Bloody Tourists

Destroyer 134: Bloody Tourists

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

Arby Maple began the day a nobody, but by day's end he would be famous.

First the evening news would introduce the world to this unlikely celebrity with the basset-hound face. Within a day all the news networks would hastily assemble their panels of experts to discuss the Arby Maple phenomenon. Their in-depth analysis of Maple's psyche, distilled into twenty-second sound bites, would be the official confirmation of what the people of the world already knew: Arby Maple was completely insane.

Within a week the garish tabloids would be on the racks in the grocery checkout lines, full of gory crimescene photos.

A paperback book entitled Maple the Man, Maple the Mass Murderer, written by a team of crack journalists, would be in the stores in under four weeks-a tremendous literary achievement. Three made-for-TV docudramas would be produced in time to air during sweeps. By then Maple was more than just another mass murderer; he was a trendsetter. Once he started doing it, it seemed as if everybody started doing it.

All the excitement wasn't going to kick off for a good twenty minutes. Arby Maple didn't know it was coming. Fact was, he was bored stupid and there was no relief in sight.

"I can't decide where to go next!" Natalie Maple said as they left the Hank Jones Auditorium, home of The Hank Jones Show.

"How about the airport?" Arby suggested.

Mrs. Maple's enthusiasm dimmed. "You can't say you didn't adore The Hank Jones Show"

"Sure, I can. I didn't adore The Hank Jones Show. I didn't even like it. Have you ever noticed the empty space on the couch at home when you watch The Hank Jones Show on TV?"

Mrs. Maple shoved the slick city map into his hands. "Okay, Arby, then you decide what we should do next."

Arby handed the map right back to her. "There's not a single thing I want to do next."

"You didn't even look at it!" his wife protested.

"Natalie, you've had maps and brochures lying around the house for months, and I've looked at every single one of them. I figured out weeks ago that there wasn't anything of interest for me in the entire town of Bunsen, Mississippi."

When Natalie got angry she stuck out her lower lip and blew air up her face. It made her look like a bulldog. "Maybe you should have informed me of this little tidbit of information when we started planning this vacation."

"Natalie," Arby said wearily, "the very day you came home with all those brochures I told you no way. No way I wanted to waste my vacation looking at a bunch of old washed-up country-music people in Bunsen, Mississippi."

His wife's eyes were as hard as glass. "You said no such thing."

"Twenty, maybe thirty times I said it, but you had your mind made up. I said it anyway, practically every day since then." Arby shrugged. "But you went right on ahead and bought the tickets and booked the hotel and here we are."

"But it's Bunsen. Where country music was born."

"Eighteen years we been married. How come you haven't figured out yet that I hate country music?"

Lips compressed in a bloodless line, Natalie struggled to come up with a zinger that would put Arby in his place. "You are a real wet blanket, Arby Maple," she declared. "It isn't fair of you to ruin my vacation:" So Natalie went her way and Arby went his. Natalie took the map, and within minutes she had immersed herself again in the magic that was the Bunsen Theater District-America's Country Music Main Street.

Arby, Natalie decided, was an idiot. This town was heaven on earth. There were beautiful shops along Main Street. There was every kind of fine country food, and shops filled with delightful gifts. But the boutiques and restaurants were just the sideshow. The main attractions were the many beautiful theaters.

Natalie had fallen in love with Southern culture when she was in nursing school. She and the other girls would sit around watching a country variety show called Yee Haw! and have a great time. Natalie's roommate, Babsie, was a well-mannered young lady from Georgia who loved to talk about the South.

"Everybody has nice manners in the South," Babsie said. "Everybody calls you ma'am." She would giggle and say, "In the South we think this show is a little, you know, wild, but I like it anyway."

Natalie was from Brooklyn. Brooklyn was crude and filthy and she hated it. Anyplace where the mild shenanigans of Yee Haw! were "wild" was where Natalie wanted to be.

She carried around her impression of the South for decades. Now she was really here. In a delightful little park between two gift shops she relaxed on a bench and looked over the schedule of daily entertainment. That's what Bunsen was truly famous for-all the wonderful entertainment! You were never more than a few steps away from a first-rate performance by some of the biggest names in show business.

Natalie Maple gasped in delight when she realized there was a show by a Russian comedian starting in just twenty minutes. He was her absolute favorite! Talk about big-name entertainment.

As she strolled down Main Street, hoping to get to the theater early and maybe snag a front-row seat, Natalie realized Bunsen, Mississippi was everything she had hoped it would be. Polite, friendly people. Clean streets. She didn't feel the need to clutch her purse against her side for fear of having it snatched.

But then there was her nitwit husband. Arby was not what she had hoped he would be. He was too stupid to know he was in paradise.

Natalie Maple decided something right then and there. This was where she wanted to live. This was the life she wanted. What was Arby going to say when she delivered that little piece of news?

Arby would never move to Bunsen, Mississippi. Not in a million years.

Natalie smiled. This little town just kept looking better and better.

ARBY WAS TRYING to explain that arguing with Natalie was like trying to convince a dog not to dig a hole. "I'm very sorry to hear that, sir." The bartender couldn't care less and left.

"I know just how you feel," said the young man a couple of stools over. "My aunt decided this was the place to go for our family reunion. They're all down the street watching some banjo players."

"Banjos!" Arby Maple said in disgust.

The young man went across to the bartender and came back with two drinks, handing one over to Arby. "It's on me."

"Thanks, friend." Maple accepted it gladly.

"The modern-day victims of Yee Haw! must stick together," the young man announced and raised his glass in a toast.

The Scotch whiskey went down all right, but when it was done Arby had some grittiness on his tongue. "You know," his new pal announced, "the worst thing about this place is the people. The people here are very rude."

"Naw, just the opposite. They're too damn polite," Maple said. "Wait. You know what? You're right. They are rude. They act polite but they're really being rude, right to your face, all the time, and just dressing it up as Southern manners. At least in New York they tell you to your face if they think you're an asshole."

"Drink up, friend," the young man said.

Maple drained the Scotch whiskey and tried to swallow the grainy residue on his tongue. "They can't even wash a glass right."

"You do not like these people," the young man stated.

"You got that right."

"Especially the assholes who work here."

"Yeah, they're the ones who lay it on thick. They're the worst."

"You know who's the worst?" the young man asked. "It's that bartender," Arby Maple growled, rising from his bar stool and clenching his fists.

The young man said quickly, "No, not him! There is somebody much worse."

Maple looked around the small bar, modeled after a quaint gentlemen's tavern that had operated in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the late 1800s. It was empty now. Just the two customers and the asshole behind the bar. The bartender was a miserable piece of dog crap who deserved to get the living shit kicked out of him. But there was somebody Maple hated even more. He just wasn't sure who....

"Who is it?" he demanded.

The young man leaned close and held his mustache in place, pointing with his other hand. Maple looked. Out the front windows, across the immaculately clean Main Street, was a small public courtyard.

"Him," the young man growled. "The guy with the cart?"

"The guy with the cart," the young man said earnestly. "There is nobody you hate more than the guy with the cart."

Arby Maple's lower lip curled. Hot breath stuttered from his nostrils as his body inflated with his passion. The young man was right-Arby abhorred the man with the cart. It was a soul-filling, mind-expanding malevolence. There was no reason why, and this kind of complete hatred needed no excuse. And there was only one thing to do about it.

The Cobbler In A Cup guy had to die.

ARBY MAPLE STRODE from the tavern, crossed Main Street and grabbed the vendor by the collar. The vendor's smile disappeared and his clip-on bow tie landed in the grass.

"Hey!"

But that was all he said before Arby Maple flipped open the lid to the hot-box cart and shoved his head inside. The vendor's face disappeared into the steaming tray of gooey cobbler.

Arby Maple loved the sound of his enemy crying out in pain, but he was disappointed to find that he could only get the man's head and one shoulder through the square opening. He pushed on the other shoulder, then heaved against it and felt a crack of bone as the shoulder went in. The vendor was screaming and kicking his feet.

Maple brought the hot-box lid down, hard, on the backbone of the trapped vendor. Then he brought it down again. The lid was polished stainless steel and was heavy enough to do the job. Maple kept slamming it until he saw the spine give. The legs stopped kicking.

Arby Maple experienced profound satisfaction. His eyes fell on a decorative iron gate, standing permanently open alongside one edge of the park. The crossbar that slid into place to secure the gate was also of solid black iron with a nice hook at one end. Maple wrenched it out of its socket.

He didn't see the people running away from him. He didn't hear the screaming. His hatred would turn on them in a minute or so, but for now he had one thought only: he was going to wipe the floor with that smug son-of-a-bitch bartender.

AS SOON AS MAPLE LEFT the tavern, the young man strolled quickly up Main Street and took cover in the door of a souvenir shop. He was tentatively pleased when he saw the body of the cobbler seller go limp.

Maple wasn't through yet, though. He grabbed a hunk of metal from the fence and went back for the bar. Well, that wasn't unexpected. The man had already been irked by the bartender.

Maple emerged from the tavern with his iron bar dripping blood and matted with hair.

Stop now, stop now, the young man pleaded silently. Arby Maple rushed a crowd of onlookers and began bashing their heads in.

THE YOUNG MAN WALKED despondently through the parklike town, against the flow of security carts and interested visitors heading for the action. His subject was supposed to kill just the one guy. Instead the man was on some sort of rampage.

When he reached his car he started the engine, but paused to pull out his notebook. There were pages of unrelated scribbling inside, but in the middle was a carefully printed chart. At the top of the first column was the entry GUTX-ED-UT1. "ED" stood for Evaporative Distillation, the method used to create this particular batch. "UT" was for Utah, home state of the manufacturing lab, and "1" was the first sample from that lab. Carefully, with his treasured fine-tipped Mont Blanc pen, the young man recorded his findings in the results field.

He wrote just one word: "Imperfect."

Police, fire and SWAT vans were careening into the parking lot as the young man left. A TV news truck was close behind. The young man had to smile when he saw that. Well, at the very least, he thought, this place was going to get some mighty bad publicity and folks would be staying away in droves. And everyone knew what that meant.

Less competition.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was ordering off the dinner menu, a la carte.

"Meatballs."

"A man like you needs more than meatballs." The waitress chomped her gum provocatively.

"Meatballs," Remo insisted.

"The customer is always right. But why not get the dinner? It comes with pasta and garlic bread and a salad."

Remo considered that, then nodded. "You talked me into it. I'll have the full dinner. In fact, make it four meatball dinners."

Her jaw froze midchomp.

"There will be others in my party," he explained.

"Hope your friends like meatballs," the waitress said, trying to sound witty. She cocked a hip at him, just to be sure he was getting the message.

But the customer in the circular booth looked right past her. "Is that a pie case? I haven't seen one of those in ages."

"We have apple and coconut cream, but I recommend the cherry pie." She leaned at him, thrusting out her impressive bosom.

"I'll take it," her customer said.

"Four slices? Or how about a piece of cherry pie for just you?"

"No, no, bring the whole pie. Two if you've got ' em." She stood up straight, looked at him quizzically and departed, her heels clicking on the linoleum. By the time she came back with four salads, she was prepared to make another go of it.

"Doesn't look like your friends are going to make it," she pronounced. "How about you and I get a room at the Hilton down the street and order room service?"

"Here he is now."

Remo slipped out of the deep vinyl booth and approached the man who was standing inside the entrance, smoothing his lapels and looking displeased. When the waitress saw who it was, she vanished into the kitchen.

"Michelangelo, good to see you!" Remo said with a hand outstretched.

"Good to see me? Good to see me?" The new arrival declined to shake hands. "Buddy, you got some serious balls, I'll give you that much. But you got serious troubles, too, you know what I mean?"

"I have a table." Remo gestured to the huge booth.

"I know you got a table. You think I don't know you got a table? You think I haven't been watching you, trying to figure you out?"

"Please." Remo was conciliatory. "Join me for dinner. We'll talk."

"I don't feel like dinner. I feel like bustin' your ass." Remo kept a firm grip on the smile. He never claimed to be an actor and this good-to-see-you shtick was getting on his nerves. To his amazement, Michelangelo "The Fig" Figaroa slid into the booth.

Remo joined him. They could have fit another five or six human beings into the booth without crowding, and the vinyl backs were so high it was like being in a room by themselves. Here they could have privacy.

"I got two guys with guns watching the place, just so's you know. I also had the place closed up. For added privacy."

"Very efficient of you, Michelangelo."

"You think I'd be here if I thought this was a setup? I had every square inch of this place checked out the minute I got your phone call and my guys been watching it ever since. I know you came here by yourself. I know that. Got it?"

"Clear as crystal. Have some salad."

"I don't eat salad. So whoever it is you're expecting to come through the door, they ain't coming. Got it?"

"Read you loud and clear. Here comes the garlic bread." Remo turned to the waitress. "Thanks very much." The waitress knew Figaroa. She set down the breadbasket and fled.

