The End of the Beginning

MacCleary slowly absorbed the CURE director's words.

Conn normally didn't bother with politics. Still, he was aware of Bianco, largely due to the senator's vocal crusade against organized crime.

"You think this is related to New York?" Conn asked.

Smith nodded. "Possibly. The method of death was...unorthodox. While he wasn't killed in the same manner as the first agent I sent to look into the Maxwell affair, the extreme, atypical nature of his death suggests that they could be connected."

"I take it he wasn't shot, stabbed or suffocated."

"Decapitation," Smith said.

MacCleary issued a soft whistle. "That's a new twist," he said, slumping back in the couch. He stared at the floor.

"I had pulled back from investigating the Maxwell matter pending completion of Remo's training. However, this could have an impact on my original game plan. Senator Bianco was part of a committee looking into organized crime. He and some of the other senators from that committee were scheduled to meet in New York in a few weeks."

"They're sure as hell gonna cancel now," Conn said.

"No, they are not," Smith said. "I suspect that, if anything, this will strengthen their resolve."

"Idiots," MacCleary muttered. "Leave it to politicians to not know when to duck and cover."

The old CIA man spoke with deep bitterness. The decade that had just ended was witness to the shooting deaths of three prominent Americans, including the President who had sanctioned the creation of CURE.

Conn knew that no age was as completely innocent as people liked to believe. He had seen too much in life to believe in fairy tales. But for many years, thanks to the secret work of men like Conrad MacCleary, the lie had been true for most Americans. Now that was all changing. In his life he had seen the evil that used to lurk in shadow step out into sunlight. America's innocence had been murdered by a sniper's bullet.

Smith's nasal voice cut through Conn's dispirited haze.

"At the moment no one is taking credit for Bianco's death," the CURE director said. "So far the papers have been kept in the dark. They believe the cause of death was a sudden heart attack. That's a stroke of luck for us. As long as they believe that, we'll be able to step up our investigation without fear of interference."

MacCleary sighed loudly. "So what? If the Mob has started wiping out politicians, America'll be better off. I say we pin medals on every guinea who helps thin that herd."

Smith's face darkened. "You don't mean that, Conn," he admonished. "And even you must see that only the honest politicians are at risk. The Mafia would not murder a politician who was working for them."

"Okay, we go with plan B," MacCleary said. "You know, the one we've used for the past eight years where we don't do anything but talk about the problem? Better yet, we let the Mob wipe out the last honest politicians in the country and then slap the cuffs on whoever's left standing."

Smith's flat eyes never wavered. "No cuffs," he insisted somberly. "Not this time."

The CURE director's tone was clipped, efficient. Across the room MacCleary felt the boozy haze bleed from his brain.

Smith's meaning was clear. It had been months since CURE had been given permission to use the ultimate sanction against America's enemies. They had been twiddling their thumbs ever since, not daring to employ their new mandate. MacCleary had been afraid Smith had lost his nerve.

"So, we're finally gonna go for it," Conn said quietly. "It's about damned time."

Beneath his gruff tone was an underlying awe. They were about to embark on something momentous. And frightening.

"If Remo is close to ready, I will commit him to the field," Smith said. "How is his training progressing?"

"Before they left, Chiun said he was coming along way ahead of schedule," MacCleary said.

Smith's face relaxed. Finally, some good news. "If it's a matter of days, perhaps we can put this off a little longer," the CURE director said. "Does Master Chiun believe he can have him up to speed within a week or two?"

MacCleary shook his head. There was a hint of sad mirth in his tired eyes. "Not quite. Chiun thinks he could maybe have him ready in fifteen years. Ten if he goes the lazy Western route and cuts a few corners along the way."

Smith blinked. "Is that a joke?" he asked.

"He sounded pretty serious to me."

The CURE director considered deeply. "Obviously, he is not serious. He's simply exaggerating to make a point. He must think Remo isn't ready for fieldwork."

"I'm not so sure about that, Smitty," Conn said. "I know Chiun's pretty out there with all that kissing up and bowing and Emperor Smith bull-hockey, but he doesn't strike me as the exaggerating type for stuff like this. I'll make sure I pin him down on it when they get back."

"I will talk to Master Chiun," Smith insisted. "When do you expect them to return?"

"I'm not sure," MacCleary admitted. "After he finished the job you gave him, Chiun took Remo out into the desert for some kind of Sinanju survival training. It's been weeks already. Could be quite a while more. Chiun's been working him pretty hard."

"What time of day does Remo report in?" MacCleary shook his head. "I told him not to bother calling. Chiun will keep him from taking off. And nothing was pressing when they left. Plus the guy's not too sharp for remembering codes or call times or tracing protocols, Smitty. We won't hear from them until they get back."

"That is unfortunate," Smith said with a frown. "I guess it was bad timing letting them go now. Especially since this could wind up being a wasted trip. I'm still not sure Chiun wasn't just whistling up all our asses about that selective-amnesia thing."

"You are the expert on Sinanju," Smith pointed out.

"Yeah, but that one seems far-fetched even to me."

Smith considered his words. "I have seen enough of Master Chiun's abilities to not disbelieve him out of hand," he admitted. "As it is, the knowledge of CURE is limited to the two of us and the sitting President. Remo will eventually have to be briefed in greater detail. Four is enough. If Sinanju truly does have a technique that can block certain memories, we will be protecting not only this agency but the former Presidents themselves."

"I doubt any President would rat us out, Smitty," MacCleary said. "Although if one does spill the beans, my bet's on the beady-eyed bugger we're stuck with right now."

"My fear is not that they would voluntarily give us away," Smith explained. "Who knows what secrets they might unwittingly divulge as they age? Something as innocent as the onset of senility or a simple slip of the tongue could prove disastrous for us. If Master Chiun is not simply boasting and it is possible to make an outgoing President forget about CURE, we will be protecting them, as well as us."

"It'd sure make my work easier," MacCleary muttered. His gaze was far-off.

Smith understood his old comrade's unspoken thought.

Three times in the past eight years CURE's security had been breached. Up until recently, deadly force had only been allowed in dealing with security matters. Each of the three times MacCleary had handled the details, and the men who had learned of CURE had simply disappeared.

Although MacCleary had killed more men in the line of duty than he cared to think about, it hadn't gotten any easier with age. Through the years, the faces of his victims had stayed with him. An accusing, Hell-sent choir that haunted his darkest midnight hours.

"Unfortunately, our original security protocols still stand, Conn," Smith said quietly. "Chiun told me the amnesia technique is not infallible. He told me there was one instance where it came undone. I cannot run that risk with someone who has learned of our activities."

"I gotcha, Smitty," MacCleary said. His tired eyes studied the dusty corners of the austere office.

At his desk Smith cleared his throat. "The Maxwell matter needs to be looked into," he said. "And since we don't know how long our new enforcement arm will be away-"

MacCleary didn't let him finish. "I got this one, Smitty," he said, standing.

Smith nodded. "Here is the data I have collected on Maxwell." He pushed a manila envelope across his desk. "We still don't know who he is, but the link to him is a man named Felton. Everything we have is in there."

Stepping over, MacCleary took the envelope. He was slipping it into his coat pocket when something suddenly occurred to him.

"Oops. I forgot."

MacCleary fished beyond the envelope Smith had given him, digging deeper into his coat pocket. He pulled out a plain white envelope and tossed it across Smith's desk.

"Present from an old pal of mine," Conn said. "Just what the doctor ordered. You do not want this guy filling your high-blood-pressure prescriptions."

With slender fingers Smith peeked into the envelope. With an approving nod, he closed the flap. Smith rounded his desk and walked MacCleary to the door. His latest secretary didn't look up as the two men exited the office. She continued typing diligently away, engrossed in her menial work. Smith allowed a brief glance of approval at the woman before turning his full attention to MacCleary.

"Good luck. And be careful."

MacCleary gave a tight smile. "Always am," he said.

For men who had shared so much of life, nothing more needed to be said. MacCleary left the office suite.

Once he was gone, Smith gave a final glance at his latest temporary secretary.

The woman was working steadily away, clattering on her clumsy manual typewriter. She didn't give the impression of someone trying to look busy in front of her employer. She seemed genuinely engrossed in her work. A conscientious employee. A minor miracle in this day and age.

Smith turned wordlessly from the outer room. He closed the door to his own Spartan office behind him, shutting out the staccato clatter of the typewriter.

Back at his desk, he settled in his chair.

The plain white business envelope MacCleary had passed to him sat over the spot where his computer monitor was hidden. With one hand he drew the envelope to him.

Lifting the flap, Smith shook the envelope. A single, small object fell out into his open palm.

This was the final part of CURE's ultimate safeguard. Smith had ordered MacCleary to get one for each of them.

Smith had expected it might become necessary when he assumed the directorship of CURE. But the probability had become a definite the moment CURE had been granted permission to take on an enforcement arm.

Smith held the small white pill between thumb and forefinger. If not for the shape, it might have been mistaken for an ordinary aspirin. The pill had been fashioned in the shape of a tiny white coffin.

It was the only way out of CURE Harold Smith or any of them would ever know.

Wondering how long it would be before one of CURE's inner circle would have to fall on the sword, Smith gently tucked the cyanide pill into the pocket of his gray vest.

Chapter 13

Don Carmine Viaselli wasn't afraid.

Given the same circumstances, other, lesser men might be afraid. But they were men of small minds and low character. They were not men like Carmine Viaselli.

Had someone else been in his shoes, Don Carmine actually wouldn't have blamed them if they felt afraid. After all, as the capo di tutti capi of the New York Mafia, he had plenty he could have been scared about.

There were the other Families. Nearby he had to worry about the Renaldis of Jersey, the Constazas of Philly and the newly empowered Patriconnes of Rhode Island. As the East Coast Families grew stronger, each of them threatened the territory of New York's Don Carmine.

Closer still were the factions in his own crime Family. In particular the Scubiscis in Manhattan were making noises. Pietro Scubisci still professed loyalty to Don Carmine, but he was showing all the signs of someone starting to flex his muscle. He was angling to take over from Viaselli.

Although the local police weren't a big problem, they still needed constant watching. Yes, anyone who mattered was already on the payroll. But every once in a while some young hotshot got it in his head that he was going to take on Don Carmine's operation. This was always a concern, since the lid had to be kept clamped tight at all times. If a cop got too full of himself, he quickly found himself walking a beat in Spanish Harlem. Or, in the case of the more stubborn members of the New York Police Department, he'd find himself walking the special beat-off a pier into the Hudson River.

The regular cops were a concern, but they weren't anything to be scared of. With them it was like trying to herd rats. A lot of scratching and clawing. A pain in the ass that had to be kept in line.

For other men these worries piled up into fears. Next came ulcers, heart trouble and an early grave. That was the usual route for ordinary men. And, the truth be told, until one year ago this was the route Don Carmine was taking.

"Carmine, you don't look so good," the traitorous Pietro Scubisci had said one afternoon, back when headaches were things to worry about for Don Carmine Viaselli.

They were meeting at Don Carmine's 59th Street fortress on the fourteenth floor of the Royal Plaza Hotel.

Carmine had just returned from the bathroom. In his hand, two Alka-Seltzers fizzed in a Waterford glass.

His deep eyes, which usually betrayed false warmth, were sickly. The healthy color of youth no longer brushed his ashen cheeks. Over the past decade he had steadily shed weight-at first a good thing, but now it was too much. In late middle age he seemed a husk of the man he had once been.

"I'm fine," Don Carmine grunted.

This Pietro Scubisci was forever looking for an opening, for a weakness in his Don. Carmine would have eliminated him, but Scubisci was well connected and respected. It would be hard to remove him without creating yet another headache. So he endured the conniving viper in his midst.

"No, really," Scubisci insisted. "You look kinda bad. You sure you feeling okay?"

He was only pretending to be concerned. Always with Pietro Scubisci there was the conniving undertone.

As he spoke, Scubisci fished around in a paper bag that he'd brought up to the apartment. The bag was stained dark. When Scubisci moved it, a slick line of grease stained the coffee table's glass surface.

"No, I'm not okay," Don Carmine admitted. "What I'm sick of is you and that paper bag of yours. Why you always gotta bring that bag with you all the time?"

"My wife makes the best fried peppers you ever tasted," Pietro Scubisci insisted. "Whatever you got's making you sick, they'll fix you right up." He produced a shriveled greasy green wedge from his omnipresent bag, offering it to his Don. "I promise you, Don Carmine, you ain't had a fried pepper till you had one of my Francesca's fried peppers."

Carmine's stomach rebelled at the smell. "Get that thing away from me," he snarled.

Scubisci shrugged. "You don't know what you're missing," he said, popping the fried pepper into his mouth. Crunching the paper bag shut, he put it down near his shoes.

Don Carmine didn't even care that the noxious-smelling bag would certainly stain his rug. With one hand braced on his knee he slugged down his Alka-Seltzer, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his dress shirt. The liquid left a thick, salty taste on his tongue.

"They're after us, Pietro," Don Carmine said, placing the crystal glass to the coffee table with a click.

"Who?" Pietro Scubisci asked.

"The government," Carmine said softly.

Scubisci snorted. "What's new?" he said. "I been around this longer than you. I seen enough of these G-men, all thinking they're hot-shit Eliot Nesses. All I know is they come and go and we're still here."

Pietro Scubisci had a habit of speaking like the old authority on all things Mob related. He was only ten years older than Carmine, but looked much older. Scubisci had looked like an old man since his twenties.

"Something's different now," Don Carmine insisted. "I've noticed it in the last five years, maybe a little more. The government's getting too good. They're coming after us on all fronts. Things they shouldn't know, they're finding out. I'd say they were getting lucky, but I don't believe in luck, Pietro. I think there's something big out there. Something that's going on where we don't see it."

"Eh, it's the same it's always been," Scubisci said. "You're just jumping at shadows. Comes from being around as long as we have."

"No, Pietro. It's there. I can feel it."

The Don spoke with utter conviction. He seemed so certain of this phantom something-or-other that even Pietro Scubisci paused.

"You sure, Don Carmine?" he asked quietly.

"I would bet my life on it, Pietro," Carmine replied. "I don't know what it is yet, but we are under attack."

After an instant's hesitation, Pietro Scubisei shook his head. For a moment he had almost been drawn in.

Pietro rolled his stooped shoulders. "So what?" he said. "I mean, I don't think there's nothing there, mind you. But so what if there is? What can we do about it?"

Carmine's face steeled. "A big threat requires a big response. Knock them down so hard they're afraid to get back up. Whack them so hard they ignore you, 'cause it's easier to pretend you don't exist than to do battle with you."

It was obvious that Carmine Viaseili had given this invisible threat some thought.

"You gonna take on the whole government, Carmine?" Scubisci had asked with a rasping chuckle.

Carmine Viaselli did not laugh. "If I could find a way, Pietro. If only I could find a way."

When that meeting with Pietro Scubisci had ended one year ago, Don Carmine Viaselli still didn't have a plan. How could you have a plan when you were fighting an enemy as big as the United States government? An enemy with so many faces, with unlimited financing, with so much raw power that you might as well try shooting at shadows? An enemy that now-if Carmine's gut was correct-had crossed over the line into lawlessness to achieve its ends.

It was a fight that couldn't be won, and Don Carmine knew it. After dwelling on the problem for weeks, he had finally decided to call it quits. Let someone else take over the show. Someone like that backstabber Pietro Scubisci.

Why not? Carmine had the money to retire. Take the wife and youngest kids and move someplace nice, like Vegas.

He was actually thinking about packing his bags that morning ten months ago when he met his unlikely savior.

Carmine had walked into the living room of his Central Park apartment only to find a stranger standing there.

It was impossible. His enforcer, Norman Felton, had set up the security precautions personally. Felton was the best. There was no way anyone should have been able to penetrate this far. Yet someone had.

Carmine Viaselli stopped dead. His heart pounded in his chest. All his worries, all the sleepless night, all had come down to this moment.

"You from the government?" he demanded. His eyes darted to the room's four corners in search of more federal agents.

The stranger was alone.

The Oriental in the black suit offered something that, on another man's face, might have passed for a smile.

"I represent myself, not a government. I have heard of your problem. I wish to offer myself as the solution."

"Who are you?"

"My name is immaterial as far as our business is concerned. But if you must call me something, you may call me Mr. Winch."

"I'll tell you what I'll call," Don Carmine threatened. "I'll call the cops, that's what I'll call."

"You are welcome to do so," Mr. Winch said. "However, would that be wise? I know that you bribe many of them, but you do not own them all. Who is to say that the ones you get won't be the ones who you fear are after you? After all, do they not work for your government?"

Don Carmine studied the Oriental with slivered, suspicious eyes. There was something about him. Carmine Viaselli had seen enough of it in his day to know what it was. This man possessed an aura of death.

"How you know about my troubles?"

"I hear things," Mr. Winch replied. "It is an easy enough thing when one knows what to listen for."

"You some kind of hit man?" Carmine asked.

This time Mr. Winch's smile was genuine. "I am the original kind," he promised.

Don Carmine's back stiffened. He thrust out his proud Roman chin. "You here to whack me?"

"I am here to offer you my services. You have a problem that needs attention. Ordinarily, I do not like to stay in any one place for very long, but at the moment my situation requires a certain amount of stability. I suggest a business arrangement from which we will both benefit."

Don Carmine knew in his marrow that he was talking to a cold-blooded killer. Maybe the coldest he'd ever met. But given the circumstances, he wasn't about to trust this Winch.

"I have a man who does this sort of work for me," Carmine Viaselli said.

"An amateur," Winch replied.

"Just the same, he's my man," Viaselli said. "I don't know you, and I won't be intimidated into hiring you."

Winch shrugged, a delicate, birdlike movement that failed to wrinkle the fabric of his perfectly tailored suit.

"Then don't," the Oriental said. "It does not matter to me. One of you is like the next. If not you, I will go to one of your enemies." He turned and walked away.

That was that. No arguing, no more discussing. Don Carmine trailed Winch into the hallway. His men there seemed surprised to see the Oriental. Obviously, they hadn't seen him come in.

"I don't like that you got in here," Carmine said as Winch got onto the private elevator.

"Yes. I can see how that would be disconcerting." His broad, flat face was without emotion as the elevator doors closed with a ping.

The instant the doors shut, Don Carmine turned to his men. "I want that son of a bitch wiped," he ordered.

The call was made from upstairs. Three of Don Carmine's best men were waiting in the lobby for Mr. Winch when he left the elevator two minutes later.

What happened next, no one was quite sure. According to witnesses, the three Viaselli Family soldiers had approached Winch with guns drawn. That much the few eyewitnesses could swear to. There was a gunshot. Everyone knew that. It was after that things got fuzzy.

There was a blur of something in black that no one seemed able to follow. An instant later, when the blur resolved into the shape of the strange Oriental, there were three fewer Viaselli soldiers among the living.

Winch had deposited one man headfirst into a sandfilled standing ashtray. The thug had drowned on a mouthful of ashes and stubbed-out cigarette butts.

The second lay in a mangled heap behind a potted plant.

The third was missing altogether. He was found an hour later in the basement. Somehow Mr. Winch had thrown him down the elevator shaft-seemingly impossible, since the doors were already closing when the men attacked. He fell only one story, yet had injuries consistent with a twelve-story fall.

When news of what had happened reached the fourteenth floor, Don Carmine quickly sent more men after Mr. Winch. These soldiers had no guns. Waving white handkerchiefs, they caught up with Winch on the sidewalk a block from the Plaza. Offering profound apologies from Don Carmine, they escorted Mr. Winch back upstairs.

When Mr. Winch stepped off the elevator to the fourteenth floor, Don Carmine was waiting for him, an eager expression on his wan face.

"Do you give lessons?" Don Carmine blurted.

