The Sky is Falling

Destroyer 63: The Sky is Falling

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

They couldn't see it. But it could blind. Normally they couldn't feel it, but it could kill. They couldn't touch it, but it could turn human skin to an especially virulent and burning cancer. It could destroy crops, flood the cities of the world and turn the earth into something that resembled the moon, a barren rock waiting for life from elsewhere some aeon hence.

That, of course, was the downside.

"There's got to be some way we can make a buck on this thing," said Reemer Bolt, director of marketing for Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts, who didn't see why they shouldn't push it through Development. "We'd have to work out the bugs, of course."

"I'd say that not destroying all life on this planet is bug one," said Kathleen O'Bonnell of Research and Development.

"Right. A major priority. I don't want to destroy all life. I am life. We are all life. Right?"

There were nods all around Conference Room A of Chemical Concepts headquarters, situated north of Boston on high-tech Route 128.

"We are not here to destroy life," said Bolt, "but to protect it. Enhance it. Make Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts a viable growing part of that life."

"What are you talking about?" demanded Kathleen O'Donnell. She was twenty-eight years old, a tall woman with eyes like star sapphires and skin like Alpine marble, white and placid. Her hair, brushed straight off her cool forehead, was a delicate reddish-gold. If she were not always getting in his way, Reemer Bolt, thirty-eight, would have fallen in love with her. Or tried. He'd tried several times, in fact. Unfortunately, there was a problem with beautiful Kathleen O'Donnell, Ph.D., MIT.

She understood him.

Reemer Bolt was glad he was not married to her. Life for a man married to a woman who understood him could be hell. Reemer should know. He had had three of them before he found himself a paranoid shrew. Paranoid shrews were the easiest to deal with. They were so busy chasing their nightmares that you really could do anything with them. With Kathleen O'Donnell, he could do nothing. She knew what was going on.

"I am talking about the basic inalienable priorities," said Bolt. "Life, living life, is important to me." His voice ached with indignation.

But Kathleen O'Donnell did not back down.

"I am glad to see that the survival of life on this planet is one of your priorities. But which priority? Number fifteen, after whether you can sell it to a Third World country or if it can be marketed in Peoria?" asked Dr. O'Donnell of those heavenly blue eyes and the steel-trap mind.

"A major one," replied Bolt. And then, in a deeper voice: "A damned major one. Damned major." Heads nodded around the conference-room table.

"Number one?" asked Kathy.

"I don't know. I said major," snarled Bolt.

"Might survival of life come after say, cost factors, general marketability, use in an oil-rich Third World country, and the possibility of an exclusive patent?"

"I certainly would not discount an exclusive patent. How many companies have poured millions into developing processes and products, only to find they were stolen by others? I want to protect all of us." Bolt looked around the table. Heads nodded. Only one remained still. That coolly beautiful troublemaker.

"Gentlemen," announced Dr. O'Donnell in an even voice. "Let me explain what we are dealing with."

She held up a pack of cigarettes taken from an executive sitting next to her. She tilted it so that the side of the package floated at eye level. It was scarcely wider than two fingernails.

"Around the earth is a layer of ozone, no bigger than this," she said, outlining the side of the cigarette pack with her finger. "It protects us from the sun's rays-the intense ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and cosmic rays. These are all rays which, unfiltered, could obliterate life on our planet."

"They also give us nice tans, comfortable weather, and a bit of chlorophyll called the building block of life, among other things," said Bolt.

"Not as we plan it," said Dr. O'Donnell. "The whole world is so scared of what might happen to the ozone shield that the only international ban ever respected to my knowledge was the abolition of fluorocarbons as propellent for hair spray."

Bolt had thought of that. He was about to interrupt with a brief he had gotten from the legal department, but Kathy continued.

"As you all know, fluorocarbons are colorless, odorless, and inert. They were the perfect propellant for hair sprays. It was a giant industry. The safest ecological substance since they combined with nothing. And that became the problem, because what we have on earth and what we have in the stratosphere are different things. In the stratosphere, these harmless, invisible fluorocarbons combined with the harsh, unfiltered sunlight that exists beyond the ozone."

Reemer Bolt drummed his fingers as he listened to Dr. O'Donnell explain how fluorocarbons produced atomic chlorine in the stratosphere. He knew that. The technical people who were always getting in the way had told him.

"What atomic chlorine does is eat away at the ozone shield which filters out all the harmful rays. Mr. Bolt is really proposing that we manufacture something that, on a broad scale, could very well destroy life as we know it on earth."

Bolt was a taut man. He wore a tight brown suit and his hair was cut dramatically short because a sales magazine had told him that long hair offended some people. He had dark eyes and thin lips. He understood the broader picture very well. O'Donnell didn't want Concepts capital going into one of his programs instead of her Research and Development.

"I said we had some problems," said Bolt. "Every project has a problem. The light bulb had more of them than you could shake a stick at. How many of you would have liked to own a share of every light bulb in the world?"

Dr. O'Donnell still held the cigarette pack horizontally. "This is how wide the ozone shield was before the hair sprays," she said. She took out one cigarette and dropped the pack. Everyone heard it hit the tabletop. The single cigarette remained in her hands. Then she turned it sideways.

"NASA has conducted experiments in outer space on the unfiltered rays of the sun. The intensity of those rays in space is frightening. But it will be far worse if those rays ever get through this side of the atmosphere with its moisture, tender cells, oxygen, and the richness of molecules that make life as we know it possible."

"What's the one cigarette for?" asked someone. Bolt could have killed the questioner.

"Because in some places this is how much is left of the shield," said Kathy. With a show of contempt, she dropped the cigarette on the table. "Thirty miles up we have, and I hope we will continue to have, a desperately thin ozone shield between all living things and what could destroy them. It doesn't grow. It can naturally replenish itself if we don't destroy it. I am not offering a choice of life or death. I am wondering why you want to even consider committing world suicide."

"Every step forward has been met with dire warnings," said Bolt. "Therre was a time when we were told that man would explode if he ever went sixty miles an hour. It's true. People believed it," said Reemer. O'Donnell was good. But competition made Bolt better. A book on sales had told him that. "I am proposing that we step into the future and dare to be as great as possible."

"By shooting holes in the ozone shield with a concentrated stream of fluorocarbons? That's Mr. Bolt's proposal."

"Right, a hole. A window in the sky to give us full controlled use of all the sun's energy. Bigger than atomic power," said Bolt.

"And potentially more dangerous," said Dr. O'Donnell. "Because we don't know what a clear window to the sun's rays will do. Not for certain. Space tests conducted beyond the ozone shield indicate that we might be dealing with something more dangerous than we thought. But what worries me most, what absolutely terrifies me, is the fact that it's been estimated that a single molecule of fluorocarbon sets in motion a chain reaction that will eventually destroy one hundred thousand molecules of ozone. How do we know we'll be opening a window and not a gigantic door? How do we know that a concentrated stream of fluorocarbons won't start an unending tear in this desperately thin layer of gas? And if that happens, gentlemen, all life will disappear. All life. Including anyone willing to buy Reemer's stock options in Chemical Concepts."

There was nervous laughter around the table. Reemer Bolt smiled, too, showing he could take a joke. Reemer knew how to take a joke at his expense very well. You smiled along with the others and then a week later, a month later, maybe even a year later, you did something to get the joker fired. The problem with the beautiful Dr. O'Donnell was that she would always be ready for that. She knew him too well.

"All right," said Bolt. "Are you saying we should ditch two-point-five million dollars in development costs because we're afraid of causing a worldwide suntan?"

"Not at all," said Dr. O'Donnell. "What I am saying is this: that before we punch this hole in the ozone layer, we make sure it's only a hole. I am talking about the safe use of the sun. Priority one. Let's not turn the world into a rock."

The debate raged in Conference Room A for four more hours, but it was a foregone conclusion. Kathleen O'Donnell of Research and Development had won. The main priority of the Fluorocarbon Stream Generator project would be the survival of life on earth. It won heavily, five to two. Reemer had only Accounting on his side at the end.

And Kathleen O'Donnell had an increased research budget of seven million dollars. It always paid to do the right thing.

Six months and seventeen million dollars later, Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell stood looking at a pile of transistors, computer components, pressurized tanks, and a black box three times the size of a man and as unwieldy as an entire operating room. Priority One had still not been met. No one could predict how big a hole would be opened in the vital ozone shield around the earth. And it was on her research budget. She had gone to Bolt's office. She went with her best little-girl-coy look and her womanly perfume. She announced that she had come to discuss the project, and she wanted to do it in Bolt's office-alone.

"We can punch the hole, and I think it would be just a hole. The probability is that it would be a hole. But, Reemer, we can't be sure," she said.

This time her argument had force. She said it in the proper way, on Bolt's lap, playing with the buttons of his shirt. She said it smilingly, moving her hands lower down his shirt. She whispered in his ear, creating tingling warm sensations.

"Do you think I am going to jeopardize my position at Chemical Concepts for a tawdry roll in the hay, Kathy?" asked Bolt. He noticed that the lights were dim in his office. It was very late. There was no one else in the flat single-story concept center that was like so many of the sandstone buildings dotting Route 128. Cars made a blurred procession of lights through the window as they sped by in the rain-slick night. He thought he recognized her perfume. Which of his wives had worn that? Somehow it smelled so much better on Dr. O'Donnell.

"Uh-huh," answered Kathy O'Donnell.

"Not tawdry," said Bolt.

"Very tawdry," whispered Kathy.

And thus on the floor of Marketing Reemer Bolt found himself the sole authorizer of seventeen million dollars in development funds.

But on this day, the very intelligent Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell misjudged the mettle, of Reemer Bolt, marketing genius of the high-tech industry, for the first time.

He had the bulky instrument loaded on a flatbed truck and carted to a field just across the state border in Salem, New Hampshire. He pointed it at the sky, saying:

"If I don't make it in this world, nobody will make it." Dr. O'Donnell heard about the experiment one hour after Bolt and her scientific staff had left for Salem. She flew to her car, careened out of the parking lot at seventy miles an hour, and then picked up speed. She was doing 165 along Route 93 North. In a Porsche 92RS, no state trooper was going to catch her. And if one did, no speeding ticket would matter. There wouldn't be anyone to sit on a judge's bench. There might not even be any bench.

She knew where in Salem Bolt had gone. The corporation had a field up there for softball games, picnics, and land investment. When she tore onto the field, tires gouging the soft earth, Bolt was staring disconsolately at his feet with the blank eyes of a man who knew it was all over. His normally immaculate pin-striped jacket lay on the ground. He had been scuffing it with his shoes.

All he said when he saw Kathy stumble out of her Porsche was:

"I'm sorry, Kath. I really am. I didn't mean for this to happen. I had no other choice. You stuck me with a seventeen-million-dollar failure. I had to go for it."

"You idiot! We're all done for now."

"Not you, so much. I was the one who did it."

"Reemer, you have some logic glitches in your mentality mode, but downright stupidity is not one of them. If all life goes down the drain, what difference does it make whether it was you or I who pulled the plug?"

"Seventeen million down the drain," said Bolt, pointing to the blackened metallic structure in the middle of the field. "Nothing works on it. Look."

He showed Kathy the remote console her staff had devised. It had to be remote, because the fluorocarbon generator was so cumbersome that it could only be aimed in one direction: straight up. And that meant the sun's unfiltered rays would return in only one direction: straight down. If everything worked as theorized, the fluorocarbon beam would open a window that allowed raw solar radiation to bathe the earth's surface in a circle thirty meters wide. If it worked. Perfectly.

But now Bolt was punching buttons on a dead board. Not even the on light glowed. The fluorocarbon generator stood silently a hundred yards away. Bolt pounded the console. He hated it because it didn't work. Seventeen million dollars and it didn't work. He hit the console again. He would have killed it if it weren't already dead.

Kathy O'Donnell said nothing. Something was happening in the sky. Set against the clouds was an exquisite ring of blue haze, as though the clouds themselves wore a glowing round blue sapphire. She watched the circle. One of her staff members had a pair of binoculars and she ripped them from his neck. Desperately, she tried to focus on the clouds, on the light blue hazy ring.

"Has it been growing larger or smaller? " she demanded. "It think it's smaller," said a staffer, one of about twenty people in white smocks or shirtsleeves. They were all looking at her and Bolt with bewildered expressions.

"Smaller," said Kathy O'Donnell. She was speaking as much to herself as anyone else. "Smaller."

"Yes," said a technician. "I think you're right." Kathy looked at the ground. The grass around the fluorocarbon generator had turned a lighter shade of green. At a distance of about thirty meters, the blades were dark green. Then, as though someone had sprayed a lightening agent, they grew paler, even now becoming a dry whiteness. It was as though someone had drawn the circle of pale grass around the device with a compass. Thirty magnificent, glorious, miraculous feet around the device. It had worked. Perfectly.

"We did it," said Kathy.

"What? The thing doesn't work," said Bolt.

"Not now," replied Dr. Kathy O'Donnell. "But it did work. And it seems our first clear solar window to the sun has given us some interesting side effects."

For the unfiltered solar rays had not only scorched the earth, they had rendered electronic circuits inoperable. The fluorocarbon generator itself was proof. It had been struck and killed by the unfiltered rays.

The eager scientists discovered other side effects. The rays parched plant life, raised the temperature slightly, and burned the skin of living matter in a horrible and unforeseen way. Skin bubbled and blackened, then separated and peeled away. They noticed this when they saw the little furry legs of a chipmunk trying to run out of what was left of its skin.

Some of the scientists turned their heads away. Seeing a poor creature suffer like that plunged Reemer Bolt deep in thought.

If we can make it mobile, and aim it better, we might have a weapons sale, thought Reemer. Or perhaps we could market a screen against the rays. Maybe both. The future was limitless. As bright as the sun.

The budget was tripled and, within a month, they had constructed an aiming mechanism. There was only one small glitch. The fluorocarbon stream could be controlled in the amount of ozone shield it opened, but it could not be aimed very exactly. They could direct the beam elsewhere instead of straight up, but they were just not sure where it would land. Which meant that Chemical Concepts would control this immense new energy source so that life on earth wasn't threatened, but couldn't direct it anywhere in particular. This shot the boards out from under Marketing. It was like owning a car you couldn't steer: if you can't steer it, you can't sell it.

"How far off this time?" asked Kathy. She had once again found Bolt using the fluorocarbon gun, as they were calling it now, without her permission.

"Two or three thousand miles," said Bolt. "I think you'll have to upgrade your targeting computer. I'll help you get more money."

"Over where did we open up a hole in the ozone shield?" asked Kathy.

"Not sure. Maybe China or Russia. Maybe neither. We'll find out when someone's electronics shut down, or if mass skin problems develop somewhere. If it's Russia, I don't think we have to worry. They won't sue for damages."

In his somewhat shrewd way, Reemer Bolt was right. Russia wouldn't sue. It was planning to start World War III.

He was old. Even for a Russian general. He had known and buried Stalin. He had known and buried Lenin. He had buried them all. Every one of them, in some way or other, at some time or other, had said to him:

"Alexei. What would we ever do without you?"

And Alexei Zemyatin would answer: "Think. Hopefully, think."

Even during the harshest times, Field Marshal Alexei Zemyatin would speak his mind to any of the Soviet leaders. He would, in brief, call them fools. And they would listen to him because he had saved their lives so many times before.

When Lenin was fighting both America and Britain on Russian soil after the First World War, and a hundred groups plotted the overthrow of the Communist government, Zemyatin confronted Lenin's worst fears. He was at the time the dictator's secretary.

"I dread the joining of all our enemies," said Lenin. "It is the one thing that will destroy us. If ever they stop fighting among themselves, we are ruined."

"Unless you help them to form a united front against you."

"Never," said Lenin. The one hope the Communists had was that their disparate enemies would keep fighting among themselves. Otherwise they could destroy the young revolution.

"Then let me ask you to think, Great Leader. If a hundred groups are all working against you, each with a different idea and a different leader, it will be as it was against the czar. No matter how many are killed, the opposition will survive. And then, as happened to the czar, a group will succeed against you one day.

"That will come later, and then only maybe. Right now we are fighting for our lives," said Lenin.

"Later always comes, fool. That is why God gives us brains to plan with."

"Alexei, what are you getting at? I warn you, you are not dealing with a small matter here. Your life is wagered on it."

"No, it isn't," said Zemyatin, who knew that Lenin needed argument in his life. So few now were willing to argue with him, at least not successfully. "Today there are shootings even in Moscow. Your secret police kill one group, but still there are dozens more untouched. Why?"

"Because the sewers spawn different bugs."

"Because none of them are joined. If you have a tree with a hundred branches, every branch will fall when you cut down the trunk. But if you have a hundred dandelion weeds, you will never be rid of them. Forests can be felled. But to my knowledge no lawn, not even that of the czar on the Baltic, was ever free of dandelions."

"But something that strong could destroy us."

"Not if we run it. And who has better knowledge of these counterrevolutionary groups than our own secret police? We will not only join these groups into one strong oak, but we will fertilize this tree. Prune it occasionally. And then, when we wish, we will cut it down with a single chop of the ax."

"It is too dangerous."

"As opposed to what else, my Ilyich?" asked Alexei Zemyatin.

In the years that followed, Zemyatin's strategy proved to be the master stroke of counterintelligence secretly admired by all of Russia's enemies. It was the one move that enabled Soviet Russia to survive, but Zemyatin was never given credit for its formulation. Instead, at Zemyatin's request, credit was given to the founder of what later became the KGB. Nor did Zemyatin accept recognition for saving Russia from Nazi Germany. While everyone else celebrated Stalin's nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, Zemyatin told Stalin that these were the most dangerous times in Russia's history.

"How can it be?" asked Stalin, fingering his clipped mustache. They had met in a private room because the dictator was shrewd enough to know that he could not allow any man to call him a fool in public and live. He did not want the brilliant Zemyatin dead.

"The safest times precede the greatest dangers, Mr. Chairman," Zemyatin told him.

"We have made peace with Hitler. We have the Capitalists and the Nazis at each other's throats. We will shortly control half of Poland, giving us more territorial safety, and you tell me that these times are dangerous."

"They are dangerous," answered the middle-aged man with the steady blue eyes, "because you think they are safe. You think that your enemies are at each other's throats. Well, they are. But because you think you are safe, the Red Army thinks it is also safe. The soldiers will sit comfortably in their barracks waiting for weekends in the taverns with whores instead of preparing for war."

Zemyatin's plan was to create another army, secretly, behind the Urals. Let Germany attack. Let Germany have its unstoppable victories. And watch them carefully. See how they fought. Then, with the Nazis rolling toward Moscow, confident of victory, their strengths and weaknesses absolutely clear, Russia would unleash its hidden army. A gigantic trap: a country wide and a people long.

The year of the plan was 1938. Four years later, after the nonaggression pact was proven to be the joke Zemyatin suspected, the Nazi advance was halted with difficulty at a city called Stalingrad. As the Germans prepared to take the city, they were surrounded by fully one hundred divisions: Zemyatin's secret army. The Russians annihilated the German Sixth Army like locusts descending on old corn, and then marched to Berlin, only stopping when they met the Americans coming from the opposite direction.

