Blood Lust

Destroyer 85: Blood Lust

By Warren Murphy apir

Chapter 1

Allison Baynes was very, very worried about little Kimberly. "It's not drugs, is it?" Norma Quinlan asked, her froglike voice cracking. She winced. Her heart skipped a beat. But inside, she couldn't wait to tell Beverly and Kathleen. She might even start speaking with Ida MacDonough again, just to see the look on her stuck-up face when she told Ida that poor Kimberly Baynes had become a drug addict. She tonged a sugar cube into her tea.

"No, it's not drugs," Allison Baynes said in a hushed and age-quavered voice. Her eyes went to the window, as if the neighbors were listening. In a way, they were. Through Norma Quinlan, the gossip queen of Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. "I almost wish it were. If it were only drugs, I could send her to Betty Ford."

"Do they take them that young?" asked Norma, deciding that a second sugar cube was called for. She would need her energy for all the phone calls she would be making later.

"Perhaps not," Mrs. Baynes said worriedly. Her plump face wore a motherly frown. She balanced her china saucer in one age-spotted hand. The other held the fine china cup suspended a micro-inch over the saucer, as if both would shatter if they met. She raised the cup to her unlipsticked mouth thoughtfully, frowned, and sipped. The cup returned to its hovering position, and Allison Baynes resumed speaking.

"She's only thirteen, you know."

"That young? Why, I saw her only the other day. She looked like a high-school girl in that . . . dress."

"She's wearing lipstick now too."

"I guess she's at the age, then. You know, they become more sophisticated at a much younger age than we did," said Norma Quinlan in a proper voice, shoving into the furthest recess of her mind the half-buried memory of the day she let Harvey Bluestein grope her at the drive-m. That, after all, had been the sixties. The late sixties. People did those things then.

"It is true, isn't it?" Mrs. Baynes said ruefully, looking at the coppery liquid steaming in her cup. Her hair was a silveryblue halo that might have been spun by a platinum spider. She sighed.

Norma Quinlan reached for a raisin scone, knowing that the moment of truth was almost at hand. The sigh was her clue. They always sighed before unburdening themselves. And she was such an attentive listener.

"She's been gaining weight, you know."

"The dress I saw the other day was a positive tent," Norma said quickly between nibbles of the scone, which was dry. "But her face was so thin. And so pretty. She's very pretty."

"Like a little doll," agreed Allison Baynes with grandmotherly pride. "You know, she adjusted very well. After the unpleasantness."

"Unpleasantness?" asked Norma, masking her interest with an innocent tone. She knew very well about the unpleasantness, but wanted to hear it directly. In case new details slipped out. They often did.

"You know that Kimmo's parents died tragically several years ago."

"I've heard that," Norma said vaguely. "Somewhere."

"Her mother was found strangled in Paris. It was perfectly horrible. They never found the killer."

Norma nodded attentively. She knew that.

"A.H., my son, met a similar fate. They found him dead in his Rocky Mountain vacation home, his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Just like my daughter-in-law."

"No!" said Norma, who knew that too.

Mrs. Baynes contemplated the steam rising from her cup with oracular intentness. "What I'm about to tell you is strictly between the two of us."

"Absolutely," Norma said sincerely, deciding right then and there that she would call Ida, after all.

"They found them both with identical yellow scarves around their necks."

"My God!"

"It's true, I sold A.H.'s place, you know. Wouldn't even step into it."

"Places like that are often haunted," Norma said sagely.

"True."

"Did they ever find the killers?"

Mrs. Baynes sipped delicately. "Never. I think they stopped looking. You see, before they died, A.H. and Evelyn-that was my daughter-in-law's name, Evelyn-joined one of those horrid . . . cults."

"I didn't know that," Norma said, spilling tea on her lap. This was better than she could have imagined. She could hardly wait to get to that phone.

"What kind of a cult?" she asked, her voice steady.

"I was never clear on that," Mrs. Baynes confessed. "And frankly, I have no interest in knowing. Looking back, it seems all so unbelievable. Like something that would happen to common people back East. After all, A.H. was the president of Just Folks Airlines."

"Too bad they went bankrupt like that," Norma said sympathetically. "Their fares were so reasonable."

"I had to sell the company, you know. And the new owners simply ran it into the ground."

Norma nodded. She neglected to mention that Mrs. Baynes had attempted to run the company for a year. Her freefares-for-senior-citizens offer had put Just Folks into receivership. She was forced to sell her stock. A year later, Just Folks was just a memory.

"So you think they were victims of this cult?"

"They had to be. I think they hypnotized A.H. into joining. He was a graduate of the Cambridge Business School, you know."

Norma made a mental note of that.

"After the funeral," Mrs. Baynes continued, "Kimberly came to stay with me. She was very unstable at first. Forever chanting childish nonsense. I guess she picked that up from the horrid cult environment. But Kimmo came out of it after only a week."

"A week!" Norma clucked. "Imagine that. Children are so resilient. It's really a blessing."

Mrs. Baynes nodded. "A blessing. She hasn't spoken of her mother or father since the funeral. Not even about Joshua."

Norma's teacup quivered in her hand. "Joshua?"

"Her brother. She had an older brother. I buried him with A.H. and Evelyn."

"Not strangled?"

"No."

Relief washed over Norma Quinlan's face.

"He was blown up," Allison Baynes said matter-of-factly, sipping her tea.

"Blown . . . up?" Norma was aghast.

"The cult had a van. Joshua was riding in it with some others. It exploded somehow. The police told me it might have been the work of a rival cult."

"You poor dear! What you've been through! And now this business with Kimberly," Norma said solicitously, steering Mrs. Baynes back to the topic at hand.

"I told you that she's been gaining weight."

"The onset of puberty will do that with some girls."

"I first noticed her developing three years ago."

"And you say she's thirteen?"

Allison Baynes nodded. "At ten."

"I read an article in Ladies' Home Journal once that said some girls start developing as early as nine. Or was it eight?"

"My Kimmo blossomed into a tiny woman almost overnight. One day she was playing with dolls, the next she was in a training bra and putting on makeup."

"They grow up so fast. My Calvin enters college next month. Law school. Tulane. I wouldn't let him go to an eastern college."

Mrs. Baynes let the veiled dismissal of Cambridge Business College go by without comment.

"I didn't think much of it at the time," she said reflectively, "but I noticed the statue grew overnight as well."

"Statue?"

Allison Baynes stared into her tea for a thoughtful interval, watching the concentric ripples created by the subtle tremor in her aging hands. Abruptly, she replaced the cup in the saucer and the saucer on the coffee table.

"I shouldn't do this but . . ." She stood up decisively. "Let me show you something."

They tiptoed up the carpeted steps-Mrs. Baynes because she had learned to tiptoe and speak softly in her own home and Norma because Mrs. Baynes was doing it.

Mrs. Baynes led her down a cream-colored hallway to the closed door at its end.

"She sometimes locks it," Mrs. Baynes explained, testing the doorknob. Norma Quinlan took advantage of the stubborn doorknob to peek through the half-closed door to the other bedroom. The expensive damask bedspread lay on the bed as if enameled to it. The open bathroom door, on the other hand, showed a slovenly array of unhung towels. Norma wrinkled her nose as if at an offending odor, but deep inside she was pleased. Allison Baynes put on such airs. It was comforting to see that she was not the world's greatest housekeeper, as some busybodies thought.

The doorknob rattled uncooperatively in Mrs. Baynes's hands and Norma's heart sank. She really wanted to see this statue.

Finally the door surrendered. Mrs. Baynes pushed it in. She looked in with more than a trace of fear on her face, Norma saw. She stepped aside for Norma to enter.

Carefully, still on tiptoe, Norma Quinlan did just that.

She gasped.

"She calls it Calley," Mrs. Baynes, said, as if speaking of the family dog.

For once, Norma Quinlan was speechless. The thing in the room was grayish-white, like a weather-beathen skull. It squatted-that was exactly the word for it-on a child's toy chest. It was nearly four feet tall, and fairly broad. The face was a malevolent mask. Norma blinked, realizing there were three faces. Two others framed the central one. But most arrestingly, it had four arms. They were upflung in spidery, arcane gestures.

Draped between the lower pair was a yellow silk scarf.

"It's . . . it's . . ." Norma began, groping for words.

"Hideous."

"My thought exactly."

"Kimberly made it. Herself."

"She must be very . . . good with her hands," Norma Quinlan gulped.

"It started as a little Play-Doh figure," Mrs. Baynes explained in a faraway tone. "She made the first one not long after I took custody. It had four arms. But she kept adding new ones. They sprouted from the chest, the legs, even the headdress. Until it made me think of an angry spider."

"I'd prefer a spider myself," Norma said, aghast. So aghast she right then and there decided not to mention the statue to any of her friends. Where would she find the words to describe it?

"One day I mentioned to Kimmo that perhaps she should stop adding arms, that the statue was pretty enough as it was. And do you know what she said to me?"

"What?"

Mrs. Baynes fixed Norma Quinlan with her steady sad gaze. "She said she didn't make the arms. Then she asked for another cat."

"Yes?" Norma said slowly, not seeing the connection.

"It was the fifth cat I had gotten her. The others had all run away."

"No!"

"She cried so much, I brought her a nice tabby. A week later it was gone. I mentioned this to Kimmo and she didn't seem very sad at all. She just asked for another cat. I didn't get her another cat. This time I got her a puppy. They're more stay-at-home."

"Dogs are a sensible pet, I'll agree. I remember when we had our Ginger-"

"The poor puppy wouldn't sleep in her room," Mrs. Baynes continued distantly. "It wouldn't even go upstairs, no matter how much Kimmo tried to coax it. It just sat at the foot of the steps and looked up. Growling."

"How odd."

"One night Kimberly came home with a leash and dragged that poor dog up the stairs. The next morning it was gone."

Norma's hand flew to her scrawny chest.

"My goodness. You don't think Kimberly had anything to do with that?"

"I called the dog officer," Mrs. Baynes said. "The highway department. The city. Everyone I could think of."

She stared at the grotesque statue a long time, her hands clutching one another.

"You know," she resumed in a too-calm voice, "they found that poor animal by the side of the road, its tongue hanging out, strangled. There was a yellow scarf around its neck. Just like that one. Just like the ones that killed Evelyn and A.H."

The coincidence registered on Norma Quinlan's thin, witchy face.

"Perhaps we should leave now," she said quickly. "You know how teenagers are about their privacy."

"You're right," Mrs. Baynes said, closing the door. It wouldn't quite shut, so she left it slightly ajar.

They descended the carpeted stairs in uneasy silence.

"More tea?" Mrs. Baynes asked when they were back in the homey living room.

Norma Quinlan hesitated. Their little chat had taken a nasty turn. She felt positively queasy. Gossip was one thing, but this could give a person nightmares.

As Norma debated her answer, the back door banged.

Norma started. Fearfully, her eyes went to the kitchen.

"Is that you, Kimmo?" Mrs. Baynes asked calmly, as if speaking to a normal child, not a strangler of innocent pets.

"Yeah," said a frowning girlish voice.

Norma stood up. "Perhaps I should be going now," she said nervously.

In from the kitchen came Kimberly Baynes. She wore a flowing yellow dashiki that almost matched her fluffy hair. It hung from her small but womanly body like a tarpaulin on a Christmas tree. She stopped when she saw Norma. Her bright blue eyes flashed with veiled danger. That anger went away quickly and in a thin voice she said, "Hi."

"Hello, Kimberly," Norma said, mustering a sweetness that had fled her voice years ago. "Nice to see you again."

"Same thing," said Kimberly casually. "Gramma, any calls for me?"

"No, dear."

The tentlike dress fluttered disquietingly. "Darn."

"What is it?"

"Robby Simpson's cat had kittens and he promised me one," Kimberly explained. "Remember when we used to have kittens?"

"Distinctly," said Mrs. Baynes, her eyes going to Norma. Norma looked as comfortable as an Israeli in Mecca.

"I have to go now," she said quickly.

"I'll see you to the door," Mrs. Baynes said.

Norma beat Mrs. Baynes to the front door by eight seconds. She flung it open herself. Stumbling out onto the walk, she stuttered breathlessly, "Very nice talking to you, Mrs. Baynes."

"We must do it again," Mrs. Baynes called after her. "Soon. There are so many things I haven't told you."

"Oh, please . . ." Norma Quinlan muttered under her breath as she stumbled across their adjoining lawn to the sanctuary of her own home.

Norma Quinlan hurried inside. She tore right past the telephone and pulled a dusty cookbook off the pantry shelf. She was going to make Fred his favorite dish tonight-Lava Chicken. She hadn't made it for him in years. Not after she put a stop to his little fling with that cheap Calloway hussy. But tonight she would serve him Lava Chicken.

Now that she understood precisely what lived next door, she appreciated him in a new way.

Mrs. Allison Baynes was clearing the living room when Kimberly came storming down the carpeted stairs, her yellow dress fluttering excitedly in symphathy with her agitated arms.

"You've been in my room! How could you?"

"I know you like your privacy, Kimmo," Mrs. Baynes said, unperturbed. "But this is my home too."

"Don't call me Kimmo, you old bag!" Kimberly said with such elemental vehemence that Mrs. Baynes allowed the sterling-silver tea service to slip from her startled fingers. It clattered to the Oriental rug.

"Oh, look what you made me do," she said without rancor.

"And you let that gossip in, too!"

"Mrs. Quinlan is a very nice woman. Could you help me?"

"Why? Why did you let her into my room?"

"Nonsense, Kimberly," Mrs. Baynes said, her voice growing chilly. "What makes you think I would do such a thing?"

"She told me."

"She?"

"And She insists on her privacy."

"I hope you're not referring to that hideous statue. I thought you'd have outgrown it by now."

Kimberly's eyes grew hard and reflective. "Maybe it's the other way around."

"If you won't help me," said Mrs. Baynes, getting down on her hands and knees with difficulty, "then at least take these things into the kitchen as I hand them up to you. I'm not young anymore."

"Maybe She's outgrown this house," Kimberly said, advancing slowly. "Maybe I have too."

"Nonsense. You're only thirteen. Would you take this service into the kitchen for me, please?"

"Sure," Kimberly said lightly. "Glad to."

Ignoring the offered service, Kimberly stepped around her kneeling grandmother.

"What are you doing, Kimberly?" Mrs. Baynes asked.

There was no answer. Only sudden strong hands on her shoulders. Their grip was quite firm.

"Kimmo, what are you doing?" Mrs. Baynes repeated.

"Hold still, Gramma," Kimberly said, pushing down hard.

Alarmed, Mrs. Baynes tried to rise. But the strong hands only pushed harder. They were irresistible.

"Kimberly," Mrs. Baynes said, dread flooding her voice. "Are those hands yours?"

Then there came a tremendous ripping sound, like a sail in a storm. She couldn't imagine what it was. But the remorseless hands on her shoulders shook in frantic sympathy.

That really alarmed Mrs. Baynes. She struggled to regain her feet, the tea service forgotten. It clattered to the rug.

And while she struggled, a flash of bright yellow crossed her field of vision, and she found it increasingly hard to breathe.

She touched her throat. Mrs. Baynes felt something silky, and her thoughts flashed to the yellow scarf that had been in Calley's clay hands.

"Kimberly, this is not funny. I can barely breathe."

The silk constricted. When Mrs. Baynes really, really could no longer breathe, she brought the other hand up to fight the tightening noose. It refused to budge.

She grabbed the cruel, tightening fingers. They were implacable. The edges of Mrs. Baynes's vision began to darken. The roaring sound in her ears reminded her of a seashell sound, but greatly magnified.

"She loves it," Kimberly sang through the growing blood roar. "She loves it."

Allison Baynes tried to tell Kimberly that she didn't in fact enjoy being choked, but since no air could squeeze past her windpipe, speaking was impossible.

And as her mind darkened, Mrs. Baynes was struck by a very odd thought.

If these were Kimberly's hands holding her down, whose were tightening the yellow scarf?

The police found Mrs. Allison Baynes hunched and kneeling in the middle of her living room, nose and forehead pressed into the rug, surrounded by the scattered pieces of her silver tea set. Her eyes bulged in an incredulous death stare. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, a rich purplish-black. Robin's-egg blue was the color of her face.

Detective Oscar Sale took one look and rushed out of the house.

"We got another one," he called to the medical examiner.

The medical examiner was overseeing two morgue attendants as they rolled a sheet-covered gurney out of the house to a waiting ambulance.

The M.E. fingered one ear forward. "What?"

"Same method-looks like a ligature strangulation."

The M.E. hurried over to the house.

"What?" he repeated.

Detective Sale led the M.E. to the front door, saying, "The door was ajar. No one answered, so I pushed it. That's what I found."

The medical examiner looked in. When he saw Mrs. Baynes, curled in a kneeling fetal position like a hibernating larva, he said, "Jesus, just like the Quinlan woman. Better check every house on the block. We could have a serial killer running loose."

But they never found the killer. Although they did find a large moist spot in an upstairs bedroom whose irregular edges were flecked with bits of a whitish substance that they rushed in evidence bags to an FBI forensics laboratory in Washington.

When the report came back that the whitish substance was common modeling clay, they decided it was not important and focused on finding Mrs. Baynes's missing granddaugter, Kimberly.

All they found of her was a shredded yellow dashiki that looked as if it had been savagely torn from its owner's body. It was found stuffed into a trashcan five houses down the street.

A nationwide alert was posted for a possible sex-maniac killer, but since no one knew what he looked like, all the lawenforcement authorities could do was wait until he struck again.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he wasn't asking for much. Just someone to kill.

"C'mon, Smitty," Remo said testily. "Give me a name. Or an address. Anything." Traffic hummed behind him, exhaust fumes thickening the humid summer air.

"Where are you, Remo?" came the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith. It was an astringent voice, one that might have been produced by a larynx cured in lemon juice.

"In a phone booth, okay?" Remo snapped. "And I'm running out of quarters. Just give me someone to hit."

"Remo, I think you should come in." Smith's voice was suddenly tender with concern. Now it sounded like a hasp sawing wood. For Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, that unpleasant sound constituted tenderness.

"Smith," Remo said with sudden fierceness, "are you hunched over your computer?"

"I am at my desk, yes," Smith allowed. "I would not describe myself as hunched. I take pride in my posture."

"Take it from me," Remo growled, "you're hunched. Look, you've got a computer full of bad guys. I just want one. I don't care where he is. I don't care who he is. I'll go there. Just give me somebody-anybody-to hit."

"If I do this, will you return to Folcroft?"

"Maybe," Remo said noncommittally.

"That is not a satisfactory answer," Smith returned stiffly.

"It's not a freaking satisfactory world!" Remo shouted suddenly.

Miles away, the earpiece against Harold Smith's ear actually buzzed with the force of Remo's shouting.

Adjusting his rimless eyeglasses on his patrician nose, Smith shouldered the phone closer to his ear so that both hands were free to attack his desktop computer keyboard. As he reached forward, his back fell into a natural stoop.

"What city, please?" Smith asked stiffly.

"Tacoma."

"I have a report of a crack house on Jane Street. Number 334."

"Great!" Remo said joyously. "Just what I need. A crack house. It might take all of thirty minutes to clear it out. Thanks, Smitty. I owe you one."

"Remo, wait!" Smith called urgently.

The click in Smith's ear was final. Harold Smith hung up, and addressed his humming computer. He input a command that would scan all incoming data feeds for reported violence in Tacoma, Washington. He wondered how long it would take until the computer verified that the crack house on 334 Jane Street had been violently cleared of its criminal element.

Of Remo Williams' success, he had absolutely no doubt.

It took one hour and fifty-seven minutes.

It broke down this way: Eight minutes for Remo to hail a cab and be whisked to the target neighborhood. Fourteen-point-seven minutes for the assignment itself, and a total of six minutes for the news of the Jane Street Massacre-as it was subsequently dubbed-to hit the wire services, from which it was conveyed to Harold Smith a nation away in Rye, New York, in the form of luminous green letters on a glareproof screen.

The remaining one hour and seven-point-three minutes constituted the police-response time from the time 911 received the first estimated body count from concerned Jane Street neighbors. That number was five. Before the call was concluded, it was seven. Before it was all over, the death toll was twenty-three.

Soapy Suggs was number five.