"Not to you," Mr. Winch replied.

"Not for me, for my men," Don Carmine said.

"No," Winch said. "Not for you, not for any of them, not for any price."

"Very well," Don Carmine said, clearly disappointed. "But you will work for me?"

"If your financial terms are acceptable to me."

"Whatever you want, you got," said Don Carmine, who felt relief for the first time in months. "You'll be my personal bodyguard. You keep my body safe, you'll be a rich man."

And so the deal was struck.

Carmine soon learned the reason Mr. Winch needed to stay in one place. It was that spooky little kid.

The New York Don was a little worried the first time he'd seen the fair-haired teenager. He figured he'd hired himself a gook bodyguard with a thing for young boys. He quickly learned that the perversions Winch was committing against that kid had nothing to do with sex.

The boy was terrified of Winch and idolized him at the same time. He had that same confident walk and that same killer's stillness as Winch. It was eerie enough coming from a grown man, but doubly so coming from a fourteen-year-old kid. The boy never talked to Carmine or his men. Only to Winch and only in that fruity gook language.

Whatever the kid's purpose, he wasn't a distraction to Mr. Winch. Winch proved himself useful in dealing with the waves of government men who were breathing down Don Carmine's neck. Whenever one of them got close, Mr. Winch removed him. Zip, bang, boom, just like that.

The bodies were remanded to Don Carmine's regular enforcer for disposal. Norman Felton had some untraceable method of disposing bodies. Felton never told his Don how the bodies were made to vanish, and Don Carmine never asked.

Every once in a while Mr. Winch got a little too exuberant and took out a couple of Don Carmine's own men. For training purposes, he said. Carmine wasn't terribly happy when this happened, but he kept his mouth shut.

For Carmine Viaselli, the idiosyncrasies of Winch and whatever he was doing with that kid of his didn't matter. He now had a weapon in his arsenal like no other Mafia leader.

Winch was so effective against the piddling government agents who came against Carmine, the Don eventually decided to use his weapon for a greater purpose.

Carmine decided that he would do precisely what he had said to Pietro Scubisci all those months ago. He would take his weapon and use it against the U.S. government. He would bring the war to them and force them to leave him in peace.

He would make them bleed. And the baptism of hot blood would bring permanent peace to Don Carmine Viaselli.

BLOOD WAS on Carmine Viaselli's mind this night. He was lounging on the sofa in his luxury apartment, sipping bourbon as he watched the evening newscast. On the screen, Walter Cronkite was wearing the serious face he put on when reporting the most dire news. He looked like a constipated buzzard. In somber tones he reported on the heart attack that had killed Senator Bianco.

"Shit," Don Carmine grunted. "Heart attack." His mocking words were answered from the shadows.

"Your media does have a habit of reporting inaccuracies as absolute truths," said the thin voice. Carmine jumped so high he spilled his drink. He glanced to his right. Mr. Winch stood next to the sofa.

"Dammit, I wish you'd stop doing that," Carmine snarled, wiping bourbon from his pajama bottoms. "And what's with this heart-attack bullshit? You were supposed to kill him in a way that sent a message. What message is a heart attack, except maybe cut down on the linguine?"

"Do not worry," Winch assured him. "In spite of what they are saying, your message has been sent."

"Yeah?" Carmine mumbled. "It better have been. I mean, three more agents last week. They just don't back off."

"Nor, I suspect, will they now," Winch said.

"What do you mean?" Carmine asked. "If they know we aren't afraid to take out a senator, they'll back off."

Winch raised a condescending brow. "Hardly," he said. "If you truly do have enemies, they are sure to retaliate. This was a message, but a weak one. You must do more."

"Then I'll kill a hundred senators," Don Carmine said. "I'll kill the goddamned President if I have to." He heard a gasp beyond the closed living-room door, followed by a muttered prayer in Spanish.

It was his maid. She was polishing the woodwork in the next room. Carmine was too indulgent of her, but she'd been working for him for almost twenty years. He'd have to speak to her again about listening in on his private conversations.

"That is possible," Winch conceded. His voice in these meetings was always so soft it didn't carry beyond Viaselli's ears. "However, the last time I did that, I recruited an agent to perform the actual deed. With certain techniques of concentration he performed admirably. For a white."

Don Carmine didn't know whether or not Winch was joking. The look on the Oriental's flat face indicated he was not.

"As I have told you," Mr. Winch said blandly, "I do not seek notoriety."

"Then we'll stick with the Senate. Kill enough of them to deliver a message. Any left when that special committee on crime comes to New York, you take them out then."

"As you wish," Mr. Winch said. He melted back into the shadows and was gone.

Don Carmine looked back to the flickering TV. "Let 'em send the biggest guns they got. By the time I'm through with that committee, they'll need a sponge to mop up the puddle."

Smiling wickedly, he took a deep swig of bourbon.

Chapter 14

On the morning of their tenth day in the desert, Remo Williams looked up at his teacher, Chiun, the Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju.

"I'm thirsty," said the Master's pupil.

As he spoke, he climbed the rope. As he had the previous hour. And the hour before that. The cool early-morning breeze tossed his short dark hair.

"What did you do with the water you drank back at the motel?" replied the Master.

In his reply, the student was typically coarse. "What do you think? I pissed it out."

Chiun shrugged. "I won't be blamed for your lack of control." Sitting cross-legged, he studied the desert sun as it burned up like a lake of red fire over the flat horizon.

Remo had made it to the top of the rope. At eye level with Chiun now, he stopped.

"What lack of control? Water runs through me. I don't know about you-I know you're perfect and all-but even you must have to tap a kidney every once in a while."

Chiun's brow lowered. "Yes, I am perfect. And I might add that it is high time you noticed. As for the rest, tell me, Remo, are all the subjects of this barbarian land as crude and insolent as you?"

"Pretty much," Remo grumbled. "Welcome to America."

Frowning deeply, he slid back down the rope. The Master considered the sheer awfulness of what his pupil's words might entail. Shuddering, the Master returned his gaze to the pretty sunrise.

His abusive pupil refused to give him a moment's peace.

"I'd like some water," Remo pressed from the bottom of the rope. His hands gripped the fat knot before he began scampering back up again.

"And I would like a proper emperor. Even one of the lesser Caesars would suffice. I would like to be somewhere other than this nation of bloated hedonists. I would like a good pupil to teach Sinanju and not some white thing who would learn a few karate tricks."

Remo paused. "Wait, I thought I was learning Sinanju."

Chiun's gaze had been far off. Blinking away the cobwebs of sad memory, he looked down at his pupil. The desert sky tinted red his cotton-white tufts of hair.

"There is the Master and there is the pupil. I am Master. But you, Remo, are not the pupil." His voice was filled with soft regret.

"What the hell am I, then, chopped liver?" Remo asked testily. He still clung to the rope, unmoving. There was no strain on his face. The effort such a feat of strength would cause another man was no longer present. It had been weaned weeks ago from this amazing white thing.

"It is not your fault," Chiun said. "Tradition dictates that the Master take a pupil from the village of Sinanju. Such has it been, such will it always be."

"Why?"

There was no sarcasm in Remo's tone. Just interest. By the look on Chiun's face, it was clear he couldn't believe Remo thought it necessary to even ask such a question.

"Because Koreans are, by temperament and breeding, naturally better suited to the difficult task of learning," Chiun replied matter-of-factly. "Some Japanese might be able to absorb some. A random Chinaman could, perhaps, pick up a move or two, if he wasn't too busy picking the pockets of other thieving Chinamen. The other, lesser Asian peoples are hopeless to a man. The Vietnamese eat dogs, Philippinos smell funny. And do not even get me started on the Thais. The races are all downhill after that. Indians and Arabs are a waste of the land they breed over and the air they breathe. Blacks are merely burned whites except angrier, and whites are bleached blacks with more television sets. Why would we go to inferior outside races for a pupil when we have perfection in our own backyard?" His voice dropped low. "Although, truth be told, most Koreans I could take or leave."

The pupil absorbed the Master's words with thoughtful silence. This was good. At last the Master had given the pupil something weighty enough to absorb his flitting white mind. When the pupil finally spoke, his eyes held a gleam of devout sincerity. "You're a racist," proclaimed the pupil.

"What is that?" Chiun asked.

"It's someone who thinks he's better than everybody else just because he happened to be born a certain way."

"Ah, this have I heard," Chiun said. A pleased smile spread across his face. "Thank you."

"That isn't a good thing, Chiun," Remo said flatly. "It isn't right to feel superior to other people." Obviously, the pupil truly believed this. The Master could see the words he spoke were heartfelt.

What is this lunatic land to which the wicked fates have brought me? the Master thought. To the sincere pupil with the wrong ideas of race, he said, "Tell me, Remo, if the sun tells the stars that their light does not shine as brightly as its own, is the sun being racist?"

"Yes," Remo said. "Because the sun is just a star like all the other stars. They're just farther away. It's no different. In fact, some of the other stars are bigger and brighter if you match them up side by side with the sun."

Chiun was aghast. "Who told you such nonsense?"

"Science. And it's not nonsense. It's the truth."

Chiun shook his aged head. "Thank the gods you are not the one destined to be my pupil. There is far too much foolishness that would have to be unlearned first. Even so, you have been adequate in some ways so I will give you some free advice that will help you as you bumble through life: The truth is everything you were not taught in school."

He went back to studying the sunrise. The red sky had burned away to yellow. The disk of the sun flamed white as it peeked over the horizon.

"They did okay with what they had," Remo said. "And whatever you think of us whites as a race, and no matter what you were hired to do by the guys upstairs, I think I'm learning more than you or they bargained for."

At this the Master fell silent.

It was true. This Remo, this white with the rude tongue and the vile beef-fueled appetites, was learning Sinanju.

It had not been Chiun's intention. He had come to this land in search of a legend. To find, as it was written, the dead night tiger that he would make whole in Sinanju. What he found was a gorging white thing. This Remo could not be fulfillment of the legend, could not become Shiva, the Destroyer. And yet there was something there.

Chiun had planned to teach a few tricks. But he found to his amazement that this Remo was capable of much more than mere tricks. Almost without realizing it, Chiun had begun to pour the ocean into a teacup because, miraculously, the teacup was accepting it. It was most disturbing. Chiun would have to pray to his ancestors for guidance.

"And I'd still like some water," brayed the pupil.

"When you are done your exercises," Chiun said.

"When's that gonna be? You've had me dangling out here like a fish on a line for the past three hours." With his chin he pointed up the length of rope. The thick braided line ended at an ancient chunk of corroded metal. To Remo it looked like something that had been left in the desert since the gold rush days. Chiun had found it on the desert floor near where they had parked their Jeep. Right now, if Remo twisted just right as he hung from the rope, he could just make out their Jeep. It was parked on a lonely, rutted desert path a thousand feet below where he dangled out in open air.

They had come to Arizona after leaving Texas. At first there was something that felt right about the Arizona desert. Remo had no idea why. It was a feeling of something old and instinctive that made his bones ache for family. A strange thought for an orphan from Newark, New Jersey. Especially given the company he was with.

For the days since their arrival here, Chiun had been putting Remo through his paces. There was a lot of climbing and jumping and scampering from rock to rock.

Remo had been forced repeatedly to pull his hand from the darting fangs of a flashing rattlesnake. This, he was told, to increase his hand-eye coordination. "Incentive," was the word Chiun used as justification for this exercise.

Hours of running in bare feet on sand had caused Remo's soles to blister, then callus. He was repeatedly scolded for doing it wrong. The right way, he learned, was when he did not leave "those mammoth churned-up hoofprints" in his wake. The one time Remo managed to run through the soft desert dust without leaving a single discernible mark, he thought he heard the Master of Sinanju utter a solitary word of praise. He knew he was mistaken, however, for when he looked the old man was wearing his usual nasty scowl.

Still, all in all it was better than Folcroft. At least he was outside. But this latest exercise was ridiculous. They had climbed up to the top of the butte in the wee hours of the night, without aid of rope or piton or any climbing gear whatsoever. Once they were at the top, Chiun drove the metal post deep into the rock. Even though he'd been watching at the time, Remo still had no idea how the old man had done it. It looked as if he'd just jammed it in, like sticking a straw into a thick milkshake. Remo was sure the post would give. But somehow the metal was secure.

The post hung out over desert. Remo was given a length of rope and told to go and secure it to the far end. Once he had done so, Chiun sat to await the sunrise while Remo was forced to climb up and down the rope endlessly.

Just a few short months ago Remo would not have thought it possible to do something like this even once. But he was in his third hour now and had not yet broken a sweat.

"So what are you saying, if I was Korean you'd let me have a drink of water?" Remo groused as he climbed and slid, climbed and slid. His hands were beyond rope burns.

"If you were Korean, you would know enough to be grateful to me for all I have done for you," Chiun replied.

The old man had stopped watching the sun to turn his attention back to Remo.

Chiun was careful to keep his face bland as his pupil continued to perform his exercises flawlessly. It was an amazing thing. Most Korean boys would have given up after the first half hour. In the light of a new day, Chiun noted that the pupil's wrists were coming along nicely.

"Yeah? Well, I'm not a freaking camel, for Christ's sake."

Seated at the edge of the butte, Chiun frowned. "Do not invoke that name in my presence," he sniffed.

At the top of the rope now, Remo stopped. "What name?"

"That Nazarene carpenter," Chiun replied. "I assume you are a Christian of some sort. You people usually are."

"I'm Catholic," Remo replied. A gust of desert sand pelted his face. He gritted his teeth against it. Still stationary on the rope, he rocked back and forth in the wind.

"Worse," said Chiun.

"What do you mean worse? What's wrong with Catholics?"

"What isn't wrong with Catholics? You may start with that busybody carpenter. Did you know that he ruined the reigns of not one but two King Herods? Of course you didn't. Because it wasn't written down in your precious white Bible. By his birth alone he forced poor Herod the Elder into the tragic and rash act of executing the firstborn son of every family in Egypt. Does your Bible tell of the sleepless nights that plagued Herod for days after initiating that unfortunate social policy? No. It was a week before his appetite returned, but was that recorded? Of course not. Here was a poor, sensitive man going through terrible emotional upheaval, but does anyone care? No, they don't. It is always Jesus this and Jesus that."

"My heart bleeds for good King Herod," Remo said dryly.

"As it should."

"I was being sarcastic."

"Of course you were."

"I like Jesus," Remo said.

"You would," Chiun replied.

There was a long moment during which the only sound was the wind that sang between them. "Okay," Remo said finally. "Here's the deal. I'm done with hanging around out here. My arms are like rubber and I'm halfway to total dehydration, so I'm coming in and if you want to stop me you can push me off this cliff. At this point it'd come as a welcome relief."

Reaching up, he grabbed the bar. Hand over hand he climbed to the flat top of the butte. He dropped to the soles of his feet next to the seated Master of Sinanju.

"It is about time," Chiun said. He rose to his feet like a swirling desert dust devil.

"What's about what?" Remo asked warily. He rubbed gingerly at his shoulders. They were far beyond ordinary pain. His arms felt as if they'd just been plugged into his sockets from someone else's body.

"I was wondering how long it would take for you to realize the pointlessness of this exercise. Most Korean boys have sense enough to see it for what it is at the outset." He marched to the edge of the butte. "We have wasted enough time playing games. Recess is over. It is time to start the day's training."

His pronouncement made, the old man slipped over the mesa's edge and was gone.

Remo stood alone for a moment. The desert morning was clear and beautiful.

"Look on the bright side," he muttered to himself. "Maybe on the way down I'll fall and break my neck."

Cradling both sore arms, he trudged reluctantly to the edge of the mountain.

Chapter 15

MacCleary brought the manila envelope Smith had given him back to his quarters at Folcroft.

During the four months of planning that culminated in Remo's staged execution, Smith had overseen the remodel of Folcroft's old, abandoned psychiatric isolation wing. In the 1920s, the closed-off basement corridor had been home to Folcroft's most dangerous patients. It was now CURE's security wing. This was where Remo was brought after his execution, where the plastic surgery was performed and where CURE's enforcement arm had recovered.

Conn had taken over another room in the otherwise empty hall. Once Remo had sufficiently healed and was remanded to Chiun's care, MacCleary had the run of the special wing.

Alone in his small room, floor cluttered with empty liquor bottles, MacCleary studied the data Smith had collected. There wasn't much. They already knew that the new Mob enforcer was somebody named Maxwell. Somehow this Maxwell was tied in with Norman Felton, a suspected hit man with ties to New York's Viaselli crime Family.

Other than a few photographs of Felton and Viaselli, that was pretty much it.

Conn was disappointed there wasn't more to go on.

In this business, the more information you had going in, the more likely you were to come out alive at the other end.

Once he was up to speed, MacCleary brought the envelope down to the basement furnace. As he fed the papers into the fire, he noted the latest addition to the virtually empty cellar. A plain metal box was tucked away in the shadows behind the furnace.

Smith had mentioned the box to MacCleary in passing, as if discussing the weather forecast.

The coffin had arrived at Folcroft a few months back, the day Smith had finally connected the White House line.

This was part of the ultimate fail-safe. Together with the cyanide pills, this was how CURE's secrets would remain secret. If the agency was ever compromised, Harold Smith would calmly descend the cellar stairs, climb into his specially ordered coffin and swallow his suicide pill.

Standing in the heat of the furnace, Conn noted that there was only one coffin.

In spite of the CURE director's earlier crack about their age, Smith was still planning a different kind of death for each of CURE's original agents. For Smith, this would be the way. Quiet, neat, alone. For MacCleary-the old field hand-it would be something away from Folcroft.

He tried not to think about what or when that might be.

With his hook, Conn flipped shut the cast-iron door of the furnace and turned for the stairs.

He met no one on his way outside.

When MacCleary pushed open the heavy fire door that opened on Folcroft's employee parking lot, thin fingers of drifting snow twisted around his ankles. Though winter was still hanging tough in the northeast, Conn smelled just a hint of spring on the breeze that blew off the sound. He held the aroma for a lingering moment before climbing behind the wheel of his dull green sedan.

The engine purred and he drove down the gravel drive and out through the main gates. The solemn stone lions watched in silence as he steered out onto the tree-lined road.

It felt good to be leaving Folcroft. It always felt good to leave. For Conrad MacCleary, leaving a place-any place-was always preferable to staying. He had an apartment in Rye. There wasn't anything there except four walls and an empty fridge. It felt good to leave there, too.

Someone else would have considered him a man without a country. MacCleary knew better. Sure, he might not have a real home or a family or anything remotely approaching a normal life, but the one thing he always would have was a country. More, he had the best damned country ever to grace the face of God's green earth.

"Give me your beatniks, your hippies, your bigmouth feminists yearning to burn bras," he muttered as he drove down the lonely road. "Dammit, she's still worth a life."

The patriotism of Conrad MacCleary was so strong a thing that no power in heaven or on Earth could have shaken it. Not even the knowledge that the life that would soon be forfeit to protect America would be his very own.

THE TWELVE-STORY APARTMENT complex stood in majestic contrast to the dingy three-story buildings of East Hudson, New Jersey. Norman Felton, Don Viaselli's man, lived in the sprawling twenty-three-room penthouse of Lamonica Towers. Since CURE's only link to Maxwell was Felton, MacCleary started there.

For three days MacCleary studied the comings and goings of Felton and his men. The first thing he realized was that this Felton was connected. Conn took care to avoid the police cars that patrolled with the regularity of a private security force outside the big building.

MacCleary spotted Felton several times. Viaselli's likely enforcer was a powerfully built man in an impeccably tailored suit. With him at all times-like an angry shadow-was Jimmy Roberts, his manservant bodyguard.

There was a handful of others Conn could tell belonged to Felton. They had the look. They dribbled in and out of Lamonica Towers at irregular intervals. Unfortunately, Conn couldn't see every entrance at all times. There was no way of knowing just how many men Felton had up there.

