Terminal Transmission

Destroyer 93: Terminal Transmission

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

The greatest domestic crisis since the Civil War struck the United States of America at exactly 6:28 p.m. Daylight Savings Time on the last Thursday in April.

Approximately thirty million citizens scattered throughout the nation and in Mexico and the lower reaches of Canada saw the crisis unfold on their television sets. And every one of them, no matter what broadcast station or network they were tuned to, UHF or VHF, saw the exact same thing.

A dead black rectangle where a moment before busy phosphor pixels had been generating kaleidoscopic images of entertainment, information, and commercials.

The blackness was relieved by thin white letters in the upper right-hand corner. The letters spelled out two words.

The words: NO SIGNAL.

TV speakers everywhere, in private homes, in hospitals, in offices, in neighborhood bars, reproduced the same staticky carrier wave hissing of dead air.

Then a voice began speaking in a monotone:

"There is nothing wrong with your television set . . ."

Don Cooder was late.

The news director was in a panic. The floor manager was running from restroom to restroom in the Broadcast Corporation of North America headquarters building on Manhattan's West Forty-third Street, peering under stalls for a pair of trademark ostrichhide wrangler boots.

"Try the ledge," the harried domestic producer cried. "He sometimes hides out on the ledge when he's unhappy."

Everybody who wasn't frantically racing around the Bridge-as the BCN newsroom was called-preparing the 6:30 news feed to the affiliates, raced to the nearest window. Don Cooder was late. Nobody knew what it was about, but everybody knew what it could mean. Their eyes were stark and frantic.

Troubled voices called back reports.

"He's not on the third floor ledge."

"He's not on the fourth floor ledge."

"He's not on any of the ledges!"

"Maybe he fell off," said a lowly desk assistant.

In the great TV-screen-blue newsroom set a hush fell. Faces, so strained a moment ago, lit with entirely different lights. Ambition leapt to some. Relief to others. And all eyes went to the Chair, more coveted than many modern thrones, which now sat spotlit but empty. Power flowed from that elegant seat, situated in the exact geometric center of the Bridge, which had been designed to make the anchor desk seem to be the center of the universe, but in practice made many viewers change channels thinking that they had tuned in to an old Star Trek rerun.

"Maybe he fell off . . ." the producer muttered.

"Maybe he jumped!" said the director.

"CBN star anchor Don Cooder succumbs to ratings pressure!" the chief news writer cried. "Makes dramatic leap into oblivion!"

A dozen lips whispered the rumor. Faces froze, some in shock, others to conceal their pleasure. The makeup woman broke down weeping for her job.

The domestic producer, his face paling, took charge. He began issuing husky orders.

"Camera crew to the sidewalk. If Cooder's a messy spot on the pavement, we'll want to lead with that." He shouted after the running figures, "If he's dying, try to get his last words."

"What about the headlines for the affiliates?" asked the director, gazing at the digital clock which read 06:28:57.

"Somebody get Cheeta Ching! I'd be damned if we go black again because of that Aggie prima donna."

An intern leaped from the room.

In her office in the outermost concentric ring that orbits the Bridge, CBN weekend anchor Cheeta Ching, nine months, one week, and three days pregnant, and as bloated as a floater freshly fished out of the East River, looked up from her script for the evening broadcast of Eyeball to Eyeball with Cheeta Ching as her door unceremoniously crashed in. The can of hair varnish she had been emptying into her raven tresses dropped from her long fingers.

"Miss Ching!" an intern panted. "You're on."

"What are you talking about? I'm not on for two hours yet."

The intern fought for his breath. "Cooder fell down the rabbit hole again," he gasped.

"His job is mine!" screeched Cheeta Ching, selfstyled "superanchorwoman of the nineties," as she bolted from her desk and trampled the unfortunate staffer before he could get out of the way.

The run from Cheeta Ching's office to the Chair was a straight unwavering line. After hours, Cheeta had timed the run with a stopwatch. Her best time had been 47:03 seconds.

That was before the home pregnancy test had come up blue, of course.

Still, Cheeta gave it her best. She had known for years-ever since Don Cooder had let the BCN Evening News with Don Cooder remain black for an unprecedented six minutes because a World Wide Wrestling match had spilled over its allotted span and into his time slot, that it could happen again. And she was ready.

Because Cheeta Ching knew that if she landed in the coveted anchor chair at the right moment, Cooder's job would be hers.

Flinging off her Georgio Armani taupe wool faille maternity skirt, she ran through the halls in her Victoria's Secret chenille slip.

The thought of the high seven-figure salary, the perks, and the intoxicating power that lay at the end of the run drove her to pound down the carpeted hall like a water buffalo in heat. Staff pressed themselves against the walls before her. A cameraman, seeing her careen toward him, hit the rug and covered his head with a script. A technician opening a door flung himself back. Too late. Cheeta hit the closing door like a linebacker; it flew back and broke the technician's nose and glasses where he stood.

The Chair was within sight now. Cheeta could see it clearly through the semicircle of indoor glass windows that overlooked the Bridge from the inner concentric ring of offices.

The director, spotting her, waved her on frantically with a script that flapped like a wounded dove.

"Mine! It's mine!" Cheeta shrieked.

The last door crashed open under the blind force of her padded shoulder. Cheeta was panting now. Only a stretch of a few cable-strewn yards stood between her and the highest-paid job in television news.

Staffers shouted encouragement.

"Come on, Cheeta!"

"You can do it, girl!"

Then a bosun's whistle shrilled and the floor manager shouted, "Admiral on the Bridge! All hands! Admiral on the Bridge!"

That's me! Cheeta thought wildly. I'm the admiral on the Bridge now.

And from out of nowhere, a pinstriped blue shape blindsided her. Heart pounding, Cheeta understood immediately what it meant. Her bloodred fingernails extended like talons as she made a last, desperate lunge for the Chair.

And an ostrich-hide boot stomped on her instep while a hard hip like a whale's jawbone knocked her down. An immaculate shoe sole flattened her nose.

And over the squeal of the Chair's springs adjusting to 185 pounds of human ego, a deep, masculine voice growled, "There's only one admiral on this bridge. And don't you forget it."

Cheeta Ching tried to struggle to her feet. But all around her sycophantic shoes had appeared, preventing her from rising.

"Don, where have you been?" the relieved producer asked.

"None of your business."

"Don, so great that you're here," said the chief news writer.

"Don Cooder is great, no matter where he is."

"Don, here's your script for the affiliates update," said the director.

"Don Cooder doesn't need a script to read headlines. Just tell me what they are and I'll wing it."

"Senator Ned Clancy issues denial on love-nest rumor," the director recited in an urgent voice. "Dr. Doom inaugurates toll-free death line. Scientists dub strange new AIDS-like disease HELP."

"Here's your lavaliere, Don."

"Will somebody please let me up?" Cheeta snapped.

"Quiet, Cheeta," the producer said coldly. "Just lay there until the commercial break."

The feet went away and the floor manager was calling out, "Quiet, please. Don Cooder headlines for affiliates! Five seconds! Four! Quiet!"

Then the voice of Don Cooder, pitched into a low resonant tone, began his clipped recital.

"Senator Ned Clancy issues denial on love-nest rumor. Dr. Doom inaugurates toll-free death line. Scientists dub strange new AIDS-like disease HELP. All that and more coming up soon, so stay with us."

Cheeta started to rise.

The stampeding feet returned.

"That was great, Don. You nailed it in one take."

"Fabulous ad-libbing, Don."

"Will somebody help me up," Cheeta said through clenched teeth. "I have my own show to prep."

She was ignored.

"Here's the script, Don."

"We're losing the bumper, Don."

"One minute to air, everybody!" the floor manager announced.

"Don, we'll lead with Dr. Doom and follow up with the love nest story," the director was saying.

"I think we should lead with the love-nest story, don't you?" Cooder shot back.

"Absolutely, Don," the director returned without skipping a beat. "But it's not written as a lead."

"I'll wing it."

"Fifteen seconds to air!" the floor manager called.

The feet went away again and Cheeta Ching tried again. Her expanded center of gravity was not helpful. She was on her back, and it felt like a cannonball had been placed on her stomach so that a trained elephant could sit on it.

Grimacing, Cheeta rolled over-and collapsed panting.

Out of the corner of her eye she spotted the red ON AIR sign flaring up.

"This is the BCN Evening News with Don Cooder," the stentorian voice of Don Cooder announced. "Tonight, beleaguered democratic senator Ned J. Clancy, married barely a year, is contending with rumors of marital infidelity. With us now is Washington reporter Trip Lutz."

Cheeta was on her hands and knees now, behind the anchor desk and out of camera range. And she felt as if she were being weighed down by an abdominal tumor the size of Rhode Island. She tried to crawl, but the floor manager caught her eye. He was on his knees waving a Magic Markered sign that said: STAY THERE FOR THE FIRST SECTION. PLEASE!

Cheeta flipped him the bird. She started crawling.

And an ostrich-hide cowboy boot came around to plant itself on the small of her back. Cheeta Ching went down hard. "Oof!"

And the hated voice of Don Cooder returned, saying, "Thank you, Trip. In other news . . ."

"Ugh," Cheeta said.

"The retired pathologist and self-styled 'thanatologist' known as Dr. Doom has discovered a fresh wrinkle in the tollfree number game: Dial and die."

"Uhh," Cheeta groaned.

"AT their lines are jammed for the second consecutive day in the wake of the controversial new service for the terminally ill."

"I think my water broke," Cheeta grunted.

"This just in," Cooder said. "Reliable sources tell BCN News that weekend anchor Cheeta Ching is at this moment giving birth at a location not far from here. Speaking on behalf of her colleagues here at the Broadcast Corporation of North America, we wish her Godspeed and a joyful labor."

And the boot heel pushed down harder.

Cheeta Ching's flat, reddening face slammed to the rug and turned sideways. Then she saw it. The line monitor, which showed the picture that millions of faithful BCN viewers were simultaneously watching in the privacy of their own homes.

The line monitor was as black as a virgin Etch-a-Sketch.

If there was one cardinal, inflexible rule in on-set broadcast journalism etiquette it was: Quiet on a live set.

But if there was a prime directive it was: Never, ever go to black.

The prime directive was far, far more important than on-set etiquette.

And so Cheeta Ching took a deep breath and, steeling herself, let out a shriek calculated to scale a salmon.

In the ringing aftermath, Don Cooder barked, "This just in. Cheeta Ching has given birth to a healthy . . ." Cooder cocked an ear for the answer.

"We're in black!" Cheeta shrieked.

All eyes swung to the line monitor.

It was nestled in the cluster of monitors that displayed incoming satellite feeds, previews of about-to be-aired reports, and waiting commercials. The other monitors were busily cutting between segments. But the line monitor, the crucial monitoring terminal, was like a glassy black eye.

A black eye that would be seen by sponsors and network brass alike. A black eye that would cause viewers all over the country to fidget, grumble, and grope for their remotes.

A black eye that would be tomorrow's headlines if it wasn't corrected in time.

"Don't just stand there!" Cooder shouted. "Put up color bars!"

In the control room, the technical director worked the switcher frantically. "Color bars up!" he shouted.

"No, they're not! Hit it again."

The technical director, his eyes widening as the seconds-each one worth over a thousand dollars in commercial airtime-ticked away, shouted, "How's that?"

The producer blinked at the line monitor. "N.G."

"We're going to get creamed in the ratings," Cooder said in a voice twisted with raw emotion.

"No, we're not," the floor manager said matter-of-factly.

"Huh?"

"The other networks. They're black too."

The monitors marked ANC, MBC, and Vox all showed black.

Relief washed over the newsroom as the truth sank in.

"Must be sunspots or something," a stage hand muttered.

"Right, sunspots."

"I never heard of sunspots blacking out TV like this," the technical director said doubtfully.

Telephones began ringing all over the set. In the circle of offices around the Bridge. All over the building.

The word came in. It wasn't a local phenomenon. Broadcast television had gone to black all up and down the East Coast.

"What a story," someone said.

"Let's get on this, troops," Don Cooder said, tearing off his IFB earpiece and storming about the Bridge like an admiral in red suspenders. "Work the phones. How big is this story?"

As it turned out, very big.

"There's no TV in Illinois," a woman at the satellite desk reported.

"St. Louis is black, Don," a reporter added.

"Montana is without reception," chimed in another correspondent.

"How can anyone tell?" said Cooder, who was from Texas.

"LA is down too. And San Francisco."

"It's nationwide!" Cooder crowed. "And it's our new lead story. We'll lead with 'Sunspots Suppress Television Across Nation.' "

"But we don't know it's actually sunspots," the director pointed out.

"It's good enough for the lead. We can always update. Get our science editor on it."

"Feldmeyer? He's on vacation, remember?"

"Then get the backup."

"There isn't one. We lost our backup in the last round of budget cuts."

Don Cooder squared his magnificently photogenic shoulders. It was not for nothing that TV Guide had dubbed him the "Anchor of Steel."

"What do we have for video on this thing?"

The news director blinked. He pointed to the line monitor.

"Just this. A dead screen."

"We can't broadcast a dead screen," Cooder complained.

"We are broadcasting a dead screen. That's the story."

Don Cooder blinked. His perpetual glower darkened. His eyes, which People magazine had described as "cathoderay blue," reverted to the Texas sunsquint of his field reporter days.

"We can't go on the air with this," he mumbled. "A dead screen is terrible television. Folks will turn us off."

"Don, get a grip. We can't go on the air. Period."

"No one can break this story until the air clears?" Don Cooder demanded.

"Right, Don."

"When the air clears, the competition will be over this like piss on a flat rock, right?"

"I guess so," said the director, who never understood his star anchor's homespun aphorisms.

"I'm not waiting for the air to break. I'm breaking this story here, now and first. And all of you are my witnesses."

"What are you going to do, Don?"

Without answering, leaving the carefully prepared script on his desk and the teleprompters standing frozen in time, Don Cooder, the highest paid news anchor in human history, strode from the Bridge to the nearest outside office. He threw up a window sash, stuck out his head and broad shoulders, and in a voice loud enough to startle the pigeons roosting on nearby Times Square buildings, proclaimed, "This is a BCN Evening News Special Report. Don Cooder reporting. All over the continental United States, broadcast television was blacked out at the start of the first national news feeds. The mysterious force responsible for this tragedy has yet to be identified, but for now, in this slice of time, for the first time in the over forty-year history of television, America is staring into a blackness more terrible than the Great Blackout of 1965. And the blackness is staring back. Who will blink first? That is the question of the hour."

The producer tapped him on the shoulder. "Forget it, Don."

"Shut up! I'm broadcasting. The old-fashioned way."

"KNNN is on the air."

Don Cooder straightened so fast he bumped his intensely black hair against the window sash. He wheeled, leaving sticky strands of hair adhering to the wood. "What!"

"It's true. They're been broadcasting uninterrupted all along."

"Damn! Did they scoop me?"

"Afraid so."

"Damn."

Cooder strode into the control room, where a monitor showed a calm anchor speaking in a flat voice under the worldfamous Kable Newsworthy News Network logo-a nautical anchor.

"Those bastards! They can't bigfoot me like this!"

"Now you know how it feels," came a groaning voice from the floor-Cheeta Ching, draped over her big own stomach and breathing through her mouth the Lamaze way.

"You deserve to be bigfooted," Cooder growled. "If only your public could see you now. You look like a beached whale suffering from acute jaundice."

"Somebody help Miss Ching," the floor manager called from the huddle around the monitor cluster. They were all tuned to KNNN. The volume was up.

Don Cooder pushed into the huddle, fuming.

"What are they saying?" he demanded.

"Bare bones stuff. All broadcasting is black. Only the cable lines are getting through. No one's figured out why yet."

"Damn. There goes all of prime time. We'll never recapture those viewers." His intensely blue eyes went to the line monitor where the mocking white letters, NO SIGNAL, showed mutely.

He was reaching for the volume control when the line monitor blazed into life. The burst of light was so unexpected that Cooder blinked. When his sight cleared, a sight more blood-chilling than the Attica riots and the 1968 Democratic National Convention put together was framed on the screen.

The sight of two stage hands helping a wobbly Cheeta Ching into the anchor chair. His Chair.

Don Cooder's head snapped around. The number one camera tally light was a red eye pointed directly at Cheeta Ching.

"We're live! We're back on!" he shouted, pitching across the news set.

A cable snagged a boot heel before he got three feet. His face slammed into the carpet. For a moment, Don Cooder lay stunned.

And floating to his ears came the hateful voice of his chief rival, her tones syrupy and triumphant, saying, "This is the BCN Evening News with Don Cooder. Cheeta Ching reporting. Don is off tonight."

And as millions of Americans settled back into their seats, those who had patiently stayed with BCN heard above the treacly voice of Cheeta Ching a raging bellow of complaint.

"Let me up! Let me up! I'm going to strangle that Korean air-hog if it's the last thing I do!"

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and all he wanted was to die.

That was all. A simple thing. No big deal. People died every day. Remo knew that better than most. He had personally helped hundreds, if not thousands, of deserving people into the boneyard. And now it was his turn.

So why did they have to make it so hard for him?

He had been dialing the toll-free number all morning. The line was busy. Remo would hang up, wait a few moments and then stab the redial button. But all he got was a busy signal beeping in his ear.

"Dammit," Remo said, hanging up.

"What is wrong?" asked a squeaky voice.

"I still can't get through."

"You are not doing it properly," said the squeaky voice.

"Yeah? Well, you try it for once."

From the east-facing windows of the great square room which had windows on all sides, a tiny Buddhalike figure squatted on a reed mat. It was swathed in crimson silks that were trimmed in shimmery golds. The bald top of its head gleamed like a polished amber egg, framed by twin clouds of hair that concealed the tips of delicate ears.

"It is not my burden," said the figure.

"We're coequal partners. It's half your burden."

"Only if you fail or die, which should be the same thing, otherwise the house will be shamed forever."

Remo blinked. "The house would rather I die than fail?"

"No. The house prefers success. But will accept your death with proper lamentations and vows of vengeance."

"What about living to fight another day?"

"This is my task in the event of your failure," the immobile figure sniffed.

Remo pointed at the phone. "How can I fail if I can't get through?"

"How can I meditate on the approaching day of joy with you banging two pieces of plastic together and pacing the floor?"

"It stops the minute I get through."

The tiny figure suddenly arose. It turned. The lavender, scarlet, and gold silks of its kimono rustled and settled as the frail-looking figure of Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, padded on black sandals over to the telephone set on the only article of furniture in the great bare room, a low taboret.

He was a tiny wisp of a man. His round head sat on a thin wattled neck like an orange on a pole. The face might have been molded of papyrus and kneaded around matched agate eyes.

The Master of Sinanju floated to the taboret and lifted the receiver with a hand whose skin was shiny with age. He did not bring the instrument to either delicate ear, but instead held it at arm's length, as if it were a distasteful thing. With the other, he stabbed the one button and then the 800 area code.

Remo started to say, "The rest of it is-"

"I know the rest," snapped Chiun.

And as Remo watched, the Master of Sinanju began tapping out the correct exchange.

"How do you know the number?" Remo asked.

"I am not deaf. I have been listening to the annoying chirps all morning."

Remo looked startled, "You can tell the number by the chirps?"

"As can any child," sniffed Chiun, tapping the first three numbers of the last group of digits. He paused, his long-nailed fingers hovering over the keypad.

"Ah-hah," said Remo. "Stuck on the last number."

"I am not!"

"Then what are you waiting for?"

"The proper moment."

Remo watched. The Master of Sinanju stood frozen, the receiver in one hand, the other like an eagle's claw prepared to pounce on the tiny square eggs of the keypad.

Remo folded his lean arms. Chiun was up to something. He wasn't sure what.

"You're going to lose the call," Remo warned.

Then the finger descended. The long colorless nail touched the five key and Remo's face quirked up. Five was the correct digit. Chiun had not been stuck after all.

Then, with a disdainful toss, the Master of Sinanju put the receiver in Remo's hand and padded back to his floor mat and his meditation.

Remo brought the receiver to his ear. The phone was ringing.

