American Obsession

Remo parked a couple of blocks farther on, in front of a gardener's pickup truck, the bed of which was loaded down with bags of grass and yard tools. The gardener in question had ear protectors on and was in the middle of mowing the front lawn of a three-story Spanish-style home.

"Let me handle the guys at the gate," he told Chiun as they got out of the car.

The Master, still miffed, said nothing.

As they passed the pickup, Remo grabbed a rake and a limb trimmer on an aluminum extender pole from the back. "Here," he told Chiun. "Carry this." The Master accepted the rake in silence.

The two of them crossed the street and walked down the hill toward the white gates. As Remo and Chiun approached, through cascades of purple-and-pink bougainvillea, they could see the blue limo parked under the mansion's porticoed auto entrance. The huge home was without frills: modern, multilevel, with lots of glass exterior walls. They were about ten feet from the gate when the two security men on the other side moved into position.

The Fed who wore his pale brown hair in a supershort crew cut spoke crisply into his headset, "We've got a pair of bogeys at nine o'clock. Stations Red and Blue on intruder alert."

With the limb trimmer resting over his shoulder, Remo stopped in front of the gate.

"Move on," said the Fed.

"We're supposed to do some pruning inside," Remo told him.

"No, you're not. Move on, lawn boy." The security men shared a smirk.

Remo set the tip of the long metal pole on the sidewalk and stepped a little closer to the gate's bars. "My partner here," he said, gesturing at the little old Oriental with the rake, "is the world's foremost expert on the monkey puzzle tree. He's made time in his busy schedule, as a personal favor to Mr. Koch-Roche, in order to inspect a suspected fungal outbreak on a museum-quality specimen on the grounds. I don't think Mr. Koch-Roche will be amused if you turn him away."

The crew-cut Fed gave Remo an irritated look, then spoke again into his mike. "Station Yellow here," he said, sizing up the men on the other side of the gate. "We've got a couple of guys claiming to be gardeners at the gate. See if they're expected. One's an old Jap-"

Remo hadn't quite reached the optimum position for the strike he had planned-the tip of the pole was a little too far to the left-but he knew he had no choice but to go for it. Chiun had already whipped the handle of his rake around, and was thrusting it between the steel bars like a lance.

With a loud crack, the wooden handle splintered against the crew-cut Fed's body armor, but not before Chiun had delivered a paralyzing shock to his diaphragm. The Fed crumpled and dropped to his side, curling up in a fetal position on the drive.

Crew-cut's partner had his hand on his mini-Uzi when Remo made his own thrust. The long aluminum pole bowed in the middle as its butt made solid contact with the man's chin. The bend in the pole absorbed some of the blow's power, which was still sufficient to stun the Fed and make him drop his weapon.

Remo quickly scaled the gate and used the lever to open it for Chiun, who with great dignity walked through the opening and stepped over the fallen form of the crew-cut Fed.

The Master paused to kneel beside the wheezing man.

"Korean," Chiun said slowly and distinctly, as if addressing a child. "I am Korean."

Chapter 17

Senator Ludlow Baculum carefully peeled the adhesive patch from his right buttock. He observed the entire operation in the master bathroom's floor-to-ceiling mirror wall, while standing on the gold marble steps leading up to a vast, Mayan-temple-motif bathtub. Having removed the spent patch, the senator carelessly discarded it over his shoulder, mesmerized as he was by the sight of his own behind.

Ludlow's butt was monumental. Not even as a young man had it jutted so firmly, so solidly. As he walked up and down the bathtub steps, he could see the various muscle groups rippling under skin stretched thin as an overinflated balloon.

Oh, he was a manly man indeed.

Even if Koch-Roche had been charging ten million a year for the patch, Lud would have paid it gladly. The wonder drug had resurrected him from the dead. Though his mind was still razor sharp, he had been trapped in a decaying, ancient hulk of a body.

His was the tragedy of the aging horndog.

His sexual desires were still intense as ever, but he no longer had the physical wherewithal to satisfy himself or anyone else. Before he'd started taking the drug, when he had put his palsied, liver-spotted hand upon a young woman's naked body, the sensation was dim, as if he were groping through many layers of fabric. Even his sense of touch had been dulled by time.

That his continuing interest in women had become a joke, a widely circulated joke, had stung the senator most bitterly. But it hadn't stopped him from chasing women young enough to be his great-great-granddaughters. Because he was hampered by his walker and oxygen tank, Baculum's Washington, D.C., staff--comprised entirely of women under thirty-could usually avoid being cornered by him in the office. Elevators were a different story. As he slipped into his mid-eighties, Ludlow Baculum had spent many happy and profitable hours lurking in the back of a crowded car, his fingertips poised for a quick pinch or a shuddering grope.

All that was past.

Now he had a new body to match his desire. After an absence of a little more than a quarter century, Lud the Stud was back.

The senator peeled the backing off a new patch and stuck it on his other buttock. Then he did some Mr. Universe poses in front of the mirror, squinting ferociously so he could focus on his popping biceps and hulking traps without donning his specs. It didn't mat ter to him that he still had a ninety-plus-year-old face, no hair and three teeth. Thanks to more than thirty years of carefully cultivated PAC contributions, of corporate under-the-table payoffs, he was filthy rich. Pretty young women could often overlook a bit of toothless blotch face when it controlled a few hundred million in purely liquid assets. Especially the type of pretty women he was attracted to: screamers in the sack with shoe-size IQs. His taste in lady friends hadn't changed since Woodrow Wilson took office.

What Lud anticipated, now that he had a worldclass bod, was fewer serial marriages and many more casual love partners. Many more. Not only would he be faster on the grab, but given his more attractive physique, his prey would be less likely to try to escape. In the long run, the senator figured to break even on the price of the drug because the cost of his prenuptial agreements was bound to take a precipitous drop.

Lud barefooted across the marble over to the sink counter, where he had left the remains of his most recent snack. He poked around in the bottom of the translucent paper sack and came up with a tiny shard of overcooked french fry and a few grains of salt. Which he quickly consumed. Then he held the bag up to the light. It was drenched in grease. He could feel it all slimy under his fingers. Delicious but inaccessible grease.

Well, not quite.

The senator wadded the bag into his mouth and chewed and sucked the oily goodness from the paper. When he was done, to make sure he hadn't missed any, he swallowed the bolus down.

As he licked his lips, he heard soft singing from the next room.

And he smelled Woman.

In the past ten hours, his sense of smell had become most amazingly acute. Even the faintest hint of the opposite sex was for him a beacon, a Klaxon, a war cry. From her aroma, the senator judged the woman's age at twenty-two, well into the range of his target zone. And he guessed that she was Latina.

He ducked his bald, spotted head around the bathroom doorjamb.

Right on both counts.

Jimmy Koch-Roche's live-in maid was bent over the queen-size bed, fluffing up the pillows.

"Hola, Lupe!" Lud said, stepping into the bedroom.

The girl looked up from her work. The friendly smile on her face vanished as she saw that the man who had hailed her was both naked and fully aroused.

Lupe was no delicate flower. Though short in stature, she weighed a good 160 pounds. Her working clothes weren't the frilly, short-skirted French-maid outfits sold in sex-fantasy shops, but the cotton, sensible, no-nonsense, loose-fitting pants and shirt jacket of a nurse or beautician. She had no waist to speak of, and therefore no apparent hips. She wore her hair twisted up into a bun at the back of her head.

None of which mattered in the least to Senator Baculum, whose dander was most definitely up. "iVenga aqui, Lupe!" he said, opening his huge powerful arms to her.

Lupe let out a yelp and ran over the bed in her pink Reeboks, trying to reach the hallway door and, she hoped, safety.

Lud was too quick for her. He blocked the exit with his massive body.

"Come to me, my little frijole negra," the senator cooed.

Lupe had no intention of doing anything of the kind. She dashed back over the bed and through the bathroom door. She slammed the door shut, shot the bolt and started yelling for help at the top of her lungs.

The senator booted the heavy door off its hinges with a single kick, then walked over the fallen door. The maid was nowhere in sight. At first, he thought she might have escaped out a window. But behind the frosted glass of the huge shower stall, he saw her shadow. She cowered there, too scared to utter a sound.

When Lud jerked open the door and stepped in, Lupe slumped down the wall to the floor, covering her head with her arms. She was sobbing, her black hair falling around her shoulders.

"Don't cry now, Lupe," Lud said in a soothing voice. "I'm not one of your wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am Latin lovers. I'm from the old school of romance. I believe in foreplay, foreplay, foreplay...."

With that, he dragged her bodily from the stall by her hair, sank his three teeth into her shoulder blade and started shaking her around the room like a terrier with an old knotted sock.

"FREEZE!" said a voice behind Remo and Chiun as they mounted the low, broad steps to the mansion's side entrance. The command was followed immediately by "Get your hands up!"

Remo turned to face a very excited young man with a very stubby machine pistol. The mini-Uzi's red laser-sight dot jitterdanced across the breast of his black T-shirt.

"Please don't point that thing at me," Remo said, lifting his hands. "It makes me nervous."

"Shut up!" The young Fed shifted his aim to Chiun. "You, too. Get 'em up!"

The red dot played over the Master's scrawny throat and brushed his smiling lips.

"What're you grinn-?"

Before the federal agent could finish the word, let alone his sentence, it was over.

He had been rendered unconscious by what appeared to be a wave of a hand, a gesture that never actually made contact with the side of his head. The vacuum, the back draft created by Chiun's movement, had caused the young man's skull to lurch violently sideways and his brain to slam into the walls of that bony chamber.

After disarming the agent, Remo and Chiun entered the mansion. At once, they heard a woman's screams. "Sounds like old Lud's at it again," Remo said. And then came the sound of heavy running feet. The running feet belonged to the rest of the mansion's security staff. Remo and Chiun were confronted by four more machine-pistol-toting Feds and a trio of Koch-Roche's personal bodyguards. The latter pointed blue-steel .40-caliber SIG-Sauer pistols at them.

"Stop right there!" shouted the Fed in charge. "Stop where you stand or we'll fire."

Remo raised his hands above his head. "We aren't going anywhere," he said. "Aren't you going to check out those screams? Or don't you understand Spanish for 'Please don't kill me'?"

"You are our only problem at the moment," the Fed said. A pair of big, mirror-surfaced aviator sunglasses was perched on top of his head. "Cuff 'em, Roberts."

"Somebody's getting murdered in the next room, and you're worried about a couple of gate-crashers?" Remo said in disbelief.

"Somebody's going to get killed in this room if you don't zip it in a hurry, pal."

Roberts gestured for Remo and Chiun to face the flagstone wall that framed the enormous fireplace. "Lean forward, hands on the wall and spread your legs," Roberts directed.

Remo and Chiun obeyed the man's order and allowed themselves to be quickly frisked.

"Okay," Roberts continued, "put your right hands behind your backs."

Even though the other six men had their weapons trained on the two suspects, even though they were watching as intently as was humanly possible, the little Oriental seemed to vanish. One second he had his hand behind his back, in an off balance and totally vulnerable position, and the next second he was simply and totally gone.

As Roberts spun around to face his colleagues, he looked up. "Shit!" he exclaimed. He was the only one who could see the old man, and there was nothing he could do about it. Chiun was hurtling through the air, the hem of his robe brushing the top of the twenty-foot-high ceiling. He soared past the lineup of security specialists, whose attention was still focused on where he had been, not where he was.

Then something hit Roberts in the side of the neck, and for him, everything went black.

At the same instant some fifteen feet away, the Master of Sinanju landed lightly on the balls of his feet and, once firmly grounded, roamed freely among the defenseless backs of his adversaries.

Everything soft and fluid.

Blows that started off hard as iron and ended at their targets as near caresses.

Without the all important follow-through, such strikes were not lethal-unless, of course, one of the men happened to have a steel plate in his head, in which case even the muted impact would have set it spinning like the blade of a runaway table saw.

As Remo carefully eased Agent Roberts to the floor, across the room armed men were falling like howling pins. Between them, Remo could make out flashes of blue brocaded silk and the afterimage of a smile.

"All asleep," Chiun announced, slipping his hands back into his cuffs.

A piercing cry echoed through the mansion. "Not all," Remo said.

Chiun nodded. "When the little head rules the big one, trouble cannot be far away."

"And Trouble Is Us...."

Remo led the way through the big house, following the sounds of struggle through the ground floor to its source.

Like a snowstorm spilling into the hall, kapok fluff floated out of the doorway to the master bedroom. Remo entered first, low and quick. For a moment, he couldn't even see the woman, dwarfed as she was by the hugely muscled naked man who bent over her on the savagely ripped, partially de-stuffed mattress.

Then Remo caught sight of the soles of her Reeboks on either side of Ludlow Baculum's massive buttocks. The woman was furiously kicking her attacker and to some effect-there was pink smeared on the white treads of her traction soles.

"Senator?" he said.

Ludlow Baculum's ancient head snapped around on his corded, powerful neck. He smiled, and there was blood on his three teeth and tongue. He had the little woman's wrists pinned to the bed. Her clothes hung in tattered strips all around her.

"Go away!" Baculum snarled. "I haven't finished."

"Oh, yes, you have."

"I can't be bothered with this," the senator snarled. He called to the other room. "Roberts! Atkins! Get your butts in here!"

"You'll get no help from your hired hands," Remo said. "They've all been subdued."

Ludlow Baculum pointed a warning finger in the maid's face and said, "Don't you move. Not a muscle." Then he let her go and turned on the bed to handle the intruders by himself.

Remo noted the overlapping tread marks that ran across the senator's hips and thighs. "Man, oh man," he said with a laugh, "that little lady danced a stone flamenco on your doodle."

Baculum was not amused.

Sensing her opportunity, the half-nude maid shot off the bed and out the door.

"I'm going to kill you for that," the senator told Remo as he hopped to the floor. "I can bend steel bars with my bare hands. I can kick through solid walls."

"That must be nice for you," Remo commented mildly.

"I'm going to rip your head off your shoulders and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine."

"Love to tussle with you, Lud, I really would, but I think you should play with somebody your own age."

When Remo looked around, the Master was nowhere in sight.

"I'd rather play with you," Baculum said.

Then the plundered mattress hit Remo square in the face. Before he could move to escape, the senator threw his body against the other side of the mattress, sandwiching Remo against the wall. From head to heels, he was not only held fast, but slowly being smothered.

"Now I've got you," Lud said as he dug in his toes, using his shoulder to wedge his victim tighter to the wall. With his free hand, the senator started ripping open the underside of the mattress, over the unmoving lump that was Remo. Through the hole he'd made in the ticking, he plucked away big clumps of kapok stuffing.

Soon to be big clumps of Remo.

"Pucker up, Buttercup...." the senator cooed.

Chapter 18

Having taken to heart Remo's caution about the loss of a valuable source of information, and how dimly Emperor Smith would view a repeat of the football incident, Chiun was determined to capture their quarry alive. He recalled the ancient Korean proverb, "You can catch more bloodworm with fish paste than you can with bitter gall."

In search of fish paste, the Reigning Master of Sinanju padded into the mansion's kitchen, which resembled that of a modestly sized upscale restaurant. Everything was made of stainless steel. Sinks. Countertops. Range tops. The refrigerator doors set in a row along the wall.

Chiun opened all the refrigerator doors and stepped back to survey their contents. "If I were Animal Man," he asked himself aloud, "what would soothe my savage breast?"

He stroked his scraggly beard as he considered the problem.

There was meat aplenty on hand, cooked and raw. Cold standing rib roast, virtually intact. A partially dissected turkey. The nether quarters of a suckling pig. Mounds of aged steaks and chops.

He lifted the cover from a ceramic tureen. Duck!

He took a tender leg from its congealed bed of sauce and nibbled daintily. Most excellent, he judged. Even cold, and perhaps four days old, it was far superior to Remo's meager cuisine. Try as he might, the man simply could not make a decent sauce. How many Saturday afternoons had Chiun made his pupil observe the magicians of the cooking channel? How many pages of notes had Remo taken down? All for nothing, it seemed. Remo's sauce was either thin as water or thick as glutinous rice. It either swam away from the dish it was supposed to adorn, or choked it, like so much concrete.

As Chiun gnawed the moist, dark meat from the bone, sucking it absolutely clean, he decided that flesh, even the fattiest kind of flesh, would not do the trick for Animal Man.

He turned his attention to the refrigerator that held a selection of high-calorie desserts. A wide array of flaky pastries, mousses and elaborate whipped cream cakes stood on the shelves before him. Yet something told him that even a five-layer Black Forest cake was not enough.

The job required something even more artery clogging.

Something so purely, so totally fat laden that the beast-senator could not possibly turn it down. Chiun found what he was looking for in the kitchen pantry, which was jammed with various sacked, canned and jarred comestibles. The ten-gallon glass jar he sought stood on the pantry floor, its off-white contents the quintessence of fat. Bending his knees, he picked up the heavy jar and carried it back toward the master bedroom.

The Master could hear the sounds of violent struggle as he lumbered down the hall with his burden, and as he approached the open door to the bedroom, once again he saw bits of mattress fluff drifting out like snow. He stopped at the doorway, unscrewed the big metal lid and discarded it.

When Chiun entered the bedroom, his pupil was nowhere to be seen. The old man with a young man's body was holding the mattress against the wall with one hand and ripping at it with the other. Under the mattress was a man-sized lump.

A Remo-sized lump.

Then the senator thrust his hand into the hole he had made, and as if he were pulling a rabbit out of its hole, jerked Remo's head through the opening by the hair.

Chiun's pupil's face was very red all over, like it had been abraded with steel wool. The whites of the eyes were red, too.

"Do something!" Remo shouted.

"Of course," Chiun answered breezily. He reached into the big jar, grabbed a handful of the slippery white stuff and flung it at the back of the senator's bald head, where it landed with a wet splat over his neck and shoulders.

The effect was instantaneous.

Ludlow Baculum let go of Remo's hair and jerked his head around, his nostrils flaring wide. Still leaning against the mattress with his shoulder, the senator scooped some of the stuff off the side of his neck and pushed it into his mouth. A moan of pleasure escaped his withered lips. His rheumy eyes rolled up in their sockets.

From his raggedy porthole in the mattress, Remo croaked, "What the hell is it?"

"Fish paste to a bloodworm," Chiun answered.

"Well, for Pete's sake, give him some more!" The Master made another mayonnaise snowball and hit Bacuium square in the chops with it.

"Nuhhhgghhh," the senator gurgled as he used the edges of both his hands to scrape the full-fat dressing into his open mouth.

"Here," Chiun said, lowering his point of aim. He tossed a string of softball-sized gobs of mayo onto the bedroom carpet, leading Animal Man away from the mattress, and the still trapped Remo.

The distinguished Southern senator hurled himself facedown on the rug and, like a dog in pursuit of its own vomit, frantically licked and sucked up the slick white goo from the tightly woven carpet fibers. When he was through with one wet gob, he scrambled on all fours to the next, totally preoccupied with the task.

Remo pushed the mattress aside and stepped away from the wall. "That bastard almost had me," he said, pausing to pick a stray bit of mattress fluff off the tip of his tongue.

"You did an excellent job of keeping him here while I found the solution to the problem," Chiun said.

"Yeah, right. I sure didn't let him escape...."

"Now that we have the live specimen Emperor Smith desired," Chiun said, "all that is left is to render him senseless so we can bind him securely for transport."

"That honor is mine," Remo said.

Senator Baculum growled menacingly as Remo approached him, but he did not stop sucking the daylights out of the carpet. He remained on his hands and knees, facedown, combing the short strands of carpet through his three surviving teeth.

Chiun watched his pupil carefully. The angle of approach.

The coiling to strike. The choice of fist.

The location and power of the blow.