On the morning of the third day, Felton appeared through the front door with his bodyguard. When the two men got into a limousine and drove away, Conn decided he had waited long enough.

Conn had spent the past few days studying the habits of the doorman. The fat man vanished each day for five minutes at nine o'clock. Felton's limo was barely out in the street when the doorman checked his watch. Like clockwork, the man whirled in his blue-and-red uniform and disappeared inside the gleaming glass doors of the apartment building.

MacCleary was out of his car and across the parking lot in twenty seconds. Through the front door in twenty-two.

Keeping his left sleeve pulled low to conceal his hook, he crossed the lobby as if he belonged there. Through a door beyond the lobby reception desk, Conn caught a glimpse of the doorman and a few other Lamonica Towers employees drinking coffee. They failed to notice MacCleary as he crossed to the stairwell entrance.

He took the stairs to the second floor, then took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Back to the stairs, he climbed up to the penthouse fire door.

He was surprised to find the door unlocked.

Conn was instantly wary of a trap. Yet there were no guards in the hallway beyond. A quick examination revealed no alarm system hooked up to the door.

Maybe reputation alone kept Norman Felton protected. In a strange way-with his connection to Don Viaselli-Felton might enjoy some of the same safety afforded the village of Sinanju by the reputation of its Master.

Still, Conn was determined not to go the way of the seven dead and missing government agents who had preceded him. He walked with care down the short corridor to the main twin doors of the penthouse.

These doors were locked. Using a set of burglary tools he pulled from his pocket, as well as the curving tip of his hook, Conn quickly picked the lock. He slipped inside.

The decor was tasteful and opulent. Smith had supplied him with a floor plan of the apartment. MacCleary steered a direct course to the back of the suite.

Pale morning sunlight filtered through the gauzy drapes of Felton's study. MacCleary hurried to the desk. Sitting in the well-oiled leather chair, he used his hook to pop the metal lock face off the top drawer. It sprang free with a soft click, dropping almost silently to the plush carpet.

Conn searched the desk quickly and methodically. There was nothing of interest. Apparently, Felton had a daughter attending Briarcliff College. There were some personal letters from her secured in ribbon. MacCleary hadn't seen anything about a daughter in Smith's dossier.

"You're slipping up in your old age, Smitty," Conn muttered under his breath.

Other than the letters, there were a few legal documents and some uncashed dividend checks secured with a paper clip. There was also some payroll information on a Jersey City auto junkyard. If there was a connection to Maxwell in the pile of innocuous papers, Conn MacCleary couldn't see it.

"Maxwell, where the hell are you?" Conn grumbled.

There were no file cabinets in the room. Rows of tidy bookshelves were loaded with unread books. A few pictures hung on the mahogany walls. Otherwise the room was empty.

Conn did a rapid sweep between the books and behind the pictures for a hidden safe. There wasn't one.

This room was a bust. MacCleary had stepped halfway back into the living room before he knew he was in trouble.

"Find what you were after?" a flat voice asked. Conn froze. He hadn't heard anyone come in. They had been careful not to make a sound. Careful because they knew he was coming, knew he was already inside. It was a setup.

Norman Felton sat in the wing chair. With him was Jimmy the butler and a third man. MacCleary recognized him as Timothy O'Hara, one of Felton's lieutenants.

They weren't alone. Over in the doorway stood three more men. They lacked the culture of Felton or the comfort of Felton' s two men. These were imports of some sort, not used to their surroundings. They seemed to have equal contempt for both Felton and Conrad MacCleary.

"You have picked an unfortunate time for your visit," Felton said to MacCleary. "These men are employed by an associate of mine. They're here on business." He waved a hand to the trio at the door. "Oh, and before you ask, the answer is yes, we did see you sitting out in the parking lot for the past three days. Do you think we're blind?"

"I suppose it wouldn't work if I told you I worked for building maintenance," MacCleary said. He kept his voice perfectly even. No quick moves. Not yet.

To his right a breeze off the open veranda blew the thin ceiling-to-floor drapes into the room like billowing cobwebs. In the wind the curtains enveloped one side of Conn's body before slipping back to the floor.

"Possibly," Felton said. "But since I own the building, I know all my employees. Now, I have a little problem maybe you can help me with. My friends in business and I are being harassed. It's been going on for quite some time, and we'd like it to stop. Unfortunately, so far the agents I've encountered haven't been forthcoming about who they work for.

Under persuasion some have tried to tell us but-and here's the amazing thing-they just don't seem to know. I've got a good feeling about you, though. I think you're going to tell me exactly who our enemy is."

Conn was doing rapid calculations in his head. The odds were definitely not in his favor. All at once, his shoulders slumped. The fight seemed to drain from him.

"Okay," MacCleary exhaled wearily. "What the hell. Bastards don't care if I live or die anyway. Anything you want to know. But we should talk in private."

In his mind Conn had already decided his course of action. His revolver was in his pocket. He had six shots. One for each man in the room.

The three at the door were holding their ground. Felton and the others were nearer, so they'd be first. Conn was confident he could take out the near three. The others would be harder, but not impossible.

Rapidly calculating his odds, Conn figured they weren't great. Still there was a chance.

The next time the drapes blew up around him, he was already slipping his hand into his pocket. The move was so smooth and practiced it remained unseen. His fingertips were brushing the butt of his gun when a new voice cut sharply across the charged air of the room.

"Do all of you Americans rely on weapons to do the work of your hands?"

The voice couldn't belong to any of the men Conn had seen. It was too close. Even Felton seemed surprised by it. The Mob enforcer's head snapped around.

When he found the source of the voice, his eyes grew dark. "You," Felton snarled contemptuously. MacCleary followed Felton's gaze. He was shocked to find that there were now two more men in the room. Conn couldn't have missed them. They seemed to appear from out of the walls themselves. Secret panels. Had to be.

One was an Oriental, probably somewhere in his thirties. Conn quickly realized the other man wasn't a man at all.

It was just a kid. Pale as a ghost, with a mop of yellow-blond hair. Though his face was dead, his blue eyes as he peered over at MacCleary seemed to sparkle with a weird electricity. The kid had a confident grace that somehow sent a chill up Conrad MacCleary's battle-tested spine.

Conn was rapidly rethinking his game plan. There was now an extra man to take out. And the presence of the creepy kid complicated things. As the drapes fell away from his stocky form, he slipped his empty hand from his pocket.

The Oriental wasn't even looking Conn's way.

"I assume this is yet another spy sent to harass our mutual employer," the Oriental said to Norman Felton.

When he turned his attention to Conn, the Oriental's eyes were blandly contemptuous. But then something strange happened. As he studied the intruder near the open balcony doors, the scorn that was as comfortable a part of his wardrobe as his black business suit melted to quiet interest.

The Oriental noted the lightness of the CURE agent's stance-the way the man with the hook seemed to balance on the balls of his feet. A little too relaxed for a beef-eating Westerner. Of course Mr. Winch was aware of the weapon even before MacCleary was reaching for it. The gun wasn't the problem. It was the stance. The pose the big man struck seemed ...familiar.

Across the room Felton didn't seem to notice the change of expression on Winch's flat face.

"This one's mine," Felton said coldly.

"He was about to kill you," the Oriental said. There was icy certainty in his voice. His hooded eyes turned not to Felton, but remained locked on Conrad MacCleary.

At this Felton laughed. Even Jimmy, his main bodyguard, chuckled gruffly under his breath. The other bodyguard, O'Hara, joined in the mirth.

"Fat chance," Jimmy growled.

Still sitting, Felton aimed a neatly manicured finger to the trio of men standing at the door. The laughter dried up.

"I want them and you out of here," he ordered. "Viaselli thinks I'm working for one of his enemies. He thinks I could be behind these attacks. I'm not. I have always been loyal. Even when he took you on-" he aimed his angry chin at Mr. Winch "-I did what I was told. I cleaned up your messes, same way I cleaned up my own. Even though you made messes like none I've ever seen. Arms and heads chopped clean off. Didn't matter. I cleaned up after you, because Carmine Viaselli asked me to and my job is to protect Carmine Viaselli. But now my Don thinks I've been disloyal to him. You tell him I haven't. You tell him that I kidnapped his brother-in-law as insurance to keep me safe while I figure out what exactly is going on here. I'm keeping him until I clear up this whole mess."

The three at the door had been keeping their cautious distance. Felton's manservant, Jimmy, had a reputation for savageness that they had no desire to put to the test. The surprise appearance of Mr. Winch, their employer's new right-hand man, had merely complicated things.

"No way," one of Viaselli's men near the door called. "We been sent to collect Bonelli, an' that's what we're gonna do. Mr. Viaselli wants his brother-in-law back."

Standing near the balcony, Conrad MacCleary was beginning to get a clearer picture of things. There was trouble in paradise. The Oriental, the men at the door. They weren't Felton's men. They all worked for Felton's boss, Don Carmine Viaselli. All pitted against one another.

Conn had been wrong these past eight years. CURE had had an effect. The men Smith had been sending in had sown the seeds of mistrust within the Viaselli criminal organization. They were turning on one another.

No one went for guns. They all stood. Staring. The Oriental and his young charge seemed the only two in the room unruffled by the standoff.

Winch raised a dismissive hand to the men at the door. "Your mission is irrelevant," he said without turning. "This man who was about to kill you all holds the key to everything you need to know."

This time there was no laughter from Felton. A smile devoid of mirth touched the corners of his lips. "Kill me?" he mocked. "He didn't have a prayer."

"Oh?" Winch asked. "The gun in his hand tells me a different story."

Felton's eyes darted to the man at the balcony doors.

It was true. The intruder now held a revolver in his good hand. It was Felton's own fault. He had become sloppy, distracted by all these uninvited guests. Everyone had been afraid that everyone else would draw guns and so no one had, except for the one man they should have all been watching.

"Okay," MacCleary said gruffly. "Here's how this is gonna work. You're all going to keep your hands where I can see them. You're going to go into that study and shut the door and I'm going to back calmly out of here. You're going to let me get out to my car without calling down for help. First bastard I see peek his head around a corner gets a bullet between the eyes. That clear to the whole class?"

His words were tough, but the simple fact of the matter was Conn knew he couldn't risk initiating gunfire. Whom would he shoot first? Each side seemed firmly allied against the other. To baptize this standoff in blood would give both teams a clear shared threat. If gunfire did break out, he only hoped some of them would take each other out.

It was not Felton who spoke, but the Oriental.

"I am sorry, but that is not possible," Mr. Winch said.

MacCleary's face fouled. "Who the hell are you, anyway?" he demanded.

"Someone, I believe, with whom you share a mutual acquaintance," Winch offered darkly. He folded his hands across his stomach, curling just the tips of his fingers into the cuffs of his white dress shirt.

"Your stance is good, by the way. It is wrong to use a gun, of course, but you are as right as can be expected given your limitations."

The words sounded odd, coming as they did from an unfamiliar face. But they were still familiar. And in that instant, MacCleary felt a cold knot of certainty tighten deep within his belly. And with the knowledge came fear.

Mr. Winch seemed to sense Conn's understanding. The Oriental gave a small nod of acknowledgment. MacCleary now realized he faced something far more dangerous than a mere Mob enforcer. Felton, Viaselli, their men, the mysterious Maxwell-all spiraled away in a swirling, inconsequential sea of mediocrity. What he faced now was the best. And recent experience had taught him that he was woefully unprepared for battle.

Conn aimed his gun squarely at Winch, ignoring the others. He didn't pull the trigger. Doubted it would have mattered even if he did.

MacCleary watched for a telltale flash of movement, a rustle of fabric, anything that would presage attack. But Mr. Winch calmly stood his ground.

"Thank you for confirming that which I already knew," Mr. Winch said with a smile.

And when the attack came against Conrad MacCleary, it wasn't the dangerous Oriental or Felton or even any of Felton's or Viaselli's men who came after him.

Winch whispered a few low words in a foreign language. It sounded Korean, but he spoke too softly to be sure. With a nod barely perceptible to Conn, Winch did the one thing Conn hadn't expected. He sent the kid forward.

It would have been laughable under other circumstances. A room full of grown men, all of them undoubtedly armed to the teeth, and a kid was being sent to kill MacCleary.

"I don't know if you gooks have heard, but we've got child-labor laws in this country," MacCleary said. He kept his gun aimed at Winch's chest.

The kid moved in an unhurried glide. His electric-blue eyes danced as he stared blankly at MacCleary. Near his employer, O'Hara had been watching the action with growing agitation.

"This is nuts," Timothy O'Hara growled all at once. Not waiting for orders from Felton, he stepped forward, shoving the kid roughly aside. "Get outta the way, punk."

Though O'Hara outweighed the kid by 150 pounds, the blond-headed teenager didn't fall down. He merely glided to one side, allowing O'Hara to pass.

MacCleary instantly forgot about the kid. O'Hara was charging for him. Jimmy Roberts took his lead, coming in behind. The others seemed to take up the thread. The men at the door began moving toward Conn.

For the moment even the Oriental was forgotten. Survival instincts honed from years of fieldwork took over.

MacCleary spun on Felton's men. Or tried to. As he whirled, he felt something rough snag the end of his wrist.

His hook! His damned hook was caught in the back of a couch! The off-balance moment was enough for his attackers. O'Hara was first on MacCleary. MacCleary couldn't get his balance to shoot before a strong hand had him by the wrist. His forearm struck the wall and the gun went flying.

MacCleary tore his hook from the sofa material. Jimmy Roberts was on him. Too late to save O' Hara.

The hook buried deep in the side of O'Hara's head, just behind his ear. MacCleary tore it free and the man fell.

Conn didn't know if it was fatal. Didn't matter. The rest would be coming....

No. Not coming. Stopped. The room had frozen. Why weren't the others moving? Felton and the Oriental just stood there. Even Jimmy the bodyguard and the Viaselli soldiers looked worried. They were all watching the kid.

Conn sensed something wrong. Later no one in the room would be able to say quite what it was. A hum, a shudder of electricity. Something felt, something heard. Some invisible something that sparked the already tense air of the penthouse room, raising hair on arms and the backs of necks.

There was a Viaselli soldier standing between Conn and the boy, blocking the young man's path to MacCleary. The boy turned his electric-blue eyes on the mobster.

"The fire," the boy said softly. Conn noted that he had a vague Southern twang. "See the fire? The fire burns."

And as if some hidden switch had been thrown, the Mafia man went berserk.

Screaming, the Viaselli soldier slapped his hands flat against his own head. He beat his palms to his chest as if trying to extinguish invisible flames. Howling in pain and crying for help, he whirled in place. At first MacCleary thought it was some kind of seizure. But when the man spun to him, he couldn't believe his eyes.

Blisters were rapidly forming on the man's face. As MacCleary watched in terrified fascination, the erupting boils turned red, then white. They spread across the man's cheeks and down his neck. As his face became one big blister, the man screeched in horror.

There was no flame, no heat. The belief that he was on fire was enough for him to experience the effects. The skin ruptured and boiled and spit and crackled as if he were fully ablaze. As MacCleary stared in disbelief, the screaming Mafia man's eyes baked to an opaque milky white. Then he wasn't screaming anymore because he was dead. The man fell face first to the neatly vacuumed wall-to-wall carpeting.

"Sweet mother of mercy," Conrad MacCleary gasped.

He saw a shuffling movement. Numbly, Conn looked up.

The kid was coming for him. He had that same weird look on his face, this time directed at MacCleary.

Conn's eyes darted around the room.

Felton and the others melted back. All the men were shocked. Only the Oriental was unaffected. He stood rooted in place, a knowing smile on his broad, flat face.

And coming toward Conn, a look of possessed doom in his deadly eyes, was the freakish yellow-haired kid.

Hypnosis or something else entirely, it didn't matter. Conn had seen what that kid could do.

There was only one way out. Calculating every possible alternative in an instant, MacCleary came up with the only workable solution. And as soon as he had it, he acted upon it.

Conn fell back from the kid, from the Oriental. From Felton and the other mobsters.

The floor-length balcony drapes blew gauzy white into the apartment. Conn stumbled through them. Felton and the others started to run, but it was too late. Conrad MacCleary flipped up and over the wrought-iron balcony railing and dropped from sight. "Dammit," Felton snarled, bounding out onto the terrace.

He was just in time to see MacCleary bouncing off a third-floor balcony. Conn had tried to grab on with hook and hand. It slowed his descent enough that when he hit the landscaped evergreens they didn't tear his flesh to shreds. He struck the trees and rolled, hitting the sidewalk hard.

The uniformed doorman and a few tenants from the parking lot ran over to the body. The doorman quickly raced back inside the apartment building to phone for an ambulance.

"Witnesses," Felton growled. "Damned witnesses."

He whirled back around, face furious.

Winch was gone. So, too, was the blond-haired kid. O' Hara lay dead on the floor. Jimmy Roberts stood over him. The two remaining Viaselli men were hovering over their own dead companion, their faces dumb with shock.

Felton shook his head, trying to shake away the shock of the past few moments. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

"Get someone down there to check the body for an ID before the cops get here," he ordered. "And clean this mess up." He waved to the two bodies in the room. "I don't want any evidence when they start asking questions."

As Jimmy got on the phone and started issuing orders, Felton took one last look at the burned body. When he stepped into his study a moment later, Norman Felton's face was ghostly white.

Chapter 16

"That's not to say you Catholics were always bad," the Master of Sinanju announced.

The old Korean was sitting cross-legged on a broad, flat rock in the middle of the prairie. The cold and lonely sky above his aged head was black and scattered with stars. Somewhere far off, a lone coyote howled at the waxing moon.

They had been in the desert for so long now, Remo had lost all track of time. His sunburned skin had long since gone from lobster red to a dark tan.

It was closing in on midnight. Rather than return to their motel when evening fell, as had become their custom during these weeks in exile, Chiun had proclaimed that this night they would remain out in the desert.

At the old Korean's insistence, Remo was trying to start a fire. He had been trying to start one for the past three hours. Remo didn't know what he was doing wrong. After all, he had seen it done in Westerns a million times. Something to do with rubbing sticks or banging rocks. Unfortunately, what was child's play for Gabby Hayes was proving impossible for Remo Williams. All the sticks he managed to scrape up were snapping and all the rocks were shattering in his hands.

Remo was squatting in the sand. At his toes was a growing pile of broken sticks, crushed rock and no fire.

When the Master of Sinanju brought up Catholics for the umpteenth time, Remo wasn't in the mood. "Are we back to Catholic bashing again?" Remo grumbled as he worked. "I thought you'd reserved today for dumping on the Chinese."

The Master of Sinanju's rampant prejudices became even clearer as the days bled into weeks. By the sounds of it there weren't many members of the human race he had much use for. Even the inhabitants of Sinanju-which Remo learned was also the name of the North Korean fishing village from which Chiun hailed-weren't spared criticism. Two days ago Remo had been forced to endure a six-hour monologue on the village cobbler, with the ominous warning never to entrust him with a pair of ceremonial greeting sandals. Remo-who had never worn a pair of sandals in his life, never intended to wear a pair, thus negating the need for mending, and who had never been to Korea and had no intention of ever going there-agreed to take Chiun's warning to heart. That blessedly ended the Sinanju-cobbler harangue. But since sunup yesterday it was all about the Chinese and how they were all thieves and liars, so Remo was a little surprised when the old man started up on Catholics again.

"You just said a prayer to the founder of your cult," the Master of Sinanju explained.

Remo frowned. "No, I didn't."

"I heard you distinctly," the old Korean said. "You invoked your deity. You said 'Jesus Christ, why won't this light?'"

