An Old Fashioned War

"I'll be right over to England, Smitty," said Rema. Poo, he found out, had just learned another word. It was "Harrods."

Chapter 8

Remo parked Poo in the Britannia Hotel in a suite of rooms overlooking one of the many little parks in London.

Before he left, she asked:

"Will you deflower me tonight?"

"If you got a petunia, I'll take it from you. But if you mean copulation, no. Not tonight."

"Why not tonight? I'm alone again on my honeymoon."

"Tonight is not the right night."

"There will never be a right night," said Poo. Somehow she had discovered, with the aid only of a phone book in a language she did not understand, that seamstresses would come up to one's hotel room and make dresses for one while one waited.

She could also order jewelers that way, too. And, of course, food. She was going to try that great English delicacy of bangers and mash.

If Poo had to be left alone again this honeymoon night, she did not know what she would tell her mother.

"Five thousand pounds," said Remo.

"I should tell my mother five thousand pounds?"

"No, you get five thousand pounds not to tell your mother a thing about what goes on and what does not go on in our marriage."

"The first night that would be a good sum. It is not unusual for couples not to consummate the first night. It does happen. But we are into many, many nights now. Now we are beginning a disgrace." Poo's moon face quivered. A tear came down one eye. She covered her face in shame.

"How much?"

The hands lowered. "We have to be talking ten thousand pounds at least. And what is the tribute you're getting for this service?"

"I don't get the tribute. It all goes to Sinanju."

"It all goes to Chiun."

"It goes to the House of Sinanju. I am a Master of Sinanju. It goes to Chiun and me, I guess."

"I am married to a Master of Sinanju who does not even know whether he gets tribute or not. Is that what I married?"

"Divorce is possible. You can have that for a solution, Poo," said Remo, reaching the door.

"Divorce is impossible in the Sinanju ceremony. No Sinanju Master has ever gotten divorced. It isn't done. It is," said Poo, pausing before that inviolate supreme word of Sinanju, "tradition."

"There must have been one Master who got divorced. I'm sure there was," said Remo, feeling the outer edges of panic kiss his nervous system.

"You should know," cooed Poo. "You had to read all the scrolls to become a Master. If you can find a divorce in the history of Sinanju, let me know. Until then, think about how you want to divide the tribute with Chiun. It is my impression you do most of the work in the current service to America."

"How do you know that?"

"Everyone in Sinanju knows what goes on in the House of Sinanju. It's a major topic of discussion. Am I right? Do you do most of the work?"

"We never figured out who did what, Poo. It works. There is nothing better than something that works. So long."

"But for whom does it work?" asked Poo as Remo shut the door behind him. He had to remind himself this girl was only twenty years old. What would she be like at twenty-one? What would she be like at forty, if he ever wanted to live that long?

No divorce, he thought. Because I am a Master of Sinanju, I am married to this woman forever. And yet he was sure there had to be a divorce somewhere in four thousand years. It was probably covered up. That's how those things worked.

But he had been poring over the scrolls more now than ever before, and every time a Sinanju Master was married, it was duly recorded. And every time a Sinanju wife died it was duly recorded, as was the departure of a Master. No Master ever recorded a separation. Every wife died married to a Sinanju Master, from the Great Wang to the Lesser Gi. Even Chiun's wife had died.

Poo was Remo's forever. And vice versa.

Remo arrived in Bath, in the southwest part of England, and ran into more English plainclothesmen than attended a royal wedding. It was a strange sight to see cars backed up at roadblocks for miles. Men with walkie-talkies occupied virtually every building.

Remo was spotted as someone who didn't belong there as soon as he entered Avon county, home of the town of Bath.

He brought with him only a bamboo satchel containing a Sinanju parchment.

A bobby stepped in and courteously asked him what he was doing in these parts, and what was in the satchel.

"Something to read," said Remo. The bobby examined Remo's passport.

"You say you're visiting the mineral baths. May I ask why now?"

"Keeps me young."

"You're about twenty-eight, aren't you?"

"Would you believe you're off by at least twenty years?"

"Really?"

"Yeah. I'm eight," said Remo.

The bobby was not amused. Plainclothesmen desperatly looking for something, anything, closed in on Remo. Remo had stepped out of his taxi at the roadblock and the driver was now indicating he never saw Remo before, did not know the man, and Remo was just another fare who hadn't paid yet.

"This isn't a laughing matter, Mr. Williams. Our prime minister has been kidnapped in this area, and we regret that certain precautions must be taken. These precautions may limit your freedom."

"Fine, just tell me where not to go and I won't go."

"I'm afraid, Mr. Williams, we cannot let you in this area."

"And I'm afraid, old boy, I'm just going to have to go in."

"Then I will keep your passport."

"Frame it if you will," said Remo.

"We're going to have to stop you physically."

" 'Fraid I can't let you," said Remo, and whistling, walked past the bobby in the high blue hat. Apologizing, several plainclothesmen warned they would have to stop Mr. Williams. Apologizing, Remo said he couldn't let them do that.

He whipped out the scroll and tried to get his bearings. From the center of the little resort city, he knew where he should go to look. But he had to get to the baths themselves first.

Several arms reached out for him, and he let his body respond to the air pressure ahead of the hands so he could dodge the hands while thinking about something else. It was more an absentminded gesture than a calculated move, letting the body itself do the dodging as he walked down the road reading the scroll of Master Wa, who had been hired by Emperor Claudius of Rome to make sure a plot against him did not develop within the legions occupying Roman Britain.

It was always a threat, Remo had learned from the scrolls, that some praetor would march his legions back from the frontiers and take over Rome. Caesar had done it. Others tried to do it, and this period of turmoil within the Western world, of plots and counterplots revolving around a corrupt and debauched center of authority, had proved to be what would be later called "one of the golden ages of Sinanju."

For as Master Wa wrote:

"No emperor slept nor senator spoke without fear of death in the night from the hand of an assassin. Sinanju, naturally, was the most in demand."

Remo felt an officer whiz by him as his body curved out of the way of the officer's lunge. The officer went forward on the dark country road, skinning his hands painfully.

Chiun had selected this scroll. He knew Mr. Arieson would be in Bath. Why?

Was Mr. Arieson seeking out Remo? And if so, why? Obviously Arieson and the House of Sinanju went way back. But how?

And what were the mysterious techniques Mr. Arieson used to avoid blows? Two more British policemen swung out at thin air. Did Mr. Arieson use techniques like Remo's, only more advanced?

No. Mr. Arieson would have been dodging the air currents Remo had created back at Little Big Horn if that were the case. And what about the helmet and chest protector the Israeli archaeologist said were perfectly new, punctured using a technique more than two thousand years old?

Remo hadn't even seen the helmet and chest protector. But there they were when his blows landed on metal aboard the USS Polk.

"Stop that man. Stop him," came a voice from behind.

"We're trying. He's made of air," answered one of the policemen.

"Then bloody well follow him," came the voice. Remo nodded. That would be all right. They could follow him right up until he decided they might be in the way. And so Remo walked into the old Roman town of Bath, reading his scroll, certain now that Arieson was in some way taunting him. Arieson was trying to tell him something by coming to a city where Sinanju had worked. After all, hadn't Arieson phoned him, calling him "boyo"?

The answer was here in a part of England that had once belonged to Rome.

The town of Bath was pleasant, with old Tudor dwellings and modern dwellings, and what was left of Rome had been reconstructed in the mineralwater baths themselves. Bacteria had formed down at the base of the springs in the old Roman piping, which had to be removed. In the process, many coins and artifacts were found.

The baths were housed in a building, and in that building Remo went to a section where he was supposed to get dressed, and laid out the scroll in full. The Praetor Maximus Granicus had set up his headquarters here because he had aching bones. He had wanted to be near the springs as long as possible, until he and his legions left the Britannic shores for Gaul and Rome.

Granicus, like most ambitious men, loved luxury, and along the military road two stadia north, he built himself a palace which was supposed to be impenetrable to entry by anyone but friends.

"This Granicus domicile," the scroll went on, "had walls collapsing within walls, so that portholes were really traps. Secret entrances beneath the domicile were really mazes, and the beauty of this defensive structure was that the only way to enter it was to know how it worked.

"While I as a Master would love to record a new defense overcome by me, Wa, I regret that it was not a challenge at all, although later I would tell the Divine Claudius how dangerous it was, describing the gigantic trap as the worst obstacle of all. This, of course, was in keeping with the rule of the Great Wang, that no assassination should ever be made to look easy. A client does not think you are more wonderful because the work was easy, rather he thinks you deserve less.

"The great Granicus' defensive network was really only a weak imitation of Pharaoh Ka's lower cataract home, which was a brilliant interpretation of early Su-dynasty imperial residences. It was penetrated easily by an open confrontation in the main, not the auxiliary entrances, which could prove problematic. Granicus was completed with a simple death during sleep, a smothering with his own pillow. His legions were given to a more loyal Claudian servant, and the civil war was averted. Tribute: pearls, three saludia in weight, eighteen in number; gold in the sum of forty-two Hibernian pharongs; twelve minor rubies, seven obols apiece; and a lengthy laudation from Claudius with an offer of games in the honor of Sinanju, offer declined."

Remo folded up the scroll. Since there was only one place mentioned in the scrolls Chiun had given him, and since Chiun knew before being told that the area where the Prime Minister had disappeared had to be Bath, therefore Remo concluded the place of action had to be the old defensive home of Granicus Maximus, two stadia north on the military road.

Since Granicus, even if he had not left the world early with the help of a Sinanju Master, would have been gone for almost two thousand years now, and since everyone who ever knew him would have been gone that long, and since anyone who knew the people who knew him would have been gone by centuries also, Remo Williams didn't bother to ask for directions but simply headed north.

In a British control base, the stranger in the gray slacks and black T-shirt was being duly recorded. It was recorded that he entered the house containing the springs, read a scroll, and then asked the nearest person, who happened to be a plainclothesman like most everyone now in this area, where the old military road was.

Constable Blake answered.

"There was a road here used to store arms for D-Day, if that's what you mean, sir."

The stranger, named Remo Williams if his passport was correct, answered:

"No. Not that one. An older one."

" 'Twas built on an old Norman road, sir," said Constable Blake.

"Bit older. How many roads north do you have?"

"Quite a few."

"What's the oldest?"

"I wouldn't rightly know, sir."

The subject, Remo, was followed to the roads north. He looked at every one of them and walked around, a bit confused. He asked several passersby how long a stadium was, and was told by a young schoolgirl the exact distance.

The schoolgirl also knew which was the old Roman road. She pointed out little white posts about a foot high along the side of the road. She told Remo:

"These are Roman mileposts. They left them all over their empire. Any idiot knows that."

"I'm an American," Remo said as Scotland Yard prepared to remove the girl from danger-if that were possible, considering the strange powers of this intruder.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Just follow the white posts. Can you count?"

"I can count. I just didn't know which was the old Roman road, that's all."

"Yes, of course. That's all right. You really can't be expected to know all these things. Just follow the white posts."

"Lots of people don't know Roman mileposts."

"Yes. Many don't. If you get lost, ask for help from a bobby," said the little girl, age nine.

"I can find it," said Remo, who could count the number of men watching him in surveillance, who could even sense the monitors on him sending signals back to their headquarters.

"I'm sure you can," said the sweet little girl with the separate teeth, schoolbooks, freckles, braids, and all the other usual accoutrements of an English schoolchild. "Just don't walk in the middle of the road, sir. Cars are dangerous."

Remo cleared his throat. "Cars are not dangerous. I'm dangerous."

"Well of course you're dangerous. You're a very dangerous man," she said, humoring him the way children sometimes do with adults. "But please do stay on the side of the road."

Remo saw a police van parked along the side of the road. It was the one containing the cameras watching him.

He sauntered over to one headlight and unscrewed it. Along with the tires, the man at the wheel, the wheel, and finally with a great roaring rip, the roof. "Dangerous," said Remo.

"Destructive," said the British schoolgirl.

The Scotland Yard detectives poured out of the van without a roof.

"Stay where you are. I'm going to get you your prime minister. Just don't crowd me."

"Do stay near him," said the girl. "He can be violent, of course, but he does seem like a dear sort, don't you think?"

"I'm not a dear sort," said Remo. "I'm an assassin. I kill people. I kill lots of people."

"Well then, they must be nasty people, but do please stay on the side of the road, and do be careful whom you let offer you a ride."

Remo shot the onlooking police a dirty glance. He could hear one of them say into a telphone: "Subject identified self as dangerous assassin." Remo blew a raspberry at the police, and one at the little girl, and counted his way up the old Roman road for as many white posts as the girl said.

He knew the road had to be underneath him.

That was how roads worked- They built new roads on top of old roads, and they just layered the pathways. Or wore them down as the case might be. It was the same thing they did with cities. They just kept piling the new city on top of the old one.

Remo reached the correct milepost and looked around. To his right was a field of grain. To his left was a flock of sheep. Stone walls surrounded the road, and far off was a little cottage billowing smoke.

There was no ruin of a mansion. Not a hint of an old Roman building. Nothing. British countryside and nothing.

"He's stopped just where they left the Prime Minister's car. He's looking around," came a voice that was supposed not to carry as far as Remo could hear.

"He's turning around now, looking back here, putting a finger over his mouth. By Jove, the man can hear me a half-mile away down the road."

If Remo could not get quiet, he would have to make it around him. A thrush called at a distance, idling motors chugged far off, wind blew through the grain, and Remo inhaled, tasting first the odors of the earth, moisture, rich soil, old gasoline fumes, and then from skin to bone he became quiet in himself, selecting the sounds and noises and scents and closing them off one by one until he was in a silence of his body.

