Blood Ties

The man with the scar dropped the video camera and suddenly there was a long-barreled black pistol in his hands. He dropped into a marksman's crouch and before Remo could reach him, four shots came. One, two, three, four. Their reports blended into a short burst that was almost like the percussive burp of a machine gun.

Remo looked toward the dais and saw Chiun's body lying across those of James Revell and Hubert Millis.

None was moving. Lyle Lavallette was running down the slightly elevated stage toward the fallen men and the bodyguards were coming from the other side.

Remo swerved away from the gunman and ran toward the platform. Newsmen were moving close now and Remo vaulted over them and landed atop the pile of bodies. "Chiun, Chiun," he called. "Are you all right?"

The squeaky voice from under him answered, "I was until some elephant crashed upon my poor body."

The gunman had stopped firing; there were probably too many newsmen in the way for him to have a shot, Remo realized. He started to his feet, even as he felt the bodies of Lavallette and the bodyguards drop on top of the pile.

"I'll get the gunman, Chiun," Remo said.

He started to slip through the pack, but could not get free. Something was holding his ankle. He reached down to free it, but the pressure was suddenly released. He tried to stand again and the pressure was on his other ankle. Through the cluster of bodies, he could see nothing.

Remo lunged backward with his body and suddenly the pressure was released and Remo went sprawling onto his back on the platform.

He stood up and looked over the heads of the reporters who were clustered milling about in front of the dais. The gunman was gone.

Remo darted into the crowd but there was no sign of the man. All around him, reporters were babbling.

"Who was it?"

"Who did the shooting?"

"Did anybody get hit?"

He heard one reporter say, "I know who did it." Remo moved quickly behind that reporter and grasped his earlobe between right thumb and forefinger.

"Who did it, buddy?" he said.

"Owwww. Stop that."

"First, who did it?"

"A cameraman. He came when I did and I saw his name on the guest list."

"What was his name?" Remo said.

"A funny name. Owwww. All right. His name was Remo Williams."

Remo released the newsman's ear, swallowed hard, then ran back to the dais to collect Chiun so they could get out of the mob scene before they wound up as stars on the six-o'clock news.

As they left the parking lot, they could hear the whooping of approaching police sirens.

Chapter 11

The Master of Sinanju was not hungry. The Master of Sinanju would not be hungry for the foreseeable future, at least so long as his ungrateful wretch of a pupil continued to intrude upon his privacy.

"Well, I'm hungry and I intend to make some rice."

"Good," said the Master of Sinanju. "Make it in Massachusetts," he added, repeating a slogan he had once heard on television.

Remo bit back an answer and went into the small kitchenette of the hotel suite. On the counter, on a room-service tray, were six packages of whole-grain brown rice, and as a concession to variety; one package of white rice, which according to Chiun had less nutrient value and an inferior taste. Not to mention being improperly colored.

Remo opened the package of white rice. "Yum, yum. White rice. My favorite."

He glanced into the living room and saw a disgusted expression wrinkle Chiun's parchment features. But the old man did not move from his lotus position in the center of the floor.

"I haven't had white rice in so long, just the thought of a steaming bowl makes my mouth water."

Chiun sniffed disdainfully.

Remo put on a pot of water and measured out a half-cup of rice grains. While he waited for the water to boil, he made pleasant conversation although he was not in a pleasant mood. Still, after a half-day of argument and pleading had failed to move Chiun, he had decided on this approach.

"Sure wish we had this rice in the desert, when my plane crashed. Do you know, Chiun? I was the leader of all the survivors. Surrounded by sand. And I found myself enjoying it."

"You would," Chiun said. "I will have Smith buy you a sandbox for Christmas."

"I enjoyed being appreciated. There we were surrounded by sand and these people I had never met before looked up to me. "

"So did the sand probably," said Chiun.

The first bubbles of water surfaced in the pot and Remo looked for a wooden spoon but had to settle for a plastic one.

"I think I may have helped save some lives," Remo said. "That was the part that stays with me. I guess I can understand how important you think it is to feed the villagers of Sinanju."

The rice swirled in the boiling water.

The Master of Sinanju opened his mouth to speak, a softer light in his hazel eyes, but he caught himself before the breath became a kind word and resumed staring into infinity.

Remo saw the momentary softening and went on, as he put a lid on the pot: "I used to think those people in Sinanju were lazy ungrateful bastards. Every one of them. Living off the blood money of the Master. But I've changed now."

Chiun brushed a long-nailed finger against an eye. Was he brushing away a tear? Remo wondered.

"I can understand now how it is a Master's obligation to feed the village."

He waited five minutes then opened the pot. The rice was soft and fluffy.

"Maybe someday, I'll be the one to feed the people of Sinanju," Remo said, putting the rice into two identical bowls. "I'd like that."

Remo looked at Chiun from the corner of his eye but the aged Korean averted his face.

"Care for some rice?" Remo said casually.

Chiun came up from his sitting position as if being catapulted from the floor. He cleared the space to his bedroom like a flash of golden light, the color of his day kimono.

The door slammed behind him and through the door panel Remo could hear the sound of the Master of Sinanju noisily blowing his nose. It sounded like a goose honking.

A moment later, the door reopened and Chiun stood framed in the doorway, calm and serene, a beatific expression on his face.

"Yes, my son. I think I will have some rice," he said formally.

After they had put aside their empty bowls and eating sticks, Remo said, "I would speak with you, Little Father. "

Chiun held up a hand. "The proprieties must be observed. First the food."

"Yes?" said Remo.

"I think you are finally learning to cook rice properly. That rice was correctly done, not like that insidious mortar that Japanese refer to as rice. This was done in the Korean style."

"That's the way I like it in Chinese restaurants," Remo said.

"Pah," said Chiun. "The Chinese stole the correct cooking technique from the Koreans, who are widely acknowledged to be the world's greatest chefs."

Remo nodded his head in agreement, although the only Korean dish he had ever tasted was some kind of pickled cabbage that tasted like rancid crabgrass.

He lowered his head and waited and finally Chiun said, "And now you may speak of other things."

"I know this subject offends you, Chiun, but I must ask. Who was that gunman this afternoon?"

"Some lunatic who likes to shoot people," Chiun said casually.

"He gave his name to one of the reporters there," Remo said.

"An alias," Chiun said. "American gangsters are always using aliases."

"He gave his name as Remo Williams," Remo said.

"He probably picked the name at random from the telephone book," Chiun said.

"There aren't a lot of Remo Williamses in the telephone book, Little Father. Why did Smith send you to Detroit?"

"Business," Chiun said.

"I figured that much. That gunman's your target?"

"You should have figured that out too," Chiun said.

"I'm trying to be respectful and hold a decent conversation with you," Remo said, and Chiun, looking as chastened as Remo had ever seen him, said nothing.

"I thought about a lot of things when I was out in that desert," Remo said. "I thought about who I am and what I was, and how I never had any family, except for you. I guess that's why I was impressed when the other passengers looked up to me. It was almost like having a family."

Chiun remained silent and Remo said, "Funny that guy would have my name."

"It is one thing to have a name," Chiun said. "It is quite another just to use a name."

"You think that man was just using my name?" Remo said.

"Yes. That man is a cruel trickster, a vicious deceitful white. Without his cruel guile, I would not now bear this scar on my aged head," Chiun said.

"The wound will heal, Little Father."

"The shame will not heal. Not until I have erased that deceiver from this existence. He cannot be allowed to live." Chiun's voice trembled with a low anger.

"I am ready to help," Remo said. What was that strange look that came into Chiun's eyes? Remo wondered. It was a flash of something. Was it fear?

"No," Chiun said, too loudly. "You must not. It is forbidden."

"The shame that you feel on your shoulders rests on my shoulders too," Remo said. "You know that."

"I know that and I know many other things. Some of which you do not know, my son."

"What things?" Remo asked.

"I know what must be done and I know what must not be done. And since I am the teacher and you the pupil, you must accept this as a fact."

"I accept it as a fact," Remo said. "But you must tell me these things or I will never learn them." Chiun was hiding something, he knew. But what?

"Wait here," Chiun said quietly. He rose smoothly to his feet and padded softly to the lacquered trunks neatly stacked in the corner of the living room.

He bent deep into one of the trunks, looked around for a while, then grunted in satisfaction and came back holding something carefully in his bony fingers.

He sat down across from Remo and handed him the object he was holding.

"This is one of the greatest treasures of Sinanju." Remo looked at it. It was fist-sized, gray and flecked with shiny particles like bits of fused sand, and cold to his touch.

"A rock?" said Remo.

"No," Chiun said. "No ordinary rock. It is a rock taken from the moon."

Remo turned it over in his hands. "From the moon? Smith must have gotten it for you." He looked up. "How'd you get Smitty to con NASA into giving you a moon rock?"

"No," Chiun said. "This rock was given to me by my father, who received it from his father, and so on, back to the one who plucked it from the mountains on the moon, Master Shang."

Remo cocked an eyebrow. "Never heard of him. And I'd be surprised if they really heard of him on the moon either. "

Chiun shook his head for emphasis. "Master Shang," he insisted. "He is known as the Master who walked to the moon."

"Oh, that explains it," Remo said. "I knew the Masters in the old days didn't have spaceships but naturally they didn't need them 'cause they just walked to the moon."

"I will ignore your insolence except to point out that absolute certainty is generally the refuge of the nincompoop."

"Nincompoop or not, the first man on the moon was Neil Armstrong and he was an American and that is an absolute certainty. And why are we talking about the moon? We were talking about things that you know and I don't and it's pretty obvious now that you know absolutely nothing about the moon," Remo said. "Less than nothing."

"I will tell you the story of Master Shang," Chiun said. "It was in the days of the Han dynasty in China. Master Shang was the ruling Master in those days but he was not a great Master, except for this one feat.

"Now Master Shang often performed services for the Emperor of China in those days. This was when the Chinese could generally be counted on to pay their bills and before they became the pack of beggars and thieves they are today. At any rate, this Chinese emperor's throne was sore beset by enemies, princelings and pretenders who coveted his gold and his women, for he had a queen and many concubines, that being the tradition among emperors of China at the time, they always being a licentious and immoral people.

"Master Shang made the arduous journey from the village of Sinanju on the West Korea Bay to this emperor's court to eliminate some foe or another but each time he obliterated an enemy of the throne, more enemies would spring up.

"One day, Master Shang said to the emperor, 'Lo, but your enemies wax like the stars in the September sky. Each year I am summoned to dispatch them and each following year their numbers increase.'

"The emperor replied, 'Is this not good, because then you have more work from my court?'

" 'No,' said Shang. 'This is bad, for soon the court of China will have more enemies than subjects.'

"The Emperor of China thought on this and said, 'What is your suggestion, Master of Sinanju?' "

Chiun paused to take the stone from Remo's hands and to set it on the floor between them.

"Then the Master Shang told the emperor, 'Take the women of your enemies into your court. Make them yours and thus, by blood, your enemies will become your relatives.'

"The emperor considered this for a day and a night. Then he answered, 'Your idea has merit, Master of Sinanju. But what shall I do with my concubines? Already they overflow the royal palace.'

" 'Set them free,' said the Master of Sinanju, who had looked with favor upon one of the emperor's concubines. 'It may be I will accept one of them in payment for my services.'

"And so the Emperor of China did this and set his concubines free and one of the women, who was called Yee, became the property of the Master of Sinanju and returned to our village with Master Shang."

"All's well that ends well," Remo said. "She must have been a beaut if the women you have there today look anything like she did."

"Nothing ended well," Chiun said. "Upon his return, Master Shang was reviled for daring to take a Chinese woman for his own. For everyone knew then, as now, that the Chinese are unclean people with bad teeth and worse dispositions and while it is permitted to work for them, one must never sleep with one.

"But the Master Shang was smitten and what could he do? This woman, this Yee, became demanding in her ways, having been spoiled by the richness of the emperor's palace. She could not fully appreciate the magnificent simplicity of Sinanju. Her insistence upon baubles grew vexing to Shang.

"Yee would ask for emeralds and Shang would give them. She would ask for rubies and they would be in her hand. Yee would ask for-"

"There's a word for Shang's problem," Remo said.

"What is that?" Chiun asked.

"Pussy-whipped," Remo said.

"You have the ability to be gross even in moments of ultimate pathos," Chiun said. "One day, Shang saw that the treasure house of Sinanju was growing empty and he went to Yee and told her, 'My wealth is less but I am the greater for your presence,' although in truth he found this woman was becoming a bother.

"One day, Yee said, 'I want something no emperor or Master has.' And Shang grew angry. 'I have given you diamonds and rubies and emeralds and pearls. What more could you ask?'

"Yee thought long as she looked at Shang and beyond the Master she saw something bright and shiny in the night sky and a sly smile came over her avaricious pancake-flat Chinese excuse for a face."

"No editorial comments, please," Remo said. "The legend and nothing but the legend. I want to be out of here today. "

"You can leave now," Chiun said.

"The story," Remo said.

"Legend," Chiun corrected. "So the avaricious Yee told the Master Shang that she wanted just one more thing and if he could not provide it, would she then be free to return to her people. And Shang finally understood what had been concealed from him all along: that Yee did not love him but only the things he could give her. But he also understood that he still loved her and so he gave her his promise. 'What is it you wish, my wife?'

"And Yee pointed beyond him into the night sky.

" 'That,' she said.

" 'The moon? No one can give you the moon. It is impossible. You are trying to trick me.'

" 'I will settle for a piece of the moon. A piece no bigger than my fist. Is this so much to ask?'

"Shang was beside himself for days. He did not sleep, he did not eat, for he was in love and at length he decided that if he wished to keep Yee as his wife, he must try.

"What a dork," Remo said.

"Silence," Chiun commanded. "So one clear night with a walking stick and a pack on his pack, Master Shang set out to walk to the moon. He walked north, beyond Korea, beyond the colder lands above Korea, always keeping the moon before him. He reasoned that where the moon set would be his goal. For wherever the moon went by day, he would find it.

"Master Shang walked and walked until he ran out of land on which to walk, and so he made for himself a boat and betook himself north in that boat. He ran out of food, he ran out of water to drink. There were strange animals in the water and bears who swam and were the color of snow.

"Finally, Master Shang, sick with hunger, sailed into a cold sea where the sun never set. He thought himself dead and doomed to sail the Void through eternity. Until his boat reached a strange land.

"Now this land was white, with mountains of snow. Everywhere there was snow and under it rock. The days passed and still the sun did not set but only hung low in the tired sky. There was no moon in the sky. Shang waited for days but it did not appear. And it was then that the Master of Sinanju knew that he had reached his goal."

Chiun lowered his voice to a respectful hush. "And so the legend tells us, he had walked to the moon.

"Master Shang ate the meat of the white swimming bear and broke off a rock the size of Yee's fist from a mountain of the moon. And with extra meat in his ration pouch, he sailed back from the land of the moon.

"When, months later, he returned to the village of Sinanju, he told Yee, 'I have brought you a rock of the moon. I have kept my promise.'

"And Yee accepted the rock and his story, although she cried because she knew she would never see her homeland again. Her days were not long after this and in the end, Master Shang was stricken by grief and he too died. But not in shame, for he had done a wondrous thing. And to remind future Masters of the lesson of Shang, the rock you hold in your hands, Remo, has been passed from generation to generation."

Chiun smiled benignly.

"Do you understand, Remo?"

"Chiun, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Shang didn't walk to the moon."

Chiun looked at Remo with an unhappy glare. "You do not understand," he said sadly.

"He walked to the North Pole," Remo said. "The white swimming bears were polar bears. And at the North Pole, the sun doesn't set for six months every year. That's why it never got dark," Remo said.

"You disappoint me, Remo," said Chiun, taking away the rock of Master Shang. "I will have to keep this until you have learned the lesson of Shang. It is sad."

"All right. Time out," Remo said. "Answer me this. If Shang did walk to the moon, why isn't he considered a great Master? Answer me that. After all, it's not everybody who can walk to the moon."

"Shang is not greatly honored for a simple reason," said Chiun evenly. "He married a Chinese and this is just not done. Had he not partly atoned by walking to the moon, he would have been totally stricken from the records of Sinanju."

The telephone rang and Chiun said, "It is Emperor Smith."

"How do you know?"

"It is simple. I am here. You are here. Smith is not here. Therefore, it is Smith."

"Very good," Remo said. "What else can you foresee?" Chiun put his fingers to his temples and closed his eyes as if peering into the future.

"I can see who will answer the phone," he said.

"Yeah? Who?"

"You, Remo."

"How do you know that?"

"It is simple," said Chiun, opening his eyes. "Because I am not going to. Heh, heh. Because I am not going to."

"Very funny," said Remo and walked across the room to answer the telephone.

"All right, Smitty. It's your dime," he said pleasantly.

"Remo?" Smith's voice was sharp. "I was calling Chiun."

"So you got me. Don't sound so disappointed. Chiun's not answering phones at the moment."

"What are you doing in Detroit? Where were you at two o'clock this afternoon?"

"With Chiun, at some car exhibition. Smitty, did you know there's a guy running around calling himself by my name?"

"Let me speak with Chiun, Remo," Smith said.

Remo tossed the phone to Chiun, who snatched it from the air and announced, "Hail, Emperor Smith. Your fears are groundless for Remo is with me and all is well."

Remo listened to Chiun's side of the conversation patiently. Normally, even from across a room, he could hear both sides of a phone call, but Chiun had the earpiece so tightly pressed against his head that Remo could not hear anything but the old man's voice.

"I cannot explain," Chiun said. "Not now. Rest assured, all will be rectified in time. Yes. No more carriagemakers will die. You have the word of the Master of Sinanju and you need no other assurances," Chiun said curtly, then hung up.

"What was that all about?" Remo asked.

"Emperor's business," Chiun said.

"Are we back to that again? Come on, Chiun. Tell me what's going on."

Chiun waved for Remo to sit and Remo lowered himself reluctantly to the floor.

"My son, you trust the Master who made you whole, do you not?"

"You know I do," Remo said.

"Then I call upon you to listen to that trust. Emperor Smith wants you to return to Folcroft. Do this. I will join you in a day. Two at most. Trust me, Remo. There are some things you should not yet know. This is one of them."

Remo sighed. "I will do as you say."

"Good," said Chiun. "Now go. I have much to do."

"I hope Smith thanked you for saving those two guys' lives today when that gunman opened fire," Remo said.

"Thanks are not necessary. It is part of my mission."

"And what's the other part?"

Chiun silently rose and placed the moon rock back into one of his steamer trunks.

He would not answer, Remo knew, so he walked to the door, but in the doorway, paused.

"Chiun. That guy with my name? Is he the reason you and Smith are so upset?"

"No," said Chiun, although it hurt him to lie to his pupil. But it was as he said. There were some things that Remo was better off not knowing.

Chapter 12

The President was disturbed; Smith could tell by his language.

"What the heck is going on, Smith? You assured me that Drake Mangan would be protected and he's dead. Now somebody tries to kill Revell and Millis too."

"We had protection there," said Smith. "Something's just gone wrong."

"Gone wrong? You're not supposed to have anything go wrong. How is that possible?"

"I'm not sure," Smith said.

The President's voice was cracking. "Not sure? Are you telling me that you can't control your people? I hope you're not telling me that because I'm tempted to give you a certain order. You know the one I mean."

"That is your decision, sir," said Smith, "but I think it would be a mistake at this time. And I've been assured that no more Detroit executives will be lost."

