The Ultimate Death

The single eyebrow crept upward in surprise.

"You must have seen him around here somewhere!" Remo was saying, his voice urgent.

"About this high? In a silver kimono? No? Damn!"

The Chinese girl skipped off, leaving Remo to prowl the byways of Chinatown. He had no idea where Chiun had gone off to. He had vanished.

It would be like Chiun to do something like this, just to teach Remo a lesson. With Chinese vampires popping out of every doorway, Chiun decides to pull a disappearing act.

"This had better be a stunt," Remo muttered to himself. "Please let it be a trick designed to teach me a lesson," he whispered.

With a shiver, Remo suddenly thought of the orange wisps of smoke that had slipped from the throats of the poor Chinese couple behind him. This was no lesson. Chiun was gone. And Remo was getting that cold feeling again. The one that reminded him that Chiun was now a hundred years old, and had not been quite the same since he had been brought back from the dead.

Remo crossed to the opposite side of Mott Street. Voices called out to him as he ran, but they were drowned out by the commotion coming from around the Neighborhood Improvement Association. The first cruiser to arrive must have seen the bodies in the foyer and called for backup. There were also two ambulances parked beyond the rim of squad cars.

Suddenly Remo remembered something. A voice. Master of Sinanju, behind you! it had shouted.

He had caught a glimpse of a man. A Chinese, dressed entirely in black, like a mortician out of some old Western. He was tall, but Remo had gotten no impression of his face. Not that it would have helped. Despite long years of association with the Master of Sinanju, Remo still thought all Orientals looked pretty much the same.

Great, he thought: Excuse me, have you seen an old Oriental gentleman in a kimono, about five feet tall, in the company of a slightly younger Oriental dressed entirely in black?

What did they look like? Like Orientals. What else?

He felt foolish thinking it. But it was his only lead.

The first person he asked was a middle-aged Italian woman, sitting in a lawn chair outside a corner store.

"Yeah, I seen 'em," she said casually, as if the pair were a couple of bankers out for a stroll during their lunch hour.

"You did?"

"You did say one was Korean, right?"

"How do you tell the difference?" Remo wanted to know.

The woman shrugged. "Same way I tell a Sicilian from a Neapolitan. Anyway, they went east on Canal. Say, whaddya doin'? Leggo my hand!"

Remo released her hand. "Just checking your fingernails," he said. He darted down the street.

"My ancestors know well of the gyonshi, O Master, for though Sinanju has faced them a handful of times in its glorious history, we have encountered them many, many times. For us it is an honor to sacrifice our lives to thwart this pestilence."

"Speak not to me of Chinese honor, Taoist," Chiun spat. "My ears bleed."

The gaunt embalmer's single eyebrow furrowed at its center, like a black caterpillar scrunching up on a leaf. He lowered his head in an informal bow. "I am confused, great Master. Did you not come to me for my knowledge of the gyonshi?"

"I came for a single answer, Chinaman," Chiun responded. "And for this I may forgive the impertinence of your last utterance. If it is the answer I seek. Otherwise . . ." He let the threat hang between them.

The Taoist seemed genuinely frightened. Good, Chiun thought. I have gotten the deformed creature's attention.

The Taoist cleared his throat. "You would defeat the Leader?" he asked, his tone making it clear that the question was unnecessary. Chiun merely stood in silence.

Like a nervous animal, the Taoist began glancing around the room. He stepped over a few scattered books and newspapers with Chinese printing, to a single door in the corner of the living room. It was tucked away behind a tattered easy chair. The door had once been painted green but the paint had long since peeled away, revealing a ghostly veneer of its original varnish.

"Come into my personal sanctum," he bid.

The Taoist pushed the door open. The room beyond was deeply shadowed. Lights from a hundred white ceremonial candles danced along its walls.

"I will tell you all I know, Master of Sinanju," he said, ushering Chiun inside.

"Then perhaps I will spare your life, Taoist with one eyebrow," Chiun responded as he passed inside.

In the flickering candlelight, unnoticed by Chiun, a sparkle of light danced on the quicksilver sheen of the Taoist's index fingernail.

On Canal Street, Remo found three others who had noticed the path taken by the pair of Orientals. All indicated the same general direction. As they pointed Remo inspected their fingernails for the telltale guillotine shape, but none of the other passersby bore the mark of a gyonshi.

Remo was accosting a roasted-peanut vendor when a police officer came into view amid the crowd of pedestrian traffic. For a moment the cop seemed startled, but then he drew his revolver and aimed it carefully at Remo. "Hold it right there," he ordered nervously.

"No time," Remo said absently. Chiun must be nearby. But there were a dozen possible doors. "Did you see them?" he asked the vendor urgently. "A Chinese and a Korean, together?"

"You better make time, pal," warned the cop, his voice growing threatening. "A guy fitting your description was seen up where the Scubiscis hang out, just after the mass murder."

"C'mon," Remo prompted the apron-clad man, "I don't have all day." He continued to ignore the cop, who stepped forward with increased belligerence.

The vendor swallowed, uncertain. He glanced from Remo to the cop, then back to Remo again. He gave a feeble shrug. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I don't know from Koreans. I'm still gettin' used to all these chinks."

The cop had his handcuffs out and was moving up on Remo. "You're coming with me."

"Sorry, pal," Remo said, turning. "You've become a distraction."

Remo's hands shot out, slapping the handcuffs away and plucking the weapon from the startled cop's outstretched hand. Simultaneously, Remo stabbed a pressure point at the side of the man's thick-muscled throat.

The young policeman's pistol clattered to the sidewalk as he himself slid to the pavement. Remo propped the unconscious man against the side of a parked car. He focused his attention back on the vendor.

"Oriental in kimono. Oriental in black. Which way?"

"Uh, there," the vendor said, pointing with a trembling hand. "They were heading for that building."

He pointed to a brick apartment building, with some kind of black-curtained storefront on the first floor. A sign over the glass read WON SIK LUNG-EMBALMING.

"Thanks!" Remo called after him. "And clean your fingernails!"

Upon entering the smaller room the Taoist had lit another of the many thick candles, his right hand hidden from view in the long sleeves of his midnight-black tunic.

"For you, Master of Sinanju," he said. His bow this time was more formal.

Chiun returned the bow with the slightest nod of his head.

The Taoist now stood at one end of a low wooden table that sat in the room's center. The flames from several dozen candles danced in the lazy air currents of the room, where a bowl of black blood had been positioned carefully between the candles. Several worn pillows were spread out on the floor around the taboret.

The Taoist beckoned Chiun to join him.

Reluctantly, the Master of Sinanju gathered up his skirts and knelt before the taboret. Only then did the Taoist himself fall to his knees.

They faced one another across the taboret, smoking shadows worrying their grim features.

"You have heard in your travels, O wise Master of Sinanju, of the blight upon this land known as AIDS?"

Chiun merely nodded. The embalmer went on.

"There have been some who have accused the gyonshi of introducing this virus, but it is known to affect far too few in its current form. Perhaps, in years, it will swell into a pestilence, but the Leader no longer has years. The gyonshi Leader craves the Final Death, and would not settle for less."

"I know of their methods," Chiun responded stiffly.

"But it is not known to many that the vampirism which affects the Leader's minions is a virus much like this AIDS. It is transmitted from one gyonshi host to another, by means of their own blood seeping up from beneath their fingernails. Enough of the poison remains in their bloodstream that they may contaminate victims forever. It is in this manner that they recruit innocents to do their bidding. And there is only one sure method of purging the host to the gyonshi poison: liberating the bad air."

"The orange smoke," Chiun said, nodding. He was staring at a faraway point in his past.

The Taoist nodded as well. "Your thoughts are of..?"

Chiun's head snapped up. "My thoughts are my own, Taoist," he said with contempt. His eyes were angry slits.

"I meant no disrespect . . . ." the Chinese said quickly.

"I would know how to stop the Leader," Chiun demanded. He had had enough of this insolent embalmer. "Speak, Chinaman, or I will wrench your viper's tongue from your head, and with it flog your miserable carcass."

The Taoist with one eyebrow gave a jittery jump. Chiun was secretly pleased. Perhaps this loquacious creature would finally cease his meandering and come to the point.

The fear on the Taoist's face melded with resolve. He leaned toward Chiun across the small table, careful to keep his right hand out of view.

"Come closer, Master of Sinanju," he beckoned. "That I might whisper to you the secret of eradicating the gyonshi scourge forever . . . ."

The building was a hundred-year-old crumbling brick edifice that stood seven stories high. Inside, Remo found himself in a narrow hall made up of concrete bricks. They were painted a gaudy black, and over this was a painting of a long, coiling scarlet-and-jade dragon that led up a listing staircase.

There was no fast way to search the building. Remo vaulted up the creaking, rotted stairs to the second-floor hallway and began opening doors, locked and unlocked.

Curious Chinese faces craned out into the hallway. Those who had had their doors splintered open recoiled in fear. None belonged to the mysterious Chinese in black.

"Sorry, wrong number," Remo said by way of apology. He left the puzzled tenants in the second-floor hall and took the flight of stairs to the third floor in three steps.

He began splintering locks again. His face reflected great worry. Chinese vampires were dangerous. And the Master of Sinanju, although wonderfully recovered from his ordeal, was still not vet the Chiun of old-if he ever would be so again.

And even a Chinese vampire could get lucky, Remo knew.

If Chiun's tales could be believed, they had decimated Sinanju in times long ago.

Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, had many things on his mind. Not least of which was the ignominy of having come to a mere Chinaman for help. But as long as Remo never learned of this, it would be between Chiun and his ancestors.

He hoped to return to the street before Remo could locate him. It would do the boy good to worry. From worry, comes appreciation.

"It is obvious that the Leader intends for the Final Death to sweep America," the Taoist was saying.

Chiun nodded. "He attempted to poison American cattle years ago, when this land gorged itself on beef."

"And in this slightly more enlightened age, he has visited his foulness upon fowl," added the Taoist.

"You know of the poisoned ducks?" Chiun demanded, surprised.

"Not ducks. Chicken. Word has traveled to Chinatown. The dead are many. I expected something of this sort. So many years . . . nothing. And then an outbreak of gyonshism more than a decade ago in Houston. Many Chinese call upon the family of Won to ensure that their ancestors rest easy and motionless. Much good blood and bad air was released. Then, quiet again. Until now. Gyonshi are abroad in Chinatown, and elsewhere. And elsewhere, men die from eating the flesh of chickens."

Chiun frowned, understanding that the Final Death could be achieved only through huge numbers. Chicken might accomplish this-but not duck.

Yes, the Leader wanted the Final Death, longed for it as he never had before, but he now desired something even greater. The destruction of Sinanju.

The Leader knew the special dietary requirements of a Master of Sinanju. There could be no other reason to baste ducks with one of his filthy gyonshi poisons. Americans, thinking they were eating healthier, were consuming more chicken-not duck.

"The duck was meant to flush Sinanju out into the open," Chiun murmured aloud. "It was intended that Sinanju should go to the Chicken King. The first trap lay there. The second at Three-G. A third at the stronghold of the Roman, Scubisci."

"Sinanju is not so easily bested," the Taoist said in a servile tone.

The Master of Sinanju waved aside the flattery. Chiun would protect Remo, but now that his pupil knew of the gyonshi threat he could be left alone for a moment. While Chiun conferred with the legendary vampire-killer.

"Speak, embalmer. How may I strike at these vermin without bringing risk to my own house?"

The Taoist leaned closer. His single eyebrow rose higher on his pale amber forehead. The candles that were spread around the darkened room cast weird shadows on his long, funereal face.

Chiun leaned closer.

The Taoist's lips pursed, as he prepared to impart the secret of the Leader's fatal weakness to the Master of Sinanju.

The Master of Sinanju looked into the candlelight reflections flickering deep in the Taoist's amber eyes.

The eyes!

But the hand was already up. Over the table. Across the space between them, like a viper.

Chiun felt a brush against his throat. Very light. No pain.

Too late . . . The Master of Sinanju had recognized the eyes too late.

A cloud of black descended over the room as the Taoist leaned back, eyes burning with a wild light. Then the cloud descended over the Taoist as well, blocking him from view. The cloud was everywhere in the room, but it was not in the room. It was in Chiun's mind, and his mind was accepting the darkness like a longawaited shroud-and that shroud was somehow comforting.

And then the blackness was everywhere, as the last light of consciousness flickered and died.

The Master of Sinanju slumped to the floor.

On the fifth floor a man and woman were having a knock-down, drag-out over something. From the smattering of Chinese Remo understood, he gathered that it had to do with the husband's interest in a very young female employee at his place of business. The woman cried and screamed alternately, the husband yelled and apologized. Glassware broke in punctuation.

The fight must have been going on for some time, because the fifth-floor neighbors were slow to respond to Remo's persistent knocking. When they did peer out, Remo didn't see the blackclad Chinese among them.

There was one door that failed to open. Remo cocked an ear and listened. There was someone inside. A man. Breathing oddly.

But he was alone.

Remo was about to spring up the next flight of stairs when he heard it. It was more shallow than usual, but the intake of air was unmistakable.

"Chiun! "

Remo cleaved the ancient door in two with a single downward stroke and burst into the apartment beyond.

A living room piled high with clutter greeted his anxious eyes. Remo wasted no time there. The breathing had come from farther back in the apartment.

Another door. This one he wrested apart on its hinges, as if it were moist paper. Door fragments spun through the air like shrapnel, embedding themselves in the walls on either side of the inner room.

Remo saw the body on the floor. Its back was to him, and it was curled in the fetal position, but Remo recognized the emerald dragon design woven on the back of the silver kimono.

"Chiun!" he breathed.

The thin figure from the street knelt above Chiun. The one who had warned them of the female gyonshi.

He looked up at Remo, his eyes those of the most vile demon from hell.

"The one you look to for guidance will help you no more, gweilo," he laughed. "The hour of the Final Death is come."

Bile rising in his throat, Remo fell upon the Taoist. Hands flew in a furious blur. Arms pounded with pneumatic precision. In seconds, the Chinese had been reduced to a quivering cone of jelly encased in its own black shroud.

When the body fell still, Remo drew the Taoist's own gyonshi fingernail across what had been his neck. In the shimmer of the candlelight, a puff of orange smoke rose and vanished.

He dropped to his knees beside the Master of Sinanju, holding the fragile head delicately in his lap, and said, "Not again, Little Father! I swear I won't lose you again!"

Tears squeezed from the corners of his pained eyes, as he gathered up his frail burden and bore him out of the bric-a-brac-littered apartment and down to the street below.

No one attempted to stop him. They all saw the expression on his face.

Chapter 16

It was a unforgivable breach of security, but Remo had threatened to take Folcroft apart, brick by brick, if Harold Smith did not comply with his demand for an immediate medevac.

The Coast Guard emergency rescue helicopter touched down on the widest, flattest roof in Chinatown, where Remo stood, holding the Master of Sinanju in his arms.

Less than thirty minutes later it alighted on the sloping lawn of Folcroft Sanitarium, near the decrepit docks on the edge of Long Island Sound.

Smith realized that medevacing a patient from lower Manhattan, at a time when the police were trying to clean up a gangland massacre, would be difficult to explain. He hoped he would not find himself in that position as, stooping, he met Remo under the sweeping helicopter blades.

"I have been trying to reach you all day," Smith said, by way of greeting.

Remo glared at him. "Congratulations," he said flatly, pushing past the CURE director.

The medical technicians had already been instructed how to carry the old man on the stretcher. They were not to drop, jostle, bounce, shake, or drag the old man. They were to do nothing that might cause the old Oriental any further injury. The young man named Remo had explained all this to them on the way from the city. When one of them told the young man not to tell them how to do their jobs, he informed them that they hadn't been listening properly and explained the entire procedure over again, this time dangling one of them out the open door of the rescue helicopter by his ankles to focus their attention.