He could taste the harsh macadam road through his shoes. There was stone under that road, deep and heavy stone. The earth was interrupted by it. A half-mile off was a little grassy hillock.

Remo remembered Chiun pointing out an old building in Judea once. He said when buildings were in countrysides, if the site was not maintained, it would grow over. And if it grew over for more than a few centuries, the plants and earth would build a small hill around it. Only recently in modern times had archaeololgists learned to recognize these hills as tels, good digging sites for old cities and such.

Remo walked over the stone wall and through the field of golden grain to the green hillock. He stood there and knew there was lots of stone underneath. He walked wherever he felt stone until he saw where the earth had been cut. Usually grass was hacked away, but this cut was done with something as smooth as a scalpel cutting a line the length of a coffin low in the hill. It was a patch, a patch of earth cut and replaced and now beginning to grow back.

Remo dug into it with his hands and peeled it back. He heard the constables back at the road say he had found something. He saw loose dirt underneath. Someone had recently dug here, and it was easy to follow. It took him only a few minutes to reach the first minor stone baffle in the outer wall of the old home of Maximus Granicus, sent early to his reward by the hand of Sinanju.

Hazel Thurston was tired of threatening that her captors would never get away with this. Besides, she didn't believe it anymore herself.

They were going to get away with it. They had kidnapped her just outside Bath in the quintessentially British county of Avon, and they had gotten clean away with it. They hadn't left the country, and yet she was in a strange stoite room with earth piled up outside the windows.

They had been here three days now, and the water was tepid, the food old, and as she suspected, the air was getting stale.

"Do you think they buried us without air?" asked the intelligence aide.

"Must be a big place if we could last until now."

"Looks like we're lost, yes?" said the aide.

"I'm afraid so."

"What do you say we overpower the guard?"

"Certainly. But what for? Where are we going to run?"

"We can start digging."

"We don't know, how much earth they piled up outside."

"I can hear you," said the guard. He held a submachine gun loosely at his side.

"Then you should know you're going to get nothing from me."

"I wouldn't want anything from you, Hazel Thurston," said the guard. "You're an ugly old Brit bitch to begin with."

"In victory or defeat, you people are just as disgusting as the day your mothers foaled you," said the British Prime Minister. The aide shot her a look of caution.

"What are you afraid of?" she asked. "That he won't like us?"

"If I didn't like you, bitch, you'd have your eyes shot out."

"I am sure that is the new form of government you wish to bring to Ireland. I don't know why people are surprised that when terrorist movements take over a country, they just use the police force the way they use you louts."

The courageous woman's chest heaved. The air was getting very thin. The guard had a little plastic tube he sucked on every few minutes. He was getting fresh oxygen.

"If I am going to pass out," said Hazel Thurston, "I do have a last word. Please get your leader here."

"You can tell it to me."

"I wouldn't leave my used tissues with you. Get your leader."

Mr. Arieson arrived without one of those tubes that apparently supplied oxygen. He didn't seem to need air. He was fresh as sunshine.

"You want to see me? You have a last word?"

"Yes, I do. I feel myself on the verge of passing out. And I want you to be aware of my last sentiments."

"I love last sentiments," said Mr. Arieson. "I love monuments to last sentiments. I love banners with last sentiments, and standards with last sentiments, and a statue with a last heroic sentiment absolutely makes me swoon."

"God save the Queen, and God save England," said the Prime Minister, and was feeling a darkness envelop her when one of the walls caved in, sending a large block of stone smashing into the room as though it had been shot from a cannon.

A man followed it inside. Blessed air filled the room. It became light. The terrorist with the submachine gun brought it to bear. He was a large man with thick forearms. The intruder, smaller and thinner, seemed to just slap at the forearms. But it sounded like thunder. The arms looked like jelly in the sleeves, and the submachine gun fell harmlessly to the ground.

The man caved in the terrorist's head like an inflated paper bag.

The intelligence man gasped. "I've never seen moves that fast or effective. Ever. That's not a man. I don't know what it is."

"He's from an old house I know," said Arieson, who didn't bother to hide or duck.

"You. I want you," said Remo.

"Here I am,' said Arieson. "I obviously wanted you. And here you are. Don't you get the message yet."

"I'm waiting."

"Stay out of my way. "

"You set things up for me to be here and you say I'm in your way."

"You people are always in my way. I try to have a little fun, do my thing, and you always cause trouble. Sinanju are the biggest troublemakers of all time. Look here at this old unused house of Granicus Maximus, who by the way knew how to treat me, if you don't. You killed him before he had his civil war."

"Who are you?" asked Hazel Thurston.

"I'm someone who doesn't like to be interfered with," said Mr. Arieson.

"I'm your rescuer," said Remo to the Prime Minister. "Or didn't you mean me?"

"I meant both of you. Get out of my way, please."

"Just a second," said Remo. "I'm going to try to kill this guy."

"Be our guest, but please do let me out first." said the Prime Minister. She saw Scotland Yard types at the entrance to the room the thin stranger had made. She told them to wait.

The thin stranger picked up a block of stone from the floor that must have weighed a ton. He did it in a gentle motion, and then the stone was chest-high and then it was flying through the air at Arieson. But the stranger was moving alongside it, as though waiting for Arieson to duck. He did not duck. He walked through the stone, and through the wall, calling out:

"Salve gladiati."

The stone shattered like shrapnel, wounding the Prime Minister lightly on her forearm and cutting a small gash in her aide's head. The thin stranger left a little less mysteriously. Whereas Arieson appeared to move through solid stone, the thin stranger moved through solid phalanx of Scotland Yard.

He was lost by the police on the road back to Bath, but later the Prime Minister found out in a confidential phone call from America's President that the stranger was American and had been sent to rescue Prime Minister Thurston.

"He seems to have amazing moves," said the Prime Minister. "But who is this Arieson and what terror group does he represent?"

"We don't know yet."

"Well, it certainly can function better than any of the hostiles before it."

"That's what worries us," said the President. He did not tell his ally, but Harold W. Smith of CURE had set up a strategy room just for this phenomenon. It tracked all the methods of the new warfare and found that previously ineffective groups had suddenly developed not only a skill for warfare but also a desire for it, something that the military academies could only hope to instill. Something was making men want to go to war more than had ever been recorded in the insane history of the planet.

Remo arrived back in Sinanju with Poo, and his puzzle. While he could do nothing with Arieson, he had a plan for Poo. He brought her to live in the big house on the hill, as was befitting the wife of a Master of Sinanju.

There he asked Chiun to speak with her.

"As an American I want my wife to be part of our business," said Remo.

"Most foolish, like most things American."

"Poo's got some good ideas about how to run the House of Sinanju."

"Really?" said Chiun. He folded his long fingernails in his lap and his face was calm.

"Yeah, she thinks we ought to formalize our relationship. You know, who gets what for what. Right now it goes into one big kitty. I don't keep track of it. But I'd like you to talk to her."

Remo said this with a straight face. And with just as straight a face, Chiun said he would be delighted. He allowed Poo to make a place for herself on a mat before him. She served them tea. Chiun's was little more than warm water. Hers was harsh and black. Remo sat down between them with the countenance of an innocent.

Poo began with praises for the Masters of Sinanju, and then began recounting tales of their wives. Remo had never heard these stories before.

Poo seemed to know just from stories handed down what each wife got, and how she was treated. Chiun only nodded. He did not disagree with anything she said. When she was finished it was past midnight and the dank West Korea Bay was dark as a buried slate. "Are you done with your demands?" asked Chiun. "I am, dear father-in-law."

"Then may I wish you luck with Remo, because he is the only one to negotiate, for it is his share that is yours, not mine. And as between Remo and me, we've already arranged things."

"But what share does Remo get?"

"Whatever share I say he gets. That is the tradition of Sinanju."

Remo saw blood drain from the round face of Poo.

"Look, sweetheart," he said, "if you feel tricked into this marriage, you can back out now."

"No," she wailed. "No Master of Sinanju ever gets divorced."

Chiun smiled, leaving Remo with Poo, who now wanted a better accounting of Remo's property than an American CPA. Just before he was out of sight, Chiun said:

"The next time Mr. Arieson calls, and he will. I will go with you. And I'll show you how to handle him."

Chapter 9

"Does Chiun know him?"

"I think so," said Remo. He was on the line with Smith in the baker's house. The baker's wife had a new dress from Harrods. As she prepared the evening dinner, she passed by Remo, making gestures. There would be a finger turned limply downward, and a contemptuous smile. There would be a noodle draped over a bowl and then a pointing to Remo. An old man would walk outside, stooped over, and she would nod to the old man while smiling to Remo, indicating the same performance could be expected from Remo.

Remo ignored her. In all the world, he had never gotten so much disrespect as in Sinanju itself. Especially from Poo's family. He could probably change it, but that would require making love to Poo. He would sooner dip his body in braised chicken liver with raw onions. He would rather swim nude through warm aspic. He would mount a vat of frozen marmalade first.

These were the things he thought of precious Poo, and the more he thought them, the more he did not wish to make love to this woman, not once. Not quickly like a chipmunk. Not ever.

It was not that Poo was fat. Weight on a nice woman could be attractive. Poo was at the core, if one could wade through to the core, a very un-nice person. She was like a magnet for every personality flaw of womankind.

Three minutes in the King David Hotel and Poo had adopted the spending habits of a Great Neck, Long Island, matron.

She came back from London like the worst of British royalty, thinking everyone around her had to be either condescended to or ignored.

She wanted to become his business partner.

And she used her mother like her own personal whip. Remo could feel for the baker, a truly harried man. In a society where women were supposed to be subservient, he was like a slave.

The fact was, for some reason the attitude of even the nicer Sinanju women was that a man was only good for what he could do for her. Remo had never heard really kind words from Chiun about his wife, other than that he had managed to live with her. But then the Masters of Sinanju had something else. They had Sinanju. That was more than a wife or a mistress: it was the one permanent relationship a Master would have. Everything else passed.

There was a closeness Remo, born in Newark in America, had with Chiun and every other Master for millennia that transcended anything humans shared with each other. It was a knowing. It was a being. Even if he and Chiun were at diametrically opposite positions on any matter, they were, after all, the same. More the same than twins. So as Remo tried to explain to Smith what the situation was, in a way he couldn't.

"He recognized Arieson. From the beginning. At Little Big Horn."

"Who is he?"

"It's not something he can tell me," said Remo.

"Why not? Look, I don't know if you realize what we're up against. But here is a person, a movement, a thing if you will, that cannot be stopped."

"I stopped him."

"No you didn't, Remo," said Smith. They had gone over all three incidents in detail, with Smith asking his usual calculated questions. And they had gone over them again and again. And each time, Smith became more worried.

"What we have here, Remo, and I have analyzed this thoroughly, is a person or system or something that cannot be stopped. The evidence so far indicates he has stopped of his own free will, not because you did anything."

"Physically, I can't stop him yet. The answer may be in the Sinanju scrolls."

"I'm not sure what answer you'll find. Are you aware of what truly worries your president and me?" Remo turned away from the baker's wife and faced out into the street. It was noon and the sun baked the cold slate waters of the West Korea Bay. Gulls dipped and winged, and landed on rocks and fishing boats, cawing insolently to the muddy little village.

"There seems to be no rational motive behind what he is doing. It's like a rocket going every which way. The man has no purpose anyone can divine. First he helps the Indians in a war, then he turns the Idrans into soldiers attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier. Then he takes random units of the Irish Republican Army and turns them into one of the flnest fighting units ever to wage war in Europe. Then he leaves, and everything he has built falls apart and he starts again. What is this person or thing up to?"

"He seems to have an old feud with the House of Sinanju. At least Chinn recognized him."

"All right. You know Sinanju, Remo. How many feuds has Sinanju had?"

"We don't. That's just it. Nowhere in the scrolls does it say we have a feud anywhere. But look, don't worry."

"Why not?"

"Chiun told me he'll show me how to deal with him."

"I hope he's right, Remo. This morning someone kidnapped the pope. The Italian police, who cannot enter the Vatican, report that for the first time in centuries the Swiss Guards are ready to fight a war."

"Good. Sounds like Mr. Arieson. Now we'll let Chiun show me how to handle this."

For Rome, Chiun packed a black kimono with silver embroidery, a gift from the finest Italian family to the House of Sinanju several centuries before.

There was a florid parchment in the folds which read:

"To a house we have learned to appreciate-your good and faithful friends the Borgias."

"We haven't used this kimono since we worked in Italy," said Chiun on the small hovercraft taking them to the waiting aircraft carrier where they would pick up their military flight to Rome. "A good family, the Borgias. Except they suffered from a do-it-yourself complex. They couldn't leave well enough alone. Lucretia Borgia used poison, and because she thought that the goodness of an assassination lay only in killing someone, the whole family ended up with a bad reputation in history. How many times have we seen a successful ruling family fall because they can't leave well enough alone? So many think they can do it themselves just because we make it look easy."

"What are you going to do with Arieson?" asked Remo.

"You'll see," said Chiun.

"I'd feel a lot better if I knew."

"I'd feel a lot better if you knew, too. But you don't, do you?"

Before they went to the Vatican, Chiun insisted on walking the streets of Rome. Some of the ancient marblework had been preserved, the old Forum looking like a partial skeleton of marble, withered in the adjacent modern street. They passed the old home of the Vestal Virgins, pagan priestesses, on whose example modern convent life in the Catholic Church was modeled. And then, of course, the bitter little remnants of the old temples to the old gods that were no more.