He loitered inside the front door to 334 Jane Street unaware of the four bodies sprawled on the sidewalk outside. Not that he would much have cared. They were satisfied customers, passing around a crack pipe in the battered Camaro because they had been in too big a hurry to get high to bother driving somewhere less public. No big deal. In Soapy's line of work, customers had a high mortality rate.

Soapy heard the polite knock on the door and grew immediately suspicious. Nobody knocked polite on his door. Not thrill-hungry uptown yuppies. Not the police. And definitely not the neighborhood.

He bounced off an overstuffed chair, grabbing a Mac-10, which he cocked with a quick, nervous jerk.

Soapy threw open the door, leaning so his gun hand was hidden by the jamb.

A man stood there with his arms folded impatiently.

"Yeah?" Soapy asked. "Whatchu want?" He didn't notice the corpse-filled Camero out on the curb. His eyes were on the man. He was a white dude. Roughly six feet tall, but looking taller because he was so skinny.

"Welcome Wagon," the skinny man said in a chipper voice. "I've been sent by request of the neighborhood to formally welcome you from Jane Street."

"You mean to," Soapy suggested.

"My mistake," the man said. "I'm new at this."

"You shittin' me?" Soapy asked, spitting out the words. "You really with the Welcome Wagon?"

"Absolutely," said the man. "May I come in?"

"Not dressed like that, you don't," Soapy said with a raucous laugh. The stress lines in his face melted with his widening grin of relief. "We got standards in this house. Just look at you."

"Oh?" the white guy said with a falling face. It was a strong face, lean with deep-set dark eyes and high cheekbones. He wore his dark hair short. His T-shirt was as black as his flat pupils. His chinos were blacker. He looked like a pool hustler in mourning. "Perhaps you'd like me to come back after I've changed into something more formal," he added good-naturedly.

"Yeah, you do that," Soapy Suggs said, his trigger finger loosening. "You get silked down. And while you're at it, trade in those jivy shoes for some good Nikes or something. Those things look like they'd scratch my floor some."

The white guy looked down at his well-polished loafers.

"These are Italian leather," he complained. "What's wrong with them?"

"They out of style," Soapy barked, spitting on the left shoe. "By about thirty years." Laughing, he drew back to shut the door.

Instead, the polite man from Welcome Wagon gave him a close-up look at the hand-tooled Italian leather.

Splat!

Soapy Suggs swallowed his teeth. His head flew back. His Mac burped reflexively, chewing the wood like a runaway buzz saw.

"Welcome Wagon!" Remo Williams sang out, stepping in and slamming the door behind him.

On the floor, Soapy gurgled as he tried to claw loose teeth from his mouth. He was having inexplicable trouble breathing-inexplicable because everything had happened so fast.

Remo gave him another close look at his very expensive shoes. He pressed one of them into Soapy's eyes.

"These particular shoes are made by diligent craftsmen in Milan," he was saying. "Notice the all-leather soles. The heel is a single piece. Also notice the tasteful absence of neon labels. No factory stamped these out."

Soapy spat up a squirt of blood. A bicuspid danced momentarily atop the red fountain. The squirt died. The tooth slid down Soapy's spasming gullet.

An inner door opened and a long black face peered around its edge.

"Who you?" he asked.

Two more faces looked down from the top of the stairs.

"Yeah," one said gruffly, "and whatchu doing to my man Soapy?"

"Educating him on the fine points of quality footwear," Remo said, trying to sound convincingly like a shoe salesman. "Come on down. This is for all of you. Don't be bashful." Remo wiggled a playful finger at them.

The two black faces at the top of the stairs exchanged dumbstruck glances.

The face at the door crack withdrew cautiously. It asked: "You ain't said who you was yet."

"Welcome Wagon."

"You said that. Don't mean nothing to me." This from the stairs.

"Neither does proper English, it seems. Welcome Wagon is a benevolent organization dedicated to making new neighbors feel a part of their chosen community."

"By steppin' on their faces and making 'em squirm on the floor?" the face at the door asked.

"Oh," Remo said, remembering Soapy under one shoe. "Sorry. I was so engrossed in our highly educational exchange, I forgot about your friend." Remo looked down. He said he was sorry. He sounded sincerely contrite. Then he brought his left heel up and down like a jackhammer. Once. Once was enough. When the foot came away, Soapy Suggs's throat looked like a Tonka toy steamroller had flattened it.

Thus did Soapy Suggs become number five.

Remo put his hands on his hips. He looked up. "Now, where were we?"

"Getting dead," snarled Jarris Jameel, flinging the door open and launching himself out. He carried a combat knife held low. His angry eyes were on Remo's flat stomach.

Remo unfolded his arms. Jarris Jameel drove in, his knife arm out like an uncoiling viper. The knife went through a ghostly afterimage. Jarris kept going.

Remo chopped at the back of his neck in passing. It was a quick, casual chop. But it sent Jarris Jameel's head rolling out the open front door to bounce down the steps. The jettisoned body took two stumbling steps and banged off a wall. It struck a throw rug, raising dust. The spurting neck stump began repainting the fading wallpaper, actually improving it, Remo thought.

"Anyone else?" Remo asked, looking up hopefully.

"One moment," he was told.

"Yeah. We be with you in a mo', Welcome Wagon," the other added.

They retreated. To get weapons, Remo assumed.

Remo went up the stairs like a bouncy wraith. His feet on the rubber runners were silent. He was actually in a good mood. It was good to work again. Really work.

The hallway was long and definitely not designed by a claustrophobic architect. Doors lay open on either side of its narrow length. A variety of odors assaulted Remo's nose. Some were chemical. Others organic. Sanitation did not seem to be a household tradition at the modest two-story frame dwelling that was 334 Jane Street.

Remo gave his abnormally thick wrists a warm-up twist. Then he casually began going from room to room, where people sprawled on beds and couches with vacant expressions.

Most of them were drugged out, which disappointed Remo. He wanted action.

"Hello?" he called, ducking his head into a promising room. "Anyone sentient?"

"Who you?" a sleepy voice asked.

"I answered that already," Remo told the muscular man who quickly pulled a silk sheet over his naked legs. The nude woman beside him lifted a rust-red head off a ridiculously large pillow.

"I ax you a question," the black man snarled, taking a chrome-plated revolver from under his own fluffy pillow.

"And I ax you back," Remo returned, relieving the man of his threatening weapon with a chop of his knifelike hand.

Chuk! Bunngg!

The pistol bounced off the floor, where the attached hand finally shook loose. The man used his remaining hand to grab his bloodied stump of a wrist. He looked from it to Remo with a horror-struck "Why me?" expression.

The expression was so piteous that Remo erased it with the heel of his hand. The gunman fell back on his pillow, his face turning into a massive bruise like a concave prune.

The redheaded woman jerked her head up, saw the blood, and asked a shrill question.

"You don't do womens, do you?"

"You sell drugs?" Remo asked.

"Sell, snort, and swallow," she said eagerly.

"I do women," Remo said, driving her nose flat and riddling her brain with splinters of nose bone. Her head was swallowed by the pillow.

Whistling "Whistle While You Work," Remo moved on to the next room.

It looked empty. But his highly attuned senses detected a heartbeat on the other side of the open door. Remo silently took the doorknob in hand.

"Well, nobody in this room," he said aloud.

He stepped back, pulling the door closed. A man inhaled sharply. A preattack inhalation. Grinning, Remo reversed the door on its hinges.

He used only the strength of his bare right arm, but the door struck the inner wall so hard that the plaster cracked on both sides, fissuring the wallpaper.

Putting a contrite expression on his face, Remo pulled the door back and peered around it.

"Oh, sorry," he said in a small voice as the lumpy body slid to the floor with the muffled gritty sound of pulverized bone.

In the next room, Remo simply lunged in and started picking up people. They were very obliging. Wherever he flung them, they would go. Quickly. And with hardly a complaint. Through walls. Out windows. And into one another.

Oh, there were a few rattling groans coming from heaps of broken limbs, but Remo took them as praise.

"Only doing my job," he said modestly.

The sound of commotion drew his attention to the remaining rooms. The noise the last bodies had made as they went through the windows had awoken even the most stupefied inhabitant of the house.

The house shook with the rattle of feet pounding on stairs.

Remo rushed out to intercept the escapees. A few made attempts to shoot him down. A weapon burped here. An automatic snapped there.

Remo dodged each bullet as he had been taught so long ago, with lightning ease. The bullets came so fast they cut shock waves in the air ahead of them. Sensing the approaching turbulence, Remo simply shifted out of the way. Even when they came from behind. His body automatically retreated from the warning pressure. He was like a paper kite that gave before the slightest wind. Except Remo wasn't at the mercy of those breezes. He gave before them, only then cutting away from the deadly bullets he could not always see coming.

Chuk! Chuk! Chuk! Chuk!

Holes chopped through wallboard where he had been. Remo kept moving.

Four men were pounding down the stairs. Remo went to the top runner and, bending at waist and knees, drove straight fingers into the wood. The staircase collapsed like a linchpin had been removed.

The quartet found themselves groaning and squirming in an astonishingly abrupt pile of splinters, like victims of a bombing.

"Did I mention the termite problem on this street?" Remo asked.

Someone tried sneaking up behind him. The sound of a clip driving home gave him away. Remo whirled, taking hold of the would-be assailant's gun arm with both hands.

Naturally, the man opened up with his automatic weapon.

Remo let him empty the clip, first making sure the muzzle was pointing down the nonexistent steps where four men groaned. Bone and meat spattered the walls. The groaning in the broken runners trailed off into dying gurgles.

The gunman added a stricken "What'd I do?" to the cacophony.

"I think you got the termites," Remo told him, brightvoiced.

The gunman spat an unintelligible curse. Remo showed him how deadly even an empty pistol can be when it strikes one's own belly muscles with pile-driver force. Whump! Behind his ridged abdomen, the gunman's stomach burst like a balloon.

With a careless toss, Remo sent him into the pile.

Crasshh!

He was number eighteen.

Remo Williams made a final sweep of the rooms. They were empty. But warm beds and a chair seat told him there were more unaccounted-for occupants. The closet gave up only one. A fat ball of blubber with a ring on every finger and one through each nostril.

Crouching on the floor, he tried diving out between Remo's legs. Remo faded back and used his head for a walnut. The slamming door and jamb were the nutcracker.

Cruunch!

Remo put his head out into the hallway.

"Come out, come out, whereever you are," he invited. His voice was cheerful.

Stealthy movement came from over his head.

"Ah-hah!" Remo said softly. "Naughty little children. They're hiding in the attic."

Reaching up, Remo felt the ceiling plaster. A slight but visible bowing told him of a foot coming to rest. Using both hands, Remo followed the man's progress. He was creeping to a definite spot in the attic.

As if walking with his hands, Remo followed the creeping feet to another room, where a drop ladder hung down from a square well. The man was creeping to the well.

Dropping his hands, Remo beat him to the ladder.

Remo waited, his face just under the square black hole. His grin widened. He flexed his thick wrists.

Presently a wide-eyed face came into view, a pistol close by. He looked around. His eyes locked on Remo's.

"Boo!" Remo said.

"Yahh!" the man returned, whipping down his weapon.

Remo reached up and pulled him bodily down the steps, making sure his face hit every rung. After the man had collapsed on the floor, Remo took pains to shatter his spine in three places.

Then he yanked the ladder away and stood back as someone spanked the trapdoor back into place. Feet stampeded.

Folding his arms. Remo listened.

"He got Derrick!" a voice wailed. He was one of the top-of-the-stairs guards who had retreated earlier.

"He gonna get us too," the other said. His missing companion. "Why'd we had to move into this damn neighborhood in the first place? I told you it was no damn good. Ain't no malls for three miles!"

"You shut up!" the first voice said tensely.

While they were arguing, Remo zeroed in on their exact location. He reached up and rapped once on the plaster with his fist, asking, "Anybody home?"

"That crazy guy! He's right under us. Shoot the fool!"

A spurt of bullets rained down, creating a salt-shaker-lid effect in a circle of ceiling plaster.

From a safe corner, Remo watched the plaster dust and Spackle rain down.

"You get him?" a muffled voice wondered.

"I ain't sure."

"Better check," the other said cautiously.

"I ain't gonna check! How am I gonna do that?"

"Try putting your eye to one of the holes," Remo called up helpfully.

"He ain't dead! You missed!"

Another bratt of sound chopped bits of plaster the length of the ceiling, peppering the floor. Remo faded out into the hall while the air cleared of settling white dust.

"Try again," Remo suggested. "You almost got me that time."

Two weapons opened up next. They fired as the gunman backed away, Remo's keen eyes spotting the imperceptible trail of bulges on the plaster. Obviously the attic floor wasn't well-shored with timber.

He maneuvered around the chewing bullets to a point where the steady track of bulges seemed to head.

When one pair of footsteps came close, Remo drove a hand up through the crumbling plaster. He took hold of an ankle. He yanked.

An Air Jordan athletic shoe came down through the crumbly hole. So did a howl of fright.

"He got me! Motherfuck got my ankle!"

"He's gonna get both your ankles," Remo warned. "And then your legs. And then your throat."

"He's gonna get my throat!" the man wailed.

Footsteps pounded up. Remo knew what was coming. He let go of the frantic ankle and slid over to one side, ready to dodge in any direction.

The storm of lead doubled the size of the ceiling hole that framed the jerking ankle. The entire leg started to slide down. An exploding kneecap punched through the plaster.

Syrupy red blood began dripping down. The leg quivered briefly as if shaking off a cramp. Then it simply relaxed.

"Oh, sorry, Darnell. Sorry, man," the last remaining voice said. "I was just tryin' to get the dude."

Remo got under the pitiful sounds of contrition and sent both fists through. The plaster heaved up. Scabby sections fell. The man ran around, screaming and firing wildly.

"You ain't gonna get me, asshole!" he howled furiously. "I ain't coming down!"

Bullets peppered the ceiling all around Remo. He wove between the spurts, taking care not to trip over the splintery holes that were collecting in the polished pine flooring.

Upstairs, the gunman was replacing clips frantically. He must have had an arsenal up there because he seemed never to run out of ammunition. Every so often he paused as if listening.

Remo encouraged him to continue wasting his ammunition with a taunting, "Nope, I'm not dead yet," in a mordant voice he had once heard in an old cartoon. "Try again."

Each time, the gunman obliged him with blistering return fire.

Soon the ceiling stopped being a ceiling. Instead, it was now an upside-down moonscape of pocked holes and shattered plaster.

When the holes became as big as portholes, Remo shot the man an encouraging wave.

The man shot Remo back the bird. Then he opened up on the spot where Remo had been.

Remo wasn't there anymore. He had taken up a position directly under the island of plaster on which the man stood.

While the gunman was frantically replacing a clip, Remo reached up and grabbed him by both ankles.

"Yee-ahh!" The shriek was fearsome.

Remo encouraged his terror by mimicking the Jaws theme.

"Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh." Remo mocked ominously.

The replenished weapon began chattering again. Gouts of plaster exploded all around Remo. The floor sprouted holes. But Remo remained intact. Which was more than could be said for his opponent's state of mind.

"You won't take me! You won't take me alive, motherfuck!"

"Done," said Remo, breaking the man's ankles with swift jerks of his thick-wristed hands.

He stepped back.

The gunman was slow to realize what had happened. He began tottering. His jaw dropped. His eyed bugged like white grapes. His nerve-dead feet refused to make allowances for his sudden lack of equilibrium.

Pitching forward, the gunman fell like a big black tree. His head went through an isle of plaster.

Remo caught his face.

"One moment," he said, supporting the man by his twisting head. The gunman hung almost upside down while Remo stomped out a hole in the bullet-riddled floor. A section crashed away.

"Okay," Remo said, stepping back, "you can fall now."

The man went through the hole as if it was made for him. His crazily disjointed feet disappeared last.

Konk!

Remo looked down. The man had landed on his head. He looked dead. His feet angled one way, his broken neck the other.

"Happy now?" Remo called down. And getting no answer, decided his work was done.

Remo floated over the debris that was all that remained of the staircase, like Tinker Bell treading fairy dust. He landed back in the living room.

He gave the broken-necked, snap-footed body a final glance and said, "Baby makes twenty-three."

His acute hearing told him that his own heart was the only one working in the entire house. His work was done. Jane Street belonged to the neighborhood once again.

Remo took time out to scribble a note on a pad by the telephone.

Welcome Wagon was here while you were out, he wrote. Sorry we missed you. Then, whistling contentedly, he sauntered down the porch steps.

Turning right, he shot a cheery wave to the man sitting stiff-spined behind the wheel of the red Camaro. The man declined to wave back. He stared out the windshield as if off into eternity. In a way it was.

He had been number one.

Chapter 3

Kimberly Baynes paraded through Washington National Airport dressed in a flowing yellow dress, her blond hair worn high over her fresh-scrubbed face and tied in place with a bright yellow scarf.

She balanced with difficulty on her black high heels, as if walking on heels was new to her. Stepping off an escalator, she steadied herself momentarily, swaying like a tree worried by a warm summer wind.

"I'll never get used to these things," she muttered in a pouty voice.

Her predicament attracted the attention of more than one male traveler who, upon seeing her heavily made-up face and yellow fingernails, jumped to a natural conclusion.

Cosmo Bellingham was one of those. A surgical-appliance salesman from Rockford, Illinois, Cosmo had come to Washington for the annual surgical-equipment convention, where he hoped to interest Johns Hopkins in his new titanium-hip-joint-replacement line, guaranteed not to "lock, balk, or shock," as the company brochure put it so poetically. Cosmo had lobbied to have the motto stamped into each unit, but had been overruled. Cosmo did not believe in hiding one's light under a bushel.

Seeing the petite young woman floating through the maze of terminals, her bright eyes as innocent as a child's, Cosmo veered in her direction.

"Little lady, you look lost," he chirped.

The blue eyes-wide, limpid, somehow innocent and daring simultaneously-grew brighter as they met Cosmo's broadly smiling face.

"I'm new in town," she said simply. Her voice was sweet. A child's voice, breathy and unsure.

Cosmo tipped his Tyrolean hat. "Cosmo Bellingham," he said by way of introduction. "I'm staying at the Sheraton. If you haven't a place to stay, I recommend it highly."

"Thank you, but I have no money," she said, fingers touching her yellow scarf. "My purse was with my luggage. Just my luck." Her pout was precious. A little-girl-lost pout. Cosmo calculated her age as eighteen. A perfect age. Ripe. Most Penthouse centerfolds were eighteen.

"I'm sure we can work something out with Travelers Aid," Cosmo said. "Why don't we share a cab to my hotel?"

"Oh, mister, I couldn't. My grandmother taught me never to accept rides from strangers."

"We'll put the room on my American Express card until we figure something out," Cosmo said, as if not hearing.

"Wellll," the girl said, glancing about like a frightened deer. "You have a nice face. What could happen?"

"Splendid," said Cosmo, who right then and there decided that he wouldn't be shelling out for a too-polished Washington call girl this year. He was going to have warm fresh-from-the-oven meat. He offered his arm. The girl took it.

During the ride to the hotel, the girl said her name was Kimberly. She had come to Washington to look for work. Things were tough back in North Dakota.

"What kind of work you got in mind?" Cosmo asked, missing completely her Colorado accent. He had never been west of Kansas City.

"Ooh," she said dreamily, gazing out at official Washington passing by, "something that involves people. I like working on people."

"You mean with people," Cosmo teased. "Yes, I mean that." She laughed. Cosmo joined in. The back seat of the cab filled with light, promising mirth.

They were still giggling when Cosmo Bellingham magnanimously checked Kimberly Baynes into the Sheraton Washington.

"Put the little lady into a room next to mine," Cosmo said in a too-loud, nervous voice. He turned to Kimberly. "Just so I can keep an eye on you, of course. Heh heh heh."

Kimberly smiled. She crossed her arms tightly, accentuating her small breasts. As the fabric of her long but attractive dress rippled, Cosmo noticed how thick around the middle she was.

He frowned. He preferred an hourglass shape. His wife was pretty thick around the middle. How could a pretty young thing with such a sweet face have such a tubular body? he wondered.

As the elevator took them up to their rooms on the twelfth floor, Cosmo decided beggars couldn't be choosers. After all, this ripe little plum had practically fallen into his lap.

He cleared his throat noisily, trying to figure out what kind of pickup line an innocent eighteen-year-old would fall for.