When they climbed off the helicopter in Rye, the technicians carried the old Oriental as if he were a gossamer chrysalis, not a mere human being.

Smith followed a grim Remo Williams across the broad lawn. He was having difficulty keeping up with the young man. His belt hung loose, for his stomach still pained him.

"What happened?" Smith demanded.

"Poison," Remo shot back.

Smith paled visibly. "He did not eat chicken?"

"He did not," Remo snapped.

"Good."

"This is a thousand times worse."

"Remarkable," Dr. Lance Drew said, shaking his head in amazement.

"What is it, doctor?" Smith asked.

Dr. Drew started, as if surprised by the reminder that there was someone else in the room with him. He had forgotten, he had been so caught up in his work.

"It's simply incredible, Dr. Smith!" he said. "This gentleman is obviously terribly, terribly old, yet his reflexes are those of a man in-" He paused. "Actually, they're not like a man's at any age at all. His reflexes are astounding. Pulse, heart, respiration. He's a phenomenal example of human longevity." Dr. Drew peered down at Chiun's motionless form. "No doubt a strict vegetarian," he added.

Smith and Remo stood on the side of the bed opposite the doctor. Remo watched in tight silence, rotating his thick wrists absently, as Chiun's thin chest expanded and deflated with each breath.

"Yes, of course," Smith said, steering the doctor to the point. "But we are more concerned about his prognosis."

The doctor stood upright and heaved a sigh. "Coma," he said, simply. "The patient has been exposed to some form of toxin, I suspect. I can't be certain. See this?" He indicated a tiny pink mark on Chiun's throat. "That is the site of the infection. Has to be. When did this happen?"

"About an hour ago," Remo said, looking up. His deep-set eyes were filled with concern.

The doctor shook his head. "Impossible," he said. "That is scar tissue. The scab has already fallen off. The puncture must be at least a week old."

Smith cleared his throat. "That will be all for now, Doctor," he said hurriedly.

Dr. Drew took the hint and began to leave. "I don't know what this poison would have done to a person not blessed with his constitution," he said, indicating Chiun. "It's his nervous system that has been attacked." He shook his head slowly as he stared into Remo's pleading eyes. "There's nothing I can do for him. I'm sorry."

Smith closed the door after the doctor and approached Remo cautiously. "I, er, know what he means to you, Remo," he said, nodding at Chiun.

"Don't start, Smitty!" Remo snapped. "You don't have a clue what he means to me! So don't even bother!"

Smith cleared his throat again. The action still gave him considerable discomfort. "There is also the matter of the poisoned chickens," he said.

"You mean ducks. And how'd you know about them?"

Smith frowned. "I have had no reports about ducks having been tampered with. Only chickens. The death toll now stands at nearly two thousand individuals. What kind of madman would attempt wholesale poisoning?"

As this sank in, Remo's face twisted in anger.

"Damn! This is all your fault, Smith!"

"I fail to understand," Smith said vaguely.

"Houston? Fifteen years ago? That ring a bell?"

"Not quite . . ." Smith said.

"Houston General Hospital," Remo explained. "That's where I put the Leader fifteen years ago. Remember the Leader? Old? Wizened? Blind? Out to poison all meat-eaters, because he belonged to an ancient Chinese cult of blood-drinking Chinese vegetarian vampires?"

"My God," Harold Smith said hoarsely. "Of course, it is the same pattern. Only this time it's chicken instead of beef."

"You were supposed to underwrite his medical bills," Remo continued in a biting tone. "Well, you obviously let that tiny responsibility go to hell for a few measly bucks. That's the only explanation. You would have known he escaped, otherwise."

"If you will allow me to get a word in," Smith said frostily.

Remo went on, as if unhearing. "You did this, Smith. You did it to all those innocent people.

"This"-he pointed a shaking-with-rage finger at the Master of Sinanju-"is your fault. All because you were too freaking cheap to pay to clean the Leader's bedpans."

Smith's usually unflappable personality began to flap. "The Leader?" he muttered, his tired gray eyes blinking furiously.

"He escaped the hospital, and he started his 'Final Death' crapola all over again," Remo said flatly.

"The Leader?" Smith repeated, sounding more shocked than surprised. "But Remo, that is impossible."

"Oh, really?" Remo asked, planting his hands on his hips. "And why is that?"

"Because," Harold Smith said in a prim, colorless voice, "the Leader is safely confined here at Folcroft."

Chapter 17

Elvira McGlone felt like an outsider now.

Not that she hadn't felt like one since her first day at Gregory Green Gideon's Three-G, Incorporated. She simply didn't fit in. Never had. Elvira McGlone wore tailored business suits and severe skirts, while everyone else wallowed in tie-dyed jeans and bandannas. She ate pastrami sandwiches and drank tap water, while the others ate Three-G's bowel-busting health bars and drank bitter foreign bottled water; because they believed every stream and reservoir in America was polluted.

Elvira McGlone had thought things might change when the new owners took over. She recalled the old adage "a new broom sweeps clean," and fervently hoped that this new broom would sweep the rest of these retrograde hippies right back to the Age of Aquarium-or whatever starry era had spawned them. But if anything, the Three-G staff had only become more cliquish, leaving Elvira McGlone even further out in the cold than she had been.

And the worst, the absolute worst, thing about the whole affair, was that she was the one who had let the pair of them in.

It had happened right after what was to be her final meeting with Gideon, at which she had argued for better merchandising of their products. She had left her market projections in her Volvo and had gone out to get them.

When she had opened the entrance door, they were standing there. Just standing there. A redhead in a crisp nurse's uniform, and what was surely the oldest man in the world this side of Methuselah. They must have been staring at the closed door and when Elvira McGlone opened it, they stared at her.

"Do you invite us in?"

It was the old man who had spoken. Elvira figured they must be strung-out health freaks looking to take one of the free tours that Gideon gave to the public. He was forever giving away free samples, too, eating away at the Three-G bottom line.

"Why the hell not?" Elvira had muttered. "We welcome the halt and the lame, why not the blind and creepy?"

Elvira McGlone held the door open for them as they entered the Three-G building. They sniffed the air like dogs.

"We couldn't have come in unless you asked us," the redheaded nurse chirped inanely.

The elderly man-he looked Chinese-only smiled at her. His eyes were white as pearls and his breath smelled like he'd just swallowed a recently expired skunk.

Shaking her head, Elvira let the door swing shut behind them and went out to her car to retrieve her papers. She thought that it would end with that.

It didn't.

Somehow, that very week, the creepy pair had assumed ownership of Three-G. The stockholders, who consisted mainly of Gideon's fellow wallowers in granola, had installed them unanimously. Elvira McGlone was not told what had happened to Gideon. Her queries were met with blank-eyed evasions, even from the usually talkative veggie zealots, who until then had been a happy assemblage of Vegans and lacto-or lactovo-vegetarians.

Now they chanted "Reject meat!" and had become irredeemably macrobiotic.

It was all much too bizarre, even for Three-G.

Elvira McGlone clomped along the hallway nervously, her long, bloodred talons striking time on the back of her clipboard. It was funny how the place made her so uneasy now. She found herself missing Mr. Gideon. She felt bonecold every time she thought of him.

She steadied herself, realizing that she was being childish. She hadn't come this far this fast on the corporate fast track to be derailed by a mere change in management.

She breathed deeply, steadying her nerves as she reached for the knob to the office of the new vice-president, Mary Melissa Mercy. It was Mercy who made Elvira the most uncomfortable. She just wasn't . . . right. And she was just too healthy. Unhealthily healthy. If there was such a thing.

Elvira paused at the door. There were voices coming from inside the office. Chanting.

It sounded to Elvira McGlone like some very weird aerobics class. Mary Melissa was calling out disjointed phrases, the others responding with even weirder mantras.

"The stomach is the center."

"Where life begins."

"No place in the afterlife."

"No place by God's side."

"The death of the stomach is the death of life."

"The homage to our God."

"The skeleton in the tree, symbolizing our strength and power."

"The burial of the innards."

"The Final Death."

The faddists must be talking shop again, Elvira decided.

When she pushed open the door to the room, Elvira McGlone discovered that these Three-G staffers weren't as strict with their vegetarianism as she had been led to understand.

The Three-G staff was arrayed around a long conference table. And they were not alone. They had been joined by several of the day's plant visitors.

These latter were not seated around the table, but splayed out on top of it.

Half of the tourists had been stripped of their skin, and their pulpy red subcutaneous flesh oozed blood. The rest were in the process of being eviscerated by members of the Three-G staff. Bloody strings of internal organs were being dragged from freshly gouged openings in the visitors' bellies. Hearts feebly pumped their last into small silver goblets. Some of the carcasses were being hauled out the broken window of Mary Melissa Mercy's office and into the garden beyond.

The pine floor was awash with blood. It was spilling from the drunkenly tilted silver goblets lifted to blood-smeared mouths.

The Vegans were actually drinking blood!

Elvira McGlone's mouth fell open, uncomprehending. A few Three-G staff members glanced up at her, their hands and faces streaked with red, their eyes hungry and animallike.

At the center, surveying all, Mary Melissa Mercy sat quietly on her desk, her clothes immaculate, her manner that of the calmest CEO. She, too, looked over at Elvira McGlone.

Elvira's brian worked furiously, trying to sort out the horrors her eyes beheld and at the same time determine some way to save herself from the fate of the pathetic half-human corpses littering her superior's office. If business school had taught Elvira McGlone anything at all, it was how to think on her feet.

"Oh, dear," she said, a sort of quavering earnestness in her voice. "If this is a bad time for you, I can come back later."

She grabbed for the doorknob to pull the door shut.

Chapter 18

Grimly, Harold W. Smith led Remo into the security wing of Folcroft.

Entry into this area of the sanitarium was severely restricted. Medical staff were required to obtain special clearance before passing through the double-locked steel doors. Dr. Smith reviewed all applicants personally.

"Yes," Smith was saying, "this food-product tampering does bear a remarkable resemblance to events fifteen years ago. But as for the Leader's involvement, I believe Chiun is mistaken. It must be someone else. Perhaps the Leader had an ally or protege?"

Remo shook his head. "Chiun is positive it's the Leader," he said firmly. "End of story."

"Er, yes," said Smith, unconvinced. "I only wish you had informed me of your progress. We could have coordinated. The loss of Don Pietro is most regrettable."

Remo glared at Smith. "Would you be happier if I'd gotten zapped, too?"

"I might have come up with some alternative," Smith said.

"Give it a rest, Smitty," Remo growled. "We were on the damned assignment before you put the key in the ignition."

Stung, Smith reached down to buckle his belt. The movement brought a fresh wave of pain to his stomach, and he turned his head to conceal his grimace from Remo.

"Something wrong, Smitty?" Remo asked suddenly.

"Ulcer," Smith said quickly.

"Try milk."

"The local dairy raised the price a nickel."

"Then die, if saving a freaking nickel's worth that much to you," Remo growled.

The first door to the right along the two-tone green corridor was closed, but as they passed it, Remo peered through the window. Beyond the wire-mesh double pane of glass he saw a wasted blond figure covered by a thin white sheet. Jeremiah Purcell. Better known as "the Dutchman." The pupil of Chiun's first student, Nuihc. Now a cataleptic vegetable. Another ghost from Remo's past.

"One less fish in the sea," Remo said.

"That one will never bother us again," Smith said flatly.

"I've heard that line before."

They passed on, Remo's expression tight and worried.

"The Leader is in the next room," Smith said.

The CURE director pushed the thick steel door open and stepped into the darkened room.

There was only one bed inside. It was positioned against a side wall, beneath a large picture window. The venetian blinds were drawn over the window, obscuring the bars and the thirty-foot drop to the ground below. Only a hint of sunlight shone in through the overlapping white slats.

An ancient figure, like a honey-encrusted mummy, lay quietly in the bed. Assorted lifesupport equipment hummed and beeped around him, like mechanical spiders sucking the juices from the dry husk that was the patient through a profusion of intravenous tubes.

"The bills at Houston General Hospital became exorbitant," Smith explained. For some reason, he felt compelled to whisper. "Two years ago they went completely through the roof. It was an economic decision to move the Leader here. Nothing more."

"With you it always is, Smitty," Remo said. He examined the old man in the bed, moving the head to one side to look for the scar behind the right ear inflicted when Remo had shaved the gyonshi's brain years before.

"This isn't the Leader," he said suddenly.

Smith seemed stunned. "What?" he asked, clutching at his rimless glasses as if they could offer some support.

"It isn't him!" Remo repeated hotly. "They pulled a switch on you! There's no scar behind the ear!"

Smith was shaking his gray-haired head. "Impossible!"

He leaned over to study the face of the man in the bed.

Obviously he was quite old. And he had distinctively Oriental features: the Mongoloid eye fold, the hairless chin, small nose. Unquestionably Chinese.

The patient's hands had been positioned peacefully, like those of a corpse, on his pigeon chest. They were gnarled and wrinkled. The index finger had the same guillotine-shaped fingernail Remo had described to Smith years ago. Smith had ordered it removed when the patient was first brought to Folcroft, but it proved too strong for the sturdiest set of clippers. The staff had finally just left it alone.

Smith stared closer at the nail. He thought he had detected something. Something that shouldn't have been there.

There! A twitch . . .

"Odd," Smith muttered. "There shouldn't be any movement at all." He leaned closer, curious.

"Smitty! Get back!"

Remo leapt forward. Too late. The nail was in Harold Smith's throat before the CURE director had a chance to process his surprise.

The sharpened nail withdrew. As Smith lurched to one side, Remo caught him and pulled him away from the stirring figure on the bed. A trickle of blood slid down the length of Smith's narrow throat and seeped into the cheap fabric of his shirt collar. Remo set Smith in a chair near the bed, as the patient's eyes opened. The desiccated head rose slightly from the pillow, only to quiver and fall back, as if having exhausted its last bit of strength.

"You have failed, gweilo," the patient wheezed through a feeding tube. "Prepare you for your Final Death." The old man's hand shot toward his own throat, eager to end his existence. His fingers were fast for a man his age, but Remo's were faster.

Remo caught the hand while it was still a foot away from reaching its mark. It quivered in the air, as the old man attempted to comprehend why he had failed. When he saw Remo's hand curled around his own bony wrist it was as if he were seeing a hand for the first time, and it was something frightening and alien. A look of terror crossed his emaciated features, and he attempted to force his throat forward into his frozen hand. His stringy neck trembled with the effort. His old eyes seemed unaware of Remo's index finger on his forehead, casually holding him down.

The gyonshi looked up uncomprehendingly, glancing left and then right, finally settling on Remo's angry features. "We are of the undead," his dry lips intoned. "The undead fear not the Masters of Sinanju."

"Yeah?" Remo said harshly. "Let's see if the undead feel pain." His fingers stabbed into the old man's side.

The puckered eyelids shot wide in shock. The orbs beneath were bloodshot and yellowed. The old man howled in pain like a skewered rat.

"I'll take that as a yes," Remo said. "Where is the Leader?"

"Consigning the stomach-desecrators to the Final Death," the old gyonshi wheezed, his mushroom-colored tongue stabbing desperately at the room's claustrophobic air.

"Not specific enough." Remo's hand dug in deeper. Not enough to shock the system and kill the old man, but enough to induce pain such as he had never before experienced. "Where?" Remo asked again.

"I do not know!" the man shouted, his back arching in pain.

Remo could see the old Chinese was telling the truth. He decided to try a different tack. "How did you get here?" he demanded.

"In my previous living death, I was a patient at the Houston hospital," the other rasped. "The Leader's nurse came to me. The nurse helped me to become one with the Creed."

"The nurse?" Remo asked. "She's the one who infected you?"

The old man seemed puzzled. "Infected?" he asked.