He was pleased to see that Remo avoided the head completely. A ninety-plus-year-old brain could be a fragile thing, full of leaky vessels and bulging aneurysms, and it was the brain they needed for its information. Remo's strike was open-handed, and there was absolutely no follow-through. The target Remo selected was a small place on the back above the right kidney, a place where many important nerves came together.

Whap!

Senator Baculum let out a startled gasp and slumped face first into a puddle of his own slobber.

Chapter 19

In his white sterile suit, Carlos Sternovsky rushed down the hall of the Family Fing Pharmaceuticals medical wing. At his side was Fosdick Fing. The lanky American took a single loping stride for every four of his Taiwanese counterpart. From the corridor ahead came a series of behemoth roars and a terrible crash of glassware and steel.

It sounded vaguely familiar to Sternovsky. Like feeding time at the lion house.

"The deterioration started to accelerate about an hour ago," Fosdick informed him as they hurried along. "It is occurring in every member of the synthetic-drug test panel. We're getting physiological and behavioral abnormalities that are way beyond anything we've logged to date."

As they neared the first of the test subjects' private suites, the door jerked open and three uniformed female nurses scrambled out, shrieking and brushing frantically at their clothes. One of the nurses had a fresh bruise above her right eye and a bloody lip. They all had wet marks spattered over their uniform dresses, from shoulder to hem. Seeing the open door, an alert orderly jumped forward and slammed it shut. She attacked me," the bloodied, black-eyed nurse cried to Fosdick. "Then after the others pulled her off me, she sprayed us! God, somehow that great ugly cow managed to spray us all!"

"We were just trying to take a hair sample for analysis!" another of the victimized nurses said. She held up a pinch of short brown strands between her fingertips. There appeared to be lighter brown fuzz mixed in with the hair.

"Calm down," Fosdick said. "Please, all of you, calm down. Give those hairs to me." He took the sample from the nurse and placed it in a small plastic bag. "Now, go change your uniforms at once. And when you've done that, I want you to go outside and I don't want you to come back until you've regained your composure."

Sternovsky's attention was elsewhere. He was looking at the surveillance monitor of the room the nurses had just exited. Inside, Test Subject Two was naked. Her body fat hovered just above zero, and her current level of muscle mass was roughly equivalent to that of a male, six-foot-four-inch high-school senior. She sat on the edge of her hospital bed and in great agitation combed at her hair with her fingers. Not the hair on her head.

The hair growing out of the tops of her shoulders. When the forty-eight-year-old romance writer had been admitted to the Fing medical wing four days before, she had weighed close to 350 pounds, less than forty percent of which had been muscle. The woman's weight problem had as much to do with her life-style and career choice as with her genetics. According to the medical history she had provided, all she did was sit at the computer and write.

And eat.

She had worked out a little reward scheme for herself. For every page of manuscript she completed, she gave herself a treat. A cookie. A bonbon. A bite of cake. A spoonful of ice cream. Using this positive-reinforcement scheme, she had produced forty-three novels in ten years.

After she'd completed her thirty-second novel, things began to go seriously wrong. When she submitted a current photograph for use on the back of the book jacket, her publisher rejected it, claiming that it made her look too much like an orangutan-her once passably cute face was lost in concentric rings of stippled white flab. This unfortunate development made book tours out of the question.

When the publisher began to suggest that a slender stand-in take care of the road work, the authoress panicked. She was caught in a terrible trap. Without the steady flow of treats, she couldn't write a word; without giving up the treats, she couldn't get the acclaim and adoration she had strived for her entire life. In her desperation to have it all, she had agreed to become a Family Fing lab rat.

WHE had seemed the perfect solution to her. Especially when its features were explained by a buttersmooth sales type like Farnham Fing. And it was a solution, up to a point.

"This isn't human hair," Fosdick said, holding the plastic specimen bag to the light.

Sternovsky tore his gaze from the monitor screen and the truly amazing definition of the woman's back muscles. "What?" he said.

"It's animal hair."

"Can't be," Sternovsky countered, leaning closer to the bag.

One look told him that despite what he knew-or thought he knew-about genetics, it most certainly was. Human beings didn't have a frizzy insulating undercoat. Wolverines, on the other hand, did.

"I don't understand," he said, a pained and helpless expression slipping over his face. "For this to have happened, WHE would have had to reprogram the test subject's DNA. Which is something we know it can't do...."

"It gets worse," Fosdick told him. And he was right.

The sounds in the medical wing went from lion house to elephant house to ape house. And back again. The bellows of one test subject seemed to stimulate the others to cry out. Uniformed attendants ran from one side of the hall to the other, trying in vain to quiet the patients. The sounds of the staff's voices had just the opposite of the intended effect. The hallway reeled with booming crashes as the Fing lab animals hurled themselves against locked doors and windowless walls.

"Is your father aware of what is happening?" Sternovsky asked.

"He's monitoring everything that's going on from the boardroom," Fosdick replied.

"Hasn't he seen enough? Dammit, man, why haven't you sedated these people?"

"Father wants them conscious because that gives us more information. That's what this is about. Information."

A male orderly dashed up to the youngest Fing and said, "Number Five's started going into convulsions. You'd better hurry."

When Sternovksy and Fing reached the test subject's suite, they found the door already open and a handful of uniformed attendants standing just inside the doorway. The assembled staff seemed very reluctant to approach the massively muscled figure writhing around on the floor.

Understandably so.

Of the six test subjects, Number Five was the only one Sternovsky recognized. His name was Norton Arthur Grape. He was a meteorologist on a nationally televised morning news-and-talk show that Sternovsky had caught a few times while he was at Purblind. As with the romance novelist, Grape's size had begun to get in the way of his work.

Literally.

Over the past few months, the weatherman had grown to such monstrously wide proportions that his figure blocked three-fourths of the satellite weather map. Even his jovial attitude and beaming capped smile couldn't make up for this daily eclipse of America.

Like Test Subject Two, Grape was a pathological eater.

Food was not just the central focus of his life; it was the only focus. Between his rendering of the day's high and low temperatures, incoming hurricanes and cold fronts, his on-camera banter was always about what he'd eaten the night before, what he planned to eat that night, what he'd like to eat at that very moment.

That was then; this was now.

No longer a great marshmallow in a fifteen-hundred-dollar custom-tailored suit, the new Norton Arthur Grape, naked and megabuffed, kicked and shuddered on the linoleum, his purpling lips hidden under a foaming cascade of spittle.

"He's started to sprout fur, as well," Fosdick said. "See there along either side of the spine." Sternovsky was no longer shocked by the callousness of the Fings, but he refused to stand idly by while someone suffered. "Fosdick, how can you just stand there? Do something for the poor man! For Christ's sake, he's a human being!"

Fosdick nodded to the male attendants. "Go ahead and put Number Five back in his bed. Let's get a heart monitor and EEG readout on him as quickly as possible."

The attendants approached the huge man very cautiously and carefully rolled him onto his back. As Norton Arthur Grape faced the ceiling, Sternovsky could see that his eyes were wide open, the pupils jerking up, then down, up, then down, in a rhythmic pattern.

"It looks like he may have stroked out on us," Fosdick said. "Father won't like that."

As the orderlies grouped themselves, two to a side, around the test subject and prepared to lift him onto his bed, Norton Arthur Grape's pupils snapped to center position.

Snapped and locked.

His hands moved in a blur as he suddenly, unexpectedly sat upright on the floor. Before the attendants could jump out of reach, he had snatched hold of two of them by the neck. As he squeezed their necks, their faces turned instantly purple-black.

"Back!" Fosdick cried as he retreated at top speed through the suite's open door.

Before Sternovsky could follow, he was knocked to one side by the scrambling orderlies. Because of the mad rush to escape, the biochemist was the last person to exit Grape's room before the door was slammed shut and bolted. As the American staggered back into the middle of the hallway, everyone could see that his white sterile suit was no longer white, but a gaudy speckle of tiny red drops.

From the other side of the door, an animal roar of triumph shook the very walls.

"He pulled their heads off," Sternovsky moaned as he sagged to his knees. "I saw him do it."

No one said a word.

Fosdick Fing looked down at the American without expression, his arms folded defensively across his chest.

Before Fosdick could back away out of reach, Sternovsky snatched hold of the lapel of his lab coat, pulled the research chemist's face down close to his own and shouted, "My God, he twisted those men's heads off like they were chickens?"

Chapter 20

Jimmy Koch-Roche sat behind the steering wheel of his parked V-12 Jaguar four-door sedan. He was able to drive the vehicle thanks to a custom booster seat that allowed him to see over the dashboard and out the front windshield. He wasn't looking that way at the moment, though. He was turned toward the rear, watching his recently freed client stuff her beautiful face with pork rinds.

On the leather back seat of the Jag, Puma Lee-sex queen, fashion setter and homicidal maniac-ripped into yet another two-pound bag of lowbrow snack food. Once the package was open, she didn't bother picking out the chips of deep-fried animal fat with her fingers; that method was way too slow. Instead, she tipped the bag to her parted lips and shook it, letting the rinds fall into her mouth until it would hold no more. Without lowering the package from her lips, she chewed, swallowed and quickly shook again.

Needless to say, this gustatory technique was accompanied by considerable spillage.

The pork rinds tended to fragment and fly when crunched. From her jawline down, Puma's world-renowned, shoulder-length raven tresses were flecked with bits of yellow, crispy pig fat.

Already the rear of the Jaguar sedan looked like the inside of a Dumpster approaching pickup day. Every place a stray shard of pork rind landed, it left a grease mark. Shreds of plastic bag, well lubed on the inside, were drawn by static electricity to the headliner, the front seats, the dash. The overspray of Puma's feeding frenzy, a combination of animal fat, fry oil and her saliva, coated the inside of all the windows like they'd been sprayed with PAM.

It was a detail man's worst nightmare.

Using the very broadest of yardsticks, Jimmy Koch-Roche could be seen as a detail man, too. A very well compensated detail man. He picked up after his careless clients, buffed their scratches, vacuumed their dirt, air-freshened their sullied reputations. And like his automotive counterpart, none of the nasty stuff he dealt with ever stuck to him.

There was never any chewing gum on Jimmy's size-5 shoe.

Which was the main difference between a lawyer/ detail man and your average garbage collector. That and the pay, of course.

The image, public and self, that Koch-Roche projected was that of a scrappy little bantam rooster. He was keen eyed, short fused and always ready for a fight. He dearly loved his job. Not just because of the money, though that was certainly a major part of it. He liked having other people come to him for help. Rich, beautiful, tall people with terrible trouble, almost always self-inflicted. The weaknesses of his clients, despite their physical gifts, made him feel superior. And in a court of law, he was. Before the bar, Koch-Roche was the Terminator, the brute to be reckoned with. That they-tall, strong, lovely-had to come to him, sometimes begging, and that they had to part with large portions of their net worth in order to secure his services, was too, too delicious.

Every night before he crawled into his little bed, Jimmy Koch-Roche thanked the Lord he was a lawyer.

Puma Lee paused for air, lowering the half-full bag of rinds. As she did, the lawyer could see that her face, from nose to chin, was encrusted with tiny bits of fried fat. The actress lifted her right leg, marveling at the swell of her own thigh muscles, at the definition between rectus femoris and vastus medialis. Her tanned, oiled skin shone like silk. On her face was an expression of perfect delight.

Vanity and narcissism, Koch-Roche thought. What would he ever do without them?

"How are you feeling now?" he asked the movie star.

"Famished," Puma said. "Where's Chiz? He was supposed to bring more food." She returned to the pork-rind feed bag.

"He still doesn't answer his car phone," Jimmy told her. "I hope he didn't have an accident on the way..."

A rap on the outside of the driver's window interrupted him. He turned to face a uniformed officer, who made a "lower the window" motion with his hand. The attorney hit the power button.

"Today is definitely your lucky day, Jimmy," the cop said as the glass glided down. "Ms. Lee's husband was picked up a few minutes ago at a convenience store in Hollywood."

"On what charge?"

"Charges, actually. I'm afraid you'll have your hands full with this one. It's nine counts of first-degree murder. And they got the whole thing on the store's closed-circuit video. Major ugly. Graham gave up without a struggle, though. He should be arriving here any minute."

The officer looked past the attorney, around the Jag's headrest, into the back seat. "Sorry to bring you such bad news, ma'am," he said to the screen goddess.

Puma crumpled up the empty bag of pork rinds and threw it on the floor. Then, with a depth of emotion she rarely showed in her professional career, she said, "Isn't there anything else to eat?"

Chapter 21

"Isn't there anything else to eat?" Ludlow Baculum complained.

The old/young lawmaker was like a stuck record. Or a tape loop.

And it was beginning to piss off Remo, big-time. Bound securely hand and foot, the senator sat on the floor of the Koreatown bungalow in front of the Mitsuzuki Mondiale. Since he had regained consciousness, Baculum had been both lucid and passive, if completely uncooperative.

"No more food until we get some answers from you," Remo informed him. "We want to know who supplied you with the hormone drug."

"What difference does that make?" Baculum replied. "WHE isn't illegal to sell or possess. On the other hand, kidnapping is very much illegal. And the kidnapping of a U.S. senator happens to be a capital crime."

"So we've heard," Remo said without interest. "I'll bet you're glad you voted for that bill."

"Who the hell are you two?" the senator demanded. "Who do you work for?"

"That isn't the issue here," Remo answered. "We need information. The drug you've been using is dangerous."

"That's preposterous. Look at me. I'm a new man. Better now than I ever was. How has it hurt me?"

"Ask your late wife."

The senator glared at Remo.

"There will be serious national-security problems if the use of WHE continues to spread," Remo said.

"So you're trying to make me think you're working for our government?" Baculum scoffed. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know. Since when does the DEA hire hit men?"

Remo decided not to get into that area of discussion with the senator. CURE's involvement had to remain secret at all costs.

"If this potion is not illegal," Chiun said from the comfort of the fully reclined La-Z-Boy, "then why are you so concerned about protecting the people who are giving it to you?"

"Because it is a rare and very expensive commodity that I want to keep on taking for a long, long time," the senator told him. "If I make trouble for my supplier, if I make him angry, he might cut me off."

"Face it, Lud," Remo said. "You're already cut off."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Remo picked a Ziploc bag from the TV tray and showed it to the senator. Inside was a used adhesive patch. "This was your last fix. I took it off your ninety-year-old behind myself about an hour ago, while you were still in la-la land."

For an instant, the light went out of the rheumy eyes.

"No mas, baby," Remo said. "We're just going to sit here and watch you revert to your former self. Got the walker and the oxygen tanks waiting for you in the back bedroom."

"Growing old," Chiun said solemnly, "is a bitter herb that should not have to be tasted twice."

When Ludlow Baculum looked down at his beautiful, still buffed bod, his lower lip started quivering, and in no time, hot tears were streaming over his cheeks. "You can't be that cruel," he insisted. "You just can't. It's inhuman. Please give the patch back to me. Please. I'll pay you anything you want. I'll give you anything you want. I can get you an ambassadorship. A cabinet post. A date with the First Lady."

"Let's cut the old crapola, Lud," Remo said. "You can't buy us because we aren't for sale. And no matter what you think, this isn't a kidnapping for ransom. Who sold you the patches?"

"No. I won't say."

Remo tried another angle of attack. "Why don't we get real for just a minute?" he said. "You are not being audio- or videotaped. You are not being observed through one-way mirrors. It's just you and us, Senator. And we all know that the drug not only gives you a bigger, better body, but it makes you do things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. It made you kill your bride on her wedding night. It's made others kill, as well. Somewhere inside that screwed-up old head of yours, you have to know what's happened. Exactly what's happened. You have to know how bad it is." Ludlow Baculum did not respond.

"He knows," Chiun said. "He knows and he doesn't care. He is Animal Man."

"Not for long now," Remo said, checking the clock on the living-room wall. "The effects of that muscle juice should have already started wearing off. It's happening so slowly you probably won't even notice at first. But after a while, things should start shrinking up and falling off."

Remo turned to Chiun and said, "Maybe we should let him think about that for a bit? I gotta make a call, anyway."

A look of desperation passed over the senator's face. Desperation and horror.

Remo picked up the speakerphone from the lamp table and waved for Chiun to follow him into the bungalow's tiny kitchen.

Chapter 22

At the sound of the bell-like electronic tone, Dr. Harold Smith looked up from his computer monitor to the color TV bolted to the wall, hospital-room style. A swirl of graphics on the television screen was accompanied by the raucous, annoyingly repetitive theme music of "Peephole USA." The theme only had one joyous bar, which was played over and over again at every conceivable opportunity. As Smith tuned in, the show was already in progress; it was just returning from a commercial break.

The male host turned to the female hostess and, with his cheeks fully dimpled, said, "Molly, you're not going to believe your eyes when you see this next story. I know you're into personal fitness and you watch your diet like a hawk..."

Molly beamed at him. Under the set's desk, her long, slender legs slithered lovingly over each other. After a slight hesitation, the dimpled man continued-the pause was calculated to increase the dramatic effect. "But wait till you get a look at the rich and famous people who've recently jumped on the workout bandwagon."

"I can't wait, Jed."

"Then you're ready for 'Look Who's Buffed!'" The two-shot of heads at a phony desk dissolved into the story title, which, in turn, dissolved into Jed walking along Muscle Beach in Venice, California. Jed had no shirt on, and was tanned and well-built, with just a hint of softness above the points of his hips. Dr. Smith noted that Jed was also completely hairless, like a preteenage boy.

"Like most of the people you see around me here on the beach," Jed said, "I work out regularly with a personal trainer. It's the fit-and-healthy life-style here in southern California, where the folks like to show as much skin as the law allows."

The camera cut to a pair of in-line-skating honeys in thong bikinis as they zipped past Jed on the boardwalk. The zoom framed the girls' backsides and held the shot for a good five seconds. Then the entire gratuitous skin sequence was rerun in extreme slo-mo.

"Well," Jed went on, "that trend has finally hit some of the biggest, and I mean that in every sense, movers and shakers in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Her Royal Highness, Princess Pye..."

The video cut to file footage of the former wife of the heir apparent to the Mossy Throne. She was twenty-three, blond, tall, with a stunningly beautiful face. She was also grossly overweight. The video showed her wearing what appeared to be a pup tent of a pink suit. Its fabric was tortured by her many personal bulges, all of which were on public display. Dr. Smith had heard it rumored that the princess's panty hose lasted only a few hours before the friction between her great shuddering thighs shredded them. On the video, she lifted the veil on her matching pink pillbox hat in order to bring a forkful of food to her lips with a dainty, white-gloved hand.

"This is the princess at a reception in York, England, two months ago," Jed told his viewers. "As you will soon see, the state function quickly escalated into a fruited-scone-and-Devon-cream-eating contest."

Dr. Smith shrank from the sight in disgust.

Jed was seriously overstating the case for a contest. If there was any competition going on, it was strictly between the princess and herself. Like a bulldozer, she plowed across the table of refreshments intended for the crowd of better than two hundred upper-crust well-wishers. The princess slathered on the rich cream even as she raised the half scone to her mouth. And took it down in a single ravenous bite. Smith found her economy of movement mesmerizing. And the pile of baked treats melted away, like the proverbial green cake left out in the rain.

In his cutesy voice-over, Jed scolded the princess for her excess of appetite. "Now, I've heard of a woman eating for two before," he said, "but Her Royal Highness is doing the work of ten. Those of you still wondering how she lost her girlish figure so soon after the wedding the world watched, need wonder no more."

As Smith recalled, the royal separation and divorce, endlessly publicized in the tabloid media, had been granted to the prince because of his wife's eating disorder. Which, according to all accounts, was both a public disgrace and a private nightmare. Apparently the princess didn't stop feeding even during the act of physical love. She always kept a trolley of tea cakes on her side of the marital bed.

"And she isn't the only big-time celebrity with a big-time poundage problem," Jed told his audience. "Consider, if you will, the international rock star, Skizzle..."