"Are you all right?" Kimberly asked in her breathy sweet voice.

"Little something caught in my throat," Cosmo said. "I'm not used to riding elevators with such a pretty thing as you. Heh heh heh."

"Maybe," Kimberly said, her voice dropping two octaves into a seductive Veronica Hamel contralto, "we should stop so you can catch your breath." One yellow-nailed hand lifted, tapping the heavy red stop switch.

The elevator stopped with an unsettling jar.

"I . . . I . . . I . . ." Cosmo sputtered.

Kimberly pressed her warm perfumed body close to Cosmos own. "You want me, don't you?" she asked, looking up through thick lashes.

"I...I..."

"I can tell," Kimberly said, touching his pendulous lower lip. "She wants you too."

"She?"

"She whom I serve." Kimberly's finger ran down his chin, to his tie, and continued south, not hurrying, but not slowly either.

"Huh?"

And in answer, Kimberly removed her yellow scarf with a sudden flick, causing her bound-up hair to cascade downward. Meanwhile, her traveling finger coasted over his belt buckle to the tongue of his zipper.

Cosmo Bellingham felt his zipper slide down as his manhood swelled, rising, behind the loosening prison of cloth.

Oh, my God, he thought. She's gonna go down on me right in the elevator. Oh, thank you, Lord. Thank you.

Cosmo's attention was so centered around his crotch that he barely felt the silken scarf encircle his throat.

For two butterfly delicate hands had taken his stiff member. One was squeezing it rhythmically. The other raked its yellow nails along its entire throbbing length, softly caressing.

Eyes going closed, Cosmo gritted his teeth in anticipation.

The yellow scarf began to tighten slowly, imperceptibly. Okay, he thought, she had a few kinks. He could go along with that. Maybe learn something new to take back to the wife.

Cosmo became aware of a problem when he suddenly couldn't breathe.

The realization that he was being throttled occurred simultaneously with the odd thought.

Who the hell was strangling him? She had both hands on his gearshift, for Christ's sake. And they were alone in the elevator.

Cosmo Bellingham's body was discovered later that afternoon when a hotel maintenance man, responding to an inoperative-elevator call, forced open the doors on the tenth floor, exposing the grease-stained elevator roof. He frowned. The car had come to a stop level with his knees. He was surprised to find the trap door already open. Lugging his toolbox, he stepped onto the cable-snarled platform.

On his hands and knees, he looked down the open trap.

A body lay sprawled below, faceup. Pecker up, too.

The elevator repairman hastily called the front desk.

"Murdered?" the nervous desk clerk sputtered.

"Well," the repairman said dryly, "if he was, he got a hell of a charge out of the experience."

The body was taken out the back way by the ambulance attendants and hustled into the waiting vehicle to spare street traffic the spectacle of a body whose shroud tented up in a place where dead people usually didn't.

Across town, Kimberly Baynes returned to her Capitol Hill hotel, where she quietly paid her next week's hotel bill in advance. In cash.

She was pleased, upon entering the room, to see that the clay image squatting-on the dresser had grown a new arm. This one protruded from its back. It had grown so fast-as fast as it had taken for Cosmo Bellingham to expire-that it had right-angled off the wall like a tree branch veering away from a stone wall.

Kimberly had left a newspaper lying at the statue's feet. Now it lay scattered about the floor as if a furious reader had gone through it for a misplaced item.

One soft white hand clutched a torn piece from the classified section. Another had the upper portion of the front page. Kimberly recognized the photograph of a man who had been in the news almost daily.

"I know whose blood you seek, my lady," Kimberly murmured.

Plucking the other item free, she read it. It was an advertisement.

"And I know how I shall reach this man," she added.

Kimberly Baynes changed clothes in the privacy of her room. Even though she was on an upper floor, she drew the drapes before she disrobed.

When she left the hotel, she was wearing a yellow sheath dress that accentuated her lean waist, lyre-shaped hips, and size-thirty-eight bust.

With the remainder of Cosmo Bellingham's billfold contents she had bought a fresh yellow scarf for her naked throat. The purchase made her feel so much better.

For today, she intended to apply for her first job.

Chapter 4

No American ever cast a vote for Dr. Harold W. Smith.

It was doubtful that had Smith ever shown up on a ballot, very many people in this age of television campaigning would have voted for the aging bureaucrat. He was a thin Ichabod Crane hank of man with skin the unappetizing color of a beached flounder. His hair was as gray as his face. His eyes yet another shade of gray. And his three-piece suit-definitely not selected with an eye to pleasing the modern voter-was still another neutral gray.

As he sat at his worn oak desk, gray eyes blinking through his rimless spectacles, this gray man unknown to over ninety-nine percent of the American electorate quietly exercised more power than the executive, legislative, and judical branches of the U.S. Government combined.

For nearly three decades, since a promising young president tragically cut down a thousand days into his only term had appointed him to his lonely post, Harold Smith had held forth in his Folcroft Sanitarium office, guarding America and its constitutional form of government from subversion. Under cover of Folcroft, Smith headed CURE, a supersecret government agency that officially didn't exist. Created in the sixties, when the fabric of American society began to burst at the seams, Smith was invested with the awesome responsibility of protecting America through extralegal means.

In order that Smith might uphold the Constitution, his job called for him to violate it as if it were a dishwasher warranty. Where the law stopped, Smith was sanctioned to proceed. When the Constitution was perverted to shield the guilty, Smith was empowered to shred it to punish them.

For the last twenty of those thirty years Smith had relied on a human weapon in his ongoing war. One man, long believed dead, who, like CURE, officially didn't exist. And now that person, the assassin he had code-named "Destroyer," was ranging the forty-eight contiguous states as if he could single-handedly stamp out all lawless elements.

Not that he wasn't making a dent, Smith thought ruefully.

His aged fingers tapped clicking keys. Bar graphs appeared, their data fluctuating like a sound-system spectrograph registering volume. It was late. The benighted expanse of Long Island Sound sparkled behind Harold Smith like a restive bejeweled giant. In Rye, New York, Harold Winston Smith was working overtime.

There had been no reports of Remo Williams since the Tacoma incident. This was not good. Smith had hoped that if he fed Remo assignments on demand, his lone enforcement arm would soon grow bored with a string of inconsequential hits and return. Remo had always complained about the small assignments. Now he seemed to relish them.

The graphs were keyed to major American cities. They charted something unusual: raw violence. Smith's massive computers culled this data from ongoing scans of news reports and quantified them. Most cities charted between twenty and forty on the violence scale.

Smith was studiously looking for fifty-plus. Anything that high would mean either an armed incursion from foreign forces or Remo on a tear.

To his profound disappointment, nothing higher than a thirty-seven-point-six registered. That was a street riot down in Miami.

Smith leaned back in his ancient cracked leather chair, his lemony frown souring further.

"Where the hell is Remo?" he said aloud. It was an unusual breach of decorum for the Vermont-born Smith. He seldom swore. And speaking aloud the name of a man who had ceased to exist long years before-even in an empty office-was not in character.

But these were not normal times. Everything had been turned upside down. Death had struck the inner circle of CURE.

As the hour approached midnight, Smith reluctantly pressed a concealed stud under his old desk.

The desktop terminal began to sink into the oak, its keyboard folding back politely. The device disappeared from view. A scratched section of desktop clicked back into place. No seams showed.

Harold Smith got stiffly to his feet. He retrieved his battered briefcase from atop a gunmetal file cabinet and locked his office behind him.

He took the stairs to the first floor because he needed the exercise. It was one flight down.

Nodding to the night guard, Smith walked to his reserved space, his shoulders stooped. Thirty years had taken a toll on the ex-CIA bureaucrat who had neither asked for nor wanted the incredible weight placed on his rail-thin shoulders.

Smith tooled his battered station wagon through the lion's-head guarded gates of Folcroft Sanitarium, his briefcase bouncing on the passenger seat beside him.

The summer trees-poplars and elms-filed by like a towering eldritch army on the march. The fresh sea air rushed in through the open windows. It revived Smith's logy brain.

As he coasted into the center of Rye, New York, Smith searched for an open drugstore. His stomach had started to bother him. Some antacid would help. He looked for a chain store. They usually had the generic brands at the cheapest prices.

The briefcase beside him emitted an insistent buzzing. Smith pulled over to the curb and unlatched the case carefully, so as not to trigger the built-in detonation charges.

The lid came up, exposing a portable computer and a telephone receiver. Smith picked this up.

"Yes?" he said, knowing it could only be one of two people, the President of the United States or Remo.

To his relief, it was Remo.

"Hiya, Smitty," Remo said distantly. "Miss me?"

"Remo! Where are you now?"

"Phone booth," Remo said. "One of the old-fashioned ones with a glass door and the rank bouquet of passing winos. I thought they had all been put to sleep-or whatever they do to antique phone booths."

"Remo, it is time you returned home."

"Can't go home." Traffic sounds almost smothered his quiet reply.

"Why not?"

"It's haunted."

"What did you say?"

"That's why I left, Smitty. Everywhere I looked, I saw . . . him."

"You cannot run from the natural grieving process," Smith said firmly. He would be firm with Remo. There was no point in coddling him. He was a grown man. Even if he had suffered a great loss. "Confronting the loss is the first step. Denial only prolongs the pain."

"Smith," Remo said with sudden bitterness, "I want you to write down everything you just told me."

"I will gladly do that."

"Good. Then roll the paper up and cheerfully shove it up your constipated ass."

Smith made no reply. His knuckles whitened on the receiver. He adjusted his striped Dartmouth tie. The hand then drifted to the briefcase computer. He logged on.

"I can't go back to that place," Remo said tightly. "I keep seeing Chiun. I wake up in the middle of the night and he's staring at me, pointing at me like Marley's freaking ghost. I couldn't take it anymore. That's why I left."

"Are you saying that you literally saw Chiun?" Smith asked slowly.

"In the ectoplasm," Remo returned grimly. "It's like he's haunting me. That's why I'm hopping all over the map. I figured if he doesn't know where I am, he can't haunt me anymore."

"And?"

"So far, it's working."

"You can't keep running forever," Smith warned.

"Why not? Before we bought that place, Chiun and I lived out of hotels. We never stayed in one place long enough to break in the furniture. I can get used to the vagabond life again."

"What about the house itself?"

"Sell it," Remo said morosely. "I don't care. Listen, Smitty," Remo added, his voice dropping to a hush like a junkie begging for a fix. "Got anyone you need hit?"

"You promised me you would return after the last . . . er, hit," Smith pointed out as he slowly, carefully input commands into the silent mini-computer.

"I will, I will. I just need something to get me through the night. I'm not sleeping like I used to."

"And you promised you'd return after the hit before that."

"Sure, sure, but-"

"And the one before that," Smith said pointedly.

"How about Mad Ass?" Remo asked suddenly. "I caught him on the late news. He's just begging for it."

"We've been through this," Smith said with a trace of weariness. "That person is off-limits. At least until the President orders otherwise. Our hope is he will be overthrown by internal discontent."

"I could do him so it looks like an accident," Remo said eagerly. "There won't be a mark on him. I swear."

"Too risky. A palace coup would serve American interests in the region much more elegantly."

"I'll organize one," Remo said quickly. "How hard can it be to motivate those camel jockeys?"

"No." Smith's voice was frigid. "The President himself has declared CURE on stand-down in the Irait situation."

"We both know the President doesn't have the power to order you around," Remo said in a wheedling tone. "He can only suggest assignments. Or order you to shut the organization down."

"Which he may do if he learns that CURE's enforcement arm is unwilling to return for debriefing," Smith warned.

"If I do it right, the President will never know it was us." Remo's tone was hopeful.

Smith's retort was flat. "No."

Silence clung to the open line. Smith continued manipulating buttons. Soon he would have a back-trace. In the meantime, he would have to stall for time.

"Remo, are you still there?" he asked in a forced tone.

"What's it to you?" Remo said sourly. "All these years I worked for you, you can't find me a few people worthy of the boneyard."

"My computers are full of them," Smith said. "Regrettably, you caught me as I was driving home."

"Sorry. It's still light here."

Smith smiled tightly. Remo was in either the Pacific or the Mountain time zone. He hoped the back-trace program would not take much longer.

"You know what next Thursday is?" Remo asked, low-voiced.

"No, I do not."

"Chiun's birthday. His hundredth birthday. I had no idea he was so old. He was eighty when I first met him. I always thought of him as being eighty. I expected him to live forever." Remo paused. His voice cracked with his next words. "I guess I wanted him to be eighty forever."

Smith's eyes flicked to his computer screen. Why was it taking so long?

"You still there?" Remo asked suddenly.

"Yes, I am. I was distracted by a-"

"You're not trying to trace this call, are you, Smitty?" Remo asked in a suspicous growl.

Before Smith could answer, he heard a second voice coming over the line.

"Gotta use the phone," it said insolently.

"I'm in the middle of talking to my mother, pal," Remo shot back. "Take it down the street."

"Got to use the phone," the voice repeated, going steely with intent.

Smith's gray eyes narrowed. The screen began signaling "TRACE COMPLETED." The location code was about to appear.

"Smith," Remo said quickly. "Gotta call you back. I think I've found someone to while away a few minutes with."

"Remo, wait!"

The line went dead. It didn't click. It simply went dead.

The back-trace program winked out without reading off the all-important location code.

Frowning, Harold W. Smith closed his briefcase and went into the nearest drugstore. Hang the expense, he thought. He needed a roll of the best antacid tablets money could buy. And he would pay well for it.

Even if it meant spending more than a dollar.

Remo yanked the telephone receiver out by its coaxial cable and offered it to the impatient man with the scraggly Fu Manchu mustache.

"Here," he said, flashing the man a just-trying-to-be-helpful grin.

The man's frown became a glower. He had been hanging around this phone booth, glancing at his watch, for ten minutes. When his pocket pager went off, he impatiently accosted Remo. Since he wore a black silk running suit with red stripes and sniffed as if it were cold, Remo had him pegged as a drug dealer. A lot of them did their business through pay phones and beepers these days.

"You dumb shit!" the man bellowed. "What'd you do that for? I need to use the phone."

"So use it," Remo said nonchalantly. "I'll bet if you twist it right, it'll go right up your nostril. Plug that nasty drip. Of course, you'll need two. And this is the only phone booth for miles around. I checked."

The man stared at the dangling steel cable with eyes going mean. One hand snaked to the small of his back. It started back clutching a wicked knife. It went snik! A blade popped out.

"You gonna cut me?" Remo wondered.

"No," the man returned, "I'm gonna disembowel you."

"Thanks for the clarification."

Casually Remo reached up for the man's face.

"Here's a trick I'll bet you never saw before," Remo said.

His splayed fingers took the man by the face, thumb and little finger attaching themselves to the man's cheekbones, the other fingers resting lightly on the forehead. Remo simply crooked his fingers slightly.

Then he brought his hand away.

Mauricio Guillermo Echeverry heard the crack of a sound. It surprised him. The Anglo's hand was in his face so suddenly he hadn't time to react. The crack sounded very near.

Then the hand went away.

Mauricio staggered, clutching the folding glass phonebooth door. Something was wrong. He dropped his knife, as if instinctively understanding it would not help him. Something was very wrong, but he wasn't sure just what. Had the Anglo guy palmed a blackjack and belted him in the face? He hoped no bones were busted. That crack sounded muy serious.

The skinny Anglo stepped back, holding something limp up to the fading light.

Mauricio would have blinked, but lacked the necessary equipment. As a red film fell over his staring eyes, the skinny Anglo made a few passes over the limp thing in his hands. Like a cornball stage magician trying to make an egg disappear.

"Notice there's nothing up my sleeve," the Anglo said in a really irritating tone.

"You ain't got no sleeve crazy guy," Mauricio snarled, his voice sounding funny because he couldn't get his lips to work.

"Just sticking to my act," the Anglo said. "No need to get upset. Here, watch the birdie."

Then he turned it around.

"Look familiar?" the skinny Anglo wanted to know.

Mauricio was surprised to recognize his own face. His closed lids were strangely flat and sunken. He was a little droopy around the lips too, and his handsome Latin face was kind of hangdog. But it was his face. Of that there was no question.

The question was, what was the Anglo doing with his face? And why wasn't it hanging off his own head where it belonged?

"Shall I repeat the question?" the Anglo asked.

Mauricio Guillermo Echeverry didn't respond. He simply leaned forward and fell square on his mush. Which was the sound he made.

Mush.

Remo tossed the flaccid skull-bone-and-skin mask on the quivering owner's back and walked into the Salt Lake City twilight, humming contentedly.

He felt better. He was doing his share to keep drug use down. He could hardly wait until next month's Department of Justice crime statistics. Just by himself, he was probably responsible for a four-percent drop.

He just wished he could get the Master of Sinanju's anguished old face out of his mind.

Chapter 5

The Iraiti ambassador to the United States was having a ball.

"If this is Tuesday," he sang to himself as he entered the Irait consulate on Massachusetts Avenue, Washington's consulate row, "I must be on Nightline. "

He beamed under his thick mustache to the guard at the gate. The identically mustachioed guard grinned back. He passed on. All was good. All was well. True, his nation had been condemned by every government except Libya, Albania, and diehard Cuba. It lay under a punishing blockade. Down in Hamidi Arabia, the largest deployment of U.S. troops since World War Two were poised to strike north and liberate occupied Kuran.

War talk had it that soon very soon-the U.S. would rain the thunder of world indignation down on the outlaw Republic of Irait.

But that was of no moment to Turqi Abaatira, the Iraiti ambassador. He was safe in the U.S. More important, he was a media star, and had been ever since his home government had rolled its Soviet-made tanks down the Irait-Kuran Friendship Road and annihilated the Kurani Army and police force and driven its people into exile as Iraiti forces literally stripped the tiny nation like a hot car, carrying every portable item of value back to the ancient Iraiti capital, Abominadad.

His smiling, good-humored face had been appearing for months on television news shows. Daily, limousines whisked him from broadcast studio to broadcast studio. As the Iraiti Army clamped down on hapless Kuran, Abaatira reassured the world of Irait's peaceful intentions in a soothing, unruffled voice.

Almost no one called him a liar to his face. The one exception-an indignant journalist who demanded to know why Iraiti troops had emptied Kurani incubators of their struggling infants-had been fired for "violating commonplace journalistic standards." Yes, it was wonderfully civilized.

Climbing the marble steps, Abaatira strode confidently into the consulate.

"Ah, Fatima," he said smilingly. "Who has called for me on this glorious summer day?"

"The U.S. Department of State," he was told. "They wish to denounce you in private once again."

Abaatira lost his good-humored grin. His face fell. His thick mustache drooped. It resembled a furry caterpillar that had been microwaved to a crisp.

"What is their problem now?" Abaatira asked dispiritedly. Lately the State Department had been interfering with his personal appearances. It was most inconvenient. Had the Americans no sense of priorities?

"It is over our President's latest edict."

"And what is that?" Abaatira asked, taking a long-stemmed rose from a glass vase and sniffing delicately.

"That all Western male hostages-"

"Guests under duress," Abaatira said quickly. "GUD's."

"That all guests under duress grow mustaches in emulation of our beloved leader."

"What is so unreasonable about that?" Abaatira asked, slipping the rose into his secretary's ample cleavage. He bent to bestow a friendly kiss on her puckering brow. "The edict does say 'males.' Insisting that women and children do this would be unreasonable. When were we ever unreasonable?"

"We are never unreasonable," the secretary said, adjusting the rose so the thorns didn't break her dusky skin. She smiled up at the ambassador invitingly. She despised her lecherous superior, but she did not wish to be shipped back to Abominadad with a poor report. The President's torturers would break not just her skin.

Abaatira sighed. "Perhaps I should have you accompany me to the State Department. I am sure that at the sight of your Arab beauty they would wilt like oasis flowers in the midday sun."

The secretary blushed, turning her dusky face even darker.

Ambassador Abaatira tore his avid eyes off that happy rose with a darkening expression of his own.

"Very well, please inform them that I am on my way for my daily spanking."

Turning on his heel, Turqi Abaatira stepped smartly to his waiting car. He instructed the driver. The car pulled away from the curb like a sleek black shark speeding toward a meal.

In the gilded State Department conference room, Turqi Abaatira used a silk pocket handkerchief to conceal a yawn.