"With her fingernail," Remo said.

"Infected," the old man chortled mockingly. "You blind fool!" His tone changed as Remo burrowed his hand in more deeply. The man sucked in a gulp of air over his blackened teeth. "She opened my mind to truths that will soon be understood by you as well, gweilo," he gasped.

"Who was this nurse?" Remo asked.

The old man's eyes circled the room one final time and locked on Remo's. They had the same strange, distant look as those of the other gyonshi.

"Mary Melissa Mercy was her blessed name," he rasped.

Remo asked, "Young? Super-healthy? Hair like a bonfire? Sensible white shoes?"

The old Chinese nodded. "She is responsible for placing me here in the Leader's stead. An honor I will cherish until the day I live in death." The old man seemed tired from his effort. His breathing had become a rattle.

Remo understood now. Mary Melissa Mercy. The woman from the Three-G health food company. The Leader had been there the whole time. And Chiun had known it. That's why he had led Remo away. It all made sense now, right down to the sensible shoes.

Remo looked down at the Chinese. "This is your lucky day," he said fiercely. "You get to die a second time."

He pressed the heel of his hand to the old man's throat, until he felt the fragile windpipe collapse under his viselike grip. The rheumy eyes bulged one final time, then the old man's head lolled to one side.

Remo looked around the room for something to use to cut the man's throat.

He found nothing. The room was spartan, even by Folcroft standards. There wasn't even a nightstand near the bed. An unnecessary luxury, it seemed, for a man who presumably had been a mere shell on life-support.

"Dammit!"

Time was pressing. Smith would need medical attention, even though Remo knew there would be little that could be done for him. If Chiun hadn't been able to resist the gyonshi toxin, then an ordinary man like Smith would be no match for it.

He would have left the gyonshi as he was but for Chiun. The Master of Sinanju had seen some special significance in the release of the weird orange smoke, so Remo, while not entirely understanding it, decided he would honor the ritual.

He'd find a scalpel or something in the medical wing of the facility. But for now he turned his attention back to Harold Smith.

He didn't know how badly Smith had been affected by the gyonshi poison. The CURE director seemed to be sleeping peacefully at the moment. He remained slumped in the chair where Remo had left him, his chin pressed down against his chest, breathing deeply. In fact, he looked as relaxed as if he had been embalmed.

Remo experienced a moment of unreality. Chiun stricken. Now Smith. It felt like the walls were closing in.

He recalled the tale Chiun had told him years ago, when a Master of Sinanju-Remo suddenly remembered his name had been Pak-had encountered the blood-drinking gyonshi in a Shanghai forest. There, the House of Sinanju had nearly been rendered extinct, as one by one Pak's servants' relatives were overcome by a mist that took the form of men with long, killing nails. Only by deceit and cunning had Pak compelled the bloodsuckers to spare him.

Now, untold generations later, Remo stood in Pak's sandals. And he found them cold.

Remo shook off his fear.

He decided to get Smith to a doctor, then return later to release the bad air of the dead man.

Remo stepped up to the chair and slipped his left hand behind Smith's stiff neck. His right found the backs of his employer's knees, and he started to gather the old man up.

At the moment of Remo Williams' maximum exposure, Harold Smith's eyes sprang open in a wild burst of energy. Remo felt the vibrations as Smith's heart rate increased almost fivefold.

Smith's hand shot up in a stunningly quick strike.

There was little time to react. Remo felt the sudden, unstoppable jab to his throat. His blood ran cold.

Remo Williams was spared only by the fact that Harold W. Smith was by nature a meticulously neat individual.

The older man's fingernails were always kept clipped and filed precisely. There were no sharp edges to pierce the skin. The blunt tip of his index finger merely poked the flesh of Remo's neck, like a soft eraser.

"Nice try," Remo snapped, dropping Smith back into the chair. A cold sweat trickled down the gully of Remo's back.

Hot-eyed, Smith tried again. This time, by holding his finger to Remo's throat and digging at his carotid artery, leaving only pale tracks that quickly faded.

Firmly, Remo removed Smith's hand and forced it into a harmless fist. Smith looked up, but the gray eyes that stared into Remo's were not those of Harold W. Smith. They were those of Don Pietro. Of the old gyonshi in the bed behind him. Of the Chinese couple. Of Sal Mondello. Of the black-clad Oriental with the creepy eyebrow who had ambushed Chiun.

They were the eyes of the Leader. The Leader who stared mockingly into Remo's soul through the vacant, dispossessed eyes of his superior.

And a voice that was unlike Smith's began to chant.

"The stomach is the center. The house of all life and death. Life begins and ends here. The soul dwells there. Destroy the stomach and destroy all life. We are the holy saviors of the stomach. We wander the earth as the undead, slaves to our God, punishers of all transgressors."

"Tell it to the head psychologist," Remo said bitterly, hefting Smith carefully into his arms.

He carried him out of the hospital room, knowing that his employer was as lost to him as the Master of Sinanju.

For there was no cure for gyonshism-except by slitting the throat and releasing the orange smoke that clogged Smith's lungs.

Remo knew he might have to perform that operation on Smith. And he would do it.

But who would free the Master of Sinanju from his living hell? For Remo knew he could never bring himself to cut the throat of the man who was more than a father to him-not even if Chiun himself were to beg for such a boon.

Chapter 19

Mary Melissa Mercy stood before the Leader in the security room at Three-G, Incorporated, the room he had been using as his headquarters. He was seated before a bank of television monitors.

"The Master of Sinanju has succumbed!" she trumpeted proudly.

The words thrilled him. So many years . . . so much wasted time . . . so hungry for vengeance. Now, fulfilled.

"He is dead?" the Leader asked eagerly.

"Better." The girl's tone seemed to shimmer with delight. "He has become one with the holy Creed. He is gyonshi now."

The Leader nodded. "The Taoist," he said, knowingly.

"Yes, Leader."

"The last any would suspect. Our bitterest enemy, but for Sinanju. The Shanghai Web proved true. The Master and his gweilo thought they had evaded each snare laid in their path. They did not dream that only through flight could they escape their doom. Only through flight."

His hands grasped the arms of the old-fashioned wooden chair that now served as his throne. He had once had a true throne of rosewood and rare gems, but Sinanju had robbed him of that glory. Just as they had robbed him of fifteen years of his life in death. The Final Death. But now his long years of shame had been expunged by the words of his gweilo nurse.

"The plan?" he asked, his blind pearl eyes upturned to where he sensed the girl to be.

The girl hesitated. "All is not well," she admitted.

A frown like a spring thundercloud passed across the Leader's shriveled purple features. "Explain."

"Their dead number only in the thousands, Leader. Not millions. Your requirements for the Final Death have not been achieved." She shrugged. "Not enough chicken-eaters, I guess."

The Leader seemed to relax ever-so-slightly. "The despised Master of Sinanju is no more?" he asked.

"Yes, Leader."

"If the Master can be stopped, cannot the pupil?"

Mary frowned. "Yes," she replied at length.

"Then where is the failure?"

"The failure is to your ancestors, Leader. To our Creed."

"Missy, this Creed of which you speak is as old as I, and older still. It is no more yours than the air you breathe, or the ground upon which you tread. The gyonshi will survive Sinanju, that is all that matters. Be it by a week, a day, an hour. The gweilo will come, and he will be consumed. Like the sacred blood that breaks our fast."

"But . . . the Final Death?"

"Will be achieved, Missy. There are other poisons. Plagues, famines, disease. If I am not here to carry out the work, it will be another. It will be you." He said it as an offhanded gesture. She was, after all, but a woman. And a white. She could be true to the Creed in spirit, but not in blood.

Mary Melissa Mercy's ample chest swelled with pride. "I will not let you down, O Leader."

He turned away from her, waving his guillotine-nailed hand in a shooing gesture. "I know you will not, my nurse."

Chapter 20

The Master of Sinanju knew not where he abided.

Upon regaining his senses, Chiun muttered a low curse for having allowed himself to fall victim to the Leader's trap.

The Leader knew what Chiun would do. Knew what he must do. It was the Leader himself who, years before, had infected the Sinanju elder with the gyonshi virus. The Leader knew of Chiun's father. It had been the Leader who had engineered his father's ultimate disgrace. If the elder of the village had succeeded in striking Chiun so many years ago, his plan would have come to fruition that much sooner. Sinanju would have ended then, the long bloodline severed.

But Sinanju had not ended. It lived. It lived in Chiun. It now lived in Remo as well.

Chiun got out of bed, setting his sandaled feet to the floor.

The Master of Sinanju glanced down at his feet. Most curious. It was unusual that the American doctors had not removed his sandals.

Chiun studied the room carefully. The walls were painted in two unappetizing shades of green. Folcroft. He did not know how he had gotten here. He hoped that someone other than Remo had found him with the Taoist. Remo would never allow him to live down the shame of letting a Chinaman land a blow, even if that Chinese had been a gyonshi bloodsucker. It would be just like Remo to overlook an important detail such as that.

The green room seemed smaller now. Much smaller. Only a quarter of the size it had been a moment before.

It must be the gyonshi poison, affecting my senses, the Master of Sinanju decided.

Chiun felt his neck. His hand came away in horror. Blood. His fingertips were coated in blood. There was a gash in his neck as wide around as a Sumerian gold piece.

It was strange his body had not gone to work to heal the wound. Stranger still that the American doctors who seemed to sprout up like dandelions, around the Fortress Folcroft of Emperor Smith had not bound his neck in thick sheets of disease-ridden bandages. That always seemed to be their answer to everything.

The room now appeared smaller still.

Chiun pressed his hand to his forehead. Beads of perspiration had formed there. They mingled with the drying blood and rolled onto his palm. He closed his hand delicately around them.

Something was wrong. A Master of Sinanju does not perspire without cause.

The walls continued to close in.

It could not be mechanical, this closing inward. The Master of Sinanju felt no vibration of gears grinding. He did not discern the walls moving toward him. Yet they were close enough that he could have reached out and touched them with his bloodstained fingers.

If this was some diabolic trap, whoever had engineered it had forgotten one thing.

He had forgotten to close the only door.

The Master of Sinanju padded out into the hallway. He was free.

When he looked back into the room, the walls had returned to the positions they had occupied when he first opened his eyes.

Chiun nodded to himself. There was no doubt now. The Leader's poison. It was the only explanation. His mind was playing tricks on him. It would cleanse itself soon enough.

The hallway was cast in a deep gloom. There were no lights on, and beyond the windows it was dark. Chiun did not know where such sparse light as there was originated.

He sharpened his senses. There was no one else nearby. He expanded his awareness. The entire building was empty.

At the end of the hall was a long wooden staircase. Padding to the top step, he descended this to the ground floor.

The stairs creaked beneath his feet.

That should not be. He was a Master of Sinanju.

Taking a sip of reviving air, Chiun took a cautious step. Still, the stair creaked in complaint. And it seemed as if there were more of them now. They stretched limitlessly into some infinite abyss below.

Something was desperately wrong. He continued, humiliation burning with every betraying creak.

Chiun touched his neck once more. The wound was as fresh as the moment it had been opened. It felt larger now. Even his neck felt larger. As if it too were growing to accommodate the expanding injury.

Suddenly, the stairs ended and Chiun found himself standing at the sterile entrance to Folcroft Sanitarium. The door was open, and the chill air of night blew in around Chiun's ankles.

He looked back. It was no longer the staircase behind him, but the door to Folcroft. Somehow he had ended up outside, beyond the door, and the door was closed.

He was being taunted. Tested.

But he did not fear. Fear he had banished long ago.

The Master of Sinanju tucked his hands into the sleeves of his kimono and disappeared into the gathering dark, where owls stared and called their eternal question.

"His neural activity just went off the charts!" Dr. Lance Drew studied the brain-wave monitor screen next to The Master of Sinanju's bed. On the screen a series of gently flowing waves had become a collection of sharp, almost vertical lines. They shot up, dropped down, and shot up again. Several disappeared off the top of the monitor, as if to escape their own frenetic energy.

A second doctor and three nurses had joined Dr. Drew at Chiun's bedside. Frantically, they pored over printouts and EKGs.

"What is it?" Remo asked anxiously. Smith lay docile where Remo had laid him, on the room's spare bed. Chiun's condition had gone critical just as Remo entered the room.

"I don't know," Dr. Drew said. "He was stable until just this minute. Now . . ." He shook his head. "I don't know what it is." He noticed Smith's prone form for the first time.

"What's the matter with Dr. Smith?" he asked.

"Same thing that's wrong with him," Remo said, nodding to Chiun.

One of the attending physicians went to Smith, checked his vital signs, and said, "He'll keep."

"Then give me a hand here," the doctor said, shaking his head. "We're in for a rough night."

A crisp professional voice interjected itself. "Doctor . . ."

It was one of the nurses. Chiun's face had twitched slightly, then returned to its parchment calmness. It resembled a death mask.

The doctor examined the monitor. The lines continued to spike dangerously. "If this keeps up, we're going to lose him," the doctor warned, glancing up at his colleagues. "He could burn out his entire nervous system."

Remo stood helplessly at Chiun's bedside. One of the nurses attempted to shepherd him to one side, but it was like pushing smoke. Each time he somehow shifted away without, apparently, moving his feet. She spoke gently of the need to give the physicians room to work. Two thick-wristed hands grasped hers and clapped them together. Not hard. But she couldn't separate her palms afterward.

She hurried off to her jeweler. Surely he would know how to un-weld her wedding ring from the one on her right ring finger.

"His heart rate's increased," the other doctor was saying.

"Respiration, too."

Remo hovered over Chiun's bedside, a spectator to a battle he could barely understand. The Master of Sinanju's life hung in the balance. Now Smith's as well. He'd probably be next.

"If only we knew what kind of infection we're dealing with," the doctor lamented at one point, "we'd have something to go on."

"It's Chinese," Remo said.

"Can you do better than that?" Dr. Drew demanded, not looking up.

"No," Remo admitted. What could he tell them that would help? They wouldn't believe the truth. And if they did, so what? Vampirism had no cure. Its victims were neither dead nor alive.

Remo's anxious eyes went to his mentor's face.

The Master of Sinanju was peaceful in repose. It was as if the medical team had forgotten there was a patient in the room, so busy were they monitoring their equipment. Languishing amid this nest of high-tech machinery, surrounded by white-clad Folcroft doctors and nurses, Chiun looked old and frail.

His face twitched spasmodically once again, then settled back into its normal pattern.

"If this is good-bye, Little Father," Remo said softly, "I swear no gyonshi will celebrate this day."

"What's that?" Dr. Drew asked distractedly. No answer. He looked up to see the door swinging shut behind Remo's resolute back.

After Remo had gone, Harold W. Smith sat up stiffly in bed. The pain in his stomach and throat were gone, although there was a slight tightening in his chest.

"Dr. Smith!" Dr. Drew exclaimed. "Please do not exert yourself! We will get to you in a moment!"

"Nonsense," Smith croaked, tightening the knot of his Dartmouth tie. "I feel fine."

"But the young man who brought you in here . . ."

"Do not concern yourself," he insisted, waving his hand in dismissal. "He is too prone to worry. I feel fine. Now if you will excuse me, I have a telephone call to make." He slid from the bed and stepped briskly from the room.

One of the nurses cocked an eyebrow. "Did he sound strange to you?" she asked the others.

"He always sounds strange," said the other nurse.

"Actually, that was the first time he ever sounded normal to me," said Dr. Drew. "And I've been on staff ten years."

"Why do you suppose he kept rubbing his fingernail?" the first nurse whispered to the second, as they resumed ministering to the old Korean.

He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that he had felt compelled to do so.

The night air was heavy with moisture. The dampness clung to his kimono. The dew on the freshly mowed grass collected in dollops on the tops of his feet.

