bitch and moan about his constant griping, and when they couldn't take it any longer they'd vote him the hell out of there. Right about now Chappel didn't care.

"Gimme my own house, my own bed. I'm sick of sleeping on the ground. And you!" he suddenly snapped directly to the camera. "Get that damn thing away from me before I shove it down your throat!"

The camera that hovered a few inches from his angry face didn't move. The cameraman behind it didn't reply.

The camera operators never talked. It was in their contracts not to interfere with the contestants. They could film, but they could not interact.

"Dammit," Chappel snarled. "Like talking to a damn zombie."

He turned back to Felder. "We about done here?"

"A couple more minutes," Felder said as he continued to pick items off the ground. "'This place is a gold mine."

Crossing his arms, Chappel glanced around. It didn't look like a gold mine to him. Not unless gold mines were surrounded by bombed-out tenements and abandoned stores.

This was the cruelest trick life had ever played on R. Chappel.

At first this had been a dream come true. He had submitted the audition tape without any expectations at all, and he had made it! He'd beaten all odds and actually been chosen as a contestant for the biggest reality game show in the history of American television.

Winner was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Hugely popular among viewers. A ratings juggernaut. Even those who had never once seen the show couldn't escape from it.

The premise was simple. A group of people with wildly different backgrounds was placed in a remote setting and forced to survive without any of the creature comforts of modern life. Each week, the group would select one person to expel. Their numbers would be winnowed down until only one was left. To the winner was awarded the one-million-dollar grand prize.

The settings of the first Winner seasons had been hot, exciting and dangerous. To shake things up in the latest installment, the producers had gone in a different direction.

"Goddamn Harlem," R. Chappel griped as he looked around the benighted urban landscape. "What were they smoking when they came up with this?"

David Felder didn't answer. He continued to dig up discarded hypodermic needles from the dirty snow of the abandoned lot. The group had leaned early on that the used needles could be traded to crack addicts for food stamps. The contestants could then trade in the food stamps at the corner convenience mart for necessities.

Felder dropped two more needles into his knapsack.

He had swiped the knapsack from base camp. The same logo that adorned both of their jackets was stitched to the bag. The words Surmount, Surpass, Survive were printed in an oval, surrounding the larger word Winner.

That same logo was plastered all over everything, from hats to T-shirts to belt buckles. It was even on the goddamn rolls of toilet paper.

Of course, real toilet paper was reserved for the producers and crew. The cast had to scrounge up whatever they could whenever nature called. When they couldn't barter with needles or deposit bottles, they were forced to make do with whatever they could find. R. Chappel had learned pretty quickly that Church's Chicken bags and discarded Wrigley's Spearmint wrappers weren't worth shit for absorbing.

"It's all rigged anyway," R. Chappel said. "They pick who's gonna win even before we get started. A guy like me doesn't have a shot." He scowled for the camera. "Yeah, and don't think I don't know you're gonna edit that out."

The three-man camera crew was no longer looking his way.

That was odd. He had gotten used to the cameras always being aimed at him. But now they were aimed at the ground. Chappel had come to think of the camera operators as cyborgs, their cameras permanently affixed to their faces. But the faces had emerged. What's more, they looked worried. They were staring down the street.

Chappel followed their line of sight.

"Oh, great," he said, rolling his eyes. "Not again."

There was a group of people heading his way. That was part of the problem with using a public locale for Winner. When the Harlem location was first brought up, there were fears for the safety of the contestants. It turned out those concerns were unnecessary. The biggest worry in this modern era of celebrity worship were those locals who wanted to get in on the act.

People had been trying to crash the Winner set for the past month. At first Chappel assumed the group coming down the street was just the latest in the seemingly endless parade of media whores. But as they closed in, he realized these ones seemed a tad more focused than the rest had been.

They didn't talk. They just marched up the road. They were carrying things in their hands. Some had boards or iron bars, others had chains.

Chappel gulped. "Um," he said out of the corner of his mouth, "you think they want our autographs?" When he turned to David Felder, he was dismayed to find that his partner was no longer digging in the snow.

Felder was hightailing across the vacant lot. As he ran, he flung his knapsack. Syringes scattered across the snow.

Two cameramen were on Felder's heels. They were struggling under the weight of their cameras. The third flung his camera at the approaching mob.

"Run, you moron!" he screamed.

It was the first time R. Chappel had ever heard one of the cameramen speak.

Fear set in. Chappel turned and ran after the man. As he raced across the lot, he heard the steady beat of a hundred footfalls behind him. He looked over his shoulder.

Big mistake. The instant he looked back, he tripped on a malt liquor bottle and landed in a heap on a broken-down chain-link fence. When he rolled back over, the shadows were already falling over him.

The mob was on him.

They didn't seem interested in David Felder or the three fleeing cameramen. The mob let the others make good their escape, surrounding the lone, terrified game-show contestant.

Chappel cowered from the sea of blank faces. A rusted piece of twisted metal dug into the small of his back.

"What do you want?" he asked, his voice small with fear.

The crowd didn't answer. It stood quietly over him. There was no talking, no shouting. Just utter silence. After a long moment, the multitude parted.

An obese man in a green jogging suit waddled from the mob. His eyes were as blank as the rest. In his dark hands he clutched a palm-size portable television set with a two-inch screen. The fat man looked from the tiny little screen to the frightened man on the ground.

"Dat's the one," he proclaimed loudly. He flashed the tiny TV to the crowd.

A few others had battery sets, as well. They passed them around, dull eyes feeding hungrily on the small image. When they were through, they refocused attention on R. Chappel. This time Chappel saw the blood lust in their eyes. It was the last thing he would ever see.

Without a peep, without a whisper, without a single angry word, the silent mob fell on R. Chappel. They hit him with boards and rods. They beat him until his bones broke and his skin was bruised and bloodied.

At first the pain was unbearable. Then it wasn't so bad. Then it was nothing, as the great numbness of death washed over him. When the final blow that technically ended his life came at last, he was already gone. With a nail driven deep into his brain, "R." Remo Chappel was voted from this life to the next.

THE FORMER PRESIDENT of the United States watched the dilapidated buildings and burned-out cars through the window of his armor-plated limousine.

Even though the people here loved him, the expresident hated Harlem. He was attracted to places that thrummed with life, like the real New York City and Los Angeles. The whole world knew Harlem was dead from the neck down.

For this former president, the best gauge of a locale's vitality was whether or not it could sustain a steady stream of thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinners. Judging by the residents he glimpsed through the tinted windows of his car, the people of Harlem would be lucky to scrape up ten bucks for a Whopper with cheese and a battle of Crazy Horse.

Everything was so dreary and depressing. One thing was certain. He wouldn't be caught dead here if not for yet another one of the million little public-relations nightmares that seemed to always hang in the air around him like the warm stink around a public outhouse.

When he had surrendered the presidency, he had originally tried to rent space on Manhattan's upper west side. But those yammering pests in flyover country had gotten a major-league bug up their collective ass over the monthly 1.2 million dollars of taxpayer money it would cost to rent his pricey Manhattan digs. If it were up to him, he would have flipped them all the bird and settled like a dethroned king in his new apartment. But his wife was in the Senate by that point, and her political fate was tied to his approval numbers. When he began to drop in the polls like a plummeting anvil, the former first lady had insisted that he find a more suitable spot for his retirement offices. That's when the Reverend Hal Shittman stepped in.

Shittman was a rabble-rousing Harlem minister whose appetite for inflammatory rhetoric was matched only by his gastronomic intake. The minister had suggested publicly that the former president should take some office space in Harlem. A reward for the unflagging support of the black community.

The former president's wife loved the idea. So did the press and the people in Harlem. Everyone thought it was a great idea. Everyone, that was, except the former president.

Life was not as it had been when he was leader of the entire free world. In his time out of political office, he had learned, as all ex-presidents learned, that his opinion on a subject no longer held the weight it once did. In the end the advisers won out and the former president lost. With much fanfare he had accepted the minister's offer.

Quietly, the former president had enjoyed a secret victory. Although he had showed up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of his new offices, that was the last time he had seen the place. In the ensuing months he had stayed away, opting for foreign trips and domestic fund-raising events.

He would have been happy to never again darken the door of his official offices. Unfortunately, he hadn't factored in the raging ego of the man who had saved his fanny all those months ago.

Hal Shittman had started talking to the press. The minister had noticed the president's conspicuous absence from his own offices. The complaints were loud and frequent. So loud were they that the expresident's wife had gotten wind of the brewing crisis all the way down in Washington.

At the time, the former first lady's approval ratings as the junior senator from New York were in a tumble. The black vote was a vital part of her core constituency. In an angry phone call that had lasted all of one minute, she had dispatched the former president to Harlem with a four-word command: "Fix it or else."

And so it was that the ex-president of the United States found himself slouched morosely in the back seat of his car as it drove along Martin Luther King Boulevard on the way to the offices he swore he'd never set foot in again.

There were only three Secret Service men in the car with him. Two were in the front, one in the back. Not like the old days.

The former president offered a long, wistful sigh as the limo turned a corner and headed down another run-down street. He was still sighing when the car came to a sudden stop.

"What's wrong?" asked the president.

He peered out the window. This didn't look like the street where his office was.

Only when he looked farther along did he notice the crowd waiting in the middle of the road.

The men and women just stood there, faces blank. At the front of the group, his great bloated belly swathed in green velour, stood Hal Shittman. The minister and some of the others held small black objects in their hands that they concentrated on like fortune-tellers over tea leaves.

"Is this the welcoming committee?" the former president asked his Secret Service detachment, his hoarse voice annoyed. He pressed his doughy face harder to the window, framing his eyes with both hands. "Doesn't look like much of a reception. How come I don't see no cameras? Do they think I do this for something other than the six-o'clock news? Get out there to Shittman and tell him my ass don't leave this seat till I see me a camera."

"Yes, sir," said the Secret Service agent who sat in the front seat next to the driver. The man got out of the car and went over to talk to the good reverend. The president waited, quietly fuming.

He watched the Secret Service man talking to Hal Shittman. He saw Shittman appear to respond. He saw someone near the minister take something out from behind his back. And as he watched in shock, he saw the spike that had been nailed into the end of the twoby-four being driven deep into the skull of the Secret Service agent.

After that, things started to happen very quickly for the former president of the United States.

The dead agent dropped. The crowd surged over him.

At the same time the ex-president's driver threw the limo into gear, backing up in a squeal of tires and a cloud of rubber. The former president was thrown to one side of the car.

Outside, the crowd swarmed the limo. Hands clawed at locked door handles. The car rocked on its springs. Men and women beat fists and weapons against shatterproof windows.

Back on the main drag, the driver wrestled the car into drive. He stomped on the gas and the vehicle surged away.

Minister Shittman's eyes bulged like an angry bullfrog's. His upswept pompadour quivered with fury. "There he go!" Hal Shittman bellowed, his great belly bouncing at the effort. "After his lily white ass!"

Screaming bloody murder, the crowd pursued the former president's limousine down the litter-strewn street. At the distant rear of the mob came Minister Shittman, a huffing and puffing mound of righteous velour rage.