"Bread, Michelangelo?" Remo offered the basket. "Nice and warm."

Figaroa shook his head tightly. "I ain't getting through to you, am I? This ain't no business dinner, because you and me ain't doing no business. I'm here to find out what the fuck you got and why the fuck you're waving it in my face."

"Oh. Okay, then." Remo put down the basket, looking crestfallen.

"So start talking."

"Okay, then. So, I just happened to know that you're a big man around here. I know you've been having some trouble, too, with people moving in on you, like Boss Jorge and the other Mexicans, and I heard you got muscled out of some parts of town and stuff. Then I heard about somebody putting some bad stuff on the street, and some of the stuff is so bad it's killing people and making them go crazy. And I heard people saying it came from the Mexicans and was really hurting their business, and nobody would buy stuff anymore from the Mexicans and so your business was doing nice. I wouldn't have thought nothing of it except that I found out something else."

"Yeah?" Figaroa demanded.

Remo lowered his voice. "The Mexicans are not too happy."

"No shit, Sherlock."

"Boss Jorge's going after you, I heard."

"When? How?"

"Not with men, you know. He's not gonna start a war. He's got a plan that he says will make you a nonproblem for good."

"Huh. That slimeball Mexican ain't got a prayer. How's he gonna do it?"

Remo sat up straighter. "That's what I'm selling, Michelangelo."

Figaroa nodded, then shook his head. He looked at the man across the booth as if he didn't quite believe what he was seeing.

The man who called himself Remo Vu was slim, neither tall nor short. He had dark hair and deep-set eyes that were cold, but the goofy look on his face told you more about who he really was. Michelangelo had noticed the expensive Italian loafers, which were a point in his favor, but Remo Vu was also wearing black Chinos and a black T-shirt. A T-shirt! There's class for you.

"You telling me you want me to pay you, some sleazebag off the street, somebody I don't even know, you want me to pay you for information that may or may not be true."

"Oh, it is true, Michelangelo, I promise."

"You promise? Let me tell you something, Remo Vu, whatever the fuck kind of name that is. I know who you are."

"Really?"

"I seen your kind before, all over the place. A month don't go by that I don't run into another Remo Fucking Vu. And you're all little guys with nothing going for ya except your little schemes and little ideas, and now you're trying one of your little schemes on me. Well, I'm saying no. I'm doing worse than saying no, 'cause I'm going to make sure all the other little maggots know that fucking with Michelangelo Figaroa is a major mistake."

The waitress arrived with a tray of plates and began setting them on the table, frightened and silent. "What is this?" Figaroa asked. "You invite me to a business dinner and you order me hamburger balls, the cheapest entree on the menu? You slap me in the face when you're trying to do business with me? You're just proving my point, Remo Vu. You know what comes next, don't you?"

"No. Do you?"

"Better believe it," Figaroa's voice was low and threatening. "Time for you to start serving as an example for the other maggots."

"Okay. Fine. I give up, Figgy."

That was the last straw. Figaroa was fed up with the smart-ass in the T-shirt, and nobody ever called him Figgy. He pulled out his brand-new toy, glad to have a chance to show it off. The piece cost him a bundle, but it was baddest piece of hardware on the streets of this town.

"Okay, dirtbag, time to talk straight"

"Has Figgy got a new popgun? I'm not impressed, Figgy."

Figaroa's brain boiled. "Look, shit-for-brains, this is a Heckler . It's got twenty rounds in the magazine, 4.6 mm shockers that go twenty-five hundred feet per second. That's like four times faster than a .45-caliber round. Just one of these bullets would rip your heart out through your spine if you were wearing five suits of body armor, which you ain't."

Figaroa couldn't help notice that he wasn't making much of an impression on his audience.

"It's got about as much rise as a .22 pistol," he continued doggedly. "So when I start shooting, it ain't too likely I'm going to get my aim screwed up by the recoil. It fires at a rate of 950 rounds a minute." Figaroa dramatically lowered the front grip and aimed it two-handed at the front of that damn T-shirt. "Now what do you have to say for yourself, smart-ass?"

"I say whoop-de-do, Figgy. Hey, is that thing made out of plastic?"

Figaroa could have explained that the MP-7 was, in fact, constructed using a polyamide material reinforced with carbon fiber. This exotic composite possessed greater tensile strength than aluminum but made the weapon extremely lightweight not even three pounds with a full magazine. But Figaroa was too furious to explain all that, and a second later he was too surprised to say anything.

The machine pistol was no longer in his possession. Remo Vu had it. He actually had a finger in the barrel and was peering at the very expensive weapon with a slight twitch of amusement on his mouth.

Then he pinched the stock of the weapon with two fingers. The entire rear end crumbled.

"I think they should have stuck with steel, don't you?" Remo observed.

Figaroa was now on his third major emotional shift in the past seven heartbeats: his confusion turned to outrage, even as part of his brain was trying to reconcile the impossible thing he just witnessed.

"You can't do that!" Figaroa blurted, not sure himself what point he was trying to make.

"Can. Did." Remo spidered his fingers around the machine pistol, and Figaroa watched it disintegrate as if it were a bread stick.

"You asshole! You know how much that cost me?"

"Chill, Figgy, you'll ruin your appetite. First thing on the menu tonight is a hertz doughnut. Ever have a hertz doughnut?"

Rage and disbelief battling for dominance in his head, Michelangelo Figaroa never saw the hand come at him, fingers pinching his earlobe. And then Figaroa felt pain. Whopping pain. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, and tears rolled down his face-that kind of pain.

"Hurts, don't it?" Remo quipped, then looked expectant.

Figaroa tried to nod, but the pain paralyzed him. He managed to shudder a little.

"I guess you've heard that one. You know, nobody laughs at my jokes," Remo complained. "Now, let's get this first little bit of business over and done with. Listen closely."

Figaroa swiveled his bulging eyes to Remo, which was about all he could do to prove he was listening. "Okay, here's something you'll want to keep in mind," Remo said. "It's about the pain."

Figaroa knew about the pain. His whole existence was pain.

"I made the pain," Remo began.

Figaroa wanted to say "Oh, yes, I understand and I hope you realize I'm being extremely cooperative," but his vocal cords were locked up.

"The important part..." Remo added slowly. Figaroa quivered in anticipation.

"Is that I can make it stop." Figaroa blinked in agreement.

"Now, Mr. Fig, would you like me to make it, ahem, stop?"

More blinking. "Yes? No? Maybe?" Frantic, teary-eyed blinking.

"Okay," Remo said reasonably. "One blink yes, two blinks no."

With more determination than he had ever mustered for anything in his forty-seven years of life, Michelangelo Figaroa blinked just one time.

"Oh. Okay."

Remo let go, and the pain was just gone. Completely. As if it had never been there.

"You wouldn't try anything sneaky?" Remo wondered aloud.

Figaroa worked his jaw and shrugged, amazed and relieved. He was perfectly okay. His ear wasn't even bleeding. He didn't know what Remo Vu had done to him, but it left him without a scratch.

It also left him as mad as hell. "Figgy, I asked you a question."

Figaroa reached for his backup piece but found his second holster empty. A new collection of metal lumps rolled out of Remo's hand. They were all that was left of Figaroa's precious old 9mm Glock.

"You son of a-!"

"Very nice couple from Arizona." Remo took Figaroa by the ear again.

The first pain had been excruciating, but that was nothing. A new explosion of fire filled Figaroa's skull and cascaded down his spine like a lava river. He started to scream.

Something like a steel vise clamped around his jaw.

"Use your inside voice, Fig," Remo said. He released the ear and the pain vanished. "Eat your dinner."

"What?" Michelangelo Figaroa sobbed.

"You heard me. Eat up."

Figaroa tried to bolt from the booth, not once but twice. He scooted no more than an inch before the pain pinchers were on his ear again. Tears of frustration on his face, he began to eat.

A minute later Figaroa's companions in crime entered the restaurant.

"Hey, Mikey, you okay?" asked a mountain of flesh under an ugly mess of wavy black hair. His partner was a bald cherub, just as wide but a foot shorter. Neither of them looked like they wanted to become friends with the man named Remo.

"I'm fine," Figaroa said, voice cracking with strain. "Leave us alone."

"Hey, Mikey, you eating a salad?"

"Hey, Mikey, you been cryin'?"

Figaroa quivered like a poodle standing at the back door with a bursting bladder. He could have ordered his men to gun down Remo Vu, but the memory of the pain was too vivid. He couldn't risk it. He was a reborn coward.

"Go away," he ordered.

"Sure you okay, Mikey?"

"Get lost, would ya!"

The pair left the restaurant hesitantly. Not until Figaroa had polished off his fourth salad did Remo begin asking questions.

"Tell me about your inventory problems, Figgy," Remo said, sliding the first plate of meatballs and pasta in front of the Mob boss.

"I got to eat this, too?"

"Yes. Answer the question."

"I got no inventory problems." Figaroa distastefully pushed the first forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.

"What about all the freaked-out junkies uptown?"

"Hey, they didn't freak out on my stuff!"

"Yuck. Say it-don't spray it." Remo wiped tomato sauce spatters off the tablecloth in front of him. "I heard you sold poisoned crack. Bad crack. Turned a bunch of peace-loving crack heads into violent lunatics. Four people died, Figgy."

"Maybe it was some of my regular customers that got all wired and went all crazy, but my stuff didn't do it."

Remo watched the mobster closely. "You're telling the truth," he said resignedly.

"Damn straight!"

"Eat your dinner."

"What for I have to eat more of this crap? I told you the truth, didn't I?"

Remo didn't seem to hear him, but one hand was suddenly on Figaroa's ear. The fingers held Figaroa's earlobe with so little pressure that the crime boss almost couldn't feel it. Still, the threat alone would have convinced him to kiss his own sister on the lips. He shoveled in more spaghetti and meatballs.

"Okay, so who did supply the bad stuff?" Remo asked. Figaroa just shrugged.

"You know."

Figaroa swallowed hard. "I don't know, I swear on my mother's grave."

"Got any suspicions?"

"No. Uh-uh."

"A hint? A clue? Back-fence gossip? Give me something, Figgy."

"I heard they was freebies."

"Yeah? That means somebody is trying to muscle his way in."

"You'd think, but it wasn't that way. It was just five or six giveaways, and it was just the one time. If somebody wanted to take my business he would have unloaded a whole shitload of cheap junk."

Remo looked dejected.

"It has got to be the Latinos," Figaroa said.

"It's not the Latinos. I questioned Jorge Moroza this afternoon, and he said it was you. Eat your dinner." Figaroa was dismayed when Remo Vu pushed a second plate of tepid pasta in front of him. "I'm full up," he complained, but he dug in.

"You think you got problems?" Remo said. "Upstairs has got me out here playing freaking Columbo. They've got more computer hardware than the IRS, and Smith puts me on the street to try to figure out what's going down."

Figaroa listened desperately, looking for any tidbit of information that would tell him who this man was and what he wanted-and how he did what he did. So what did this mean about Upstairs and computers? The guy had to be a Fed, right? But not like any Fed that Figaroa had ever heard of.

"And all I get for my trouble is a bunch of ethnic attitude from you and Moroza," Remo continued. "You two are a real pair of curly-lip slimeballs. The only way to tell you apart is by the accents."

Figaroa gagged. He had been likened to Moroza once before, and the fool who made the comparison was compost. This time he decided to let the insult pass.

Remo was on a roll. "Cripes, between Moroza's favorite restaurant and this place I've got a coating of grease in my lungs that'll take me a week to hack up. And you know what the worst thing is? All this effort is for nothing. 'Cause when it comes to providing me information, you're just as useless as he was."

Figaroa caught the past-tense reference and knew with certainty that his archenemy Moroza was dead. That should have made him happy. It didn't. He knew who was next on Remo Vu's list. He slurred something through a mouthful of meatball.

"Don't talk with your mouth full."

Figaroa forced himself to swallow the partially chewed mush. "I know something."

"No, you don't."

"I do! I swear I got something that'll help you break this thing open!"

Remo rolled his eyes, seeing right through Figaroa's bluff. So Figaroa was going to die.

Then came salvation. It appeared in the form of Angelo Vichensi and Franco Ansoti, his right-hand men. They had sensed trouble when they came in the first time, and now they were back to put things right. They emerged silently from either side of the booth with their weapons aimed at Remo Vu. Can't-miss shots. Remo Vu wasn't even looking in their direction

"Shoot him!" Figaroa bleated.

The shots never happened. Remo Vu reached up as if to scratch his right shoulder. Angelo Vichensi and Franco Ansoti fell over.

"Oh, my God!" cried the waitress, who stopped dead as she emerged from the kitchen.

"We'll need clean forks for Mr. Fig," said the man whose name was Remo.

Figaroa half rose from his seat so he could see the bodies of his bodyguards. One inch of a fork handle protruded from a tiny wound in Angelo's forehead. Franco had a nasty opening in his throat where his Adam's apple had been.