Long Island Sound stretched out into infinity behind the sanitarium. No boats bobbed on its surface. No lights were visible. No starlight reflected in the lapping waves. The Sound was totally black, like spilled crude.

Chiun, Master of Sinanju, peered into the distance. Not totally black after all, he saw now.

Wallowing somewhere on the far horizon, there was a grayness. It swirled there for a moment in eternity and then shot out to either side, spreading outward from that single finite point until it had become great gray wings.

Wings which began to beat remorselessly toward shore, spreading and widening.

They became a tidal wave, covering the vast distance to the shore in mere seconds.

The gray wings of fog enveloped Chiun's legs, rolling in around him in thick currents, but not stirring the wispy hair clinging to his venerable chin and in puffs over his alert ears.

It moved across the shore, obscuring the huge building behind Chiun.

Soon there was nothing but fog all around. No sky, no ground, no sea. Just the fog.

And there was a blackness in it. Like an evil pit in a rotted peach. It was vague and indistinguishable one moment, solid the next. It leaped around Chiun in the protective haze of the swirling gray fog.

Chiun followed its movements impassively.

The black fog-within-the-fog split in two, then the two vaporous shapes became four, and the four, eight. They spun kaleidoscopic patterns around him, encroaching, then retreating, bold and timid by turns.

Chiun paid them no heed. He stared resolutely out to where the horizon had been.

"Sinanjuuuuu . . ." The word was a taunt.

Chiun ignored the voice.

There was no breeze, and there were no other sounds or smells. Chiun was not even certain if he stood on solid ground any longer. There was just the dampness of the fog against his face. And the circling black mist.

"Do you invite us in?" A chorus of voices this time.

Chiun remained fixated on a long-vanished point in space, refusing to answer.

"You are frightened," scoffed a single voice.

"He has much to fear," another agreed.

"Much indeed," a third chimed in. "For he remembers Shanghai."

Chiun spoke. "I fear not gyonshi vermin." He refused to focus on the mist.

"Then invite us in," the first voice dared.

"Invite us in now, Sinanju Master."

"It is an invitation to death," Chiun said blankly.

The black mist circled closer. "Do you fear death, O great Master of Sinanju?" the voice whispered mockingly in his ear.

Chiun's eyes remained shards of flint. "I was not referring to my own death, gyonshi mist." Chiun delicately removed his hands from his kimono sleeves. He intertwined his fingers before him so that they formed a yellow basket of bones.

In his heart, he prepared himself.

"You are invited in," he said softly.

The tightness in his chest had worsened.

The man Smith had been would have been concerned, but not overly so. He would have assumed that it was simple esophageal reflux, or his ulcer acting up again. Were it to persist, he would have had it checked in a few days.

The thing that Harold W. Smith had become, however, did not care at all. Smith was a mere vessel now. The latest adherent of an ancient Creed. An expendable extension of the Leader.

But this thing that inhabited the body of Harold W. Smith was also in possession of Smith's knowledge.

Although Smith did not fully understand all that was happening to him, the thing did.

The Leader was of the Creed, he knew. The Leader had helped what had once been Harold W. Smith to be reborn in death. The Leader was all-knowing. The Leader could explain his new purpose to Smith the Undead.

But the Leader was in danger.

This "Remo" was a threat to the Leader, who Remo believed dwelled in the Three-G, Incorporated, health food company in Woodstock, New York. He was on his way now.

Smith's secretary was not at her desk when the Smith-vessel stumbled toward its office. For some reason, the body was not fully responding to the commands issued by its brain.

It wanted to stand erect, but the body was hunched. It clutched at its chest, trying to hold the pain in. In this doubled-over manner, the Smith-thing crossed the office and dropped into the cracked-leather chair behind the desk.

It was an effort to call up a phone directory for upstate New York over the computer terminal, and secure the number. But this was done.

When the phone was finally answered, the pains in the Smith-vessel's chest had grown sharper and more localized. It began to sweat. The sweat was cold, clammy.

The breath came with difficulty. His left arm grew numb.

"You . . . must . . . must . . . warn . . . Leader," the Smith-thing wheezed into the phone receiver. "Remo . . . Sinanju . . . coming . . . uuuhhhh . . ."

The receiver dropped to the floor as the Smith-thing slumped forward onto the sparse wooden desk, clutching his left breast as if a stake had been driven through his ribs and into his heart.

In her Woodstock office, Mary Melissa Mercy delicately returned the receiver to its cradle and hurried off to inform the Leader that the Shanghai Web had snared another foe.

All that remained now was the hated gweilo.

Chapter 21

Mary Melissa Mercy knew at an early age that she would devote her life to nursing the sick. As far back as she could remember she had practiced her art. Bandaging the family dog. Listening to family hearts with a stethoscope fashioned from a Dixie cup and plastic hosing. Once, she had even tried to "inoculate" a neighborhood playmate with a rusty nail-which resulted in a severe case of tetanus.

Mary Melissa got to visit the playmate in the hospital, thus opening up an entire new world to her young imagination. A world that smelled disinfectant-clean.

As soon as she had graduated from high school, Mary Melissa Mercy enrolled in the Lone Star Nursing School. It was a dream come true. And why shouldn't it have been? If there was one thing Mary Melissa cared about, it was health.

She had never been sick a day in her life. When every other kid was suffering from colds and flu and measles and chicken pox, Mary Melissa was always in the pink of health. Even a case of the sniffles would have been unusual for Mary Melissa Mercy.

She attributed her remarkable good health to one thing and one thing alone: vegetarianism.

If nursing was Mary Melissa Mercy's vocation, then vegetarianism was her avocation.

It wasn't something she had to do in order to maintain her perfect figure. It wasn't something she thought she'd try because her peers did it. They were beef eaters. It wasn't something that had been forced on her by her parents.

It was because Mary Melissa Mercy couldn't stand the taste of blood.

Little did she realize that her twin passions and single phobia would collide mere weeks after graduating from the Lone Star Nursing School, in a small, poorly ventilated corner room in the terminal ward of Houston General Hospital.

The elderly patient in Room 334 was enshrouded in mystery. He was known to the staff as Mr. Nichols, which everyone agreed couldn't be his name, for he was unmistakably Chinese.

The old Chinese had been left at the hospital many years before by his grandson, a Remo Nichols. This young man had dropped twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to pay for the life-support systems, and quickly vanished. Before the money had run out more began coming in, to cover the spiraling cost of sustaining the old Chinese gentleman, but the grandson never returned to visit his comatose grandfather.

Mary Melissa thought that was disgraceful. The old man had been left there to waste away by a relative who had no intention of ever returning.

She took on that patient as a personal cause.

At first, Mary Melissa told herself she gave the man special attention only because of his personal situation. That was all. But in fact, as with everything else in her life, she had become obsessive about him.

She had been obsessive in her quest to become a nurse, obsessive in her strict adherence to vegetarian dogma, and now she was obsessive in her care of the terminally ill Chinese gentleman.

And the trigger for that obsessiveness was the fingernail. It couldn't have been anything else.

What is its purpose? Mary Melissa often wondered, as she trimmed the old man's hair and sponged his flaking, purplish skin.

She had tried at one point to trim the sharpened guillotine tip of the index fingernail, but it just would not cut. She even jutted the tip of her pink tongue through her pearl-perfect teeth and scrunched up her freckled forehead in determination as she bore down on the nail with all her might, but all she succeeded in doing was snapping her clippers. The nail remained smooth and shiny.

Mary Melissa would sit for hours, eating salads from the cafeteria and holding one-sided conversations with the old man, because she had read that even the comatose were sometimes cognizant of their surroundings. And who knew? Maybe she could talk him back to health.

Mary Melissa Mercy believed in miracles.

The nursing staff at Houston General thought she was as loopy as mating squid, but no one complained, because Mary Melissa Mercy was the only nurse who undertook the distasteful job of veggie-grooming without complaint.

One day, a miracle seemed to occur.

Over the rhythmic sounds of the ventilator that assisted the man's breathing, she heard a sound issue from parted purplish lips.

"Missy . . ."

"My name! You spoke my name! You can hear!"

"Missy . . ."

"I've gotten through to you!"

Later, Mary Melissa Mercy tried to explain her progress to the attending physician. He was a cynic.

"Nurse Mercy," he had said. "I know you're excited. But try to listen carefully. The patient is brain-damaged. He will never regain consciousness. He will never leave that bed, except for the county morgue."

"But he said my name! He called me Missy! Missy was my childhood nickname!"

"Missy," the doctor patiently explained, "is a very Chinese form of address when speaking to a young woman. I would not take any such vocalization seriously."

But Mary Melissa Mercy did take the patient's words seriously. In the weeks that followed, she devoted herself to the old Chinese.

She knew on an instinctual level that he realized she was in the room with him. She spoke to him for hours on end. About the weather. About current events. About her life-which consisted mainly of the same twelve-by-fifteen foot room the old man lived in.

Her ministrations were rewarded one late afternoon, with the flicker of a translucent eyelid.

Many in her profession would have disregarded such an event. They would have called it an example of "unfocused neural impulses," or something equally random, and gone on ignoring the old man.

But Mary Melissa Mercy had seen it. Seen it with her own two eyes.

Over the next few weeks there were more such twitches. Mostly around the eyes, but some were located in the hand. The one with the strange super-hard nail.

Mary Melissa was changing the old man's linen one day when his eyes snapped open completely. They were hideous. Like twin fungi. She did not back away in fear as some might have but moved closer to him, peering down into his dark, drawn face.

Mary Melissa Mercy had thought those eyes hadn't seen the light of day in more than six years, but the sight of them told her it had been much longer than that. They were so white, it was difficult for her to discern any pupil at all. She finally gave up trying. It didn't matter, however. He could see. Perhaps more clearly than a sighted man. Those blind, milky eyes bored into her very soul.

He forced two words from between thin lips.

"Reject . . . meat."

"Yes, yes!" Mary Melissa cried, thinking the patient had absorbed her lectures on proper Vegan diet.

As quickly as they had opened, the milky eyes closed again. The old man seemed tired from his effort. His eyes rolled and locked beneath their parchment lids. The twitching stopped for several days afterward, as he regained what little strength he had.

Mary Melissa Mercy told no one of the miracle she had wrought.

Over the course of the next year, the old man's strength increased. He seemed to possess a boundless determination to recover. It appeared to Mary Melissa that, even in his obviously advanced years, the old man had some overriding reason to cling to life. A drive. Something that compelled him to beat almost insurmountable odds to recover.

In the second month after that first time his eyes had opened, the old man began to speak in complete sentences. The words seemed to be Chinese. The voice struggled laboriously over the pronunciation, as the vocal chords vibrated for the first time in over a decade. A few English syllables seemed to pepper the subvocal murmurings.

The head would sway from side to side-that started shortly after he had begun opening his eyes-and he would wheeze out a stream of unintelligible nonsense.

The words he said most often sounded like "sin and chew." They seemed to trouble the old man greatly. Often the phrase would seem a curse; at times it was said almost reverentially, and at others, as a plea.

Mary Melissa was so interested in the old man that she went to the public library to try to find out what had caused him so much mental anguish. It took some doing, but finally she found it.

It was Sinanju-just some tiny little fishing village in Communist North Korea, nestled in the heavily industrialized western coastline. It didn't even appear on most maps, it was so small. Mr. Nichols had probably spent some time there as a boy, she decided.

Like most Americans, Mary Melissa Mercy lumped the entire Asian continent into one big neighborhood.

The old man became more animated as time wore on. He also became consciously aware of Mary Melissa's presence. Eventually, he told her in his halting English that he had learned the language thanks to her and her hours of disconnected ramblings. He told her that, despite appearances, they were much alike.

"Really?" she asked.

"We do not soil our stomachs with the flesh of animals."

"How did you know I was a vegetarian?"

"We are one Creed, you and I, Missy," rasped the Chinese named Nichols. "Soul mates. Connected in mind and spirit."

A one-sided relationship, akin to idol worship, began to develop between the old man in Room 334 and Mary Melissa Mercy.

Then the bottom fell out. Orders were passed into the terminal ward saying that the old man was to be moved out of the hospitial at the end of the month. When Mary Melissa Mercy tried to find out where, she was told the new location was not known.

In tears, she ran to tell the poor old man of his fate.

He was sitting up in bed, propped against a half-dozen pillows. The blinds were opened wide and he was basking in the midday sun, which made his scaly skin appear livid and strange.

"Sir," Mary Melissa had said, sobbing. "They are taking you from me."

He smiled thinly-a corpse's grimace. "Taking me where?" he asked.

"I don't know," Mary Melissa answered. "I guess it must be your grandson's doing."

"Grandson?" he asked. His purple head still moved from side to side, like that of a cobra weaving to unseen music.

Mary Melissa had never mentioned the ungrateful youth to Mr. Nichols before. She had hoped to spare him the grief.

"Yes," she admitted. "He brought you here years ago. He has paid for you to stay here all these years," she added brightly, as if to sugarcoat the familial ingratitude.

The smile vanished. "Missy," he said coldly, "the grandson of whom you speak is no grandson of mine."

Mary Melissa Mercy shrugged-a wasted gesture. "I know, but what are you going to do with family?" She tried to joke, but her heart was breaking. In truth, she felt closer to the old Chinese man lying in that hospital bed than she did to her own kin. They all ate meat and drank the blood, which they called "juice."

"This 'grandson' is Sinanju," he spat. It was the first time she had heard him use that word since regaining full consciousness.

"He's from Korea?" Mary Melissa had asked. She was puzzled. A doctor had once told her that the man who dropped the old Chinese gentleman off had been Caucasian.

The old man beckoned Mary Melissa Mercy closer. His breathing was labored. She had grown used to his rank breath more than a year before. "He is not what he appears, this gweilo," he said. "He is servant to an ancient evil, as is his master. Both must be stopped."

Mary Melissa Mercy felt a strange tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach. There was something otherworldly about this elderly Chinese as he stared blankly up at her. There was something in those eyes that held the key to her destiny. She just knew it.

"It is this gweilo who rendered me immobile," he said, "condemning me to a living death. You will help me to stop him. You will help me to end the line of Sinanju."

"I don't understand. I thought Sinanju was a place."

"Sinanju is a cult of assassins. I am only one of their many victims. They have warred with my people for hundreds of years."

"Do they eat meat?" Mary Melissa asked slowly.

"They are duck-eaters."

"Then I hate them. I had baby ducks when I was eight."

Mr. Nichols nodded weakly. "You will help me to achieve the Final Death longed for by my Creed."

This was it! This was why he had pulled himself back from the brink of death. A mission! Mary Melissa could tell the old man was about to impart some great wisdom to her. This was why she had stayed so long. This was why she had found him so endlessly fascinating.

He brought his gnarled index finger into the air. Sunlight reflected off of the tip of the razorsharp nail. It remained poised there, as if to assist the old man in making some great oratorical point. But no more words came.

The finger dropped, slicing into the side of Mary Melissa Mercy's exposed neck in a delicate, almost loving gesture.

And her mind was opened to the universe.

Mary Melissa Mercy, gyonshi, obediently arranged the patient switch. She found another old Chinese man to take her benefactor's place. He was in the surgical wing for a gall bladder operation. It was easy enough to do. Practically no one but Mary had been in Room 334 for almost three years. They would not recognize the difference.

She had wheeled Mr. Nichols-whom she now addressed as "the Leader"-to an access elevator in the surgical wing and out of the hospital.

She had stayed on at Houston General only long enough to shape and strengthen the nail of the imposter to match that of the Leader by applying a varnish made from an ancient recipe.

And then they had simply vanished.

It had taken several years for the Leader to regain his strength. Mary Melissa Mercy knew that he had recovered as much as his aged body would allow.