"Oh," Remo said, nodding understanding. "Just a figure of speech. Although I wouldn't object to a little otherworldly intervention right about now. The Lone Ranger could use his gun to start a fire. You wouldn't happen to have a .45 stashed up that skirt of yours, would you?"

"For your sake I will pretend I did not hear that," Chiun droned. His hooded eyes sought night shadows.

Remo sighed. "Back to square one." He returned to his rocks and sticks.

"There were some nice popes in the Middle Ages," Chiun resumed as Remo crushed a fresh pair of rocks. "Now, the Borgias. There were some popes who knew how to treat their assassins. And when there was more than one pope at a time, the babies of Sinanju ate well. But now you people have settled on one pope who seems content to follow your founding precepts. Worse even than a false religion is a false religion that actually practices what it preaches."

"Yeah," Remo said. "I can see how that'd wreck the market for professional killers." More rocks shattered in his hands. "Damn," he muttered as he threw them to the ground. "You know, this would be a hell of a lot easier if you'd just let me drive to town for some matches."

"No matches. Steer clear of those evil things, Remo," Chiun warned darkly.

Remo almost hated to ask. "What have you got against matches?" he said, sighing wearily.

"Aside from fostering a reliance on devices for doing something that you should be able to do yourself?"

"I don't fart fire, Chiun," Remo pointed out.

"Do not be gross," Chiun chided. "Matches are made of poison. The whatever-it-is they put on them that makes the fire causes a disease called necrosis. Thousands have been killed or crippled. The deadly poison at their tips has even been used for murders and suicides. Matches are wicked implements of death and destruction."

Remo's eyes narrowed. "When did this allegedly happen?" he asked suspiciously.

"Oh, just the other day," Chiun insisted, fussing at the skirts of his kimono. "I believe it was in the 1830s."

"Thought so," Remo said, nodding.

He was learning that this sort of thing was typical for the Master of Sinanju. The old Korean measured everything against the yardstick of Sinanju. Since his discipline had been around for millennia, his concept of time was skewed. Although the United States was nearly two centuries old, Chiun still considered it to be an upstart nation. Events of 140 years ago were just yesterday to him.

If he had met the Master of Sinanju a few short months ago, back when he was in his old life as a Newark patrolman, Remo would have thought the old man was senile. But he had come so far in so little time that he was finding himself accepting the words of the wizened Oriental more and more. Not that it was always easy. It seemed as if Remo could do nothing right. Earlier that morning, for instance.

Today's training had involved climbing sheer rock faces. Of course, Remo did it wrong. He used hands and toes to seek out cracks and bumps in the surface. Chiun had told him that he should make himself a part of the wall. Remo wasn't sure exactly what that meant. Besides, it wasn't necessary.

"Why should I try that hocus-pocus?" Remo had asked. "If I can find a ledge or a crack, I should use it."

"And what will you do if you encounter a completely smooth surface?" Chiun had asked.

"Find a ladder," Remo replied with certainty.

"And suppose there is not one available?"

"I'd tell Rapunzel to let down her freaking hair," Remo groused. "I don't know what I'd do, Chiun. I'd holler for help, I guess."

"And assuming there is only you?"

"There isn't just me," Remo said. "There's MacCleary and his boss and probably a dozen other guys in training like me. They'd send help."

At this, Chiun shook his aged head. "There is only you, Remo," he insisted. "There is only ever you. You must learn to rely on yourself, not others."

"You seem like an okay guy," Remo said. "For a slave-driving pain-in-the-keister. How about I call you?"

During their conversation, the harsh lines of the Master of Sinanju's face had softened ever so slightly. At Remo's words the old man's face hardened. Sniffing, he raised himself to his full height.

"Climb," Chiun commanded, his voice cold steel. Remo climbed.

But that was today and this was tonight and Remo was on his fiftieth rock combo and he still hadn't discovered fire.

"What kind of a sissy-girl desert is this?" Remo complained after another pair of rocks exploded in his hands. "That's it, I give up. These rocks are made of goddamned saltines." He threw down the stone shards in disgust, brushing the powder from his hands.

"Rock is rock," Chiun said quietly. "It is the same as it has always been. It is you that is different." By his tone it was obvious the old man thought he was making some great point. Remo had no idea what it might be.

"What do you mean?" asked Remo.

"This," said Chiun.

And the Master of Sinanju picked up two of the bigger chunks of rock Remo had broken and discarded. Clapping the surfaces together over the pile of twigs, the old man sent off a spark that ignited the tinder.

He held the rocks out for Remo to inspect. Somehow they hadn't broken in the old Korean's weathered hands.

"You have reached a new level in your training," Chiun explained as the fire caught in the kindling. "How'd you do that without breaking them?" Remo asked, puzzled. He took one of the rocks from Chiun. It was small in his palm. His fingers nearly wrapped completely around.

"Because I can control what I have learned."

Remo raised a dubious eyebrow. "You trying to tell me I broke rocks with my bare hands?"

"What do you think this exercise was all about?" Chiun replied. With a long stick he began turning over the small pile of brush, spreading the fire evenly.

Across the growing campfire, Remo frowned. He hadn't been aware that this was an exercise. Taking the rock tighter into his palm, he squeezed. Nothing happened. The rock remained solid, unbreakable. But that wasn't right. Just a few minutes before it had been just like all the rest, shattering from an even bigger stone in his hand.

He raised his doubtful eyes from the rock.

"You weren't thinking about it before," the Master of Sinanju said, answering his pupil's unspoken question. "You were thinking only of the fire and of your frustration. Your attention was focused on something else. Like now."

Remo wasn't sure what the old man was talking about until he looked back down. In his hand was a crushed pile of rock. Stone dust sifted from his open palm.

"Holy Christmas crap," Remo gasped, amazed. "Did you see that?" He looked up, wide-eyed.

"Your mind is unfocused," Chiun replied as he played in the fire. "We must work on that next. But that is for tomorrow. For now you need to sleep."

"Sleep? No way. Did you see what I just did? I just crushed a freaking rock with my bare hand. With my bare hand. That's even better than breaking boards."

"It is child's play in Sinanju."

Remo slapped the dust and shards from his hand, scooping up another rock from the ground.

"It's gotta be a trick. Show me what I did."

"No," Chiun said. "It is time for you to rest."

"I don't want to rest. I wanna break more rocks," Remo said, barely able to contain his excitement.

"You just did," Chiun pointed out.

Remo looked down at his hand. Another solid rock had been crushed while he wasn't looking. "Hoo-wee, this is great!" Remo enthused. "You've gotta be the greatest teacher ever."

Despite his agitation that his order to sleep had been twice ignored, Chiun's face warmed at the compliment.

"Either that or I'm the greatest student ever," Remo insisted.

Chiun's face dropped. Remo felt the desert air chill. "You have an ugly tongue, even for a white," the Master of Sinanju said. "Go to sleep."

"What?" Remo asked. "What'd I say?" His answer was an icy stare.

"Okay, okay," he grumbled. "But this is more like what I expected from all this training. Sign me up for more of this stuff in the morning."

Remo didn't think he'd ever be able to sleep again. He felt as if he could burst out of his own skin, so astonished was he by his own growing abilities. But Chiun was adamant and so he obeyed, curling up on the ground in the glowing warmth of the blazing fire. In spite of the rush of excitement he was feeling, sleep quickly overtook him.

AN HOUR LATER, Remo awoke to the most disgusting odor he'd ever smelled in his life. Retching bile-fueled air from deep in his empty belly, he sat up.

It was just after one in the morning. A soft breeze stirred the desert dust. Chiun was still tending the fire, a thoughtful expression on his weathered face.

"Where's that stink coming from?" Remo gasped. The old man looked up. Yellow fire danced across his hazel eyes.

"You," the Master of Sinanju replied. Remo frowned. Since the second month of his Sinanju training, he hadn't needed deodorant. He didn't know why. Just another one of the freaky changes his body had been undergoing. Chiun told him that his body was beginning to awaken, to do those things it was meant to do. But this smell was different than body odor. It was a strong stench of rotting flesh that flooded his senses and filled the air. He tasted the foul odor thick on his tongue.

"No way that's me," Remo said. "I think an animal must have died around here somewhere."

He glanced around the desert scrub for a dead buffalo. For a smell that awful, the animal had to be huge.

"Many animals died to make that smell," Chiun replied, still twirling his stick lazily in the fire.

"Figured," Remo said, holding his nose. Somehow the stink still penetrated. "Where'd you take me, the elephants' graveyard? There must be carcasses buried all around us."

"They are not buried. You are the one who brought them here."

"You know I didn't bring anything out here," Remo said. "You haven't allowed me any meat in months. You won't even let me out of your sight when we go into town."

"It has nothing to do with your new diet. What you are smelling is the result of more than one score years of wallowing in cow burgers, pig's feet and sheep entrails."

With a look of cautious skepticism, Remo sniffed his own forearms. The stink nearly bowled him over. Eyes watering, he looked up. "It is me," he said, shocked.

"I told you. Why don't you ever listen to a word I say? Sometimes I think I would be better off talking to the wall."

"No walls in the middle of the desert."

"And so I am forced to converse with you," the Master of Sinanju lamented.

A quiet moment passed.

"Chiun?" Remo asked eventually. "Why do I stink?"

The old Korean became very still. Curls of smoke from the dancing fire encircled his age-speckled head. "It is a rite of passage called the Hour of Cleansing," Chiun explained with a knowing nod so gentle it failed to disturb his tufts of gossamer hair. "It was common for Masters of the old order. Less so for those of the new, since most begin proper diet and training not long after birth. Your body is purging a lifetime's worth of poisons. It understands better than you the changes you are going through. The pollution of beef and everything else that has clogged your body is being released."

"This is all just from eating meat?"

"It is the product of an unhealthy diet."

"Phew," Remo said, disgusted. "Remind me of this stink next time I want a steak." He tried to slow his breathing as he'd been taught. The odor still clung. "The Hour of Cleansing, huh? I suppose I can put up with it that long."

"That is just a name," Chiun informed him. "For you it will be longer."

"How much longer?"

"That depends on how many caramel-dipped cows you ate in the past year. Judging by that ring of fat around your middle I would say no more than eight years."

It actually took eight days.

During that time they remained in the desert, away from civilization. Remo's training continued.

By late afternoon of the eighth day, the Hour of Cleansing finally and blessedly passed. It was as if Remo's body had flipped a switch. The smell was there one minute, gone the next. It didn't even linger.

Relieved by the sudden wash of clear, clean desert air, Remo took in a deep breath. Somehow he felt more alive than he'd ever felt before, in tune with the plants and sand and sky and soft desert wind.

The Master of Sinanju noted his pupil's breathing with satisfaction. This white had taken the rudiments of Sinanju and embraced them like no other. That he had passed the Hour of Cleansing so soon was yet another miracle. A hint of pleasure touched the corners of the old man's vellum lips.

Remo didn't see his teacher's pleased expression. Once the smell had lifted, Chiun gave him permission to break camp.

Remo was lost in thoughtful silence as he packed their bedrolls in the back of their Jeep. As he shut the tailgate, he came to an abrupt decision. Setting his shoulders firmly, he turned to face his teacher.

"I've got something to tell you, Chiun," Remo announced reluctantly. "I was going to just do it, but I feel-I don't know-like I owe you something."

"You owe me everything," Chiun replied, frowning at his pupil's serious tone.

"Right. Okay. Sure. Anyway, all this stuff you're showing me has been great and all, but it doesn't really matter. First chance I get, I'm outta here."

Chiun frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You've been square with me, so I will be with you. I didn't ask for any of this. They shanghaied me. Screw 'em. I'm leaving the minute all your backs are turned."

Chiun's face darkened. When he spoke, his voice was filled with low doom. "You intend to run away?"

Remo's spine was straight. He nodded tightly. "You bet. First boxcar out of town, I'm on it."

Not a single wrinkle on the old man's parchment face so much as flickered. "So," he said quietly. "After all this time, after all my effort, you choose now, now to tell me that you were wasting my time?"

"No offense," Remo said.

"You have been selected to work for America's secret emperor, the man who will rule over all this benighted land when he chooses to ascend to the throne. And as if this great honor was not enough, you were given another one, far greater than the first. You were remanded to the care of gracious and generous-of-spirit me, who has given you the beginnings-yes, there I said it-the beginnings of Sinanju. And you wait until now to tell me that I have been wasting my time? Now? Now!"

"I wasn't going to tell anyone at all," Remo said. "But you're-" He shrugged. "I don't know, you're different, that's all. I thought it wouldn't be right to not tell you."

But Chiun was no longer listening. Bony shoulders thrust back in indignation, he turned his back on Remo. Eyes facing the desert, he crossed his arms haughtily.

"Go," the Master of Sinanju commanded.

Remo's brow lowered. "Huh?"

The old man's expression never wavered. "I cannot believe that whatever pagan god you believe in gave you those giant ears only to make you deaf. Go means go. Go."

"What do you mean?" Remo asked. "Like take off, go? Run away from the organization? Right now?"

"I have been here long enough, Remo, to see that there is no organization to this disorganized nation," Chiun sniffed. "It is a wonder you people have lasted this long, with your mad emperors, your constitutions that your own government admits do not work, your Presidents who are selected by batting their eyelashes at the dribbling masses every four years like courtesans currying favor in a Pyongyang brothel, and your would-be students who cavalierly fritter away the valuable time of their betters. There is chaos and lunacy here, Remo, but not organization. If it is your wish to run from those who brought you to this life against your will, then go. I will not stop you."

"So I got this straight, you do mean right now? This minute. In the Jeep?"

"I will survive," Chiun sniffed.

"Okay," Remo said. He climbed in behind the wheel.

"But consider," the Master of Sinanju announced before Remo could put the key in the ignition. "If you leave now, you are leaving wonderful me, glorious me. The only person who has given you anything of any use in your pathetic excuse for a life. When I found you, you were nothing. A foundling wallowing in mud and despair. I have raised you from that. By leaving now you confirm your utter hopeless worthlessness. To stay will prove to me that you are something other than just a pale piece of a pig's ear."

Remo was thoughtful for a quiet moment. "Oh, well," he said. "See you in the funny papers." When he tried to turn the key in the ignition, he felt a sharp slap across the back of his hand. Looking up, he saw a pair of hard hazel eyes peering accusingly at him from the passenger's seat. Chiun had the keys in his bony hand.

"What kind of cold, heartless thing are you, that you would abandon an old man in the middle of the desert?" the Master of Sinanju demanded.

Remo hadn't even heard the door open and close. He had to admit it, the tiny Korean was good. "You're not letting me go, are you?"

"No. Take us home."

"I don't have a home anymore," Remo said bitterly.

"Tell it to someone who cares," Chiun said, tossing the keys back to his pupil.

Regretting that he'd ever said anything about his plans to the Master of Sinanju, Remo started the Jeep. "Old buzzard," he muttered.

"Pale piece of a pig's ear," Chiun replied.

They drove out of the desert, back to civilization.

Chapter 17

No light spilled through the high windows of room 36E. Night had long since claimed the Eastern Seaboard.

Even before twilight drew its dense black shroud across the land, the troubled gray soul of Dr. Harold W. Smith had already been stained with shadows of despair.

It was afternoon when the world grew as dark as a midnight cave for the director of CURE. For the taciturn Smith, the eclipse blotted out all light, all hope.

He learned of the events at Lamonica Towers through the normal CURE network. A low-paid reporter for the local East Hudson, New Jersey, newspaper supplemented his income by passing on unusual stories by phone to an anonymous number in Kansas City. He assumed it was for some kind of government agency that was analyzing crime statistics. He was partly right. What he didn't know--could never be allowed to know-was that his regular reports were rerouted through several dummy sites until they reached a certain lonely desk in a vine-covered building on the shore of Long Island Sound.

MacCleary had failed.

At first Smith couldn't believe it. His heart pounded wildly when he read the news. Blood sang loud in his ears.

There were few details. The digest was concise, standard procedure for CURE's unwitting informants. A man with a hook had jumped from a balcony in Lamonica Towers. Police had interviewed Norman Felton, the building's owner. Felton-whom the world would never know worked for the Viaselli crime syndicate-claimed that the man had attacked him in his apartment. Documents found on the jumper identified him as Frank Jackson, a patient of a private mental institution in Rye. Foul play was not suspected.

A few short lines. And the end of the line for CURE.

MacCleary couldn't be brought back to Folcroft. Not without raising too may questions.

It was all too soon.

Too soon since MacCleary had brought Remo aboard.

Too soon since his trip to Korea aboard the Darter to retrieve Master Chiun.

Too soon since he'd gone to Trenton State Prison in his guise as a monk.

MacCleary had been too active these past few months. Many had seen him. It had been an acceptable risk until now. MacCleary was CURE's only field agent. Everything that he'd been involved in had been necessary.

But this? This brought it all to a head.

A man with a hook jumping from a building. The news item had made it into a few papers already. How many more would it find its way into? Would it snowball from there?

How many sailors who had just seen another man with a hook would read that paper? How many prison guards would recall the monk with the hook who had visited that prisoner on death raw? What was his name, Williams, wasn't it? And by the way, wasn't it odd how fast that trial was? A cop going to the chair just for killing a pusher-wasn't that strange? Maybe someone somewhere should look into that, maybe even an enterprising young reporter from an East Hudson paper who subsidized his meager pay by passing along news stories to a mysterious phone number in Kansas City.

It was improbable that it would play out quite like that. But not impossible. And therein was Smith's dilemma.

The existence of the mere possibility that some of those things might happen was unacceptable. MacCleary could not be brought back. To spirit him from the East Hudson Hospital where he was in intensive care would raise questions.

Too many questions. Smith's brain swam.

All the lies, the cover-ups. They had all been necessary. Necessary to preserve the most damning secret in American history. Necessary to save a country from chaos and anarchy. All absolutely necessary.

And the thing that would inevitably have to happen next was necessary, too.

Smith couldn't even think it.

At one point soon after he'd heard the news, Miss Purvish buzzed him. The East Hudson police were calling. Something about a former patient who had attempted to commit suicide in New Jersey.

Smith took the call. He didn't even know what he was saying. The cover story came out by rote. More lies.

When he was through on the phone, he left his office, telling his secretary where he would be. With a few instructions delivered woodenly to Miss Purvish, he headed deep into the sanitarium. Up the stairs to this corner room.

He sat down in the drab vinyl chair. And there he had stayed for hours. Day bled into night. The shadowy twilight slipped away from the windowsill as fluorescent bulbs flickered and hummed to life in the corridor beyond the open door. Yet Smith stayed.

In the bed near him, the Folcroft patient who had become Conrad MacCleary's obsession in recent years continued to breathe rhythmically. The comatose young man's eyes were lightly closed.

He would never wake up. Never again open his eyes on the world.

Smith felt sick.

The chair in which he had sat all afternoon still smelled vaguely of MacCleary's aftershave. How many hours had his old comrade sat in this chair?

Smith hadn't eaten all day. His stomach was a growling pocket of churning acid.

It was well past two in the morning. For the whole time he had been there, Smith hadn't once checked his watch. His mind was still lost in swirling thought when a hand reached in from the hallway. The light switch inside the door clicked and the room was awash in garish white light.

Smith blinked away the brightness.

The prim nurse who entered seemed surprised to find someone else in the room.

"Oh, excuse me."

When she realized that it was Folcroft's director sitting alone in this room, the nurse hesitated.

"Dr. Smith," she stammered. "I didn't realize-Is something wrong with the patient?"

His vision was coming back. Blinking away the dancing spots, Smith looked over at the teenager in the bed.

"There's been no change in his condition," the Folcroft director assured her. His own voice sounded strange to him. Hollow. He cleared his throat. "I was merely checking in on him. For a friend." The last words were difficult for him to get out.