"My men."

"Killed by cutlery," Remo said. "I could hear those two tromping around in the kitchen like a pair of walruses. But don't worry about it. You don't need them anymore, Fig."

"I don't?"

"Eat up."

Figaroa didn't even consider disobeying. He used his hands.

"Hello? Forks?" Remo said to the paralyzed waitress. "And whatever happened to that cherry pie?"

Chapter 3

Greg Grom pulled the rental Buick to the curb and extracted the photocopied newspaper article. The editorial from a concerned citizen was titled Nashville's House Of Shame.

"The Nashville Police Department has raided the house ten times in eight months. When will they put some of these resources behind a long-term solution?"

The concerned citizen had included the address of the building in hopes of embarrassing the owner into taking action, such as locking the place up. It didn't help. Nothing helped. The dilapidated three-flat continued to serve as a flophouse for crack users and sellers.

Just what Grom was looking for.

The building was a trash magnet, the sidewalk piled with soggy paper and other unidentifiable filth. Guess the residents don't have much civic pride, Grom joked silently to relieve his own tension.

He was startled when one of the trash heaps moved, looking at him with baleful eyes.

The human ruin that he had mistaken for a pile of garbage began to lose interest when Grom just sat there. The head swayed and the eyes narrowed to slits as catatonia reclaimed him or, possibly, her.

Grom lowered the window four inches and called out, "Hello, you there. I have free samples."

The eye slits became as round as quarters and the heap of trash staggered to its feet. At the same time a head emerged from the half-open front door and shouted, "D'you say free samples?"

"Free samples," Grom said.

The human trash pile reached out one shaking hand, and Grom fed a small package through the window opening. The hand snatched at it, and Grom withdrew his hand in panic. The human trash pile missed the little package and fell to the ground, scrambling for it.

The woman from the building was eyeing him suspiciously and approaching Grom's car with her arms crossed resolutely. She was black, twenty-something, and her limp clothing and sallow skin showed the effects of dramatic weight loss.

"Why you giving free samples?"

"It's a method of damaging the local narcotics traffickers' hold on market share."

"You doin' what now?"

Grom winced. "I want a piece of the action," he said, the words sounding stilted.

She sniffed disdainfully. "You think Fumar is gone like you taking some of his what-choo-call 'market'?"

"That's between me and Fumar."

"Maybe I get Fumar right now and see what he says about that."

Other faces now peered from the dingy darkness of the half-opened door and the shattered windows. They all had the starving look of addicts, ruled by a nasty craving that they would do anything to satiate.

Grom saw the same need in the black woman's eyes. Her bluster couldn't mask it. He was already on firm ground.

"Look," he said reasonably, "you don't have to take any if you don't want any."

The woman scowled at the human trash pile as he or she crept into the nearest smelly alley with Grom's little plastic bag.

"I guess Fumar ain't goin' be after us 'cause we took some freebies. But he sure goin' be after you, white bread."

"You let me worry about Fumar." He forced a reassuring grimace and thrust a plastic sample bag through the window.

She took it and hurried into the condemned building. That had to have been the signal the others were waiting for, because the crack house residents came pouring out. Suddenly it was Halloween, and Grom couldn't hand out his treats fast enough to satisfy the eager queue of red-eyed ghouls outside his car window.

When the last of them had scurried back inside, Grom still had three samples in his grocery sack. The black woman reappeared, chin bobbing to unheard music. The free sample had improved her mood.

"I was wondering if you had more samples, white bread," asked the emaciated woman, who inserted her face in the window opening.

"Here you go," Grom said pleasantly; passing them to her.

"You okay, white bread."

"I'm more than okay," Grom said. "I'm a great guy."

She nodded slowly, then vigorously. "You sure are the greatest."

"I'm the nicest guy you ever met. That guy Fumar? He's an asshole. He's always ripping you off."

"Yeah. Yeah! Fucker!"

Grom spoke carefully now. "You are going to tell everybody what a bad person Fumar is."

"Tell 'em?" she cried. "I can do more'n that!"

The crack heads jittered out of the condemned building, agitated and looking for focus. Grom spoke loudly and hurriedly. "Fumar is a very bad man. He is always ripping you off. You want to tell him how mad you are." The crack heads showed rapt attention now.

"All of you, you hate Fumar and you want to spread the word," Grom exhorted. "Tell everyone what a bad man Fumar is."

"I wanna cut him, don't I?" demanded a buzz-cut Anglo man with a steel stud in each nostril.

"You do not want to cut him-none of you wants to hurt Fumar. All you want to do is spread the word."

"Spread the word." The black woman nodded, her eyes now bright with fervor.

"Spread the word. Spread the word about Fumar," the crowd agreed.

"You right," the black woman cried suddenly, "You right about Fumar, and you right about you! You the greatest!"

She came at him, and Grom groped for the window switch but was too slow.

"I love you to pieces, white bread!" Her upper body wriggled into Greg Grom's car, forcing the window down, and she wrapped her bony arms around his neck, mashing her mouth against his. Her breath was putrid. Grom struggled, but his paramour was powered by passion. When she opened her mouth and probed his clamped lips with her tongue he felt the bile rising.

He was saved by a shout from the crack-house crowd. "It's Fumar! He's coming!"

Grom's admirer joined the mob. Every one of them faced the same way, watching Fumar come. And they chanted.

"Spread the word."

"No violence," Grom announced loudly, then added, "Unless he starts it."

"We hate Fumar," the crowd growled. "Spread the word."

"Spread the word."

"Spread the word."

The chant quickly became a battle cry as a tight knot of toughs rounded the corner. Grom pulled the rental car into Reverse.

"You! Yeah, you! Where you think you're goin'!" The towering Latino stalking down the middle of the street had to be the man himself. Fumar was outfitted in embroidered jeans tight enough to profile his manhood and a green polyester sports jacket loose enough to hide his piece. A small army of powerful-looking bodyguards was at his heels, and every last one of them carried a persuader-a crowbar or a section of steel pipe.

Grom knew they had guns, too. The question was if they could get them out and get a bullet into him before he got the hell away. He stomped on the gas, gripping the wheel as the rental screeched backward down the decrepit street.

Fumar grabbed inside his coat just as Grom oversteered and sent the back end of the Buick into a brick building facade. A giant crunch came from the rear end and left Grom momentarily dazed.

He rubbed his temple and blinked to clear his blurry vision, and by then he found the whole scene changed. Fumar and his boys had forgotten about Grom. They were too busy with the chanting crack house crowd.

"Spread the word. Spread the word. We hate Fumar!" The neighborhood drug dealer wasn't used to this lack of appreciation from his loyal customers. They moved in on him, a congregation united by a common hatred.

Grom was so enthralled he forgot his predicament. Had he done it? Was it working? He could see the intensity in their clenched faces, but the crack heads didn't lash out.

There was no violence. At first.

All it took was a shove. Fumar pushed one of the crack addicts out of his way. She was a skin-and-bones teenager who didn't look as if she had enough muscle mass to lift a cigarette, but she struck back at the drug dealer in a blinding fury. Her jagged fingernails sank into the flesh under his eyes and dragged down, tearing skin off his cheeks.

Fumar staggered away, mouth dangling open, but the girl wasn't done. Flinging away the scraps of human tissue, she leaped at him again, clamping her scrawny arms around his rib cage and sinking her teeth into the open wound on his cheek.

Fumar's boys moved in to help, grabbing the girl by her amazingly quick stick arms. The other crack heads crowded around, shouting belligerently, but they didn't touch Fumar's boys.

Now Greg Grom understood. His suggestion had been that they should not resort to violence unless the other guys started it. The suggestion was holding, but the impulse to violence was too strong. They were exploiting the loophole he had provided them.

The inevitable happened. The enforcers began thrusting the addicts out of the way, which was good enough to qualify as "starting it." The crack heads turned on Fumar's boys with sudden savagery.

The crack heads grabbed and bit and slashed with their fingernails. Fumar's boys gave up on their big sticks in a hurry, and there was a flurry of gunshots. Bodies started falling, but the addicts got their hands on a few metal clubs and started cracking skulls. Their obsession gave them a huge battlefield advantage-a disregard for their own safety.

In just seconds the tide turned against Fumar's boys, who quickly came to a conclusion-these weren't just crack heads and waste cases. They were mad animals. They were maniacs. Fumar's boys tried to flee and didn't get far.

Grom was intrigued by a few desperate crack heads dancing around the fringes of the bloodbath and trying to maneuver themselves into the thick of the fighting. His suggestion was still holding. They were in hysterics, but they couldn't break the no-violence suggestion until and unless they were physically assaulted by one of Fumar's men. Grom observed this behavior with the fascination of a true scientist.

But inevitably they managed to insert themselves into the fray and get shot or pushed or hit by one of Fumar's men, and then they were released into a frenzy of violence. Grom thought of a mad dog at the moment the leash snapped-and the cat that had been taunting him was just sitting there; ready to be snapped up. Grom's eyes grew bright. There was none of the scientist in his appreciation for the ensuing slaughter.

Then the mayhem became stillness. Fumar and his boys were obliterated.

One pathetic crack head, the human trash pile who had accepted Grom's first sample, danced around the massacre shouting at the bloody remains. "Spread the word! We hate Fumar!" Somehow, he or she had never managed to get into the fray.

The other crack heads were disoriented and muddled, several of them wounded and some of their number sprawled in the street with Fumar's men.

Of Fumar himself there was nothing recognizable left. The teenage girl who drew first blood had torn the flesh from his body until her fingers broke, then hacked at his corpse with a pry bar until her adrenaline was used up.

Sirens. Greg Grom was startled back to the reality of his situation. He pleaded with the rental car to start, and it did. He begged it to actually roll on its wheels and it did that, too, although some part of the crushed rear end was rubbing against a tire.

The rental car got him across town, which was good enough. He pulled to the curb in a Nashville industrial park. When no one was looking, he yanked off the stolen license plates that covered the rental car tags. He tucked the plates into a sewer, along with his hairpiece.

Then he pulled out his notebook and flipped to his chart, scanning the left-hand column of alphanumeric identifiers. The column next to the list was headed Results.

He found the entry GUTX-SPF-OR1. The Oregon lab had held out high hopes for its patented system called slow-process fermentation. Slow-process fermentation, however, looked like a big fat failure. Greg Grom meticulously penned in his one-word summation of today's trials.

"Imperfect."

Chapter 4

Dr. Harold W. Smith didn't pick up the phone. Mark Howard, his assistant, did.

"Hi, sonny," Remo said, "could you put your old man on the line?"

"Dr. Smith is tied up at the moment, Remo. Give me your report."

Remo stood at a small end table using a house phone in a parlorlike sitting area, which was dwarfed by the vast hotel atrium. It was a classy place, but Remo had stopped noticing hotel lobbies after the first few thousand. "This is grown-up talk, youngster," he said. "I think I better speak to your dad."

"Dr. Smith is tracking an event, Remo," Mark Howard explained.

"Right now?" Remo asked. "Where is it?" Suddenly Remo found himself on a speakerphone, and he heard Dr. Harold Smith's lemony voice over the bad acoustics.

"Nashville, unfortunately, Remo."

"Crap. I'm still in Boston."

"The event has concluded anyway," Smith said without emotion. "What did you discover?"

"I discovered exactly how much spaghetti and meatballs are lethal to an adult male scumbucket."

"That's all?"

"Eight plates, and then the stomach bursts. It's quite a sight."

"That's all you learned?" Smith pressed.

"That's it."

"The bad narcotics didn't originate with Figaroa or Moroza?"

"They didn't deal them and they don't know who did. Figaroa said somebody claimed the drugs were giveaways, but there wasn't enough of it to look like new competition."

"What do you mean, not enough?" Smith asked.

"Huh?" Remo asked. "Not enough means you need more before it's enough."

Without thinking about it, Remo's stance was an instinctive balance of muscle and bone, but it was more that just your average good posture. His stance took into account a hundred factors that any other human being would have failed to sense.

Maybe someone standing beside him would have felt the slight movement of the circulating air, if they concentrated. But they never would have been able to sense, let alone make sense of, all the other shifting pressure waves flickering through the atmosphere.

Remo did feel them, and balanced his body to them just as he adjusted himself to the force of gravity. He didn't feel these dynamics in a conscious way, but absorbed them as part of the ebb and flow of his environment.

The part of his environment he was trying to ignore at the moment was the concierge, an outgoing woman in her forties with mannequin-perfect grooming. She caught his eye and gave him a sultry smile.

Well, Remo thought, you ask somebody to point you to the phone and you're just looking for trouble.

"I am asking about the quantity of the drugs that were distributed," Smith clarified.

"I told you, Smitty, a handful of samples."

"You don't know that," Mark Howard observed. "There could have been thousands of samples distributed on the streets and only a small percentage were contaminated."