Zemyatin, as usual, took no credit, letting the battalion be called Zhukov's Army.

His counsel was passed on from Russian leader to Russian leader like a national treasure. More often than not, he would counsel caution. Aiexei Zemyatin did not believe in adventures any more than he believed his form of government was any better than another. He kept his government from war with China. He lectured each new general personally on his belief that so long as Russia did not endanger America proper, there would be no Third World War. He insisted on three safety backups for every Soviet nuclear weapon, his greatest fear being an accident of war. Thus, the entire Politburo was shocked and terrified when it heard that Field Marshal Zemyatin himself was preparing for World War III. This was confided by the Premier to select Politburo members, who later spread the word.

It was autumn, cold already in the country of the Russian bear and Siberian steppes. No one had expected it. No one knew what the danger was or even if there was a danger, just that one was coming. Even the chief of staff was asking: Why?

According to rumors at the highest levels of the Kremlin, rumors the Premier only occasionally confirmed, the Great One, Zemyatin himself, had made the awesome decision to prepare for war in exactly one half-hour. There had been what was termed "minor trouble" at a missile base in Dzhusaiy, near the Aral Sea in the Kazakh SSR. Many parts were often faulty, so minor troubles went on all the time. The Soviet Missile Command was used to it. But Zemyatin had always known enough to fear what did not appear dangerous. Often he would make special trips here and there, and then quietly leave. So it was not thought unusual when the General was flown by special KGB jet to the missile base where a strange accident had happened. The "accident" was that all electronic equipment, from the firing keys to the telephones, had inexplicably gone inoperative at the same time and needed replacing. This fact had been kept from the higher command for a week because the commanding officer had assumed it was the fault of his men; and had tried to fix it before anyone accused him of incompetence. But a conscientious junior officer had reported him to Central Missile Command. Now the commanding officer sat in a jail cell, and the junior officer directed the missile base.

The junior officer, whose name was Kuryakin, followed Zemyatin down a corridor, talking incessantly about what had happened. The light blue halo that had appeared in the sky, more luminous than the sky itself. The discoloring of the steppe grass. And the sudden failure of all electronic equipment. The junior officer had only heard rumors about Zemyatin-he had never met him. He even suspected that the Great One did not exist. But seeing the way the KGB generals deferred to Zemyatin, the way he would walk into a room and interrupt their discussions, peremptorily dismissing the generals' views as a waste of his time, showed the junior officer that indeed this had to be the Great One.

Zemyatin's face was gnarled like old wood, but his head was bald and shiny like new skin, as if his fertile brain kept it young. He walked with a slight stoop, but even then he towered over the others in his presence. His eyes were a watery blue, somewhat filmed by age. But it was clear to Kuryakin that this man did not see with his eyes.

"And so, sir," the junior officer was saying, "I proceeded to make an investigation. I found animals dying horribly, scorched in their very skins. I found that within a certain radius, the men manning the missiles had become sick. Indeed, they too are now seeing their skin blacken and peel. And all our equipment ceased at once. All of it. When my commander refused to report this, I risked insubordination and my career, and indeed my life, sir, but I reported my findings. This was more than an accident." Zemyatin did not even nod. It was as though he were not listening. But a question here and a question there showed the old man had missed nothing.

"Come. Let us meet your commanding officer," said Zemyatin finally. He was helped by two KGB generals into the back of a large ZIL automobile and driven to the prisoners' compound.

The commanding officer sat in a single gray cell on a rude chair, his head bowed and his mind undoubtedly contemplating the chances of his spending the rest of his life in a Siberian gulag, or of shortly standing before a firing-squad wall. The man did not lift his head when Zemyatin entered. But when he saw the dark green KGB uniforms behind the old man, he fell to his knees, begging.

"Please. Please. I will inform on anyone. Do anything. Please do not shoot me."

"You disgrace the Missile Command," accused the junior officer. "It is good you have been exposed." To Zemyatin he said, "This garbage must not defend Mother Russia. "

"Not my fault. It's not my fault. I am a good officer," sobbed the former commander. Thus began a full hour of obvious half-truths and weaseling evasions, a performance of such abject misery that even the KGB generals were embarrassed for the Missile Command.

At the end of it, Field Marshal Zemyatin pointed to the quivering wreck at his feet and said:

"He is in full command again."

And then to the astonished junior officer: "He dies now. Shoot him here."

"But the traitor and coward was the commanding officer," blurted one KGB general, who had known Zemyatin many years.

"And you, too. You die now," Zemyatin said, nodding to his old colleague. And to the guards:

"Do I have to do it myself?"

Loud shots echoed in the small cell, splattering brain and bone against the stone walls. By the time the shooting stopped, the former commander had to be helped out of his cell, his shirt covered with the blood of others, and his pants filled with his own loosed bowels.

"You are not only in charge again, you are promoted," Zemyatin told him. "You will report everything that happens in this base, no matter how slight, to me. No one will be allowed to leave here. No one will write home. I want to know everything. No detail is too small. And I want everyone to go about his business as though nothing has happened."

"Should we replace the electronics, Comrade Field Marshal?"

"No. It would indicate that they did not work. Everything works fine. Do you understand?"

"Absolutely. Absolutely."

"Keep making reports as you always did. There have been no breakdowns."

"And the dying men? Some of them are dying. Those at the missiles themselves are already dead."

"Syphilis," said Zemyatin.

On the way back to Moscow, the surviving KGB general spoke to Zemyatin as the field marshal drank tea from a glass with a plain dark biscuit:

"May I ask why you had me shoot the loyal soldier and then stand by while you promoted the negligent coward?"

"No," replied Zemyatin. "Because if I tell you, you might breathe it to someone else in your sleep. I had the general shot because he did not move quickly enough."

"I know. I had to shoot him."

"And you have to do something else. You must assemble a staff to take calls from that negligent coward of a missile commander. He will be phoning me with every little bug that drops out of the sky. But we are looking for only one thing," said Zemyatin. "We are looking for anyone or anything inquiring about damage to the base. Do not let the commander or even the staff know that. But if it happens, let me know immediately."

The KGB general nodded. He had survived a long time, too. While he still did not know why the Great One had promoted the coward and had him shoot the hero, he did understand why he was not told. It was for the same reason that he had had to shoot the other KGB general in the cell, the one who had questioned him. Alexei Zemyatin wanted, above all things, obedience. This from a man who for the seventy years since the Russian Revolution went from commander to commander telling him first to think, then to obey. Now it was the opposite. For some reason, everything had changed in the world.

From Vnukovo II Airport, Zemyatin insisted on being driven, not to the Kremlin, but to the Premier's home, just outside the city. He told the servants who answered the door to awaken the Premier. Then he followed them into the bedroom. He sat down on the side of the bed. The Premier opened his eyes, terrified, certain it was a coup.

Alexei Zemyatin took the Premier's hand and put it on his own blouse, pressing it against something crusty. The Premier's room smelled of French perfume. He had had one of the cheap whores he liked so much again this evening. Zemyatin wanted him to understand the danger. He pressed the Premier's fingers as hard as his withered old hands would let him.

"That is dried blood, the blood of an honorable and decent officer. I had him shot earlier today," said Zemyatin. "I also had shot a general who delayed because he understood correctly how wrong this was. Then I promoted the most craven coward I ever saw back to command."

"Great One, why did you do this?" asked the Premier, looking for his eyeglasses.

"Because I believe we may soon have to launch a missile attack against the United States. Stop looking for your glasses, fool. I haven't brought you anything to see. I need your mind."

Then he explained that some force, probably a weapon, had put an entire SS-20 missile base out of operation. Without a sound or even a warning.

"What has happened is catastrophic, a Russian Pearl Harbor brought about with the silence of a falling leaf. There is a weapon out there, probably in the hands of the Americans, that can make all of our weapons useless."

"We're done for," said the Premier.

"No. Not yet. You see, there is one advantage we still have. Only one. America does not yet know they can destroy us so easily."

"How do you know that? How can you say that?"

"Because if they did, they would have done it by now. I suspect what we have here is a trial, a test. If the U.S. doesn't know that their weapon works, they may not launch the rest of the attack:"

"Yes. Yes. Of course. Are you sure?"

"I am sure that if they don't know it works, we are safe. The reason people pull the little triggers on guns is that it is common knowledge that a gun will shoot lead bullets where it is pointed. But if no one knew what a gun would do when fired, my dear friend, they would hesitate to pull the trigger."

"Yes. Good."

"Therefore, I could not allow the one man who had already risked his life to expose the truth to live. He might do something crazy, like warn someone else that one of our missile batteries is useless. Of course, he would do this with the best intentions. But his good intentions could get us all killed now. So I replaced him with the one man who would happily live a lie and command a missile base that did not work as though it did. Then, of course, I had to have shot the KGB general who stopped to think. We need obedience now, more than ever."

The Premier blinked his eyes and tried to organize his thoughts. At first, he told himself he might be dreaming. But even he would not dream of Alexei Zemyatin coming to his bedroom like this.

"Our biggest danger now, of course, is that they find out their weapon, whatever it is, has worked against us. Therefore I have ordered that I be informed of anyone or anything that might be prying into the current ready status of the Dzhusaly missile base."

"Good," said the Premier.

"We cannot waste time. I must go."

"What for?"

"To prepare a special missile for a first strike. Once they find out they can destroy our nuclear arsenal, we are going to have to launch them all or face a certain first strike ourselves."

"Then you wish me to tell no one?" said the Premier. "I have informed you because only you can authorize a first strike on the United States. Remember, once they find out how vulnerable we actually are, we must attack before they do. I expect to get more serviceable missiles."

This from the Great One, Alexei Zemyatin, who had dared to call all the Russian Premiers in their times fool, whom history had vindicated as the true genius of the Union of Soviet Republics, and who had now just reversed everything he had been preaching since the Revolution.

In America, the President was informed that the Soviet Union had no wish to share information about a threat to all mankind.

"They're crazy," insisted the President. "Something is disrupting the ozone layer. All civilization could be wiped out, and when we inform them it might be happening over their own territory and that we want to get together on this thing, they stonewall us. Won't tell a thing. They're crazy."

"Intelligence believes they think we're doing it to them."

"To them! What the hell do they think our skins are made of?" demanded the President, shaking his head. And then he quietly went to his bedroom and picked up a red telephone which had no dial or buttons on its face and which connected, when the receiver was lifted, to only one other telephone in the northeast corridor. He said simply: "I want that man. No, both of them."

"What for, sir?" came back the voice. It was crisp and lemony with sharp New England consonants.

"I don't know, dammit. Just have them ready. You come down here, too. I want you to listen in. I think the world is going up and I don't know what the hell is going on."

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he walked among the explosions. But that was nothing special. Any man could walk safely through this particular minefield. The mines were not designed to kill the person who touched them off. They were meant to kill everyone around him. Guerrillas used these mines, the Vietcong especially.

They worked this way: a company would walk along a trail. One man, usually the one walking point, would step on the buried pressure-sensitive device and set it off. Ordinary mines usually exploded upward, making hamburger of that man. Not this mine. It expended its force outward, not upward, and the singing shrapnel would cut down everyone in the vicinity. Except the one who caused the carnage. A soldier alone, conventional military wisdom said, was useless. No army fought with lone soldiers. Armies worked in platoons and companies and divisions. And if you built a mine that left one soldier standing alone, you rendered him useless.

So the mines went off under his feet, sending pieces of shrapnel cracking loudly along the prairie grass of North Dakota, setting fires where steel spanked off rocks and sending sparks into the dull dry grass. Remo thought that he heard someone laughing up ahead. That was special.

To hear a small sound in a great one was to be able to hear one hoof in a cavalry charge, or a can of beer opening during a football game.

He heard the laughter by not blocking out sounds. That was how most people dealt with loud noise, by defending their eardrums. Remo heard with his entire body, in his bones and with his nerve ganglia, because his very breathing vibrated with that sound and became a part of it.

He had been trained to hear like this. His aural acuteness came from his breathing. Everything came from his breathing: the power to sense the buried land mines, the ability to ignore the shock of the blasts, even the speed that enabled him to dodge the flying steel pellets if he had to. And there, as clear as his own breath, was the laughter up ahead. A very soft laughter coming from the high granite building set like a gray mountain in a plain that had no mountain. From its parapets, a person could see for fifteen miles in every direction. And they could see a thin man, about six feet tall, with high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes that lay in shadows like the holes in a skull, walking casually across the minefield.

Remo heard the laughter from a mile away, from a thousand yards, and from ten yards. At ten yards, there were no more mines. He looked up at the parapet to see a very fat man with a gold hat on his head. Or a crown. Remo couldn't tell. He didn't care to tell. It was the right fat face and that was all that mattered.

The man yelled down from the parapet.

"Hey, you! Skinny. You know you're funny," said the man.

"I know. I heard you laughing," said Remo. "You're Robert Wojic, the Hemp King of North America. Right?"

"That's legal. And so are the mines. This is my property. I can shoot you for trespassing."

"I've come to deliver a message."

"Go ahead and deliver it and then get out of here."

"I forget the message," said Remo. "it has to do with testimony."

The barrel of an AK-47 poked out of one of the stone slots in the parapet. Then another. They came from both sides of the Hemp King of North America.

"Hey, you're a dead man. No one tells Robert Wojic what to say in court. No one tells Robert Wojic anything. Robert Wojic tells you. And Robert Wojic tells you you are dead."

Remo thought a moment. There was testimony that was needed from the fat man, but what? It was specific. He knew it was specific because he wrote it down. He wrote it down and then he did something with the note. What did he do with the note?

One of the rifle muzzles quivered in an obvious pre-fire sign. The man behind it was about to squeeze the trigger. It was on a white paper that he wrote the note. The rifle fired. It fired a burst that sounded more like a string of firecrackers to Remo, each pop separate and distinct. But his body was already moving toward the castle wall where the man couldn't get a firing angle. The bullets thudded into the ground as the crack of a second burst followed. Another gun opened up, this one trying to comb the wall free of Remo. Making his way up it now, he felt the stone against his fingers. He didn't climb by grabbing and pulling, which was how most people climbed and the reason why they couldn't do verticals. He applied the pressure of his palms to the wall for lift, and used his toes to keep level between hand movements. It looked easy. It wasn't.

He had written the note with a pencil. There were three key points to the testimony. Good. Three points. What were they?

Remo arrived at the top of the parapet and stopped the AK-47 from firing by ramming it through blue jeans into something warm and moist, namely the natural opening into the triggerman's lower bowels. Then he pushed it into the upper bowels and slapped in the man's belly with a hard short blow, setting off the rifle and sending the top of his cranium toward the blue North Dakota sky.

The other guns ceased because the men firing didn't want their weapons muzzled the same way. They dropped them on the stone walkway as they reached for the sky. It was as though the ten men, as one, suddenly became strangers to violence, their weapons foreign objects which had mysteriously appeared at their feet. Ten innocent men with innocent expressions gingerly nudging their rifles away with their toes.

"Hello," said Remo. He had just shown the Hemp King that his military books that asserted a man alone was useless were themselves useless.

"And Robert Wojic says hello to you, friend," said Wojic, looking around at his useless gunmen. They had their hands in the air like a bunch of petrified pansies.

"I need your help," said Remo.

"You don't need no one's help, friend," said Wojic. And then to the toughs he had picked up in the waterfronts of the world: "You there. Put your hands down. You look like you're going to be frisked. You gonna frisk them?"

"No," said Remo.

"Put your hands down. All of you. This whole castle. Everything. Useless. A lousy investment. Listen to me, friend. Robert Wojic, the Hemp King, biggest importer and exporter of hemp rope around the world, tells you here this day: castles suck."

"I need your testimony on three points."

"Oh, the trial," said Wojic, shaking his head. "I got a right to remain silent, not to testify against myself."

"I know, but there's a problem with that," said Remo.

"What's that?" asked Wojic.

"You're going to."

"If you force me, my testimony will be thrown out of court," said Wojic triumphantly, very satisfied with his legal point. He was sitting in a very large chair encrusted with gold. He wore a purple robe trimmed in white ermine, and hand-tooled cowboy boots of Spanish leather peeped out from under the robe. Hemp rope did not pay for all these luxuries.

"I am not going to force you," said Remo, who wore just a white T-shirt and tan chinos. "I am not going to apply any untoward pressure to make you testify. However, I will push your eardrums out through your nostrils as a way of getting acquainted."

Remo clapped both palms against Robert Wojic's ears. The slap was not hard, but the absolute precision of the cupped hands arriving simultaneously made the Hemp King's eardrums feel that indeed they would come out of his nostrils at the slightest sniffle. Robert Wojic's eyes watered. Robert Wojic's teeth felt like they had just been ground by a rotating sander. Robert Wojic could not feel his ears. He was not sure that if he blew his nose, they would not appear in his lap. He did not, of course, hear his own men laughing at him.

And at that moment, Robert Wojic suddenly knew how to help this visitor to the prairie castle. He would give Remo the three pieces of information needed to help the prosecutor in his case. Wojic explained that the three pieces of information had to be the names of three cocaine runners. Wojic's hemp-import operation covered for them, and his international contacts allowed them to move the drug and the money freely. That was how Robert Wojic could afford such luxury from importing a material that wasn't much in demand since the invention of synthetic fibers.

"Right," said Remo. "That's what it was."

And Robert Wojic assured Remo that he would testify to this willingly because he never, ever wanted to see Remo come back for a second favor. Perhaps he would be killed by the angry cocaine runners; but Wojic wasn't concerned. He had seen death just moments before, and the man lying on the parapet with his brains blown out of his skull looked a hell of a lot more peaceful than Wajic himself felt as he checked his nose. Nothing was coming out. Then he felt his very tender ears.

"So long, friend. Will I see you in court?"

"Nah," said Remo. "I never have to go."

Robert Wojic offered to have one of his men give Remo a lift into town. All ten said they would personally have been willing to drive the stranger who climbed up walls, but they had immediate appointments in the other direction.

"Which direction is that?" wondered Remo.

"Where are you going?" they asked in chorus.

"That way," said Remo, pointing east, where Devil's Lake Municipal Airport lay.

"Sorry, that seems to be in the general direction of New York and I'm heading for Samoa," observed one of the triggermen. "I don't know about these other guys."

As it turned out, they, too, were headed for Samoa. Immediately. All of them. So Remo had to walk to the airport alone, back the way he came over the scorched prairie grass where hidden mines were supposed to reduce a company of men to a single quivering human being.

At a push-button pay phone in Minnewaukan, Remo had to punch in a code to indicate that the job had been successfully completed. The code was written on the inside of his belt, along with an alternate code that indicated a problem and the need for further instructions. This was a new system. He was fairly certain the "mission complete" code was on the right. He punched in the numbers, suddenly wondering if Upstairs had meant his right or the belt's right. When he got a car wash, he knew he had copied down the codes wrong. He threw away the belt and caught a 747 for New York City.

