Waste Not, Want Not

The men around her were fastening metal clips and checking for holes in her old canvas-and-rubber diving suit.

There was one metal barrel at the edge of the deck. One chance for defense if they were discovered. Not that they would be. This mission was a simple matter of confirming Director Chutesov's suspicions. If the Institute head was right, others would be called in to clean up the mess.

The man in charge of dressing Petrovina picked up a large steel helmet from the dry deck of the ship. He was a thick-necked ex-Party member named Vlad Korkusku. His eyes were dull, his knuckles were hairy and he had developed an instant dislike for Petrovina the moment he had been told she would be his superior while they were in Mayana. But the command had come directly from SVR head Pavel Zatsyrko.

"Still nothing?" Petrovina asked Korkusku. Korkusku turned to the bridge where a man in a suit identical to his own was checking the sonar. "Nothing," the man called down.

"Nyet," Vlad told Petrovina.

"I wish to be told the instant anything is detected. Is that clear?"

"Yes, of course," Vlad snarled.

Petrovina allowed Vlad to place the helmet over her head. Others fastened it securely to her suit. A spear gun was hooked to her back.

Her oxygen was fine, but there was a problem with the radio. She smacked the helmet a few times to clear it.

"If radio goes, I will tug line when I am coming up. You tug line if you wish me to return. Understand?"

Korkusku nodded dully. "Of course," he grunted. The men guided Petrovina to a gap in the rail. Her weighted feet clomped loudly on the buckled wooden deck.

At the deck's edge, Petrovina stepped off into oblivion, dropping like a stone. With a mighty splash, the sea swallowed her up. She sank quickly to the bottom.

The heavy boots touched the sandy soil gently.

Puffs of silt swirled in her wake as she walked along. Shafts of morning sunlight knifed down from the surface, blotted out in spots by floating trash. Nervous schools of fish twitched tails in unison as she walked, flitting off, away from the strange intruder.

She was already sweating in her suit.

Trash was scattered all across the seafloor. A discarded grocery bag floated like a plastic jellyfish before her face. With a slow-motion swipe, she pushed it behind her. It joined other scraps and bits of junk-civilization's castoffs-that danced in lazy sea currents.

When she looked up through the floating garbage, she could just glimpse the underside of her boat. "Korkusku, come in," she said.

No reply.

"Korkusku, can you hear me?" Still nothing.

The radio didn't sound as if it were out. There was still an audio hum. A new malfunction. Cursing under her breath, she forged ahead.

At her feet, crabs skittered around broken bottles. A pitted cluster of coral lost from some other world rose up ahead. Bits of trash had snagged the surface. They waved like ghostly fingers as Petrovina passed by.

Beyond loomed the twisted shape of the American scow.

Above the sea the boat would have been big. Below, it seemed impossibly huge-a building toppled into water.

Petrovina walked around the coral and into the long shadow cast by the scow.

As she walked, she felt a tug from behind.

In her suit and helmet, it was awkward to turn around. The metal helmet was the shape of an inverted fishbowl. Three tiny windows, one at the front and one on either side, allowed a limited view of the area around her.

She found that her oxygen line had snagged on coral. Petrovina took the line in her gloved hand and gave it a flick. The line rolled in slow-motion, snaking off the coral and settling to the seafloor.

Loose once more, she headed slowly for the ship. Some garbage had washed away, but most remained around the wreckage. She was soon wading through ankle-deep trash and climbing on her knees up to the scow. Fish flitted around her, swimming in and out the side of the sunken ship.

The scow had split in two big sections. The rear had broken from the bridge, jamming into the soft sand at the seafloor. The bridge section had nosed down. She saw what she was after at the rear of the angled bridge.

Taking her oxygen line in hand, Petrovina climbed slowly up to the side of the scow. She ran a glove over the metal.

It was twisted back from something that could only have been an impact explosion.

"Sukin syn," she swore beneath her helmet.

As she spoke, Petrovina lost her footing. Some of the garbage on which she was awkwardly kneeling gave way. As her boots slipped, she grabbed around, hugging the broken metal for support. Her glove touched something soft.

The object fell loose, swinging down from the interior of the ship and slapping soundlessly against the hull.

She found herself face-to-upside-down-face with a bloated white corpse.

Petrovina gasped, falling back.

The body of Captain Frederick Lenn swung gently in the fissure that had split his beloved ship. Crabs and fish had chewed his face. His bloated tongue mocked Petrovina.

She held one hand to her belly. Her heart raced. Her breath steamed the glass of her helmet. Averting her eyes from the body, she quickly climbed back down the hill of garbage.

She had seen all she needed to see. Petrovina could head back to her boat, report to Director Chutesov, leave this place and let the Russian navy clean up the mess. Her work in Mayana was finished. She should have felt relief.

So why could she not catch her breath?

She tried to will herself calm. It did no good.

At first she couldn't understand it. She had seen many dead bodies as part of her Institute training. None in the line of duty. They had all been in a Moscow morgue. Still, most had been in far worse shape than Captain Lenn.

She paused, taking in a deep, calming breath. She could not. And then it hit her. The problem came not from her, but from above.

Her oxygen line emitted a feeble hiss. Then nothing.

Korkusku! The SVR idiot had cut off her oxygen supply.

It was too far back to her boat. She would never make it. Petrovina started walking. Every step brought the fire of futility to her straining lungs. She could feel the panic swelling inside her. Nothing she could do to stop it.

Every step was agony. Her feet were deadweights. As she waded through trash, she looked up for a sign of her boat. She could see nothing through the floating debris and the thickening fog within her helmet.

No. That wasn't true. Through the fear and fog she thought she saw something.

No, not something. Someone.

He appeared from the haze before her. Swimming as confidently as a shark through the depths of the Caribbean.

Petrovina thought the man might be her savior. If he could share oxygen with her, she could get back to the surface. But with growing despair she saw that he had no diving gear. The man wore only a T-shirt and slacks.

Still, he was an amazingly fast swimmer. At the speed he was traveling, he could help. Maybe he could swim back to her boat. Get help. Uncrimp her line. Do something.

As the last gulps of breath struggled from her sweat-drenched lips, Petrovina Bulganin feebly signaled the stranger who had become her last hope to live.

REMO BARELY NOTED the woman in the diving suit. His legs did the work as he swam, propelling him forward with the speed and grace of a porpoise. He knifed toward the twisted hulk that had been the American scow.

He had already seen the Mexican ship. The hull of that scow had been blasted open by an impact explosion.

When he swam past the woman, she grabbed for him.

Remo dodged her gloved hands. She waved her arms desperately. He waved hello back.

The woman had stirred up trash and silt. It swirled in the stirring currents beside the American scow. No matter. He could clearly see the hole.

The metal had buckled at the point of impact, curling back in twisted shards. On the second half he could see a mirror image of the torpedo hole that had cracked the scow in two before it settled at an angle on the seafloor.

Face stern, Remo kicked away from the scow. The woman in the diving suit was now walking away through an undersea blizzard of trash. She seemed to be having a rough go of it. Every step was a great labor.

Remo swam up to her.

When she saw Remo appear before her, she waved again, this time with far less energy than before. Assuming she was just being friendly, he waved back once more.

Scowling, she swatted his hand and pointed to her oxygen hose. Her panting was steaming up the inside of her helmet.

Remo trained his ears on the hose. He heard nothing but a few pained squeaks. The light of understanding dawned.

O. He formed the letter with thumb and forefinger. I. He pointed to himself. See. He pointed to his eyes. You. He pointed to the woman. Can't. He shook his head. Breathe. He clutched his hands to his throat. Remo smiled, triumphant at his successful pantomime.

The woman tried to shoot him with her spear gun. Remo dodged the spear. Frowning, he began to work out in his head how to say "That wasn't very nice" in undersea charades when the woman's eyes suddenly grew wide.

Remo had felt the pressure of something striking the surface of the water far above their heads. Whatever it was, it was sinking slowly. He followed the woman's line of sight up toward the sun.

It was some sort of steel drum. The barrel was heading for the bottom.

Remo assumed it was more trash. The area around the scows was full of it. But if it was just an ordinary metal barrel, why was the asphyxiating woman in the diving suit now running in panicked slow-motion back in the direction of the submerged American scow? He decided to ask her.

Grabbing her breathing hose, he reeled her in like a fleeing fish.

She was running forward. Then she was running in place. Before she even realized she was going backward, she was face-to-face with Remo once more.

The air in her suit was nearly gone. She panted pitiful gulps. Her eyes bulged wide behind her fogging mask.

With a questioning expression, Remo pointed behind them and up. The barrel was fifty yards back and much nearer the bottom.

She yanked on the hose in his hand, desperate for him to let go. In a hysterical voice she yelled something in a language Remo recognized but didn't understand.

When she saw the look of dark confusion pass across his face, she seemed to realize suddenly that this man who could stay underwater without seemingly needing oxygen might actually be able to hear her.

She screamed again, louder this time and in English.

The echo of words in the helmet was like a ringing bell against Remo's hypersensitive eardrums. "Depth charge!" Petrovina Bulganin gasped. And as she yelled, the explosion came. Fiery hot, it rocked the seafloor and hurled metal missiles straight toward them.

Too late, Petrovina Bulganin thought. We are dead.

I wonder if the hotel restaurant serves that brown rice I like? Remo Williams mused.

Chapter 14

The explosion threw them backward toward the ruptured hull of the American scow.

Remo surfed the bubble of water, riding it back as it expanded from the heart of the blast. The jagged metal peaks in the side of the sunken boat caused by the torpedo rupture flew toward them.

Kicking hard once, Remo rode up over the metal ridge. With a gentle nudge, he kept Petrovina from being impaled on a spear of metal. Her limp body was carried up and over with him. Grabbing her by the diving suit, he tugged her to safety behind the exposed inner hull of the scow.

Tiny metal fragments from the depth charge barrel pinged the side of the sunken scow.

An undersea cloud of trash and churned-up silt spread out from the center of the blast. Veils of darkness stretched like clouds of doom across the seafloor, muddying the water and blotting out the streams of sunlight.

From what Remo could tell before the sea went dark, the boat that had dropped the depth charge was the same one Petrovina Bulganin had come from. The woman's useless oxygen hose had stretched along the seafloor and up to the side of the bobbing boat.

He glanced over at her.

Petrovina's boots were clamped to the scow's hold, keeping her upright. But her head was bowed. Her arms floated ghoul-like in the dirty water. She had lapsed into unconsciousness. Asleep, she would last a few seconds longer than if she were flailing awake, but she didn't have much time left. Her heartbeat was already growing thready.

Even worse for Petrovina, a piece of flying shrapnel had cracked her mask. Her helmet was taking in water.

Remo frowned in annoyance. Why did everything bad always happen to him?

Wishing he could find a loophole in his conscience that would allow him to just swim off, he glanced back up.

The sea was still dark, but not entirely. At least not to eyes trained in Sinanju. Where the silt thinned he could just glimpse the outline of a boat's hull. After launching the depth charge, Petrovina's trawler had puttered closer.

Remo zeroed in on the boat through the sea of floating trash. He grabbed a fistful of diving suit in one hand. The dying flutter of Petrovina's struggling heart carried like sonic waves to his hypersensitive ears.

Touching his toes to the scow's rusty hull, Remo flexed his calf muscles. He took off like a fired torpedo, launching straight up at the bobbing boat. The unconscious Russian agent trailed in his wake. A limp, living rag doll in the last gasping moments before death.

THE MEN ON THE TRAWLER had ridden out the explosion gripping chains and rails. The sea had churned, vomiting an enormous bubble of white that rocked the trawler and nearly capsized her. After the waves subsided and the boat began to chug into the spot where Petrovina Bulganin had walked in her diving suit, the former KGB men scrambled over to the edge of the soaking wet deck.

Their matching black suits looked as if they'd been bought off the rack at Woolworth's back in 1977. Three fat ties dangled out over open sea.

Eager eyes searched the field of risen trash and floating fish for human body parts. They were surprised when the part that popped up right next to the boat was not a woman's arm or leg, which was really what they were looking far. It was a man's head. The head was talking to them.

"Do svidaniya," Remo Williams said.

There were three shocked intakes of air. Three meaty hands grabbed simultaneously for shoulder holsters.

Deciding just this once to opt out of the traditional Russian 9 mm handshake, Remo reached up and snagged three fat dangling ties. He yanked, and the men and their guns were dumped overboard.

"I should have known there were Russians in town," Remo griped as the men fell. "A million tons of rotting garbage can't cover the stench of boiled beets and vodka."

As the Russian agents splashed in panic amid the garbage, Remo lifted Petrovina Bulganin from below the surface and tossed her onto the boat. She slapped to the deck with a watery splat.

Another moment and Remo was over the side. He padded barefoot across the deck. His white T-shirt and baggy black chinos clung tight to his body as he bent over Petrovina.

He pulled off her helmet. A shower of seawater poured out, splattering the already soaked deck. Reaching around, Remo massaged her lower spine. With the other hand he worked the heart and lungs. Petrovina's pale face reddened. All at once her eyes shot open. Gasping desperately for air, she turned her head, coughing up water. Bleary-eyed, she twisted toward her savior, still gagging on seawater. "Who are you?" Petrovina demanded as she pushed herself up to a sitting position.

"My name is Mr. Thank-You-For-Saving-My-Life," Remo said. "But you can call me I-Would-Have-Drowned-If-It-Wasn't-For-You."

She hardly heard. Her attention was drawn to the side of the boat where the three former KGB men were pawing through floating trash trying to swim back to their vessel.

A light switched on in her eyes. "Korkusku," she hissed.

"God bless you," Remo said.

Petrovina scarcely noticed him. Scrambling to her feet, she pushed past Remo. Diving boots clomping the deck, she stormed around the cabin to the front of the boat.

She found the head of her SVR detachment sitting calmly in a deck chair.

Vlad Korkusku seemed uninterested in the action that had taken place on the other end of the boat. A pair of headphones was attached to a twenty-year-old Sony Walkman, and the volume turned up so loud that all ears could hear the blaring, scratchy 1950s Moscow Chamber Orchestra version of the Soviet national anthem. He had a copy of the latest People magazine in his hands and was flipping from page to page. Announcing every picture as decadent, he christened each with a glob of fresh spit.

The left rear leg of the big man's deck chair sat squarely on Petrovina's oxygen hose, which still hung useless over the side of the boat.

Petrovina marched up to Korkusku and slapped him so hard across the face that his headphones flew off.

"You tried to kill me!" she yelled.

At first he seemed shocked to see Petrovina Bulganin alive. Almost as surprised to find that she was not alone. He quickly got his bearings, scrambling to his feet.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "Did something go wrong?"

"You deliberately crimped air hose," she snapped.

"Oh," Vlad Korkusku said with hollow innocence. "Is crimp in hose?" He looked straight down at the chair leg.

Beside Petrovina, Remo rolled his eyes. "Couldn't you pretend to look around a little first?" he groused. "Maybe a little look of surprise when you find it? Don't look down at the exact freaking spot where you stuck your chair leg. Cheez, you'd think after seventy years of communism you Russians would actually be good at lying."

Korkusku took a step back. "He is American," he hissed.

Petrovina ignored the words of both men. She shoved Korkusku hard in his meaty chest. She was ludicrously small compared to the big man. Korkusku barely budged.

"Is true you try to suffocate me?" she demanded in English.

The SVR man pulled his eyes off the American. His back stiffened. "No, no," he insisted with great bluster. "Was terrible, completely unscheduled accident."

"What about depth charge?"

"Accident," Viad Korkusku repeated, this time very quickly and very firmly. "We thought we saw phantom killer submarine on sonar, but was actually school of minnow fish." He pointed to Remo. "Do you wish me to kill American spy?"

This time when Petrovina shoved him, her fury was so great that Korkusku stumbled back against his chair.

"Yes, he is American," she snapped, shoving Korkusku again. "But that does not automatically make him spy."

Remo had stripped off his T-shirt and was wringing water out onto the deck. "Actually-" he began.

"And you will not kill him," she continued, shoving Korkusku one last time. "Because if not for him, I would be dead right now. Idiot!"

This time when she pushed him, Vlad Korkusku was not taken by surprise by her wiry strength. Korkusku stood his ground. His flabby face steeled.

"Ridiculous child," he said, sneering contemptuously. "You are the idiot, little girl. Out here playing at game of men."

She heard an angry grunt behind her. When she wheeled around she saw that the three men Remo had thrown into the water had found their way back aboard. Water ran off their drenched polyester suits. Their guns were drawn. Water dribbled out of the barrel of one.

Petrovina spun back to Korkusku. Her wet hair slapped around her neck like angry tentacles. "Have you gone completely mad?" she barked. At this Korkusku laughed bitterly.

"I mad? Little girl, I have seen the world go insane around me until all that is left is madness." He spit at her feet. "While you were still playing with dolls at your mother's feet, I watched a great nation collapse into anarchy. And now I am this. A baby-sitter to a slip of a girl. This is-as they say-last straw. I will endure no more." He addressed the three men. "Shoot them. Throw their bodies over side."

The three soaking wet men surrounded Remo and Petrovina.

She could see that there would be no reasoning with them. Obviously she had been assigned a group of relics who longed for the glory days of the Cold

War with the West. There was only one option open to her, and it was not one that filled her with much hope. She spun to the American.

"Do something," Petrovina insisted.

Remo was twisting the last drops of water out of his soggy T-shirt. He hadn't been paying close attention.

"Huh?" he said, glancing up. "Oh, yeah." Remo flicked his T-shirt. The end snapped the back of a Russian gunman's hand. The hand skipped, and the Russian fired into the shoulder of his nearest comrade.

As the bleeding man fell in agony to the deck, the other two disappeared. Vlad Korkusku and Petrovina Bulganin weren't quite sure what happened to them until they saw two faraway splashes in the Caribbean.

Korkusku turned to Remo, face growing pale. "I'm in a lazy American mood, so two options," Remo said, pulling his shirt back on. "In the first you put yourself in the water and you get to keep your arms. Guess the second."

Blinking shock, Korkusku headed for the rail. "And take him," Remo said, jabbing a thumb toward the bleeding man who was groaning in agony on the deck. "I hear enough Russian whining at the Olympics."

Korkusku took the man by the ankles. He dragged him over the edge of the deck where they made a single splash.

"You're welcome," Remo said once the men were all playing safely in the surf.

"What?" Petrovina snapped.

"What you said to Bruno the Bear just now. That if it wasn't for me you'd be dead right now. You're welcome."

Petrovina's full lips thinned. "Enough nonsense," she said. "What were you doing down there?" Realizing he had gotten as close as he was going to get to a Russian thank-you when she opted not to shoot him, Remo shook his head tiredly.

"Same thing you were," he sighed. "Looking for subs in all the wrong places."

"You know about submarine?" she asked.

"Know about it. Here to stop it. Unlike your pals there, who seem more keen on stopping you."

He aimed a chin at the water where Vlad Korkusku and his three companions were splashing amid the muck.

"I have met their kind before," she said. "KGB dinosaurs. They do not understand that world has passed them by." Petrovina considered for a moment. "We will work together on this, you and I," she announced. "I cannot do this alone, and it is obvious that you are not as stupid or untrustworthy as the fools who were sent to help me."

"Stop it, I'm blushing," Remo said.

"You will help me stop submarine," she said, adding ominously, "and perhaps help to prevent new eruption of cold-war tensions that could end civilization as we know it."

"Hey, that's swell," Remo said, distracted. He pointed to a distant fishing boat bobbing amid the scows beyond the Mayanan cordon. "Before we do that, can we stop by my boat? I left my best world-saving shoes over there."