"How did you do that?" he called over to Chiun, who had returned to his mat.

"It is the correct method."

"For what?"

"For calling radio talk programs."

"You been doing that?"

"Thrush Limburger is very entertaining for a fat white with a loud voice."

"When did you start listening to him?"

"Since he speaks the truth about this lunatic land I serve."

Then the ringing stopped and a crisp nursey-sounding voice was speaking.

"This is the office of Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian," the nursey voice was saying. "If you are calling from a touch-tone phone, please press the correct option. If you are not calling from a touch-tone phone, please stay on the line and if possible someone will assist you. But do not count on it. We have many patients to process."

"Wonderful," Remo growled. "I got his answering machine."

"If you are a reporter calling to interview Dr. Gregorian, press one."

Remo gave the one key a miss.

"If you are a lawyer calling to sue Dr. Gregorian, press two."

"I'll bet that's a busy line," Remo muttered.

"If you are calling because you wish to die, press three."

Remo pressed three.

There was a long pause, then some musical chirping that made Remo think of tin crows, and a crusty male voice said sharply, "This is Dr. Gregorian. State your business."

"I want to die," Remo said.

There was a hesitation on the line. Then, "State your disease."

"Leprosy. "

Another hesitation. "State your prognosis."

"I'm falling apart."

The line hummed. Remo figured the man was writing everything down. At least he had gotten through to him.

Then, "State your preferred manner of crossing the River Styx. Barbituate pill. Lethal injection. Or suffocation."

"I'll take the pill. Where do I show up?"

The line hummed. Then, "State your sex."

"Male. What do I sound like-Madonna?"

The crusty voice didn't answer. There was a pause and Remo heard a relay click. Then, once more sharp, the voice said, "Your application has been rejected. Do not call again. Have a nice day."

The line went dead.

Remo slammed the phone down so hard the keypad 0-for-operator button bounced off the ceiling.

"I was talking to a freaking machine!" he complained.

"You could not tell?"

"I thought it was the real Gregorian."

"I do not believe there is any such person," said Chiun.

"If I can just lay hands on the guy, there won't be. He makes me sick to my stomach."

"A strange thing for an assassin to say."

"Hey, I'm a professional. The guy is a ghoul."

"A ghoul to some is a boon to others," Chiun said.

A frown touched Remo's face. It was a strong face, dominated by deep-set dark eyes and pronounced cheekbones. The frown brought out the innate cruelty of his tension-compressed mouth.

"He's out there snuffing people for money," Remo snapped.

"And what is it we do, you and I? If not snuffing?"

"That's different. We're professionals."

"Sit."

Still frowning, Remo toed a tatami mat into place before his mentor. Crossing his ankles, he scissored his legs downward until he had assumed the traditional lotus position, feet crossed, wrists on knees. Remo's wrists dwarfed his lower legs. They looked thick enough to conceal baby I-beam girders.

The rest of him was lean enough for a diet commercial. There wasn't an ounce of extra fat on his exposed arms. His muscles were understated, but well-defined. He was dressed casually in black chinos and a fresh white T-shirt.

"Life is cruel," intoned Chiun. "Many are born. Almost as many die before their prime. All die in their own time. One day I will die, as will you."

"Nobody could kill you, Little Father," Remo said simply.

Chiun lifted a finger in stern correction. "I did not say kill, I said die. Even the magnificence that is embodied in my awesome form must one day wither and expire like that of any lesser creature."

Inwardly, Remo winced. This frail wisp of a Korean had come into his life more than twenty years ago, transforming him into the superbly trained human machine he was now. Chiun had not been young then. Now, even though he admitted to only eighty winters, Remo knew the old Korean had surpassed his one hundred year mark some time ago. He showed it in tiny ways. A faint fading of the bright hazel eyes. A thickening of the wrinkles that sweetened his parchment features. The color of his sparse beard and eyebrows in some lights seemed more of a smoky gray that the crisp white of days gone by. Remo shoved those thoughts into the furthest, darkest corner of his mind. He did not like to dwell on the future.

"In my heart, you will never die," Remo said simply.

Chiun nodded once. "Well spoken, but untrue." He raised a thin finger once more. "I do not know how many years lie unspent in this shell, especially without the powdered bones of a dragon to prolong my span."

Here we go again, Remo thought. Since their last assignment, Chiun had been bemoaning his "sad fate." A Brontosaurus had been found living in the heart of equatorial Africa. The Master of Sinanju, under the impression that the creature was some unknown species of Africa dragon, had talked the head of the organization for which they both worked into letting them rescue the dinosaur from a terrorist group. Chiun had had an ulterior motive. He coveted a dinosaur bone because it was a traditional Oriental belief that the bones of a dragon, ground to powder and mixed in a potion, insured longevity. No amount of argument about the differences between dinosaurs and dragons could sway him. It was only when their superior had ordered them to see to it that the Brontosaurus was safety transported to America for study did Chiun finally, reluctantly, noisily give up on the idea of prolonging his life at the expense the last surviving Brontosaurus.

Remo decided he didn't want to argue the point once again and simply let out a short sigh. Chiun seemed to get the hint-a major miracle.

"But it is of no moment," he said dismissively. "I understand these things. Dragons are important. Old men who may have lived out their usefulness are not."

"It's not like that at-"

"Hush. I was speaking of death." Remo subsided. "I will tell you a story now," Chiun added.

Remo shrugged. "Why not? Maybe it will help me think."

"You would need a new brain for that."

"Har de har har," said Remo, folding his lean arms.

Chiun rearranged his skirts before speaking. "Many are the stories I have told you of my glorious village," he began, his voice deepening, "the pearl of the East, Sinanju, from which sprang the awesome line which you-a mere white-have been privileged to belong. How the village had the misfortune to perch on the coldest, grayest, most barren waters of the West Korea Bay. How the soil gave up no seedlings. How, in even the good times, the people suffered want and privation."

"That part I know by heart," Remo grumbled.

"Good. For one day, as the next in line, it will be your happy task to pass on the story of my ancestors to your pupil."

"Yeah, and I'll tell them the truth."

"Truth! What truth?" The Master of Sinanju spanked his hands together. "Quickly. Speak!"

"I'll tell him how the villagers were so lax they ate the seeds instead of planting them," Remo said. "How they never went fishing because the waters were too cold and they couldn't be bothered to build boats. So the village leader was forced to hire himself and the strongest men of the village out as hired killers and mercenaries to support the lazy ones. Until the days of Hung, who died in his sleep before he could teach Wang, who left the village to meditate and fell asleep in a field, then woke up understanding the secrets of the universe. I still don't know how that worked, but anyway, Wang had discovered the sun source and he went back to the remaining mercenaries and cut them down because they weren't needed anymore. After that, Wang and his descendants had a lock on the title of Master of Sinanju."

Remo paused to see how he was doing.

The visage of the Master of Sinanju was frozen, its webby wrinkles deep with shock. The parchment yellow of his tiny features were slowly turning red, like Donald Duck in a particularly strenuous cartoon. His tiny mouth was a tight button. And as Remo watched, his cheeks began to bulge like Dizzy Gillespie blowing on his trumpet.

When his breath exploded out of his mouth, the words of the Master of Sinanju came like a violent typhoon.

"That is not how the legend goes, pale piece of pig's ear!" Chiun hissed. "You have everything wrong and nothing right!"

"You forget I've been to Sinanju," Remo countered. "If you and I didn't send them CARE packages every year, they'd probably all move to Pyongyang and go on welfare."

"An outrage! My people are country folk. They would not dwell in cities, as I am forced to."

"Then again, North Korea doesn't have welfare," said Remo. "And what does this have to do with Dr. Gregorian?"

"You have not only gotten it all wrong, you have left out the most important part," Chiun complained.

Remo scrunched up his face in thought.

"Oh, yeah. Every other martial art, from Karate to Kung Fu, was stolen from us. And nobody got it right either. Which is why if Bruce Lee were triplets and still alive, either one of us could take him with our big toe tied behind our back."

"No! No! The babies! You forgot the babies."

"Right. The babies," said Remo, wondering why if Chiun were telling him a story, how come he was doing all the work? "The first Master left the village because the food situation got so bad they had to drown the babies in the bay."

Chiun lifted an admonishing finger.

"First the females," Remo added, "because they weren't good for much except for making more babies, which might not be needed anyway, and then the males-but only if it was absolutely necessary."

"And this is called?" Chiun prompted.

" 'Sending the babies home to the sea,' " said Remo. "Another word for crap."

"Crap?"

"That's right, crap. They were drowning innocent infants. Calling it something fancy and talking about how they'd all be reborn in a better time doesn't change what it was."

Chiun cocked his head like a curious chipmunk. "Which is?"

"Murder, plain and simple."

"No, it was necessity. Just as this Dr. Gregorian is performing a necessary service. Snuffing."

"Crap."

"And what would you do if those days were to return and you were Master, Remo?"

"Me?" A cloud of confusion passed over Remo's face. What would he do? Of course, it was unlikely. Each year the United States sent a submarine crammed with gold to the village of Sinanju in payment for Chiun training Remo in the art of Sinanju. Hardly any of it was spent, either. The human race would probably die out before the gold ran out at the rate it was being spent. But that wasn't the point. Remo was being tested. His brow furrowed deeply.

"I wouldn't drown any babies, that's for sure."

"You would send them away?"

"Probably."

"To wander alone and unloved, to be eaten by wild animals-those who did not starve?"

"I'd've put them up for adoption then," Remo said firmly.

"And what of the piteous wailing of their mothers, who would not eat in the grief of not knowing the fate of their children, and without whom there could be no future generations?"

"Okay, I wouldn't put them up for adoption. I'd. . ."

"Yes?"

Remo hesitated. He was on the spot. "I just wouldn't," he said flatly. "I'd find a way. Something would come to me. I wouldn't give up until-"

"-until all had expired in the agony of their empty bellies," Chiun snapped. "You may be a Master of Sinanju, thanks to my indulgence, but you will never possess the grace and wisdom of a true Master. You have a white mind. It sees poetry and reduces it to garbage. Oh, I have tried to drill those traits out of you, Remo, but I can see the error in my ways." He shook his aged head ruefully. "It is very sad, but I have no choice."

"To do what?" Remo asked suspiciously.

"To stay alive long enough to see that the boy who will soon issue from Cheeta Ching's mighty womb is properly trained in the art of Sinanju."

"I'm glad you brought that up," Remo said. "I've been wanting to clear the air."

"This is easily done. Simply leave the room and the air will clear itself. Heh heh heh." Closing his eyes, the Master of Sinanju rocked in time with his own cackling. "Heh heh heh."

"Why are you on my case all of a sudden?" Remo asked, barely masking the hurt in his voice.

"Since you have become testy with unwarranted jealousy," Chiun returned.

"Jealous? Me? Of what?"

"Of the boy who is about to be born."

"One," Remo said. "You don't know it's a boy. Cheeta's not saying."

"A grandfather knows these things."

"Two, it'll be a cold day when I'm jealous . . . Wait a minute--did you say grandfather?"

"Merely an expression," said Chiun, looking away. "Think nothing of it."

Remo hesitated. For nine months now, ever since Cheeta Ching had announced her pregnancy after a brief interlude with the Master of Sinanju, Remo had believed the child was Chiun's. Chiun had not discouraged this belief. After all, Chiun had been infatuated with the Korean anchorwoman for over a decade now. And Cheeta had been trying to become pregnant by her husband-with a noticeable lack of success-for years. It all added up, although no one was speaking on the record.

"Let me get this straight," Remo pressed. "Are you saying you're not the father?"

"I am not saying that," Chiun said evasively.

"Then you're not denying that you're the father?"

"Cheeta would not be with child were it not for my grace and wisdom."

"Then you are the father!"

Chiun lifted his bearded chin proudly. "I admit nothing. Cheeta is a married woman. I will not shame her with rumors. Nor will I be lured into making rash statements by jealous persons."

Remo's dark eyes narrowed. The Master of Sinanju made a show of arranging his riotous kimono skirts.

"I am not jealous," Remo repeated.

"No? Then why are you running hither and yon, snuffing Emperor Smith's enemies as if there were no tomorrow? You are hardly ever home anymore."

Remo made a violent, sweeping gesture that took in the entire room. "You call this pile of stone home?"

"You will be fortunate indeed if your next emperor bestows upon you a castle," Chiun said aridly.

"This isn't a castle," Remo said hotly. "It's a freaking church turned into condos and foisted off on you by Smith. I can't believe you fell for his lame sales pitch. He tells you it's a castle with a great meditation room. This is the steeple, for crying out loud!"

"It is true," Chiun said in an injured tone, "that this castle is not as large as I would have liked, but this is a new country and sadly deprived of royalty. Its castles are lamentably few. I was forced to settle."

"I got news for you, you settled for a freaking church-turned-condo."

"Also," Chiun added, "there was the urgent need to prepare a suitable dwelling for the boy who is to be born."

"If Cheeta and her brat move in, I'm moving out."

"I would not trust you to change the diapers of a son of pure Korean blood," Chiun sniffed disdainfully, "you who would not grant a starving child the boon of sending him home to the sea, but instead let him be eaten by wild wolves."

Remo threw up his hands in surrender. "What does this have to do with that ghoul, Gregorian?"

Chiun's evasive gaze suddenly locked with Remo's. "Just as the young depend upon those who have more wisdom than they to end their lives in times of difficulty," he said, "so too do the old."

"You saying that euthanasia is okay?"

"No. Not okay. Merely preferable."

"To what?"

"To granny dumping, for example, a cruel practice in this barbarian land you love so much."

"I would never dump you."

"That is not the question," Chiun shot back. "If I lay broken in body and mind, pleading for a gracious snuffing, you would deny me the clean blow that would send my essence winging into the peace of the Void?"

"That's easy. Yeah. I would not kill you. No way."

Chiun's face fell. "Then I have failed you, and you are not worthy to change a single precious diaper."

"Good," Remo said, folding his arms. "I'm glad that's settled, because I don't change diapers."

"And if you were wise, you would leave this man Gregorian alone. He has done nothing to you."

"Hey, he's probably our next assignment."

"Which you have been hectoring Emperor Smith into granting you. If only to still your beseeching tongue."

"Smith dislikes him as much as I do. He's exactly what the organization was set up to deal with. The guy found a technicality in the law that lets him get away with killing every halt and lame basket case who can't-"

"Commit suicide for themselves?"

"That's not what I mean. And he only kills women. You ever notice that? Never men. I just got refused because I'm a man. You heard it."

The Master of Sinanju sniffed delicately. "Perhaps when my time comes and the pain is unendurable, I will call upon this Dr. Boon to ease me into the Void with dignity and grace."

"Doom. They call him Dr. Doom," Remo snapped.

"He has been misnamed by cretins. He is truly Dr. Boon."

"Forget it," said Remo, rising from his mat. "I'm going for a walk. I need some fresh air."

"Since you are unwilling to bestow upon me the gift of a graceful snuffing out in my time of future need, perhaps you will find it in your cold white heart to turn on the television set for one of my venerable years. It is nearly time for Cheeta Ching."

"This is a weekday. Cheeta's only on weekends," said Remo, snatching up the TV clicker and pointing it at the TV.

"You are forgetting her special program, which is not on until later. But Cheeta will soon give birth. I am certain this joyous event will be the first thing that Don Cooder speaks of. I would watch him-but only for tidings of Cheeta."

"Suit yourself," said Remo, turning on the TV. It was twenty-eight minutes past six. "And, speaking of that barracuda, isn't she way overdue? Like into her ten or eleventh month?"

"The perfect child is not produced in a mere nine months," Chiun said, his tone dismissive. "The Great Wang was in gestation for fifty weeks. Cheeta is only doing her duty properly."

"If you ask me," Remo said as the set warmed up, "she's waiting until sweeps month starts."

"Sweeps?"

"Next week May sweeps begin. And-" Remo stopped. He looked at the screen. It was black as a bat's daydream of nirvana. In the upper righthand corner the words No SIGNAL showed thin and pale.

On his mat the Master of Sinanju started.

"Remo! What is wrong!"

"I dunno," said Remo, dropping to his knees. He tried changing the channel manually. On every channel, he found the same unrelieved blackness and the same NO SIGNAL legend. "Damn, it's on all channels."

Chiun was beside himself now. "Remo, I cannot miss Cheeta. "

Remo adjusted the contrast knob. The NO SIGNAL came and went. "Something must be wrong with the set," he said.

"Quickly, bring the other device from the lower floor."

"Tell you what since it's ninety seconds to Don Cooder, how about we just go downstairs and watch it in the privacy of the kitchen?"

"Is there nothing you would do for me, who have exalted you to greatness?" Chiun said huffily.

"Turn on the TV for you? Yes. Cook dinner? Some days. Rush downstairs and drag a twenty-two-inch Trinitron up a flight of steps? Maybe on your next birthday."

"Ingrate!" sniffed Chiun, throwing off all semblance of age and feebleness. He became a silky flash that disappeared down the stairs like a specter of lavender, crimson, and gold.

Out of curiosity, Remo followed him down.

The Master of Sinanju had turned on the downstairs TV, which was set on an island in the middle of a spacious kitchen.

"Remo! Remo! Come see, come see!"

Remo stepped in and saw the same thing the upstairs TV had showed-a block of broadcast tar.

The TV was speaking.

"Do not adjust the picture. "

"Remo, what does this mean?" Chiun demanded.

"Could be an early warning bulletin or something," Remo muttered.

"The problem is not in your set . . . . "

"Definitely not a reception problem. They're saying so."

"Is this is the end of the world?" Chiun squeaked. His voice betrayed rare fear. "Have the ignorant whites succeeded in ending their so-called civilization? Oh, now I will never hold Cheeta's beautiful boy in my arms."

"Don't panic yet. Listen."

"We are controlling transmission .... We will control the horizontal .... We will control the vertical .... We can change the focus to a soft blur . . . "

The TV screen remained black, the NO SIGNAL message unwavering.

"Or sharpen it to crystal clarity . . . ."

"Wait a minute," Remo said suddenly. "I recognize this. It's the opening to an old TV show, The Outer Limits."

"I see only blackness," Chiun said, frowning.

"We're getting the audio signal. But no video."

"I do not know this audio-video mumbo jumbo," Chiun spat.

Remo tried changing the channel. Every station was the same. Even the New Hampshire and Rhode Island stations which they normally couldn't get or which came in full of snow. There was no difference in picture quality.

Chiun's eye went to a wall clock whose second hand moved in time to the cartoon cat's eyes and wagging tail. "It has already started!"

"Relax. This is a reception problem. If we can't pick it up, I'll bet no one can."

As Remo ran up and down the channels, the sonorous voice had fallen silent. Static hissed steadily.

"Well?" Chiun said impatiently.

"Hold it. What do you think I am?"

"A white. Therefore one who understands machines."

"Well, I don't understand this machine. Every channel is the same." Then the voice began speaking again.

"Do not attempt to adjust the picture."

"Something's wrong," Remo said slowly.

"Yes! I cannot watch television."

"No, this Outer Limits thing is back on, but I'm on a different channel now."

"The trouble is not in your-"

Remo switched channels.

" set. We control the-"

"-horizontal. We con-"

"-rol the vertical. "

"This is weird," Remo muttered. "Whatever's doing this, it's on every channel."

"I can see this!" Chiun wailed, beseeching the ceiling with upraised arms. "I wish to see Cheeta instead."

"Uh-oh," Remo muttered.

Chiun dropped his arms. "What?"

Remo hesitated. A few months ago, there had been a grave Cuban-American crisis. The Havana government, in retaliation for what it wrongly believed was a latter-day Bay of Pigs invasion, had stepped up its government broadcast power and overwhelmed all TV in south Florida. As it happened, the counterattack had interrupted a Cheeta Ching newscast-thereby incurring the bitter enmity of the Master of Sinanju. The matter had been resolved without Chiun having fulfilled his vow to decapitate the Cuban leader. If it were happening again, Remo knew there would be no stopping Chiun this time.

"Maybe I should call Smith about this," Remo said quickly.