Chapter 6

Remo Williams knew something was wrong when he saw the squad cars slowly patrolling the lonely road that led to Folcroft Sanitarium. In thirty years he couldn't remember ever seeing a cop on that street. He assumed Smith used his computers to somehow arrange for the Rye police department to always be on patrol somewhere else. But here were two cop cars in four minutes driving along the lonely midnight road.

Remo saw the gaping hole in the sanitarium wall as the taillights of the second squad car were disappearing in his rearview mirror.

He pulled to the side of the road to examine the wall.

Footprints of a dozen men mangled the snow all around the area. It didn't matter. Remo could see that a simple force blow in the weakest part of the wall's inner face had sent bricks scattering out to the street. It was actually a pretty sloppy job by Chiun's normal standards.

No matter. It was clear what had happened. The Master of Sinanju had been in a pissy mood these past few days. If the patrolling cops were any indication, something more than just a wall had paid the price.

"Five bucks it was the cabbie," he muttered to himself.

Before Remo had headed south for his rendezvous with Alex Wycopf and his Chinese contact, he had put his teacher in the back of a cab at JFK. The cabdriver was a Pakistani. Chiun didn't like Pakistanis. Worse, the man wore a turban. For fun Chiun sometimes liked to yank on turbans so that the heads beneath them spun like tops. Most times the heads came off and skipped away, to the old man's delight.

Chiun had been ticked at Remo for some reason, and as a result some innocent-albeit surly--cabdriver had paid the ultimate price.

"I am not spending the rest of the night beating the bushes for some dead Paki's head," Remo vowed. Climbing back in his car, Remo drove to the main gate. Usually the guard in the booth was dozing in his chair. This night he actually seemed alert. It was unnerving. He watched intently as Remo drove up the gravel driveway.

Folcroft itself seemed brighter than usual. Exterior lights that were not ordinarily used had been turned on. Yellow light shone bright across the snow as Remo parked his car in the employee lot.

In spite of himself, he found his eyes scanning the shadows of the lot for human heads.

When he reached the building, he found the side door he always used locked. He tapped a finger twice on the locking mechanism and the bolt clicked agreeably open.

Remo climbed the stairs to the second floor. From stairwell to executive wing, Remo could tell more people had been here recently than normal. The dust that normally clung comfortably to corners danced now in the cold drafts. There were different smells, as well. A lot of men with a lot of cheap cologne had come through Folcroft.

Remo was beginning to think there might be something more serious to worry about than a single dead Pakistani cabdriver, but when he reached Smith's office door he recognized the two heartbeats that emanated from within.

Smith's door was locked, too. Remo popped it and slipped inside the dimly lit room.

The Master of Sinanju sat in the middle of the carpet, his back to the door. He had to have sensed Remo as he came into the room, but the old man didn't turn. Eyes closed, he continued to meditate as his pupil shut the door.

"Okay, where's the body?" Remo asked. "And don't think I'm volunteering, 'cause I am not moving it. "

Smith looked up sharply from his desk.

"Remo," the CURE director exhaled. The weird light cast up from his submerged monitor seemed to age his haggard face. "Why didn't you call in?"

"Nice to see you, too, Smitty," Remo replied. "I didn't call because I was coming right home. Although by the looks of it maybe I shouldn't have. What's the bad news?"

Smith took a deep breath. "Jeremiah Purcell has escaped," he said. There seemed a tired resignation to the announcement. His eyes were rimmed in black.

Remo wasn't sure how to react to the news. He blinked, looking from the CURE director to the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun's eyes were now open. He didn't look his pupil's way. Gaze flat, he watched Smith.

"How?" Remo demanded. "When?"

Smith hesitated. "His, er, medication was altered in my absence. As a result, he came out of his coma sometime yesterday morning."

"So when you couldn't find me, what? You called the cops?"

"There were several deaths," Smith explained. "The police were here before I even got back from South America. They searched but came up empty. There is a manhunt going on right now. I'm surprised you haven't heard. Folcroft has been featured on the news."

The mere mention of the press coverage that had been part of the fallout resulting from Purcell's escape was enough to make Smith squirm in his chair.

"I was in the air most of the day," Remo said. He was recovering from his initial shock. "Okay, Smitty, where is the nutbar? Chiun and I will go toss a butterfly net over him and drag him back here."

"That's the problem," Smith said wearily. "I've been searching for him for the past thirty-six hours. There have been no other unusual deaths reported, no sightings of any kind. He has for all intents and purposes disappeared."

Remo couldn't believe what he was hearing. He turned to his teacher. "Little Father?" he asked. The old man shook his head.

"The emperor has done his best," Chiun said flatly. "You should thank him as I have for taking interest in what is essentially a Sinanju problem."

"Sinanju my ass," Remo said. "He's the psycho pupil of your traitor nephew. They both forfeited the right to claim Sinanju status the first fifty-seven billion times they tried to kill us. And we can't let him just run around loose. Try harder, Smitty."

"I have done all I can," the CURE director said.

"Do more," Remo insisted. "Everybody's gotta be somewhere. I thought you knew how to run those dingwhistle computers of yours."

"Remo, I have exhausted all possibilities," Smith said, straining to inject calm. "Purcell is gone." Remo couldn't believe the older man's attitude. This was big beyond big. Smith should have realized that. And Chiun. Chiun of all people should have known better. But the two of them were just sitting there.

"Well, isn't this just marvey?" Remo snarled sarcastically. "The biggest threat we've ever faced is out roaming the countryside like an albino Frankenstein, and the three of us are sitting out on the terrace drinking mint juleps and waiting for the freaking magnolias to bloom."

Smith pulled off his glasses. With slender fingers he pinched the bridge of his nose.

"If it seems as if I am not worried, I assure you, Remo, that's not the case," the CURE director said. "But I have spent the better part of the past day searching for Purcell with no success. He has disappeared completely. I can't send you after him when I don't know where in the world he is. And at the moment Purcell is not our only problem."

"Why?" Remo asked, suddenly suspicious at the older man's grave tone. "What other disaster happened while I was gone?" A thought popped into his head. "Hey, by the way, where's Smitty Jr.? It's halfpast time for him to annoy the piss out of me right about now."

"Mark is-" Smith hesitated. "He has been committed as a patient here at Folcroft."

Remo's brow darkened. "Purcell zap him?"

"No. I am not sure what's wrong. Physically, Mark is fine. It's his mental and emotional state that concerns me at the moment."

"Why? What happened to the kid?" Smith replaced his glasses.

"The doctors aren't certain. At the moment he is being treated for exhaustion. It appears as if he has not slept in days. Master Chiun believes that his condition is the result of some sort of external mental phenomenon, which could explain why he cut Purcell's sedatives."

Remo's eyes went flat. "Hold the phone," he said, voice dead. "Are you telling me Wally Cleaver is the one who let Purcell out of his cage?"

"It would appear to be the case," Smith admitted.

Remo's face steeled. "Fine," he said. "How do you want me to work this? You want him to die in bed here, or do you want me to take him somewhere else and do it?"

Smith shook his head firmly. "I do not want Mark harmed, Remo," he said. "Not until we know all the facts."

"Facts, my ass," Remo said. "You put MacCleary on ice for a lot less than this. Or am I the only one who remembers that?"

Conrad MacCleary had been part of CURE's inner circle in the early days. He was the man responsible for bringing Remo into the organization. MacCleary had also been Harold W. Smith's only real friend. At the mention of his old comrade's name, Smith's spine stiffened.

"MacCleary was a different case," the CURE director said coldly. "He was hospitalized with injuries that would more than likely have killed him anyway. With the medication he was on, there was a risk that he would talk."

"Right. And I suppose you're treating Howard with nothing but happy thoughts and Yoo-Hoos?"

"Mark is under sedation, yes," Smith admitted. "But I have taken precautions. He has been isolated from the rest of Folcroft's population. Master Chiun and I have been monitoring his progress. I have only allowed the medical staff to see him while I am present. It's safe for now."

"It'll be a hell of a lot safer once I pull his spine out through his mouth," Remo said. He spun on his heel.

Before Remo could storm from the room, the Master of Sinanju rose to his feet.

"Hold!" the old man commanded.

Remo stopped, spinning back around. "This is the right thing to do, Little Father," he snapped. "The kid did more than just screw us. He might have signed both our death warrants. Or did you forget Purcell's got an edge on us?"

"The Dutchman's ability to cast hallucinations is not the issue here," Chiun said. "Until we learn the truth of his involvement with Purcell, you will do nothing to harm the Prince Regent."

"Why?" Remo asked in Korean. "Because you think you can soak him for a few shekels once he takes over for Smith? Here's a news flash for you. Your vaunted little prince just stabbed us all in the back. I say we cut bait on him now."

"And I say we do not," Chiun retorted in the same language. "My time as Reigning Master may be growing short, but I am still head of our village and my decrees will be followed by my apprentice. What is more, your emperor has ordered that his lackey not be harmed."

At the door, Remo felt the fight drain out of him. He felt tired. Chiun's attitude lately had been draining enough. Now this. He exhaled angrily.

"I think it's a bad idea," Remo growled.

"Happily, Remo Williams, the rest of us are not as limited in our ideas as you," Chiun said. "I for one could not live in a space so confining. Now be a good boy for once in your disobedient life and do as you are told."

Shoulders slumping, Remo trudged back across the floor.

Behind his desk, Smith seemed relieved.

"For the time being, this is for the best," the CURE director assured Remo. After the past day he seemed pleased to finally change the subject. "Now, what happened with Alex Wycopf?"

"He's toast," Remo said. He thought of Wycopf's face. "Or scrambled eggs," he amended. "Either way he's history. And I sent General Seesaw back to China with a warning. They should pull back for a while. Assuming they believe him. 'Course, if they don't, knowing them he'll be executed, tried and arrested. In that order."

Smith seemed satisfied with Remo's results. Before he could ask another question, the CURE director was distracted by a beep from his computer. He turned his attention to his monitor as Remo and Chiun sat on the carpet.

"Did you tell the Chinaman my grandfather's words?" Chiun asked Remo as Smith began typing at his keyboard.

"Word for word," Remo replied. "I told him to lay off America or 'the Yangtze flows red with their blood.' It worked pretty good. But he really crapped his kimono when he found out I was a Master of Sinanju."

Chiun arched an eyebrow. "Don't you mean the Master of Sinanju?" he asked blandly.

"No," Remo insisted firmly. "Not this time. I promised myself this on my way back here. You're not sucking me into that again. You're the Master of Sinanju, okay? The one, the only. Accept no substitutes."

"I would like to believe that you still respect me, Remo," Chiun said. "But how can I when it is so plain to me that you are ashamed to be seen with me?"

"I'm not ashamed," Remo said. "It's all in your head."

"Ah, now I see. So I am a nuisance and I'm crazed. Clearly, I have become too great a burden to you. How unfortunate for you that Long Island Sound has no convenient ice floes on which to leave me. Perhaps in his infinite kindness Emperor Smith will give me permanent residence in one of the upper floors of Fortress Folcroft. Once you have assumed Reigning Masterhood, I can be hidden up there to sit and gather dust with the other elderly castaways."