The concierge was coming out from behind her desk, moving languidly, eyes locked on Remo Williams as she sauntered in his direction. Remo gave her his back.

"That's true," Smith said. "Figaroa's customers wouldn't be forthcoming with that kind of information so he might not have known. Remo, you could survey the populace."

Remo's exasperation crested. "Okay, Smitty, First, no. Second, the Boston Freak Party happened on one street corner, so even if there's a thousand other untainted doses floating around out there, so what? Third, here's the important part-I'm not Peter Falk and the word investigator is not on my business card."

"I know this-"

"Fourth, you've got so much computer brainpower in the loony bin basement that even Bill Gates would be hard-pressed to monopolize it. Why haven't they figured this out?"

"The data coming in to the mainframes is only as good as the data our gatherers can uncover," Smith explained with forced patience.

"So put the Folcroft Four on the streets," Remo insisted, referring to the mainframes that collected and served data for Upstairs. "Have your Boy Howdy slide 'em in the ass end of that rustbucket battleship you call a car. When you get here you can put them on toy robot treads to move around town."

"I don't think that is a reasonable plan."

"You know what these people drink?" Remo continued. "Ripple. I didn't even know they still made Ripple. I don't even know what Ripple is. But that whole end of town smells like Ripple."

"Remo-"

"I bet the Folcroft Four know what Ripple is. They're way smarter than I am-we both know that. You get them out here, they'll put two and two together in a big way."

"This is foolish. The mainframes cannot serve as gatherers."

"Then get other gatherers," Remo retorted.

"We have the best gatherer on the planet. You."

"Just when I think I've heard it all you go and lay some flattery on me," Remo grumbled. "Well, there was the one time you thought I was just the right one to be framed for murder and electrocuted, but since then, no compliments. So today you don't have any credibility."

There was a sigh. "Remo, it was not a compliment, it was a statement of fact. When no one else can get people to tell what they know, and tell the truth, you can do it."

"There's lots of things I can do better than other people-" Remo said.

"I'll bet there is." It was the concierge. She lounged on the sofa by the phone, one long leg crossed on the other. A dressy high-heeled sandal dangled from her toes. Remo had been pretending she wasn't there, but she didn't get the hint.

"Who's that?" Smith demanded.

"Hold on," Remo said. "Who are you?"

"I'm Madelaine," she purred. If her blouse had not somehow become unbuttoned almost to her belly, her white lace bra wouldn't have been so exposed.

"She's Madelaine," Remo said to Smith.

"I didn't want you to ask her name," Smith responded, his voice becoming more tart.

"I'm the concierge," she said.

"She's the concierge," Remo relayed.

"Remo, I don't care," Smith said.

"I do things for people," Madelaine breathed.

"She does things for people," Remo told Smith.

"I don't care," Smith insisted. "I meant-"

"What kinds of things?" Remo asked the woman.

"For you? Anything."

"Smitty, great news," Remo said into the phone. "She'll do anything. So you can have her walk the Boston beat" Smith came close to raising his voice.

"Remo, please stop this foolishness."

"You first" Remo hung up, then severed the cord from the phone with a tug.

Madelaine was delighted. "Now it's just the two of us."

"Yeah, well, not counting the fifty people I can see in the restaurant and the bar and at the front desk."

"Forget them. Let's go to your room."

Remo shrugged. "Sorry, Madelaine. I can't tell you how great you've been. I mean, who'd have thought I'd get so much personal attention just because I asked where the phone was? But I'm off to Nashville."

"Can I come?"

"Without a doubt. But not with me."

Madelaine sat up suddenly. She was alone, just like that. The hunk in the T-shirt had vanished.

She stood and looked all around before glimpsing a figure in a black T-shirt slipping through the stairwell doors. Was that her hunk? He could never have traveled that far through the obstacle course of the lobby in just a couple of seconds.

Could he?

Chapter 5

"Cue the music," the director ordered.

From the speakers came a swell of steel-drum rhythms with an underlay of romantic strings. "Action," the director called.

The camera on its lofty crane perch drank in the scenery of lush gardens embracing the base of palm trees, which stretched over the sugar-white sandy beach and the turquoise Caribbean Sea.

The camera crane descended to the level of the woman in the bikini, strolling on the shore with the waters tasting her toes. Her lithe body was deeply tanned but detailed with freckles. Her hair was luxurious and dark, with just enough of an auburn hint to match the terra-cotta trim of the white bikini and the translucent wrap on her waist. She looked off camera, admiring the glorious tropical view, and produced a smile. The smile, warm and provocative and friendly all at once.

Todd Rohrman smiled along with her. He always did. She was something special. You couldn't put your finger on it, but you knew she had a gift of, well, attractiveness. Everybody liked her. Men lusted after her, and women gravitated to her as if she were their best friend. People just wanted her.

She turned from her beautiful view of the beautiful ocean, looking directly into the camera with her beautiful blue-green eyes.

Rohrman thought, She's looking right into the minds of every man and woman who'll see this commercial. She's unbelievable.

His trousers buzzed.

Rohrman retreated on tiptoe through the snaking cables and equipment tables. He didn't answer the phone until he reached the pool deck, but the caller hadn't given up.

"Hello, Todd, this is Amelia. I have the president on the line. He would like to speak to the minister."

"It'll have to wait. They're right in the middle of the new commercial shoot," Rohrman said.

"He's calling from the United States, Todd," Amelia Powlik pressed.

"This island is the United States, Amelia."

"The mainland, I mean."

"He'll have to wait," Rohrman said patiently.

"He's meeting with federal officials in two minutes," Amelia insisted.

Rohrman didn't get excited. Sometimes people just didn't understand the pecking order around here. Even people who were a part of the pecking order. "I will not interrupt the minister of tourism in the middle of a shoot."

Amelia pursed her lips with displeasure-Rohrman didn't have to see her to know she was doing it. Below him they were doing another take of the same shot, this time with a reflector positioned to backlight that beautiful mass of dense hair. Nice, Rohrman thought approvingly. The auburn highlights glimmered in the added burst of backlighting, and the vision of loveliness in the bikini was even more radiant.

"This is the president," said a new voice on the phone.

"This is Todd Rohrman, Mr. President."

"Why am I not speaking to the minister of tourism?"

"As I explained to your secretary, Mr. President, there's a shoot today."

"Mr. Rohrman, I am the president of Union Island, and I want to speak to my minister of tourism. Now."

"Sorry, Mr. President. Not until the shoot is done."

There was a long, tired sigh. "Oh, all right."

"It will just be a few minutes-maybe ten," Rohrman added cheerfully. Then Todd got to do one of his favorite things in the whole world.

He put the president on hold.

THE DIRECTOR WATCHED in the monitors, which received video feeds from all the cameras. It was their eighth take of the afternoon, but the star of the commercial didn't show it. She gazed into the lead camera, and even the director felt as if she were looking directly at him. When she spoke it was both intimate and friendly.

"I am Union Island," she said with her delicious half smile. "Come to me."

She was perfect. She stirred you up when she talked like that.

"You nailed it," he told her as they viewed the shot a minute later. "You got it just right."

"Thank you." She smiled like that even when she wasn't being filmed. "It's good working with you again, Hal. I can't wait to see the finished spots."

Hal, the director, was about to offer to show her the finished spots personally, but the proposal, which he had been practicing for weeks, was laid waste by an announcement from the rear of the set.

"I have the president on the phone for the minister of tourism."

Excitement seemed to ripple through the crew. "Bye-bye, Hal. Thanks so much." The woman in the bikini threaded her way through the set, shaking hands and offering her thanks to every one of the crew, all the way down to the Florida State University sophomore who was interning with the sound engineer. "How did I look?" she asked Todd Rohrman.

"You turned me on."

"Come on!"

"Almost. Seriously."

She gave him a doubting look and took the portable phone.

She said, "Minister Summens speaking."

Todd Rohrman strolled away to watch the set teardown.

After all, government leaders needed their privacy when discussing matters of state.

"MINISTER SUMMENS, what's our communications status?"

"Wide open, Mr. President," replied Dawn Summens, professional bikini model and Union Island minister of tourism.

"I see," the President said.

The president always had a hard time improvising on an unsecure phone line.

"How are your visits going with the U.S. officials?" she asked leadingly.

"Good. Yes, productive. Constructive. I would like to discuss them when you have time."

"I'll be available in my office between seven and eight this evening, Mr. President."

"Fine. Talk to you tonight, Minister Summens."

"Goodbye, Mr. President." Summens killed the connection.

"Moron," she muttered under her breath.

Chapter 6

The white man wore only a T-shirt. If he was cold in this unseasonably chilly evening, he didn't show it. If he was concerned about being alone in the worst part of town, he wasn't showing that, either. Maybe, Antoine Jackson thought, he was a crazy man. He'd heard some white men did some mighty stupid things.

But in sixteen years he'd never seen a white man acting this stupid.

He dragged on the front window of his mother's second-story apartment and yelled, "Man, what are you doing here?"

The white man looked right at him as if evaluating him for a moment, but he never slowed his pace. "You ought to stay out of that place! They'll kill you in there!"

The white man ignored him. "I'm just trying to help you out."

The white man waved and went to the door of the crack house without hesitation.

Antoine slammed his window. He tried to be a good kid-Lord knew that was tough enough living in the Nashville slums. He tried to be decent to his fellow human beings. But sometimes people just didn't want your sincere help. Let the white man go get himself killed if that's what he wanted. Nothing more Antoine could do about it.

THE WHITE MAN PUT his hands on the door and waited until he saw the shadow of the young man disappear from the window. The kid was partly right. Somebody was going to get killed.

He felt the movements of people inside the condemned building, and his nostrils were assaulted by the acrid fumes of burning trash.

The quick slap with the flat of his hand looked feeble, but the blow cracked the door at the bolt and sent it swinging open.

"Special delivery!" He stepped inside and nudged the door closed. "Candy-gram! Pizza boy! Anybody home?" The foyer of the condemned apartment building was empty. At the foot of the stairs anyone else would have heard only silence, but he detected activity in the ground-floor rooms and movement upstairs.

The ground-floor inhabitants were his first consideration. But those upstairs might try to make a break while he was otherwise engaged. And he hated to do a half-assed job. He grabbed at a broken steel folding chair and dismantled it into components with a few snaps of his fist, then straightened the longest section of black metal tube and jammed it between the wall and the stair rail six inches off the ground.

That would slow whoever descended from the upper floors.

He strolled through the door of the first ground-floor apartment. The tiny living room was bare, but the burning stench was potent.

"Fire inspector! You need a license for a cookout in this city, you know."

The simmering coals of a fire glowed on a makeshift fireplace of scavenged bricks in what had once been a bedroom. The charred remains of rotted timber, old wooden signs and melted plastic soda bottles littered the floor.

He heard his assailant coming and waited until the noisy footsteps were close, then he intercepted the attacker with movement that looked like quick-seeping mercury.

The attacker was street scum, a crack dealer who used a little too much of his own product. His clothing and hair were filthy; his face had dirt crusted in the creases.

His dirty creases grew when his mouth gaped open. His mouth gaped open because he suddenly found his handgun flying out of his grasp as if it had sprouted wings. The man he thought he was sneaking up on was now holding him by the collar, and there were several inches of empty air between his dangling feet and the floor. "Cleaning service!"

"I didn't order no cleaning service, man!" the drug dealer wailed.

"Somebody did, and man, this place needs it."

"I ain't payin' for no fucking cleaning service!"

"Somebody else is footing the bill:"

Before he protested further the dealer's skull was knocked against the wall hard enough to crack it open-and then he was beyond complaining about anything. The corpse got nudged into the closet as it collapsed.

A buzz-cut man scrambled out of his closet hiding place to escape the cadaver that tackled him.

"Who are you, man?" he demanded.

"I'm the florist," Remo Williams lied.

"You killed Drago, man. Killed him with your bare hands. How'd you do that, man?"

"Even we florists need to know self-defense-they taught judo at the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago." Remo was lying again. He had never attended the Flower Arranging Academy of Chicago. Or any floral trade school, for that matter.

"You killed Drago. You killed Drago!" The young man snatched a switchblade from his jeans pocket, "You killed Drago!"

"Are you trying to tell me I killed Drago?"

The young man leaped at Remo with a screech like a rabid beast. Remo extended his arm, letting the flying man connect with his fist, cutting off the noise. The knife wielder's nose exploded across his face and his body cartwheeled before he slammed to the floor. Remo made a quick punt and the knifer's head arced through the air.

In the door a straw-haired woman, as clean-cut as Janis Joplin, issued a grunt of horror and bolted. Remo followed her out of the apartment and into another down the hall. Her pig snorts of panic were joined by the howling and grunting of two other people who stormed out of the bedrooms to stand by her side. More addicts-dealers. But there was something else going on here. The three of them stood in the empty apartment living room and screeched and howled wordlessly, crouching like apes, clawing at the air in front of them. Remo came at them slowly, but their howls became throat-tearing screeches.