Before Christianity there were only these gods in what was called the civilized world. For every attribute-love, drinking, war, the sea-there was a special god. From Venus to Neptune these gods ruled the daily lives of the people and received their offerings.

But with the advent of Christianity, with the promise of eternal life, with a god who had died for his people, an unseen God from the Hebrews, the great temples became empty, and the last priests lived alone without followers, without offerings, tending the statues of their cults.

And when the priests were gone, when the coffers built up over hundreds and hundreds of years were finally empty, either Christians set up their churches in these pagan temples, or as Remo saw now, the buildings just decayed. Standing before the site of the Great Temple of jupiter, where once thousands would crowd in for feasts, Remo saw just a worn simple marble slab in the dirt of Rome with a bronze inscription saying there had been a huge temple here.

"They were good cults," said Chiun. "You knew where they stood. It was clean. You gave a god something, he gave you something back. None of this suffering for love, and an affliction as some kind of reward. We never thought Christianity would catch on, but see, here we are, and it has."

"I was raised by nuns in an orphanage. I'm going to feel funny in the Vatican."

"Don't. Remember, the Borgias were once popes and we have worked there. Ah, Rome, who would have thought you would last so long," said Chiun, waving a hand at the city on the Tiber which had once ruled the world, and now was only bad traffic and picturesque marble remnants. And of course, the Vatican, the great Vatican, where once a fighting arena had stood.

Outside the large columns, Italian police and soldiers had sealed off the entire state-within-a-state. From St. Peter's, little groups of men could be seen hacking away at each other. Some wore striped pantaloons and velvet hats. They were the Swiss Guards, who protected the post. Once they had actually fought other little armies, but now they were only ceremonial.

Until, as Remo found out, the morning when they threw over their papal banners, shouted to hell with peace, and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a group of Turks brought in by a strange man with a muscled neck whose eves seemed to glow.

This they learned from the carabinieri, who warned Remo and Chiun not to enter.

"It's terrible, terrible what's happening in that holy site," said the carabinieri. "But we cannot enter."

"Why not?" asked Remo.

"The Vatican is another state. Someone has to invite us in. We have not been invited. And no one will do anything in there until the pope is free."

"Is he a prisoner?"

"We think so," said the carabinieri.

A head went rolling along St. Peter's courtyard, lopped off by a Turkish scimitar.

"Horrible," said Chiun.

The carabinieri covered his eyes. "Horrible," he agreed.

"Yes, amateurs making a mess of things. Well, that's to be expected with what's let loose. Come, Remo. This is not the way to enter the Vatican. You can just tell Mr. Arieson is inside. Look at that enthusiasm for a bad stroke."

The way to enter the Vatican was the way Augustus Caesar would enter the arena. "Through tunnels, protected from his citizens in case they rioted. These tunnels later became part of the catacombs of Rome.

The catacomb Remo and Chiun wanted was underneath a restaurant. Chum calculated where the entrance used to be according to his old lessons, to which, he stressed, he devoted himself as a child, unlike Remo, and sent a fingernail into old plaster. Vibrating it within the rhythms of the molecules, he collapsed the entire wall, to the despairing shouts of the restaurant owner, who had stored olives and garlic and fresh tomatoes down there in the basement. They were all ruined now.

"We're in service of the pope," said Chiun. "Send your bill to the Vatican."

Before them rising out of the rubble was a high entrance, larger than most modern doors. On either side of this entrance were frescoes of gods and goddesses making love, playing, and dancing. Remo noticed the clothes on the gods were quite skimpy. Chiun led the way, explaining the tale of the artist who painted these frescoes. In the palace of Augustus Caesar nearby, people were being killed. Everyone thought it was Augustus' wife, Livia, again with that great Italian attraction to poison. Actually, it was a minor assassin employing the artist as a conduit to the cooks.

The assassin knew the artist could buy his freedom, and was in love with another slave whose freedom he wished to buy also. So he used the artist for access to the palace. The House of Sinanju came along in the employ of Augustus, discovered the plot, eliminated the competition with ease, and brought the artist before Augustus.

Augustus, a wise ruler, understood the artist was only a slave, expected to be weak, and let him live. But the cook, a free man, he had crucified because more was expected of a free man than a slave.

"It is a beautiful little story," said Chiun.

"What's beautiful about a crucifixion?" asked Remo. The tunnels had a strange glaze from the underearth about them. It made Remo's skin crawl.

Remo saw an old-style fresco with fine color tones but crude lines. It reminded him of one room of the treasures of Sinanju. He had seen that room on his first visit to Sinanju. There were statues and jewels and gold, and then Remo remembered, it was the room that had the indentation in the mahogany floor. He tried to remember what had made that indentation. But he couldn't. When one has taken on four thousand years of accumulated treasure in one afternoon, everything tends to blur. Besides, never having received tribute, he didn't care about it too much.

They walked three miles under the Vatican and then Chiun turned into a doorway with stone steps leading steeply upward. Above them they could hear laughter, and screams and cries and the clashing of swords.

"Disgraceful," said Chiun. "But you have to expect this now."

They pushed through a wood-and-steel door at the top of the steps opening into a vast room where tapestries hung from the walls. Ornate furniture was placed a few feet from the walls and nothing stood in the center of the room where the inlaid pink and gold marble floor was covered now by the slime of blood.

Swiss Guards swung their halberds in wide, deadly arcs against a group of Turks fighting with scimitars. Sometimes a big-bladed halberd would strike clean and a head would go rolling, or an arm would be neatly severed. More often than not it missed, striking only a glancing blow, spilling more blood. The scimitar, less useful for arm-length fighting than the long-poled halberd, was very effective at close range. It could disembowel the guards right through their velvet blouses.

In the middle of this butchery Mr. Arieson sat, a big smile on his face, rubbing his hands.

"I love it. I love it," he said. And seeing Remo and Chiun, added: "Welcome to the selfish bastards of Sinanju. See what you'd like to deprive your fellowman of? I hate you bastards, always have."

"Okay, deal with him," said Remo.

"Not now. We've got to save the pope," said Chiun.

"Since when are you a Catholic?"

"We have a sacred and binding obligation to the chair of St. Peter," said Chiun. "We have promised the Borgias."

"Good folks, the Borgias," said Mr. Arieson.

"Sometimes," said Chiun. "And never when you liked them," and pointing to Arieson Chiun told Remo: "That is a killer. Now you know the difference between a killer and a true assassin."

Remo wanted to take one last try at Arieson's stomach, just on the chance that a blow would work this time, but Chiun pulled him along.

"Is he from some other house of assassins, Little Father?"

"Him? From another house? He has no respect for assassins."

"Could you just tell me who he is, instead of beating around the bush?"

"No. You don't deserve to know."

"Well, I don't care who he is. Just show me how to deal with him when this is done."

His Holiness was being held by a group of dark young men wearing fezzes with bright crescents on them. They called themselves the new Janissaries of Turkey.

There were twenty of them around the pope, parading their new power. His Holiness sat quietly in dignity made more awesome by the fact of the noise and threats from the Turks.

"We are the new Janissaries, and we are here to revenge the insult to our glorious fighters from battles past. We are here to revenge Mehmet Ali Agha, who stood his hand for us and our glory. In other words, pontiff, we will not miss this time."

The words were spoken by the leader of the group as Remo and Chiun entered the small audience room where the pope now sat chained to a little dark wooden throne.

"We never had much use for the old Janissaries," said Chiun. "Your Holiness, we are here. Glory to the Borgias, glory to their papacy, the House of Sinanju is here to honor its pledge."

The pope, who had suffered through the nightmare of seeing his own normally docile Swiss Guards become raving maniacs, delighted at the prospect of battle with the attacking Turks, now saw an aged Oriental in a black kimono with silver embroidery and a thin white man in black T-shirt and gray trousers begin playing with the Turks.

It was like a formal dance. A Turk would swing a scimitar and follow it into a wall, yet the elderly Oriental hardly moved. The white would skewer three men on their own swords and neatly lay them in a corner.

It did not look like a battle so much as two chambermaids cleaning up a room, picking up bodies, laying them down. The younger one seemed to do more of the stacking, complaining in English that he was always the one who had to do this chore. The older one seemed to make flourishes of his kimono for the pope's pleasure.

Finally the older one severed the steel chain on the pope's wrist as though it were tissue paper and bowed low. The younger one looked shocked at this.

In a great and courtly bow, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, kissed the pope's ring.

Remo, the Catholic orphan from Newark raised by nuns, stood with his mouth open.

"Your Holiness, we are here," said Chiun. His wisps of hair touched the floor as he reached the nadir of his bow, and then, using his kimono like wings, flourished it gloriously and stood up.

"Who are you?" asked His Holiness in English.

"A fulfiller of the wisest arrangement ever made by the throne of St. Peter."

"Would you tell me the arrangement? This has been a most trying day." The white still stood with his mouth open, looking at the pope's ring.

To Remo, an ex-Catholic who had never heard a Christian word from Chiun, this ornate sign of perfect obedience seemed to him as strange as a talking flounder. He couldn't believe it. But he had seen it. It was better than in St. Monica's back in Newark. The nuns could not have improved one whit on the way Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, had greeted His Holiness. It wasn't that Chiun even kissed the ring. It was the hearty way he went at it. Remo would have thought Chiun had just entered the priesthood.

"Your Holiness, the accords between the Vatican and the House of Sinanju were established during the magnificent pontificate of the Borgia popes."

The pope tilted his strong and kindly face.

"Sir," he said. "One of the proofs of the divine inspiration of the Catholic Church is that we survived the likes of the Borgia popes. We survived and triumphed over that decadence and murder. We have been reaffirmed by His hand against our sins."

"We have only fond memories of the Borgia popes."

"I do not understand who you are."

"We are the House of Sinanju, assassins to the finest of the world."

The pope shook his head. "I want no accords with assassins," he said, and asked the date the supposed document had been drawn. Once given the date, he sent for an aide, and the aide sent for another aide, and that aide sent for a nun who found the parchment, sealed with the three-tiered crown of St. Peter.

The pontiff read the document with wide eyes. The Borgias, that disgrace to the Catholic Church, had purchased the services of these Oriental assassins in perpetuity; for a set fee the House of Sinanju agreed never to serve an enemy of the pope.

"No," said His Holiness. "We will not have this. You are free of your pledge."

"Your Holiness, we have adopted some most Christian customs in honor of your saintliness. Like marriage," said Chiun. "We Masters do not believe in divorce. Marriage is a bond not to be broken. Remo, my son, raised a Catholic, seems not to understand this."

The pope looked at his attackers, now stacked against the wall. In truth, these two had saved him. He asked the white man what should be so complicated about the marriage vow.

"Fulfilling it," said Remo. He did not bow down to kiss the ring, any more than he would talk in flowery nonsense to Harold W. Smith.

"One owes certain duties to one's spouse."

"I know. But I didn't want to marry her in the first place. Not really. I only did it to get my father, Chiun, to help me figure something out, something that had to do with that maniac Arieson."

"Then you did not enter this union of your own free will, my son?"

"No, Holy Father," said Remo.

"And Sinanju's customs regarding marriage are the same as those of the Holy Roman Catholic Church?"

"They are, Holy Father," said Remo.

"Then the marriage never took place. Only when someone enters a marriage freely and then consummates it is it a true marriage."

"I certainly haven't consummated that thing," said Remo.

"Then your marriage definitely does not exist, for two reasons."

Remo jumped almost to the ceiling, then fell on his knees and with awesome gratitude kissed the ring of the pope even though he didn't believe anymore. He would have kissed the hem of this man's garment. He was free of Precious Poo. The marriage did not exist.

"I'm free, Little Father, isn't that wonderful?" said Remo.

Chiun, kissing the pope's ring with just as grand a flourish, muttered in Korean about the perfidy of Rome.

Arieson was still in the large room with the tapestries, waiting for Remo and Chiun.

"I hear you rescued your client, Chiun," said Arieson.

"I have come to deal with you, Arieson," said Chiun, folding his arms and setting one foot forward in a posture of supreme arrogant bearing.

"Sure, Chiun. What's the deal?" said Arieson, leaning back in the chair and sending encouragement to the last Turk to fight to the death.

"We will stay out of Western Europe if you stay out of Asia," said Chiun.

"I'm not giving up China and Japan. I've enjoyed those places immensely," said Arieson.

"Japan is worthless now. It manufactures toys. What do you want with Japan?"

"That's only in the last fifty years. You don't think they've changed totally in the last fifty years? I can't let you have Japan."

"How many good markets are there?" asked Chiun. "Look at what I'm walking away from. America. Now, that's an active country for you. South America. It's coming into its age, and all of Europe, and the Middle East. Do you wish to deal or not?"

"You're not in a position to bargain. You can't give me what I want or deserve. You just don't have the goods anymore. You can cause me a little trouble here and there, but your boy Remo is just a diversion. I will let you have Japan."

"And Indochina."

"No. Too much."

"You have all China. You have Russia. Are we bargaining or are you dictating?" asked Chiun.

"Done," said Arieson. He offered a hand that Chiun refused to shake.

"Done," said Chiun.

Arieson offered the same hand to Remo.

"No," said Remo. "No deals. And you, Little Father, you said you'd show me how to deal with Arieson."

"I just did. We just did. You don't want to live with it, that's all."

"Walking away from most of the world, Little Father, is not dealing with Mr. Arieson."

"It's the best I can do until you get back the treasure of Sinanju."

"That's still lost, is it?" laughed Arieson.

"How do you know so much?" asked Remo.

"I just watch you guys hack around and laugh my insides out," said Areison. "Let me tell you about this city. It's good to be home again. I hated Hibernia, and your new country, Remo."