The nurse didn't notice the catch in his voice. Smith had been balancing the patient's chart on his knee all night. He had picked it up when he came in the room. He didn't know why. It was something he had seen MacCleary do countless times. He handed the chart to the nurse.

She accepted it with a curious expression, replacing it at the foot of the bed. When she began fussing with the sheets, Smith was already leaving the hospital room.

He trudged down the hallway.

It was closing in on three in the morning. At this hour he didn't expect to meet many faces in the hall. Smith kept the sanitarium staff to a minimum at night. He caught only a few odd looks from Folcroft's civilian employees on his way out of the hospital wing.

The administrative wing was empty. He walked through deserted halls to his office suite. When he reentered his office for the first time in hours, he found a note waiting on his desk.

Dr. Smith:

The patient you were asking about showed up at about 5:00 this afternoon. The guard phoned me, but I didn't want to bother you. He and his nurse(?) are in his room. Hope this is okay. See you tomorrow.

K. Purvish

The daft woman had wasted an entire sheet of yellow legal paper for one small note. No matter how much he tried to instill in her a sense of frugality, she refused to change her spendthrift ways. And that question mark. She was always just a little too curious.

Questions. Would there be more questions? A foam-lined steel box in the basement. The questions would end when he pulled the lid tight over that airtight box.

Smith crumpled the note in one hand, throwing it to the drab carpet.

He sat there for a long time. As he contemplated the shadows, his long fingertips pressed his vest pocket.

The hard outline of his new cyanide pill was a strange and alien thing.

Finally, some rational part of his mind broke through the haze. He reached across the desk, picking up the interoffice phone. He punched the code that would connect him to the main desk.

"This is Dr. Smith. The new patient, Mr. Park, arrived back late yesterday. Please send someone to retrieve his manservant. Yes, I am aware of the hour. I need to speak with him about the patient's special-care needs."

Smith hung up the phone.

The walls seemed to be closing in around him. No. They were a million miles away.

Smith blinked. His eyes were hot. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse.

"Forgive me," he quietly implored the shadows. Security. Everything was about security.

Leaning forward, Smith retrieved Miss Purvish's note from the floor. Smoothing it, he fed it through the special document shredder he kept at the side of his desk. It went through with a whir and was gone forever.

REMO NEVER THOUGHT he'd be relieved to be back at Folcroft Sanitarium. But after the weeks he'd spent in the wilderness, returning to civilization-even the CURE version of it-was a welcome change.

The guard at the main desk recognized Chiun as a patient who had gone on a brief sabbatical. When they returned in the afternoon, he called upstairs to relay the news.

No one seemed to care. There were no brass bands. Remo and Chiun were left alone in their basement quarters.

Remo was a little surprised when MacCleary didn't come down to see them. They had been out of touch for weeks.

Probably off on a bender somewhere. MacCleary liked his booze. At the start of his training just a few short months ago, Remo would have done anything to join him. But thanks to the Master of Sinanju, Remo's craving for liquor was almost gone. Not that he intended to become a teetotaler, but at the moment the thought of alcohol made him slightly ill. He was sure it would pass.

He took a long, hot shower.

Chiun even made him dinner. Some sort of disgusting mess made from brown rice and fish heads. It looked to Remo as if the Master of Sinanju had shopped for the ingredients from the Folcroft Dumpster.

But while the food was revolting, the portion was large compared to the subsistence meals he'd been allowed to eat in the Arizona desert. He ate greedily, drank water to his heart's content and went to sleep with a full belly.

He was awakened by a knock at the door.

There were two bedrooms in the basement quarters. Chiun used them both-one for himself, one for his luggage. He gave Remo a straw-thin sleeping mat and told his pupil to sleep out in the common room.

As the Master of Sinanju flounced out of his room to answer the door, Remo was sitting up groggily. "Kind of early to be delivering the breakfast garbage, isn't it?"

"The desert is only a few hours away by air carriage, O garbage mouth," Chiun warned.

Not wanting to go back to desert rations, Remo stilled his tongue as the Master of Sinanju opened the door.

An elderly Folcroft security guard stood in the hall. He spoke softly to Chiun for a few moments. Afterward the Master of Sinanju inclined his head to his pupil.

"What is it?" Remo yawned.

"Follow him," Chiun told him. He pitched his voice low. "And mind your manners."

Remo raised an eyebrow, but Chiun's mouth was sewn shut.

Remo pulled on his pants and T-shirt. Slipping his feet into a pair of sneakers, he followed the guard into the hall.

They took the stairwell to the administrative wing. To Remo, this had become "Upstairs," the nerve center of the CURE operation. He had never been up here before. MacCleary had told him that it was off-limits for him.

From the start he had a picture in his mind of walls of computer banks whirring away as harried G-men ran from room to room with armloads of files labeled Top Secret! Instead he found himself walking down a colorless hall that fulfilled its intended function precisely. There was nothing there that didn't look typical for a drab sanitarium.

He noted that there were no other people.

The guard's shoes clacked on the polished floor, echoing off the walls. A few times he looked back to make sure Remo was still following. It took Remo a minute to realize why. His own canvas sneakers made not a sound on the floor.

Remo found himself straining to hear his own nonexistent footfalls even as the guard ushered him into an empty office.

A brass plaque on an inner door read: Dr. Harold Smith, Director.

"Dr. Smith is expecting you," the guard said.

He went back into the hall, leaving Remo alone in the outer room.

Remo wasn't sure whether he should knock. He hesitated a moment before turning the brass knob. With the tips of two careful fingers he nudged the door open.

On the other side of the room a thin, middle-aged man in an ash-gray suit sat behind a big oak desk. His back was to Remo. He was staring out the window at the darkness and the moon-splashed sound.

"I'm Smith," the man said without turning. "I'm your superior. Please shut the door."

At first Remo didn't know how the man knew he'd even entered the room. The floor was carpeted and the door had swung open on silent hinges. But then he saw the reflection. Owlish glasses looked back at him in the big picture window behind the desk. The image was a little too clear. Remo realized it had to be some special kind of glass.

He did as he was told, pushing the door shut. On cautious, gliding feet he approached the desk.

The office was big but sparsely furnished. Yellow light from a banker's lamp arced over the desk's smooth surface. There were two telephones on the desk, both off to one side. One was black with a series of buttons. An interoffice line. The other was blue and had a simple rotary face.

A steaming white cup sat near the phones. Smith had brewed himself some hot water from Miss Purvish's coffeepot. The drooping tea bag was on its third use.

Smith continued to gaze into the darkness. "You should know most of what you need to by now. I will get you access to weapons, clothing and money. There are phone codes that you will need to memorize for contact purposes. There is identification already prepared for Remo Cabell. The first name was retained because your profile indicated that it was one of the few things you would not surrender."

Smith spoke without passion, without inflection. It was a simple dry recitation. Like reading a list of names from the phone book.

"Your cover will be as a freelance writer from Los Angeles," Smith droned on. "Your assignment calls for an-" he paused, his voice catching. When he finally managed to finish, the words were strained. "An elimination. The target is a patient in East Hudson Hospital in New Jersey. The man fell from a building yesterday. Probably was thrown. You will interrogate and then eliminate him. You need not worry about him being uncooperative. If he is alive and lucid, he'll talk to you."

Remo waited by the desk. He didn't expect his first assignment to be like this. Not that he really knew what to expect. But killing some poor schmo in a hospital bed certainly wasn't what he'd bargained for.

"Where do I meet MacCleary?" Remo asked. "He's supposed to go with me on my first assignment."

Smith's voice grew quiet. "You'll meet him at the hospital. He's your target."

Remo's breath slipped out. He stepped back a pace on the dingy carpeting. He couldn't speak. Shoulders steeling, the seated man finally turned. The chair let off a soft squeak. Eyes of flint gray stared up at CURE's new enforcement arm.

"He has to be eliminated," Smith stated firmly. "He's near death, in pain and under drugs. There's no telling what he might say."

Remo forced out the words. "Maybe we can make a snatch," he said. "Like he did with me." "Impossible," Smith insisted.

"It's too dangerous. He was carrying identification as a patient of Folcroft. I've already been contacted by the police in East Hudson where the fall occurred. There's a direct link to us now. I told them that he was emotionally disturbed. They seemed to accept that. They have closed the case as an attempted suicide."

Smith looked down at his cup of tea. He had brewed it but hadn't taken a single sip. It was growing cold.

"You will, if he's still alive, question him on Maxwell," the CURE director said. "That is your second assignment."

Remo was still trying to get his bearings. "Who's Maxwell?" he asked.

"We don't know," Smith admitted. "He is an associate of Norman Felton, an agent of the Viaselli crime Family in New York. It was Felton's apartment from which MacCleary fell. Maxwell provides some new perfect murder and disposal service. The bodies disappear without a trace. We have lost several agents already, although obviously none were directly traceable to CURE. At least, not until yesterday." Still staring at his watery tea, he cleared his throat. "The agents' orders were issued through the various agencies to which they were assigned. They did not know for whom they actually worked. I have pulled off all other agencies that might have an interest in this matter. You will have neither interference nor backup of any kind. With MacCleary gone, you are CURE's lone field agent."

Remo tried to comprehend the importance of Smith's words. The moment should have been big, but it seemed so small. The late hour, the lemon-faced bureaucrat, the Spartan office. Nothing seemed large. And yet that wasn't quite true. There was something huge looming over all.

Remo knew he shouldn't have cared. He should have hated MacCleary. Yet he'd wound up liking him. And now he was being sent to kill him.

"This Felton," Remo said. "You said MacCleary was tossed from his apartment. Just so we're clear, I get to punch his dance card, right?"

Smith was surprised at the ice in the younger man's voice. Eyes narrowing as he studied Remo's face, the CURE director nodded.

"He is the most likely candidate to offer a lead to Maxwell," Smith said. "Beyond that he is expendable."

"Consider him expended," Remo said flatly.

Smith shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Yes," he said slowly. "Just so you know, given the situation with MacCleary, we could already be compromised. If I learn that is the case, I will be forced to shut down this agency."

Remo almost asked what would happen to him under those circumstances. But then he thought of MacCleary. If this Smith thought nothing of eliminating Conrad MacCleary, he would think even less of taking out Remo.

The CURE director understood his unspoken question.

"Please understand," Smith said. "This organization cannot be exposed. That's why your first assignment on MacCleary is a must. It's a link to us, and we've got to break that link. If you fail, we will have to go after you. That's our only club. Also know that if you talk to anybody, we'll get you. I promise that. I will come for you myself."

There was cold certainty in the older man's tart voice. His eyes were shards of granite.

Remo's face grew sour. "You're a real sweetheart, aren't you?" he asked.

Smith ignored him. "MacCleary is in the hospital under the name Frank Jackson. Conn already briefed you on how we will contact you in case normal communications lines fail. Read the personals in the New York Times. We'll reach you when we have to through them. We'll sign our messages 'R-X'-for prescription, for CURE. That's it. I will have everything you need available within the hour. Good luck."

Smith took the arms of his chair and spun back around, eyes searching out glimmers of light on Long Island Sound.

Remo stood there quietly for a moment, absorbing it all. Smith only knew Remo had left the room when he looked up and saw the younger man's reflection was no longer in the one-way glass.

Alone once more, Smith released a sigh fueled with bile. He blinked his tired, bloodshot eyes.

He hadn't told Remo about the Senate committee or about the murder of Senator Bianco. There was no sense in overwhelming his new agent with more information than he needed. With any luck, by eliminating Maxwell, the threat against the United States government would dry up, as well.

Spinning back around, he took the cup from his desk. Standing wearily, Dr. Harold Smith brought the untouched tea into his private bathroom. To dump it down the sink.

Chapter 18

In his mind he was falling, falling.

Warm wind whistled around his ears. His heavy overcoat flapped behind him like a cape.

The ground was a thousand miles below. He saw the curve of the Earth. Sparkling blue oceans bracketing the familiar coasts. Purple mountains rising up majestically in the west. Craggy black hills and green forests in the east. Squared-off acres of checkerboard farmland everywhere in between.

The view was so spectacular he wanted to sing. Break into a chorus of "America the Beautiful" with Kate Smith singing harmony and the goddamned Mormon Tabernacle Choir to back them up. He wanted to scream from the mountaintops the words that filled his tired old heart.

And then he wasn't falling anymore.

There was a jolt of hitting sudden ground. At the moment of impact his heart had to have skipped a beat, because the monitor beside him chirped once loudly in electronic concern before resuming its normal rhythmic beeps.

A woman in a starched white uniform stuck her head in the room. She had to have been passing by. Satisfied that there wasn't a problem, she ducked back outside.

Conrad MacCleary saw her wheel a cart filled with tiny paper pill cups down the hall. Then she was gone. And for the dozenth time he realized the terrible truth. He was not free-falling from the sky above the nation he loved. He was in a hospital bed.

He was out of it. Couldn't pull his thoughts together. It was the drugs. The thought gave him a brief moment of terror. But even that was fleeting. In the next moment he was back in the sky, floating, falling.

Conn had been unconscious when they brought him here. He remembered going off the balcony at Felton's building, but the fall itself just wasn't there. His mind had isolated and eliminated that particular memory. He didn't remember the crowd or the ambulance ride. Didn't recall the broken arm and ribs or the emergency surgery on the compound fracture in his right leg. Didn't know a thing about the pins they'd installed in his shattered pelvis or about the kidney, spleen and gall-bladder they'd had to remove. He didn't know anything about anything until the moment he regained consciousness in the private room in the intensive-care unit of East Hudson Hospital.

Painkillers that didn't quite kill the pain. They made the pain different. Forgettable if his mind wandered.

The drugs were good, but they weren't as good as booze.

A stark memory came to him late in the night. He suddenly remembered waking up briefly when they first brought him in. A nurse-a pretty young thing-was working to cut off his bloodied clothes. He had asked her to go pick him up a bottle. He remembered-God-had to be hours later.

For Conrad MacCleary, it was the most frightening moment of his professional life.

He had spoken to someone without realizing he was even doing it. Asked a clear question. How much more had he said? Who else had he spoken to? He was hooked to a respirator now, a tube snaking down his throat, into his lungs. But how long had he been on the machine? How long had his mind allowed his mouth to run free?

The panic came and with it the pain and then came the morphine, and the panic didn't matter so much anymore.

In his mind's eye he saw a young boy with yellow hair. Fire blazed where his hands should be. Conn had seen the kid somewhere, but he couldn't place the face.

MacCleary thought of another kid. Back at Folcroft. Lying comatose in bed for the rest of his life. The boy with fire for hands was around the same age.

Maybe he could save that kid. Hell, maybe he could save both of them.

But he was busy right now. For the moment the Germans had him. Kraut bastards had captured him somehow. They'd been torturing Conn for hours, trying to make him talk. It wouldn't do them any good. He'd escape this torture chamber and find Smith. Smith had always been the key. The brains to balance Conn's brawn. Once Conn was safe, he and Smitty could come up with a new strategy, just as they always had.

But then his mind found brief focus, and he realized he wasn't being tortured. World War II was over. It was early 1972 and he was in a hospital because he had jumped off a twelfth-story balcony.

Yes, that was right. A hospital room. That's where he was. And he wasn't alone. There was a face looking down at him. Hovering like the angel of death above his bed.

Conn knew him. Recognized him from the eyes. Hooded, hazel. Oriental eyes. He'd seen those same eyes in the penthouse of Lamonica Towers.

A flat, familiar Oriental face was looking down at him.

Another dream in a sea of dreams.

In his dream the Oriental moved. With one hand he reached for something near the bedside. The other hand reached for MacCleary's throat.

For a brief moment Conn wondered if his dream was going to strangle him. And then his unspoken question was answered. The hand latched on to his neck.

He felt the fingers press against his flesh. And in a small, rational part of his swimming brain, Conrad MacCleary realized that this wasn't part of his tortured dreams.

A gentle manipulation and the intubation tube slipped up out of his throat.

"Now I have seen everything," a singsong voice clucked disapprovingly. "Machines that breathe for you. The bottom drops out yet again on the depths of white laziness."

The Master of Sinanju's weathered face puckered in displeasure even as he slid one hand under Conn's back. Long fingers manipulated the base of MacCleary's spine.

The drugged haze began to burn away like morning mist. For a moment there was pain like nothing Conn had ever before experienced, but then the hand-the magical, wonderful hand-pressed a cluster of nerves and the pain disappeared.

MacCleary was himself again. Exhausted, more parts missing than usual. But alert.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. His tired voice was a pained rasp.

The Master of Sinanju folded his arms across his chest. "A simple thank-you would suffice," the old Korean sniffed.

"You shouldn't be here," MacCleary insisted. A thought suddenly occurred to him. "Oh, I see. Did Smitty send you?"

"The emperor told me that an accident had befallen his worthless general," Chiun admitted.

"Thank God," MacCleary said. "Please do it fast, Master Chiun. The nurse was just here. She could come back."

Chiun's face grew puzzled. "Do what fast?"

"Kill me, of course."

The old Oriental's eyes grew dull. "Forgive me, but in your delirium have you forgotten to whom you are speaking?"

MacCleary's face sagged. "What? I don't understand. You're the Master of Sinanju. You're an assassin. The best in the world. Killing is what you do."

"Killing?" Chiun asked, indignant. "Killing? Does the spring kill the winter? Does the rising tide kill the shore? When the seed dies so that the flower may grow, has the flower killed the seed? Killing. Pah! You have claimed to be an expert on Sinanju, but how limited still is your knowledge of that which we are."

MacCleary still didn't understand. "But that's what you do," he insisted. "You're professional assassins."

Chiun nodded. "With the emphasis on professional. I do not recall any gold passing hands."

"Smith paid you. That's why he sent you here, right? To kill me? He did send you?"

The old man tipped his head. "Indirectly," he admitted. "I was out for an innocent stroll around the palace grounds and happened to pass by his window. As he spoke to my pupil about you, a word or two may have reached my blameless ears."

"He's sending Remo?"

"That might have been said. There was so much white blathering it was hard to keep track."

Relief formed deep in the care lines of Conrad MacCleary's ghostly pale face. "Good," he breathed. "But how did you get here first?"

"Because a bolt of lightning is faster than goose droppings. Honestly, MacCleary, I don't know where you found this one. He is lazy, he talks back to his elders. If he is late now, it is only because he chased a butterfly into the park or he lost the little note with the hospital's name on it that someone pinned to his sleeve."

The pain was coming back. Conn's head sank deeper into his pillow. "You think he won't come?"

"Who knows with that one?" Chiun shrugged. Conn felt hope slip away.

"He has to. If not..." He was growing desperate. "Master Chiun, Smith is good for it."

Chiun shook his head firmly. "No credit."

"I don't have any money. I think they took my wallet."

"It wouldn't matter anyway," Chiun said. "Paper money is merely a promise of payment." MacCleary wanted to shake his head in frustration, but the casts and tubes prevented movement.

"If not to kill me, then why are you here?" he said in tired exasperation.

"Your Smith has ordered your death against his own wishes. I could hear the sadness in his regal voice. Like most young emperors he does not yet understand the powerful sword at his side that is Sinanju. I would prove to him that his fears are groundless. I have come to liberate you."

The light of understanding dawned weakly. MacCleary shook his head. "No," he exhaled. "I can't leave."

"White medicine is a dangerous thing," Chiun warned. "We must hie from this den of quacksalvers before they decide to open your veins in order to bleed the sickness from you."

"I can't leave here, Master Chiun," MacCleary insisted weakly. "I was carrying my Folcroft ID."

"All the more reason to spirit you away. If the emperor's enemies learn his general is vulnerable, they might see weakness and use the opportunity to move against him."

"Smith's enemies are our country's enemies, Master Chiun," MacCleary explained tiredly. "I know you don't see it like we do, but you have to trust us. I can't go back to Folcroft now. I'd be leading America's and Smith's enemies straight to him. Smith understands that. The best way for him and the nation to survive-maybe the only way-is to eliminate me. I agree with him."