"I've been meaning to talk to you both about that," Smith said. He continued to work, eyes trained on his computer screen. "It is too problematic for you to remain here any longer. Given current circumstances, it is time the two of you found alternative lodgings."

"Oh, great," grumbled Remo. "Perfect timing."

"Why would I expect anything more?" Chiun moaned. "Now you both wish to rid yourselves of the nuisance that is me. Why not smother me in my sleep? Or better yet, the two of you could take me into the depths of the forest and chain me to a tree like some unwanted dog. I will buy the chain."

"Thanks a bunch, Smitty," Remo groused. "Couldn't you pick a better time to toss us out on our ears?"

"Permanent residence for you here at Folcroft has never been an option," Smith insisted. "By allowing you to stay all these months, we have all been guilty of falling into a comfortable but dangerous habit. You knew you couldn't remain here forever." His eyes narrowed as he studied the data on his computer. "Oh, my," he said quietly.

"What's wrong now?"

"There is apparently some civil unrest in Harlem," the CURE director replied.

"No kidding?" Remo said blandly. "What's the matter, Cincinnati run out of windows to break?"

"This could be serious," Smith said gravely.

As he spoke, his computer beeped anew. Tired eyes scanned the new information culled by the CURE mainframes. By the time he'd finished reading, the last of the color had drained from his gray face.

"The president was visiting Harlem at the time. Initial reports are not clear, but he was apparently in the area when the mob action began. He may be in danger."

"What the hell is he doing in Harlem?" Remo asked. "I thought he only left Camp David to fly to Texas."

"It is a former president," Smith explained.

"Oh." Remo's face relaxed. He glanced around the gloomy office. "Anything good on TV?"

Chapter 7

A dour winter's dawn was beginning to streak the sky above Harlem as Cindee Maloo stomped her size-five Timberland all-terrain boot on the potholed street.

"Pooh," Cindee complained. "Pooh, pooh and more pooh."

She had just been given some very bad news about the former president of the United States.

"Are you sure he escaped in one piece?" Cindee demanded.

"I'm sorry, Cindee," replied her assistant. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there weren't any dramatic rescues or blood on the sidewalk or anything. According to the news people, he managed to get into his office after the mob attacked his car. When they didn't storm the building, he holed up in there for a few hours. The mob surrounded the place and screamed and yelled for a while, but when the police showed up, everything just sort of stopped. Everyone surrendered peacefully and the president took off. He's probably halfway to Chappaqua by now."

Cindee stomped her little foot in its rugged outdoorsy boot again. "Pooh!" she repeated.

Her nasal accent made the word come out sounding like "poe." The accent was Australian, which was no surprise since Cindee Maloo herself was Australian. She was Australian from her nasal accent to the top of her naturally curly Australian blond hair and to the toe of her pretty little Australian foot, which she stomped angrily on the ugly American pavement one more time.

"Where's the drama in just having him escape like that?" Cindee complained. "Who's gonna stay tuned if they know he gets out of it alive?"

Cindee cast a furious eye up at the building in which the former president had spent a harrowing night.

Rocks had shattered most of the windows. The sidewalk was littered with glass.

The thinning crowd gathered outside the building was mostly news people along with a few neighborhood residents who had come out to gawk when the fireworks started.

Nearer, there were two men examining some of the debris that had been crushed by the mob's stomping feet.

"I'll prove it to you," Cindee said to her assistant. "Let's ask Joe Sixpack here." She turned to the nearest of the two men. "You. Lemme ask you something."

The man didn't even look at her. That was unusual. With her smooth skin, perfect teeth and piercing brown eyes, Cindee had the sort of features that usually had no problem turning men's heads.

The man spoke without lifting his head. "Where'd you buy that accent, Paul Hogan's going-out-of-career sale?" he asked, his nose still in the gutter.

What he was looking at, Cindee had no idea. "I wanna ask you about TV," Cindee pressed.

"Go squat on one."

"Did you hear the president got away?" Cindee demanded.

The man let loose a protracted exhale of air. Turning his attention from the junk on the ground, he straightened, settling his gaze on Cindee.

"What part of me being rude to you so you'll go away don't you understand?" asked Remo Williams.

"I just want to ask you a question. Why won't you let me ask you a question? You Americans are so vulgar."

"This one speaks with a wisdom beyond her years," announced the Master of Sinanju, who had been studying the trash in the road alongside his pupil.

Remo shook his head, irritated. "Thanks a heap, Waltzing Matilda," he growled at Cindee. "He wasn't on the rag enough already without a jump start from you. What do you want to ask me? And make it quick."

"Drama," Cindee said. "I want the opinion of the man in the street about what he thinks makes good drama. You couldn't get more in the street than you, since you're actually standing in the street." She frowned. "What are you doing in the street, anyway?"

"Going back to ignoring you," Remo said.

"Wait," Cindee insisted. "Even you must understand what makes good drama. The ex-president here, a mob on the street hurling flaming bottles and rocks at the building where he's hiding. That's drama. You'd watch that, wouldn't you?"

"No," said Remo impatiently. "Are we done now?" Not waiting for a reply, he returned to examining the street.

A man with a camera near the battered building caught the eye of Cindee's assistant. The young woman hurried over to him, leaving her boss in the company of Remo and Chiun.

"Of course you would," Cindee persisted. "Don't try to pretend you're not like everybody else in this country. You people love that kind of violent drama. Why do you think you're glued to the set every time some kid opens fire in his high-school cafeteria? You got helicopters overhead, police cordons, kids climbing out windows. Drama."

When Remo looked back up, his face was cold. "Don't tell me what I love," he said, voice chilly. She was momentarily taken aback by the icy menace in his tone. It was in that moment of hesitation that the Master of Sinanju inserted himself. The old Korean took Cindee's gloved hands in his frail fingers, patting gently. His face was the personification of ancient wisdom.

"Of course you are correct, my dear," Chiun said.

"I have maintained for years that the American culture revels in violence. I hear others out there saying the same thing now, but I was first."

"Good for you," Cindee said. She tried to extricate her hands, but they wouldn't budge. It was as if the old man's hands were fast-drying concrete that had firmed up around her own.

"This is a new kind of violence," Chiun continued. "There are some who might think it began with your foolish Revolution or the things you would call world wars, even though everyone knows the only important part of the world wasn't involved in them. There was violence there, yes, but it was men killing men, which has gone on forever. Do you want to know when your culture truly turned to violence?"

"Technically, I'm Australian, not American," Cindee said. "Not my culture." She tugged at her hands.

"June 11, 1975," Chiun said. "A day that will live in infamy." He hung his head.

Cindee's eyes narrowed. "What happened then?"

"Some dippy soap opera actress hit some dippy soap-opera actor," Remo supplied.

The Master of Sinanju's face tightened. "It was Rad Rex, it was 'As the Planet Revolves' and it was the end of your American culture," he said over his shoulder to Remo. "Since then there has been nothing but car crashes and shooting guns. Poor Mr. Rex, whose autograph remains my most prized possession, had to retire. A gentle soul, he left before his dignity could be sullied by the death of art in this land."

"Yeah, he was really worried about preserving his dignity that time I saw him hawking some pocket wiener pump on a 1980s infomercial," Remo said.

"Pay him no heed," Chiun confided. "He only says such things to appeal to prurient minds. How typical he is of the current state of this nation's culture."

This time when Cindee yanked her hands, Chiun allowed her to have them. She pulled so hard, she smacked herself in her Australian forehead. She quickly stuffed her hands in her pockets, lest the old geyser with the viselike grip latch on to them again.

"Thanks for the input, Fops," Cindee said. "But you're not my ideal demographic."

"What does that mean?" Chiun asked suspiciously.

"It means you're too old for your opinion to matter," she explained. "Advertisers skew younger and-I hate to break it to you-you're way beyond that prized eighteen-to-forty-nine range. Like two hundred years beyond it."

"I will let that insult pass because you are obviously possessed of a deranged mind," Chiun said thinly.

"What she obviously is is some kind of TV exec," Remo said. "They're deranged on a good day. On the rest, they're just stupid as a sack of doorknobs." He was annoyed at his teacher for wasting time with the Australian ditz.

"I'm a producer," Cindee corrected.

"Same pot, different crack," Remo said.

"You do not listen to anyone older than forty-nine?" Chiun interjected, steering her back to what was now, for him, the main point.

"Not if I can help it," Cindee said. "No offense, but that's just the way the business works."

"What of the wisdom derived from age and experience?" Chiun said, astonished. "They mean nothing to you?"

"Sorry," Cindee said. "Now him," she added, pointing at Remo. "He's in the right demo group. His opinion holds weight."

"Go cuddle a kangaroo," opined Remo.

Chiun thrust his hands deep in the sleeves of his kimono. "You and my son have much in common," he said unhappily. "He, too, believes that people of a certain age have nothing more to contribute to the world. He has often said that he would send all of us over sixty-five on buses to the cemetery today, just to save the young the time and expense of having to bother with funerals later on."

"Not true. Not listening," Remo said. He was leaning over, hands on his knees.

Chiun nodded to Cindee. "It is true, no matter what he tells you," he confided.

"Hey, lady," Rema said, ignoring the old man, "you're a TV expert. Does this look like a little TV to you?"

Cindee went over to him. She peered down at the object that had so fascinated the two men.

"Yeah," she said. "It's one of those little handheld numbers you get at the mall."

The plastic case was cracked, the electronic guts spilled out onto the road. The mini-television set looked as if it had been crushed flat by hundreds of stomping feet.

"So that's one, too?" Remo said.

He pointed a few feet away. There was another small television there, no bigger than a person's palm. Near it were two others. All of them had been stomped by the mob.

When Cindee looked around, she saw that there were dozens of crushed televisions around the area. They were mixed in with the rest of the street litter.

Cindee's pretty little Australian nose crinkled in confusion. "Why are all those TVs here?" she asked.

"I don't know," Remo said. "Ordinarily, I'd say that a cop shot a black murderer and the community expressed its outrage that a killer got killed by helping itself to the inventory of the local electronics store. But this is Harlem. There isn't a lootable Circuit City within a trillion-mile radius."

He stood back up.

"Any thoughts, Little Father?" Remo asked.

"Why do you care what I think?" Chiun sniffed.

"Okay, had enough of that already," Remo said. He turned back to Cindee. "I wonder who dropped these here. How long have you been here?"

"I just got here about ten minutes ago," she replied.

"So you didn't see the mob?"

Cindee's face sagged. "Don't remind me," she griped. "By the sounds of it, we didn't get any usable footage."

"What do you mean, footage?" Remo asked.

Cindee huffed impatiently. "For 'Winner,'" she explained. "We're taping in the area."

Remo recognized the name of the program. It had been on the television in the lobby of General Zhii Zaw's hotel in Cancun.

"That stupid TV show?" he asked. "I saw part of it just the other day. It looked like you were filming in Bosnia."