On the plane, he suddenly realized that throwing the belt away was a mistake. Anyone finding the belt could punch in one of the correct codes and throw the entire organization Remo worked for off course. But nowadays he wasn't sure what that was anymore. He went to sleep next to a thirtyish blond who, sensing his magnetism, kept running her tongue over her lips as though rehearsing a lipstick ad.

In New York City, Remo's cab let him off at a very expensive hotel on Park Avenue, whose elegant windows now reflected the dawn. About thirty policemen crowded the lobby. Someone, it seemed, had thrown three conventioneers thirty stories down an elevator shaft with the force of an aircraft catapult. Remo took a working elevator to the thirtieth floor and entered a major suite.

"I didn't do it," came a high squeaky voice.

"What?" said Remo.

"Nothing," said the voice. "They did it to themselves." Inside the living room, draped in a golden kimono trimmed in black, his frail body seated toward the rising sun, wisps of hair placid against the yellow parchment of his skin, sat Chiun, Master of Sinanju. Innocent.

"How did they do it to themselves?" demanded Remo. He noticed a small bowl of brown rice sitting unfinished on the living-room table.

"Brutality always begets its own end."

"Little Father," said Remo, "three men were hurled thirty stories down an open elevator shaft. How could they possibly have done it to themselves?"

"Brutality can do that sort of thing to itself," insisted Chiun. "But you would not understand."

What Remo did not understand was that absolute and perfect peace made any intrusion a brutal act. Like a scorpion on a lily pad. Like a dagger in a mother's breast. Like volcanic lava burning a helpless village. That was brutality.

The mother's breast, helpless village, and benign lily pad were, of course, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, at breakfast. The scorpion, dagger, and volcanic lava were the three exalted members of the International Brotherhood of Raccoons, who had walked down the hall singing "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

As Chiun had expected, Remo again stood up for other whites, explaining away their hideous brutality as "some guys high on beer singing a drinking song," something that in his perverted mind did not call for an immediate return to gentle silence.

"I mean, they couldn't very well throw themselves down a thirty-story shaft with the force of a machine, could they, Little Father? Just for singing a drinking song? Listen, we'll stay out of the cities from now on, if you want peace."

"Why should I be denied a city because of others' brutality?" answered Chiun. He was the Master of Sinanju, latest in a line of the greatest assassins in history. They had served kings and governments before the Roman Empire was a muddy village on the Tiber. And they had always worked best in cities.

"Should we surrender the centers of civilization to the animals of the world because you blindly side white with white all the time?"

"I think they were black, Little Father."

"Same thing. Americans. I give the best years of my life to training a lowly white and at the first sign of conflict, the very first incident, whose side does this white take? Whose side?"

"You killed three men because they sang a song," said Remo.

"Their side," said Chiun, satisfied that once again he had been abused by an ingrate. His long fingernails poked out of his elegant kimono to make the telling point. "Their side," he repeated.

"You couldn't have just let them walk down the damned hallway."

"And brutalize others who might be transcending with the rising sun during breakfast?"

"Only Sinanju transcends with the rising sun. I sincerely doubt that plumbers from Chillicothe, Ohio, or account executives from Madison Avenue transcend with the rising sun."

Chiun turned away. He was about to stop talking to Remo, but Remo had gone to prepare the rice for breakfast, and would not be aware of the slight. So Chiun said:

"I will forgive you this because you believe you are white."

"I am white, Little Father," said Remo.

"No. You couldn't be. I have come to the conclusion that it is not an accident you have become Sinanju."

"I am not going to start writing in one of your scrolls that my mother was Korean but I didn't know it until you gave me Sinanju."

"I didn't ask that," said Chiun.

"I know you have been struggling with how to explain that the only one to master the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju, is not Korean, not even Oriental, but white. Pale, blank, blatant white."

"I have not written the histories lately because I did not wish to admit the ingratitude of a white, and how they all stick together even when they owe everything they are to someone kind and decent and mild who thoughtlessly gave the best years of his life to an ingrate."

"It's because I won't write that I'm not white," said Remo. In his training he had read the histories, and knew the long line of assassins the way British schoolboys learned of the ancestry of their kings and queens.

"You said you were raised in an orphanage. Which orphan knows his mother, much less his father? You could have had a Korean father."

"Not when I look in the mirror," said Remo.

"There are diseases that afflict the eyes and make them mysteriously round," said Chiun.

"White," said Remo. "And I know you don't want to leave that in the history of Sinanju. When I take over the scrolls, the first thing I do will be to say how happy I am as the first white to be given Sinanju."

"Then I will live forever," said Chiun. "No matter how afflicted this old body is, I will struggle to breathe."

"You're in your prime. You told me that everything really comes together at eighty."

"I had to because you would worry."

"I never worry about you, Little Father."

Chiun was interrupted from collecting that insult and depositing it in his bank of injustices by a knock on the door, which Remo answered. Three uniformed policemen and a plainclothes detective stood in the doorway. Other patrolmen and detectives were at other doors, Remo noticed. The police informed Remo that they had reason to believe that three visitors to the city, three conventioneers, had been brutally murdered. Something had hurled them down from the thirtieth floor. They were sure it was from the thirtieth floor because the elevator doors on this floor had been ripped open and the cage jammed half a floor up to make room for the falling men. The problem was that they could find no trace of the machine that did it. Did the occupants of this suite hear any kind of machine this morning?

Remo shook his head. But from behind him, Chiun spoke up clearly and, for him, quite loudly:

"How could we hear machinery with all that racket this morning?" he demanded.

The police wanted to know what racket.

"The bawdy screaming yells of drunken brutals," said Chiun.

"He's an old man," Remo said quickly. He added a little smile to show the police they should be tolerant of him.

"I am not old," said Chiun. "I am not even ninety by correct counting."

In Korean, Remo told him that in America, and the rest of the West for that matter, no one used the old Wan Chu calendar, which was so inaccurate it lost two months in a year.

And in Korean, Chiun answered that one used a calendar for grace and truth, not for mere hoarding of time. Like Westerners so obsessed with each precise day that they think they have lost something if one day disappeared in a week.

The police, confronted with the spectacle of two men speaking in a strange language, looked to each other in confusion.

"Perhaps that loud noise was the machine that killed those men?" asked the detective.

"No," said Remo. "It was people. He didn't hear any machines."

"Not surprising," said the detective, motioning for the others to get going. "No one else heard the machine, either. "

"Because of the singing," said Chiun.

Remo shook his head and was about to shut the door when he saw something he should not have seen. Walking through the police line into a murder scene in which Remo and Chiun might be connected was a man in a tight dark three-piece gray suit, with a parched lemony expression, gray hair parted with painful neatness, and steel-rimmed glasses.

It was Harold W. Smith, and he should not have been there. The organization was set up to do the things that America didn't want to be associated with but that were necessary for survival. So secret was it that outside of Smith, only the President knew of its existence. So necessary was secrecy that a phony execution had been staged so that its one killer arm would have the fingerprints of a dead man, a dead man for an organization that could never be known to exist. The fact that Remo was an orphan and would not be missed was a significant factor in his selection. There had been another man who was almost, chosen, but he had a mother.

Now here was Smith not even bothering to set up a cover meeting to protect the organization, walking right into the one sort of situation that could blow it all, walking very publicly up to the hotel suite of his secret killer arm, and making himself vulnerable to questioning by the droves of police roaming the halls on a matter of triple murder.

"It doesn't matter," said Smith, entering the apartment.

"I thought you would have phoned to have me meet you someplace," said Remo, closing the door on the sea of blue uniforms. "Something. Anything. Those cops are going to be questioning the cockroaches before they're through."

"It doesn't matter," repeated Smith:

"Hail, O Emperor Smith. Thy graciousness brings sunlight to darkness, glory to the mud of daily life. Our day is enhanced by your imperial presence. Name but the deed, and we fly to avenge wrongs done to your glorious name." Chiun had said hello.

"Yes," said Smith, clearing his throat. He had said hello. Then he sat down.

"Peasants in this very hotel have been defaming your glorious name during the time of transcendence itself. Lo, I heard them this very morning, loud as machines," said Chiun.

In Korean, Remo told Chiun: "I don't think he cares about the three bodies, Little Father."

Chiun's delicate fingers fluttered in the still air, his silk brocaded kimono rustling as he gave greetings. The Masters of Sinanju never bowed, but they did acknowledge others with a tipping of the body which resembled a bow. Remo knew what it was, but Smith couldn't tell the difference and always waited patiently until it was over. Smith had found he could no more stop this than he could convince Chiun that he was not an emperor and was never intended to be. Several times Smith had thought he'd explained the workings of America's constitutional government to the Master of Sinanju, and Chiun had exclaimed that he understood perfectly, even commenting on some of the passages Smith had read him. But always Remo would later tell him that Chiun thought the Constitution merely contained some beautiful sentiments that had little to do with daily life, like prayers or love poems. He was still puzzled as to why America should be afraid to violate its constitutions when any reasonable emperor would flaunt his power to have his enemies assassinated.

"Gentlemen," began Smith. "What do you know about fluorocarbons?"

"They are evil, O gracious Emperor, and were probably behind the desecrators of your glorious name, this very morning sent to their righteous doom," said Chiun.

"They're the things in spray cans, aren't they?" Remo asked. "They make them work:"

Smith nodded. "Fluorocarbons are a manmade chemical propellant. Their industrial use was severely restricted almost ten years ago."

"He who would make noise during transcendence," observed Chiun, "would make a fluorocarbon that the whole world despises for its ugliness."

"High in the stratosphere lies a layer of ozone gas. It's only about an eighth of an inch thick, but it performs the critical ecological function of filtering harmful solar radiation so it doesn't strike the planet's surface. Unfortunately, these fluorocarbons rose to the stratosphere and began to eat away at the ozone layer faster than new ozone was being produced up there."

"Our gracious ozone," said Chiun. "The swine." And to Remo, in Korean:

"What is this man ranting about? Is he afraid of hair sprays?"

"Will you listen to him, Little Father? The man's talking," Remo whispered back in the Korean dialect of the northwest province in which the village of Sinanju, Chiun's village, was located.

"Hair sprays today, poems about people's rights yesterday. What will it be tomorrow? I say now, as I have said before, let us leave this lunatic's service. The world has never had more despots and tyrants, rulers who would not only pay more, but would properly honor a professional assassin with correct employment." This from Chiun, also in Korean.

"Will you listen?" said Remo.

"Yes," continued Smith. "It is a major problem once more because someone, some lunatic, is shooting holes in the ozone layer on purpose."

"What can you expect from violators of transcendence?" said Chiun. Remo gave him a dirty look. Chiun ignored it. If Remo had a flaw, Chiun knew that it was his lack of expertise in dealing with emperors. Remo followed this Smith, still not realizing that emperors came and went, but the House of Sinanju, of which he was now a part, went on forever. To avoid being an emperor's tool, one should never let him know that he, the emperor, was the tool. One did this by pretending loyalty beyond loyalty.

Smith, who had never looked excessively healthy, appeared even more haggard now. His words were heavy as he spoke, almost as if he had given up hope. And Remo did not know why.

"We have not determined who is doing this, but NASA satellites have detected a stream of concentrated fluorocarbons, obviously manmade, collecting through the atmosphere above the Atlantic Ocean. This stream appeared to open an ozone window above central Russia. We are not sure where it originated but we believe it came from somewhere on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe North America. Maybe South America. In any case it opened up that window."

"Of course," cried Chiun. "This is your chance to destroy your archenemy. Find the wicked fluorocarbons, place them in righteous hands, and then conquer the world. Your wisdom transcends Genghis Khan, O Emperor. They will sing of you as they have sung of the great Attila. Praise be that we are at the birthing of this glorious day. 'Sack Moscow!' is the people's cry."

Smith cleared his throat before continuing. "There are two reasons we must locate that fluorocarbon source. One, it may ultimately rupture the ozone shield. Ground radiation levels under the Russian window indicate that the shield closed itself off in less than a day. Provided that atmospheric ozone levels haven't been seriousiy strained, it will probably be replenished."

Chuin raised a single finger to his wisp of a white beard and nodded sagely. Remo wondered what he was thinking about.

"The second reason is that when we offered to help the Soviets analyze the damage to the ozone over their country, they acted like nothing had happened. And then we picked up the strangest sort of activity. The building of an entire separate missile command. These missiles are unlike anything we have seen before. And we are afraid these new missiles have only one purpose. A first strike."

"How do you know? I mean, how can you tell what's going on in their minds?" asked Remo.

"Our satellites have photographed the new missile bases, so we know they exist. But we haven't picked up any trace of a response mechanism. That's a system that has several layers of checks and counterchecks built into it, so that the missiles are fired only after certain preconditions are met, including a determination that the country has been attacked. It's fairly easy to read from outer space. All we have to do is pick up the electronic signals created by the response mechanism. But this new command doesn't have any of that. They have one phone line and a backup. It's what we call a raw button."

"A what?"

"The only thing you can do with those damned missiles is launch them. There is no waiting for confirmation, no protection against incoming missiles, no launch codes. Nothing. They are already aimed and await the press of a single button. All they need to start World War III is one phone call, and dammit, the way their phones work, a thunderstorm could set off that call."

"We burn either slow from the sun or fast from the Russians," said Remo.

"Exactly," said Smith.

"So what do we do? Where do you want us to go?"

"You wait. Both of you. The entire world is watching the skies for those crazies to try streaming fluorocarbons again. If they do, we'll get a fix on them, and then you two move in. No holds barred. Don't wait for anything. There aren't two people I would rather have between the human race and extinction than you. The President feels the same way. I just hope another incident won't set the Russians off. I never have understood them, and I understand them even less now."

"Of course," said Chiun. He always understood the calculated moves of the Russians, but could never remotely fathom Smith and his democracy.

"I do. You know," Remo said slowly, "sometimes I think what we do doesn't matter. Not as much as I'd like it to matter. But this does. You know, it makes me glad to be alive to do this. It's saving the world, I guess."

"Don't guess," said Smith. "It is."

"And it shall be recorded that the great Emperor Harold Smith did perform the wondrous act of saving the world through a trainee of the House of Sinanju."

"I am glad you feel that way, Master of Sinanju," said Smith. "By the way, there was a small problem with your gold tribute. But we will reship it."

"What? What problem?" asked Chiun. His delicate head cocked so suddenly that the wisps of white hair at his ears and chin quivered.

"The submarine carrying your gold surfaced five miles off Sinanju, in the West Korean Bay, as always. On the same day and at the appointed hour, as always. In agreement with the North Korean government, as always."

"Yes, yes," said Chiun eagerly.

"Would you like some water, Smitty?" asked Remo. He looked as though he could use some. The tribute to Sinanju would only pile up in that house above the village, so it was not of great importance to Remo that there was a delay of sorts. Smith did look especially worried by this, but they would be able to reship, of course.

"Shhh, fool." Chiun to Remo. Smith said he didn't need the water. "The gold. The gold," said Chiun.

"We have tea," suggested Remo.

"The gold."

"Well, it's nothing serious," said Smith. "Usually someone from your village rows out to meet the sub and collect our yearly tribute to the House of Sinanju which pays for your services as Remo's trainer. This time no one came."

"They must," cried Chiun. "They have always done it."

"This time, they didn't. But we will reship."

"Reship? My loyal villagers did not appear to claim the tribute that has sustained Sinanju for centuries, and you will reship?"

"What's the big deal, Chiun?" said Remo. "You've got so much tribute in that place that one year's gold isn't going to make much difference."

"The village starves without the tributes earned by the Master of Sinanju. The babies will have to be sent home to the sea by their weeping mothers, as it was done in the days before the Masters of Sinanju hired themselves out as assassins to prevent that very thing."

"That hasn't happened since the House worked for the Ming Dynasty in China. They can live off that treasure alone for a thousand years."

"We'll reship a double payment," said Smith in an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity. That told Remo more than anything else that Smith really feared for the survival of the planet.

Chiun rose in a single smooth movement, entering the bedroom like the wind.

"What happened? What's gotten into him?" asked Smith.

"I think he may be upset. That treasure is kinda important to him," Remo said. "I've seen it. Some of it is priceless. Mint coins from Alexander the Great. Rubies. Emeralds. Ivory. Gorgeous stuff. And a lot of it's junk, too. Things they used to think of as precious that aren't anymore. Like aluminum, when it first came out, centuries ago before it could be manufactured. They have gobs of aluminum. I've seen it right there beside a case of diamonds. Really. The diamonds are off to the side."

"It's all right that we're going to double the shipment, isn't it? I mean, how could he object?" asked Smith.

Remo shrugged. "Some things even I don't understand yet."

But when Chiun reappeared in a dark gray flecked robe, his face grave as a statue, hands folded within his sleeves and thick-soled sandals on his feet, Remo Williams knew that the Master of Sinanju was leaving. This was his traveling robe. But his trunks were not packed.

"Little Father, you can't leave now," Remo said in Korean. "The world may go up."

"The world is always being destroyed. Look at Nineveh. Look at Pompeii. Look at the Great Flood. The world is always destroyed, but gold goes on forever. And the ancient treasure of the House of Sinanju, which has survived catastrophes without number, may well be in danger."

"I can't go with you, Chiun," said Remo. "I have to stay here."

"And betray your responsibility as the next Master of Sinanju? A Master must protect the treasure."

"If there is no world left, where are you going to spend it?"

"One can always spend gold," said Chiun. "I have taught you strokes, Remo. I have trained you to fulfill the potential of your mind and of your body. I have made you strong, and I have made you quick. Most of all I have made you an assassin, one of a long line of honorable assassins. I have taught you all these things when I should have taught you wisdom. I have bequeathed the power of Sinanju to a fool." This in Korean. This said with rage.

So angered was he that the Master of Sinanju left the suite without giving a formal bow to his emperor. "Where did he go?" asked Smith, who did not understand Korean.

"Did you notice that he didn't give you a proper farewell?"

"Yes, I thought it seemed briefer than usual. Does that mean anything?"

"He just said good-bye," Remo said quietly. Without thinking, he dropped to a lotus position on the floor, easily and smoothly with the legs joining like petals as he had been taught so many years before.

"I am sorry. I had hoped to use him, too, in this crisis. Well, we still have you and that's the important thing. When he comes back, we'll use him."

"I don't know if he is coming back," said Remo. "You just got a good-bye."

"And you? Did he say good-bye to you?"

"I hope not. I really want to believe not," said Remo. And with soft, cutting motions, he tore up pieces of the thick pile carpet, not even noticing what his hands were doing.

"I am sure Chiun will return," said Smith. "There is an emotional bond between you two. Like a father and son."

"That treasure is pretty important to him. I don't think it can be that important, because nobody ever spends it. But then again, I am white."

Chapter 3

Champagne corks popped. Noisemakers shrilled. Balloons clustered against the soundproofed ceiling like frightened owls. A gigantic white cake with the blue Chemical Concepts logo was wheeled into the main lab room on Route 128 as some of the technicians passed around freshly rolled joints. Bubbling laughter shook the room, seeming to set the bright-colored balloons in motion.

Reemer Bolt jumped up on a lab stool and yelled for silence. He got it.