"What the hell do you want?" asked Remo.

"To do what I do. I'll get what I want unless you fellas give me what I deserve."

"And what does that mean?" asked Remo.

"Chiun will tell you. Don't worry, only the dead have seen the last of me."

"Well, you haven't seen the last of me," said Remo.

"Wanta fight, big boy?" laughed Arieson.

This time Remo tried something entirely strange. If all the blows of Sinanju had not worked, then perhaps a straight punch to the stomach, fairly slow, not much faster than a professional boxer, would work. Remo let it go and shattered the fine wooden chair on which Mr. Arieson had sat.

The room was filled with the dead and the quiet. But not with Mr. Arieson.

"I can believe this troublemaker has some strange powers. But I can't believe, Little Father, that pile of junk you call the treasure of Sinanju has any bearing on this. You just want it back."

"Until we regain the treasure of Sinanju, Remo, we will be helpless against Mr. Arieson. I am sorry you do not believe me. But you can believe this. Until we regain that treasure, I will consider you obliged to consummate your marriage with Poo."

"But you heard the pope. I'm not married. I've never been married."

"That's for Roman Catholics, Remo. You're Sinanju."

"But you said you followed the Catholic laws."

"And since when, Remo, do you believe anything I tell an emperor?" said Chiun.

They left the Vatican the way they came. Out on the street in front of the restaurant, where the owner was trying to have the two arrested for ruining his basement, Chiun said:

"We have missed the glorious ages of Sinanju, Remo. Make a son for us, so that he might see an age of assassinry, where the corrupt and despotic do not take their people to war, but hire professionals like ourselves to do the proper work."

"I'm happy with the time I'm in," said Remo.

"You're never happy," said Chiun.

"Neither are you," said Remo.

"No," said Chiun, "I always say I am unhappy but I enjoy it. You always say you are happy but you never enjoy it."

"I'm not going back to Sinanju, Little Father."

"And I am not leaving Sinanju until you recover the treasure."

"Then good-bye, Little Father," said Remo.

"Good-bye," said Chiun, refusing to look at him.

"Would you want to marry Poo if you were me?" asked Remo. But Chiun did not answer. He chose to walk around one of his favorite cities as Remo hailed a cab to take him to the airport.

Back in America, Smith made the rare gesture of allowing Remo to return to Folcroft, an area he was supposed to avoid to help sustain the cover of the sanitarium. Remo as well as Chiun had been seen at random points around the country, but no one had yet connected them to the organization housed on Long Island Sound. No one, that is, who was allowed to live.

Smith was even more serious as he brought Remo into a special situation room, with maps on the wall and grids on a table. They were alone here, and Remo could see that Smith was figuring out patterns of Mr. Arieson.

"So far, Mr. Arieson has been random, like a ball in a roulette wheel. He would bounce into a major area of conflict and bounce to a minor one."

Remo nodded this was true.

"Now, he is back to the most major of all. I think we're going to have a war with Soviet Russia, and you may be the only one who can stop it," said Smith.

"Stop it?" asked Remo. "I can't even lay a hand on the guy." But even now, he was having an especially good thought about Russia, and her name was Anna.

Chapter 10

Anna Chutesov once again saw the panic. It always came with field marshal's braid on its shoulders, and the traditional ranking officer's field cap.

Panic came in stone faces talking with apparent calm about opportunities and risks. It always came cloaked in that all-encompassing garbage bag called: "National Security."

In Russia those words were more holy and central to life than Jesus was to Christianity. And they were always invoked when the military leadership was being pressured to act rationally in a time of crisis.

"Comrade Sister Chutesov, you cannot call in the Americans. You are endangering national security," said a field marshal who had survived the Second World War and Stalin and had enough big shiny medals on his chest to fill a checkerboard. He was indeed a hero of the Soviet Union, known for his implacable calm in the face of danger.

All heads nodded around the little clearing in the woods just south of Moscow. There were fifteen generals and Politburo members. Their most loyal aides, some colonels, some majors, stood just beyond the clearing with AK-47's at the ready. Some of the men stamped their feet to keep out the early-autumn cold. Someone passed around a lone hot cup of tea. Anna ignored the cold. She always wore the latest thermal underclothes from the West as soon as September came and switched to lighter clothes only in the middle of April.

Her head was bundled in a fur hat and her fine beautiful high-cheekboned features were framed by a band of silvery fur. If anything, this strategic adviser to the Premier looked like a Kewpie doll. She spoke in a low whisper that forced the taller men to lean down to hear her.

"And you think national security has not been breached? What, then, is the top military command doing meeting here like frightened rabbits in a hole?"

"But to willfully invite an American operative into the inner reaches of our command structure. To invite a foreigner here to attack Russians. It is treason." This from the commander of the KGB, a field marshal in a stiff'green uniform.

"Tell me, field marshal, what would you propose instead? The fact is, you are supposed to run the finest security network in the world. The fact is, comrade field marshal, you are helpless."

"If the Premier-"

"The Premier is not here. Most of your junior officers are not here. We do not know which units of the KGB are with the government and which are not. We do not know which units of the great Red Army are with us or not. We do not know which units of the air force and the navy are with us or not. We know one thing: major elements of our defensive structure have suddenly gone berserk. We cannot control them and the government is terrified that we are definitely heading into a major war with America."

"Well, that's our problem," said the KGB commander. His name was Nevsky. He had a face like a beagle's. It looked kind. But the man wasn't. He made a motion with his hands indicating the case was closed.

"It's our problem," said Anna. "And there is nothing anyone of us here can do about it. We are meeting here in these woods instead of the Kremlin precisely because none of us knows which of his own units will kidnap him the way our premier has been kidnapped. We are here because we cannot solve the problem."

"But they are our units," said the army field marshal. "They are Russian. They have, like many of us, become frustrated by this long twilight war orchestrated by the KGB as the way to defeat the West. They are tired of getting new tanks and seeing them rust as they become outmoded before being used in combat. The soldiers of the brave Red Army are better than watchdogs on our border. They are warriors."

"I see you too have been infected by that mysteriously sudden disease that has spread throughout the defense forces."

"Honor and courage are not a disease," said the army field marshal. His name was Rossocov. When he spoke, his pantheon of medals jingled.

"When the army decides it is going to declare war on America itself, and kidnaps the Premier to do so, I would say that is a bit of a trauma in the body of the defense system," said Anna. "The arms and legs have gone off without the head. And the head stands around here in these woods, terrified of getting its body back."

"The army might win. You don't know it will lose," said Field Marshal Rossocov.

KGB Field Marshal Nevsky nodded agreement. A few of the Politburo also nodded. Even if this was a Russian rebellion, it was still being run by Russian Communists.

It was then that Anna Chutesov stepped into the center of the little circle in the cleared section of the woods. She inhaled the cold Russian autumn air and said more loudly than she had before, loudly but not quite a scream:

"Win what?"

Then she turned and looked every one of them in the eye.

Finally Field Marshal Rossocov said bluntly: "The war."

"And what does the war win us?" she asked.

"Victory," said Rossocov.

"What is the gain of that victory, which, by the way, could well result in the annihilation of multimillions and a planet much less inhabitable than before?"

"The gain is that we have destroyed the center of capitalism. We have defeated our major foe. We have triumphed against the strongest nation in the world."

"You still didn't answer the question," said Anna. Rossocov wanted to slap the woman across her pretty face. Women could never understand war like men, even the brilliant Anna Chutesov.

"Defeating capitalism is not winning something."

"It most certainly is. It is the triumph of communism. It is the end of the struggle. No more war."

"Excuse me, but this flies in the face of reality. We have until recently been closer to war with China, a communist country, than with America. So the triumph of international communism as we know it will not mean an end to war any more than the advent of Christianity among nations meant an end to war."

"Is the triumph of communism nothing, then?" asked Field Marshal Rossocov.

Anna could see the sympathy for this argument in the faces around her, supported by the patriotic and socialist fervor they had lived with all their lives.

Men she thought. What idiots. She wanted to say, "Probably nothing," but that would have required in these men a sophistication to understand that every social system tended to function by its own human rules rather than the ones laid down from the top, like communism.

Instead, she stressed again that the defeat of capitalism would not mean an end to struggle, that there would always be more enemies and that they would face those enemies on a planet far less inhabitable than it was before.

"Given that there is no prospect of winning anything worthwhile, and given that we cannot do anything about this mental disease infecting vast segments of the Russian defense forces, I must recommend we go outside for help."

No one spoke in agreement. They were silent, too panicked to move. But as men they had developed the calm exterior of those who are in control. The reason they had gotten away with it for so long was that most women wanted to believe that men could really defend them with their superior stability. Most men were in fact as stable as daisies in a windstorm, and at the first sign of danger, they stopped thinking and began mouthing platitudes about national security and winning wars.

"In America there is one man of special and awesome abilities, whom I have had the distinct pleasure of working with. He belongs to their highest secret organization, used only for the most vital situations, and I believe we can get his services again precisely because it is in America's interest also not to have a war with us."

"This man you wish to see," said KGB Field Marshal Nevsky, "would he happen to be somewhat handsome, with dark hair and dark eyes and high cheekbones, and be named Remo?"

"He would," said Anna.

"And would this Remo be the same one you were seen with on several different occasions, once during a penetration of Russia and twice in America while you were on assignment there?"

"He would."

"And did this foreigner American seduce you, Comrade Chutesov?"

"No," said Anna, "I seduced him." She did not want to get entangled in men's romantic myths, so she cleared up the questions she knew were coming. "No, I am not in love with him, and yes, the sex was wonderful, and no, I am not so desperate to copulate with this man that I would destroy the planet in a nuclear holocaust."

And then KGB Field Marshal Nevsky said with absolutely typical male stupidity, "How do we know that?" She saw a few heads nod.

She would have to lie. If there was one man among them who could accept the bald-faced realistic truth, he would be a lot.

"If I want sex, who is better than a Russian man?" she said.

It was a suitable fib so that now these male leaders, all in their sixties and seventies, could allow Anna to go on with saving them from possible nuclear annihilation.

"Do what you have to do, Comrade Anna," said Nevsky.

"Thank you," she said. She was even able to keep a straight face.

She had already contacted Remo's superior, a Mr. Harold W. Smith, who for a man was extremely rational. He had explained that this phenomenon of men lusting for war was not new to Russia and had been occurring randomly around the globe.

"I must tell you, Ms. Chutesov, Remo has had no luck so far in stopping the force behind this. The man's name is Arieson. Does that ring a bell with you?"

"No," Anna had said. "But names mean nothing."

"Sometimes," said Smith. "But I don't know how helpful Remo can be."

"It is truly sad to hear that Remo has met this man and failed. However, Remo can do things that none of our people can, and he has succeeded at something no other man has managed to do."

"What's that?"

"From everything you have told me, Remo is the one man who has not been seduced into going to war under the spell of Mr. Arieson."

"That's right," Smith said.

"With my calculating ability and Remo's extraordinary powers, I think that's the best chance to get back our Russian armies."

"You may be right. But you could be wrong."

"We have nothing else available unless the Oriental, his surrogate father, wishes to help."

"No. He doesn't. He cut a deal with Arieson." This had interested Anna, and since Remo had been present at the bargaining, Anna decided to wait until Remo arrived. He had already taken off from the U.S. when the meeting in the woods started, and Anna waited until just before his American aircraft landed just outside Moscow to show up to greet him. She never knew which troops were loyal to whom now.

Remo in his light and smooth way almost danced down the ramp. She saw him smile when he spotted her. The KGB was undoubtedly watching her in some way. That was their custom. But she didn't care now. With Remo here, they didn't matter.

"Hello, darling," she said.

"Hello, darling," he said, and she was in his arms for a long warm kiss before she even saw his hands move.

"Not here on the tarmac," she whispered.

"Tarmac is better than a bed," he whispered.

"Where did you hear that?"

"I Just made it up."

"I like it, but we are probably being photographed by the KGB."

"Good, I'll give them lessons."

"Stop that," she said, moving his arm away from one of the many points he could use to send her body into writhing pleasure. "I want you, not just fingers playing on the keyboard of my nervous system."

"I can live with that," said Remo.

"I could live for that," said Anna.

"It's good to be back with you," said Remo. He did not tell her about Poo.

"The whole country may have turned against us. It is a nightmare. We don't know which units have been infected and which have not. To make matters worse, the defecting units have seized the Premier so that they can declare war on America. They want a declaration of war. They want to give America time to get its best army into the field. They even want a place designated to fight it."

"Let's go to a hotel," said Remo. He could sense Anna's charms, and he wanted them. Her cool sparkling smile. Her delightful blue eyes. Her body that had been his in many delightful moments, and of course that great mind.

"Did you come here to save your country and mine from a disastrous war, or did you come here to make love?"

"I came here to screw," said Remo casually.

"Yes, well, let's do that after we do business."

"You women are all business," said Remo.

The facts were similar to the Vatican, the Bath, the USS Polk, and the Little Big Horn incidents.

A Mr. Arieson had transformed ordinary men into warriors whose only desire was to get into a battle. As with his previous appearances, there seemed to be no purpose for the war but the war itself.

"We have got to get control of our armies back into the hands of the Communist party," said Anna as her pass got her by the guards in the airport. Her Zil limousine was waiting for her for their ride back to Moscow.

"Wait a minute. I'm not putting an army into the hands of the Communist party," said Remo, the ex-marine.

"Well, where would you put it, Remo?" asked Anna. Remo was darling, Remo was exceptional, but Remo, Anna had to admit, thought like a man.

"Maybe some democratic form of government."