"We're not," she said, sounding almost as if she wished they were. "We're right around the corner from here. And don't remind me that they decided to run more than just the Thursday-night episode this week. The network is going to run us into the ground putting us on two nights a week. They said it's only because of the holiday next week. It better be. We don't want a 'Millionaire' overexposure problem. Of course, it might be okay to double up if we had some action to blast into people's living rooms. That mob would have been great for background-you know, set the stage on the real-life hardships in Harlem. Show how gritty these streets can get. But the three cameramen we had on the scene panicked and ran. They didn't even get the murder on tape."

"What murder?"

Cindee clapped a hand over her mouth. "Forget I said that," she insisted.

"Gladly," said the Master of Sinanju, bored. He was watching the gathering crowd of reporters, which by now filled the sidewalks around the former president's office building in numbers greater than the previous night's mob.

"Was one of the people on the show killed?" Remo asked.

"I'm not confirming or denying," Cindee said quickly. "You'll have to watch and see. We're taping what will be week eight right now, and next week's episode will only be the second week of the season, so you have a while to go."

Rema shook his head. "Not me," he said. "I do reality, not reality shows. Your little friend wants you."

He pointed down the sidewalk. Cindee's assistant was waving for Cindee to join her. She and a Winner cameraman had cornered an interview subject on the sidewalk. Cindee hurried over to join them. Remo and Chiun followed.

The two Sinanju Masters were careful to avoid the many cameras. There were local and national reporters on the scene. Some were doing live interviews for the morning network news programs. They weren't lacking for interview subjects. In the wake of the riots, dozens of experts on the black community had swarmed into Harlem. They had done their swarming that morning from white communities. Like most experts on the black community, none of them actually lived in an actual black community.

Remo passed by four very angry women with bulging, lunatic's eyes who were screeching into cameras that the CIA and not poor, maligned Minister Shittman was actually responsible for the previous night's events. Three of the women were tenured professors at prestigious New York universities. One was a bag lady. The only difference Remo could see between the professors and the bag lady was that the professors apparently took off their tinfoil-lined hats while on camera.

The man Cindee's assistant had scraped up was a middle-aged black doctor with a kindly face who actually lived in the community and knew many of the people involved in the riot. He was soft-spoken and unobtrusive and, thus, no one was interested in anything he had to say.

"This could be good for a few seconds' footage," Cindee's assistant promised when Cindee and the two Masters of Sinanju arrived. "Tell her what you were telling me."

"Oh," said the man. "I was trying to tell these people that something is wrong here, but no one will listen."

His wet eyes were pleading with them to understand.

"Of course something's wrong," Cindee said. "A mob tried to kill the president last night and we missed getting so much as an inch of footage." She shot a dirty look at her assistant for wasting all their time.

"No," insisted the doctor. "That's what they wanted it to look like. But it couldn't be."

The doctor was on the verge of tears.

Remo would have dismissed him as just another one of the crowd of sidewalk apologists who had crawled out of the woodwork to offer excuses for the mob's actions, but there was something about the man. He seemed so sincere.

"Why isn't this riot like every other one?" Remo asked.

"The people involved," the doctor said. "Most of them were patients of mine. They weren't the kind of people to riot. They're just regular folks. There was even an elderly couple who were afraid to leave their apartment. I used to have to make house calls to them. It doesn't make sense that they'd come out in the middle of a mob like that."

"Unless their son who coveted their possessions sent them out in the hope that they would not survive the civil unrest," the Master of Sinanju pointed out.

"Put a sock in it," Remo suggested. To the doctor he said, "So what do you think happened with them?"

"Not just with them," the doctor said. "With the whole mob. It looks like some sort of dissociation to me." He noted all their blank faces. "It's a psychological state," he explained. "Internally, the mind can disconnect certain ideas and behaviors from the main body of a person's belief system. An individual in a dissociated state acts and talks and reacts in ways they never would consciously."

"You're saying this is some sort of sleepwalking," Remo said dubiously.

"In a way. That's what it looks like to me. Normal people don't just run out and join a mob if they're not divorced from their conscious minds."

"Nonsense," Chiun sniffed. "You whites do nothing but play around in mobs. Then the mobs get too big and you have to have a war to make them smaller. That is what what's-his-name did in Europe a few years ago. The one with the funny little mustache. He was white like these people."

The doctor's face grew hard. "Not that it matters, but these people were black."

"Were they Americans?" Chiun asked blandly.

"Of course."

"White as rice," Chiun concluded.

"I don't know," Remo said, steering the doctor away from the Master of Sinanju. "A mob's a mob till someone proves otherwise. I mean, what would cause this dizzy-what's-it?"

"Dissociation," the doctor repeated. "And I don't know. I've never heard of anything like this. To my knowledge, dissociation is always manifested in individuals, not groups. It wouldn't make sense the other way. Sleepwalking, psychotic delusions, certain forms of amnesia, automatic writing are all accepted forms of dissociation. Not this."

"Automatic writing?" Cindee asked.

"Just an aspect of the phenomenon. An individual's hand writes messages without conscious control."

"Pretty much explains every screenplay in Hollywood," Remo commented.

Cindee gave the hairy eyeball to her assistant. The woman shrugged apologetically.

"Okay," Cindee droned to the doctor. "That was really fascinating stuff. I was-wow-just, well, fascinated. Bye." She turned to go.

"But he didn't even turn his camera on," the doctor said, face collapsing in disappointment.

"Outta tape," Cindee confided.

"No, I'm not," said the cameraman.

Cindee clouted the camera operator in the back of the head before spinning around and marching away. "Sorry," Remo said to the doctor after Cindee Maloo and her Winner crew were gone.

As the desperate physician looked for someone else to tell his story to, Remo and the Master of Sinanju headed back down the sidewalk.

In the street beyond the crowd of babbling reporters, two men watched Remo and Chiun go.

The pair of Harlem police officers sat in a cruiser at the edge of the crowd.

An alert had come over the radio two hours ago. All cruisers in the area had been given a description of two men, a young white and an elderly Asian. In Harlem, a pair like that would stick out like sore thumbs.

The men in question were believed to be armed and were without doubt very, very dangerous.

Starting their engine, the police officers drew cautiously away from the curb. Slowly so as not to attract attention, they began trailing the suspects down the litter-strewn street.

Chapter 8

With the mob dispersed and the former president safe, technically Remo's work was done. He would have been okay to head back to Folcroft. But Folcroft wasn't any fun at the moment, what with all the cops and dead bodies and crazy people. And even if Smith allowed them to stay in residence a few more days, Remo wasn't really in the mood to be cooped up in his quarters surrounded by packing crates and staring at the walls. Not with the Master of Sinanju in his current snotty mood.

The Harlem doctor had sown a tiny seed of doubt in Remo's mind. When he asked a bystander, Remo found out that most of the rioters had been brought to the same nearby police station. He decided to check them out before leaving.

On their way to the station he checked on his car. Since the most hardened Harlem criminals usually went home come sunup, the hours from dawn to noon were low tide for criminal activity. It was a little after seven in the morning, and all the pros were safely tucked away in bed. Consequently, instead of being completely stripped, Remo's car was only half-dismantled.

"You've got twenty minutes," Remo announced to the gang of eight grammar-school kids who were tearing apart his car like wrench-wielding locusts.

"What you talking 'bout?" one of the kids demanded.

He was thirteen, looked nineteen and had a Glock pistol jutting from the waistband of his exposed underpants.

Remo took the gun, shattered it into three fat pieces and skipped the parts down the street. Eight young jaws dropped.

"Twenty minutes, class," Remo repeated. "I come back and my car's not back together by then, you're all going to be victims of white rage."

Remo grabbed the oldest kid. "You're elected hall monitor." Climbing one-handed, he hauled the youth up a telephone pole. He hung him by his exposed underwear from the shattered overhanging streetlight.

"You can oversee reconstruction," he said. "Anyone leaves, you're telling me names and addresses."

"Yessir!" the terrified kid said.

When Remo slid back to the ground, the others were already frantically trying to reassemble the car. The Master of Sinanju was supervising their work with a bland eye. As Remo headed off to the police station, the old man padded up beside him.

"What kind of children are you raising in this country?" the old Korean asked.

"No one's raising them," Remo said. "That's the problem. America's inner cities have turned into Children of the Corn with crappier production values."

The Master of Sinanju stroked his thread of beard. "Perhaps it is not so bad that you wish to shoot me like the old horse that pulls the milk wagon, Remo. At the speed with which this nation is falling into ruin, it would only be a matter of time before a building drops on my head anyway."

"Keep picking that scab, and I'll never take over as Reigning Master," Remo warned. "Those lazy slugs back in Sinanju'd have to find real jobs. How would it look to your ancestors if you became the first Master who trained a student who decided to ditch that craphole of a village?"

"You would not be the first," Chiun said coldly. Remo realized he'd misspoken. He had forgotten about Chiun's nephew, Nuihc, the renegade Master of Sinanju who had trained Jeremiah Purcell in the ancient martial art.

Rather than dig himself in deeper, he clammed up. As the two walked along, Remo noted that they had drawn attention from the surrounding buildings. About a dozen video cameras were trained on them from the windows.

The riot and the subsequent police and news activity had drawn them out. The locals were hoping to catch an instance of police brutality they could sell to the networks.

Chiun floated away from the cameras, finding blind spots and shadows where no lens could find him. Remo had his own technique for avoiding identification. Every time he felt the pressure waves of a camera aimed his way, he vibrated his facial muscles.

Later on, when the camera operators tried to view the image on the tape, all they'd see was a blur where a face should have been.

Remo had successfully negotiated his way through the gauntlet of window cameras when he spied yet another lens up ahead. It was nestled in a clump of ugly, snow-draped weeds that huddled at the corner of a squalid tenement. He recognized the face of the cameraman.

Marching over, Remo dragged Cindee Maloo's camera operator from the bushes. The little red light on his camera was lit. It was still aimed at Remo. "What the hell is this?" Remo demanded.

He addressed not the cameraman, but a broken-down wall that rimmed the adjacent vacant lot. A sheepish Cindee Maloo rose into view from behind the shattered wall. The cameraman turned the lens to the Winner producer.

"I didn't get your name," Cindee asked.

Remo's face fouled. "Bunny Wigglesworth," he said, dropping the cameraman to the sidewalk.

"You're not very nice, are you?" Cindee frowned. "That could work. Someone nasty's always fun to toss into the mix. Are you a struggling actor?"

"What is all this?" Remo asked. "Don't you have a game show to go rig?"

Cindee waved a dismissive hand. "The cameras are rolling continuously back there. Whatever happens, we'll get it. Right now I'm thinking ahead. The next season of 'Winner' will have to get started soon. We've gotta get another cast assembled. You want to test for it?"

"Oh, brother," Remo exhaled.

He started down the sidewalk. Cindee and her cameraman hurried to keep up.

"Seriously," Cindee insisted, dogging him. "You're kind of good-looking, in a mean sort of way. "

"Kind of thanks a heap, in an up-yours sort of way." Remo snarled.

"I will do it," Chiun announced.

Cindee screamed, startled by the new voice. She wheeled around, expecting a mugger or worse. "Oh, it's you," she breathed when she saw the wisp of an Asian trailing behind her. "I didn't see you there." She sniffled relief and rubbed her hands for warmth.