"They don't grow on trees," said the President. "We've lost Mangan and I don't want to lose any more."

"If you have no specific orders for me, Mr. President, I must return to monitoring the situation."

There was a heavy silence over the safe line to Washington and for a long moment, Smith thought that the order to disband was coming. Instead, the President said, "Well, okay, Smith. Do your best. What the heck. Nobody got killed today so I guess that's something and who knows, tomorrow might be better. It usually is."

"I hope so, Mr. President," said Smith as he hung up. Was the President correct? Smith wondered. Would things be better? Or were they so far out of control now that nothing could mend them? Chiun had just assured him that Remo was not the Detroit assassin, but why was Remo in Detroit in the first place? How had Remo found Chiun so quickly? Was it possible that the two of them were working together, at cross-purposes to Smith?

If there were one more death, Smith knew the President would dissolve CURE. He had always been prepared for that day. There was a poison pill that he would unhesitatingly take and a coffin ready to receive his body. A simple computer command would erase all the CURE files and Smith's final order would be to Chiun: eliminate Remo and return to Sinanju. There would be no trace of CURE's existence after that.

Well, one trace, Smith thought. One large one. America still survived, but no one would suspect that a secret agency had ever been responsible for that.

A chilling thought flashed into Smith's mind. Could he trust Chiun to eliminate Remo upon command? If not, then what would happen without Smith to control the two deadliest assassins in human history?

He shuddered and brought up his computer link.

Chiun had assured him that Remo would return to Folcroft immediately. That would at least be a sign that things were still in order. Smith logged onto the main computer net that recorded all flight reservations in and out of Detroit. The names and destinations began scrolling up. Smith stopped the file when he recognized the name Remo Cochran. It was one of Remo's cover identities. And Remo Cochran had confirmed reservations on a Detroit-New York flight.

Good. Now all that had to happen was for Remo Williams to walk through the gates of Folcroft Sanitarium. Then, and only then, would Smith feel that the situation was under control.

Remo drove to Detroit City Airport, turned in the keys to his rental car, and reminded the counter clerk to keep the other three vehicles, unused, in the lot for the next three months. "Just in case," he said.

Then Remo bought a one-way ticket to New York City on Midwest-North Central-McBride-Johnson-Friendly Air, which until its most recent merger five minutes before had been Midwest-North Central-McBride-Johnson Airways. The flight was delayed an hour so that crews could quickly repaint the new name on the plane, so Remo bought three newspapers and threw away the news, sports, and business sections and began reading the comics.

It took him twenty minutes to read the comics because he didn't understand them. When he was growing up, comic strips featured funny characters doing funny things. Now they seemed to be about what people ate for breakfast and how so-and-so needed a different haircut. Maybe someone someday, Remo thought, might do a comic strip that was funny again. Would anyone read it? Or had the world grown too tired for funny comic strips?

He threw away the comics and the front-page headline of one of the papers he had thrown away caught his eye. It read: "GUNMAN ATTACKS AUTOMAKERS; COPS HINT IDENTITY IS KNOWN."

Remo picked up the news sections of the three papers and read them. Each had basically the same story: a gunman had attacked Revell and Millis earlier that day but was not successful. Police said that the gunman appeared to be the same one who had wounded Lyle Lavallette earlier in the week and said he had apparently entered the press-conference area with false press credentials. While police would not release the name the gunman used, it was apparently the same name he had used earlier when Lavallette was wounded at the Detroit Plaza.

Next to the story on the shootings was another which told how Lyle Lavallette had invented an automobile which got its power from household refuse and the Maverick Genius of the Auto Industry had proclaimed this the end of the Detroit gas-burners.

When Remo put the newspapers down, his face wore a stricken expression. The gunman who had attacked today had struck three days ago-while Remo was out in the desert-and had used the name Remo Williams at that time too. Why hadn't Chiun told him? What were Chiun and Smith trying to keep from him?

Remo ripped the articles from the paper and jammed them into his pocket.

"I thought you were leaving town," the rental agent said when Remo reappeared at the booth.

"Changed my mind," Remo said. "I'm going to take one of my three cars. Give me the keys."

"Fine, sir. Here they are. Would you like to rent a replacement car to leave in the lot?"

"No. The two I've got there should be enough. I need directions to American Automobiles."

"Just take the Parkway west. You'll see the signs," the clerk said.

Remo nodded and left the airport. He was so angry that, as he drove, his fingers dug into the warm plastic of the steering wheel as if it were taffy. Chiun had lied to him. There was something going on, something that both Chiun and Smith were hiding from him. But what could it be? Who was this gunman who was using his name? Remo could have gotten him today if it had not been for Chiun grabbing Remo's ankle and preventing him from giving chase.

He concentrated, trying to remember the man's face. There was something familiar about him, something around the eyes. Where had he seen those eyes before, dark, deep-set, and deadly?

And he remembered. He saw those eyes every time he looked into a mirror. They were his own eyes.

Remo was doing ninety on the Edsel Ford Parkway. Screw Chiun. Screw Smith. There was something going on and Remo was going to find out how it concerned him.

The newspapers had gotten one fact wrong. All three had written that the gunman had sprayed shots at both Revell and Millis, but Remo had been there. He had seen the man take his stance, had seen the angle of the shot, and he knew that James Revell had been the intended target. The gunman had shot Lyle Lavallette and killed Drake Mangan and tried to kill James Revell. Only Hubert Millis was left on the list. Remo wanted to see that gunman again. All he had to do, he was sure, was attach himself to Hubert Millis and wait.

He hoped it wouldn't be a long wait.

At Folcroft Sanitarium, Smith saw by his watch that the flight on which Remo was booked had left Detroit City Airport ten minutes before. He called a New York service and arranged for a private limousine to meet the passenger who traveled under the name of Remo Cochran and bring him directly to Rye, New York.

That done, he drew a paper cup of spring water from his office cooler and settled down to call up the news-digest file from his computer. It was a constantly running data collector that keyed off the wire services and network media computers. Smith had programmed it to collect only those reports that contained certain buzzwords that indicated CURE might be interested. Stories about corrupt politicians would automatically be downloaded into the CURE files by the word "corruption." An arson story would wind up in the same file, keyed by the word "arson."

The constantly expanding file kept Smith up-to-date on slow-breaking events that might one day mushroom into a priority situations for CURE. And when they got into priority situations and all other possible solutions had failed, Remo Williams-the Destroyer-was called on. The Ravine Rapist had been just such a case. There was no question of the man's guilt, but apprehending him and trying him and convicting him was so long and so unsure a process that many other innocent people might have been killed along the way. Remo prevented such a waste.

Smith speed-read his way through the file. He took no notes, although lately he had noticed his memory was not so sharp as it once was and notes would have helped. But notes were dangerous so he forced his memory to respond.

When Smith came to the string of reports concerning the shootings in Detroit, he reached for the button that would skip over that section, but he was stopped by a sidebar cross-reference:

SEE FILE # 00334 Key: REMO WILLIAMS

Smith sipped his spring water, wondering what possible cross-reference would contain Remo's name.

When he saw what it was, his spring water went down the wrong pipe and it was a full minute before the coughing spasm subsided enough for him to read the wireservice story.

It was datelined Newark, New Jersey, four days earlier. The report read:

Police are still investigating the fatal shooting of an unidentified women whose body was found last night in Wildwood Cemetery.

The woman, whom authorities estimate was in her mid-fifties, was found sprawled over a grave. An autopsy showed she had been shot at close range by a .22-caliber pistol. Three bullets were recovered from her body.

Authorities are puzzled by the absence of identification, although the woman appeared to be well-dressed and the autopsy showed that she had been in good health prior to her death. A floral display was found beside the body and police suspect that the woman was placing flowers at a grave when her killer attacked. A preliminary investigation showed that the nearest grave belonged to Remo Williams, a former Newark police officer who was executed for the murder of a minor drug pusher more than ten years ago.

Efforts to trace the woman's identity through friends or relatives of the deceased Remo Williams have proved unavailing. According to police sources, Williams had no family.

Police speculate that robbery may have been a motive in the woman's killing.

Smith shut down the computer. It was impossible. First there was the killer in Detroit who was using Remo's name. And now, after all these years, someone had visited Remo's gravesite. In all the years since the casket had been laid in that grave, no one had ever stopped to pay respects to the memory of the dead policeman. Smith knew this because a cemetery worker, who thought he was working for a sociological-research center, filed a monthly written report listing the patterns of visitation to selected graves in Wildwood Cemetery. There was no such sociological-research center and the report went directly to CURE. And every month it noted that no one had visited Remo Williams' grave. And now this.

Who could the woman have been? An old girlfriend, carrying a torch after all those years? Not likely, Smith thought. She was too old. Old enough to be Remo's mother, in fact.

"Remo's mother," Smith whispered hoarsely in the silence of his shabby office. "Oh, my God. It's all unraveling. "

* * *

The black car pulled into the deserted construction site like something propelled by air. Only the soft crush of its tires in the bulldozer-gouged earth warned of its approach. It was early evening and the construction crew had gone home for the day. A crane stood off to one side of the framework building, like a mutant monster insect.

The black car with its tinted windows circled the crane before drawing grille to grille with the car already parked there. The dark-eyed gunman with the scar down his right jawline was leaning against the parked car. He flicked a cigarette away.

"Williams." The testy voice emerged from the black car, disguised by the sealed windows. Williams walked up to the vehicle. Because of today's demonstration by Lavallette, he now recognized it as a Dynacar. So his employer had not been boasting when he said he had stolen one of the Dynacar models.

"What do you want?" the gunman asked.

"What did you think you were doing today?" the voice from inside the Dynacar demanded.

"Trying to fulfill my contract," the gunman said. "I don't like it. You could have ruined everything."

"What ruins everything," the gunman said, "is when you don't level with me and tell me what I'm up against."

"What do you mean?"

"Today, I would have had Revell except that old Chinaman got him out of the way. It was the same Chinaman who showed up at Mangan's apartment last night. Who the hell is he?"

"I don't know," answered the voice from inside the Dynacar. There was a pause, and then the voice again: "What I do know is that I didn't tell you to hit anybody today and you've got to do it my way, on my schedule. Anything else is unprofessional."

"I don't like being called unprofessional," the gunman said softly.

"These are the rules. You take them one at a time. Don't hurry. No head shots."

"Just tell me who you want done first," the gunman said.

"Try getting Millis," the voice from inside the car said. "Revell is probably spooked by now and we've already put the fear of God into Lavallette. I think Millis."

"Okay," the gunman with the scar said as the Dynacar abruptly slid into reverse, turned, and drove from the construction site.

The gunman had not realized that the car was still running. No matter what the press thought about the Dynacar, it was one spooky machine.

He got behind the wheel of his own vehicle and while he waited, lit a cigarette. It tasted stale. He had kicked the habit years ago, but this job was getting to him. Everything had been getting to him, ever since Maria had died. Half the time, it was painful to think of her and the other half of the time, he could not get her face out of his mind. Once she had been so beautiful and so loving.

Something else was also bothering him. His early hunch had been that his employer was a business rival of Lavallette's and now he was sure of it. There was only one reason why he would have been upset about the shooting spree at the Dynacar demonstration. He was one of the executives attending it.

The man had told him to go take out Hubert Millis of American Automobiles. The gunman thought that could mean only one thing: he was a contract killer for James Revell and today he had almost killed the man who hired him.

No wonder the man in the Dynacar had been upset. Served him right though for not leveling with the gunman from the start.

Who was that damned old Chinaman anyway? Who was he working for?

And the gunman had gotten the feeling today that there was somebody else with the old man. But he hadn't seen his face.

It didn't matter. If either of them showed, or got in his way again, he was taking them down and he didn't care if it took head shots to do it.

Chapter 13

The sun was slowly setting over the Great Lakes region and there was a cooling breeze off Lake Erie. The leaves were thinking of turning color. Children, only a few weeks back to school, had fallen out of the habit of play. Rush hour was over; life was settling down and in their homes, people were eating dinner or preparing to feed their minds with a diet of prime-time pap. The peace of the fall season had settled over every part of the town of Inkster, just outside Detroit.

Except for the American Automobile plant, which looked like a combat-ready military base.

Brand-new American Vistas, Stormers, and Spindrift Coupes ringed the electrified fence surrounding the headquarters of one of the Big Three automakers, like wagons pulled into a circle. One ring of cars was outside the twenty-foot-high fence, and another inside.

Six separate roadblocks, only thirty yards apart, controlled the single access road leading to the main gate and American Auto security guards, attired in green uniforms and toting semiautomatic weapons, prowled the grounds.

It was an impressive sight as Hubert Millis stared down from his office atop the American Auto corporate building, smack in the center of the headquarters complex. He filled with pride, watching the American Auto vehicles arrayed to protect him.

The head of the company's security said proudly, "Nothing will get through that, Mr. Millis." He was a young man in a neat brown suit who possessed a genius for security-systems analysis. He would have been prime FBI material, but American Autos paid him more than he could ever hope to earn working in Washington.

Millis nodded absently and turned his attention to the television set in the room. The station had concluded its 120-second summary of international news, national news, sports, and weather and was now starting its twenty-eight minutes of coverage of the auto industry. Millis, a sturdy man with a nervous habit of wringing his hands, turned up the sound as he saw the picture on the screen of Lyle Lavallette.

The announcer said, "Industry sources are predicting that Lyle Lavallette may be asked to head National Automobiles. This after the tragic death last night of Drake Mangan, shot and killed in the penthouse apartment of a Ms. Agatha Ballard, who was not believed to be acquainted with Mr. Mangan."

"Right, a total stranger," Millis hooted. "He'd been humping her for three years." He remembered his security guard was in the room and mumbled, "Well, at least that's what I heard. Something like that."

The announcer went on about industry sources. "They" said that Lavallette's new Dynacar might be the biggest thing to hit Detroit since Henry Ford. "They" said that National Autos was thinking of asking Lavallette to run the company so that it could control the development of the Dynacar. "They" said that Genera! Autos and American Automobiles might even follow suit, especially if this environmental killer kept up his attacks on auto-industry officials.

"They" said a lot more but Millis did not hear it because he turned the television set off.

"Bullshit," he said. "Every one of us fired that goddamn Lavallette because he's a goofball. It's going to take more than one damned gunman to make me turn over the company to that loser." He went to the window and looked out over the cars massed in the parking lot. "You sure nobody can get through?" he asked his security chief. "I don't think a bumblebee could get in here."

"I believe you're correct, Lemmings," Millis said. "You know, though, I think it might have been more artistic if you had used different models from our car fleet out there. Sound advertising, you know."

Lemmings looked confused. "I did, sir."

"You did?"

Millis looked through the triple-thickness window again. From this vantage point, every one of the encircled cars looked alike. He paid design engineers six-figure salaries so that American Automobiles' cars were distinctive and original and stood out from the competition and this is what he got?

"They all look alike," Millis said.

"Isn't that the idea?" asked Lemmings. "Mass production and all that?"

"But they all look exactly alike. Funny I never noticed that before. Does everybody else's cars look exactly alike?"

"Yes, sir," said Lemmings. "Much more so than ours do."

"Good," Millis said. "Then we're still the industry leader. That's what I like around here. Hey! What's that?"

"Sir?"

"Something's happening at the gate. See what it is." Lemmings picked up the phone and got the gate. "What's going on down there, people?" he said.

"Someone trying to get past the gate, Mr. Lemmings."

"What's his business?"

"He says he has to see Mr. Millis. And he won't take no for an answer," the security guard said.

"So what's the problem? Just run him off."

"Impossible, sir. He's taken our guns."

Lemmings looked out the window and saw an assault rifle fly over the Cyclone fence, followed by a shotgun. They were, in turn, followed by assorted handguns and a truncheon. Then a telephone handset sailed after the weapons and the line in Lemmings' hand went dead.

"I think we have serious trouble at the gate, Mr. Millis."

"I can see that," Millis said. "Must be a hit team. God, do you think that gunman belongs to some terrorist gang?"

Then another object appeared in the air over the fence. One man, and at that long distance, he didn't look impressive, but he floated up the Cyclone fence as if he were being pulled by a magnet.

"No hit team," Lemmings said. "Just that skinny guy in the black T-shirt."

"How's he getting over that fence? Is he climbing or jumping?" Millis asked.

"I can't say, sir, but it doesn't matter. When he touches the electrified wire on top, he's gone."

But the skinny guy was not gone. He kept going and landed on both feet, perfectly balanced on the electric wire that ran along the top of the fence.

"Shouldn't he be dead now?" Millis asked.

"No, sir. He knows what he's doing. He timed that jump perfectly to land on the wire with both feet. The charge is fatal only if the person touching the wire is grounded. "

"I don't understand that 'grounded' business. That's what the electrical department's for," Millis said. "I thought when you touched a hot wire, you died."

"If you ever saw a pigeon land on the third rail of a subway, you'd understand, Mr. Millis."

"I don't ride subways. I own six cars and they all look alike. "

"That man won't be hurt by the current as long as he doesn't touch another object while he's on the wire."

"He can't stay there forever, can he? Unless these terrorists belong to a circus. Maybe they're all acrobats and wire walkers and like that," Millis said.

"There's only this one, so far," Lemmings said, and as he spoke, the man on the electrified fence jumped and seemed to float to the ground, just as he had seemed to float up to the wire in the first place.

"I'll have him stopped in his tracks," Lemmings said and dialed the main security outpost on the office phone. Hubert Millis watched the man in the black T-shirt run across the grassy ground that separated his office building from the first defense perimeter. A tiny puff of dust kicked up near his feet. Then another. But still the man kept coming.

"What's wrong with those guards of yours? Can't they hit just one running man?"

"They're trying," said Lemmings.

"What's the matter with you people?" he yelled into the telephone. "Can't you hit just one running man?"

"Wait," Millis said. "He's turning. I think he's running away."

Lemmings rushed to the window. The thin man in black had doubled back. The dust-puff marks of high-powered rifle bullets still pursued him, still missed, but now the man was running in the opposite direction.

He vaulted toward the Cyclone fence in a high-arcing leap. This time he did not land on the electric wire, but cleared the whole fence and landed on his feet, running, on the other side.

He kept on going. "We scared him off," Lemmings said happily. "My people did it."

"Maybe," said Millis. "And maybe not. I saw him before he turned back. He was looking at that building on the other side of the highway. It looked like something caught his eye and made him change his mind."

"Begging your pardon, sir, but that doesn't make sense. Obviously, he's after you. He wouldn't turn back after coming this far."

"Yeah? Then why's he running toward that building?" asked Hubert Millis.

Remo Williams had gotten past the American Auto guards without a problem. Like all fighters who relied on weapons instead of the powers locked inside their own bodies, they were helpless once their weapons were taken away.

The fence too had been easy. The hair on the backs of Remo's arms had registered the electrical current even before he had consciously become aware of it. The few seconds he had spent balanced on the wire had given him time to scan the complex layout, and once on the ground, the ragged fire of the inner security forces-anxious not to shoot their own men-had been easy to evade.

Millis would be found, he knew, on the top floor of the tallest building in the complex but as he cleared the space toward that structure, he had caught the glint of something out of the corner of one eye.

On the roof of a building outside the complex, the dying red sunlight was reflected from something glass. Remo's eyes spotted the source of the light.

A man was crouched on the roof. He was sighting down the scope of a long-barreled weapon and even at the distance of five hundred yards, Remo had recognized the man as the scar-faced gunman he had encountered earlier in the day.