The undersecretary of state was truly wound up this time. The poor overworked man was beside himself, pounding the table in his fury. He was not getting much ink these days, Abaatira reflected. No doubt it rankled. He could understand that. Not so many months before, he himself could not get a choice table in the better restaurants.

"This is an outrage!" the man was raging.

"You said that yesterday," Abaatira replied in a bored voice. "And last week. Twice. Really, what can you except me to do?"

"I expect," the undersecretary of state said, coming around the table to tower over the ambassador, "that you act like a civilized diplomat, get on the damned horn to Abominadad, and talk sense to that mad Arab you call a President. The whole house of cards in the Middle East is about to come tumbling down on his head."

"That, too, I have heard before. Is there anything else?"

"This mustache thing. Is Hinsein serious about this?"

Abaatira shrugged. "Why not? You know the saying, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'?"

"Abominadad is not Rome," the undersecretary snapped. "And if your people don't watch their step, it might just become the next Pompeii."

"As I was saying," Abaatira continued smoothly, "when in Abominadad, one should respect the great traditions of the Arab people. In my country, there is a law stipulating that all men should emulate our President in all ways, especially in regard to facial adornment. If we expect this of our own people, should we not also ask it of our honored guests?"

"Hostages."

"Such an overused term," Abaatira said, stuffing his handkerchief back into his coat pocket. "So like calling everyone who disagrees with you a latter-day Hitler. Really, sir. You ought to change your record. I believe it is skipping."

The undersecretary of state stood over the Iraiti ambassador, clenched fists trembling.

He exhaled a slow, dangerous breath. Words came out with it.

"Get the hell out of here," he hissed. "And communicate our extreme displeasure to your President."

"I shall be delighted," Abaatira, said, rising. At the door, he paused. "He finds my cables outlining your outbursts hugely entertaining."

Returning to his limousine, Ambassador Abaatira picked up the speaking tube.

"Never mind the consulate," he told the driver. "Take me to the Embassy Row Hotel."

Then, getting on the car phone, he made two calls. The first was to reserve a room at the Hotel Potomac.

"Just for the afternoon," he told the front desk.

Next he put in a call to the Diplomatic Escort Service.

"Hellooo, Corinne?" he asked cheerfully. "This is Turqi. How are you, my dear?"

An unfamiliar voice said, "Corinne is indisposed. May I assist you in some way?"

"I truly hope so. Is Pamela available for a few hours?"

"I'm sorry, but she is indisposed."

"Hmmm. I see. How about Rachel?"

"Rachel is out of town."

Abaatira frowned. They were passing the White House. A protest group was assembled outside the east lawn, shouting, "Food, not bombs! No blood for oil!" They waved placards: "U.S. OUT OF HAMIDI ARABIA." His frown melted. His heart gave a little leap of joy. Such a civilized country.

"I will tell you what," he said magnanimously. "I am feeling adventurous today. Why not send over a selection of your choosing? Hotel Potomac. Room 1045."

"Kimberly is available. You'll like her. She's a fresh face. Very, very good with her hands. And blond."

"Yes, I like the sound of that. Kimberly will do nicely."

Ambassador Abaatira replaced the receiver. He leaned back in the tooled leather seat, folding his hands on his stomach and closing his eyes. He thought pleasant thoughts. Of blond-as-daffodils Kimberly.

"Ah," he murmured, "Washington is so restful in the summer. "

At the office of the Diplomatic Escort Service, Kimberly Baynes put down the phone.

She stood up her yellow silk dress shifting in the light. It was a sheer ankle-length dress cut in the Chinese pattern. A slit showed most of one shapely leg. Above the waist, it thickened and billowed around her ample bosom.

Taking her purse from the desk, she went to a door and opened it a crack, revealing a bare closet.

On the floor, Corinne D'Angelo, founder of the Diplomatic Escort Service, lay in a heap, a yellow silk scarf twisted around her neck. Her tongue lolled out like a black snail extruding from its shell. Her eyes were open, but only the whites showed.

Because she was still quivering. Kimberly knelt down-careful not to split her dress seams-and wrapped spiderlike fingers around the ends of the tight scarf.

She gave a hard, fast jerk. The quivering stopped. A faint gurgle escaped past the swollen black tongue. Another came from deep within her, and the sudden stink of released bowels filled the closet's narrow confines.

"Oh, yuk," Kimberly said recoiling. She hated it when they let go like that. She slammed the door sharply on her way out of the office suite.

On her way to the elevator, she bumped into a redhead wearing a white knit dress through which her black lace brassiere and panties showed like playful black cats in a heavy fog.

"Oh!" the redhead said. Stepping back, she looked Kimberly up and down frankly. "You're new, I suppose." Her tone was appraising, a little cool. "I'm Rachel."

"Corinne's expecting you," Kimberly said quickly.

"Good. I could use a few bucks. Catch you later."

Rachel brushed past. Kimberly tugged a long yellow silk scarf from her neck while the redhead rattled the office doorknob with growing annoyance.

She was knocking on the panel when Kimberly came up behind her, holding the yellow scarf in both hands.

"You have to lean into it," Kimberly said. "It's stuck."

Rachel's long-lashed eyes flickered in her direction. Taking in the scarf, she said. "You should get another color to go with that dress. Yellow on yellow is so tacky. Try white or black."

"That's a good idea," Kimberly said. "Maybe you should take this one."

"No, thanks," Rachel said, rapping on the door. "Yellow isn't my color."

"Oh, no," Kimberly said sweetly, lowering the scarf around the redhead's neck. "I insist."

"Hey!" Rachel said, flailing. Then: "Ugh! Ukk Ukk Ukkkkk."

"She loves it!" Kimberly cried. "Can't you tell?"

Rachel's knees buckled. Face bluing, she slowly collapsed into a heap of warm white knit flesh.

Holding Rachel's head off the floor by the yellow scarf, Kimberly Baynes unlocked the door. She dragged Rachel by the neck. Rachel protested not a bit as she was hauled into the well of the reception-room desk. When Kimberly let go of the scarf, Rachel's head went boink! She jammed her cooling limbs in.

Kimberly left her to decompose in private.

Ambassador Turqi Abaatira changed into a dressing gown in the privacy of his hotel room. As he waited patiently, he watched CNN, his eyes going often to his gold wristwatch, which he had set on the nightstand by the bed.

A reporter was engaged in a carefully worded report of U.S. troop deployment m faraway Hamidi Arabia.

"Since we are forbidden by military censors to report our location," the reporter was saying, "I can only say that I am reporting from a place near the Hamidi Arabia-Kuran border, where forward units of the Twenty-fourth Mechanized Infantry Division are dug into the shifting sands. Rumor has it that only a few kilometers north of here, Hamidi frontline troops are busily erecting a top-secret weapon, described only as a kind of modern Maginot Line they say will neutralize any gas attack the Iraitis dare launch. Operation Sand Blast commanders have so far refused all comment on the exact nature of this breakthrough . . . ."

Abaatira smiled. Let the Americans have their spy satellites, which cost billions of dollars and could read a license plate from orbit. The Iraiti Revolting Command Council had a superior tool. The American media. Under the banner of freedom of the press, they were daily feeding all sorts of valuable intelligence directly to Abominadad. And all for the price of a satellite dish. Who needed spies?

The knock at the door was sudden and inviting.

Abaatira hit the remote unit and bounced off the bed in one motion.

He padded to the door, his spirits soaring. With a grand flourish, he flung the door open.

She was, if anything, lovelier that Abaatira had expected.

"Ah, and you could only be the unrivaled Kimberly," he said, eyeing her yellow silk gown. A flash of thigh showed like a tantalizing dream.

"May I come in?" Kimberly asked demurely.

"Of course." She entered with a languid grace. Abaatira closed the door after her.

She stepped around the room, casually placing a small yellow purse on the nightstand by the bed. She turned. Her smile was red and inviting.

"And what would you like today?"

"I have been under a certain tension," Abaatira said. "I seek relaxation. And relief."

Kimberly perched on the edge of the bed. She patted it.

"Come. Join me."

Abaatira obeyed with alacrity. He rolled onto the bed.

"Lie back," Kimberly purred, leaning over to whisper into his ear. "Let Kimberly soothe you."

"Yes, soothing," Abaatira sighed. "I need soothing. Very much."

"I have brought love oil with me. Would you like me to use it?"

"Yes, that would be fine," Abaatira said, feeling his loins stir in response.

"Close your eyes, please."

Abaatira did as he was told. His ears were alert. Something else was coming to attention too. As he waited, delicate fingers tugged at the sash of his robe.

He felt himself being exposed. The coolness of the air conditioner passed over his stiffening member. He folded his hands on his bare stomach, swallowing with anticipation.

A hand took firm hold of his root, steadying his quivering tool. The sound of a small cap being unscrewed made his heart beat faster. He hoped this Kimberly would take her time. Abaatira preferred thoroughness in these matters, something he had stressed to Corinne D'Angelo when he had first explained his needs, many Kimberlys ago.

The cap was set down. There was a tantalizing drawn-out moment. Then the warm thick liquid began to pour. It slid over the tip of his Arab maleness, running down the shaft like warm, gooey syrup. A delicious scent tickled his nostrils. He sniffed curiously.

"Raspberry," Kimberly whispered naughtily.

"Ah, raspberry," Abaatira breathed. "Allah is just." He trusted that meant she would use her mouth. There was no rush. Eventually.

Then the other hand joined the first, and together they began kneading and manipulating him in clever, surprising ways ....

When Turqi Abaatira woke up, the first thing he noticed was that his erection was as proud as ever.

He blinked. This was unusual. He could distinctly recall climaxing. In fact, under the discreet manipulations of the girl named Kimberly, he had experienced the most nerve-satisfying climax of his life. It was also, oddly, the last thing he could recall.

He must have fallen asleep. It sometimes happened after he spent himself.

But there it was, proud and undaunted by its recent exercise.

Abaatira blinked again. There was something strange about his tool. It wasn't the yellow scarf that seemed wound rather loosely around the root of his intromittent organ. It was the color of the column of upright flesh towering above.

It looked rather . . blackish. Or was it green? No, greenish-black, he decided. He had never before seen himself turn that unlovely color. It must have been quite an orgasm to cause him to turn such a remarkable hue.

"Kimberly?" he called.

No answer. He tried to sit up. Then it was he noticed that his feet were lashed to the baseboard. By two yellow scarves identical to the one coiled on his belly.

"I did not ask for this," he muttered darkly.

He again attempted to sit up. His arms refused to move. He looked up. His wrists, too, were lashed to the bedposts.

"I definitely did not ask for this," he said aloud. Raising his voice, he called, "Kimberly, where are you, my apricot?"

Then he noticed his watch sitting on the nightstand. It said four o'clock. Much later than he had thought.

His eyes happened to alight on the tiny window that displayed the day of the week. They went wide. The red letters said: "THURSDAY."

"Thursday?" he gulped. "But this is Tuesday." Then the cold, mouth-drying realization sank in. His hot, dark eyes went to his defiantly inexhaustible manhood.

Ambassador Turqi Abaatira did the only thing he could do under the circumstances.

He screamed for his mother.

Chapter 6

The Master of Sinanju was dead.

Remo stared up at the cold stars wheeling overhead and tried to make sense of it all.

He could not. Nor had he been able to make sense of it in all the bitter months since the tragedy.

It had been, after all, a nothing assignment. Well, maybe not nothing exactly, but not as important as some. Looking back on it, Remo decided that he simply had underestimated what he and Chiun had gotten into.

It had started with a poison-gas attack on a failing northeast Missouri farm town. Remo had already forgotten its name. La Plume or something. Overnight, the town had been wiped out. Remo and Chiun had been out of the country when it had happened. No sooner had they returned to the States than Harold Smith had put them on the trail of the unknown culprits.

In Missouri they had collided with a strange group of characters, including a bankrupt condominium developer, a college girl with a no-nukes message, plus a working neutron bomb and an environmentalist group known as Dirt First!! The bomb had been stolen and, jumping to the conclusion that it had been the work of the Dirt Firsters, Remo and Chiun had gone after them. A mistake.

The neutron bomb had been stolen by the condo developer, Connors Swindell, whose grandiose visions of reversing his slumping business caused him to gas one town and plan on nuking another so that after the bodies were hauled off, he could scoop up the distressed real estate on the cheap.

"A frigging real-estate scam," Remo reflected bitterly. He lay in the coarse gravel of the Newark high-rise roof. He had lived here in the days after he had left St. Theresa's Orphanage. The day when, as a young Newark cop, he had opened up his draft notice, he had taken a bottle of beer up to this roof and lain back on the biting gravel to count the stars as he daydreamed of what Vietnam would be like.

Tonight, Vietnam seemed a thousand years distant. Tonight, his cop days were a receding memory, as were the cruel months he'd spent on death row, framed for the murder of a drug pusher he had never even laid eyes on. It had all been a gigantic scam engineered by Harold Smith and Conrad MacCleary, the one-armed ex-CIA agent who had seen Remo Williams in action in some forgotten rice paddy. MacCleary had mentally filed Remo away for possible future use. And when CURE had been sanctioned to kill, MacCleary had told Smith about a former Marine sharpshooter whom the Twenty-first Marines had nicknamed "The Rifleman."

Remo took a swig on a bottle of mineral water. His beer-drinking days were long behind him. So were his meateating days. So was the simple life of Remo Williams of Newark, New Jersey. These days his highly refined metabolism subsisted on rice, fish, and duck.

He had been electrocuted up at Trenton State Prison. They had strapped him in, sweating, frightened but outwardly cool. Zap! And he was gone.

The swimming darkness of oblivion gave way to the applegreen sterility of Folcroft Sanitarium and CURE.

Officially dead, his face recut into unrecognizable lines by plastic surgery, Remo found himself pressed into service for his country. As CURE's one-man killer arm. And he had taken the job-just as MacCleary and Smith had known he would. Remo Williams was, after all, a patriot. Besides, the cold bastards were ready to dump him into a shallow grave if he told them no.

In the spacious Folcroft gym, they had introduced him to the eighty-year-old Master of Sinanju, Chiun.

That meeting, Remo recalled as if it had happened last Friday.

MacCleary-a bluff, hard-drinking Irishman-had entered the Folcroft gym and engaged Remo in a seemingly pointless conversation. Remo was anxious to get out into the field. He had been well-trained in weapons handling, codes, disguise, poisons, infiltration-all things that soon became irrelevant. MacCleary had told him he wasn't yet ready, making his point with hand gestures that set his stainlesssteel hook flashing under the shaky fluorescent lights.

The big double doors opened. Conn MacCleary turned.

"Ah, here he comes now," MacCleary had said.

Remo's suspicious face went to the door. They separated as if actuated by a photoelectric beam. And framed in the open door, his hands tucked into the wide sleeves of a white kimono so that Remo had wondered who had opened the heavy doors for him, stood a tiny, pathetic figure.

He was approximately five feet tall from his whispering black sandals to the crown of his bald yellow head. Straggly wisps of pale hair floated over each ear. Like a bleached tendril of seaweed clinging to a rock, more ancient hair clung to his chin: His face was a calm mask of papier-mache wrinkles.

As he padded toward him, Remo saw that the slanted eyes were an unexpected clear hazel color. They were the only thing about him that did not look old, frail, and weak.

MacCleary had explained to Remo that the old Korean was called Chiun and he was going to be Remo's teacher.

Chiun had bowed formally.

Remo had stared blankly, saying, "What's he going to teach me?"

"To kill," MacCleary had replied twenty long years ago. "To be an indestructible, unstoppable, nearly invincible killing machine."

Remo had laughed, causing a dark shadow of anger to cross Chiun's eyes like stop-motion storm clouds scudding by.

Suppressing his amusement, MacCleary had offered Remo a night away from Folcroft if he could tag the Korean called Chiun. MacCleary then handed him a hair-trigger .38.

Sighting coolly, Remo lifted the sights to the Korean's sunken chest. It was easy. All he had to do was pretend the old gook was a Vietcong. Inwardly he decided that this was a test of his ability to kill on command.

Remo fired. Twice. A faint smile seemed to gild the old Korean's face. It was still there when the reverberations of the shots ceased echoing. Holes popped into the padded tumble mats.

But the frail little man flashed, unscathed, through the gym. He slid sideways with nervous, geometrically angular motions. He faded here. He danced there. Annoyed, Remo continued trying to nail him as the sweat came to his forehead.

And when the last chamber contained only a spent, smoking cartridge, Remo angrily threw the weapon at the older man's head. Missing completely.

The Oriental came up on Remo so cleverly that he never saw him. Remo was thrown to the hard floor with such force it blew all pain and air from his surprised lungs.

Impassively the old Oriental had stared down into Remo's face. Remo glared up at him.

"I like him," Chiun had said in a high, squeaky voice. "He does not kill for immature or foolish reasons."

Remo later learned he was the Master of Sinanju, a martial-arts form old when Egypt's sands were new.

And on that day Remo started down the difficult path to becoming a Master of Sinanju himself, Chiun's heir, and now, Reigning Master. The first white man in a five-thousand-year chain of consummate assassins.

Long ago.

The last time Remo had seen the Master of Sinanju alive, Chiun had been arguing with him in the California desert near Palm Springs. They had located the stolen neutron bomb. It had been armed, with no way to disarm it. The digital timer was counting off the final minutes of life for the only person Remo had ever thought of as family.

With the real-estate crazy named Connors Swindell and the bomb's inventor, they had barreled out into the desert, racing against that silently screaming timer display, trying to put Palm Springs behind them and out of the kill zone-even as they carried the kill zone along with them.

It was a doomed effort. Chiun had pointed this out, with his usual uncompromising wisdom. One of them would have to bear the bomb out into the desert alone. Or all would perish.

"I'll do it," Remo had volunteered.

"No. You are the future of Sinanju, Remo," Chiun had said stiffly. "I am only its past. The line must continue. So I must do this."

They had been feuding in the days before the end came. Remo didn't even know the reason, until Chiun had reluctantly explained that he was approaching his one hundredth birthday-something Remo had no inkling of. Tired of arguing, concerned for Chiun's advancing years, Remo had cut short the argument to get possession of the bomb in a cruel way. He had ridiculed the Master of Sinanju.

"Cut the martyr act, Chiun," Remo had said. "It's old. You're good, sure, but you're not as fast as me. I'm younger, stronger, and I can get further faster. So stuff your silly Korean pride and face reality. I'm the only one for this job, and we both know it."

The memory of Chiun's stung face was one that seemed to burn behind the stars above.

His soft, "So, that is how you feel about me," still echoed in Remo's ears.

Remo remembered reaching for the neutron bomb. Then the world went black. Chiun. Getting in the last word.

He woke up in the speeding car. It was careening back toward Palm Springs, away from the kill zone. He realized what must have happened. He had only time to look back.

The neutron bomb ignited with a heart-stopping vomiting-up of boiling black smoke and hellish red fire.

Remo had raced back into the rising hell. But the spreading zone of deadly radiation forced him back.

Months later, when it was safe, he had returned to the desert, finding only a capped-off underground condo site and a fused glass crater. Not even the Master of Sinanju's body had survived the blast.

But out there in the remorseless desert, the spirit of the Master of Sinanju had appeared to Remo. Wordlessly it had attempted to indicate what could not be communicated otherwise. By pointing at Remo's feet. Then it simply vanished.

Remo's existence had become an aimless one since then. What Chiun had commanded him to do was to confront the choice he knew he would one day face. He was now the inheritor of the line. It was as Chiun had said. The line had to continue. The House of Sinanju had to go on. The village had to be fed. And the village had always been fed by the work of the Masters of Sinanju.

Now Remo wasn't so sure. Could he continue the tradition? He was an American. The people of Sinanju were a bunch of ungrateful parasites. They knew nothing of the hardships Chiun had endured to feed them. They would care nothing if they had known.

Remo had put off returning to Sinanju to break the terrible news. It was not long after that that Chiun had reappeared to him, spectrally pointing a ghostly finger, commanding him to obey.

"I'll get to it," Remo had said that second time.

But weeks later, when Chiun reappeared, Remo had reverted to the old days of their bickering relationship.

"Get off my back, will you?" he had said heatedly. "I said I'd get around to it!"

Chiun had raised his drawn, stricken face to the ceiling and faded like so much unscented smoke, leaving Remo feeling bitter and ashamed.