"We thought it was marketable," he howled. "But before we could sell it, we needed a final test. And you delivered! So here is a toast to the great technical staff of Chemical Concepts who made it possible and kept their mouths shut. I promise to make all of us rich. Very rich." Reemer Bolt shook up a jeroboam of Dom Perignon and let the sudsy foam spurt over the screaming crowd in the laboratory. This wonderful crew had taken the wild, improbable concept of the fluorocarbon beam and not only made it work, but made it as directional as an attack plane. On this very day they had proved that they could fire the beam and make it strike any point in the atmosphere. Any point. They had harnessed it. They could control it.

They had aimed the beam at Malden, a village eighty miles from London, England. Like a high-pressure jet of water through cigarette smoke, it poked a hole in the ozone above that town, showering it with the full force of the mighty sun. Their control was absolute. They had focused the beam across an entire ocean and hit an area no larger than forty feet by forty feet.

"I love you, Kathleen O'Donnell," Bolt screamed into the open transatlantic line.

On the other end, in a field in Malden, England, Dr. O'Donnell simply hung up. She had work to do. Forty-seven precise experiments were laid on the field that they had prepared in advance for the great test. This had to be done in secret, because if the British government learned that a United States chemical company was conducting scientific tests involving banned fluorocarbons on their royal soil, it could trigger an international incident. Worse, the British might sue Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts into bankruptcy. The British were touchy that way.

So Dr. O'Donnell had disguised the nature of the experiment. To help with that disguise she had hired a British testing firm, and simply misinformed them about a thing here and a thing there. All she needed them for was to calibrate and quantify what was happening there in the little village north of London.

She walked among the experiments, the dead grass crunching under her feet. The cages, beakers, and vials were receiving the attention of white-coated technicians. The major experiment, of course, was already a smashing success. They could not only direct the fluorocarbon stream thousands of miles, but they could control the size and duration of the window with a small tolerance.

As she went from table to table, Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell realized that she was walking among the gravy. The meat had already been cooked. Perhaps that was what made her feel this sort of tight giddiness. Then again, there were so many sounds of pain among the dying animals.

A cluster of rosebushes caught her attention. Beautiful black roses. She looked at her small chart. They had been yellow before the experiment. A kiss of a breeze shattered a few petals, and the buds fell like ashes.

This was a natural field with a small brackish pond. A white film coated the pond with a rather thick layer of shriveled insects. She couldn't believe how many bugs the little pond had contained until she saw them dead. She heard one technician mutter that even the microbes in the pond were dead.

She wondered where the strange music was coming from and then realized it was the dying animals. There were rabbits with extra thick fur, fur that had not protected the skin at all. It had peeled and cracked, turning black like a seared hot dog, fur or not. Kathy had shaved half of them, just to make certain. Same for the puppies. Except they whined and cried, instead of sitting in their cases shivering with the fear of the unknown. Dr. O'Donnell looked at them more closely and made what she thought was an interesting discovery. The puppies were blind.

Some of the technicians, hardened by other animal experiments, turned away from the suffering.

Dr. O'Donnell felt only exciting tingles on her skin, as though she were being caressed in her soft parts. Apparently, the puppies' more developed animal senses had caused them to look up into the sky, the source of the unfamiliar radiation. The unfiltered sunlight had burned out their retinas.

One of the technicians came up to her with an important question.

"Can we put the animals out of their misery now? We've logged our findings."

Dr. O'Donnell saw the pain in his face. More than that.

She felt it. Her tongue moistened her lips. She didn't answer him, but let him stand there with the pleading in his eyes. Her body was good and warm. The old thing was happening to her again, here in England, here at this experiment.

"The animals. They're in real pain," said the technician.

Kathleen scribbled some notes on her pad. She saw the technician squirm as though every moment of delay was intense pain for him. It was definitely happening again. "Can we destroy them? ... Please."

"Just wait a moment, won't you?" said Kathy. She wondered if her pants were moist yet.

Half an hour later, most of the animals had died painfully and the technicians were sullen. People often reacted to suffering that way. Kathy was used to this. She had seen a lot of it in puberty. In puberty she had begun to wonder why grown-ups and other children were so horrified by the suffering of other creatures. Her parents had sent her to several doctors to find out why she was so different. But even at age twelve, the brilliant little Kathleen O'Donnell knew she wasn't different. The world was different.

So as she became an adult she hid her special feelings because the world feared what was different. She drove fast cars. She fought for control of companies. She competed for honors. And she let her special feelings be secret, secret even to her own womanly body. Men were never that interesting. Success was only a factor to be achieved because it was better than failure.

But when so many little animals began screaming, her body awake on its own, sending delicious, delicious feelings throughout all the good parts. They felt wonderful. When someone offered her a lift back to London, she said she would rather stay here and work in the field a bit longer.

She wanted to play. She wanted to play with the people who were now suffering because the animals were suffering. People were fun. They were more complicated and challenging than numbers.

Sometimes they were easy, though. Like Reemer Bolt back at CCM. He was a sexual game, easily played. Bolt was the sort of man, like so many other men, who needed sex to vindicate his sense of self-worth. Give him sex and he felt good. Deny it, and he felt worthless. He would literally give you control over his life in return for a little leg at the right times, provided you pretended to be pleased. Bolt needed that and Kathleen always gave it to him. She was a good actress. She always had been. She even fooled the psychiatrists when she was a teenager. But all this suffering now couldn't fool her body, even after all these years.

She wondered what a person would look like kept in a cage under the fluorocarbon beam, even as she told an ashen-faced technician that this experiment was important because they were establishing controls to make it safe for all mankind.

A technician came over to her to beg permission to put a terrier out of its misery. She commented on vitreous solutions as she watched him bite his lip. There was no blood, she noticed.

"How can you do this to these animals?" he asked.

Kathy put a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry you had to see it, John," she said. She knew this seemed soothing.

"Jim," he corrected.

"Whatever," she said. "The tragedy, Jim, is that people as sensitive as you have to look at things like this."

"They didn't have to suffer," said the man. His eyes were filling with pain. She showed deep concern for him as a person while she reminded herself that his name was Jim. Like pin. See the letters J-i-m on the blackboard in your mind, Kathleen told herself. J-i-m, like Jungle gym. Jim. "Jim ... they had, to suffer."

"Why, dammit, why?"

"So that children won't suffer in the future. We don't want the sun's power perverted like atomic energy. We don't want these horrible things happening to innocent children." Kathleen looked into the man's troubled eyes. She hoped hers registered the correct amount of sympathy. "I am sorry, Jungle-" He looked puzzled.

"--Jim," said Kathy, kneading his arm softly. It always helped to touch a man when you worked him. That was what made doing it over the phone so challenging. You had to work without your hands. "Jim, we are learning things here that will protect our most precious resource, the children. And, Jim, I don't know of a better way to do it. Jim."

"Do we have to let the poor animals suffer like this?"

"I am afraid we do. Children won't have the luxury of being put out of their misery. Can you bring yourself to watch?"

Jim lowered his head, adding the shame of his weakness to his pain. "I guess I have to," he said.

"Good man, Jim," Kathleen said. "If the power we have harnessed here ever got out of control, the children would suffer the most. They would lie in the streets, moaning and crying, unable to understand what was happening to them, unable to know why their tender skins had turned purplish-black and peeled off in great chunks, unable to see what happened because they would be sightless. Sightless, Jim, sightless and afraid. And dying. Would you, Jim, if you found a baby dying like that in the gutter, would you be able to slit its throat to put it out of its misery? Could you?"

"No, no, I couldn't do that," said Jim. His face paled, his arms shuddered, and his legs seemed to find other places to go than to stay beneath him. He tipped over and landed like a bag of peat moss off a truck.

Kathleen O'Donnell wanted to tell him it was good for her, too.

The Jodrell Bank radio telescope picked up strange readings in the jet stream of atmosphere. Something that caused their signals to bounce back crazily.

"Do you think this is it?" asked one of the scientists. "Never saw anything like it," answered the other. "Must be."

"Over Malden, I gather."

"Well, let's give the intelligence chaps a ring, eh?"

"Odd effect on radio signals, I say. So that's how a fluorocarbon beam, or stream, behaves. Have you considered what it might do to the ozone?"

"Don't think so. It's supposed to be coming from America."

"Can't tell for certain. The source appears to be west of Great Britain."

"America is west of Great Britain."

"Quite. "

The phone rang in Remo's suite. "Remo?" It was Smith. "Yes?"

"They got a hit in Great Britain."

"Is that thing there?"

"No. It struck there, but they believe the point of origin was west of England. Which we think also."

"So where is it?"

"Somewhere in America, but we're not sure where. Probably still on the east coast. The British should have a better read than we do. That's the thinking here. But there is a problem in Great Britain. They are not sharing their data with us. For some crazy reason, their intelligence services are keeping everything to themselves."

"Which means?"

"You get over to Britain and find out what they're hiding. They get back here and tear the hearts out of these lunatics before we're all killed," said Smith. Remo had never heard the rigidly controlled man use terms of violence when he ordered violence.

"And do it fast, because I don't know what's happening with the Russians. I never could figure them out. The only one who ever knew what they were doing was Chiun. And I can't figure him out, either?"

"What's happening with the Russians?" Remo asked.

"I think they picked up something, too. They knew what to look for now. But how they'll react is anyone's guess. There will be an Air Force jet waiting for you in a special hangar at Kennedy Airport. It's the latest fighter. Cost a quarter of a billion dollars to build and can get you across the Atlantic in half the time of the Concorde. Performs wonders."

One of the wonders of the new Z-83 retracting wing Stratofighter was its ability to track all radar signals in the hemisphere and translate them into a tactical reading so that a staff officer in the Pentagon could feed them into a computer. This brilliant idea would in theory enable the Air Force to monitor all air traffic around the world using just two jets.

The problem with the Z-83 was that it had so many "enhance functions"; the radar-tracking computer, the navigational computer, and the automatic target select and track unit, that most of the time the engines wouldn't start. The Z-83 sat like a metallic-winged shark on the runway when Remo arrived, and kept on sitting.

"Does this thing fly?"

"She's best aircraft in the world when we integrate her multimodes." This from an Air Force general who explained that it would be militarily premature to assign any on-line function to the system; one should look at it as a launching mode strategically, rather than tactically.

In brief, the general explained, it didn't fly, wouldn't fly soon, and had every likelihood of never flying. He advised taking Delta Airlines. They would be ready when he was.

When Field Marshal Alexei Zemyatin was informed that another beam had been fired, this time above England, he muttered over and over:

"I do not want a war. I do not want a war. Why are the fools giving me a war?"

It was the first time that the Great One had been heard to call an enemy a fool. He had always saved that for allies. An enemy, he had warned every Russian leader, was brilliant and perfect in every way until he showed you how he could be defeated. And, of course, he always did because no one was perfect.

"How do you know they are not attacking Great Britain?" demanded the Russian Premier. "Some in the Politburo think America might be using Great Britain as a target because it is a useless ally. Contempt, it is. How can you say war when they are firing that thing against an ally?"

Zemyatin sat in a black leather chair staring into a room filled with Russian generals and KGB officers. They did not look back because they did not see him. They were on the other side of a one-way mirror and they talked quietly among themselves in aimless conversation. It was aimless because the Premier had left the room. He had left because Zemyatin had buzzed.

Zemyatin shook his hairless head. The sadness of it all. This mindless pack was Russia's future. Still, the rest of the world was run by the likes of these. But even the likes of these across the Atlantic should not start a war for no reason.

"How do you know they plan war?" the Premier asked again. Zemyatin nodded. He motioned the Premier to bend down because he did not wish to raise his voice. He wanted the other to listen hard.

"When our missile base was hit by this thing-whatever it is-I allowed myself to hope it was an accident. Granted, one does not run a country on hope. That would be disastrous."

"Why did you think it was an accident?"

"I didn't think it was an accident," corrected Zemyatin. "I hoped it was an accident. I reacted as though it was a willful act, but I had to ask myself why America would do something so foolish. There is no reason for them to test an untried weapon on us first. You don't do that if you are starting a war."

"Yes. Good thinking. Yes."

"But it was such a device that I thought perhaps the Americans consider us fools and believe that we would not recognize their device as a controllable weapon. A foolish idea, because we suspect everything."

"Yes, yes," said the Premier, struggling to follow the twists and turns of the Great One. Sometimes he was so clear, and other times he was like the summer mists of Siberia. Unknowable.

"There was still the possibility, a shred of hope, that this was an accident. However, we knew there was one thing they needed from us. And if one can be certain of anything, I am certain of that."

Zemyatin paused. "They know what it does to animals, according to our reports. They know what it does to microbes. But they still do not know what it does to our current defenses. In my belief, they do not know how to use it for war. Yet."

The Premier thought that sounded good. He was hesitant. He did not want to be called a fool even in private. He was relieved when Zemyatin refrained from doing so.

"But I am also sadly sure, now more than before, that they will use it for war. And why? When they tested it against us, they made a mistake. They couldn't find out whether it worked or not. As a matter of fact, it was such a severe mistake, it left open the one small hope that perhaps it was an accident. Of course, they fell into our trap when they desperately sought to 'share' information in our so-called common struggle. So what do you do now that your first test has possibly alarmed your enemy?"

"You don't test again. But they have," said the Premier.

"Exactly. In friendly territory, pretending for all the world that they have only a scientific interest. Blatant. If they had shot this thing at soldiers, I would be less sure of their intentions for war, because then they would not be disguising a first strike."

"Oh," said the Premier.

"Yes," said Zemyatin. "And it was I who had for all these years said they did not seek a war, but control of resources."

"Why now?"

"If we had such an advantage, would we ignore it?"

"Ah," said the Premier.

"Yes," said Zemyatin. "Our one defense is that they do not yet know how effective it is against our missiles. When they do, of course, they will take us apart like an old clock."

"You won't let that happen?" asked the Premier. "No. We will have to strike first. The fools leave us no other choice but nuclear war." The old man shook his head. "So many things are changing. I used to say there was no greater enemy than a fool for an ally. Now I have to say the greater danger in the nuclear age is having a fool for an enemy."

But there were good things, he added:

"Fortunately, this second test was made on England, which to our KGB is like downtown Moscow," said Zemyatin. He did not have to remind the Premier how thoroughly penetrated British Intelligence was. The KGB practically ran Britain's spy service. There were several high-ranking KGB officers on the other side of the oneway mirror. Zemyatin had turned down the volume control on the microphones listening in on them. In his youth he never would have had to issue this order. But the KGB had become quite fat on its own successes around the world.

"I want their best effort in England. No games. No politics. No cool British ladies for parties. Yes, I know about them. I want results. You tell them that. You tell them we demand that. Don't let them give you their fancy talk."

"Right," said the Premier, who had risen to his post by satisfying as many powers as possible, including the army and the KGB.

Zemyatin watched the Premier return to the other side of the mirror. He watched him make a show of being stern. What Zemyatin would have preferred at this time was Stalin. Stalin would have had one general shot just to get everyone's attention. And with a comrade crumpled before a bullet-pocked wall, they would not be playing political games over the best course of action and the best man for the job. But this Premier was not made of the stuff of Josef Stalin. And Zemyatin knew the first rule of war was to fight with what you had. Only a fool hoped for more.

He watched the Premier through the one-way mirror. There was another discussion. He turned off the sound and pressed the buzzer again. Again the Premier left the generals and came into Zemyatin's room.

"Listen. If you let them have a discussion, you are going to be run around. No discussions. No games. You go in there and tell them to break bones. No games. Blood. Get the sort of people into Britain who will not stop at the sight of blood. To hell with undercover. If this war comes, there will be no cover for any of us," said Zemyatin. He banged a hand on the armchair. If he were younger he might have literally strangled this man. Not out of anger, of course, but because this Premier was so susceptible to force. He had to make it strong and simple:

"Blood. Blood on the streets. Blood in the gutters. Find out what they know. There is no tomorrow. Now!"

An immaculately uniformed colonel met Remo at the airport, offering smiling pleasantries, expressing happiness over the opportunity to work with Remo, inquiring what department Remo reported to, and allowing that he was terribly impressed that the highest levels of the U.S. government had requested that all cooperation be extended to Remo. But.

But what? Remo wanted to know.

But unfortunately there was blessed little Colonel Aubrey Winstead-Jones could offer in the way of assistance. Her Majesty's government did not know what Remo was talking about. Really.

"Frankly, old boy, we would have told your State Department early on had you asked. No need to have you over here, what?"

Remo listened politely, and on the way from Heathrow Airport into London, with the gray industrial choke of Great Britain on either side of the chauffeured automobile, Colonel Winstead-Jones suddenly decided to tell Remo that he had been instructed to guide Remo around London, taking him nowhere in particular until Remo got tired and went home. Colonel Winstead-Jones was not to help Remo in any way. He was supposed to make sure Remo had all the wine, drugs, and women he wanted. He had been told this by the station chief of MI-12. When asked, he willingly gave Remo the address and cover used by MI-12, and a brief history of the ministry. Remo for his part was equally cooperative. He assisted Colonel Winstead-Jones back into his car, which had been dragging him along the British highway system. Joining the colonel to the native highway system had done wonders for openness in communication. The colonel might even regain the use of his legs in the near future, Remo assured him. At least those parts still attached.

The colonel told him exactly who had given him the orders to run Remo around.

"Thank you, old boy," said Remo.

Just off Piccadilly Circus, in an old Tudor building, stood the office of MI-12. It was inconspicuous in the extreme. Seemingly a tobacconist's shop on street level, a side door led up a single staircase to a second floor with dusty windows. Actually, they were ground opaque, impenetrable to eyesight or listening device, and looked remarkably like the windows in a quaint library. But inside, a crack team of British Special Service chaps lurked as a cunning trap for anyone daring to penetrate MI-12.

This was the building, the colonel said, that housed the station chief who gave him orders. Would Remo be so kind as to give him back the use of his legs?

"Later," said Remo. He got the same promise from the driver by running his hands down the spinal column and creating a small nerve block in a lower spinal vertebra.

"Be right back, old boy," said Remo.

Remo opened the door and saw the stairway leading up to the second floor. The place could have bottled the must and sold it. The wooden steps creaked. They were dry and old and brittle. They would have creaked under a mouse. But Remo did not like making noise when he moved. His system rebelled against it. He set his balance to ease the wood, to be part of the age of the wood, so that he now moved quietly upward. But he had made the first noise.

A door opened at the top of the stairs and an elderly man called down:

"Who is it? Can we be of service?"

"Absolutely," Remo said. "I've come to see the station chief of MI-12, whatever that is."

"This is the Royal Society of Heraldry Manuscripts. We are sort of a library," came back the voice.

"Good. I'll look at your manuscripts," said Remo.

"Well, can't be done, old boy."

"It's going to be done."

"Please be so kind as to stay where you are," said the elderly man.

"Not at all," said Remo.

"I am afraid we are going to have to give you your last warning."

"Good," said Remo. There wasn't going to be any surprise. He already heard the feet. They had the steady light movement of athletes: trained feet, trained bodies. Hard. They were getting into position upstairs. There were seven of them.