The video cut to a hugely fat young man, naked from the waist up, heavily tattooed, barefoot and clad in cutoff Levi's. The superstar Skizzle held a microphone in one hand and a quart bottle of his favorite alcoholic beverage, Black Death Porter, in the other as he cavorted in a spotlight on a stage before tens of thousands of screaming fans. Empty bottles of the super-high-calorie brew littered the stage. Skizzle's grotesque blubber jiggled and shook as he danced to the savage beat of his backup band. He danced and drank, sang and drank. Drank and drank.

Suddenly Skizzle froze. Clutching at his throat, the rock star pitched facedown on the stage. The six-piece band, which was accustomed to such occurrences, continued to play the vamp with overamplified enthusiasm. They played as an emergency medical team rushed out from the wings of the stage. The paramedic crew quickly voided the hefty headliner of the beer bolus that was blocking his airway.

After a good puke, Skizzle rose from the dead to the tumult of the crowd. Guzzling more Black Death, he picked up the song and dance right where he had left off.

"And last but certainly not least," Jed said, "how about the world's richest man? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dewayne Korb, the computer-software billionaire."

The video shifted to a shot of Korbtown, the three-hundred-acre high-rise complex where the thirty-something tycoon's army of fresh-from-college, handpicked nerds worked, lived, played and earned seven-figure retirement packages by age twenty-six. The shot cut again, this time to Dewayne Korb himself as he walked from the reception center's entrance to his stretch limo, waving and smiling meekly for the assembled paparazzi. His clothes were less a fashion statement than a desperate and fruitless attempt to conceal what lay beneath them. Korb wore loosefitting, pleated tan cords, a button-down blue shirt under a vast, heather-colored, Shetland V-neck sweater.

From all camera angles, he was round, like the Pillsbury dough boy.

Only with a side part and wearing saddle shoes. "The way his former associates tell the story," Jed went on, "Dewayne Korb snacked his way to greatness. He kept a Rubbermaid trash can full of highcalorie treats right beside his keyboard. That's how he managed to put in all those twenty-four hour days at the computer. But we all know how quickly brain food turns to butt food...."

The video shot zoomed in on the broad expanse of the billionaire's backside. There was enough widewale corduroy there to upholster a large armchair.

"And now the moment you've all been waiting for," Jed announced. "Look at who's buffed!"

Dr. Smith shifted uneasily in his ergonomic chair. Unlike the rest of the show's national audience, the head of CURE had a pretty good inkling of what he was about to see. And despite that, he was not prepared for what came next.

The "Peephole USA" camera caught Princess Pye as she posed for the media outside a Manhattan members-only night spot. Her face was chiseled perfection. Her body no longer a heap of unsightly bulges. Its fat content was near zero. The sleeveless bare-midriff top she wore exposed a sleek stomach that was a perfect gridwork washboard above the small, sexy indent of her navel. She had a waist like a wasp, and though she'd lost a good yard from the girth of her hips, the narrowness of her midsection made it appear that she still had womanly curves. Gone was the shuddering heft of her thighs. Those dimpled columns were just a memory. A dream, fading. The legs the princess's miniskirt revealed were slender and shapely from ankle to hip.

And even more stunning than her fat loss, than her muscle increase, was the overall tone of her body. Princess Pye absolutely glowed.

One of the reporters present called out a question. "How'd you do it, Princess?"

The blond beauty gave him a dazzling flash of white teeth and baby blue eyes. "Wouldn't you like to know," she teased.

The video then cut to Skizzle, onstage. The rock star had been changed radically, as well. He was no longer the staggering, drunken blimp. He looked like Mr. Universe in cutoff Levi's. The immense size of his chest and arms had stretched his tattoos almost beyond recognition. And there were a couple of new twists to his stage act.

He jumped as he sang and danced.

This was no hidden-trampoline trick. Over and over, Skizzle leaped five or six feet in the air, effortlessly, and completely on his own. This thanks to his hugely developed calves and hams. His high jumping antics sent his fans into delirium.

And the famous public drunkard had switched from drinking a case of Black Death Porter quarts onstage to drinking a case of Bertolli Olive Oil sixty-eight-ouncers. The plastic bottles with the jug handles. He also had a new international tour to promote his new CD.

After the concert, the "Peephole USA" camera caught Skizzle toweling off in his dressing room. Amid the crush of bodyguards, music celebs and hangers-on, Jed and his crew fought to get the story.

"Wow, Skizz," Jed gushed, "you look like a million bucks."

"Yeah, that's about right," the rock star said. The answer was vintage Skizzle: purposefully mysterious, apparently unresponsive. A response that, as all his fans knew, had to be jam-packed with hidden, important meaning. The rock star cracked the tamperproof plastic cap off a chilled bottle of greenish liquid.

"What's your secret?" Jed asked him.

"I want to thank the Bertolli company of Secaucus, New Jersey, for all its support on the Extra Virgin Tour," Skizzle said. As the singer tipped the jug to his mouth, his right biceps bulged far bigger than even Jed's extralarge head-a physical feature that was required for a career in television. The tattoos on Skizzle's enormous arm looked faded and decades old because ink lines were so far apart.

"Cheers, America!" the rock star said. Then he took a long, satisfying chug from the jug.

Skizzle's grinning, unshaved, lantern-jawed face faded into a long shot of a grassy playing field. Men in T-shirts and shorts ran around with baskets on sticks, chasing a small ball. Behind them, as far as the eye could see, was a sprawling, modern business complex.

Jed's voice over said, "Well, folks, this is just another sunny Saturday afternoon at Korbtown. What you're looking at is a weekend game of the company's intramural lacrosse league. The technical writers are battling the technical editors. It's all part of the nonstop fun-and-games life-style of these young computer whizzes."

The camera closed in on knock-kneed nerds in Nikes trying, in vain, to club each other senseless with their lacrosse sticks. Wild overhead swings ended in clean misses that sent the players staggering, sometimes even spinning to the ground.

"But wait, folks," Jed said. "We have a lastminute substitution on the editors' side...."

The TV audience was treated to a tight shot of a man's bare back. No ordinary back, this. From armpit to armpit, this man's lats were a yard wide. His traps were like great hulking boulders beneath the skin. And all of it shouted density, incredible density, as well as mass.

The man's head, seen from the rear, looked way too small in comparison to the neck width and shoulder spread. Then the head turned.

Dewayne Korb, the new Dewayne Korb, beamed for the "Peephole USA" audience.

The camera retreated to take in the whole picture. The billionaire had traded his extrawide cords for an electric blue Speedo swimsuit. He had ditched his early-eighties hairdo for a slicked-back, supermoussed bullet-head look, with plenty of whitewall over the ears. His bare pectorals were promontories of power, his forearms were tree trunks, his buttocks Rocks of Gibraltar.

With blinding speed, and no word of warning, the computer billionaire snatched up his lacrosse stick and charged into the fray.

Needless to say, it was no contest.

Dewayne Korb not only leveled the opposition, but when he was done with them, he turned on his own team, clobbering them with his stick. Those that tried to escape the field of play, screaming, he ran down. And summarily cold-cocked from behind.

When he was done, and the grass field of Korbtown was strewed with pale, skinny male bodies, some barely breathing, Dewayne Korb raised his hands over the head and did a Rocky-on-the-steps imitation.

"How could you do that to your own employees?" asked the aghast "Peephole USA" reporter.

"Hey, it's not like they're programmers," the billionaire explained.

Jed nodded as if he understood, eager to move on to his next question. "All of America wants to know about your superhard body," he said. "How about letting us all in on how you did it?"

"With money, Jed," the tycoon said. "Lots and lots of money. Now you'll have to excuse me. The Internet development group is about to throw the first pitch to the hardware guys over on the softball diamond, and I don't want to miss my turn at bat."

The cameraman chased after Korb for a dozen yards. But winded and unable to keep up, he let the muscular figure dwindle in the distance.

"Well, Molly," Jed said as the picture returned to the studio, "what do you think?"

"I'll take whatever they're having," Molly replied.

"You and fifty million other people," Jed said, laughing. "Don't worry, folks. We'll stay on this story...."

Dr. Smith shook his head. Deep in his heart of hearts, he'd been hoping that he'd made a fatal error in his forecast. Not so. Like a train on a track, the doomsday scenario he had predicted was approaching. A mysterious wonder drug gets international publicity. The body-image-crazed public clamors for access to it. And when the product finally arrives on the market, the public gobbles it whole.

Presto!

The end of civilization as we know it.

Dr. Smith had just shut off the TV when his scrambled phone line rang. It was Remo reporting in. The news wasn't promising.

"Our man is keeping his lip zipped," Remo said. "He doesn't want to go back to being a geezer."

"You've removed his patch?"

"Yeah, but nothing's happened yet. Lud's still buffed."

"Keep on him. Maybe he'll crack when he starts to lose his fountain of youth."

"What about the analysis of the Boomtower patch?" Remo asked. "Has the report come in yet?"

Dr. Smith had arranged for that evidence to be chemically analyzed by a private lab in Los Angeles-an outfit used by the CIA for work they didn't want the FBI to know about. "We had a hit there," Smith said. "The drug-delivery patch was manufactured in Taiwan, part of a job lot purchased by Family Fing Pharmaceuticals, of the same country."

"Never heard of them."

"Up until now, they've mass-produced herbal remedies based on naturopathic and folk recipes. I'm still running down their corporate network, trying to connect names with our list of known users to uncover the pipeline, and hopefully, trace it directly back to Family Fing."

Suddenly, there was an awful scream at the other end of the scrambled line. It was so loud that it made Smith flinch and pull the handset from against his ear. "It's Lud," Remo said. "Call you back..."

Dr. Smith waited for five interminable minutes, drumming his fingertips on his desktop. He picked up the return call before the first ring had finished. "Yes?"

"Bad news, I'm afraid," Remo said. "Old Lud checked out. He suicided on us."

"What? No one was watching him?"

"We had him securely tied in the next room," Remo defended. "Didn't want him to overhear this conversation. We only left him alone for a couple of minutes. He didn't get loose from his bonds."

"Then how did he manage it?"

"He chewed off his own right foot. I never thought a ninety-year-old could be that limber. Before we could stop it, he bled out on us. Sorry, Smitty. I didn't figure he'd do a thing like that."

Dr. Smith hadn't figured it, either, so he couldn't put all the blame on his assassins. What seemed clear to him was that the negative side effects of the patch were escalating-the longer a person used the drug, the worse things got. It was something that he hadn't included in his forecast, and was a development that kicked the disaster scenario even further over into the danger zone. It meant he had even less time to get the matter under control.

"We've got quite a mess on our hands here," Remo explained.

"Don't worry about it," Smith said with a sigh. "I'll send over a disposal team at once."

After he hung up, the director of CURE pulled up the file of Los Angeles steam cleaners. He had their service rates listed right by their phone numbers. Selecting the least expensive service, he hit the autodialer and waited for Andy the Rug Doctor to pick up the phone.

Chapter 23

Jimmy Koch-Roche drew himself up to his full height and addressed the biggest box-office couple in movie history. "I'm sorry, but I can't let you drive yourselves home," he said. "It's as simple as that."

"We're not children," Puma Lee protested. She paced the floor of the attorney's walnut-paneled interview room like a caged animal. Four steps to the wall. Turn. Four steps back.

Chiz, who leaned against the front of Koch-Roche's desk, agreed with his wife. "A while back, you said something to me about consequences. Specifically, you said that there wouldn't be any. For your information, I consider being forced to have a baby-sitter a negative outcome."

The little lawyer held up his hands for silence. "I promised you that I could keep any and all charges from sticking, but come on. To do that, I need some cooperation from you both. In the last twenty-four hours, the pair of you have demonstrated a certain, well, let's call it an unevenness of temper. I want to avoid a repetition of similar incidents. I can work miracles in front of a jury, but there's a limit to even what I can do. Understand this, if you pull another grand-scale boner like the SpeeDee Mart debacle, I can no longer assure you of a get-out-of-jail free card."

"Not good enough, Jimmy boy," Chiz said. "Not good enough by a long shot." He walked over to where the attorney stood and raised his massive fist over the little man's head like the hammer of God.

To his credit, Koch-Roche did not shrink back, even though he'd had ample evidence of what his clients were capable of. His was a world of bluster and bluff, of smoke and mirrors. And five-inch lifts.

Koch-Roche said, "I want you two to allow yourselves to be escorted back to Bel Air by my driver and security team, as per the bail agreement we worked out with the judge." He didn't use the words house arrest because they sounded so unpleasant. "I want you to stay there inside your compound under the protection of my men. You'll be safe there and you'll have an unlimited supply of the foods you desire, while I work on your defenses. I'm not asking you to become permanent prisoners on your own estate. We just need some quiet time to sort things out. Some time without further incident."

Chiz let his fist drop to his side.

"Honestly, it doesn't seem like all that much to ask," Koch-Roche said. "Considering the alternative, which is that you both get convicted of first-degree murder."

"We get restless," Puma said.

"Then roam around your own grounds. There'll be no one around to bother you. I've already arranged for your mansion staff to take a holiday. My security people will be taking care of all your needs. Cooking. Cleaning. Grounds. They are there only to help you, so please don't do anything to harm them."

"You're not going to try and take our patches away, I hope," Chiz said. Then he added, "Because that would be a big mistake."

"That's the last thing I want to do," Koch-Roche replied. "But I do think it's pretty obvious that you both may be having a little trouble with the dosage that you're currently taking. I've already contacted the manufacturer about correcting that. We should have a solution to the problem from them in the next few days."

"But if you give us less of the hormone, our bodies might shrink up," Puma said.

"Or go back to fat," Chiz chimed in.

"Not necessarily," the lawyer hedged. "And anyway, wouldn't it be better to give up a bit of muscle than to have a string of murder charges hanging over your heads?"

Puma and Chiz exchanged dubious looks.

"Isn't there some other way of fixing things?"

Puma asked. "So we don't lose any of what we've got?"

"The manufacturer is looking into that, too," Koch-Roche assured them. "They are as concerned as we are over what's happened. The last thing the manufacturer wants is a drug that nobody will take."

The attorney pushed a button on his desk intercom. "I'll have my people take you home now," he said. "You've both had a long and trying day. You must be exhausted."

After a moment, four large, heavyset men entered the interview room single file. They were dressed head to foot in Threat Level IV body armor, including shiny black helmets, black shin guards, black steel-toed shoes, black gloves and clear, bulletproof shields. They looked like a cross between riot police and ancient samurai. They were armed with assault-style pump shotguns and Taser stun guns, and had headset mikes and earphones. Behind the Plexiglas of their face guards, the security men didn't look happy.

"These are the guys who are going to mow our lawn?" Chiz said incredulously.

"Among other things," Koch-Roche answered.

"Aw, let's just get out of here, Chiz," Puma said. "I'm starting to get hungry again."

ON THE WAY DOWN to the parking garage in the elevator, security man Bob Gabhart was on full red alert. His body was badly bruised from the encounter earlier in the day with the little Oriental. Every time Gabhart breathed, he could feel the contusion above his left kidney. His torso was wrapped with yards of elastic bandage. No way would he hesitate to use deadly force again; from now on, it was shoot on sight.

Amazingly, he hadn't actually felt the blow when it had been delivered. Gabhart was a guy who had been punched plenty of times, given his extensive martial-arts training during his stint in the U.S. Army as a Ranger captain, and during his subsequent, much more lucrative career as a security-systems analyst. Often, in the latter case, he'd been socked by a client while said client was either drunk or stoned, usually trying to make violent contact with someone else, an annoying photographer, a former spouse or business partner. It was part of Gabhart's job to absorb abuse, either directed at or coming from his employer.

The incident at Koch-Roche's mansion earlier in the day had been unusual to say the least. In his professional experience, no matter what happened in the movies, when the odds were seven to two, the side with seven always won. Especially when the side with seven all had guns. That his highly trained team had lost was as surprising as the painless blow that had so thoroughly bruised his back. A blow that had knocked him senseless; like he had been blindsided with a twenty-five-pound feather duster. Only after he had regained consciousness had the pain started. Last time he'd checked, he was still peeing orange. According to the doctors, he was still bleeding a little inside. But no way would Gabhart take the rest of the day off. He had been humiliated in front of his boss. Somehow he had to make it up, to save face.

It was cramped in the elevator car. There were too many big bodies. Too much gear. For Gabhart, the whole situation felt strange and uncomfortable. He'd had no idea that Puma and Chiz were so pumped. They were built like animals. And there was a tension in the car, something electric in the air. Like the pair the security team was supposed baby-sit was about to go berserk. Their muscles kept twitching, twitching, twitching.

The security man had thought that standing less than a foot behind the great Puma Lee would be the thrill of a lifetime. It was, but not in the way he'd expected. It had never occurred to him that he'd feel threatened by a female movie star. Physically threatened.

Even though the actress didn't even look at him, he had a sense that if given the chance, she could and would beat him to a bloody, quivering pulp. Having hit people before, with fists, feet and baton, Gabhart knew what it felt like to make contact with solid muscle. The shock wave shot right up your arm or leg. He had never hit anything as dense as the body Puma Lee displayed. And he had the sinking feeling that nothing he could do with fists, feet or baton would make the slightest impression on her. That he was fully body armored and carried a 10-shot 12-gauge gave him no comfort whatsoever.

When the car opened in the basement, fresh air rushed in. Two of the security men slipped out with shotguns shouldered, and knelt beside the doorway, sweeping the area for hostiles.

A voice in Gabhart's helmet said, "This is Stinger. We are all clear. Let's roll."

A black stretch limo surged from its parking space and came to a squealing stop in front of the elevator. Its black-uniformed driver immediately jumped out and opened the rear passenger door.

As Chiz and Puma got in the limo, a mint green Ford Explorer pulled in behind. It was the troop carrier. Three of the security men got in it. Bob Gabhart opened the limo's front passenger door and climbed into the shotgun seat.

The driver, a blockily built Samoan who looked like he could handle himself, hit the electronic door locks, belted himself in and floored the big Lincoln, sending it screeching away from the elevator.

As they climbed up the concrete ramp to the street, tires squealing as the long vehicle rounded the series of hairpin turns, Gabhart flipped up his Plexiglas face shield but didn't take off the helmet. Behind his head, the soundproof, one-way privacy window that divided the limo's driver and passenger compartments was up. The stars didn't want to be disturbed.

After they'd exited the parking garage and veered onto the street, a voice in Gabhart's headset said, "Captain Crunch, we are on your bumper."

"Roger that, Stinger," he said. "We'll proceed to base by the prearranged route."

Sticking to the major streets, the limo worked its way to the freeway on-ramp. As the driver merged with the thick evening traffic, Gabhart checked out the view on his side. In the distance were the glittering lights and concrete gridwork of Megalopolis. Just ahead, at the next off-ramp, he could see the sprawling roofline and acres of free parking of the Sepulveda Malt.

Then a knuckle rapped on the other side of the privacy window.

As the window dropped, the familiar face of Puma Lee appeared in the opening. Gabhart saw the tension around her eyes and mouth.

"We need to make a stop," she said.

The driver looked at her in the rearview, then over at Gabhart, who for the purposes of this mission was his boss.

"Sorry, ma'am," Gabhart said, "that's not on our itinerary. My orders are to take you directly to your mansion."

"My husband and I need to pick up a few things at the mall," the movie star insisted. "Take the next off-ramp."

Gabhart steeled himself and looked her straight in the eye. "No need to trouble yourself with that kind of thing, ma'am," he said. "If you'd like to make a list, the security team will be more than happy to pick up whatever you want after we get you settled in at home."

"I told you to take the next off-ramp."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am. I have strict orders to see that you go straight home. It's for your own protection."

Gabhart saw the actress's fingers tighten on the top of the seat back. Her fingernails dug into the leather. For some reason, he hadn't noticed her nails before. They weren't just red, long and pointed; they were thick, almost like bone. And they sank into the seat cushion like five paring knives into an overripe peach.