"Is that all you have to say for yourselves?" Apparently it was.

"You the nice folks that offed a local distributor named Fumar?"

One of them, a tall white man in torn jeans, managed to get words around his howls. "Kill you!"

He bent and charged Remo. Maybe he played football before crack claimed his brain. Remo applied a palm to the top of his head, creating a tremendous amount of force that compressed the attacker's vertebrae into one fused bone-mass.

The other man whirled a crowbar overhead, issuing a catlike yowl. Misjudging his clearance, the crowbar lodged in the ceiling and he looked up to see what the problem was. Remo drummed his knuckles on the man's chest as if he were knocking on the neighbor's front door.

The druggie forgot the crowbar and concentrated on the fact that his heart had begun pounding as wildly as a rubber ball in a tiny box. He ran blindly into a wall and fell to the floor, dying in spasms.

The woman made singsong wails that came with each exhalation, her mouth pulled back over her teeth like a chimp in a snit. Despite her apparent mania, she calmly leveled the mini-Uzi she had grabbed from somewhere and squeezed the trigger.

Her chemically altered state left no room for skill, and she emptied the entire magazine in a single continuous stream of rounds that crashed into the wall of the room and somehow managed to get nowhere near her intended victim, who slithered away from wherever she directed the fire.

Remo lifted the Uzi out of the crack queen's grasp when she still had a single round left in the magazine and, with a blow to the head, snapped her off like a light.

He heard footsteps and the tumbling of bodies tripping over his booby trap on the stairs. He found two men scrambling to their feet. They were junkyard warriors. One had a piece of old chain, while the other possessed a ragged steel bar. They spotted Remo and instantly began howling, bansheelike.

Whatever was going on here wasn't pleasant, and Remo considered the possibilities as the two howlers came at him. Remo had run into his share of drug users in his day, and none of them made such a racket. It wasn't just ghoulish; it was annoying.

"Oh, be quiet!" He grabbed the iron bar from the first attacker and used it to absorb the blow of the second attacker's chain. The chain looped around the bar and lifted it out of the attacker's hands. Suddenly the bar was descending on them both, the point crashing through the first skull with such momentum it was carried well into the second skull. The first attacker collapsed with a good portion of his brains splattered on the walls and floor around him. The second fell on his back with the bar sticking straight up like a flagpole.

The deaths were witnessed by a group at the top of the stairs and started them all yowling, which got on Remo's nerves. He loped up the stairs in long strides and grabbed the first crack head he came to, hurling him over the railing to the landing below, where his vocalizations stopped with a bony crunch.

A crack head bashed his vodka bottle on the floor. Half the contents spilled out, and the air filled with the smell. Remo lifted the glass weapon out of the crack head's hands and inserted it in his chest, twisting and slicing a perfect circle of empty space where much of his rib cage and heart should have been.

The final crack head ran into an empty apartment and tried to slam the door behind him, only to find his attacker standing right there at his side. His howl died to a curious "Urk?" and he died with it, as his trachea shattered and his breathing apparatus stopped functioning.

There was a rustle from above and Remo drifted up to the third story, following the sounds to the doorless entry to another apartment. A zinc trash barrel stood in the middle of the room, smoking slightly from a fire that had been allowed to die out. A hairy, greasy man was struggling to claw his way through the narrow window, snuffling and grunting like a dog digging its way under the fence.

"Let's talk," Remo suggested. The hairy man's mouth fell open. "Please?" Remo added.

All he got was a high-pitched hyena wail.

"Oh, can it!" Remo swept the metal garbage container across the room, where it slammed into the screamer and crushed him into the window frame, shattering most of his skeletal system and silencing him instantly.

Remo listened. There were no more animal-like howls. More importantly, he could hear no other heartbeats or furtive movement inside the building.

Grabbing the boneless dead man, he tromped to the second floor and collected an armful of corpses. On the first floor he sat all the dead druggies together, rifling their clothing for paraphernalia and coming up with a few large plastic bags of white powder, a few plastic-wrapped rocks of crack cocaine and a couple of syringes. He broke the needles and pocketed everything else.

Down the street was a tiny neighborhood grocery that looked like a miniature prison. The windows were barred. A heavy steel gate covered the door.

Miraculously, the pay phone on the sidewalk functioned. Remo depressed the one button and held it. Somewhere, magic computerized connections were made. A wind blew and his body adjusted automatically to the chill.

"Luigi's Pizza," said a computer-simulated voice on the other end of the line.

"I want an extralarge pepperoni, delivered," Remo said. A scrawny man stalked to the phone booth, wearing so many gang colors and insignias he looked like an Eagle Scout who had gone over to the dark side.

Remo nodded. "Evening. The weather outside is frightful. Dum, dum, delightful."

"Man, what're you doing on my telephone?"

"Remo? What did you say?" said a new voice on the line.

"I'm talkin' to you, boy. What're you doin' on my phone? You know this is my place of business."

"Hold on, Luigi," Remo said, then turned to the gangbanger. "I thought you guys used cell phones these days."

"Usually I do, but there's times I need a public phone, and it's that phone right there. Now you get off my phone."

"You work with those clowns in the big green building down the street?" Remo asked.

"What's it to you, boy?"

"I just took this off them," he said, pulling one of the largest of the plastic bags of white substance out of his coat pocket. The dealer became very still, steam hissing out of his nostrils.

"Remo, what's going on?" Harold Smith demanded.

"Just hold on, Luigi."

"You a cop?" the dealer demanded.

"Just an interested bystander."

"If you ain't a cop, then you're moving in on my territory!" Reaching into the back of his pants, he yanked out a snubby handgun. "Hand it over."

Remo extended the dope and let go of it. In the moment the drug dealer's attention was distracted by the plummeting bag of controlled substance the handgun somehow became turned around in his hands, with his thumb depressing the trigger. He started to shout, and Remo nudged the muzzle of the weapon into his mouth. A great red mess suddenly covered the sidewalk. Remo snatched his bag of drugs before it hit the ground.

"I'm here, Smitty."

"Are you calling me from the middle of a job?"

"No, job's done. I just got tangled in some superfluous details and now they're untangled."

A man in a sleeveless undershirt and a dirty apron stepped out of the front of the grocery, looked down at the corpse and the mess on the sidewalk, then peered quizzically at Remo. Remo shrugged. The grocer retreated inside.

"You get any samples?" Smith asked.

"Got 'em. You were right about the perpetrators. They howled like dogs."

"Get those samples shipped here ASAP and maybe we'll figure out what's making it happen."

The wail of a siren filled the dingy block, and a Nashville Police Department squad car rolled around the corner. As the crowds gathered, Remo slipped through the cops trying to take control of the scene. A scene that appeared, as unlikely as it seemed, to be a suicide. The victim was on the ground with the front end of his handgun wedged squarely in his mouth, hand on the trigger.

If only a few more drug dealers took care of themselves like that, one of the cops observed, the world would be a better place.

The police never even saw Remo slip past them.

Chapter 7

The colors of the late-afternoon sun played over the peaceful community of cookie-cutter duplexes in Stamford, Connecticut, painting bright colors on the windows and lengthening the shadows of hopscotching children. Inside one of the duplexes a phone started to ring.

The ringing lasted twenty minutes. It stopped, then rang again, for twenty more minutes.

The childlike figure in the kimono sat cross-legged on the mat in the empty-looking living room, performing a nearly impossible feat: ignoring the ringing. Truly ignoring it. The endless electronic jangling did not annoy or even distract him. This was not a child at all, but an old Asian man. So old, in fact, he could have used his age to make himself a celebrity, had he chosen to.

There was a sheaf of empty parchment pages on the mat. There was another such stack on a mat across from him. A quill pen was placed next to each stack of paper. He ignored these as well. He was staring into space, not smiling, but somehow with contentment on a face that was as dry and pale as the parchment but far more wrinkled. When the phone paused and started to ring yet again, the Asian rose and lifted the receiver from its wall mount. He put it to his ear, saying nothing.

"Master Chiun, is that you?"

"Yes, Emperor Smith."

"Were you out?"

"Out of what?"

"Is something wrong, Master Chiun? Were you sleeping?"

"I have been reciting Ung."

"I see. I've been letting the phone ring for the better part of an hour."

"I was reciting Ung. It is an absorbing and beautiful literature."

"I see. Well-"

"The people of the Western world cannot allow their attention to rest on any one thought for long. They are children who become bored with playthings and look for another plaything and then another."

"I suppose that's true-"

"I blame Homer."

HAROLD SMITH HAD been struggling to change the direction of the conversation. He knew little of Ungian poetry, other than it was extremely lengthy and endlessly repetitive, and he knew the old Korean named Chiun could lecture about it for hours, interweaving his diatribe with discourses on the inadequacies of those who didn't enjoy it-a population that likely included everyone on Earth save Chiun himself.

But now the old Master of Sinanju had piqued his interest. Smith studied the classics during his university years, which was decades earlier, and was proud that he retained much of his classical education.

"Surely you don't mean the Greek poet Homer?" Smith asked.

"Of course I mean the Greek poet," Chiun sniffed. "Has there ever been another famous Homer?"

"Not that I know of," Smith agreed. "But Homer penned the great epics." He knew he shouldn't be having this conversation, but somehow he couldn't steer off the subject.

"Pah. He made outlandish adventure tales," Chiun retorted. "He put sex and violence and low-brow ribaldry on every page to keep the dim-witted entertained, and he broke his stories into convenient segments that could be read quickly before the reader lost his concentration. From there it was just a few short centuries before that abominable playwright popularized the formula for the masses. Now the West produces hackneyed films and miserable, fatuous 'literature' that is all derivative of the abhorrent formula Homer scribbled on vellum three thousand years ago."

"I don't think you understand the true impact his writing had on the world," Smith insisted.

"Ungian poetry, on the other hand, is written without the artificial structure of a series of events that lead a character careening without purpose into one hair-levitating quandary after another. Ung explores a single, simple aspect of nature. It gives full value to its subject, be it a flower or a cliff face or a lichen mass in a tidal pool. It is truly in harmony with the nature it celebrates."

"But Homer can be appreciated by the common man," Smith countered. "In fact, the Iliad was likely a transcription of stories that had been in the oral tradition for centuries-the Odyssey may have been, as well."

"Circuses for the rabble," Chiun declared. "Thank goodness his rivals in certain neighboring empires saw wisdom in hiring competent assassins to carry out a literary coup de grace before he could distribute his other stacks of quill scratchings. I can't imagine what seventeen more 'epics' would have done to further degrade the Western intellect."

Smith was flabbergasted at the implication. "Are you saying Homer was assassinated by Sinanju?"

"Trust me, Emperor, the other epics are as lacking in merit as the two that are known to the modern world."

Smith's dismay deepened. "Master Chiun, are you saying Sinanju possesses them? That you've read them?"

"What is the purpose of your call, Emperor Smith? Remo has not yet returned, and when he arrives he will be indisposed for many hours."

Harold W Smith, with an effort, forced himself to focus on the cold data windows filling the display under the surface of his great, black onyx desk. These dispassionate reports were his world. Why had he become so distracted? "I am afraid Remo's not returning to Connecticut tonight. He's in Nashville."

"I see," Chiun said after a frosty silence.

"There's been another event. I'm hoping he'll be able to catch up to whatever person or group is making it happen."

"I understood that was the purpose for which he was dispatched to the city of beans and arsonists," Chiun retorted acidly. The old Master and his son had lived in Boston for years, the sole inhabitants of an old, renovated church. It was the closest thing to a real home the pair had known in all the years they were contracted to the organization Dr. Smith headed, but the building burned to the ground in a fire set by irate mobsters. The irate mobsters were extinguished not long after the blaze they set, but Chiun was still bitter over the loss of his Castle Sinanju.

"Remo was unable to identify the perpetrators in Boston," Smith explained.

"That is to be expected. He is a good son but, between you and I, Emperor, he is not the brightest bulb in the toolshed."

"Uh." Smith had to think about that one for a moment before he sorted out the mixed metaphor. This conversation was definitely not going as efficiently as he would have hoped. "Yes, Master Chiun, which is why I was hoping you would join Remo in Nashville. He could benefit from your incisiveness."

"Ah," Chiun said in a singsong sigh. "I understand. But I have no wish to leave my home at this time." Smith continued. "He is a skilled Master and he has been trained flawlessly-"

"Yes, that is certainly the case. But he lacks your wisdom."

"I understand completely, Emperor." Smith could almost see the appreciative half smile on the face of the Korean centenarian. "In the ways of the mind, he is a child, really."

"An amateur thinker," Smith added.

"Yes! Those are the perfect words," Chiun agreed with a squeal of enthusiasm.

"He may be biting off more than he can chew in Nashville if there is much deductive reasoning called for."

"We can only imagine what sort of mischief he might cause. I believe I should join him immediately."

"An excellent notion, Master Chiun."