After that, he had closed up the house and hit the road. He felt torn between two worlds. He had outgrown America. Yet he was not of the blood of Sinanju. The line that stretched back five thousand years had nothing to do with him. He was a latecomer, a mere pale piece of pig's ear, as Chiun had so often said.

That left only CURE. But to Harold Smith, Remo was a tool. If compromised, he would be abandoned, disavowed-even terminated. Chiun had loved Remo, and Remo had grown to love the Master of Sinanju as a son loves his father. But between Remo and Harold Smith there was only a cool working relationship. Grudging respect. Sometimes, annoyance. Often anger. Who knew, but with Chiun out of the way, Smith might have some prearranged plan to reclaim Remo for the organization. Smith was no fool. He had long ago come to understand that Remo belonged equally to the village of Sinanju.

Suppose Smith decided to reprogram Remo? The cold bastard had tried it once before. Only Chiun had rescued Remo's sorry ass that time.

"What the hell do I do with the rest of my life?" he asked the stars. "Where do I belong? Who do I turn to?"

The stars poured down cold twinkling light that had no answer.

Remo sat up. Draining the last of his water, he tossed the empty bottle straight up. It ascended seventy feet, poised as if frozen by a snapshot, then began its tumbling return to earth.

Remo leapt up and snapped out with the heel of his foot. Pop! The glass shattered into a thousand gritlike pieces that sprinkled the roof with no more sound than hail falling.

Remo walked to the roof's edge, thinking how he always seemed to be drawn back to his old neighborhood in times like these. There was nothing for him here anymore. St. Theresa's Orphanage had been razed long ago. The neighborhood had fallen victim to the junkies and the pushers and the inexorable eroding of the American inner city. It was a lawless wasteland-the very thing Remo Williams had been erased from all records to prevent.

Now, lower Broad Street looked like Inner City Nowhere. A tight-skirted hooker lounged against a dirty brick wall. The needle tracks on her arms were like a connect-the-dots Amazon River. Two men passed sandwich-bag packets between them. Drugs. A battered pickup drew up to a red light. A man came out of an alley carrying a VCR still in its cardboard box. He dropped it into the bed of the truck and accepted a roll of bills from the driver. The transaction was accomplished without a word spoken.

"Ah, the hell with it," Remo growled.

He had made his decision. He stepped off the parapet edge.

Using the bricks for steps, Remo walked down the side of the building. His heels stepped from brick to brick, taking tiny jerking steps. Upright, his balance perfect, his bleak dark eyes looking out over the Newark skyline, he might have been descending a steep art-deco staircase.

No one noticed his impossible descent. And no one accosted him as he stepped onto the sidewalk and made his way out of the place he had sprung from and which was now as alien to him as the mud flats and fishing shacks of Sinanju, half a planet away.

Harold Smith picked up the dialless red desk telephone on the first ring.

"Yes, Mr. President?" he said crisply, no trace of fear in his voice. In fact, he was quite scared.

"The FBI aren't cutting it," the President said in a careworn voice that muted his vaguely New England twang. "I am turning to you."

"I presume you are referring to the missing Iraiti ambassador?" Harold Smith asked.

"Abominadad is claiming we've taken him hostage," the President snapped, "and we can't prove otherwise. Personally, I wouldn't mind if the smug son of a gun were found floating facedown in the Potomac, but I'm trying to avoid a war here. This kind of escalation could trigger it. I know you've lost the old one-what was his name?"

"Chiun," Smith said stiffly. "His name was Chiun."

"Right. But you still have your special guy, the Causcasian. Can he cut it alone?"

Harold Smith cleared his throat noisily as he mentally framed the news he had been keeping from the chief executive.

"Mr. President-" he began.

Then another phone rang. The blue one. It was the line through which Remo reported.

"One moment," Smith said quickly, cupping the mouthpiece to his gray vest. He grabbed the other phone like a life preserver. He spoke into it.

"Remo," Smith said harshly. "The President has a critical assignment for you. Will you take it? I must have your answer. Now."

"Assignment?" Remo asked in a taken-aback voice. "What kind?"

"The Iraiti ambassador is missing."

"Why should we care?" Remo demanded.

"Because the President does. Will you accept this assignment?"

The line was silent for nearly a minute.

"Why not?" Remo said breezily. "It should kill an afternoon."

"Hold, please," Smith said, no trace of the relief he felt sweetening his lemony voice. He switched phones, hugging the blue receiver to his chest.

"Mr. President," he said firmly, "I have our enforcement arm on the other line. He is prepared to enter the picture."

"Fast work, Smith," the President returned. "I'm pleased with your efficiency. Damn pleased. Go to it."

The line went dead. Smith hung up the red telephone and lifted the blue one from his vest.

"Remo, there is no time for details. Fly to Washington. Contact me once you get there. I hope to have operational details for you by then."

"On my way," Remo said. "Maybe Mad Ass had him assassinated," he added hopefully.

"I doubt that."

"I'd give anything for a crack at that Arabian nightmare."

"Official policy is hands-off. Now, please, go to Washington."

"Keep the line free. The next voice you hear will be yours truly."

Chapter 7

Turqi Abaatira listened with attentive straining ears as the gorgeous blond vixen he knew only as Kimberly sat on the edge of the bed and lectured him on the causes and pathological symptoms of gangrene.

"When blood flow is cut off," she explained in a breathy voice like a schoolgirl reciting from a book, "oxygen is also restricted. Without oxygen, the tissue becomes starved for nourishment. It begins to decay, to become corrupt."

Kimberly reached over and gave the bulging tip of his male organ a friendly pat. It quivered. Abaatira couldn't feel a thing. This alarmed him.

It fascinated Kimberly enough to deviate from her lecture.

"Do they always act rubbery like that? When they're not gangreny, I mean."

She removed the gag from his mouth.

"You do not know?" Abaatira gasped. "You, a professional call girl?"

"I'm new at this stuff," Kimberly said, gazing into her high-polished yellow fingernails. "Actually, you're my first customer."

"I refuse to pay you until you release me," Abaatira said hotly. The gag was replaced.

"Tissue death usually signals itself by a slow change in color," Kimberly went on absently. "Healthy pink skin turns green, then black. When it is completely black, it's dead. Amputation is usually the only remedial procedure." She paused. "I think this black goes very well with yellow, don't you?" she added, adjusting the yellow silk scarf that had strangled the blood flow from Abaatira's upright penis.

Ambassador Abaatira gave his head a violent shake. He tried to give vent to his anger, his rage, most of all to his fear, but an identical yellow silk scarf stuffed into his mouth prevented this. A third one held it in place.

Kimberly had stuffed the one into his mouth after he had first started to cry out, carefully tying the other at the back of his head.

"It's been two days," she went on pleasantly. "I would say that another, oh, twelve to fourteen hours from now, it's gotta go. Bye-bye, Black Peter. Of course, the surgeons might not have to cut it all off. Every last inch, I mean. Perhaps they can save some of it. The tip would definitely go. It's pretty black right now. But you might end up with a kind of stump."

"Mumph-mumph!" Abaatira squealed through the silk gag.

"It wouldn't come in very useful during an orgy," Kimberly went on, "but you could tinkle with it. Maybe enough could be salvaged that you could still point the stream where you wanted it to go. Otherwise, you'd have to sit down like us girls."

Abaatira shook his head violently. He strained at the yellow bonds.

"What's that?" Kimberly asked, leaning closer. "You say you don't want to sit like a girl when you tinkle?"

Ambassador Turqi Abaatira changed the direction of his madly shaking head. Up and down instead of side to side. He poured a great deal of enthusiasm into it. He wanted no ambiguity. None at all.

"I might be persuaded to help you out," Kimberly offered.

The up-and-down shaking became even more manic. The entire bed shook.

Kimberly brought her pretty face up to Abaatira's sweatsoaked one. She smiled invitingly as she whispered, "You're in touch with Abominadad every day?"

Oh, no, Abaatira thought to himself. A spy. She is a CIA spy. I will be executed for allowing myself to fall into her brazen toils.

But since his overriding concern was to leave this room with all his body parts a healthy pink, he kept nodding yes.

"If you tell me everything I want to know," Kimberly said, rolling her shoulders against the digging weight of her bra straps, "I might be willing to untie that pretty silk scarf." She ran a yellow nail down his cheek. "You would like that, would you not?"

Abaatira hesitated. His English was impeccable-he was a Harvard man-but this was a critical point. His mind raced. Should he answer the "You would like that?" Or the "Would you not" part. Or were they the same thing? The wrong reply could have grave consequences.

Abaatira shook his head yes, and the treacherous, diabolical call girl leaned over to untie the encircling yellow ribbon. She then plucked the yellow wad of silk from his mouth.

Ambassador Abaatira tasted the dryness of his own mouth.

"Water?" he said thickly.

"Answers first."

"You promise?"

"Yes."

"You swear to Allah?"

"Sure, why not?"

"What do you wish to know?" he croaked, his eyes going from the fresh pink face hovering near him to the ugly greenish-black mushroom that he could barely recognize as a cherished part of his anatomy.

"The intentions of your government."

"President Hinsein will never relinquish Kuran. It is our long-lost sister state."

"Whose army you crushed and whose property you carried back to Irait, including the streetlights and cars, and even a giant roller coaster. Not to mention all the rapes."

"You are not a Kurani, by any chance?" Ambassador Abaatira asked with a sudden flare of fear deep in his naked belly.

"No. I serve She who loves blood."

"I love blood too," Abaatira pointed out. "I would love it to circulate more freely through my body. To every needy part."

Kimberly patted his damp hair. "In time, in time. Now, tell me about the plans your government has for war."

"What about them?"

"Everything. I wish to know everything about them. Under what circumstances you would go to war. The provocations necessary. The thoughts of your brave leader, who must love blood, for he spills so much of it. Tell me about his personal life. I want to know everything. About his family, his peccadilloes, his mistress. Everything."

Ambassador Turqi Abaatira closed his eyes. The words came tumbling out. He told everything. And when he ran out of secrets to reveal, he repeated himself.

Finally, dry of mouth and spent of spirit, he put his head back on the pillow and gasped for breath.

"That is everything you know?" asked Kimberly, the Mata Hari of barbaric Washington, where not even a diplomatic media star was safe from torturers.

Abaatira's gasp could only mean yes.

"Then it is time for me to fulfill my part of our little bargain," Kimberly said brightly.

This brought Abaatira's sweat-sheathed head back up. Eyes widening, he watched as those hateful tapered yellow fingers reached for the deadly yellow silk scarf that seemed so loosely tied, but which had brought him such terror.

He steeled himself, for he knew that the restored blood flow would bring with it horrible pain as the starved nerve endings came back to life.

The fingers tugged and plucked, and with tantalizing slowness they pulled the silk away. A trailing end caressed Abaatira's naked body as it retreated.

With a sudden wicked flick, it was gone.

Childish laughter, mad and mocking, seared his ears.

Ambassador Abaatira's eyes bulged stupidly. He threw his head back and screamed.

For he had seen half-buried in the greenish-black root of his manhood the slick gleam of copper wire-and knew that he had betrayed his country for nothing.

The yellow scarf went around his throat, and his scream became an explosion of choking that trailed off in a frenzy of gagging.

Chapter 8

Marvin Meskin, manager of Washington's Potomac Hotel, thought he was having union problems.

"Where the hell is that maid?" he roared, slamming down the front desk phone. "That was another guest on the tenth floor, wondering if we charge extra for changing the sheets and towels."

"Let me check," said the bellboy helpfully.

"Yeah, you do that," Meskin muttered, wondering if the entire hotel wasn't going to hell. For two days, maids had been disappearing in the middle of their shifts. They just walked off the job, leaving their service carts behind. The first one had quit on the ninth floor. Her replacement had quit two hours later. Her cart was found on the seventh floor.

But that was not the odd part. The odd part was that the carts were always found on floors that had been completely serviced.

Somehow, the maids never seemed to quite finish the tenth floor.

Meskin had complained to the Hotelworkers' Union, but they claimed it wasn't a job action. The union sent over another replacement, a Filipina named Esmerelda. She spoke even less English than the last one.

The desk phone rang. It was the bellboy.

"I'm on the ninth floor," he said. "I found her cart. No sign of . . . what was her name-Griselda?"

"I thought it was Esmerelda," Meskin said bitterly. "And who the hell cares what her name is? They come and go faster than the damn guests. I think this is a union plot or something."

"What should I do, Mr. Meskin?"

"Keep searching. I'll call every room from nine up and see who needs linen."

Wearily Marvin Meskin began the process. As he went about this irksome task, the lobby elevator door dinged open. His quick eyes went to it, hoping it might be that lazy Esmerelda. He couldn't understand it. Everyone said Filipina help was top shelf.

The woman stepping off the elevator was not Esmerelda. Meskin's eyes followed her through the lobby anyway. She walked with a kind of loose-hipped undulation that wiped Meskin's mind free of his cares. He had never seen such a set of boobs on someone that young. She was quite a piece of work in her tight yellow skirt and yellow fingernails. Like a voluptuous banana. Meskin wondered what it would be like to peel her.

Someone picked up the line, breaking into Meskin's banana-flavored fantasy.

"Yes, this is the front desk," he said. "I was just wondering if you've gotten fresh linen for today. No? Well, I am very sorry. We seem to be having a busy day. I'll get right on it."

Thirty calls later, Marvin Meskin put down the desk telephone to find a man was hovering only inches away. He had not heard him approach the front desk.

"Yes? May I help you in some way?" Meskin asked, his nose wrinkling at the man's all-black ensemble. If a T-shirt and slacks could be called an ensemble.

"I'm looking for a guy," the man in black asked.

"I'll bet you are," Meskin said dryly.

It was the wrong thing to say, and on an ordinary day Marvin Meskin would never have allowed those insolent words to escape his lips, but he was in a bad mood and the man in black was not dressed like a traveler. In fact, he looked as if he had slept in his clothes.

But he had said it, and the wrongness, the utter and complete boneheadedness of the comment was brought home forcefully to Marvin Meskin when the skinny guy in black lifted his thick-wristed hands and clamped first one on Meskin's shoulder and then the other on his throat.

That was all. There was no other sensation. Not of floating. Not of flying. Not even of dislocation.

Yet somehow Marvin Meskin found himself on the other side of the front desk, his back crushing the deep-pile royal blue lobby rug and his left arm straining to come out of its socket.

Way up there where the oxygen was, the skinny guy was calmly and methodically using one terrible hand to slowtwist Meskin's going-numb left arm. His other hand rested on his hip. One of his feet-Meskin had no idea which was planted irresistibly in his windpipe, restricting the flow of air.

"Gasp," Marvin Meskin gasped. "Hack! Hack!"

"You'll have to speak up. I didn't hear the answer to my question."

Meskin could not recall a question being put to him, but he signaled with his flailing free hand that he would be delighted to answer.

"Let me repeat it," the skinny guy was saying. "The Iraiti ambassador was dropped off at the Embassy Row Hotel two days ago. The front desk there told the FBI that he never checked in. I double-checked, and what do you know, it was true. Since the FBI understood he was in the habit of being dropped off at the Embassy, according to the ambassador's driver, that means he was pulling the old duck-and-dodge-something that should have occurred to the FBI, but didn't. Your establishment is the closest to that one. Ergo, your establishment goes to the top of the list."

This made perfect sense to Marvin Meskin, so he nodded in agreement. The action scratched the man's shiny shoes. Meskin's five-o'clock shadow appeared around noon. He hoped the desecration was not noticed.

"Okay," the guy in black was saying, "now I ask you if you'd know the Iraiti ambassador if you saw him." And the shoe withdrew.

"I'm a faithful watcher of Nightline," Meskin said hoarsely. He started gulping air in case the shoe returned. It did not.

"He check in two days ago?"

"Yes, he did."

"Check out?"

"I'd have to examine our records."

At that moment the bellboy stepped off the elevator. He started at the sight of his employer being held down on the royal-blue rug.

"Mr. Meskin, should I call the police?" he asked from behind a potted rubber plant. "Say no," the skinny guy said flatly.

"No," Meskin said, really wanting to say yes. But those deep-set eyes promised certain death if he disobeyed.

"Did you hear that?" the skinny guy asked, directing his deadly eyes toward the bellboy.

"I don't work for you," the bellboy said bravely.

"Go look for that maid!" Meskin yelled.

"I found her. I found all of four of them. In the storage room."

"All? What the hell are they doing-playing strip poker?"

"No, sir, they appear to have been strangled."

"Did you say strangled?" the skinny guy demanded.

"Union dispute," Marvin Meskin said quickly. "Nothing for you to concern yourself with. We run a discreet hotel."

The skinny guy frowned. "I'd say this is more than union trouble. Let's look into the ambassador first. I see dead bodies all the time."

"I'll bet you do," Marvin Meskin said as he was hauled by one arm to his feet. Weak-kneed, he stumbled back behind the counter and went to the computer. The skinny guy followed close behind him.

"There's something wrong with this computer," Meskin said, trying to call up the name. The amber screen was misbehaving. The letters and symbols were wavering as if written in disturbed water. "I can't get it to straighten out," Meskin complained, banging the terminal.

"Just a sec," the man said, stepping back.

The amber letters reformed, readable once more.

Meskin looked over his shoulder. The skinny guy stood, his bare arms folded, about twelve feet away.

"Hop to it," he said.

And Meskin hopped to it.

"We have an Abdul Al-Hazred in Room 1045," Meskin called out.

"So?"

"So that's the name the Iraiti ambassador uses whenever he takes a room here."

"He do that often?"

"Quite often. Usually for only an afternoon, if you know what I mean."

"I know. What floor is 1045-tenth or forty-fifth?"

"Tenth," Meskin said, "the same floor we've been having trouble with. Oh, my God," he croaked, his own words registering in their full impact.

The skinny guy came back. The amber screen broke apart like water that had been disturbed by an idly swirling stick. He took Marvin Meskin up by the scruff of his neck and on the way to the elevator collected the bellboy.

"Are we going to be killed too?" the bellboy asked as the elevator shot up to the tenth floor.

"Why?" the skinny guy asked while Meskin felt his stomach contents turn acidic.

"Because I'd like to call home and tell my mother goodbye," the bellboy said sincerely.

"Tell her good-bye over dinner tonight," the skinny guy growled. "I'm in a big rush."

Stepping out into the corridor, Meskin recalled that he had forgotten to bring along a passkey.

"No problem," the skinny guy said, releasing them on either side of Room 1045. "I brought my own."

"You? Where did you get . . . ?"

The question was answered before it was completed. The skinny guy answered it when he took hold of the knob, flexed one monster wrist, and handed the suddenly loose knob to Marvin Meskin.

It was very, very warm, Meskin found. He tossed it from hand to hand, blowing on his free hand by turns.

The door fell open after the man tapped it.

Marvin Meskin was shoved in first. The bellboy stumbled in, propelled by the skinny guy, who had such an irresistible way about him. They collided.

While they were picking themselves up, the skinny guy went for the bed, where the late Iraiti ambassador, Turqi Abaatira, AKA Abdul Al-Hazred, lay spread-eagled, his dark manhood dominating the decor like an overripe banana.

Ambassador Abaatira made a very colorful corpse. His body was a kind of brownish-white, his natural duskiness bleached by his lack of circulation. His tongue was a purplishblack extrusion in his blue face. His manhood was at full mast, a corpsy greenish-black.

The skinny guy looked over the body with a dispassionate eye, as if used to seeing corpses that were lashed to hotel beds by yards of yellow silk. He seemed most interested in the late ambassador's throat. The cords and muscles of his thick neck were squeezed by a long yellow silk scarf.

"Was he into bondage?" the skinny guy asked, turning from the body. His face was two degrees unhappier than before.

"We do not pry into our guests' affairs," Marvin Meskin sniffed, averting his eyes from the ugly but colorful sight. They kept going back to the swollen member in a kind of mesmerized horror. The bellboy was on his knees in front of the wastepaper basket. From the sounds he made, he was straining hard to throw up-but not hard enough. All he did was hack and spit.

When he at last gave up, the bellboy found himself being hauled to his feet by the tall skinny guy.

"Let's see those maids," he ordered.

The bellboy was only too happy to comply. On the way out of the room, the skinny guy paused to shove Marvin Meskin back.