"I will do your program," Chiun repeated.

Remo could see the frozen earnestness in the old man's weathered face. The Master of Sinanju was serious.

"No way," Remo said.

"Still your tongue," Chiun hissed.

"Well, we have had old people on before," Cindee said.

"He's not doing it," Remo told her. "Chiun, Smith would have a heart attack if you went on 'Winner.'"

"He has had them before and yet still lingers to vex the living," the Master of Sinanju said. "Worry not about Smith's strong heart, but about my weak one, which you have broken in your mad desire to hasten me out to pasture."

"You could be interesting," Cindee admitted.

"Not could be," Chiun corrected, "am."

Remo shook his head firmly. "He is not interesting and he is not going on some game show where the other contestants vote the rest off the show. And I'll tell you why. He wouldn't hunt, he wouldn't forage, he wouldn't lift a goddamn finger to help anyone else out. He'd be the laziest sack of egomaniacal selfishness you ever had on that show. He would be the first-the very first-they would vote off, and then he'd win the million bucks because the whole rest of the cast along with the production staff would get snuffed out one by one on national TV like tiki torches until someone cut him a check. He is not interested."

"Silence, O basher of the aged and infirm," Chiun hissed.

"Oh, if you're not in good health, we couldn't use you," Cindee apologized.

"I am healthy as healthy can be," Chiun said rapidly, with a wave of his frail hand. He pitched his voice low. "Do not ruin this for me," he warned Remo.

Remo threw up his hands. "Fine. Kill Smith by going on national TV. Just remember, you've lost your fallback position. The little prince is on his way out the door."

Cindee was pulling some business cards from her pocket. She passed one to the Master of Sinanju.

"Here's the address to send your demo tape to." Chiun happily accepted the card. It disappeared inside the voluminous folds of his kimono.

Cindee tried to give Remo one of the cards. As he walked along, he tore the card to confetti with blurry hands and let the hundred fragments flutter to the cold street.

"Don't you want to be famous?" Cindee asked.

"Fame ain't all it's cracked up to be," Remo said. "For what I do, reputation is better. The parts of the world where they need to know me? Believe me, they know me."

"That doesn't make sense," Cindee said. "Reputation is fame. If someone knows you, they know you."

Remo shook his head. "They only need to know what I am, which they do. The 'who' changes. That little glory hound back there-" he nodded over his shoulder to where the Master of Sinanju padded along behind them -he's the current who. I'm the next who. There have been five thousand years' worth of us. The faces have changed, the reputation remains the same. And we got all that without sucking up to key demos or studying overnight ratings in Pittsburgh."

She saw that he spoke without boasting. As if he knew what he was saying to be true. And the way he walked. More a glide than a normal man's stride. He had a confidence and inner grace that she found at once mysterious and sexy. He seemed to just know what and who he was.

Cindee was a twenty-eight-year-old Australian woman who had risen in the American TV ranks to be producer of one of the biggest cultural phenomenons to hit the small screen since Uncle Miltie donned his first dress back in television's golden age. She was well on her way up the professional ladder. Cindee Maloo had arrived. Yet for some reason he made her feel as if she'd done nothing with her life. She suddenly felt the need to justify herself to this stranger.

"I didn't start out doing 'Winner,'" Cindee confided all at once.

"Are you still here?" Remo asked, irritated.

"'The Box,'" she said. "That was something I produced all by myself for one of the nets last year. We took fourteen real people and put them in a big steel box and buried it under a pile of sand. Every day for two weeks the people in the box would vote one person out of the box."

"I never heard of it," Remo said. Cindee's face grew glum.

"Well, that's because things didn't go too well with the pilot." She raised a gloved finger. "Technically, it wasn't my fault. I assumed someone else would figure out all that stuff about air holes and oxygen. Fortunately, all our contestants had signed releases, so their heirs didn't have much of a leg to stand on legally."

"As reality shows go, I guess 'This Old House' doesn't cut it anymore," Remo said dryly.

"I don't do boring," Cindee said. "The public likes their stuff to be edgy. I did another pilot, this one for syndication. It was called 'Sea of Love.' In that one we took seven men and one woman and put them on a yacht out in the middle of San Francisco harbor. Every day for a week the woman voted one man off the boat till only one was left."

"I sense a common thread here," Remo said.

Cindee bristled. "There isn't one," she insisted. "If you're saying that they're just like 'Winner' and all I was doing was copying that show, you're wrong. They were both very different. One was underground and one was on a boat in the water. Are you stupid or something?"

"Yes, he is," Chiun replied.

"So what happened to the boat one?" Remo asked.

Cindee flushed. "It wasn't my fault," she said. "Someone else suggested that it'd be sexy to make them go skinny-dipping by moonlight. Who knew there were sharks swimming around in San Francisco harbor?"

"I did," said both Remo and Chiun.

"Well, I should have hired you both as consultants, shouldn't I?" Cindee said sarcastically. "Anyway, my shows didn't get picked up, but they got noticed. That's how I got the job with 'Winner.'"

They had arrived at the steps of the police station. Remo turned to Cindee Maloo.

"Are you through following me?" he asked.

Cindee gave a reluctant frown. "I still think you'd be great on the show. You've got something. I think people would find you appealing. Anyway, your friend's got my card if you change your mind."

Remo was grateful when Cindee and her cameraman turned to go. As the Winner crew went back down the street, Remo and Chiun mounted the station house steps.

"You know we're being watched," Remo said to the Master of Sinanju once they were alone.

"Of course," Chiun sniffed, insulted. "I am not an invalid. They have been following us for ten minutes."

At the top of the stairs Remo shot a glance back at the street. The police car that had been tailing them ever since they'd left the front of the ex-president's building was slowing to a stop in front of the precinct house.

"We don't exactly look like we live around here," Remo said. "Probably just making sure we're okay." As a former beat cop, Remo was heartened to see there were still dedicated officers who took seriously their duty to protect the public. Leaving the pair of uniformed patrolman out in the street, he ushered the Master of Sinanju inside the station.

Remo felt the vibrations of a pair of video cameras as soon as he stepped inside. One was directed at the door; the other swung his way as he walked up to the desk.

Chiun was playing coy with the cameras again. He found a blind spot where neither lens could track him, settling on a bench where several handcuffed men awaited processing.

When Remo presented his phony FBI identification at the desk, the sergeant on duty seemed a little more interested than he should. He studied Remo's picture ID and his face several times before allowing him inside.

"You coming with, Little Father?"

The old Korean shook his head. "This seems like as good a place as any to observe the collapse of Western civilization," he replied.

Leaving the Master of Sinanju in the lobby, Remo followed a uniformed officer into the bowels of the station.

The cells in the back of the station were full. Remo found that the Harlem doctor had been right about the rioters. Many of the people in the cells he passed seemed lost and frightened, completely out of place in a jail environment. The people were mostly middle-aged or older. Women outnumbered men.

The officer led him to a rear cell where one prisoner had been isolated from the rest.

When Remo entered the cell, he found Minister Hal Shittman sprawled on a soiled bunk like a velour-wrapped whale. With every snoring exhale, the famous minister's giant belly deflated only to strain velour once more on the inhale. The rancid wind that passed his lips reeked of the two dozen stale Twinkies and gallon of grape Kool-Aid that had been his previous night's supper.

Only at the clank of the closing cell door did the minister awaken. As sleep fled, bleary red eyes looked up unhappily at the white man standing in his cell. "Who are you?" Shittman demanded.

"Adidas corporate lawyer," Remo said. "Since you insist on dressing in our clothes, we'd like you to either lose nine hundred pounds or stick masking tape over our logo. It's bad for business having a guy with breasts bigger than Pamela Anderson's waddling around in our sports gear."

"You ain't my lawyer," Shittman declared. "I put in a call to Mr. Johnnie. Get lost, skinny."

He flopped back on his bunk.

Remo didn't feel like wasting more time than he had to in that cell. Shittman's cologne was vying with his breath for the title of worst stink in the tristate area.

Remo drove two hard fingers into a neck that felt like sweaty pudding. He only knew he'd somehow found the proper pain receptors when Shittman's eyes sprang open wide.

"Youch!" Shittman yelped. Fat arms flailing, the minister rolled to a sitting position.

"Now that I've got your attention," Remo said, "tell me what happened last night. And make it fast, 'cause that aftershave of yours smells worse than a lying, shit-smeared teenaged girl."

The shock of pain that had shot through his body was still reverberating through his most distant extremities. The minister's great blubbery jowls jiggled in fear.

"I keep telling everybody I don't remember last night," Shittman said. "Last thing I remember I was mindin' my own business, as the black man always is. Next thing I knows, I wake up here. Racist whites made it a crime to drive while black. Now it be a crime to sit at home while black."

"You don't remember leading last night's riot?"

"I don't riot, I protest," Shittman replied. "And I sure wasn't protestin' last night. They trying to tell me I was there-they even try to shove their white programming in my head so I'll crack up and confess, but I was home. No doubt about it."

"People saw you there," Remo said.

"Liars."

"They've got you on tape."

"Computer-generated forgeries," Shittman insisted. "Phonied up by the CIA to discredit me. The government been pulling that kind of shit on me my whole life."

Remo didn't like the minister. Shittman was one of those community leaders whose job it was to jab a stick in the humming beehive of racial tensions every few months and give a good vigorous stir. Yet despite his personal distaste for the man, Remo could clearly see that the minister-at least in his own mind-was telling the truth.

"What do you mean shoving programming in your head?" Remo asked.

"That's the worst thing," Shittman moaned. "I don't know how they done it, but I can see the words. I see them right now." Bleary eyes stared at the cell wall.

"Where?" Remo asked.

"There," Shittman said, his fat face worried. He pointed at the air before him. "They there. Even though I know they not, they there. All kind of just floating there. Like when you look at something for a long time and then look away. How you still can see it? That's what I see."

Remo saw the troubled urgency on the minister's face.

"What do these words say?" he asked.

"Well, there be some stuff about the old president," Shittman said. "The words are telling me to surround his building and not let him out till morning. They look like they fading. But the ones I see strongest are just two words. They just kind of hang there, even when I been sleeping. They telling me to kill that guy with the funny name from that 'Winner' show. I can even see him dead on the ground. It strange, 'cause that was the show I was watching when I blacked out an' I don't remember him dying on the TV."

This jibed with what Remo had heard already. Cindee Maloo had let it slip that one of the Winner contestants had been killed during the mob action the previous night. Apparently, Shittman had been involved in the murder but had no real recollection of participating in the events.

"I hate to admit it," Remo said, "but I believe you."

"'Course you do," Shittman sniffed.

"No," Remo explained. "I really, really hate to admit it. You have no idea how much I don't want to believe you."

He suddenly felt as if he needed a shower. He turned to go.

"You think all this might have somethin' to do with them teeny TVs they give us?" the minister called after him.

Remo suddenly remembered all the little broken handheld television sets he and Chiun had found around the former president's office building.

"Who's passing out free TVs?" Remo asked.