Several years to recreate the ancient poison. Several years for the Leader to perfect his scheme. Several years to engineer the downfall of Sinanju, a scheme which was approaching fruition at last.

And now, the evil Master of Sinanju had been defeated. They had been warned that his protege, the gweilo, was en route. He would be defeated as well.

Mary Melissa Mercy didn't know who it was who had called her to tell her that Remo was on his way, and she didn't care. She suspected it was whomever employed Sinanju in America. There was no other person who could have had knowledge of Remo's next move. And that person had become gyonshi now, as well.

The afternoon wind blew a fragrant lilac aroma through the huge broken window of Mary Melissa's Three-G office. She hadn't bothered to have maintenance fix the window. Right now they were too interested in eviscerating rats in the boiler room to install a new pane anyway.

She stepped through the window and out into the lush garden.

The smell was stronger here, and she lifted her slender nose to the air and inhaled greedily. They were here. All around her. The sacrifices.

From every tree in the thick garden there hung a skeletal corpse. Strips of flesh still clung to ribs. Blood still dripped slowly and deliberately from dangling toes.

The ground had been freshly turned in splotchy patches throughout the garden. The buried internal organs spread widening stains of darkness around the earthy mounds.

This was the smell that Mary Melissa Mercy so loved. The smell of the unclean meat-eaters. The smell of death. It reminded her of her first hospital visit.

She was even getting used to the taste of blood finally. But only because she had been assured drinking blood was central to the practice of the gyonshi religion-which it was.

The Leader sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the main path. A plaid afghan was tucked neatly around his knees and his hands were cradled carefully in his lap. But for the array of corpses that swayed and rattled like bony wind chimes in the breeze around him, he would not have looked out of place on the porch of any rest home in America.

"The gweilo will be here soon, Leader," Mary Melissa Mercy said.

He looked up at her, his white eyes unblinking. He smiled evilly.

"We will be ready, Missy," he said softly. "The Shanghai Web demands one last victim. Vengeance shall be ours. The Final Death will achieve dominion over this tired world." He paused, as if to drink in a vision only his sightless eyes could perceive.

"And for our eternal enemies, the Ultimate Death . . ."

Chapter 22

Night was falling on the longest day of Remo Williams' life.

He steered his rented car through the dying light, his face a mask of single-minded concentration.

Remo racked his brain, trying to remember all that Chiun had told him years before about the Chinese vampires, but the images were intertwined with flashes of other, more personal, memories.

He pushed these away.

The vampires cannot enter a residence unless invited, Remo recalled. He was pretty sure of that one. A lot of good that did him now. They were all over Three-G like glassy-eyed cockroaches. And they were as fast as Sinanju, but not as strong.

The first time Sinanju had encountered the gyonshi Creed had been in a forest near what would later become Shanghai, and they had asked the Master of the time if he would invite them in. Did that mean all Remo had to say was "no" and they'd leave him alone long enough to kill them? Who knew? It didn't seem reasonable, but neither did the idea of vegetarian vampires who drank blood.

They were shape-changers as well. Remo remembered that much of the legend. Would he find himself facing a gyonshi vampire one minute and a spitting cobra the next?

And they hid in mist, he recalled. Or maybe they became the mist itself. Remo wasn't certain which. The legends were vague.

All he could call up beyond that were images of bats and wooden stakes and garlic and castles-distortions of the reality that had given rise to the European vampire tradition.

His thoughts turned again to Chiun, lying alone, possibly dying, on that hospital bed back at Folcroft.

He was in this one alone, he knew.

Smith would be of no help. For all Remo knew, he had joined the rest of the vampires by now. At least Chiun had been saved that ignominy. His nervous system had given out well before the gyonshi virus could turn him into one of the undead.

Remo gripped the steering wheel of his rented car tightly and raced along the twisting mountain road. Woodstock lay ahead. And the hilly eminence that was Three-G Incorporated.

In the blink of an eye, on the shore that had no name because it did not belong to reality, the black mist congealed into human form.

The black-clad figure was sickly thin, with cadaverous features and pale, almost albino pigmentation.

The guillotine-shaped nail on its index finger shot forward toward Chiun's throat in a near perfect jab. Near perfect, however, was not good enough.

Chiun easily sidestepped the blow and fired his elbow in a backward thrust, crushing the windpipe and sending a font of blood squirting from the stricken creature's mouth.

Its eyes wide open in surprise, the gyonshi fell. The gray fog swirled around the body and accepted it. It congealed, squeezing like a vaporous fist, and slowly vanished from sight.

Chiun wheeled. Two more of the shapes were emerging from the mist behind him. They were as pale as the first, their cheeks sunken, their teeth clearly visible through the thin, almost transparent facial skin. Both raised their hands in the air, assuming a menacing posture.

Chiun took this as an invitation and sent both fists rocketing into the sternums of the two creatures. They howled in pain as twin rivers of blood erupted from their chests. They, too, retreated in the ever-thickening fog like skulking dogs.

"We are shape-changers as well, Master of Sinanju," the first gyonshi voice whispered in his ear. "Do you not fear us?"

"A Master of Sinanju fears nothing, Chinese vermin," Chiun replied haughtily.

"No . . . ?" the voice faded in the distance. The remaining misty shapes vanished amid the swirl of gray fog, leaving the Master of Sinanju standing alone.

The fog continued to move in circular patterns around him. It was as if his world were no bigger than the nearest visible point, only five feet all around him.

A sound fluttered somewhere in the swirling vapor.

Chiun's hunting ears were alert to it immediately. It was a graceful glide. More akin to a ballet movement then a footfall.

Something about it was familiar. Almost . . .

A lone figure stepped from out of the fog. He wore a black business suit and tie. His face was flat and smooth. His features were not unlike those of Chiun as a young man. And although his stomach bled profusely, the vision that stood before Chiun did not seem to mind.

Chiun's eyes widened in disbelief. "Nuihc!" he hissed.

The younger man smiled. "You are looking well, Uncle."

And now the Master of Sinanju knew he stood face-to-face with his greatest pain-alone.

The first thing Remo noticed, on driving up the wide strip of asphalt that serviced Poulette Farms Poultry corporated, was the unnatural quiet.

The second thing he noticed were the bodies.

The bodies were even quieter.

The building was surrounded on all four sides by an eight-foot-high hurricane fence. The fence ran parallel to the road and veered off along the property line.

Someone had snipped the chain link from its fastenings and rolled it up into two gigantic tubular coils at two corners of the fence. Suspended along the long, bare metal support bars were Poulette Farms employees, hanging by their feet like elongated pale-pink pigs in a Chinese butcher shop window.

And in the center of them all was Henry Poulette himself, surrounded by his omnipresent gaggle of secretaries. His gentle tufts of yellow hair blew softly in the mild mountain breeze.

The difference between the Henry Cackleberry Poulette of the moment and the Henry Cackleberry Poulette of Poulette Farms' award-winning commercials was that in the commercials, Poulette's internal organs were tastefully tucked away in their proper body cavities under his well-tailored suit. Not buried in a mound of bloody dirt directly below his inverted head. Remo knew from past encounters what the mounds concealed.

Remo saw that all of Poulette's employees had suffered the same fate. Throats slit. Blood drained. Organs extracted and buried. It was some sort of combination of the Leader's vampire Creed and the ultimate vegetarian revenge.

Remo drove past the still, upended bodies toward the glistening patch of glass in the hills above.

It was time for the final showdown between Sinanju and the gyonshi.

"Behold your handiwork, Uncle," Nuihc proclaimed. He spread his hands wide. The raw wound in his stomach continued to pour blood into the cloud below him. Chiun saw that Nuihc's feet were invisible in the half-foot-thick blanket of fog. He maintained a pensive silence.

"Not the best stroke available to you," Nuihc continued, indicating his own stomach. "But one that effectively took me by surprise. Still, it is rather unlike you, Uncle. You are usually more tidy than this."

Chiun's face had become impassive. He stared silently beyond Nuihc, his expression carved from alabaster. He was remembering a time from many years ago. Nuihc had wrested control of the village of Sinanju from Chiun, usurping the title of Reigning Master. Remo, wounded, virtually helpless, had entered into mortal combat on Chiun's behalf. For the Master of Sinanju was forbidden to harm a fellow villager.

Remo had had no chance. He had stood on the threshold of death. And although it went against all tradition, Chiun had inserted himself into the fight, plunging his left index nail into his first pupil's abdomen so quickly that no one saw this and Remo received credit for the victory.

"You ignore me?" Nuihc asked. "After all of these years, not even a greeting?"

"You are not real," Chiun said tightly.

Nuihc laughed. A low, heartfelt rumble that started in his bleeding belly and burst out from his pocked moon of a face. "Is this the excuse for your rudeness?" he asked. "Let me assure you then, Uncle, that I am as real as you are at this very moment. I am as real as this place of your devising, and the demons you now must face."

Chiun became slightly more interested. "You know of this place?"

Nuihc nodded. "As do you, Uncle. Here you are neither alive nor dead. Here is the 'undiscovered country' that the Englishman Shakespeare spoke of. This is the Ultimate Death. Here, your worst fears are realized." Nuihc bowed. "And I am honored to be one of your worst fears, O great Master Chiun." The arrogance of Nuihc had finally asserted itself. His face became angry. The personality change was jarring. "You murdered me!"

"You would have murdered my son," Chiun countered harshly, "cur of an ingrate!"

"Your 'son'!" he scoffed. "A white! Not even of the village!"

"He is more of our village than you, wicked son of my good brother!" Chiun spat.

"And is this why you killed me? For if he is truly the reason, you sullied your line for naught. He is doomed to share your fate, gyonshi thrall."

Chiun drew himself up haughtily, saying, "Remo will survive. He is the dead white tiger of legend. The Shiva avatar. I have seen this with my own eyes." But Nuihc had struck a nerve. There was concern in Chiun's voice. The evil Chinese bloodsuckers had decimated the House of Sinanju in times past.

Nuihc's expression became sly. "If the Master of Sinanju can be beaten by the gyonshi, so too can his heir," he said flatly. "As your father was bested, you were as well."

"Do not mention my father, betrayer of Sinanju!" Chiun flared. "My ears bleed, that your false tongue invokes his noble spirit."

Nuihc smiled thinly. "You accuse me of betrayal. So be it. But my treachery, as you call it, at least was known to all. Yours is far more insidious. You broke one of the most sacred tenets of the House of Sinanju to banish me here, uncle." He placed his hands on his hips. "I accuse you of treachery, Master Chiun. Your father accepted his responsibility for slaying the village elder, while you have not." Nuihc took one step back into the mist. Chiun saw that the wound in his stomach had miraculously healed. "I demand atonement for my murder!"

Chiun shook his aged head. "I will not be dictated to by a dog of your color," he hurled back. "You, who had every advantage and squandered it. You, who would take the wisdom of your ancestors and twist it to your nefarious ends. You, who scoff at every tradition you should hold most dear." But even as he spoke the words, doubts began to gather in Chiun's mind.

Nuihc's grin broadened. "I am most sorry, uncle. It is, as the French say, a fait accompli." He waved his hand, and the black mist seemed to appear at Chiun's feet-only this time it was not a mist but a yawning maw of a hole. And as Chiun slipped down into this funnel of inky blackness, all he could hear echoing off the endless slick walls was Nuihc's fading, taunting laughter.

The sun was setting in a dazzling reflection of orange and yellow as Remo entered the Three-G, Inc., building through a shattered window. The place seemed to be falling into disrepair.

As twilight approached, weird shadows cascaded along the gleaming hallways, sending spears of darkness along walls and into corners.

Remo wasn't sure what to expect. He didn't care.

He had only one purpose. To destroy the Leader. He was the reason all this had happened. He had engineered this entire scenario for one purpose and one purpose alone. Revenge. He had baited the trap, and Remo had willingly stepped in.

The dying sun was expending its last shred of fiery orange brilliance as Remo entered a wide reception area. A sign posted near a horseshoe-shaped desk at the center of the room read TOUR BEGINS HERE. Beyond the sign was a long hallway, off of which were dozens of closed doors.

Remo concentrated every fiber of his being on the doors in the hallway beyond. He stood stock still, his hands at his sides, as he let his mind and senses sweep down the darkening hall more effectively than any electronic sensing device.

Nothing. No movement. No breathing. There was no one in any of the offices.

Remo was about to move down the hall when he heard the first pre-attack warning noises.

And he knew he had made a cardinal mistake for someone in his profession. He had overthought his adversary. While concentrating his senses on the offices up the hallway, he had allowed his opponent to get the drop on him. Literally.

Section upon section of styrofoam ceiling panels caved in above him, showering the entrance area with a blanket of manufactured snow. Six gyonshi dropped from the newly made openings with surprising agility, bent at the knees, and sprang up at him. A flurry of long-nailed fingers groped for his throat.

Twisting, Remo evaded the outstretched hands and sent a fist up into the groin of the nearest man. He was rewarded with the satisfying crack of a pelvis. The man howled in pain and dropped to the floor, grabbing at his injury and accidentally stabbing himself in the thigh with his own guillotine fingernail. He howled.

On the recovering step Remo executed a backward somersault, inches ahead of the glittering ring of poisoned claws, to land on one knee on the marble-topped reception desk. He scooped up a silver letter opener and hopped lightly to the floor.

"Mail call," he told the gathering swarm.

As one, the five remaining vampires lunged. Arms slashing, teeth bared, they closed in on Remo.

"Reject meat. . . ." they chorused.

"Say no to blood," Remo shot back.

When they were an arm's length away, Remo took the blade in his teeth and grabbed the wrists of the two on the leading edge. He yanked them toward him.

Momentum carried them across the reception area.

The pair crashed through one of the huge panes of glass that made up the outer wall of the room, sending an explosion of glass out onto the well-tended front lawn of Three-G, Inc. Remo flicked a third after them. He saw with a cruel grin that one of the bodies had been impaled grotesquely on a triangular shard of glass. The point jutted through the neck of the lifeless gyonshi, and a film of orange smoke rose into the chilly night air. The others were already getting unsteadily to their feet, like zombies burdened with osteoporosis.

The remaining pair thrashed and lunged, desperately trying to infect Remo with their guillotine nails.

Darting under their attacks, Remo caught up their wrists and, with a jerking movement, forced their sharpened nails into one another's throats. They fell apart, going in opposite directions and surrendering a haze of orange smoke.

Remo spat the letter opener back into his hand as the two survivors he had hurled through the window clambered and stumbled back into the fray.

One was a man, the other a woman. The woman seemed unharmed, but the man, about fifty and portly, was bleeding profusely from an open head wound. He was pale and weaved unsteadily. Remo guessed he was in shock from blood loss. Assuming vampires can experience shock, that is.

The man nearly fell into Remo's arms. He tried to claw at him with his gyonshi fingernail, but seemed winded.

"Reject meat.. . ." he gasped. "Accept the Final Death."

"Sorry, pal," Remo said softly. "Sister Mary Margaret would never understand." With blinding swiftness, he sliced the man's throat cleanly.

The final gyonshi woman, in a torn black Moody Blues concert T-shirt, lunged for him. Remo simply swatted her hand down, as one might scold an angry child, and drew the letter opener across her neck.

With a shriek she floundered away, even as her gurgling throat dribbled vile orange smoke.

Six down, Remo thought. But how many more to go?

The first man Remo had felled still writhed in agony on the floor. As Remo squatted down beside him the man attempted to scratch him with his sharpened nail, while cradling his mangled lower body with his free hand.

Remo felt pity for him. Not rage, not anger. Only pity. These health-food fanatics were all pawns in a twisted demon's game of revenge. Now that Chiun was lost, it was Remo the Leader was after. And the Leader would send anyone and anything into the fray rather than face Remo himself.

After Remo had sliced the man's throat, he didn't even watch the silent plume of orange smoke. He was already walking deeper inside the Three-G building, ready for whatever horrors Sinanju's old adversary had concocted as part of his sick game of revenge.