"Do you wish to invent one this afternoon, darling? Or did you bring one with you from America?"

"Let the people vote for the kind of government they want."

"They have. It's communist."

"Those elections are rigged."

"No, darling, it's that there is no other party running against them. The communists are the only people they can vote for or against. That's the only structure in this country. There is the Communist party or war."

"It just makes my bones rattle to give an army to communists. Communists are the biggest troublemakers in the world. In fact, and I don't care whether you like to hear this or not, Anna, they are the main troublemakers in the world."

"You're thinking of the countries which don't have power, darling. In Russia, we are just like any other corrupt political machine. The last revolutionary was shot by Stalin. The Politburo is the safest group to run any army. They don't want to lose what they have."

"I still don't like it," said Remo.

Anna crossed her legs and gave Remo a friendly pat on the wrist, careful not to let his divine hands get her going again.

At Anna's special apartment, one with the best perks in Moscow, roughly equal to an upper-middle-class condominium in America, Remo told Anna everything he knew about Mr. Arieson.

Why, she wanted to know, did Mr. Arieson have some form of antagonism against Sinanju?

"I don't know, but Chiun seems to know. He made a deal with Arieson."

Anna nodded for Remo to go on. She poured herself a brandy in a Waterford crystal snifter and sat down on her imported French couch a cushion away from him. The night lights of Moscow glittered through her window. She had once had a fireplace but it was so badly constructed, like most buildings in Russia, that every time she tried to use it she would set fire to the building.

And only in Russia would the concrete catch fire. She knew her country better perhaps than any of the older men and women in high positions. But none loved it better. She loved it more than she loved this marvelous man Remo, so she forced herself on this warm evening to keep her hands off him and get on with business.

Remo did not know precisely what the feud was between Sinanju and Arieson. But it went back a long way.

"How long? Ten years? Twenty years? Seventy years? I am a communist, Remo, and I think in long periods of time," said Anna.

"Three, four thousand years, I don't know." Anna dropped the brandy snifter. It fell to the deep pile rug. Since the rug was manufactured in Russia, the crystal cracked.

"I don't understand. How can a feud go on for thousands of years?"

"The House of Sinanju has been going on since before any modern country existed, except maybe Egypt, and I do believe we've got them by a few centuries, but I don't know. Chiun knows him or knows of him, or something. He told me from the beginning that I wouldn't be able to handle him."

"You did, but that's something else."

"I didn't destroy him, though."

"No. You didn't. But you didn't join some army either."

Remo shrugged. How could he join an army knowing what he knew, being Sinanju? He could no more join an army than he could stop Sinanju working within him. He was once a marine. He understood marines. He could never be a marine again. Anna seemed interested in this. He told her about the tributes to Sinanju and the scrolls and the indentation made by a large marble thing in the mahogany floor of the treasure house of Sinanju.

He told her of his sense of connection with the frescoes in the old tunnels under Rome to that one room of the treasure house. He told her about the trip through Rome with Chiun and the pausing at the old temples.

Anna dismissed that point.

"New gods or old gods are just a waste of time. What is this thing between Sinanju and Mr. Arieson?"

"I don't know," said Remo. "And Chiun won't tell me. He's mad about the loss of the treasure, and he says knowing who Mr. Arieson is won't do any good until we get the treasure back."

"I know a bit about your surrogate father. He is quite a manipulator and the whole thing may have nothing to do with the treasure. He just wants it back. Being the standard-bearer of the world's greatest anachronism, I am sure the trappings of the past are of great importance to him."

"If it's an anachronism, why can we do things no one else can? If it's an anachronism, why don't I go running off like some idiot for war? If we're an anachronism-"

"I'm sorry, Remo, if I offended you."

"You didn't offend me. You just sounded like some communist twit. You know, just because it wasn't invented yesterday doesn't make it invalid. It's more valid because it survived the test of time."

"You indicated yourself that you were suspicious about the treasure playing any part."

"Yeah, well. That's something else," said Remo.

"The something else," said Anna wisely, "is that I am talking about your family, and you may think the worst about Chiun, but God help anyone else who thinks the same way."

"Let's get on with business. Where are these special troops?"

"We're not sure. They seem to be all over."

"Chiun usually has an idea of where he might appear. If you can get to Smitty, I can get to Sinanju. We have a special secure line," said Remo. He did not tell Anna about overlapping the American system with the Russian one in Cuba. Remo didn't understand the electronic theory exactly, only that he had overcome his little portion of it, and was proud of it.

After all, for someone who does battle with a toaster with only fifty-fifty odds of success, getting the right plug into the right socket is an accomplishment.

"All our wires are tapped by the KGB, so keep that in mind."

"Why are you warning me?"

"Because despite your marine concept of Soviet Russia, the KGB and the army and my special security service serving the Premier are not all one monolithic block out to fry your precious little buns, dear," said Anna.

"You have a sharp tongue, lady," said Remo.

"So have you when you want to," said Anna. Remo lifted the telephone receiver off the hook. It was an old-style phone made of plastic that still had the aroma of the factory. As he got through to Smith, he polished the phone to make it look as though it were manufactured in a modern country.

Smith got the call and made the transfer to Sinanju, explaining that the signals required a lot of electronic brushing to clean them up.

Since the line was in the baker's house, Poo's mother answered the phone.

"Let me speak to Chiun, please."

"Poo is right here," said the mother.

"I want to speak to Chiun. This is business."

"Your lawfully wedded wife waits here every moment for the sound of her husband's voice. Her eyes are filled with tears. The rest of her has been filled with nothing."

"Yeah, well, let me speak to Chiun," said Remo. He was burning. He smiled at Anna. Anna smiled back.

"I will give you Poo."

"Poo, let me speak to Chiun," said Remo.

"There's another woman in the room with you," divined Poo.

"This is a business phone and I want to speak to Chiun."

"You haven't even consummated our marriage and you're cheating already," she wailed.

Anna did not understand the Oriental language Remo was using in the latter part of his call to Sinanju. But there were some things she did understand.

When Remo finally had a respite while waiting for Chiun, she asked:

"Remo, do you have a girlfriend in Sinanju?"

"No," said Remo honestly.

"Then who was that woman you were talking to?"

"What makes you think it was a woman?"

"Remo, I know how men speak to women. Who is she?"

"Not my girlfriend. Nothing to do with romance."

"Who is she, Retno?"

"My wife," said Remo. He went back to the phone. Chiun was there.

"Arieson's in Russia. He could start World War III. Where can I find him?"

"World War III is his business. Not ours. So long as he has left us Southeast Asia, I don't care."

"It's my concern. Where is he?"

"Until you get the treasure, why bother?"

"Where is he?"

"That is no way to speak to your father."

"Little Father, please tell me where he is. I am in Russia and I don't want to hang around this place looking for him."

"Well, if he were in the modern country called Russia, that must include Siberia. There is a Tartar encampment between Vladivostok and Kubsk. I would say he would probably be there. He would probably be welcome there for all the damage those little vandals are likely to do."

"Thanks, Little Father," said Remo.

"Poo has a word for you."

"I'll speak with her," said Remo, still in Korean, "only because I owe you a favor."

"Owe me a favor, Remo? You owe me everything. You just chose to pay back this one small thing. Here she is. Here, dear, don't cry. Remo does not mean to dishonor you and his own father by his failure as a man. Speak freely, Poo."

"Remo, I miss you. Come home soon."

"Thank you," said Remo, and turning to Anna, he asked her about a Tartar encampment between Vladivostok and Kubsk.

She unfolded a map on her imported glass coffee table and drew a circle encompassing thousands of miles.

"These are what we call tribal lands. It is amazing that Chiun knows of them. From the czars to us, every Russian government has allowed these people to live alone the way they wanted in total autonomy. We don't bother them and they don't bother us.

Every year, whatever government is in power delivers massive amounts of grain and feed for their horses. Even if we are starving, we deliver them grain."

"Why?" asked Remo.

"Because we want to be left alone."

"But if they use horses, why are you afraid of them?"

"Because they, Remo, are the descendants of Genghis Khan's horde."

Remo turned up his face. Sinanju knew Genghis Khan. Another military leader. Another bloodsoak-sack-a-city-destroy-a-culture-go-on-with-the-bloodfest military butcher.

"You have some revulsion for Genghis Khan?" asked Anna.

"Not that much. That was someone else's problem, and that problem was taken care of."

As they arranged a flight into the restricted tribal territories, Anna said:

"You might not know this, but Genghis Khan was never defeated in battle. The horde stretched west, overrunning all the Moslem East and driving into Europe before it simply turned back."

"Yeah," said Remo as they boarded a Russian Fox three-seat fighter plane for the great eastern expanses of Russia. "I know. He overran Baghdad against Sinanju's warnings, and we took care of him."

"Genghis Khan died of a heart attack," said Anna.

"I'll show you what I mean when we get there." The pilot was afraid to land his plane on the frozen wastes. He knew the tribal areas of Russia and knew that no pilot ever came back alive. Once, one had bailed out and certain delicate and private portions of his anatomy were left with his uniform at the tribute station.

Remo made the pilot think otherwise by getting hold of the nerves in the pilot's neck and showing him that there were worse things than death.

The pilot made a very bumpy landing. When Anna and Remo climbed out, jumping down to the frozen tundra, he took off immediately, almost crashing because he wanted to get out so quickly. Almost immediately, hundreds of horsemen in fur hats on small ponies appeared in the distance from all directions.

Anna grabbed Remo's hand.

"I'll show you the Genghis Khan heart disease," he said.

As the horsemen got closer, they seemed to drive themselves harder, as though the first to get to the intruders would be able to claim them.

The first horseman extended his hands during the ride, reaching for Remo's head. There was a Mongol game where they would fight for the head of a victim as sport. This sport was later transferred to India, where the British learned it and named it polo.

Remo caught the horseman, lightly plucking the small deadly warrior from the saddle like a ring on a carousel.

He slipped his right hand into the man's chest and through the sternum, feeling his heart collapse, his hand around the upper rib cage, blocking external movements of the heart. The man's eyes popped wide. His mouth opened in desperation, he let out a groan, and then slumped backward, his face contorted, his lips blue.

"Heart attack," said Remo to Anna, dropping the first one. He had to handle the next two simultaneously because they had arrived that way.

On one he scratched markings into the face and crushed the spleen.

"Pox," he said.

On the other, he manipulated the blood vessels in the neck until the warrior was unconscious. "Stroke," he said.

He caught the next, and with deft movement around the rib cage, in a manner Anna could not understand, made the joints swell suddenly.

"My rheumatoid arthritis," said Remo pleasantly. "Good, but not great. Chiun's is absolutely perfect. We can do lots of other diseases but we need time for the heavyweight loss involved."

And time was what they did not have. The invincible horde was just about to close on them from all directions and Anna could not see how Remo could get them out of this one.

Chapter 11

Huak the greater warrior, son of Bar, grandson of Huak Bar, great-grandson of Kar, all of whom traced their lineage to Sar Wa, who himself carried the seven-yak-tail banner of the Great Khan, Genghis himself, had lost none of his horse skills. He had not lost one flickering finger of accuracy with the short bow.

Nor did he fail to understand the gun, which his great-great-grandfather had been the first to capture from the whites.

Huak had the first flintlock taken from a Russian nobleman, whose head was strapped in a bag with a dozen scorpion beetles. He had the Enfield taken from the British troops who tried to help one of the Russian armies during its rebellion. He had the shortnosed submachine guns taken from Russian troops who got lost on their way to the border with Korea.

But his favorite weapon was the short razor-sharp sword that could take the ears off a man before he could hear the words of challenge, lie facedown, and submit.

This sword did the chunky five-foot-two-inch Huak, warrior, brandish before him, lathering his horse to reach the two whites before there was nothing left to attack.

Because Huak had taken the time to command everyone to attack the whites, because he had called out the ancient battle cry, "Let blood honor your swords," because he had been in his own mind too much of a gentleman, there would now be nothing left.

They would already be disemboweled. The ears would be gone. Someone would undoubtedly have plucked the eyes with a dagger, and as for the sexual organs of the two, those would be the first to go. There might not even be a bone left.

That was what Huak would get for being a gentleman, and as he raced his little pony, also a descendant of the horses of the horde, the only army in the world never to lose a battle, Huak the Greater thought: No more Mr. Nice Guy.

But when he was less than a spear's throw away from where the remnants should be, he saw the white man whole, the woman whole, and at least eighteen of his brothers lying peacefully in repose, numbers nineteen and twenty rapidly following suit, and with the great horse skills undiminished since the horde left the Gobi desert to devour everything and everyone in its path, Huak pulled his steed up short, almost breaking its neck.

"Skirah," he screamed, and that meant "spirit." Huak was not afraid of death. He believed that a man killed honorably in battle would live to fight again. Only those who fled from battle died like tow animals. But the spirit that came from the winds, that could snuff his soul and put him in the sleep from which his spirit would never awake-that would torment him for eternity, leave him without a horse forever, without a sword forever, and steal his name so Huak would not even know who he was but be like some grain of sand, nothing, undifferent from any other, unbeing.

A few were not in time to hear his warning about the evil wind spirit, and went to sleep at the spirit's hands. He had brought his pale woman with him, probably also to feast on the souls of those to be made like dust, like sand, like nothing.

Of those gone before the other horses were able to rein in, the number was twenty-two, not dead so much as lost forever.

A young warrior, hearing Huak's command, but thinking there were so many of them that the white man could not possibly dodge a hundred arrows, pulled back his bow in the quick short draw of the bowstring made famous at the gates of Baghdad and at the fringes of Europe.