Dr. Smith hung up feeling satisfaction with how he had handled Chiun. Getting Chiun to change his mind on anything was a major victory. Smith still shuddered at the memories of the contract-negotiation sessions he endured with the old Master.

In recent months Chiun had been somewhat of a recluse. Smith knew that, after the Rite of Succession, when the Reigning Master of Sinanju passed the torch to his protege, the elder Master often retired to a life of seclusion. Smith was aware that there was a cave outside the Korean village of Sinanju that was the traditional hermitage of retired Masters.

Smith had mixed feelings about this possibility. Remo Williams was extremely capable in his role, but Chiun could be a godsend at times.

It wasn't even that Chiun had time and again been the catalyst to success in the organization's various undertakings. It was that he was a part of a team. Remo and Chiun. There had never been a time when it had not been the two of them working together.

The pairing had come about many years ago, when Smith needed muscle-when his organization remade itself from being simply a clearinghouse of information to an agency of enforcement.

The agency was named CURE. Smith steadfastly thought of the name in all capitals, like an acronym, but it wasn't. The name had come from the mind of a U.S. President who decided that the escalation of crime and mayhem needed a solution-a CURE for a sick nation.

This President, as young and idealistic as he was, understood that the government agencies designed to rein in crime, within the limitations set by the U.S. Constitution, weren't doing the job. The laws of the land tied the hands of law enforcement, but the criminals ignored those laws.

So CURE was set up to maintain the integrity of the Constitution by ignoring the Constitution. To protect the freedom of Americans by violating their rights to privacy and due process.

Creating CURE would have decimated the reputation of even a wildly popular President if it became public knowledge, but the bigger worry came from the potential for abuse. CURE, operating virtually without accountability, represented incredible power. And power corrupts.

So the young President looked for an incorruptible man to run it. One whose ethics were incontrovertible, whose self-discipline was steel, whose patriotism was unquestionable.

Somewhat to his own surprise, the President, not long before he was assassinated before the eyes of the world, found a man to fit the bill. An ex-CIA computer expert, not the most charismatic man you'd ever meet, but Harold W. Smith had all the qualifications to take on the awesome responsibility of CURE.

That burden of responsibility expanded when it became clear that simply finding and exposing illegal activity had minimal impact. Smith and his network of oblivious operatives uncovered more illegal acts than the FBI and the CIA combined. but all Smith could do was surreptitiously pass the intelligence along to other agencies to take action. Sometimes they could not act, did not act, were prevented by manpower and corruption-and the credibility of the intelligence Smith funneled their way-from acting.

So CURE changed its strategy. It became an agency that took action, and the action it took was just as illegal as its blatantly unlawful intelligence-gathering.

CURE hired an assassin. They found him in the form of Remo Williams, a New Jersey beat cop and war veteran. Smith's right-hand man, Conrad MacCleary, made the choice. What CURE needed, after all, was a natural-born killer. Conn had witnessed Remo Williams in action in wartime and never forgot it.

Officer Williams, with a fiancee and a solid reputation and a bright future, was framed for murder. He was found guilty. He was sent to the chair and executed.

But the execution didn't take, thanks to Smith and MacCleary, who arranged the entire charade, and Remo Williams woke up with a surgically altered face and a decision to make. Join the team. Or die. For real this time. No hard feelings.

Remo Williams joined the team. He was trained in weapons and stealth. He was trained in Sinanju. Chiun was another one of MacCleary's choices. Smith had such faith in his old friend from the CIA that he acceded to what sounded like a bizarre training regimen. Sinanju, MacCleary said, produced the finest assassins the world had known. Ever.

Smith didn't quite buy into it. MacCleary wasn't known to exaggerate, but the feats that he claimed for these Sinanju masters were beyond believability. But Chiun proved Conn right.

Before long, Remo proved Conn right, as well. Even Chiun was surprised by Remo's ability to absorb Sinanju. No child of the village of Sinanju ever mastered the art as Remo mastered it. No adult had ever been able to learn more than a few rudimentary basics.

But Remo became Sinanju, and Chiun deemed that this American orphan would become his protege, a last-minute godsend for an elderly master who had lost two heirs already-one to tragedy and one to betrayal.

Chiun would not leave Remo, so CURE found itself with the most potent pair of assassins on the planet under its employ.

They worked side by side, a perfect team. The disasters that had been averted by Remo and Chiun were unfathomable in their scope.

Harold Smith didn't know what the future held for the world, but he knew the world wasn't ready to exist without CURE and its enforcement arm. Its enforcement team.

But he might have no say in the matter. If and when Chiun made up his mind to seek the comfort of retirement in a dark cave in North Korea, Smith certainly wouldn't be able to talk him out of it.

There was something else on Smith's mind. He had enjoyed his parlay with the old master about the merits of Ung and Homer. It had hearkened back to the discussions he enjoyed years ago, when he was considered a scholar of sorts. It was the kind of pastime he had looked forward to during that brief interlude in his life when he was retired from the CIA and had accepted a position as a university professor. All too quickly that future was erased with a summons from a U.S. President in need of a man just like him.

Smith hadn't refused the CURE assignment. His patriotism would not have allowed him to refuse. But there had been no personal considerations, really. From the moment of that meeting with the President until this day, decades later, CURE came first. Everything else in Smith's life came second. Wife. Family. Home. Enjoyable diversions.

That give and take with Chiun had been quite satisfying and novel. It had been a long time since he had that kind of, well, fun.

Chapter 8

Greg Grom evaded his security detail without trouble. He always did. Still, he followed orders and did the circle-the-block thing and tailback thing. There was no sign of the others.

He looked for a likely dark alley to do the park-and-wait thing. Sitting in the shadows for fifteen minutes watching for the tail he knew would not come. What a waste of time. Just this once he'd skip it and nobody would ever have to know.

But that was a fantasy. When it came time to report in, he wouldn't be able to hide his rule breaking. And then he'd be in big trouble.

"Dammit!" He shouted at the steering wheel, then turned the car quickly into a convenience store lot, parking in the shadows alongside the building where a security floodlight was inoperative. He waited and watched for fifteen minutes, as ordered. There was no sign of pursuit.

"Told you so," he said to nobody.

It was a two-hour drive to Lexington. It was a two-hour drive back.

He stopped for a short while at the Big Stomp Saloon, which was big. It had been a roller rink once. The "Stomp" referred to the type of dance favored by the clientele. It seemed to include a lot of cowboy-boot stomping.

The Big Stomp was now famous throughout Kentucky and Tennessee as the birth of country rave, the newest evolution in country music. The original raves had sprung up in the US in the 1990s, when the designer drug Ecstasy became all the rage. Kids took it and danced all night. That was a rave.

An Ecstasy high gave the user a high-adrenaline rush that lasted for hours, and rave music had a rapid, thumping beat. Country music took years to come up with a hybrid that fit the bill. It was mostly just Garth Brooks remixed over a disco rhythm track. Whatever. It was awful.

Greg Grom smiled broadly, at no one in particular. "Look like you got a stick up your butt and you really are enjoyin' it," commented an acne-scarred teenager in grease-blackened jeans and shiny, new imitation-rattlesnake cowboy boots.

"Do I?" Grom asked.

"What the hell you all smiley about?"

"I just made a big score," Grom explained.

The teenager looked around. "Oh, yeah? So where's she now?"

"Not a woman. Business. A deal. I just closed a big deal, and I made a hell of a lot of money off it. Buy you a beer?"

"Oh. Sure. Yeah." It was hard to stay antagonistic to a guy who paid for your brew.

"Give this man a beer!" Grom shouted at the bartender. He slapped a twenty on the counter. The twenty made the bartender his friend, too. "What the hell! I want everybody to celebrate-give everybody a beer!"

He thrust a few hundreds at the happy bartender and the party started. Word spread throughout the place and the dance floor emptied as the patrons crowded in for the free drinks. "Let me give you a hand," Grom shouted, and the bartender had no objections when Grom stepped behind the bar to help him man the tap and shove beer mugs across to the eager customers. The bartender never noticed that Grom's beer mugs received a quick sprinkling of white powder before they were rotated under the open taps.

"This is party night!" Grom shouted. "This is the most fun we have ever had! We need to keep dancing all night long!"

The bartender gave him a bemused smirk, but Grom thrust several more hundreds at him. "That should cover things for a while."

The bartender quickly estimated it would cover every customer's bar tab for the whole night and maybe the next. "The rest is yours, friend! Keep 'em coming!" Grom shouted, "This is the best night ever! We want to celebrate all night long!"

He sounded like an ecstatic idiot drunk, and that was perfectly okay to the Big Stomp patrons. The bartender figured he had to be some sort of foreigner. The guy didn't talk right, sort of. But the bartender wasn't about to upset this apple cart.

After the first free round was distributed, Grom slapped the bartender on the shoulder. "Thanks, friend! I need to step out for some fresh air-"

The bartender just grinned and kept pouring.

"Hey, you're the greatest, businessman!" shouted the acned teenager, waving his free beer at Grom. Other patrons came at him, shaking his hand, offering compliments. Grom was careful not to say anything more. One careless suggestion could ruin everything.

Every batch so far had technically worked. The formula he was searching for-the perfect formula-would be the one without side effects.

The original formula of GUTX, derived from nature, had no side effects. But there was no more natural source. Grom had one alternative only: a synthesis. It had cost him serious cash to have certain laboratories synthesize versions of GUTX, none of which perfectly replicated the natural substance. They were close, but, so far, not close enough.

Tonight he was taking a different approach to his suggestion-making, too. All positive statements. Have fun! Be happy!

Greg Grom had not even reached the door when he heard the sounds of violence. A stomp dancer had been jettisoned off a raised section of the dance floor into a table below.

A livid couple stomped off the lower-level dance floor. "You spilled my beer!" screeched the plump young woman. "His, too!" she added before her plump young boyfriend could add his two cents' worth. They started stomping all over the offending beer-spiller.

Their victim twisted free of the bruising boots just long enough to stab one finger viciously skyward. "'Twarn't me!" the poor man yelped. "Johnny Ogden throwed me!"

Suddenly the plump couple and their heavily stomped victim were at peace with one another and forged an instant alliance against a common enemy.

"Johnny Ogden, you sheep-fucking son of a swine!" The woman had a piercing quality that cut through the disco-country soundtrack. Everybody looked at her. Nobody stopped stomping. The fallen man, one arm hanging limp, struggled to his feet and even he resumed stomping.

Oops, Grom thought. He'd suggested something about dancing all night long, hadn't he? And this was what these people called dancing.

The music stopped. The stomp dancing continued, but it was now the march of soldiers into battle, filling the vast saloon with the clomp-clomp rhythm.

The woman and her pair of male followers stomped up the ramp to the upper-level dance floor.

Other patrons stomped out of their way.

The plump young woman stomped at a big stomping man that could only be Johnny Ogden.

Greg Grom noticed the bartender. The only non stamper in the place. He was punching numbers into a cell phone and looking frantic. Calling the cops. Time to go, Grom decided.

The bartender looked right at him.

Grom's heart sank.

The guy would remember him. Recognize him. He would be lucid enough to give the cops a description. That would ruin everything.

Grom felt foolish. But he couldn't stop to berate himself now.

He had to solve the problem. "Stop!" he shouted.

They stopped fighting, Johnny Ogden and his three attackers. Everybody in the bar turned to Greg Grom, still stomping. The grinned and waved at their good friend, the guy who bought them the beer.

"Johnny Ogden is not a bad man." Grom declared. "Johnny Ogden is your friend! But there is someone else here who is the enemy! Someone you all hate!"

The stomping grew furious as fifty-three enraged beer-swillers craned their necks, trying to find the enemy. "Who?" squealed the plump lady. "Who is it?"

"It is-" he paused, just for the drama "-the bartender!"

The bartender looked stricken. He didn't understand why this was happening, but suddenly, with perfect clarity, he knew how it was going to end.

Grom left as the stomping became deadly.

He pulled out his little black book. With regret, he found the entry for that night's batch and penned in next to it, "Imperfect."

Chapter 9

The quartet of sky marshals scowled at Remo Williams. They scowled at the nervous young lady at the checkin desk. They scowled meaningfully to one another to make it appear they knew what was going down.

But they didn't have a clue.

"You sure there's no problem here?" the head sky marshal asked the airline ticket puncher for the third time.

"They say everything is fine," she protested.

"What about the complaints?"

"The passengers issued an apology through a spokesman," she explained reluctantly.

"Since when do a bunch of passengers have a spokesman?" the sky marshal demanded.

"I guess they're traveling together," she said. "A tour group from Paris."

Uh-oh, thought Remo, who now had an inkling as to what was going on aboard the 737 that had just landed. Its pilot had relayed a passenger-disturbance complaint minutes before landing. That brought the sky marshals in a hurry, but after the aircraft landed the pilot called back to say the complaint had been retracted. The sky marshals weren't buying any "retraction."