"All right, come on up if you wish," said the man.

By the time Remo got to the top of the stairs he could smell their lunches. The men had had beef and perk. The odor was about a half-hour strong in their bodies. They would move slower.

As Remo entered the room, two men came up behind him with what were supposed to be catlike movements. Remo ignored them.

"Suppose you tell us, young man, why you think this is MI-12?" said the elderly gentleman who had answered the door.

"Because I dragged a colonel two hundred yards along one of your lovely roads until he told me it was," said Remo. "But look, I don't have time for pleasantries. Take me to the station chief."

The cool muzzle of a small-caliber pistol came up to Remo's head.

"I am afraid you are going to have to make time for pleasantries," said a deep voice. At that point, the pistol nudged the back of Remo's head, presumably to make Remo more cooperative.

"Let me guess," said Remo. "This is where I'm supposed to spin around, see the gun, and turn to quivering jelly. Right?"

"Quite," said the elderly man.

Remo snapped back an elbow far enough to catch the pistol and send it into the ancient ceiling like a rock into dried mud. The pistol went with its owner. A shower of old plaster and Spackle exploded over the room like a snowstorm.

A bulky commando type stepped out from a wall with a short stabbing dagger, angling for Remo's solar plexus. Remo sent him back into the wall with a side kick. The elderly man ducked, and from behind him appeared a lieutenant in full uniform, who began firing a submachine gun. The first burst came straight at Remo. There was no second burst because the bullets appeared to Remo like a line of softballs coming at him. Fast enough to hurt, but slow enough to dance around, even before they had left the barrel. His body allowed itself to sense the slow stream, and move through and then beyond it to its source.

The lieutenant, lacking such skill, found himself without gun and very much smashing backward into the steel door he had vowed with his life to defend.

The door shivered on its drop-forged pins and came down in the next room like a bridge over a moat.

Remo stepped over the unconscious officer into an office.

A man in gray sports jacket looked up from his desk to see that his penetration-proof cover had been penetrated by a thick-wristed young man in dark slacks, T-shirt and loafers, using no other weapon, apparently, than a knowing smile.

"Hi," said Remo. "I'm from America. You're expecting the one Colonel Winstead-Jones was supposed to dilly around London with wine, drugs; and women."

"Oh yes. Top-secret and all that. Well, welcome, Remo. What can we do for you?" asked the man, lighting a meerschaum pipe carved to resemble the head of some British queen. He had a long-nosed, gaunt-cheeked patrician face and a toothy smile. His sandy hair might have been combed by a lawn mower. He didn't rise. He didn't even look upset. He most certainly did not look like a man whose defenses had been turned to broken plaster. "We have a problem with something that's poking holes in the ozone layer, and the possibility that if we don't fry slow from the sun, we are going to fry fast from Russian nukes," said Remo.

"Would you kindly explain to me how this involves you barging in here and throwing our people around? I would ever so much like to know why."

The station chief took a puff of his pipe. He had spoken most pleasantly. Remo most pleasantly slapped the pipe out of his mouth, along with some frontal teeth thal looked too long for anything from a human head outside of the British Isles.

Remo apologized for his American rudeness.

"I'm trying to head off World War III, so I'm in kind of a rush," said Remo.

"Well, that does put a bit of a different complexion on the matter," admitted the station chief, shaking his head. He did not shake too hard because blood was coming from his nose. He thought a brisk shake might loosen some of the brain matter above his nostrils. "Yes. Well, orders came from the Admiralty."

"Why the Admiralty?"

"You can kill me, old top, but I never will tell you," he said. But when Remo took a step toward him, he hastily added; "Because I don't know. Haven't the foggiest."

Remo took the station chief along. He took him by the waist, careful not to bloody things as he trundled him downstairs past his own dazed guards into the car. At the Admiralty, he found the officer identified by the station chief. He explained about the tradition of American-English cooperation.

The commander in charge of a special intelligence detail appreciated this long friendship. He also appreciated the use of his lungs which Remo promised to leave in his body. Considering that the way Remo was stretching his ribs, losing the lungs was a distinct possibility. The commander made every effort to figure out what Remo was talking about.

Since Remo was never good at explaining technical matters, this was not easy. It sounded like the sky was opening up for some reason. Then the commander, in great pain, recognized what Remo was looking for. The Jodrell Bank telescope fellows had tracked something. Remo brought the naval officer along. It was becoming crowded in the back seat. In the entire crowd no one could tell him why they were not willingly cooperating with their best ally.

"Well, sir, if you didn't use violence we would be significantly more cooperative." This from Winstead-Jones, who had told the others about being dragged outside the car.

"I didn't use it till you weren't," said Remo. The car was very comfortable. The Jodrell Bank fellows, as they were called, were surprisingly cooperative. Strangely, they were the only ones not part of the British defense establishment.

Yes, they had tracked the beam. Somewhere west. Probably America. They were delighted to explain the details of the tracking. Basically one could tell precisely where the ozone shield was penetrated, and thus determine precisely where the unfiltered rays landed by the angle of the sun in relation to the earth.

Remo knew where they had landed in England early that morning. That was why he was here. The Jodrell Bank fellows knew a little more. The unfiltered rays had penetrated above the fishing village of Malden.

Remo returned to the car with the good news. No one was moving. Everyone knew someone should have left the car for help against the brutal American but the problem had been who. They had ordered the driver to do just that. The driver said his orders were to stay at the wheel, so the little piece of defense establishment was waiting for Remo.

"Hello. Good to see you back," said the colonel. The station chief stayed conscious as a way of greeting and the commander breathed.

"We're going to Malden," said Remo cheerfully.

"Oh, so you found it," said the colonel. "You won't need us then."

"You knew everything I was looking for. Why didn't you tell me?"

"Orders."

"From whom?"

"You know, those people who always give orders and then aren't there when the blood begins to flow, I would say."

"But we're allies," said Remo. "This thing threatens the whole world."

"Orders don't have to make sense. If they made sense anyone could obey them. The real test of a soldier is following orders no matter how unfounded they are in common sense."

On the way to Malden Remo tried to find out who had ordered them not to be cooperative. Did they know something he didn't know?

"It's intelligence, old man. No one trusts anyone else," said the station chief.

"I trust you," said Remo.

"Then who ordered you here?"

"You wouldn't understand," said Remo. "But take my word for it, the world is going to go up. Even with your separate departments."

Remo noticed a radio telephone near the driver's leg. He wondered if he could use it. The driver explained it was very simple. The problem was whether to talk over a very open line. If they didn't get that thing penetrating the ozone shield, there wouldn't be any reason for secrecy. He used the radiophone into which the whole world could listen.

"Open line, Smitty," said Remo when he heard Smith answer.

"Okay. Go ahead."

"Located source."

"Good."

"It's definitely the east coast."

"We already knew that. Could you be a bit more specific? The east coast is larger than most countries."

"That's what I have so far."

"Yes, well. Good. Thank you. I take it there will be more."

"Soonest."

"Good luck. Don't worry about open lines. Anything you get. Anything."

"Right," said Remo. It was the first time he had ever heard Smith's voice crack.

In Malden, everybody seemed to know everybody else's business. It was a small quaint village and yes, there was an experiment going on, some people thought by their own government.

In a small field, white-frocked technicians examined cages. Everyone but Remo looked at the field. Remo's training had given his instinct the full power others had stifled. And the main part of that power was a sense of danger. It was not the field he looked at.

It was the sky itself that seemed to say, "Man, your time has come." In the gray gloom of clouds choked with industrial char, a small, perfect sapphire-blue circle was closing. It was not the blue of sky, but closer to neon, yet without its harshness. It was as though a blue gem had been electrified by the sun, and then its light sprinkled into a small circle in the sky. Remo watched this circle close as the driver pointed to the field and said:

"That's it."

It was its beauty that alarmed Remo. He had seen great jewels and felt the fire that other men longed for, even though he had never longed for it. He remembered one of Chiun's early lessons. Like so many teachings then, he was not to understand it until much later. But Chiun had said that things in nature of great beauty were often the ones to watch most closely.

"The weak disguise themselves in dull colors of the ground. But the deadly flaunt themselves to attract victims."

"Yeah. What about a butterfly?" Remo had said.

"When you see the most beautiful butterfly in the world, stop. Do not touch. Touch nothing you are attracted to touch."

"Sounds like a dull life."

"Do you think I am talking about your entertainment?"

"Sure," Remo had said. "I don't know what you are talking about."

"Yes," Chiun had said. "You don't."

Years later, Remo had realized Chiun was teaching him how to think. Something was beautiful for a reason. Something was attractive for a reason. Often the most venomous things cloaked themselves in glory to attract their victims. Yet in the sky, what Remo saw was not something that intended its beauty as a lure, but the awesome indifference of the universe. It could end millions of lives without caring or even intending to, because in its basic atomic logic, life did not matter. Remo looked at the beautiful blue closing ring and thought of these things as the security officer kept repeating that the field he wanted was in front of him.

"Okay," said Remo to the car full of British security personnel. "Don't move."

"How can we?" said the Navy commander. His uniform had lost one of the fifteen medals he had earned by never going to sea. "I haven't felt my legs for an hour."

The field smelled of burning. This little patch of England was not green, but flecked with dead dried grass, pale white as though someone had left it in a desert for an afternoon. Several cages on metal tables held the blackened bodies of animals. Remo could smell the sweet sticky odor of burned flesh. Nothing moved in the cages. A few people in white coats stood around the tables, filling in forms. One of the white-coated workers gathered the dead grass. Another was packaging the earth into beakers and then sealing them in plastic. One of them banged his watch.

"It doesn't work," he said. He had a sharp British accent. It was a strange thing about that language that one could measure the class by the tones, as though on a calibrated scale of one to ten: the ten being royalty and the accent being muted; the one being cockney, its accent very strong like a sharp pepper sauce. The man complaining about his watch was a seven, his broad accent of the upper classes but with a trace of cockney whine.

"Hello," said Remo.

"Yes, what can I do for you?" said the man, shaking his watch. Several other technicians looked at their watches.

Two of them worked, three of them didn't. The man's face had the pale British look as though bleached of sunlight and joy. A face designed for drizzle and gloom, and possibly a shot of whiskey every so often to make it all bearable.

Even if he hadn't spoken with an accent, Remo would have known he was British. Americans would attend to a watch problem before dealing with any stranger.

"I am curious about this experiment. There might be some danger here, and I want to know what you're doing," said Remo.

"We have our licenses and permits, sir," said the technician.

"For what?" said Remo.

"For this experiment, sir."

"What exactly is it?"

"It is a limited, safe, controlled test of the effects of the sun without filtration by ozone. Now may I ask whom you are with?"

"Them," said Remo, nodding to the car filled with British security.

"Well, they certainly look impressive, but who are they?"

"Your security forces."

"Do they have identification of sorts? Sorry, but I must see identification."

Remo shrugged. He went back to the car and asked for everyone's identification. One of them, still groggy, handed up his wallet with money.

"This isn't a robbery," said Remo.

"I thought it was," said the dazed representative of the ultrasecret MI-12.

"No," said Remo, adding his clearance card to the other cards and plastic face-picture badges. He brought a handful of identifications back to the technician. The technician looked at the identifications and gasped at one of them.

"Gracious. You've got a staff officer in there."

"One of them," said Remo. "There is an intelligence guy there, too."

"Yes. Quite. So. I see," said the technician, giving back the identifications. Remo pocketed them in case he might need them again. "What would you like?" asked the technician.

"Who are you?"

"I am a technician from Pomfritt Laboratories of London," said the technician.

"What are you doing here? Precisely. What's going on?"

The man launched himself into a detailed explanation of fluorocarbon and the power of the sun, and the harnessing of the unfiltered rays of the sun and finding out in a "controlled"-he stressed "controlled "-atmosphere just what mankind could do with the sun's full power.

"Burn ourselves to cinders," said Remo, who understood perhaps half of what the technician was talking about. "Okay, what is doing it, and where is it?"

"A controlled fluorocarbon beam generator."

"Good," said Remo. "Where is that fluorocarbon ... thing?"

"At its base."

"Right. Where?" said Remo.

"I'm not sure, but as you can see, this experiment is marvelously controlled," said the technician. He gave his wristwatch a little tap again to get it going. It didn't.

"Why aren't you sure?" asked Remo.

"Because it's not our product. We're just testing it."

"Good. For whom?"

The technician gave Remo a name and an address. It was in America. This confirmed some of the data he had gotten from the intelligence people in the car. He returned to the car and asked for the telephone.

The number rang. Remo held the black telephone attached to a unit in the front of the car. He stood outside the driver's window. When he heard the crisp "Yes" from Smith, Remo said:

"I am still on an open line."

"Go ahead," said Smith. "What do you have?"

"I found the source of that thing that opens up the ozone layer."

"Good. Where?"

Remo gave him the name and address of the firm in America. "Do you want me to return and close in on them? Or do you want to do it yourself? You're there in America."

"Hold on," said Smith.

Remo smiled at the group of men in the back of the car. The colonel glowered back. The intelligence officer stared ahead glumly. In the field, the lab technicians were comparing watches. Remo whistled as he waited for Smith. "Okay," said Smith.

"Do you want to handle it there, or do we have enough time for me to fly back and do it right?"

"I want you to keep looking, Remo. Not only is there no such company as Sunorama of Buttesville, Arkansas, but there isn't even a Buttesville, Arkansas."

Remo returned to the laboratory technician and offered to fix the man's watch by running it through his ears and out through his nose if he didn't tell the truth.

"That's the name we have. We're participating in the experiment for Dr. O'Donnell. It's her company. That was the name she gave. Really."

Remo tended to believe the man. Most people told the truth when their dorsal root ganglion was compressed painfully into the sensory neuron along the spinal cord. Sometimes they would cry. Sometimes they would yell. But they always told the truth. This lab technician opened his mouth to yell when Remo allowed the pain to subside and thus enabled him to talk.

"Fine," said Remo. "Where is Dr. O'Donnell?"

"She left with a Russian-speaking guy," said the technician.

Remo noticed at that very moment that there were no British bobbies on the scene, no protection around this field that the intelligence personnel of America's ally had tried to keep hidden from America. Who was on whose side, and who was the Russian?

Chapter 4

Harold W. Smith calculated, on a small old-fashioned piece of white paper, a line going up signaling reports of new missile sites in the Soviet Union. Also going up was the possibility of a rupture in the ozone shield that might not be closed.

It was a race as to which would destroy them all first. And Smith could only handle one line at a time. He had Remo.

If he had Chiun, he could launch the aged assassin into Russia, a good place for him. For some strange reason, Chiun seemed to be able to predict the Russians quite well. Chiun also seemed to be able to communicate with anyone, perhaps a necessity for a member of a house of assassins that had been around for thousands of years.

Under a secret agreement, Smith was not only allowed to send in gold by submarine, but he was able to contact Pyongyang when Chiun returned. Yet even that had changed.

Smith briefly wondered if the change had something to do with the Russian response. Even though the North Koreans were their closest ally in the world, the Russians did not trust them. They looked upon them as some poor cousins, an international embarrassment they were forced to endure. It was not even much of a secret. Almost every intelligence agency in the world had monitored the pleas of North Korea seeking Russian respect.

Few people knew it at the time, least of all Smith in his Folcroft headquarters on Long Island Sound, monitoring the approaching destruction of the world, but the President for Life of North Korea had left the moment the Master of Sinanju landed. He had done it on the assurance that it would be best for him to be out of the country when the Master of Sinanju found out what had happened in his village.

The district colonel who followed a full twenty paces behind the Master of Sinanju did not know what his superiors planned, either. He was told only not to provoke the Master of Sinanju. No one was to address the Master unless spoken to.

The Master had landed and walked through the honor guard, as though they blocked his way in some line, right through to the waiting limousine. He was immediately driven to the village of Sinanju. The colonel, like all security officers, could not enter. This village, alone among all places in North Korea, was allowed to keep its old ways. It paid no taxes, and once a year an American submarine was permitted to land in Sinanju and off-load cargo. Of this irregularity, the colonel knew only that it was not a spy mission and that he was not to interfere. The business of Sinanju was the business of Sinanju, he had been told, and was not the concern of Pyongyang. The Master of Sinanju would look after his village. And now that fabled entity, this Master of Sinanju, had returned to Korea because of something worse than a disgrace. A tragedy.

The colonel had been ordered to grant this frail old man's every wish. His superior, General Toksa, told him to report those wishes to himself, and the colonel knew that the general was to report the same to Himself, President for Life, Kim Il Sung. The colonel shivered a moment at the thought of his responsibility.

Not everyone reacted that way. As they walked through the airport, youngsters laughed at the strange kimono worn by the Master of Sinanju. Even a state security officer burst out laughing.

The Master of Sinanju spoke for the first time, using a term outlawed for forty years:

"Japanese kissers," he spat. It was an epithet dating from the time of the Japanese occupation. Many secret tales survived about Koreans who had collaborated with the hated Japanese. When the colonel had taken over the northwest province, which included Sinanju, he had heard that the Japanese never dared to enter Sinanju, and that before, when China occupied Korea, the Chinese never entered Sinanju. But it was whispered that in times past, the throne of the White Chrysanthemum in Japan and all the dynasties of China had sent tribute to the tiny village on the West Korean Bay. Yet they had never entered it. Neither had the colonel. But now, because of what had happened, he would at last see what secrets that village had. He had been ordered not to mention what had happened at Sinanju, but to take very careful notes of the Master of Sinanju's every reaction. Nothing this man said was to go unrecorded. Nothing this man did was to go unnoticed. But the colonel was to do nothing but report.

So he listened in silence and with as much dignity as he could muster to the many treasons now issuing forth from the Master of Sinanju.

The new uniforms would better serve as dressing for meat than for people, said Chiun. He said he could sense that the soldiers of Himself, Kim Il Sung, had replaced courage with viciousness, a sure sign that they had not gotten over kissing Japanese backsides. He called the Third World poster on the airport wall an admission that Korea was still backward because everyone outside of Korea knew that "Third World" was just another term for inferior, backward, less. And Korea was never less. It was better. The trouble was that Koreans themselves failed to appreciate that.

"I am Korean," the Master of Sinanju told the colonel. "You are Korean. Look at you. And look at me. I am glad my son born in America is not here to behold you."

The colonel drew himself up against the implied insult. "I am a superior officer. I am a colonel," he said proudly. "In the pot you keep by the bed for the wastes of your body, what do you see float to the top, colonel?" asked the Master of Sinanju.

The crowds in the airport suddenly hushed. No one ever talked to a colonel of state security in such a way, a district colonel at that.

And thus did Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, return to the land of Korea by airplane. Thus was he met by a toady in uniform and taken many miles from Pyongyang, west to the fishing village of Sinanju, as the toady made notes of all he saw and all that was said by the Master of Sinanju.

The village was rich in pigs and grain. The colonel noticed that there were several very large old-fashioned storehouses, indicating the village people never suffered from want or famine. He noted, too, that when the elderly man named Chiun approached the village from a hilltop, there were cries from below and the people ran away in fear.