"Yes! Yes! Call Smith. Smith will know. Ask if he has had word of Cheeta. Ask if he will tape all news of Cheeta, that I might miss none of it."

"All right, all right. Let me dial in peace."

There was a wall phone and Remo picked up the receiver, one eye on the Master of Sinanju, who stood before the blank-faced TV set as if looking upon an injured pet. His eyes were stricken.

Remo was about to press down on the one button-the foolproof code by which he could reach his superior-when abruptly the screech-owl sound of Cheeta Ching's voice filled the kitchen.

"This is the BCN Evening News with Don Cooder. Cheeta Ching reporting. Don is off tonight."

"Cheeta!" Chiun crowed. "It is Cheeta! My ancestors have heard me. My prayers have been answered."

"If they have," Remo growled, "they must have a heck of a lot of pull with the FCC."

"Hush."

Remo left the phone and came to Chiun's side.

"Tonight," Cheeta Ching was saying, "BCN Evening News was blacked out nationwide just as a search for missing anchor Don Cooder was called off."

"You lying witch!" a voice cried from offstage. "You said your water broke!"

"Wasn't that Cooder's voice?" Remo said.

"Hush!"

"As yet," Cheeta continued unperturbed, "no clear understanding of the electronic disturbance has been ascertained. There are reports, unconfirmed at this time, that the broadcast blackout was not confined to BCN."

"It wasn't my fault!" Don Cooder's disembodied voice cried.

"That was Cooder," said Remo. "Where is he?"

"Remo!"

"In our efforts to stay on top of the headlines, BCN has video of the unprecedented phenomenon."

The screen went black except for the NO SIGNAL message, and the sonorous voice repeated its monotone mantra: There is nothing wrong with your television set . . . . "

"Remo," Chiun squeaked. "The TV is broken again!"

"No, this is a tape."

"But why are they showing this?"

"It's the headline for the night. What else are they going to show? Don Cooder standing around with nothing to do?"

"They could show Cheeta's beauteous face, dwelling on her perfect nose, her lips so-"

"Vampire-like."

"Philistine!"

The wall phone rang suddenly and Remo said, "Karnac predicts that's Smitty."

"Tell him I am out."

"Sure thing," said Remo, picking up the receiver. "Sinanju diaper service," he recited. "You soil 'em and we'll boil 'em."

A voice that sounded the way bitter lemons smell said, "Remo. Smith here."

Remo stepped out into the hall, the receiver cord uncoiling behind him. He eased the door closed. "Tell me this isn't Cuba all over again," he whispered.

"Remo, I do not know what it is. But for nearly seven minutes broadcast television was knocked off the air from Yellowknife to Acapulco."

"Could the Cubans do that?"

"Theoretically, with a powerful enough transmitter, they could. But that is not what appears to have happened. Except for cable owners and satellite dish receivers, on-air television signals did not reach their affiliates, and somehow the affiliate signals were blocked before they could be received by home sets."

"Is that what the 'no signal' message meant?"

"Yes. I want you and Chiun to stand by."

"I wasn't having any luck getting hold of Dr. Doom, anyway."

"I must remind you that he is not yet an assignment-and certainly not a problem of this magnitude."

"Problem? There was no TV for a few minutes. Big hairy deal. The worst thing that could have happened was for everybody to go to the john at once and mess up the plumbing."

Smith's humorless voice was clipped. "Remo, stand by. I must gather more information. Just stand by."

The line clicked. Remo returned to the kitchen to hang up and look in on Chiun.

Cheeta Ching was going on and on in her screechy voice. As Remo listened, he realized she was simply repeating the essential story: Broadcast TV had been blacked out. No one knew why. It was a three sentence story, but like a stuck phonograph record, she couldn't get off it.

From time to time, a hand would appear in the background, waving or shaking a fist. It apparently came from a figure who was presumably flat on the floor, and from the occasional glimpse of a human form being prevented from rising into camera range by kneeling stage hands.

"Looks like Cooder finally Wigged out on camera," Remo remarked. "They must have pulled Cheeta in as a substitute anchor."

"Hush."

Twenty minutes later, after Cheeta had had on-air conversations with virtually every BCN correspondent, all saying the same thing-which is to say, nothing--Cheeta Ching fixed the viewers with her dull, sharklike eyes and smiled without sincerity.

"In other news, I'm happy to report that my pregnancy continues on schedule with all signs pointing to an imminent delivery. Stay with BCN News for further updates and bulletins on this momentous developing story. This is Cheeta Ching reporting."

"Which momentous story?" Remo asked. "The blackout or the baby?"

"Oh, Remo do not be ridiculous. Of course it is the baby."

"That's what I was afraid of," said Remo, rolling his eyes ceilingward.

Chapter 3

Dr. Harold W. Smith rarely watched television.

Even when it was new, he seldom spent more than a passing hour a month watching television. He much preferred radio. With radio, it was possible to do something constructive and listen at the same time. To a lifelong workaholic like Harold Smith, the demands television put on a person's full attention meant only one thing: TV would not last. It was a fad, a vehicle for novelty programs like wrestling matches and roller derbys, soon to pass.

So back in the so-called Golden Age of Television-the early 1950s, when he would come home from his long days at the then-new Central Intelligence Agency, Harold Smith would ignore the tiny round-screened television despite the serious dent it had made in his government salary, and he would turn on the radio instead. Why bother watching a broadcaster reading the news off a script when radio commentators performed the same service and stimulated the imagination at the same time?

Yet millions did. Further proof that TV would not last.

But it was not long before the television shows expanded to thirty minutes and began including footage of events. And as music tastes changed and rock and roll seemed to more and more crowd out the tasteful standards Harold Smith enjoyed, he listened less and less to his old console Atwater Kent-a graduation gift from his uncle Ormond.

Reluctantly he retired it into the attic.

Grudgingly Harold Smith fell into the habit of watching TV news. The Huntley-Brinkley Report had been his favorite-although Howard K. Smith-no relation-had also been good. He was able to stomach Harry Reasoner, despite his unseemly frivolity.

Today, the current crop of anchors left much to be desired, so Smith had swallowed hard and invested in home cable, paying out of his own pocket the installation charge and the monthly access fee despite the fact that he was well within his rights to charge the fee to either of his operating budgets.

Smith had two. The lesser of them was the operating budget for Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy but efficient private hospital on the shores of Long Island Sound in Rye, New York. Harold Smith was Folcroft's director, and had been since his retirement from the CIA back in the halcyon days of Huntley and Brinkley.

The other operating budget was Smith's to do with as he wished. It wasn't literally true, but in practice there was no one above Smith to tell him that no, he could not siphon off $53.50 each month to equip his Rye, New York home and Folcroft office with cable. Even if he had been subject to auditing, the paltry $53.50 would have been hardly a blip on a CPA's radar screen.

For Smith's total annual operating budget, the budget in which Folcroft was a minor expenditure, exceeded many millions of dollars in taxpayer's money.

Harold W. Smith was the head of CURE, sanctioned by the President of the United States-but answerable to no lawmaker, no congressional oversight committee, no one. It had been set up in the early 1960s to operate outside the constraints of lawful government. Its mission: to keep order in an increasingly chaotic society, resorting to extraconstitutional activities when deemed necessary by Harold Smith.

In those difficult early days it had often been necessary. Smith had run the organization from his Folcroft office until the day a successor to the martyred president who had set up CURE in the first place had given Smith authorization to take the next necessary step: create an enforcement arm.

A candidate had been chosen. An ordinary man, soon to be made extraordinary. First Smith had the subject executed. The subject had been a Newark cop, seemingly no different than others who pounded the urban streets of a declining America.

Smith had arranged for his badge to disappear, only to reappear in an alley beside the bludgeoned body of a pusher. The death penalty had been in effect in those days, and the subject had been quickly railroaded into a death cell.

It had all been arranged in advance. The execution had been a fraud. The "body," in a pill-induced coma, was spirited to Folcroft, where a plastic surgeon went to work on the subject's face, while Harold Smith, in his Spartan office, went about the grim task of covering his tracks. All records of the declared-dead Newark cop were purged from Social Security, IRS, and Marine Corps records. The man had been an orphan, unmarried, and thanks to Smith, disgraced. So it was a simple matter to virtually wipe all but the fading memory of one Remo Williams from the official record.

Smith had felt no remorse. A greater good would be served. And it was, once Smith had presented Remo Williams with the cold choice-volunteer or die for real. Remo had been placed in the hands of the last Master of Sinanju, a forgotten line of assassins on the verge of fading from the human stage, for training in the ultimate martial art, called Sinanju, which had taken its name from a desolate village in the bleakness of Communist North Korea.

In time, Smith had his enforcement arm-a human killing machine, professional, unstoppable, invincible, which he had code-named "Destroyer."

For twenty years, Harold Smith had fielded innumerable crises as head of CURE, the supersecret government agency that officially did not even exist, drawing vast sums from a secret operating budget, sanctioning covert operations that involved mayhem, murder, and extortion, utterly unaccountable to anyone, yet in all that time he had personally accounted for every penny to the highest authority Harold Smith personally knew-his own conscience.

The president who had invested Harold Smith with his enormous power and responsibility had never lived to see how Smith had exceeded the trust placed in him. But if he had, he would have experienced absolutely no misgivings.

And so, on a Tuesday evening in April, Harold Smith sat in a comfortable overstuffed chair in the privacy of his home enjoying a night alone, with his wife away at his sister-in-law's, and saw the greatest crisis in his career of public service begin as a KNNN update.

"This just in to Kable Newsworthy News Network News," the cool-voiced anchor had said. "As they were preparing their evening news programs, the three major broadcast networks experienced a unusual simultaneous service interruption. The disruption appears to be nationwide. More on this story as it becomes available."

Smith took his remote from his coat pocket and pointed it at the cable box. The channels marched before his eyes. It took him only one cycle before he realized two incontrovertible facts.

First, that all satellite reception and cable-only stations were broadcasting unimpeded.

Second, all other stations were blacked out, UHF and VHF.

He listened to the sonorous voice advising viewers that the trouble was not in their sets and, not being a watcher of episodic television, failed to recognize it as an old program theme opening.

That was not important. For Harold Smith recognized something more important that he was witnessing the tip of an iceberg more terrible than any that had threatened the democracy he had sworn to safeguard.

Smith turned on a tabletop radio, and the sonorous voice broadcasting on all TV stations issued from the radio speaker in perfect time with the TV. There was no tape delay.

Turning off the radio and lowering the TV volume, he picked up a well-worn briefcase that was never far away. Smith placed it in his lap, defused the explosive charges in the locking latches, and exposed a portable computer and telephone handset.

This was his link with the secret computers at Folcroft, the nerve center though which he monitored the affairs-public, secret and subversive-of a computerlinked nation. He lifted the handset, dialed a number from memory, and was relieved to find his enforcement arm reachable.

Only after he had put Remo Williams on standby did Harold Smith call the President of the United States, the only person outside CURE to know about the organization.

Smith had not spoken to the new president, who had taken office months before, trusting to the outgoing chief executive to have broken the news of the existence of CURE. He imagined the revelation of the secret organization that kept American democracy stabilized for nearly thirty years had come as a distinct shock to the new man. Normally, Smith left it to each successive president to make contact with him.

But this was a crisis. He just hoped he could convince the latest occupant in the White House of its gravity.

The President's raspy Southern voice was curious.

"Smith?"

"Of course," said Smith. The phone was tied by computer link into the dedicated line that had rung a red dialless telephone in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. No president since CURE's inception ever failed to answer it. Harold Smith did not make casual calls. "Mr. President, I am calling to warn of a grave danger to this country."

The President's tone lifted an octave. "What is it?"

"Are you aware of the nationwide television blackout?"

"Yes. But the White House is wired up for cable. We weren't affected."

"Sir, a powerful force has showed itself. For what reason, I do not know, but it has the capability to knock broadcast television off the air nationwide."

"They're saying it's sunspots," said the President.

"Who are saying this?"

"The networks."

"Sunspots would not do what this power has accomplished," Smith returned. "Somehow, by some science I cannot fathom, this power has managed to intercept all TV video signals, at the same time broadcasting an audio signal of its choosing."

"Could this be the Cubans up to their old tricks?"

"Doubtful. This appears to be a quantum leap beyond Havana's technical capability. Let me explain the situation as I see it. For years we have feared Cuban interference with our broadcast reception. We know that they possess a transmitter that could be boosted to over 100,000 watts-powerful enough to overwhelm U.S. TV transmissions nationwide. In short, they would override ordinary signals across all frequency bands with an overriding multifrequency signal of their own."

"I follow, Smith."

"This is not the phenomenon we are witnessing here."

"No?"

"No, Mr. President. This power is somehow preventing the outgoing signals from every local broadcast station from getting onto the air. At the same time, it is able to put out an audio signal of its own."

"Science isn't exactly my field, Smith."

"My limited grasp of television theory tells me that this is an amazing and very threatening breakthrough. The power behind this has tonight tested his equipment. Now that he know it works, he will show his hand."

"How?"

"He will jam every TV station in his broadcast radius. Soon. Within the week at the very latest. And if there are demands, he will broadcast them."

"That's a heck of a lot of deduction from a seven-minute blackout."

"Mr. President, I have placed my people on alert. I suggest you do the same. Particularly, be prepared to triangulate the audio signal so that we may trace this interference to its source or sources."

"You think there is more than one source?"

"While it is possible to drown out all TV signals through one centrally positioned broadcast tower, we can't discount an array of jamming stations. Each of them must be tracked down and terminated."

"I'll start the machinery, Smith. Please stay in touch."

"Of course, Mr. President," said Harold Smith, hanging up.

It has gone as well as could be expected, Smith reflected. The succession had gone as it always did, noisy but bloodless. Still Smith was going to miss the old President. He was probably the last one of Harold Smith's generation.

Sadly he closed his briefcase, shucked off his slippers, and drew on his well-polished wing tip shoes. He had not so much as loosened his tie upon coming home, but he tightened the knot as he stood up.

Smith was a tall graying man of retirement age, the flesh tight on his prominent bones. His face was pinched, a pair of rimless glasses perching precariously on his patrician nose. A congenital heart defect gave his skin an unhealthy grayish pallor that matched the hue of his three-piece suit. His eyes, faded from years of dull bureaucratic work, were a similar gray. Even his fingernails looked gray. His Dartmouth tie was hunter green.

For the work that lay before him, Smith would need the speed and power of his Folcroft mainframes. He picked up his worn briefcase.

Smith went out into the night, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had tried to impress upon the President the seriousness of the event, but he doubted the President had fully grasped the potential for harm tonight's seven-minute blackout foreshadowed. The man had not turned down the music that had been playing in the background during their conversation. It had sounded like Elvis Presley.

As he drove his battered station wagon to Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold Smith hoped the President would not have to deal with it.

For just the tip of the iceberg filled Smith with dread.

Chapter 4

Remo Williams was on boom-box patrol.

Ever since he and Chiun had moved into the converted-church condominium-occupying all sixteen units-in the city of Quincy, Massachusetts, Remo had been stuck with boom box patrol. It was one of his least favorite duties.

There was a high school next to the Gothic-Swiss-Tudor fieldstone building Chiun considered his castle, and at night teenagers sometimes hung out, playing loud music. Mostly rap. Remo hated rap. He despised heavy metal. Disco gave him headaches. Rock was okay-as long as it was pre-Beatles rock. Why was it, he wondered, that each successive evolution moved further away from melody and toward pure beat? He figured popular music was on its way to extinction. Not that it mattered much. If the local kids were playing Mozart at an estimated 130 decibels, Remo would still have to put a stop to it.

Loud music was offensive to the Master of Sinanju's easily offended ears. Especially with Eyeball to Eyeball with Cheeta Ching about to come on.

So Remo had slipped out the front door and was moving toward the disembodied squawk of a rapper extolling the virtues of shooting uncompliant girlfriends in the face with his Glock.

"This is a no-noise zone," Remo called out by way of greeting.

"And this is a free country," a voice shot back. The voice sounded black but the face was white as bleached flour.

"This is a no-noise zone before it's a free country," Remo countered.

"That's not what they taught us in school, man."

As Remo approached, he saw that the loiterers were a mixture of white and Asian kids, wearing sweatshirts and turned-around Red Sox caps. Somewhere he had read that the biggest, deepest secret in the music industry was the fact that rap music was strictly a suburban teenager phenomenon. Remo wasn't sure what urban kids listened to. Bluegrass, for all he knew.

The sight of the Asian faces alarmed him more than the music bothered him. Chiun had a thing against Asians. True, he was no fan of white people, considering them inferior to Koreans, especially North Koreans, especially North Koreans from his village, and particularly inferior to Chiun's immediate family, but especially inferior to the Master of Chiun himself.

But white Europeans had never invaded Korea, nor their kings cheated previous Masters of Sinanju. Much.

When Chiun had discovered that he had moved into an area with a healthy Asian population, he had all but gone ballistic. It had been all Remo could do to talk him out of embarking on an Sarajevo-style ethnic cleansing campaign.

Reluctantly, Remo had agreed to go door to door and ask his Asian neighbors to kindly, if it was not too much trouble, move to another city. He was almost relieved to discover that almost none of them spoke a word of English. That let him off the hook. But Remo began to feel awkward himself. He personally preferred neighbors who spoke English.

Approaching the mixed white and Asian teenagers listening to black music, his mixed feelings returned. He represented a five-thousand-year-old Korean tradition-the first white man to become a Master of Sinanju-spoke fair Korean himself, and was more comfortable shopping at the local Asian market than the nearby supermarket. He could eat the stuff from the Asian market and survive the experience. The supermarket stuff was 99 percent lethal to his Sinanju-refined digestive system.

Remo had been raised by nuns at St. Theresa's orphanage in Newark. For a long time, he had felt torn between the country of his birth and the honor and responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders. Somewhere along the line, he had become more Sinanju than Newark.

"Tell you what," Remo said in the spirit of compromise, "you can stay if you behave, but the box shuts down."

A quick hand reached for the volume control knob. Remo started a smile that became a grimace when his eardrums were abruptly assaulted by a screeching voice emanating from the dual speakers.

Remo swept in, grabbed up the box and thumbed the off switch.

"Show you a trick," he said.

And like a basketball player, Remo heaved the box into the night sky with both hands. He made it look casual. Five thousand years of Sinanju Masters stood behind the gesture. Five thousand years of unlocking the secrets of the human mind and body. Five thousand years of applying principles Western learning had not even approached.

All eyes shot upward. The box receded into a silvery gleaming dot. And kept going.

This impressed the trio.

"Whoa!"

"Way cool!"

"I wouldn't stand there if I were you," Remo remarked.

"Why not?" one teenager asked, not dropping his gaze from the seemingly stationary gleam above.

"It's going to come down."

"Yeah, I know. And I'm going to catch it. It cost me $47.50."

"It'll cost you both arms of you're lucky enough to catch it," Remo said.

"Says you."

"Says Newton's third law. What goes up, must come down."

"Newton's third law says for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction."

Remo shrugged. "So sue me. High school was a million years ago."

The trio kept their eyes on the night sky. Various expressions played over their young beardless faces. One twitched. Another, the truth dawning on him, took three giant steps backward, his eyes going very wide.

"It's sure taking a long time to fall," one muttered.

"Take the hint," said Remo.

Then the third teenager shouted, "I see it! I see it! It's coming back."

"I got it! I got it!" said the first teenager.

They bumped heads, jockeying for position.

Remo was tempted to let nature take its cruel course, but at the last minute relented.

He swept in, caught a shirt collar in each hand and pulled the two bumping would-be boom-box rescuers out of the way as the box screamed back to earth and shattered into a thousand bits of plastic and electronics, incidentally cracking the asphalt noticeably.

The trio were slapping at their arms and faces. Their fingers came away bright with tiny drops of blood.

"Ouch! Ouch! What hit me?"

"Shrapnel," said Remo. "Now go spread the word. Anyone caught making noise after dark ends up picking plastic out of his face-if I'm in a good mood."

The trio looked to the shattered box, to Remo, back to the box, and fled.

As he walked back to Castle Sinanju-as Chiun called it-Remo muttered, "Beats evicting the entire neighborhood."