Chiz Graham leaned into the window opening beside his wife. "For your protection, son, take the next off-ramp."

"It'll cost me my job, sir...."

Puma Lee reached through the privacy window and touched the driver's wide shoulder. "Turn now," she ordered.

The driver looked at Gabhart, who shook his head. The movie star responded by sinking her nails into the driver's deltoid. Instantly, the blood drained from his round face, and he swerved the limo for the offramp, cutting between a semitruck and a minivan poking along in the slow lane.

Behind the limo, the Explorer's brakes screeched as it attempted maneuver for the off-ramp, but it was cut off by the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The driver swung into the emergency parking lane, locking the brakes again. When the Explorer finally came to a stop, the driver reversed his way back to the ramp, tires smoking.

"This is Captain Crunch," Gabhart said into his headset mike. "Stinger, we've had a sudden change of plans. We're proceeding at once to the Sepulveda Mall."

"Negative, Captain Crunch," said the voice in his ear. "Repeat. Abort that. What is the trouble?"

"Victoria and Albert have the munchies," Gabhart explained. "I'll keep you updated on our position." When he looked over, he saw the blood dripping down the front of the driver's sleeve and lapel. Puma Lee still had her nails in him.

Gabhart thought about reaching for his side arm. But what then? If he pulled it, would he actually use it? Would he shoot a goddamned movie star he was supposed to be protecting? He didn't know. And the not knowing made him hesitate. He did know that drawing his gun and being unable to use it could put him in an even worse situation, as in being forced to eat it. So he reached for the cellular phone and started punching in the numbers for the Koch-Roche and Associates office.

"Who are you calling?" Puma asked.

"Got to report the change in route, ma'am."

"You don't got to do anything," she said, letting go of the driver and snatching the phone.

Gabhart didn't tussle with her over it. There wasn't time. She took it from him in a single, blindingly fast sweep of her hand, like stealing candy from a small, clumsy and not overbright child.

"I'm really getting tired of this guy, Chiz."

"Ditto," the action star said. "It's like being back in first grade."

"Open the sunroof," Puma told the driver.

As the panel slid back, exposing the rear of the limo to bright sunlight, the movie star seized Gabhart by both shoulders.

"Wait... !" he cried.

But it was already too late. With astounding ease, the woman pulled him through the narrow privacy window. Before the security man could do anything about it, she had thrust him halfway out of the sunroof, headfirst into the streaming wind.

Though he tried desperately to cling to the sunroof's opening, with one hard shove Puma Lee broke the power of his grip and sent him flying up and out of the limo.

Gabhart hit the trunk lid, then the road, bouncing and rolling wildly across the pavement. The driver of the Explorer, in high-speed pursuit of the wayward limo, once again had to slam on the brakes. He swerved the four-by-four into the oncoming lane to keep from running over Gabhart. Despite all the body armor, the impact shattered his right knee and shoulder. He rolled to a stop, facedown in the gutter.

As he lay there, gasping, Gabhart had no idea how lucky he was.

Chapter 24

When Puma Lee tapped the limo driver on the side of the neck, he flinched, horribly. His eyes full of dread, he glanced up at her in his rearview mirror.

"Stop over there," she said. She pointed across the parking lot, at a side entrance to the mall.

As Chiz opened the door, he warned the driver, "Wait here for us. We'll be back in a minute." But as soon as the movie-star couple stepped up on the curb, the limo driver put the gas pedal to the floorboard. With a squeal of tires, he shot away, highballing it for the nearest exit.

Chiz started to chase him down, and would have, but Puma caught his arm. "Don't bother," she said. "We'll take a cab home."

The movie stars slipped through the side door and onto the mall's main gallery. The shopping corridor featured marble-veneer floors and three-story-high atrium ceilings. There were full-size tropical trees and jungle plants in strategically positioned beds. Every hundred yards or so, the gallery walls were broken by a waterfall or fountain. Flashing neon lights lined both sides of the main walkway, luring customers into stores aimed at all age and demographic brackets. There was the young-and-baggy look. The old-and-dowdy look. The middle-aged-crazy look.

The stores seemed to be clustered according to the type of merchandise they offered. Chiz and Puma strolled past four jewelry stores in a row. Then four department stores. Shoe stores. Bookstores. It appeared that every business had cloned itself at least twice. The mall was a fertile spawning ground for various mercantile species. And some of them were wheeled. The shopping center had rented out some of the space in the middle of the gallery aisles to arts-and-crafts vendors with display carts. Again, there was strong evidence that some kind of cloning was going on. Witness the multiple outlets for handmade pottery. For watercolor portraits of Labrador retrievers. For potpourri. For wicker baskets. For gnome figurines.

Chiz and Puma Lee never ever shopped in such places. For one thing, they couldn't go out in public without being mobbed. For another, they had no interest in wearing what everybody else was wearing. They were the trendsetters, ahead of the current fashion curve by light-years. Their clothes and accessories were custom-designed, guaranteed one-of-a-kind items. They had appointments with exclusive couturiers and shoemakers. Nothing they put on their backs had ever seen the inside of a plastic bag.

As the movie stars moved purposefully down the gallery, they drew stares and double takes from the regular mall shoppers. People stopped in their tracks, slack jawed, as if witnessing some miracle of Creation. Their eyes were at first puzzled, disbelieving, then brimming with delight. As Chiz and Puma strolled along, they could hear the same words uttered over and over: "Is that really them?"

The mall customers began to follow along behind them like they were pied pipers, dropping whatever it was that they were doing, wherever they were going, whatever they had intended to consume. The gnome and potpourri vendors struggled to keep their carts in place as more and more people surged into the main corridor.

Despite the gathering throng, Chiz and Puma proceeded without incident until they reached the spawning ground of the camera stores. One of the clerks, who happened to be standing outside his shop cleaning a display window, caught sight of the commotion coming toward him. Instinctively, he snatched a loaded camera from the counter and, thinking of posterity, rushed forth into the middle of the aisle to record the moment.

In so doing, he blocked the actors' path.

Chiz didn't react well to the flash going off in his face. It startled and angered him.

The well-scrubbed camera clerk was trying to get both stars in the frame when Chiz took matters into his own hands. He grabbed the camera, which hung around the clerk's neck by a webbed strap, and flung it over his shoulder. The gesture was halfhearted, like he was shooing away an annoying fly.

Halfhearted or not, it jerked the hapless clerk right out of his shoes and sent him hurtling onto the mob forming behind the movie stars, a mob further fueled by people rushing out of the stores for a look at what in the world was going on. Because he landed on the mob and not the marble floor, the camera clerk might well have survived the fall-were it not for the fact he was dead the moment his feet left his shoes, when Chiz's jerk had broken his neck in three places.

The mood in the mall's gallery was so joyous that people didn't seem to notice that someone had just died. The screams of those few who had actually been struck by the corpse were drowned out by the Muzak and the excited rumble of hundreds of other shoppers. Oblivious to what lay beneath their feet, the mob tromped on the camera clerk's body like it was a display dummy or a rolled-up length of carpet.

An obstacle. Not a victim.

Puma and Chiz were hardly aware of the tumult that surrounded them. They were that focused on aromas, on the myriad delicious smells coming from the direction of the mall's food court.

For its dining area, the mall's developers had created a miniature amphitheater. A sunken oval under huge skylights, with more of the ubiquitous jungle planters, palm trees and ferns, as well as a black tile floor. The semicircular seating area was bordered by individual take-out food shops. The cuisine on offer was a mixture of ethnic and traditional. There was the usual Italian, Mexican and Chinese fast food, but also curious, main-course cross-over items like Moo Shu Chimichangas, Carne Asada Calzones and the like. This, so the businesses could compete with their neighbors on either side. In addition to the full-meal-type of fast food, there were several all-dessert shops, including The Big Cookie, which sold enormous, half-cooked chocolate-chip cookies, and Sin-O-Bun, which sold enormous, half-cooked cinnamon buns.

The tables in the amphitheater were about a third full of shoppers, surrounded by bags full of purchases, by baby carriers, by avalanches of fast-food paper debris. The dull roar of the approaching crowd made them look up from their lasagne stir-fries and deepdish egg rolls.

It was into this arena that Chiz and Puma strode, with an army of awestruck fans at their heels. Most of these people were under thirty; many of them teenage mall rats who had been spending time, not money, in the faint hopes of being entertained.

As the juggernaut of humanity rolled onward, some people-the easily baffled-didn't move out of the way quickly enough. Chiz and Puma tossed the living statues left and right, sending them crashing into the plate-glass windows of the lines of shops on either side of them.

As the mob swept into the food court, mall security finally made its presence known. A dozen brown-uniformed men entered the amphitheater from all directions. At the sight of the huge crowd, they also seemed to freeze. There was no question of drawing their side arms; there were too many people for that. They conferred through their walkie-talkies, but it was clear that they didn't have a clue what they should do. Finally, the ranking officer ran to the nearest pay phone to call the LAPD.

Among the people loathe to move out of the way of the throng were the good folks waiting in line at The Big Cookie for a fresh batch hot out of the oven. They had already been waiting ten minutes.

Chiz and Puma weren't really interested in cookies, but the thought that someone else might be eating one right under their noses absolutely infuriated them. If anybody was going to eat cookies, it was them.

And them alone.

They altered their course a few degrees, just enough to put themselves dead center in the middle of the cookie line.

The would-be eaters and the service clerks in blue gingham paper hats gawked as the movie stars and their entourage bore down on them. They were unsure what it all meant.

Could it be part of a movie that was being filmed?

Were the newcomers trying to cut in line?

The three cookie fans with the mental wherewithal to take a good look into Puma Lee's eyes didn't stick around to find out. They beat feet. The others instantly became HFOs-Human Flying Objects. Chiz and Puma really put some muscle into these tosses, because it was a territorial thing, because there was real anger behind the action. They plucked the cookie fans out of the lineup and, with a single twist of their torsos, sent them into low and tenuous orbits. The cookie eaters' bodies cartwheeled as they arced over into the eating area, crashing limply upon the metal tables and the concrete-and-steel housings of the overflowing trash receptacles.

Mall security looked on in helpless horror.

And the crowd began to chant, "Poo-mah! Poo-mah!"

The confusion in the minds of the shoppers was understandable. Overstimulated by bright neon lights, by loud music, by flashy displays, they weren't really sure what they were witnessing. A music video. A computer game. An infomercial.

On the other hand, Chiz and Puma weren't thinking at all. They were simply reacting to the sights and smells of the food court. Nostrils flared, they moved along the ring of fast-food shops. It wasn't spices they were sniffing at; it was the fat content.

They passed by Veggie Haven with scarcely a sidelong look. At Tex-a-Que, it was a different story. The odors of roasted fatty meat and of steak-fry grease drew the actors like a magnet.

Woe to those fans of down-home barbecue who did not flee.

Practically swallowing his tongue in excitement at the prospect of serving the stars, the Western-shirted, Buddy Holly-spectacled clerk automatically said what he had been programmed to say, "Howdy, folks. What'll you have?"

"We'll take a little of everything," Puma said. Chiz smashed through the top of the plate-glass counter with his left fist while Puma cleared the queue of Tex-a-Que fans with a single look. After ripping away the remains of the countertop, they plunged their hands into the mounds of heavily sauced beef, smoked chicken and hot links, of potato salad and coleslaw that were ninety-five percent pure mayo, of baked beans swimming in bacon grease.

Behind them, the crowd closed in.

The teenagers continued to chant, "Poo-mah! Poo-mah!"

Some began to make howler-monkey sounds: "Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo."

The actress picked up a whole pork butt in one hand and a fistful of Louisiana hot links in the other. She alternated bites, gulping and gnawing, until both hands were empty.

Chiz meanwhile concentrated on the coleslaw. He didn't lift his head from the slaw bucket when he heard a megaphone order the mob to clear a path. Only when the amplified voice barked right in his ear did he raise his face.

"Stand back from the counter," the command said. Of course, that was absolutely the last thing Chiz and Puma were prepared to do. With grease running down their chins, the movie stars stared at the rent-a-cops. All four had their service revolvers drawn.

"We don't want any more trouble," said the head security man. "The LAPD are on their way. Don't make things any worse for yourselves than they already are."

Puma and Chiz shared a look. Trouble? What trouble?

The actress picked up the steel serving tray of barbecue beans and tipped it to her lips. The overflow of beans and sauce spilled all down the front of her cleavage.

"I'm asking you again," the head security guy said, "to please step away from the counter. We need you to follow us to a secure area. For your own safety, please."

The other three rent-a-cops looked mighty nervous, sandwiched as they were between the press of the mob-which was now shouting, "Let 'em eat! Let 'em eat!"-and the huge, animal-like, food-covered megastars.

"Mghhmppp!" Chiz said, gesturing with a slab of baby back ribs, his mouth crammed full of sweet potato pie.

At this point, three of the four bodyguards assigned to the stars by their lawyer finally caught up to them. The private security crew pushed to the front of the crowd.

"Oh, Christ," said Stinger as he viewed the carnage around Tex-a-Que.

"You guys aren't LAPD," said the mall's head security man. "So, who the hell are you?"

"Their court-ordered escort."

"The court isn't going to be real pleased with your service."

"They ditched us. And nearly killed one of our guys who was riding with them."

Above the chaos in the food court came the sound of approaching police sirens.

Lots of sirens.

The mob began to boo. Its size had grown. It looked like everyone in the shopping center, easily four or five thousand people, had migrated to the food-court area. All the shops were deserted, racks of merchandise and cash registers left unguarded, but even the thieves were too fascinated by the little drama to stay on the job.

"We don't want any gunplay here," Stinger told the world-famous couple. "A lot of innocent people could get hurt. The press for you two would be horrible. Before this gets any messier, let's just chill out."

Stinger moved a little closer to Chiz, with his hands raised. His stubby 12-gauge riot pump hung under his arm on its sling.

The action star lowered the gnawed remnants of the ribs.

Puma stopped licking the trough of beans.

Stinger had unwittingly put himself between them and Senor Chorizo, the next fast-food shop in the row. He was a red flag; they were bulls.

It wasn't a simple matter of competition, or that he was interfering with the smooth execution of their feeding frenzy. All the fatty meats and bacon drippings they had eaten were already beginning to react with the WHE in their bloodstreams. They had blast furnaces in their biceps, nuclear reactors in their buns. And in their bellies was the glow of power.

Rage seemed so natural, so right.

And the outburst of violence so pleasurable in its release.

Unaccustomed though Chiz and Puma both were to playing before a live audience-neither had ever acted on the stage-they got into the spirit of the thing. The feedback of a crowd was like an energy boost.

Some of the people who cheered and hooted and urged them on were still laboring under the delusion that what was happening was not real.

That bubble quickly burst.

In a movement quicker than the eye could follow, Puma Lee stepped behind Stinger. Before he could react, she took hold of his elbows and lifted, raising and trapping his arms above his head.

Though they hadn't rehearsed this part of the show, Chiz knew exactly what to do. Closing on the bodyguard, he grabbed hold of the top of his armored vest and ripped it down and off. Then he gripped the man's shirt and stripped it down around his waist. "Jesus, don't..." Stinger pleaded.

They were his last words, if you didn't count the scream.

Chiz snatched hold of his collarbones, and as easily as he had torn off the vest, he ripped the man's muscles from his chest.

The crowd oohed and aahed. What special-effects treat this? What high-tech movie magic?

A make-believe torso spurting blood from clusters of broken arteries.

The folks in the front row knew the action was real. The blood that hit them was hot. And the smell that wafted over them, the smell of punctured guts as Chiz continued to root around in the man's body cavity-there was no way to fake that.

Puma slung the corpse aside.

People at the front edge of the mob tried to retreat, but were blocked by those behind them who refused to budge. Likewise, the two security teams found retreat impossible.

And then there was the chorizo.

A Mexican sausage so spicy that it was colored orange from all the chili powder and red peppers it contained. But the main thing about chorizo was the grease. When squeezed out of its casing into a hot skillet, or in this case, on a hot grill, the mound of spiced pork released pungent clouds of steam and a cascade of chili-tinted animal fat. Fat that was scraped off the grill with a spatula and into a gutter that dripped into a five-gallon plastic bucket.

A bucket long overdue for dumping.

The three-person staff of Senor Chorizo, all wearing minisombreros and sequined red felt vests over their aprons, had already jumped ship. As they were all Guatemalan nationals, and not fully Americanized Californians, the sight of brutal murder did not immediately make them think about popcorn and an extralarge soda. It made them think of death squads, which in turn, sent them on their heels, aprons flapping.

This left a half-dozen heaps of decased sausage oozing on the grill.

If there was perfume of the damned, this was it. Red chili. Cumin. Tumeric. Coriander. Garlic. A hint of clove.

With a higher annual income than the GNP of some island nations, Chiz Graham and Puma Lee could have had literally anything or anyone that their hearts desired. But all they wanted was that slops bucket of chorizo grease.

The security teams tracked Chiz and Puma with their weapons as the movie stars jumped the counter of the Mexican food shop in a single bound, like they had springs on the soles of their shoes.

None of the security guys wanted to shoot. Or rather, they all wanted to shoot, but the consequences of such an act were too unthinkable. Shooting unarmed civilians in the line of duty was one thing; shooting unarmed famous and rich civilians was another. If the first was a no-no, the second was the Empire State Building of no-no's.

Chiz and Puma ignored all the handguns and shotguns pointed at their backs. They were too busy struggling over who would take the first gulp from the chorizo bucket. Both had a firm grip on the container's rim; neither would relent, though the sides of the bucket bowed outward. Neither would relent because he or she knew that to give the other the first taste would mean there would be none left.

With a loud crack, the bucket split down the sides. And the rich orange oil splashed over their bare legs, shoes and the black tile floor.

Chiz flung himself facedown and began lapping at the grease. Puma, now in full control of the slops bucket, took a moment to pour what little remained down her throat. Then she, too, played human rag mop with her tongue.

They had cleaned about half the square footage of the floor when another bullhorn blasted at them from the far side of the counter.

"This is the LAPD SWAT team," said an unfriendly male voice. "Put your hands where we can see them and slowly, I repeat, slowly, rise up from behind the counter."

Chapter 25

Remo checked the rental car's rearview mirror. At the gated entrance to Chiz and Puma Lee's Bel Air estate, there were still no signs of life. Nothing had moved for better than an hour. That was when the mansion staff was herded off the grounds by three guys in full riot gear. Remo was tired of sitting, tired of looking up in the mirror and seeing zip. It was warm in the car, even with all the windows rolled down. The evening air was dead still.

The only sound was Chiun's snoring.

A low, steady rumble punctuated at irregular intervals by sharp pops. The Master of Sinanju slept sitting up in the front passenger seat, his torso held in place by his shoulder belt.

His napping wasn't a nodding-off every ten minutes, nor was it poor blood circulation to the brain, which one might expect of a normal, semisenile ninety-year-old. One of the benefits of a lifetime of study in mind-and-body control was that the Master was able to sleep anywhere, anytime. To drift off and awake instantly refreshed, ready for action.

Remo checked the clock on the dash. How could it possibly take Puma and Chiz so long to get here? he asked himself. The judge had ordered them to proceed directly from their lawyer's office to the mansion, a journey of no more than fifteen or twenty minutes by surface streets. To disobey the court's order meant both movie stars would go to jail. Which was why Koch-Roche had arranged for them to be escorted to their destination. It didn't figure that the security guys would go along with a side trip to some intermediate destination; what did figure was that something bad had happened. Something real bad.

Remo decided to call Smith. As he reached for the cell phone, it beeped. He knew it had to be Smith calling him, since no one else knew their mobile number.

At the sharp sound, Chiun's eyes snapped open. He gave Remo an irritated look, as if he'd been the one who'd caused the noise.