"Let me get this straight;" the head sky marshal said to the ticket puncher. "This tour group issues a complaint against another passenger and asks for law enforcement. Then the passenger apologizes, so the Paris tour group says no hard feelings and expects us to just drop it?"

The ticket puncher seemed to shrink into herself. "Not exactly, Officer."

"Marshal."

"Not exactly, Marshal. From what I understand, the Paris tour group apologized to the passenger. You know, the one they issued the complaint about."

"Well, why'd the bejeezus they do that?"

Remc knew the answer. The answer strode out of the debarking door, scowling. The scowl became worse by degrees when Remo approached.

"Bad flight, Little Father?"

"Do you know what was on that flight, Remo? Can you possibly guess?"

"Hmm. When you screw your face up that tight, it's got to be, oh, French?"

"Yes!" Chiun exclaimed, pleased to share his outrage. "They spent the entire flight behaving like French. They spoke French. They smelled French. I was harassed for hours."

"It's a fifty-minute flight."

"They gave me no peace. They insulted me in their hideous tongue, thinking I could not understand their meaning. It was a mob of uncivilized nonbathers against a frail but hygienic elderly man. I was on the verge of being physically assaulted."

"You were lucky, I guess."

"Excuse me," asked the sky marshal, "where are the rest of the passengers?"

"There was some trouble with the lavatories after landing, Marshal," Chiun said, croaking out the words like the weak, failing senior citizen he wasn't. "Apparently a great many of them became wedged in the lavatory cubicles."

"Oh, my Gad!" the sky marshal said. "How did that happen?"

Chiun looked at the floor, a sad and pathetic old man. "They are French. Who can say with the French?"

CHIUN THE ELDERLY, Chiun the Frail, Chiun the Dying became Chiun the Obstinate when he was informed that he was to board another aircraft at once. His wrist bones, as brittle as sun-dried pine needles, nearly broke when the old Korean master illustrated his displeasure by backhanding the motorized cart that had just transported them to a two-engine prop plane.

The airport staffer on the cart knew his little putt-putt vehicle couldn't possibly go as fast as it was suddenly going, and it sure the hell couldn't do it in reverse. He was still trying to figure all this out a half second later when the cart stopped against the protective concrete pillar at the base of the airport gate. It was hours before he thought about anything again.

"Do you have my trunks?" Chiun demanded.

"Yes. The Reigning Master of Sinanju is faithfully jockeying all six of your trunks."

"The Master of Sinanju Emeritus expects no less," Chiun replied with an off-hand wave. "See that they are not scratched."

"They're not scratched," Remo said.

"You handle them irreverently," Chiun complained.

"Hey, you were lucky I grabbed those things just when you were sending the poor driver halfway across the tarmac. They'd have been scratched and dinged and who-knows-what all."

"Dinged?" Chiun stopped on the third step up into the charter plane. "You shall not allow my trunks to be dinged, or scritched or danged or any other thing."

"I didn't, no thanks to you."

"Of course there are no thanks to me," Chiun said with a sniff. "There have never been thanks to me, especially not from the adopted son to whom I have given everything." Chiun was speaking now for the benefit of the flight attendant who awaited them inside the doors at the top of the steps.

"I gave him my title. I gave him an education and a vocation," Chiun explained to her. "I gave him what orphans the world over dream of. What do I get in return?"

"Bellhop service for life," Remo answered.

"Disdain." Chiun's quivering head shook sadly.

"Oh, dear," the flight attendant murmured, her mechanical smile melting into genuine sympathy.

"Don't believe a word of it," Remo warned.

"You poor man."

"Ask him how poor," Remo called from behind. "He could buy this airport."

"Poor in the currencies that matter. Loyalty. Understanding. Respect."

"Yo, Emeritus! We got places to go."

Chiun leaned close to the young woman in the starched navy blue uniform. "You see how it is for me," he whispered, his lungs, weary from a century of breathing, were barely able to get the words out.

The flight attendant wiped away a single drop of moisture from the corner of her eye and tenderly embraced the little man's crippled body in her arms, then gently assisted him to the window seat. When she was sure he was comfortable-as comfortable as his weak, failing body could possibly be-she turned and shot a lethal look of disgust at Remo Williams, Reigning Master of Sinanju.

THE FLIGHT WAS chartered for just the two of them, and in no time they were taxiing to a stop at a tiny regional airport. A rental car was waiting, and Remo followed the directions that had been faxed to him, with a hand-drawn map, from Folcroft. Remo still felt disoriented by the three words that were printed in neat block letters at the big X that indicated their destination. He knew what "Saloon" meant. What was "Big Stomp?" Was Smitty experimenting with some more code words? If so, Remo missed the meeting. Or he'd missed paying attention at the meeting. Did Big Stomp indicate he was supposed to go in and assassinate everybody in the place? He was thinking he'd better call Upstairs and clarify the message before he actually carried out such instructions.

His destination came into view in the form of a massive lighted sign, fifty feet off the ground, bright red with white letters. Then he understood the words on the map.

"Big Stomp Saloon is the name of a bar?"

"The Big Stomp?" Chiun said, perking up from his introspective sulk. "Is it the Big Stomp Saloon?"

"Don't tell me you've heard of the place?" Remo asked as they parked amid squad cars and unmarked vehicles.

"Hey, you!" said a state trooper just inches from the driver's-side window.

"Who has not heard of it?" Chiun asked as they stepped from the car.

"Mister, I been waving you off since you started up the drive," the trooper said. "Now you tell me, you blind or just stupid?"

"I'm with the federal government, so you make the call," Remo said, pulling out an ID and giving it a quick glance before presenting it to the trooper. "Remo Baggins, National Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol Association."

"From who now? You mean ATF? Partner, this ain't a federal case. No nationwides are invited."

"There was something in the booze that caused it, so that makes it the business of the booze bureau."

The trooper's lips went tight. "You wait right here." He scurried off, never noticing the pair was silently tailing him, but the Masters halted when a white limousine turned into the lot and rolled to a stop on crunching gravel.

"Do you see, Remo? People of wealth come here. It is a place of importance in musical history."

"Yeah." The limo received personal service from one of Tennessee's finest. A trooper chatted with the driver, but Remo was more interested in the figures behind the dark glass in the back seat. "You mean they aren't reopening tonight?" asked a voice from the rear. Whoever he was, he was hidden behind the bulk of a bodyguard.

The trooper chuckled politely and explained that it would take hours to process the crime scene and, no, the place would not be reopening tonight. The figure in the back stared past his hired muscle, taking it all in. Then he stared fixedly at Remo-it was the voyeur gaze of a man who knew he could see but, behind the dark glass, not be seen.

But this time he was wrong. Remo adjusted his vision to compensate for the refraction of the flashing light that turned the windows into mirrors, at the same time adjusting the angle of his face so that the headlights of the nearest squad car put his own face in shadow.

But the man in back never moved out from behind the bodyguard. Remo saw only the eyes.

Then the limo rolled away.

REMO AND CHIUN FOUND the cavernous interior of the Big Stomp crowded with uncollected corpses, shattered furniture, and the stench of spilled beer turning sour under hot crime-scene lights.

"Yeesh. The Big Stomp is a big dump," Remo said. "So how come you've heard of it?"

"It is renowned throughout the world," Chiun said.

"Which world we talking about?" The stark white police lights hid none of the shabbiness of the peeling wall paint, the scratched floor or the water-stained ceiling tiles.

"This is where the career of Wylander Jugg blasted off," the old Korean explained.

"Launched?"

"Before she became a star, the comely Wylander was performing here without appreciation of her marvelous talents, until a musical agent came to see her show. Even in this foul place her brilliance shone, and the musical agent took her under his wing."

"Ah. Many things now makes sense to me about Wylander Jugg." Remo looked down at a body inside a chalk outline. The broken end of a beer bottle protruded from the stomach of a man with a week's growth of shaggy beard.

"Nasty, ain't it?" asked the man taking pictures.

"Looks like a prop from a Patrick Swayze movie," Remo commented.

The photographer screwed up his face. "Dirty Dancing?"

"I wish. Who did all this running amok?"

"Who didn't?" the photographer said. "The whole place went nuts. Started out with one little fight on the dance floor, and next thing you know everybody was brawlin' everybody. We had five bodies when we got here and we musta sent fifty wounded to the Methodist hospital."

"Were they lucid?" Remo asked.

"Were they who?"

"You know, were they thinking clearly? Or kind of confused?"

"Oh. Definitely more like kinda confused. None of ' em seems to know what happened. None of 'em even knows who did the killin'."

"Can I help you?" demanded a county official with a sheriff's badge pinned on his rumpled white shirt. "You federals are not supposed to be here."

"Just asking a few questions," Remo said. "Won't take long."

"Let me see your identification:"

Remo thrust his badge at the sheriff. "Where's your witnesses?" he asked the photographer.

"Don't answer that, Aberle!" the sheriff snapped. "What about him? You gonna try and tell me he's ATF, too?" The sheriff nodded at Chiun, who watched stoically with his hands tucked neatly in the sleeves of a scarlet kimono. .

Remo tried to remember what Chiun's ID said. "Who're you with again, Little Father?"

"CLECIC," Chiun chirped without hesitation. Remo and the sheriff were equally befuddled. "Huh?" the lawman demanded.

"Congressional Law Enforcement Corruption Investigation Committee," Chiun explained in his pleasant singsong.

"There ain't no such thing!" the sheriff insisted. "Let me see your damn-"

The sheriff stopped talking and stopped moving. His mouth hung open, ready to complete the expletive. The photographer found it very curious. He also found it curious that the little Korean man was now holding the sheriff by the earlobe. "What just happened?" he asked the skinny Caucasian ATF agent.

"We were being rudely interrupted. You're done blathering, right, Sheriff?"

The sheriff had tears rolling down his face, but he managed a terse nod.

"Okay. Now tell me about the witnesses."

The photographer looked questioningly at the sheriff, who gave his permission with very emphatic head jerks. "Okay," the photographer said. "Well, there was just one witness. The bartender."

"Yeah. He among the living?"

"Oh, yeah, not a mark on him. He got out. Went into the manager's office and locked the door behind him, then watched the whole thing through the peephole."

"What about the manager?"

"He's at a restaurant trade show in Chicago."

"Wait staff?" Remo asked.

"Two beer gals usually, but tonight one of them called in sick, and she's lucky she did. The only serving girl who was working the place is over there."

He nodded at a nearby mess of flesh that had erased its own chalk outline with spreading blood.

The photographer expected a gag or a gasp, but Remo just sighed.

The little old Korean man rolled his eyes. Then he strolled to the long, L-shaped bar and gingerly lifted a plastic beer mug, sniffing the contents.

Remo, too, had noticed the odd aroma that permeated the place. Even masked by the stench of spilled beer, the smell was obvious and alien. Chiun looked puzzled.

They left the sheriff with the photographer and found the bartender still in the manager's office giving his statement, and the tale came so automatically it was clear he'd gone through it all several times.

"Relax," Remo told the good-cop trooper and his hulking, silent partner, the bad-cop trooper. "We're Feds. We'll just listen in."

"Like hell," growled the bad-cop trooper, a colossus who knew he didn't even have to stand up to be intimidating-so he didn't bother. His shoulders were powerful, his arms massive under the specially tailored uniform. "This ain't your jurisdiction until I hear otherwise. Amscray."

"No, thanks." Remo nodded pleasantly, hoping the good-cop trooper would continue the questioning. The colossus got to his feet. He did it slowly, as if moving his monstrous frame into a standing position required a mighty challenge to the forces of gravity. "Don't make me go local on you, U.S. boy," he growled.

"Okay, Unincredible Hulk, you made your point. You're big and tall. Ooh. Ahh. So what. Sit down." The trooper with the notebook went white. Wrong thing to say! he communicated to Remo Williams silently.

Remo Williams didn't care. He wasn't here to make friends. In fact, he didn't know what he was here for. Upstairs had him running around doing all this lookinto-this stuff and investigate-that stuff. He wasn't experiencing job satisfaction and he wasn't running into a lot of friendly, cooperative people. Even the cops were giving him crap.

So when the hand the size of a manhole cover made a grab at his collar, he broke it.

Even the giant didn't get it at first. He thought the skinny little guy had simply batted his hand away. Then he felt the sensation of shattering bones and the pain that traveled up his arm like a flood tide. With a bull-sized bellow he went for a full body tackle, and stopped midair. The skinny guy from the federal government caught him in the chest with his palm, and it should have sent the little guy flying halfway across the state. Somehow it was the giant state trooper who crashed to the floor.

"The bigger they are, the smarter they are not," Chiun observed.

"But they are louder," Remo added, groping around the back of the giant's neck and making a small adjustment. The bellow ended.

"Ah, peace and quiet."

"What'd you do?" the good-cop trooper demanded.

"Don't worry, I just hit the mute button. Please carry on."

"But he's wounded! He's paralyzed!"