And because Remo was interested in Hubert Millis only as a lead to the gunman who called himself Remo Williams, he had doubled back and headed for a showdown with the man who had stolen his name.

The sniperscope checked perfectly. He could see Hubert Millis through it and the gunman laughed aloud because for all his effort in erecting defenses, Millis had overlooked the possibility of a sniper's nest outside his building complex.

Millis was in frantic conversation with an underling and there appeared to be some kind of disturbance at the gate, the gunman saw. No matter. It would be over in a very few minutes.

Crouched on the roof, the gunman locked the telescope sight and from an open briefcase, extracted the add-ons that transformed his Beretta Olympic into a working rifle.

He screwed the collapsible shoulder stock into the nut built into the pistol's butt, extended it, and tested the feel. Good.

Next he fitted a mounting, like a silencer, over the barrel. It received the rifle barrel smoothly. Finally he exchanged the ammunition clip for an extra-long sixteen-round version that stuck out from below the butt.

When he was done, he carefully went back over the job, making sure that everything was fitted together perfectly. Then he hefted the weapon to his shoulder and peered into the light-gathering scope.

He saw the front door of the American Auto corporate headquarters.

He raised the rifle so his scope saw the sky, then slowly lowered it until he was zeroed in on the highest floor. Millis was still there, talking to a younger man who looked like a cop on vacation. Perfect.

The gunman took a deep breath, then began the slow controlled pressure on the trigger to ensure a smooth first shot. Only one would be necessary and he sighted carefully at Hubert Millis' chest.

Then the gun barrel kicked up and knocked him backward. He found himself sitting down, his finely crafted weapon sliding to a stop a few feet away. What had happened? He had not even fired.

The gunman got to his feet and scooped up his weapon. It appeared undamaged. No. Wait. There was a nick along the gun barrel and then he noticed a rock lying on the gravel roof. It had not been there a moment before. He was sure of it. He picked it up. It was not a rock but a shard of brick, exactly the color of the walls of the building he stood upon.

Someone had thrown it. But who? How? There was no one else on the roof and no other roof in throwing distance. Besides, he had felt the gun barrel being knocked upward. That meant the shard had come from below.

But that was impossible. He was twenty stories above the ground.

He looked over the parapet anyway.

He saw a man. An impossible man. The man was climbing the sheer face of the building, somehow holding on to the cracks between the bricks. And he wasn't just crawling, he was moving fast.

As he watched, the gunman saw the climbing man's face grow more distinct. It was looking up at him and he recognized the face of the man he'd noticed at the Dynacar demonstration, the one who had run toward the old Chinaman when the shooting started.

What was he doing here?

The gunman decided it didn't matter. He drew a bead on the white face of the climbing man and fired.

The man stopped climbing and scuttled sideways like a jumping spider. The bullet missed and the gunman fired again. This time, the man jumped the other way. It was more of a hop and the gunman actually saw him float in midair for only the length of time it took for his eye to register the phenomenon. Then the man was perched and climbing again.

The gunman took his time, lining him up in the scope. This time the man stopped, whacked a fragment of brick from the building face with the side of his hand, and flipped it casually. The fragment hit the gunman in the shoulder. It was only a small fragment, hardly larger than a pebble, but it struck with enough force to knock him back twelve feet and tumble him onto his back.

He was getting to his feet when the man came over the edge of the roof.

"Well, well, well. If it isn't Mr. Environment," Remo said. "I've been looking all over for you. The Sierra Club wants to give you an award."

The gunman looked for his Beretta. It was too far away and he had no backup weapon. He never carried one; he had never needed one before.

Remo came at him and the gunman felt himself lifted to his feet so fast the blood rushed from his head. When his vision cleared, he was looking into familiar eyes; they were the eyes of cold death.

"Well, give me my award and let me get out of here," the gunman said. He grinned and raised his hands in a gesture of empty-handed surrender.

"Age before beauty," Remo said. "You start. What's your name? Your real name?"

"Williams. Remo Williams," the gunman said.

"I don't think that answer's truly responsive," Remo said. The gunman found himself flat on his back on the roof again, a searing pain in his right shoulder.

Remo was smiling down at him. "It only gets worse, pal. Your name?"

The gunman shook his head. "It's Remo Williams," he said. "Check my wallet. My ID."

Remo ripped open the back of the man's pocket and extracted his billfold. There was a driver's license, a Social Security card, three credit cards, and an organ-donor card.

They all said "Remo Williams." Remo ripped up the organ-donor card. "You won't need this last one, I don't think," he said. "Your organs aren't going to draw much interest in the medical market."

"I don't know why you don't believe me," the man said. "I'm Remo Williams. Why's that so hard to believe?"

"Because that's my name," Remo said.

The gunman shrugged and tried to smile past the pain in his right shoulder.

"Who knows? Maybe we're related. I'm from Newark," he said. "Not Ohio. New Jersey."

Remo suddenly felt dazed. His own voice said softly, "That's where I'm from too."

"Maybe we are related," the gunman said. He got to his feet; the shoulder pain had gone and he glanced toward his gun.

Remo said, "I'm an orphan. At least I thought I was an orphan. "

"I had a son once," the gunman said, still eyeing his weapon. He edged a step closer to it. "But my wife and I separated and I never saw him again. You'd be about the right age."

Remo shook his head. "No. No. Not after all these years," he said. "It doesn't happen that way."

"No, sure," the gunman said. "Just a coincidence. We just happen to be two of the forty or fifty thousand guys named Remo Williams who come from Newark, New Jersey." He took two small steps sideways toward his gun. He noticed that the younger man seemed not to be seeing anything; there was a dumb uncomprehending expression in his dark troubled eyes.

"I can't believe this," Remo said. "Chiun told me to stay away from you. He must have known."

"I guess he did," the gunman said. Chiun must be the tricky Oriental who kept getting in the way. "But nothing's thicker than blood. We're together now. Son." He casually retrieved his weapon; the younger man seemed not to notice. His face was an expressionless mask.

"Smith must have known too. They both knew. They both tried to keep me from meeting you. From knowing the truth."

"I bet," the gunman said sympathetically. "They both knew, but you can't keep family apart, son. You're with me now and I have some work to do. Then we can get out of here. "

Remo's vision cleared suddenly. "You're a professional hit man," he said.

"A job's a job," the gunman said.

"It's my job too, sort of," Remo said.

"Must run in the family, son," the gunman said. "But just watch. I'll show you how the old man does it."

The gunman walked to the edge of the roof and hoisted his weapon to his shoulder. Maybe he could finish this up quickly, he thought.

"I can't let you do that," Remo said.

The gunman started to pull on the trigger. "I guess here's where we see if blood is really thicker than water," he said.

Chapter 14

Sergeant Dan Kolawski did not understand. "Twenty-three years on the job, I'm going to be fired over a freaking clerical error?"

"No," he was told by the lieutenant. "I didn't say you're going to be fired. I just said you might be fired."

"Over a freaking clerical error? Is this the way Newark's finest are being treated these days? Wait until the goddamn union hears about this."

Kolawski's voice rattled the windows of the police precinct building. Heads turned. The sergeant's face was turning crimson.

The lieutenant laid a fatherly arm about Kolawski's trembling shoulders and led him to the men's room. "Look, Dan," the lieutenant said once they were inside and safe from eavesdroppers. "You've had the request since yesterday. Why didn't you send the file the way you were supposed to?"

"Because it was unauthorized. There was no backup requisition form for the file. See?" He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket and shook it in the air. His voice shook too.

"See? There's nothing on here to say who authorized it. "

"I know that," said the lieutenant. "You know that. But I just got chewed out by the captain, who got chewed out by the mayor. I even got the impression that the mayor himself was chewed out by somebody over this."

"Over a freaking ballistics report? Over a freaking Jane Doe killing?"

"Calm down, Dan, will you? I don't understand it and you don't understand it. Let's just get it done and get on with our lives."

"All right, I'll send it. But this smells."

"Right," the lieutenant said. "But let it smell someplace else. Send the damn thing."

Sergeant Kolawski went to the records bureau, filled out a form, and a clerk in khaki uniform gave him a preprinted form, headed "JANE DOE #1708."

Kolawski saw the form was wrinkled and swore under his breath. He knew from past experience that wrinkled sheets had a tendency to jam in the fax machine, which is what they called the device used to transmit photocopies of documents over the telephone.

Kolawski made a Xerox copy of the file, returned the original to Records, and took the copy to the fax machine.

The machine was a desktop model. It was attached to a telephone used exclusively-except for an occasional personal call by a cop to his bookie-for fax transmission between police departments all over the country. It was also hooked up to the FBI, and dealing with the FBI was a large-size headache because they wanted everything just so and they wanted it yesterday.

But this one was even more of a problem than the FBI usually was. Maybe the CIA was behind this strange ballistics requisition, Kolawski thought. But there was nothing on the form to say who was going to receive the document. Just a phone number and, by God, that was against regulations and the reason Kolawski had not sent the report in the first place.

Kolawski dialed the 800 area-code number. The line rang once and a dry voice said, "Proceed."

"I must have the wrong number," Kolawski mumbled, knowing that no government agency would answer an official phone without some kind of identification.

"Stay on the line and identify yourself," the dry voice demanded.

"Just who do you think you're talking to?" Kolawski said. "This is police business."

"And you're late," the dry voice said. "You have the report?"

"Yes. "

"Transmit immediately," the voice said.

"Keep your shirt on," Kolawski said. He decided he had the right number after all. He fed the report into a revolving tube like an old-fashioned wax recording cylinder, then pressed a button. He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle as if he were hanging up.

The cylinder revolved with the report wrapped around it. In some way that he did not understand but took for granted, the report was duplicated and the image broken down and transmitted via phone lines to a similar machine which would then generate a high-quality duplicate of the original.

When the cylinder stopped revolving, Kolawski picked up the phone and said, "Did you get it?"

"Affirmative: Good-bye."

"Hey. Wait a second."

"I don't have a second," the dry voice said and the phone went dead.

"Freaking CIA spooks," Kolawski said. "They're ruining the world, those bastards."

In Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith took the fax copy to his desk and laid it next to three similar documents. They were also ballistics reports but they were printed on FBI stationery. They listed their subjects' names as Drake Mangan, Agatha Ballard, and Lyle Lavallette.

The reports were alike in several particulars. Mangan and his mistress had been killed and Lavallette wounded by .22-caliber bullets, an unusual caliber for murder victims. Except in mob hits. On mob hits, because they were almost always done at close range by someone friendly with the victim, the .22 with its low muzzle velocity was preferred.

Smith skimmed the text of the reports. He understood enough about ballistics to figure them out. Every gun barrel was grooved in a distinctive way to put spin on a fired bullet. This added force and stability to the projectile, which otherwise would tumble erratically when it emerged from a gun barrel. But a consequence was that, like fingerprints, each gun barrel was distinctive and every bullet it fired bore the marks of its travels.

Smith had played a hunch when he ordered the ballistics reports. There was no reason to think that there was any connection between the murder of an anonymous woman at Remo Williams' forgotten grave and the sudden wave of violence directed at Detroit's automakers, but the synchronicity of the events demanded an investigation.

He had gotten the FBI reports immediately; the Newark report had been delayed through clerical incompetence. But now Smith had them all on his desk, side by side, and he began to wish he hadn't because now his worst nightmares were coming true.

For the ballistics report told him, certainly and absolutely, that the unknown woman in Newark had been killed by the same gun that had killed Drake Mangan, his mistress, Agatha Ballard, and that had injured Lyle Lavallette.

The same gun. The same gunman. Smith shook his head. Whatever was happening in Detroit, it had all begun at the grave of Remo Williams.

But what did it all mean? Maybe Remo himself would know when he arrived.

The telephone rang and Smith, already on edge, was startled. Then he saw it was not a CURE line but one used for Folcroft's routine business and he relaxed slightly. "Dr. Smith?" a voice said.

"Yes."

"This is the limo company. You asked us to pick up a patient at the airport. A Remo Cochran?"

"Yes," said Smith sharply, squeezing the receiver involuntarily.

"We didn't connect with him."

"Then look harder," Smith said.

"No. He's not there. Our driver says he wasn't on the plane in the first place."

"Wasn't on the plane . . ." Smith said hollowly. Even though the dying sun flooded through the big windows of his office overlooking Long Island Sound, it seemed to Smith as if the room had suddenly darkened.

"You're certain?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Was he delayed? Should we wait for the next flight or what?"

"Yes. Wait. Contact me if he arrives. No. Contact me if he doesn't. Call me as soon as anything happens. Or doesn't happen. Is that clear?"

"The next flight isn't for four hours. This is going to cost. "

"I know," Smith said. "I know this will cost. I know more than anyone," he said as he hung up the telephone.

Chapter 15

"What did you say to me?" the gunman asked coldly.

He lowered his Beretta Olympic rifle-rig carefully. He knew that if he fired, he could kill Hubert Millis in the building across the highway with one shot, but he also knew that the frightening man with the thick wrists and the dead-looking eyes could kill him just as easily.

He turned carefully. It all depended on how he handled the situation. Killing Millis was a priority but not the same priority as living. Living was Priority Number One.

"What did you say to me?" he repeated more firmly.

"I said I can't let you kill him," Remo said. His hands hung at his sides. They were his weapons, his surgical instruments, but here on this roof, in the dying sun, facing the man who shared his name, they felt old and useless.

"I heard what you said," the gunman replied. He rubbed the scar along the right side of his jaw. "That's not what I meant. "

"What are you talking about?" Remo said.

"Shouldn't that have been, 'I can't let you kill him, Dad'?"

"Dad?" Remo said. "I can't call you Dad. I don't even know you."

"Maybe you'd prefer 'Pop.' I hate 'Pop' myself, but if it's what you want, son . . ."

"Son . . ." Remo repeated softly. "Dad," he mumbled. He felt bewildered and shrugged. "I never called anyone Dad before. I was raised in an orphanage. Nuns took care of me."

"Not very good care," the gunman said. "They didn't even teach you how to address your own father. Instead I get threats. You were threatening me, weren't you?"

"I didn't mean to. But I can't let you kill someone in cold blood."

"Why not? I told you it was my job. You want to deprive your old man of a living? I'm not getting any younger, you know. What is this Millis guy to you anyway?"

"I don't even know him," Remo said.

"Fine. Then you won't miss him." The gunman turned and brought the weapon to bear again.

Remo took a hesitant step forward. "No."

"Okay, kid," the gunman yelled and tossed the weapon to Remo. "You do it then."

Remo caught the rifle instinctively. It felt ugly, awkward in his hands. It had been years since he had held any kind of weapon. Sinanju had taught him that weapons were impure, unclean things that defiled the art and ruined the man who used them.

He dropped it.

"I can't. Not that way."

"I might have known. I'm not around and you grow up to be a pansy. Look at you. You dress like a bum. You talk back. I ask you to do one little thing and you deny me, your own father."

"But . . ."

"I never thought I'd say this, especially right after finding you after all these years," the gunman said, "but I'm ashamed of you, son. Ashamed."

Remo hung his head.

"I thought you said you were a killer," the other man said. "Isn't that what you told me? And I said to myself, 'Remo, your son is a man. He's following in your footsteps.' That's what I said to myself."

The man spat disdainfully.

"I didn't know you were a wimp. Now are you going to let your father do his job? Are you?"

Remo did not answer. He looked toward the man and then toward the fire door that led down from the roof. His mouth worked and he was about to speak when there was a crash at the fire door and it popped up like a piece of steel bread ejected from a toaster. Pieces of hinge and padlock flew like grenade shrapnel.

A head appeared in the opening like a ghost rising from its grave, except this ghost wore a purple kimono instead of a shroud and spoke in a voice that crackled like a loose electrical wire.

"Remo! What are you doing with this man?"

"Little Father, it's-"

The gunman interrupted. "What did you call him?" he demanded as he reached for his Beretta, which still lay on the graveled roof.

"Well, he's not really my father," Remo said. "But he's been like a father to me."

"I'm your father, Remo. Don't you ever forget that," the gunman said.

"Lies," snapped Chiun, his face flushed with fury.

"No, Chiun," said Remo. "I think it's true."

"Stand aside," Chiun said. "I will deal with this most base of deceivers." He stepped up from the stairwell.

"No," Remo said.

The gunman grabbed his weapon. Good, if the kid keeps the old gook busy, I'll be able to wrap this up.

"You say no to me, Remo?" Chiun demanded. "Are you crazed?"

"Keep him busy, kid. I'll just be a moment," the gunman said.

"I can't let you hurt him, Chiun. I'm sorry."

"And I cannot let this amateur thug harm someone under the protection of Sinanju."

"Didn't you hear me, Chiun? He's my father. My father. I didn't even know he was alive."

"Not for long," Chiun said. He moved around Remo and instinctively Remo swept out a hand. The hand almost touched the person of the Master of Sinanju, when Remo's feet suddenly tangled together. He tripped and went down.

Remo bounced back to his feet as if he were on a trampoline.

"Chiun," he said and the Oriental whirled. A longnailed finger flashed warningly at Remo, then at the gunman. "I cannot let this man live."

"You knew he was my father all along, didn't you? Didn't you?" Remo cried.

"I am doing this for your own good," Chiun said. "Now stand back."

"This is why you didn't want me around here, isn't it? You and Smith knew about him. You knew he was my father, didn't you?"

"I am your Master," Chiun said. "Nothing else in the universe has a meaning in your life. Now leave us, Remo."

A kind of sick horror rode over Remo's features as he said, "You can't hurt him, Chiun."

"That man," said Chiun stonily, "has profaned the sacred personage of the Master of Sinanju." He touched the spot over his ear where the ricocheted bullet had hit him. "He has attacked someone under Sinanju's protection. He must die."

"Kick his ass, son," the gunman yelled. "1 know you can do it."

Remo looked at the gunman, then at Chiun. His decision showed on his face.

"You may not raise your hand against the Master of Sinanju," Chiun intoned gravely. "Though I love you as one from my village, Sinanju comes first."

"I don't want to fight you, Chiun. You know that."

"Good. Then wait below," Chiun snapped.

Suddenly a shot sounded and Chiun's bald head whirled, the tufts of hair dancing.

"Aiiieee," he shrieked.

"Got him," the gunman grunted. "One shot and picked him off clean."

"Murderer," cried Chiun and moved toward the man, but Remo dove between the two of them.

Chiun stopped and his hazel eyes narrowed as he looked at Remo.

"So be it," he said. "You have made your choice, Remo. You are lost to Sinanju and lost to me."

He watched only for a moment, before realizing that ordinary people could get hurt just by being close, and the gunman slipped out the fire door, collapsing his Olympic pistol into his briefcase on the way down.

He walked down, shaking his head all the way. He had never seen a fight like it. It had started like a ballet. The old man's movements were slow and graceful. A sandaled toe floated out and Remo's body became a blur as he avoided it. Remo's counterthrust was a lunging handspear that seemed to go wrong only because the old man sidestepped with such exquisite speed that he seemed not to move at all.

If they were master and pupil, the gunman thought, they were the two scariest people on earth. Remo's thrusts looked faster because the human eye read them as a blur, but the old man was so blindingly quick in his movements that the eye did not register them at all.

The gunman had had enough; all he wanted to do was to get away. When he reached the ground floor of the building he told the guard at the desk that there was a fight on the roof. He had been able to hear it from his own top-floor office, he said.