Huak's knife cut that short with a snap jab into the jugular. The boy fell instantly like an old wineskin spilling its red contents on the tundra.

The boy's father, riding adjacent to the son, saw what Huak had done, and said:

"Thank you, brother Huak." And no more was said. The father understood that if the son had died at the spirit's hands, his soul would be gone forever. Now they could take the body back with them and bury it knowing it was still part of them, possibly returning even in the next birth, a boy of course.

Male spirits never came back as women. Thus was the belief of the horde unchanged in its centuries of unbroken triumph.

A thousand horses came to snorting, stamping rest around the two whites. Clouds of warm air from their nostrils puffed out into the cold Siberian air. "Oh Skirah spirit, what have you come for, what can we give you to appease you, to honor you so that you will leave our souls in peace and seek others?"

"Get your horses back, they smell. The whole horde smells like a shit farm," said the white man in the older tongue used at the time of Genghis Khan himself.

"How many languages do you speak?" whispered Anna. She had seen Remo kill before, and all of it looked so smooth, it could have been someone stacking crates at an hourly wage.

"I dunno," answered Remo in English. "You read the scrolls, you pick up dozens of languages. Sinanju needed them for work."

"I presume, darling, that's Mongolian," said Anna.

"No. The horde spoke a dialect peculiar to Genghis Khan's tribe."

"How many words do you know?"

"If you know to tell them to move their smelly horses back, you've got fifty percent of everything you ever need to tell a Mongol," said Remo, and in the language Chiun had taught him during a training session outside Dayton, Ohio, while Remo was still learning basic breath, he said:

"Horses, move backward. Back. And you there. Clean up the droppings. Don't litter the tundra. Bunch of dirty dogs. Back."

A warrior dismounted, and quickly gathered a loose plop of goo in a skin.

"You didn't have to use your hands. We may be eating supper with you. On second thought, if you've only got yak meat, we'll do without. I'm looking for someone."

"Whom, Skirah, do you seek?"

"He calls himself Mr. Arieson and I think he should be around here."

"Arieson?"

"Thick neck. Beard. Blazing eyes. Hard to put a spear through. Probably impossible."

"Oh, you mean our friend Kakak."

"White?" asked Remo.

"What else is the color of ugly dead flesh?" asked Huak.

"Do you want to stay on that horse or would you like to blend in with the tundra?" said Remo.

"I did not mean to dishonor your color, Skirah. Come with us and take your glorious bride spirit with you. Our encampment is not far away."

"Ride ahead and clear the horses out. I don't want to be downwind from you guys."

"As you say, Skirah," said Huak to Remo.

"Who is Skirah?" asked Anna.

"One of their spirits. Maybe the way they pronounce Sinanju."

"I think I understand. Religion, spirits, and gods are the way people explain to themselves what they don't understand. So when Genghis Khan died at the hands of Sinanju, they explained it away as a bad spirit. And it had to be a great bad spirit because Genghis Khan was great. It's all logical. Everything in the world is logical, except we don't always understand the logic right away. Don't you think?"

"We're walking behind eight hundred horses, and you're thinking about rational explanations for myths?" asked Remo.

"What should I be thinking about?"

"Where you're stepping," said Remo.

Anna felt a sudden warm moistness up around the calf of her boot. She realized Remo could be brilliant at times.

But there was something far more sinister on the tundra. As they approached the encampment, great gaping cracks appeared around them, parallel paths chewing up the frost-white earth, churning up frozen blackness underneath. Something had passed here very recently, and it used treads. Tanks.

But the Mongols of the horde did not use tanks, at least not to Anna's knowledge. With modern equipment like that, these horsemen-invincible in the frozen wastes of Siberia-could theoretically overrun Europe, something they could not do with Genghis Khan.

Then again, the family that had stopped him was back again. He might stop them before they broke out.

Unless, thought Anna, the treads were not made by Mongol-driven tanks at all. Maybe it is something worse.

And as soon as they saw the encampment, Anna knew the worst had happened. Walking freely among the Mongols were Russian soldiers and officers. Thousands of them. She saw them with their arms around the shoulders of the Mongols, and vice versa.

That meant the prohibition against whites was not universal. The Russian soldiers had somehow earned the friendship of the Mongols, and considering the Mongol mentality and the military mentality, she was fairly certain how it happened.

"Remo, ask the leader why they are friendly with Russians now."

She heard Remo call out to the backs of the hundreds of horsemen and one of them turned around and galloped back. She heard Remo ask questions in that strange tongue and saw many hand motions on the part of the Mongol.

Remo translated as the Mongol spoke.

"There was a great battle, not in numbers but in spirit. The whites showed they did not fear death. They only feared dishonor. They showed a love of battle and a love of war."

Anna nodded. It was all coming together now. Remo continued:

"They did not fight as whites ordinarily do, to steal something, to protect something, or just to save their miserable lives. They fought for the honor of fighting. These are the first whites who understood war."

"He mentioned that name for Arieson. Kakak."

"No," said Remo. "That is their name for war. Mr. Arieson, I guess quite logically, means war."

"That's the only thing he seems to mean," said Anna. So elements of the Russian army had joined the Mongol horde. And she was fairly certain how they would pull off this war with America. And they just might win it, even without the use of nuclear weapons.

They could pour over the Bering Strait supported by ships from the Vladivostok naval station that had sailed north. It would not be easy, but since America always suspected an attack against Europe and not its own borders, then they could be taken by surprise. What forces did America have to oppose the Russians? Nothing but what was in Alaska, and the trek up through Canada would be almost as long as Russia's trek to its borders. They could battle down through Canada, and with the spirit of these soldiers, they could just as well win.

What was she thinking? Was she insane? Was she so marrow-deep a Russian that she thought they would win something by conquering America?

How could they occupy a country of two hundred and forty million, moving their forces not only through Siberian transit but down across Canada as well? They would also have to conquer Canada. And should that even be possible, should moving the troops be as easy as moving from Minsk to Pinsk, why on earth would they think that occupying America would do them any good? To be free of a competitor with nuclear weapons? There would surely be another, and if Russia should attain its age-old dream of conquering the world, anyone who knew how men traditionally ran things had to understand that the world would have to split up into two camps and there could just as easily be a war between Russia East and Russia West.

No, this had to be stopped here. This had to be stopped now. And she was grateful that the man beside her, this glorious, handsome, wonderful anachronism, was the only man to do it.

As for Mr. Arieson, she was sure there was a logical explanation for this creature that had not occurred to Remo or his rather intelligent superior, Harold W. Smith.

Remo understood the world of the extent of the human body. Smith understood things mostly in the great world of technology, but no one yet had brought common rational sense to Mr. Arieson.

It was she who had been able to understand that for some reason, Remo and his surrogate father, Chiun, were immune to Arieson's blandishments. It was she who understood that the only reason Remo felt he had failed was that he had not enjoyed the total victory Sinanju was used to.

And it was going to be Anna Chutesov who would figure out what Mr. Arieson's real weaknesses were. She had never failed with any other man. There was no reason to start failing now.

And yet, Anna was not prepared for what she saw.

Riding on a little pony was a man so apparently powerful that power became a handsomeness the like of which she had never seen. His presence almost took her breath away. His beard seemed a perfect accessory for his strong jaw and muscled neck. His eyes had a glow of infinity to them. And he wore a simple Russian soldier's helmet, making it more glorious by his presence underneath it than any helmet on any soldier she had ever seen. She understood now why men could feel a glorious call to battle in his presence, and she hadn't even spoken to him vet.

"Here comes the spoilsport, men. Here he comes, sauntering after the fine cavalry. Come on, ruin it all for everyone."

This from Mr. Arieson, the voice carrying over a thousand tents and filling the slight valley in this wasteland.

"Look, already the horses are clearing out just because he doesn't want them. Glad to see you're here, Remo. You're not going to get me, but here you come nevertheless, empty-handed, despite the deal your father made."

"I see you don't mind the smell of horses," Remo called out. The entire camp stopped to look at the two men facing each other, taunting each other.

"Have you ever smelled a battlefield two days after? The rotting bodies would make you pass out."

"So why are you trying to start a war?" Remo called out. He made sure Anna was to the side as he walked steadily toward Arieson.

"Who said I didn't like the smell? I love it. I said you'd pass out. I'd roll around in it and make sure people built statues there so they wouldn't remember how horrible it was, and think they really accomplished something."

A tank commander, hearing Mr. Arieson yell insults at the lone stranger, thought he would do a favor for this man who had given him the gift of heroism by running over the skinny white man who seemed not to need heavy winter clothes. He turned his massive ground-chewing machine toward the man and drove. He heard Mr. Arieson call out that it wouldn't do any good, that it never had, but the man now filled with the true spirit of battle was ready to die trying.

He charged his behemoth down on the thin figure and the man didn't bother to dodge, but like a bullfighter stepped to the side, cleaved off a tread barehanded, then cleaved off the other tread as the tank spun helplessly around.

The tank commander, enraged at losing his armorplated chariot, stormed out with his sidearm and a knife, and promptly found out what they tasted like as the thin stranger stuffed them down his throat and kept walking.

"See, it won't do anyone any good," called out Arieson. "That is an assassin. No soldier there. A Sinanju assassin. No glory there. Death in the night. Highest bidder gets the service. No courage in that man. Doesn't even fight fear. Uses it. No courage there, assassin."

"Is that true, Remo? Is that what is different?" said Anna.

"I have fear. I just use it. He's right."

"Look, let's talk to Mr. Arieson."

"I don't want to talk. I want to nail him."

"Have you tried talking?"

"You can't talk with a man who loves the smell of rotting bodies."

"But you haven't, have you?"

"I'll kill him, then I'll talk to him," said Remo, thinking that since his body blows had proved ineffective he might try hurling a soldier or two at Arieson's head and see what that produced.

"Very bright, Remo. Are you good at talking to the dead?"

"I mean when he's dead he won't be a problem anymore."

"You haven't succeeded yet. Just let me talk to him."

"Don't make it too long," said Remo.

"Why don't you fight some people while you're waiting?" said Anna.

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"Partly, but I want to understand his reactions to you. They're very interesting."

Close to Arieson, Anna sensed an inner laughter at everything that went on, almost as though he cared but didn't care. Several soldiers issued a challenge to Remo. Arieson called out that it wouldn't do any good, that the soldiers would die against Sinanju, that by the evening their commanders would be dead, and they would no longer be an army.

Sinanju had done this countless times throughout history.

"Were you there?" asked Anna.

"If you want to undress and dance for my glory, fine. But ask me questions?"

"Why not?" asked Anna.

"You just did it again."

"You made a deal with Remo's surrogate father. Perhaps I can help you make a deal with Remo."

"How do you deal with someone who is Sinanju and doesn't respect what he's dealing with?"

Remo cleaved Russian commandos with a back hand so slow it looked as though the hand itself was drawn out of his body. The soldiers went in separate directions, heads going one way, legs another. Anna turned away from the slaughter.

"No fair fight from Sinanju," called out Arieson. "Bunch of assassins."

"So Remo has some form of power over you," said Anna.

"Not over me. Over what I want to do. He gets in the way. These Sinanju boys have been doing that for centuries."

"And you've been around for centuries," said Anna. Arieson's strong legs seemed to caress the fat belly of the little horse. She wondered if the horse enjoyed it. She wondered if she would enjoy it. What was it about this man that so stimulated sexual desire in her? Remo did the same thing to her, but for a good reason. She had known the wonders he could deliver. All she knew about Arieson was that he could transform ordinary soldiers into valiant warriors.

The Mongols were avoiding the fight with Remo. Only the Russians kept coming on at him. She did not like to see this kind of killing. For the soldiers it was some form of glory. But she knew Remo might not even be thinking about what was going on except to be concentrating on the form of the blow to keep in good practice.

"What do you want, Mr. Arieson?"

"What does Remo want?" asked Arieson.

"The treasure of Sinanju," said Anna. The words were out almost immediately, but she knew she was right. Everything else had been a stalemate.

"Oh, that. The greedy rewards for murder."

"You made a deal with Chiun. Maybe I can broker a deal with Remo. I know he wants the treasure."

Anna heard something roll nearby. She hoped it wasn't a head.

She turned to Remo.

"Will you stop that, Remo?" she yelled.

"I didn't start anything. They're coming at me," Remo called back.

"Well, just stop it," she said, and turned away so she wouldn't see what would happen to three burly tankers who had now grabbed large steel wrenches and were going to try to beat the slim stranger with the thick wrists.

"I didn't start it," said Remo. "They were coming at me."

He was by her side now, looking up at Arieson. "Do you want the treasure of Sinanju?" asked Arieson.

"I do."

"What will you give me for it? Will you make the same deal as Chiun?"

"No," said Remo. "But I'm going to get the Premier and end this horde forever. We should have done it at the fringes of Europe when we took care of your boy Genghis Khan. Should have done the job right."

"Leave my horde alone. I've felt at home here more than with any other army."

"I don't want my country to be in a war with Russia."

"All right. All right. I'll go. There won't be a war. Will that make you happy?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, if that's your horrible price. You can have it this time. But I warn you, you can't stop me forever, especially now that I know you want the treasure of Sinanju."

"Do you know where it is?" asked Remo.

"Of course I do."

"How?" asked Remo.

"Ah," said Arieson, and it sounded like all the winds over all the deserts and all the battlefields that had ever been. And he sat no more on the Mongol pony before them. The pony whinnied and then scampered away, only to be brought quickly to rein by a young Mongol horseman in this forbidden encampment in the Siberian wasteland.