Chapter 15

Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume had a name fit for a British lord and the down-to-earth charm of a Mayanan peasant. With appeal that cut across class and political divides, the leader of the Mayana Free People's Party had carried more than sixty percent of the popular vote in the country's last presidential election.

He had slipped onto the Mayanan political stage more than fifteen years earlier, after Mayana had applied for Commonwealth status. His name was made as a voice against Communist-era reforms such as state-controlled industry and price controls. Serendipity put him on the right side of global politics just as the Russian Communist machine and its influence in South America were collapsing.

Curry-Hume was a populist vote grubber. There was no village meeting too small for him to attend, no metropolitan development committee he would refuse to join. As his influence grew, he found himself on university boards, state advisory committees and on dozens of community groups.

In a country the size of Mayana, it was relatively easy to become a household name.

By the time he was finished establishing himself as a man of the people, his fellow Mayanans had practically begged him to run for executive president. No one was surprised at his landslide victory. Least of all, President Curry-Hume.

That was because everything-from his first handshake to his televised victory speech-was part of a meticulously laid-out plan.

If someone were to suggest the lengths to which this professed nonpolitician had gone to attain elected office, they would have been scorned by a disbelieving public. Such was the people's faith in their president. It was a faith constructed on that most flimsy of foundations: personality.

Curry-Hume had charisma by the bushel. When he spoke, it was as if he were speaking directly to every single person in his audience. According to a New Briton newspaper that had supported his candidacy, he could "charm the moon from the sky."

When it was announced that Mayana would host the Globe Summit, the people gave credit to their first-term executive president for drawing attention to their tiny country.

That week, when the people of Mayana learned of the Vaporizer at the same time as the rest of the world, they heaped praise at the feet of their executive president for managing to keep so great a thing secret. When they were told how lucrative the project would be, not just in terms of money to the government treasury but also job creation, the poor of Mayana stood and cheered.

But there was one man in Mayana who wasn't applauding. One man who didn't buy into the concept of citizen politician. One man who knew what a crock it all was.

Finance Minister Carlos Whitehall was fussing at his jacket cuffs as he entered the office suite of Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume.

Phones were ringing off the hook. The entire building was abuzz with excitement. And the man who was truly responsible was getting no credit whatsoever.

The Vaporizer Project had been the brainchild of Finance Minister Whitehall, who had held the same post in the previous administration. The project was initiated under Whitehall, before Executive President Curry-Hume's election. But were the people told the truth? No, of course not.

Oh, if the project had been a failure, Finance Minister Whitehall would have gotten all the blame. And unlike a slippery politician, he wouldn't have been able to wiggle out of it. He was-to his intense irritation-not a charismatic man.

Whitehall wended his way through the bustle of people, stopping before the desk of the executive president's secretary. "Is he in?" he droned unhappily.

The woman glanced up. She had a phone in one hand and was digging through her desk drawer with the other.

"Oh, good morning, Minister," the harried woman said. "He knows about your appointment, but he's in conference now. Would you mind waiting?"

It was insulting to even suggest such a thing. Carlos Whitehall was a cabinet minister after all. On the other hand, he didn't feel like wading back through two floors of crowded hallways to his own offices. Lips twisting to show his annoyance, he took a seat in the waiting area.

He was dismayed to find that he was seated directly across from the official government photographic portrait of Blythe Curry-Hume. He had to put up with that photo everywhere he went in the building. There was even one hanging in his own office.

As usual, the man so beloved by his fellow countrymen failed to impress Finance Minister Whitehall. Certainly the executive president's appearance alone wasn't exceptional. In a country where combined Spanish and English features were common, Curry-Hume seemed to be a bland mix of both. His nose seemed a bit two narrow, and his eyes were almost a too-perfect almond shape. His features were white, though his skin was dark. It was as if his face had been voted on and selected for its across-the-board appeal.

Sitting in his little corner of the presidential waiting room, Carlos Whitehall realized that this probably went to the very heart of what constituted a successful politician.

"Mr. Curry-Hume will see you now, Minister." Whitehall glanced over. A helpful young presidential assistant was smiling at him. Whitehall harrumphed displeasure at the young man. He allowed the aide to lead him back over past the secretary's desk to the executive president's door.

Two men were just exiting. Whitehall recognized Blythe Curry-Hume's brutish bodyguards. The men were new to the government payroll. The executive president had brought them in from his private life. The men swaggered off through the crowded office suite and out into the hall.

The young aide caught the door just as it was closing, holding it open for the finance minister. Whitehall stepped past him without so much as a nod of thanks.

The door closed with a soft click behind him.

In person, Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume was as bland as his official portrait.

Curry-Hume sat behind his broad desk. The back of his gleaming leather chair touched the edge of the mahogany. Brown eyes stared out the window and into the lush hills above New Briton.

Curry-Hume was the one who had insisted the Vaporizer be built in those hills. The original plan had put it closer to the harbor for convenience. Often in meetings his eyes would slip to the window. Cabinet officers would find him staring wistfully at the miles of hills and jungle overgrowth that separated him from the device. He seemed to take strange comfort in the Vaporizer that went beyond what the device would mean for his country.

Whitehall waited a few seconds before clearing his throat.

"Sit down, Carlos," Curry-Hume said. The president did not turn around. He continued to stare. Finance Minister Whitehall took a seat in front of the president's desk.

"And what is so urgent that the man who has saved Mayana needs to see me?" Curry-Hume asked.

It was an admission only made in private. The world would never know where credit was truly due. "We might have a slight problem," Carlos Whitehall said. "One of the Vaporizer scientists has disappeared. He did not show up for work this morning. When someone was sent to check, they found his apartment in shambles."

"The Japanese," Executive President Curry-Hume said.

Whitehall raised a surprised eyebrow. "You heard?"

"News travels fast in a country this small," CurryHume said as he stared out the window. "I have spoken to their ambassador this morning. Apparently a member of their diplomatic mission never returned to their embassy last night. When the authorities were called, they already knew about your missing scientist. From you?"

Carlos Whitehall's face had paled. "What?" he asked. He shook his head. "No, no. The men who checked his apartment called the police. Mr. President, these men must be found. My God, this could be a disaster."

Curry-Hume finally pulled his eyes from the window.

"I know what you're thinking, Carlos," he said, spinning at his desk to face his visitor. "But I do not believe there's anything to be concerned about."

Whitehall shook his head. "I don't think you understand the ramifications of this," he insisted worriedly. "We hired Yakamoto away from one of Japan's biggest corporations. He signed a nondisclosure agreement like the others, but that is just words on paper if he never stopped working for Nishitsu. If he and this other man were working together, our technology could already be in their hands."

Curry-Hume offered a paternal smile that crimped the tight skin near his eyes. "Please, Carlos," he said in soothing tones. "Apparently I'm not a doomsayer like you. But even if it's as you say and they have stolen the ability to create their own Vaporizer, it would take them years to build one. And until that time, the market is ours. Look out at the harbor. We are turning scows away. The Caribbean continues to fill with ships waiting to dock. So what if someone builds another Vaporizer somewhere else? Will it bother me? Yes. But it's probably inevitable. And it is a long way away before they can hope to compete with us. We have everything in place to build more devices-faster than anyone else could, since we have learned from the mistakes of the first. And we have the first Vaporizer, Carlos. The only one in the world. It will serve its purpose."

Whitehall absorbed the executive president's words. He made sense. And though the finance minister was loath to admit it, Whitehall had already considered it inevitable that the technology would one day fall into the hands of others. However, he had always hoped that day would be far away.

He grunted unhappily. "I would still like to know where Yakamoto has disappeared to," he said. Curry-Hume's smile flickered just a little. "I am certain he will turn up somewhere. For now, the authorities will investigate. Put it from your mind. There is nothing we can do to help by worrying. And we have other business to attend to." He folded his hands in prayer on the desktop. "What about those scows that sank?"

Carlos Whitehall was reluctant to leave the subject of Toshimi Yakamoto, but he knew the executive president was right. With a deep breath he refocused his thoughts.

"There is no proof yet that they were torpedoed," he said. "Boat traffic has been restricted in the area, pending an investigation. We haven't been able to search yet, since our security is stretched thin already preparing for the Globe Summit. But honestly, sir, I doubt we'll find anything to support the American captain's claim. More than likely there was an accident. Perhaps an engine explosion on one that ignited flammable materials that engulfed both ships. The scows are very close to one another out there. It could be that they simply collided and both went down."

The executive president nodded. "Very good," he said. "Well, we seem to have only a few minor problems. Excellent. The Globe Summit delegations are all arriving. New Briton's hotels are bursting at the seams. Nearly all of the leaders of the world will be here by week's end."

Whitehall sensed by his tone it was time to leave. The finance minister got to his feet.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. President," he said.

"Oh, Carlos," the executive president said, "before you go, there is one other thing."

Reaching in a drawer, he passed a large piece of shiny computer paper across his desk. When Whitehall leaned forward, he saw that it was a photograph of two men. One was an elderly Asian, the other, a young Caucasian.

"Do you know these men?" Curry-Hume asked. Whitehall shook his head. "No. Are they with one of the delegations?"

The executive president nodded. "U.S. State Department scientists," he explained. "They were on one of the tour groups of the site yesterday. There were many men who have come and gone this week, but that one-" he tapped the old Asian "-is the only person in all the groups to speak with your Dr. Yakamoto. They were seen by security cameras."

The finance minister's face grew worried once more. "Another Japanese?" he said. "Mr. President, I strongly recommend that the authorities vigorously investigate the Yakamoto disappearance. Even if we accept the notion that others will one day steal the technology, we can't-"

"Not Japanese," Curry-Hume interrupted. With his fingertips, he spun the picture around so that the two men were facing him. "I would say Korean. Yes, definitely Korean." He twirled the photograph back around.

Carlos Whitehall squinted harder at the older man in the photo. "I do not wish to seem racist, but I don't know how to tell the difference," he admitted.

The executive president smiled. The already taut flesh tightened back near his ears.

"It's the eyes, Carlos," Curry-Hume said. "One can always tell a man by the eyes. As I said, these men are scientists. That is what their identification says they are. The strange thing is, thanks to the Vaporizer we have detailed records now of all the leading refuse experts in the world, and these two men are not to be found in any of our files. You've immersed yourself in this work these past few years. Tell me, Carlos, are you certain you don't know them? Read about them, perhaps? In published papers? Books? Articles? Their names are Doctors Henell and Chiun."

"I don't know them."

Curry-Hume nodded. "Very well," he said, offering his hand. "Thank you for stopping by."

They shook hands and Carlos Whitehall headed for the door. When he opened it, the noise of frantic activity from outside spilled into the room.

"Oh, and don't waste time worrying about Yakamoto, Carlos," Executive President Curry-Hume called as the finance minister stepped from the room. "You have enough to coordinate without wasting time on dead ends."

Curry-Hume continued to smile his tight smile as the finance minister closed the office.

Chapter 16

Remo had collected his shoes and threw a handful of money at the captain of his rented boat. Leaving the skipper to pilot his way back alone, he rejoined Petrovina on the Russian agent's trawler.

Even more scows had joined the garbage armada since Remo left shore. With Petrovina at the helm, the beat-up little boat had a tough time winding its way through the Caribbean maze of garbage scows on the long way to land. The sun was riding low in the sky by the time they puttered up to a private pier along the Mayanan fishing coast.

Houses that looked picturesque on puzzle boxes but were just squalid in real life slumped up the lush hills. Even away from the harbor, the air was ripe. Overloaded barges waited their turn in a line that stretched up the shore.

Remo had walked the five miles from town. They took Petrovina's car back to the center of New Briton.

The two of them were staying in the same hotel, Petrovina four floors down from Remo. The hotel was on the trash route from the bay. All day long massively loaded trucks rolled by, shaking the walls and littering the streets with trailing bits of trash. Petrovina had to wait for two flatbeds to pass by before she could turn into the hotel parking lot.

The car's air-conditioning had filtered out some of the smell. As they stepped into the humid dusk, the odor assaulted them anew. On their way into the hotel from the parking lot they made arrangements to meet after dinner.

"I will come to your room," Petrovina said. While she went to the desk to check her messages, Remo headed for the elevator.

He was pressing the button for the eighth floor when a small group of men hustled onto the car. Most of the men looked like they had pieced their outfits together from the Goodwill bin. Two wore suits with sandals. But at the center of the crowd was a roly-poly little man, well dressed except for a straw Panama hat that didn't quite coordinate with the rest of his outfit.

When Remo glanced at the man's face, he realized with a smile why he was wearing the mismatched hat.

NICOLAI GARBEGTROV was frowning as the elevator doors closed. When he saw his reflection in the silver doors, he took quick inventory, as he always did these days. He tugged gently on the brim of his hat, making certain the offending pro-American tattoo that had mysteriously appeared on his head was completely covered. Satisfied that none of the disfigurement was showing, he let loose a soft grunt.

The former Soviet leader glanced around the car. Garbegtrov noted the thin man who was not part of his entourage standing in the back of the elevator. The man seemed to be smiling at some private joke. In his T-shirt and chinos he didn't look like a visiting diplomat. Probably a member of the Green Earth rank and file. The ex-head of the Soviet empire stuck out a pudgy hand.

"Hello, fellow citizen of world," he announced. "I am Nikolai Garbegtrov, concerned passenger of spaceship Earth."

Remo looked at Garbegtrov, then looked at Garbegtrov's hand. He looked back at Garbegtrov. "Sorry, I don't shake hands with Russians. Got tired of having to take inventory of my fingers afterward."

Confused, Garbegtrov withdrew his hand. "Do you not know who I am?" he asked.

"Know. Don't care," Remo said as he watched the floor numbers blink by.

His sagging frown growing deeper, Garbegtrov retreated to the center of his entourage.

When the doors opened on the eighth floor a moment later, Remo slipped through the crowd. On his way out, he looked square at Garbegtrov's forehead.

"Nice tattoo," Remo said with an approving nod. "I think America's pretty neat, too."

Garbegtrov let loose a horrified gasp. Thinking his hat had fallen off, he clamped his hands to his head. Fat fingers rammed the brim of the Panama hat, knocking it clear off his head.

Shrieking, he plastered an arm up around his bald head as he frantically tried to catch the hat on the way to the floor. Men scattered as Garbegtrov swatted the hat around a half-dozen times before finally catching it one-handed near his toes. With his bald dome pressed to the corner so no one could see, he quickly tugged the hat back on.

The doors were closing as he straightened. Panting, the former Russian leader watched the thin young man's retreating back. When the doors closed, Garbegtrov's eyes were narrowed to daggers of suspicion.

REMO HEARD the doors ping shut behind him. He was still smiling as he rounded the far corner of the hall.

When Remo had left earlier that day, Chiun opted to stay at the hotel. After their trip to the Vaporizer, the old Korean had complained about the damage prolonged exposure to the Mayanan air might do to the delicate fabric of his kimono. But Remo saw the look on his teacher's face. He had seen the same expression many times over the past few months. Chiun wanted to be alone to meditate. The old Korean was introspective ever since Remo's ascendency to Reigning Masterhood. It was as if he were trying to come to terms with some great inner dilemma.

Chiun's private problems weren't on Remo's mind as he headed up the hall. Thanks to his chance meeting with the ex-Soviet premier, Remo's spirits were light when he got to his room. He was whistling as he pushed the door open. His face fell the instant he stepped over the threshold.

"Aw, c'mon, we're not starting this again," Remo groused, swinging the door shut behind him. Chiun sat cross-legged on the floor, face turned to the balcony and the setting sun. Behind him on the carpet two men in suits lay facedown on the carpet. Red stains spread from beneath their chests, darkening the beige rug.

"It was like that when I got here," the old Korean said without turning.

"Cut the baloney. Room service doesn't leave mints on the pillow and goddamn dead bodies on the rug. Chiun, I've got company coming."

"I tried to move them," the old man insisted. "I thought, 'I cannot leave a mess for Sinanju's newest young Reigning Master, even though it is a mess that I did not make, or if I did, was justified in making.' But feeble as I am, I could not lift them. I strained and strained and finally, with great reluctance, surrendered to the inevitable fact of age. I throw myself on your infinite mercy."

Hands on his hips, Remo was scowling at the mess on the carpet. "'Reserve mercy for those with coin to pay; punish the rest,'" he quoted. "The Great Wang."

After quoting the greatest of all Sinanju Masters, he noted a very slight satisfied smile on his teacher's lips.

Remo's shoulders slumped. "Heaven help me, I'm back in the body-dumping business," he muttered. He flipped over the nearest dead man, searching for identification. There wasn't any. Nor was there any on the second corpse. Both men wore shoulder holsters but had no guns. Remo found their weapons sitting in a planter across the room. There were daisies sticking out of the barrels.

He was relieved. No ID meant they had something to hide, which meant they didn't work for the hotel, which meant his teacher hadn't killed the manager and head bellboy.

"Chiun, any idea what these guys wanted?" he said as he shook the daisies onto a table. He returned the corpses' guns to their holsters.

"They wished to intrude on a delicate flower in second bloom. They wanted to destroy the peace of a kindly old man whose only desire was to steal a moment of tranquillity in order to meditate on his place in the world. They desired to insult the memory of what I was by thinking they could threaten the Master in Retirement with mere firearms."

"So I take it they didn't have a chance to say much of anything before you kacked them?" Remo said dryly.

"When whites speak, who listens?" Chiun replied.

Remo fixed him with a level eye. "I'll be back. Try not to kill anyone in the next twenty seconds." He ducked out into the hallway.

Two suites down, Remo spied a pile of luggage through a partially open door. Someone was checking in, presumably a Globe Summit mucky-muck, given the elegance of the suitcases. He heard a shower running but saw no one around.

Ducking into the room, Remo selected two trunks that seemed to be around the right size. He cracked the locks and dumped the contents onto the floor. An empty trunk on each shoulder, he headed back to his room.

Chiun was still at the glass doors. The sun was setting over the garbage-mounded scows in the Caribbean.

Muttering Korean curses, Remo placed the trunks next to the bodies. He went into the bedroom and stripped the sheets and blankets. Wrapping the bodies, he stuck one in each trunk. They didn't fit at first. A few strategic crunches and they folded up nicely. All that was left were the two bloodstains. Remo went to work tearing up the carpet.

"And who is your company?" Chiun asked as he worked.

"Huh?" Remo said absently. "Oh, just some spy or something I met. Chiun, the least you could do is put down a drop cloth or something. Or use the tub. You ever think of killing them in the bathroom? Bathroom cleans up nice."

"If you spent as much time working as you spend figuring out ways to avoid work, you would be finished by now."

"I'll finish you," Remo grunted.

He had a big square of carpet up. Tearing it in long strips, he tucked it in the trunks around the bodies. As he was snapping the lids shut, he felt a familiar rumble.

Realizing he might have just gotten lucky for one of the first times in his life, he stacked the trunks on top of one another and made a mad dash for the door. He ran down the far end of the hall where a common balcony overlooked the street. Eight stories below, another trailer truck was driving by on its way up to the hills above New Briton. The open back was filled with garbage.

As the truck passed directly below, Remo tossed the trunks over the balcony railing. They plunged the eight stories, landing neatly in the back of the passing truck. It continued up the street.

When he turned, he saw two elderly women sitting at a metal table on the corner of the balcony. He smiled at them.

"Almost missed trash day," he told them. Brushing imaginary dust from his hands, he headed back inside the hotel.

"This better not be the start of a revival," Remo announced as he came back into the suite. "I did my time already. I'm not about to start hauling dead bodies for you every other day again."

"That is only fair, for you are now Reigning Master," Chiun agreed. "You may limit the disposal of bodies to those days that fall in between every other day."

"That's not what I meant," Remo said.