"Fellow from BCN, the big TV network. He bring some cases of them around to my church. Say he's doing a study of viewing habits among African-Americans for his homogenized, white-bread, nocoloreds-allowed network. He pass out the TVs to my flock." Shittman waved a hand to the other cells. "Most of the folks he give them to are right here."

"You know where I can find this guy?"

"Sure," Shittman said. "I let him set up shop in the basement of my church. He gots all kinds of broadcast and computer stuff there. Fella passes out free TVs in Harlem's a fella you don't mind giving a little office space to."

"Thanks," Remo said. He headed for the door. "And try to get some rest. Sleep burns calories. A slimmer you is just eight million years away."

He called the guard to let him out.

Remo sensed something was amiss when the cop who had escorted him to the cell tried to shoot him through the bars.

Remo danced around the hail of lead.

"What the bliz-blaz?" he demanded as the young officer unloaded his revolver into the tiny room. Bullets screamed into the cell, ricocheting sparks off the brick walls. In a panic, Hal Shittman screamed and rolled onto the floor. The minister tried to stuff his massive bulk underneath his bunk.

"Brutality! Brutality!" Shittman screeched, in the first understatement of his public life.

Remo didn't know what was going on. When the policeman ran out of bullets, he continued to click the trigger, barrel aimed square at Remo's chest. His eyes were glazed.

Remo reluctantly surmised that-what with all the shooting and trying to kill him and all-the cop wasn't going to be nice and let him out of Shittman's cell.

"Why isn't my life ever easy?" Remo groused. Muttering to himself, he broke the lock on the cell and banged the bars into the forehead of the vacanteyed cop.

The police officer sprawled backward onto the cellblock floor. His gun clattered away. As Remo exited the cell, he saw something pressed in the cop's other hand.

He was surprised enough when he realized it was another palm-size television. But he soon received a fresh shock.

"What the hell?"

There was a regular television broadcast in progress. On one of the morning network talk shows, the hosts were discussing the violence in Harlem. But there was something else on the screen. Two words flashed intermittently beneath the talking heads. It was like the command to watch Winner that he'd seen in the hotel lobby down in Mexico.

He realized now that he should have looked more closely in Cancun. It was clear his Sinanju training alone allowed him to see what was there. The words were being flashed at intervals too great for the normal human eye to perceive.

The words read "Kill him." And, accompanying that phrase, pulsed too fast to be seen on anything other than a subconscious level, was a flashing image of Remo Williams.

Remo blinked, stunned.

The picture was a little off. Like a composite sketch run through a computer to clean up the rough lines. But there was no mistaking who it was supposed to be.

So shocked was Remo as he watched his own image being broadcast on a national network news program, he didn't even take note of the sounds of scuffing feet at the far end of the cell block. He only knew that he had drawn more unwelcome attention when fresh gunfire erupted in the Harlem station house.

His body tripped to automatic, flipping out around the first volley of gunfire. Twisting, Remo saw a line of uniform and plainclothes officers framed by the open steel door of the dingy cell block. The cops were firing like madmen, eyes devoid of rage or even conscious thought.

With a sinking stomach Remo saw that many of the cops clutched miniature televisions in their free hands.

This was too much to sort out. He had to get out of there. Had to contact Smith.

Skittering through the gunfire, Remo raced down the dank corridor between the cells. Through the barred doors came the frightened screams of men and women Remo now knew to be innocent.

Running full out, Remo flew into the midst of the cops.

Dancing down the line, he sent the flat side of his palm into forehead after forehead. Men collapsed like wilting daisies. As they fell, more flooded in from the adjacent hallway to take their place.

Remo fought them back to a blind corner where an iron door was bolted shut on an alley that ran beside the station. He kicked open the door, at the same time snatching a radio from one of the unconscious police officers.

Remo tossed a couple of cops into the alley, ducked into an empty office and hollered over the radio that the subject had escaped out the back door.

He got a clearer image of just how many men were under the thrall of the television signals when the whole building began to rumble. Stampeding cops flooded out exits. Car engines started outside. Sirens blared and tires squealed.

When Remo made it back out to the squad room, he found the place cleared out. The Master of Sinanju was still sitting on the lobby bench where Remo had left him.

In their haste to leave, someone had dropped one of their TV sets at the old man's sandaled feet. When Remo spied him, the Master of Sinanju was just scooping it up.

Remo's heart froze.

"Don't look at it, Chiun!" he yelled.

He didn't bother with the door. He was across the sergeant's desk in a fraction of slivered time. A hand too fast for even the Master of Sinanju's eyes to perceive flashed out and the palm TV skipped out of the old man's hand, smashing into a hundred pieces against the wall.

Chiun's hooded eyes saucered in outrage. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded.

Remo quickly told him about the subliminal signals.

"You couldn't see them, Little Father. If you did, you'd have gone nuts like all the cops here."

"You looked on them with no difficulty," Chiun pointed out. "If these commands are so great as to subvert a mind trained in Sinanju, why did you not kill yourself?"

Remo hesitated. "Well, I...um..."

Chiun's expression grew flat. "I see," he said coldly. "Only the pupil's enfeebled Master is at risk. How lucky I am, Remo, to have you to keep weak-minded me from embarrassing myself."

Without another word, he turned on his heel. Kimono hems whirled angrily as the old man stormed from the police station.

Alone, Remo let the air slip slowly from his lungs. "It sounded less insulting in my head," he said to the empty station house.

Chapter 9

With eyes red from lack of sleep, Harold Smith watched the rhythmic breathing of the figure in bed. Mark Howard's broad face looked peaceful in slumber. Sedatives and sleep had erased the care lines that had lately formed around the younger man's eyes. Even the dark bags beneath them had begun to fade. All the tension that had been building up was slowly dissolving.

Smith hadn't realized how haggard the young man had become in the past few months. As usual, Smith had been too busy with his own work to notice the changes taking place right below his own nose. The story of Harold Smith's life.

The chair he had pulled to Howard's bedside seemed designed to be uncomfortable. Smith shifted his weight.

He remembered sitting in another Folcroft chair, another night thirty years before.

Conrad MacCleary. Smith wasn't surprised that Rerno had brought up their old associate.

On the night he had learned of MacCleary's near fatal accident, Smith had retreated from the world. Hidden himself away in a darkened corner of Folcroft like this. Back then he had known what he had to do. MacCleary-his friend-would have to die, and Smith would have to give the order.

It all seemed so logical, so necessary back then. MacCleary would have been the first to agree with Smith. But the years had melted away some of that hard certainty.

Time gave one a new perspective on all things.

In the old days, Smith had ordered the deaths of many who posed only a marginal risk to CURE. Never casually, for Harold Smith had never lost his distaste for the necessary extinguishing of life that was part of his job. But he had done so unflinchingly. In Mark Howard's case, however, his certainty didn't seem as firm as it should.

Unlike MacCleary, at least it wouldn't be necessary to eliminate Howard purely for the sake of security. It seemed as if the turmoil of the past few days was finally subsiding. The police still wanted to question Mark, but they had come to accept Smith's story. As far as they were concerned, the dead Folcroft doctor had altered Jeremiah Purcell's medication on his own. Unbeknownst to the Rye police, Smith had used CURE's facilities to check the report in their own database.

The only real problem now was Mark's motivation. Why had he cut Purcell's sedatives?

Smith would find out the answer soon enough. Right now Mark needed rest. His mental state when they'd found him had not been conducive to questioning. A few days to recuperate and Mark would be in far better shape to talk.

Looking down on his slumbering assistant, Smith felt an odd sense of obligation. A need to protect this young man who had come to CURE barely prepared for what he was getting himself into.

He couldn't deny it. Somewhere in the depths of his stone heart, Harold W. Smith had developed a fondness for his assistant. It was not the same as it was with Remo or Chiun, although as he grew older he had come to realize that there was more than just the bonds of shared hardship for the three of them. No, Remo and Chiun didn't need Smith. They would do just as well with him or without him. Mark Howard was another story.

There was the potential for greatness in the young man. Smith had seen it early on. But he needed guidance.

As he got to his feet, Smith wondered if he might not be softening in his old age.

MacCleary and Smith had worked together for a long time. Still, Smith had been the authority figure while MacCleary had been more comfortable in the trenches. Here it was almost as if the circumstances were reversed. Here, Smith was the old hand. He had a lifetime's worth of experience to impart to his deskbound young protege.

Assuming, that was, he didn't have to order Mark Howard's death.

Turning from the bed, Smith left the room.

Order had begun to return to the security corridor. The room where Jeremiah Purcell had been imprisoned for the past ten years had been sealed off by police. The door was closed tightly as Smith passed. He didn't look in.

Of the ten rooms in the hall, only three had been regularly occupied in recent years. Purcell's was now empty. Beyond it were the other two.

Smith glanced in the second-to-last room.

A young woman lay in bed, her body covered by a crisp white sheet. Vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling tiles.

A faint smell of sulfur emanated from the room. The staff had tried all manner of soaps and air fresheners, but they could not eliminate the unpleasant odor.

The girl had come to Folcroft as part of the fallout from a CURE assignment nearly four years before. Since that time she had remained in a vegetative state. Smith continued on. He lingered at the last door.

There was another patient in that room, this one male. The patient in the bed looked far older than his years.

He had been in a coma when he was first brought to Folcroft. He had remained a permanent resident of the main hospital wing until just a few years ago, when he had been moved to the security wing at Smith's order.

Looking in on that patient, in that particular room, Smith felt a twinge of unaccustomed melancholia. In the early days of CURE, a secure corridor like this one had been unnecessary. It had never occurred to Smith back then that there would be patients related to his secret work who would need to be housed somewhere.

Prior to its current use, this hallway had been too far off the beaten path to be convenient for Folcroft staff or patients. It had been closed off for years. Back in those days, when Conrad MacCleary didn't feel like going home to his apartment he stayed here. For several years this room had been MacCleary's home away from home.

The room next to this, where the girl lay, was the one where Remo had been taken after the staged electrocution that had brought him aboard CURE. Later, he had recovered from plastic surgery in the same room.

This was a hallway filled with memories. And for Smith, in spite of the worries caused by current circumstances, not all of the memories were unpleasant.

As he tore his eyes away from the comatose patient, there was something approaching a sad smile on the CURE director's lemony face. It remained with him on his trip back upstairs to his office.

"Mark is doing well," Smith announced to his secretary as he entered the outer room.

She had asked him so frequently over the past two days that he now found himself answering preemptively.

Mrs. Mikulka offered a relieved smile. "That policeman called while you were downstairs," she said. "They haven't found the missing patient yet. He wants to come by to talk to you tomorrow afternoon.

I made him an appointment for one o'clock. If you'd like, I can change it."

"That will be fine, Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said. Thinking nostalgic thoughts, the CURE director stepped through to his office. He was crossing the room when the blue contact phone jangled to life. He hurried to answer it.

"Report," Smith said, sinking into his chair. "Something big's going on in Harlem, Smitty," Remo's troubled voice announced.

"The former president got out safely," Smith said, the last remnants of a smile evaporating from his bloodless lips. "As I understand it, the police have rounded up the rioters. I was going to have you return here so that we could discuss your future living arrangements."