From the squat Gothic steeple, windows aglow on all four sides, issued a sudden shriek of anguish. Chiun.

"Now what?" said Remo, whipping through the front door.

Remo burst into the meditation room and stopped in his tracks.

The Master of Sinanju was hopping about the room, his hands clutching at the puffs of cloudy hair that floated over each ear.

"Don't tell me it's another blackout!" Remo said.

"Worse! Worse!" Chiun leveled an agitated finger at the screen.

Remo looked. There was the stony face of Don Cooder, looking steely-eyed into the camera. He was speaking.

"In our efforts to bring you up to date on the crisis along Network Row, we are preempting Eyeball to Eyeball with Cheeta Ching for a special live 24 Hours. Tonight: '24 Hours on Blackout Street.' "

"What about Cheeta!" Chiun cried.

"Cheeta Ching will be seen at this time next week," Cooder said. "Unless, of course the big moment arrives, in which case BCN will cut in live for special labor coverage."

"They're planning to broadcast the birth?" Remo grunted.

Chiun said, "Of course. It will be a day of celebration."

"Bulldookey," said Remo. "Look, I'm sorry Cooder's horned in on Cheeta's face time, but these things happen."

"Why do these calamities keep happening to Cheeta? It is not fair!"

"Hey, you got your dose of Cheeta for the night. Lighten up."

"My evening is ruined."

"Why don't we just watch this? Who knows, Cheeta may start having contractions and you'll get to see it all in its gory glory."

As Remo settled onto one of the mats facing the screen, the Master of Sinanju ceased his pacing.

"Why are you interested in this?" he asked suspiciously.

"Smitty thinks that blackout may be something for us. Might as well get current."

"It is not the work of that bearded ruffian, Castro, is it?"

"Smith doesn't think so. We threw a pretty good scare into him last time. He still hasn't shown his face in public."

"No doubt his beard has not yet regrown itself," Chinn sniffed.

"Rat's nests aren't built in a day," said Remo cheerfully.

They watched in silence. A graphic filled the screen. It showed a green circle indicating the area of broadcast interference. It was a big circle. All of the U.S. as well as most of Canada and Mexico were in what Don Cooder referred to as "the null zone."

"While the source of this disruption has not yet been identified," he was saying, "sunspots cannot been ruled out. For more on this important story and how it may affect you, here by telephone is vacationing BCN science editor Frank Feldmeyer."

As a Quantel graphic still of Feldmeyer showed on the screen, the correspondent's comments ran as a voice-over. He was a square-faced man whose features were made smaller by oversized horn-rimmed glasses.

"Don, this phenomenon, if it is a natural one, is utterly baffling. Somehow, all video output was intercepted and substitute audio broadcast in its place. Sunspots might account for one, but not the other."

"Frank, are you saying this could be man-made?"

"Don, there doesn't appear to be any other explanation. Beyond that, it's too early to tell."

"It's too early to tell," Cooder intoned.

"Didn't Feldmeyer just say that?" Remo asked Chiun.

Chiun said nothing. His hazel eyes were narrow in thought.

Cooder was back on the air now. His ruggedly handsome black-Irish face was fixed. There were bags under his eyes large enough to double as coin pouches.

" 'It's too early to tell,' " he repeated. "Portentous words. What can they mean? Is this just a glitch of the electronic age, or-something more? Something that will darken all of our lives? For another perspective, here is White House correspondent Sheela Duff."

The picture cut to the White House correspondent standing, appropriately enough, on the White House lawn. She was speaking into a handheld microphone that looked like a candy box with a giant BCN logo.

"Don, here at the White House there is no sign of a crisis atmosphere."

"That's because there's no freaking crisis," Remo grumbled.

"But reliable sources assure us that the President is aware of the situation and cognizant of its meaning."

Cooder asked, "Sheela, as you know, Havana tried to jam U.S. airwaves not long ago. Is this an unscheduled rerun of that old crisis?"

"No, Don. As the graphic you just showed indicates, Cuba is not the epicenter of the so-called null zone. In fact, reliable reports are that Cuban TV and radio were knocked off the air at the same time. In fact, Havana is angrily pointing the finger of blame at Washington. As are, I might add, the Canadian government and the Mexicans."

Cooder came back on. "Let's look at that graphic again, shall we?"

The graphic came on. Remo leaned into the screen.

"Looks like he's right," he said. "Can't be Cuba. Otherwise the blackout would reach clear down to Peru. The transmitter must be in the U.S."

"I understand none of this voodoo," Chiun said darkly.

Don Cooder was saying, "If I read this graphic correctly, and I want to be sure I understand this . . . Frank Feldmeyer, are you still with us?"

"Yes, I am Don."

"I know you can't see the graphic, but it shows a circle encompassing most of North America. What should we be looking for?"

"The center."

"For those of us not well grounded in science, that's the middle, correct?"

"Exactly, Don."

"Actually it looks to me like Canada is the center," Remo muttered.

"The epicenter appears to lie in the heartland of the United States itself," announced Don Cooder.

"Any idiot can see it's Canada," Remo complained.

Don Cooder went on, obviously making it up as he went along. "For those just tuning in, at this hour, the known facts are these: U.S. TV blacked out for seven minutes. Cause: Unknown. Motive: Unknown. Suspicion: Somewhere in the U.S. heartland a pirate transmitter waiting patiently. For-what? No one knows."

Don Cooder paused, fixing the camera with his unblinking eyes. "For the story of those most affected by this, here's our national correspondent, Hale Storm."

The image changed to show the prettily handsome face of BCN national correspondent Hale Storm, looking as dashing as if he had stepped out of a soap opera-which he had. BCN had hired him from one of their own soaps in an effort to broaden their female audience base.

"What was the first thing to go through your mind when the blackout hit?" Storm asked an off-camera figure.

The face of Don Cooder, looking pensive, appeared. He was informal in a fawn-brown cardigan sweater.

"I was at the anchor desk-we call it the Chair around here-and had just read the lead-in headlines when the producer noticed the line monitor had gone black. At first, he thought it was an internal glitch, but I knew that couldn't be. Here at BCN we have the finest technical staff in television. I immediately pitched in and, sensing something more serious amiss, discovered that the other networks were black too."

"Very astute, Don."

Don Cooder offered his trademark forced smile and said, "Don Cooder has been in this news game a long time, man and boy. He can smell a story."

Chiun nudged Remo. "Why does he refer to himself in the third person?"

"Maybe he's schizo," Remo offered. "What I want to know is why are they interviewing each other. Shouldn't they be talking to the man in the street?"

"Why should they waste their time speaking with peasants?" Chiun wanted to know.

"Maybe because the story affected maybe sixty million people, and only a few dozen TV employees, that's why. These news guys all think they are the news."

"They are obviously very important," said Chiun.

"What makes you say that?"

"They all look very much like the President of Vice, who is an important person as well."

"Come to think of it, the Vice President does kinda look like he should be reading the news, not making it. And he's just like the network anchors. They're practically all airheads. They get paid a ton of money to just sit there and read."

Out of the corner of his eyes, Remo noticed Chiun's wispy beard tremble. And he knew he had made a mistake.

"They are paid how much to simply sit and read?"

"Uh, I forget," Remo said evasively.

"I will settle for a rough estimate."

"Oh, I heard Cooder gets oh, four or five."

"Thousands?"

"Millions."

"Millions! To simply read!"

"Cheeta isn't exactly paid in seashells, either, you know."

"That is different. She does not read mere news, but recites poetry in her lilting voice. She is a fountain of culture in a barbarian land. No amount of money can be too much for her."

"And she's just the weekend anchor."

Chiun's eyes narrowed. "Why are they called anchors?"

"Good question. Ask Smith next time we see him. He knows all kinds of useless stuff."

The taped interview with Don Cooder ended and the live Don Cooder returned to do a live interview with the national anchor who had just interviewed him. Then, Don Cooder interviewed the producer, the news director, and up on to the president of the news division, who vowed that this would never happen again, but if it did, BCN would be there to cover it. Round the clock, if need be.

How BCN could cover a disruption that would prevent them from broadcasting was not explained, and no one thought to point out the lapse in logic. Everyone spoke in crisp, authoritative sentences, wore expensive suits, and boasted perfect helmets of hair that could decorate storefront manikins. Some possibly had.

At the end of the broadcast, the camera closed in to frame Don Cooder's face and he said, "BCN Evening News pledges to keep you up to date on this developing story. Until next time," he added, giving the peace sign, "Rock on."

Immediately, a local anchor came on with a teaser for the eleven o'clock news.

"TV blacked out nationwide. The story at 11."

"Why do they do that?" Remo complained.

"Do what?"

"We just watched a half hour of national coverage and the local station immediately jumps in trying to get us to watch it all over again at eleven."

"I do not understand these American customs," Chiun sniffed. "I only know that I will have to wait until the weekend before beholding the sight of Cheeta the Beauteous."

"You'll make it."

The Master of Sinanju arose like a pale column of smoke. He had changed to evening white. "I will retire now," he said.

"Kinda early, isn't it?"

"Awake, I will only feel sadness. Perhaps in sleep I will dream of Cheeta the Fair."

"Does that mean I gotta resume boom box patrol?"

The Master of Sinanju paused at the door. He turned, his face stern.

"If I am dreaming of Cheeta, and rude voices awaken me, there will be heads adorning the gates by dawn."

"Trust me," said Remo. "You'll sleep peacefully if I have to sleep outside."

"I would not mind," said Chiun, padding off to his bedroom.

And hearing those chilly words, Remo's spirits fell.

Chapter 5

The office of Harold W. Smith was a Spartan cube that looked as if it had been furnished in 1963 from a municipal auction of sixty-year-old surplus school equipment.

The desk was a scarred slab of oak; the leather executive chair in which Smith sat was cracked with age and the corrosive action of human perspiration. Smith had sweated out countless crises in the chair.

There was a faded green divan that might once have sat outside a school principal's office for discipline-problem students. The file cabinets were a mixture of dark green metal and oak. Intelligence analysts could have pored over the contents of those cabinets for a hundred years and would have been forced to conclude that Folcroft was no more than a stodgy private hospital.

Behind him, Long Island Sound was a crinkling expanse of moonlit India ink visible through a picture window of one-way glass so prying eyes could not read Harold Smith's lips or peer over his shoulder at the computer terminal that occupied one corner of Smith's pathologically neat desk.

The illumination was fluorescent-as an aid to Smith's nagging eyestrain. One filament shook nervously. When the day came that it finally burnt out, Smith would replace it, not before.

As he worked the keyboard, Harold Smith was not even aware of the annoying problem.

From this terminal, Smith could reach out with invisible fingers and touch virtually every computer net accessible by phone line. Right now, he was monitoring the internal computer systems of the three major networks and Vox TV.

On his screen appeared, in rotation, news stories being written in distant terminals by network newswriters, internal office memos, and electronic mail.

All four networks were busy. According to their computer activities, there was a great deal of gossip and speculation going on, but no hard facts. Doggedly Smith logged off one network and switched to another. It sometimes seemed to him that it had been easier in the early days of CURE, before computers revolutionized American business. In fact, it had been more difficult. It was just that the proliferation of computers meant that much more raw data was accessible to Smith-and hiring a staff to keep track of it all was out of the question.

As Smith secretly prowled the Multinational Broadcast Corporation database, unknown fingers were typing a fragment of electronic mail.

"This weird fax just came in," the fingers wrote. "And the brass all went into a huddle."

Smith dropped out of the MBC net and accessed the AT that processed telephone calls. He brought up the MBC headquarters active billing file and backtracked the most recent incoming calls. There was no way to differentiate between voice and fax transmission calls, except that the latter were usually brief. In the last five minutes, Smith found, MBC had received six incoming calls. Only one was long-distance. It was from Atlanta, Georgia.

Smith dropped out of the file and brought up the American Networking Conglomerate billing file. ANC, too, had received a long-distance call from Atlanta. The number was the same. Ferociously, Smith accessed the BCN file.

There had been no call from Atlanta. Then, as Smith watched, one appeared.

Like a demented concert pianist, Harold Smith dropped out of AT ed up the BCN database. Most faxphones, he knew, were tied into computer software so that on-screen text could be faxed by the simple press of a hot key, without bothering to generate a hard copy. Smith raced from screen to screen, breathing like a jogger in motion, looking to see if an incoming fax was appearing anywhere in the system.

Then he found it. Line by line, it began manifesting itself on his own terminal.

"My God," he croaked. "It is worse that I imagined."

Without taking his eyes off the screen, Smith reached for one of the many telephones on his desk. From memory, he called the Atlanta number that was the source of the fax. The other telephone rang six times. Then there was the click of a backup line cutting in, followed by more ringing.

As the fax completed itself in ghostly green letters, a telephone voice was speaking in Harold Smith's ear.

Smith groaned, a low inarticulate sound. The voice had told him exactly where the fax had originated.

If it meant what he thought, a new and terrifying kind of conflict was about to be played out. And the battlefield would be an electronic one.

Chapter 6

Cheeta Ching was afraid to leave her office.

Normally, Cheeta Ching wasn't afraid of man, beast, or machine. Behind her back, she was known as the Korean Shark. Even her coworkers feared her. But if there was one colleague even she feared, it was senior BCN anchor Don Cooder.

Theirs had been a long-running feud, dating back to the days before she had jumped rival MBC for BCN. Cheeta had never wanted to leave MBC. Certainly not for a lateral slide from MBC weekend anchor to BCN weekend anchor. She would never have done it. Never in a million years. Except for Don Cooder.

With Cooder in the Chair, BCN was dead last in the ratings, heading for the ratings cellar with a millstone around its corporate neck. Nobody expected him to last. And as the pressure had mounted, the hothead from Texas had become increasingly unstable.

There was the famous seven-minute walk-off. The shouting matches with presidential candidates. Being kidnapped by irate taxi drivers. It was only a matter of time, the industry knew, before Don Cooder cracked like an overboiled egg.

Cheeta Ching knew that she was making a potentially disastrous career move. She also understood that if Cooder went off the deep end, whoever was his heir-apparent was certain to land her lucky ass in the Chair. And Cheeta Ching wanted to be the proud owner of that lucky ass.

Industry critics all but wrote her professional obituary when she accepted the BCN weekend anchor slot. In interviews, she shrugged off all predictions of doom. After all, she was Cheeta Ching. The Cheeta Ching. The only female Korean anchor on earth. Or at least outside Korea. Nothing had ever stood in her way.

Except, she had discovered to her everlasting chagrin, Don Cooder.

The man was like a starfish attached to an oyster with that damned Chair. He couldn't he pried up, knocked off, or smashed loose.

Not that Cheeta Ching hadn't tried. During one of their smoldering feuds, she had hired a group of thugs to jump him outside his Manhattan apartment crying, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

It should have sent him over the edge. It didn't. The man was a barnacle, inert and immovable.

After that, Cheeta shifted tactics, announcing the start of her heroic struggle to become pregnant. As Cheeta saw it, the publicity value would be incalculable. She was over forty, female, and a symbol to career-minded women across the nation. To have a child would have made her the ultimate emblem of having it all. And why not? It had worked for Candice Bergen.

Except that Cheeta Ching couldn't conceive to save her life.

It was embarrassing. Entertainment Weekly called her the "Little Anchor Who Couldn't." Don Cooder had ramrodded onto the air a special report, "Why Superwoman Can't Ovulate."

It was especially embarrassing because her husband was a gynecologist-turned-talk-show-host. They did it in every position except free-fall-but only because Rory's fingers couldn't be pried loose from the open aircraft door. He was petrified of heights.

Next, they resorted to every fertility drug known to man. Her biological clock ticking, every tabloid holding her up to ridicule, Cheeta Ching grew desperate as a starved barracuda.

Then, like a miracle, a man had appeared in her life. A Korean. Of course. Only a fellow Korean, a member of the most perfect race ever to grace a sorry world, could have helped barren Cheeta Ching to total, womanly fulfillment.

His name had been Chiun, but out of respect for his years, Cheeta always called him "Grandfather." She had never spoken of him to her husband. There was no need to crush his spirit. Rory had been certain that the oysters and Spanish fly omelette breakfasts he had endured for more than two years had done it.

For nine months now, Cheeta Ching had basked in the glow of positive press. BCN Weekend Report ratings were soaring, even as Cooder's were sinking. She had been cover-featured by People three times-once each trimester. Vanity Fair had a standing cover-shoot offer, preferably showing mother and child nude. Breast-feeding. In the rarified world of the celebrity anchor, Cheeta Ching was Queen of the Mountain-and determined to grind her stiletto heels into the eyes of the competition. It was only a whisper in the halls, but already they were talking about making a major change when Cooder's contract came up for renewal.

The Chair was as good as Cheeta Ching's.

All she had to do was live long enough to plant her lucky behind in it.

It was almost eleven o'clock now. Cheeta had been locked in her office since she had signed off the 6:30 feed and rushed from the newsroom.

"It's for your own good," said the producer, as he escorted her to her office. Security guards ringed her with drawn guns. Down the corridor, Don Cooder was incoherent with rage, screaming, and frothing at the mouth.

The remaining security force was sitting on him.

"I'm admiral now, right?" Cheeta had asked breathlessly.

"We'll talk about it later. Okay?" the producer returned.

"What about the seven o'clock feed?"

"It's a slow news day. We'll just replay the 6:30."

"Who's going to do the West Coast update?"

"Don't worry about that," the producer promised, shoving her into the office and closing the door. "Better lock it to be safe."

As the producer hurried away to deal with his temperamental anchor, Cheeta banged in the door and asked, "What about my Eyeball to Eyeball edition?"

"We'll let you know when the coast is clear."

Cheeta spent the next hour with one ear pressed to her locked office door, listening to the horrible sounds coming from the newsroom as the staff attempted to placate Don Cooder.

"We'll give you a raise, Don."

"Don Cooder's very soul has been wounded. It will take more than mere money to bind up his mortal wounds," he announced.

"We'll increase your operating budget. Add that backup science correspondent you wanted."

"You insult Don Cooder with a bribe of another color."

"How about you do a special special tonight?"

"A special special?"

"Yeah. On the blackout. You can do it in the Eyeball to Eyeball slot."

Cheeta tried to choke it down, but the shriek of anguish came out of her too-red mouth as raw sound.

"You bastard!"

"I'll do it," said Don Cooder in a suddenly placated tone.

At eight o'clock, Don Cooder had gone on the air, his hair sprayed into submission, his wild eyes almost calm.

As she watched on her office TV, Cheeta Ching's greatest hope slowly dwindled to nothingness. Namely that the brass would see the seven-minute blackout as a repetition of the famous seven-minute Don Cooder walkout and can the prima donna once and for all.

"My time will come," she hissed at the screen, while eating cold jungol soup. Once, the baby kicked. Cheeta slapped her belly and he settled right down.

When it was over, Cooder was knocking at the door, saying in an imitation Robert DeNiro voice, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

Cheeta sat very still in her desk and said nothing until the clumsy sound of his boots creaked away.

Less than an hour later, he was back doing a Jack Nicholson.

"Heeerre's Donny."

Cheeta refused to respond. Fortunately, no ax came splintering through the panel. Cooder went away again. From time to time, furtive footsteps returned to her office door. Cheeta ignored them, mentally vowing to outwait him, just as she would outlast her arch-rival in the long haul.

Hours had passed without any further sign of Cooder. Cheeta called around the studio. No one had seen him. But no one had seen him leave the building either.

With any luck, Cheeta hoped, he had gone to the john to have his long-overdue nervous breakdown. If only someone would tell her for sure. The cold spicy soup was repeating on her. Either that or she was having the weirdest contractions.

Cheeta was steeling her nerve for a tentative hallway reconnoiter when her office fax tweedled and began emitting annoying noises.

She turned in her seat and watched the sheet slide from the slot. She ripped it free and read it.

It was short:

BROADCAST CORPORATION OF NORTH AMERICA:

UNLESS TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS IS DEPOSITED IN SWISS BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER 33455-4581953 BY NOON TOMORROW, THE NEXT BLACKOUT WILL BE SEVEN HOURS, NOT SEVEN MINUTES. THINK OF WHAT THAT WILL DO TO YOUR RATINGS.