Chiun saw and heard them, and told the colonel to wait on the hilltop while he went into his village, or swift death would be his reward for disobedience. The colonel remained in his jeep and Chiun walked down into the village and the silence therein.

The rich smells of fish and pig meat filled the desolate village, for the food was still cooking. But no children laughed and played, and no elders appeared to give thanks for the beneficence of the House of Sinanju that had kept them fed through the centuries, even through times of famine, fed and healthy before the West was strong, before even the dynasties of China with their great armies marched where they willed. Only the waves crashed by way of greeting, cold and froth white against the dark rock shores of Sinanju.

There was silence for the first time as a Master of Sinanju returned, instead of proper songs of triumph, and joyous laudations. Chiun was grateful that Remo did not see this-Remo, whom Chiun had enough trouble convincing of the glory of this village and the place he was destined to take here, Remo, who Chiun hoped would one day take a bride from this village to produce a male child to carry on the way of Sinanju so that he would not have to stoop to take a foreigner, as Chiun had. This then was the small blessing of this tragic day.

Chiun accepted the insult. The villagers would return to their pig meat and fish and rice and sweet cakes. Their stomachs would bring them back. They ate almost as badly as Remo used to eat. But, for them, it did not matter. No emperor would call upon them for service. No glory would ever be theirs, no demand would ever be placed on their bodies that required them to eat so that those bodies functioned at their utmost. Chiun remembered how, as a youngster, he had asked his father if he could feast on the rich meats his friends enjoyed, the meats his father's own services abroad paid for.

"It is hardest for the young to realize this," his father, who was then the reigning Master of Sinanju, had said. "But you are getting a greater gift than meat. You are becoming something they are not. You are earning tomorrow. You will thank me and remember this when they bow to you and the world again sings glorious praises to the Masters of Sinanju, as they did in centuries past."

"But I want the meat now," young Chiun had said.

"But you will not want it then."

"But it is now, not then, not tomorrow."

"I told you it was hard for a young man, for the young do not know tomorrow. But you will know."

And he did, of course. Chiun thought back to the days of Remo's early training and the difficulty of overcoming the bad habits of almost thirty years and the handicap of being white. He had spoken the same words to Remo, and Remo answered:

"Blow it out your ears."

Then Remo had eaten a hamburger after years of training and almost died. At the time, Chiun had scolded Remo, neglecting to mention that he, too, had snuck a piece of meat and his father had forced him to vomit it out. As far as Remo knew, all Masters of Sinanju were obedient in the extreme, except for Remo, who was disobedient in the extreme. Chiun wondered how troublesome Remo would have been had he ever realized that one of the qualities that made great Masters was their independence. He would probably be uncontrollable now, Chiun decided.

And so the Master of Sinanju stood in the middle of his village waiting for his people to return, thinking of Remo and wondering what Remo was doing now, glad Remo was not seeing this shame, but also sad that he was not here.

A night passed. And during the night, Chiun heard the villagers clumsily sneaking back into their homes to fill their bellies with dead burned pig. There was even a side of spitted beef steaming upwind. It smelled so much of meat that Chiun thought he might be back in America. In the morning, however, one came out to give the Master of Sinanju the traditional greeting:

"Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully, leader of the House of Sinanju. Our hearts cry a thousand greetings of love and adoration. Joyous are we upon the return of him who graciously throttles the universe."

Another came, and then another, and still more while the Master of Sinanju regarded them all with unmoving visage and steely eye. When the sun was full over the village and they were all assembled, Chiun spoke:

"Shame. Shame on you. What do you have to fear from a Master of Sinanju that you flee to the hills as though I were a Japanese warrior, or a Chinese. Have not the Masters of Sinanju proved a greater protection than any wall? Have not the Masters of Sinanju gone out from this village and kept it fed, lo, these many centuries? Did not the Masters of Sinanju keep Sinanju the only fishing village on the West Korea Bay that did not have to surrender its babies to the cold ocean for want of food? You do not fish well. You do not farm well. And yet you eat well. All because of the Master of Sinanju. And when I return, you run. O shame. O shame that I should keep burning in my bosom in silence."

And the villagers fell to their faces, begging mercy. "We were afraid," they cried. "The treasure has been stolen. Centuries of tribute given to Sinanju are gone."

"Did you steal it?"

"No, great Master."

"Then why are you afraid?"

"Because we failed to guard the treasure."

"You never guarded anything, nor were you supposed to," explained the Master of Sinanju. "Our reputation has guarded the treasures of Sinanju. Your duty is to give homage to the great Masters of Sinanju, and report all that transpires while they are away."

Now an old man, who remembered Chiun in his youth, and the kindnesses shown by the Master, and feats of strength demonstrated for the amusement of the young, spoke up:

"I watched," said the wizened old man, his voice cracking. "I remember my duty, O young Chiun. There were many who came. And they came with guns, taking a full day to remove all the treasure from your house."

"Did you tell them they were stealing the treasure of Sinanju?" asked Chiun.

"Yes, yes," cried the crowd.

But the old man sadly shook his head.

"No. No one did. We were all afraid," the old man said, tears streaming from his slitted eyes which, like Chiun's, were hazel in color.

Chiun stretched out a long-nailed hand, as if in blessing, and said:

"Because of your honesty and loyalty, this village will be spared the consequences of its treason. Because of you, your single act of loyalty, the honor of Sinanju has been preserved. You alone will walk with me, ancient one, and be revered when I leave because of what you have dared to tell this day. You have done well."

And so, the old man at his side, Chiun walked to the house where the treasure of Sinanju had been stored. The house had been built by Egyptian architects sent by Tutankhamen as tribute to Sinanju. They built it on what was rare in Korea, a foundation of stone, not wood. But upon that stone, they raised a jewel of wood-the finest teaks, firs, and ebonies, lacquered and artfully painted. The Greek kings had provided glass of a clarity not seen again until the West learned to produce it as freely as the myriad wheat of the field.

There were rooms of ivory and alabaster. Scents from India, and Chinese silk. The drachma, rupee, dinar, shekel, boul, reel, and stoneweight of silver had all known a home here. It had been a place of plenty. But now, in utter shock, Chiun beheld bare floors in the house of the Master of Sinanju, floors which had not been bare since the first Roman legion marched from a little city on the Tiber. Even the walls of the room used to store the gold of Cyrus the Great of Persia were shorn of their leaf.

On the bare walls, Chiun could read the ancient Persian inscriptions instructing the workmen who were to lay the leaf, with a note cautioning them that this was for the house of the powerful Wi. Gone and gone were the treasures of Sinanju, no matter where Chiun looked. Rooms of fresh dust and bleached squares where chests had rested for centuries filled the barren house.

The old man was weeping.

"Why do you weep?" asked Chiun gently.

"So much has been taken. Your father took me through this house when I was a child. It is all gone. The gold. The ivory. The jewels and the great statues carved in amber and jade. O, the jade alone, O great Master, was an emperor's treasure."

"That was not what was stolen, old man," said Chiun. "Of jade, there is plenty in the outside world. We can get more. And of gold, much more. There are always craftsmen to make statues. Woods and amber and diamonds abound in greater weights than could ever fill this house. They can all be replaced, or recovered, as I intend to do, beginning now. But that was not what was stolen," repeated Chiun, pausing as he felt the anger burning in the perfection that was his heart.

"What they stole was our dignity and strength. By daring to steal from this house, they have violated the House of Sinanju, violated its strength and reputation. This they have stolen, and for that they will pay. Mightily will they pay. Before the world they will pay."

And then Chiun confided to the old man that the one whom he had been training as the next Master of Sinanju had not come with him to avenge this dishonor.

"I saw him when he came before. He seemed most noble . . . for a white."

"He appears to the untrained eye to be white," said Chiun. "But only now has he acted white. Do not repeat this, ever."

"I will not," said the old man who respected Chiun so much.

"The one who was to take my place does not even respect the treasure of Sinanju. He has gone off to help whites save the world."

"No," said the old man, trying to imagine such ingratitude. He clutched his heart. This encouraged Chiun to confide further in a mere villager.

"He thinks the sky is falling," whispered Chiun, and then it was too sad to discuss any longer, even with one so worthy as the old man who had been true to those who fed him.

"Is he crazed?"

"I thought he had overcome his backward white habits after all these years. You can train and train. But some whiteness always remains," Chiun said sadly.

"Still white?" asked the old man, shocked.

"A little. Not very much. It will go eventually. He was raised among them. But for now I must labor alone."

In Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, the Master of Sinanju's every step was noted. How he had debarked from the plane, how he had entered the village, and what he had done there.

These things were told in an office only a few knew of, and one those few approached with dread.

It had neither spacious windows nor carpeting. If it had had a window, the view would have been bedrock. It was eight stories beneath the street, built during the time of the imperialist invasion of the homeland, known to the west as the Korean War. It had been dug out of the rock with picks. Two thousand laborers had been worked to death to get this far down into the bedrock. At its base was the most expensive steel imported to North Korea since Japan had ruled the peninsula. Around that steel was lead, and for a finish was rough concrete.

It had been built by the glorious leader himself, Kim II Sung, President for Life.

If there was one building that would survive an atomic attack by the Americans, it was going to be that building. From that room would spring a new Korea with the soul of a sword and a heart of a shark.

In the deepest room of that building came the word about the village on the West Korea Bay. The information came to Sayak Cang, whose name was never mentioned, because to speak his name was to die.

Typists who worked in the building were told never to enter that corridor, because typists were in demand. To walk in the corridor without a permit meant instant death without appeal.

Those few who knew Sayak Cang had never seen him smile. They had never heard him say either a positive or unnecessary word.

When they did-with passes-enter that room, they did so with moist palms, having rehearsed everything they had planned to say many times over.

Sayak Cang was the director of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle for the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea.

Sayak Cang, in brief, was the head of their intelligence. This day Sayak Cang had given every detail of the rest of the world, including the never-ending penetration of South Korea, to his subordinates. He wanted to know everything that had happened or was happening in the village of Sinanju.

This day, too, Sayak Cang ordered that, for expediency, anyone arriving needed neither a pass nor clearance. The most important thing was every detail that happened in Sinanju.

Sayak Cang had a melon-round face with slits for eyes and a mouth that was a harsh line. His lips always looked dry, and his hands showed a scar above the thumb knuckles. That was, people said, from his heavy use of the whip when he had been a junior officer in charge of interrogation.

The Master of Sinanju had entered the village. The Master had found that the treasure was gone. The Master was seen talking to an old man. Did Sayak Cang wish to know what the Master was saying?

"If anyone puts an electronic device to detect what the Master of Sinanju says or hears, I will have that person crushed under rocks," said Sayak Cang, who did not believe that a Master of Sinanju could be overheard without the Master knowing it.

And he was not about to upset his Glorious Leader Kim Il Sung with the possibility that the Master of Sinanju suspected that the People's Republic was in any way spying on him. Sayak Cang had insisted his leader leave before the Master's plane was given flight clearance, and so Kim Il Sung had taken off for Yemen with his son. Unfortunately, with modern jets, Yemen was not all that far away, and after reviewing the industrial progress of that Marxist country on the Arabian Sea, the glorious leader had only consumed a half-day. He was bored with Yemen within five minutes.

"Once you have seen one hand cut off you have seen them all," said the President for Life of North Korea.

"I am sorry, but you must stay out of the country until it is safe."

"A well-dug sewage ditch had more industrial progress than Yemen."

"What about Ethiopia? That is a friendly country," said Cang.

"Are there any socialist countries that are interesting?"

"Only before they are liberated, sir."

"Well, hurry, Sayak Cang."

"You well know, sir, I would not dare hurry a Master of Sinanju. I would lay down my life now for our struggle. But I would not for all our sakes and for the dignity of our nation hurry the Master of Sinanju."

"You have always known what you were doing, Sayak Cang. What can I do in Ethiopia?"

"You can watch people starve, Your Excellency."

"Another country?"

"Tanzania."

"What can I do there?"

"Pretty much what they are doing in Ethiopia without the intensity. You can starve."

"How about a white country?"

"East Germany. You can watch people being shot trying to climb over the wall they have used to seal everyone in."

"No."

"Poland. Maybe they will murder another priest for you."

"Is there any place with some fun in it?"

"Not if you want to go to a country that has freed itself from the shackles of imperialist domination."

"Do what you must do as quickly as possible then, Sayak Cang," said the Premier.

Sayak Cang had no intention of hurrying. While the others feared Sinanju, or had talked about the humiliation by a single archaic pack of murderers who served reactionary monarchies throughout history, Sayak Cang had told them all that the House of Sinanju was the one glory in the history of a nation shamed among nations.

"We have been the footstools of the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese, the Mongols. There is no one who has not put his heel on the Korean neck. But in all that time, there has been only one note of glory: the House of Sinanju. Only the Masters of Sinanju have earned this nation any respect during those shameful times. Glory to the House of Sinanju, to the Masters of Sinanju who refused to be whore worms to those who sat on foreign thrones."

Thus spoke Sayak Cang at a most important meeting of the generals and labor directors of North Korea. He spoke to silence and to many who thought that he would soon be executed for such insolence.

But in that silence at that most important meeting many years before, Sayak Cang had won respect, for into that silence came the sound of soft palms touching each other. It was a clap from Himself, Kim Il Sung.

And now Sayak Cang himself was prepared to tell a Master of Sinanju what he thought of him to his face. "If he is still in the village, beg that he come here. If he does not wish to leave the village, ask that I be permitted to enter."

This was sent by radiophone to the officer who was waiting outside the village. He asked a child to go to the house to which the Master of Sinanju had returned and tell Chiun himself that there was a message waiting for him. The officer promised a coin if the child would do this.

He was quite careful, of course, not to enter himself. The child returned, saying the Master of Sinanju did not wish to speak to any Pyongyanger, and it was as though the officer had heard his own death sentence.

With trembling hands, he picked up the radiophone made in Russia, as was all North Korean equipment, and phoned the number of Sayak Cang. He had seen men who had displeased Cang. He had seen one tied to posts begging to die while Sayak Cang exhorted the rest of the man's company to laugh at his pitiful cries.

"The Master of Sinanju does not wish to come to Pyongyang although he was begged by myself to do so. Begged."

"Exactly what did he say?" asked Sayak Cang.

The officer felt the cold sea winds from the West Korea Bay blow through his thin uniform, but he did not mind the cold. He saw his own breath make puff clouds before him, and he wondered how long his own body would be warm.

"He said, comrade sir, that he did not wish to speak to a Pyongyanger."

It must have been the faulty Russian equipment because the officer could have sworn that he heard laughter from Sayak Cang himself at the other end of the phone.

"Tell a child, any child from the village, to show the Glorious Master a history book. Any history book. Then beg the Master to go to a neighboring village and see any history book that the children read."

"And then what, comrade sir?"

"Then tell him that Sayak Cang ordered these histories written. Tell him where I am, and that I would gladly come to him."

The officer sent the child back with a coin for himself and the message for the Master of Sinanju. The child disappeared into the mud and filth of the fishing village. Within moments Chiun's flowing gold kimono could be seen coming up from the village, the winds blowing the wisps of hair, the gold like a flag of conquest whipping in triumph.

The Master of Sinanju held a schoolbook.

"Take me to another village," said Chiun.

Hurriedly, the officer made way in his car for the Master of Sinanju and drove five miles to a farming town. Unlike Sinanju, there were red flags everywhere and in every building was a picture of Kim Il Sung.

Here people came to attention and hurried at the officer's command. Here he did not need a coin for people to do his bidding.

The Master of Sinanju was brought one history book and then another. He wanted to see every grade's text. Finally he said:

"Almost correct."

"The man who insisted they be written like that is in Pyongyang," said officer. "He will come to you, or if you wish, you may come to him."

"Pyongyang is an evil city of much corruption. But I will go because in all the darkness of this day, one light shines from Pyongyang," said Chiun. "Would that my own pupil had shown such understanding."

The officer bowed profusely. Chiun kept the books. The building that covered the eight-story excavation into bedrock was a simple one-story government office. But the elevators were lavish by comparison, with full use, of aluminum and chrome and the most expensive metals. The elevator descended to the lowest level and there, with his face oddly changed, was Sayak Cang.

The change was noticed by those who worked on this lowest level, those who knew him. Sayak Cang, with great pain to his facial muscles, was smiling.

"You caused this to be written?"

"I did, Glorious Master of Sinanju."

"It is almost correct," said Chiun. "I interrupted a grave situation to tell you that."

"A thousand thank-yous. A million blessings," said Sayak Cang.

Chiun opened the books he had with him. They told of the misery of Korea. They told of filthy foreigners with their hands at the pure maiden's throat. They told of strangulation and humiliation. And then there was a chapter called "Light."

It read:

"Amid the darkness shone pure and glorious the light of the Masters of Sinanju. They alone paid no homage to foreign lands, but received it. They alone like the sunlight shone eternal, invincible, magnificently glorious, keeping alive the true superiority of Koreans while the rest of their nation waited, humiliated in darkness, with only Sinanju to foretell the coming of the true destiny of the Korean people."

Sayak Cang nodded at every sentence.

"Basically you have got this right," said Chiun. "But instead of 'light,' wouldn't 'awesome light' be more correct? A light could be a little match."

"But in darkness a match is glorious."

"Are you talking about the glory of Sinanju or the darkness of the rest of you?"

"Most correct. Every book will be changed."

"Usually, young man, historians lie and shade the truth for their own convenience. But here in Korea we have a passage that can be called absolute truth."

Sayak Cang bowed. One of the secretaries on the floor almost gasped. No one even knew that his vertebrae moved, much less bowed.

"But you have thieves in this country," said Chiun. And then he told him of the treasures of Sinanju.

On the lowest floor of the most secure building in North Korea came a scream of horror. It came from the lips of Sayak Cang.

"This is a disgrace to the Korean people. This is an indignity. A shame that knows no bounds. Better our mothers and daughters sold into slavery to whore for the Japanese than this insult to our history. When they have robbed the House of Sinanju, they have robbed us of our past."

At that moment the entire intelligence network of North Korea was laid at the feet of the Master of Sinanju that his treasure should be recovered for all the people.

Of course there was a saying in Sinanju that light from a Pyongyanger was like darkness from an honest man. But who, after all, could argue with what Chiun had seen being taught to schoolchildren?

Then again, within not too long a time, a North Korean embassy discovered that one of the treasures of Sinanju was being sold. At an auction no less. In a white country.

Shortly before noon, the gruesome luck of the Western world seemed to change. Chiun was putting through a phone call to Folcroft.

Smith almost wanted to breathe a thank-you to the heavens. But he said:

"Look. We have something we need immediately. We promise to replace much if not all of your treasure. We need you now."

"The House of Sinanju is honored to exalt your glory," came Chiun's voice. "But first, are you in touch with Remo?"

"Yes," said Smith.

"Good. Take this down, and be very careful. Do you have ink?"

"I have a pencil and a computer," said Smith.