"You're gonna have to reschedule our eviction," Remo said. "The president's fine. It's us who might be in the doghouse on this one."

He went on to give Smith a rapid rundown of all that had happened that morning, ending with the attack at the police station and his own image being broadcast subliminally on the handheld televisions.

"My God," Smith croaked when he was through.

"Mine, too," Remo said. "I just about plotzed when I saw my face on TV."

Smith's fingers were like claws, biting into the phone's plastic casing. With his other hand he clutched the edge of his desk. His heart was a molten lump in his palpitating chest. Blood sang a panicked chorus in his ears.

"My God," he repeated. He didn't know what else to say.

"Reel it back in a little, Smitty," Remo suggested. "It might not be all that bad."

At this Smith finally found his voice. "Not that bad?" he said, aghast. "It's the end, Remo. All of it. We have to disband. You and Chiun need to leave the country right away. I will take care of the loose ends here."

He thought of the first loose end. Mark Howard, asleep downstairs. An air-filled syringe would end the young man's life. Smith's assistant would die in his sleep, never knowing what had happened. Smith's own end would come minutes later in a cold steel box that had been gathering dust in the corner of Folcroft's basement for thirty years.

"Take a breath, Smitty," Remo warned. "No one else really saw what I saw. I'm sure of it. I don't even think it'd be visible if you taped it and freeze-framed it. It's like light between the video images. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure no one but me could see it."

"But someone is broadcasting it, Remo," Smith said. "Someone has your image to broadcast. Who could have it? I have been so careful. Who could know about us?"

"I don't know," Remo admitted. "I'd say Purcell, but he hasn't been out long enough to cook up something like this. Plus it's not really his psycho style. It's gotta be someone else. But the good news is these images fade for people who see them. Shittman said the words he saw were already disappearing. If I can track the source and stop them, their heads will be clear of me in a couple days."

"No, Remo," Smith said firmly. "A couple of days is unacceptable. If what you've said is true, then we have to disband now, before we become known publicly."

"Smitty, something is known to somebody," Remo argued. "But whatever they know, they're not running to the New York Times with it. They obviously have a way to broadcast it, but they haven't held a press conference. They didn't go on the evening news or break into the middle of prime time with a news flash. All they did was put my picture up in a way that even the people who've seen it don't know they've seen it."

This was nearly too much for the CURE director to digest. He tried to swallow, but his throat had dried to dust. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.

"No," Smith said weakly. "We cannot go on after this."

There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the line before Remo sighed.

"This might not even be a CURE thing," Remo admitted reluctantly. "It could be a me thing." Smith couldn't miss the guilty concern in the younger man's voice.

"Why?" the CURE director asked. Some of his fear was instantly replaced by suspicion. "What have you done?"

"Not me," Remo said. "Chiun. Something strange happened when we were in Europe a couple days back. I didn't tell you because I figured it was gonna cause me enough grief in the future without getting an earful from you right now. Remember that fat Swiss assassin we went after?"

Smith remembered all too well. The killer in question had dogged Remo and Chiun from Europe to South America, setting several elaborate booby traps in the path of the two men. They had traced him back to his hideaway in the Alps.

"Olivier Hahn," Smith said. "What of him?"

"It's not him, exactly," Remo said. "See, Chiun's been mailing out some kind of top-secret letters for the past few months. He's been real mysterious about them. Every time I ask, he tells me to take a flying leap. When we went to punch that Swiss guy's ticket, the guy had one of those letters in his house. I recognized the envelope. Chiun grabbed it up before I could take a look at it. I think it has something to do with me becoming Reigning Master of Sinanju. So maybe this picture of me on TV is connected to the same thing."

Smith was trying to digest Remo's words.

"Could Chiun be so careless?" the older man breathed. He knew the truth even as he posed the question. If history was an indication, the answer was a resounding, unequivocal yes.

"Not Chiun exactly," Remo replied. "But I don't know what those letters said or who got them. This stuff in Harlem could be connected to Sinanju and not CURE at all."

"Ask Chiun," Smith demanded tartly.

"I could, but I doubt he'd give me a straight answer. He wouldn't before and he's kind of ticked at me right now."

"Put him on the phone."

"I can't," Remo said. "He stormed out of here. I'm standing in an empty Harlem police station. Which, by the way, I should get out of before the cops come home."

Smith sat behind his big desk, quietly fuming. The Master of Sinanju had been unconcerned about security in the past. It was entirely possible that they had been brought to the brink of ruin because of the old Korean's carelessness.

Smith allowed his grip on the phone to loosen. "Those weren't typical rioters," he mused. "They had the opportunity to attack the former president at any time in the hours they had his building surrounded but they did not. It's possible that whoever gave them their orders was merely trying to draw you in."

"Shittman said he was watching 'Winner' when he zonked out," Remo explained. "You know, that show where they strand a bunch of people I wouldn't trust to lick the sticky side of a stamp out in the middle of nowhere."

Smith frowned. The name triggered something in his recent memory. He couldn't place it.

"I am not familiar with the program," he said.

"No surprise there," Remo said. "Do you even own a TV?" He forged ahead. "It's on BCN. Shittman said the BCN guy who's been passing out free palm TVs has set up shop in the cellar of his church. I'll go check him out."

"Please do," Smith said. "And find out if Master Chiun is involved in this. If his irresponsible behavior is to blame, at least he can tell us exactly what we're dealing with. In the meantime I will check into the BCN angle. Call back as soon as you know anything more."

Smith hung up the phone. His hand pained him from gripping the receiver too tightly.

This was a catastrophe in the making. Events in Harlem might have been engineered to draw Remo out, but it was just as likely it had been done to draw CURE into the light. There was no way of knowing right now, no way to stop an unknown foe with unknowable intentions.

One thing was certain. Whoever it was, CURE's faceless enemy was possessed with incredibly dangerous technology. What Remo had described was clearly dissociative behavior. The separation of an idea of activity from mainstream conscious thought. They had discovered a way to make people do things divorced from the societal or personal boundaries of morals and ethics.

The name of the program that had triggered the dissociative response in Minister Shittman and the others still seemed familiar to Smith. He assumed he had come across it as part of his daily work as CURE director.

Right now that didn't matter. He had more pressing things to deal with.

He turned his attention to his computer.

As the clock ticked down to zero on what might very well be the last minutes of both his life and the life of the agency he led, Dr. Harold W. Smith began to steer a steady course through the troubled rapids of cyberspace.

Chapter 10

Remo swiped an abandoned cop car from the street in front of the station house. There was a hat on the front seat. He put it on and pulled it low over his eyes.

The hat fit. For an instant it gave him an odd, old feeling. In the rearview mirror he saw that the face looking back at him could have been that of the same Remo Williams who had been a Newark beat patrolman a million years before.

But he wasn't the same. The world was different and they were all going to have to come to grips with it.

He started the engine.

Remo found the Master of Sinanju marching down the sidewalk halfway back to their car.

"Want a lift?" he called, slowing next to the elderly Korean.

Chiun gave him the briefest of hateful looks before sliding in the passenger seat beside his pupil.

"I suppose you are worried now to let me walk the streets for fear I might be mugged," the Master of Sinanju sniffed.

"Little Father, I'd be worried for Harlem if it tried to mug you," Remo replied honestly. "And I didn't mean to insult you back there. The place was going nuts, and I did have a reason to be concerned about you. It happened to you once before. Remember that head case Abraxas who wanted to take over the world years ago? You didn't realize back then you were seeing his subliminal signals."

"How fortunate for me that in my dotage I have you to remember the most embarrassing moments of my life," Chiun said, his tone enough to chill the already cold winter air.

"I'm not trying to embarrass. I'm just saying you-we-need to watch out. This stuff they're using is sophisticated as all hell. It's not just a name flashing on a screen like it was back then. Whoever's doing this is using the signals to make people do things that go against their nature."

"Perhaps I have already fallen victim to these signals, Remo," the Master of Sinanju said. "For it is against my nature to train an ingrate fat white with oatmeal for brains in the art of Sinanju. Yet there sits bloated, oatmeal-brained you. Yes, Remo, you are right. Clearly, I am old and senile and in need of special attention."

"Sue me for being concerned," Remo grumbled. "And as long as I already pulled the pin out of the grenade, Smitty wanted me to ask you if this was connected to those letters you've been mailing out."

So slowly did the old Korean's head turn, not a single hair stirred around his parchment face. His hazel eyes burned laser holes in Remo's skull.

"You told Smith?" he asked, voice low with accusation.

"Not really," Remo said. "I can't very well give him specifics about something I don't know about. I told him there were envelopes and how one already showed up out of the blue in the house of someone who was trying to kill us. I thought maybe my picture on TV was connected somehow."

"It is not," Chiun said firmly.

"It'd help Smitty to make sure about that if you told me just what the hell they were for," Remo said. But the Master of Sinanju became uncommunicative. Turning from his pupil, he stared out at the potholed street.

"Why me, Lord?" Remo muttered.

He found his leased car where he'd left it.

The kids who had been stripping it had made a valiant effort to put it back together. It seemed, however, that they were more adept at destruction than construction.

The car looked as if it was falling apart at the seams. Lined up on the sidewalk beside it was a row of anxious black faces. Hanging high above them was the kid Remo had suspended from the light pole.

"Didn't any of you take shop class between arrests?" Remo growled at the kids as he got out of the cop car.

Remo kicked the light pole. The vibrations knocked the hanging kid loose. He screamed all the way to the ground. Remo snagged him from the air just before he went splat.

"Go scare your teachers."

The kids didn't need to be told a second time. In a pack, they hightailed it down the street.

Remo's car rattled along the streets of Harlem. With every turn, something new seemed to drop off in his wake.

On Malcolm X Boulevard they passed a familiar building.

Remo had first been to the seventeen-story skyscraper on an assignment years before. Back then the XL SysCorp building was a gleaming tower of polarized glass. In the intervening years it had fallen into such disrepair that even the homeless were afraid to find shelter inside.

Thinking dark thoughts of the events of that time, Remo drove silently past the ruins.

Hal Shittman's Greater Congregation of the Lord Church was located just off George Washington Carver Boulevard.

Remo knew he'd have trouble questioning the BCN representative who had set up shop in the minister's basement as soon as he drove up the street.

Reporters crammed the road and sidewalk. It looked as if they had come over directly from covering the unrest outside the former president's offices.

Remo left the Master of Sinanju in the car. Avoiding police, he fell in with a crowd of people who were watching the activity around the Harlem church. "What happened?" Remo asked.

"White dude shot hisself," one man replied. "He call all the press here and when they all gots they cameras going, dude shoots himself right there. Whole world watching. It just terrible." He shook his head, dark face miserable.

Although it meant the loss of his only lead, Remo was at least a little heartened to find someone who actually cared about the loss of fellow human life.

"Dude was givin' away free pocket TVs and I missed out," the man continued morosely.