He was eyeballing the hole in the carpet. He found one of the sheets he hadn't used to wrap a body. He stretched it over the exposed floorboards. He was just finishing up when the room phone jangled to life. Simultaneous with the ringing phone there came a knock at the door.

The phone was cordless. There was apparently a button on it somewhere Remo was supposed to push. He pushed one. The phone stopped ringing. When he put it to his ear, there was no one on the line nor was there a dial tone. He shook the phone and checked again. It didn't help.

Phone in hand, he headed for the door. As he was pulling it open, the phone started ringing again.

A smiling waiter with a serving cart stood in the hallway. "Room service," he announced.

"I didn't order room service," Remo said.

"I did," announced an authoritative voice from the hall.

Petrovina Bulganin breezed into the room.

The phone in his hand still ringing, Remo spun around Petrovina and the waiter, who had pushed the cart in after the Russian agent.

"I thought you were eating in your room," Remo said.

"I decide is perhaps too dangerous," Petrovina replied. "Hello," she said to Chiun.

The old man eyed the young woman with bland contempt.

"This is your company?" he said to Remo in Korean. "A Russian female? I thought you were past that phase."

"Can we not pick that particular wound right now?" Remo answered darkly in the same language. Petrovina didn't understand what they were saying. Nor did she care. She was looking at the ringing telephone, her beautiful face twisting in a frown of irritation.

"Are you going to answer that?"

Remo looked at the still-squawking phone. "Can you get this for me?" he asked the waiter, who was in the process of setting up Petrovina's meal on the cart.

The waiter took the phone and pressed a button. Remo swore it was the same button he had pressed. But this time instead of dead air, he heard the familiar lemony voice of Harold W. Smith.

"Remo? What took so long? Is everything all right?"

"Just a sec, Smitty," Remo said. "We're reenacting the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera here."

He told the waiter to bill the meal to Petrovina's room, threw him a tip and hustled him from the suite. When he came back into the living room, Petrovina was lifting the sheet on the floor with the toe of her shoe. She was frowning at the bare floorboards. "I've got to take this in private," Remo said, pushing her cart toward an adjacent room. "You mind?"

She looked through the doorway. "You want me to eat in lavatory?" she asked in bland disbelief.

"Hey, I've been to Moscow," Remo said. "This is five-star ambience."

He rolled her cart in, pushed a protesting Petrovina in after it and stuck a chair up under the knob. "Okay, Smitty, we can talk now," Remo said.

"What was that commotion?" the CURE director asked.

"Just a Russian agent I picked up. She was sent here to figure out what's going on, too."

Smith's voice grew concerned. "Who is this Russian?" he asked.

Remo frowned. Stepping over, he knocked on the bathroom door. "Hey, dumpling, what's your name again?" he called.

"Let me out!" Petrovina shouted. "That your first name or last?"

There was a furious hiss and a stream of muttered Russian on the other side of the door. It was followed by the angry sound of silverware clanking on dinner plates.

"She's not talking, Smitty," Remo said. "I think she said Bulganov, Balganan or something like that before."

"I do not like the idea of you bringing an outsider into this," the CURE director admonished.

"Hold that thought, because you're going to like what we found out even less," Remo said gravely. "The captain of that scow was right. The boats were torpedoed."

The Russian agent was instantly forgotten. "Are you certain?" Smith asked tightly.

"Those weren't love taps on the sides of those scows."

"Have you any idea who is responsible?"

"Not yet. But a couple of guys tried to kill Chiun while I was out checking the boats. Could be related."

"Is Master Chiun all right?" Smith asked.

Near the balcony windows, the old Korean clucked indignantly. "Four months," he muttered to the newborn night sky. "I have not been Reigning Master for a mere four months. Does the mad ghost-face think my skills were scattered to the winds with the relinquishing of my title?"

"Chiun's fine, Smitty," Remo said. "Which is more than I can say for the guys who came after him. They had no ID, no nothing. But dollars to doughnuts they're tied in with whatever's going on down here. They probably saw us when we were taking our tour of that doohickey or something."

"You saw the device in action?"

"Yeah. And you can surrender your skepticism, Smitty," Remo said. "It definitely works. By the looks of what Chiun and I saw today, this machine of theirs is really incredible. I can see why everybody's lining up to haul their junk down here. The world gets cleaner and Mayana gets richer. Seems to me like everyone benefits. Actually I don't see why anyone would want to stop it."

"Since the device was unveiled there have been complaints issued from a number of quarters," Smith said. "Some poorer nations are saying that lack of funds will limit their access to the device. A few in the scientific community have suggested that the technology is too important not to share it freely with the entire world. There are also some groups with environmental concerns. Any one of them has a motive to throw a monkey wrench into the works."

"I suppose there's no lack of screwballs out there," Remo conceded. "So I guess this means the President won't be coming down here after all."

"Unfortunately I doubt this will be enough to change his mind," Smith said. "The Mayanans have successfully kept outside investigators from checking out the scows-I'm assuming so as not to derail the Globe Summit. They have too much invested in it, especially now. The President has already made clear his intention to go. Unless the sinkings become public knowledge-or expand into something that affects more than a few garbage scows-I doubt he will change his mind. However, I will bring the matter up once more. It would help if you found something concrete on whoever is behind this. Perhaps that will help sway him to err on the side of caution."

"If you wish to know who is responsible, Emperor Smith, look no further than the Russian pretender who once occupied beloved Czar Ivan's throne," Chiun called. "Not only is his name garbage, but he once ruled the trough of garbage that poor, late, lamented Ivan's Russia has become."

"Oh, yeah, Smitty. Garbegtrov's down here, too," Remo said. "And it doesn't work that way," he told Chiun. "His name doesn't have anything to do with anything, other than the fact that he got shafted by his parents."

"Believe what wrong things you wish," Chiun sniffed.

"I heard the former premier was there," Smith said thinly. There was a note of disapproval in his tart voice.

"I know what you're thinking, Smitty, and I don't want another lecture."

Smith would not be deterred. "It was reckless of you to do what you did," the CURE director said. "Breaking in to the former premier's house and tattooing that slogan on his head was not something that I would ever have authorized."

"Wasn't up to you," Remo replied. "Russia stole some techniques from Sinanju. Three Russian leaders knew all about it, starting with Garbegtrov. That made it a Sinanju matter for punishment, not a CURE one. Ol' Garby was just lucky this wasn't the day of Master Nun. Back then a Chinese baker tried to steal just one ingot of gold from an Egyptian tribute caravan as it passed through his village. Nun flayed him alive and made him cook his own skin in his own ovens. Big mess. At least Garbegtrov got to keep all his skin. He got off easy. Besides, that tattoo was some of my finest work. It's still holding up even after a couple of years."

"You actually saw him?" Smith said.

Remo's tone grew sheepish. "We kind of shared an elevator," he admitted.

He could almost see the look of intense irritation on the CURE director's face.

"Did he see your face?" Smith pressed.

"Yes, but that's not a problem," Remo sighed. "He was asleep during the tattooing. And even though he saw me and Chiun years ago when Russia tried to steal our contract and get us to work for them, we gave him the Sinanju amnesia thing. He wouldn't remember me."

"Perhaps," Smith said. "But you do not exist in a vacuum. You have operated in Russia several times since then. It is possible you are known to some within their security services. Remember Anna Chutesov."

"I told Remo the same thing, Emperor," Chiun said.

Remo scowled. "Why does everyone keep bringing her up today?" he complained. "Anna doesn't remember me, and neither does Garby. I wiped both their minds clean of me, okay? And besides, the last time Garbegtrov saw me was before my last plastic surgery, so he wouldn't even know me even if he remembered me, which he doesn't."

There was a reluctant hmm on the other end of the line. "Very well," Smith said slowly. "Still, as a simple security matter in future it would be best to limit your contact with world leaders, current or former. Especially so soon after the Sinanju Time of Succession."

"That's gonna be hard to do if I'm still around here at the end of the week," Remo said. "This place is going to be crawling with presidents and dictators and other assorted assholes in another couple of days. And every one of them got a dead-body-o-gram from me a couple months back."

"Which lends even more urgency to your work," Smith said. "At the time I was uncomfortable with the requirements of the Time of Succession. You came in direct contact with too many leaders of the world. I want you finished in Mayana before too many of them are there, so please work as quickly as you can."

"No problem," Remo said. "After meeting some of them, color me unimpressed. In fact, if you could talk the President into staying home, I'm tempted to leave right now and let them all fend for themselves."

"Absolutely not," Smith said firmly. "Now is not the time for political instability in any part of the world. Regardless whether the President was going, I would still want you in Mayana. Given the climate we now live in, I do not want any of the other world leaders in jeopardy."

"Except for the ones we decide need the ax," Remo said. "Which I don't have a problem with, by the by. Okay, Smitty. I'll try to wrap this up fast."

"Please do," the CURE director said. "Also, bear in mind Mayana has an antiquated phone system. The delegates to the Globe Summit are reporting problems with the phone lines. But satellites will work even if landlines are frozen. If you have trouble calling in to report, find a cell phone. It doesn't matter whose. It will be scrambled from this end so there will be no chance of a trace."

"You got it," Remo said. "Talk to you soon." He tried to hang up the phone but couldn't figure out which button to press. Shrugging, he took it in both hands, snapped it in two and dropped the halves in a bureau drawer.

He heard a rustling of fabric from the bathroom, followed by rapidly retreating footfalls.

The door was thick. He doubted Petrovina could have heard much.

"Seek your answers from the garbage trough," Chiun instructed as Remo crossed over to the bathroom. "I have heard him speak his native tongue. He commands the Russian language as poorly as he commanded the Russian nation. That one has garbage on his tongue, as well as between his ears."

"I don't know, Little Father," Remo said skeptically.

Chiun shook his head, disturbing the soft tufts of yellow-white hair above his ears. "Listen. Do not listen. I was only the Reigning Master long before you were born. Why would I have anything of value to say?"

Remo pulled the chair out from under the doorknob and swung the bathroom door open.

"Coast is clear," he announced.

Petrovina Bulganin was perched on the edge of the toilet, long legs crossed neatly at the knees. A white napkin was draped across her lap. Knife and fork in hand, she was eating her meal from the serving cart. The Russian agent turned a bland eye on Remo.

"Oh," she said, chewing a mouthful of stringy beef. "Are you finished insulting my country, keeping secrets from your ally and locking me away in this porcelain gulag?"

"Lose the melodrama, Ivan Denisovich. We've been allies for all of twelve hours."

"Which is twelve hours too long," she replied snidely. As she stood, she slipped the napkin from her lap and dropped it on top of her plate. "This was mistake. Korkusku was idiot, but forming alliance with American agent makes me bigger fool. I will proceed on my own."

"Your funeral," Remo said, shrugging as she brushed past him. Kicking off his shoes, he flopped on the couch.

"You want duck tonight, Little Father?"

"Until you wash the smell of garbage water from your clothes, you will be eating on the balcony," Chiun replied.

It was as if Petrovina weren't even there. Amazing. This was what America had for spies? She had heard stories, of course, but the Russian agent could not believe how lax America was. As the men bickered over supper, she hurried from the room and out into the hallway.

She had her cell phone out of her purse and was pressing the speed-dial button for the special number on her way down the hall.

"Agent Dvah for Director Chutesov," she stated when the Institute operator answered. "Tell her is urgent."

As she waited, she pressed the down button on the elevator. Anna Chutesov was on the line before the elevator doors opened.

"I have most interesting news, Director," Petrovina whispered. "Is about this strange amnesia you said you experienced and possible American involvement."

So excited was she that when the elevator doors slid open she wasn't paying full attention. Petrovina didn't see the strong hands that reached out and grabbed her. Didn't see the faces of the men who dragged her onto the elevator or know the contents of the rag that was slapped over her mouth. There was a brief struggle during which Petrovina dropped her cell phone to the hallway floor. The fight soon drained from her. She slumped unconscious into the arms of her attackers. The elevator doors slid softly shut.

"Hello, Agent Dvah? Hello? Hello?" Anna Chutesov's troubled voice called over the phone to the empty hall.

Chapter 17

The Jeep bounced down the rough path through the dark South American mountainside. Behind the wheel, its sole occupant perspired in the warm Mayanan evening.

The jungle from which the Jeep had emerged was dense. A wild slice of prehistory lost in time in the modern age.

On the radio a classical music station soothed the driver's ears. This was truly a barbaric place. He would have chosen to be almost anywhere on Earth rather than Mayana. But necessity had dropped him here.

The road led down from a ravine that cut through the mountains above the Vaporizer site. There was a valley on the other side that had been closed off to the public for years. The valley was a site of infamy. It was there that the famous Jamestown tragedy had taken place, where hundreds of cult members had met their end.

Many mothers had lost misguided children that day so long ago. Some said their ghosts still haunted the hills. It was superstitious nonsense that had come in handy.

There wasn't an ounce of concern about running into any wayward ghosts on the face of the Jeep's driver as he threaded his way down the treacherous mountain road.

Eventually the rutted path turned to paved road. The government workers who had rolled the asphalt hadn't been allowed to go too far up, lest they stumble on something they shouldn't see. It was best to keep the remote location as hostile to visitors as possible. The rutted old road above made the special work that much more difficult.

The telephone poles that lined the route had been hauled up by peasant workers, men without families who would not be missed if they disappeared.

He picked up speed on the paved road. Soon the lights of blessed civilization appeared. They were just a few halogen floodlights on poles, but to the man in the Jeep they were like the Star of Bethlehem.

He sped toward the lights, slowing to a stop at a set of gates across the road. From the gates, a fence disappeared into the jungle in either direction, making the rest of the mountaintop inaccessible.

Armed guards manned the special rear booth at all time.

The guard booth and road were in a remote spot, away from prying eyes. Since no one who came to the Vaporizer site down below ever saw them, none had ever questioned what exactly they were guarding.

The guards themselves sometimes wondered. But they never mentioned it to anyone. They were paid well for their silence, and so they never said a word about the mysterious gate and the back road that led to nowhere. Nor did they mention the fact that the only two men who never used the road were Dr. Sears, director of the Vaporizer project, and the strange, rude little janitor who rarely seemed to push a broom or mop and never spoke a word to anyone but Dr. Sears.

The gates were opened for the silent janitor. His Jeep was allowed to pass out of the secret compound. He stopped on the other side to make certain the gates were closed once more. Only once they were secure did he proceed down the road.

The hill grew steep for the next mile before leveling off. The jungle trees broke apart, revealing the acres that had been cleared for the Vaporizer. Lights from the sprawling complex cast a warm yellow glow to the dark night.

The janitor drove his Jeep around behind the main offices. There was a small one-story building near the rear fence. It was said to be for the custodial staff, although only one custodian was ever allowed to enter it.

When he drew to a stop in his personal parking space, the janitor's headlights sliced across a lone figure sitting on the steps.

The waiting man winced at the light.

The American scientist, Mike Sears, the public face of the Vaporizer project, wore a worried expression. He got quickly to his feet, hurrying over to the Jeep.

"I wasn't sure what to do," Sears said. "It was in the last shipment. They dumped it without knowing it was even there. I only saw it because I was in the booth up above."

Sears had placed a call to the janitor two hours before. Two hours of waiting anxiously for the man to return from above.

"Where is it?" the janitor asked in an accent that was neither Mayanan nor American.

Sears was clearly panicked. He was as white as a sheet.

"Here, I'll show you," he said.

He led the way to the Vaporizer. Both men put on a pair of special boots before going onto the deck. Sears had put the lights on bright, illuminating the pit. There was a pile of garbage far down inside. Sitting on top was a big piece of broken luggage. Half-spilled from the trunk, a twisted body lay wrapped in a white sheet.

The man who was posing as a janitor pursed his full lips. "Come with me," he commanded.

They hurried out the gate. Mike Sears helped roll the special scaffolding back in. The two men kicked out the locks, and the scaffolding unfolded into the pit.

Sears waited nervously on the edge of the Vaporizer while the other man climbed inside.

Inside the Vaporizer, the bogus janitor scurried over heaps of rotting garbage to the body. Taking the dead man's chin in his hand, he tipped the head, examining carefully. As he was doing so, something else caught his eye. He climbed over the edge of the trash pile, vanishing completely from sight. He reappeared a moment later. Climbing back across the awkward pile, he scampered back up the scaffolding. "Is it who I think it is?" Sears asked.

The other man was wiping his hands on a handkerchief. He was clearly more irritated than repulsed. "Is one of President's bodyguards," he replied.

Sears felt his stomach grow weak. "I thought so," he said. "He looked like one of the men who came with him to the unveiling."

"It is not only body," the other man said, stuffing his hanky in his pocket. "There is second one on far side. Also presidential bodyguard."

"My God," Sears said. "I didn't know what to do. I sent everyone home before anyone could see. I just- With up there and all-" He nodded numbly toward the mountains. "I thought it would be... Who do we tell?"

The other man spoke with clear authority. "No one," he insisted. "I will make call to inform those who need to know. In meantime, clean this mess."

"How-?" Sears began. "Oh. Oh."

He stared down into the Vaporizer pit. At the body lying pale and broken with the rest of the trash. "But shouldn't we...?" Sears began to ask.

But when he turned, the man who Mike Sears alone knew was not actually a janitor was already gone.

Chapter 18

Remo had showered and changed, tossing his soiled clothes out the window. After an hour of arguing about what they should do for dinner, the two Masters of Sinanju decided to eat in the hotel dining room. Around the corner from their hotel suite, they found a cell phone on the hallway floor behind a potted plant. Remo scooped it up.

"Hello?" he asked.

Nothing but dead air. Shrugging, he snapped the phone shut and slipped it in the pocket of his chinos. "Problem solved," he told his teacher. "Smitty says I should be able to get through to him on one of these gizmos."

They rode the elevator downstairs. On the way to the lobby it stopped on the fifth floor. When the doors opened, Remo was confronted by a familiar, surprised face.

Vlad Korkusku blinked in shock at the sight of Remo. One of the other SVR agents Remo had sent for a swim was with Korkusku. Both Russian agents took a cautionary step back.

"Is you," Korkusku hissed.

"Is leaving," Remo replied blandly, pressing the lobby button once more.

It was apparent that Korkusku and the other man didn't want to upset Remo. They smiled to prove that they were friends. When Remo got a close-up look at the products of Russian dentistry, he frantically pressed the lobby button. Everyone seemed relieved when the doors began rolling shut.

"I am not your enemy," Korkusku offered, leaning at an angle toward the closing door.

"Tell that to someone who hasn't smelled your breath," Remo replied. "You're taking the next car down."

Exhaling, Korkusku whispered something in Russian to his companion. Though Remo didn't understand the words, he knew the tone of guilt when he heard it.

"Little Father?"

"He says they kidnapped the woman and are holding her captive in a room down the hall," Chiun said, uninterested. He clucked unhappily. "We should have sent downstairs for a menu first. We do not even know the fish of the day."

Remo wasn't listening. His hand had already shot out, catching the doors just before they closed completely.

Korkusku and his companion had apparently heard the old Korean's loud translation of their worried whispering. When the doors rolled back open, the two men were already halfway down the hallway and running like mad.

Remo tore off after them. Frowning his annoyance, Chiun flounced after his pupil.

Korkusku had slid to a stop in front of a door. Frantic fingers fumbled at a key chain. When he found it, his shaking hands couldn't get the key in the lock. Which didn't matter because by this time Remo was on him.

"Knock, knock," Remo said, banging Vlad Korkusku's head into the door. The lock popped and the Russian agent and his companion toppled in onto the carpet.

The curtains in the big suite were drawn tight on the bright lights of the warm New Briton night. Beyond the living room was the open door to a bedroom. Sitting on a chair in the middle of the adjacent room was Petrovina Bulganin. Her hands were tied behind her back. Cords from the drapes bound her ankles to the legs of the chair.