There was a silence all around them. Something important was no longer there, and neither Remo nor Anna knew what it was. Something seemed to go out of the Russian soldiers. There was no more bounce or joy or comradeship with the Mongols. They seemed like a bunch of men in uniforms stuck in a cold inhospitable place they would like to escape.

Only the Mongols seemed to stay the same, as a priest called out that Mr. Arieson remained in their hearts always.

"Anna, Anna," came the voice from a yak tent. A handsome bald-headed man wearing an ill-fitting Russian soldier's uniform was waving to Anna and Remo.

Remo recognized the face from the newspapers. It was the Russian Premier. "Anna, what are you doing here?"

"What are you doing here?" she answered.

"We are about to launch the greatest campaign in Russian history. Read this," he said. It was a piece of parchment with the Communist-party insignia on it.

Anna knew what it was. These things had not been seen for centuries, not since the advent of the sneak attack.

It was a declaration of war against America and it bore the Premier's signature. Arieson had gotten to the head of the Communist party as well as the soldiers. Here was a man who should have known better. He had lost his entire family in the great patriotic war in which Russia had defeated the lunacy of Nazi Germany.

Anna tore it up.

"What are you doing?"

"It's all over."

"It can't be. I was going to conquer America," said the Premier.

"Excuse me," said Remo. He stepped in between Anna and the Premier, and with limited power and maximum palm exposure slapped the Premier hard, like a giant towel whacking water. The Premier's eyes teared momentarily, then a silly smile appeared on his face. He sniffled back the sudden nosebleed.

"Friendship always between the glorious freedom-loving American people and their allies, the glorious Russian people enjoying the fruits and luxuries of socialism," said the Premier.

The Russian soldiers, getting back to normal, now began to fear the Mongols again, and the Mongols, sensing it, began closing in. But Remo called out that his protection was upon them, and so he, Anna, and the Premier, with the defecting army units, made their way that day out of the special tribal encampments reserved for the notorious horde of Genghis Khan.

Harold W. Smith received word from his Russian contact, Anna Cliutesov, that the danger of imminent war was now over. But according to the pattern of this new force, it would reappear again. This he had to stress.

"Yes, but we're learning more about him, Mr. Smith. We are learning Remo has something he wants."

"And what's that?"

"Remo and Sinanju have been in his way for centuries."

"But he, whatever he is, whoever he is, is still around."

"Ah, but Mr. Smith, you are missing the most salient point. So is Sinanju."

In Anna's apartment they made love on a fur rug, with the apartment dark, with the quiet lights of Moscow beaming in the near distance, their bodies becoming one, until Anna with delirious joy shrieked the completion of her ecstasy.

"You're wonderful, Remo,"

"Fair. My mind's elsewhere," said Remo.

"You didn't have to tell me that."

"I don't mean to insult you, but lovemaking is part of my skills. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're fair, just like other strokes. It doesn't mean I don't care."

"Was it work for you, Remo?"

"With you it's never work, Anna."

"I hope so," she said. "But you know, I'll never know."

"You know," he said, kissing her gently. But she was right. Sometimes he didn't know either. When you were Sinanju, when you became a Master, Sinanju was not something you used or did not use; it was what you were.

When he had seen Mr. Arieson, there was no choice about whether he would be enthralled or not. He was disgusted, just as he would be disgusted by a bad smell. It was not a choice. His antagonism toward that force was as central to him as his breathing. And Remo did not know why.

The little half-tinkle of the second-rate Russian phone rang above them on a table. Remo reached back to get it without disturbing anything.

"That was well done," laughed Anna.

It was Chiun, who had been told that Mr. Arieson was about to give back the treasure of Sinanju to Remo, if Remo would meet him at a special place, a place dear to his heart.

"All right. I'll make it there in a while."

"What could be more important than the treasure of Sinanju?"

"Litte Father, I'll get the treasure, but in a short while."

"I know what you're doing and your white lust for a white body has overcome the good judgment and training I have spent the best years of my life giving you."

"I am talking about less than a few minutes," said Remo.

"You are talking about uncontrollable, dirty lust for that white Russian hussy, instead of faithfulness to your precious wife, Poo."

"I'll get the treasure, Little Father," said Remo, hanging up.

The place Arieson had picked was a complex of miles and miles of underground concrete bunkers fronted by miles and miles of rotting concrete tank traps. It stretched along the border of France and Germany, a massive undertaking equal in its time to the pyramids.

It was, however, perhaps the greatest failure of all time.

It was the Maginot Line, too expensive now for France to even dismantle, but in its time it had loomed as the greatest defensive network ever assembled. It stared Germany in the face. France made foreign policy confidently behind its fortifications. When Germany attacked Poland, France stood by its poor ally. It also stood behind its Maginot Line.

Germany went around it.

No one in France had thought of that. France fell.

The Second World War was on, the Maginot Line was dead forever.

Inside its coffinlike interior, Mr. Arieson now waited, whistling joyfully. He glowed in the dark. He tossed in his hands a large vase emblazoned with pink flamingos. Each flamingo held a gold rod with a diamond on top, the archaic but distinct sign of a minor dynasty Remo recognized.

He had seen it sitting on velvet amid thirty or so other vases, all quite similar. He had never seen it anywhere else but in that one place, because that minor dynasty had been absorbed entirely by the country that would become China.

The place he had seen this vase before was in the treasure house of Sinanju. Arieson handed Remo the vase.

"You can have the rest, too. Just give me Chiun's deal," said Arieson.

Remo could see his outlines in the dark even if a faint glow did not emanate from him. Anna, however, had difficulty walking in the dark because she needed strong light to see. Remo held the precious vase in one hand and steadied Anna with the other.

Arieson waited, chuckling and whistling. Something was shaking the concrete underground bunker. It felt like there was traffic overhead. Lots of traffic. One truck after another, rolling along over their heads.

"Your choice, Remo. Just clear out and I'll tell you where the treasure was hidden a few years ago. Bring it back to Chiun, both of you enjoy the fruits of thousands of years of troublemaking, emperor-killing, conqueror-stopping, whatever you wish. Yours. Feel it."

Remo could feel the old glaze in his hand. Chiun appreciated this period perhaps more than any other. Did Arieson know that? There was some dirt at the base. There had never been dirt at the base.

The truck sounds were getting heavier. Arieson was getting happier.

"What's going on up there?"

"If you take the treasure, it won't matter. Feels good, doesn't it, son?"

"You mean I have to clear out of Europe?"

"Now especially."

"What's going on up there?"

"A golden oldie," sighed Arieson. "One of my favorites."

"A war?"

"Not a dance," sang Mr. Arieson. "Think about it. Here you will be returning to Sinanju as the Master who recovered the treasure. You'll be somebody. Think of Chiun. Think of his gratitude. Think of you having the upper hand."

Remo was thinking about getting out of the marriage to Poo, among other things. He was too experienced to know that returning the treasure would end Chiun's complaining. Chiun was only happy when complaining. The words "All right, a deal" were almost out of his mouth when he said:

"I think I'd better see what's going on upstairs."

"Don't bother to look. A group of valiant French officers has decided to regain the honor of France humiliated so many times by the dastardly Hun. The dastardly Hun is going to be up there also. You don't know how hard it's been for me. We're going on almost fifty years now without a Franco-German war. A generation without a Franco-German war is like a night without stars."

"Remo," said Anna, "you can't let another one of these disasters happen. You can't let millions die just for your treasure. Remo?"

"Hold on," said Remo, whose marriage to Poo was still valid in Sinanju if nowhere else on earth. "I'm thinking."

Chapter 12

It was not an easy choice, and the shortage of time didn't make it easier. On one hand were the assured deaths of thousands of civilized Europeans, who after years of regularly killing each other in warfare had finally learned to live together. On that side was death, the destruction of major cities, perhaps even this time an end to one of the nations, each of which when they were not warring had produced so much for the benefit of mankind and would continue to do so.

On the other was the treasure of Sinanju. Actually, when Remo thought about it, there really wasn't much choice. There were always going to be wars. If not the French and Germans, then certainly the Arabs and Iranians, the Arabs and the Israelis, the Arabs and the Africans, the Arabs and the Arabs. And that was just one ethnic group. Moving on from the Semites, you couldn't get out of the Asian subcontinent without another good twenty wars.

So what was he stopping, really?

"Remo, why are you taking so long?" asked Anna. "Are you going to let the French and Germans slaughter each other again?"

"Eh," said Remo.

"Is that your answer to warfare? A blase little 'eh'? That's it?"

Remo shrugged.

"Trust me, Remo. I think I have figured out what Mr. Arieson must be. I don't think he's invincible. Don't make the deal with him. I'll help you with the treasure. You've never had the combined might of both Russia and America working for you. I think Mr. Arieson has made a mistake by returning part of the treasure. Remo, stop this war."

Arieson, who had let Anna have her full say, finally interrupted. His voice resonated throughout the bunker like a hymn, like trumpets, like all the music men had ever used to raise their hearts to the battle. Anna was not unaware of this. She sensed Remo was. Moisture had collected on the concrete walls in the old Maginot Line and it was like breathing in a sewer. In a war, men would fight in bunkers like these and worse. All the martial music could not change that. She squeezed Remo's arm as Arieson spoke.

"Remo, have you ever really seen an old-fashioned war? I mean a good one. Not something where the cities are bombed, and drably dressed men crawl through the mud, and no one even knows where the enemy is half the time. I'm not talking about that shoddy new stuff. I'm talking good old-fashioned war, with banners and trumpets and men in glorious uniforms marching out to make history and glory."

"And to hack away at each other like butchers and then have their poets cover it up," said Remo. "I've read about those kinds."

"Once a Sinanju assassin, always a Sinanju assassin. What about the deal? You don't care about these armies. You've always considered warriors as some kind of cheap competition for your services."

"You don't mean to tell us you've been around for thousands of years," said Anna.

"I'm not talking to you, girlie," said Arieson. "What about it, Sinanju boy? Take the deal. You get the treasure. All you people ever cared about was getting paid. Don't feel you have to show off for the girl."

"Remo!" cried Anna.

"I was still raised by the nuns. I was still raised American," said Remo. "No deal."

It was not an attack so much as an eerie light and voices from nowhere that lunged toward Remo. But Remo held the vase. He held the vase against the strange sense of flesh that was not flesh, energy that was more thought than energy, against hands that were not hands trying to take back the vase that had once been given in tribute to the Masters of Sinanju.

And then Arieson was gone and Remo had a war to stop.

It was not hard. Everything seemed to fall apart when Arieson left anyhow, and this time when Arieson was gone both France and Germany closed in on what they called their lunatic commanders, who instead of being considered saviors of the nations were both publicly called "lunatic disasters who never should have been given command of troops."

But Remo was left with one vase in the sunlight of a French field where ugly concrete lay too vast to be removed.

"I don't think Chiun's going to let me out of the marriage to Poo for one stinking vase, Anna," said Remo. "And I don't blame him. I had the treasure in my hands for a single deal for one more lousy war that these yo-yos probably would have loved to fight anyhow, and I let it go. I may have let Chiun down. I may have let down every Master in the line."

"Let me see the vase," said Anna.

Remo started to brush off the dirt before he handed it to her, but Anna, horrified, told him to leave the dirt.

"That's our chance. That's what I'm counting on. Arieson left the earth. I'm surprised he did so."

"Dirt is something you clean off," said Remo. "Chiun won't be happy he's getting only one vase back, let alone a dirty one."

"Dirt is what things are buried in. Dirt is what is peculiar to each place, dirt is what the greatest technological nation on the earth can read a speck of and tell you exactly where it came from."

"We have to go back to Russia?"

"Are you kidding? I'm talking about modern science. Your Harold Smith has at his disposal the greatest technological materials known to man. He's your best chance."

None of them talked directly to the scientist in the mass-spectrometry laboratory because that would have given him an inkling of whom he might be working for. Instead, through concealed cameras they watched as another scientist who thought he was working on a government grant for archaeological expeditions talked to the operator of the instrument. They could have gotten a report, but they didn't even want to wait that long.

Anna was amazed how all this could be accomplished in such secret openness. They did the watching in the back of a limousine, which had microscopic controls that gave this one brilliant man access to more technological power than perhaps any human being other than his president.

Anna appreciated how America had chosen well in Harold W. Smith, the taciturn lemon-faced head of Remo's organization. Harold W. Smith was not one to believe in the Red Menace. He understood her country as an enemy. He understood he had to use caution and stamp out its thrusts toward his own country, but he did not view Russia as the demon of the world. He was not one to start a war, but this man was sure to finish it.

Remo was bored with the spectrometry research and kept reaching a hand to her knee. Anna liked the hand on her knee but she did not want an orgasm while discussing earth samples with someone else in the back seat of an American limousine.

They were driving down the Merritt Parkway just outside New York City. The driver was sealed off by a solid soundproof glass shield. They could hear him but he could not hear them unless they gave him an order through a microphone. To the world it looked like a common luxury automobile where the inhabitants were watching television.

The impressive reading of particles in the laboratory was not done through some lens, but rather by bombarding the earth with electrons and reading the emissions on a printout.

They heard the technologist read the structure of the earth found on the vase.

The archaeologist-geographer punched the readings into a portable computer he carried. Both men were dressed as though they were about to go out and throw a Frisbee for a while. They looked so ordinary doing such an extraordinary thing, thought Anna.

She slapped Remo's wonderfully skilled hand again. "Please," she said.

Harold W. Smith blushed.

"Nothing," said Remo. "I wasn't doing anything. If I did something, you would feel this-"

"Remo!" shrieked Anna.

"Remo, please," said Smith, trying to avert his eyes.

"Nothing," said Remo, raising his hands as an innocent.

And then the findings.