The guard did not recognize him, but guards everywhere responded to men wearing well-tailored suits and carrying leather briefcases.

The guard telephoned for a security team to go to the roof, then took out his pistol, checked the action, and rode the elevator upstairs.

When he got to the roof, he shoved his way through a crowd of uniformed guards who stood around the doorway. "What's the matter? Why aren't you doing anything?" he demanded.

"We tried. No good."

"No good? What do you mean, no good? I see two guys at it and you say no good."

One guard held up a swollen purple hand.

"I just walked up to touch the old guy on the shoulder. I don't know what happened but my hand went numb. Now look at it."

"Does it hurt?"

"No, but I got a feeling it will when the nerves come back to life. If they do."

"Aaaah, I'll handle this," the security guard said. "They're not even fighting, for Chrissake. They're dancing. I'm going to break it up."

"Don't do it," the guard with the purple hand said in a quivering voice. "Don't get between them."

The security guard from the desk ignored him and stomped across the rooftop. He held his pistol in his right hand, waved it at the two men, and said, "Okay, cut the crap. You're both under arrest."

He did not know which one of them did it, but in a movement that his eyes could not register, someone wrapped the barrel of the pistol around the fingers of his shooting hand. He looked down at his fingers trapped inside a corkscrew of twisted steel and yelled to the other guards: "Call out the National Guard."

Remo was against the edge of the building when he saw, far below, the figure of the gunman walking toward a car.

He leaned over the parapet and without thinking, he cried out:

"Don't go. Dad. Wait for me."

And then Remo was over the edge, down the side of the building. Chiun waited a moment, and then, as the security guards in the doorway watched, his head seemed to slump forward and he turned and walked toward the exit door.

The guards made way for him as he walked by, and later, one of them would swear he had seen a tear in the old man's eye.

Chapter 16

Dr. Harold W. Smith had not slept all night and now the sun was showing through the big one-way glass window of his office overlooking Long Island Sound.

Smith's face was haggard, his thinning hair uncombed. He still wore his striped Dartmouth tie tightly knotted at the throat but his gray jacket lay across the back of a chair, a single concession to the fatigue that stress and lack of sleep had wrought.

It was Smith's manner that he seemed smaller and slighter than he really was, and he wore naturally the look of a middle-management type who, in his declining years, had risen to a cushy but boring position as the director of a totally unimportant facility for the elderly, known as Folcroft Sanitarium.

No one knew him, but if someone had, it was most likely that Smith would have been described as a gray man, dull and unimaginative, who counted the days until retirement by the sizes of the piles of paper he shuffled endlessly.

Only one of those descriptions would have been true. Smith was unimaginative.

That was one of the reasons a long-dead President had picked him to head CURE. Smith had no imagination, nor was he ambitious in that power-hungry way that came naturally to politicians and reporters.

But the President had counted that as a virtue because he knew that a man with imagination could quickly be seduced by the unlimited power he would wield as the director of CURE. A man with both imagination and ambition might well attempt to take over America. And such a man could have done it too. CURE was entirely without controls. The director ran it with a free hand and without restrictions. A President could only suggest missions and the only order Smith was bound to obey from the President was the order to disband.

For two decades, Smith had been prepared to execute that order if the President gave it or to order the disbanding himself if CURE was ever compromised.

There would be no retirement for Harold Smith. Only a swift, painless death, and not even a hero's burial in Arlington National Cemetery for the man who had served his country with the OSS during World War II and who had occupied a high position in the Central Intelligence Agency until his supposed retirement in the sixties. The secrecy of CURE, the organization that didn't exist and whose initials stood for nothing and for everything, was too important to allow Smith even a small bit of posthumous recognition.

It was a lonely job, but never a boring one, and Smith would not have traded it for any work in the world because he knew its importance. Only CURE stood between constitutional government and total anarchy.

To remind himself of that, each morning Smith would come into his office, press the concealed button on his desk that raised the main CURE computer terminal, and consider that CURE was the most powerful agency on earth because it had unlimited access to unlimited information and it knew how to keep the secrets.

This morning, as he did every morning, Smith tapped out a simple code on the computer, and on the video screen appeared the first paragraph of the Constitution of the United States of America in glowing green letters. Smith began reading, slowly, carefully, sounding out the words in his mind.

We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice . . .

He could have recited the entire thing from memory, but to this rock-ribbed native of Vermont, the Constitution was not something one recited, as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited by unthinking schoolchildren, but a sacred document that ensured Americans the freedoms they enjoyed. To most of them, it was an ancient piece of paper kept under glass in Washington, a piece of history they took for granted. But to Harold W. Smith it was a living thing and because it lived, it could die or be killed. Smith, sitting quietly behind his desk and looking small in the Spartan immensity of his office, stood on the firing line in an unknown war to defend that half-forgotten document and what it represented to America and to the world.

Yet every time he entered his office, Smith knew he betrayed that document-by wiretapping, by threat, and so often these days, by violence and murder. It was the ultimate tribute to Smith's patriotism that he had accepted a thankless job whose very nature filled him with revulsion.

And so, in order not to lose sight of his responsibility and perhaps as a kind of penance toward the living document in which he believed implicitly, Smith read the Constitution from his video screen, reading slowly, carefully, savoring the words and not rushing through them, until in the end they were more than just words on a computer screen. They were truth.

When Smith had finished reading, he closed out the file and picked up the special telephone that connected directly to the President of the United States of America. But the telephone rang just as he touched it.

Smith snapped the receiver immediately to his ear and said, "Yes, Mr. President."

"Hubert Millis has just come out of surgery," the President said.

"Yes, Mr. President. I know. I was just about to call you regarding that matter. I assume you'll be issuing the order for us to disband."

"I should. Darn it, Smith. There's no excuse for not protecting Millis. What went wrong?"

Smith cleared his throat.

"I'm not certain, Mr. President."

"You're not certain?"

"No, sir. I've had no communication from my people. I don't know where they are and I don't know what happened."

"I'll tell you what happened. Despite everything, Millis was shot and is lucky to be alive and your people didn't do anything to stop it. If he had been killed, I want you to know that your operation would have been terminated immediately. "

"I understand, sir. My recommendation precisely."

"No, you don't understand. There's a lot of talk now that the Big Three auto companies are all going to make a deal to have Lyle Lavallette come in and run their companies, because they can't compete with the Dynacar anyway. I want Lavallette protected. If he goes down, Detroit may be down the tubes. And I want your people either on the job or eliminated. Do you understand? They're too dangerous to be running loose."

"I understand, sir."

"You keep saying that, Smith, but somehow I don't find it as reassuring as I used to. I expect to be hearing from you."

"Yes, sir," Smith said. He replaced the special phone and tried, for the hundredth time in the hours since he had learned of Hubert Millis' brush with death, to call Chiun at his hotel.

As he held the telephone he wondered if he would ever again begin a working day reading the Constitution of the United States from a computer terminal.

In the honeymoon suite of the Detroit Plaza Hotel, in the early-dawn light, Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, watched the sun ascend in glory.

He sat before the glass doors of the balcony which gave the clearest view of the sunrise. He rested on a straw mat, a single taper illuminating the room behind him with a smoky, angry light. As the sun rose, the light of the taper faded before it, like the glory of old empires fading before new ones.

Many Masters of Sinanju had preceded Chiun. They were all of the same blood. Chiun's blood. But there was more than a blood link connecting Chiun with his ancestors. They were all of the sun source and one with the sun source-the awesome power that enabled the Masters of Sinanju to tap the godlike power that lay within all men.

But only those could come to the sun source who had trained under a Master already possessing the sun source and only after a lifetime of training. Sinanju had been handed down to each generation of Chiun's ancestors from the time of the first great Master, Wang, who legend said had received the source from a ring of fire that descended from the stars.

It had been a proud, unbroken tradition until the day of Chiun. Chiun, whose wife bore him no heir. Chiun, who then took a white man from the outer world because there were no worthy Koreans left in Sinanju. Chiun, whose pupil was so ungrateful that when asked to choose between the gift that was the sun source and a white meat-eater who had so little use for him that he left him on a doorstep as a child, had made the wrong choice.

And now it had come to this.

Chiun hung his tired old head in sadness and seemed to hear the voices of his ancestors speaking in the stillness:

-Oh, woe, that Sinanju should come to this.

-It is the end. The greatest line of assassins in the universe will soon be no more.

-Gone, gone. All gone. Our honor besmirched and there is none to carry on our line.

-Shame. Shame to Chiun, trainer of whites, who chose a non-Korean. Shame to him who let the future of Sinanju slip through his fingers while he lived in luxury in a corrupt land.

-All we were, you are now. When you are gone, the glory of Sinanju will be no more.

-And we will be voices in the void, nothing more. Voices without hope, without one of our blood to carry on Sinanju.

-And you will be one of us, Chiun.

-A voice.

-In the void.

-Without a son.

-Without hope.

-That will be your destiny, Chiun, final Master of Sinanju.

-And your shame.

-0h, woe, that Sinanju should come to this.

Chiun lifted his head at the sound of the ringing telephone, then turned away. But the ringing continued, insistent, and finally he rose from his lotus position and glided to the phone. He picked it up but spoke no greetings.

After a pause, Smith asked, "Chiun?"

"I am he," said the Master of Sinanju.

"I've been trying to reach you, Chiun. What happened? Millis is in a coma."

"I have no answer for you," Chiun said.

Smith noticed the old Korean's voice was empty of feeling. He said, "Remo never arrived. He wasn't on the plane. "

"I know. He is lost to us, lost to Sinanju."

"Lost?" Smith demanded. "What do you mean lost?"

"He is with the one of white skin who is his father," Chiun said.

Smith said, "But he's alive, right? He's not dead."

"No," said the Master of Sinanju as he hung up the receiver quietly, pain in his hazel eyes. "He is dead."

Chapter 17

If he could only take care of that lunatic gunman, things would be perfect for Lyle Lavallette. He considered that as he sat in his office, first trying, then rejecting a pair of elevator shoes that his cobbler in Italy had just sent him. They were guaranteed to make him a full inch taller than his even six feet, but when he tried them on, they wrinkled his socks and so he tossed them in the wastepaper basket. Maybe if he were only five-feet-eleven, but he was six feet tall already, and the extra inch wasn't worth wrinkled hose.

He had expected more competition from the Big Three when he unveiled the Dynacar. But with Mangan's killing, the board of directors National Autos seemed prepared to offer Lavallette the opportunity to head the company. And he had already heard from two board members at American Autos, whose president Hubert Millis lay near death in a hospital. Only Revell's company, General Autos, seemed to be holding firm, but Lavallette figured that Revell was shaky and with a good pension offer, could probably be persuaded to take early retirement. That would clear the way for Lavallette to take over General Autos too.

No one had ever done it before. He would head the entire car industry in the United States. It had been his dream since he was a little boy playing with matchstick cars and trucks. And it was coming true.

"Miss Blaze, things are looking up," he said as his secretary entered the office.

"I don't know, Mr. Lavallette. What about that awful man who tried to kill you? I won't rest easy until that man is in jail."

"I'm not afraid of him," Lavallette said, tapping his bulletproof Kevlar suit. Even his tie was bulletproof. It was not technically necessary but he had had a set made, for a thousand dollars, because he liked his ties to match his suits. At any rate, his public relations firm told him they could probably get him a page in People magazine with that tie: "LYLE LAVALLETTE, THE MAVERICK AUTO GENIUS WHO WEARS METAL TIES."

Lavallette like the idea. He liked it all a lot and after this was all over, he might just keep wearing bulletproof ties. He checked his tie knot in one of the three full-length mirrors in his office. They were strategically placed so that, no matter how Lavallette faced visitors from behind his desk, he had at least one unobstructed view of himself. That way he knew whenever his tie was crooked or his hair not precisely combed, or if any similar near-catastrophe threatened.

Lavallette smiled at his own image now in the mirror facing his desk, and thought he was showing a little too much gum. He tightened his face. Yes, that was it. Too much gum was bad. It took away from the brilliance of his shiny ceramic teeth and he wondered if there was such a thing as gum-reduction surgery. It might be easier to submit to surgery than to have to keep adjusting one's smile. He made a mental note to look into it.

"I think you're very brave," Miss Blaze said. Lavallette popped out of his self-absorbed mood.

"What's that you say?"

"I said I think you're very brave. I know if I were in your shoes, I'd be petrified." Miss Blaze's body shook at the thought. Her breasts shook especially, and Lavallette decided that she was at her most appealing when she shuddered in fear. Maybe he would arrange for the experience to happen often.

"I survived one attempt. I'm not afraid of another," he said.

"But when I think of poor Mr. Millis, lying in a coma-"

"That moron," Lavallette snapped. "Do you know he fired me in 1975?"

"Yes. You've told me twenty times. I think it still bothers you."

"They all did. They all fired me. But I swore I'd be back on top again. And now I am. And look where they are. Mangan's dead; Millis is going to be a vegetable . . ."

"You shouldn't speak that way about him." Miss Blaze pouted. "The past is the past. You should let bygones be bygones."

"Miss Blaze, do you know what a bygone is?"

Her pouty face opened involuntarily and her brow furrowed.

"Sure. It's a . . . a . . ."

"Never mind," Lavallette said dismissively. The recollections of the black periods in his career still rattled him whenever they came to mind. "You came in here for a reason. What is it?"

"Oh, I did, didn't I? Let me think."

Lavallette rapped his fingers on the desktop impatiently. He stopped suddenly, his face freezing in horror. "Arggggh," he groaned.

"What is it? Oh, God, have you been shot? Tell me you haven't been shot. Should I get a doctor?"

Lavallette bolted from his chair, holding his right hand at arm's length, as if the pain were beyond bearing. Miss Blaze stared and stared, looking for telltale bloodstains but she saw none.

"What is it?" she wailed, biting her knuckles to keep herself under control.

"In that cabinet, quick. The first-aid box. Hurry."

She threw open a liquor cabinet, rummaged around, and found a teak box that said FIRST AID in gold letters. "Here it is. What should I do?"

"Just open it," Lavallette said in a tight voice.

She undid the latch of the box. Inside, instead of the usual first-aid equipment, she saw tweezers, combs, and two long plastic boxes, one marked "right" and the other "left. "

Lavallette took out the small box marked "right," still holding out his right hand.

Miss Blaze saw inside five oval-shaped objects, like wood shavings, except clear. If she hadn't known better, she would have sworn they were fingernails. Not the long tapered kind that women wore, but blunt mannish versions.

She saw Lavallette go frantically to work on the tip of his right index finger with a gold tool of some kind. It almost looked like a pair of fingernail clippers.

When the tool stopped clicking, a sliver of fingernail fell onto the desk.

Lavellette lifted one of the oval shapes from the box and carefully, with tweezers and adhesive, laid it over his right index fingernail.

The anguished expression slowly left his face as he examined the nail with a magnifying glass.

"A hundred-dollar manicure ruined because of you," he said at last.

"Me? How me?" she said.

"You made me wait and I was drumming my fingers and my nail chipped. Forget it. What was it you wanted, and it better be good."

"Oh," Miss Blaze said. "The FBI is on line one. They want to know if you'll reconsider their offer to put you under round-the-clock protection."

"Tell them no. I can handle this myself. Tell them I have it covered."

"And the Army is out in the lobby. They say they have an appointment."

"The Army? I didn't ask to meet with the Army."

"Colonel Savage said you did."

"Oh. Savage. You ninny, he's not the Army. He's part of my new bodyguard team."

"I thought you weren't afraid of anyone," Miss Blaze said.

"I'm not. But if that killer comes around again, I want to be ready for him this time."

"Should I send them all in? There's at least thirty of them, all dressed up in those jungly clothes with rifles and ropes and boots and all that Rambo stuff."

"No. Just send in Savage."

"Gotcha."

"And don't say 'Gotcha,' Miss Blaze. Say, 'Yes, sir.' You're not waiting on tables in a diner anymore. You're the personal secretary to one of the most powerful executives in America. And one of the most handsome," he added as an afterthought, checking his cresting wavy white hair in a mirror.

"Don't forget brave. You're also brave."

"Right. Brave. Send in Savage."

Colonel Brock Savage had prowled through the swamps of Vietnam in pursuit of Vietcong guerrillas. He had hacked his way through two hundred miles of the jungles of Angola. In the deserts of Kuwait, he had lived for eight weeks as a bedouin in order to infiltrate a sheik's inner circle. He was a specialist in underwater demolition, night fighting, and survival tactics. His idea of a vacation was to parachute into Death Valley with only a knife and a bar of chocolate and see how long it took him to get out.

All these qualifications were described in the "Positions Wanted" advertisement Lavallette had answered in Soldier of Fortune magazine. Lavallette could have had the FBI at his disposal for free but he didn't want only protection. He wanted men who would accept his orders without qualm or questions, regardless of what those orders might be. Colonel Brock Savage and his handpicked mercenary team fit Lavallette's needs perfectly. Savage was perfect-except he was not used to the boardrooms of executive America.

That fact became apparent when Savage, resplendent in jungle fatigues and battle gear, tried to enter Lavallette's office. He got through the doorway all right, but his Armalite rifle, slung low across his back, caught its muzzle and camouflaged stock against the doorjamb.

"Ooof," grunted Savage before he fell.

He landed on his rump. The cartridge-jammed bandoliers crisscrossing his chest ripped. Cartridges broke loose, scattering across the floor like marbles. A folding knife fell out of his boot. A packet of K-rations popped loose.

Under his breath, Lavallette groaned. Maybe he should have gone with the FBI after all.

Brock Savage struggled to his feet, weighed down by almost one hundred pounds of destructive equipment. Finally, he shook off his bandoliers and rifle. After that, it was easy.

"Colonel Brock Savage reporting for duty, sir!" he said, scuffing the smeared K-rations off his boots and into the expensive carpet.

"Don't shout, Savage," said Lavallette. "Pick up your gear and sit down."

"I can't, sir. Not with all this equipment."

Lavallette took a second look and realized that if Savage could sit down, his canteen, K-ration packs, and other belted hardware would chew up his imported Spanish leather chairs.

"Fine. Stand. Let me explain my position and what I want you to do."

"No need, sir. I read the papers."

"Then you know the assassin who is stalking me, this Remo Williams environmentalist nut, is bound to come after me again."

"My men and I are ready. We'll capture him if he shows his civilian face around here."

"I don't want him captured. I want him dead. You understand? If I wanted captured, I'd let the FBI swarm all around here. I can't have that. My Dynacar is a high-security project. Guarding it will be part of your job too."

"Yes, sir."

"And stop saluting, would you please? This is not a military operation."

"Anything else, Mr. Lavallette?"

"Yes. Throw away those stupid ration packs. Dynacar Industries has a wonderful subsidized company cafeteria. I expect you and your men to eat in it."

"Yes, sir."

"In the blue-collar section, of course."

Chapter 18

"Tell me about my mother."

"Kid, I've told you about your mother three times already. Give me a break, will you?"

"Tell me again," Remo Williams said. He sat on a big sofa in a Detroit hotel room, following with his eyes the man who was his father, feeling a strange mixture of distance and familiarity. His father had just gotten off the telephone and was looking for a fresh shirt.

"Okay. Last time. Your mother was a wonderful woman. She was beautiful and she was kind. She was intelligent. In the right light, she looked like twenty-three even when she was forty-three."

"How'd she die?" Remo asked.

"It was awful," the gunman said. "Sudden death. One minute she was fine; the next minute she was dead."