Remo propelled Korkusku and the other man into the bedroom. A television flickered on a stand in the corner. On the screen a fire burned at sea. Orange flames licked the sky while an endless scroll of text moved on a bar from left to right. The CNN logo was plastered in the corner.

Remo ignored the television.

Four other men were inside the room. Three were Russian agents. The fourth and most prominent individual was a portly little teddy-bear-of-a-man who looked shocked at the sudden, tumbling appearance of Vlad Korkusku. His fear grew to anger when Remo and Chiun slipped into the bedroom.

Nikolai Garbegtrov wore a black sweater and matching trousers with a black beret pulled tight over his tattoo. The outfit made him look like an overweight beatnik.

"Ublyudok," Garbegtrov said to Korkusku, thinking he had been betrayed.

One of the agents in the room pulled a gun, wheeling on the intruders. On his knees on the floor, Korkusku shook his head frantically, trying to warn the man off. Before he could open his mouth, there was a horrible crack of bone.

The SVR gunman was upside down when he crashed into the louvered closet doors. The doors splintered, and the contents of the closet dumped into the room.

Hundreds of hats spilled from suitcases and hatboxes. There were fedoras and homburgs, baseball caps and toques. Hats of all different shapes and sizes, all collected in the recent past. A black bowler rolled out across the floor, tapping into the toes of Petrovina Bulganin's shoes. Hanging in the back of the closet Remo saw a sorry little sombrero.

Near where the agent had been standing, Chiun tucked his hands inside the voluminous sleeves of his kimono.

"Now can we go eat?" he asked.

"In a minute," Remo said. "Okay, what the hell do you turnipheads think you're doing?" Garbegtrov pulled himself up to his full height, jutting out his chins indignantly.

"I do not know who you think you are to be," he sniffed. "But I am former head of Russia and we are questioning this person for possibility of treasonous acts. You may go now, and we will not involve police. But you will go now."

He spoke with such authority. Standing erect in the middle of the posh Mayanan hotel room, the former Soviet premier was the very haughty embodiment of offended dignity.

Remo flicked off Garbegtrov's beret.

"Aahhh!" screamed the former head of Russia. There was a brief flash of his pro-American tattoo before he managed to stuff his head between the mattress and box spring.

"Let's try this again," Remo said, turning to Petrovina. "What's going on here?"

Petrovina seemed a little dazed. A result of the drugs they'd injected into her after dragging her down in the elevator. Petrovina tried to keep her lolling head straight as she looked up at Remo.

"Oh, is you," she said. "Hello."

"Yeah, hi," Remo said. "What are they doing with you?"

"It is there. On television." Remo glanced at the TV.

The fire still burned. Remo checked the endlessly scrolling bar as it rolled by the bottom.

... Rescue ambulance falls in as storm drain collapses, further endangering imperiled kittens'?" he read.

"Not words," Petrovina said. "That is different story. Look at picture."

Remo looked more closely at the screen. When he got a good look, his face steeled. He marched over to the bedroom window, drawing back the drapes.

Far out at sea, a fire blazed high into the night. The same image as that on the screen. In fact, it looked as if the action were being filmed from the roof of their hotel.

"Sub's back, Little Father," he said darkly, letting the drapes slip from his fingers.

"Yes," Petrovina said. "Two more scows have been sunk in last half hour. Garbegtrov want to know what I know about sinkings. Is my fault. I should have worked alone. Should have known. Korkusku was former member of KGB who worked presidential security. That is how he knows Garbegtrov and why he is in league with Garbegtrov now. After I left you, his men kidnapped me and brought me here. They knew I was in Mayana to investigate trouble at sea. They only learn now that trouble was caused by that one." With a contemptuous nod, she indicated Nikolai Garbegtrov.

All that was visible of Garbegtrov was his ample rump.

"Whatever she says, she is lying!" he yelled from under the mattress. "I never even met this woman before. Now that I think on it, I do not believe this is even my room."

Still bound to the chair, Petrovina was shaking her head. "I knew was mistake to rely on SVR help," she muttered to herself. "The Institute has agents who could have come down to assist me. Good agents who I know and trust. But Russian entourage for Globe Summit was picked by Kremlin, not Institute. Our president was once KGB and so trusts old KGB men. So I get traitors to back me up."

Remo didn't hear the last. At the mention of the Institute, he glanced at Chiun. The old Korean's eyes had narrowed to slits of deep concern.

"The Institute has field agents again?" Remo demanded. "What kind of agents?"

It was the drugs that replied. Petrovina would never have answered such a question under ordinary circumstances.

"Like me," she said simply. "Espionage agents. I was drafted from ranks of SVR. We are all women. No men allowed. It is like big sorority." She giggled.

Remo let loose an exhale of relief. Beside him, Chiun nodded soft satisfaction. His thin beard barely stirred.

"She has not repeated her previous folly," he said.

"Wasn't Anna's fault that time, Little Father," Remo replied. "Still, I'm glad she's not churning out hack versions of you and me again. Sounds like the Institute's gone all feminist."

In her chair, Petrovina blinked. She seemed to be coming around. "Anna," she said. "Director Chutesov. Yes, you know her, don't you?"

Remo shook his head. "Long story with an unhappy ending," he said. "Let's worry about the here and now. What do you know about the scows that you didn't tell me?"

"Is Russia caused problem," she said. "We suspected it but did not know. Now we do. But we did not know Garbegtrov was behind problem. I only learned that now."

Garbegtrov had wrapped a blanket around his head like a turban and crawled over to his nearest spilled hat. He stood up now, a woolen nightcap covering his great shame. A dangling red pom-pom bobbed in front of a flabby face that was pleading understanding.

The premier seemed resigned to the fact that the truth was about to come out. He at least wanted to be certain that it was his version.

"I can explain," he insisted. "Is not actually my fault. Is his. He has gone insane."

"Do not lie," Petrovina accused, chin aimed squarely at former Premier Garbegtrov. "It is your doing. From what you have said, it is all your fault."

"What did he do?" Remo demanded, exasperated.

"He stole Russian submarine and now it has gone completely out of control," Petrovina Bulganin replied. Her eyes burned accusation at Nikolai Garbegtrov. "He wished to silence me, thinking I was only one who knew. But then news came on television of cause of first two scows sinking. He now wants information from me to stop submarine."

Remo looked around the room-from Petrovina to Korkusku and his men to Garbegtrov. Vlad Korkusku was on his feet now, a chastened look on his sagging face. Garbegtrov wore a hangdog expression of guilt.

"So we're all on the same side now?" Remo asked.

"I am on no one's side but my own," Chiun proclaimed.

"No surprise there. Everybody else?"

Vlad Korkusku spoke up for his men. "We will work with you," he volunteered.

"I want to stop sub," Garbegtrov pleaded. "It will ruin me if truth gets out."

"Don't tempt me," Remo warned darkly. "A question for the room. Does anyone here know how to find it?"

Heads shook all around.

"Great," Remo groused. "We're limited to water." He pointed at Korkusku. "You're driving." They started for the door. Behind them Petrovina bounced in her chair near former Premier Garbegtrov. She was tugging at her ropes. With the others leaving, Garbegtrov seemed at a loss for what to do with the Institute agent.

"Are you going to cut me loose?" she demanded.

"You already cut me loose, baby," Remo replied. "Or did you forget your post-eavesdropping snit?" With Chiun and the others, Remo was heading out the door. Petrovina screeched after him.

"I have keys to boat!"

At the door, Remo stopped. His Russian entourage plowed into one another behind him. At Remo's elbow, Chiun's weathered face puckered unhappily. The old Korean could see the look of surrender on his pupil's face.

"Just remove the harpy and take her keys," Chiun spit. "No good has ever come of consorting with Russian women."

Remo sighed. "I'm sure it'd be easier," he admitted. "But I've already dumped my share of bodies for the day."

He trudged resignedly back to Petrovina.

Chapter 19

Captain Gennady Zhilnikov did not like having civilians aboard his boat. Unfortunately he didn't have much of a choice. His entire crew were technically civilians. Yes, they had all been sailors at one time. But now they were common civilians. Just like Captain Zhilnikov himself.

It seemed somehow fitting. After all, civilian money had bought and paid for his boat.

Not originally. Way back when the world made sense, the construction of the Charlie-class nuclear attack submarine Novgorod had been financed by the glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No, only its theft had been paid for by civilians.

The Novgorod was one of the many submarines in the Atlantic fleet that had been retired at the end of the Cold War. Towed to an abandoned Latvian shipyard on the Gulf of Riga, the submarine was added to the lengthy list of vintage craft from the Russian navy slated to be dismantled or scuttled in the Arctic Sea.

The Novgorod was docked for months. A sad, silent, rusting symbol of another era.

When the Russian empire began to collapse faster than anyone had imagined, the republics along her western border quickly claimed independence from Moscow. Along with independence, Latvia claimed ownership of all of the vessels docked within her borders. This included the Novgorod.

Russia hemmed and hawed for a time about wanting the ships returned. In time Moscow decided it would be easier to let someone else worry about disposing of the obsolete vessels. Russia turned control of the boats over to Latvia.

After claiming victory over its former master, Latvia suddenly realized that it had no idea what to do with the rusting hulks it now owned. It was years before someone up the chain of command in the newly independent country decided that a detailed inventory should be made. When the task was finally undertaken, no one noticed that one of their decommissioned Russian submarines had gone missing.

It had happened when the eyes of the world were directed at more important matters. An elite group of former Russian navy officers and men had crept onto the base under cover of darkness and made off with the Novgorod. Most amazingly, this daring act had taken place by order of none other than former General Secretary Nikolai Garbegtrov himself.

Back when they first stole the sub, Captain Zhilnikov thought that he was part of a covert mission to restore the glory of communism to the tattered remnants of the Russian empire. He and his men assumed that Premier Garbegtrov was assembling a secret fleet that would force the reformers from power and return him to his rightful place as Party leader and iron-fisted ruler. Zhilnikov and the rest would be toasting their success within the walls of the Kremlin by summer.

But summer came and summer went. American fast-food restaurants opened in Moscow, billboards advertising American products sprouted up around the capital and still the new revolution failed to materialize.

The men of the Novgorod began to realize they might not have signed on for the mission they had expected. Premier Garbegtrov seemed more interested in hosting American film, television and recording stars aboard the captured submarine than in seizing control of the Russian ship of state.

Captain Zhilnikov learned the truth one fateful evening off the coast of New England. The Novgorod had surfaced in the dead of night to take on supplies. They were met by an expensive American yacht.

This had happened frequently since the theft of the submarine, usually near Martha's Vineyard, where many rich Communist apologists lived. Food, repair materials, oil-anything they needed was given them by the Americans. That night the boat that met them belonged to a middle-aged singer whose well-publicized heroin addiction and institutionalization for mental problems assured him gold records, Grammy awards and plaudits from his peers.

Garbegtrov had given the singer a complete tour of the submarine, from stem to stern. The gleeful songsmith nodded approval, stating emphatically that America had never built anything as impressive as the Novgorod.

Captain Zhilnikov knew right then and there they were dealing with a complete imbecile. American submarines had always been superior to Russia's. Zhilnikov complained about the man after the singer had climbed out of the conning tower and the crew of the Novgorod closed the hatch.

"That man is a fool," the captain snarled.

"Yes," former Premier Garbegtrov agreed. "But he is a rich fool."

Captain Zhilnikov glanced at his men. They were checking instruments, going about their duties as good Communist sailors. The yacht was puttering away from the submarine. While they were busy, the captain pitched his voice low.

"With respect, Comrade Premier," he whispered, "the men are anxious. When will you begin the restoration of the glorious Soviet Union?"

Garbegtrov looked to Captain Zhilnikov, a hint of amusement in his tired eyes. When he saw Zhilnikov's earnestness, the premier burst out laughing.

Garbegtrov rubbed tears from his eyes as he held on to a bulkhead for support. Still laughing, he glanced back to Zhilnikov. The captain's eyes had grown suspicious. His heavy brow was low.

The laughter died in the premier's throat.

"Oh," Garbegtrov said, amazed. "Oh, you are serious."

"Of course, Comrade Premier," Captain Zhilnikov had said. "Is that not our mission?" Garbegtrov shot a look over at the other sailors on the cramped bridge. They were busy at work. Only the executive officer was looking their way.

"Come with me, Gennady," Garbegtrov whispered.

The former premier led the captain back to the quarters he used whenever he was aboard the Novgorod.

"What precisely do you think we are doing here, Gennady?" Garbegtrov asked once the door to the small cabin was closed and locked.

"I thought we were working to restore Lenin's great vision to Mother Russia," the captain replied. Garbegtrov sat on the steel edge of his bunk. "And how will we do this with only one submarine?"

"I assumed, Comrade Premier, that we were the first in a new Soviet fleet. We would build strength, and when the time came our forces would seize control."

Garbegtrov's frown deepened. "I will let you in on a secret, Gennady," he said. "A secret I assumed you knew. We are not only the first ship in this mighty fleet you have invented, we are the only ship."

Captain Zhilnikov's face clouded. "I do not understand," he said.

"Gennady," the ex-premier said, "do you know the cost of keeping this one vessel afloat? We can barely afford it as it is."

"Finance is something capitalist Americans fret over."

Garbegtrov nodded. "You are lying to yourself if you believe communism cares nothing for money. If we did not, this ship would never have been decommissioned. She was left to rust because Mother Russia could no longer afford her. Capital has always been as important to Russia as it is to America. Except they knew better how to spend it."

Captain Zhilnikov didn't like what he was hearing. "Respectfully, Comrade Premier, the pursuit of money is not the goal of a good Communist."

Garbegtrov smiled sadly. "You and your men are being paid well, are you not?"

Zhilnikov frowned. "Yes," he admitted. "But that is because we are the new chosen ones. The vanguard of the new order."

"You are. But it is not the order that you think." And Garbegtrov went on to tell the captain how he had gone to a meeting not long before the theft of the Novgorod. At this meeting he found a group of people who had given him hope for a new future for the global Communist movement.

"Was it in Moscow?" Zhilnikov asked hopefully.

"California," Garbegtrov replied.

He explained to the former Russian navy captain about environmentalism and an organization called Green Earth. How the Green Earthers were more devoted to socialist dogma than any Duma member. Garbegtrov told the captain that the people who had been ferrying supplies out to the Russian sub were wealthy Americans who belonged to the organization.

"They hate their country, these rich, spoiled children of privilege," Garbegtrov explained. "They hate its freedoms and strength. They loathe the military. Anything that weakens American power and prestige in the world gives them joy. When I mentioned Russia's own diminishing military strength, they were crestfallen. There was a time, Gennady, when we would have destroyed their way of life-crushed the very freedoms that allowed them to act like the stupid children they are-and these people were actually upset that Russia was no longer a threat to their survival.

"It was when I told them about the situation with our decommissioned warships that they became particularly interested. One got it in his head that it would be a fitting slap in the face of his own country if Green Earth could have its own Soviet submarine. A way to strike fear in the hearts of illegal dumpers, whalers, oil tankers and the like. Before I knew what was happening it was being voted on by the Green Earth board. The project was green-lighted, I was put in charge and-not long after-you and your men stole me my submarine."

Captain Zhilnikov couldn't believe what he was hearing. He was absolutely crushed. His legs were wobbly. He had to sit down in the little chair near the bolted-down desk in the corner of the tiny cabin.

"We will not use the Novgorod to take back Mother Russia?" he asked weakly.

Garbegtrov sighed. "Russia is not as strong as she once was," he admitted. "But Moscow will not surrender to one little obsolete submarine that has to beg for its supper."

And that was that. Out of financial necessity, Captain Gennady Zhilnikov had become a tool of environmental zealots.

For several years the Novgorod was kept afloat by Green Earth money. During that time, Garbegtrov moved up the ranks of the organization just as he had risen to the top position of the Communist Party. As time went on, the former premier spent less and less time involved in matters of the Novgorod, he was too busy staying in plush hotels paid for by Green Earth. Funding and supplying the sub was turned over to a minor American Green Earth member. The ultimate insult.

By now the men on board knew the truth. Though it sickened them, the pay was good and the work was undemanding. In fact, it was almost as if they had been forgotten.

Then one day two weeks before the Globe Summit in Mayana, Captain Zhilnikov learned that this was indeed the case.

His American Green Earth contact had met the sub in international waters off the coast of Florida. With him was one of the ranking members of the Green Earth board.

The board member was a dotcom millionaire who had cashed out before his online birdseed store had collapsed along with the rest of the Internet market. He was twenty-six, had a social conscience and was a lot more concerned with the bottom line than the rest of the organization's membership.

"You gotta be fluffing kidding me," he said as he climbed down from the deck of the Novgorod. He looked around at the sailors-still dressed in their Soviet-era uniforms. "No fluffing way, dude," he said, shaking his blond-highlighted head.

"Is something wrong?" Captain Zhilnikov asked.

The kid laughed. "Dude, this is all wrong. We've been paying to keep this tub afloat for years." He glanced back at the man who had been Zhilnikov's liaison with Green Earth. "Years, right?"

"Yes, sir. Approximately a decade."

"Dudes, that is way nuts," the kid said. "I know some of the older guys thought this was a cool idea and all, but this thing is tapped. I think they were high when they okayed this 'cause there's no way they could ever have used it."

"What do you mean?" Zhilnikov asked. He had taken an instant dislike to this callow American.

"It was stolen, dude. The Russians would freak if they found that out. Someone up in Green Earth figured that out, so they kept this floating money pit a secret. But they thought it was cool, I guess, so they kept you around. No more, dude. You're history."

"What does this mean, 'I am history'?"

"You, your little barnacle-butt buddies-you're all gone. Take this tub out and sink it in the Atlantic. We'll get you back on our boat."

Captain Zhilnikov was appalled. The Novgorod had been home to himself and his crew for years. He would not surrender without a fight.

"Out of the question," the captain said. "I demand to speak with Nikolai Garbegtrov. He is powerful man in your organization now. He will not stand for such outrage."

The kid laughed. "Dude, who do you think signed off on scuttling this tub?"

Captain Gennady Zhilnikov couldn't speak. He blinked in disbelief. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

He had believed in Garbegtrov when the politician was first selected premier of the old Soviet Union, only to be betrayed.

Again he personally trusted that Garbegtrov had arranged to steal the Novgorod to take back Mother Russia. Again betrayal.

And he had surrendered all dignity to work for these demented Americans who loved trees more than children, only to have Garbegtrov-incompetent, decadent, slave-to-the-West Garbegtrov-betray him one last time.

Zhilnikov tried to gather thoughts now filled with images of rage and hate and revenge. Through the haze he heard a voice.

"It's kinda too bad and all," the youthful visitor to the Novgorod was commenting. He was glancing around the sub's bridge. "This is pretty cool. Das Boot and all. Hey, dude, you got torpedoes and everything on this scow?"

Captain Zhilnikov's face steeled. He personally took his two American guests to the torpedo room. He made sure several of his men were accompanying them. Zhilnikov spoke low orders in Russian. His guests didn't understand Russian.

"Hey, that's pretty cool, dude," the blond-haired American said as he peered in a torpedo tube. "Hey, are those real torpedoes over there? Hey, what are you dudes doing? Hey, put me down! Hey, open this up!"

The last words were shouted from the wrong side of the locked torpedo tube door.

The second man was loaded into another tube. Both men banged and screamed as the Novgorod sank below the waves. The tubes were flooded and the banging stopped.

When their bodies popped to the surface a few minutes later, there was very little time for their companions on the boat that had brought them there to panic. A single torpedo strike from the Novgorod sank the boat and all hands.