CAPTAIN AUDION

"Audion?" Frowning. Cheeta went to her wordprocessor. Her chief asset as a news reporter had been her aggressive take-no-prisoners style and her flat-but-photogenic features.

As weekend anchor, it had been her attention-getting voice and her mane of raven black hair.

Writing had nothing to do with any of it. She was paid over two million dollars a year to be a corporate logo that talked. The truth was, Cheeta Ching could barely spell. So she input the word "Audion" and waited for her electronic on-line dictionary to help her out with the unfamiliar term.

The database responded instantly.

AUDACIOUS: Brash, outrageous or unconventional.

"That's not what I asked for," Cheeta complained. Then she noticed she had misspelled the word and the database had given her the nearest equivalent. She retyped the word again, this tune using both typing fingers.

AUDION: A triode or vacuum tube used in early television development.

"Hmmmm," said Cheeta, swiveling back to her faxphone. As a journalist, she had received her share of anonymous death threats-most, she was convinced, came from Don Cooder. As a precaution, Cheeta had an AT D device attached to her phone that gave a digital readout of the last number that had called. She pressed the memory button.

A ten-digit number marched along the readout screen and froze. Picking up the phone, she dialed it. The phone rang six times, and there came the click of a second line cutting in.

A crisp woman's voice at the other end said, "Burner Broadcasting."

Cheeta hung up an instant ahead of her own gasp.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," she told her nest of inanimate electronics. "You have just given me the greatest story of my career."

"Story?" A low voice called through the door. "What story?"

Cheeta froze. Forcing a lilt into her barn owl voice, she called, "Fooled you, Don. Just testing to see if you're still there."

"I'm not Don Cooder," said the unmistakable voice of Don Cooder.

"And I'm sleeping on the office couch tonight," returned Cheeta Ching, getting up to turn off the lights.

After waiting a full minute, she got down on her hands and knees and peered under the door.

An unblinking bloodshot blue orb was staring back at her.

"Comfy?" she asked the eye.

The eye refused to answer. Neither did it blink. It was pretending it wasn't there. Or something.

Noticing some dust along the carpet edge, Cheeta puffed at it hard.

"Arggh," said the eye, going away. Ostrich-skin boots hopped and danced out in the well-lit corridor.

"Something in your eye?" Cheeta taunted.

"You'll never read news in this town again," Cooder warned, stomping off.

"Pleasant dreams," she returned, struggling to her feet. She threw herself on the divan and moved her bloated body so the springs creaked noticeably. The stomping stopped. But in the quiet that followed, Cheeta could hear labored breathing. Cooder had obviously tried the old trick of walking in place to give the impression he had gone away.

After a while, heavy footsteps did pound away, sounding disappointed.

Cheeta went to her window, which overlooked the studio's Forty-third Street entrance. A dark figure in a Borsalino hat and holding a hand up to one eye flung itself into a waiting taxi, which roared away like a fat yellow jacket.

Cheeta eased the door open a crack. Seeing the coast was clear, she slipped out the back door and hailed a taxi with a two-fingered whistle.

"La Guardia," she told the driver.

"Ain't you Cheeta Ching, the anchor lady?"

"No, I'm Cheeta Ching the superanchor," Cheeta spat back. "And after tonight, no one will doubt it."

"Fine. Just don't have your brat in my back seat, okay?"

"You should be so lucky," Cheeta snapped back. "My baby is going to be bigger than Murphy Brown's." She reached into her purse, fished around, and her tightly knit eyebrows separated in dull surprise.

Noticing her expression in his rearview mirror, the cabby asked, "Forget your wallet?"

"Worse. My pills."

"Should I turn around?"

"No," Cheeta said firmly. "The story always comes first. Besides, I'm only going to be away a few hours."

Chapter 7

The biggest flap ever to hit television had turned into the story of the decade with the transmission of a handful of extortionary faxes to the four broadcast networks-and no one knew what to do with it.

At MBC, Senior Anchor Tim Macaw ran his hand through his boyish salt-and-pepper hair as he read the fax over and over with innocent-looking, uncomprehending eyes. In an age where maturity of face and voice lifted ratings, he was rarity-a youthful anchor. Critics dismissed him as Tom Sawyer with a sixty-dollar haircut and dressed up in a Pierre Cardin suit. But he appealed to blue-haired elderly women, and while it was not much of a demographic niche, he sold of lot of Efferdent and Tylenol.

"Captain Audion? Is this on the level?" he asked his producer.

"No one knows."

"But it could be for real?"

"There's no telling."

"Should we break in with a bulletin?"

"If we do, it could be the worst gaff since KNNN almost aired that hoax report that the last president had died."

Tim Macaw frowned, his youthful features gathering like a Kleenex dropped into water.

"I'm not taking responsibility for this," he said petulantly.

"Good. I'll kick it upstairs. It sounds like something for legal anyway."

"Yeah, this is legal's turf."

And two of the most powerful men in broadcasting went their separate ways, relived that they had avoided a potentially career-wrecking bear trap.

At ANC, Dieter Banning had just drawn on his trademark trenchcoat and was about to leave for the night when Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler rushed in, clutching a shiny but smudged fax.

"Dieter-this just came off the newsroom fax."

Dieter Banning was widely considered to be the smoothest, most cosmopolitan anchor in modern television. His round Canadian consonants were invariably delivered in impeccable style. He projected the image of a man of the world-cool, unflappable, and one of the few anchors on TV whose hair looked like his own.

"What kind of bullshit is this?" he yelled, cigar ashes falling on the fax signed "Captain Audion."

Ned Doppler snatched the fax away, his protruding ears red.

"Don't burn it, your moron!" he snapped. "It may be news! I'm giving you the option of going live with it.

Banning wrinkled his pointed nose at the fax. "Is it for real?" he muttered, feeling for something lodged in his left nostril with a thumb.

Doppler shrugged. Banning frowned. The two men stood, toe to toe, sizing one another up like gladiators in some electronic arena.

Both were thinking the same thought.

If I go on the air with this, it could be a career maker. If I don't, it could break me. On the other hand, if it's a hoax I'll never live it down.

"Has it been checked out?" Banning pressed, wiping his thumb clean on the inside of his lapel.

Doppler fixed Dieter Banning with his frank, expressive eyes, like twin marbles sunk into Silly Putty. In spite of his protuberant ears and overfreckled cheeks, and despite his resemblance to a boozy Howdy Doody, Ned Doppler was considered by many to be the most trusted man in TV news since Walter Cronkite.

"How do you check out an anonymous fax?" he retorted.

"You know," said Dieter Banning, flicking cigar ash onto a carpet that looked as if it had been pulled from a burning tenement, "I'm just going to pretend I never saw this. How's that?"

"It's your career," Doppler growled.

Banning smiled broadly. "Only if you have the balls to use it on Nightmare."

"It's Nightmirror and you know it."

"I was thinking of your next night's sleep," grinned Dieter Banning, striding from the room.

Ned Doppler stood watching him go. "Putz," he said softly. It was ten past eleven. He was on live in twenty minutes and he didn't have his lead written.

He fished into his pocket for his lucky quarter. It would not be the first time he was prepared to risk his career on the outcome of a coin toss . . .

Eventually, a producer at the fledgling Vox newsroom bit the bullet. He called his counterpart at BCN.

"Yeah, we got one," said the BCN producer. "Did you?"

"Yeah. Think it's legit?"

"Sonny, if you don't know by now, you ain't never gonna know." And the BCN producer slammed down the receiver and raced to his office TV. He turned on Vox, hoping they would break the story. That way, BCN could use it, falling back on the Vox report for credibility. If it went sour, Vox would take the heat. If not, it was a story BCN would dominate. Vox ran their newsroom as if it were a sitcom, complete with studio audience, orchestrated applause, and canned laughter for the human interest stories. They weren't even in BCN's class.

But Vox didn't break in with a bulletin.

Unhappily, the BCN producer pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and draped it across the mouthpiece of his office phone. He called his counterpart at MBC.

"This is your counterpart at another network," he said through the muffling handkerchief.

"BCN, right?"

"You can't prove that."

"Sure I can. I just got off the phone with both ANC and Vox. They got faxes signed Captain Audion, too."

"Damn. Are you cutting in with it?"

"Why don't you tune in and find out," said the MBC producer, hanging up.

For the BCN news producer, it was pressure beyond belief. All of his competition had the story now. It was just a matter of minutes-perhaps seconds-before someone broke in.

As the seconds crawled past and salty sweat oozed out of his forehead, he decided that the network that was dead last in the ratings could afford to give the one-armed bandit of destiny a hard pull.

"Is Cooder still in the building?" he snapped into his intercom.

"No, sir."

"Then get me Ching. I know she's still here. She's been circling the Chair like a shark, hoping to go into labor live."

"Miss Ching left fifteen minutes ago."

"Is there anybody still in the building who can read news?"

"I'd be happy to give it a shot," said the secretary in a hopeful voice.

"Forget it."

The BCN producer settled heavily into his executive chair. He turned on ANC. It was almost time for Nightmirror. That goofball Doppler was sure to run with the story. He had looked silly for years and it never seemed to hurt his career.

But Nightmirror made no mention of the fax. Neither did MBC or Vox.

Potentially it was the story of the decade. All four networks were on ground zero-and no one knew what to do with it.

Chapter 8

Harold Smith had his tiny portable black-and-white set perched on his Folcroft desk. The reception was snowy and one of the rabbit ears was bent. He was watching Nightmirror. Had he been a viewer of TV during the medium's infancy he could be forgiven for mistaking the blurry talking head on the screen for Howdy Doody or a Mad magazine cover.

The sonorous voice of Ned Doppler came through the static like an audio beacon.

"And so it remains, seven minutes of television time lost to mankind. That's 420 seconds to you and an estimated 40 million dollars in lost advertising revenue to the networks. Will it matter? Stay tuned. I'll be back in a minute."

Harold Smith switched off the set, knowing that Doppler always came back only to say, "That's tonight's report. I'm Ned Doppler." Sometimes he did a program update. But never came back with any statement of substance. The tag was simply a device to trick viewers into watching the final block of Nightmirror commercials-usually for a national retail chain that had a hundred-year reputation and was recently found to have engaged in a pattern of racketeering and fraud in their automotive repair and appliance divisions. Smith had personally exposed them after being overcharged seven dollars on a muffler patch job.

Smith gave the other networks a final scan and switched off the set. It was midnight. None of the networks had floated so much as a hint of the extortionary fax transmissions. Perhaps they had dismissed them as crank faxes. Possibly none of them understood they were not the only recipient. At any rate, the networks were unlikely to break programming with bulletins now, with much of the country asleep or preparing for bed. It was the flip side of the same cynicism that motivates political leaders to schedule their press conferences an hour before the midday or evening news.

Smith recalled a nonsense adage: If a tree falls where no one can hear it, does it make a sound? Wryly, he wondered was it news if no one reported it?

Harold Smith knew the faxes were real. He knew this because he had an excellent idea who had originated them. Not in the absolute sense. But all the signs pointed in one direction.

Clearing his throat, he reached for the dedicated line to Washington.

"Yes, Dr. Smith?"

The President's answer was slightly hoarse. He had picked up on the fifth ring. Smith did not apologize for waking him. That was not how CURE worked. Although ultimately answerable to the executive branch, the President could not mandate CURE operations. That would invite possible political abuse. The chief executive could only suggest missions. Or he could issue the ultimate directive-to shut down CURE forever.

In this case, Harold Smith was merely keeping his president informed.

"Mr. President," he said, "the four major networks have received extortionary faxes demanding twenty million dollars from each, or all broadcast television will be blacked for a seven-hour interval."

"Is that so bad?" was the President's first question.

"It could be catastrophic. The public would be cut off from their most immediate source of news, not to mention passive entertainment. And the advertising revenue loss would exceed . . ." Smith consulted his computer ". . . 600 million dollars."

"But there's still KNNN. This only affects on-air broadcasting, right?"

"Mr. President, I have traced the faxes to their transmission source. They all come from the Kable Newsworthy News Network headquarters in Atlanta."

"What?"

"I have confirmed this to my satisfaction. KNNN appears to have launched a campaign to demoralize if not destroy network television."

"Smith, I find this very hard to believe. Here at the White House, we could hardly get by without KNNN."

"Mr. President, any hoaxer with access to a KNNN telephone could have sent those faxes. But to knock coast-to-coast television off the air requires enormous money and extremely sophisticated equipment."

"I know the competition out there is pretty fierce, but isn't this taking it too far?" the President said weakly.

"There is reason to believe that KNNN head Jed Burner is directly culpable," Smith added. "This is no prank."

"You have proof?"

"I admit it is circumstantial, but it appears telling. The fax was signed Captain Audion."

"Audion?"

"An old-style vacuum tube critical to early TV reception."

"So? KNNN is cable."

"You might recall that in his more flamboyant days, KNNN president Jed Burner was known by the sobriquet of Captain Audacious."

"Audacious. Audion. Hmmm. Isn't that kind of obvious?"

"Only if the fax source is known to the people Captain Audion is attempting to extort. It was a blind fax. He cannot know I have determined its origin."

"How do you know these things, Smith?"

"Sorry. Privileged."

"The last guy told me you were like that. All right," the President said tightly, "what do you suggest?"

"The national economy, never mind public peace of mind, cannot afford a seven-hour blackout. I am putting my people in the field."

The President's swallow was audible. His raspy voice became tinged with reluctance. "If you think this warrants it."

"I do."

"Well, I guess there's nothing more to say, is there?"

"No, Mr. President. I just wanted you to know."

Harold Smith returned the red receiver to its cradle and lifted the blue contact phone handset, reflecting that it was always difficult breaking in a new chief executive. Now more than ever it was fortunate that CURE stood prepared.

There were a great many questions that remained to be answered, but one thing was certain. After tonight, the threat of a television blackout would be nullified.

The Destroyer would see to that.

Chapter 9

The first problem Remo encountered was getting out of the Atlanta airport.

Remo had been in airports all over the world, ranging from tiny cubicles in distant deserts to urban mazes. But this place was Byzantine. There was more space in the complex than out on the runways. Most of it seemed designed to impress other airport architects.

Remo got lost twice before someone directed him to the automated buses.

He got on the first one that arrived, and it began talking to him in a silly-ass 1950s robot voice.

"Welcome to Atlanta. Welcome to Atlanta. This is Terminal A. The next stop is . . ."

"Shut up," Remo snapped.

". . . Terminal B. If you would like me to stop at Terminal B, press . . ."

"Shut up!"

"Welcome to Atlanta. The next stop . "

There was no one else on the bus, so Remo gave the wall a kick.

"iiiisssss . . . squawwk . . ."

Immediately, he felt better. But not by much.

Once outside, Remo hailed a cab. The dogwood-scented city air was sultry entering his lungs. It was still too full of hydrocarbons and metallic traces for his taste, but it least it was a change. Remo wasn't so sure he liked living in New England. The climate and foliage reminded him of North Korea.

"Where to, friend?" the cab driver asked in a mellow Southern drawl.

"Peachtree," said Remo.

"Which Peachtree?"

Remo frowned. The call from Harold Smith had told him to go to the KNNN headquarters on Peachtree. That was all. It seemed enough.

"There's more than one?" he asked.

"More than one? There's dozens. Take your pick." The cabby began ticking off items on his thick fingers. "Peachtree Lane, Peachtree Road, Peachtree Street, Peachtree Circle and then you got your Peachtree Avenue-"

Remo brightened. "Avenue! That's it, Avenue."

"Good. Now is that Peachtree Avenue East, or Peachtree Avenue West?"

Remo's face fell. "Happen to know where the KNNN building is?"

"Which one?"

"The one on Peachtree," Remo said.

"There's two on Peachtree. They call them KNNN South and KNNN Not South."

"Not South?"

"You hang a North on a business down in these parts, you might as well torch it the next day."

"Take me to the nearest one," Remo sighed, settling back into the cushions. He was starting to feel glad the Master of Sinanju had decided to stay behind.

After receiving the word to move on KNNN from Harold Smith, Remo had reluctantly awakened Chiun. He would have preferred not to. But he knew that he would catch hell either way.

The first words out of the Master of Sinanju's excited mouth were, "It is happening? Is the baby coming! Tell me!"

"No, that's not it," Remo said hastily.

The Master of Sinanju had stopped in the middle of a frantic lunge for his traveling kimono, which lay neatly folded at the foot of his sleeping mat. "What? Then why do you awaken me?"

"Smitty wants us on this TV blackout thing," Remo had explained. "He thinks Jed Burner is behind it."

Chiun's haughty chin came up. "I do not know that name."

"You're one of the lucky ones. They used to call him the South's Loudmouth. He runs KNNN. That's where I'm headed. Now let's go."

To Remo's surprise, Chiun had tucked his hands into the sleeves of his sleeping kimono.

"I cannot go," he said stiffly. "If harm come to both of us, there will no one to take care of the boy."

"What's wrong with the freaking mother?" Remo had shouted.

"The boy needs a father," Chiun had said in a thin, remote voice.

"Sounds to me like the little bastard's going to have his pick," Remo shot back.

"I should be at Cheeta's side," said Chiun, averting his face.

"Then why aren't you?"

"Remo. It would be unseemly; Cheeta is a married woman. There are those who would gossip."

"Beginning with her husband. He'd have you both on his TV talk show so fast your head would spin."

"I have seen his program. It is filth."

Remo got control of his voice, "It's called The Gabby Gynecologist," he explained patiently, "and doctor talk shows are the latest thing."

"I will accept talk. But they show pictures. Gross pictures."

Remo folded his arms. "No argument there. But if anything breaks on Cheeta's condition, you might as well be with me as sleeping."

"How so?"

Remo repressed a smile. The hook was baited. Now to reel in the unwary fish...

"Where I'm going," he said, "I'll be on the ground zero of TV news for the entire world. If Cheeta's water breaks, KNNN will probably have it on the air before Cheeta even knows it's happening."

"In that case," Chiun said, "I will remain here, my ears glued to KNNN."

"The expression is eyes. Eyes are glued to TVs, not ears."

"Glued eyes cannot see and I intend to resume my sleep. But I will leave the television device on, so that if the name of Cheeta Ching is spoken, I will snap awake and race to her side."

Remo frowned. "Last chance. The scuttlebutt is that Cheeta's been keeping her legs crossed until sweeps start, anyway."

Chiun's hazel eyes grew round with shock. The hair over each ear shook imperceptibly. "Is this possible-to hold the baby within the womb until the mother wishes to release it?"

"For normal woman, I don't know. For Cheeta Ching, I wouldn't put anything past her. She's so ratings crazed, she'll do anything for more face time-or whatever they'd televise."

"So speaks the green voice of jealousy," Chiun sniffed.

"So speaks a man who's had more than one run-in with that barracuda," Remo snapped.

"My mind is made up."

And it was. Hurt, Remo had left. It was hard to believe. Chiun actually cared more about some brat who hadn't even been born yet than he did about Remo.

All during the flight to Atlanta, Remo's eyes had felt hot and dry and there was a funny tightness in his throat. He couldn't figure it out ....

Now, racing through downtown Atlanta, he was angry. And he was going to take his anger out on whatever was behind this.

Up ahead, Remo could see the distinctive KNNN Tower emblazoned with its world-famous corporate symbol-a nautical anchor. The roof was a clump of satellite dishes, like crouching spiders searching the heavens for prey.

"I just hope that this is the right building," Remo growled.

The cab driver hoped so too. His passenger was wearing a really fierce expression. And the way he was gripping the upholstery and shredding the stuffing gave a man a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Chapter 10

Jed Burner was the last person on earth anybody would have thought capable of transforming the face of television news.

"TV? Ah don't watch it," he had boasted upon assuming control of a tiny Atlanta UHF station his suddenly deceased father had built from the ground up. "TV's for setters. Ah'm ah doer. Ah've probably watched all of ah hundred hours of TV in mah entire life. Tops."