The old man's frown lines deepened. This was something unexpected. He had come to America expecting sloth and selfishness. But here was a white, ready to offer up his life in service to his king.

"You are stubborn, even for a general," he said quietly.

"Does that mean you'll kill me?"

"I do not give to charity," Chiun replied. "However, since my useless student may never find his way here-he having no doubt gotten lost in a downstairs broom cupboard where he is even now brutally assassinating the mop he has mistaken for you-I will assist you in doing what you think you must. Strictly in the interest of fostering good client relations."

Chiun had noted the open closet door when he first arrived. It was immediately next to the bathroom. MacCleary's bloodied clothes had been thrown out. His personal effects were locked away in storage. All that remained were his shoes and one other item. The plastic forearm of MacCleary's prosthetic had been damaged in the fall, but it was still intact. It had been removed prior to surgery and brought here afterward.

Chiun retrieved the false arm, bringing it over to the bed. The curved hook glinted in the room's pale light.

No words were spoken. None was necessary. MacCleary closed his eyes as the Master of Sinanju pressed the hollow end of the prosthetic up around the elbow nub. Chiun fastened the silver buckles around the forearm and shoulder.

In his fatigued brain, Conrad MacCleary was counting down the seconds of his own mortality. His lack of passion surprised him. He had lived life hard.

He had always figured when the time came he'd go out kicking and screaming.

In his last moments of life Conn tried to sort through recent events. A thought suddenly occurred to him.

"Chiun, do you have a son?" MacCleary asked abruptly.

The old Korean was just finishing with the shoulder straps.

"What business is that of yours?"

There was coldness to the Oriental's voice.

Conn opened his eyes. The pain was swelling. His whole body ached. For now it was dull and distant. "I don't know. I think I might have met him," MacCleary said with a frown. "Is that possible? Maybe at that building in Jersey? The one I fell out of. There was a guy, I think. An Oriental. He had your eyes."

MacCleary heard a little slip of air.

When he looked up he would have sworn the color had drained from Chiun's face. Or maybe it was just a trick of the weak light.

"I have no son," Chiun said softly.

"Oh," MacCleary said. His head collapsed back wearily on the pillow. "I'm sorry. Maybe it's the drugs. Everything's still a little fuzzy. I'm not sure of anything right about now. I swear there was a guy, though." He tried to concentrate. To think back to the events at Felton's apartment. "There were other guys, too. And a kid. I think But the Oriental had your eyes. Same color, same everything. It was like looking at you, but younger. I don't know, maybe it was part of the dream. Hell, probably it was."

Chiun didn't respond. He straightened from the bed.

"You are ready," he announced.

MacCleary didn't notice the flatness in his voice. Conn lifted his false arm. He turned the hook around, inspecting the sharp end. "Thanks," he grunted.

Chiun wasn't listening. He had cocked one shelllike ear to the open hallway door.

"Someone is coming," he hissed all at once.

The Korean recognized the confident footfalls. Not quite a glide, but no longer a normal man's walk. With an admonition of silence to MacCleary, the old man ducked inside the bathroom, pulling the door nearly closed behind him. He brought one hazel eye to the narrow gap.

Remo entered the hospital room a moment later, shutting the door to the hall quietly behind him. MacCleary's face was partially bandaged. Those features that were visible were heavily bruised. Remo didn't even look at the face as he leaned over the body.

Through the slivered door Chiun saw Remo move a hand up the damp plaster cast that encircled MacCleary's chest. Good. He was looking for a cracked rib to press into the heart. The technique was sloppy, but it would get the job done. Unfortunately, the young man's heart wasn't in it. He didn't do the deed fast enough.

"Hey, buddy," came MacCleary's faint voice. "That's a hell of a way to make an identification." Remo's hands fled the cast. As Chiun frowned, MacCleary began to babble some white nonsense to his pupil.

It was as Chiun feared. Remo had become distracted when he should have been focused on his task. This was the real reason Chiun had come to the hospital in the first place.

Remo was a sentimentalist. He liked MacCleary and so would find it difficult to kill the man. He might have done it if the silly old general who wanted death had kept his fool mouth shut. But he had to talk, and now Remo was looking at him no longer as a target but as a man. Worse, a friend.

Remo had learned too much in those early months of training. He had grasped the rudiments of Sinanju. That was partially Chiun's fault. But now he had been set loose on a world that might mistake him as truly Sinanju.

That was bad enough, but a failure in this first assignment might be-however unfairly-blamed on the House of Sinanju. As the last Master, Chiun couldn't allow that. He had hoped to get MacCleary back to Smith's castle, thus forestalling Remo's first assignment until his mind could be properly prepared. But the general was stubborn. He saw his act of suicide as noble. A final act of loyalty to his emperor and to his nation.

There was no doubt about it. These Americans were each one more lunatic than the last.

And so Chiun had done his part to help his pupil and thus Sinanju's reputation along. And when Remo arrived he hid in the next room, listening as the two fools chattered pointlessly, all the while hoping that the young man would come around and assassinate his dying friend.

For a little while Chiun was concerned that he might be discovered. Fortunately, the boy was a bit of a dullard. Remo didn't even seem curious why the hospital staff would leave the prosthetic arm and hook on a patient on whom they had performed emergency surgery and who was suspected to be suicidal. Obviously it would have been removed.

They talked for a time. When they were done, Remo turned and walked from the room.

In bed MacCleary's whole injured body tensed as he called weakly after CURE's new enforcement arm. "Remo, you've got to do it. I can't move. I'm drugged. They took my pill. I can't do it myself. Remo. You had the right idea. Just pressure the rib cage. Remo. Remo!"

But the door slowly closed on room 411.

As the big man called vainly into the empty hallway, Chiun stepped out of the bathroom.

"I can't believe it," MacCleary gasped as the Master of Sinanju swept up to the bed. "He was supposed to do it. All the personality projections said he'd do it."

The old spy seemed crestfallen.

"Some men are more than the sum of their projections," Chiun replied evenly. "I must go now." MacCleary was too weak to nod. Failure weighed heavy on his battered bones as he scratched his hook up across his chest cast to his neck. The defeat he felt came not from a life now at its end, but rather from distress that he might have failed in picking CURE's perfect weapon.

Chiun sensed the injured man's concern. Since it no longer mattered and since there was no one around to hear, the Master of Sinanju leaned close.

"Leave your worries about this one to the world of flesh, brave knight," Chiun confided in a whisper.

"I have seen the seeds of greatness in him. They are small and few in number now, but given time and care they can flourish. Even he does not know they are there. For what he is, you can be proud as you leave this life. For what he might become, Sinanju owes you a debt that can never be repaid."

An uncertain peace seeped across MacCleary's battered face. "Thank you, Master Chiun. I hope you're right."

With that, he buried the point of his hook deep in his own throat. Jerking his arm, he tried to tear it across, but the strength just wasn't there. Eyes wide with pain and pleading looked up at the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun's jaw tightened. "You asked a question before," the old Korean whispered. "Since you are an honorable man, bravely facing death, I will answer. It is true I once had a son. However, he no longer lives."

Chiun flicked the curve of the hook. In a twinkling it tore open Conrad MacCleary's throat, exposing a chasm of bubbling crimson. A font of red soaked the white pillowcase.

As the EKG monitor beside the bed spiked one last time before going forever flat, the old man shook his head.

"But sadly he was not the only one to share my blood."

Chapter 19

That long-ago spring day had been unseasonably warm. The sun smiled bright in the cloudless blue sky, scattering sparkling diamonds on the waters of the West Korean Bay.

The air hummed. The village of Sinanju-the very world itself-was alive with joyful song.

It was a great time for the chosen few, those who by luck of birth were able to call Sinanju, the Pearl of the Orient, their home. It was the Time of Departure, the time in every generation when the old Master surrendered the mantle of protector and provider to his successor. After years of training, the pupil was finally allowed to go out into the world as Reigning Master of Sinanju.

The people had gathered to await the appearance of the new Master, who was preparing to leave the village for the first time. The old Master was there. Standing silently before the House of Many Woods. When his successor finally appeared through the door an hour after the preordained time, a chorus of happy voices rose from the village square.

"Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully," the people shouted as their new protector strode down the path. "Our hearts cry with joy and pain at your departure. Joy that you undertake this journey for the sake of we, the unworthy beneficiaries of your generosity. And pain that your toils take your beauteous aspect from our midst. May the spirits of your ancestors journey safe with you who graciously throttles the universe."

The Masters who had preceded him back beyond the oldest memory, all the way back to before even the Great Wang, had all accepted the traditional words of departure with stoic countenance. But this Master was different than what the village had ever seen before. He smiled at the crowd as they sang his praises, accepted the flattery as his due. Hazel eyes turned left and right, soaking in the adulation.

Behind the new Master came the old one. Unlike his pupil, the former Master of Sinanju kept his eyes trained above the heads of those gathered, focused on some unseeable distant point. His face was stone.

"It is about time the old Master stepped aside," some of the villagers whispered after the two men passed by. "Look at this new one. Such pride, such bearing. Here is a Master whose praises we will gladly sing."

"Yes," more agreed. "He is not like that old-fashioned one who went before him and stayed long past his time. This one will bring glory to Sinanju."

"It is fortunate things worked out as they did," still others said. "If the old one's son had not died in training, he would not have had to take on another pupil. Then we would not have this great new Master to feed the children and care for the old and lame of our village. How lucky we are."

They all agreed they were very lucky the old Master's son was dead. As he walked through the village of his ancestors, the Master pretended not to hear their words.

Though his son had been dead for years, the wound was still as fresh as the day he had carried the little boy's battered body down from Mount Paektusan. Their words brought anguish to his weary heart. But he was a Master of Sinanju, and it was tradition since the time of the Great Wang himself that a Master could not raise his hand against any of the village. And so the retired Master made his ears deaf to all the hateful, petty things the people were saying.

In the village square the new Master stopped.

"I leave now on my great journey," he announced. "In Sinanju death feeds life. I will ply our art faithfully, for there is no higher calling. Death feeds life. What I embark on this day feeds the village. My labors sustain the villagers I love. Such has it been, ever shall it be."

When the cheers came, he soaked them up like desert rain.

The Master who had trained him could hear the falseness in the young man's voice. In truth he knew his pupil felt little but contempt for the village of his birth. But as Master of Sinanju his duties were clear. He would uphold the traditions as had all the Masters who had come before him.

Singing songs of praise to their new protector, the people swept the new Master up to the road that led from the village. With joyful hearts they sent him on his way. With tearful eyes they stood on the road, watching until he was a speck on the horizon and then disappeared into the muddy paddies. Certain that this new Master would restore the glory of the greatest Masters of Sinanju to the small fishing village, they returned to their homes to await the tribute from king and emperor that would fill their souls with pride and their cooking pots with food.

And they waited. And waited.

But the tribute never came.

Their new Master, their great protector, the one who would lead the village into greater glory, never returned.

Word came through circuitous means that he had abandoned the village, seeking to ply his trade for personal glory.

The villagers heard from the missing Master only once. When first he left, he performed a service that indirectly benefited his despised village. He kept the money, but he did send a servant back with a message for his teacher and uncle, the man who had been Master before him. On a small parchment scroll were carefully inscribed the characters, "I await the day." The retired Master slew the messenger.

The old Master was to blame. He had chosen the traitor. He had trained him. And after the betrayal, he was the one who kept the villagers' hope alive long after he should have.

Every day for years after his pupil abandoned them all to hunger and despair, the old one would come out of the House of Many Woods and pad through the village. He would climb up the craggy rocks above the bay and sit in the shade of the Horns of Welcome. Alone with thoughts that were never shared, he would watch the sea from dawn until dusk, waiting for his nephew to return. He kept the flickering light of hope burning long after he should have. Until the years had gone on too long even for him.

One day he suddenly stopped going to the shore. It had taken him long to admit his failure. But in the end even he realized the truth. He had chosen his pupil poorly, and so the entire village would suffer. The one who had left as new Master, but whose title had been stripped from him, flourished in his evil. In the years following his departure from the village of his birth, he was driven by greed and hate. He amassed wealth, craved power.

He shared the same name with his hated uncle, the retired Master of Sinanju. They were not the only ones to have had this name. His uncle's father, who had also been Master, also did. And there had been others still.

Since he hated them all, all the way back to the original Master of Sinanju, he had almost changed his name. But then he heard something wonderful. It came to him through that hum of life that somehow always connects one to the place he first called home. His uncle had changed his own name, as well as that of his father. All who had shared the name throughout the history of the House of Sinanju would no longer be called the name of the hated traitor.

The sound of the name was reversed. Henceforth his uncle and the others would be called Chiun, leaving the betrayer as sole possessor of a despised name.

He reveled in the news. He had given them shame. And that shame resonated back through the ages. Since leaving the village he had gone by many names. He was Inchu, Sun Yee, Uinch, Chuni. These days he was Mr. Winch. But those were just temporary changes as need dictated. When he formed the word of his name in his secret heart, it was always and would forevermore be Nuihc. The first true Master of Sinanju of the great new order.

In fact the aliases probably weren't even necessary. There was only one man on Earth he need fear, and his uncle had not made a move to follow him. He heard from sources within the village that the old fool sat looking out at the bay as if he actually expected Nuihc to come back to him. He had enjoyed many a laugh at the withered old idiot's expense.

Nuihc traveled the world. He found work in Russia and China, India and Italy and a dozen African nations. Wherever there was money to be made from dealing death, he was there.

The last Nuihc had heard, his uncle was still in Sinanju. No longer sitting on the shore, he spent most of his time hidden away from the villagers. An old man now, he sat in the Master's House, awaiting the end.

For Nuihc the world was just beginning. In spite of what his uncle thought in his senile old heart, all that had ended was the type of Sinanju that had been practiced for centuries in a muddy little village on the West Korean Bay. Nuihc was inheritor of the true tradition of Sinanju.

It was the most terrible secret in the history of Sinanju, never spoken of in public. The present-day art of Sinanju was founded on a lie.

The Great Wang-the Master who was the first of the current line of Masters-was an impostor. All who came after him were frauds. Oh, they all claimed to be of the pure bloodline. But they were of a bloodline, not the bloodline. Through Nuihc's veins flowed the blood of the true Masters of Sinanju. He had it on the best authority.

Nuihc's mother had married into the family of the descendants of Wang. Her blood was pure. His father had merely been a tool. The foolish brother of the Reigning Master, he was an unwitting pawn. The means by which she would get her only offspring trained in the most ancient martial art-the art that had been stolen from her family by the so-called Great Wang himself.

As a boy, Nuihc listened to her by the firelight of their tiny home. When she spoke of the great theft of their family's birthright, her voice grew cold with ancient fury.

She spoke often of that terrible day the Great Wang stole the village out from under Nuihc's family.

In that day, while there was only one Reigning Master, there were many lesser Masters of Sinanju, called night tigers. When the time came for the Reigning Master to retire, he would choose his successor from the ranks of the night tigers. But at this time the Master died unexpectedly, never having made a choice. The night tigers were fighting among themselves when Wang-Wang the Thief, Wang the Liar-stepped into their midst, claiming to have had a vision of the future of Sinanju. Using trickery, he killed the night tigers and established himself as Reigning Master. From that point on, there was only one Master and pupil per generation.

Nuihc's ancestor had been one of the night tigers slain, and a rival of Wang's. Had he not been murdered, he would have ascended to the position of Reigning Master.

Nuihc's family never forgot. The hatred burned bright down through the generations. A thousand years after, it still blazed in the eyes of Nuihc's mother as she told her son the truth of his heritage. Nuihc liked the story. His oldest memory was of his mother telling it to him. In childhood he even shared her resentment. By then he was already being trained by his uncle. She had told her son never to repeat the story to the current false Master. As he grew older, he realized that he was only being told part of the story at home. During training, his uncle often shared another version with his pupil. In Chiun's tale, Wang was nothing but heroic.

While Nuihc doubted both versions were completely accurate, he knew that his uncle was enchanted by fables. He was blind to anything that did not show the history of his ancient discipline in the most ideal terms.

Nuihc knew his mother for what she was. A hunched old crone driven by bitterness and envy. But it was her version of the tale that he found easier to believe. The theft of his birthright made the hate so much easier.

Nuihc hated his uncle. He hated his uncle's father, and his father before him. He hated their direct lineage to Wang, the original Master of Sinanju of the modern age.

The truth was, even without his family's secret history or his mother's inspiration, it was always very easy for him to hate. Hate was such a pure thing. The hate sent him from the village and the hate kept him from going back.

It was hate that was his companion that day when fate put him on that train in Kentucky.

A chance encounter had dropped him in the path of a most remarkable boy. Somehow this child was able to use his mind to plant seeds of thought in the minds of others. When he witnessed one of the boy's mass hallucinations first-hand, Nuihc knew he had made the discovery of a lifetime.

The boy became Nuihc's pupil. He had no choice. It had only been a few years, but he was making great strides.

The pattern was established early on. Nuihc would give the boy a few lessons and then go off on business, leaving his pupil to study. If upon his return a few months later the boy had not mastered the skills he'd been taught to Nuihc's satisfaction, he would be punished severely.

It was a system that had worked magnificently. There was only a slight problem at a Swiss boarding school where Nuihc had left the boy for a brief period two years before. The child had not yet mastered the physical abilities to deal with the problem. When he learned that they had quarantined the boy after an incident at school, Nuihc had demonstrated his displeasure by killing the entire faculty and burning the four-century-old institution to the ground. After that he took a more active interest in the education of his young charge.

The boy's physical training was coming along nicely. But it was his other power-the power of his mind-for which Nuihc had the highest hopes.

A mere thought and the boy could make a man believe he was on fire. Or freezing. Or drowning. If he convinced a man in his mind that he was suffering the ravages of some terrible disease, the victim would believe it so completely that he would actually manifest symptoms. His thoughts killed.

The potential uses of such a power were limitless.

The boy was a resource that needed to be controlled so that it could be properly harnessed. And so Nuihc taught the physical, all the while breeding fear and reverence in the boy so that when the time came the awesome power of his mental abilities could be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Much of the training over the past year had taken place in a secluded mountaintop hideaway in the Caribbean. But there were some things that could only be learned out in the real world. Like eliminating live targets.

Nuihc decided to seek employment. At the moment the world was in turmoil. With its social and political upheaval, the United States seemed an ideal locale. It had a rich population, a burgeoning criminal class and a government incapable of dealing with its own imminent collapse.

Nuihc went to New York City, the focus of criminal activity in America. Once there he sought out the reigning crime figure, Don Carmine Viaselli.

Others within the Viaselli crime organization were cool to the idea of bringing in outside talent. With the war in Southeast Asia still raging, many complained about having an Oriental in their midst. Several even tried to kill the new Viaselli enforcer, stirred by some nationalistic passion that made enemies out of everyone of Asian descent.

These last were perfect targets for Nuihc's pupil. The boy killed the enemies of his Master and the enemies of Carmine Viaselli. And Nuihc collected a healthy salary.

For months it had been the best of business arrangements. That had changed two days ago.

Nuihc had replayed the events in that apartment in New Jersey over in his head a hundred times. The white with the hook wasn't a fluke. No one came to his knowledge on his own. He had the specific balance of someone who had been tutored by a Master of Sinanju. And there were only two men on the face of the planet who could have taught him.

Was it possible that his uncle had finally left the village? Had he decided to seek revenge on his nephew? Was he training others to do his work for him?

This last question Nuihc had dismissed almost as soon as his mind asked it.

Chiun wouldn't train someone from outside the village, least of all a white. He was a pathetic old dog, clinging to a worthless bone of tradition. But the fact remained that the white with the hook had known proper balance. It wasn't Sinanju, but it was a hint of something.