And on that very special day-a day of liberation for the old Soviet captain-Gennady Zhilnikov had finally found a post-Cold War mission for the crew of his small stolen submarine. The utter humiliation and destruction of the man who had put the Novgorod and Mother Russia out to sea.

Zhilnikov already knew through the Green Earth newsletter (printed on 100% recycled paper) that Nikolai Garbegtrov intended to act as the organization's ambassador to the Globe Summit. With the eyes of the entire world squarely on Mayana, there would be no better place to seek public revenge.

On occasion the Novgorod had returned in secret to Latvia or one of the other breakaway republics for supplies. It was, after all, a nuclear attack submarine and there were some items that just could not be procured from even the wealthiest American fools. On the black market they were able to purchase scavenged parts from ships rusting all along the west coast of the former Soviet Union.

Captain Zhilnikov had made certain that he had a full complement of torpedoes on board at all times. No matter what Green Earth claimed about peaceful motives, Gennady Zhilnikov had no intention of putting out to sea unarmed.

His torpedoes had come in handy removing the Green Earth boat that had delivered Nikolai Garbegtrov's doomed envoys to the Novgorod. And now, two weeks later, they were proving instrumental in Captain Gennady Zhilnikov's scheme to ruin Russia's untrustworthy former premier once and for all.

UNSEEN BY EYES on sea or shore, the dark shape of the Soviet-era submarine Novgorod slid silently through the midnight-black waters of the Caribbean Sea.

After sinking the first two garbage scows three days earlier, the old submarine had slipped out to deeper waters between Haiti and Mayana. There it had waited patiently among coral and schools of swimming fish.

Captain Gennady Zhilnikov expected some news. The world was watching Mayana. The two scows had obviously been sunk by torpedoes. A simple investigation would reveal that fact. Even Mayana with its limited resources would be able to figure it out with just a cursory examination of the scows.

The news would create fear and panic, especially with the leaders of the world converging on the small South American country. The world would focus like a laser beam on the treacherous Caribbean and the unknown danger that lurked beneath its surface. And then, then Gennady Zhilnikov could surface, pop the hatch and point a finger squarely at the great betrayer, Nikolai Garbegtrov-the man behind it all. His men listened in on radio signals for hours. There were no news reports of the torpedo strikes. That the two garbage scows had sunk was mentioned a few times. But it was attributed to a human error. One scow had struck another, resulting in an explosion that consumed both ships. As the hours dragged into days, no corrections were issued. The captain of one of the scows was to blame for both ships sinking. There was no mention of a submarine. No one knew of the stolen Novgorod. No one knew that Nikolai Garbegtrov, the lying, former dog-of-a-Soviet-premier, was to blame.

It was all too much.

"Human error," Captain Zhilnikov growled. "I will give them human error. Take us back," he ordered.

Even when they returned to the coast of Mayana, the Russian captain thought they might be sailing into a clever trap. But there were no submarines or warships lying in wait for them. Just a cluster of fat blips on the sonar screen.

There were many more scows than had been there just three days previous. The green dots of the scows stretched from one side of the sonar display to the next.

Sitting ducks.

Zhilnikav watched the screen through narrowed eyes. The monitor bathed his pale face in a wash of watery green. He looked like a seasick Martian.

"That one," Zhilnikov commanded, pointing randomly at a blip on the screen.

The order was relayed, the torpedo tubes loaded. "Periscope," Captain Zhilnikov commanded, spinning from the sonar station.

Far above, the periscope rose like the neck of a steel sea monster.

He found the scow. Silhouetted against a backdrop of lights from the hundred ships beyond it.

Captain Zhilnikov paused for a moment.

They had gotten away with their first attacks. He and his men could slip off and the world would not be the wiser.

He thought of Garbegtrov-the bloated betrayer-sprawled on a bed of American dollars. Laughing at Zhilnikov, laughing at the Soviet Union. Laughing at Russia.

The old Russian officer's face steeled. "Fire!" Captain Zhilnikov bellowed.

And the word launched frothy spittle from between the bitter old captain's furiously sputtering lips.

Chapter 20

Remo and Chiun stood on the damp deck of the speeding Russian trawler. Beside them, Petrovina Bulganin and Vlad Korkusku studied the Caribbean night. The rest of the SVR agents were up on the bridge.

The two Russians on deck were damp from the spray of the waves that broke across the boat's prow. Both Sinanju Masters remained bone-dry.

The first scows were moored a half mile off the coast.

There had been more torpedo strikes since they left the hotel. In a dozen spots fires now toyed with the twinkling stars in the warm sky. The scows were so tightly packed that flames from the explosions had spread to other boats.

Mayana wasn't equipped for such an emergency. Here and there in Garbage City could be seen flashes of red-and-blue lights-official boats sent from shore. Two undermanned fireboats squirted high plumes of water onto two separate blazes.

When the attack began, some scows had tried to flee. The slow-moving craft were easy targets. The remaining scows were hemmed in by miles of floating trash heaps.

The unnatural firelight cast visions of Hell across the calm sea surface. Petrovina Bulganin's beautiful face was bathed in a ghoulish wash of flickering orange.

She had regained her full senses during the ride from the hotel and the trip out on the boat. Her anger toward the men around her worsened as she grew more alert.

"So you try to kill me for Garbegtrov and his idiotic environmental movement?" she said, sneering at Vlad Korkusku. "That is why you try to blow me up and suffocate me?"

"No," Korkusku grunted in reply. He was watching the sea. "At first it was because I just do not like you."

Remo raised his hand. "Me, neither."

"Make that three," chimed in Chiun, who knew only too well his pupil's soft spot for beautiful Russian spies.

"And you," Petrovina said to Remo. "You are a menace, with your kicking in of doors like macho American Rambo. You could have gotten me killed. "

"Could've, should've, would've," Remo said. "Sue me for saving your life. And for those of you keeping score, that's the third thank-you I didn't get from you."

"Russian women never show proper gratitude," Chiun confided. "You would think being tractor wenches with cement-mixer hips and shovels for faces they would be grateful for any little attention they receive. But their ugliness has made them resentful. Do not talk to Russian women, Remo, unless you wish to be disappointed or need to know 1001 ways to abuse a cabbage."

Vlad Korkusku-whose mother, sisters, aunts and grandmother were all Russian women-decided to say a word not for Petrovina Bulganin, but for Russian females in general. He spent the next minute dangling by his ankle from the back of the boat with his head underwater and his face an inch away from the propeller. When he was allowed back up for air, Korkusku vehemently agreed that all Russian women were ugly, nasty harpies.

"You see?" Chiun said. "Even through his alcoholic delirium this Russian male understands."

"I don't think he's drunk, Little Father. Just wet."

Chiun patted Remo's hand. "You are still young in so many ways," he said paternally.

Searchlights were cutting across the water. The others concentrated on the spots of white. Remo and Chiun searched the darkness between the light. They all scanned the surface of the water for any signs of the Russian submarine.

"This is stupid," Petrovina said. "We have no weapons or defenses even if we do find it. What do you plan to do?"

"Don't know," Remo said. "Maybe toss you at lt."

Another five minutes passed before he spotted the sub sliding up from beneath the sea. The dark, curving shape of a periscope was lost in the darkness. A thin froth of white water broke as it barreled through the waves.

"There it is," Remo said tightly.

Chiun had spied it, too. Petrovina and Vlad Korkusku squinted but could see nothing.

"Where?" Petrovina asked doubtfully.

Remo wasn't paying attention to her. "That way," he hollered up to the bridge. "Angle us that way." The SVR helmsman had twice seen Remo in action. He dared not disobey. Picking up speed, he eased the boat to port. The line of moored scows drew closer.

"I see nothing," Petrovina said. "How do you see it?"

"You got thirty years, I'll show you," Remo said. "Otherwise butt out. Okay, we're good here," he called up to the bridge. "Stay on this course."

Petrovina opened her mouth to express further doubt, but was interrupted by an excited voice. "We have submarine on sonar!" an SVR agent called down from the bridge.

Remo and Chiun had already moved to a break in the rail. Remo kicked off his loafers and Chiun shed his sandals.

Floodlights were sent searching the sea. They found the periscope gliding along forty yards off the port bow.

The fishing boat had no torpedoes of its own. Korkusku had squandered their one depth charge. Petrovina Bulganin threw up her hands, helpless.

"So you have found it. What now?" she demanded.

"This," said Remo.

His toes were curled over the edge of the boat's deck. Remo tightened his leg muscles. He shot up in the air, slicing at an angle that brought him parallel to the waves. Chiun did the same.

Ten yards out, both men cut sharply downward. Without disturbing a single drop of water, the two Masters of Sinanju disappeared beneath the gentle waves of the Caribbean.

IN THE BELLY of the submarine Novgorod, Captain Gennady Zhilnikov watched through his night-vision scope as the two men jumped from the deck of the fishing boat.

For a moment they seemed to soar like birds before they dropped like stones. Together they vanished below the surface.

They certainly couldn't hope to catch the Novgorod. Already they would have fallen behind. Even the boat from which they'd jumped was having trouble keeping pace with the submarine.

"What do they think they are doing?" Zhilnikov asked, puzzled.

"Shall we sink her, sir?" his executive officer asked, thinking Zhilnikov was referring to the fishing boat that had obviously seen their periscope.

"What? No. Target another scow. Any one. It does not matter."

The order went down for another torpedo to be loaded. Another random scow was targeted. Zhilnikov was about to give the order to fire when the sea erupted with a noise so terrible it rattled the captain's molars.

The horrible wrenching noise came from somewhere above his head. It was the sound of tearing metal. The noise reverberated down the length of the Novgorod, trailing off at her giant propellers.

In all his many years at sea Captain Zhilnikov had never heard such a sound. It was as if Poseidon himself were squeezing the submarine in his mighty hand.

"What did we hit?" Zhilnikov snapped.

Frantic men checked instruments, surrendering to frightened confusion. "Nothing, Captain!" Zhilnikov looked up. The ceiling had never seemed so low or fragile. The echo of terrible sound was rolling back up along the metal shell.

"What the hell was that?" the Russian captain whispered.

For some reason his normally logical mind summoned up boyhood images of sea monsters that could drag helpless vessels to a watery grave. He banished the childish thought as soon as it occurred to him. He was on a vessel built by the powerful Soviet Union. There were no ships to match his in the area.

Captain Zhilnikov's confidence returned. He knew in his proud Russian heart that no animal or sea serpent was strong or foolish enough to challenge the mighty Novgorod.

REMO WASN'T QUITE SURE at first the best way to break a submarine. He figured anything that would get the water from the outside inside would do the trick.

He and Chiun had followed the lowering periscope down to the Novgorod. The Russian submarine was a huge dark shape gliding only a dozen yards beneath the waves. At about twenty knots it was easy for the two Sinanju Masters to keep pace.

A wall of displaced water pressed hard against them as they made their way down to the conning tower.

Once inside, the tower protected them from the surging water. They found the hatch-like an oversize manhole. Their fingers searched for a flaw, a lip, anything that could be used for a handhold.

They found what they needed at the front where the hatch hadn't been properly set in the frame. It was just the slightest misalignment in the airtight frame.

Remo jammed his fingers into the opening. Steelhard fingertips jimmied a gap wide enough for his hands.

Remo ripped once, hard.

The reinforced metal screamed in protest as Remo peeled the hatch back like the lid on a can of sardines. Water flooded in through the mangled hatch door.

Both men let the water take them. The water surge drew them down the tower and to the inner hatch. The dark tower interior was like working in a phone booth with the glass painted black. The inner hatch had the kind of handle Remo was used to. A round wheel sat at the center bulge of the hatch.

When Remo grabbed it and tried to give it a spin, the locked wheel stubbornly refused to budge. Remo's exertions thus far had done little to exhaust his oxygen supply. His concern was for his teacher, who, at one-hundred-plus years, would be feeling the effects by now.

He glanced at Chiun. The old man had been studying the hatch for hinges or flaws. When he felt the pressure waves of Remo's stare, Chiun looked up. Through the murky water, Remo saw the look of angry annoyance that creased the old Korean's brow. Beyond that there was no sign of strain on his parchment face.

Chiun raised a hand in impatient warning before returning attention to the hatch. Remo joined him. There were no handholds. There was only one option open to them. It was Chiun who attacked first. A bony fist struck hard steel. Then another. Remo joined in. First right, then left, then repeat. One Sinanju Master built up a rhythm that the other would shatter. The vibrations caused invisible cracks deep in the forged steel. The bowed metal shell dented, then buckled.

When the edge lifted, Remo reached in and yanked up the metal. He felt the pop of a breaking lock. And with a protesting scream, the hatch began to creak up.

CAPTAIN ZHILNIKOV HEARD the rush of seawater from where he stood beside the ladder to the conning tower. A former Russian navy lieutenant had raced with him to the spot from which the first sound of tearing metal had come. A half-dozen sailors formed a nervous line back to the bridge, where the executive officer awaited orders from the captain.

The Novgorod was already coming about. They were heading back out to sea. When the steady drumbeat on metal began to sound directly on the other side of the hatch, Zhilnikov felt his blood run cold.

"What is it, sir?" asked the ashen-faced lieutenant.

"Are we full about?" Zhilnikov snapped.

The question was shouted down the line. The Novgorod was passing beneath moored and burning scows in the long arc that would take them out into deeper water.

The pounding at the hatch intensified. The vibrations felt as if they would rattle the sub apart. "Weapons at the ready!" Zhilnikov shouted, not believing he was giving such an order.

Sailors raised pistols to the hatch. One raised an old Kalashnikov rifle.

The hatch began to bow inward.

The pounding abruptly gave way to a few brief moments of unnerving silence. The men watched the hatch with dread.

Then came another horrible sound of tearing metal like the first that had lost the Novgorod her outer hatch.

With a pop that hurt Zhilnikov's eardrums, the inner hatch seal broke. Water sprayed down on the shocked, upturned face of Captain Zhilnikov.

Jumping from the flood, Zhilnikov wiped stinging salt water from his eyes. When he looked back up, the hatch was tearing upward.

"Have we cleared the scows!" Zhilnikov bellowed.

The answer couldn't come quickly enough. Another, final tear of metal and the hatch ripped free. A high-pressure waterfall began surging through the tower. The deck around his ankles flooded with frothing seawater.

Zhilnikov was thrown back by the surge. "Surface, surface!" Captain Zhilnikov screamed over the roar of the rushing water. Veins in his neck bulged. His eyes were wild as he stumbled in ankle-deep water.

"Weapons ready!" he shouted to the nearby men. "Whatever comes through that hatch, shoot it on sight!"

And through the flood and the fear, Gennady Zhilnikov watched the water for the first slithering tentacle of the unholy beast that had torn his mighty Russian ship to pieces.

PETROVINA BULGANIN'S fishing boat had tracked the fleeing renegade submarine as far as the first line of moored garbage scows. Petrovina was watching on the bridge when the big sonar blob sped beneath the scows and was gone.

She slammed a hand on a console.

"Dammit," she snapped. "Can you follow them in?"

The fishing boat had already been forced to cut speed.

A fire raged on a half-submerged scow directly in front of them. The water was thick with floating trash, the air with acrid smoke. Someone was shouting something unintelligible through a bullhorn from one of the Mayanan fireboats.

"No,'' Vlad Korkusku replied. "The scows are too tightly packed. And according to the radio, some in the middle are panicking and trying to force their way out. We would be crushed if we tried to maneuver between them."

The fishing boat was coasting into a slow, wide turn. There was nothing Petrovina could do. She left Korkusku and his men on the bridge and went back out on deck.

Orange flames brightened the dark sea. She saw nothing but more spreading garbage and an oil slick that shone like silver in the flickering light. No sign of Remo or Chiun.

Petrovina was certain they were dead. She had no idea what they thought they were doing when they jumped into the sea, but if they thought they could force the Novgorod to stop or surface, they were out of their minds.

The American might have demonstrated amazing abilities before, but they were mere tricks compared to stopping a Soviet-era nuclear submarine. And the old man? Well, it was all simply ludicrous.

Her slender fingers gripped the rail. Jaw clenching, she dropped an angry fist against the wood.

It was infuriating! To think she had come so close to the thing she had been sent to stop, only to lose it. It was ridiculous that she'd allowed Remo to force her out here. Ridiculous that Vlad Korkusku and his men had been so easily cowed by the American. This wasn't Petrovina's fault. Her record in her short professional career had been without a blemish until now. It would have remained so if she had been given Institute personnel to work with. Every woman who worked for the secret agency was a professional. Not like men. They were like Remo-always out to prove their masculinity. Or like Korkusku, always demonstrating his lack of the same. She was beginning to understand the wisdom of Director Chutesov.

Petrovina was growling at the sea when her angry eyes spotted sonmthing strange.

She was looking back toward the scows. The fishing boat had turned completely about and was puttering slowly in the direction from which it had come. As her gaze drifted across the waves a dozen yards behind the small boat, the reflection of fire began to rise into the air.

That was impossible, of course. The water was bulging, swelling up from below. That could only happen if...

Her eyes widened.

"Faster!" Petrovina screamed.

The SVR man at the throttle dutifully followed her command even as another agent monitoring the sonar began to shout excitedly.

"It is back! Directly behind us!"

The fishing boat raced ahead, barely avoiding the leviathan that was the surfacing Novgorod.

The conning tower was first to appear. It sliced slowly through the water, like the dorsal fin of a dying shark.

Water poured from the tower, churning the sea a frothy white. Almost as fast the main deck broke the surface.

The fishing boat had sped ahead and came quickly back around. The small craft bounced against the waves rolling off the sub. Excitement gripping her belly, Petrovina held tight the railing of the fishing boat.

"Korkusku! Get down here with weapons!" They were parallel to the Novgorod. The sub was nearly at a full stop.

Vlad Korkusku and his fellow SVR agents ran to join Petrovina on the deck. When she saw the wrenches and hammers they'd plundered from the boat's tool chest, she fixed the men with a gimlet eye.

"The American threw our guns away," Korkusku explained sheepishly. "He said trusting Russians to know how to use guns properly is like trusting Russians to know how to use democracy properly." Petrovina spun back to the sub. The Novgorod just sat there.

There was a short, tense moment during which all Petrovina could do was stare helplessly.

There it was, as big as life. And what could she do about it? Throw a net over it? Drag it back to shore?

As she pondered impossible options, something suddenly launched from the submarine.

Petrovina gasped.

For a terrible instant she thought the stolen submarine might have been stocked with more than just torpedoes. But as quickly as the thought came, she dismissed it.

A nuclear missile would not be launched from the conning tower of the submarine. Nor, she realized, would it scream in blind terror as it flew into the air.

The flying thing, which Petrovina now realized was a Russian sailor, was quickly joined by a second and a third. The sailors continued to pop from the tower like champagne corks. They made distant little splashes amid the garbage.

When the supply of rocket-charged men stopped shooting skyward, a head popped into view above the tower. When Petrovina saw who it was, her jaw dropped.

Standing on the conning tower of the submarine Novgorod, Remo Williams offered a friendly little wave.

"Hey, Natasha," he called. "How okay are Russians with the high-seas concept of finders keepers?"

"Do not let him have another toy,'" called Chiun's disembodied voice from down below. "He already has an airplane he hardly ever plays with."

Chapter 21

The breaking dawn over Long Island Sound found Dr. Harold W. Smith hard at work behind his desk. The first report had come in after midnight. Thanks to the increased media presence in Mayana, it had turned into an all-night news explosion.

A decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine had been stolen and set loose on civilians in the Caribbean. After a terror-filled night, the sub and its crew had somehow been captured. They were being held by Mayanan authorities.

In any other age it was a news story that would have wrested control of the airwaves from anything else. But the news of the twenty-first century played differently.