The computer announced three places the earth could have come from, but Remo knew immediately that two were wrong. One was along the coast of Chile, and the other was a fishing village in Africa.

"I always wondered how they managed to move so much treasure and only find witnesses who saw it leave the village, while no one anywhere saw it arrive. I always wondered how Chiun could have sifted through North Korean intelligence without finding the men who had lugged it away. I always wondered," said Remo.

Anna and Smith said the third place was not only a brilliant site but also logical.

It was as brilliant as it was simple. Smith and Anna discussed Arieson as they all three drove to a small military airport outside of New York City. They had the treasure. Now to end the power of Mr. Arieson.

Cymbals of welcome reached Remo and Anna as they arrived at the junction of Sinanju One with Sinanju Two and Three, an area which looked like a large empty parking lot. It stopped at a mud path, Sinanju proper.

Chiun was waiting, too, squinting disapproval: "You have brought her here. Into your own village. A white. That white. The white you have consorted with," said Chiun, looking at Anna.

"You'll never guess where the treasure is."

"Of course I'll never guess. If I could have guessed, I would have found it."

"Do you think that is a nice hillock you are standing on, Little Father?" asked Remo.

"It overlooks the highway. Behind me, down the path into the village, I can see everything going on there. It is a perfect spot."

"And on the night the treasure was stolen, did not the North Korean intelligence operatives carry the treasure up this path?"

"It is the only way to get out of Sinanju. Why not? Don't try to escape the fact that you have brought that," said Chiun, pointing at Anna, "back to where you live, where your precious wife lives."

"I know about that marriage. It's not a real one," said Anna with a cold smile.

"And Remo said you were intelligent," laughed Chiun. "They tell that to all you girls."

"I believe Remo wouldn't lie."

"Believe what you want," said Chiun, "but you'll never know."

"Getting back to the treasure, Little Father, did it not seem strange to you that you could uncover none of the many men who hauled it away?" asked Remo.

"If they could have been found, I would have found them. As a precaution, obviously they were killed so they would not tell."

"Ah, and when were they killed? Where were they killed?"

"I don't like these games."

"You played games with Mr. Arieson. You didn't tell me."

"I'm allowed. I'm your father," said Chum.

"Isn't it amazing how that hill you are on seems to grow?" Anna said.

"Of course it grows. It is the Sinanju garbage dump."

"And at the bottom, where the dump touches the once-fresh earth, you will find the poisoned bodies of the men who hauled away your treasure."

"Good. Let them rot," said Chiun.

"Sir, if they are dead, who carried the treasure farther, and why do I think they were poisoned?"

"Because you are a sex-crazed white woman and never had a logical thought in your head," said Chiun.

"They were poisoned, I am sure, because that was the quietest way to get rid of them after they did their work, and then one man with a shovel could cover them with the loose garbage and drive back to Pyongyang, where he could agree to come to your village as often as you want to help you look for the treasure. Your treasure has been in the only one safe place it could have been hidden all along. Right here in Sinanju."

Anna thought Chiun was so excited about the find that he did not remember to thank her, but Remo explained Chiun had difficulty with thanks. This of course did not mean that anyone could ever forget to thank Chiun. When it came to gratitude, he was very careful to weigh and measure.

The entire village dug into the little garbage heap, some with shovels, some with their bare hands. They sang as they worked, about the glory of their House of Sinanju.

But they always sang as they worked while the Masters of Sinanju were around. Chiun did not forget nor let them forget that when he was gone earning tribute for the entire village, they had not lifted a finger when the treasure was stolen.

They covered their faces when they came down to the decomposing bodies, but under the bodies was fresh, easily dug earth, and only the thinnest layer of earth covered the first trunk of valuables. All night they cleaned and carried and hauled, while Chiun directed one group here and one there to lay the treasures before the doorway of the House of Sinanju. He and Remo would put them where they belonged. This for Remo and Chiun would be a labor of love.

"May I come in?" asked Anna. She had helped locate the treasure. She had saved it for Remo and Chiun. She was actually feeling good for the cranky old racist.

"No," said Chiun.

"I do believe I was instrumental in your regaining the historical treasure that meant so much to your lines of assassins," said Anna.

"You had some deal with Remo. Probably for sex," said Chiun.

"No. I stopped a war," said Remo, making sure the Mayan gold was not mixed with the lighter and shinier Thai gold.

Chiun was proud that Remo would remember the difference between the two.

"Well, we can deal with Arieson now."

"I've heard about your deals, Chiun. What are you going to give him now?" asked Anna.

"A pinch of something or other," said Chiun. He had spotted the casks of faience beads from the Third Dynasty of the upper kingdom of the Nile. "To the left, along with the alabaster cats, thank you," he said to the Sinanju workers.

"You don't understand, Master of Sinanju, Arieson is not some mindless mystical thing that you could understand. Smith, an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, and I have put our heads together."

"Twin cabbages," said Chiun, seeing the great damask cloth, named for the city of its origin, Damascus. "Ah, the beautiful Abbasids," said Chiun, being reminded of the treachery of that dynasty. And then of course there were the treasures from Baghdad, the pinnacle of civilization, which the warrior Genghis Khan destroyed, and then of course died for that abomination.

"The old Baghdad," said Chiun, taking a bolt of silk centuries old but still perfect because of the denseness of its weave and the special perfection of its silkworms fed a secret diet by the wonderful caliphs in that wonderful city.

And of course, the gifts from the Greek tyrants, coming now over the hill, down the path toward the House of Sinanju. Chiun's hands were aflutter with joy. The Masters of Sinanju always had special affection for the Greek tyrants. While the Greeks never paid excessively, they always understood exactly the work they wanted. They were not ones to see imaginary plots behind every marble wall. They knew who had to be removed and got the best to do it, saving themselves much wealth in the long run.

"Mr. Arieson," said Anna, "in case you are interested, is an electronic force that feeds off its victims themselves. The victims are human beings who respond to negative military impulses. The reason you and Remo cannot be affected is you are so perfectly trained that all your basic responses are harnessed. Other men fight their fear; your fear powers you. You fight nothing because you are one with every element of yourselves. Do you understand?"

"You slept with a woman who is going to explain Sinanju to you?" asked Chiun.

Remo made a motion of the inexplicability of women, and stopped the Mali iron statues before they were brought too far forward.

"Those go back a bit," said Remo.

"Are you coming?" asked Anna.

"No, he's not," said Chiun.

"Let him answer," said Anna.

"I've got to put stuff away here first."

"Don't you want to see Mr. Arieson collapse in an electronic counterforce?"

"Sure, but I've got to straighten up the rooms first," said Remo. Chiun smiled. Remo could be a good boy at times. And Remo was his.

"He knows your little tricks cannot stop someone like Arieson," Chiun said.

"But he's not a someone. That's what Smith and I figured out, from all the evidence."

Chiun laughed. "You will never stop him. I will make you a bargain. If you in your ways stop Arieson, you may have Remo. If not, never set foot here again."

"You won't interfere with us because I'm white?" asked Anna.

"I promise," said Chiun.

"Hey, you can't promise me to anyone," said Remo.

"I can promise not to interfere," said Chiun.

"Done," said Anna.

"Done," said Chiun.

"I'll phone for you, Remo."

"Say good-bye to her, Remo."

But Remo ignored them both. Anna did not see it as she walked up the mud path toward the now lower hill at the entrance, but Remo did and he knew where it went. He had seen pictures like it in the tunnels under Rome. He watched three men laboriously carry it on their shoulders, but he ran out to help them. Holding the marble base lightly in his fingers, he alone walked the path back to the house, and wiping his feet free of mud he carried it into the house and into the room where its square marble base fit exactly into the indentation in the dark mahogany.

It was a marble bust. And the face had a beard and a fat neck, and obviously, four hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mr. Arieson had posed for it.

It took three days for Remo and Chiun to replace the treasure. During that time, word reached Poo that Remo, in payment for returning the treasure of Sinanju, was released from his marriage vows.

She came up to the house. She wept at the doorway. She wept louder when other villagers were about. She tore her hair. She screamed insults and curses. She said there would not be a soul in Sinanju who would not know how Remo had failed in his manhood in regard to her.

This was not much of a threat because everyone knew that on the wedding night anyhow. Poo had always been a bigmouth.

Poo stretched her great bulk over the steps of the doorway to the House of Sinanju, known in Sinanju as the House of the Masters, and declared to one and all she was an abandoned woman.

"When does this stop, Little Father?" asked Remo.

"On the fifth day," said Chiun.

"Why the fifth day?" asked Remo.

"By the fifth day she will be tired and ready," said Chiun, without explaining ready for what.

On the fifth day, Chiun went down to where Poo lay exhausted and whispered in her ear. She allowed him to help her up and walk her back down to her home in the village.

"Done," said Chiun on his return to the house.

"What did you say to her?" asked Remo.

"Forty-two thousand dollars cash," said Chiun. "What did you think I said to her? That everything would be all right? That the marriage was over? That she was better off without you?"

"That's a lot of money," said Remo.

"She earned it," said Chiun. "It was truly a noble performance she did on our steps."

"How sure are you we won't hear from Anna Chutesov?" asked Remo.

"Did the statue fit the room exactly, and was not the likeness perfect?"

"Yes," said Remo.

"Be confident, she will never come here again," said Chiun.

"That's not what I wanted, Little Father."

"You wanted to eat red meat at one time also," said Chiun.

"But Anna's different. She's special."

"You only feel she's special."

"That's the only feel I care about, Chiun," said Remo.

"Right," said Chiun. "You don't care what I think. You don't care what is good for the House of Sinanju, but what does the great Remo Williams feel? The feelings that count here are mine," said Chiun. And walking through the rooms of the house, he kept repeating the word "mine," although each time he said it the word became softer, and happier, as he viewed the returned treasure of Sinanju.

Anna's call came on the seventh day, but there was no rejoicing. Remo was going to have to return to America and stop Harold W. Smith. He had gone insane.

"He's screaming 'Forty-four-forty or fight,' and he's starting a war with Canada."

"Smitty?" asked Remo, unbelieving.

"Right from Folcroft."

"How did you find out about Folcroft?"

"I told you he's gone insane. He's not bothering with precautions anymore. He's gotten himself a banner and he's screaming that he wants recognition and that he deserves a medal for what he's done and he doesn't care who knows about him. The more, the better. You'd better get back here and save your organization, Remo."

"Arieson?" asked Remo.

"Who the hell else?" snapped Anna.

"I'm coming over," said Remo, who even now saw the great bust of Mr. Arieson being carried on a litter down to the pier with Chiun directing everyone. Chiun himself followed with an alabaster jar. "What's that?" asked Remo.

"A little pinch of something," said Chiun.

Folcroft was a mess, but fortunately, since it was a sanitarium for the mentally deranged, few bothered to even notice banners flying from its walls. Since it was close to Long Island Sound, many people thought of them as boat signals.

Some of the doctors were questioning why the normally reserved and almost unreachable Mr. Smith was now saying hello to everyone and trying to enlist them in a fight against Canada. They would have committed him to an institution, except he was in one already and running it, and if the truth be known, what made someone a patient at a mental institution instead of an administrator was purely a matter of chance.

According to Smith, Canada had thumbed its nose at America ever since the American Revolution, and the real honest and sacred boundary between the two countries was latitude forty-four-forty, but the cowardly and probably traitorous people running the country, all Canada-simps as he called them, had settled for this tragic injustice.

All it needed was for a few brave and honest men who could not be bought off or intimidated by the Canada lobby.

Remo gently cornered him with an arm and guided him back to his office, as Smith very intently asked Remo if he was one of those who was willing to forget that during the Vietnam war Canada played host to American draft dodgers.

"They get away with everything and they control everything and when you point out these obvious facts, you're called a bigot. Do you understand?"

"I do, Smitty," said Remo.

"That's why only a purifying war can rid us of this cancer in our midst."

"Right. We'll join your war, Smitty."

Smith's gray hair was disheveled and his eyes were wide with the vision he alone saw. He found Anna in his office. Remo glanced at the drawers to the computer consoles out of instinct. She was not, after all, part of the organization.

Chiun arrived bringing the bust of Mr. Arieson. It looked like a kimono as a stand for a ton-size marble bust. When he put it down on the floor the room trembled a bit.

From under his gray kimono Chiun took the alabaster jar and opened it. He reached into the jar and took out a pinch of brownish powder and lit it. Its purplish fumes tickled the nostrils and made the far reaches of the room smell pleasant even as it burned a bright orange at its core. Incense. He had lit incense before the bust of Mr. Arieson.

"O Aries, God of War, called Mars by the Romans, and other names by other tribes, please do allow mankind to have his own stupid wars instead of arranging them."

With a whoosh like a storm, the incense clouds were sucked up into the stone nostrils, leaving only a great silence in the office of Harold W. Smith.

"What are you doing here?" he asked Anna. "And you, Remo? And Chiun?"

"We have made the proper sacrifice to the god of war the Indians released on the Ojupa reservation. He's returned to his observer status," said Remo.

Smith straightened his tie and made sure all of the drawers were shut. Ms. Chutesov was, after all, a Russian high operative.

"I don't believe it," said Smith.

"That statue must have some historical significance which activated the electronic waves you talked about, when you tried that machine you had your scientists create to counterbalance any wave coming at it," said Anna.

"Sinanju does have access to electronic forces," said Smith. "In its primitive way."

"Historical forces," said Anna, who had been educated in communist schools.

"The white mentality," said Chiun of both Anna and Smith, as he got Remo to carry the property of Sinanju out of Folcroft. After all, he had personally carried it in. But was he complaining?