"So what do you want us to do, Mr. Burner?" asked his nervous station manager on the occasion of new owner Jed Burner first setting foot in the station he had inherited.

"How much this station gross in a yeah?" Burner had asked looking around the master control room and pressing buttons that interested him. Videotape squealed as it went into reverse and a thirty minute episode of Adventures in Paradise went onto the air backward. No one noticed.

"Currently we're losing a half million per quarter."

The sandy-haired man with the crinkling sea-blue eyes paused, took his Havana cigar out of his mouth and said, "Find me a sucka."

"Mr. Burner?"

"Ah'm unloadin' this sinkhole. Now get hoppin'."

The staff of WETT-13, "Your Window to the Sunny South," hopped out of the new president's office, their eyes dispirited. They hadn't expected any better. Jediah Burner was a playboy, a sailor of fast boats, a winner of gaudy brass trophy cups and a relentless pursuer of busty blondes. No one expected him to take the helm of anything as stationary as a troubled TV station.

A week and hundreds of cold calls later, they hopped back into his office.

"Who made the best offer?" Burner demanded.

"The ones who hung up laughing," said one.

"The others told us to shove it," added another.

Jed Burner eased his lanky frame into his seat, put his deck-shoe clad feet up on his desk, and tilted his yachting cap back with a cocked thumb. His eyes crinkled humorlessly.

"What we gotta do," he said slowly, "is turn this scow into a sloop. Make it shipshape. Give it some value."

The staff looked to one another. No one quite knew what that meant. Exactly.

The station manager took a helpful stab at it, though.

"We could put a sail on the roof, I suppose."

Jed Burner fixed him with a nautical eye. "Main or jib?"

"Reef?"

Burner's feet came off the desk and a tanned-brown fist slammed the green felt blotter. "Now yoah talkin'! We need us a new motto, if we're gonna catch us a friendly wind."

"The Flagship of the South?"

"Damn fine thinkin', theah. Get on it. Ah got me some practice runs to make. Anybody wants me, tough. Ah'm gonna be writin' mah name all over the Chesapeake. The Americas Cup ain't that far off."

And with that, Jed Burner left. The staff didn't lay eyes on him again for two months. But they heard about him. Twice he was reported missing. Once, his sloop had been boarded by the Cuban Coast Guard, but he had ended up having lunch with Fidel Castro. Each time, he turned up alive, smiling, and posing for the cameras with a vacuous blonde-sometimes two-rubbing herself against him.

Every time he resurfaced in the station, he had ditched the blonde, but never his smile or his cigar.

"We're still in the toilet," he grumbled on one of those rare occasions, looking at the most recent Arbitron book.

The station manager wore a glum face. "We tried everything, sir."

Burner scratched his beard. "Maybe we need a bigger sail . . . ."

"The one we got keeps getting blown off the roof. We've gone through seven already. It's been costing us dear."

"Dammit. Do Ah gotta do everythin' around heah? If a sail won't do it, fetch me up an anchor."

And with those fateful words, Jed Burner stalked from the building in search of a headwind and headnot necessarily in that order.

The staff looked to one another helplessly.

"Did he mean an anchor anchor or a news anchor?" asked the program director.

"It don't matter none," the station manager returned glumly. "We can't afford either."

"Let's price both and go with the cheaper option."

If the Savannah Nautical Supply House had been having their annual November sale a week later, WETT-13 might have gone the way of the Confederacy. They could have had a nice stainless steel twofluker for $367.99. A bargain. But they missed the sale by thirty-six hours and couldn't afford full price.

On the other hand, Floyd Cumpsty was willing to anchor the WETT-13 News for free.

"I'll even brown-bag my lunch so as not to put any strain on the station cafeteria," Floyd said with the youthful sincerity of a man who knew where he wanted to go in life.

"The station cafeteria," the personnel manager said, "is that broken down candy vending machine you passed in the hall. And why do you wanna go and work for nothing, boy?"

"I hear they make big money reading the news up North. I figure I can learn, get experienced, and seek my fortune up there."

"Sounds reasonable. Except for the living up north part. But first I gotta see if you have the qualifications."

"Yes?"

"Can you read, son?"

"Yes, sir. I'm a high school graduate."

"That hair sitting on your noggin, it the real McCoy?"

"Yes, sir."

The personnel manager stood up and offered a firm hand, "Then let me be the first to welcome you aboard the Flagship of the South. You're our first official anchor."

In those days, there was no news department. In fact, there were no scripts. The WETT anchor assembled his own scripts by cutting up newspaper headlines and changing enough words that no one sued. Then he read them into the camera, frequently mispronouncing words.

No one sued. But a lot of people watched. At first, with their jaws hanging slack in disbelief. Then, with their bellies shaking in laughter. WETT News became a favorite in dorm rooms and seedy bars. People caught on to the headline trick and big money was won and lost on which words the anchor would mangle.

Ratings rose. They did not soar. But a quarter point here and an eighth there meant that in six months they had crept up one whole point. Enough to become a blip on the local TV screen and lure in a few thrifty advertisers.

Eight months of steadily rising ratings later, Jed Burner called.

"Hey! How's the boy?"

"Fine, Mr. Burner. And my name is David. David Sinnott. "

"Now don't get all fussy with me, boy. Ah'm here off the coast, just cruisin' along, with Bubbles and Brenda. Ah heah we got us some upward movement in them poll things."

"They're called ratings. And we've jumped a point. It's not a lot, but-"

"It ain't beans and you know it. Don't you kid a kidder, heah? Now Ah got mah friends in town callin' me about this thing we got on the air."

"WETT News?"

"Yeah. That. Whose damnfool idea was that?"

David Sinnott winced. "It's bringing in some advertising now," he said hopefully. "Elmer's Linoleum Emporium, a couple independent filling stations, and we think the A r people are interested-"

"It bringin' in enough that Ah can sell this talky white elephant?"

"No, sir."

"My friends are also tellin' me they don't see hide nor hair of no anchor on mah roof."

"Oh," Dave Sinnott said, only then understanding that his boss had meant an anchor anchor. "Well, we priced anchors and they were a little out of our range."

"Listen to me, boy: You take that new advertisin' money and you sink some of it-Ah don't care how much-into a shiny new anchor so mah friends won't think Ah'm some kinda windy blowhard."

"Yes, sir."

"Only you don't put it on the roof. Since we got all these nice folks watchin' that fool news show, Ah want it up on the wall behind that idiot what's doin' the readin'."

"Yes, sir."

The nautical anchor was in place in time for the five o'clock news that very day. And it hadn't cost a thin dime. Dave Sinnott had bartered advertising time for the thing, which required four strong backs to carry it into the building.

The news anchor took one look at it and refused to go on the air.

"Are you kidding?" Floyd said tearfully. "This will ruin my career."

"Boy, your career's done. You just don't know it yet. Now you get your raggedy ass planted in that chair and you read."

Floyd Cumptsy cut his copy of the Atlanta Constitution more slowly that day, like a man who had come to the end of his string.

Half way through the broadcast, the anchor fell to the floor with a resounding crash. The other anchor-the one who was reading-kept on reading, his face turning red and his heart sinking along with his future.

Then the calls started coming in.

"Put up that damn anchor."

"Are you just going to let it sit there?"

"It's the best darn part of the show."

Dave Sinnott knew public interest when he saw it. Not bothering to wait for the commercial break, he walked onto camera range and personally hoisted the anchor into place. It immediately fell, breaking his foot in two places.

He hopped off the screen, venting choice curses.

The switchboard was flooded with more calls. Taxis began dropping off excited viewers, offering to put the anchor up themselves. Fistfights broke out over the privilege.

The first three who offered got the job. As the seated anchor droned on and on, slowly sinking into his chair, three Georgia Tech boys got the other anchor up and banged it into place, all but drowning out the weather with their hammering.

The next day, offers to syndicate WETT News poured in.

"How many buyers we got?" Jed Burner demanded over the cellular phone hookup when he got the word.

"Thirty," Sinnott said proudly, "and they're still coming in."

"What's the best of the lot?"

"Two thousand."

"Two thousand? Some prime jerk wants to buy mah whole station foah a measly two thousand dollahs?"

"They don't want to buy the station. They want to buy broadcast rights to WETT News."

"Explain it so a lil' ole sailor boy can get the nut of it, will you, son?"

"We have over thirty cable stations vying for the right to rebroadcast WETT News. The best offer is two thousand dollars. Per episode. Seven days a week is fourteen thousand dollars, times fifty-two weeks is-"

Jed Burner interrupted with a question. "What's cable?"

"It's TV that is carried on wires. They gotta hook it up special. They also call it pay TV."

"How come?"

"People pay for it."

"You joshin' me, son. TV's free. It's like oxygen. You buy a set and plug 'er in and you're set for life. Except for the commercials. Think we can get better ratin's if we cut out those dang commercials?"

"Mr. Burner, if we had more commercials we'd be in the black."

"Tell me some more about this cable thing," Jed Burner said slowly.

Station manager Dave Sinnott patiently explained cable. He tried to keep it simple. He knew his boss had the approximate attention span of a gnat.

"Never work in a million years," Jed Burner said at the end of it.

"It's not doing so bad now. These cable outfits are hungry for product. And they'll throw just about anything on the air. That's why our news looks so good to them. It's different."

"All them wires. Ridiculous. But back to this heah rebroadcast rights thing, are these good offers?"

"Depends on what you compare them to."

"Try comparin' them. Just to humor a poor cracker."

"Well, compared to a locally produced show with its budget, these are right handsome offers," Sinnott admitted.

"Ah hear a 'but' in your voice, boy."

"Compared to what network affiliates pay for the big news shows produced up North, it ain't cowflop."

Interest flavored Jed Burner's cornpone voice. "By what kinda margin?"

Sinnott floated some figures and the silence on the line was prolonged. The rush of ocean water past a fiberglass hull was indistinguishable from static in his ear.

He was about to ask if his boss had fallen overboard when Jed Burner's voice came back on the line. Gone was the loud, obnoxious attitude which, combined with his brash personality, had caused the print press to dub him "Captain Audacious."

"You listen here. Forget all that rebroadcast stuff. Ah want you to take that there dinky news show we got and you build it up. Heah? Built it up so that it's bigger and better than the Northern shows. With me so far?"

"Yes." The station manager's voice was a froggy croak.

"Then you offer it around. But you undercut them network scuts. You undercut 'em good. Ah want WETT News carried on every station in the cottonpickin' country."

"Impossible!"

"Ain't nothin' impossible. What's it gonna take?"

"Money. Millions."

"Okay, you got the millions. Ah got a few shekels jinglin' in mah jeans. Mah daddy made himself a fair pile afore he passed on, even if he did kinda let this station thing go to pot. Anythin' else you'll be needin'?"

"Yes," Sinnott said, crossing his fingers, "a bigger anchor."

"Son, you got not one, but two anchors. Moolah's no object. Just make sure it's nailed down real good this time."

"That's not the kind of anchor I meant."

"What other kind is there?"

"The news reader. They call them anchors, too."

"Then we already got two anchors. Am Ah right?"

"We need a bigger one."

"Which should be bigger?"

Sinnott thought fast. "Both. Especially the talking one."

"Guy looks pretty hefty to me."

"Ah meant a bigger name. One more recognizable. One of the network anchors."

"Who's good, but cheap?"

"Don Cooder."

Then Jed Burner blurted out the question that was subsequently reported in Time, Newsweek, TV Guide, the New York Times-the question that would haunt him in the months and years to come.

"Who the hell is Don Coodah?"

At first, it was seen as a colossal joke. The brash entrepreneur who ran a station no one wanted, trying to launch a national newscast based on a spoof of the news.

It would never have gotten off the ground had the station manager not understood that he had hit the bottom of his television career. It was make WETT News work or manage a Burger Triumph. If Dave Sinnott could find one that would take him on.

It was 1980, and the booming cable TV industry, barely a decade old, was facing its first challenge: Satellite TV.

Dishes were already beginning to appear in backyards and hotel lawns and bar roofs in anticipation of the next boom in broadcasting.

Meanwhile, broadcast TV, reeling from the challenge of cable, fought back on every front. The first casualty was their own anchor system. Virtually overnight, the old guard of anchors, seasoned professionals, many of whom learned their craft on radio, were unceremoniously canned.

And a crop of young manicured and tonsured celebrity anchors were brought in to replace them. Thus, the cult of the anchor was born.

Overnight, the cream of television broadcast journalism was on the street.

WETT News had its pick. So Dave Sinnott hired two of the best of the dispossessed anchors.

They weren't flashy. They weren't backed up by computer graphics or identifying Chyrons, But they could read copy off a teleprompter and switch to script without skipping a syllable.

Virtually overnight, WETT News was respectable.

"We have to change our name," Dave Sinnott, now doubling as uncredited news director, said one day. "Folks are still laughing."

"Is that bad?" Jed Burner asked via transatlantic telephone.

"Very bad. We have to be serious now. An image change would help."

"Okay-but we gotta keep the word News in there. How about Kable News-KN?"

"Cable is spelled with a C."

"No, Kable was spelled with a damn C. And you gotta add somethin' dignified."

"Like what?"

"Do Ah gotta come up with all the brilliant stuff in this operation? A dignified word. Try to get the word 'news' into it some more."

"Twice?"

"Why not? We're the news that is news. The newsy news."

"How does Newsworthy News sound?"

"Sounds dang dignified. Everything people say Ah ain't. Haw. Listen, gotta go. Dixie here's gettin' that dewy look about her. Ah want us up and runnin' in a yeah. Got that?"

"A year? You want a national news network in a year?"

"Yeah. Normally Ah'd of given you only six months. But I can't on account of Ah'm embarkin' on a round the world cruise, just me and mah forty footer-and Trixie and Dixie and Hortense."

"Hortense?"

"Somebody's gotta do the scullery stuff. Ah told mah attorney to write you all the checks you want. If Ah come back in a yeah and find Ah'm dead broke and there's nothin' to show for it, Ah'm gonna take that expensive anchor of yours, tie you and him both to the real anchor, and drop you-all in white water. Catch mah drift?"

"If it can be done, you'll have it, Mr. Burner."

And so the race to launch the first national news network had begun, run by a man who had almost unlimited capital and nothing to lose.

When the first commercial Satcom satellite went up, Dave Sinnott purchased a transponder.

Then he had an office building behind WETT headquarters razed to the ground and a satellite dish farm laid out in neat white rows, like ridiculous but very attentive sunflowers.

KNNN quadrupled its anchor staff, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, just reading news. It was rough, it was hectic-and it carried over its original local audience just from the sheer ineptitude of it all.

"The locals love it," he was informed in a staff meeting. "They're laughing twice as much."

"It's not supposed to be funny now!" Sinnott complained.

"And they're asking after the anchor."

"Which one?"

"Well, the one with the flukes mostly, but we're getting fan mail on the readers too."

Dave Sinnott sighed, giving in to the inevitable. "Put it up again," he said weakly. "No, scratch that. Make it part of our logo. Burner'll like that."

After six months, Sinnott received a staticky call that had been patched through from the sloop, Audacious.

"This heah's Jed," the familiar boisterous voice announced.

"Where are you?" Sinnott asked.

"Becalmed off the Cape of Good Hope. Just like Vasco Da Gama, except he didn't have a lot of broads yappin' in his ear day and night. Listen, Ah been listenin' to the shortwave broadcasts. Folks is laughin' at me. What you're doin' up there?"

"We're in all fifty states, twenty-four hours a day. By satellite. No wires."

"They're sayin' Ah'm losin' a cool million a week."

"In another six months, we'll be all turned around."

"If you hadn't a said that, Ah was gonna turn mahself around and come wring your neck. You got six months, boy, or you're gonna have barnacles all over your back teeth. You and that anchor."

"There are sixteen of them now, Mr. Burner."

Dave Sinnott redoubled his efforts. He created bureaus in seven states. And all over Canada. That only added to the roughness of the broadcasts as miscued remote reporters were caught picking their noses on camera, and anchors could be heard belching and farting.

Once, an aging anchor stroked out on camera. Ratings roared. Millions turned in to his replacement hoping for a repeat performance.

Then Sinnott hit upon an idea worthy of his boss. The skies were full of satellites beaming network newsfeeds to affiliates for use on their local broadcasts, and these same transponders would relay local news clips for network use. Except the networks refused to release their clips until after their 7 p.m. feeds. In other words, the affiliates were expected to pitch in to help the networks and in return they got stale leftovers.

It was the era of the ninety-minute local newscast. News was booming. Local stations from Dry Rot, Georgia to Bunghole, Oregon were fielding news crews equipped with microwave vans and satellite uplink capability. And even then they were starved for pictures.

So KNNN offered them instant access to their feeds. Free. In return for reciprocal access to theirs.

It was unheard-of. It was absurd. Everyone expected a hitch or trick or catch. There wasn't one.

Once KNNN hooked a few affiliates here and there, the others came like lemmings. And the networks howled. But there was nothing they could do. Everyone was satellite dependent. And every hour of every day, the transponders relayed raw transmissions up and down, between cities, among states and across oceans, feeding a growing insatiable appetite for the news.

There was no stopping it.

By midyear, KNNN News became the most watched news program in human history-not necessarily because of its content.

While broadcast news grew increasingly slick, polished, and show bizzy, KNNN News offered a relaxed alternative. Down Home news. It became their official slogan.

At the end of the twelfth month, Jed Burner docked, dropped anchor, and was airlifted to KNNN Headquarters on West Peachtree.

He hardly recognized the place. It was a beehive of activity. People were running around, frantic and white-faced.

"What in hell's goin' on?" he roared.

"We've gone black," a harried voice cried.

Jed Burner brightened. "Damn fine. And right on schedule."

"It's the third time this month!"

"Now we're talkin'!"

He burst into the station manager's office.

"Ah heard the good news, boy."

Dave Sinnott stopped shouting into the phone long enough to ask, "What good news?"

"We're in the black!"

"No, we've gone black. It's not the same thing."

Jed Burner puffed furious cigar smoke. "Explain it to a li'l ole country boy."

"We've lost our uplink to the satellite transponder."

"You ain't doin' so good," he warned.

"We can't get the TV signal up."

"Yeah . . . ?"

"That means it can't come down to the earth stations for rebroadcast!"

"We're dead, then?"

"No. We lose our picture a lot, actually."

"How about our financial picture?"

"We turned a profit two months ago. Everbody's watching us, from the White House on down to the outhouse."

"They laughin'?"

"Maybe some."

"They stickin' with us?"

"Not for long," Sinnott admitted.

"We're losin' ratin's, then?"

"That's not how it works anymore, Mr. Burner. People don't watch TV like they used to. They don't just sit and watch a show. They skip around, graze a little here and there. Channel surfing, they call it. We're perfect for that. As soon as five thousand people turn us off, there's another six tuning us in."

"What's that mean?"

"It means," said Sinnott, his chest puffing up in justifiable pride, "that on any given week, anyone with a satellite dish or a cable box is watching us. Everyone. "

Jed Burner seized his cigar as the thought sunk in. He made faces. The thought appeared to be sinking more slowly than it should.

"Don't you realize that this means?" Sinnott blurted. "You can sell this station for a bundle."

"Sell! Are you loco? Ah ain't sellin' mah pride and joy. And what's more, you're fired for suggestin' such a dastardly thing."

"Fired? I made KNNN what it is today."

Jed Burner poked his station manager in the chest with his cigar. "With mah money. And Ah'll pay you six figures a yeah to go live out your lucky-dog life in obscurity. From now on, KNNN was mah idea, mah vision, mah-"

"But that's not fair!"

"Son, life ain't fair, but it was mah money that done it. That's all that counts in life. Who's signin' the damn checks. Now be a smart fella and take mah generous offer."

Dave Sinnott did. It was either that or continue working for a lunatic.

Jed Burner called a press conference that very day. He looked tanned and fit in immaculate white ducks, and he was holding two very photogenic blondes rented for the occasion.

"It was mah idea," he said through cigar-clenching teeth. "From the start."

"What about Dave Sinnott?" he was asked.

"I didn't catch that name, boy."

"He was your station manager."