It was now early morning and the hard overnight news of the Russian submarine was being set aside, overtaken once more by human-interest puff pieces. On the newscast Smith was watching, the submarine story was supplanted by an update on a frivolous story out in California. From what Smith saw, it was some nonsense about a cat in a storm drain. There was apparently a growing sinkhole that had collapsed part of the street and had swallowed up three fire trucks and a police car. Smith didn't like cats and didn't think such a story had a place on any broadcast, especially when there was serious news to be told.

It was another sign of the changing times. A grave danger had presented itself in South America. Already there were many world leaders on the ground in Mayana. Others were on the way. The last update from the White House was that the President of the United States still planned to attend the Globe Summit. There was carnage in the Caribbean, fires still blazing out of control, a renegade Russian submarine responsible far sinking more than a dozen defenseless commercial vessels and killing an undetermined number of innocents, and the news media was opting to sweep it all aside for a story about a wet pussycat.

Leaning across his desk, Smith switched the channel on his old black-and-white television. The knob had cracked a few years back. There was now masking tape wrapped around it to hold it together.

For a few seconds he jumped back and forth between three newscasts. They were all covering the cat story. He finally gave up, snapping off the TV in disgust.

Smith assumed Remo and Chiun had something to do with the capture of the Novgorod. He had phoned Remo's hotel room several times during the night. The phone rang and rang with no answer. Eventually he gave up.

It would be easier for Smith to contact Remo than it would be for Remo to call in. The blasted Mayanan phone system was the problem. The national phone company was a Byzantine disaster of an analog system, rotary phones and party lines: Only recently had the government-subsidized phone company purchased its first modern fiber-optic cables. From what Smith had read, those seemed directly connected to the Vaporizer project. For what reason he had no idea, but many miles of the latest high-tech cables had been part of that project's budget. There was no indication that fiber-optic lines had been used anywhere else in the country.

It was like dialing out of the Dark Ages. Ordinarily for a small nation like Mayana, the system would be more than sufficient. But with the Globe Summit beginning later that day and so many international guests in the country, the lines had only gotten increasingly tangled.

Thanks to the CURE mainframes, Smith didn't have a problem clearing a line into the country. But if Remo was trying to call out on a land-based phone line, it could be days before he managed to get hold of Smith.

With a sigh of weary impatience, Smith turned his attention to his computer monitor. He had accessed an old American surveillance satellite during the night. At first the pictures he received had been little more than a black screen. Here and there were glowing fires. For a time he had watched with alarm as the number of fires increased.

With the coming of gray dawn the fires were fading. From above, the hundreds of scows in the Caribbean were lined up as neatly as Kansas wheat fields. In the wide view the rough coast of Mayana and some of the mountains above New Briton were becoming visible. The image extended up beyond the Vaporizer site.

Already a row of trucks could be seen crawling up into the hills from the harbor. They had been loaded overnight. In spite of the previous night's events, the government was doing its best to conduct business as usual.

Smith admired their tenacity. But he still could not shake his nagging doubts about the technology. Something on the screen caught his attention. "Odd," Smith mused.

He was squinting through his spotless glasses when there came a soft rap at his door. Frowning, he checked the time display in the corner of his screen. It was still too early for Mrs. Mikulka to be at work.

"Come in, Mark," Smith called. He returned his gaze to his computer as Mark Howard stepped into the office.

"Good morning, Dr. Smith," the assistant CURE director said, a touch of questioning concern in his voice as he noted Smith's attire.

The older man's gray suit jacket was draped over the back of his chair. He was working in his shirtsleeves, his tie still knotted tightly at his protruding Adam's apple. The only time Smith removed his jacket at Folcroft was when he worked late into the night, and then only rarely.

Smith noted his assistant's tone. "It is not time for our morning meeting," he said blandly. As he spoke, he half stood, shrugging his jacket back on. Brushing the sleeves, he sat back down.

"I figured I'd better check in as soon as I got here," Howard said as he came up to the desk. "Dr. Smith, were you here all night?"

Smith nodded. "I was about to leave when the situation in Mayana grew more dire." He glanced up over the tops of his glasses. "You are aware of what happened?"

"I saw it on the news," Mark said. "Dr. Smith, I told you I'd stay any time you want me to. There's no need for you to wear yourself out. And neither of us has to stay at Folcroft. We've both got laptops and phones we can hook into the CURE mainframes from home. If there's a problem, I can take care of it, or if it's too big, I can call you."

It was a discussion they had had before. Mark Howard understood better than anyone else in the world the stress Smith had been living with for forty years now. As their time working side by side grew, Howard had developed more and more familial concern for the aging CURE director.

"I know that, Mark," Smith said, straining patience. "But I've been waiting for Remo to report. And even though his call would be rerouted to my briefcase phone, I prefer not to take CURE calls from home. It is important that we minimize potential exposure, even to our loved ones."

Mark Howard sighed. There would be no getting through to his employer. Smith was too set in his ways.

"I understand," the younger man said. He was standing beside Smith's desk. Glancing over, he noted the satellite image on the canted computer monitor. "That the latest picture?" he asked.

"Yes," Smith said. "It appears that the fires are slowly being extinguished. Brazil has sent fireboats to help. In all, fourteen ships were sunk last night." Howard had stepped next to Smith's chair behind the desk to get a better look at the screen.

"At least the sub that was doing it was caught. Any idea if it was Remo and Chiun?"

"No," Smith replied tightly.

"Well, no matter. The crisis is over."

"Perhaps," Smith said. "I would like to know if there are any other submarines or ships out there we should know about. The captain of the vessel might have confederates. And certainly if they could steal one vessel, they could have stolen more. The Russians have promised to take a full inventory of their decommissioned ships, but that could take weeks. And there is no way to know if they are one hundred percent accurate even then. We also don't know why this one submarine was even there. The captain could have just been fomenting chaos. We have seen that behavior before from some of their people who refuse to see that the Cold War is over. It would help if the news reported his motivation."

The older man's frustration was fueled by lack of sleep. He removed his glasses, massaging his tired eyes.

Mark Howard was still studying the satellite image on the computer screen.

"What's that?" he asked.

Howard pointed to a small grayish blot in the valley that was nestled on the other side of the mountains above the Vaporizer site. It was the same spot on the landscape Smith had noticed when Howard had first knocked on his door.

The CURE director replaced his glasses. The incongruous spot looked like a smudge in the otherwise green valley.

"I'm not sure," Smith said. "I doubt if it's a settlement or factory. It's too far away from everything else. By the looks of it, it's virtually inaccessible."

"There," Mark said, pointing. "That's a road, isn't it?" His finger traced a pencil-thin line from the back of the Vaporizer compound. It vanished into the jungle.

Smith nodded. "I noticed that. It appears to be new." He hummed, curious. "When you get to your office, look it up. See if it exists on any maps."

As they squinted at the monitor, both men were suddenly distracted by the ringing telephone.

It was the blue contact phone. The computer image was forgotten. Smith scooped up the telephone. "Remo," he said.

"Hi, Smitty," came Remo's voice on the other end of the line. "You hear the news?"

"Yes," the CURE director said. "The submarine was captured. By you and Chiun?"

"Who else?" Remo said. "As usual, the world makes a mess and we're the ones who have to clean it up. I'm just wondering if I might have driven him to it."

"Driven who to what?" Smith said, concerned. Remo seemed surprised.

"You didn't hear? Nikolai Garbegtrov is the one who stole the sub. Or bankrolled it, anyway. That cockamamy environmental group of his wanted it, then didn't want it. I guess while they were making up their minds the captain went a little nuts and decided to make things go boom. He was screaming Garbegtrov's name as they were hauling him off. None of this was on the news?"

"Not all," Smith said. "Only mention of a crew of former Russian navy men."

"No surprise," Remo grunted. "I used to think that birthmark of his was Dan Rather's smeared lipstick. Probably a hundred more just like it on his ass."

"So was Garbegtrov behind the actual attacks?"

"Doesn't look that way. The captain was just pissed off the way Russians always get. He decided to vent down here to humiliate his old comrade. Garbegtrov wasn't lying. He wanted the sub stopped just as much as we did."

Smith's eyes went flat. His chair made a little squeak as he sat up more straightly.

"You spoke with him again?" he pressed.

"It's no big deal, Smitty. He's not talking. The Russians have bundled him off to their embassy. I'm betting he's signed himself up for a nice Siberian honeymoon. Especially when they get a load of what Bartholomew Cubbins has been covering up with his five hundred hats."

Smith drummed a hand on his desk. "I suppose this has worked out for the best. Still, I am not pleased if your-" he hesitated, searching for the right word "-creative visit to Nikolai Carbegtrov is in any way responsible for this."

"Know a joke when you hear one, Smitty?" Remo droned, irritated. "The sub was stolen long before I tattooed Garby. I'm not a coconspirator. Sheesh."

"Very well," Smith said, wrapping up the call. "The President still intends to go to Mayana today. I'm not sure if that has changed privately, given the events of last night. If you feel it's safe, I see no problem. I'll call him and let him know."

"Tell him to pack nose plugs," Remo warned. "I'll see you when I get back, Smitty."

The connection broke with an electronic blip, rather than a click. Smith realized CURE's enforcement arm had been using a cell phone.

During the phone call, Mark Howard had taken a seat before the desk. As Smith hung up the blue contact phone, the young man got to his feet.

"You heard," Smith said.

"Enough," Howard said. "You going to call the President now?"

Smith checked his wristwatch. "Yes," he said. "The President is an early riser. He should be up by now."

"Okay," Howard said. "I'll be in my office if you need me. I'll see you for the meeting at nine."

The young man headed for the door. As Smith was reaching for the special White House line in the bottom desk drawer, he glanced at his computer screen. His eye was drawn once more to the blot in the valley above the Vaporizer site.

"Mark," Smith called.

When the assistant CURE director turned, Smith had one hand on the red phone. He was frowning down at his monitor.

"When you check on this road, see what you can find out about the valley above it," Smith said.

"Yes, sir," Howard said.

As Mark left the room, Smith was picking up the cherry-red receiver. His suspicious gray eyes never left the crisp Mayanan satellite image.

"THANKS, BUDDY."

Rema took the cell phone back from the Mayanan dockworker he had asked to dial and hang up for him. He'd held the man by the scruff of the neck throughout the call with Smith. The dockworker was just grateful to be free. Nodding a "you're welcome," he hurried off.

The wide dock on which Remo stood was ordinarily used for cruise ships. Across the broad concrete slab, the submarine Novgorod sat exposed to the world. A crowd of reporters, government officials and gawkers crammed the area.

Away from the crowd stood a wizened figure. Chiun was watching the crowd as the crowd watched the sub.

As he crossed the dock, Remo tried to figure out how to snap the cell phone shut. It should have been easy to do-after all, he had done it back at the hotel-but for some reason this time it wouldn't budge.

"I knew I let that guy go too soon," he griped, struggling with the phone as he walked up to his teacher. "That's it, Little Father. We can get out of here."

"It is high time," Chiun replied. "The stench of this place has permanently corrupted the fabric of my kimono. I will be sending your Emperor Smith a bill."

"'Our,'" Remo corrected. "You're still on the payroll."

Chiun stroked his thread of a beard. "As an uninvolved adviser, perhaps. Until my exact position post-Reigning Master is determined, I am little more."

"You gonna give half the money back?"

Chiun fixed him with a glare he reserved exclusively for rambling mental defectives and Remo at his most obtuse. He was still glaring when Petrovina Bulganin strolled up.

"The crew has largely confessed to working for Green Earth," the Institute agent said. "It looks as if Mayana wants to get rid of submarine and end this matter quickly. UN inspectors are already in the country for Globe Summit, so they will oversee disarming of weapons. Once hatch is repaired, submarine will be towed to rendezvous with Russian ship that will take it rest of the way home."

"Super," Remo said, uninterested.

He was still struggling with the phone. He didn't want to break it, but it looked as if that was the only way to shut it. But that couldn't be the case, because cell phones weren't tossed out like Band-Aids after one use. At least he didn't think they were.

Petrovina saw him grappling and tipped closer to see what was hidden in his hands. She was surprised when she recognized the phone she'd dropped back at the hotel.

"That's it," Remo said, frustrated. "I'm chucking it." He hauled back, ready to heave the phone into the harbor.

"No!" Petrovina snapped. "That's-" She stopped abruptly, hands outstretched.

Remo paused. "You want it?" he offered. Petrovina hesitated. For an instant her hand wavered in place.

"Yes, I do," Chiun interjected. He snatched the phone from Remo's outstretched hand. He clicked it easily shut, and the cell phone vanished up a broad kimono sleeve.

"I meant Petrovina, Little Father. And how did you shut that thing? It was stuck or something."

"I don't want it," Petrovina announced.

"Good, because you cannot have it," Chiun stated.

"What are you going to do with a cell phone?" Remo asked.

"Perhaps I will phone my son who offers free gifts to Russian floozies he only just met while his father to whom he has never given anything nice is standing right there. Do you know his number offhand, Remo, or should I just dial I-N-G-R-A-T-E?"

"Say, I just got a swell idea," Remo said. "You keep it."

He turned to Petrovina. "Sorry," he said.

"That is all right," she insisted. She seemed suddenly distracted. "I must talk to Korkusku."

"You want us to wait to give you a lift back to the hotel?" Remo offered.

"No, no," she said. "Not necessary." She smiled a stiff-lipped smile. "The Russian Federation thanks you for your help."

"Yeah, okay," Remo said, raising a suspicious brow. "Give it a sloppy wet one from us."

She nodded crisply to Chiun. He scarcely noticed. "If you will excuse me," she said. With that she turned and hurried off, back to the crowd of people around the sub.

"She's up to something," Remo said.

Chiun had his new cell phone back out. He was clicking the mouthpiece open and closed.

"Fish swim, Russians scheme," the old man said as he played with the phone. "I would be shocked if she was not plotting against you in some way."

"Well, it's going to have to be long distance," Remo said, nodding firmly. "'Cause we're out of here. Let's go, Little Father."

The two men left the crowds and the submarine and headed off on foot to their hotel.

Chapter 22

When the knock sounded at his office door, Pavel Zatsyrko, head of Russia's intelligence services, sighed deeply. He checked his watch. Right on time.

The SVR head put down his pen and closed the file on which he had been making notes.

"Come in," he called with barely restrained irritation.

His secretary stuck her head in the room. Olga Chernovaya was an ugly, lumpish thing. The broken capillaries around her nose looked like a map of Moscow, she had prematurely gray hair as stiff as wire and her backside had gotten round from a lifetime's worth of government jobs.

"Your appointment is here," Olga snarled.

"Show her in," Zatsyrko said.

Too late. His appointment was already in. Even as the SVR director spoke, the woman he was scheduled to meet slipped around Olga and into the office.

When the beautiful woman appeared, the reason for Olga's disdain became clear. It had everything to do with envy and nothing to do with the fact that neither her employer nor her employer's guest had told Olga this important visitor's name.

With a look of hate-filled jealousy, Olga backed from the room and shut the door tight.

His visitor made certain they were alone before she turned full attention to Pavel Zatsyrko.

"I assume you dragged me all the way over here as some pathetic attempt to assert your masculinity," Anna Chutesov complained.

"Delighted to see you again, too," Zatsyrko droned.

He ordinarily stood when a woman-particularly a woman as beautiful as Anna Chutesov-entered a room. But for the director of the mysterious Institute, he didn't bother.

There was a time when he had acted more chivalrously toward her. It was a brief time back when he first met Director Chutesov and learned of the secret agency that had existed to offer advice to Russia's leaders since the days of the Soviet empire. The few times they met he had stood to greet her, tried to open doors, tried to be a gentleman. She rebuffed his chivalry with feminist insults. And, worse than rudeness, she began plundering his own agency of its best minds-always female-to work at her Institute.

Zatsyrko had been friends with the current president of Russia back when the two men worked together in the KGB. At first he had gone to his old comrade to complain about this nuisance Chutesov woman and her growing sapphic legion.

The president was less than supportive.

"Give her what she wants," Russia's leader grunted. "She has proved more useful to me and to Russia than all the agents in the SVR combined." Thus ended all argument.

And so Pavel Zatsyrko was forced to open the personnel files of Russia's premier intelligence service to a woman who would not allow someone to pull out her chair for her and who treated men as if they were ... well, women.

"You said you had information on the pictures I forwarded to you," Anna Chutesov said.

"Yes," Pavel Zatsyrko said. "I did."

There was a faint glimmer of satisfaction on his face as he got to his feet.

"Please come with me," the SVR head said. Zatsyrko did not hold the door for Anna as they left his office.

The upper floors of the SVR headquarters were like a library-people talking in hushed tones, practically tiptoeing from office to office. Zatsyrko led Anna through the quiet upper reaches of Russia's chief intelligence agency and to a dusty back hall and elevator, both of which had to be unlocked with special keys. The elevator carried them deep into the subbasement. The doors opened on a long, dingy corridor illuminated by fluorescent lights, many of which seemed on the verge of burning out.

Pavel Zatsyrko marched smartly down the hallway, past locked doors and steel cages stacked high with crates and cardboard packing boxes. As he walked, the SVR head hummed softly to himself.

He was enjoying wasting Anna's time. She refused to give him the satisfaction of showing her impatience. Mouth screwed tightly shut, Anna followed Zatsyrko to the far end of the hall. The SVR head led her into a small room.

There were no windows. Cold concrete was flaking from the walls onto the drab green floor. A single metal table and two old chairs sat in the middle of the room.

The back wall was lined with a dozen ancient metal file cabinets. Zatsyrko went to one of the cabinets. From a drawer he produced a pair of manila files.

The SVR head tossed the files onto the table. "Those will not leave this building," he said. "You may go over my head to the president if you wish, but tell him that if you take those files from the SVR building, he will have my resignation before you reach the curb."

Men never changed. They were always involved in some long-distance urinating contest to prove their virility. She ignored Zatsyrko's chest-thumping.

When she sat in a chair, the first thing she noted about the files were the old KGB codes on the flaps. Reverse Engineering Directorate had been typed in large Cyrillic lettering below the codes. There were smaller project code words on each flap. Anna scanned the file names.

Zibriruyushchiy Kostyum. Lyovkiy Dukh.

"These are not projects with which I am familiar," she said darkly.

"How interesting," Zatsyrko said. He was sitting across from her, arms folded. "We have finally found something that you do not know. I will be sure to mark my calendar."

As Zatsyrko watched, Anna read through the files thoroughly. She seemed to grow more amazed with every turned page. By the time she was done, the care lines around her blue eyes were crimped tight with concern.

"Is this information complete?" she demanded.

Pavel Zatsyrko seemed surprised. "I assumed you would ask me first if it was a joke. If this was the first time I was hearing about all this, that would be my reaction."

Anna shook her head impatiently. "The KGB was never known to joke," she spat. "Nor does the SVR have the skill to falsify records with this level of believable detail. Even if you could, you do not dislike me so much that you would waste your time on such foolishness. Therefore the only conclusion I can draw is that this information is real."

Like most men, Pavel Zatsyrko found that Anna Chutesov's logic was inarguable.

"That is everything except the personnel overview," he grunted. Getting up, he retrieved another file from the cabinet. He slipped it across the table. Anna flipped open the file.

She expected to find the usual dry details. The KGB collected information on everything from eating habits to shoe size. Wondering if Zatsyrko had given her this file to waste her time, she scanned the first page. It contained information about an old Soviet-era physicist.

When she checked the man's photograph, which was clipped to the back of the sheet, Anna's mouth tightened. She looked up angrily at Pavel Zatsyrko. Zatsyrko seemed pleased to have finally gotten a rise out of the Institute director.

"I thought you might find that interesting," he said.

Anna wasn't listening. She had clicked open her leather purse. She pulled out a small stack of photographs.