"What a white man doing in Minister Shittman's church anyway?" asked a hugely overweight woman. Her fingernails were very long and extremely purple and couldn't help but make one wonder why a person so obsessed with one part of her physical appearance wouldn't spend less time at the nail salon and more time at the gym.

"Spying for the CIA," replied the man.

"CIA," echoed a chorus of voices with utter certainty.

Remo frowned at the crowd. "Paranoia is a lot more fun than taking responsibility for our own actions, isn't it?" he announced to those gathered.

He left the scene.

For a time the crowd discussed the rude white man. They did this while the sheet-draped body of the BCN network executive who had apparently been doing secret studies on the television viewing habits of the black man was being brought up from the basement of Minister Shittman's church.

Eventually they all agreed he had to be yet another CIA agent sent into the black community to promote unrest.

"Won't be the last time," they said knowingly.

THREE BLOCKS OVER, on the vacant lots that were home to the current season of Winner, Cindee Maloo sat alone in a gloomy production trailer. On the monitor before her played the images collected by her cameraman that morning.

She couldn't be certain. But then, her instructions had been clouded in mystery. Besides, she was pretty sure.

An old Korean and a young white.

The Korean wasn't on the tape. Even though her cameraman had tried to get him, he had failed. It was as if the wisp of a man could make himself invisible.

The other one had worked out a little better. He was at least on the tape. But at the same time he wasn't there.

She had carefully viewed the scant footage. On all of it, Remo's face seemed out of focus even though the rest of his body was crystal clear. He somehow had managed to shake his head in such a way to make his features unrecognizable.

It made Cindee dizzy just watching him.

When she could take it no more, she finally spit the tape out of the machine and plugged it into the special unit she'd been sent the previous day.

She pressed Send. With a whir, the image went out at high speed over the satellite feed.

The process was over in less than ten seconds. Once it was done she popped the tape, tugged it in black spools from the casing and dropped it in the trash.

As she was leaving the small Harlem trailer, the images Cindee Maloo had beamed into the heavens were already being scrutinized on the other side of the world.

Chapter 11

Ominous black clouds rolled in from the east across the Great Dividing Range, casting an otherworldly pall over the Great Artesian Basin in Queensland, Australia. Beneath the scudding clouds, Kenneth Robert MacGulry's Land Rover bounced along a long flat road that sliced through the broad desert.

MacGulry-who the world knew as "Robbie" had taken one of his personal helicopters across New South Wales to the spot where the Darling River split into the jagged threads of the Warrego and Culgoa. The Land Rover and its driver met him at Wyandra.

A long haul out into the middle of nowhere. A colossal effort for mere sport. But Robbie MacGulry managed to carve out so little time for recreation these days. To his intense displeasure, he found that his trip into the outback was being ruined by his incompetent driver.

"Faster, you idiot!" MacGulry roared. So thick was his native Australian accent, the word came out "fastah."

The driver understood only too well, dutifully pressing harder on the gas. Speeding up, the Land Rover tore at the ground, throwing clouds of choking dust in its wake.

Riding shotgun, Robbie MacGulry fumed.

Oh, it wasn't all the driver's fault-although the worthless wanker would be out of a job once they got back to Wyandra. It was living that boiled his blood. Life itself bothered Robbie MacGulry. Bile was the force that drove him.

MacGulry was in his late sixties. His pugnacious, suntanned face was drawn into a perpetual scowl. Flinty eyes glowered from behind thick, black-framed glasses. A flattened nose was testament to the great many fists Robbie MacGulry had encountered in his youth. He liked to be called a fighter. So much so, he made sure his many newspapers around the world worked it into any articles about him.

And why not? It was the truth.

Robbie MacGulry had never been one to shy away from a fight. This was one thing friend and enemy alike could agree on-although MacGulry was first to admit that there were very few friends and a great many enemies. One did not become the most powerful media figure on the face of the planet without racking up an extensive list of foes. At the moment, however, his greatest enemy was the nong ocker who was steering his Land Rover like a frightened Sheila.

"Pull up beside them, you bloody bludger!" MacGulry bellowed.

The Land Rover had nearly pulled alongside the mob of hopping kangaroos. Running full-out, the animals were clearly terrified. Huge feet stomped in furious rhythm against the hard-packed earth. Although fast over short distances, the animals were no match for the Land Rover. MacGulry's driver drew beside the stragglers at the rear of the stampeding kangaroos.

Musky rat kangaroos were more common in the northeastern part of Australia, but their small size made them less fun to hunt. MacGulry always liked to keep a healthy stock of the much larger gray kangaroos on all his ranches.

Standing on his seat, the world-famous media mogul reached in back. A moment later, the barrel of an elephant gun stuck out the open window. Bracing it on the door, MacGulry took careful aim.

A wicked smile carved his chapped lips the instant before he pulled the trigger.

The explosion was deafening. The driver jerked the wheel in time with the recoil and the Land Rover skidded sideways. A simultaneous eruption of red burst beside the speeding vehicle. Thick bright blood splattered the dusty hood and windshield. Chunks of warm kangaroo bits splashed the young driver's bare arms and knees.

Robbie MacGulry grinned delightedly. "Woo-hoo!" he screamed. "Bagged the bugger!" His rugged face was flecked with blood. His shoulder ached where the gun's padded stock had hammered the joint.

As the billionaire media mogul wiped blood on the sleeve of his bush jacket, his driver struggled to keep from vomiting up the poached eggs and Foster's beer he'd had for breakfast.

MacGulry whooped a wicked, snorting laugh as the driver regained control of the Land Rover. They raced back up alongside the thundering mob.

The kangaroos had shifted direction. The panicked animals were tiring. Mouths foamed, noses twitched as the Land Rover pulled abreast.

One doomed animal was so close MacGulry could have reached out and scratched it behind its furry ears.

MacGulry brought the gun barrel within an inch of the kangaroo's gray head and pulled the trigger.

As the latest explosion rang out, Robbie MacGulry whooped with joy.

"Gotcha, ya bastard!" MacGulry screamed.

In the side mirror, the driver glimpsed the dead kangaroo. The animal was suddenly something from another planet-all feet and tail. The head had been shot clean off. A ragged chunk of torso was missing, as well. One limp arm hung in grisly red strips.

Robbie MacGulry grinned at his driver. Flecks of sticky wet blood stained his big white teeth. The smile suddenly collapsed into a scowl.

"Here! What the hell ahh you doing!" MacGulry yelled as his driver puked on the dashboard. "Sorry, sir," the young man gurgled. He was trying to hold in the vomit with one hand while driving with the other.

"What ahh you, some kind of Greenpeace pooftah? It's just blood." MacGulry ran his tongue across his teeth, licking off the sticky red film. "See?"

The man did see. He saw his boss lapping up blood like a ghoul, and he saw thick chunks of furry gray flesh stuck to his own knees and then he saw last night's supper joining breakfast on the dashboard of the Land Rover.

The driver's hands fled the wheel and he slammed on the brakes. Chucking clouds of dust, the Land Rover skidded to a spinning stop.

Sensing salvation, the kangaroos cut off in another direction. In a haze of hot dust and pounding feet, they hopped to freedom across the vast plain.

MacGulry's eyes grew wide with rage. Raw fury knotted his wrinkled face. Baring pink-stained teeth, he was contemplating swinging the barrel of his gun to the driver's head when his dashboard-mounted phone buzzed to life.

The media giant exhaled angrily. "You're fired," he growled, flinging the gun into the back of the truck.

Dropping into his seat, MacGulry snatched up the receiver, flicking off bits of kangaroo flesh. "What?" he demanded.

There was only a handful of people on Earth with access to this private number. The voice on the phone was clipped and obsequious. Very professional and very, very British.

"Mr. MacGulry, sir, I hate to bother you, but it's important."

"What's wrong?" MacGulry pulled the phone away before the caller could answer.

"Stop puking, ya underdaks-wearing bastard! If you're gonna be crook, do it in the dunny!"

The driver looked around for a dunny. The prairie was vast. No outhouses in sight.

"Nature's dunny, idiot," MacGulry snarled.

The driver understood. Climbing from the truck, he went over and puked in the dirt.

"What is it?" MacGulry growled into the phone. The caller picked his words carefully.

"There is someone-that is to say, there's something here you should see, sir. At once."

Like all News Company employees-which was the corporate umbrella under which virtually all of Robbie MacGulry's businesses existed-the caller knew enough not to waste his employer's time. The Englishman was being vague for a reason. MacGulry sighed hotly.

"I'll be back quick as a can," he grumbled. He slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

MacGulry sat there for a long moment, staring at the bleak horizon.

The kangaroos were a distant cloud of hopping dust. He pulled off his glasses, blowing dirt off the thick lenses.

"Bastard," he whispered so softly even the wind failed to hear. Had someone been there to hear, they would have gotten the clear impression MacGulry was talking about neither the Englishman on the phone nor his incompetent driver.

MacGulry glanced to his right. His driver was still doubled over. The young man seemed to be almost finished.

Quietly, MacGulry slid over behind the wheel. When he started the engine and stomped on the gas, his driver had to jump out of the way to avoid the lurching Land Rover.

The media tycoon floored it and cut the wheel. When he zoomed back the way they'd come, he could see his panicked driver waving helplessly from within a cloud of beige dust.

"Teach you for ruining my day off, mate!" Robbie MacGulry yelled.

The vehicle sped across the endless plain, away from the distant looming mountains of the Great Dividing Range.

THREE HOURS LATER-showered, shaved and dressed in an impeccably tailored Bond Street two-piece blueblack suit-Robbie MacGulry stormed into the main production facility of his Wollongong, New South Wales television station.

South of Sydney, the Wollongong station was small compared to others in his globe-straddling television empire, but it was the one closest to his main home. If Robbie MacGulry had a heart, Wollongong would have been the one nearest and dearest to it.

Wollongong was the first TV station he'd ever owned. Although off the beaten path of his global media empire, an uncharacteristic lapse into sentimentality by its owner made it the flagship of his entire entertainment empire.

Banks of television screens lined up like unblinking eyes above dozens of computerized stations all around the production room. A visitor might have mistaken the facility for a space-shuttle control room if not for the images on the screens. On most of the monitors, a yellow-headed cartoon family was sliding around an icy parking lot. The cartoon was one of the most popular shows in the decade-plus history of MacGulry's American television network.

"You better not have called me back here to watch bloody cartoons!" MacGulry roared.

The men in the room wheeled on the booming voice. As the rest resumed working double-time, one hurried over to Robbie MacGulry.

"I'm sorry again for disturbing you, sir. I presumed you'd want to see something we received from America."

Rodney Adler was as English as frigid women and warm beer. It seemed as if the very act of speech pained his perpetually locked jaw.

MacGulry only liked the British as employees, and even then he didn't care for them very much. As a people, he'd always considered them to be condescending nitpickers whose sole joy in life was to piss in the party's punch bowl. His dream was to amass a big enough fortune to buy the British Isles and order the entire population to march off the bloody White Cliffs of Dover.

The billionaire followed Adler to one of the stations. There were two nervous men seated before it. MacGulry dropped into the empty swivel chair between them.

"We have been monitoring the situation in Harlem," Adler said, "per your instructions."