"Yeah, Smitty," Remo said as he picked up the phone. "What's going on?"

Chiun's expression mellowed and he yawned. The Emperor could do no wrong.

"A change of plans," Smith replied. Because they were talking on a cell phone, which could be monitored without their knowledge, the conversation had to be circumspect. "The job lot you were sent to collect is no longer, on the market. It was unexpectedly detoured, and another collector has taken control of the targeted items."

"Do I know the new owner?" Remo asked.

"A Mr. Black and Mr. White."

"No chance of retrieval, then?"

"Not at this time. The situation is fluid. The outcome uncertain."

"I take it, then," Remo said, "that we have another SpeeDee Mart situation in progress?"

"Yes, only more extreme," Smith told him. "Unfortunately, the matter is out of our hands, perhaps for good. I want you to proceed to the next shop on your list. The item there is definitely in the same league. Once it is under your control, it may open up other profitable areas of search."

"Got it. Later." Remo broke the connection and put the cell phone back in its cradle.

"And?" Chiun said, stretching like a cat.

"Our movie stars are not coming home anytime soon," Remo said. "The local police have them surrounded somewhere between here and Koch-Roche's office. It sounds like they must've killed again."

"The wild animal cannot change its spots."

"An old Korean saying?"

Chiun couldn't hide his disappointment at the feebleness of Remo's memory. It was so poor that he couldn't recall the contributions of one of the greatest men to ever draw breath.

"King Sejong, your fifteenth century," the Master said. He was prepared to go into a lengthy lecture on the scientific and cultural achievements of the Yi Dynasty monarch known as the "Leonardo of Korea." But his one and only pupil was focused on the task immediately at hand.

"No way we can get to Chiz and Puma now." Remo continued. "Smith wants us to pick up the little dipshit attorney instead. Apparently, he's up to his eyeballs in this mess."

Smith was the magic word. It made Chiun forget all about the urgent need to reeducate Remo.

"By all means," the Master said, giving the car's steering wheel an impatient wave of his hand, "let us fly to the dipshit."

Chapter 26

Jimmy Koch-Roche had to sit on his hands to keep from chewing his nails and ruining a 250-dollar manicure. He was watching the big-screen TV in his private office. A special news bulletin had interrupted regular programming. The live video picture was shot from a helicopter circling over the Sepulveda Mall. It showed an army of black-and-white police cruisers, SWAT vans, paramedic and fire units in the mall parking lot. At the bottom of the screen was the computer-generated headline MegaStars On Mall Kill Rampage.

The TV reporter in the helicopter was rehashing what little information she had while the pilot flew around and around the parking lot. "At about 5:30 p.m.," she said, "Chiz Graham and Puma Lee, both recently arrested for murder, evaded their armed escort and entered the mall at the south entrance. What happened next is still unclear, but authorities believe it precipitated the deaths of at least five more people, shoppers at the mall. The earlier reports we had of automatic-weapons fire inside the mall are all still unconfirmed at this time. The police have sealed off the area and are not answering any questions until the situation on the ground is resolved." The camera cut back to the woman reporter, who was grimacing as she pressed her earphone tighter to her ear. Then she said, "Okay, Jeff, uh, we have located an eyewitness on the ground. I'm breaking to Filberstan Wanajinji. Go ahead, Fil..."

The video switched to a swarthy-looking young man in shirtsleeves standing in front of a gas station. The male reporter turned to a bleached blond, crewcut, nose-ringed youth next to him and said, "You were inside the mall when the incident happened. Can you describe it for our audience?"

"Big movie stars started kicking butt, that's what happened," the boy said. "Royal kick butt, man."

"You saw the violence?"

"Look at my threads, man," he said, lifting the hem of his superbaggy, monochromatic plaid sports shirt. "See that?"

The reporter leaned in for a better look. "Uh, not really..."

"That there's blood. It was flying everywhere. Chiz Graham, man, when he splattered that guy, he ruined my threads."

"What guy?"

"Some dude with a shotgun and strange helmet."

"A police officer?"

"Don't know. Whoever he was, Chiz killed him good."

"We've heard rumors about gunfire inside the mall. Can you tell us anything about that?"

"Oh, man, it was way cool, like a firing squad. Cops lined up on one side, and Puma Lee and Chiz on the other."

"Did Puma and Chiz have guns?" the reporter asked. "Did they do any of the shooting?"

"Nah, they just got the holy crap blown out of them."

"You saw that?"

"Hell, yes. It was like World War III. The cops just cut loose on them. Bullets and guts went everywhere. See this here...?" He held up another part of his shirt. "This is some of Puma, I think."

As the reporter waved the camera in for a closeup, Jimmy Koch-Roche shut off the TV.

To say things weren't going well for the diminutive attorney was a major understatement. First, there was the as-yet-unexplained death of Bradley Boomtower after an attack on the L.A. Riots' training headquarters by two unidentified men claiming to be assassins. Assassins sent by whom, no one knew. But Boomtower had most certainly gone down. Then came the disappearance of Senator Baculum while under the protection of both private and federal security. Despite a three-state manhunt, no trace of him had been found. It was a lucky thing that there had been so many witnesses to the senator's abduction, or Koch-Roche himself might have been suspected in helping the man flee the murder charge.

Again, a two-man team had committed the attack. Probably the same one that had gone after Boomtower. That a pair of men, one of them reportedly Oriental and ancient, could overpower and disarm more than seven trained men was difficult to understand. That one of them could take Boomtower's life without using a weapon of some sort seemed impossible.

The big question was, who sent them? But the huge question was, who was next?

Clearly, someone out there was targeting the high-profile users of WHE. The possibilities gave him cause to sweat. Koch-Roche pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his dripping face. The effort had to be unofficial, as the compound wasn't illegal yet. Perhaps some other drug cartel wanted in on the hormone action, maybe even one of the Golden Triangle gangs. Or some other pharmaceutical house, or a clandestine arm of the U.S. or other government that wanted to nip the new drug in the bud. Whoever they were, they were willing and able to use deadly force, seemingly whenever and against whomever they wanted. It was something that made his twenty percent commission on hormone drug sales seem suddenly way too small.

The intercom on his massive wood desk bleeped. He stabbed the Talk button with a thumb.

"Leon, I told you not to disturb me!"

"Mr. Koch-Roche, I'm sorry," said his executive assistant. "I have Mr. Korb here in the outer office. He would like to see you at once."

The little attorney was not in the mood for the multibillionaire. Like most barristers, he had a low opinion of his clients. An opinion that bordered on contempt. Generally speaking, they were worse liars and thieves than he was. Which is why he always made them pay up front. Before Dewayne Korb had started taking the drug, he'd been an insufferable bore, obsessed with stopping the theft of his intellectual property, and conversely, with defending himself against a mountain of similar claims against him. After taking WHE for a week, he was not only an insufferable bore, but a dangerous one. Though his physique had never been imposing, now all Korb could talk about was the size of his abs, lats and glutes.

Before Koch-Roche could tell his assistant to send the man away, that he'd already gone home for the night, the double oak doors to his office burst off their hinges and came crashing down on the Persian carpet.

Dewayne Korb, the world's richest man, strode over the fallen doors and into the lawyer's private office. "Get rid of your flunky," he said, indicating the male secretary with a jerk of his head, "or I will."

"Go, Leon," Koch-Roche said, shooing him away. "You should have gone home hours ago, anyway."

"I still have a few things to clear up, sir. I'll be outside if you need me for anything."

When the assistant had left, Korb advanced on his attorney's desk. In his case, the change wrought by WHE was particularly spectacular because the original article had been such a complete and total mush ball. Now he was anything but a mush ball. The computer billionaire was easily as wide as Boomtower across the shoulders and back, only he stood seven inches shorter, at a modest five foot ten. Having discarded his trademark cords and loose-fitting crewneck sweater, he wore a kind of turquoise bib-front swimsuit made out of spandex. His bare calves were the size of Smithfield hams.

Korb was no longer the constant butt of computer-nerd jokes.

He was the constant butt kicker.

No matter. Koch-Roche felt secure behind his huge battleship of a desk. The wood it was made of was so hard and so rare, coming as it did from the depths of the endangered tropical rain forest, that it was sold by the ounce. He felt powerful, too, because his desk was on an elevated dais, four steps above the floor of his office. It made Koch-Roche appear to be of slightly taller than normal height.

He loved his dais.

"As you probably know, it's been a rough day for me, Dewayne," the attorney said, holding his ground as the billionaire advanced on him with menace in his eye. "So I'd appreciate your getting to the point."

"The point," Korb said, leaning across the desk, "is that I need some more patches."

Koch-Roche was incredulous. "But I gave you a one-month supply just a week ago."

"I ran out yesterday."

"What's going on, Dewayne? You were given directions about how to use the patches. You've got to level with me."

The billionaire shrugged his massive shoulders. "I figured if one patch was good, then four were four times better. And I was right. Check this out." Korb flexed his right biceps. It was like a huge, oiled piston gliding under Saran Wrap. "Jimmy, I need some more."

"That's gonna be a problem."

"Clarify."

Koch-Roche explained the situation vis-a-vis the sudden deaths and disappearances of the other rich and famous users of WHE. He did not mention anything about the fate of Puma Lee and Chiz, because he didn't want the billionaire freaking out on him. He figured Korb already knew about that anyway-he probably had a goddamned Internet server in his head.

"Bottom line here is," Koch-Roche said, "I'm afraid to go back to my house, and that's where the rest of the patches are. I don't think I'd make it back from there alive."

"I got more security men than you can shake a stick at over in Korbtown. I can round them all up and we can take an M-1 tank over to your place if you want."

"No, I'm not going back there until I know who's behind all this. Tanks can be blown up."

"Not real satisfactory," Korb said. His fingertips were leaving indentations in the tropical hardwood. "I got to tell you, Jimmy, I'm real disappointed in you. I need some more of the hormone and I need it right away. I'm starting to feel funny. Sort of bloated. My fingertips feel swollen. How are we going to fix this problem?"

"It's going to cost you more."

"Am I surprised? Do I care? It's only money. Come on, you greasy little bastard, out with it before I turn your head into a paperweight."

Koch-Roche was thinking fast. He liked his head right where it was. He needed to put a few thousand miles between himself and the pursuers, whoever they were. An entire ocean would do very nicely, thank you.

"The only other supply of the drug is in Taiwan," he said, "at the manufacturer. If we can get over there, you'll have no problem. They've got lots of it in storage at their plant. They'll sell you all you want."

"Taiwan? That's no big deal. I thought this was going to be hard. Grab your passport and let's go."

The attorney patted the breast pocket of his pinstriped suit. "My passport's right here."

When Koch-Roche didn't step down from the dais quickly enough, Korb reached over and picked him up by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten. He gave the attorney a brisk shake, then said, "I've got a private 757 sitting on the runway at LAX, fueled and ready to fly. We're outta here."

Chapter 27

As Remo and Chiun swept through the glass entry doors to Jimmy Koch-Roche's office suite, they nearly collided with a tall, thin man with an attache case.

"Can I help you gentlemen?" the thin guy asked. "I'm afraid the office is closed for the day."

"We're looking for Mr. Koch-Roche," Remo said. "Then you just missed him. Perhaps you could call for an appointment tomorrow? As I said, the office is closed for the day. I've already locked up my desk. I was just on my way out the door."

Remo read the nameplate on the desk. "Leon," he said, "we need to get in touch with your boss at once. It's an emergency."

Leon scrutinized the ancient Oriental, who stood with a placid expression on his wrinkled face and both his hands buried up the sleeves of his silk robe.

"You're not one of Mr. Koch-Roche's current clients," Leon said. "I'm sure I'd remember you if you were. And even if you were, I am under strict instructions not to give out my employer's whereabouts once he leaves the office. I'm sure you can appreciate that. Being such a high-profile attorney, he gets all sorts of unwanted attention, often from well-meaning individuals who are not the least bit insane."

"This is a matter of life and death," Remo told him.

Leon was thoroughly unimpressed. "In case you never watch TV or pick up a newspaper, the people who come in here are always in trouble."

"No, you don't understand, Leon," Remo said. "We're not the ones in trouble. He is."

"Maybe you'd better identify yourselves and state your business with Mr. Koch-Roche." From the sudden brittleness in his voice, it was evident the executive assistant was losing his patience.

"Of course," Remo said, reaching in his back pocket. He opened the leather DD holder and held it up for Leon to read.

The big blue letters stenciled across the documentation said FBI.

"Remo Reno?" Leon said dubiously. "Who's your friend--Charlie Chan?"

The slender hands slipped out of the baggy cuffs. Lucky for Leon, the alarm bells were already going off in Remo's head. The name Chan, of course, reflected negatively on the width of nose-and general tendencies toward barbarism, pillage and rape.

"No," Remo said, stepping between the Reigning Master of Sinanju and the attorney's assistant. "But you're close. It's Charlie Chiun."

"I have to be frank with you," Leon said. "Neither one of you looks like Bureau material to me."

"We left our gray suits at home. Lighten up, Leon. We're here to do your boss a favor."

"First, it's life and death, then it's he's in trouble, now you're offering a helping hand? I think both of you should leave immediately." Leon put his briefcase on top of the desk and picked up the phone. "Leave now or I'm going to call security and have you arrested for trespassing."

"Bad idea," Remo said.

"Oh, really?" Leon hit one of the buttons on the console.

Chiun reached over and jerked the cord connecting the handset to the receiver. It parted with a snap. Leon looked at the broken cord in astonishment. Then he carefully replaced the handset in its cradle. "If this is a robbery," he said, "you are welcome to everything I have on me. The office keeps no cash except what is in my center drawer."

"Leon, baby, don't blow a gasket on us," Remo told him, "we're not interested in your petty cash or your cuff links. We just want to know where your boss is."

Leon stared at Chiun's long fingernails. "I don't know. He left a few minutes ago."

"Alone?"

"No, he was with a client."

"Don't make us wring the information out of you."

Chiun took a half step toward the executive assistant.

"It was Korb," Leon squeaked. "Dewayne Korb, the computer tycoon. Look, I've had more than enough excitement for one day, thank you. You should see what Korb did to the door. The man's a maniac."

"Where did they go?" Remo asked him.

"I have no idea."

"Why don't you show us Mr. Koch-Roche's office."

Leon obliged reluctantly. And with a little prodding, even opened his boss's wall safe.

"If you tell me what you're looking for," Leon offered, "maybe I could help you find it. Then you wouldn't be leaving me quite such a mess to clean up."

Remo stopped dumping papers from the open safe onto the floor. "We're looking for a list of names of all the clients he's provided drugs to."

"I know nothing about that."

"No, of course not. People come in here one week as ninety-pound weaklings, and the next they look like the Incredible Hulk. Get a bit real, Leon."

"Mr. Koch-Roche has never told me anything about that. I've never seen a list of names."

"Boomtower? Baculum? Chiz Graham?"

"I'm sorry. They are just his legal clients, to my knowledge. If my employer is doing anything against the law, I am not a party to it."

"I can make this one speak," the Master announced.

Chiun backed the tall, thin man into a corner with hand gestures like a snake charmer.

"Don't waste your time, Chiun," Remo said. "He doesn't know anything. I believe him." Then he asked Leon, "Does Koch-Roche keep his passport in the office?"

"Center drawer of his desk."

Remo opened it and looked. "It's not here," he said.

"That's where he keeps it, unless he's using it."

"You've been a big help to us, Leon," Remo said. "Now we're going to need for you to spend some quiet time in a closet."

"I'm claustrophobic," the thin man confessed.

"Is there an office rest room?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then you can wait in there."

After they had locked Leon in the men's bathroom, Remo and Chiun returned to the attorney's private office.

"Time to call Smith," Remo said, picking up the phone.

"Yes," Chiun agreed, "the Emperor in his wisdom will surely guide us."

Remo punched in the code to CURE's scrambled line. He didn't know exactly how the thing worked, but when he dialed the number, his call was somehow rerouted by the Folcroft mainframes, sent through a few hundred thousand other phone numbers from all over the world, making it impossible for anyone to pull up the Koch-Roche phone records and find out whom he'd called.

Smith picked up on the first ring. "What have you got for me, Remo?" he demanded.

"Looks like we just missed our boy Jimmy," Remo said. "Apparently, he's flown the coop with Dewayne Korb, the billionaire nouveau muscle man. We have no idea where he's gone, but his passport isn't here."

"Let me run a quick check through the FAA in Los Angeles," Smith said. "See if Korb's filed a flight plan." After a pause, the director of CURE said, "I'll have that information momentarily. Did you get any break on a list of WHE users?"

"We got nothing there, either."

"That's too bad."

"The hormone heads will turn up eventually, won't they?"

"Yes, but probably only after they've committed some kind of atrocity. We could've saved a lot of innocent people a lot of pain and suffering if we'd isolated the current users.

"The FAA data is scrolling up now," Smith continued. "It shows a Korb-owned Boeing jet at LAX with a flight plan filed to Taiwan, nonstop."

"We'd better get on it, then," Remo said.

"No, it's too late. Their scheduled departure is in ten minutes. You'll never get there in time to stop them from taking off."

"What now?"

"We proceed according to plan. We have to stop the production of the drug at the point of manufacture, which means taking down Family Fing Pharmaceuticals of Formosa. And we have to do it before they have a cheap synthetic version of WHE ready to mass market. Bottom line is, you're going to Taiwan, too."

"So, how're we gonna handle that?"

"Your tickets and documents will be waiting for you at LAX. I'll book you on the next flight out."

"Aisle seat," Remo said.

"What?"

"Chiun likes an aisle seat. He claims it gives him a better view of the in-flight movie."

Chapter 28

Fosdick Fing touched the LCD screen of his notebook computer, making the densely packed table of five-digit numbers shift to a bar graph. "Now, that's a welcome sight!" he said. An expression of profound relief on his face, Fing showed his American colleague the newly correlated data. "I think Test Subject Three is definitely responding to the change in her diet," he told Carlos Sternovsky.

The American reviewed the computer-generated graph, then looked up at the video monitor bolted to the wall above the patient's locked door. The connection that Fosdick was making seemed tenuous at best to him. Like connecting bad luck with the presence of a black cat, or good luck with the position of the stars. The bar graph was a mathematical construct; it presented facts subject to interpretation. And interpretations were subject to being one hundred percent wrong.

True enough, the game-show hostess turned talk-show hostess turned opera star, known professionally as Okra, seemed to have calmed down. Only minutes before, she had been in the midst of a gibbering, foaming-at-the-mouth rage. Alone in her hospital suite, she had pounded on the walls, kicked at the steel-reinforced door and turned one hundred thousand dollars' worth of medical monitoring equipment into so much twisted wreckage. In her fury, Okra had even de-stuffed her own mattress. The empty ticking lay rumpled on the bed frame like the discarded skin of some enormous, gray-and-white-pin-striped fruit. Ankle-deep drifts of white polyester padding covered the floor of the room.

Since she'd started in on Fosdick's new food regimen, she hadn't moved from her position on the floor. She knelt in front of the jury-rigged feeding tube that had been slipped through a hole the staff had drilled in the wall.

Lips to the clear polyethylene, Okra sucked down a light brown substance, barely pausing for breath. "I'm positive," Fosdick said, "that the tantrums we've been seeing are related to too low a dietary-fat content. Think about it, Carlos. If the synthetic hormone is making greater and greater demands for fat intake over time, and that additional fat isn't provided, it could cause the test subjects terrible discomfort. And the violence they've exhibited may be directly related to the internal pain they are feeling."

"That may be so," Sternovsky said. "But what you're doing now proves nothing. Except that she likes peanut butter more than she likes tearing the bejesus out of her hospital room."

"True, it's not a double-blind study," Fosdick admitted, "and the data from this subject isn't fully calibrated yet, but these results certainly give us reason to hope that the negative effects of the drug can be lessened to market-acceptable levels."