"Heart attack," Remo said and the gunman nodded.

"It really broke me up," he said. "That's why I left Newark and came out here."

"You haven't told me why you left me at the orphanage when I was a baby," Remo said.

"Your mother and I just weren't making it. We tried but you know how those things are. We got divorced and she got custody of you. You understand?"

"Yes,"' Remo said. In the evening light, he thought he could see the family resemblance in his father's eyes. They were the same flat unreflective black as his own.

"So, anyway, in those days, it was tough for a woman to be divorced and to have a kid. Neighbors, family, nobody would talk to her and finally, she decided it would be best if you went to the nuns. I was furious when I heard about it, but if I came to get you, it would look like I was saying your mother didn't know how to take care of you. So I left you there, even though it broke my heart. I just figured . . . well, I figured there was no looking back."

"I guess not," Remo said. "Do you have a picture of her? Sometimes, I used to try to imagine what my mother looked like. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed when I couldn't sleep and make up faces."

"Is that so?" the gunman said as he put on his jacket. "And what'd you think she looked like, kid?"

"Gina Lollobrigida. I saw her in a movie once. I always wanted my mother to look like Gina Lollobrigida."

"That's amazing, son. It really is. Your mother looked exactly like her, exactly. You must be psychic or something."

Remo looked up and said, "Where are you going?"

"Out. I've got business to attend to."

"I'll come with you."

"Look, kid. It's good that we found each other after all these years but I can't have you following me everywhere. Now relax. I'll be back in an hour or so. Go get yourself fed or laid or something. Practice. That's it. Practice. 'Cause when I come back you've got to start telling me how you do all that stuff with walls and fighting and all." The hotel-room door slammed on Remo's hurt face.

The gunman took the elevator to the hotel garage and drove his car onto the dingy street of Detroit.

"Jeez," he said to himself aloud. "This is going to be a bitch."

He lit a cigarette, hating the stale taste in his mouth. He had to get rid of the kid. What he didn't need now in his life was some overgrown teenager worrying about Daddy. Maybe he would wait until Remo had taught him his tricks. Sinanju, he called it, whatever that was. He didn't know what it meant, but you were never too old to learn new things, especially if they could help you in your trade. Maybe he'd wait and learn and then one night when the kid was sleeping, just put a bullet in his brain and get away.

That was one way. The other way was just not to return to the hotel and let this Remo kid try to find him. But Remo had found him before. Whatever Sinanju was, he seemed to be able to do things that normal people couldn't do. The old Oriental too, for that matter, and he had to be eighty if he was a day.

The gunman wondered why the old Oriental was hounding him. First, he showed up at the Mangan hit, and then at the Dynacar demonstration and then at the Millis shooting. All because the man who hired him had insisted on sending the stupid environmental warning to the newspapers. That part had been dumb and unprofessional, but it was part of the job. The old gook though; he wasn't part of the job.

He had tried to escape from the two of them that early evening when he had left them fighting on the rooftop. But even as he was pulling out of the parking lot, he saw the kid coming down the side of the building and running after him.

He had sped up to seventy-five, then slowed to sixty-five once he got to the interstate highway, thinking he was free. And suddenly the passenger door was pulled open.

He had stomped on the gas pedal and swerved to the right so the twin forces would slam the door shut, but the door would not close. It was being held open, and then a voice had yelled, "Hey. Keep the wheel steady."

It was the kid, Remo, running alongside the car, holding the door open, and then he hopped into the passenger seat and slammed the door after him.

"Don't worry, Dad," the kid had said. "I'm all right." Just the memory of it made the gunman's mouth dry.

It was going to be hard to shake this Remo. At least for a while. The best way to stay alive was to play along. And what if the kid was right? What if Remo was his son? It was possible. A guy who could run as fast as a car could be anything he wanted to be.

Remo Williams sat in the darkness of the hotel room which to his eyes was not darkness at all, but a kind of twilight.

It was something he did not even think about anymore, this power of sight, but simply allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Unlike ordinary eyes, the pupils did not simply dilate to catch all the available light; it was something more. Chiun had once called the phenomenon "fishing for light." Somehow, in a way Remo was trained to achieve but never to understand, his eyes fished for the light and even in utter pitch darkness, he was able to see.

Remo wondered if it was a talent that had been in all men back in the days before artificial light, before campfires and candles, when man's earliest ancestors had to hunt by moonlight, and sometimes, without even moonlight. Remo did not know; he only knew he had the power to do it.

Thanks to Chiun.

His feelings toward his teacher, as he sat in the darkness that was not darkness, were confused.

Chiun had always done what was best for Remo, except when Sinanju came first. That was understood between them. Sinanju was the center of Chiun's personal universe.

But this was different. Chiun-Smith, too-had hidden from Remo the truth about his father. It was hard to take and even harder to understand.

It was all hard. Remo had not thought of his parents for years. They had been no part of his childhood, much less his adult life. They were simply an abstract concept because everyone had parents at one time and Remo just assumed that his were dead.

Once, well into his Sinanju training, Remo discovered he could tap into his early-life memories, calling them up the way Smith called up information on his computers. So he sat down one day to call up the faces of the parents he must have seen when he was an uncomprehending infant.

Chiun had found him seated in a lotus position, eyes closed in concentration.

"What new way have you found to waste time?" Chiun had asked.

"I'm not wasting time. I'm calling up memories."

"He who lives in the past has no future," Chiun had said.

"That's not real convincing from somebody who can recite what every Master of Sinanju liked to eat for breakfast. All the way back to the pharaohs."

"That is not the past. That is history," Chiun had sniffed.

"Says you. Now would you mind? I'm trying to summon up the faces of my parents."

"You do not wish to see them."

"Why do you say that?" Remo asked.

"Because I know," Chiun had said.

"No, you don't. You can't possibly know. You knew your parents, your grandparents, all your forebears. I know nothing about mine."

"That is because they are not worth knowing," Chiun had said.

"Why is that?"

"They are not worth knowing because they were white," said Chiun.

"Hah!" Remo shot back. "I've got you there. All the time you're trying to convince me I'm part Korean, just to justify your giving Sinanju to a white. Now you're changing your tune."

"I am not changing my tune. You are changing your hearing. You are not white, but your parents were. Somewhere in your past, overwhelmed by generations of diluting mating with non-Koreans, there is a drop of proud Korean blood. Perhaps two drops. Those are the drops that I train. It is my misfortune that the white baggage has to come along with them."

"Even if my parents were white," Remo had said, "that doesn't make them not worth knowing."

Chiun said loudly, "They are not worth knowing because they thought so little of you that they left you on a doorstep. "

Chiun had stalked off and Remo closed his eyes again but he was not able to recall his parent's faces. A moment before, he had been all the way back into his early days at St. Theresa's Orphanage, and was sure that in another minute, he would have his parents in his mind. But not now. Chiun had ruined it with his remark and he wondered if Chiun had been right. After that failure, Remo never tried to summon up those infant's memories again.

And now that he had found his father, alive and not dead, Remo wondered if it would have been better to have left the past alone, as Chiun had said. Because now Remo could trust neither Smith nor Chiun. Both had betrayed him and while he could have expected it from Smith, he felt bewildered about Chiun's reaction.

Remo knew he had now lost a father who was not really his father, and he had gained one who was, but who didn't seem like it.

Maybe when we get to know each other. Maybe then it will feel right, he told himself. Maybe it will feel like it did between me and Chiun. But even as he thought that, he knew it would never be. Between Remo and Chiun, there had been more than a relationship of human beings; there had also been Sinanju. And now it was no more.

Remo did not know what Chiun would do next. But he knew Smith's next move. Smith would order Chiun to find Remo and return him to Folcroft and if Remo refused, Smith would order his death. Smith would not hesitate. It was his job never to hesitate when CURE's security was concerned.

But what would Chiun do when he was given such an order? And what would Remo do if Chiun came to kill him?

Others who had seen their fight on the roof might have been fooled, but Remo was not. Both he and Chiun had pulled their blows, making sure not to try to hurt the other. The result had been a long stylized kung-fu match, the kind seen in Chinatown movies. But Sinanju wasn't like that. Sinanju was economy. Never use two blows where one would do. Never fight for two minutes when the job could be accomplished in two seconds.

Neither of the men had tried to hurt the other. But that might not be the case the next time they met. And Remo did not know what he would do.

So he waited alone in the darkness. A dream had come true in his life, but he knew a greater nightmare was about to begin.

Chapter 19

The Dynacar was waiting for him at the landfill on the Detroit River.

As the gunman got out of his car, he thought that it was appropriate that the car that ran on garbage should be here, surrounded by building-high mounds of garbage.

"I'm here," he said to the opaque windows of the Dynacar.

"I can see you," the unseen man behind the wheel said. "Millis didn't die."

"He's in a coma. He may not be dead but he sure ain't moving, either," the gunman said.

"I wanted him dead."

"And he would have been if I was allowed to pop him in the head."

"I told you before-"

"I know," the gunman said. "No head shots."

"I still want him dead."

"Hey. They've got guards on him around the clock. Let's let things cool down and then I'll finish him."

"Finish him now," said the voice from inside the car.

"Why not Lavallette? I can get him next, then finish Millis."

"There's time enough to get Lavallette. He's making a million public appearances with his new car and he'll be easy. But I want Millis dead now."

"Suit yourself, but hitting a guy surrounded by cops isn't as easy as it might sound."

"Millis next. Then Lavallette."

"What about Revell?" the gunman asked.

"I don't think we'll have to bother with him."

"There's another problem," the gunman said.

"There's always another problem with you. When I hired you, I thought I was getting the best."

"I am the best," the gunman said coldly. "So what's the problem?"

"The old Oriental. The one at the Dynacar demonstration. He showed up at the Millis hit."

"So what?"

"I think he works for the government," the gunman said.

"Doesn't matter to me. If he gets in the way, get him out of the way. Permanently. Anything else?"

"No. I guess not."

"All right," said the voice from inside the car. "I'll pay for the Millis hit when it's done."

And the Dynacar silently moved out of the dumping ground like a black ghost on wheels.

The gunman got back into his car. It was too chancy for him to go after Millis. The automaker would be surrounded by guards. But there was another way perhaps.

He lit another cigarette as he thought it over.

And he also thought that it would be very interesting when it came time for him to go after Lyle Lavallette again. Very interesting indeed.

Chapter 20

There was no longer any doubt in Smith's mind. The unidentified woman who had been killed at the grave of Remo Williams was Remo's mother. And her killer-the same man who was running amok in Detroit-was Remo's father.

There was no other explanation. As Smith had reasoned it out, it must have been a family argument and probably the only close relative the dead woman had was the husband, her killer. That explained why no one had reported her missing to police.

Smith still did not understand how, after so many years, the parents had found Remo's grave. They had never attempted to contact Remo in all the years he was a ward at St. Theresa's Orphanage. They had kept their distance during Remo's tour of duty in Vietnam and during his years as a Newark beat patrolman.

But somehow, later, they had accomplished what Smith had long assumed was impossible. They had found their son, or, more precisely, they had found the grave that they believed contained their son's body.

But now Remo was really dead. And his father was slaughtering the heads of Detroit's automotive industry. Even with all the pieces in place, it still made no real sense to Smith. And there were still loose ends.

An exhaustive records search had turned up no Remo Williams Senior living anywhere in the United States. Smith still did not have a name for the woman who must have been Remo's mother. The woman's morgue shot, circulated nationwide after Smith pulled some behind-the-scenes strings, had yet to bring forth anyone who knew the woman.

Where had the couple been living all these years? Smith wondered. In another country? Under assumed names? On the moon?

Whatever the truth was, Smith had made a mistake many years ago. The mistake was in selecting Remo Williams to be the man who did not exist. Smith had done it, supposing Remo to be a man without a past, but he had had a past and now that past had caught up with him. It had caught up with all of them.

Even with most of the answers in front of him, Smith wondered about the loose ends. He would look into them. But that would have to wait. First, there was still the Detroit matter.

Drake Mangan was dead and Hubert Millis was near death in a hospital. Confidential reports said that James Revell had gone out of the country. That left Lyle Lavallette and the more Smith thought of it, the more sure he was that the gunman would be back to finish the job on Lavallette.

Perhaps not, if Smith could help it.

Remo was gone, but there was still Chiun. Smith picked up the telephone.

The Master of Sinanju was packing his steamer trunks when the phone rang and he answered it in the middle of its first ring.

Smith's voice crackled over the line. "Chiun?"

"Hail, Emperor Smith," Chiun said. It was his customary greeting but its delivery was anything but customary because the voice sounded barren and tired and Smith realized he should proceed cautiously.

"Master of Sinanju, I know how you must be feeling at a time like this," he said.

"Hah! No man can know. No man who is not the blood of my blood."

"All right, then. I don't know. But just because Remo is gone, it doesn't mean that the world stops. We still have a mission."

"You have a mission," said Chiun, folding the last of his sleeping robes and gently packing it in the final open trunk.

"Let me remind you, Chiun," Smith said sternly, "that we have sacred contracts. One stipulation of our contract is that in the event of injury, incapacitation, or the death of your pupil, you, as his trainer, are obligated to render whatever service is necessary to dispose of unfinished business. This Detroit matter comes under that obligation."

"Do not speak to me of obligations," Chiun hissed. "All whites are ungrateful. I gave Remo what no white has ever before achieved, and I gave you the use of Remo. And what have I to show for all my sacrifices? Obligations!"

"You have been well paid. In gold. You are a rich man. Your village is rich."

"I am a poor man," snapped Chiun, "for I have no son, no heirs. My village eats, yes. But will their children eat, or their grandchildren, after I am gone and there is none to take my place?"

Smith resisted the urge to remind Chiun that the United States government had shipped enough gold to the village of Sinanju to feed its entire population well, for the next millennium. Instead, he said, "I've always understood that a Sinanju contract is unbreakable. And that the word of Sinanju is inviolate."

Smith felt strange throwing back Chiun's own arguments at him, but it worked. Chiun was silent for a moment. In his hotel room, Chiun felt something hard under the sleeping robe he had just packed away and reached for it. It was a silken pouch containing the shard of speckled gray rock, the rock of the Master Shang, the rock which Sinanju tradition said Master Shang had taken from the mountains of the moon.

Hefting the rock in his hand, Chiun remembered the lesson of Shang and, his voice clear again, he said to Smith, "What would you have me do?"

"I knew I could count on you, Chiun," said Smith, who knew no such thing.

"This killer who goes by Remo's name," Smith said. "My belief is that he will next attack Lyle Lavallette of Dynacar Industries."

"I will go to this carriagemaker. I will protect him. This time there will be no excuses from Sinanju."

"Don't just protect him, Chiun. Stay with him. Ask him questions. We still don't know why those auto men are targets for assassination and I don't believe it has anything to do with environmental protests. Maybe there is some common link between them all, other than their business, that you can find out. Anything would be helpful. And if the killer shows up again, take him alive if possible. We've got to know if he's doing this for personal reasons or if he's in someone's employ."

"I understand. I will protect the carriagemaker. And I will find out what he knows. Which, of course, is very little because he is a white and an American besides."

Smith ignored the remark. He paused a moment, then said, "Would you tell me how Remo died? Do you mind talking about it?"

"He fell into bad company," Chiun said.

Smith waited but the old man spoke no more. Finally, the CURE director cleared his throat and said, "Well, okay, Chiun. Communicate with me as soon as you have something. "

"I have something now," said Chiun. "I have the ingratitude of whites. It is a larger thing than any Master of Sinanju has ever had before."

He hung up and at Folcroft, Smith thought that the bitterness Chiun felt toward Remo was strange. He would have thought Chiun would be racked by sorrow, but there was no sign of it. Still, you could never tell about Chiun and Smith forced it out of his mind and turned his attention back to the loose ends surrounding the murder at the grave of Remo Williams. Even at this critical time, in the last few hours that CURE might continue to exist, those loose ends ate away at him.

Chapter 21

"So what have you been doing all your life, kid?" the gunman asked after the cocktail waitress had brought them drinks. They were in a quiet corner of the best restaurant in Detroit. The lighting was dim and there was a view of the downtown area through the spacious windows. By night, the dirt was forgotten and Detroit looked like a city carved from ebony and set with jewels of light.

"I've been working for the government," Remo answered after a pause. He felt uncomfortable talking about his work.

"Come on. You've got to level with your old man. Before, you told me you were in the same line as me," the gunman said.

"I am. For the government, sort of."

"I get it. Secret stuff, huh?"

"Right," Remo said. "Secret stuff."

"Well, tell me about it. And drink up. That's good bourbon."

"I can't," Remo said.

"You can't tell your own father what you've been doing for a living all these years?" the gunman said.

"I can't tell you that either," Remo said. He pushed the tumbler of brownish fluid away from him. Even the smell bothered him. "What I meant was, I can't drink this stuff. "

"That's the way it goes. Name your own poison," the gunman said. He looked around for a cocktail waitress.

"I can't drink anything."

"Jeez, my son, the teetotaler. Is that what you're telling me, Remo?"

"My system won't handle alcohol," Remo said.

"You got something wrong with you?"

Remo stifled a laugh. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with his system. It was just the opposite. He was such a finely tuned human machine, thanks to Sinanju, that like a racing-car engine, the wrong mixture in the fuel tank would throw his performance off. In some cases, as with alcohol, it could have serious or fatal effects.

"What are you smiling about?" the gunman asked.

"Just thinking of Chiun," Remo said. "He said we're funny people because we eat the meat of dead cows and we drink the juice of rancid grass."

"Forget Chiun," the gunman said.

"What I mean was I can't drink stuff like this. It screws me up."

The gunman took a healthy sip of his own drink. "If you ask me, a man who doesn't drink is already screwed up."

Remo was silent. The man across the table from him was a stranger. He kept looking into the older man's face, looking for something, a flash of recognition, a long dormant memory, a hint of a shared experience, but there was nothing. Remo was confused and sad and more than a little uneasy. In another time and place, he and this man could have been enemies, and over the years for CURE, Remo had killed hundreds of professional hit men. But for circumstances, he might have killed the man who sat across from him without hesitation, never dreaming that the target might be his own father.

The waitress came back and asked for their order.

"Prime rib. Bloody rare. Mashed potatoes. Any green vegetable's okay."

Remo said, "I'll have rice. Steamed."

When Remo did not add anything else to his order, the waitress said, "And?"

"No 'and.' That's it. Just the rice. And a glass of bottled water, please."

"Yes, sir," the waitress said dubiously, taking away their menus.

"Rice?" the gunman said, "Just rice?"

"I'm on a special diet."

"Skip it for just one night. How often is it you find your father? Isn't that reason to celebrate? Have a steak."

"I can't," Remo said

"Those nuns really did a job on you," the older man sighed. "Or maybe it was hanging around with that old Chinese character?"

He quickly changed the tone of his voice when he saw the look that came into Remo's eyes. It scared him and he reminded himself to go light on that subject in the future. Or there might not be any future.

"Okay, suit yourself," the gunman said. "I want to talk to you about something."

"You never told me where I was born," Remo said suddenly.

"You never asked. Jersey City."

"I grew up in Newark," Remo said.

"That's where I worked. We moved there."

"What other relatives do I have?" Remo said.

The gunman shook his head. "Just me. I was an only child and so was your mother. Both our parents are dead. You've got nobody else but me. Listen to me, now. This is important."

"I'm listening," Remo said, but he was thinking of Chiun. The old Korean had, through the legends and history of Sinanju, given Remo more family than this man, his own father, had. He wondered what Chiun was doing right at that moment.