He was back in Sinanju.

The main square of the village was crowded. The villagers shouted cheers of encouragement. The buildings were newly whitewashed. Every nail was shiny and new. The village had never been so neat. Even the mud flats had become a golden beach.

Nuihc stood before him, arms crossed absently across his chest. He wore a two-piece black fighting outfit.

"Why have you brought me here?" Chiun asked. He did not look at the people of Sinanju. Their shouts were for Nuihc, not Chiun.

"It is not my doing, Uncle," Nuihc said, "but yours."

Chiun shook his head and inhaled deeply. "It is not I," he said.

"You," Nuihc said, smiling evilly. "And you alone. The poison coursing through your system has ripped away layers of your pretentious inhibitions, Uncle. Is there some ghost you have yet to exorcise?" Chiun did not respond. Nuihc's eyes opened wide, as if suddenly alighting on a stark truth. "Perhaps we have discovered the one thing the infallible Chiun fears: his own unsavory past."

Chiun brought his eyes level with Nuihc's. His nephew's orbs burned with undisguised hatred. Their gazes locked.

"The ignorant dog barks at its own stink," he said, his voice dripping with contempt.

Nuihc, once Master of Sinanju, struck up a fighting stance.

"Defend yourself, decrepit one!" he shouted.

Chiun stood his ground. "I will not fight you, shamed one."

Nuihc's eyes became angry steel slits. "Ah, I understand. Only when your opponent is unsuspecting, unprepared, do you strike. Here, where there are eyes to witness your treachery, you hold back. Time has addled your withered mind, uncle. You have forgotten that I do not share your compunctions. If you do not defend yourself, I will slay you like a dog in the street."

Chiun lowered his head. "So be it," he said quietly. And he turned his back in contempt.

Nuihc's eyes went wild. "I will have my revenge!"

Nuihc flew at Chiun, his index finger extended in a forward thrust-the identical stroke Chiun had landed against him years before.

Chiun would not react. He would not move to defend himself. If his physical fate was somehow sealed with his fate in this internal world of his fevered devising, then he would leave the outcome to destiny.

But he did not have the chance.

Against his will, he felt his body move. Nuihc's blow encountered vacant air as Chiun whirled, his arm swooping in a deadly arc, an out-thrust fingernail sweeping for his nephew's open chest.

At the instant the stroke should have registered, Nuihc was no longer there. In his place, several paces removed, was a man much older. He was looking at a young boy nearby. Neither had been there a moment before, Chiun was certain of that.

There was something about the older man in Nuihc's place that Chiun should have recognized, but there was no time to think. The man was stalking the boy. And his hand was streaking across the vacant space between them in molasses-slow milliseconds.

The boy! Something about the boy was familiar! The Master of Sinanju's hand moved with the speed of a thunderbolt and the grace of a swan. He intercepted the blow. Stopped the hand. Saved the boy.

The attacking man dropped to the dust of the ground, crumpled, becoming dust himself. Chiun looked to the boy.

The boy stared back at him. He seemed fearful. Shocked. And sad. Very, very sad.

He looked up at Chiun with hauntingly familiar eyes that tore at Chiun's heart and rended his soul.

Chiun knew who the boy was. It was the young Chiun. And he had somehow become his own father.

The villagers gathered around the village elder, whom Chiun had felled. He heard their curses, felt their angry, frightened glances.

He was at once father and son. Unable to avoid destiny. Unable to evade his past.

"Murderer!" they cried.

"Betrayer!"

"You killed your own nephew, one of us!"

"Who will be next? For none of us is safe!"

And in the prison that was his mind, Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, dropped to his knees and let the suppressed anguish of nearly six decades pour out onto the dusty main square of his native village.

Chapter 23

The elderly Chinese known only as the Leader sat on his rude wooden throne in the security surveillance room of Three-G, Incorporated. The thick metal door was double-locked, and virtually impossible to break down with anything less than a point-blank Stinger missile strike.

A line of Sony closed-circuit television screens displayed in static-filled images the drama being played out in the complex around him.

The Leader was oblivious to the pictures on the screens. Mary Melissa Mercy was not. She continued her running narration.

"He has gotten through the first wave, Leader," she said, a twinge of nervousness in her voice.

The Leader smiled, exposing snaggly rows of stained teeth.

For this great moment, the Leader had donned a scarlet-and-gold gown over leggings and boots. A rising phoenix, its wings wide, was a stitchery of flame on his chest.

"The surprise attack failed because surprise was not on our side," he explained. "The gweilo knew of us. But we have not failed. We will never fail. Ours is the true faith."

Mary Melissa Mercy stared down at a TV screen. On it, the gweilo Remo could be seen gliding stealthily down a corridor, away from the reception area and toward the atrium. "Will the second phase succeed?" she asked.

The Leader's smile widened until Mary Melissa could see the pits of his blackened back teeth. "With a certainty," he said. "Sinanju can be defeated by sheer numbers. This, I know. This, I know. As in Shanghai, so in this place."

His head continued to sway from side to side, as if to deny his own pronouncement.

Remo found himself in the darkened garden at the center of the Three-G complex. It was not exactly the Eden its designers had intended.

He saw dismembered bodies swinging lazily from the thickest tree branches, suspended by wire and rope. The putrid smell of rotted flesh assaulted his nostrils. The air was thick with swarms of buzzing flies.

And there were others there, as well. Hiding among the dead, pretending to be dead when they were only the undead. They had smeared one another with the blood of their victims to disguise themselves, but Remo knew they were there before they'd made their first move.

They roused, like sleepy pink bats stretching emaciated wings.

Remo deliberately had walked to the center of the garden in an attempt to appear unprepared, allowing them to surround him.

At his approach, two gyonshi dropped from the blackened branches of a dead oak tree like ugly fruit. One leapt over a heavy stone bench positioned at the edge of the path. A second was about to follow suit when the first rocketed backward, scooping his companion up in mid jump.

Both slammed into the tree from which they had climbed seconds before. They became intertwined with the tree trunk. Branches fell and clattered like brittle bones.

Remo slapped imaginary dirt from his hands as a dozen more vampires closed in.

By now the moon was high above, and the approaching mob advanced with movements that suggested wolves more than men.

Their faces were pale in the reflected moonlight. Their lean shadows spread and melted together, blurring their numbers and masking their features in an on-again, off-again flicker of silvery light. A cemetery whose graves had disgorged its residents might create such a picture.

Their hands were raised in the air before them, zombie-like, as they approached with a detached animal intensity. Their eyes held the same devoid-of-thought malice displayed by Sal Mondello and the other gyonshi. "Reject meat. . . ." they pleaded.

"Tennis, anyone?" Remo asked coolly.

He received a chorus of hisses in reply.

"All this because my elbow was bent," Remo growled, moving into action.

He dropped back and rolled, feeling his T-shirt dampen as he encountered one of the cool, blood-seeping mounds of buried organs. He came back to his feet just beyond the reach of the vampires.

The concrete bench over which his first attackers had clambered was cool to his touch as Remo stooped and hefted it into the air, leaving twin mud furrows in the ground where it had rested.

Remo lifted the two-hundred-pound bench with no more effort than if it had been constructed of papier-mache. He held its curved legs firmly in both hands and extended it impossibly far out in front of him, using it as a shield to ward off the blows of the deadly herd.

A twig snapped. Movement behind. There were more skulking in through the underbrush, eyes dull and feral.

A gyonshi nail hissed past his ear. Remo stabbed the right side of the bench outward in a sharp parry that caught the assailant in the forehead. There was a satisfying crunch of bone, and the vampire fell.

Another on his left. Two more. Both had almost landed simultaneous blows.

He stabbed out the opposite corner of the bench in rapid consecutive thrusts and the gyonshi fell. The rough-textured concrete was by now matted with bits of gristle and blood.

The attackers emerged from the brush. Another eight.

They merged with the original throng, venting a sort of primitive rumble of pleasure.

Remo backed against the trunk of the oak for protection.

Suddenly, a slapping hand groped from the other side. Another joined it. And another.

Balancing the bench in one hand and continuing to use it to ward off the advancing gyonshi, Remo shot his elbow back sharply, careful to avoid lacerating his own arm on the wicked fingernails. The unseen vampires shrieked as the bones in their hands were crushed between Remo's hammering elbow and the tree. As the collapsed appendages withdrew, three clearly defined handprints could be seen gouged in the pulpy wood.

"That's for the poisoned duck," Remo spat.

He couldn't allow himself to become careless now. He still had to find the Leader.

He pushed the heavy bench into the mob, then dropped it atop two male gyonshis. It burst the skull of one and crippled the second. Human brains oozed out like a fungus.

Remo bent his knees and uncoiled his legs like a spring, launching himself into the air and grabbing hold of a branch of the oak that extended out over the path. When he felt its bark almost giving way beneath his fingertips, he brought his heels against the temples of two of the vampires, breaking their necks while using them as a toehold to scramble higher into the tree.

Remo felt a slight breeze at his left calf. One of the gyonshi had managed to land a blow. An eight-inch gash had been slit in the back of his pant leg. It must have missed puncturing his skin by only a fraction of an inch.

They ranged below him, staring vacantly up into Remo's eyes as he crouched on the branch, considering his next move. There were too many of them to try to jump beyond them. There must have been almost thirty still standing, among them several Three-G workers whom Remo recognized. He couldn't run the risk that a gyonshi at the edge of the crowd might land a lucky shot as he leaped to safety.

Remo was considering other possibilities, and coming up empty, when he realized that he was not alone.

There was someone-or something-in the tree with him.

He spun on the branch, directly into the empty gaze of the late Gregory Green Gideon.

What little flesh had been left on the body was now almost completely decomposed. Gideon's eye sockets were teeming with writhing maggots. His arms and legs had been tucked away, fetalstyle, inside the tree trunk with him. His splintery ribs reflected the white moonlight like a broken picket fence.

An idea occurred to Remo.

A few of the gyonshi had finally realized that they could climb up the tree after Remo. The first, the former Three-G manager named Stan, was searching out a toehold in the wide-grooved bark at the base of the tree when the first jagged rib landed.

It spiraled downward like a makeshift boomerang, slipping between the gyonshi's own ribs and skewering his delicate heart muscle. Vampire and rib were hurled to the ground, impaled next to a mound of internal organs that had once belonged to an organic gardener from Batavia.

"Not exactly wooden stakes, but I guess they'll do," Remo muttered. He plucked out a handful of Gideon's ribs like laths from a plaster wall, splintered the ends into rude points and let a half-dozen more fly at once.

They speared faces and necks. The gathered gyonshi mob screamed and howled and shrieked and fell, but not one retreated. They surged around the oak like rabid wolves, their hands raised, their fingers extended in a last desperate attempt to infect Remo with the same deadly poison that coursed through their own veins and fretted at their dead, diseased brains.

Remo threw the ribs with quick precision, until his supply ran out. There were several vampires left beneath the tree, standing among their gruesomely disfigured comrades. Remo used Gideon's shoulder blades and collar bones to finish off the last of the survivors.

When there were no gyonshi left standing, Remo slipped from his perch and dropped lightly to the ground.

He stood among the gyonshi mob, their bodies twisted, their mouths open in shock. Blood coursed from their newly formed wounds, soaking into the earth, mixing with the stagnant blood of their victims.

Remo heaved a sigh, and removed the borrowed letter opener from his back pocket. He squatted down and began the distasteful task of slitting the throats of the undead, muttering, "An assassin's work is never done."

Mary Melissa Mercy had never before seen the Leader so nervous. She had believed him to be incapable of raw fear.

Yet here he was, his head shaking determinedly from side to side, his white, unseeing eyes opened wide in his purplish face. His self-confidence seemed to be oozing out of his coarse, dead pores.

"You are fearful, O Leader?" she asked, hesitantly.

The dead face jerked up at her, his eye-slits narrowing in a mockery of sight. "All has happened as you have described it to me?" he asked, indicating the rough location of the bank of television screens.

"It has, Leader," she replied.

He set his jaw thoughtfully, and was silent for a time. Then he said, slowly, "My Creed once ruled the Asian continent, Missy. And in that time long ago, in the subcontinent now known as India, a prophesy was made. A seer who fell victim to us prophesied at the moment of his death that the second coming of the Undead would come in a land yet unknown. And in that land, the last gyonshi would tremble at the sound of the voice of a god who was not the one God." His voice trailed off.

Mary Melissa shook her head. "There is only one God," she said with certainty. "The God of our Creed, who bids us to punish the stomach-desecrators."

The Leader's dead face sank, as the brain within his skull succumbed to dark thoughts. "This is the second time I have visited the Final Death on this land, and this is the second time I have faced the gweilo of the Sinanju Master."

Mary Melissa's brow furrowed. "What would you have us do, Leader?"

"Fight to the death, Missy. It is all we can do." His jaw snapped shut like a bony vise, and his thin lips pressed tightly together.

The production floor of Three-G, Inc., was silent as a tomb. Moonlight filtered through the ceiling-to-floor windows, throwing a ghostly semi-light over the huge room.

Remo left the door behind him open, as he padded quietly across the concrete floor toward the nearest metal staircase. He glanced up at the X-shaped catwalk that connected all four corners of the second-story level. He saw no one through the tiny diamond shapes that the catwalk flooring formed.

He was slipping past the dormant conveyor belt when he saw a figure hiding in its shadow. It was definitely female.

Remo recognized her from his last trip to Three-G: Elvira McGlone. He cleared his throat by way of warning.

She spun around to face him. Even in shadow, her eyes were desperate and fearful, like those of a rabbit transfixed by the headlights of a car. Her face might have been enmeshed in the hypothetical car's grille.

"Miss McCrone?" Remo asked. Her fingernails, including her index forger, were still coated in the same blood-red polish. She was not gyonshi. He was sure of it. Her index fingernails tapered to points, not edges.

"McGlone," she corrected. With one hand, she attempted to adjust the lines on her tattered skirt as she rose to face Remo. She pretended nonchalance, while her body language screamed her fear.

"Sorry," Remo said, taking a step toward her.

"Don't come any closer!" Elvira McGlone hissed. Even before she wheeled on him, Remo knew that she was shielding a revolver in her other hand. "I swear I'll blow your brains out!" She waggled the weapon menacingly.

"No bullets," Remo said, nodding toward the revolver, whose exposed cylinder chambers were like tiny caverns. It might as well have been a pencil sharpener. He glanced around the production room disinterestedly. He wondered if there were more vampires hiding close by. Waiting to pounce.

"Don't test me," Elvira McGlone said. The gun-waggling had become more pronounced.

"And don't kid me," Remo returned, reaching over to pluck the weapon from her hand. He flipped open the cylinder and shook it like a saltshaker. Nothing came out. "See? Empty." He tossed the gun away.

Elvira McGlone started backing away, like a toy doll whose batteries have been inserted upside-down. She whipped two Waterman pens from a pocket of her mannish tailored suit and crossed them protectively before her.

"You keep away!" she shrieked, pushing back into the conveyor belt. In her haste, she tripped over a plastic rubbish barrel and landed on her best side. Her backside. One of the pens rolled away out of sight.

"Don't sweat it," said Remo, who, until this last manifestation of fright, had thought she couldn't possibly become any more repulsive. "I'm not one of them."

"I don't care! Go away!" she said, groping her way to her feet.

Remo reached down and took Elvira McGlone by the back of the neck. He hauled her to her feet, working her neck vertebrae with hard fingers until her body relaxed to nearly its normal level of tension.

The fear drained from her eyes.

"Let's have it," Remo urged.

"They've been stalking me for days," she said, catching her breath. "I don't dare trust anyone."

"Check out the fingernails," Remo said. He offered his hands to her, nail-side up.