"Front man. Just in case Ah piled up on a reef somewhere. All the time Ah was away Ah was guidin' things by telephone."

"Isn't that an unusual management style for a TV network?"

"If Ah'm gonna cover the entire globe, Ah had to see it with mah own eyes, didn't Ah?" Burner countered.

"Globe?"

"That's right. KNNN is nationwide after only a yeah. We're puttin' news bureaus all over the dang world now. We're gonna be global inside of two yeahs."

The assembled press gasped.

And Jed Burner took his cigar out of his big mouth and beamed broadly.

"They don't call me Captain Audacious for nothin', boy."

True to his word, KNNN went global. When wars broke out, KNNN was there first, booking the best hotels. If there was a coup, KNNN was first on the scene. In the global village, KNNN was the town crier of many faces-fast, rough, sloppy, but instant.

Jed Burner explained it like this in a Playboy interview:

"Not everybody's got the time to brew a good pot of coffee. We're the instant brand. Folks want brewed, they wait for the networks to serve some up. You want it now, you got it-on KNNN."

For one roller-coaster decade, KNNN could do nothing wrong. If their coverage of the Gulf War infuriated some viewers, it didn't matter. There were always more. Presidents swore by KNNN. The Pentagon watched it constantly. If the farting and the belching died down as more anchors were added and coffee and lunch breaks inaugurated, people still tuned in hope of catching KNNN at an awkward moment.

And as KNNN's fortunes climbed, the networks declined. Strapped for operating funds, they closed bureaus all over the globe. KNNN snapped up the leases the next day. Before long, the networks were carrying KNNN footage on a regular basis, trading off economy for the humiliation of advertising their chief rival.

The night broadcast TV went black for seven minutes. Accompanied by his latest trophy wife, his hair now as gray as an old salt's, Jed Burner was on his 129-foot yacht equipped with helipad and Superpuma helicopter.

The deck phone rang. It was his private secretary.

"Mr. Burner," she said tightly, "the networks are blacked out."

"Screw 'em. They're dinosaurs." He clapped and hand over the telephone mouthpiece and hollered in the direction of the bow. "Honey, you're gonna pull a pretty hamstring if you keep bendin' yoahself into petzel-like shapes."

A shrill female voice called back. "I'm practicing for my next video." "Ain't you done enough of them things? Ah don't want nobody sayin' a wife of mine's gotta work her butt off for a living."

"My last workout video grossed two hundred million."

"For Gosh sake's, woman, don't stand so close to the dang rail! You might tumble over and drown that sweet two hundred million dollah butt of yours."

The telephone continued squawking. "Mr. Burner? Mr. Burner? Are you still there."

"Huh? Oh, yeah. Ah'm heah. What was you sayin' about the TV?"

"They just came back on. It looks like all broadcast stations across the country were knocked off the air. It's never happened before."

"Fucking fantastic!"

"Sir?"

"That means all those frustrated couch 'taters grabbed up their clickers and tuned in to lil ol' us. Are our anchors on top of this?"

"Yes, sir. We were the first to air the story."

"Honey, KNNN is always the first to air a story. So don't you go all redundant on me."

"Yes, Mr. Burner."

Hours later, the phone rang again.

"Mr. Burner, Cheeta Ching is here in your office. She's demanding an interview with you. What do we tell her?"

Jed Burner wrinkled his sun-beaten forehead, crinkling his sea blue eyes and asked the last question the man who transformed the way America gets its news would be expected to ask.

"Who the hell is Cheeta Chang?"

Chapter 11

Cheeta Ching, oblate as a satiated python in her dark red Carolyn Roehm maternity coat, teetered on her stiletto heels in the anteroom of Jed Burner's office.

"I heard that!" she hissed. "He asked who I was!"

The KNNN secretary clapped a brown hand decorated with gold fingernails over the telephone receiver.

"I'm sure Mr. Burner misunderstood you, Miss Ching."

"He did not! And he got my last name wrong. It's Ching, not Chang. Chang is Chinese. Chinese anchors are three-for-a-buck. I happen to be one hundred percent Korean. Who the hell does he think he is?"

Fear was in the secretary's liquid eyes now. "Please don't be upset, Miss Ching. I am sure we can work this out."

"Prove it. Answer this: Whose number is 404 555-1234?"

"Why, that's Mr. Burner's private number. How did you get it?"

"Not important. Tell that mouthy ignoramous I got his fax." Cheeta lifted her voice into a sandblasting screech. "You hear me, Captain Audion?"

"It's Audacious," said the secretary, clapping a firm hand over the phone mouthpiece.

"It's Audacious," echoed the muffled voice of Jed Burner. "And tell that sweet-talkin' woman Ah'm on my way."

"Yes, Mr. Burner." The secretary hung up.

Cheeta blinked. It seemed too easy. "He's coming?" she asked in a taken-aback voice.

"That's what he said."

Cheeta's puzzled frown was a pancake question mark.

"I think," the secretary said, "your voice reminded him of his wife."

Cheeta calmed down. "I've always admired Layne for telling the truth about Vietnam. Is she still getting death threats?"

The secretary indicated a vent near the ceiling. "See that? Behind the grille there's a marksman with a .454 Casull all set to pop you if you make a wrong move."

Cheeta's neck and ears paled. But her face didn't change color visibly. It couldn't. It was too heavily made up.

"And there's other security all about the building," the secretary further explained, "including antiaircraft guns up on the roof. Folks have long memories. Especially down here."

"Personally, I supported her work in Haiphong," Cheeta said in a too-loud voice.

From the vent, the cocking of a rifle came distinctly.

"Better get up on the roof," the secretary said, urging Cheeta to the elevator.

"Why the roof?"

"Cause Mr. Burner has his helipad up there. He's flying in."

Cheeta Ching walked backward on red heels, one eye on the dark ceiling vent. Her center of balance wasn't what it should have been, and when she stumbled back into the elevator, a heel caught and the door closed on the sound of her yelp of pain as she landed on her hormonally inflated backside.

"Going up?" an unfamiliar voice asked.

Cheeta looked up. A man was standing in the elevator. He wore a rumpled raincoat of some sort. It was open and the man's hairy legs showed.

Oh God, a flasher, thought Cheeta-until her gaze, traveling up the man's muscular calves, came to his sinewy thighs. He was not wearing pants. He wasn't even wearing underpants. But he wasn't naked either. He wore some kind of green plaid miniskirt. Her almond eyes shot upward. The man's face, made insect-unrecognizable by wide sunglasses and shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, was looking down at her with a cold remoteness.

"Nice timing," he said.

Then a gloved hand came out of a raincoat pocket and pointed a silenced gun barrel at the largest target in the tiny elevator.

Cheeta Ching's bulging stomach.

Jed Burner was listening to the familiar screechy voice over the rotor whine.

Normally, it was hard to carry on a conversation in the Superpuma. It was as soundproofed as a helicopter could be-which meant that holding a conversation under the whirling rotor mast was akin to hearing confession in a giant Mixmaster.

"She'll be perfect!" Layne Fondue-despised by a generation of US servicemen as "Haiphong Hannah" Fondue-was saying.

"Ah never heard of her," Burner snapped.

"She's the most popular TV anchor in journalism."

"So? Ah don't traffic in star anchors. They cost too damn much."

"I'm not talking about hiring her for KNNN. I want her in my next exercise video, Layne Fondue's New Mother Workout."

"We wouldn't need her if you'd just get pregnant like Ah keep tryin' to get you," Burner shouted back.

"I think I must have inhaled some Agent Orange during the war," Layne muttered, primping her pile of streaked hair that made her resemble a hungry Pekinese. "It blocked my tubes or something."

"You ask me, you ain't tryin'. Ah settled down so Ah could have a son and heir, and all Ah get is yappin'. Ah want yappin, Ah'll buy a cockah spaniel. Which come to think of it, you're gettin' a trifle doggy around the edges."

"You sexist pig!"

Burner beamed broadly. "Say it again. Ah don't think the Almighty got the word yet."

Layne Fondue took nothing from nobody. Unless one counted her career, which she had wheedled out of her famous actor-father. She had enjoyed a brief career as an ingenue, rode the celebrity activist circuit in the sixties and seventies while her physical assets succumbed to gravitational erosion, and as her politics went out of fashion, found a comfy niche as the premier exercise guress.

The fact that she had gone to Haiphong, Vietnam and done political commentary for the North Vietnamese, denouncing US soldiers as "baby-eating cannibals," had earned her the unshakable nickname of "Haiphong Hannah."

She was tough, she was hard, and she turned around in her seat and slapped her husband in the mouth.

Jed Burner picked his cigar off the floor, examined the stogie for damage, and blew on the gray ash. It burned red. He put it into his mouth, inhaled long and deep, eyes closed as if thinking.

While his wife watched, slowly relaxing, he suckerpunched her to the floor and kept her there with one foot.

"Let's get somethin' straight, heah," he said calmly. "Ah didn't marry you. Ah acquired you. That makes you mah property. In a manner of speakin'."

"You can't talk to me that way, you smug cracker!"

"Ah'm doin' it. And you gotta take it. Yoah pushin' fifty. You ain't crow bait. But you hang on a man's arm and smile and coo at his friends so he looks good. Ah like that. Folks respect me for my broadmindedness marryin' a pinko and reformin' her, makin' her respectable again. Not that you were all that respectable to start with." He rolled the cigar in his mouth. "Now do you behave or do Ah gotta really get rough?"

"I hate it when you pull that macho crap!"

Jed Burner beamed. "Then why ain't you strugglin' harder?"

The KNNN tower was once described by Architectural Digest as the only modern office building with a serious toadstool infestation.

In fact, it looked like just about any major office building in downtown Atlanta. There was too much glass, too much design, and an atrium with enough wasted space to warrant the architect being courtmartialed.

Except for the satellite dishes. They added that distinctive toadstool touch. There were three of them, each one aimed at different satellites orbiting somewhere in the heavens. Only one actually pointed at a satellite hanging over the Atlantic. The rest of the KNNN transponders were out over the Pacific. The signal was relayed over ground-based microwave towers to an earth station that connected with the Pacific birds. That was how KNNN fed a news-hungry world.

The satellite dishes made a shadowy cluster around the KNNN helipad, from which KNNN correspondents would be rushed to the Atlanta airport to wing their way to the world's trouble spots.

They also made excellent cover for when the Superpuma touched down.

"Better stay low," Jed Burner told his wife. "We're agoin' in."

Layne Fondue flattened and closed her eyes. She crossed her fingers as well. She was not big on obeying her husband. Except at times like these.

A lot of people thought she had married Jed Burner for his money. That was ridiculous. Layne Fondue was wealthy in her own right.

Or that it was a case of opposites attracting. That was absurd. Both were as mouthy as two human beings could be.

The real reason that the despised Haiphong Hannah-the most hated woman since Tokyo Rose or Axis Sally-had married Jed Burner was that he had almost as many enemies as she did.

The chief attraction was that Jed Burner came to the altar with a fabulous security system in tow. It was as simple as that. Theirs was a marriage of convenience-and mutual survival.

Layne figured if the worst happened, the bullet was as likely to catch him as her. She calculated her odds of surviving an assassin's bullet doubled whenever they traveled together.

So she stayed flat, with her husband's heavy foot on her left breast as the Superpuma settled onto the anchor-shaped helipad.

"Honey, we're home," Burner said, popping the door and stepping out.

"Coming, dear."

Layne Fondue sat up and followed Jed Burner as he slipped down a flight of steps to his private elevator.

That's when all the shooting began.

Chapter 12

Melvin "Moose" Mulroy liked his job a lot more before his boss got married.

Not that being head of security for the burgeoning Kable Newsworthy News Network was ever easy. It was just that there were triple the headaches involved in bodyguarding two flaming lunatics as one.

Moose Mulroy's troubles had started when Jed Burner married Haiphong Hannah Fondue. That was the bitch. Oh, it was one thing to pluck an aging spoiled rich kid falling overboard in a mint julip stupor. It hadn't happened so much since Captain Audacious had settled down.

But bodyguarding Haiphong Hannah was another matter. Moose Mulroy was forty-three years old---old enough to remember Layne Fondue when she had been a two-bit actress stepping everyone's lines on the silver screen. Nothing to write home about. No Jayne Mansfield. Certainly no Bridget Bardot-to Moose Mulroy the height of distaff thespian talent.

Moose had indelible memories of Layne Fondue's infamous trip to Haiphong, Vietnam to lend comfort to the enemy. He still had his "Hang Haiphong Hannah" bumper sticker on the back of his aging Thunderbird.

Now a lot of people disliked Jed Burner. He was a mouthy loose cannon. And an open mouth made a mighty tempting target. But folks hardly ever tried to kill him. Mostly, he was about the business of getting into trouble on his own hook.

But Haiphong Hannah was a mare of another odor. People were always sending her death threats, obscene faxes, and the occasional Fedex surprise package.

Moose didn't mind the live tarantulas so much. And the deer ticks hadn't been so bad. No one had actually acquired Lyme disease either time.

It was the crazies showing up at reception with the hidden weapons. That was the bitch.

The metal detector caught most of them before they got past the lobby. Except for the anticolorization nutjob with the hang glider. And Moose had personally brought him down with a lug nut and slingshot. That way, it looked like an accident, and no one sued.

The Vietnam vet with the plastique girdle had everyone sweating for three hours the day he showed up, demanding Haiphong Hannah be brought to him. But Moose had talked sense into that one.

At least he hadn't stormed the building shooting. Those were the guys who made Moose Mulroy break out in cold sweats every time the big revolving door went whisk-whisk-whisk.

The revolving door was going whisk-whisk-whisk now. The sound snapped Moose's attention as rigid as his spine aligning in anticipation of trouble. He fixed his eyes on the man walking in through the atriumlike lobby, towering for twenty stories of glorious, glassy, totally wasted space.

Immediately, Moose became suspicious.

He wasn't a suit. But he wasn't a cameraman either. They usually wore polo shirts and raggedy jeans.

This guy wore chinos and a T-shirt. He looked kinda fruity, except that he walked with a casual, almost aggravating, cock-of-the-walk grace. Like he owned the building. Moose noticed his wrists. Big wrists. Too big. They hardly looked real.

As the thick-wristed man walked toward him, his face unreadable, Moose noticed that his eyes had that flat, dead kinda look, the classic thousand yards stare of the Vietnam vet. Trying to be casual, Moose shifted his body as he stabbed a button on the monitor array, simultaneously touching the concealed buzzer button.

That alerted the hidden sharpshooters. They were the first line of defense, but a last resort. The uniformed security were already percolating around the lobby, putting themselves in position to surround the strange guy in the T-shirt.

The cameramen, of course, would be piling into the elevators to record the slaughter. The bastards. But company priorities were priorities. Mulroy was under explicit instructions to hold fire until the videocams were in place and taping. Even the wall-mounted security cams had a direct feed up to master control.

Mulroy released the button, looking up from the main monitor.

"Can I help you, sir?" he asked the approaching man.

"No, but you can help yourself."

"Come again?"

"You can tell me where to find Jed Burner."

"Mr. Burner is not in the building."

"Fine. You can tell me where I can find him, then."

"I can't do that without knowing your business with Mr. Burner."

The security team was hovering just behind the thick-wristed guy. With Moose ready to vault over the security desk, he would have no place to run.

Then the guy made it easy for everyone.

"My business is my business," he said.

"In that case, I'll have to ask you to leave." And Moose motioned for security to close in. The guy's clothes were tight. Not much danger of concealed weapons. He was thin as a rail too. Moose relaxed slightly. The guards were enough. No need to jump in. Besides, he was getting too old for that kind of crap.

One guard hung slightly back, one hand on the butt on his holstered revolver, while the flanking pair moved up to take the man by the elbows. They used both hands, just as Moose had instructed them, so the man would be instantly immobilized.

The hands came up and Moose Mulroy blinked.

The two guards were suddenly clutching one another, and the skinny guy, not six feet away just the blink of an eye before, was no longer there.

Moose blinked again.

And the guy shot up from under the desk top. Like magic. Moose Mulroy found himself looking into two dead eyes that smiled with a faintly humorous light even though the rest of the face wasn't smiling at all.

Moose was well-trained in what he did. He went for his sidearm. He heard the snap and felt the pull of his leather holster as it was unceremoniously detached from his gunbelt by a pinkish blur at the end of a thick wrist. The holster flew across the lobby, taking his revolver with it as a second hand-feeling like warm steel-took his throat while the first hand spun him around.

Resistance was the first thought in Moose Mulroy's mind. He knew a little judo, a smattering of aikido, and a lifetime accumulation of rough and tumble.

Resistance never got past the impulse stage, however.

For the man suddenly had Moose by his spine and suddenly the only thoughts in Moose's thick skull were those of pleasing the skinny guy with the irresistible hands.

Now Moose Mulroy understood that a human hand cannot reach in through flesh and walls of back muscles and seize a man's spinal column like it was a tree branch. He knew it, would have sworn to the impossibility of it. On a stack of bibles.

But standing at his security desk, looking at the two security guards doing a four-handed handshake while the third tried to separate them like Moe in a Three Stooges skit, Moose Mulroy knew without a doubt that a hand had wrapped around his spine. He could feel the fingers even through walls of muscles that felt dully painful-just the way they did that time in Pleiku when he had been bayoneted by a Vietcong sapper. It hurt. It hurt bad.

And the truly terrifying thing was that there was nothing Moose Mulroy could do about it.

The man spoke calmly into his left ear. "Say the magic words and keep your spine."

"Glad to," Moose grunted.

Before the man could instruct him further, the elevator doors opened and two sets of camera crews pounded out. They pointed their camcorders at Moose Mulroy standing there helplessly.

My job is history, Moose thought.

Aloud, he managed, "Get those cameras away from here! This is a hostage situation."

Wrong thing to say. The cameraman inched closer. The idiots obviously thought they were bulletproof.

Other security were arriving now. One guard asked a question.

"What do you want us to do, Moose-I mean, Mr. Mulroy?"

"Just relax. Nothing bad will happen if everyone relaxes." Moose directed his voice toward his captor. "Isn't that right, pal?"

"Depends on my mood," said the man in an unruffled voice. "I'm looking for Jed Burner."

"Not in the building," someone said. "Honest."

Then a desk phone rang. The man reached down and picked it up. He moved his body only slightly, but the hand holding onto Moose's spine moved with him. Moose moved too. He also saw stars. Electric green ones.

The receiver came up to Moose's ear. "Yes?" he grunted.

"Mr. Mulroy! Mr. Burner's helicopter just landed and there's something going on. I hear shooting."

"I'm a little busy right now," Moose grunted. "Can't someone else take it?"

Then through the earpiece came a shriek. It was no ordinary shriek. It sounded sharp enough to cut diamonds.

For the first time, a worried note crept into his captor's tone. "That isn't who I think it is?" he muttered.

"If you're thinking it's Haiphong Hannah, your thinking is right on the money."

"Actually, I was thinking it sounded just like Cheeta Ching. "

"That's possible, too. She blew in twenty minutes ago, all hot and bothered and looking for Burner."

"Damn," said the voice in Moose's ear, and suddenly Moose found himself walking backward toward the elevator, a human shield. It was his worst nightmare.

Security paced him every step of the way, hands on gun butts. No one was dumb enough to draw iron. And Moose fervently hoped no one would. He liked his spine-even though at this exact moment it felt like an arcing electronic cable in his back.

"You're my office guide," the voice said.

"We got pages for that kinda work."

"You just volunteered."

Then, they were in one of the elevators and the doors were closing on the frightened faces of the security team and the glassy fish eyes of the clustering videocams.

As the lift shot up, Moose grunted out a halting question.

"You here to kill somebody?"

"Maybe."

"If it's Haiphong Hannah, you'll get no argument from me."

"Right neighborly of you," said the voice of the man who owned Moose's spinal column. He showed his appreciation by giving a brain-darkening squeeze.

When Moose Mulroy regained consciousness some hours later, he was surprised to find himself alone and in one piece. The first thing he did was tear off his shirt and run screaming into the men's room.