The gunman said, "Before, up on that roof, you told me you were a professional. Okay. I'm not going to ask you who you worked for or anything like that. I just want to know if you were straight with me when you said that."

"I was straight," Remo said.

"Okay. I believe you. Now listen to your old man. That guy I clipped. Millis. He didn't die."

"No?"

"No. And that means I don't get paid."

"Right," Remo said.

"That means I gotta finish him."

"Why don't we just forget him and leave town?" Remo said. "We can try some other place. Maybe some other country. Get to know each other."

"Look. I gotta finish him. And the way I see it, if you hadn't been screwing around on the roof, I would have gotten a clear shot and he would have been history."

Remo shrugged. "Sorry," he said.

"That doesn't cut it. I've got a reputation to maintain and this is going to hurt it. I'm not a rich guy. I need to work from time to time."

"I said I was sorry."

"I accept that," the gunman said. "But what are you going to do about it, son?"

"Do about what?" Remo said, who was getting an idea of what the older man was hinting at. The thoughts of Chiun fled from his mind.

"I mean that you owe me, Remo. You owe your old man for screwing up his hit and I want you to take care of Millis for me."

"I can't do that," Remo said.

"Can't? Everything I'm hearing from you tonight is can't. I can't drink, Dad. I can't eat, Dad. That one word is seriously going to jeopardize our relationship, son." Remo looked down at the table and the gunman said, "Millis is in a coma. It should be easy. I'll even loan you my best piece."

Remo's answer was a growl. "I don't need a weapon to take somebody out. "

"No, I guess you don't," the older man said and lit a cigarette. "Then it's settled?"

"This isn't right," Remo said.

"I know you've killed for the government. You told me that. I'm just asking for my due. If you can work for them, you can work for me. Do it or take your 'can'ts' and get out of my life." The gunman set himself. If the kid was going to turn on him, it would be now.

"It isn't right," Remo said hollowly, as if he had not heard the other man speak. "I killed for my country in Vietnam. I killed for Chiun and for Smith ... for the government. And now you. It isn't right that we meet and you tell me to go kill somebody for you. That's not what a father's supposed to be."

The older man relaxed and his tone grew sympathetic. "It's the breaks, kid. You've got to go with the flow. For you, the choice is buy or fly. What's it going to be?"

"I don't know," Remo said. "We'll see." He looked up as the waitress brought their food.

"Sure we will, son," said the gunman. "Sure we will. You sure you don't want some of my prime rib?"

Chapter 22

He had never been to Wildwood Cemetery.

More than a decade before, Smith had arranged for a man to be buried in the grave that bore the name of Remo Williams. He had made the funeral arrangements, ordered the headstone, and bought the cemetery plot. He had even arranged for the body that went into the grave. It was not Remo's body but that of some homeless derelict whom no one would ever miss. Smith had known the derelict's name once but he had long since forgotten it. That man had had no family, either. And there was no CURE record of the person.

And during all that he had never visited the cemetery and now, as he stood over the grave marked "Remo Williams," Smith felt the rush of emotion that he had ignored for more than ten years.

Smith did not cry, not outwardly. But what he felt was a wave of strangling feelings. He had picked a policeman, a cop with a clean but undistinguished record, and arranged for his ruin. Overnight, Remo Williams had gone from being a respected policeman to a man on trial for his life. Smith had rigged it all-the drug pusher who had been found beaten to death in an alley, Remo's badge conveniently next to the body. And he had set it up so it took place at a time when Remo would have no alibi.

He had not had to bribe the judge who sentenced Remo to the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison, although he would have done that if necessary.

And finally he had made the necessary arrangements so that the electric chair was rigged and Remo Williams survived it and came into the employ of CURE and into the care of Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju.

Not once in all the years had Smith allowed himself a moment of remorse over what he had done, but now that Remo was dead, it all flooded into his mind.

Still, no tears came. It was too late for tears just as it was too late for Remo. It was probably too late for CURE too.

Remo's grave stood in the shade of a dying oak tree, half its limbs gray and bare and without leaves. It was the most utilitarian grave Smith had ever seen, a square of granite marked with a cross and Remo's name and no more. Smith had ordered the headstone from a catalog and, to save costs as much as a security measure, had ordered the stonecutter to leave off the dates of birth and death.

Grass grew uncut around the grave. Groundskeeping was not a high priority at Wildwood, which was one of the reasons Smith had chosen it. Wildwood was a small burying ground, tucked away in a seldom-visited area outside Newark, hidden in woods and surrounded on all sides by a wrought-iron fence which was in the final stages of collapse. Wildwood got few visitors.

Remo's grave was not alone. There was one on either side, spaced closely together. On one side, an older stone bore the name D. Colt. On the other, there was a larger stone bearing the family name DeFuria, and the names of several generations of DeFurias who had been interred in the ground around it.

Smith tried to reconstruct the murder of the anonymous woman in his mind. He stood where he knew she must have stood. He imagined the direction from which the bullets had come and tried to calculate the impact. He saw where the flowers she held in her hands had fallen.

It all seemed reasonable enough, but still something did not make sense. Why hadn't she visited the grave before all this? And how had she found Remo after all these years, even in death?

Those bothersome questions, more than anything else, had brought Smith to Wildwood and, standing over Remo's grave, they bothered him even more.

Smith took out a spiral notepad and jotted down the names on the stones on either side of Remo's grave and made a note to ask Chiun where Remo's real body was. Perhaps he could arrange for Remo's burial here at Wildwood. This time for real. He owed Remo that much, at least.

And then he walked out of the cemetery.

He did not look back. It was too late for looking back.

Chapter 23

When the gunman told him that the hospital might be a tough place to penetrate, Remo considered telling him what he knew: that a hospital is not a fortress, not designed to keep people either in or out. It is just a hospital, a place where sick people go to become well, and one could put a thousand guards around a hospital and its security would still leak like a sieve.

But he decided to say nothing; the older man would not understand.

He slipped out of the car as the gunman slowed down along the John C. Lodge Freeway in the center of Detroit. As the door closed behind him, Remo heard the gunman say, "Give 'em hell for your old man, kid."

The car sped off and Remo vaulted the retaining wall along the edge of the freeway and made for the hospital grounds. Remo wore black and in the darkness of the night, he was a silent thing that moved from tree to bush, from bush to car as he worked toward the hospital's parking lot.

The hospital itself was a large complex and in the artificial light of the ground floods, the main building appeared bone white and cold.

Remo slipped past idly patrolling security guards. He had not expected any trouble from them. If there was trouble, it would come on the floor where Hubert Millis, president of American Autos, lay in a coma.

Once he got to the big entrance doors, Remo rose from his crouching walk and sauntered into the lobby as if he were delivering coffee and Danish.

A brassy-looking nurse stood behind a reception desk, making marks on a clipboard.

"Yes, sir," she asked Remo.

"What floor is Mr. Millis on, please?"

"Visiting hours are from three to five p.m.," she said

"That isn't what I asked," Remo said pleasantly.

"And visiting is restricted to immediate family."

"I didn't ask that either," Remo said.

"Are you a relative?" the nurse asked.

"Just part of the family of man," Remo said. He noticed the clipboard and reached across the desk to snatch it up.

"Give that back," the nurse snapped.

Remo found Millis' name and the room number 12-D. That meant the twelfth floor. Or did it mean D ward? "Where's the D ward?" Remo asked.

"There is no D ward," the nurse said huffily.

Remo handed her the clipboard back. "Much obliged," he said. Good. It would be a lot easier to get to the twelfth floor than to spend his night hunting everywhere for some frigging D ward.

"Guard!" the nurse yelled.

"Now you've done it," Remo said when a uniformed security guard came around the corner.

"What is it?" the guard demanded, a hand hovering near the butt of his holstered revolver.

"This man is asking questions about the patient in 12-D," she said.

"What's your problem, buddy?" the guard asked.

"No problem," Remo said breezily. "I was just leaving."

"I'll walk you out," the guard said.

"Fine. I love company," Remo said.

His hand on his weapon, the guard followed Remo into the cool evening. He was torn between calling for help on his walkie-talkie and cuffing the intruder on general principles, but the man had not really done anything wrong. He had simply asked some questions about the patient in room 12-D, which the guard knew was under twenty-four-hour watch by a team of FBI agents.

The FBI agents had snubbed the guard when he offered to help them.

"Just stick to your post, old-timer," the FBI team leader had said. They had given him no specific instructions so now he was not sure what to do with the skinny guy in black.

And then the question became academic because suddenly Remo was no longer there.

He had been standing alongside the guard and now he was not there and the guard did a 360-degree turn, saw nothing, and then moved over toward the bushes alongside the front door. All he saw were shadows but they were funny shadows, darker than most, and they seemed to be moving, and then he was sure, they were moving, but it was too late then because slowly he slipped into unconsciousness.

Remo caught the guard after he released his oxygen-blocking hold on the man's neck. He carried him as easily as if he were a child to a nearby parked car, popped the lock with a finger, and put the man behind the wheel, where he would awaken, hours later, not exactly sure what had happened to him.

By that time, Remo expected to be gone.

The face of the hospital building was sheer, without handholds, but there were windows, and Remo hopped lightly up onto a ground-floor window ledge. From there, he reached the second-floor window, and in that fashion, using the windows as rungs in a ladder that was the hospital itself, Remo started upward. To anyone watching it would have seemed easy and for Remo it was. Several of the windows he reached were open or spilling light and because his approach depended on stealth, Remo worked sideways a window or two before he could resume climbing again. It was like playing checkers against the hospital wall, with the windows as the squares and Remo as the only moving piece.

He passed the twelfth floor and on the level above, he scored the glass of a darkened window with his fingernail and pushed hard on the circle he had made.

The circle turned and Remo grabbed an edge that swung outward and pulled. Soundlessly, the ring of glass hung free in his hand and Remo flipped it off to the side like a Frisbee. It zipped across the parking lot and embedded itself in the side of a tree, the way a single straw can be driven into wood by a tornado's wind.

Remo reached an arm through the hole and silently unlocked the window. His eyes automatically adjusted to the darkness of the room as he slipped inside. It was a sickroom, not in use. There were two beds and the room reeked of the hospital smell that was ninety percent chemical disinfectant and ten percent the scent of sickness and despair.

Remo pulled a sheet from one of the beds and ripped it several times. When he was done, he pulled it over his head. It looked sort of like a hospital patient's gown, if one did not look too hard. Remo kicked off his shoes. Being barefoot might help him pass as a patient.

No one gave him a second glance in the hospital corridor and at the nearest exit, Remo found a stairwell down to the twelfth floor.

He started down, still not sure what he was going to do when he got there.

FBI Field Agent Lester Tringle never forgot the advice he had given in the FBI training academy: "Always expect trouble. Then, if it comes, you're prepared."

So even now, on this piece-of-cake detail guarding a man in a coma, Tringle was ready for trouble. He stood outside Room 12-D, cradling in his hands a short-snouted machine pistol with a complicated telescope and box arrangement on top.

Personally, Tringle had no little regard for the laser-sighted armament. He was a crack shot and felt he did not need any fancy gadgetry, but his area supervisor had insisted. The White House considered Hubert Millis' survival a high national priority-not so much because of who he was as because so many auto manufacturers had been attacked lately. It looked bad for America if one crazed gunman could pick off the heads of the country's auto industry with impunity.

Crazy stuff, thought Lester Tringle, and even crazier that the gunman had written that letter to the paper and then signed his name, Remo Williams, at a guest register at one of the shooting sites.

He did not expect him to try to storm the hospital, but if he did come, Tringle would be ready and so he had relinquished his sidearm for a machine pistol that could fire over one thousand rounds a minute along a beam of red laser light.

There was one big benefit to laser-sighted weapons when a man worked in a team as Tringle was doing tonight. It made it a lot less likely that you'd be shot by your own teammate, because the lasers made a marksman nearly infallible. You just touched the trigger lightly and the beam shot out. A red dot, no bigger than a dime and visible under day or night conditions, appeared on the target. If the red dot appeared over a man's heart, you could bet a year's salary that when you pulled the trigger all the way, the bullets went where the dot was. That meant a lot fewer innocent bystanders and other agents shot, and for Lester Tringle, who planned to live long enough to collect his pension and open a tavern in Key West, Florida, that was important. And he always conceded that the laser was especially useful with a machine gun because the wild spray of bullets from a machine weapon could do enormous damage if it went where it wasn't supposed to go.

Tringle pushed away from the wall where he was leaning when he heard a sound from down the corridor that sounded like the burp of automatic-weapon fire.

The sound died almost as soon as it started, which was strange, for even the shortest pull on the trigger of one of these machine pistols meant a full-second burst of about fifteen rounds.

"Hey, Sam," Tringle called out. "What's going on?" There was no sound from the East Wing hall. There were no elevators at that end of the building and Agent Sam Bindlestein was guarding a stairway exit. But now he wasn't answering.

Tringle pulled his walkie-talkie from under his armored vest.

"Harper, do you copy?"

"What is it?" Agent Kelly Harper's voice crackled back.

"Something's up, I think. I don't want to leave here. Everything quiet at your end?"

"That's a roger."

"Then come running and watch your back."

Three heavily armed agents were all the local FBI office had thought were needed for the job. But now, with one agent unresponsive and a second leaving his post, Agent Lester Tringle wondered if that might not have been a serious miscalculation.

He called Bindlestein's name into his walkie-talkie a half-dozen times but got no response, then saw a patient, a thin man with high cheekbones, walking toward him wearing a ragged-looking hospital robe.

"You there," Tringle called, turning toward the man and bringing his weapon almost up to chest height. "You don't belong here."

"I'm lost," Remo said. "I can't find my room. Can you help me out?"

"You're on the wrong floor. This is a restricted floor. There are no other patients here."

"I'm a patient and I'm here," the patient said reasonably.

"Well, you don't belong here. There's an elevator down the hall. Take it to the lobby and someone down there will help you."

But the patient kept coming. Then Tringle noticed that although the man's arms were bare, his legs, under the robe, were not. He was wearing black pants, and hospital patients never wore anything under their robes.

Tringle brought his machine pistol perfectly level with the man's stomach and touched the trigger lightly. A red dot appeared over the man's navel.

"I am ordering you to halt," Tringle shouted.

"I stopped taking orders when I left the Marines," Remo said.

"I'm asking you to halt then. Don't make me shoot." The red dot wavered as the patient kept coming. There was no weapon in his hands, Tringle saw, but there was a confident expression in his dark eyes.

"One last time. Stop where you are."

"I told you, I don't know where I am. How can I stop where I am if I don't even know where that is?"

Tringle let the intruder get to within ten yards, then tapped the trigger.

The burst was short, only a dozen rounds or so, and a wall behind the patient erupted into a cloud of plaster and paint chips.

The man kept coming. The red laser dot still floated over his navel. Tringle blinked furiously. Was this a ghost? Had the bullets gone right through him?

He fired again, a longer burst this time.

And this time, Tringle saw the blurry motion of the patient as he slid away from the bullet track. Tringle corrected right. The red dot found the patient's chest and he aimed again.

The patient floated left. The sound of the weapon, in this narrow hallway, was not loud, since the weapons had been silenced.

Tringle swore to himself. The silencer must be throwing off his aim. But almost as soon as that thought flashed through his mind, he rejected it. The laser was supposed to make up for the silencer's bias.

Tringle clamped down on the trigger and a long volley of bullets spewed forth. The man in the hospital robe seemed to ignore them and just kept coming.

"Why are you shooting at that patient?" Agent Kelly Harper asked, as he trotted up, holding his gun at his side. "Because he's unauthorized," Tringle said hotly.

"He's also unhurt. Are you firing blanks?"

"Look at the walls behind him and see if you believe that," Tringle said hotly. The walls behind and on either side of the patient in the ragged robe were riddled and in places hunks of plaster hung loose like peeling skin.

"Isn't your laser working?" Harper asked.

"You try yours," Tringle said.

"This is the FBI. I'm asking you to stop where you are," Harper called out.

"Make me," Remo called back.

"Okay. That's excuse enough," said Harper as he lined up on the approaching figure's unprotected chest. By that time, Remo was almost on top of the pair. Harper pulled the trigger, intending to fire a brief burst, but for some reason, his machine-gun muzzle pointed at the ceiling all by itself. He tried to take his finger off the trigger but it seemed to be attached and would not move.

Then Harper noticed that the patient was standing next to him, a finger massaging Harper's elbow lightly, a cruel smile on his lips, and somehow he knew that the touch of the man's hand on his elbow was responsible for his arm pointing upward, trigger finger frozen.

Remo lowered the agent to the floor while Tringle backed up to get into better firing range.

"You just killed an FBI agent," Tringle said coldly.

"He's not dead. He's just out of it. Like you will be in a second."

"Like hell," Tringle snapped, and fired. He didn't bother to check where the laser dot was pointed. At this range it would not matter.

But it did matter. Bullet holes peppered the walls, but the patient was not even touched. He was laughing aloud.

"You can't laugh at the FBI that way," Tringle cried, tears of frustration welling in his eyes.

"No? What way can I laugh at the FBI?"

Tringle did not answer. He was busy trying to yank the empty clip from his gun so he could ram home a fresh one. In training, he had consistently performed that operation in less than 2.5 seconds and had received a commendation for that speed.

He found, though, that it meant very little in actual practice because before he got the old clip out, the gun began falling apart and he was left holding a finely machined piece of junk. The laser targeting system still worked however. Tringle knew this because he could see the red dot dancing on the unconcerned face of the patient, who was holding portions of Tringle's gun in his right hand and who was raising his left hand slowly to the FBI agent's weeping face.

Then there was nothing more to see because Tringle was on the floor, unconscious.

Remo put the two agents in a closet and covered them with blankets because it was cold in the closet. In a few hours, they would be clear-headed enough to receive official reprimands for dereliction of duty and only Remo would know that they were not at fault. There had been only three of them and three was not enough.

Remo entered the unlocked door of Room 12-D. Hubert Millis lay wide-eyed on the bed, tubes plugged into his mouth, his nose, and his arms. His breathing was barely noticeable amid the beeping and blipping of electronic monitoring devices.

Remo passed a hand over the man's eyes. There was no reaction, not even a dilation of the pupils to interception of the light. Remo could sense that the man was very close to death. A quick thrust to the temple might be more mercy than murder.

He reached his right hand toward the man's head, then withdrew it. He had killed many times but this was different. This man was not a criminal, not someone who deserved death, but just a businessman who happened to wind up on somebody's hit list.

But Remo's own father had asked him to kill the man. His own father.

Slowly he raised his right hand again.

The EKG machine suddenly stopped beeping. Another machine kicked into life; the sound it made was a long, drawn-out, tinny "screeeeee."

Alarm horns rang out in the corridor. Somewhere, someone was yelling. "Code blue. Room 12-D.

A team of doctors burst into the room. They ignored the bullet- shattered corridor walls and pushed past Remo as if he were not there.

A nurse stripped the nightshirt from the scrawny chest of Hubert Millis. A doctor touched a stethoscope to the man's chest and shook his head.

Someone passed him a pair of disks, attached by cable to a wheeled machine.

"Clear," the doctor yelled.

Everyone stepped back. When the disks touched Millis' chest, his body jumped off the bed from the shock. Then it lay still.

Three times the doctor reapplied the shock procedure, one eye cocked at the EKG machine, whose steady line of light indicated no heart action.