Thumbing through, she found one that she set next to the old KGB photo.

The man was older now. His jowls sagged, and his dark eyes had puffed into fleshy gray bags. But there was no doubt that it was the same man.

Anna picked up the folder and flung it at Pavel Zatsyrko. Papers flew everywhere.

"Idiot!" she snapped. "You drag me down here just so you can strut around and show me how important you are, not even caring that the world is in danger."

Zatsyrko was surprised by the ferocity in her eyes. "I did not know he was that important to you," Zatsyrko said. "We were lucky to find these files at all. You only gave us the pictures to search for. No names."

"I did not know his name," Anna retorted. Snatching up the small photograph she had brought with her, she flung it in her purse, snapping the latch viciously.

"What is he to you?" Zatsyrko asked. "He is just one of our old scientists. Probably retired. We do not even know where he is."

"I know where he is. And now I must do what I always do. Stop you and idiot men like you from blowing us all up."

She didn't wait for Zatsyrko to see her out. Spinning on her heel, she marched from the room.

She took the elevator back upstairs. When a guard saw her marching through a restricted area without an SVR escort, he approached her. Anna chased him away with a glare.

Hurrying through the halls and out the front doors, she emerged into the Moscow sunlight.

She found her car on the street where she'd parked it.

For a moment after she climbed in behind the wheel, she seemed uncertain what to do.

The Institute had an agent on the ground. They had lost contact, but perhaps that was only temporary. Digging in her purse, she pulled out her cell phone. The photograph-a copy of which she had sent to the SVR for examination-fell out on the seat.

Anna scooped up the photo. When she saw the man's face once more, she shook her head angrily. "They will kill us all," she hissed.

Holding the photo in one hand, she used the other to press out Petrovina Bulganin's cell phone number.

"YOUR KIMONO is ringing," Remo said.

They were strolling along New Briton's docks. The scenery was truly beautiful. This had been a nicer part of town. Tidy buildings, immaculate pleasure boats, lush vegetation. With the wind at their backs, the smell of rotting garbage was almost bearable.

Chiun's hand disappeared inside a wide sleeve. When it reappeared he was clutching the ringing cellular phone.

"I found that, so it's not anyone we know," Remo pointed out. "Maybe you should just toss it in the water."

"Just because it is someone who does not know you, does not mean that it is someone who does not know me," Chiun sniffed as he snapped open the phone.

"Here, at least let me answer it for you."

Chiun pressed a button and the ringing stopped. With a thin smile he raised the phone to his shelllike ear.

"How did you do that?" Remo asked.

"Because I do not take stubborn pride in being an ignoramus," Chiun replied superiorly. Into the phone he said, "You have reached the ear of the most gracious Master who once reigned but who is regrettably between honorifics at the moment. Speak. But speak quickly, for these devices have been known to cause ailments of the brain."

Remo tried to listen but the old man pressed the phone tight to his ear, preventing eavesdropping. He knew something wasn't right when he saw Chiun's face pale.

"What is it, Little Father?" Remo asked.

Chiun glanced sharply at his pupil, as if surprised that he was standing there. "Nothing," he insisted, waving Remo back with a bony hand. "A nuisance call." He pressed the phone even tighter to his ear. "I have told you people before not to bother me," he warned. "Your cards of plastic are more worthless than paper money, and I do not care to answer questions about which baby-kissing white male you install as your leader. If you call again, you invite my wrath." His tone turned grave. "And believe me when I say you do not want that."

The last words were said as hard threat.

As Remo's confused frown deepened, Chiun pressed the Phone Off and hastily switched off the ringer.

"You sure that was a telemarketer?" he asked. "Of course," Chiun sniffed. "Thanks to you always loitering around, that is all that ever calls me these days."

"Somehow I doubt you were the most popular kid on the assassin's teen chat line before I showed up," Remo deadpanned. "You know, I think I've changed my mind. If that thing works, maybe I should keep it after all." He held out his hand for the phone.

"It is mine," Chiun insisted. "Find yourself another." The cell phone vanished back inside his robes.

His tone was a bit too sharp, his face straining a little too hard at being untroubled. The old man kept his eyes dead ahead as he walked.

From his demeanor alone Remo knew his teacher was keeping something from him. He shrugged. "Oh, well. Wouldn't be the first time," he grumbled to himself as he trailed the old Korean to the parking lot.

SITTING IN HER CAR outside the SVR building, Anna Chutesov clicked her phone shut.

Anna had been disturbed by Petrovina Bulganin's earlier phone call. Before being cut off, the agent had mentioned something about having knowledge of Anna's strange amnesia.

The Institute director had not tried raising Petrovina directly after that, fearing that she and her phone had fallen into the hands of an unknown enemy. But things had just gotten too desperate not to try.

Anna had no idea who had answered Petrovina Bulganin's cell phone, but it was clearly no longer in the hands of the Institute's agent. No matter. In fact, that was a potential silver lining in this mess. That could be dealt with once the current crisis was past. Assuming the world survived.

There was only one course of action open to her now.

Anna hadn't realized that she had been clenching her other hand. She smoothed flat the photo that Petrovina Bulganin had taken in Mayana.

Glancing one last time at the Vaporizer janitor who didn't seem very interested in his broom, she dropped the photo and the phone in her purse.

Tossing the car into gear, she peeled out of the parking spot and flew out into the heavy Moscow traffic. In the direction of the airport.

Chapter 23

The Jamestown tragedy of 1978 had propelled the People's Sanctum cult to the front pages, sent Americans scurrying for maps to find out just where Mayana was and had put cult leader Jack James-at least for a time-at the top of a shortlist of the most infamous figures of his age. It was the public end to a private journey along a twisted valley where death was mocked and evil embraced.

Jack James founded the Holy Assembly of God Church in Columbus, Ohio, in the early 1960s. Messianic from the start, he preached a gospel of salvation where he alone was the only bridge between man and God.

"Survival of the soul," James bellowed to the great unwashed, "comes only from intimate knowledge of this church's blessed teachings!"

Jack James was fond of sharing this intimate knowledge with his parishioners. Especially the women.

Jack James always had an eye for the ladies. Jack James also had a mahogany cane with which he punished evil. He found much evil in women. With his "rod of persuasion" he chastised many a wayward sister. In their pain the self-ordained pastor found his greatest pleasure.

"The sisters exude the alluring scent of carnality!" he exclaimed under the hot lights of his rented auditorium. "The brothers have in them the seed of Satan! The power to corrupt is in all of you! There is darkness in the world and there is light! Who here can say he longs to live in darkness? The light is bright but it does not burn. Come into the light. Forgo the darkness and come to me!"

He spoke the words not with arrogance but with utter conviction. Jack James was the light. Sadly the lost and pathetic souls of his misguided flock seemed to agree.

Preaching impending Armageddon to his followers, James managed to fill to capacity his Sunday-afternoon revival meetings. As the money and membership ranks grew, so, too, did James's belief in his own power. Jack James began to see himself not as God's voice on Earth, but as God himself.

God could not be contained. James began to plot his expansion beyond the borders of Ohio. The catalyst came to him one fateful August day in early 1966.

James had spotted an attractive young woman in the fourth row of one of his services. When it was over, he directed some of his followers to bring the girl to him.

As his flock was driving home, hearts filled with hope of eternal salvation, Jack James was ushering the young girl into his trailer and thinking positively impure thoughts.

She was stunning, this wicked child of Eve's sin. A college student who had stopped by the revival meeting on a whim, the young girl was bubbling with energy and enthusiasm. Her hair was bleached blond and pulled back in a coarse ponytail, tied with a yellow ribbon. The fresh, full womanhood of her chest threatened to burst buttons on her tight yellow blouse.

James smiled in the trailer, which was parked in the shade of an elm tree near a softly gurgling brook. "Sit, child," he beckoned, patting the edge of his bed. "There are no chairs." He shrugged apologetically.

"I never heard a sermon like yours before," the girl said. "I was brought up boring Episcopalian. That's what Daddy is. Mom was Jewish. At least she was before they got married. We're not supposed to mention it because of Daddy's job, although I don't think he needs to worry about it like you used to have to. But, oh, maybe I shouldn't have said it to you. I guess I shouldn't worry though, you being a man of God and all."

James's smile faded ever so slightly. "I am not a man of God," he said dully.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say something wrong? Maybe I should go." She started to stand.

"No, no," Jack James said. He pressed her shoulder, coaxing her to sit back on the bed. "We're fine."

His sermon had touched her. He could see it in her eyes. He could always tell from their eyes. She sat perched on the bed, a bright-eyed, guileless child who would be more than willing to do anything for the leader of the Holy Assembly of God Church. Jack James excused himself to the trailer's small bathroom in order to change. When he returned a minute later he was stark naked. He held his hands behind his back.

"Oh, my goodness," the shocked girl said, eyeing the excitement of the preacher who was definitely not boring Episcopalian. "Oh, my God," she gasped when he brought his hands out from behind his back.

"Wicked child takes my name in vain," James said. "Wicked child must be punished."

Jack James held a mahogany cane-his rod of persuasion-high in the air. The girl screamed. She fell off the bed and scrambled for the door. Jack James spun around her, breathing her fear, savoring the pain.

James brought the cane down across her leg. The girl had been twisting the doorknob. With a shriek she let it go, falling to the floor.

"Wicked child tempts the flesh to sin," James sang.

A crack to the side of the head. Light blinding bright in her eyes, she tumbled under the small table in the trailer's kitchenette.

She was crying now. A gash bled from her temple. "Please." She tried to crawl to the door.

"Wicked child pleads for mercy," Jack James announced. He was sweating profusely now. Panting with excitement. "But mercy is God's to give. Today, God says-"

He brought the cane back one more time. Frothy white spittle sprayed from the corner of his mouth. Swing, crack.

The girl slumped face-first to the floor. "No," the almighty Jack James concluded.

His excitement spent, he left the dead girl on the floor and went in to take a shower. Later, under cover of darkness, he dumped the body in a shallow grave in some woods and rolled her car into a lake.

The story might have ended there for James had he not learned the identity of the young girl who had suffered the ultimate punishment of the wicked temptress. He saw it in the newspaper a few days after the incident. Front page, with accompanying picture.

It turned out that the young college girl was the only child of an Ohio senator who was part of the old Democratic machine. He had powerful friends on both sides of the law. The body had been found and the father was out for blood.

Jack James was not a fool. The day he saw the newspaper photo of that wicked, smiling temptress was the day he realized it was time to seek out sunnier pastures. Four days after the story broke, the Holy Assembly of God Church was renting a storefront in downtown San Francisco.

The move to California, though abrupt, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In a state where tradition was yesterday and deeply held religious beliefs were last week, it seemed that everyone was looking to buy into the next fad. Church membership flourished. Over the course of the next eight years, James's church-eventually rechristened the People's Sanctum-enrolled tens of thousands of new members. The public face of the People's Sanctum was a church concerned with the plight of the poor. Food and clothing drives, free beds to indigents and church-sponsored soup kitchens were all part of the church's intensive antipoverty drive. Because of all his good works, Jack James was even appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority.

The success of Jack James seemed divinely inspired.

His delusions had only grown more firmly entrenched over time. There were no lucid moments. James was now God on Earth. The one eternal, omniscient Deity, come to lead his sheep to his own version of eternal salvation.

And since he was omnipotent God, it came as a shock when everything he had built collapsed from beneath his feet.

He had dodged the charges for years. In the end it took only one betrayer.

A young woman who had barely survived a personal audience with James came forward. She had scars that were the kind that couldn't be seen and the other kind that could. She showed the latter on the evening news.

"Outrageous," said a church spokesman. "Unfounded," the same spokesman insisted when another woman told a newspaper an identical story. Soon more former cult members were coming forward. A trickle became a rising flood.

There were allegations of extortion, encouragement of sexual promiscuity and enforcement of discipline among church disciples through blackmail and beatings. One man who came forward knew where some of the bodies had been buried. Literally.

Fortunately for Jack James, he had been warned ahead of time by an acolyte in the media. There was nothing else he could do but flee.

America was no longer safe. Luckily he had purchased several hundred acres of land in the Mayanan jungle a few years earlier. He had hoped to put it to agricultural use-primarily for growing coca plants. The land became haven to Jack James and the six-hundred-odd People's Sanctum members who fled with him from California.

Life in Mayana proved difficult. There weren't the same creature comforts as back in America.

To discourage disloyalty among his remaining cult members, Jamestown-as the property became known-was cut off from the outside world. To break the spirits of his followers, James worked cult members fourteen or more hours a day. As punishment, food and water were often withheld.

There was no longer any need to hide his peccadilloes behind a socially acceptable mask. James roamed the fields of Jamestown administering beatings to men and women chosen completely at random.

Over the years he had let a few close acolytes in on the extralegal aspects of the church. There were twelve in all. In Mayana these apostles became his own private security force. They would serve his every whim and, when necessary, dispose of the bodies afterward.

Jack James might have ruled for the rest of his natural days in the hell that was Jamestown and died a forgotten old maniac in the jungles of Mayana if not for a lone man. He wasn't even very important in the grand scheme of things. Just a run-of-the-mill California congressman.

In November of 1978, word came of an impending visit by Congressman Lenny Rand. Some of his constituents who had relatives in Jamestown were demanding the congressman do something to get their loved ones home. The congressman had decided to plead the case for Jack James's extradition to authorities in New Briton. But first he wanted to take a fact-finding tour of Jamestown. The congressman would be there in less than a day.

James's paranoia reached critical mass. The visiting congressman was an agent of Satan. He was in league with the demons who had driven James from his comfortable home in California. He was cohort to the Ohio senator whose Bathsheba daughter had tempted the flesh of Jack James so many years ago. His world was coming apart. The forces of evil were aligning to destroy Jack James.

The almighty Jack James refused to let Satan win again.

He had no troops to speak of. Jamestown could not survive an attack by America. His security forces were few in number. The regular cult members were starving, emaciated shells. But God was nothing if not resourceful.

When Congressman Rand arrived in Jamestown, he and his party were greeted by the security farces of Jack James. They were slaughtered to a man. James himself beat the congressman's skull in with the rod of persuasion.

That was step one.

After the massacre, stainless-steel vats of the children's fruit drink Kook-Aid were brought forward. The wasted members of the Jamestown cult were lined up. James's personal security men stood behind folding tables, ladling out paper cups to passing cult members.

The first few people who drank James's special brew quickly discovered there was more than just flavored sugar water in their cups. Stomachs convulsed. Chests heaved. Faces contorting in final agony, the men and women collapsed to the muddy ground of the compound.

Jack James stood on a platform supervising the operation. He wore an untucked dress shirt buttoned to the collar and a pair of dark aviator's glasses. He watched in satisfaction as the second step of his plan was carried out.

"It's the only way for us," he shouted over the public-address system. "The haters of light draw near. The United States government is rallying its evil might against us in the name of the unholy one! We do this now to rob the wicked of their prize!"

James continued to cheer them on even as they dropped like flies, courtesy of the cyanide he had added as a special ingredient to their fruit punch.

Not everyone wanted to drink. These were dealt with by the twelve heavily armed members of Jack James's security forces.

It took just over an hour.

Once phase two was complete, phase three was quickly put into action.

There were time constraints now. The dead congressman had already been to New Briton. The government there would eventually send someone to look for him.

The bodies of the men and women who had followed their god to South America had already begun to putrefy in the hot Mayanan sunlight as James and his trusted apostles opened the door to the forbidden barn. Inside was a neatly stacked row of thirteen bodies. All had been prepared earlier that day.

They had been selected for their looks. Each body bore a physical resemblance to one of his security agents. Beaten faces and mangled fingertips would prevent positive identification. All wore a special People's Sanctum tag, identifying them as Jack James's chosen disciples.

"Are you sure this will work?" one of the men asked as he dragged his own double into the sunlight. Jack James smiled. "Ye of little faith," he said, removing his aviator's glasses.

It was Jack James the authorities would be looking for. One of the corpses was thin, for he had been worked hard over the past few years, but his resemblance to Jack James was still uncanny. He had the same general facial features. The same hair color, same build.

James put his sunglasses on the corpse. His wallet had already been stuffed in the pocket of the man's trousers. There was no record of Jack James's fingerprints anywhere. He had never been in the military, and he had fled the United States before he had been arrested for his crimes there. The dead man had a similarly clean record. His face was bruised only slightly and his fingers were left intact.

God knew that it would be enough to fool Satan. James and his followers left the look-alike corpses and escaped into the hills of Mayana. When the authorities arrived, they found exactly what Jack James wanted them to find-a cult leader who had forced his followers to commit suicide, killing himself, as well, rather than go to prison. It was instant frontpage news.

The legend of Jamestown flared brightly for a time. But news was an ongoing search for fresh blood. As time went on, Jack James was tossed on history's dusty heap of infamous psychotics.

And while the mass suicide he had engineered became the stuff of twisted legend, the real Jack James hid out in a small village in the dense Mayanan jungle. After a year in exile, he ventured out of the forest into New Briton.

James found a gifted plastic surgeon, a British expatriate who had left England under unpleasant circumstances. The man asked few questions. A few years and several operations later-with the bandages off, the scars long healed and the bruises faded away-Jack James emerged from the jungle as politician Blythe Curry-Hume. A true man of the people. A patient man, he started small. A handshake here, a small village meeting there. As the years went on, the drip-drip-drip of personal appearances swelled into a river.

It didn't take a great effort to establish a trust with the disaffected element of the Mayanan population. His years in the wilderness had not diminished his ability to weave his charismatic spell. He became champion of the common folk.

The rest took longer. Over time, Blythe Curry-Hume graduated to bigger cities, larger crowds. And when the time was right, he made the final move from the fringes of Mayanan politics. It was a journey of almost two decades.

The Almighty was slow to anger and righteous in his wrath. As executive president, Blythe Curry-Hume's platform was a simple one. He wanted revenge. Revenge against the world that had banished him. Revenge against those who thought him mad. Revenge against the wicked mortals who had persecuted him. And, fittingly, God's scheme of vengeance was truly great.

James had constructed his instrument of revenge on the old Jamestown site. And the fenced-off valley where his followers had met their end hid a special secret.

Finance Minister Carlos Whitehall still thought the Vaporizer Project was his own idea. He resented Blythe Curry-Hume as an interloper who had stepped into office after the project had already been started. The fool.

Carlos Whitehall was a tool, to be used and discarded. A scapegoat if one became necessary. The same was true for all of Mayana if it came to that. But it would not come to that.

They were all unwitting pawns. Every last one of them going about their prearranged parts in a play written in blood by a madman who alone knew the final act. And when revenge came, the world would be rocked to its molten core and the heavens would rain fire.

THERE WASN'T A SIGN of fire in the beautiful clear blue sky as Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume watched the heavens. Along with his entourage, he stood on the tarmac of New Briton International Airport. The sun warmed his upturned face, glinting off his sunglasses.

The plane appeared as a dot, growing larger along with its fighter-jet escort. Curry-Hume watched as it landed and taxied slowly to a stop on the main runway.

Curry-Hume stood more erect as the air stairs were rolled up to the plane.

Soon, very soon.

At his side Finance Minister Carlos Whitehall stood at attention. The fussy older man seemed irritated that there were others from the Mayanan government there to intrude on what was actually his moment in the spotlight. Curry-Hume noted the minister's irritation.

No clue whatsoever that he was a minor player. The fool, manipulated by the king.

"Is everything all right, sir?" Minister Whitehall asked, concerned.

"Couldn't be better," Curry-Hume replied. "Why?"

"Well, sir, your smile. It-" Whitehall shook his head. "Never mind."

Blythe Curry-Hume hadn't even been aware he was smiling. A grin of wicked triumph had stretched across his tan face, drawing tight the face-lifted skin at the back of his jaw. A few eyes had turned his way, brows raised. News cameras clicked and whirred in his direction.