"Without actually going to the trouble of changing the formulation," Sternovsky said.

"My father was adamant. You were there. The future of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals hangs in the balance."

Sternovsky watched the test subject as Fosdick used the remote control to zoom the camera in on her face. Okra's cheeks hollowed as she nursed on the end of the tube. Her eyes were shut in apparent rapture. She paused in her sucking only for the occasional belch.

Sternovsky had no formal training as a physicist, but he knew that to draw creamy peanut butter through a one-inch tube required an awesome amount of force. And Okra was accomplishing the feat without the aid of a pump. With just a little help from gravity-the five-gallon peanut-butter bucket was elevated about five feet off the floor--Okra was pulling in peanut butter by the foot, all on her own. Based on Fosdick's calculations, she was intaking 3420 calories per yard of suck, and in that yard, 2300 calories came from fat. Roughly estimating Okra's suck rate, Sternovsky figured she was taking in a human male's recommended daily allowance of calories every ten to twelve minutes. And after more than a half hour of the new regimen, she showed no sign of slowing down on the peanut-butter pipeline.

"I'm not sure we aren't opening an even bigger can of worms here, Fosdick," Sternovsky said.

The youngest Fing waved him off. "Results are what my father wanted, and results are what I'm going to give him."

Fosdick turned to the waiting medical support staff and gave them a crisp order punctuated with jabs of his stubby index finger. "I want you to switch all of the test subjects over to Skippy immediately," he told them. "I think we finally have our answer. Let's use the big containers, people."

Sternovsky scanned the faces of the nurses and attendants. They all looked haggard. Frightened. Like they'd been working in a combat zone or a natural catastrophe. The situation on the ward was that overwhelming. They had seen their fellow workers torn limb from limb, and the bellows and roars of the other less tranquil test subjects were constant reminders that the same thing could happen to them. The staff was still willing to feed the drug-trial lab animals through holes drilled in the walls, but if Fing asked them to confront their patients face-to-face, he was going to have a full-scale rebellion and walkout on his hands. "The only way we're going to know for sure what effect the peanut butter is having," Sternovsky said, "is to draw blood samples from her."

"Sure," Fosdick said. "You're the expert on drawing blood. You know where the hypos are. Why don't you do the honors?"

The American scientist shook his head. "I'm serious, Fosdick. Pump some tranquilizer in through the feeding tube, knock her out and let's get a blood-level reading on her."

Fosdick wouldn't hear of it. "A tranquilizer will negate the experiment completely. Think about it. We can't build up people's muscles but in the process turn them into tranked-out zombies who can't get out of bed. Our most recent demographic studies show that eighty-three percent of the fun of having a hard body is showing it off."

"Tails are okay, though," Sternovsky said sarcastically.

"For all we know, the new diet might affect that, too. We could even get a complete reversal."

Sternovsky gawked at the research chemist. For a moment, he was speechless. When he recovered, he asked, "Where did you say you did your graduate work?"

"I didn't."

"You didn't do graduate work?"

"No, I didn't say. Actually, I had a two-year fellowship at Lever Brothers."

Oh, God, Sternovsky thought as a lump the size of a cantaloupe rose under his breastbone. Now it all became clear....

"You were in the floor-wax division?" he asked.

"No, I was with the Wisehart Center for Unguent Development."

Sternovsky was aghast. A balmer! The WHE project was being run by a fucking balmer!

"Fing," he said, barely controlling his understandable anger, "for Pete's sake, open your eyes. Our subject there has got a real corker of a tail going for her and, the change in diet notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be getting any smaller."

The appendage in question, a stout, furry bit of baggage with a funny curl at the tip, trailed across the floor. As Okra nursed on the hose, it twitched and flipped around as if it had a mind of its own.

"We'd have to measure it to know for sure," Fosdick said. "It looks smaller to me."

Sternovsky had no intention of explaining the basic theories of biology to his Asian counterpart. "Do you expect her fur to fall out, too?"

Fosdick shrugged. "We believe that the fur is a fully manageable side effect. A daily depilatory application should handle that."

Sternovsky squinted at the monitor. The nursing woman had an all-over pelt. It was especially long and luxuriant on the backs of her legs and the insides of her arms, like a golden retriever or Irish setter.

"She's going to have to bathe in Nair to get rid of that coat," Sternovsky said.

Behind him, the medical-wing staff was already carrying out Fosdick's orders. A couple of female attendants were using cordless drills to bore holes through the walls of the test subjects' rooms. And from the other end of the hallway came a daisy chain of gurneys pushed by nurses and orderlies. Balanced on each hospital cart was a huge drum of peanut butter.

Carlos Sternovsky sagged against the corridor wall and stared at his empty hands. Had it really come down to this? he asked himself. All the dreaming since he was a small boy, all the hard and unrewarded work? Had he suffered the scorn and rejection of his peers for this idiocy? Like a man possessed, he had fled from his own country and sold his soul to the Fings in order to keep his precious line of research alive. And what were they doing with it? They were destroying it. If the Fings released the drug prematurely as they planned, it would undermine everything he had worked for. The drug's future usefulness would be tainted, its scientific and medical reputation ruined.

Somehow, blinded by his own mission, by his own thickheadedness, he had managed to hand the control of a cutting-edge discovery over to a Taiwanese unguentologist, a man whose advanced training was in making a baby's butt softer to the touch.

That Fosdick Fing was a blubbering, father-cowed moron was the icing on the cake.

Sternovsky watched the medical staff thread plastic feeding tubes through the walls of the corridor, thereby connecting the enraged test subjects to the elevated drums of Skippy.

Sure as the nose on his face, he knew. Things were going to get worse.

Chapter 29

When Fillmore Fing's bleary-eyed receptionist escorted the firm's U.S. legal counsel and the world's richest man into the boardroom, Fillmore rushed over to greet them. Though it was just past four in the morning, Taiwan time, and though he'd had a sleepless and tension-filled night, the elder Fing was almost painfully chipper.

"Come in, come in," he said, waving them into the nerve center of his global enterprise. Despite the lateness of the hour, he was most pleased to see one of the initial success stories of WHE in person. "Welcome to Taiwan, Mr. Korb," he said. "This is a wonderful surprise. And if I may say so, you are looking tremendously fit."

Dewayne Korb grunted in reply, his eyes narrowed as he searched the boardroom conference desk, the surrounding bookcases, tabletops, work surfaces for a hint of red-and-white foil and plastic pouch-the hermetically sealed packet that contained the drug and its delivery system.

"This is my oldest son, Farnham," Filimore said, indicating the casually dressed young man seated on the room's leather couch.

Farnham, who was less of a disappointment to his father than his brother was, nodded politely but didn't offer to shake hands with the computer billionaire. He didn't want to get that close to someone who had been taking the hormone. He and the entire Family Fing medical staff had learned the hard way that impinging on a WHE user's personal space was a good way to lose your head.

Fillmore Fing, a massive smile distorting his round face, gestured for the two Americans to have a seat at the long table. As Dewayne Korb drew back his chair, the patriarch couldn't help but stare at the back of the billionaire's pants. What he was looking for, and so pleased not to discover, was the protruding stub of a tail. There was, however, a certain puffiness to Korb's face, something Fillmore hadn't seen in any of the other subjects-their faces were uniformly lean, just like their bodies.

Jimmy Koch-Roche was dressed for high heat and humidity. In his baggy shorts, his hairless legs looked sickly, spindly, like white toothpicks.

It was Korb who spoke first, his voice gravelly and excessively loud. "I need some patches," he said. "I need them right now. And I'm hungry. I need something to eat, too."

"We ran out of food on the plane over the Marianas," Koch-Roche explained. "And Mr. Korb has been off the hormone medication for ten hours now. His time-release patches are all worn-out."

"How could you let that happen?" Fillmore asked in a tone of disbelief.

On the other side of the long table, from low in his belly, Korb started growling.

"I'll explain that," Koch-Roche said. "But, really, he can't wait any longer. We have to do something. .."

"Of course, of course," Fillmore said. "Mr. Korb, we'll go over to the medical wing at once and get you fixed up."

The four of them hurried from the boardroom. In the hall outside the entrance, a pair of electric golf carts was parked. Farnham and Korb got into the first one, and Fillmore and Koch-Roche climbed in the second. Farnham took off with a chirp of tires on the well-waxed tile and zoomed away. His father followed, but at a slower pace, down the otherwise deserted hallway.

Fillmore had waited long enough for an explanation. He turned to his attorney and said, "I thought you had an ample supply of the hormone extract on hand? Have recent sales been that brisk?"

"Sales have been excellent, exceeding even our most optimistic projections," Koch-Roche explained, "but in the last day or so, we've had some unexpected problems."

"I know, I know," Fillmore said. "But my youngest son assures me that he has worked the bugs out of the product. There will be no more unusual behavior from the users of WHE."

"That's not what I'm talking about," the attorney told him. "The problems aren't directly related to the recent violent public outbursts by my clients and your customers."

Fillmore's brow furrowed. "Go on."

"We've had a string of incidents that make it appear someone does not want WHE to become available, distribution-wise. Someone who is willing to kill in order to keep that from happening."

"You are certain of this?"

"Absolutely," Koch-Roche assured him. "I still have a good supply of patches at my home, but I couldn't retrieve them for fear of being killed myself. There has already been one attack on my residence. A successful attack in which a U.S. senator, the oldest user of the hormone to date, was kidnapped despite the protection of almost a dozen armed guards. He has not been seen again. Another of my clients was brutally murdered on a football field in broad daylight. Presumably by the same pair of hired assassins who kidnapped the senator."

"You may well have led the killers straight to us!" Fillmore exclaimed. "Why didn't you inform me of this before you came?"

The tiny attorney forced a smile. "Because I figured that they had already made the connection between me, the drug and Family Fing. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist, after all. We haven't been too concerned about covering our tracks. Since the drug hasn't been declared illegal yet, there was no need for that kind of secrecy. There was no way you, me or anyone could have anticipated a lethal response to the drug's test-marketing in the States."

"Certainly you don't suspect that this is an official effort of the government?"

"No, I don't think so," Koch-Roche said. "To date, these attacks have targeted individuals using WHE, but there have been no subsequent press releases, no mention of the existence of the drug itself. It seems to me that whoever is behind this campaign doesn't want to give our product any more publicity, positive or negative, but would much prefer to sweep the whole thing under a rug."

"This could be an organized attempt by a competitor to sink our development program, co-opt the discovery and bring out a rival product," the elder Fing speculated.

"That had occurred to me, too."

Fillmore Fing pulled at his silky smooth earlobe. He knew that any one of a half-dozen international rivals in the pharmaceutical trade could be behind the disruption.

And who could blame them?

The profits on global sales of WHE were going to be astronomical. And even if the U.S. FDA refused to approve the drug, even if it was declared illegal and dangerous, it would still turn a huge profit in the Third World, where bureaucrats were not so fussy about what they allowed their people to ingest.

Though he hadn't confided as much to his sons, the patriarch Fing already had a contingency plan in place. To move the heart and soul of the brand-new, state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in New Jersey would cost him a few tens of millions. He had had the entire operation designed so it could be disassembled, placed on a fleet of cargo ships and transferred to some more friendly country-all in a matter of a few weeks. Fillmore Fing had never been one to fail for lack of adequate foresight.

The reason he hadn't told his sons about this failsafe option was that he wanted to keep the pressure on them. He didn't want to lose so much as a dime on the deal if he could help it. His concern with his boys was that they were, at heart, slackers-especially Fosdick, the mama's boy. He had spared the rod, there, at the urging of the boy's late mother. And now, decades later, he was reaping the bitter reward.

Fillmore would never have reached his elevated position in the world without being an excellent judge of character. He put people into two main categories: the weak or the strong. Both types could be used and manipulated, if you knew how to pull the right strings. For example, this Dewayne Korb, the richest man in the world, wanted physical as well as financial power. He wanted to be able to intimidate others with a look, even if they didn't know who he was or how much money he had. This failing of character, this fatal flaw, led the man straight into the clutches of Family Fing.

Such vulnerabilities were part of the human condition. Fillmore himself was not immune. His own greed had undone him more than once. The difference between the elder Fing and Dewayne Korb was that Fing had mapped his own soft points.

And was ever on guard.

Fillmore pulled the cell phone from inside his suit jacket and, steering with his knees, punched in a number. When the party on the other end answered, he spoke in rapid-fire Chinese. Then he turned to the lawyer and said, "Can you describe the people who did all the damage in Los Angeles?"

Koch-Roche told him what he had been told by his security people. "There were two of them, both male. One was a white American, in his late thirties or early forties, average height and wiry build. The other was an Oriental, origin unknown, well over seventy, with a thin white beard and wearing a brocaded blue robe."

Fing passed this information on to his security force and broke the connection.

Ahead of them, Farnham pulled his golf cart up to the entrance to the wing that housed the plant's hospital facility. A pair of uniformed, armed guards in white steel helmets, white Sam Browne belts, white puttees and camouflage jungle boots, hurried to open the heavy door.

Which looked like it had come from a bank vault. "This is new," Koch-Roche commented, hooking a thumb at the massive steel barrier.

"I had it installed about a week ago," Fillmore said as he followed his oldest son through the portal. "We've been having difficulty containing some of the synthetic-drug-trial test patients. We don't want to risk their getting loose in the main plant. They'd be a nightmare to subdue and recapture."

On either side of them, floor-to-ceiling glass walls looked in on medical labs tightly packed with technical equipment. As they came to a much smaller window set in a section of cinder-block wall, Fillmore stopped the golf cart so his passenger could look through the glass to the cage enclosure it protected.

In the white tiled cell was a lone wolverine. The number 3271 was branded into its haunch. The top of its skull had been shaved, and from the pale skin a dense cluster of electrodes protruded. The tips of the electrodes were connected to a series of multicolored electrical wires bundled together three feet above the animal's head and disappearing up into the cage ceiling.

"What are you doing to this one?" Koch-Roche asked.

"We're using low-level electrical current to try and stimulate natural hormone production. It causes a stress reaction, which activates the glandular system."

Even as Koch-Roche looked on, the animal's eyelids began to flutter and it sagged down on its forelegs. The dark lips drew back from four-inch fangs in a grisly predator's smile.

"That looks like it hurts," the attorney said.

"Life hurts," the elder Fing philosophised. Then he punched the cart's accelerator, and with a whir they shot down the hall.

Fing's oldest son had already parked beside the medical station's high counter. As Fillmore pulled up behind him, Farnham said something to the nurse on duty, and she turned at once to a cabinet along the back wall. Beyond Farnham, medical personnel in green scrubs and white lab coats scurried back and forth between opposing, locked doorways.

Overriding the usual antiseptic smell of the hospital was another odor. Unexpected. Mildly sweet, but also earthy and pungent.

"Jesus, is that peanut butter I smell?" Koch-Roche asked.

"My son Fosdick believes it is the solution to our side-effect-management problem."

As the duty nurse turned back from the cabinet, Dewayne Korb bailed out of the cart and snatched the strip of sealed pouches from her hands. After tearing open the front of his shirt, he ripped apart the safety packaging and stuck on four of the patches. That done, he looked down at himself. It was the first time in ten hours that he had examined his own chest. His pectorals sagged. His belly drooped. Though he hadn't been taking WHE during that interval, he had continued to eat as if he had. Korb had lost more than twenty percent of his muscle mass; it had been replaced by solid blubber.

"It looks like we have a lifelong customer there," Fillmore said smugly, giving the lawyer a nudge as they started to walk over to where the billionaire stood. The pharmaceutical baron was not displeased to see that the user was taking considerably more than the recommended dose. If his behavior represented a trend, Family Fing's projected profits might well quadruple.

Before they reached Korb's side, a very distraught Fosdick Fing rushed up to the service counter. He was so distraught, hopping up and down with anger at his brother, that he spoke in Chinese.

"Family squabble?" Koch-Roche asked.

"No, a technical issue," Fillmore answered. Actually, the research chemist was having a cow because his playboy sibling had mistakenly told the nurse to give the patient some of the synthetic drug. And also because said patient had immediately overdosed himself by a multiple of four. The "technical issue" under discussion was whether the Fings should have kept Mr. Korb on the natural drug as a one-man control group for the synthetic test subjects. "Please," Fosdick said, turning to Dewayne Korb, "you've been given the wrong medication. I need to replace those patches with the proper ones."

When the youngest Fing reached out for Korb's stomach to take away the patches, the billionaire slapped his hand away. The sound of contact, flesh on flesh, was like a gunshot. Fosdick slumped to his knees, clutching his shattered wrist, his face suddenly ashen.

Korb advanced on the moaning chemist, but then walked right past him. The other workers gave him plenty of room, flattening themselves against the corridor wall. They had nothing to worry about. It was the massive drums of Skippy that drew the computer billionaire's attention. Tearing the lid off the closest barrel, he grabbed a big, gooey handful and mashed it into his mouth. Groaning with pleasure, he fell upon the brown sticky stuff with both hands. That was too slow, it seemed. Gripping the drum's rim, Korb plunged his head into the top of the barrel.

A tall, skinny, balding man in a white sterile suit rushed around the ostrich-playing billionaire. "You got to make this stop!" Carlos Sternovsky said to Fillmore Fing. He waved a sheaf of computer printouts in the tycoon's face. "What we have here is a disaster, an unmitigated disaster."

Farnham tried to mollify the biochemist. "Easy, Carlos, let's step into an office and talk this over...."

Sternovsky would not be mollified. "Look at these tabulations," he insisted. "Fosdick's whole new diet concept is fatally flawed. I've calculated the potential muscle-mass increase. Its geometric. Don't you get it? The reason the test subjects are placid is because all their available energy is going to produce muscle mass. For Pete's sake, they are semiconscious."

Korb's drum tipped over, fell off its gurney and rolled on the floor. Instead of tipping the barrel back up, as he could have easily done, the billionaire got down on his hands and knees and crawled into it.

At least as far as the breadth of his shoulders would allow.

"And your point?" the patriarch Fing said.

"My figures indicate that the rate of change has already begun to level off," Sternovsky told him. "Very shortly, our test subjects will have maxed out. When the demands of WHE on their bodies to produce muscle begin to slack off, they will wake up. Bigger. Stronger. And even more dangerous."

"Fosdick!" Fillmore barked. "Is this true? You promised me that you had the situation well in hand." The youngest Fing wanted to reply, to defend himself, but the shock of his injury was such that though he opened his mouth to speak, he couldn't even manage a stutter.

Farnham, sensing that his father was about to turn on him, diverted attention by attacking the American biochemist and taking up the banner of his fallen brother. "All you're giving us is speculation," he said. "You don't know what's going to happen in the next two minutes, let alone the next half hour. And you certainly can't predict the behavior of our test subjects even if the synthetic's effect does level off as you suggest."

Sternovsky put his hands to his head and pulled at his comb-over, making it stick straight up. "You're not listening!" he cried. "There is no door, no lock on this ward that will hold them."

"I think we've heard enough," Fillmore said.

"No, you haven't," the biochemist countered. "God forgive us for what we've done to them, but these test subjects are no longer human beings. If you don't euthanize them now, and quickly, while they are still in a stuporous state, they will wake up and kill us all."

Fillmore had always figured Sternovsky for a whiner. There was something weak in the eyes and the dark circles that surrounded them. But the expression he now wore clearly declared he had reached his limit. No amount of browbeating would bring him back into line. "I'm canceling your contract, as of this instant," the elder Fing said. "Turn in your security badge at the desk downstairs and be off the grounds in two hours or I'll have you arrested."

"That suits me fine," Sternovsky said. "Just remember I told you so when the shit hits the fan." The lanky researcher, his hair still alarmingly upright, stormed off and out the bank-vault door.

The Fings and their U.S. attorney watched the man go.

"Could he make trouble for us, patent-wise, somewhere down the line?" Koch-Roche asked.