Finally, the doctor dropped the disks and stepped back.

"That's it. He's gone. Nurse, prep him for removal." And still without noticing Remo, the doctors left the room.

The nurse still stood by the bedside and Remo took her arm.

"What happened?" he asked urgently.

"He flatlined."

"That means he's dead, right?"

"That's right. Heart failure. You were in the room with him. Who are you?"

"Never mind that. What killed him? I have to know."

"His heart just gave out. We half-expected it."

"It wasn't the excitement, was it?" Remo asked. "Excitement didn't kill him?"

"Excitement? He was in a coma. He wouldn't have got excited in a car bombing."

"Thanks," Remo said.

"Don't mention it. What were you doing here anyway?"

"Wrestling with my conscience," Remo called back.

"Who won?"

"It was a draw."

Chapter 24

When Remo returned from the hospital, he found the older man slouched in a chair, watching an episode of The Honeymooners.

"How'd it go?" the gunman asked, without taking his eyes from the screen.

"Millis is dead," Remo said.

"Good. You do good work, kid. Sit down and watch some TV."

"I think I'll go to sleep," Remo said.

"Sure, son. Whatever you want, you do it."

"We going to be leaving town soon?" Remo asked.

"Hold your horses. I got some things to do yet," the gunman said.

"Like what?" Remo said.

"Business. I got business. You gonna pester me? I want to watch this. Ed Norton just knocks me out."

"I thought Millis was your business."

"He was," the gunman said.

"Well, Millis is dead."

"What do you want? A freaking medal? You owed me that hit 'cause you screwed it up on me before. Now we're even and get off my case. I got other things to do."

Remo had gone into the bedroom and lain down, but he had been unable to sleep. His entire adult life had been spent yearning for a family, but maybe having a family was not all it was supposed to be.

He meant nothing to his father, out in the other room, laughing uproariously at the rerun he had probably seen a dozen times. And that was family.

Chiun, on the other hand, for all his carping and complaining, cared about Remo. And Chiun wasn't family, not real blood family anyway.

Was "family" just a label, meaningless unless there was sharing and trust and love involved? Remo didn't know. He lay on the bed groping for something to say to his father. But all the important questions-who Remo was, where he was born, all the rest-had been answered and now there were no more questions to ask and Remo felt empty.

He heard the telephone ring in the other room and focused his hearing on the gunman's voice when he heard him say hello. Most people could not hear properly because untrained ears were not able to filter out all the background noise and concentrate on what a person wanted to hear. Most people lived in a world of static, but Remo could direct his hearing in a narrow range so he was able, without real effort, to hear both sides of a telephone conversation.

He heard his father say, "When are you going to pay for the Millis hit?"

"As soon as you get Lavallette," a voice answered.

"Wait a minute. This is supposed to be pay as you go, remember?"

"Millis isn't even cold yet and this is an emergency. I can't explain it now. I want Lavallette hit and I want him hit right away."

"That's not our agreement," the gunman said.

"I'll pay double for Lavallette," the voice responded.

"Double? You really do want Lavallette hit, don't you?"

"Was there any doubt?"

"I guess not. Okay, I'll do it."

"He'll be at his office at eight o'clock this morning. One last thing. No head shots. You get him in the face or head and you don't get paid."

"I remember."

"But this time it's especially important. I have my reasons. "

The gunman hung up the telephone and in the empty room, Remo heard him say, "I guess you do. Damned if I can figure out what they are, though."

At his apartment, Lyle Lavallette hung up the telephone and laughed nervously.

The game was almost over. This was the last risk and when he got through this one, he was the big winner. Who would have thought it over the last twenty years? Who would have thought it when all three of those ungrateful bastards had fired him from their auto companies? Well, now, it was payback time and the Dynacar was the way to do it. Within a month, Lavallette expected that he would be the head of all three of America's major car manufacturers. He would control the industry as no man before him, not even Henry Ford, had ever done.

And who knew what was next? Maybe Washington.

Maybe the White House itself.

Why not? Everything else had worked perfectly so far. It was a master stroke to have hired a killer and then to have named himself, Lyle Lavallette, as the first target. That way, when the other car moguls were removed, no one would think of pointing a finger at Lavallette.

And it had worked. He had panicked the other car companies and they were all coming around.

The only loose end left was the killer. He didn't want that man around, maybe to be arrested, maybe to talk. Even though he didn't know who had hired him, it was possible that some smart investigator might be able to get him singing and put two and two together.

The assassin had to go, so Lavallette had called him and told him when the target would be vulnerable.

The killer would come in the morning.

And be met by Colonel Brock Savage and his mercenaries. End of the gunman. End of the problem.

It was perfect.

Lavallette put a hairnet over his sprayed hair and got carefully into bed. He wanted a few hours' sleep. He wanted to look good when he went before the TV cameras tomorrow and told the world that the crazed Detroit assassin had been killed.

Chapter 25

"So that's the Dynacar. When do you go into production?"

Lyle Lavallette looked at the new public-relations counsel he had hired and said, "Don't worry about that now. More important things take precedence."

They were standing inside the large garage of the Dynacar Industries building. The public-relations man was confused because he had gotten the impression from watching the news broadcasts that Lavallette was ready to begin construction of the revolutionary car immediately. But the inside of the Dynacar plant was as barren as a baseball stadium in December. There were no workers, there was no assembly line, there were no parts or equipment. It was just a big empty warehouse.

"I'm not sure I follow you, Mr. Lavallette," the public-relations man said. He had been a newspaperman for fifteen years before getting into public relations "to make some real money," but his newspaper background gave him the uneasy feeling that he was involved in some kind of scam.

Even looking at the sleek black Dynacar which stood in solitude in the middle of the plant's floor did not dispel that feeling.

"Listen and I'll make it simple for you," Lavallette said. "I've been planning to go into production, but now with that crazy killer running around loose, things have changed."

"How?" the public-relations man said.

"First of all, when Mangan got shot, the directors of his company started reaching out for me to take over their company and consolidate it with the Dynacar production. Right?"

"Right."

"And that story you planted yesterday about American Autos reaching out for me to do the same thing is going to work. They'll be on the telephone before the morning's over. "

"How does that explain why you're not building Dynacars?" the P.R. man said.

"Wait. I'm not done. Now we all know that Revell from General Autos has gone on vacation because he's scared for his life. What we want to do is to plant some stories; get General Autos to ask for me too."

"To run their company?" the P. R. man asked.

"Exactly."

"You mean, you want to run all three big auto companies as well as Dynacar?"

"Now you've got it," Lavallette said.

"Nobody's ever done that before."

"There's never been a Lyle Lavallette before. And that explains why we're not doing production here. If I'm going to merge my company with the Big Three, I'll use their production facilities to build Dynacars. That way, in a year, I'll be able to do what it'd take me a century to do here by myself. I'll have a Dynacar in every garage. You understand now?"

"Perfectly," the P.R. man said. What he understood was that Lyle Lavallette, the Maverick Genius of the Auto Industry, was as loose as ashes. Who would believe that the Big Three of the auto business, who lived to compete among each other, would all turn to the same man to head their companies? It sounded like something that might be considered in Russia, but not in the United States. "Good," Lavallette said. "So keep planting stories about mergers. How with the new Dynacar, only I can save the Big Three. Maybe you can call me the Maverick Savior. That might be good."

"Okay," the P.R. man said. Why not? The money was good.

"And one important thing." Lavallette said.

"Yes, sir."

"Try always to photograph my left side. That's my best side. "

"You got it, Mr. Lavallette. Does this car really run on garbage?"

Lavallette shook his head. "Refuse. Not garbage. We always say 'refuse' around here. If we get this thing tagged as the garbagemobile, we could run into a lot of public resistance. Refuse." He smoothed a hand over his hair. Good. Everything was in place. "And to answer your question, it runs like a charm and it's the greatest discovery in automobiles, maybe since the wheel. Try to get that printed somewhere. The greatest thing since the wheel."

"You got it, Mr. Lavallette," the P.R. man said.

In the White House, the President of the United States was sipping coffee in his bedroom when an aide came in holding a scroll of paper that contained a brief report on the overnight news events.

The top item reported that Hubert Millis, president of American Automobiles, had succumbed at 1:32 A.M. in Detroit.

The President excused his aide, opened the drawer of the nightstand, and picked up the receiver of a dialless phone that was hidden beneath two hot-water bottles and a copy of Playboy.

He waited for the voice of Harold Smith to come on the line. The President had decided, and it was time-time to order the dismantling of America's ultimate shield against chaos.

He was going to tell Smith that CURE must disband. The agency had failed and it was time to go back to more traditional law-enforcement agencies, like the FBI. He had always liked the FBI, especially since he had once played an FBI man in a movie.

But no one answered the phone.

The President remained on the line. From past experience, he knew that Smith was seldom away from his headquarters and when he was, he carried a portable radiophone in his briefcase, hooked up to the private line in his office.

He waited five minutes but there was still no answer. The President hung up. He decided he could give the order after lunch as easily as before lunch. A few hours' difference wouldn't matter.

It wouldn't matter at all.

Chapter 26

Chiun, Master of Sinanju, allowed the doorman of the Detroit Plaza Hotel to summon his conveyance.

When the taxi pulled up, the doorman, wearing a uniform that reminded Chiun of those worn by the courtiers to the throne of France's Sun King, opened the door for him, then closed it gently after Chiun was seated in the rear.

Then the doorman leaned into the cab window with an expectant smile.

"You have done well," Chiun said. "Now remove yourself from my field of vision."

"You must be new to our country, sir," the doorman replied, still smiling. "In America, good service is usually rewarded with a tip."

"Very well," said Chiun. "Here is a tip. Do not have children. Their ingratitude will only cause you sorrow in your declining years."

"That wasn't the kind of tip I had in mind," the doorman said.

"Then here is another," Chiun said. "People who delay other people who must be off on important business often have their windpipes ripped from their throats. Onward, driver. "

The cabby pulled into traffic and said, "Where are you going, buddy?"

"To the place of the carriagemaker. Lavallette."

"Oh. The Dynacar guy. Sure. Hang on."

"In what direction is his place?" Chiun demanded.

"Direction? Oh, I'd say west."

"Then why are you driving north?"

"Because I have to drive north to catch the interstate that goes west," the cabby replied good-naturedly.

"I am familiar with the tricks of your trade," Chiun said. "Do not drive north. Drive west."

"I can't do that."

"You can. Simply point your wheels west and proceed."

"In a straight line?"

"I am paying only for the miles driven to our destination. The west miles," Chiun said. "I will not pay for unnecessary deviations from our route."

"I can't drive in a straight line. There are little things in the way like skyscrapers and trees."

"You have my permission to drive around such obstacles. But west, always west. I will keep track of the west miles for you," said Chiun, resting his eyes on the clicking digital meter.

The driver shrugged and said, "You're the boss, buddy."

"No," said Chiun. "I am the Master."

"Just as long as I'm still the driver."

As they drove, Chiun kept his eyes on the meter but his mind was on Remo.

He had not lied when he had told Smith that Remo was lost to Sinanju. The appearance of the older Remo Williams-Remo's natural father-had torn Chiun's pupil in another direction, away from Sinanju. Chiun had hoped to prevent this difficulty by killing the gunman before Remo had ever known of his existence. But it did not work that way.

However, Chiun had lied when he told Smith that Remo was dead. In a sense, it was true. Without Chiun to guide him, without someone to keep him on the path of proper breathing and correctness, Remo's powers would atrophy and perhaps fade entirely. It had happened to Remo before without Chiun and it would probably happen again. Remo would cease to be Sinanju.

But what Chiun had feared more was that if Smith knew that Remo was still alive, no longer under Chiun's control, Smith would order Remo's death and Chiun would be bound by contracts to obey that order.

It was not time for that. There was still a chance to bring Remo back into the care of Sinanju.

Which was why Chiun journeyed through the cool dawn to the place of the carriagemaker. Not for the carriagemaker and not for Smith and not for a moment to benefit this stupid land of white people who were all ingrates.

Chiun traveled in the hope that if there were another attempt on the life of Lyle Lavallette, his would-be assassin would not come alone. He would bring Remo.

Then, Chiun knew, this matter would be resolved. Forever.

The taxi arrived at the Dynacar Industries plant forty minutes later.

"That'll be $49.25," said the driver. The fare was three times what it would have been if he had been permitted to drive on the interstate.

"That is a reasonable fare," said Chiun. He reached into the folds of his kimono and brought forth one of the new United States gold pieces in the fifty-dollar denomination.

The driver looked at it and said, "What's this?"

"What it appears to be. Coin of the realm. Fifty dollars gold. American."

"Where's my tip and don't give me any of that 'don't-have-children' routine. I already got nine of them. That's why I need a tip."

"Yesterday's gold fixing on the London market was $446.25," Chiun said. "Surely, $397 is enough of a tip for following directions."

"How do I know this is real?" said the driver.

"Because when you die in five seconds because of your insolent tongue, I am going to take another just like it and place them over your eyelids to smooth your journey into the other world. I would not use counterfeit coins to do this."

"You mean, it's real?"

"Isn't that what I've been saying?"

"And it's really worth $440?"

Chiun corrected him. "$446.25."

"Want me to wait to bring you back to the hotel?" the driver asked.

"No," said Chiun.

The guard at the gate to the large empty Dynacar parking lot wanted to know what Chiun's business was.

"It is my business and not yours. Let me pass."

"You're not an employee, not dressed like that. I can't let you in without a visitor's pass. You got a visitor's pass, old-timer?"

"Yes," said Chiun, raising his open palm for the guard to see. "Here it is."

The guard looked, expecting to find an ID card in the old man's hand, but he saw nothing. He saw nothing twice. First he saw nothing because the Oriental's hand was empty. Then he saw nothing again when Chiun took his nose between thumb and forefinger and squeezed until the man's sight clouded and he fell back on the seat inside his small guardhouse.

As he slipped from consciousness, the guard had a half-second realization of what was happening. He had heard of nerves in the human body that were so sensitive, they triggered unconsciousness when pressed in a certain way. But he had never heard of any such nerve in the tip of the nose.

When he woke up three hours later, he was still thinking that thought.

Lyle Lavallette was sitting behind the wheel of the Dynacar in the big empty plant, making "vroom, vroom" noises with his mouth. The first inkling he had that he was not alone was the slight tipping of the vehicle on the passenger side.

He looked over to see an elderly man with Asian features, dressed in a flower-emblazoned red brocade robe, sitting beside him.

"I am Chiun," the Oriental said. "I am here to guard your worthless life."

Lavallette recognized the man. It was the same Oriental who had used his own body to shield James Revell from the gunman's bullets at the Dynacar demonstration the previous day.

"What are you doing here?" Lavallette said.

"I have just told you. Have you wax in your ears? I am here to guard your worthless life."

"I'm worth over ten million dollars. I don't call that worthless."

"Ten million dollars. Ten million rocks. It is the same thing. Worthless."

"Savage!" Lavallette yelled through the open car window. Colonel Brock Savage, sitting with his men in a small room off the main garage floor, heard the shout. He slipped the safety off his Armalite rifle and gave his men the hand signal to follow him as he trotted up to the driver's side of the Dynacar.

Lavallette, a panicked expression on his face, mouthed the word "him" and pointed toward Chiun.

"Surround the car," Savage ordered his men. "You! Out," he barked at Chiun, pointing his Armalite through the window so that, if he had to fire, he would riddle the unarmed Oriental.

Lavallette realized Savage would riddle him too because he was directly in the line of fire and shouted, "Get over the other side, you maniac. Don't shoot me."

Savage ran around the car and Chiun pointed a finger at him. "Do not point that weapon at me," he said.

"Get out, gook."

"And do not give me orders. I do not take orders from whites who dress like trees," Chiun said.

"I'm a private merc, idiot. The highest-paid merc in the world. And I'm trained to kill."

"No," said Chiun. "You have been trained to die." To Lavallette's eyes, it looked as if the old man had simply walked through the closed car door, but in fact Chiun had opened the door so quickly that Lavallette's slow eyes still held the afterimage of the closed door simultaneously with registering the Oriental's leap from the car.

Brock Savage squeezed the Armalite's trigger. Chiun squeezed Savage's trigger finger and the weapon dropped from the big man's hands. Chiun picked it up and snapped the barrel in half.

Savage reached for his combat knife, a ninja butterfly knife that opened like a folding rule. He flashed his hands around and the blade snapped from concealment. Then it too was on the floor next to the gun barrel.

Savage looked at the broken blade and dove for Chiun's throat, hands extended in front of him.

"Ki-ai," he shouted, but he quieted as he hit the floor with Chiun pressing a finger against an artery in his temple. Then he was unconscious.

Chiun turned to the other mercenaries.

"He is not seriously hurt," he said. "I do not wish to hurt any of you. Please take him and leave."

Two mercenaries ran forward, grabbed Brock Savage's unconscious form, and pulled him away.

Chiun led Lavallette through a door that led to the office wing of the Dynacar plant and told the automaker to take him to his office.

Inside the office, Chiun said, "You are fortunate to have me here. You were not safe surrounded by those private jerks."

"Mercs," corrected Lavallette.

"Only one of us is correct," Chiun sniffed. "And I do not think it is you."

Chapter 27

The gunman had fallen asleep on the sofa, watching television, and when he awoke, he glanced at his watch, picked up his briefcase, and walked quietly from the hotel room.

Let Remo sleep. The kid, with his eternal questions, would just be a drag if he came along. He was already a large-size headache with his rice-eating, no drinking, "I can't-explain-to-you-how-I-do-what-I-do" routine.

When this hit was over, the gunman was leaving, and to hell with Remo Williams. Who needed that grief? Let him go back to his Chinaman friend.

The guard outside the parking lot at the Dynacar plant appeared to be asleep in his booth. The gunman had planned to park nearby and sneak into the property, but he had learned early on never to look a gift horse in the mouth. A sleeping guard was a gift from heaven, so he drove into the lot and parked his car near the main building.

He took his Beretta Olympic from his briefcase and slipped it into his spring-clip shoulder holster. He left the rifle add-ons in the briefcase. They would not be necessary. This, he thought, was a television hit: "up close and personal."

He walked through a large warehouse-type building where the Dynacar was sitting alone in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. His body was tensed, all his senses focused on what was in front of him. Were there guards? Could this be a trap?

But he saw nothing and he never realized that behind him, Remo had slipped out of the backseat of the car where he had been hidden and was now following him into the plant.

The gunman, if asked, would have admitted to some confusion. Until this minute, he had been certain that he had been hired by one of the company presidents who had been on his target list. But he had killed Mangan and he would have killed Revell if it hadn't been for that crazy old Oriental. That left Millis and Lavallette as his possible employer. Now, with Millis dead, there was only Lavallette. It would have been simple except his employer had called and told him to kill Lavallette today.

So who was he working for?

He decided that when he collected his last payment, he was going to pull open the door of that Dynacar and find out who was sitting behind the wheel.

But that was later. For now, he had to be wary of a trap. He saw no one in the warehouse, and in the tall office structure attached to the rear of the work area, there was no one in the lobby.

The gunman paused to light a cigarette and for some reason, Maria's face floated into his mind. He had not thought of her since that Remo had started to pester him.

He took a puff off the cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray on an empty desk, and got into the elevator to ride upstairs. Maybe it was a trap, but if it was, he was prepared.