Nuihc had to know.

The man who had broken into Norman Felton's apartment was his only link. If his uncle was somehow involved with Norman Felton's attacker, he might show up at the hospital where the man was recovering from his injuries.

Nuihc wouldn't risk going himself. His uncle's skills had certainly dulled in old age, but he might still sense someone watching him. Nuihc sent emissaries to keep an eye on the hospital while he waited in his spacious apartment in the Manhattan building of his current employer.

He had left the boy to work on his breathing in a warehouse in Jersey City. Nuihc was alone when he heard the heavy footfalls coming up the hallway.

He knew they were coming to him even before the two men stopped outside his door.

"Enter," he commanded before they could even knock. His voice was thin and reedy.

When the men came in, they didn't see him right away. Nuihc had to clear his throat to draw attention to himself.

They found the Oriental in a lotus position near the main living-room windows. The men seemed surprised to see that Mr. Viaselli's enforcer was sitting out in the open. Somehow their eyes had missed him. The drapes were drawn.

"We got what you wanted, Mr. Winch," one of the men said as they crossed over to Nuihc.

They were big and muscled, with greased-down hair. The stink of garlic and tomato oozed from their pores.

"Here," Nuihc ordered. He rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, waving a hand to a low table. Nuihc sat delicately to his folded knees before the table. Huffing and puffing, the two men settled uncomfortably down beside him.

"We finished up around nine this morning," the first man said. "It took us this long to get them developed."

Each man had a big manila envelope. From each, they extracted a thick pile of photographs.

"We set up just like you told us," the man continued. "Right out front. Kinda weird you'd want that. Most guys in our line of work like to use the back."

"We are not in the same line of work," Nuihc said icily. He didn't mention that the person he was interested in wouldn't deign to use the service entrance. "Okay, Mr. Winch," the man agreed nervously.

The two men began laying out the photos.

The pictures all showed the main entrance to East Hudson Hospital. They were taken from a car that had been parked directly across the street.

The men set out the photographs very carefully on the funny little table. They were going backward through the stacks, from the ones most recently taken to the earliest.

"We got mostly everybody who come in the front," the first man said as they set down the black-and-white photos, one on top of the other. "Right up to when we heard the guy with the hook killed himself. We figured we was done then."

"He is dead?" Nuihc asked, frowning.

The Viaselli man nodded. "Ripped his throat out with his own hook. Sick bastard."

Nuihc didn't respond. He glanced from pile to pile as the men set down the photographs. Nothing of interest so far. Just people coming and going.

At one point a man in a suit and tie caught his eye. He had wrists thicker than a man of his build ordinarily would. In the photos he seemed to have something....

But there were only two pictures of him. One as he came up the sidewalk and one of him on the stairs. They were quickly covered up. Sorting through a few more photographs, the men suddenly heard a hiss of air.

When they looked up they saw that Nuihc's eyes were open wide. The men saw a look that might have been fear dancing across the Oriental's broad face. It came as a surprise. They both knew well Mr. Winch's reputation.

"That guy showed up about a quarter to five in the morning," one of the men explained, tapping the photo. "I remember we said it was weird 'cause it was almost like he knew we was there. It was like he was posing or something."

In the photo an elderly Oriental in a long robe was shuffling up the sidewalk.

"Look at this. We were going through this bunch before we got here. It's real spooky." The Viaselli man laid out a few other pictures of the old geezer.

In each photograph the old man's head was turned a little more to the left. By the last one, he was staring directly down the camera lens. The Viaselli men had found this particularly disturbing when they'd had the film developed. When they put the pictures together and riffled through them from one corner, it appeared as if the man in the photos was actually turning to look at them.

"Isn't that the craziest thing you ever seen?" the Viaselli man asked.

Nuihc didn't answer. He didn't even look up at the two men sitting at the table with him.

The silence lasted minutes. The room grew very still.

The men glanced nervously at each other. "Um, hey, you okay, Mr. Winch?"

"Go," Nuihc barked.

"Oh. Okay, sure. Anything you say, Mr. Winch." They began reaching for the photos. A hand slapped down atop the stack depicting the old Oriental.

"Leave them," Nuihc ordered.

The men didn't need to be told a second time. Climbing awkwardly to their feet, they hurried from the apartment.

Once they were gone, Nuihc sat there for a long moment. He heard the elevator descend, heard the traffic sounds in the street below. Sirens howled in the distance.

This was Manhattan. The Rome of the New World. As far removed from antiquated courts and dusty thrones as one could get in this modern age.

He looked at the top photograph.

And yet there he was. Older, yes. But still the same. Nuihc picked up the photo, holding it delicately by the corner. "So," he said softly to the empty room. "You have finally come for me, Uncle."

It was a little soon. He would have preferred to put it off another ten years or so. But it would still work. He would have to tweak his employer's plan just a little.

If he planned it just right, he would succeed. And he could finally get retribution for the injustice committed against his family a hundred generations ago.

Nuihc tipped his head to one side. With an index fingernail short but sharpened to a dagger's point, he lazily traced the outline of his old teacher's head.

"The time is come, old man," Nuihc whispered to the photo. "It is finally come."

Cut free from the rest of the photograph, Chiun's decapitated head fluttered gently to the carpet.

Chapter 20

The racial situation was awful, just awful. Senator Leonard Albert O'Day wanted to make the sheer awfulness of it all absolutely clear to the gathered reporters.

"Awful, just awful. We must do all we can to address this terrible situation of race in America."

He was on the sidewalk outside 40 Rockefeller Center. Senator O'Day had just left the New York studios of NBC, where he had announced on the network's Sunday-morning news show that the racial situation in America was awful, just awful.

Senator O'Day had been using that same phrase for the past ten years. Ever since the study he had commissioned had found out that black people who lived in ghettos in America were poorer than affluent suburban white people.

The results of his study were greeted with somber faces and serious nods. Because of his work, Senator O'Day was heralded as a pioneer in the field of race relations.

Back during the sixties, one reporter who hosted an afternoon talk show in the senator's native New York noticed after a year of "awful, just awfuls" that Senator O'Day wasn't really saying anything at all about race. As a result of his very expensive, tax payer-funded study, he just seemed to see a problem with the races that everyone knew was there, but he didn't seem to offer any solutions. The next time the senator was a guest on his show, the host decided that it was high time somebody asked him what his future plans were based on the results of his highly publicized study.

"You've said a lot about race this past year, Senator," the talk-show host stated. "After a year of talking about the issue, can you tell me what you plan for the future? The concrete policies you will try to implement in Washington to deal with this crisis you've recognized?"

"It's a terrible crime the condition these people live in," Senator O'Day said, nodding. "There are many, many Negro children born out of wedlock, which contributes to the problem. It's awful, just awful."

The senator had a lisp, a bow tie and a lock of hair that sometimes hung down over his right eye.

"I understand that," the host said. "But what would you suggest we do to remedy the situation?"

"Well," Senator O'Day said, sitting up like a fussy hen in his chair, "we must address it head-on, of course. We're the greatest nation on Earth. Isn't that marvelous?"

"Yes, but what can we do?" the reporter stressed. Senator O'Day grinned his little cherub's grin and licked his darting tongue across his moistened upper lip and said a lot about money and responsibility. To sum up, he repeated once more his oft-used phrase.

After the program was through, the performance of Leonard O'Day was heralded as compassionate, understanding and bridge-building for the races. The reporter, on the other hand, was called a racist, reactionary, fascist tool of the military-industrial complex and was fired on the spot.

After that incident, no reporters dared press the senator on his specific remedies for race relations.

At the impromptu sidewalk news conference this day, the senator offered many bland "awful, just awfuls" to the press. As he did so, he glanced every so often at his pocket watch.

"Senator O'Day, it's been a week since Senator Bianco's death made you senior senator from New York," one reporter called. "What's the mood in the Senate?"

Senator O'Day licked his lips. "The sudden, unexpected death of my friend and colleague was awful, just awful. A terrible shock. We are all coping as best we can. Now, gentlemen, I really must be going."

His car was parked at the curb. A few reporters shouted more questions to him as he ducked into the back seat. Leonard O' Day was relieved when his driver shut the door.

They were pulling into traffic a minute later. "Thank God that's over," Senator O'Day exhaled as he sank into the seat. "Drive, Rudolfo."

They headed out of the city.

Leonard wasn't completely surprised the press had brought up Senator Bianco's death. It was an open secret in political circles that the family was hiding something from the public. Some were whispering the late Senator Bianco had been murdered. Head chopped clean off on his own front steps in Georgetown, a stone's throw away from the Capitol.

Although the press was starting to dig, they hadn't found out anything yet. No surprise there. Leonard Albert O'Day doubted there was anything there to find. Besides, the press corps couldn't find their fannies with both hands if they were given a month of Sundays and a picnic lunch.

The same couldn't be said for Leonard O'Day. New York's new senior senator knew exactly where his fanny was. It was sitting comfortably in the back seat of his black sedan as it raced along the highway to his upstate hideaway.

Leonard felt a deliciously familiar tingle.

This was a "Special Day". One of a few days out of the year that Senator O'Day carved out of his busy schedule just for himself. On Special Days, only Rudolfo was allowed to handle the driving chores. His trusted staff member was also in charge of the other details of Special Day. That thing that made Special Day so exquisitely special.

"Is it a nice one today, Rudolfo?" Leonard asked, unable to keep the excitement from his voice.

"Yes, sir, Senator," his driver answered.

Senator O'Day shuddered happily. His tingle tingled all the way up to his secluded estate. It was still tingling when Rudolfo passed right by the main house and slowed to a stop in front of the stables.

"The stables today, Rudolfo?" Leonard O'Day asked eagerly.

"You're the owner of a racehorse that's been losing at the track, sir," Rudolfo explained. "He's the jockey. Unless you can motivate him to win, you've got to fire him."

The rules seemed simple enough. Senator O'Day clapped his hands giddily. He loved games.

The senator got out of the car and rolled the barn door open just wide enough to slip through. Inside, the stable smelled like horse droppings and damp hay. Sunlight filtered in through open vents near the ceiling.

The smell of manure made him even more excited. This was just a minor peccadillo. As he walked along the hard-packed earthen floor, Senator O'Day knew there was nothing wrong with it. Everyone needed a way to relieve the tension. Some people played with model trains, some built ships in bottles. Some, like the senior senator from New York, diddled young boys.

Rudolfo was his procurer. Leonard didn't know where his driver found the boys, nor did he care. However he came by them, he always managed to find the freshest meat. His efforts required a huge bonus at Christmas-as much a thank-you as it was hush money. But it was worth every penny.

The role-playing was always fun. Sometimes he was a sea captain; sometimes he was Scarlett O'Hara. Today it was horses, with a young jockey to discipline.

When he saw the boy, the senator was licking his lips and thinking how much fun he could have with a riding crop.

Rudolfo had outdone himself.

The young man was blond and pale, just like Leonard liked them. The thin and wiry boy stood there in the middle of the stable, alone and defenseless. Just waiting to be punished for his losing streak at the racetrack. It would have been the perfect game if not for one thing.

"Where's your jockey uniform?" Senator Leonard O'Day pouted, jamming his loose wrists to his hips. Some kind of uniform was mandatory, no matter what game he happened to be playing. Without pants, of course.

The boy who wasn't wearing a jockey uniform didn't answer. He just stared at the senator. The way he looked at Leonard, the senator almost felt a twinge of guilt for his extracurricular activities. That lasted only until Leonard noticed the body in the nearest empty stable.

It was lying facedown in the hay, naked bottom aimed at the rafters. The dead boy wore a jockey uniform.

"Oh, my," Senator O'Day gasped.

In shock now, he turned to the young man.

The blond-haired boy with the electric-blue eyes was no longer standing. Somehow-impossibly-he was flying through the air directly toward New York's frightened senior senator.

And in the next instant the senator felt an explosion of pain in his hip as his right femur was shattered into his pelvis. He collapsed in a heap to the floor.

The pain blinded all rational thought.

His face landed in a pile of manure. In a flash that sometimes came just before the moment of death, the senator suddenly thought that he could maybe play a game where he was the cruel stable owner and he had to punish a derelict stable hand for not cleaning up all the horse droppings. He was going to bring it up to Rudolfo, but then he remembered he really was the stable owner and that his face was in a real-life pile of shit because his actual employees hadn't cleaned up properly. And then a toe crushed his other hip and a pair of dropped soles flattened his shoulder joints. By the time the foot that ended his life crushed his skull, the senior senator from New York was long past the ability to even feel the pain.

When the young man was through, Senator Leonard Albert O'Day looked as if he'd been mangled in the pounding pistons of some massive pneumatic device.

For a moment there passed a look of revulsion on the young man's pale face. His eyes grew moist with fear as he looked down on the body. The life he'd snuffed out. One moment a living, breathing thing. The next...

With a force of will far older than his years, he blinked away the image. His teacher insisted that emotions were for the weak. He would not be weak.

Reaching down, he removed the dead man's pocket watch.

Burying the brief hint of human emotion he'd allowed to seep to the surface, the boy turned from the body and padded back into the shadows. He left the stable through a back door. To find his Master.

Chapter 21

For Dr. Harold W. Smith the wait had been going on for five agonizing days. Five days of reading the papers. Five days of checking the daily computerized reports from CURE's hundreds of unwitting employees in federal law enforcement. Five days of waiting for that one, final, fateful call on the new dedicated White House line.

Smith expected this to be the end. He assumed the connection would be made between MacCleary, Folcroft and, eventually, CURE. If not in the papers, he assumed he'd see it in the secret reports from the CIA or FBI. As soon as the President got a whiff, he would make the call.

It was the one control the nation's chief executive had over the covert agency. He could only suggest assignments; he couldn't command Smith into the field. But he could order the organization to disband.

If CURE had indeed been compromised, Smith assumed the President would hear about a rogue agency operating in Rye during his daily intelligence briefing. He would then calmly excuse himself from his meeting and-after the door was shut-run like mad to give Smith the order to disband before legitimate federal law-enforcement agencies arrived at Folcroft's gates with battering rams and tear-gas canisters.

But for the five days since Remo had been sent to deal with MacCleary and the Viaselli situation, the secluded road out beyond Folcroft's high front wall had remained quiet. Spring buds were bursting open on the maple trees that lined the lane. Cheerful squirrels cavorted in the branches. There was no sign of tanks or armed federal agents. Still, as he toiled behind his desk, he found one eye straying more and more regularly to the window. He half expected to see armed agents swarming the back lawn of Folcroft.

Remo called to check in twice during this time of high crisis. The first was after the story of the suicidal man with the hook appeared in the local papers.

Smith complimented Remo on his work at the hospital. Remo sounded violent on the phone, vowing to bring back the mysterious Maxwell's head in a bucket in five days.

Only one more call. This time asking Smith for three thousand dollars to buy an engagement ring for Norman Felton's daughter. Remo explained that he was romancing the flighty young girl to get close to her father and, hopefully, to Maxwell, the Viaselli man behind Felton.

That was it. Dead silence afterward. Five days of waiting without knowing.

During that time, Smith did his best to put MacCleary out of his mind. Logically, he knew that it would do no good to dwell on it. Yet his mind couldn't let it go.

One of CURE's own was gone.

Remo was an add-on to the agency. It had been difficult arranging his execution, but he was replaceable if necessary. Chiun was just his temporary trainer. They weren't part of the inner circle. MacCleary had been there from the start.

Conrad MacCleary. The only real friend Harold W. Smith had ever had. Dead.

"America is worth a life."

How many times had MacCleary uttered those words. One of the last great patriots, the hard-drinking agent had said it most passionately over the past eight years. It invariably came up when he was arguing the necessity for CURE to have an enforcement arm that was sanctioned to kill.

At no time had MacCleary ever thought he would be that enforcement arm's first victim. It was ironic, yes. But MacCleary loved irony, lived to find humor in the absurd.

There was no doubt that if he could, Conrad MacCleary would be sitting on the couch across the room clutching his sides and laughing that bellowing laugh of his over the circumstances of his own death. But the sofa was empty.

Unlike his deceased friend, Harold Smith found nothing humorous about death. Not MacCleary's, and certainly not the ones he was reading about this morning.

Two more United States senators were dead.

The details of Leonard Albert O'Day's death weren't complete at the moment, but they were clear enough. He had been found in the stable on his estate. His four major joints, along with his skull, had been crushed. The coroner was speculating that he had been stomped to death by one of his own horses.

Leonard O'Day had just been joined by Senator Calvin Pierce of Connecticut.

Senator Pierce's body had been found at the apartment of his mistress. The girl was dead, as well. According to the earliest reports, the bodies had been mutilated almost beyond recognition. Somehow the killer had hurled the two victims against each other with such force that their bodies became intertwined. It was a ghastly trick, obviously. The forensics experts were quietly saying that it would be almost impossible to cut the two bodies apart.

The condition of the senator's body would make the arrangements difficult for the senator's widow. Mrs. Pierce had already released a statement through her lawyer saying that, given her husband's years of public service, she expected no less than a state funeral in Washington.

As he read the reports, Smith felt a curl of ice slither like a frozen serpent up his rigid spine.

Two more senators had been murdered. Coincidence was unlikely in the extreme. Coming just a week after the murder of Senator Bianco it could only mean one thing. Some unknown force was systematically removing members of the United States Senate.

It was almost too much for the CURE director to contemplate. Smith was immersed in the latest data on Senator Pierce's death when the blue contact phone jangled to life.

Tearing his eyes from his computer monitor, he checked his watch even as he picked up the bulky receiver. Just after 2:55. It was Remo's ten-minute call-in window.

"7-4-4," Smith announced crisply.

"Hey, Chief, it's Agent K-14."

It sounded like Remo's voice. But he wasn't giving the proper code.

Smith felt his stomach knot. Remo was the only one who should have access to this line. That was it. His worst fear had been realized. CURE had been compromised.

"I'm sorry, but you have a wrong number," Smith said woodenly. He was fishing in his vest pocket for his poison pill even as he hung up the telephone.

The phone rang ten seconds later.

"It's me, dammit, 91 or 99 or whatever the hell dippy-do dingdong number you gave me. Don't hang up."

This time Smith recognized Remo's voice. Relief washed over him. He slipped his pill back in his pocket.

"That is not quite the proper code," the CURE director scolded. "In future please do a better job committing it to memory."

"Close enough for government work," Remo said. "Listen, I don't know what you think you sent me out here to do, but I tracked down that Maxwell for you."

Smith's hand tightened on the receiver. From the start the Maxwell situation had been intertwined with the senatorial committee that was on its way to New York. Perhaps CURE had finally gotten lucky.

"Is he out of commission?" he asked, scarcely able to keep the hope from his tart voice.

"In a manner of speaking. I pulled the plug on him. Literally. Turns out he's not quite a he."

Smith frowned. "Explain."

"First I'd like to point out that you guys need better field intelligence or something," Remo said. "The short of it is this Maxwell you've been trying so hard to find isn't a guy at all. It's just a brand name on some kind of car crusher. Felton owns-owned-an auto junkyard in Jersey City. He's been putting bodies in cars and then using this Maxwell Steel Reducer doohickey to crush them all up together into one neat, semimushy package. So this Maxwell you were all worked up over was just a machine."

Blinking, Smith removed his glasses. He set them to his desk with a tiny click.

"A what?" Smith asked dully.

"That's what Maxwell was," Remo repeated. "Felton was the boss."

"Impossible."

"All right, it's impossible," Remo agreed. Smith's mind was still reeling. He hardly heard the rest of their conversation. He only knew Remo was gone when the line went dead in his hand.