"A brilliant biochemist," Fillmore said, "but he has absolutely no business sense. The agreement he signed with Family Fing surrendered all commercial rights to the product."

"He actually signed something like that?"

"The contract was written in Chinese."

"Don't tell me," the lawyer said. "He used a translator that you recommended."

Fillmore smiled.

Suddenly, the steady, sloppy sounds of sucking ceased.

"They've stopped eating," one of the orderlies cried. "They've all stopped eating. Look!" Fillmore half turned to follow the man's pointing finger. The video monitors behind the nurses' station counter all showed movement. The test subjects had dropped their feeding tubes and, one by one, were rising to their feet.

Chapter 30

Remo had no complaint about the directions he'd been given by the bilingual car-rental clerk at the airport. After an hour and a half of driving on a two-lane road that ran straight as a string through miles of open farmland-pancake flat, diked and about half of it flooded for the cultivation of rice-the lights of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals had come into view. In the distance, he could see the white towers of the plant complex rising up out of the blackness of the plain. The feeling of dread he got every time he looked at them was very intense.

Up until this point, he and Chiun had had the luxury of confronting the hormone-altered killers one at a time. The last one, old Ludlow Baculum, had nearly had Remo's guts for garters, and would have succeeded if Chiun had not intervened at the last second. In the area of sheer physical power, Remo had never encountered foes quite like these. The idea that he would have to confront them en masse, and very soon, sent a chill down the back of his neck.

Chiun sat in the passenger seat, apparently unconcerned about what danger might lurk in the white complex ahead. Under the glow of the map light, he was flipping through the fax Dr. Smith had sent them along with their plane tickets in L.A. As well as the particulars of the layout of the pharmaceutical complex, he'd included photos of all the prime players he'd identified. It was this group of faces that the Master was so intently studying.

"Sheesh, haven't you memorized those stupid mug shots by now?" Remo asked him.

When Chiun looked up from the series of black-and-white pictures, he wore an expression that Remo knew all too well: the mask of Masterly disappointment. Which immediately put the pupil on the defensive.

"What?" Remo said. "What?"

"How do you intend to find our targets?" Chiun asked. "By their noses? Or perhaps their ears?"

"How about the happy confluence of same?" Remo said. "It's called a face. Everybody's got one."

Chiun heaved a sigh before he continued, in lecture mode. "The truly skilled assassin looks deeper than the superficial," he said. "He looks inside, for tendencies, for relationships. Only in this way can he anticipate what the man he hunts will do in a given situation, and use that knowledge to be waiting, ready to strike at exactly the right moment."

"You can tell that from a picture? A bad picture at that?"

"All this can be seen in the position of the brow in relation to the nasal meridian. The circular flow of energy around the eyes. And in other ways..."

"Such as?"

"Take this one," Chiun said, tapping at the top page with the tip of a razor-sharp fingernail. "Here we have a man of about seventy years, who pretends to be much younger. He is willful. He is vain. He is greedy and ruthless. A typical Chinese."

"Did the width of his nose give him away?"

"No," Chiun said. "It was his name-Fing. But that is not important. What is important is what the picture tells me of his true nature. This is a man who will not fight his own battle unless he is cornered. This is a man who cares nothing for the lives of others, not even those of his own flesh and blood. He would sacrifice anyone to keep what he has. What he has is what defines him."

"And how is this going to help us kill him?"

"Are you not listening?" Chiun asked. "This man will hold on with his teeth, if necessary, to keep his possessions. They are the center of his life. His anchor." The Master paused for dramatic effect, then said, "They are his gallows."

"That's all very nice and poetic," Remo said, "but what if your friend Fing has already made liquid most of his assets? What if he can walk away from that white monstrosity over there without ever looking back?"

"You still do not understand, and it pains me deeply," Chiun confessed. "I sometimes think you pretend to be stupid in order to cause me, your teacher, grief. I who have with great patience and care brought you so far from your truly pathetic beginnings-"

"Look, Chiun, you're making about as much sense as mud. The whole idea behind an explanation is that it explains something."

"Ah-hah!" the Master said, pouncing on his student's words. "Now we are getting to the basis of your problem."

"That I expect you to be rational?"

"That you expect to be given an answer." Seeing the blank look on his pupil's face, the Master sighed again, this time even more tragically, as if the entire weight of the world were pressing down on his deceptively frail appearing form. That weight took the form of his own, personal Chong-wook.

"Very well," he said, "though I know it is a mistake to coddle you, I will explain my meaning. The Western concept of liquidity, of invisible wealth, of electronic millions, does not compute in this man's mind. Look here, at these shallow lines radiating from the corners of his mouth. They are from many years of sucking on his own tongue. Like this..."

In the greenish glow of the dashlights, Remo could see that Chiun had his lips slightly puckered, and his cheeks drawn in, as if he were nursing on, a cough drop.

"I take it that somewhere under your noble beard you're sucking your noble tongue," Remo said.

"This habit denotes a man of a grandiose and pompous type," Chiun told him. "Such a man often builds great monuments to himself. Ugly monuments that he alone finds beautiful."

"And this tongue sucker," Remo said, "you're saying he won't abandon his work of art?"

"Only when all hope is lost."

"So, we must allow him to hope until we have him in our noose," Remo offered. "Happy?"

The Master frowned.

"What's wrong now?"

"The airplane food has filled me with a terrible wind. How could portions so small have such a violent effect?"

"That is a mystery for the ages," Remo said. "I'll roll down my window."

As he did so, the floodlit entrance to the Family Fing complex loomed before them. The plant's grounds, which appeared to stretch on for miles, were ringed by a twelve-foot-high hurricane fence. The fence was topped with steel branches on which were strung garlands of razor wire. The road ended at a counterbalanced steel pole of a gate and a guard hut. Remo slowed as he approached. The barrier was down, barring the way onto the grounds.

When Remo stopped, a white-helmeted guard stepped out of the hut. He took one look at the car's occupants, immediately stepped back into the hut and picked up a phone.

"I don't like this," Remo muttered.

After a very brief conversation, the guard hung up and advanced on the driver's side of the car. He had drawn his service revolver out of its holster, and his finger was on the trigger. He spoke to Remo through the open car window in blindingly fast Chinese.

After a moment or two, Remo raised open palms in the universal gesture of helplessness, then pointed over at Chiun, who waved the guard around to his side of the car. Believing that the ancient Oriental was going to converse with him, the guard walked around the front end of the vehicle, his weapon held along his hip.

As the Master of Sinanju cranked down his window, the guard leaned forward slightly, holding the pistol aimed through the door at the old man. On the other side of the gate, alongside the towering white tanks in the near distance, four men with white helmets were piling into a jeep, and almost instantly the jeep was roaring their way.

When the guard repeated the question he'd asked of Remo-which was "What is your business here?"-Chiun replied with a blow. His hand flicked out through the window like a head of a snake; the fist was closed but soft. So quick, so devastating was the strike that the guard couldn't even pull the trigger by reflex. He dropped to his butt on the asphalt, helmet thunking as his head hit the ground.

Remo jumped out and raised the gate as fast as he could. But by the time he got back in the car, the jeepful of reinforcements was barreling straight for them. And two more jeeps from opposite ends of the complex had joined the party. They were racing across the open courtyard toward the gatehouse.

There was nowhere to go, and no time to get there. The first jeep screeched to a halt right in front of the rental car. The other two angled in from either side. Four security guards, armed with M-16s, piled out of each vehicle, their weapons leveled at Remo and Chiun through the rental car's windshield.

One of the dozen newcomers, a guy with a pencil mustache and sideburns, immediately started shouting something at them.

"What's he saying?" Remo said. "He's talking too fast for me. I can't make heads or tails of it."

"He says for us to get out with our hands up," Chiun told him.

Remo surveyed the semicircle of autorifle muzzles. "I think we'd better do what he says." He stuck both his hands out the driver's window, opened the car door from the outside, then very slowly exited the car. Chiun did the same.

The man in charge continued shouting a mile a minute. He seemed very agitated.

Chiun spoke once more, quite distinctly and with great dignity. Remo got the gist of what he said. The Master suggested that the man with the mustache should speak less rapidly so his stupid white companion could understand what he was saying without the necessity and bother of Chiun's making a running English translation of every word.

As if he were talking to a very slow three-year-old, the man in charge told Remo to step to the left. Which he did.

"Do you have any idea what these guys have in mind for us?" Remo asked Chiun.

As the Master also sidestepped, hands raised in the air, he said, "Why would I?"

"I don't know. I thought you might be able to read their energy levels or something. The guy giving the orders sure looks like a teeth grinder to me. Doesn't that tell you something?"

"Only that once again you have failed to grasp a fundamental concept."

The flash suppressors of the twelve M-16s tracked them as they moved past the gatehouse to a stretch of open fence, directly under one of the floodlights. Then the head guy yelled at them to stop.

The other guards lined up on either side of Mr. Mustache, switched their fire-selector switches to full auto and shouldered their weapons.

The man in charge barked a single word. A Chinese word that Remo understood.

The word was "Ready."

Still in denial, big-time, Remo found himself puzzling over the guy's inflection. Had he heard wrong, or hadn't the end of the word risen in pitch? Which would have made it a question, not a statement. If it was a question, it might damned well mean anything. Ready to take a break? Ready to let these guys go? Ready for a little Macarena?

His scant hopes vanished altogether when the mustachioed guard spoke again.

The word this time was "Aim."

Chapter 31

The Fings, their tiny lawyer and the entire staff of the medical wing stood transfixed by the images on the video monitors.

"They are bigger," one of the nurses gasped.

"Hugely bigger," an orderly corrected her.

"You're letting your imagination run away with you," Fillmore told them. "We've all worked practically around the clock. It's just the power of suggestion acting on our tired minds...."

Though Fillmore mouthed the words, he couldn't put any conviction behind them. They were a half-hearted, ill-considered and totally transparent attempt to quiet the panic he could feel building around him. Obviously, the test subjects were bigger.

In the space of half an hour, while the Fings and their employees had looked on, the patients had increased their muscle mass by fifty percent. And Sternovsky, the deserter, had been right about something else, too. The test subjects no longer looked human.

Even without the shaggy fur or the tails, the density of their muscles made them look like some other, as-yet-unidentified species. There was enough meat on the hooded fan of a single test subject's latissimus dorsi to make ample backs for three normal-sized Homo sapiens. And with the newly added bulk came a return to the insensate fury of their pre-peanut butter time.

The romance writer, her tail curled into a tight spiral behind her back, booted the inside of her door with the sole of her bare foot. The impact shook the walls and sent glassware crashing to the floor all along the corridor.

"Oh, my God," Koch-Roche said, steadying himself against the side of the golf cart.

The noise awakened an army of related devils. The other five test subjects began kicking their doors, too. In the narrow hall, it sounded like volleys of rolling cannon fire. And the force they unleashed against door frames and walls set the floor trembling, rippling as if from an earthquake. Glass walls everywhere shimmied and shattered, sending cascades of fragments whooshing across the hallway floor. The window in front of the wolverine's enclosure likewise dropped away in a spiderwebbed sheet, leaving the test animal stunned, blinking and extremely mad.

"The doors aren't going to hold much longer," Farnham warned. He pointed at the nearest door frame, which was already beginning to splinter away from the wall. The steel door was itself bowing out in the middle from the full-power kicks Toshi Takahara was raining on it.

At the far end of the hallway, the attendants abandoned their posts and started running in the direction of the bank-vault door. As they ran, they yelled at the tops of their lungs.

It was a nightmare come to life.

A horror dream so unthinkable that it froze the Fings, their lawyer and the surrounding medical personnel where they stood.

It did not freeze Dewayne Korb, though. The computer billionaire jerked his head out of the drum of peanut butter, his hair and face smeared with the stuff, his eyes wide with alarm. Thanks to his overdose on synthetic hormone and dietary fat, he had arrived at a new and advanced animal state. Every fiber of his being told him that much bigger dogs than he were about to break loose. It also told him that when these big dogs did free themselves, he stood no more chance against them than the frail, petrified humans. Before anyone else could blink, the billionaire took off, high-kicking. By the time the others regained their wits, he was out the heavy door and gone.

"Don't you think we should go, too?" Jimmy Koch-Roche said.

When no one replied, the lawyer turned around. It was only then that Filmore and Farnham had already come to that same conclusion. And acted on it. Their golf cart was speeding for the exit, with Fillmore driving. They had left poor Fosdick slumped on the hallway floor, broken wrist and all, to fend for himself. Mixed in with the sounds of the wrecking-ball chorus were the shrieks of lag bolts as they were ripped out of two-by-fours. In their frenzy to escape, the test subjects were pulling the wing down around them. The door closest to Koch-Roche buckled, bowing out so far that a hairy hand was able to thrust through the gap between door and jamb, out into the hall. Ten furry fingers fought to get just the right grip and proper leverage to pop the lock bolt out of its striker plate.

Everyone was running toward Koch-Roche and the exit. Running and falling as the floor shuddered and shifted underfoot. The panicked medical staff crashed down onto the heaps of broken glass, struggled up, only to fall as the floor heaved again.

The attorney had seen more than enough. But before he could climb into the remaining golf cart's driver's seat, the vehicle was commandeered by a pair of burly male nurses. The cart started to scoot away at once. Koch-Roche jumped for the back of the vehicle and managed to get a grip on one of the canopy posts. He hung on like grim death.

Behind him, the doors to the test subjects' rooms began to burst open. Dark, hairy monsters surged out into the hall.

And began to tear the terrified staff to shreds. "Faster!" the attorney screamed.

As they zipped past the wolverine's open cage, he got a brief glimpse of the experimental animal. It had managed to pull down some slack in the bundled wires and was gnawing through the connections, one by one. The cut electrical wires hung down from its shaved scalp like rainbow-colored strands of shoulder-length hair.

"Faster!" Koch-Roche howled.

But the golf cart was redlined. And to make matters worse, the test subjects seemed to lock on to and pursue anything that was running away. Like giant Airedales, a pair of them dashed down the hall after the cart, their mouths hanging open, their tongues lolling, their bare feet pounding the corridor floor. Behind them down the hall, Koch-Roche could see flying human bodies. The other test subjects were chasing down the fleeing medical personnel and bowling them over. Once the staff members were bowled, some of the beasts stood on their supine torsos and pulled off the limbs. Some just stomped a few times and then ran on. The ruined hallway was thick with huge, dark, darting shapes.

When the attorney looked ahead to try to gauge the distance to the heavy door and safety, he saw that the Fings had stopped their cart on the other side of the barrier.

And they were closing the door!

Realizing what was at stake, the driver of KochRoche's cart stomped on the accelerator with both feet, trying to urge a little more speed from the motor. The other nurse knew the only way to go faster was to lighten the load. To this end, he began pounding on Koch-Roche's head and shoulders with his fists, trying to dump him off the back of the vehicle.

But the lawyer would not be moved. He knew that to fall off meant falling into the hands of the beasts that were quickly gaining on them.

His refusal to let go doomed them all.

Forty feet ahead, the bank-vault door slammed shut with an ear-splitting clang. The driver of the cart hit the brakes, sending them into a four-wheel, sideways slide. The cart crashed nose-first into the wall and bounced off. Koch-Rache was thrown clear, over the driver's compartment, hood and solidly against the selfsame wall.

For a moment, he was thankfully unconscious. When he awakened, it was to hot wetness splashing over his legs. He opened his eyes and saw the two test subjects-it was no longer possible to tell who they were, or whether they were male or female-tearing the nurses to ribbons with their bare hands.

One of the beasts looked up from its gruesome game and saw Koch-Roche, leaning there against the bottom of the wall, alive. For an instant, their eyes locked. The beast's mind was an open book. It was thinking, More fun.

The attorney didn't think. He reacted. In front of him, the bumper of the golf cart had caved in the metal grate over a ventilation duct. As Koch-Roche scooted for it, he felt a hairy hand graze the back of his knee.

Between the grate and wall was a jagged opening no bigger than twelve inches. The little lawyer squirmed through the gap like he'd been greased and crashed onto his belly inside the square stainless-steel duct.

Ahead of him, the duct made a tight right turn. Behind him, the test subject was ripping at the grate. When the screen came off, the duct rocked and groaned. But Koch-Roche was already out of reach, moving for the bend: Before he rounded it, he looked back over his shoulder and saw the huge animal face with its dripping fangs, the hairy arm and hand groping to reach his foot.

No way, he thought, his heart thudding high in his throat. The duct opening was too small. The monster could not follow him. To catch him, this beast would have to peel back the sides of the duct, and keep on peeling them back. As strong and as determined as the creature was, such a thing was simply not possible. The ducts ran all through the pharmaceutical complex, miles and miles of them for Koch-Roche's endless retreat.

The attorney belly-crawled around the turn, putting the monster out of sight. Ahead, the way was pitchdark. Scary, but safe. All he wanted to do was hide.

To hide and stay hidden until someone, somehow, figured out how to kill the big bastards.

He crawled in a straight line for what seemed like a long time. The sounds of bestial rage and terrified screams gradually dwindled behind him, until all he could hear was the bump of his bony knees on the inside of the duct, and the rasp of his own hoarse breathing.

Then he saw a dim light ahead. It appeared to be coming from the floor of the duct. He approached cautiously until he got close enough to see that it was a grated vent. The light was comforting to him after the long crawl in darkness, but he didn't allow himself to linger there. He knew that if one of the test subjects got wind of him, it could and would pull down the ceiling to get at him.

Koch-Roche edged close enough to the grate to peer through the mesh, into the room directly below. He saw nothing, no movement of any kind. He held his breath, straining to pick up a sound over his own pulse pounding in his ears. A shuffle of bare feet. The floor creaking under a tremendous weight. A single sniff of a beast trying to seek him out.

There was nothing.

When he was certain he wasn't being observed, he moved past the vent and started to continue on. Then he heard it. Not beneath him. But behind him in the duct.

The scraping of powerful claws on steel.

The huffing breath of a predator closing for the kill.

Chapter 32

It was a moment etched into heightened focus by the adrenaline load coursing through Remo's veins.

A dozen autorifles poised, aimed, waited for the command to fire. Waited while the points of impending bullet impact shifted over Remo's body. He could visualize the track of the bullets' intended flight, feel a warm touch where each would strike.

Here. Here. Here. Heart. Lungs. Liver. Brain.

And as the aim of the guards wavered ever so slightly, responding to the intake of breath or the burden of the rifle's weight on the shoulder, the warm touch of death brushed over Remo's skin.

Here, I will strike.

Remo knew there were things beyond even the power of Sinanju. One rifle's sting could be avoided, one man's aim confounded with misdirection, smoke, mirrors. But twelve? Twelve?

In the instant that stretched on and on, Remo studied the faces of the men in the firing squad. Sweating.

Yellow faces. In the eyes of some, there was fear. Others gloried in what they were about to do. In the license to kill that had been granted them.

He could feel the tension build as, in anticipation, their index fingers tightened on the triggers.

Empty, Remo thought. Empty. And he visualized the Nothing. As his minded flushed itself clear of all distraction, his body accepted chi, the life force of the universe. Like a sweet cloud entering through his mouth, it coursed down his throat, into his lungs and lower still, to the center of his being, just below the navel. A torrent of energy biliowed out from his center to the tips of his fingers and toes, the soles of his feet, the top of his head. It crawled under his scalp like ten thousand ants.

The martial art known as Sinanju was like a dance. A dance that assassins passed down, from generation to generation.

It was also like a portal, a conduit through which the chi power could flow. The amount of transferred power was limited only by the skill and the physiology of the artist. The steps of the Sinanju dance, the various complex motions of the limbs, were an illusion. True, they could be used to kill. But their real intent was to move and focus the spirit-mind, to open the door to the chi flow. And after decades of continuous practice, the movements themselves became superfluous. Unnecessary.

For an ascended Master of Sinanju, the door to power was always ajar.