Chiun was prepared too. He sat on a small rug outside Lavallette's office. He had told the automaker to stay inside and Lavallette had disobeyed only once, when he came out to say that he had received an anonymous tip that the killer was on his way to murder Lavallette.

"Is he coming alone?" Chiun asked.

"I wouldn't know. My informant didn't say," Lavallette replied.

"Go back into your office."

"He'll get me," Lavallette said. "Colonel Savage and his people are gone. I'm dead meat."

"To get to you, he will have to pass me," Chiun said. "Get back inside."

He had pushed Lavallette inside, closed the door, and then taken up his station on the rug outside the man's office, watching the elevator door, waiting.

The moment of reckoning was coming.

Remo did not know why he had stowed away in the back of his father's car, to follow the gunman. When he saw the man with the scar start to ride up on the elevator, he slipped into a stairwell and started to walk upstairs, driven by some urge he did not understand.

When the elevator doors slid open, the gunman had dropped into a marksman's crouch, his Beretta pointed ahead in a double-handed grip. He felt prepared for anything, but he was not prepared to see the old Oriental sitting calmly on a carpet in the middle of the floor.

"You again," he said.

Chiun's face was stern. "Where is my son?"

The gunman laughed. "Don't you mean my son? He's sure of it, you know."

"And what are you sure of?" Chiun asked.

"I'm sure that he's a chump."

Chiun rose from his position without any apparent shifting of limbs under his kimono. He seemed to grow like a sunflower from the floor.

"Whatever Remo is, he is Sinanju. You have insulted Sinanju too many times already. Prepare to die."

The gunman fired two shots coming out of the elevator. One of them buried itself in the door directly behind Chiun, but Chiun was no longer there. He was three feet to the left somehow. And was it the gunman's imagination, or was he standing closer now?

The gunman fired again.

And again, Chiun was suddenly in another place. He had not seemed to move. It was like magic; the old Oriental popped up in another place, grim and purposeful.

Now only twelve feet separated them and the gunman fired four shots in a fanning arc. He had gotten the old Oriental before with a ricochet; why was it so difficult this time?

In the brief microsecond in which the gunman reacted to the noise and flash of the pistol shots, he blinked, and in that same blink of a second, the Master of Sinanju moved again. The gunman's eyes opened and he seemed to be alone in the spacious reception area.

From behind the door marked "LYLE LAVALLETTE. PRESIDENT" a muffled voice called out.

"Hello? Is anyone dead out there? Is it all right to come out now? Hello?"

It was too much for the gunman. There was no possible place where the old Oriental could be hiding. Maybe he had the powers of invisibility or something. He started to back into the still-open elevator, and stopped.

His gun hand seemed to catch fire. He screamed. His pistol clattered to the floor. Something was wrong with his arm, something terrible.

He dropped to his knees, clutching his arm. From the corner of one tearing eye, he saw the Master of Sinanju step out of the elevator.

"How?" he groaned.

"You may spend eternity pondering it," Chiun said coldly. His eyes were wrathful. "Now you will answer my questions."

Chiun knelt beside the squirming man and gently touched his inner left wrist.

"Arrrgh," the man screamed.

"That is just a touch," Chiun said. "I can make the pain much worse. Or I can make it disappear. Have you a preference?"

"Make it go away."

"Where is Remo?" Chiun said.

"I left him back at the hotel."

"Good. You answered truthfully."

"Make it stop. Make the pain go away. Please."

"Who hired you?" Chiun said implacably.

"I don't know. I never saw his face."

"That is not a good answer."

"It's the only answer. I thought it was Lavallette but now I don't know. It might be anyone. Help me. I'm dying here."

"That will come later. Why would the carriagemaker hire you to kill himself?"

"Ask him, ask him. Just give me a break."

Chiun touched the man's arm and the gunman's contorted joints loosened and relaxed. He lay on the floor, still as death.

Chiun was at Lavallette's office door when the door to the stairwell opened. He did not have to turn to know it was Remo stepping out. The first soft footfall told him that, for no other human stepped with such feline ease. Except for Chiun himself.

"Little Father," Remo said. And then he saw the gunman's still body.

"No!" he screamed.

"He is not dead, Remo," Chiun said softly.

"Oh."

"I was going to come for you when I was finished here," Chiun said stiffly.

"Smith's orders?"

"No. I already told the emperor that you were dead. A necessary untruth."

"You both knew about him all along, didn't you?" Remo said, gesturing to the man on the floor.

Chiun shook his aged head, making the wisps of hair over his ears flutter in the still air.

"No, Remo. No one knows the truth. Least of all, you."

"This man is my natural father. You kept that from me. You tried to kill him."

"I kept that from you to spare you grief," Chiun said.

"What kind of line is that? What grief?"

"The grief you would have felt had Smith ordered you to eliminate this wretch. This is my assignment which I took upon my frail shoulders to spare you the burden."

"Oh, Chiun, what do I do?" Remo said.

"Whatever it is, you may have to do it quickly," said Chiun, pointing a long-nailed finger at the gunman, who was rising to his feet now, his pistol in hand.

"Out of the way, kid," he rasped. "I'm going to kill that yellow bastard."

"No," Remo said.

"Get out of my way, kid. You hear me?"

Remo glanced at Chiun, who quietly folded his arms and closed his eyes.

"Don't just stand there, Chiun," Remo called.

"Without a pupil, Sinanju has no future. Without a future, I have no past. I will be remembered as my ancestors have told me I would be remembered as the last Master of Sinanju, who gave Sinanju to an ungrateful white. So be it."

"No, Chiun," Remo said. He turned to the gunman. "Put it down. Please. We can settle this some other way."

"There is no other way," Chiun said.

"For once the gook is right," the gunman said. "Get out of the way. Who the hell's side are you on anyway?"

"Yes, Remo," said Chiun. "Whose side are you on?" The gunman lined up the shot. Chiun stood immobile, eyes closed. The gunman slowly depressed his finger on the trigger.

Remo yelled something inarticulate, then surrendering to reflexes built into him by Chiun over the years, he moved toward the gunman.

The man with the scar whirled and fired at Remo. The bullet missed.

"You asked for this, kid," the gunman said. His finger lowered again.

"Me, too?" Remo cried but it was too late. The killing stroke of his hand was already in motion.

It struck the man called Remo Williams squarely on the breastbone, shattering that bone and turning the connective cartilage to mucus. That was just the beginning. The force of the stroke vibrated through the gunman's body, initiating a chain reaction of breaking bones and jellifying muscles and organs.

The gunman with the scar stood poised for an infinite second, his contorted face seeming to soften as the hardness of his skull dissolved, and then he slipped to the floor like a pile of potatoes tumbling out of a ripped sack.

His last sight was of Remo's empty hand coming at him and his final thought was not his own. He could hear Maria's last words and finally he understood:

"A man will come to you. Dead, yet beyond death, he will carry death in his empty hands. He will know your name and you will know his. And that will be your death warrant. "

He did not feel himself slip from his body. Instead, he felt his mind contract, tighter and tighter, until it was as small as a pea, then as small as the head of a pin, then smaller still until his entire consciousness was reduced to a point as infinitesimally tiny as an atom. When it seemed that it could compress no tighter, it kept shrinking and shrinking.

But the gunman did not care because he no longer cared about anything. His very essence became part of a darkness greater and blacker than he could ever comprehend, and not knowing where he was and what was happening to him was much, much better than knowing.

"I killed him," Remo said in a strangled voice. "I killed my own father. Because of you."

"I am sorry, Remo. Truly sorry for your pain," Chiun said.

But Remo did not seem to hear him. He just kept mumbling the same words over and over again in a lost little boy's voice:

"I killed him."

Chapter 28

Remo sat down heavily and touched the limp body of the man he called his father. It felt as formless as a jellyfish. All that was now left of the man was a casing that surrounded broken bone and tissues.

Lavallette's door opened slowly and he peered outside. He saw the dead man and then Chiun.

"What happened to him?" he asked.

"Sinanju happened to him," Chiun said.

"Did he say who hired him?" Lavallette asked.

"No. He did not have to," Chiun said.

"Why not?"

"Because I know that you hired him," Chiun said.

"To kill myself? Are you crazy?"

"Only one stands to gain by the killings of the carriagemakers. That one is you," said Chiun.

"What motive would I have?" Lavallette said. He looked away as his secretary, Miss Blaze, walked into the reception area. She saw him, then quickly looked down at a piece of paper in her hand.

"Your public-relations man called, Mr. Lavallette," she said. "He said he's planted a story that all three auto companies are going to ask you to head them." She smiled and looked up, then saw Chiun standing by Lavallette, and Remo sitting next to the dead body.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know you had company. "

"Idiot," Lavallette snarled. He ran to the open elevator, pressed the button, and the doors closed behind him.

"Well, what got into him?" Miss Blaze said. "Can I help?"

"You may leave, bovine one," Chiun said. He walked to where Remo still sat next to the body.

"Remo," he said softly. "The man who is truly responsible for this death has just left."

"What?" Remo said, looking up at Chiun's hazel eyes.

"All the pain you feel, all the hurt, is the fault of the carriagemaker Lavallette. It was he who caused all this trouble. "

Remo looked again at the dead body, then got to his feet.

"I don't know," Remo said. "I don't think I really care. "

"Remo, you are still young. Know this. There are so many times in a man's life when he must do things that later he may think are wrong. All a man can do is act with a spirit of rightness and then he need fear no one, not even himself."

"Rightness? I killed my father."

"As he would have killed you," Chiun said "That is not a father's love, Remo. A father would not do that." And Remo thought back to the battle the previous evening atop the building near American Autos, thought back to how Chiun had done nothing but parry Remo's blows, had done nothing to hurt Remo, and in a brilliant flash, he understood the nature of fatherhood and family. He was not an orphan; he had not been since the first day he had met Chiun, because the old Korean was his true father, a fatherhood based on love.

And Sinanju, the long line of Masters stretching back through the ages, was Remo's family. Thousands strong, all reaching their hands across the centuries to him.

His family.

"You say Lavallette's skipped?" Remo said.

Chiun nodded and Remo said, "Let's go get the bastard, Little Father."

"As you will, my son."

Lavallette sped from the auto plant in the prototype Dynacar.

Let the cops sort it out, he said to himself. I'll deny everything. Who's to know different?

As he turned onto the roadway, he looked into the rearview mirror to see if any cars were following him. All he saw were two joggers. Good. He pressed down on the accelerator and the Dynacar sped ahead. But the two joggers in the mirror did not fall behind in the distance. They were getting closer.

How could that be?

Then Lavallette saw who they were. It was the Oriental and the young man with the dead eyes. They were running after him and they were gaining.

Lavallette checked his speedometer. He was going seventy miles an hour. He pressed the pedal down to the floor, but it did no good. The two men were getting bigger in the rearview mirror, and then they were abreast of the speeding Dynacar.

Lavallette glanced through his open driver's window at Remo, who was now alongside him, "You can't stop me," he snarled. "I don't care how fast you can run."

"Yes, we can," Remo said.

To prove he was wrong, Lavallette pulled the wheel hard left, turning the car into Remo, but the young man, without breaking his stride, dodged away. Lavallette laughed but then Remo's hand floated out and the fender on the driver's side of the car flew away from the tire. The passenger-side door came next. It opened with a screaming wrench and bounced down the street. Lavallette glanced over to see the old man jogging lightly alongside.

"Still think we can't stop you?" Remo said.

Lavallette hunched over the wheel. He was going eighty-five now. It wasn't possible for them to be running alongside him, but even if they were, they would soon tire.

The roof came off next after the pair of runners broke the support posts. Then the trunk lid was ripped off and then the rest of the fenders flew.

The two men grabbed one of the support posts of the car, and Lavallette could feel it slowing down, and in only a few hundred yards it came to a stop, stripped to its chassis.

Lavallette stepped out, still holding the steering wheel, which was no longer attached to anything.

"Don't kill me," he pleaded.

"Give me a reason not to," Remo said coldly.

"Why did you hire the killer?" Chiun asked.

"I wanted to get rid of the competition. With them dead and me with the Dynacar, I would have run all of Detroit."

Remo walked toward the back of the car. "If this damned thing was any good, you wouldn't have had to do that. "

He looked inside the open trunk. "There's batteries back here. What are they for?"

Lavallette was pleading now for his life. He said, "The car's a scam. It doesn't run on refuse. It runs on electrical batteries, nonrechargeable."

"What does that mean?" Remo said.

"It means the car runs for a month or two and then goes dead and you have to buy a new car."

"I had a Studebaker like that once," Remo said.

"It does not turn garbage into energy?" Chiun said.

"No," Lavallette said. "That was just for show."

"The Dynacar doesn't run on garbage," Remo said. "It is garbage."

"You might say that," Lavallette said.

"You know what else you might say?" Remo said.

"What's that?" asked Lavallette.

"You might say good-bye," Remo said. He took the man's elegantly coiffed head between his hands and shook. Contact lenses flew out of his eyes. False teeth popped from his mouth. His corset snapped and ripped through his shirt in an explosion of elastic.

For only a moment it hurt and then Lyle Lavallette felt nothing else. Remo dropped the unmoving body beside the stripped prototype of the Dynacar and walked away.

"It is done. You have avenged yourself and Sinanju," Chiun called after him.

Remo said nothing. The set of his shoulders told the Master of Sinanju that his pupil was hurting very much inside.

Chiun walked in the other direction. Remo needed to be alone now and his teacher respected that need.

Before either man had gotten a hundred feet from the car, a gang of teenagers came out of the weeds along the roadside and began stripping the car's seatcovers and mirrors and chrome.

An hour later, there would be nothing left but Lavallette's body.

One thing had led to another and the President had not been able to call Smith and now, while waiting to greet this week's ambassador from Zimbabwe, the President was handed a note by an aide.

He looked at it, bolted from the room, and ran to his bedroom, where he picked up the special phone.

"Yes, Mr. President," the dry unflappable voice of Harold Smith answered.

"Now Lavallette is dead," the President said.

"I know, sir. My people did it."

"Your people are out of control. I'm ordering you to-"

"No, sir," Smith interrupted. "I just spoke to my people, the older one. He informed me that Lavallette himself was behind all the shootings. The actual killer is dead too. And the Dynacar is a fake."

"The garbage-powered car is a fake?" the President said.

"It's a complicated story, Mr. President, but that's the bottom line. It was a fake through and through. I'll be getting you a full report. Just a few loose ends left."

"Smith, I have just one question for you."

"Yes, sir?"

"Are you in full control of your people?"

"Yes, Mr. President. CURE is fully operational."

"That's all I need to know. You came very close this time, Smith. I want you to know that."

"I know it, Mr. President. Will there be anything else?"

"Not from me. I think I need a nap. Let Zimbabwe wait."

"Very good, sir," Smith said as the President hung up. Smith returned to his computer terminal. There were only a few loose ends, but for CURE to be back to normal, they had to be resolved. It was almost dark before the answers came.

Chapter 29

Smith and Chiun waited in darkness for Remo to arrive. A brisk wind scattered the red and gold leaves in the graveyard like tiny dead things come to elfin life. Somewhere, an owl made a lonely sound. Remo came up the cemetery walk with a padding silence that made him seem more at home in these surroundings than anywhere else, Smith thought grimly.

"You're late," said Smith.

"So what?" Remo said.

"He is still hurting," whispered Chiun to Smith. "Do not heed his rudeness, Emperor. All will be set right when you give Remo the good news."

"What good news?" asked Remo.

Smith extracted a folder from his briefcase.

"I asked you to meet me here because this is where the whole thing began, Remo. At your grave."

For the first time, Remo noticed the gravestone with his name on it.

"So this is what it looks like. It's not much, Smitty. You could have sprung for an angel on the top."

"It served its purpose," Smith said. "A woman was murdered on this spot a few days ago when she was laying flowers on a grave. The flowers fell on your grave, Remo."

"My grave? Who was she?"

"My research has finally pieced the puzzle together. I was thrown off by the fact that the flowers fell on your grave and that the man who killed the woman, according to ballistics reports, was the same man who was doing the killing in Detroit."

"Who was she?" Remo asked again.

Smith pulled out a sheet of paper and a photograph. "Her name was Maria DeFuria. She was the former wife of a Mafia hit man named Gesualdo DeFuria, a professional well-known for his use of a Beretta Olympic target pistol."

"What does this have to do with me?"

"The emperor is explaining," Chiun said.

"Gesualdo DeFuria was the man you thought was your father, Remo. He was not your father."

"Prove it."

"Here is a copy of a note found at Maria DeFuria's house. You may read it but let me summarize. The note explains that the woman had discovered that her ex-husband had trained their son, Angelo, to follow in the father's profession. But during a team hit, the son was caught and convicted of a murder. In fact, the father was the real murderer and the son only an accomplice in training. Because of the Mafia's code of silence, the son kept quiet and was executed for the crime."

He pointed behind Remo. "They buried him here, in the family plot, next to your own grave."

Remo read the name DeFuria on the stone next to his own.

"You mean the guy buried next to me was executed for a crime he didn't commit, just like I was?" Remo asked.

"A strange coincidence but Wildwood isn't exactly Arlington National Cemetery," Smith said. "This is near Newark after all. Let me finish the story. DeFuria attempted to reconcile with his wife and the truth slipped out about the son's innocence. Maria decided to go to the police with her information. We can only assume the rest. On her way, she stopped to put flowers on her son's grave. DeFuria followed her here. They argued and he shot her and the flowers fell onto your grave."

"But he called himself Remo Williams," Remo protested.

"He had killed his ex-wife and had to leave town. Even the Mafia doesn't like that kind of killing. He knew he was going to need a new name so he picked the one off the headstone where his wife fell. Your name, Remo. If the flowers had fallen on the grave on the other side of yours, he probably would have called himself D. Colt."

"He had all kinds of ID," Remo said.

"Nowadays, if you have a few dollars, you can buy any kind of identification," Smith said.

"But there was a family resemblance," Remo said. "Around the eyes."

"A resemblance," Smith admitted, "but not a family one. You were both in essentially the same business. Too many deaths mark a person. I think you could call it a professional resemblance, not a family one." He paused. "Don't let your feelings cloud your judgment, Remo," he said.

"It is the lesson of the Master Shang," Chiun said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Don't tell me you have forgotten, Remo," said Chiun. "Master Shang, he of the moon rock. I told you that legend."

"Yeah, I remember. What about it?"

"The lesson of the Master Shang lies in this stone which Shang believed he took from the mountains of the moon." Chiun produced the grayish stone from the folds of his kimono. "See?"

"I thought you believed that story," Remo said suspiciously.

"Do you take me for an idiot?" Chiun said. "Any fool knows you cannot walk to the moon. Master Shang should have known that too. But he so desired the Chinese tart that he deluded himself into thinking he could walk to the moon to hold her love. That is the real lesson of the Master Shang. Do not desire something too much, for wishful thinking impairs the sight and not all things are as they appear. You, Remo, deluded yourself into believing that wretch was your father, because you wanted a father so badly. It did not matter to you if he was real."

"Are you trying to tell me that you knew all along that he wasn't my father?" Remo demanded.

"I am not trying to tell you anything. I have told you."

"Bulldookey," Remo said.

"It is nevertheless true," Chiun said. "When first I saw him, I saw that he moved like a baboon. He used weapons. He had no finesse. He bore no resemblance to you at all."

"I think you're paying me a compliment," Remo said.

"Then I withdraw my remarks," Chiun said.

"How did you dig all this up, Smitty?" Remo asked.