"You," he said in a no-nonsense voice. "Mind the dead guy."

"Why me?" Meskin bleated.

"Because it's your hotel."

Which somehow made perfect sense to Marvin Meskin. Meekly he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Remo Williams let the nervous bellboy lead him to the storage room.

"I found them in a corner, behind some stacked chairs," the bellboy was saying. "They . . . they were just like that dead guy."

"If they were, medical science is going to have a field day with them. Not to mention the National Enquirer, Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and Copra Inisfree."

"No, I didn't mean exactly like him," the bellboy protested, his face actually reddening with embarrassment. Looking at him in his tight-fitting hotel uniform, Remo decided he would be embarrassed too. "I meant they were killed the same way. Strangled," he added in a hushed voice as he unlocked the storage-room door.

The room was a dark forest of stacked chrome-and-leather chairs and great round folding tables. The bellboy led Remo to a dim corner.

"This was a smart place to hide them," the bellboy was saying. "All the damaged chairs and broken tables are stashed in this corner. Here."

He stepped aside for Remo to get a good look.

The maids were seated on the floor, their legs straight out, facing one another as if posed in a game of pat-a-cake. Their heads lolled drunkenly off the shoulders of their starched blue uniforms and their arms hung down off their drooping shoulders, elbows and wrists folded stiffly.

Their faces were almost-not quite-the same delicate blue as their starched uniforms. A few stared glassily at nothing.

Each maid was marked by a purplish bruise at the throat. Something had been tied around their necks very, very tightly. Tight enough to seemingly force their tongues from their open mouths. Tight enough to cause at least one of them to defecate into her underwear.

Remo went among them, kneeling at each body, making certain they were gone. They were. He stood up, his high-cheekboned face grim.

"What do you think, sir?" the bellboy asked, getting the idea that the skinny guy was not a dangerous maniac, but something much, much more.

"I don't like that yellow scarf upstairs," he muttered.

The cryptic comment called for no response, so the bellboy offered none. He stood there feeling angry and helpless and wondering if there was something he should have seen or done or heard that might have averted this tragedy.

Then it struck him.

"You know," he said slowly, "I saw a girl walking around the hotel yesterday who wore a scarf like the one we saw."

"Yellow scarves are pretty common," the man said, regarding the bodies dispassionately.

"She also wore a yellow dress. And yellow fingernail polish."

The skinny guy looked up suddenly.

"Did she look like a hooker?" he asked.

"I got that impression, yeah. More like a call girl, though. This is a classy place. The manager doesn't let streetwalkers in."

"If he lets the Iraiti ambassador frolic in the afternoons," the skinny guy said, walking off, "you shouldn't feel so damn proud of this fleabag."

"Should I call the police?" the bellboy called after him.

"No," the skinny guy said. "Wait here."

And even though he never returned, the bellboy obeyed.

He was still standing watch over the bodies when the FBI came in en masse and sealed off the hotel.

The bellboy didn't get a chance to see his mother that night, but he was allowed to call her to say that he'd be home after the debriefing. He made it sound important. It was. Before it was all over, the world would edge toward the brink of a sinkhole of sand from which there was no return.

Chapter 9

Harold Smith accepted Remo Williams' telephone report without any expression of regret. The loss of the Iraiti ambassador was not exactly an affront to humanity. But the political fallout could be significant.

"If it wasn't for all the strangled maids," Remo was saying grimly, "I'd say it was a kinky lovers' tryst gone bizarre."

"The ambassador was quite a ladies' man," Smith was saying in a half-audible voice that usually meant his attention was divided between his conversation and his computer.

"Who do you think this girl in yellow is?" Remo wondered.

"The possibilities are endless. A Kurani spy out to avenge her homeland. An Isreali Mossad agent out to send a message to Abominadad. Even the U.S. CIA is a possibility, but highly unlikely. If this were sanctioned, I would know about it."

"The bellboy had her pegged as a call girl."

"That is my thought as well. I am checking my file on Ambassador Abaatira even as we speak. Yes, here it is. He is known to prefer the services of the Diplomatic Escort Service."

"Good name," Remo quipped. "You know, you might have mentioned this before."

"I hadn't thought the ambassador's sexual appetites would play a role in this."

"Believe me, Smitty," Remo said airily, "sex was uppermost in the guy's mind when he cashed out. He had a ringside seat to his last hard-on. In fact, if you get to see the morgue photos, you'll notice he had his eye on the ball right to the bitter end."

Harold Smith cleared his throat with the low, throaty rumble of a distant thundercloud. "Yes . . . er, well, those details are unimportant. Listen carefully, Remo. The FBI is going to suppress this entire matter. For the moment, the Iraiti ambassador is still on the missing-persons list. His death would cause who-knows-what reaction in Abominadad. We cannot afford that."

"Screw Abominadad," Remo snapped. "After all the hostages they've taken, how much of a stink can they raise over one flagrante delicto diplomat?"

"The stink I am thinking of," Smith said levelly, "is not diplomatic. The stink I fear is the stink of nerve gas in the lungs of our servicemen stationed in Hamidi Arabia."

"Point taken," Remo said. "I still say you should let me cash out Mad Ass. I'm sick of seeing his face every time I turn on the TV."

"Then do not turn on the TV," Smith countered. "Investigate the Diplomatic Escort Service and report on what you find. "

"Could be an interesting investigation," Remo said with relish. "I'm glad I brought my credit cards."

"Remo, under no circumstances are you to procure the services of-"

The line clicked dead.

Harold Smith returned the receiver to its cradle and leaned back in his ancient executive's chair. This was worrisome. This was very, very worrisome. It would be better-although not good-if the Iraiti ambassador had fallen victim to a common criminal, or even a serial killer. If this had an intelligence connection, no matter what nation was involved, the unstable Middle East was about to become even more precarious.

Remo Williams found a yellow police-barrier tape in front of the office building that was the base for the Diplomatic Escort Service. It was the same yellow as the silk scarf around the late Ambassador Abaatira's neck, he noticed without pleasure.

"What's going on?" Remo asked the uniformed cop who stood by the main entrance.

"Just a little matter for the D.C. detectives," the cop returned without rancor. "Watch the evening news."

"Thanks," Remo said. "I will." He continued on his way, slipped around the corner, and looked up at the dingy facade.

The side of the building wasn't exactly sheer. But it wasn't a ziggurat of brick and gingerbread, either.

Remo walked up to the facade, placing his toes to the building's base as Chiun had taught him so long ago. Raising his arms, he laid his palms flat against the gritty wall.

Then, somehow, he began ascending. He had forgotten the involved theory, the complicated movements, just as he had his old fear of heights. He had mastered ascents long, long ago.

So he ascended. His slightly cupped palm created an impossible but natural tension that enabled him to cling and pause while he shifted his footholds and used his steelstrong fingers to obtain increasingly higher purchase.

Remo wasn't climbing. Exactly. He was using the vertical force of the building to conquer it. There was no sensation of going up. It felt to Remo as if he were pulling the building down, step by step, foot by foot. Of course, the building wasn't sinking into its foundations under Remo's practiced manipulations. He was going up it.

Somehow, it worked. Somehow, he found himself on the eighth-floor ledge. He peered into a window. Dark. He walked around the six-inch-wide ledge with a casual grace, pausing at each grimy window-sometimes scouring pollution particles from the glass the better to see inside-until he found the office window he wanted.

The medical examiner was still shooting pictures. He was shooting into a closet. Remo could smell, even through the glass, the odors of death, sudden perspiration, now stale, bodily wastes, both liquid and not. But no blood.

He took that to mean the bodies-there were at least two because the M.E. turned his camera toward the hidden desk well-had been strangled.

Remo listened to the idle talk of the M.E. and two unhappy detectives.

"Think it's a serial creep?" the M.E. asked.

"I hope not. Damn. I hope not," one detective said.

"Face it. Johns don't happen to walk around with a pair of yellow kerchiefs, lose their cool, and strangle two hookers-"

"Call girls," the first detective said. "These were high priced broads. Look at those clothes. Designer clothes for sure."

"They smell just like dead hookers to me," the other grunted. "Worse. Like I was saying, no one happens to strangle two hookers with identical scarves. If it was a crime of passion, he'd have cut or bludgeoned one. No, this is a kinky hit. The worst kind. Who knows what this guy had eating away at him to do all this?"

"You think it's a guy?" the M.E asked, changing a flashbulb.

"I know it is. Women don't do serial killings. It's not in their nature. Like lifting the toilet seat when they're done."

"We don't know it's a serial thing yet."

"This is the fourth corpse wrapped this way in less than a week. Trust me. If we don't find more like these in the next few days, it'll be because whoever did this ran out of yellow silk."

Deciding there was nothing more he could learn, Remo started back down, taking the side of the building in hand and using gravity to return him to the sidewalk.

As he walked away, he thought about yellow scarves.

And he thought about how much he missed Chiun, and wished more than ever that the Master of Sinanju were still around.

If the yellow strangling scarves and the cold feeling deep in his stomach meant anything, Remo needed the Master of Sinanju as he had never needed him before.

But Chiun was gone. And Remo walked alone. And there was no one to protect him if his worst fears proved true.

Chapter 10

Remo walked the humid streets of Washington, D.C., with his hands crammed into his pockets and his sad eyes on the endless pavement unwinding under his feet.

He tried to shove the fear into the deepest recesses of his mind. He tried to push the ugly memories back into some dark corner where he could ignore them.

"Why now?" he said, half-aloud.

Hearing him, an alley-dwelling wino lifted a paper-bagwrapped green bottle in salute. "Why not?" he said. He upended the bottle and chugalugged it dry.

Remo kept walking.

It had been bad before, but if what he suspected was true, Remo's life had just taken a turn toward catastrophe. He considered, then rejected, calling Smith. But Smith would not understand. He believed in computers and balanced books and bottom lines. He understood cause and effect, action and reaction.

Harold Smith did not understand Sinanju. He would not understand Remo if Remo attempted to tell him the true significance of the yellow silk scarves. Remo could not tell him. That was that. Smith would only tell Remo that his story was preposterous, his fears groundless, and his duty was to America.

But as Remo's feet carried him toward the Capitol Building, he thought that his responsibilities were also with the inhabitants of Sinanju, who, when the Master of Sinanju failed them, were forced to send their babies home to the sea. Which was a polite phrase for infanticide. He owed Smith only the empty grave somewhere in New Jersey. To Chiun, and therefore to the Masters of Sinanju who had preceded him, Remo owed much, much more.

Were it not for Chiun, Remo would never have achieved the full mastery of his mind and body. He would never have learned to eat correctly, or to breathe with his entire body, not merely his lungs. He would have lived an ordinary life doing ordinary things and suffering ordinary disappointments. He was one with the sun source of the martial arts. For Remo, nothing was impossible.

He owed Sinanju a lot. He had just about made up his mind to go back to the village when Smith had called. Now he had more reason than ever to head for Korea.

In Korea, he might be safe.

But if he returned, would it be because he was too afraid of the yellow scarves? Remo wasn't sure. In twenty years of working for CURE, Remo had known fear only a few times. Cowardice he had tasted once. Years ago. And even then, he had not feared for his own safety, but for others'.

And now the terrible unknowable power that had once made of Remo Williams an utter slave to its whims had returned.

Remo found himself on the steps the Pantheon-like National Archives Building. On an impulse, he floated up the broad marble steps and into its quiet, stately interior. He had been here before. Years ago. He glided on soundless feet to the great brass-and-glass repository housing the original Constitution of the United States in a sandwich of inert gas.

It was, of course, where he had last seen it. Remo stepped up to the encircling protective guardrail and began reading the aged parchment paper that struck him as looking a lot like one of Chiun's scrolls, on which he faithfully recorded the history of Sinanju.

A guard came up to him after only a few minutes.

"Excuse me, sir," the guard began in a soft but unequivocal voice, "but we prefer that tourists not loiter here."

"I'm not loitering," Remo said testily. "I'm reading."

"There are brochures available out front with the entire text of the Constitution printed on them. In facsimile."

"I want to read the original," Remo said, not turning.

"I'm sorry, but-"

Remo took the man by the back of the neck, lifting him up and over the guardrail until his surprised nose was jammed up against the breath-steamed glass.

"According to this, it's still a free country," Remo snarled bitterly.

"Absolutely," the guard said quickly. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is what I always say. Always." As a reward, his feet clicked back on the polished marble floor. The hand at his collar released. He adjusted his uniform.

"Enjoy your reading, sir," the guard said. He faded back toward a doorway where he could keep his eye on the strange tourist in black, yet still stay out of reach of his strong hands.

If the guy made any weird moves, he would trigger the alert that would cause the Constitution housing to descend by scissors jack into a protective well in the marble flooring.

Then he would get the hell out of the building. The guy's eyes were as spooky as an owl's.

Remo finished reading in silence. Then, turning hard on his heel, he left the Archives Building and glided down the stairs like a purposeful black ghost.

Harold Smith picked up the blue telephone, frowning.

"Yes, Remo?"

"Smitty? I have some good news for you and some bad."

"Go ahead," Smith said in a voice as gray and colorless as his apparel.

"I'm quitting CURE."

Without skipping a beat, Smith asked, "What is the good news?"

"That is the good news," Remo returned. "The bad is that I can't quit until I finish this assignment."

"That is good."

"No, it's bad. I may not survive this one, any more than Chiun survived our last one."

"Come again?" Smith asked, his voice losing its studied neutrality.

"Smitty, you gotta get those computers of yours replaced. They blew it. Big-time."

"Come to the point, Remo."

"If they're still working-which I doubt-you're going to get a report on a couple of strangled call girls found in the offices of the Diplomatic Escort Service."

"I trust you interrogated them before you strangled them?"

"Nope. I didn't strangle them. My guess is our happy hooker did."

Smith paused. Remo could hear the hollow clicking of his computer keys. "What did you learn from the office?"

"That Washington is in the grip of a strangulation flap-something your computers should have picked up, if they were working."

"I am aware of only two homicides by strangulation other than those you have reported," Smith said. "A medical-supply salesman named Cosmo Bellingham and an insurance adjuster by the name of Carl Lusk. One was found in the elevator of the Sheraton Washington Hotel. The other in an alley near Logan Circle."

"And that didn't ring any bells?"

"Two strangulations. Statistically within the norm for an urban center like the District of Columbia."

"Well, counting the two call girls, four hotel maids, and the late ambassador, we have nine. How statistical is that?"

"Are you saying that all of these homicides are connected?"

"You tell me," Remo said acidly. "Does your computer tell you what they were done away with?"

More clicks. "No."

"Silk scarves," Remo said. "Yellow silk scarves."

"Like the ambassador?" Harold Smith croaked. "Oh, my God. Are you certain?"

"The cops I overheard at the escort service say it's the killer's trademark. Now, think. Who do we know who strangles with yellow scarves?"

"The Thuggee cult," Smith said hoarsely. "But, Remo, you wiped that group out long ago. It was the work of that pirate who ran Just Folks Airlines, Aldrich Hunt Baynes III. He's dead. The cult was smashed. Even the airline is out of business now."

"Tell me, Smith, were those two salesmen traveling when they got it?"

"Let me check." Smith's fingers attacked his keyboard like a feverish concert pianist. Presently, expanded versions of the wire-service reports on both homicides appeared on the screen as side-by-side blocks of text.

"Bellingham was killed shortly after checking into his hotel," Smith reported. "The other man died before reaching his."

"Travelers. Same M.O., Smitty," Remo pointed out. "They always hit travelers. Make friends, get their confidence, and when they're lulled, wrap the of silk scarf around their throats. Then walk away with their wallets."

"The two men were also robbed," Smith said. "But, Remo, if we smashed that cult, how could this be?"

"You forget, Smith. It's just updated Thuggee. It was around long before Just Folks tried to scare up some new customers by scaring passengers away from other airlines. And it'll probably be around long after. Besides," Remo added, his voice going soft, "we smashed the cult, not Kali."

"Beg pardon?"

"When we wrapped that one up," Remo admitted slowly, "there were a few things Chiun and I left out of our debriefing."

Smith clutched the receiver until he was white-fingered. "Go on."

"It wasn't just Baynes and the others. It was Kali herself."

"If I recall my mythology," Smith said aridly, "Kali was a mythical Hindu deity."

"Who lusted for blood and who the original East Indian thugs worshiped. Hapless travelers were sacrificed to Kali. The whole cult thing was triggered, believe it or not, by a stone statue of Kali that somehow exerted an influence over its worshipers."

"Influence?"

"According to Chiun, the spirit of Kali inhabited the statue."

"Yes," Smith said. "I recall now. The cult revolved around the idol. The Master of Sinanju believed that it possessed magical properties. Pure superstition, of course. Chiun comes from a tiny fishing village without running water and electricity."

"That just happens to have produced a line of assassins who worked for every empire since the paint on the sphinx was still wet," Remo retorted. "So backward that when the United States-the greatest nation on the face of the earth anytime, anywhere-needed someone to pull its chestnuts out of the fire, it turned to the last Master of Sinanju."

Smith swallowed. "Where is that statue now?" he asked.

"When we tracked down Baynes," Remo answered, "he had it. I grabbed it. It grabbed back. We struggled. I broke it into a zillion pieces and threw it off the side of a mountain."

"And?"

"Obviously," Remo said in a distracted voice, "the spirit of Kali went somewhere else."

Smith was silent.

"Strictly for the sake of argument," he asked at last, "where?"

"How the hell do I know?" Remo snapped. "I just know that without Chiun, I don't think I'm strong enough to beat her this time."

"But you admitted that you threw it off a mountain."

"Thanks to Chiun. He made it possible. Until he rescued me, I was its slave. It was awful, Smitty. I couldn't help myself." His voice sank to a reedy croak. "I did . . . things."

"What things?'

"I killed a pigeon," Remo said with thick-voiced shame. "An innocent pigeon."

"And . . . ?" Smith prodded.

Remo cleared his throat and looked away guitily. "I laid it before the statue. As an offering. I would have gone on to wasting people, but Chiun gave me the strength to resist. Now he's gone. And I have to face Kali alone."

"Remo, you do not know this," Smith said sharply. "This may simply be a serial killer with an affinity for yellow scarves. Or a copycat."

"There's one way to find out."

"And that is?"

"If this killer is targeting travelers, throw her some tourist bait," Remo suggested.

"Yes. Very good. The other victims were apparently picked up at the Washington National Airport. That is where you should start."

"Not me, Smitty. You."

"I?"

"If it is Kali, I may not be able to resist her scent. That's how she got to me last time. But you might. She has no power over you. We could set up a trap. You play the cheese and I'll be the trap. How about it?"

"The field is not my place. It is yours."

"And I have a responsibility to Sinanju now. I am Sinanju. I have to go there and see if I can hack it as Reigning Master. But I gotta close the books on Kali before I go. It's the only way."

"You are serious about leaving CURE?" Smith asked quietly.

"Yeah," Remo said flatly. "That doesn't mean I wouldn't take the odd job here and there," he added. "But nothing small. It's gotta be worth my time. Otherwise you can just send in the Marines. I'm out of it. What say, Smitty?"

The line hummed with the silence between the two men.

At last Harold W. Smith spoke.

"As long as you are with the organization," he said coldly, "you will do as instructed. Go to Washington National. Allow yourself to be picked up by this woman. Interrogate her, and if she is the sole cause of these strangulations, liquidate her. Otherwise, call for further instruction. I will await your report."

"You gutless bas-"

Harold Smith hung up the phone on Remo's reply. If there was one thing he had learned in his many years as an administrator, it was how to motivate employees.

Whatever he had become under Chiun's tutelege, Remo Williams was still an American. He would heed his country's call. He always had. He always would. That was why he had been selected in the first place.

Chapter 11

"Screw you, Smith!" Remo shouted into the dead receiver. "You're on your own."

Remo slammed the phone on its hook. The hook broke off, taking the receiver to the floor with it.

Remo started away from the pay phone. Outside, he hailed a Checker cab.

"Airport," he told the driver.

"Dunes or Washington National?" the cabby asked.

"Dulles," Remo said, thinking no sense tempting fate. He had been willing to go to the mat one last time for Smith, but only if Smith would do it his way. He had been doing it Smith's way for too damn long. No more.

"Going anyplace interesting?" the cabby asked.

"Asia," Remo said, cranking down the window against the heat of the warm July day.