Felton was dead. That was clear enough from Remo's words. But Maxwell? Just a machine? Could it be that Conrad MacCleary was dead because Smith had sent him after the wrong target? Norman Felton was the real Viaselli Family enforcer. All at once Smith snapped alert. He quickly hung up the silent phone. Replacing his glasses, Smith's hands flew across his computer keyboard. In just over a minute he had a trace on the line. Grabbing the contact phone, he hastily dialed the number on his computer screen.

As the phone rang, Smith checked his watch once more. It was nearly five past three. The ten-minute window on the secure line was rapidly closing.

The phone was picked up on the fourth ring. "This better be important," Remo growled.

"We don't have much time before this line goes dead," Smith said urgently. "When did all this take place?"

"I dunno," Remo said with a sigh. "Last night sometime. Why?"

Smith looked at the green screen of his raised computer monitor. According to all the reports he had been going through, Senator O'Day had been killed in the early morning. And Senator Pierce had died some time after noon today.

"Aunt Mildred wanted me to thank you for sending roses this Easter because chocolate gives her hives," Smith said.

There was an agonizing pause on the other end of the line. Smith watched the second hand of his watch slip past the thirty-second mark. The call window was closing.

"Okay," Remo said slowly, "I'm kind of out of it on all this spy stuff. Does that mean I come back there, or we meet near the paddle boats in Central Park?"

"Cousin Lulu plants pink begonias only after the last frost," Smith replied rapidly, eyes on his watch. Fifteen seconds left.

"Cousin who?" Remo asked.

"Just come back here," Smith blurted just as the phone cut off. He prayed Remo heard.

As he replaced the phone, Smith's alert eyes darted back to his computer screen.

The two senators had been killed today. Hours after Remo had put Felton and his disposal machine out of commission. That could only mean one thing. They were killed by someone else entirely. Someone independent of anything known to CURE.

There was another enforcer working for the Viaselli crime organization. Someone who was fast, efficient, stealthy and violently cruel.

The methods used to eliminate the three senators had been unorthodox in the extreme. A pattern like that didn't develop overnight. With Felton out of the picture, Smith would have to sift through thousands of bits of information collected by CURE's network of informants to see if there was someone else who could be responsible. Unfortunately, his computers were sluggish things. It would take days or even weeks of searching to uncover a list of potential culprits.

Girding himself for a long, arduous search, the CURE director stretched his hands for his keyboard. He stopped before his fingers even brushed the keys.

Inspiration suddenly struck. Leaning forward, Smith pressed a button on his desk intercom.

"Yes, Dr. Smith?" Miss Purvish's voice asked. "Please have an orderly go down to collect Mr. Park. I would like to see him in my office." Clicking off the intercom, he gripped the arms of his chair, twirling around to face the big picture window. Waves of foam rolled in off the sound and attacked the shore. A warped boat dock rose and fell with each successive wave.

The Masters of Sinanju were legendary dealers of death. The old man could have encyclopedic knowledge of assassins and assassination techniques. Perhaps Master Chiun could offer some insight into the mind of this particular killer.

Chapter 22

Don Carmine Viaselli placed the call from the small office off his apartment's master bedroom.

It was the private number, direct to Norman Felton. He expected either Felton or his butler to answer. They were the only ones who'd ever had access to that line before. He was surprised when a new voice answered.

"This is Viaselli," the New York Don said. "I just wanted to thank Norman for releasing my brother-in-law Tony."

"This is Carmine Viaselli, right?" asked the voice on the other end of the line.

"That's right. Who is this?"

"I'm an employee of Mr. Felton' s and I'm glad you called," said the unfamiliar voice. "Mr. Felton wanted to see you tonight. Something about a Maxwell."

Don Viaselli had heard about this Maxwell from Felton. The investigations of the past few months seemed to focus around this mysterious figure. A man neither Felton nor Viaselli had ever heard of. It was because of their mistrust over Maxwell that Norman Felton had taken Viaselli's brother-in-law hostage. An insurance policy. But now Tony was free and safe, and Carmine Viaselli was being asked to personally meet with Norman Felton about Maxwell.

"Where should I meet him?" Carmine asked, knowing full well there wasn't a chance in hell he'd ever go himself.

"He has a junkyard on Route 440," the voice on the phone replied. "It's the first right off Communipaw Avenue. He'll be there."

A setup. He knew it was a trap even as the stranger gave him the time. Ten o'clock.

Viaselli hung up the phone. He sat at his desk, his hands gripping his knees through the silk of his dressing gown, knuckles clenching white.

"Bastard is setting me up," he growled at the empty room. The low sound became a bellow. "I trusted him with my life and the goddamned son of a bitch is setting me up!"

A noise came from the next room. The soft rustle of fabric.

Viaselli looked up to see a portly woman in a black dress and white apron standing in the open door. She was clutching a stack of folded linen to her ample bosom.

It was his maid. She was always popping up where she wasn't wanted. If she hadn't been with him so long, he would've sent her to Norman Felton to eliminate ages ago. As usual, she wore an apologetic look on her broad face.

"Get outta here, Maria!" Viaselli bellowed. The woman scurried fearfully away.

Don Viaselli sank back in his chair. Felton had gone to the other side. Carmine Viaselli had made him a rich man as the Viaselli Family's main enforcer, and this was how he repaid the favor. It was the damned government. They had turned Carmine's most trusted man against him.

They were coming for him. They wouldn't stop. They wouldn't back off until they had him.

But Don Viaselli might have an edge. Mr. Winch. Felton might have blabbed to the government about the Oriental hit man, but they probably hadn't believed him. Who would? Some unstoppable gook killer who could appear and disappear at will. It was funny-farm material. But Winch was real, and he was on Don Viaselli's side. Problem was, at the moment Carmine Viaselli had no idea where his enforcer was.

"I need you back here now, Winch," he whispered to the shadows, his voice a sick murmur.

He was startled when the shadows answered. "What do you need?" said a reedy voice. Viaselli's head snapped up. Mr. Winch stood in shadow next to a window. His face was turned away from Don Carmine. Flat eyes watched the cars go by on 57th Street fourteen floors below.

Carmine Viaselli couldn't believe it. He had called for Winch and the hit man had appeared. Like a genie from a lamp.

"It's Felton," Viaselli said, face relaxing in lines of great relief. "He was supposed to be my white queen. My most powerful chess piece. And he's betrayed me." A smile cracked his sagging jowls. "But now I have you, thank God. You are my new white queen. I want you to find Felton and kill him before he can testify against me."

"Impossible," Mr. Winch said blandly.

Viaselli's brow dropped. "If it's money, I'll double it. I want the bastard dead, no matter what it costs."

"Then you need pay someone else, not me," Winch said. "Your Norman Felton is already dead." Viaselli carefully took hold of the edge of his desk. "Norman's dead? How do you know?"

Still at the window, Winch turned his head. His face was bland. "Who released your brother-in-law?"

"I don't know," Viaselli admitted. "Some guy. Tony wasn't good at giving a description, but he said the guy had eyes like a dead man. That was the one thing he remembered. That and the fact the guy was whistling 'Born Free' when he let him outta that closet at Norman's apartment."

"Whoever that man is, he is the one who killed your associate. There are probably others with him. You Americans seem to view everything as a team sport. Even assassination. No, your Felton is dead, along with his men. And I would not be concerned that whoever did this thing wants to put you in jail. Whoever is responsible will be coming to kill you, not arrest you."

Viaselli's grip on the desk tightened. His heart was pounding like mad. He could feel the blood rise in his cheeks.

"You have to stop them," Don Carmine insisted.

"I could hold them off," Winch said, nodding. "For a time. But I cannot be with you forever. They will send a man, then another and eventually an army. And there will be that one time. That single, isolated, unguarded instance when they will find you alone. And they will have victory."

"This can't be happening," Don Viaselli said. "This isn't how the game is played in this country. We got laws."

At this, Mr. Winch smiled. Mr. Winch never smiled. Now the mobster saw why. It was the most unnerving thing Don Carmine Viaselli had ever seen. "They will not retreat," Winch warned. "Not yet. They have declared war against you and you against them. They have not suffered enough to make them consider ending it."

Viaselli was having a hard time breathing. "But what about that pervert, Leonard O'Day? Didn't you get him?"

"He and another in Connecticut have been removed. But already others vie to fill their seats. It is always the way. There is never a shortage of politicians."

Viaselli's head was spinning. He had to maintain his grip on the desk to keep from toppling onto the floor.

"I thought I could stop them. Send them a signal. This isn't how it's supposed to play out."

Mr. Winch turned fully from the window. He remained in the shadow, away from where outside eyes might be looking in.

"All is not lost," the Oriental said. "You have made a good start in this war of their making, but you have not yet done enough to insure your safety. As the head of your House, they are coming for you. Who leads theirs?"

Viaselli looked up, blinking away the cobwebs. He tried to concentrate. "The Speaker of the House, you mean?"

"No," Winch said impatiently. "He is not their leader. He does not direct the forces that have been marshaled against you. His is not the one face of all the other white faces in your nation's capital that everyone recognizes."

A dawning realization stretched across Don Viaselli's tan face. With it came a steadying calm. "You think I should whack the President?" he asked; voice strong and even. He released the edge of his desk.

"It has been done before," Mr. Winch replied. "It would paralyze the forces of your enemies. Your power would be unquestioned. They would not dare move against you."

Viaselli's eyes twitched back and forth, studying the corners of the room. He finally looked up. "Nice and quiet. There can't be any trail back to me."

"Of course," Mr. Winch said, his voice oily calm. Don Carmine Viaselli nodded. The deal was struck. He turned slowly in his chair, offering Mr. Winch his back.

"Fool," Nuihc whispered under his breath, so low the word was audible only to himself.

Melting back into the shadows, he passed like a whispered thought from the office, leaving the old buffoon to his unsophisticated plots of revenge.

Chapter 23

As he watched the flickering images on the TV screen in the privacy of his Folcroft quarters, a single perfect tear rolled down the cheek of the Master of Sinanju.

If he was not the Master, he would not have believed his eyes or ears. But his very soul gave witness to it.

Since he had first set sandal to soil, Chiun had thought America an ugly and barren place. A cultural wasteland whose inhabitants wallowed in the unsightly offenses of their own creation. But he was wrong. It was only mostly like that.

Here was art. Here was beauty.

There was a lesson here, even for the Master. Just because a thing seemed on the surface to be completely and utterly squalid and worthless didn't necessarily mean that there was not something worthwhile hidden somewhere in it.

In nature could not a flower grow from a dung heap? Was not a pearl formed by oyster from sand? Such was the case with this land called America. Here was a land of unrivaled ugliness, and yet...

The voices on the television abruptly stilled. In place of them a crudely drawn cartoon figure with a bald head was trying to sell a white female in heels a yellow liquid to clean her dirty floors.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his basement room, Chiun blinked away the tears.

The tiny Korean's joy was beyond measure.

He had begun watching America's televised art form during Remo's earliest training sessions. Broadcast daily, the short plays were things of sublime perfection. Timeless, touching studies of the human condition whose message of hope and love transcended all cultures and borders.

The best was As the Planet Revolves. While most of the players on the program were wonderful, the true standout was Rad Rex. The actor played the part of wise and kindly Dr. Wyatt Winston, half brother to Grace Kimberland, whose fourth husband, Royce, had recently been discovered having an affair with Patrice, the scheming matriarch of the Covington family, which was secretly planning to build a textile plant on the site of the Eden Falls School for Wayward Youth and put the displaced orphans to work as slave labor. Dr. Winston had learned about the plot from Patrice Covington's Guatemalan illegal immigrant maid, Rosa, who had been rushed to City General Hospital for emergency bladder surgery. Even though this damning secret could destroy the fortunes of amnesiac pickle magnate Roland Covington, so far Dr. Winston had remained silent.

Dr. Winston had been silent long before Chiun had gone to Arizona with Remo and he was still silent now. Two full months of silence. Every now and then City General's star surgeon would raise a knowing and disapproving eyebrow to the audience, just to let everyone know that he was waiting for the proper moment to disclose the terrible truth.

Such patience. Such acting. Such writing.

"Chiun, those are soap operas," Remo explained in those first, early weeks of training.

"They are windows into the human soul," Chiun replied as he studied the television screen. "Hush."

"Then the human soul is a smokehouse, 'cause I'm looking at a bunch of reeking hams right now."

For his insolence, Chiun touched Remo on the knee. Remo rolled around on the floor in agony for two hours. After that, Remo learned not to interrupt Chiun's dramas.

Even though Remo wasn't here to interrupt now, Chiun knew precisely where he was. Unbeknownst to Smith or Remo, Chiun had spent the past five days following his young pupil.

That was partly Conrad MacCleary's fault. In his dying moments Smith's general had placed a seed of worry in the Master of Sinanju's mind. The old man's concern had proved to be unfounded. The only people bumbling Remo encountered were other bumbling whites.

Still, Chiun didn't consider the time wasted. There was another good reason to follow his pupil. In a way Remo was a representative of the House of Sinanju. A failure on his part would reflect poorly on the House. But Remo had done his work as well as could be expected. He had completed the task he was sent out to perform without getting killed. Once Remo was done, Chiun slipped back to Folcroft with no one the wiser that he'd ever left.

He settled down in the privacy of his quarters to catch up on the wonderful daytime dramas.

On the TV an advertisement for tooth polish ended the selling moments and the program began again. After a few more raised eyebrows from Dr. Winston and a little hinting at a devastating revelation by Beatrice Sloane, grand-niece of Mayor Simon Parkhurst and former drug-addicted homecoming queen, the program ended.

As the Planet Revolves was followed by Search for Yesterday. Not quite as brilliant as the show that preceded it, but it was still good.

When the program ended at 3:30, the Master of Sinanju's eyes were damp. Releasing a contented sigh, he pressed off the television with a long finger.

Closing his papery eyelids, he began replaying the best scenes in his mind. His harmony was disrupted by the sound of approaching footfalls. He hoped they would pass by, but was dismayed when they stopped outside his chambers.

There was a sharp rap at the door.

The dramas were over. Ugliness was about to intrude on his day once more. With a sigh Chiun opened his eyes.

"Enter," he called reluctantly.

Harold Smith came into the room, a pinched expression on his lemony face.

"Master Chiun, I-" He stopped dead in his tracks. "My God, what happened here?" Smith gasped.

"Where?" Chiun asked, brow dropping in confusion.

"The body," Smith replied, eyes wide with shock. "My God, there's a dead body at your feet." Chiun turned a bland eye on the floor before him. A white-clad man lay facedown on the painted concrete.

"Oh, that." The Master of Sinanju waved. "Not to worry. I will have my pupil remove it when he gets back." He smiled. "You are looking exceptionally fit today, Emperor."

It was as if Smith didn't hear. He hurried over to the body. Crouching, he pressed his fingers to the man's throat, searching in vain for a pulse.

Chiun crinkled his nose in displeasure. This Smith hadn't even acknowledged the compliment he had just received. Chiun already suspected the man was crazy. Now he could add rude to the list of his current employer's shortcomings.

"There's no pulse," Smith said.

"No," Chiun agreed.

"This man is dead," Smith stated sickly.

"He's white. Who cares?" Chiun shrugged. "No offense," he added, lest this rude madman was the sort of lunatic who got offended by the truth.

"What happened?"

The Master of Sinanju raised his palms in confusion.

"I am not sure I understand your question, Emperor. He breathed, then he ceased breathing. Dead is dead."

"Master Chiun, you should have called me about this," Smith said. "I sent him to get you. When you didn't come to my office, I came to see why." Crouching beside the body, he looked over to the seated Oriental. "Did he say anything before he died? Perhaps clutch his heart or left arm?"

"I believe he said something," Chiun admitted. "I did not really hear, engrossed as I was in the travails of poor Lance Langdon and his alcohol-abusing wife. He got in the way, so I removed him."

Smith had been looking down at the body. Chiun's words stilled the blood in his veins. Moving only his eyes, he looked up over the tops of his rimless glasses at the placid face of the Master of Sinanju.

"Did you say 'removed'?" he asked levelly.

"No need to thank me," Chiun assured him, raising a hand to ward off praise. "The peace of mind you gain from knowing that this interrupting serf no longer stalks the halls of your castle is more than enough thanks for me."

Smith rolled the man onto his back. The body was already cold.

He didn't see it at first, so small was it. But then his eyes fell on it. A half moon sliver of a mark between the eyes just above the nose. It was the kind of mark that might be left by a puncturing fingernail.

"My God," Smith groaned again. "You killed this man. "

"Perhaps a small thank-you," Chiun said modestly. "If you insist."

"Chiun, this is unacceptable," Smith spluttered. "You killed a man in cold blood. A Folcroft employee, no less."

Shaking his head in shock, Smith dropped to his backside on the floor.

Smith's pale face was more ashen than normal. As he studied his employer, the Master of Sinanju's eyes narrowed.

"Maybe your humble servant is not understanding this correctly, O Emperor," he said slowly, "but it almost sounds like you are not pleased that I did you this favor."

"Favor? This is no favor. It's another catastrophe in a week of catastrophes. Chiun, you can't go around killing people just because they disturb you while you're watching television. How on earth am I supposed to explain this?"

Chiun had assumed he was misunderstanding his employer. But he was right. The fussbudget wasn't going to thank him for disposing of this rabble at all. He was actually upset.

The Master of Sinanju's face puckered.

Some unused silverware lay on a bench near a cheap sideboard. Reaching over, Chiun scooped up a soup spoon and thrust it deep into the orderly's forehead.

"He tripped while delivering bowls of gruel," Chiun said thinly. Explanation delivered to this rude lunatic of an employer, who refused to give so much as a simple thank-you to his royal assassin, the old Korean rose to his feet in a single fluid motion and swept from the room. His bedroom door slammed shut.

Still seated on the floor, the CURE director cast a queasy eye across the orderly's corpse. The spoon jutted from the broad forehead like a shiny silver handle.

"What have I gotten myself into?" Smith implored the cinder-block walls.

He pushed himself to his feet. Grabbing the body by the ankles, he began dragging it wearily across the room.

REMO COULDN'T believe it. He was actually coming back to Folcroft Sanitarium. Voluntarily. MacCleary had once told him that his psychological profile said he wouldn't leave. According to their research, Conn assured Remo that he wouldn't take off. Remo was a patriot. A do-gooder who thought if he did enough good he could make the world a better place.

Remo thought MacCleary was full of shit. He fully intended to prove wrong all the faceless quacking shrinks who had figured out every little thing about him without ever bothering to go through the trouble of meeting him.

But the quacks were right. Worse, Remo didn't really care they were right. And the icing on the cake was that Remo was actually in a good mood as he drove his car up the long lane to Folcroft's front gate.

He waved to the guard at the booth. The uniformed man didn't even raise his gray head from his magazine as Remo drove up the driveway and onto the sprawling grounds.

Remo was whistling as he parked the car. Or trying to. It became easier once he dropped the cigarette he'd been puffing and ground it out with his toe.

He knew he'd get in trouble with Chiun for smoking. If he got caught. But he'd taken precautions. He squirted a spritz of breath freshener into his mouth that he'd picked up at the store. As he walked to the building, he peeled a breath mint from a roll in his pocket and popped it in his mouth. Pausing at the fire exit, he covered his mouth with his hand and took a good whiff of his breath.

The perfect crime.

Ducking inside the building, he headed downstairs. The suit he'd worn on his assignment felt confining. He didn't know why. He'd worn suits before. And it wasn't as if his police or Marine uniforms had been loungewear. But for some reason regular clothes didn't feel right anymore. For one thing the cuffs were too snug around his wrists.

He was unbuttoning his cuffs as he pushed open the door to the Master of Sinanju's basement quarters. Chiun wasn't there.

Remo stepped into the spare bedroom, where the old Korean stored his steamer trunks.