The executive president relaxed his smile. Patience, patience...

Men in black suits with radio receivers in their ears swarmed around the ramp. When the all-clear was given, a lone figure finally emerged from the plane.

The man waved to the crowds at the airport before climbing down the stairs.

Blythe Curry-Hume was there to meet him. The executive president of Mayana extended his hand. "Welcome to Mayana, my friend," said Jack James to the President of the United States.

Chapter 24

A series of afternoon thunderstorms swept down from upstate New York, bringing heavy rain and wind. Thunderclaps rattled windows for two hours as people from Westchester County to the Bronx ran to catch runaway lawn furniture and trash barrels. As quickly as they had come, the fast-moving storms blew out to sea, leaving eerie calm in their wake.

As usual, in the sparse office of Harold Smith the severe weather had gone all but unnoticed. If the one-way glass of his picture window had been shattered by a blown tree branch, Smith would have donned a slicker against the gale-force winds and hunkered back down at his computer, ignoring the driving rain on his back.

The storm was several miles out to sea. Soft thunder still rumbled angrily in the distance. The late-afternoon sun was peeking out from behind the black-streaked clouds high above the whitecapped waters of Long Island Sound.

Smith's secretary had already left for the evening. After remaining at Folcroft the previous night, Smith was exhausted. He intended to leave soon, as well. But there was something that made him linger.

Something scratching at the back of his mind that would not let him go.

He wasn't sure what it could be. All the loose ends seemed to be tied up. The submarine had been taken care of. The crew was in custody. Smith had phoned the President early that morning, clearing the chief executive for his trip to the Globe Summit. Remo and Chiun would soon be home.

So why did Smith still sit?

As a rule he didn't believe in hunches. Harold Smith preferred to truck in cold, hard fact. But there were rare occasions, going back to his days in the OSS in World War II, where Smith had felt the lure of intuition. Being a man not ordinarily given to hunches or even simple imagination, when Smith had a hunch it usually meant something.

Before shutting down his computer for the night, Smith pulled up the Mayanan file.

The file was still active. The CURE mainframes were still drawing information related to the Mayanan situation and dumping them in the growing file. There were a few newer entries since the last time Smith had checked.

News out of Russia on the background of the Novgorod's captain. The Russian president commenting on the situation on his way from Moscow to the Globe Summit. Still no mention of Nikolai Garbegtrov's involvement.

There was a story on the U.S. President's arrival in New Briton. A picture with the story showed the President shaking hands at the airport with Mayana Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume. Smith noted with a frown that Curry-Hume was wearing sunglasses.

Aside from backwater dictatorships, one rarely saw world leaders wearing sunglasses at important meetings. Men preferred to look one another in the eye at such events. But the sun at the airport did seem bright, at least in the photo. Most of the men with Curry-Hume were squinting.

Probably just an unintentional gaffe by Mayana's new leader. And an understandable one, given the fact that his small country had suddenly drawn international attention.

Smith was going, to close out the file, but something about the picture made him linger. He was still staring at the image when a message suddenly popped up on his screen: Dr. Smith, could you come to my office for a minute?

Casting one last, puzzled look at the picture of Blythe Curry-Hume and the American President, Smith turned down the brightness on his monitor. The picture darkened. Leaving the computer on, he went down the hall.

Mark Howard generally worked with his door locked. He had unlocked it for Smith and was just sitting back down behind his desk when the CURE director entered.

"What is it, Mark?"

"I found something, Dr. Smith," Howard said excitedly. "Though I'm not sure what it means. Take a look at this."

Howard's desk was a sturdy oak slab too large for his small office. Smith had to sidestep to get in behind it.

Unlike Smith's hidden desk unit, Howard's monitor and keyboard sat on top of the desk. A recessed stud could be used to lower them below the surface.

Standing next to his assistant's chair, Smith peered at Mark's computer screen.

"I've been going over blowups of those satellite images like you asked me to," the assistant CURE director said, tapping at his keyboard. "Here." A picture popped up on his screen. It was in clear focus with sharp lines, cleaned up by special software. "Here's the road we saw above the Vaporizer. Take a look at what's next to it."

Mark had drawn red circles around two objects on the ground. They might have been mistaken for trees from far off. At close range it was clear what they were.

"Telephone poles?" Smith asked. "That should all be uninhabited jungle. There aren't any settlements in that region."

"I double-checked that, too, just to be sure. There aren't. But those are definitely telephone poles. And right there." He tapped the screen between the poles where a few thin black threads stretched from one to the next. "I think this is where your fiber-optic cables went. But what they're doing with them out in the middle of nowhere is a mystery to me. Look. See where they run off here into the jungle?"

Mark quickly accessed several close-up pictures that he had prepared earlier. In breaks in the dense jungle foliage he showed glimpses of the continuing road-now unpaved and rutted. There were underlined markings on each photo to show the telephone wires running parallel to the road.

"It goes clear up the hill," Howard said.

Smith was intrigued. "It can't be a government installation," he mused. "I pulled all those records at the start of the crisis. If it's a secret, it's not one tied to their defense forces."

"I think it's something else. Lemme show you." Howard pulled up a wider image of the Mayanan satellite picture in order to give Smith a clearer idea where the road headed. He had traced a path up the mountainside, through a ravine and into the valley beyond. The strange grayish blot at the edge of the valley that had caught the eye of both men earlier that morning reappeared.

"It leads there?" Smith asked.

Mark Howard smiled. "Wait," he said excitedly. "Get a load of this."

Typing swiftly, he pulled up another enlarged picture, this one from the valley. It was a super-close-range photo of a single item that had been isolated on the ground.

When Smith saw the familiar image on the screen, he blinked surprise. Assuming he had made a mistake, he leaned in, peering more closely at the picture.

The image was not quite right, but it was clear enough.

"It's a car," the CURE director said, puzzled. Howard nodded. "Pretty mangled. I'd say it had to be in an accident, but it doesn't look like it was damaged in a crash. The metal's not crumpled and there's no shattered glass. It just looks sort of rearranged. See that shiny stuff on the hood? I think that's the windshield. Or was."

Where Mark Howard pointed, a thick, clear, uneven substance looked to have thawed and congealed on the hood. It had the rough, rolling edges of solidified lava.

"It appears to have melted," Smith said.

"I thought so, too. We can't see too well from this angle, but it looks like that tire has fused with the fender. And right there. See that?" He pointed to a small rectangle on the car's roof.

Dragging a magnifying glass icon over the spot, Howard clicked to enlarge it. The image of a license plate appeared in great detail. It looked as if it had been grafted to the roof. Smith could clearly make out the numbers.

"I ran the plate through the New Briton driver registry," Howard said. "The car belonged to a guy named Toshimi Yakamoto. He was a Japanese scientist who worked on the Vaporizer." He glanced up at the CURE director. "Someone reported him missing yesterday morning."

Smith's frown deepened. "I suppose he could have driven up that road and gotten lost or injured. If so, we should report this to the proper Mayanan authorities. Still, it doesn't explain what happened to his vehicle."

"This might help," Howard said anxiously.

With great enthusiasm he attacked his keyboard. He expanded from the image of the license plate by rapid degrees. The car briefly filled the monitor once more. The picture quickly enlarged to encompass a wide area around the car. When he was done, Mark sat back in his chair, careful to keep his head from bumping the near wall. There was a flush of giddy triumph on his wide face.

Smith's mouth opened a shocked sliver. A cloud of dark confusion passed across his gray features. The car sat on a mound of heaped bags and paper. All manner of metal and plastic jutted crazily from everywhere around the pile. Since it was a still image taken from above, Smith could distinctly see the backs and outstretched wings of several seagulls frozen in flight as they swooped over the piles.

Smith tore his eyes off the screen, glancing in confusion at his young assistant.

"Trash," the CURE director said, frowning.

Howard nodded. "Tons of it," he said. "It looks like a big blur from above because it's pretty much shapeless. It almost looks like that's where they're dumping everything they're bringing up to the Vaporizer."

"How?" Smith asked. "They aren't using that road. It's far too narrow and remote. And there are no others up into the hills. Besides, they are driving to the device on public roads. They would be missed if they detoured for as long as it would take them to get all the way up there."

"I know," Howard said, pursing his lips in thought. "I've tracked some of the trucks off and on today. They go from the harbor, up to the Vaporizer, dump their stuff in and then go back down." He crossed his arms, frustrated. "Unless they found some way to beam it up there from down below, it's getting vaporized, just like they claim."

Smith raised an eyebrow. "Beam?" he asked. Howard had learned this about his employer early on. The CURE director knew little about popular culture.

"From a TV show, Dr. Smith," Howard said. "They could transport matter from one spot to another." He was peering at his screen. "I don't know. I thought this might be something, but it must just be an old dump," he concluded. "It's probably stuff they've been dumping there for years. Doesn't have anything to do with the Vaporizer. Still, I'd like to know how that car got all the way out there."

He was still staring at his screen when he heard a soft hiss of air beside him. When he glanced up he saw a flush of color on his employer's normally gray face.

"The scientist you mentioned," Smith pressed urgently. "The one whose car that was. You said he was Japanese. Did you research him-specifically employment history?"

"Some," Howard said. He pulled up the file on Toshimi Yakamoto. "Not much here. Hired a year ago by the government of Mayana. Before that he worked for fifteen years for the Nishitsu Corporation of Japan. I can do more if you'd like."

Smith was shaking his head. There was a look of quiet triumph on his face.

"Of course," he said. "It all makes sense."

Mark Howard looked from Smith to the monitor, then back to Smith once more. "It does?"

The CURE director shooed the younger man from his seat. Mark Howard stood back in the tight corner as Smith sat down before the raised monitor. The older man's hands flew over the keyboard, keys clattering madly.

"I gave you some research material from our old files after you came to work here," Smith explained while he typed. "Out of necessity I condensed much of it," He finished with a flourish. "Here it is. Read this file. It's more complete than what I gave you before. Digest the broad details as quickly as you can. Skim the rest for now. When you are finished, meet me in my office."

He vacated Howard's chair. The younger man was slipping back in the seat as Smith hurried back into the hallway.

The CURE director marched back to his own office. He slipped into his own familiar chair and grabbed up the blue contact phone. From memory, he called Remo's hotel room directly.

There was no answer. He tried the number a few more times before calling the main desk. Remo and Chiun had not returned, nor had they checked out yet.

That was at least a good sign. Remembering that Rema had checked in by cell phone, Smith spun to his computer.

When he turned up the brightness an the monitor, he found the picture of Mayanan Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume smiling on the tarmac of the New Briton airport.

Feeling a stir of something in the back of his brain, Smith dumped the picture, activating CURE's tracer program.

He quickly traced the line Remo had used to report in. He was concerned to find that the phone was registered to a Russian telephone service.

Smith tried the number several times.

No answer. Knowing Remo, he had most likely tossed the phone in the trash once he was through with it.

Smith was sitting back in his chair and frowning in deep frustration when Mark Howard entered his office. The young man was shaking his head in amazement.

"You read the material?" Smith asked.

"Enough," Howard said. "You sure about this?"

Smith nodded crisply. "It all fits," he said.

Mark seemed to still be digesting everything he had just read. "How did all this end up down there?"

"I have a good idea on that, as well," Smith said, tapping a frustrated hand on his desk. "Fortunately this is not necessarily a major problem. Not for CURE anyway. As long as Remo is down there, I would like to have him confirm my suspicions before he leaves."

He reached once more for the contact phone. Maybe Remo had returned to his hotel by now.

"I can see them choosing that valley," Howard mused. "It's the perfect site. That's the exact spot where Jamestown was. No one's allowed out there."

Smith already knew the location of Jamestown. Yet it took someone else speaking the word aloud for the little nagging doubt that had been playing persistently at the edges of his mind to finally crystallize.

He dropped the blue phone. The color drained from Smith's face. His mouth went as dry as desert sand. His hands were shaking as he reached for his keyboard.

"What's wrong?" Mark Howard asked, noting with dread the sudden change in his employer's demeanor.

Smith didn't answer. His ears rang as he pulled up the photo that had been taken an hour before on the tarmac of New Briton International Airport. President Blythe Curry-Hume stood shaking the hand of the American President, sunlight glinting off his dark glasses. Smith enlarged the photo for a close-up on the face of the Mayanan executive president.

Delving into the CURE archives, Smith retrieved a picture that had been taken twenty-five years earlier. He set the old photograph next to the new one.

The instant he saw them side by side Smith felt a tightness in his chest. As if a cold hand had reached in to clench the life from his struggling heart.

The skin was darker now, but it seemed unnatural. A salon tan rather than natural pigmentation. The nose was oddly sharp, the hairline plucked back. The hair itself had been dyed jet-black. But the build and the general facial structure remained the same. The men in both pictures were even wearing the same aviator-style sunglasses.

Mark Howard had come around the desk and was peering at the pictures of the two men.

Smith had been guided by instinct. Since Remo had undergone several operations to alter his appearance since coming to CURE, Smith had also become adept at spotting plastic surgery. Mark Howard, on the other hand, had his own sixth sense, an ability to see that which others could not. That the young man saw what Smith had seen was clear.

"My God." the assistant CURE director croaked. "But Jack James is dead. That can't be him." Smith scarcely heard. His hands were on the leather arms of his chair. Deadweights at the ends of his wrists.

A peal of distant thunder rumbled in across Long Island Sound. The sound registered dully on Smith's ears.

It could not be. Yet there it was.

Jack James, the psychotic. Jack James, the murderer. Jack James, long-dead leader of the People's Sanctum, the man who had killed hundreds of his own followers at Jamestown.

There now, shaking hands with the President. The President of the United States and dozens-hundreds-more world leaders and high-ranking diplomats were in Mayana for the Globe Summit. And their lives, perhaps the fate of the world, were in the hands of an utter madman.

And not one of them knew the truth.

Chapter 25

Remo had hoped to get a quick flight out of Mayana. Unfortunately the opening-day ceremonies of the Globe Summit tied up all air traffic in and out of New Briton. With dignitaries from around the world swarming the city, the earliest flight he could catch was the following morning.

He tried phoning Smith to speed things up, but Mayana's phone system was worth spit. After hours of trying, he still couldn't get through.

"You know, maybe we could get out of this dump faster if you showed me how to use that cell phone I found," Remo complained to Chiun after his hundredth time pressing the redial button on their hotel room phone. The hotel had given them a new phone with an actual cord that actually plugged into the actual wall, replacing the phone that Remo claimed was already broken in two when they checked in, honestly.

"What phone?" Chiun asked. The old Korean was watching the sun sink out over the Caribbean.

"Ha, ha," Remo said. "Come on, where is it?"

"I lost it."

"Right," Remo droned. He gave up, hanging up the phone. "Looks like we're stuck here tonight. What say we put our best clothespins on and go out to dinner?"

Still wearing a look of serious contemplation, Chiun nodded agreement. The two of them headed out the door.

The moment they stepped out into the hall, someone tried to shoot Remo in the head.

"What the hell?" he snarled, whirling. A bullet whizzed an inch from his ear, burying deep in the hallway wall.

At the far end of the corridor, two men in dark suits braced themselves in doorways, guns aimed at Remo and Chiun.

They seemed surprised to have missed with the first shot. Both men began squeezing off rounds. Silenced bullets sang left and right around the two Masters of Sinanju.

"I thought we were done," Remo griped, dodging bullets as he turned to his teacher. "Who are these guys?"

"They are dressed like the two braying fanatics who intruded on my peace yesterday," Chiun replied.

"I thought those guys didn't say anything."

As hot lead sliced the air around his frail form, Chiun waved an impatient hand. "They might have. I have weighty issues of my own to consider. I do not have time to entertain the wrong thoughts of every door-to-door religious crackpot who intrudes on my peace."

"Religious?" Remo asked, frowning.

Chiun was tapping his foot impatiently. "Are we eating or aren't we?"

"Smith gave us the okay to get out of Stenchburg," Remo mused. "If someone wants to kill us, they're going to have to follow us back home."

He turned to the gunmen who were still trying to shoot them. "Sorry, boys," he called to the increasingly frustrated men, "but we're officially off duty."

As the bullets ran dry, Remo and Chiun headed down the hall in the opposite direction. Leaving the baffled gunmen helplessly reloading, the two Masters of Sinanju ducked into the stairwell and were gone.

AFTER HOURS SPENT at the docks of New Briton, a tired but triumphant Petrovina Bulganin returned to her small hotel room flushed with success.

She had accomplished much more than her mission's original objective. Not only had she proved the Novgorod was behind the scow sinkings, she had also captured it. The renegade submarine had been stopped, its crew was in custody and-as a bonus-former Premier Nikolai Garbegtrov had been collected and quietly locked away at the Russian embassy.

In a serious crisis, Petrovina had both proved her own mettle and demonstrated the effectiveness of the Institute to Russia's male-dominated espionage community.

Yes, Remo and Chiun had helped. But no one need ever know the extent of the American agents' involvement. Vlad Korkusku wouldn't talk. Who would believe him if he did? The same with his men.

They would be laughingstocks if they mentioned any of what they had seen. Thrown out of the SVR. No, this was Petrovina Bulganin's victory to savor.

She pulled her suitcase from the closet floor, setting it on her bed. Removing her laptop from a zippered flap, she sat down at the small writing desk.

Since the ground lines were useless and she was now without a cell phone, her computer's satellite hookup was the only way she could check in with the Institute. As she booted up her computer, she thought of her special cell phone. Another exultant smile passed her full lips.

Even an unplanned accident had worked out in her favor. Everything about this assignment was working out perfectly.

When she checked her mail she found several urgent notes from Director Chutesov. Checking the time, she found that the first was already many hours old.

As Petrovina scanned the first note, her smile of triumph slowly faded. By the time she finished the second and third notes-written by Director Chutesov on a flight from Moscow-Petrovina's hands were shaking.

They were still shaking as she stabbed out the number to Remo's room. The internal lines worked. The phone rang and rang without answer. Woodenly she hung up.

Petrovina fumbled in the suitcase pocket where her computer had been hidden away. For a moment she didn't seem to know what to do with the pistol she pulled out. Finally she stuffed it in her belt, zipping her jacket up over it.

When she stepped numbly from the room a moment later, the usually efficient Petrovina Bulganin didn't even notice that she had left her computer on and the door wide-open.

Chapter 26

Captain Gennady Zhilnikov was lying on the bunk in his New Briton prison cell when he heard the distant clacking of footsteps far up the corridor beyond the iron door.

Zhilnikov tuned out the sound.

People had been coming and going all afternoon. Ever since he and his men were brought here by the local authorities. There had been local and federal police. The Russian ambassador stopped by, voicing disapproval of this whole affair. One of the SVR agents who had been on the boat that helped capture the Novgorod-an SVR neanderthal named Vlad Korkusku-came by with the ambassador. He growled and threatened and puffed out his chest in the way only old KGB could do. When he left, Korkusku told Gennady Zhilnikov that he was looking forward to seeing him back in Moscow.

Now, hours later, hands behind his head as he stared up at the springs of the empty bunk above him, Captain Zhilnikov smiled. As prison cells went, this one was not so bad. In fact, it was more spacious than his quarters on the Novgorod.

Despite Vlad Karkusku's bluster, things were not as dire as they could be. Zhilnikov had chosen the right time to go mad. With all eyes focused on Mayana, there was no way the Mayanans would deal harshly with their prisoners. Even a return to Moscow would not necessarily be the end. Ten years ago death would have been certain. Now? Who knew?

He had been told that the Russian government was already working to extradite the crew of the Novgorod. If they succeeded, the cell he would end up in would be nowhere near as pleasant as his current accommodations.