"Asia. That's pretty far. Better there than the Middle East, huh?"

Remo perked up. "What's going on there now?"

"The usual. Mad Ass is rattling his scimitar. We're rattling ours. But nothing happens. I don't think there'll be a war."

"Don't count on it," Remo said, thinking that what went on in the Middle East wouldn't matter much to him once he was back in Sinanju. Hell, he wouldn't be surprised to find a job offer from Mad Ass himself waiting for him. Of course, he wouldn't take it. He was going to be particular about who he worked for. Unlike Chiun, who would work for anyone as long as their gold took tooth marks.

The ride to Dulles was short. Remo paid the driver and entered the main terminal. He went to the Air Korea booth, bought a one-way ticket to Seoul, and then went in search of his gate.

As he approached the metal-detector station, he noticed the blond woman loitering outside the ladies' room.

The first thing Remo noticed was that she had the largest chest he had ever seen. It projected out like a triangular form straining to burst the yellow fabric of her dress. He wondered how she kept from tipping forward.

Evidently they were quite a burden, because she picked at her brassiere straps with careless fingers.

Remo noticed her yellow nail polish. His eyes flicked to her throat.

"Uh-oh," Remo said, his pupils dilating at sight of the tastefully tied yellow silk scarf.

Remo ducked into the men's room. Bending over a sink, he splashed water onto his face. He patted himself dry with a paper towel. Had she been waiting for him?

"Maybe she won't be there when I get back," Remo muttered. He went to the door. With a single finger he eased it open a crack. She was still there, leaning against a white wall, her eyes darting to the line of passengers coming down the walkway, laden with luggage and shoulder bags.

Remo swallowed. She looked very young. Not dangerous at all-unless she fell on top of you and crushed you with her sharp chest, Remo thought with forced humor.

Words the Master of Sinanju had told him long years ago echoed in Remo's ears.

"Know your enemy."

Remo took a deep breath and stepped out onto the walkway. He went directly to the girl in yellow. His legs actually felt rubbery. He sucked in a double lungful of oxygen, held it in his stomach, and released it slowly, releasing also the tension in his chest and the fear in his belly.

He was in control enough to smile as he approached the blond.

"Excuse me," he said.

Her head turned. Her blue eyes fell on Remo. They were curious. Almost innocent eyes. Maybe he had been mistaken. "Yes?" she said in a sweet, breathy voice.

"Are you Cynthia?" Remo asked. "The office said they'd send a gorgeous blond named Cynthia to meet me."

Her red mouth parted. Thick brows puckered tentatively.

"Yes, I'm Cynthia," she said. "You must be-"

"Dale. Dale Cooper."

"Of course, Mr. Cooper." She put out a hand. "Nice to meet you."

Remo smiled. She had taken the bait. "Call me Dale."

"Dale. Let's get your bags together."

"Sure," Remo said. He let her lead him to the luggage carousel, where he made a pretense of picking his luggage from the revolving conveyor.

"This is mine," Remo said, grabbing a brown over-the-shoulder bag and a black leather briefcase. "Shall we go?"

"Yes. But we'll have to take a cab."

"You don't look like you have much driving experience," Remo remarked lightly.

"Oh, I'm older than I look. Much older."

She led him to the first cab waiting in line. The driver got out and opened the trunk. Remo saw that he was the same driver who had brought him here.

"What happened to Asia?" the cabby asked gruffly.

"Search me," Remo said, forcing a smile. "Last I heard, it was still in the Pacific."

The driver scratched his head as he jumped back behind the wheel.

"Where is the office putting me up this time?" Remo asked.

"The Watergate Hotel," the girl who answered to the name of Cynthia said quickly.

"Watergate it is," the driver muttered. To Remo's relief, he was silent during the rest of the ride.

Remo made small talk as he took stock of "Cynthia."

Seen closer, she struck him as younger than he had thought. Her body was certainly mature. But her face, under expert makeup that included a purplish-yellow eye shadow, seemed girlish. She had that dewy look.

"Yellow must be your favorite color," Remo suggested.

"I worship yellow," Cynthia said, fingering her scarf. "It's so . . . eye-catching." She laughed. Even her laugh sounded pure. Remo wondered how someone with that kind of high-school laugh could strangle ten people.

He would remember to ask her that-before he took her out.

At the Watergate lobby, Cynthia turned to Remo and said, "Why don't you relax? I'll check you in."

"Thanks," Remo said, putting down his luggage. He watched her saunter over to the front desk. She had a nice walk. A little slinky. She walked in her high heels as if driving tacks with them.

As Remo watched, she leaned over the counter, startling the clerk with her ample bosom. "Any messages?" she whispered.

The clerk's "No" was a croak. His eyes were on her bosom as if it snarled and snapped at him like a pair of pit bulls.

Cynthia thanked him and palmed a key from her yellow purse as she turned.

Remo smiled tightly. His acute hearing had picked up the exchange. And the palming, though slick, was made obvious by Cynthia's body language.

She was taking him to a room she had preregistered. Either her own, or to one that was a convenient dumping ground for victims.

Either way suited Remo Willams just fine. If she was an acolyte of Kali's, he'd soon know where his mortal enemy was hiding. He could decide whether to run or strike, depending on the answer.

Cynthia joined him. "I don't see a bellboy," she said, frowning. A bellboy hovered out of sight. Obviously paid to ignore anyone Cynthia brought in.

"I can carry my own bags," Remo said quickly.

"Great. I hate waiting."

Once they stepped on the elevator, the mood changed. Cynthia stared at the ceiling, lost in thought. Her yellowtipped fingers went to her neck scarf. This time they plucked at the fabric nervously. The loose knot slipped apart. When Cynthia brought her hand down, the scarf floated with it.

This time Remo suppressed his smile completely.

The elevator came to a stop.

"After you," Cynthia offered, her voice cool and tight.

Remo picked up his bags. This was the critical moment. His hands were encumbered. Would she take him before he stepped off the elevator, or wait until they were in the room itself?

He stepped out into the corridor, feeling Cynthia's warm presence trail after him. Her body heat registered on the back of his bare arms. A temperature change of only a few degrees would indicate an impending attack.

But the attack didn't come. Instead, Cynthia got in front and opened the door for him. It was pitch-dark inside.

Remo slipped in, tossing his bags down. He snapped on the light switch. Before he could turn, it snapped off again. The door slammed. The room went totally black. He was not alone. Remo skipped the mock protestations. He shifted to one side as his visual purple adjusted to the blackness. As a Master of Sinanju, he could not exactly see in the dark, but he could detect shadowy motion within the blackness.

In the dark, he grinned in fierce anticipation.

And in the dark, the yellow scarf settled over his throat with a silken snap.

Casually Remo reached up. A supersharp fingernail raked the smooth fabric. The scarf tightened. It parted with an angry snarl.

"Sorry," Remo said. "Yellow isn't my color."

A hiss answered him, low and feline.

Remo snagged a soft, thin wrist. He gave it a twist.

"Oww! You're hurting me!" It was Cynthia.

"Not what I had in mind," Remo said, collecting the scratching fingers of Cynthia's hand in one fist. He pushed the hand back, exposing the wrist.

With his other hand, Remo found the girl's wrist and tapped it once, sharply.

"Oh!" said Cynthia. It was a very surprised "Oh." Remo tapped again. This time her exclamation was dreamy and moist.

As he tapped, Remo drew Cynthia to the light switch. He nudged it with an elbow, without breaking the building rhythm of his manipulations.

In the light, Cynthia looked up into Remo's dark, obsidianchip eyes. There was no anger there. No hate. Just a kind of wondrous fear that caused her pink lips to part. She ran a deeper pink tongue over her lips, moistening them further.

"They call this the thirty-seven steps to bliss," Remo explained in a low, earthy growl. "How do you like it so far?" "Oh," said Cynthia, as if impaled on a delicious pin. Her eyes went from Remo's cruel face to her wrist as if trying to fathom how this ordinary man could reduce her to squirming helplessness with only one intermittently tapping finger. "I don't understand," she said in a surprise-twisted voice. "What are you doing to me?"

"Let's start with your name."

"Kimberly. It's Kimberly," Kimberly said, panting a little. She squeezed down as if cramping. Her thick eyebrows gathered together, forcing her innocent blue eyes into narrow slits of bright cerulean:

"Good start. This, by the way, is only step one."

Kimberly's eyes popped open. "It is?"

Remo's smile was arch. "Honest. Would I kid a blond that had just tried to throttle me in the dark?"

"I don't . . . know."

"I wouldn't. It's such a rare experience. So, tell me. Why'd you waste the Iraiti ambassador?"

"She told me to."

"She?"

'Kali."

"Spell that."

"K-a-l-i."

"Damn," Remo muttered to himself. It was true. Now he would have to take this to the bitter end.

"Take me to Kali," he said harshly.

"I only take offerings to Kali."

Remo tapped once more, then stopped. "No introduction, no happy finger action," he warned.

"Please! It hurts when you stop."

"But it will feel so good when I start up. So what's it gonna be? Do I finish the job or do I leave you here to play with yourself? It won't be half as much fun. Trust me on that."

"Finish me!" Kimberly pleaded. "I'll do it! Just finish me!"

"For a pro," Remo said, bringing his finger to bear again, "you're not very collected about this stuff."

"This is my first time," Kimberly gulped. Her eyes were worried and inward-looking.

"That's a laugh. Is that what you told the Iraiti ambassador?"

Kimberly was no longer listening. She rested one steadying hand on Remo's hard bicep. The other, trapped in Remo's immovable fist, squeezed harder and harder as her eyes squeezed tighter and tighter. The tapping finger continued to strike the sensitive point she had never suspected existed there. A tear leaked out of one eye as her pretty face gathered together, reddening, twisting, apprehensive.

"Something's happening!" Kimberly cried sharply.

The shudder started in her face. It rippled down her neck and convulsed her entire body. Her breasts seemed to actually throb. Remo had never seen breasts throb before.

"Oh Oh Oh Oh . . . uuuuhhh," she cried, uncoiling like an old spring from a sofa. She swayed this way and that. Then all the life seemed to escape her body.

Remo caught her.

"If you give as good as you get, you're probably worth every dime," he said, carrying her to the bed. He set her down, noticing that her chest seemed almost an inch bigger than it had before. The damn thing looked like it was trying to strain free of her dress front.

Kimberly lay on the bed, zoned out, as Remo checked the room. The closet and bathroom were both empty. There were no personal items. It was a setup room.

"Where is she?" Remo asked.

"I will never betray her," Kimberly said softly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Remo collected her purse from the rug. He went through it. Deep inside, he found a brass key. It was stamped with the hotel's crest and a room number two floors down.

"Never mind," he said, tossing the purse on a bureau. "I think I can handle it from here."

Remo drifted over to the bed and, with two fingers, closed Kimberly's dreamy eyes. Then he took her trembling chin in hand.

"You're going to kill me." It was a realization, not a question.

"That's the biz, sweetheart," he said, breaking her neck with a quick sideways twist. When he removed his hand, Remo saw no mark. Chiun would have been proud.

He left the room in silence, thinking that maybe this wouldn't be so difficult after all.

The key fitted the lock on Room 606, two floors down.

Remo paused, his heart rising in his chest. He wasn't sure what to expect. Another idol? A portrait? Kali in the flesh?

Whatever, he knew he would have to hit hard and fast, if he wanted to survive. Remo placed an ear to the door. He heard no organic noises. No breathing or heartbeat. No gurgling of bowels.

He turned the key.

The door eased inward. In the harsh hallway light, Remo caught a flash of maroon drapes. He pushed the door open some more.

The light caught something white and spidery, with too many upraised arms.

Remo hit the light switch, plunging into the room. He flashed for the white outline. One hand out and open, he drove for its vulnerable neck.

Too late, he realized his mistake. His stiffened fingers made contact. The outline shattered into repeating images. The white thing was a mirror reflection.

"Damn!" Remo whirled in place, dropping to a protective crouch, as he zeroed in on the white many-armed thing.

It squatted on a dresser, pale legs crossed, three faces-one looking out, the other two facing east and west-fixed in identical malevolent expressions. The eyes were closed, however. A necklace of flat skulls draped over its pendulous breasts.

Without hesitating, Remo floated up to it. He detected no odor. The last time, it was the hellish scent that had gotten him. There had been no odor clinging to the girl. And this statue was equally sterile.

It was clay, Remo saw. It possessed four normal arms, but other, smaller limbs stuck out from different points in its torso. These lesser limbs were thin and withered.

Remo would dismember the gruesome thing first, he decided.

As if the thought had triggered something deep within the clay idol, its eyelids snapped open. The gash of a mouth writhed in a silent snarl like a Claymation illusion, and a cloying sickly-sweet scent billowed toward him. And the familiar, dreaded waves of psychic force pushed toward him.

Remo struck. A slashing hand slipped through the shoulder area, cleaving two arms and bending others. The clay was soft, Remo found. It would be easy.

Remo drove a fist to the head. He knocked the triple face half off its neck. It gave like soft separating excrement.

The hands came to life. Remo batted them back. Somehow animated, they were still but moist clay. He slapped them back without effort. Clay hands flew from clay wrists. Clay nails raked his face, leaving only slimy whitish trails and clay crumbs.

"Must be the heat," Remo mocked. "You're positively melting."

The psychic waves abated, the dreaded scent grew no stronger. An unhearable voice screamed in defeat.

Grinning with relief, Remo plunged his fingers into the thing's thick white torso. On the floor, the triptych of faces howled in silent protest as Remo kneaded the clay out of shape. His steely fingers constricted. Clay oozed out from between them. He flung clods of the heavy stuff in all directions. Some of it stuck to the walls. The clay make gushy noises as Remo pulled and pushed and separated the heavy white stuff, reducing the ornate body of the thing to a lump of heavy inactive matter.

When he was done, Remo looked around the room. A clay hand was quivering on its back. Remo nudged it with a toe. It flopped over and, finding its fingers, began to scuttle away.

Laughing, Remo brought his foot down on it. The fingers spread out and died.

"Not so tough now, are you?" Remo taunted.

He looked for another hand. He found one, writhing as if in its death throes. Reaching down, Remo brought it up to his wild-eyed face.

The fingers made a futile stab for his face. Remo laughed again as he calmly began pulling the fingers off, one by one.

"She loves me . " he sang. "She loves me not."

When he plucked off the thumb, he said, "She loves me," and flushed the maimed palm down the toilet.

There were no other intact hands, Remo was disappointed to see. He looked around for the head. Not finding it, he frowned.

"Here, kitty," he called, for want of a better term. "Here, kitty, kitty."

When that produced no response, Remo got down on hands and knees and spied under the furniture.

"Not under the dresser," he muttered. Shifting, he saw the head wasn't beneath the writing table either. Nor was it hiding under the chairs.

"That leaves . . ." Remo began, reaching down for the hem of the bedspread.

" . . Under the bed. Boo!"

The head beneath the bed reacted to the sudden light and the sight of Remo's face with horror. The clay mouth formed an O that was echoed by its mates. The opaque white eyes went round too.

"Well, if it isn't Mrs. Bill," Remo said, reaching in for the head. It bit him. He laughed. The teeth were soft clay. It could do nothing. Kali was the goddess of evil, but he was the Reigning Master of Sinanju. He was invincible.

Getting to his feet, Remo carried the protean head to the window. Brushing aside the drapes, he employed one fingernail to score a circle in the glass. The sound was like a diamond-tipped glass cutter at work.

"Don't you just hate that screechy sound?" Remo asked the head, lifting it so its many eyes could see the whitish circle in the pane and the city lights it framed.

"Guess what happens next?" Remo asked the head of Kali. The six eyes closed. And Remo smacked the face into the glass.

It stuck there, the center face mashed flat. The side faces, however, continued their fearstruck contortions.

"Next time, come back as something a little stronger. Like balsa wood," Remo suggested, giving the back of the head a gentle tap.

The glass gave a crack! The circle fell outward. It carried the clay head down eight stories to the pavement below.

Upon impact, the glass circle shattered. Remo looked down.

A matronly woman stopped dead in her tracks before the flat white blob on the sidewalk that was surrounded by a litter of glass shards.

"Sorry," Remo called down. "Temperamental artist at work." Then he laughed again, low and raucously. He hadn't felt so good in years. And he had been so scared. Imagine. Over a stupid clay statue. So what if it was imbued by the spirit of the demon Kali? According to Chiun, Remo was the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer. Remo had never believed that. What the hell would Shiva be doing come back to earth as a Newark cop?

But if he was Shiva, obviously Shiva was mightier than Kali.

Remo left the hotel room laughing. He was free now. Really free. He could do whatever he wanted. No more CURE. No more Smith. Hell, he didn't even have to listen to Chiun's carping anymore.

"Free. Free. Freeee," he sang with drunken joy.

Chapter 12

Remo Williams whistled as he rode the elevator to the lobby.

The cage stopped at the second floor, and a well-dressed man stepped aboard, a copy of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his summer jacket.

"Nice night, huh?" Remo said.

"Indeed," the man said dryly.

"On a night like this, you really understand what life is all about."

"And what is that?" The man sounded bored.

"Winning. Taking care of your enemies. Squeezing their soft doughy guts through your fingers. It doesn't get any better than that."

Eyeing Remo nervously, the man edged over to the safety of the elevator control panel. He pretended to finger a spot on the brass panel that was greasy with skin oils. His hand stayed close to the alarm button.

Remo resumed his whistling. He wasn't going to let some stiff who didn't understand what a glorious night this was ruin his good mood.

The cage deposited Remo in the lobby, where he found a pay phone and dropped a quarter in the slot.

"Mission," Remo said after Harold Smith picked up, "accomplished. Surprise. Surprise. Bet you thought I had deserted you."

"I knew you would not," Smith said without pretense.

"Sure, sure," Remo said. "You probably want my report, huh?"

"The target has been neutralized?" Smith asked cautiously.

"Sleeping the sleep of the dead," Remo said, humming. "And I got the statue."

"You did?" Smith said in an odd voice.

"It too has been neutralized, to use your quaint expression. In fact, to coin one of my own, I would say it's been mashed to a crisp."

"I am glad your mind is free of worry," Smith said, dismissing the matter of magical statues with his brittle tone, "but what about the target?"

"I told you-dead as a doornail. Where did that expression come from, anyway? I mean, what the heck is a doornail?"

"It is the metal attached to a knocker," Smith said. "One strikes it with the knocker."

"Is that so? Imagine that. Smith, I'm going to miss your dictionarylike personality. Your encyclopedic wit. Your-"

"Attention to details. Who was your target? What was her goal?"

"I think she had a grudge against Irugis."

"Iraitis. Irug is another country entirely."

"Irait. Irug. Irun. It's all the same. Except Irun. That's what I'm going to do now. Run. I don't know that I can take more than a week in Sinanju, but at least I gotta break the bad news to the villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll throw me out and I won't have to put up with them anymore either."

"Remo, who was this woman?"

"Called herself Kimberly. Had a mean way with a yellow silk scarf, too."

"And her last name?" Smith asked patiently.

"We never got that personal, Smitty. It's hard to get a complete biography when the target's trying to throttle you."

"She must have had personal identification."

Remo considered. "She did have a purse."

"Please, Remo, we have a dead Iraiti ambassador to explain. I must know who this woman is."

"Was. Dead as a doorknob now. But I'll admit she looks good. Natural, as the embalmers like to say."

"Remo, are you drunk?"

"Smitty," Remo clucked, "you know better than that. Alcohol would upset my delicate constitution. I'd end up on the slab next to poor Kimberly. Of course, a hamburger would do that. So would a hot dog. Even a good one."

"You sound unlike yourself."

"I'm happy, Smith," Remo confessed. "Really happy. I was scared for a while there. Scared because I was going up against something I didn't think I could handle alone. But I did. Kali was putty in my hands. So to speak. Damn. Should have used that line on her. Too late now."

"You are really happy?"

"Really," Remo said, scratching his initials in the pay phone's stainless-steel acoustical shield.

"Even with Chiun dead?"

Silence clogged the wire. Remo put a finishing flourish on the W for "Williams." His open, carefree expression froze, then darkened. Lines appeared. They etched themselves around his mouth, his eyes, his forehead.

"Smith," he said in a small voice, "you know exactly how to rain on my life, don't you, you cold-blooded son of a bitch?"