She studied them cautiously, her breathing still heavy. "Okay," she said uncertainly. "Maybe you are normal."

"If I wasn't, you'd be one of them by now," Remo pointed out.

"Okay, okay. You've sold me. just what the hell is going on here?" she demanded, her voice a hoarse whisper. She peered over the top of the conveyor belt behind her.

"Would you believe me if I told you we're surrounded by vampires?" he asked.

She shook her head. "A week ago, I would have thought you were as flaky as everyone else around here. But now. . ." she composed herself. "I walked in on them while they were turning some of the tourists Gideon brings through here into human slumgullion. That Mercy woman was at the center of it all. When she saw me, I ran. I've tried to get out, but they're watching all the doors. I've kept out of sight, changing hiding places when I can to fool them."

"They're not very bright," Remo pointed out.

Elvira McGlone nodded her head toward where her pistol had skittered away in the shadows.

"But they're dangerous," she said wryly, "and you just tossed away our only protection."

"It was empty," Remo said, moving toward the stairs.

"That's because I took out six of them the first day," she explained. When he glanced back at her, she shrugged and added, "I worked five years in a New York ad agency." She followed him cautiously. "My survival skills are as sharp as a U.S. Ranger's."

Remo hadn't gone up four steps before he spotted a small dark figure hiding behind one of the upright metal banisters. It was the emaciated tiger-stripe cat he had seen during his tour of the Three-G plant with Mary Melissa Mercy.

It cringed in the darkness, its back arched, its mangy fur slowly rising like porcupine quills.

Remo reached out to the creature. "You tried to warn me about her, didn't you, tiger?" he said gently.

There was a gleam in the reflected moonlight. Something was wrong. It was the look in the animal's eyes. It was the same dead-eyed stare he had been given by his gyonshi attackers.

The cat hissed and spat at Remo, lashing out with its poisoned claws.

Remo allowed the animal to bound away. It flew backward off the staircase and into the production area, landing roughly against an opened electrical panel.

The panel sparked at the cat's impact, casting a bright blue aura over the four enormous stainless-steel cauldrons on the main floor.

The cat dropped to the floor, severely singed but alive. It struggled, finally found its paws, and limped off into the darkness.

Remo could smell burnt fur. But there was something else. The orange smoke. Very faint. Not quite as much as from a human host. It dribbled up from the cat's tiny nostrils.

The thin cloud rose eerily in the moonlight, then dissipated.

Remo nodded his head in silent understanding as he mounted the stairs double-time. Elvira followed.

They found themselves alone on the second level, overlooking the main production floor. The catwalk extended before and behind them into the shadows.

"An old Chinese man," Remo said, turning to Elvira McGlone. "Have you seen him?"

"Yes," she replied. "He spends most of his time with that Mercy ghoul. I think they're in the security room." She leveled a blood-red fingernail and added, "The metal door at the far end of the walkway."

"Thanks. Now go back to the spot where we met until I come back for you." Remo was just about to move down the catwalk when Elvira spoke, her voice low and husky.

"There's one more thing."

"What?" Remo said distractedly, hesitating.

"This." With a flick of her thumb the artificial nail popped off her index finger, revealing the chopped-off gyonshi guillotine edge. Before the red crescent press-on nail hit the floor, Elvira McGlone had slashed her hand in a perfect diagonal, opening Remo's shirt from shoulder to stomach.

Eyes wide, Remo jumped back, only to find himself pinned against the railing, the production floor below him. He looked down at himself. No blood. She hadn't broken the skin. Elvira slashed out again. Remo leaned back farther, ready to grab her wrist as she withdrew. He never got the chance.

The metal railing creaked and gave way. Too late, Remo noticed the shiny bright slits that the hacksaw had made at either end of the railing section. He toppled over backward and plunged toward a huge stainless-steel cauldron far below that was filled with shadows-and who knew what else.

His mind exploded with a sudden grisly recollection.

Didn't the gyonshi also boil their victim's blood in big pots before drinking it?

Chapter 24

At Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Lance Drew was losing a patient.

"He isn't responding!" The replacement nurse's voice was full of tension and frustration. The heart monitor, which had been beeping like a video game with a nine-year-old Nintendo master at the controls, went quiet.

"Pressure's bottomed out. He's arrested!"

Dr. Drew grabbed the twin paddles from the portable heart unit next to the bed. "Clear!" he ordered. Beads of perspiration had formed on his forehead. As one, the medical team jumped back from the bed. The doctor placed the paddles on the pale, thin chest and shocked the heart muscle. He looked up expectantly at the monitor. Still flat-lined.

"Nothing," said the second doctor.

Dr. Drew clenched his jaw determinedly. "Clear!" he commanded again. He shocked the heart a second time.

There was an echoing blip on the nearby monitor. Another. It was followed by a string of beeps.

"Pulse is climbing!" called the nurse. "Heart rate increasing!"

The body on the bed arched its back as if in pain, and began spewing a thin cloud of saffron smoke from its mouth and nose.

"My God, what is that?" the nurse asked, incredulous.

Dr. Drew gripped the paddles more tightly. He stared at the orange smoke as it rose in the air, spread across the acoustical ceiling tiles, and faded in the glow of the fluorescent light. He shook his head in awe.

The second doctor looked up from the monitoring equipment. It was beeping steadily now. "Heart rate's back to normal," he breathed. He glanced toward the others, a look of intense relief on his young face. "He's out of it."

All those in the room released their breaths-for the first time realizing they had been holding them.

The team became engrossed with their patient once more, forgetting, for the moment, the strange phenomenon they had just witnessed.

On the bed, Dr. Harold W. Smith's face relaxed, seeming more at peace than it had been in many years.

Chapter 25

The first danger, Remo knew, was the falling railing. It was sharp at both ends. Sharp enough to impale him if he fell on it.

Remo slipped his fingers around the railing and, using his waist as leverage for his arms, twisted in midair to flick the heavy length of steel a safe distance away.

He relaxed his muscles, and tucked his legs in close to his body in order to avoid any broken bones.

And so fell neatly into one of the giant stainless-steel cauldrons.

Remo landed on his feet, in darkness. The big object was empty. No blood. No floating bone or human matter. Just slick, shiny steel all around him.

Too slick and shiny to climb. Remo prepared to run up one side, knowing that once momentum enabled him to reach the lip he could launch himself back up onto the catwalk.

He was preparing to do just that when the production facility sprang noisily to life.

All over the floor, lights lit and machinery began to roar at an ear-pounding volume.

The floor of the tureen Remo stood upon began a relentless move inward on itself, spiraling toward a trio of narrow holes at its center. Razorsharp stainless-steel blades pounded into view above the holes.

Obviously they had been designed to chop up something, probably an ingredient for one of Three-G's many health products, and funnel the residue down the production line. Remo was determined not to become one of those ingredients.

He hit the spinning metal floor on his feet and leapt out of the deadly trap. At the same moment, a mass of hard-shelled walnuts was released from a storage bin directly above the tureen.

They struck Remo like a dense, crunchy waterfall and carried him back inside the cauldron, where the deadly blades continued to whir remorselessly.

He slid on the floor, feeling the inexorable drag toward its center. He pulled himself to his feet with difficulty. The undulating sea of brown walnuts had buried him to the chest. He could feel the vibrations of the shells as they were crushed beneath his feet.

The jump would be more difficult now. The sound of whirring Servo-Motors came from somewhere in the ceiling high above. He tried to steady himself but felt his legs gliding slowly inward, like water to a drain.

The whirring sound above him abruptly stopped.

Remo did not even have a chance to push off the floor when the second mass of walnuts fell. For a second he scrambled amid them like a drowning man, but the pull from below was too great.

As the machinery continued to rumble its cacophony of death, Remo allowed himself to be dragged to the tureen bottom.

One hand shot up, like that of a drowning man, only to sink back beneath the crunchy morass.

Elvira McGlone released the controls, turned to the nearest TV monitor, and gave a thumbs-up sign. Her eyes were dead.

Mary Melissa Mercy smiled tightly. "The gweilo is no more Leader," she announced.

The Leader leaned forward, the swaying motion of his head lessening as his expression tightened. "You see his body, Missy?" he asked, a trace of eagerness adding an edge to the rasp that was his voice.

Mary Melissa Mercy peered more closely at the television monitor. The noise from the production floor poured out of a tinny speaker at the end of the console. All she could make out in the fuzzy black-and-white image was the shifting pile of walnuts. There was no sign of the gweilo, Remo. "He has vanished below the surface, Master. But no one could survive the chopping blades of that machine. Not even one of these impure Sinanju duck-eaters."

The Leader slumped back in his chair, tired from all his efforts. "My soul rejoices," he said, nodding. "If a carcass should surface, prepare it in the prescribed manner of my ancestors."

"Yes, Leader."

He listened as she left the room. He heard the locks of the heavy metal door clanging back into place as she closed it behind her.

The girl was happy once more. He could tell by the light tread of her heavy shoes. She had become concerned momentarily, but that concern had vanished along with the gweilo. She had reverted back to her innate self-confidence.

The Leader was pleased, as well. His Creed had survived its greatest challenge. He could now fulfill his destiny. The Final Death would now be achieved without interference.

The sounds from the production floor continued to squawk from the small speaker. The Leader was half listening to them when he heard another sound.

A new sound. Different from the rest. It was a sort of wrenching whine, like that of complicated machinery being forced to run backward by a force stronger still. It was succeeded by a rumbling hiss.

The Leader did not hear the three consecutive pops as the blades at the base of the tureen were snapped loose. Nor did he hear the grinding protest as they were wedged back into the mechanism to stop the motion of the floor.

The wrenching sound he did hear was that of the stainless-steel tureen into which the walnuts had been poured. Two hand prints had appeared on its smooth outer surface and were gliding downward, as if the steel were rubber. Tenfinger furrows marred the shiny texture. Halfway down the hand marks separated, tearing a gouge from the top of the tureen to its base as easily as if it were paper.

The screech of metal was unearthly.

The rumbling hiss that had accompanied the sound of the tureen's destruction was that of the walnuts spilling out across the production room floor.

After the noises had died down and the last lonely nut had rolled to a stop, the Leader remained puzzled.

He could not see Remo stepping through the opening, his eyes dead, black pools of menace. He did not see Remo flicking one of the walnuts upward to the catwalk, knocking Elvira McGlone unconscious. He knew only that the feeling of cold dread from before had returned.

A hollow voice boomed out, crystal-clear over the static of the speaker, louder than the loudest machinery.

And the hollow voice intoned: "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju. Who is this dog meat that dares challenge me?"

Feeling his thin blood turning to ice, the Leader of the gyonshi trembled uncontrollably.

Remo Williams mounted the stairs in a single leap. Elvira McGlone was sprawled across the catwalk. He'd take care of her later.

Remo slid past her and moved swiftly along the walkway.

Someone stood at the far end. In the shadows. Mary Melissa Mercy. His final obstacle.

"You just don't know when to quit, do you, duck-eater?" Mary Melissa taunted, her naked green eyes blazing.

"Big talk, coming from a cannibal," Remo returned.

He continued moving toward her.

"We only drink blood. And you have no idea what you're dealing with," she warned. She found that she did not have to force confidence into her voice. "We possess powers no meat-eater can understand."

Remo remained silent.

"Your old friend understands now," she said, hoping to elicit a reaction. None came. "I am one with the Leader. The others you have defeated were nothing. Mere agents of our Creed. The old Korean knew that." She took a step toward him, still in shadow. "If the Master of Sinanju can be defeated, why not his pupil?"

Remo continued to move silently toward her across the raised platform.

Any hesitation Mary Melissa Mercy had felt before was gone. Her adrenaline flow continued in its wild rise. Her heart rate was more than double what it would have been had not the gyonshi infection empowered her purified blood.

"My Leader tells me that your Sinanju is a powerful force," she said. "But I've learned to master the secrets of something far more potent." She spread her hands like a game show hostess. "Behold!"

A dark mist seeped up and around the body of Mary Melissa Mercy. In an instant, she was enveloped in a sepia pall.

Remo, whose eyes ordinarily could break down fog or smoke into its component molecules, and see beyond as if it were only a light haze, could make out no shape within the inky blackness.

This was it. The infamous gyonshi mist Chiun had warned him about. Well, Remo had his trump card. He would not invite Mary Melissa Mercy in. He just hoped she was a stickler for tradition.

Cautiously, he pressed against the railing. He noticed it too had been hacksawed into a subtle trap. No doubt there were other traps about.

The mist spread slowly and insidiously along the length of the catwalk, until it was only a breath away from Remo.

There was something odd. The clank of foot falls on the metal catwalk. Should that have been there?

A long-nailed hand slashed out from within the dense black mist.

Remo shrank back. Just in time. The hand whizzed past his face and disappeared back inside the fog.

If a vampire can actually become mist, Remo wondered, will it still make audible footfalls? He decided to test his theory.

The hand slashed out again. Remo wrapped his fingers around the delicate wrist and tugged. Mary Melissa Mercy reappeared more easily than she had vanished. Although much less daintily. She did a half-flip through the air and landed roughly on her backside in the center of the walkway.

The black mist continued to billow and hiss behind Remo. A break in the cloud showed the stuff pouring from a metal grate at the base of the wall. "Thought so," he said, nodding to himself.

Confidently, his face a gigantic cruel smile, he advanced on Mary Melissa Mercy.

She had crawled back to her feet, and was in a sort of half-crouch as Remo approached. She brandished her gyonshi finger before her like a stiletto.

"Stay back!" she warned, slashing the air between them.

"Try garlic," Remo taunted. "Or am I thinking of werewolves?"

He grabbed her wrist firmly in his hand, being careful to keep the gyonshi fingernail at a safe distance, then bent Mary Melissa Mercy onto his hip. As he carried her down the stairs to the production floor she made repeated attempts to bite his arm and to claw him with her free hand, but he ignored those futile gestures.

After a short search Remo found an open electrical panel. He lifted Mary Melissa to it, careful to keep her right hand pinned to her side. She thrashed and screeched, but Remo's grip was firmer than iron.

With his other hand, he unscrewed the glass fuses.

Slowly, Remo bent her face into the exposed contacts. He growled, "Kiss this," gave her a hard push and retreated.

A violent hiss of blue sparks resulted.

The light show lasted only for a moment. Mary Melissa, limbs quivering, sprang away from the panel and fell heavily to the floor.

Remo watched with interest as Mary Melissa Mercy struggled to her knees. When she lifted her dazed face to his own, he nearly let out a whoop of triumph.

Her fiery red hair smoked at the ends. But that was not all that rose from Mary Melissa Mercy. The orange fog was pouring out of her mouth and nose.

"No!" she screamed thinly, clawing at the evasive vapor. "Noooo!"

Like some possessed ex-smoker, she scrambled after the cloud as it rose, frantically trying to draw it back inside her lungs.

"You know what they say about secondhand smoke," Remo warned. "It's a killer."

But Mary Melissa paid his taunt no heed. She was on her tiptoes moments after the smoke had vanished, still gulping at the air frantically. Nothing happened. She dropped back to the balls of her feet and her eyes careened wildly around the room, as if desperate for a fix.

She looked down at her hand. And seemed to hit upon an idea.

Mary Melissa Mercy began stabbing at her own throat, attempting to reinfect herself with her gyonshi fingernail. She succeeded only in opening her carotid artery. Blood spurted out with each of her still rapid heartbeats, pooling on the cold concrete floor. Dazed, Mary Melissa Mercy fell back to her knees. She looked up imploringly at Remo, who regarded her with cold, unsympathetic eyes.

"The Leader..." she gasped. "The Leader . . . can save me."

Remo shook his head. "Not where he's going," he said solemnly.

The machines had ceased their merciless thrumming.