Remo's mind was open, receptive, his body waiting, ready, when the push of air hit him. He didn't have to think about where it came from or what it meant. Like a leaf caught in a gust of wind, he went with it, toes digging into the asphalt, legs driving.

Only moments later, when it was all over and the shooting had stopped, did Remo understand what had happened.

The rush of breeze that had touched his face was from Chiun's left hand. Standing five feet away, the Master had used the air's resistance to the power and speed of his push to launch himself to the right. Somewhere between the push and the rippling roar of autofire, Remo distinctly heard the clack of firing pins. Ragged. Unsynchronized.

Bullets sprayed the spot where he had been standing. Bullets screamed after him, rattling the hurricane fence, kicking up divots of asphalt at his heels. Remo started to turn hard to the right, to force at least some of the guards to hold their fire for fear of hitting the man standing in front of them.

But a volley of bullets cut off that route.

Over his shoulder, he saw the whole line of men crumpling. And he saw why.

The Master had hold of the elbow of the guard at the end of the firing line. With the pressure of thumb and forefinger, Chiun was redirecting the sweep of autofire from the man's M-16, aiming it into the backs of the other guards. He was also controlling the tendons in the man's arm, making it impossible for him to release pressure on the trigger.

When the magazine came up empty, Chiun let the man go. Eleven bodies thrashed on the tarmac, thrashed and then grew still. Astonished and horrified by what he had been made to do, the guard dropped his gun and helmet and ran for the complex's gate.

Remo watched him vanish in the darkness down the road.

Chiun already had the faxes out of the cuff of his robe and, in the light of the flood lamps, was examining the map of the grounds that Smith had provided them.

"Maybe I should have a look at that, too," Remo said. "In case we happen to be separated."

That wasn't why he wanted to see the document. He wanted Chiun not to be in charge of directions. The Master passed the map over without comment. A combination of body language, facial expression and spiritual aura indicated the Master's displeasure. Remo got a glimpse of lightning bolts behind the old man's eyes.

"It's this way, I think," Remo said.

They crossed the expanse of asphalt and made straight for the main building's entrance. Which, strangely, was unguarded. Remo had figured that a plant this big would have to have more than a dozen guys on its security force. But if there were more guards on the premises, they were nowhere in sight. They'd all either suddenly died or taken a powder. Remo cast his vote for the latter. As he looked along the front of the plant complex, he saw workers by the score pouring out of the various doors and gates of the warehouse and manufacturing areas. They were scooting off as fast as their legs would carry them, like rats leaving the proverbial sinking ship. Instead of running out the main gate, many of the Family Fing employees were taking the shortest possible route off the grounds by dashing straight to and scrambling right over the hurricane fence.

"Something's wrong here," he said.

"Of course," Chiun countered. "And it is our job to fix it."

"That's not what I mean," Remo said. "Those guys climbing the razor wire over there aren't doing it for exercise. They look like they've got the devil after them."

Chiun seemed unconcerned. He opened the door to the lobby, then looked back at Remo. "Do we go this way?" he asked innocently. "I no longer have the luxury of a map...."

"Yeah, yeah," Remo said, "that's the way." He took the lead, heading for the elevator. Once they were inside the car, he glanced at the fax. "We want the tenth floor. That's where the medical wing is." Remo had to reach around Chiun to press the floor button. As the Master's hands were up his sleeves, he could not perform the task himself.

The elevator doors opened on a deserted corridor. Chiun stuck his head out, then wrinkled his nose in disgust. "They are here," he said. "And there are many of them. The stinkers."

Remo looked at the massive, gleaming steel door that completely blocked the hallway at one end. With a carefree tone that was not entirely genuine, he said, "It appears, Little Father, that what we're looking for is behind door numero uno."

The two assassins spread out, each taking a side of the hall as they cautiously advanced on the barrier. Even Remo, whose nasal sensitivity had been compromised years ago by filthy food and a degraded Western life-style, could smell the hormone users now.

"Man, oh man," he groaned. "It's like a convention of skunks in here!"

"It would be best," Chiun told him, "to put that unpleasantness out of your mind. For as we have already seen, these are not skunks...."

Remo nodded. But how does one stop smelling something noxious? By breathing through the mouth, obviously. But Chiun had taught him that mouth-breathing was a big no-no in Sinanju. According to the Master, if you inhaled through the mouth, it made it impossible to correctly position the tongue, which was supposed to lightly touch the roof of the mouth.

Without the tongue in the correct position, the flow of chi was impeded. The choice Remo faced was between not smelling the hormone beasts or not being able to fight them. So, it really wasn't a choice at all.

Somewhere, Remo had read that after prolonged exposure, the sensors in the nose become desensitized to aromas. To hurry this end, he breathed in and out rapidly, putting as much stink on his nasal receptors as he could.

"What are you doing?" Chiun asked him. "Why are you making so much noise?"

"Trying to desensitize my nose."

"Why don't you just breathe through your mouth?"

Remembering all the months of working on nothing but proper tongue position, Remo started to complain, but caught himself. After all, what was the use?

The tempered-steel frame of the door filled the hall from side to side and floor to ceiling. Immense bolts tied the tremendously heavy unit into the steel beams that supported the building's exterior walls. The door itself might have been looted from a bank vault. On its front it had a huge lever and three sets of tumblers. It was closed and appeared to be locked.

Remo reached out and ran his fingertips down the millimeter-wide seam between door and frame. "Definitely locked," he said.

Chiun stepped closer to the door, cocked his head, then pressed his ear to the cold steel.

"What do you hear?" Remo asked him.

The Master waved an impatient hand for silence. "Shh," he said. "Listen."

Remo put his head against the door, too. Through the metal, he heard groaning sounds. Not human. Not animal. The sounds of metal being stressed, over and over.

Then there was a loud crash. Followed by a metallic shriek.

On the other side of the door, something still lived. Something that had been locked in.

Something that wanted out.

"It's pulling the guts out of the door lock," Remo said as he drew his head back. And even as he spoke, the huge steel lever on the face of the door began to move. A little wiggle at first, then a waggle, then a wide arc.

Both of the assassins took a giant step back.

The lever flipped over, and when it did, the door's many interior bolts slid back.

"We'd better find some cover, and quick," Remo said.

"There is no place to run," Chiun told him. "We must stand and fight right here."

"But we don't know how many are in there!" The seam between door and frame gaped wider as the door slowly swung out.

"There are too many," Chiun told him. "Does that make you feel any better?"

Chapter 33

Jimmy Koch-Roche didn't wait to see what the thing that pursued him looked like. By the time it had passed over the duct vent, he was around another turn, crawling as fast as he could go. His bare knees were scraped and bleeding, but that was the least of his problems.

As Koch-Roche fled in panic, somewhere in the back of what remained of his rational mind, it occurred to him that whatever the snuffling, scrabbling thing behind him was, it wasn't a hormone-enlarged human. It was something small enough to get into the duct, something small enough to move quickly and easily through it.

Then, from some hidden juncture along the winding black passage, the air pumps kicked in, blowing hot wind against his sweating back. And along with the heat, an odor swept over him.

Musky, fecal and ever so nasty.

The smell made him whimper and crawl even faster.

If he didn't know what it was, he knew one thing for sure-it was gaining on him. Over the thunk of his knees on the steel and a rasp of his own breathing, he could hear the clatter of its claws drawing nearer and nearer.

A plan, he thought. He had to have a plan. As the attorney scrambled along, he racked his brain for a solution. He certainly couldn't fight the thing in the closed confines and darkness of the air duct and hope to come out on top. But if he could get to the next vent, if he could through it, get down into a room or a corridor, even if the thing jumped down after him, he would stand a chance of escape. In a room or a corridor, there would be somewhere to hide; if he couldn't lock the thing in a room, he could lock himself in one.

The plan was feasible. The problem was, the duct ahead him was dark as pitch. A long straight stretch with no exit.

Don't look back, Koch-Roche told himself. For Christ's sake, keep on moving. His knees banged harder against the inside of the duct, making echoes boom before him.

In the darkness, he didn't see the T-branch of the tunnel. The top of his head rammed into the unyielding surface, making him see stars. He refused to let himself black out.

To black out was to die.

Shaking off the shock of the impact, the lawyer started frantically stripping off his shirt. He couldn't count on the beast not being able to locate him by smell-although how it could smell anything but itself had to be the eighth wonder of the world. But he could try to confuse it. Koch-Roche tossed his shirt as far as he could down the right arm of the duct. Then he turned the other way and hauled ass.

If his trick slowed the creature down even a few seconds, he told himself, it might be enough.

What had eluded him, due to his fear and the stress of the moment, was that his battered knees were leaving a blood trail everywhere he went. And it was his fresh blood that the creature was tracking.

The attorney's heart leaped when he saw the patch of light filtering up through a grate in the floor just ahead. Reaching it, Koch-Roche hurled himself at the mesh, ripping the grate out of its track and letting it drop through onto the floor of an office below.

At his back, the growling, snarling, scrambling thing was coming his way, fast.

If Koch-Roche hadn't looked up, he might have gotten away. But look up he did. The sight of the experimental-subject wolverine filling the duct, its multicolored electric-wire wig flopping as it bore relentlessly down on him, froze him in place.

For forty-five of his forty-nine years, Jimmy Koch-Roche had had a secret fear that something huge and hairy and powerful would get him. Get meaning grab, hurt, stomp, tear, punch, cut, even kill. This nameless thing had taken many forms in the real world. The junior-high-school gym coach. A senior classman at Hami High who used to confiscate his lunch money daily. Various thugs and toughs who, when they saw his size, thought easy pickings. Even as late as law school, he felt at times threatened by those bigger than him. It was only after he'd made his mark on the national legal scene that the terror took a step back into the shadows.

It was not gone, though.

Even though he was rich, a man of influence and authority.

It waited in the wings.

It was a curious irony then, that when James Marvin Koch-Roche finally came face-to-face with the beast that would in fact kill him, it was actually much smaller than he was. He outweighed it by seventy pounds.

What the wolverine in the heating duct lacked in size, it more than made up for in pure, kill-crazed frenzy. Its first vicious bite took him high in the shoulder. The fangs were like red-hot irons piercing his flesh. The bones of his shoulder cracked. As the attorney screamed, his heels drumming on the duct, the wolverine shifted its fangs to the side of his neck. Once its grip was solid, it went to work on his belly with its claws.

Chapter 34

Fillmore Fing brought the golf cart to a screeching halt outside the ornately carved ebony-and-ivory arch. With Farnham hot on his heels, he ran into the lobby area of his executive suite. The receptionist was long gone; the trail of debris she'd left behind-sheets of bond typing paper, a lipstick tube and a roll of breath mints-led to the door marked Emergency Exit. After father and son had rushed into Fillmore's private office, Farnham slammed and securely bolted the double doors behind them.

"What now, Pop?" he said.

"We've got no choice," Filimore told him as he snatched up the phone from his desk. He punched the speed dial for the warehouse. While the phone rang at the other end, he said, "We've got to kill all of the human test subjects."

"Yeah, sure, but how?"

"We've got enough cyanide gas stockpiled in our warehouse to wipe out a small city," Fillmore said. "It's simple, really. All we have to do is drill a little hole through the bank-vault door and pump the poison into the medical wing until they're all dead."

"Uh, Pop, aren't you forgetting that there could be people, people who are still human beings, alive in there?"

The elder Fing scowled at what was, undoubtedly, his only surviving son. "There's nothing we can do for any of them," he said. "Anybody left in the medical wing is in very small pieces by now. We've got to concentrate all our efforts on containing this thing. That's the key here. If we can keep a lid on what's happened in the last twenty-four hours, at the very least we still have a chance of doing a nice piece of business in the Third World. At best, we may be able to proceed according to our original plan. But if we can't black out the news of this disaster, it's all over for Family Fing. We'll never survive the bad publicity. Imposter Herbalistics will go down the drain, too."

Even Farnham was taken aback at this. "Jeez, Pop, you mean we'll go out of business?"

"I mean, we'll go straight to jail, if not the gallows," Fillmore said. He glared at the phone in his hand. No one was answering. He hung up and speed-dialed the number for the plant's technical center.

Something else suddenly occurred to Farnham. Something important. "Uh, Pop, Fosdick is in there, too."

"Goddammit, what's happened to the night shift?" the patriarch cried. "Has everyone gone home for the day?" He slammed down the phone, then said, "Come on, Farnham, we'll have to do the job ourselves."

Fillmore took the lead, cautiously exiting his private office. Seeing no one in the reception area, he moved quietly to the arched entrance that opened onto the hallway. When Fillmore poked his head around the arch, he saw a hulking dark shape about a hundred feet down the corridor. The elder Fing ducked back so quickly he practically knocked Farnham down.

"Can't go that way," he whispered to his son. "The American computer guy is outside."

"Oh, shit," Farnham groaned softly.

Fillmore was already heading back for his office. When the doors were safely locked once more, he went into his mahogany-paneled private washroom. When he came out a few seconds later, he had an automatic weapon in his hands, and the side pocket of his suit jacket was bulging with extra clips.

"Whoa!" Farnham said, stepping lively to one side and out of the line of fire. "Hey, do you really know how to use that thing?"

The elder Fing gave the M-16's cocking handle a jerk, chambering the first bullet in the 30-round magazine. Then he flipped the fire-selector switch to full auto.

"Now," Fillmore said with a smile, "I'm ready for bear."

"I hope you don't get any of that gun grease on your suit, Pop," Farnham said.

Fillmore took a seat in the throne chair behind his enormous desk. He propped the autoweapon up on the butt of its magazine, with the muzzle aimed between the silver handles of the suite's massive doors.

"First," he told his son, "I'm going to shoot the hell out of Mr. Billionaire, then I'm going to hunt down the skinny white bastard who got us into all this trouble in the first place."

"But Sternovsky tried to warn us what would happen, Pop. Don't you remember? While Fosdick was pushing for us to go ahead with the program, Carlos kept telling us we were in for it. He's been ranting about terminating the human trials for days. Long before any of the real bad stuff started going down. He also said we should kill the test subjects before they woke up, that it was our only chance. Don't you remember? That was right before he walked out."

"He should have made us listen to him instead of taking off like that," Fillmore insisted. "If he had done his job, maybe we wouldn't be in such a godawful mess now."

"Actually, you had already fired him by then, Pop."

"He doesn't know what fired is," Fillmore said. "But he's sure going to find out."

Farnham Fing knew better than to try to reason with his father when he was in this kind of mood, and heavily armed. Instead, the heir apparent to the Family Fing fortune edged himself along the wall, moving as far from the doors as he could get. Out of range of both the hormone-crazed American and his naturally crazed old man.

DEWAYNE KORB, the new and improved Dewayne Korb, was not the least bit alarmed by the sight of dense brown fur sprouting all over his body, nor by the perky little tail that was fast emerging from his backside-he was, in fact, looking forward to his tail growing long enough for him to chase. To make room for its full extension, he had already torn off all his clothes.

The world's richest man, aka Billionaire Blubberboy, had become Korb the Transcendent. Abstractions like software systems, like management flowcharts, like ten-figure mergers, which had featured so large in his daily life, no longer preoccupied him. Korb simply did not have room in his head for such things. In his former existence, he would have categorized the problem as an extreme case of information overload.

Along with the startling increase in his muscle volume over the past ten minutes, he was experiencing changes in the quality of his five senses-particularly in smell, sight and hearing, which suddenly seemed able to pull in staggering amounts of data from the surrounding space. There was so much sensory information coming at him from so many directions that he could hold it all in his mind for no more than a fraction of a second. Then it was gone, displaced by volumes of new data. As detailed as this instant-by-instant picture of his immediate environment was, the former boy genius couldn't remember what he had smelled, tasted, seen or heard even a few seconds before.

Instead of feeling buried under the weight of this constant flow of sensation, Korb was elated by it, profoundly relieved to be fully in the present moment, at one with the all-embracing Now.

Sniffing the air, and finding it lacking, the billionaire hurriedly marked the corridor wall next to the watercooler. For good measure, he sprayed the ornamental broad-leafed plant in a Chinese vase, as well. That was better.

Dropping to all fours, Korb pressed his nose to the floor. Inhaling, he knew that he'd walked down this hallway before. He could make out the trail of his own footprints. He could smell the footprints of others, too. Those that had intruded upon his territory. They were not creatures like him.

The billionaire beast took a moment to more fully demarcate his turf, sending a stream halfway up the wall, then set off in pursuit of the intruders.

Though his prey had attempted to mask their secret body odors with flowery perfumes, Korb was not fooled. To him, smells were signposts. They led him past the parked golf cart, which he recognized only as a thing not living. It might as well have been a rock or a pile of dirt-this despite the fact that for six years he had used just such a vehicle to get around his 150-room mansion at the heart of Korbtown. When he entered the reception area, he put his nose flat to the carpet. Amazingly, he could tell which of the scent footprints was the most recent by the intensity of the smell. He could also tell male from female, although in his current state, the distinction between the sexes had no real meaning.

The smell trail led him to a pair of big doors made of highly polished wood. He put his ear to the hairline gap between them. Holding his own breath, he could hear the heartbeats of two living things on the other side. He jammed his wet nose against the crack and sniffed, drawing in a great volume of air, and with it billions upon billions of molecules from inside the room.

Oh, yes, they were there.

Korb the Transcendent didn't think of his quarry as humans anymore. Only as not-Korb. And though the not-Korb were only sometimes eaten, they were always killed.

Wiping the slobber trailing from his chin onto the matted hair of his chest, Dewayne Korb prepared to spring.

Chapter 35

As the bank-vault door swung out and the rank odor intensified, Remo considered what Chiun had just said. And he decided that knowing that there were "too many" on the other side of the door did actually make him feel better. It defined the rules of engagement in no uncertain terms: every strike had to be perfectly timed and executed, since there would be no second chances. No time to worry about being overmatched physically. Remo's survival depended on concentration, which in turn depended on relaxation.

But he found it very difficult to relax as he watched the door arc back against the wall and saw the space between the doorjambs more than filled by two monumental brutes. The coarse fur on their chests was encrusted with blood; their arms glistened with it, up to the elbow, and so did the shaggy, wet hair that ringed their dripping maws.

Looking at them, Remo guessed their weight at around seven hundred pounds apiece. There was no clue who they might have been before, when they were human. Because they weren't human anymore.

Seeing pupil and Master as new potential victims, the beast who was also the author of more than forty romance novels, including the genre megasellers Let's Love and Let's Love, Love, tipped back her gore-drenched head and, spewing a gust of foul breath, released an earth-shaking bellow.

Her test-subject companion had a much more luxuriant and remarkable tail, which he lashed back and forth as he leered eagerly at Remo and Chiun. The former sumo wrestler known professionally as Toshisan sniffed the air like a gourmet about to partake of some rare feast.

Under the layers of blood crust, of fur and underfur, Remo sensed the coiling of vast muscle groups. "They're going to charge," he warned.

And they did. Both at once.

The two huge bodies hurled themselves at an opening barely large enough for one. The impact of 1400 pounds smashing against the door frame shook the floor and sent a crazy spiderweb of cracks running along the hall's ceiling.

Bouncing off the steel doorjamb, the authoress immediately grabbed the sumo wrestler by the ears and tried to flip him over her shoulder. Because of his tremendous weight and the elasticity of his ears, this proved impossible.

The attempt on her part did, however, make him very, very mad.

Toshi-san threw a wicked elbow into the writer's midsection, then lunged for the doorway and the unmoving, apparently helpless victims. His blow had no effect on his rival. She reached the door frame at the same instant he did.

Remo could not have possibly anticipated what happened next, but because he was centered, grounded and open, he was able to take advantage of the situation.

In their frantic need to be first through the door, and therefore the first to kill, the two beasts thrust themselves through the opening. They hit with enormous force again, this time managing to wedge themselves together in the narrow gap.