The long mirror showed that a fist-sized area between his shoulder blades was a mass of purplish black, edged in green. It was the biggest, ugliest bruise Moose Mulroy had ever seen.

Otherwise the skin was completely unbroken. There wasn't a drop of blood. It made no sense, but for a month afterward Moose could still feel those strong fingers wrapped so tightly around his spine the fingertips must have met.

Ultimately Moose Mulroy had a lot of time to contemplate it all, because he found himself unemployed and on the street. He considered himself lucky.

Lots of folks ended up dead.

Chapter 13

Remo Williams released the security chief on the thirty-fourth floor, the top floor. The man made a pile in one corner of the elevator as Remo came out of the lift with every sense alert.

He found himself surrounded. By videocam lenses.

A man waved at him from behind his camera.

"Just pretend we're not here," he said in a friendly voice.

"That's right," chimed in a second. "We're just here to record events as they happen. Pay no attention to us."

"Do whatever you were going to do," encouraged a third cameraman.

And so, forefingers extended, and Remo began to methodically shatter each camera lens.

"Hey! You can't do that!"

"This isn't how it's done!"

"We're the media!"

Remo growled, "And here's the message: Get out of my way."

Their eyes blackening from sudden impact with recoiling viewfinders, the camera crews begrudgingly fell back.

There was only one security guard. He had his Glock up in a two-handed marksman's grip, the muzzle pointed at Remo. For a twelfth of a second.

Walking on the outside of his soles, Remo feinted, moved in, and used the man's own hands to crush the plastic gun into so much sharp black plastic shards.

He left the guard moaning and wringing his bloodied hands.

Heads poked out of half-open doors all along the corridor.

"Which way to the roof?" Remo asked.

Most of the heads withdrew like frightened gophers.

A hand snaked out and pointed helpfully in the direction of the ceiling. "Up. The roof is up."

"I know that, you dip. What I don't know is how to get there."

"Fire stairs. Straight ahead and turn left."

Then, a bullet ripped down through the ceiling tiles and forced the remaining heads to withdraw behind slamming doors.

Remo shot forward. A woman screamed. The high, piercing sound was joined by another scream. Both screams were ear-punishing. Yet they blended into one anguished otherworldly shriek as if vented by identical twins, dying in harmony.

Remo floated up the stairs, leaping over the sprawled bodies of security guards who had died defending their posts, and reached the roof.

It was a nest of satellite dishes. In the center of the nest, like a dragonfly, sat a luxury helicopter.

And standing in the shadow of the drooping helicopter blades was a small knot of people.

The knot consisted of two parts-a man and a woman, and another man with a woman.

The nearest pair whirled, and Remo recognized the flat, pasty face of Cheeta Ching. She was so frightened her face was shedding flakes of pancake makeup like dandruff.

"Ronco!" she cried. "Help me!"

"Ronco?" Remo said blankly.

"Stay back," the man with the gun said, pushing the barrel into Cheeta Ching's temple. He was tall, his features masked by oversized sunglasses and a big hat. He was using Cheeta Ching as a human shield, but Remo could see that his lower legs, visible behind Cheeta's, were bare.

"What makes you think that'll stop me?" Remo asked.

"Ronco! How could you!"

The gunman transferred the pistol muzzle to Cheeta Ching's bulging stomach. "Or I can waste the brat."

Remo stopped dead still. The baby was another matter.

"Just hold that pose," said the gunman, walking backward.

The other pair had frozen at the open door of the helicopter, Jed Burner turned and gave Layne Fondue a hard shove. On all fours, she scrambled into the helicopter.

Then the gunman resumed backing away, pulling Cheeta with him. Her almond eyes were wounded.

"Ronco!" she pleaded. "Don't let this happen!"

"Ronco," warned the gunman, "don't be a chump."

Remo stood, rotating his thick wrists absently. His face was stone.

The gunman reached the waiting helicopter and abruptly sat down on its sill. Remo saw his legs clearly. He was wearing a plaid kilt of some kind.

But Remo was keeping his eyes on the man's hands. To pull Cheeta Ching into the helicopter in her condition was a two-handed job. To pull it off, the gunman would have to point his weapon away from his captive.

Crossing the roof while the gun was pointing elsewhere was possible, Remo knew. But the weapon would have to be at least three feet from Cheeta for it to work. Any closer and it was even money Cheeta would catch a bullet.

Imperceptibly, Remo came up on his toes, ready to strike.

Then, behind him, KNNN cameramen poured out of the roof hatch, along with a pair of reporters clutching hand microphones. Fanning out, they called excited questions to no one in particular.

"Is this a kidnapping?"

"If so, who's being kidnapped?"

And the gunman whipped his muzzle back to Cheeta's belly.

"You!" he shouted, yanking Cheeta into the helicopter. "Keep them away or the slope gets a .45 caliber abortion right here!"

That decided it. Remo pivoted and began tripping legs. He caught videocams as they slipped from clutching fingers and smashed them under his feet. He made sure to pop cassette ports where he could and pulverize the cassettes, so that his face could not be broadcast.

The helicopter began to wind up.

"Nobody go near that bird," Remo warned, crushing a cassette to powder in a cameraman's face.

And no one did.

Blowing air and city grit, the Superpuma lifted off and racketed out to sea.

Remo watched it go. "Damn," he muttered. "Chiun is going to kill me."

A reporter shoved a microphone into his face and asked Remo a breathless question.

"Can you tell us what's going through your mind right now?"

Remo answered the question by using the mike to perform a radical tonsillectomy on the questioner.

The others withdrew.

"Pretend we're not here," one suggested.

"Pretend you're not here," Remo growled.

The KNNN news gatherers who could still walk under their own power hastily helped the others down the roof hatch.

Remo ignored them. His features grim, he watched the helicopter become a dwindling speck of light in the night sky.

When the sound of its rotors no longer reached his sensitive ears, Remo slipped jumped down the hatch and found an empty office, where he called Harold Smith.

"Smitty. Bad news."

"What is it, Remo?"

"I got here too late. Burner and Haiphong Hannah just took off with some guy in a kilt. They got Cheeta. She's a prisoner."

"What was Cheeta Ching doing there?"

"Who cares? Listen, if Chiun finds out I've blown this mission, there's no telling what he'll do."

"How can we stop it?"

"Search me. But I'll find a way."

And he did.

Twenty seconds later, the building filled with the tormented wrenching of metal under extreme stress. The awful sounds could be heard coming from the roof. When a two-man security team ventured up there, they came down, weapons mysteriously missing.

"I think we should evacuate the building," said one.

"Evacuate?" the station manager blurted out. "Why?"

"The guy on the roof told us we should."

"What kind of a reason is that?"

Then one of the satellite dishes sailed past the long eastern window, on its way to the sidewalk many floors below.

Staff surged to the window. Another dish cartwheeled past.

The station manager cleared his throat and rumbled, "I move we evacuate right now."

The evacuation was swift, orderly, and successful. Everyone exited the west side of the building, because the dishes seemed to be falling on the east face.

Eyes straining upward, the entire staff of KNNN waited for the third and last satellite dish to fall.

Remo Williams finished dislocating the last satellite dish from its roof base. He did this with the naked edge of his palm. The base consisted of steel struts painted white. They were built for support, not resisting hands that could by touch alone seek out weak spots and snap them with lightning blows that separated the metal along molecular lines, leaving superclean edges, as if giant bolt cutters had been brought to bear.

Remo left the last dish when it fell. KNNN was no longer transmitting. He went downstairs to report to Dr. Smith.

The building seemed deserted. Remo's acute hearing detected no sounds of life. Air conditioners hummed. Water moved through plumbing. A mouse chewed at a partition.

But no human heartbeats came to his ears.

He picked up a phone at random, holding the one button down.

"Smitty, good news. I solved the problem."

"How?" asked Harold Smith.

"I knocked KNNN off the air."

Pause.

"Remo," Smith said tightly, "I hope you have done the correct thing."

"Maybe I did and maybe I didn't. But I bought us some time."

"No, I mean in reference to the blackout matter."

"I'm worried about Chiun. Screw the rest. Besides, isn't KNNN the source of the jamming?"

"That is my information, but we have yet to prove it.

"Well, I got the building to myself. At least until the local Marines are sent in. Just tell me what to do."

"Look for suspicious equipment."

"Hold the phone," Remo said, sweeping the control area with his deep-set eyes. "On second thought, this is a cellular. I'm going to carry you with me, Smitty. Try not to wriggle."

Remo walked around the sprawling control area. There were banks and banks of monitors, tape decks, and other broadcasting equipment Remo didn't recognize.

"I can't tell one thing from another around here," Remo told Smith. "Give me some clue."

"I cannot," said Smith. "I am not very familiar with broadcast equipment."

"Wait a minute. I just found something weird."

"Describe it."

Remo was looking through a long Plexiglas port. Inside was what appeared to be a video library racked in row upon row of shelving. There were two great tapedecks at the far end of the room.

And moving along a ceiling track, an aluminum robot arm. As Remo watched, it slid along, emitting a thin red laserlike beam. It was scanning the exposed sides of the racked cassettes. As the scanning beam came to a silver bar code label, it beeped, then stopped. The arm telescoped downward to grab the cassette between flat aluminum fingers.

Holding it firmly, it retracted, and tracked back to the dual cassette decks and with too-precise movements, inserting it into one deck. A red light went on as a matching red light in the other deck winked off. The second deck released its cassette and the arm swung in perfectly and seized it.

Slowly, it retreated along its track until it came to an empty slot. Smoothly, the cassette was returned to its receptacle.

"It's some kind of automatic cassette feeding thingy," Remo said.

"Thingy?"

"It's big, there's no one in charge and I don't even see a chair for someone to sit in."

"Remo, many cable outfits run automatic programming. The commercial tapes are programmed into a guiding computer."

"That explains the bar codes."

"Bar codes?"

"Yeah. Every cassette is coded."

"I do not think that is what we are looking for," Smith said disappointedly.

"Maybe I should rough up some of the technicians," Remo suggested.

"Where are they?"

"Out on the sidewalk waiting for the third shoe to fall."

"Er, I fail to understand."

Then above him, Remo heard the clattery rattle clatter of helicopter blades.

"Don't look now," Remo said guardedly, going to a window, "but either the bad guys are back for more hostages or the local SWAT team just arrived."

"Remo, can you leave the building unseen?"

Remo opened a window and looked down. The streets were choked with people looking up.

"No," Remo told Smith.

Smith groaned.

"Can you leave it safely?" Smith asked.

"Probably."

"Do so. If KNNN is off the air, you may have crippled any jamming capability they might possess. It is time to regroup."

"Gotcha," said Remo, dropping the phone.

He made for the elevator, and before he could press the call button, every door on every elevator opened simultaneously and out came floods of cameramen. They were looking through their viewfinders and didn't notice Remo at all.

Remo whistled. A baker's dozen lenses swept in all directions. They pointed up, down, up the corridor, down the corridor-in every direction except where Remo was standing.

So Remo shouted, "He just headed down the stairs to the lobby."

A man took up the cry. "He's headed for the lobby!"

Instantly, the cameramen ducked back into the waiting elevators, unaware that Remo was snugly in their midst.

No one noticed that Remo was riding to the lobby with them. They kept their videocams on their shoulders, their eyes glued to eyepieces, fingers on triggers-ready to record whatever sight the opening doors revealed.

They revealed, Remo discovered to his displeasure, a phalanx of Atlanta Metro Police in full riot gear.

A cameraman shouted, "He headed back this way!"

Bending his knees so no one could see his face, Remo rammed a pointing finger out of the clot of bodies and said, "There he goes now!"

Immediately, the elevators emptied. The lobby was soon boiling with riot helmets and videocams bumping blindly into one another.

Remo said, "What the hell," and abruptly pressed the Up button.

The lift took him back to the top floor, where he made his way to the roof stairs in time to meet landing police helicopters.

They were festooned with lights and M-16 rifle barrels prodded from the open sides of the bubbles. One sweeping light found him, and he heard someone yell through a bullhorn, "Don't move! We have you dead to rights."

Remo moved anyway. The light tried to follow him. Each time, he eluded it. Once he inserted his hands into the beam long enough to make a hand shadow of a bunny rabbit nibbling a carrot.

That brought a fusillade of bullets, and enough noise and confusion that Remo was all but invisible on the darkened tower roof.

Moving with a self-assured calm, Remo took hold of the tipped-over satellite dish. It was as big as a swimming pool, but light in proportion to its weight. Not that its weight would have mattered to Remo.

But there was a steady breeze out of the west and the dish was unwieldy. Using his sensitive fingers to find its center of gravity, Remo flexed his wrists. The dish, responding to an innate balance that was in all things, came up in Remo's hands and he caught the breeze. That helped.

Remo walked to the helipad, not exactly propelling the dish so much as guiding it, like a great round aluminum sail.

The police choppers were hovering there, preparatory to landing.

Holding the dish over his head like a shield, Remo began fending them off.

The ringing clash of the dish against landing skids spooked the first chopper pilot. He swung away. Remo slid under the next one and caught the tip of a skid with the joined points of the dish's emitter array. Walking backward, Remo guided the chopper along like a stubborn kite, then whipped it free.

The chopper made crazy circles while the pilot attempted to being the ungainly bird under control.

The third chopper pilot, seeing his comrades in distress but not what was causing it, orbited the tower warily.

At the roof edge, Remo gave the dish a flip. His motion was short and economical, but the twenty-foot dish flipped out into space, hanging emitter side down like an umbrella with a snapped-short handle.

Remo leaped into space and grabbed the emitter in both hands. The dish, which had been hesitating in midair, began to slide downward.

It was not as good as a parachute, but it had nice gliding characteristics. Remo swung his feet, slipping a little air and the dish skipped past a nearby office tower.

People in the lighted office windows waved to him. Remo ignored them. He was focused on his breathing. It took a lot of concentration to think like a feather.

As the SWAT helicopters gingerly settled to the roof helipad on bent skids, Remo rode the dish over a mile outside the city, steering it toward the scent of fresh water that promised a safe landing. When he spotted the glint of moonlight on water, he dropped toward a soft, if wet, landing.

When a caterwauling contingent of the Atlanta Metro Police arrived, all they found was the bent dish, floating in East Lake.

Remo Williams floated beneath the cool water, holding his breath, untouched by crisscrossing police helicopter searchlights, and wondered what the Master of Sinanju would say to him when he learned that Remo had allowed kidnappers to abduct the mother of his child when she was about to give birth.

As he waited for the helicopters to give him up for dead, Remo's lean body gave a great shudder that had nothing to do with the deep chill of the lake water and everything to do with the cold thoughts in his brain.

Chapter 14

News moves instantly in the age of satellite communications.

In New York, the three major broadcast networks learned of KNNN's loss of signal at exactly the same time.

So much had KNNN changed the way the world got its news that in every control room of each network there was a man whose job it was to monitor KNNN round the clock for breaking news. They were on the payrolls as "market research monitors."

At MBC, the monitor saw his KNNN satellite feed go down.

At BCN, the monitor gasped as the pair of KNNN anchors became a black square with the words NO SIGNAL in the upper right-hand corner.

At ANC, they saw the same thing.

At the three majors, the cry was the same.

"It's happening again!"

But it wasn't. Line monitors were checked. And rechecked. All other transmissions were up.

"It's just KNNN," the news director at BCN said, relief washing along his vocal cords.

Then it struck him.

"Get a team down to Atlanta. This is news!"

Planes were charted. Equipment was hastily rushed to waiting hangers. Flyaway satellite dishes were hauled out of storage.

And in less than an hour, with a full Georgia moon washing West Peachtree Avenue, the remote microwave vans started pulling up. Masts were erected. And videocams were busily recording the sight of two mighty satellite dishes lying in the street as the KNNN anchor teams milled about, dazed expressions on their faces as they interviewed themselves on tape for later broadcast.

The first to arrive was Don Cooder of BCN News. He stormed into the crowd wearing his lucky safari jacket. Usually, it was something he saved for reporting coups and civil wars, but since this was, professionally speaking, enemy territory, he thought wearing it was a good idea.

"I'm looking for Jed Burner," he said, biting out his words.

"No one's seen him."

"A KNNN anchor, then. Is there an anchor who hasn't been interviewed yet? I'm offering a BCN exclusive!"

From the crowd, a half dozen hands jumped into the air.

"Me! Me! I haven't been on the air in three hours!"

"No, me. I'm more photogenic!"

"One at a time! One at a time," Cooder said hastily. "Everybody will get his or her chance." Cooder stopped, turned to the videocam and pitched his voice an octave deeper.

"This is Don Cooder, speaking to you from in front of KNNN Headquarters here in Augusta, Georgia."

"It's Atlanta!" a voice called out.

As if he hadn't heard, Cooder pushed on. "For those just tuning in, here are the facts as we understand them to be: Hours after broadcast TV is blacked out from the Manitoba to Monterrey, calamity befell Kable Newsworthy News Network's once great empire-"

"What do you mean 'once great?'" a voice snapped.

"You're off the air," Cooder snarled.

"But we'll be back."

Cooder whirled. "Do you mind?"

"Hey, Mom!" someone yelled, waving past Cooder's turned back. "I'm fine! Don't worry about me. It was just the satellite dishes."

"Who's doing this stand-up, you or me?" Cooder snarled.

It was the wrong thing to say. KNNN anchors exchanged glances and suddenly Hurricane Don Cooder, veteran of the natural disasters, civil rights coverage, Vietnam, and Tiananmen Square, was fighting for his own microphone in full view of his faithful audience.

"Let go of my mike or I'll brain you with it!" he snarled.

"Cut Cut!" the remote producer yelled frantically.

Hearing the sound of his colleague in distress, Dieter Banning came running to the rescue, his London Fog trenchcoat skirts slapping at his legs.

"Get that fucking camera on him!" he yelled to his cameraman.

"What about you?"

"Never fucking mind me! I'll do a damn voiceover."

The videocam light blazed into life, and Dieter Banning's frantic voice was suddenly crisp, cool, and mannered as that of an English valet.

"The scene here in Atlanta tonight is reminiscent of Beirut," he said as Don Cooder, gaining the upper hand, proceeded to pummel his rival into submission. "As so often happens in the wake of such things, the fabric of ordinary society quickly breaks down. To American viewers this may seem like nothing more than a boisterous argument, but I assure in the more civilized corners of the world, say, London, or Ottowa, the sight you are now watching would be met with anguish, shock and utter shame . . . ."

Tim Macaw was trying to get the facts. That was all he wanted-the facts. Without facts, he had no story. It was good to have pictures, essential in this age of electronic journalism, but if you don't have the facts, pictures were so much electronic confetti.

"Does anyone know what happened here?" he cried out, pushing into the crowd.

"KNNN is down."

"Can anyone confirm that?"

"Sure. Me," said a helpful voice.

"Me, too," said another voice.

"Good. Good. What caused it?"

"Someone ripped the satellite dishes off the roof."

"Who?" Macaw asked.

"Nobody knows."

"What is this all about?"

"Nobody knows."

"Where is Jed Burner? Has anybody seen Jed Burner?"

"He disappeared just before it happened."

"Oh. Does anyone else know this?"

"Search me."

Tim Macaw, sensing a story, turned to his remote producer.

"They're saying Jed Burner has disappeared. Has anyone broken the story yet?"

"No, Tim."

"Well, can we confirm it independently?"

"How? Usually we confirm these things by turning on KNNN. Can't now."

"Right. Damn. What do we do?"

"If we air and it's wrong, we look stupid."

"But if it's right, and we don't get it out there, one of the other networks will own the story."

"It's your call, Tim."

Shoulders slumping in defeat, Tim Macaw moaned, "What do print guys do in situations like this? Damn."

On one corner a black man in black Cons and a backward cap was doing a rap before the TV cameras.

KNNN is out of shout, Global.news is down for the count. Nobody knew who knocked it flat, Check it out-Vox TV is where it's at.

Shifting into a mellow announcer's voice, he added, "This is Vox TV's Rap News. First with the news that today's young people can understand. Now we return to The Stilsons. Tonight, Fart microwaves baby Sue and Gomer mistakes her for . . ."