"Use the pencil," said Chiun. "Now, write down, 'The Glorious Struggle of Korean Peoples Under the Leadership of Kim Il Sung, grades one through five.' "

"I have it."

"Pages thirty-five and thirty-six," said Chiun. "Good."

"Tell Remo he must read that now."

"All right. Will do. Now, we have. . ." said Smith, but he was unable to finish his sentence. Apparently an operator from the other side had cut them off after Chiun had hung up.

Chapter 5

Alexei Zemyatin did not trust good news, especially from the modern KGB. He remembered how they had been under Felix Dzerzhinsky, their founder. Then, they were frightened, angry, and ruthless. Many of their leaders were in their teens then. They were all learning, those early state police known as the Ogpu: trying to copy the late czar's Cheka, afraid of making mistakes, yet also afraid not to act.

If one of those ragamuffins had told him they had made a major breakthrough in finding out the source of this deadly, invisible new American weapon, he would have felt reassured. But when the KGB general in his tailormade green uniform told him, plump with imported chocolates and fruits and sporting a wristwatch from Switzerland which would tell him the time to return to his lush dacha in the quiet suburbs of Moscow, Alexei Zemyatin felt only suspicion.

The West might fear the KGB because of its successes. But they did not realize how much effort and failed motion went into each triumph. They did not realize that for every operative there might be one hundred officers living the good life, whose main concern was to keep that life. And to keep that life they would create reports to make themselves look good. Therefore, when speaking to the KGB about something they were responsible for, one also had to calculate how they were protecting themselves. One did not accept good news at face value under any circumstances.

Alexei Zemyatin put his hand on the soft green felt of the lavish desk in the lavish office. On the other side of the desk was a defender of Russia's security making a very comfortable job of it all. This KGB general was young, in his mid-fifties. He did not really know of the Revolution, and was a child during the great patriotic war against Germany. Apparently he had never been interrupted by anyone for the last few years. He was director of the British desk of the KGB, the unit responsible for what was perhaps the most successful penetration of any nation by another since the British infiltrated the Germans in the thirties and forties. He had made, in his own boastful words, "all England like downtown Moscow."

"Excuse me," said Zemyatin. "Before I hear of your triumphs, indulge me in the little details of the matter. I want facts."

"Of course," said the young KGB general coolly. His office was as large as a ballroom, featuring a plush couch, art on the walls, and, of course, a picture of the chairman behind his desk. His desk had once been used by a czar and still enjoyed the gilt design. The room smelled of rich Cuban cigars and the best French brandy. The young officer took the interruption by the old man as he would by someone in the Politburo who, while having more authority, would in a very few minutes acknowledge the young general's technical superiority. These old men were like that. The young general had heard about this one from older officers but dismissed their kudos as nostalgia for the past. Therefore he was not surprised or offended when the relic in the typical worker's baggy suit interrupted him. In just a few moments the old man would be as grateful as the others for the general's brilliant technical presence on the British desk.

"We ascertained a strike in the British area of Malden, approximately eight A.M. their time. The target area was a field of approximately one hundred square meters. The launch site was verified by Jodreil Bank as west of Ireland, which of course is continental USA. I think we have gone over this before."

"Go on," said Zemyatin.

"We have the woman responsible for the weapons. We have her," said the young general, "in a British safe house and she is cooperating fully." The general waited for Zemyatin to ask why they were using a British safe house. Then he could boast that it was a unit within British intelligence that they controlled; that the Americans had sent someone, and that the KGB British desk had intercepted him. There was even more if this old man would allow the true technological brilliance of the younger generation to show itself. The old man had probably started by throwing gasoline in old vodka bottles at czarist police.

"How do you know this woman is connected with the weapon?"

"She is the one who hired Pomfritt Laboratories, the British firm, to conduct the test. Not only did she do this, but she gave an artificial company as the one hiring. CIA of course. It was a cover."

"We know she lied. Do you have any verification that she is from the CIA?"

"Not yet. But we will. We will have everything," said the young general. He offered more brandy. Zemyatin shook his head. He had not touched the first glass.

"Be so kind as to indulge me. But how do you know she will cooperate?"

"How do you know the sun will rise, sir?" said the general.

"I don't," said Zemyatin. "I only presume it will because it has done so all my life and according to all the historians of mankind it has risen in the past. But I don't."

"Well, I can't give you anything more assured than a sunrise, sir."

"Give me the facts. I will work out the confusion. On what do you base your flamboyant conclusions?"

"We have her psychological profile."

"That head business?" said Zemyatin, referring to the experiments in parapsychology and psychology that the KGB prided itself on. People who could read minds. Others who could bend objects without touching them. People who could do all manner of hocus-pocus Zemyatin had seen Gypsies do for coin when he was a boy. Now the entire government was financing this nonsense. Not only was it all still a form of charade, but America was ironically still sending the CIA agents to discover what Russia had found. It was a lovely little trap if anyone wanted to remove a few enemy operatives, but, like most ventures of this kind, was meaningless even there. It only paid to remove operatives when an opponent was short of them. America had operatives falling over operatives in more secret organizations than the KGB had yet discovered.

"Psychological profiles are valid, sir," said the general. "Our profile of Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell explains why she came with our agent."

"To you, yes. Excuse me, young man, if I want more facts. Why do you believe she came with you out of pure motives? Why do you believe she is telling the truth?"

"The psychological profile tells us we are dealing with a woman who is a form of sociopath. Somewhere in her early childhood, her development took a strange turn. She undoubtedly was a beautiful and somewhat spoiled child. But her normal love patterns were somehow thwarted, and her sexual drive linked itself strongly to violence and suffering."

"I am looking for a weapon, General," said Zemyatin.

"Yes. Yes. Of course. Please. These sorts of people can hide their aggressions and hostilities very well . . . and I might add they usually are quite successful in life ... until one time when they actually see and feel intense suffering. Then they will do anything to satisfy their insatiable urge to see more violence and suffering. You see, they are basically a bomb ready to go off within themselves. Many people are like that. War brings it out in them."

"People are not bombs. They are human beings. These games-"

"More than games, sir. Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell will tell us more and give us more than if we used some old bodyguard of Lenin with a nightstick. This woman has been awakened."

Zemyatin was not insulted. A jackass could do nothing better than bray at a horse. He was despairing and did not conceal his sigh. "How do we know these things?"

Now the young general smiled.

"We knew that the experiment was to take place in Malden, England. We didn't know its source then, but we knew the leadership was looking for it."

"Yes, that was good," said Zemyatin. He did not mention that, with the awesome amount of the Soviet treasury that was poured into the KGB operations, they not only should have found the site but the weapon itself and had it for him on his desk. Nevertheless, one fought battles with whom he had. Not with whom he wished. Zemyatin's Russia had the KGB. To replace this man now would take time. However, if he had time, Zemyatin knew he could find someone else. Or do something to shatter this man's self-satisfaction. That complacent face could get them all killed.

"While we were a bit rushed setting up the surveillance, we did manage to make sure there would be no local police or intelligence operations from the British near there. We created what we like to call an environment."

"An environment?" asked Zemyatin.

"Yes. We observed the experiment and the experimenters. We saw that Dr. O'Donnell was taking a great deal of unusual pleasure in the suffering of these animals. We . . ."

Zemyatin raised a hand.

"I want that weapon. Get it now. She knows where the weapon is. Twist her arm. It works. Use an injection. That works. Get the weapon."

"Field Marshal? Do you think it is a pistol we are looking for? Some new kind of cannon? Just for example, we could put twenty American weapons right here on this desk, sir, and we wouldn't have the remotest idea of how they work. Today it is computer technology. The weapon isn't the pieces of metal. The weapon, Field Marshal, is here . . ." said the general, pointing to his brain. "That's where the weapon is. The knowledge. Now, this effort was a maximum priority in time and effort, correct?"

Zemyatin nodded.

"We might be able to put that weapon in your lap tomorrow, but there are very good odds we wouldn't know how to work it for three years. Maybe never. I could boot up a computer now, and without the knowledge of how it works, it would be only a hunk of metal. The weapon is the knowledge, and knowledge is in the mind."

"Most people in the world will tell you everything on their minds, sometimes for a kind word in a harsh environment, or if they think they are going to lose their lives," said Zemyatin.

"In a simple world or a simple time," said the general.

"How long will it take until we have her mind?" said Zemyatin.

"A day. Two days," said the younger man. "I appreciate your wisdom and what you have done for the motherland. We are good at what we do, even though you might have your doubts. Let me dispel those doubts, comrade."

"Young man," said Zemyatin. "You will never dispel my doubts, and the one thing I worry about for the future of the motherland is how few doubts you have. Only lunatics don't doubt."

"We act instead of worry."

"I want you to continue your search for the weapon. I do not want you to let up in any way on any front. You may think you know, but you don't."

"Certainly," said the younger general with a confident smile.

"No. No. You don't understand."

"You are right," said the general. "We would not mind being told why this weapon seems more important to you than their space lasers or new deliveries of atomic devices. We have found that the more we know, the better we can serve you."

Zemyatin did not answer. It was an old saw in Intelligence that five people could not keep a secret. Zemyatin suspected the real number had to be two. He did not care about the reports that said the Americans were disorganized and could not move quickly without committees and teams of men. There just might be someone in America who, knowing the effect of missile batteries, would have the wisdom to launch immediately and then dictate terms of surrender. He would do that. And the one way to let America find out how truly dominant she was at this time was to tell one more person who would tell another person that indeed the U.S. weapon could render all of Mother Russia's weapons useless.

Zemyatin knew his country had neither time nor leeway.

And here was one of the bright new stars of the KGB sitting complacently behind his luxurious desk as the world headed toward a showdown. A showdown Alexei Zemyatin was not about to lose, not after all the millions of lives that had gone up until now into defending his country.

"Tell me. What do you know of the agent the Americans sent?"

"He was 'run around,' so to speak."

"It didn't bother you that they sent one person?"

"It is possible, Field Marshal, that the Americans do not think this weapon is as important as you do."

"Americans don't send one of anything to do anything. Americans work in teams. They have teams, and now we see one man. It is a man, isn't it?"

"There is an old axiom, General. An enemy is perfect until he shows you how to destroy him."

"Yes, sir. That was quite popular in the First World War among pilots involved in dogfights. Those were old, slow prop-driven aircraft in which individual pilots shot at each other. There are electronic devices and formations now."

Zemyatin did not answer the general but rose slowly. There was a gold letter opener on the luxurious desk. Zemyatin picked it up and fondled it.

"It belonged to a princess, Field Marshal. Would you like it?" asked the general politely.

Alexei Zemyatin noticed how smooth and comfortable the face was. Its very complacency terrified him. Carefully he closed his fingers tight around the gilt leather pommel of the letter opener. He smiled. The general smiled back. Then Zemyatin leaned forward as though to hand the letter opener back to the general. But as the general reached forward to take it, Zemyatin, driving himself with his rear foot, pushed the point into a smooth fat cheek.

The general lurched backward, his eyes wide in shock, red drops splattering the perfect green uniform. His cheek spit blood.

"War is blood," said Zemyatin. "You should know what the rest of us have felt. I hope you understand what it is about a bit more now."

The general understood that the one they called the Great One was too powerful to move against at this time, possibly anytime. He was a dinosaur, from an age long gone. And he had to be humored. The cut not only continued to bleed, but it needed stitches. It was the first time in the general's life he had ever been wounded. For some reason he could not explain, it made him slightly more unsettled than he thought he should be. He never once suspected that he was reacting precisely the way the old man had intended him to. The young general was not giving in to the old man's crude brutality when he ordered a trace and analysis thrown at the American agent who had arrived in Great Britain. He was just humoring the old man, he told himself. He also requested an immediate response on the woman. The answer back from the chief London unit of the KGB was that the general should stop worrying. Dr. O'Donnell was not only beginning to talk, but she was secure in the safest safe house in all England. After all, what was good enough for Henry VIII should be good enough for the KGB.

Chapter 6

The first thing Remo did was get an exact description of Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell. She had red hair and was gorgeous. One of the technicians said she was "a knockout." Another one amplified on this:

"A real knockout."

The eyes were blue, the breasts were perfect, the smile was elegant, the face was exquisite.

No one could tell him more. Remo realized that beautiful women were never really described in detail but in the way people felt about them. Which did him no good.

In the car, he explained his problem to the British intelligence and military officers who were still conscious. "I am looking for a redheaded knockout of a woman," said Remo.

"Aren't we all," said an officer.

"Try Soho. Got a brunette there last week. Woman did wonders with leather," said the unit chief.

"I am looking for the redhead who ran this test."

"Can't tell you that, old boy. This whole thing's hush-hush. If you hadn't been such a brute you wouldn't have even found out where this test was," said the station chief.

"Let's try something else. Who said this was hush-hush? Who said you should try to run an ally around the block?"

"Can't tell you that. That's even more hush-hush," said the unit chief. However, when he discovered that he could end the incredible pain in his legs, where the American seemed to be exerting just the slightest pressure, by telling what he knew, he decided it wasn't that much of a secret after all.

"It's an agency we have. Doesn't even have an MI code. Good people. Right sort of schools and such. Best we have, and they don't make much ado about normal intelligence labels. You do know what a label is, don't you?"

"No," said Remo. "I just do my job. Where are these guys?"

"These guys, as you call them, are known as the Source. You don't just jolly well drop in on them. They don't have some crude concrete building, with guards and snooping devices and people with guns. They are, in brief, the very best there is."

"Maybe you don't know it," said Remo, "but we are on the same side. We have been for the last century and I expect we always will be. So where is the Source?"

"You'll never get through to them. They're not some little station disguised off Piccadilly surrounded by plaster walls and a few gunmen. The Source is absolutely British and your newfangled hand tricks couldn't get you within a hundred yards of them."

"Newfangled? I didn't show you anything that wasn't thirteen centuries old when you people were painting yourself blue," said Remo.

The place Remo was not supposed to be able to penetrate was on the way from Malden to London, about twenty miles outside the city limits.

The inpregnable edifice sat on a small hillock surrounded by hundreds of yards of lawn. The lawn was not for decoration. Remo knew that centuries before, all the trees would have been felled by peasants or captives or slaves. The land was always cleared around castles so that the enemy would be vulnerable as it approached. This castle was massive stone, twenty feet thick, smoothed so that attackers could not climb its high walls. There was even a wide moat. And parapets. And slit holes no bigger than a fist for the famous English longbow.

"This? This is supposed to be impenetrable?" asked Remo.

"Yes. Just try your newfangled techniques on that, old chap! "

"That," said Remo, "is your typical Norman castle, perfectly devised to stop Anglo-Saxon rebels, and other Norman lords, It's got a moat, a drawbridge, access to the outer walls from inner ramps to roll up vats of boiling oil. It also has the mandatory escape tunnel that runs under the moat for use if all of the aforesaid shouldn't work."

Remo reeled off this information quickly like a child reciting, which was the way he had learned it. He never thought it would come in handy. It was one of those early lessons in tradition. There was the Norman castle, the Roman stockade, the Japanese palace, the French fortress, and all those old defenses he thought were ridiculous to learn about because they weren't used anymore.

Remo had the car stop two hundred yards from the drawbridge.

"Giving up?" said the intelligence chief.

"No. You don't enter a Norman castle from a drawbridge. You can do the walls, but why bother? I like to surprise people."

Remo smiled and left the car. He would find what he was looking for between two hundred and one hundred and fifty yards from the moat. By now it would be well overgrown, but even when in use, it was disguised by rocks. Usually it was placed west of the castle so that the rising sun would be behind it. They liked to use the passages in daylight, because at night attackers would respond to sound. It was the escape tunnel, its location known only to the reigning Lord. The Japanese had long before abandoned that sort of escape route because of the danger of assassins using it. The British had never had that problem and had left the tunnels.

The beautiful aspect of these tunnels was that they always came from the lord's bedroom, always the safest place, and the point an assassin would invariably have to attack. The lord of the castle would deliver a stirring speech about holding out to the last man, then in the privacy of his sleeping room, don the clothes of his enemies, and with his immediate family make his way into or behind enemy lines. It was a perfect escape from any Saxons or Normans against whom they might be fighting a losing battle.

Remo could have gotten into this castle within the first month of his breath training. He felt the earth under his feet and tried to sense some different stone formation beneath. He stayed very quiet, smelling the fresh grass and sensing the odor of the oak and new life all around him. His steps became smooth glides, his arms like divining rods which seemed to rise so that his fingertips and the ground they hovered over rested on the air between them. A bird chirped in nearby trees away from the castle. Behind him the heavy gasoline chug of the car spit heavy fumes into the pure air.

Remo kept his pace, shutting his eyes because he could not find this place with his eyes. Time had made them useless.

Inside the car, the remaining conscious Britons discussed the peculiar American.

"What's he doing?"

"Damned well waltzing for all I know."

"He's not doing anything. Just gliding around there. His eyes are closed."

"Strange one."

"Bit brutal, yes?"

"I don't know. We're supposed to be his allies, after all. Why are we hiding these things from him?"

"We're not hiding anything."

"We're not exactly giving information freely."

"Well, we're not hiding anything."

"Don't think we should have at the beginning, if you ask me. The Americans are our friends. Who are we really protecting?" asked the military officer.

"You worry too much. Ask too many questions. People won't like you after a while if you behave like that," said the intelligence-unit chief.

"There. He's stopped. Over there. Now what's he doing?"

"By Jove, look at that."

The thin American with the thick wrists paused, quivering, then slowly, as though on some invisible quicksand, slipped down into the earth and was no longer seen.

Remo had found the escape tunnel.

There were those who knew of Guy Philliston, some who even said they knew him personally, and then there were his dear, dear friends.

Guy Philliston's dear, dear friends ran England. Pretty much the way they had always run England since the Industrial Revolution. It was not some great diabolical consortium of vested interests plotting against the common man. Many of them liked to call themselves common men. Guy Philliston's dear, dear friends were those people who generally made things work to a degree. They lunched together, theatered together, sometimes transgressed with one another's wives, and if they were really close, introduced one another to their tailor. They got government posts in whatever government happened to be elected, and generally, when there was a post to fill, filled it with one of their own. Governments might change, the Queen might die, but the dear, dear friends of Guy Philliston went on forever, in empire and in dissolution, in conquest and in defeat.

Thus it was that when Her Majesty's Secret Service found itself riddled with Russian agents, one section chief after another turning up in Moscow with the most sensitive of British secrets, this group turned to one of its own.

It occurred at the races in the right box. The men wore gray gloves and gray top hats and impeccable race attire. The Queen had entered. They rose out of respect.

"Guy," said his friend to Lord Philliston, "bit of a muck-up at MI-5."

"Rather," said Guy Philliston. He had heard at lunch the day before that Russia had not only gotten away with a master list of every British agent in the Middle East, but because the list was so incredibly sensitive, no one had dared make a duplicate. Now only Russia knew who Britain had under the sun where the West's oil energy lay buried.

"Got to do something, you know. Can't go on like this. Be nice if we, not they, knew who we had."