The Leader did not notice. His mind was locked on one thing and one thing alone: the Final Death. The contagion that would erase the stomach-desecrators and restore purity to the once clean face of the impure earth.

He did not hear Mary Melissa Mercy cry out as Remo delivered a killing blow. He did not see him move along the catwalk.

Only when the thick metal door to the security room burst inward with a crash did he know the gweilo had found him.

His face jerked toward the distraction, his blind eyes like nystagmic pinballs.

"Sinanju. . ." he whispered vacantly. His shoulders collapsed.

"We have unfinished business," he heard the voice of the gweilo say.

"I, too, had a mission," he rasped. "You have prevented me from fulfilling this sacred duty."

"That's the biz, sweetheart," the gweilo called Remo said.

The Leader's white eyes flew open in sudden remembrance. His lips formed a gleeful leer. "We have the soul of your master!" he cried victoriously. "He writhes in the Ultimate Death, and so is lost to you forever!"

"Forever is a whisper in the Void to Sinanju," returned Remo.

The Leader's shoulder's sagged, like a slowly bending wire hanger. The gweilo had seemed indifferent to his boast. "You do not understand!" he spat.

"Wrong," Remo said coldly. "I understand perfectly. I can't undo the past. But I can avoid the mistakes of the past. And you represent a big one."

The Leader's voice became the hiss of an angry serpent. "My Creed is as old as time! We are older than your pathetic House!"

Remo shrugged. "We've all got to go sometime."

He advanced on the Leader.

And in the eternal blackness in which he dwelt, the Leader saw something he had not witnessed in generations.

Color.

And the color was the hue of blood.

Somehow, it was inside both of his eyes.

Then it was gone.

And so was he.

Chapter 26

Chiun walked alone in the hills east of Sinanju. The evergreen trees pointed toward the heavens, some so high that they seemed to yearn for the clouds gathered above. Shafts of bright amber sunlight raked the sky like hollow swords. The air was cold and clean.

He walked the brown earth, between sharp inclines covered in rich green.

There was someone waiting for him up ahead, where the path diverged. Chiun knew he would be waiting here. Just as he had been waiting for him for nearly five decades.

The tall man wore a white shirt with a tight waist and loose sleeves, a pair of baggy black pants that tightened at the ankles, white leggings, and black sandals. His hair was short and black, his features were proud. His eyes were the shape of almonds and the color of steel.

The man smiled warmly at Chiun's approach.

"Hello, Father," Chiun said.

"My son," said the tall, handsome man. He looked Chiun up and down, nodding his approval. "You have grown," he said. He had not aged a day since Chiun had last seen him.

"It has been many years, Father."

"Yes. Yes, I suppose it has." There was a hint of sadness in his strong voice.

An awkward silence hung between the two-together as men for the first time.

"Why are you here, Chiun the Younger?" his father asked at last.

"I am young no longer, Father," Chiun explained. "I ceased to be young both in name and in spirit on the day you went into the hills. Little did I know then that my burdens were just beginning."

"And your pupil?"

"Alas, the son of my brother turned his back on our village," he said sadly. "I was forced to deal with him severely."

"Our disgrace is the same," Chiun the Elder said, nodding. "Mine public, yours private." He smiled. "To me you will always be 'young Chiun,' my son."

Young Chiun's wispy beard trembled. "You know of my crime, father?"

"Not a crime. A necessity. The boy was a renegade who had to be brought to task. No one but you could have fulfilled this duty. Your son in Sinanju was saved. The line will continue." He paused. "How is he, by the way?"

"Remo?" Chiun asked. "I know not, Father."

His father's eyes grew moist. "My grandson in Sinanju," he said wistfully.

"Remo is a fine boy, Father," Chiun agreed. "Pigheaded at times, but he respects our history. His history."

"Just as we have respected that same history?" Chiun the Elder laughed. "We are the same, you and I," he said, staring absently at a cleft in the wall of rock beyond.

Chiun knew where his father's thoughts were drifting. "You did only what you had to do, Father," he told the man who was now, inexplicably, younger than himself.

"As did you, Son. Why do you torment yourself?"

"My ancestors were shamed by my deed," Chiun said, his head bowed.

Chiun the Elder spread generous arms. "I am not ashamed. Am I not your most cherished ancestor?"

"You do not understand," Chiun said, his wrinkled face still downcast.

Chiun the Elder extended one hand, raising his son's chin until their eyes locked. "Know you this, my son. I understand more than any other. You think you have performed the most despicable of deeds. But it is only so here." He placed his fingertips against Chiun's forehead. "You know in your heart that the act you were forced to perform was just and right. As do I. You will never have peace nor leave this place until you come to understand that the greatest battle a man can win is the one within himself."

Old Chiun the Younger remained silent, contemplating his father's words.

"How is it you come to be here?" the old-man-who-was-young asked finally.

"I was protecting the boy, Father. My son is very strong in body, but not yet powerful enough in mind. Had he been banished to this place he would have built a home, married an angel, and fathered strapping boys with properly shaped eyes. He still yearns for peace, and the things he cannot have. He accepts what he should not and does not accept what he should." Chiun's words were more for himself than anyone else.

"Like you, my son?"

Chiun seemed uncertain. "Perhaps."

The handsome young old man clasped his hands behind his back. "We sacrifice for our children," he said simply. "It is the most difficult duty we are called upon to perform. And the most noble. Fortunate are those who are called to the temple of fatherhood."

Chiun's hazel eyes glistened in the starlight. "I missed you, Father."

Chiun the Elder smiled. "Yes, my son. I know. Your devotion sustained me in my last days in these mountains. When I looked to the sky, I saw you. The eternity of nothingness, was filled by you." He shook his head. "For me there was no emptiness, no suffering. I survived in you. And in your promise."

Chiun looked into the eyes of the man who had taught him so much in so precious little time. "I loved you, Father," he whispered. "I have abandoned mercy, pity, remorse, but I do know love. That was your greatest gift to me. Thank you, Father. Thank you."

The handsome visage of Chiun the Elder turned to his son, and his smile lit the heavens. Then he became the heavens, his face turning into the sky and stars.

Chiun looked up at the night, which now hemmed in the mountains, and felt all eternity around him. But it was no longer cold and distant.

At last, he understood.

The Leader had opened the recesses of Chiun's mind with his gyonshi poison. It was no wonder that no one returned after glimpsing this. Their bodies were merely empty shells for the poison that raged in their systems, driving the victim to attack without conscience or compunction. Their minds lived on in the hell or paradise of their own imaginings.

To remain was tempting. Here, anything was possible.

Chiun heaved a sigh and turned his back on eternity. There was still much he had to do. The work on Remo's body was all but finished. It could hardly grow any more skillful. But there was much yet to be done with the potentially limitless power of his mind.

"Sinanju swine!"

Chiun spun when he heard the taunt in Korean. "Who dares call me thus?" he shouted. The darkness had become total, bathing the mountains until they were immersed in a sea of sludge.

There was something about the darkness. Something vague. Something . . . inviting.

"I dare, puny one! Prepare yourself!"

The voice was getting closer. Chiun spun in the opposite direction. "Show yourself!" he demanded. He expected to see Nuihc once more, returned to goad him into battle. Instead, the figure that seemed to step through a slice in the darkness was wrinkled, small, and dressed in a mandarin's robe. He had a fringe of steel-blue hair, like a metallic halo that had fallen, and his skin was the color of a Concord grape.

The Leader. His pearl eyes burned with a chill fire.

"We meet again, Korean," he rasped.

The blackness of the sky was forming a pool on the ground nearby. Something was drawing Chiun toward the orifice.

"Begone, vision!" he commanded. "I am leaving this place. Do not dare attempt to prevent me."

The Leader merely leered. "You will never leave this place."

Chiun met the leer with a confident smile. "I will-now that you are here to take my place."

The Leader flew at him. Chiun struck a defensive posture. They collided, twin furies unleashed.

The fight was extraordinary, impossible, titanic. The heavens cracked with the sound of mighty blows. Five thousand years of history flowed perfectly and precisely together from their limbs. They danced with death, every muscle coming into play, the neurons of their brains sparking like flashbulbs.

Their fingers, palms, wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms, shoulders, necks, chins, heads, torsos, waists, hips, thighs, knees, calves, feet and toes intermingled, striking and blocking at the same time-each thrust countered like two faucets of water opened full, melding together in one fantastic waterfall.

They fought furiously in the space of their two bodies, their arms making intricate patterns and their legs swinging up, around, in front, to the side, and behind, as if attached to their pelvis by rubber bands. They spun in space, their fists striking each other in furious rhythm, always connecting with impotent blows.

Neither won, but neither lost. They mirrored each other, clashing in perfect harmony. Their blows became faster and faster and faster still, until everything in their heads became a blur. The sound of their movements buzzed, interrupted only by the continual, closely-spaced slaps of contact. Their fight became a strange, aching song of violence.

"Live!" a voice boomed in Chiun's head. It was deafening, but Chiun had no time to pay it heed.

The battle continued.

"Live!" the voice commanded again. It seemed somehow familiar. "I was poisoned years ago. I was unconscious. Near death. You thought I didn't hear you, but I did. Live!" ordered the voice, which was no longer unfamiliar. "It is all you told me, it is all I tell you. You cannot die unless you will it, and I will not allow it. I need you."

Chiun had no choice but to ignore the voice. The battle still raged. He could not pause, lest he be slain.

They would have fought forever if Remo had not appeared above them. He dropped toward them, ready to strike. He wore the black, beltless two-piece fighting garment of the traditional Sinanju pupil.

"Remo!" Chiun cried. "My son! No! Leave this place!"

"Kill him, gweilo!" the Leader shouted. "You are heir to Sinanju! Do as your destiny commands!"

Remo smiled, his expression deadly, raising his hand as he prepared to cleave one of the combatants in half.

For one horrible instant, the Master of Sinanju believed that his worst nightmares were about to come true. Feared that Remo did indeed seek his throne, his treasure, his honor. He had never believed it before. The charge was just his way to compel obedience in the wayward white.

Then Remo fell upon the fear-struck Leader, crushing him to nothingness and disappearing into the pool of blackness that endlessly spilled from the heavens.

For a moment Chiun stood alone in eternity, his breathing difficult, his chest aching.

"I'm not going to wait all day, Little Father," Remo's voice whispered in his ear.

A sensation of warmth spread up from the pit of the Master of Sinanju's stomach. It radiated outward across his torso, seeking his heart. The pit of the Oriental soul met and joined forces with the Occidental seat of love.

For an instant Chiun was a young man again-standing at the edge of his village with the voices of celebration behind him, his father's back vanishing into the mountains before him.

But he no longer felt the same isolation. The same feeling of loss.

The Master of Sinanju looked up at the heavens, put his feet together, and took a small hop. He disappeared into the inky blackness.

Chapter 27

Chiun's old, old eyes fluttered open.

Remo stood beside his bed, two strange paddles in his hands. He hooked the paddles into two slots on the side of an upright wheeled cart.

"How are you feeling?" Remo asked. His voice was filled with concern, but his face beamed with joy.

Chiun saw the ghostly image of the orange gyonshi mist thinning and spreading along the ceiling. "The bad air is no more?" he said wonderingly.

Smith lay on the bed across the room. He had turned so as to look at Remo and Chiun. His eyes were rimmed in black, his skin a paler gray than normal. Most would have smiled at Chiun in encouragement, but Smith managed only a formal bow of the head. "Master of Sinanju," he croaked.

"Emperor Smith," Chiun said, returning Smith's gesture with a barely visible nod. "I trust you are well."

"I seem to have suffered a heart attack," Smith returned weakly. "But I am on the mend, the doctor says, thanks to a timely electrical restimulation of the muscle."

"You have the heart of a lion," Chiun said loud enough for all to hear. "Let no one doubt this." Then, beckoning for Remo to come closer, he lifted his head slightly.

Remo leaned over the bed, tipping his ear close to Chiun's mouth. "Yes, Little Father?" he asked.

"Be a good boy, and see that I get a private room."

Two weeks passed before Remo and Chiun were able to return to the Catskill Mountains.

The press had long since departed, explaining away the deaths at Poulette Farms as an unusually severe political statement by some concerned but nutritionally unbalanced vegetarians, out to avenge the food-poisoning epidemic that the USDA had officially traced to Poulette Farms and only Poulette Farms.

Henry Cackleberry Poulette had been officially blamed for the epidemic. His personal psychiatrist had held a press conference, explaining his late patient's pathological hatred of chickens.

Within the hour, he was fielding multimillion dollar offers for transcripts of his private sessions with the Chicken King.

Smith had had the gyonshi victims at Three-G carted away in secret. Remo didn't ask how. He didn't care. Smith had told him that so many bloodless, butchered bodies would be difficult to explain away. Let the world simply think the vengeful Vegans had closed up shop after visiting justice on Henry Poulette.

Remo and Chiun climbed the mountain above Poulette Farms, and it was several minutes before they exchanged a word. They moved in harmonious unison, letting the warmth of the spring afternoon wash over them in cleansing waves.

It was a gorgeous day. The sun shone brightly through the swaying branches and broad green leaves. Fragrant blossoms mingled their scents in the air.

"How did you know that the gyonshi virus could be purged by electricity?" Chiun finally asked.

"A cat told me," Remo said nonchalantly.

Chiun nodded in satisfaction. "Cats are very wise, my son," he said. "Although sons are wiser at times." His eyes shone as they gazed upon his pupil.

Remo offered a small bow of his head.

They were silent yet again.

That was all Chiun had needed, during his titanic struggle with the Leader, to tip the odds in his favor. The knowledge that Remo was there for him when he needed him most. He had manifested Remo into a physical presence in his mind, allowing him to defeat the forces that trapped him. Those forces being his own poisoned neural system.

"The gyonshi?" He had not asked about them during the two weeks of recuperation at Folcroft. Even now the question seemed superfluous.

"A sham," said Remo. "Whatever they once were was long gone. The only thing they had left was the virus. Everything else was a pale plagiarism of their ancestors' legends. The mist. The blood-drinking. Everything."

They climbed the hill parallel to each other, walking some ten feet apart. The grass sprang immediately back to life after they had passed, as if only wind, not human feet, had pressed it down.

The ultramodern Three-G building leaped into view as they passed through a thicket of shrubs at the top of the mountain.

They had finally reached the summit, and now stood where the luxurious garden at the center of the building stretched out into the surrounding countryside.

Turning, they looked down on the valley below, neither bothering to squint in the glorious sunlight which bathed them.

"And the Leader?" Chiun asked, not looking at Remo.

Remo seemed disinterested. He raised his head a centimeter.

Chiun did not have to look up, but he did. In the tallest part of the rotted oak tree which squatted at the center of the garden, hung a skeleton. Its flesh had been completely shorn from muscles. Its muscles and tendons were completely ripped from its bones. Its bones were white and gleaming, as if they had been shined to a perfect luster. Its eyes rested, unstalked, inside its open eye sockets. Every other tooth had been surgically removed.

It smiled a checkerboard smile, its pupils cockeyed.

Remo entered the grove. Chiun followed in silence.

The bodies of the vampires were gone. Everything was as it had been the first time Chiun had entered the large garden, save for one detail.

With his toe, Chiun touched the earth by the base of the oak tree. It was soggy with blood. Beneath a thin cover of dirt the internal organs rested-crushed to plasmic puddles, then wrapped and knotted inside the Chinese's own pale purple skin.

Remo had been very busy during Chiun's recuperation. Even now he seemed preoccupied. Remo reached inside a large, open knothole in the side of the tree and removed a whole, perfectly preserved brain. He placed it at his teacher's sandaled feet.

"This time," the future Master of Sinanju said, straightening. "I positively, definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, did not bend my elbow."

The present Master of Sinanju smiled with pride upon his student, then brought his foot down in the exact center of the dead, gray mass.