"That is better," Smith said. "Now I am speaking to the Remo I know."

"Fix this moment in your memory, because it may be the last," Remo warned. "I'm officially off the payroll."

"One last thing, Remo. The woman's identity."

"All right. If it's so important that you'd wreck my good mood, I'll root around in her purse."

"Good. I will remain here." Smith disconnected.

"Bastard," Remo muttered, hanging up the phone.

But by the time he returned to the eighth floor, he was humming.

Remo dug out the hotel key and used it. The door opened to the touch of his fingers. He hummed. The tune was "Born Free."

The moment he stepped across the threshold, the sound trailed away on a puzzled note.

Kimberly lay on the bed just as Remo had left her. Except her hands sat folded under her pyramidlike chest. He hadn't arranged her hands that way.

"What the hell?" Remo muttered.

He hesitated, his ears reaching for any telltale sound.

Somewhere, a heart beat. Remo zeroed in on the sound.

It was coming, he was more than astonished to realize, from the bed.

"Impossible," he blurted. "You're dead."

Remo glided across the rug, his heart beating a little high in his throat. His ebullient mood had evaporated. This was not possble. He had used an infallible technique to shatter her upper vertebrae.

Remo reached for the folded hands, intending to feel for a pulse. One wrist felt cool.

The indrawn breath came quick and sharp, sending the pyramid-sharp chest lifting. The innocent blue eyes snapped open. But they were not blue. They were red. Red from the core of their fiery pupils to the outer white, which was crimson. The orbs looked as if they had been dipped in blood.

"Jesus!" Remo said, jumping back reflexively.

Bending at the waist, the cool thing on the bed began to rise, yellow-nailed hands unfolded like poisonous flowers opening to the sun.

Remo watched them, mesmerized. And while his shocked brain registered the impossible, the corpse came upright.

The head swiveled toward him. It hung off to one side, as if from a neck crick. Her features were milk pale, the yellow eye shadow standing out like mold. The legs shifted to a sitting position.

"If you're auditioning for Exorcist IV," Remo cracked nervously, "you've got my vote."

"want . . . you," she said slowly.

The hands flashed up, reaching for her chest. The nails began tearing at the yellow fabric.

Remo caught them, one hand on each wrist.

"Not so fast," he said, trying to control a mounting fear. "I don't remember promising this dance to the girl with the bloodshot eyes. Why don't you-?"

The quip died in his throat. The wrists struggled in his unshakable grip. They were strong-stronger that human limbs should be. Remo centered his hands and let their opposing force work against itself. The wrists made circles in the air, Remo's hand still tightly attached. Every time they pushed or pulled, Remo carried the kinetic energy to a weak position. The result was a stalemate.

Still, the thing that had been Kimberly persisted, its angry red eyes fixed sightlessly on Remo, head tilted to one side like a blind, curious dog. The cool spidery fingers kept gravitating to its heaving chest.

"You don't take no for an answer, do you?" Remo said, trying to figure out how to let go without exposing himself to danger. Kimberly was no pushover.

The question stopped being important a moment later when a familiar scent insinuated itself into Remo's nostrils like groping gaseous tentacles.

It smelled of dying flowers, musky womanhood, blood, and other impossible-to-separate odors commingled. The stuff slammed into his lungs like cold fire. His brain reeled.

"Oh, no," he croaked. "Kali."

And as his thoughts whirled between attack and escape, Kimberly's chest began heaving spasmodically. It convulsed and strained, and deep in the panicky recesses of Remo's mind an image appeared. It was a scene from an old science-fiction movie. He wondered why it jumped into his mind.

And then the front of Kimberly's yellow dress began a fury of rending, tearing cloth and Remo's horrified eyes went to the things that were breaking free.

And a familiar voice that was not Kimberly's snarled,

"You are mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Chapter 13

Harold W. Smith waited an hour before he began worrying. After two hours, he became concerned. It should not take Remo this long to go through a dead woman's purse.

Smith reached into his right-hand desk drawer and stripped foil from a sixty-nine-cent roll of antacid tablets, causing two tablets to drop into his waiting palm. He put them in his mouth and went to the office mineral-water dispenser. He thumbed the button. Cool water rilled into a paper cup. Smith swallowed the bitter tablets, chasing them with water. After checking for leaks, he returned the paper cup to its holder. It hadn't started to decompose from repeated use yet. He might get another month out of it.

Smith returned to his desk as the phone rang.

He reached for the blue phone, realizing his error when the ringing repeated itself after he lifted the receiver.

It was the red phone.

Smith switched the blue receiver to his other hand and snatched up the red one.

"Yes, Mr. President?" he said with muted embarrassment.

"The lid has come off," the President said tightly. "The Iraiti government wants to know where their ambassador is."

"This is not my area, but I would suggest you arrange a plausible accident."

"It may be too late. They've taken a hostage. A big one."

"Who?" Smith asked tightly.

"That anchorman, Don Cooder."

"Oh," Smith said in a tone of voice that didn't exactly convey relief, but certainly wasn't concerned.

"I won't miss him either," the President said, "but dammit, he is a high-profile U.S. citizen. We can't let these repeated provocations go unpunished."

"The decision to go to war rests with you, Mr. President. I have no advice to offer."

"I'm not looking for advice. I want answers. Smith, I know your man did his best to find the ambassador alive. The FBI tells me he was already cold before we left the gate. So that's that. But what the heck is behind it?"

"The ambassador appears to have fallen victim to a serial killer, who I am pleased to report was . . . ah . . . removed from the scene only within the last hour."

"Who, Smith?"

"A woman I am now trying to identify."

"You mean this wasn't political?"

"It does not appear to be," Smith told the President. "Naturally, I will reserve judgment until our investigation has been completed. But from all accounts, the perpetrator seems to have been affiliated with a dangerous cult that was all but neutralized several years back. Other, similarly strangled bodies, have turned up in Washington. Identical yellow scarves wound around the necks of each of the victims."

"A cult, you say?"

"A single woman, who is now dead. There is no reason to believe the cult is active."

"In other words," the President of the United States pressed, "we don't have any live scapegoat to hang this on?"

"I am afraid not," Smith admitted. "Our task is enforcement, not arranging subterfuges."

"No criticism was intended or implied."

"I know."

"Keep working, Smith. I'll get back to you. I'm convening an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss our response to the Iraitis."

"Good luck, Mr. President."

"I don't need luck. I need a goddamned miracle. But thanks anyway, Smith."

Harold Smith replaced the red receiver. He noticed he was still holding the blue one tightly in his other hand. It began emitting the off-the-hook warning beep. Smith replaced it hastily, thinking that he never used to be so absentminded. He hoped it was age, not Alzheimer's. For if his twice-yearly medical exam should ever reveal such a judgment-clouding prognosis, Harold Smith would be forced to make a call to the President of the United States informing him that CURE could no longer function as a secure arm of executive-branch policy.

It would be up to the commander in chief to decide whether Smith would have to be retired or CURE must shut down. If the latter, it would be up to Smith to close down the organization, wiping clean the massive data banks of the four computers hidden behind false walls in the Folcroft basement and taking a coffin-shaped poison pill that he carried in the watch pocket of his gray vest. For only three living persons knew of CURE. And to publicly admit that it even existed would be to admit that America itself didn't work. When the time came for the organization that didn't exist to vanish, all traces-human and technological-would also have to be obliterated. Only a grateful President would remember.

As for Remo Williams, the human superweapon Harold Smith had created, Smith had several ways of retiring him.

If Remo hadn't already abandoned America forever, which was a growing suspicion in Smith's mind.

His weak gray eyes went to the silent blue telephone.

He felt a vague apprehension, but not panic. There had been so many near-disasters in his thirty years as director of CURE that Smith could not summon up any panic. Perhaps, he thought, that was a bad thing. Fear had motivated him in the past, forcing him to go to superhuman extremes to fulfill his mission. Without fear, a man was too prone to let the tides of life swamp him. Smith wondered if he hadn't simply lost the fire in his belly and if that wasn't reason enough to make the termination call to the White House ....

Chapter 14

"Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Two grasping hands exploded for Remo's throat like pale spiders with yellow feet, a banana-colored silk scarf strained between them.

Fighting the clogging miasma in his lungs, Remo released Kimberly's wrists. Or what he thought were her wrists.

He didn't know what to think. In the instant of time in which his mind was paralyzed by impossibility, his Sinanju-honed reflexes took over.

He got one attacking wrist, clamped hard on it. It felt solid. Whipping away the scarf, the opposite hand snapped it at his eyes. Remo ducked instinctively. He snared the other wrist by feel, and twisted it against the natural flex point.

That hand was solid too. Not illusionary. His furiously working brain had begun to question their reality.

A snarl blew hot breath into his face. And as Remo tightened his death grip, two more yellow-nailed hands snatched up the falling scarf and slipped it over his head.

It was happening faster than Remo could comprehend. He had had Kimberly by the wrists. Yet her hands had exploded toward him. He had grabbed them, and now the others were back, the phenomenon repeating itself like a nightmare record skipping. And an absurd thought welled up in his brain.

How many hands did Kimberly have, anyway?

"You will never escape me, Red One," the voice snapped.

"Wanna bet?"

Pivoting on one leg, Remo launched into a Sinanju Stork Spin, taking the girl with him.

Kimberly's feet left the floor. Her legs lifted from centrifugal force. The silken noose tightened around Remo's throat. He ignored it. This would take only a minute.

His eyes fixed on the spinning figure, Remo watched the room blur behind it. Kimberly was helpless in his grip, her body practically perpendicular to the spinning floor. He had her wrists for sure.

The trouble was, she had another pair of arms that were busily engaged in the serious task of throttling him.

Her eyes were hot orbs of blood. Her mouth contorted in a mirror image of the Kali statue's writhing snarl.

She hissed like a burst steam value.

As Remo watched, the wet scarlet color drained from her eyes.

That struck Remo as a cue, so he simply let go.

The silken noose around his neck jerked, and ripped free.

Threshing wildly, Kimberly struck the far wall with a spasmodic twitching of many white limbs. She collapsed to the rug like a broomed scorpion. Her eyes shut slowly, the red hue fading to a bald white like shelled eggs.

Remo moved in fast, ready to deal the coup de grace with a demolishing snapkick to the temple.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

The sight of Kimberly's now-tattered dressfront did it. It looked as if her brassiere had exploded, spilling white lace and heavy support wiring. Her breasts, pale and pink-nippled, hung from the torn bra. They were very small, practically breastlets.

Remo gaped stupidly, but not at the breasts that had proved to be almost nonexistent. Just under them, lying across her lap, was Kimberly's right arm. Remo registered its existence, noting the banana nail polish.

What made his jaw drop was a second right arm that lay straight out, cradling her crazily angled blond head.

A matched pair of left arms splayed over her left side like puppet limbs after the strings had been cut.

"Jesus Christ!" Remo exploded. "Four arms! She's got four frigging arms."

Hovering just out of striking range, as if before a venomous jungle insect, Remo eyed the bizarre collection of arms. The hidden pair was rooted just below the normal set. All twenty fingernails were painted banana yellow. They were otherwise ordinary arms. Obviously the lower set had been crossed inside her oversize brassiere, clutching the hidden scarf.

The sight made Remo shiver and think of the multiple-armed Kali statue and the terrible unearthly voice that had snarled up from Kimberly's throat.

Years ago he had first heard that voice. In his mind. Kali's voice. And it was Kali's scent in the room. It had been overpowering but even as it faded, Remo shook inside with an unreasoning fear of it. The thing with four arms had been Kimberly. And Kimberly had died. Then it had been Kali. Somehow the spirit of the statue had entered her dead shell and reanimated it.

Still, it was dead now. That was certain. Remo forced himself to approach, fascinated as if at the sight of a dead sea creature flung up on an ordinary beach. But no earthly ocean had spawned the thing that was Kimberly.

He knelt, lifting one bruise-yellow eyelid. The revealed pupil was slack, dilated as if in death.

"Funny," Remo muttered. "I thought they were a lighter blue."

His sensitive fingers felt no pulse of life, no hum of blood, no sensation of life coming through the lifted lid.

Kimberly was definitely dead.

"Little girl," Remo said with relief, "you've had a busy day."

The pupil imploded with life, iris turning cerulean blue to deep violet like splashing paint.

"It's not over yet!" Kali's hateful voice ripped out, and the overpowering smell shot into Remo's lungs like poison gas.

As if through a yellow haze, Remo fought back. But the hands were everywhere, in his face, at his throat, grabbing his wrists, pulling him down, overwhelming him, smothering him.

And in the haze, something was wrapped around his throat, something slick and slippery. And even though Remo Williams dimly understood what that was, and the danger it represented, he was helpless to resist it because the scent of Kali was stronger than his will.

"Who is putty now!" Kali mocked.

When Remo woke up, he was nude.

The dawn light was coming in through the chinks in the closed hotel-room drapery. A ray of sunlight fell across his eyes. He blinked, shaking his head, and tried to throw one arm across his face.

The arm hung up. Craning his neck, Remo saw the yellow silken fetters around his thick wrist.

His startled eyes went immediately to his crotch.

To his horror, he saw the encircling yellow scarf, and an evilly gleaming spot of red at the tip of his erect manhood. He was not greenish-black like the late Iraiti ambassador, but closer to purple.

Remo ripped one arm free. He pulled the other loose. Silk thread smoked and parted. He sat up. The yellow scarves around his ankles were anchored to the bedposts.

They snapped with a single rip of complaint when he retracted his legs.

Remo drew himself into a seated position on the bed. His eyes were bleary, and the ugly scent was like old mucus in his nostrils. Compressing his lips, he blew out through his nose, trying to force the detestable odor from his lungs, his senses, his very essence.

As he did so, he untied the yellow scarf at his crotch and revealed a deeply wound copper wire.

Breathing hard, centering his rhythms, Remo concentrated. His face turned red with exertion, his chest heaved as he forced the blood from every extremity to his solar plexus and from there downward.

His manhood quivered and quaked, expanding until the gleam of copper fell into shadow.

And the copper wire slowly, agonizingly, reluctantly parted, falling away under the inexorable flow of blood.

It was then that Remo looked more closely at the moist red blot he thought was a drop of blood. He saw that it was unmistakably in the shape of a woman's lip print. Lipstick.

And then he remembered how it had been ....

Remo jumped from the bed, calling her.

"Kimberly! Kimberly!"

No answer.

Then, louder, anguished, "Kimberly!"

He plunged into the bathroom, flung open the closet door. The hallway was empty as well. He grabbed up the room phone and dialed the other room, the one he had ransacked.

"Come on, come on," Remo said as the ring repeated itself like a mantra of bells. Getting no answer he slammed down the receiver. He scooped it up again and got the front desk.

"The woman in Room 606. Has she checked out yet?"

"Two hours ago," he was told.

Remo resisted an urge to go from room to room in a blind, futile searching for her. She would not be there. Her last words came back to him, echoing in his ears. The words he had heard after sinking helpless and spent into a languorous postcoital slumber.

"We are mated once more, Lord Shiva. You are mine forever. Seek me in the Caldron of Blood, and in blood we shall together revel, dancing the Tandava that crushes the bones and souls of men as one under our remorseless feet. "

Putting his back to the hotel-room door, Remo looked down at himself. He was still erect. And it came to him why.

He wanted Kimberly. Yet he hated her, with her spidery arms that made his skin crawl. But those same hands had given him more pure pleasure in one night than all the women he had ever known combined.

He had been drugged by her sexual odor, manipulated by her cruel ways. And the very thought of her, the sight of her lipstick brand on him, made him harder, even as he felt his gorge rise in disgust.

Remo plunged into the shower and turned the water on full blast. He soaped himself clean, and when the smell seemed to have gone away, he switched to cold water.

When he stepped from the shower, he was nearly back to normal, his male tool swinging in normal repose.

He looked around the room. The bed was a mess. His clothes lay in a pile. He went to them, pulling on his pants, drawing his black T-shirt over his head. It was torn, as if by an animal. Remo remembered how they had fought to remove it in their fury of lovemaking, his hands and hers. All six plunging into passionate, unholy caresses.

When his shoes were back on his feet, Remo Williams started to leave. Something stopped him. He looked back at the bed. The urge to crawl into it, to wait for Kimberly's return, was growing. The urge to smell her horrible sexual scent was irresistible. He shut his eyes, trying to force the kaleidoscopic memories of their perfect orgy from his brain.

"Damn," Remo muttered. "What did she do to me?"

He returned to the bed and snatched up one of the yellow silk scarves. He pushed it under his nose and inhaled greedily.

The smell hit Remo's brain like a drug. He grabbed a wall for support.

And under his black pants, he could feel his erection return.

Remo stuffed his pockets full of yellow silk and stumbled from the room to the elevator. He walked with one hand hovering over his crotch to conceal the bulge.

Down in the lobby, a fortyish woman carrying a Scottish terrier under one arm was getting on as he was stepping off the elevator. She looked to his strategically placed hand and smiled.

"If you still have that problem around lunchtime, drop on by," she breathed. "Room 225."

"Screw you," Remo muttered.

Her laughing "Exactly what I had in mind" came through the closing steel door.

The cabby was very understanding of Remo's predicament. He asked if Remo had a destination in mind, or was he just planning to play with himself in the back seat?

"Because if you are, the fare's triple," he said. "I know this is Washington, but for that kinda consideration I gotta charge more."

"Airport," Remo said, pulling a length of silk from his pocket and holding it up to his nose.

"I know this place where they specialize in bondage," the cabby suggested as he pulled away from the curb, his eye on the rearview mirror and Remo.

Remo dug his fingers into the heavy mesh of the backseat partition. He squeezed all five fingers.

Grunk!

When he took his hand away, the mesh had a in it like a holed cobweb.

"Airport," he repeated.

"Which?"

"The nearest," Remo bit out. "Fast."

"You got it," the cabby promised. "Hope you don't lose your enthusiasm by the time I get you to her."

But Remo Williams wasn't listening. He was inhaling the sweet musky scent that to him meant pure sex, adoring the odor but hating himself with a deepening passion.

Chapter 15

Kimberly Baynes woke up on her own hotel bed on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel with a stiff neck.

Her eyes tried to focus. The events of the day had come back to her. She had awoken late. The previous day's newspaper lay before Kali, as it always did. But instead of a ripped and ragged clipping, one hand clutched a brochure offering limo service to Dulles Airport that had previously rested on the writing desk. Kimberly had gone to the airport, knowing that Kali would provide the victim. And the man in the black T-shirt had accosted her. And just in time, too. Her bra had been digging into her shoulders something fierce.

The last thing she could recall was that the man in the black T-shirt had been about to kill her. She knew intuitively that was his intent. The hand took her. And a silver light exploded within her frightened brain.

She remembered nothing after that. A warm breeze was coming in through the window, disturbing the maroon drapery. That was wrong. She never left the window open.

Kimberly sat up. First she noticed that all four hands were free. She remembered struggling to unleash the hidden pair with their tightly knotted yellow rumal when the silver light exploded.

So how had they gotten loose? And how had she gotten here?

"Kali will know," she whispered, turning to the nearby bureau.

But where her mistress had squatted, there was only emptiness. Only a moist spot on the polished dresser top and a single white elbow. Disconnected.

Kimberly jumped from the bed, her four arms reaching out. She stepped on an already mashed hand, recoiling with a flutter of many hands.

"Oh, no! Mistress Kali! No."

All over the floor, the vessel of Kali lay in segments-maimed, dismembered. conquered.

Had she been conquered too?

No.

The voice came from deep inside her head.

"Hello?" Kimberly said aloud. "Is that you?"

Yes. I live.

"But your vessel-"

My temporary vessel. You are my vessel, Kimberly Baynes, my intended vessel. I have been preparing you just as you have nurtured the clay that housed my spirit. I gave you the body of a woman years before your rightful time, and so you are a woman in fact. You are my avatar. I am your soul.

Kimberly sank to her knees on the rug. Four yellow-nailed hands assumed prayful shapes. Her eyes closed, her face tilted toward the white plaster sky of the ceiling.

"I know, I've known it ever since-"

Ever since your breasts grew and the nub of Kali's nether limbs sprouted from your sides. Clay is only clay. It served its purpose. I blessed you with two of my many arms, the better for you to work my will. You and I are destined to be one.