"Quite," said Guy. "Did you try the salmon mousse?" A silver tray of hors d'oeuvres rested on a mahogany stand next to a chilled magnum of champagne of a modest year. Nothing rude, of course, but nothing to make one stop and notice.

His friend thought about the salmon mousse awhile. Then he said:

"Do you want to grab hold of those boys and shake them up a bit, Guy?"

"Don't think it would work."

"What would you do?"

"I would use our misfortune, old boy," said Guy.

"The one thing I want to do with a disaster is forget it."

"Not in this case," said Lord Philliston. He was devastatingly handsome with fine strong features befitting a British lord. Indeed, more than one movie producer had asked him to take a screen test. He had always refused. Acting was too much like work.

"If we have a deuced mess, and we try to rearrange things, one chap here, one chap there, one chap somewhere else, then we may still be moving around people who might be loyal to Ivan. In which case we are only rearranging our problem, not solving it."

"Go on. Please do."

"Let's not close down the section. Matter of fact, let's keep it going. Strong."

"But we don't even know who we have there! The Russians know who we have there. They have the only list for our Middle East section."

"Which shows how stupid they are. Taking the only list was a mistake. They should have made a duplicate and let us go on thinking we had somewhat secure agents out there."

"I think it was a snatch and grab. No great internal mole. Some clerk slipped a few quid, snatched a list here or there, and it happened to be an important one."

It was then that Lord Philliston showed his true brilliance. The plan was to let the Russians know that MI-5 believed they had only carelessly misplaced the list. MI-5 would start a search for it and allow the Russians to do their job right by smuggling back the entire original list to some intelligence department.

"Then what?"

"Then we continue to rely on the useless people."

"Wouldn't that be a bit purposeless?"

"Not at all, because in our disaster is their comfort. We should stop at nothing to let the Russians and the rest of the world believe that we have become the worst, most riddled intelligence system in the world."

"I beg your pardon, Lord Philliston."

"Try the mousse, will you?"

"I beg your pardon. What is this insanity?"

"Because we will, starting today, start a new intelligence system, protected by the Russians' certainty that they own pieces, if not all, of ours."

"From scratch you mean? From the bloody start you mean?"

"Absolutely," said Lord Philliston. The trumpets were announcing the first race. "Our real intelligence system will be one no one has ever heard of."

"Brilliant. We will show the Americans we can still hack it."

"We will show them nothing. The Americans are addicted to talk. A major American secret is one that is reported by only a single television network."

"An excellent idea. I knew you were the right fellow for this thing, Lord Philliston. I suppose we will have to give you your MI code. Would you like MI-9?"

"No label. No codes."

"We have to call you something."

"Pick a word then," said Lord Phiiliston.

"Doesn't seem quite right to launch an intelligence operation without an MI code."

"Call the bloody thing 'Source.' "

"Why 'Source'?"

"Why not 'Source'?" said Lord Guy Philliston.

And thus the Source was born that afternoon at Epsom Downs. No one quite knew how Lord Philliston managed it, and he was not one to tell. Information that the Americans could not gather was immediately placed at the disposal of every British prime minister. News of major Russian decisions and the reasons for them began appearing on plain typed paper. More often than not it was too late to do anything about these major Russian moves, but the reports were always accurate, if not brilliant. Guy Philliston performed with a tenth of the personnel allocated to the public intelligence system. And never once did he seek promotion or fame.

His success only confirmed what all of the good friends knew in the first place: one of theirs knew how to run things best. Always had, always would.

One never went wrong trusting someone who used the right tailor. And the best thing about Lord Philliston's Source was that it never made public noise, never embarrassed anyone. A legend grew up among those who ran things that if it were brilliant and impossible to figure out, it had to be Source.

One reason Lord Philliston's Source could use so few men was that he didn't have to waste years and manpower penetrating the inner circles of the Kremlin.

He merely had lunch at the right club. There in his private mail, which no one would dare open, were the reports in English, neatly typed, of what was going on in the world. There was also a very handy summary of what they referred to, so that Lord Guy Philliston could get through a month's work in less than five minutes. One minute, if he chose to speed-read the summary.

The information about the Kremlin was accurate because it came from the Kremlin. And the original list of British agents had been returned.

In fact, everything Lord Philliston had told his friends at Epsom Downs that day had been worked out for him by his KGB contact, who was also his lover, and who knew that what Lord Philliston liked best in the world was generally to be left alone. The one thing he hated in the world was the Philliston duty of serving Queen and country.

Running the Source allowed Lord Philliston the utmost respect of his family and friends with the least amount of work or danger. Russia certainly wasn't going to endanger her absolutely prime position with him in charge of Britain's secret security unit. Daddy wouldn't press him to join the Coldstream Guards, and Mummy wouldn't demand he escort one properly bred sow after another if he could claim that his time was fully taken up by Her Majesty's Service. Being a traitor to Queen and country had been an asbolute blessing to a lazy lord who preferred the love of men to that of the women his entire family wanted him to breed with.

There was occasional elements of risk in this job. Like the day he was told by the Russian contact to retire to his safe room because an American was about, mucking things up.

He did not like Philliston Hall. Even the parapets where one could survey the Philliston countryside were gloomy. And the safe room, once the master bedroom of the lords of this fortress, was gloomier still. Not even a slit for air. Fifteen feet of rock on every side and not an inch of it provided insulation. Stone never did.

No one had even bothered to put in a proper toilet. Rather, one relieved oneself in a little niche with a narrow hole to accept one's discharge. It had taken workmen three months to cut in the narrow holes for the security lines. One of them went to Whitehall, another went to Scotland Yard, another went to Number 10 Downing Street, and the one that had the really impenetrable scramble system went to the cultural-affairs department of the Russian embassy. Guy, of course, had direct access to the chief KGB officer there.

"This is ridiculous," said Guy. He was wearing a scratchy cashmere sweater pulled on over a cotton shirt that had too much starch. The brandy was adequate, but it kept chilling. The only way to heat anything in the room was to start a fire, but fires made smoke and the air was already deucedly unbreathable.

"Stay right where you are,'' warned the Russian. "Do not leave the room. The American is near you."

"One American is forcing me to hide in this stone-cold chamber?"

"He has run through some of your best staff and right now he is parked less than two hundred yards west of Philliston Hall."

"Who told you that?"

"Your guards. Stay where you are. You are too precious for us to risk. This man may be dangerous."

"Well then, let's give him what he wants and get rid of him. Then let me get back to London. This place is worthless. Useless."

"Stay where you are."

" 'Stay where you are,' " said Guy Philliston, imitating the soupy Russian accent before he hung up with force. He hated the Russian accent. Always sounded like they had something they wanted to cough up. Israelis sounded like they were about to spit something out, and Arabs hissed. Americans sounded like their tongues couldn't handle vowels, and Australians sounded-rightfully-as though they had all just been let out of Old Newgate Prison. Why, Lord Philliston asked himself, couldn't Britain fight the French? The French would make lovely enemies. They were cultured. The only real flaw of their race was that the men liked women too much.

Into this dreary cold life came the most beautiful surprise. Virtually out of a wall came the most handsome man Lord Philliston had ever seen. He had magnificent dark eyes, high cheekbones, and was in perfect trim. His body movements made Guy Philliston quiver with excitement. He was carrying something white, which he let drop to the stone floor with a clatter. They were bones. Human bones.

"Is that your specialty?" asked Lord Philliston. "I've never done anything with bones but it sounds absolutely delicious. Smashing."

"They're your bones," said Remo. "I found them at the end of the tunnel where your ancestors left him. Him and about three more."

"My ancestors?"

"If you're Lord Philliston, and if you are in this room you would have to be."

"Why would they leave bones at the end of a tunnel?"

"Because they were like the Egyptians, and others," said Remo. "When they constructed a secret entrance to a pyramid or castle, they killed the workmen. Secrets are always best buried underground."

"Oh, isn't that delightful. You found the secret passage Daddy promised to tell me about someday. That is, if he could ever get me to this place. Which he couldn't." Guy Philliston looked at the opening in the wall. It was low and concealed by only one stone. He wondered if saving his life was worth getting so soiled by crawling through a tunnel like that. This man in his dark T-shirt and light trousers could apparently move through things and not get a smudge. The very thought of it made the head of Source tingle.

"Look, sweetheart," said the American in his magnificent rough voice, totally American-city-butch, "I am looking for a woman. You are supposed to know things. You are the one who runs Source."

"Are you sure you want a woman? How about a really attractive boy?"

"I am looking for a knockout of a redhead. Her name is Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell."

"Oh, that little matter," said Lord Phiiliston, clutching his chest in relief. "I thought you wanted her as a bed partner. You mean it's business-related?"

Remo nodded.

"Well, of course you can have her. She is staying in one of my personal safe houses. You can have anything you want."

"Where is she?"

"Well, you've got to give me what I want first." Remo grabbed the smooth throat and pressured the jugular vein until the handsome features of Lord Philliston became red, then painfully blue. Then he released. "You'll need me to get in."

"I don't need anyone to get in anywhere."

"I can help you. Just do me one favor. Do that thing with your hands again. You know the spot."

Remo let Lord PhiIliston down on the stone and wiped his hands on the Britisher's cashmere sweater. He snared a bunch of it for a handle and dragged Lord Philliston with him back through the tunnel. Remo had questions to ask. Why were the British obstructing him? Didn't they know that the entire world was in jeopardy? What was going on? It was not difficult to ask these questions while moving quickly through the underground escape tunnel. The problem was in getting answers. Lord Philliston tended to bang against the rough rock walls as they moved. He was gashed. He was cut. He was brutalized. By the time they surfaced to where Remo had discovered the entrance, Lord Guy Philliston was battered and quivering.

He was also in love.

"Do that again. Once more. Please," said the head of the super-secret special British security agency. The car was still waiting for the American. The survivors packed into the back seat had decided that he had done his worst, and if they didn't move, would do no more.

They saw the American appear from the exact spot he had descended into. Behind him was the man they had all learned to respect and trust.

The British colonel thought he might try a desperate lunge toward the American. His body wouldn't move. The intelligence chief wondered what Sir Guy was doing.

"Is he following him or being dragged?" he asked. "Don't know for sure. Lord Philliston is biting his hand, I think."

"No. Not biting. Look."

"I don't believe it."

As the American opened the car door, they all saw the undeniable pressing of their chief's lips to the American's hand. The head of the unit to which they had devoted their lives was kissing the hand that dragged him.

"Sir," snapped the colonel.

"Oh, bugger off," said Philliston. He knew what they were thinking.

"A bit improper, what?" said the colonel.

The unit chief, who had been assigned an MI code but who had secretly worked for Source, gave Lord Philliston a big wink. He was sure this was some sort of maneuver of his, something so cunning that only a master of intelligence could think of it. He vowed to be ready to move against the American when the time came. The head of Source saw the wink, and returned it. Strangely he added another sign. It was his palm on the inside of the station chief's hand.

"Driver, to the Tower of London," said Philliston. He moved from the rear seat to the little pull-up seat just behind the driver facing the back. There was blood on a few of the men crushed there. One of them still pretended not to recognize him, as was the order with any secret personnel like himself. A bit silly, Philliston thought. The American seemed to sit without a chair. As the car lurched over the roads, everyone else seemed to bounce but the American.

"She's in the Tower of London?"

"Of course. Excellent safe house. Has been since 1066," said Lord Philliston.

"That's a tourist attraction, isn't it?" asked Remo.

"Whole bloody island is a tourist attraction," said Lord Philliston. "If we weren't using Philliston Hall as headquarters, we'd be bloody well selling tickets to it."

"Why are you holding back information from your allies?" said Remo.

"Everybody holds back information from everybody else," said Lord Philliston.

"Don't take it personally, please. Personally I would give you anything." He ran a tongue along his lower lip.

Brilliant portrayal of a flaming fag, thought the station chief. And the American just may be suckered in. But why is he giving away the location of safe house eleven?

"Are you aware that we all may be burning up in the sun's unfiltered rays if we don't go by nuclear holocaust first? Did you know that? Does it mean anything to you guys?"

"You are taking things personally," said Lord Philliston.

"I always take the end of the world personally," said Remo. "I am personally in it. So is everything I love personally in it. Also some things I don't like."

"What's this about filtered sun? Unfiltered?" asked the colonel.

"Ozone. Without that ozone shield no one could survive. I am trying to trace the source of a weapon that threatens it. I would appreciate your cooperation. Dr. O'Donnell was running the test on this side of the Atlantic. Now, why are you people withholding information from us?"

"Ozone? How are they doing that?" said the station chief.

Remo tried to remember whether it was fluorocarbons or fluorides, or spray cans, or what.

"We'll find out when we get there, all right?" he said. All the way to London, his men listened to Lord Guy Philliston portray a flaming fag in love with a brute. It was shameful and disgraceful, but every one of them knew he was doing it for England. Everyone except the station chief, who sat on Lord Philliston's other side and continuously had to protect the zipper on his fly.

Chapter 7

The message was clear, but brief. The American had not been misled in Great Britain. According to the fragments of information received in Moscow, the American was at this very moment outside the gates of the Tower of London, the perfect safe house he was not supposed to find. How he'd gotten there was not explained. Whether he realized the woman was being held at he Tower was not mentioned. Only the short notification of danger came through to British desk, KGB Moscow.

It came with a message equally brief, this from the psychological officer. The American woman was about to tell them everything.

The time had come to wrap all this up. KGB British desk Moscow immediately sent back a message regarding the American: "Put him down."

He was to be killed, despite all the ranting and raving from that old revolutionary leader Zemyatin, who seemed strangely concerned with the danger of one man. The KGB had more and better killers at its disposal today.

Very shortly, the American nuisance would be removed and the woman would lead them to everything they needed.

Kathy O'Donnell knew nothing of the messages going across the Atlantic or that someone was coming to rescue her. She didn't want to be rescued.

Until this day, she realized, she had not known real happiness. She was in a room whose floors and walls were stone, on a rough bed, with a man who really excited her. How he did it, she was not sure, but she didn't care. The excitement had started during the experiment at Malden and just hadn't stopped. It was wonderful, and she would do practically anything to keep it going.

Even as the rough hands pinched the soft parts of her body and the cruel mouth laughed, she remembered what had happened at the Valden site, where she met this Russian fellow. Perhaps he was the first real man she had ever known.

One of her hired technicians had passed out. The animals were weeping in delicious pain. And she, of course, was coolly pretending that nothing was the matter as the ozone shield began closing itself above the burned field.

There were looks of horror on all the technicians' faces. Some punk rockers with purple hair and yellow-painted faces even threw up. But one man standing nearby was watching her and the animals closely.

He alone showed only mild interest. His face stood out like a white mask in a black night. Here was everyone else squinting, and turning their heads away, and there he stood as though watching a curious animal in a zoo. "Doesn't this bother you?" asked Dr. O'Donnell.

He looked puzzled. "What is to bother?" he responded in a thick Russian accent. He had a face like steel with slits of Slavic eyes. Even through his thick black facial hair, a sure loss for a razor, she could see scars. People had wounded this man. But what, she wondered, had he done to others? He had that sort of face. He was just under six feet tall and carried the massive presence of a tank.

"It doesn't bother you to see animals suffer?"

"People make more noise," he said.

"Really? Have you ever seen one burned like that puppy over there?"

"Yes. I have seen them cloaked in oil and burning. I have seen them with their bellies on the ground and their heads rolling along gangways as their bodies quivered uselessly above. I have seen it all."

There was a bit of confusion. First someone told the man that this was not his post. Then someone else said to leave him alone. They were getting results. Kathy O'Donnell didn't care. She had a question she absolutely had to have answered. Where had he seen them like that? "All over," he answered. And she knew without his saying a word that he had been the one who had done those things. She asked him what he was doing here in Malden. He didn't answer. She asked if he would like to go somewhere with her. She saw his eyes undress her. She knew the answer was yes, even though he said he would have to ask someone. She saw him in a little conference with some men. She didn't care. He might be a policeman. He might be anything. The excitement boiled within her, and she felt that for the first time since childhood she did not have to disguise anything. She did not have to say how sorry she was when someone had an accident. She did not have to cluck her tongue at disaster. She could have what she really enjoyed with this man.

She did not know, of course, that the man was a minor functionary in a larger plan, that he was just there for muscle if it were needed. She did not know that he was being ordered to attend to her, and take her somewhere. She knew that whatever came, she could deal with it. Men were never a problem. Anything involving men was something she could handle, especially this man, and the way his eyes had played first on her breasts and then lowered.

"Come. Let us go," he said when he returned. "We will have romantic date, yes?"

"I think so," she said. And then to the technicians she had hired:

"I'll be back in a while."

And she was off with the Russian. He drove a car rather clumsily, perhaps because his eyes were only occasionally on the road.

"Tell me," she said, "about the first man you ever killed."

Dimitri said it was not a big thing. He said it while churning down a British country road, one of those narrow strips meant for horses or race-car drivers.

"You are doing experiment there, yes?"

"Yes. What was it like? How did it feel to know you had actually killed someone?"

"I felt nothing."

"Was it with a gun?" asked Kathy.

"Yes," said Dimitri.

"A big gun? With a big bullet?" she asked.

"Rifle."

"Far away?"

"No. Close."

"Did you see him bleed?" she asked. Her voice was a soft sexy breath.

"He bled."

"How? Where?"

"In the stomach. Why does beautiful woman like you care about something like that?" Dimitri did not add that he was chosen for his job precisely because these things meant nothing to him. His was not considered an important job. It did not require brains. The men with brains went on to become thinkers behind desks. He was a foot soldier in the intelligence war. With this beautiful American woman he had lucked out. He might even have a chance at the fun of things instead of breaking arms or shooting off heads. He wanted to get her to a bedroom. He wanted to talk of love, and if not of love then at least unclothed bodies. Still he had been ordered to switch plans and escort her to the safe house instead of providing backup muscle, as it was called.

He was told that if he could, he should ask questions about the experiment, but not press the matter. There were others who knew the intelligent questions to ask.

"When the victim bled-was it a lot? Like all over the floor?" asked the woman.

"No. It was outside. He fell down."

"And then?"

"And then he was put down."

"With a bullet?"

"Yes."

"In the head? In the mouth? Did you do it in the mouth?"

"No. The head."

"Would you kill for me?" she asked. He could feel her breath on his ear. He thought that if he were to feel her tongue, he might discharge at the wheel.

"What is crazy question like that?"

"Would you?"

"You are beautiful woman. Why do you ask crazy things? Let us talk about what you do back in Malden."

"I do lots of things. What do you do?"

"I drive," said the man called Dimitri.

All the way into London he could get nothing from her, so he did not press. She wanted to know details of his killings. Since he did not mention names or places, he assumed the details she wanted would be all right. They were not anything another intelligence agency would want to know, nothing to do with where, or why. She wanted the intimate details of groans and sizes of wounds and how long something took. Was it big? Was it small? Was it hard?

In London, he bought tickets to the Tower of London, like any tourist. It was not a tower. It had been a royal castle at one time, and later became the premier prison where the British liked to behead their old enemies of the state, or the crown as they called it.