"Criminy!" Remo opened the door and gave the giant a nudge with the bottom of one expensive Italian shoe. The paralyzed trooper rocketed out the door and down the short hall, still moving fast when he hit the messiest of the corpses. Sliding on blood, he actually seemed to pick up speed. Remo didn't bother to watch the dramatic end of the wild ride. grabbing the pen and notebook from the hands of the other trooper and tossing them out the door, as well. The trooper stared at Remo dumbfounded.

"Well? Go fetch."

The trooper nodded sadly and left.

The bartender was, if anything, mildly amused.

"I hate to do this to you again, but could you tell us what happened here?" Remo asked.

"Hell, sure. You two are the first law enforcement I seen all night that act like they could actually do something about it." The bartender quickly related the events that led up to the violence. "That door saved me," he said. "It's like a safe door. Solid steel. Anything less they would have got me and killed me for sure. When they couldn't get in, well, it was like they had to take it all out on somebody. They started fighting each other. Somebody would go, 'Hey, ain't you the bartender?' and they'd go after one of the other customers and kill him and then do it again."

"That's sort of unusual, isn't it?" Remo asked. He knew the guy was telling the truth, but it sure made no sense.

"Weirdest damn thing," the bartender agreed.

"The one who purchased the intoxicants for your patrons was gone by this time?" Chiun asked thoughtfully.

"Yeah, he left right after he sicced everybody on me."

"But you don't know who he was or what his home address is or anything like that?" Remo prodded, knowing he was grasping at straws.

"Naw. You know, you don't ask questions like the other cops."

"Yeah, this ain't my gig," Remo explained dejectedly.

"He is not skilled at speech or thought," Chiun added helpfully.

"But I can tell you he was disguised," the bartender offered. "I saw him in the parking lot. I lock myself in here and grab the phone for the cops and I look out back." He nodded at the grimy window over his shoulder. "There he was, writing in his notebook."

"Huh?" Remo asked.

"That's what I thought," the bartender agreed. "Just a quick note. Then he rips off his eyebrows and his hairpiece and he drives off."

"In what?"

"The car? Couldn't tell."

"See what he looked like without the fake fur?"

"Naw. Back's dark."

"You been a lot of help."

"I think the state of Tennessee is really mad at you guys," the bartender offered as a megaphone down the hall demanded the surrender of all occupants of the office. "That's just perfect," Remo grumbled.

"Really?" Chiun asked with raised eyebrows. "You mean to say this is going as you had intended?"

Chapter 10

"The State of Tennessee multidepartmental task force has established an irrefutable link between the incident at the Big Stomp Saloon, the Mafia and the Yakuza." Harold Smith's voice was more sour than usual.

"Is that so?" Remo replied in his best not-in-the-mood-for-it voice. Trouble was, he'd been using that voice a lot lately, and nobody seemed to get the message.

"They report their crime scene was aggressively compromised by two men posing as federal agents."

"Us?" Remo asked.

"It was not us, Emperor," Chiun called out, never turning away from the television set. He was sitting on the hotel-room floor staring at the screen.

"One elderly Asian and one Caucasian male, age indeterminate," Smith reported.

"That's what they're going on?"

"There's more," Smith said. "I'm getting into the Tennessee crime database now."

Remo sat on the hotel bed and listened to Smith tap the keys. The tapping stopped but Smith said nothing. "Let me guess," Remo volunteered. "It's the shoes and kimono."

Smith spent a long time saying the word "Yes."

"So we go in there and get what you asked for despite a bunch of Southern-boy attitude, and all they see is a pair of Italian loafers and an Asian guy in a bright robe. I don't know what's more amazing-that they came up with the Yakuza and Mafia theory or the fact that you think we blew it."

Smith considered that. "You may have a point," he admitted. "Still, you overreacted. You put an investigator in the hospital."

"We could have put him in the morgue," Remo countered. "On the other hand, we could have left when they said, 'Sorry guys, no Feds allowed at our crime scene.' For future reference, which choice should we make next time, Smitty?"

While Smith hemmed and hawed, Remo watched two Mexican actresses with flawless makeup have a conversation in Spanish, one on either side of the small silhouetted skull of the Korean Master of Sinanju. As the poorly acted discussion became more dramatic, the woman with the artificial mole began extruding tears. The camera moved in for a close-up of the perfect glycerin drop just as the drama faded to commercials. Then came a news break with a video clip from some political dinner, where the guest of honor looked about twelve.

"So what now?" Remo prodded. "You want us to go run some prints through the crime lab, maybe? How about we round up some usual suspects? Maybe we could do something really useful like look through the mug books."

"I hope we'll have some direction for you by morning," Smith said.

"Which means right now you've got nothing."

Smith made a weary sound. "That's right. Nothing."

"You feeling okay, Smitty?" Remo asked.

"I feel fine," Smith snapped back.

"You oughta take a nap."

"I don't need a nap, and it's a luxury I can't afford regardless."

Remo hung up slowly, but his thoughts were interrupted by a seething hiss.

"What's the matter?"

"You did not notice this? This?" Chiun spun on him and jabbed a bony hand at the television screen.

"The television? The news anchor? Give me a hint."

"Fah!" Chiun uttered in disgust. "This news break is now in its second minute, coming after two one-minute commercials. This dramatic series is edited for breaks of three minutes each."

"Since when do you know all this kind of programming junk?"

"Since I watch the program and happen to pay attention to the world around me. You do not. How you notice the door is closed before you walk into it is a mystery of the ages. The point is, they are butchering the drama with irrelevant anecdotes that pass for substantive journalism."

Another video clip now showed the same youthful looking honoree in an expensive suit. "What is he, the world's oldest Boy Scout or something?"

"Less important still-the idiot president of an island that is vying for independence," Chiun said with disgust. "He is some sort of hero to the Puerto Ricans who watch this television channel."

Remo sneered. "That kid's too young to be president of the chess club." Then a thought occurred to him. "You mean vying for independence from us? America?"

"Cretins!" Chiun spit as the news break ended and returned to some Mexican soap opera sobbing, already in progress. "They defile art to show us their foolish news footage of feasting imbeciles!"

"Art?"

"Hush! I know your taste in drama and it is as valid as your negligent appreciation of literature."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Silence. I have missed too much of the story already. If I had not already watched the episode this afternoon, I would be forced to have the programmers of this station coerced into replaying it at once."

Remo didn't argue the point. The last thing he needed was to be browbeaten into paying an unsocial call on the poor engineer running the boards at the local Latino TV station.

It was just the kind of busywork he'd have a hard time squirming out of if Chiun got the idea in his head.

Chapter 11

The phone buzzed softly. The couple on the veranda tried to ignore it.

She was gazing over the tops of the palm trees, watching the golden blazing ball of the sun descend on the glimmering mirror image of itself on the surface of the Caribbean Sea. The moment they touched was like a melding of fate-linked lovers.

"Exquisite," murmured her companion, his hand creeping atop hers on the stone rail. The phone, thankfully, went silent.

"You're not even watching it," she chided gently.

"It's not the sunset I'm talking about, Minister." Union Island Minister of Tourism Dawn Snmmens felt something special in the unique golden rays of the sun during those precious moments as it was swallowed by the sea. It felt different from the first light of the morning, and somehow she felt it infused her with a special radiance. This notion had come to her when she was just a teenager but stuck with her ever since.

When she joined the government of Union Island she appropriated this office for its unparalleled sunset views. When the former occupant protested, Summens saw the demand as a challenge to her new authority. The former occupant now had a cubicle on the ground floor. "I don't think you appreciate my view, Senator."

"But I appreciate mine," Sam Switzer, Republican senator from Utah, said glibly.

Summens all but rolled her eyes, but her words were complimentary. "Very witty, Senator. But I was talking about my view on the Free Union Island movement."

"What?" The senator looked confused.

"You have not looked at this issue from my point of view."

His mouth hung open and the sagging flesh of his cheeks hung just below his jawline. "You're right. I've never even stopped to consider your perspective. How stupid of me."

"Now, there, not stupid," she assured him. "You're just a little too narrow in your thinking."

The senator was suddenly stricken. "Oh, mother of mercy, you're right. I've got to open my eyes to the world! I've been wearing blinders all my life!"

"No, it's not as bad as all that," she said reassuringly, and at that moment the phone began to buzz again, annoying as a mosquito. "I'll be right back."

Summens strode through the custom French doors she had ordered from a Michigan woodworker and snatched at the phone on the desk. "Yes?"

"Good evening, Minister Summens. This is President-"

"I can't talk now."

"Come on, Dawn, I gotta talk to you about something. I'm getting worried."

"Call later. One hour. Make it two."

"Aw, come on!"

Dawn hung up and practically sprinted onto the veranda, but the damage was done. The senator had run with her suggestion and was by now way, way out in left field.

"How can I vote against abortion rights when I've never had an abortion?" he demanded, tears of shame in his eyes. "Why did I fight for tax cuts when I never even listened to my opponents' reasons for wanting tax increases? And will you please tell me what gives me the right to introduce antigay bills when I've never even gone to the trouble of experiencing sex with another man?"

Summens thought furiously. What was it she'd said exactly? Had she suggested he needed to see all sides of the story? It had been something like that. Christ, this was the only dose she had been entrusted with in a month and she was on the verge of blowing it, big time. "Senator, listen to me," she said in a clear, loud voice. He stopped talking, his attention riveted on her.

"The freedom of Union Island is the most important issue before the Senate right now. You must make it well known that you now support the Union Island Freedom Bill, and you need to put resources into corralling support for the bill. It must pass."

"Of course. it must."

"With enough votes to override a veto," Summens added. ''And there can be no amendments to the aid package."

"I won't let them trim so much as a single dollar," the senior senator agreed emphatically. "Union Island needs U.S. dollars just as fervently as it needs independence from the U.S." His old, wrinkled eyes drew together. "Now, why is that again?"

Summens patted his arm. "You'll come up with very clever arguments to support your position. You can't wait to get started."

The senator nodded, his posture erect with new purpose. "My dear, you must forgive me if I cancel dinner and our little tryst. I have suddenly realized how vital it is for me to get involved in this campaign immediately."

"Of course I am disappointed," Summens said, although the truth was she never intended to sleep with the man. "But I understand. It's for the cause."

Before she could suggest he not do it, the old slimeball had mushed his slobbering lips against hers. It was over in an instant, though, and he left in a hurry.

He'd better come through for her, she thought, or next time she'd suggest he go for a long walk off the short roof of the Congressional Office Building.

Summens was angry with herself. She had handled the senator badly. She could count on one hand the number of times she had been entrusted to perform a dosing alone, and this time she almost lost control. She'd probably ruined the senator's career as it was-his constituency might not go along with his new views on contentious issues. No matter, so long as he kept his job long enough to help ram through the Union Island Independence Bill.

She needed a good dinner to get the taste out of her mouth. She had reservations for two at Cafe Amore, but maybe she could just order in.

Then she remembered that the president would be trying to reach her in the office in a short while.

That was a very good reason to be anywhere else.

Chapter 12

"Sheriff Pilchard here," said the monotone voice on the other side of the door.

Greg Grom unlocked the dead bolt and tried to open the door, but the little brass security thingy brought it to halt. Grom closed the door again, silently swearing at the little brass thingy for making him look like an idiot. The worst thing ever was to look stupid.

"Sorry, Sheriff," he said to the unsmiling statue of a country sheriff.

"Quite all right." The sheriff followed Grom inside and sat without invitation in an easy chair in the parlor. "I don't suppose you'd accept a drink when you're on duty."

"I suppose I would. Scotch."

"Oh. Okay." Grom found a bottle of Scotch whiskey behind the bar and poured while his guest looked casually around the expensive suite.

"Some room, huh?" Grom observed sheepishly.

"Cleaned up a triple in this room 'bout nine months back," the sheriff announced.

"What's a triple?" Grom asked, sucking on a bottle of Corona beer.

"Homicide."

The beer went into his lungs, and he hacked it up for two minutes. Then he said, "I see."

"Looks like they recarpeted. Guess they would've had to." The sheriff chuckled without losing his dour expression.

"Yeah. Heh."

The sheriff looked Grom dead in the eye. "Guy used a fan blade off an International Harvester OTR rig." The sheriff shrugged and reclined with his drink. "It was convenient. Trucker had it parked at the motel next door. So the guy just tore it off and came in here swinging the thing."

"Imagine that," Grom said.

"Not a sharp edge to it. Took some work on the murderer's part. Made a hell of a mess."

"I bet..."

"Poor trucker started his rig the next morning and heard this awful noise and popped the hood. Found his fan all out of whack and some of it missing and he reported the vandalism. That's how we know what we know."

Grom had been trying desperately to think of a way to steer the conversation in a new direction, but now he said, "You mean you didn't find the weapon."

"Oh, yeah. Few weeks later. Twenty miles outside town alongside the road in a culvert. Couldn't get prints or anything useful off it by that time. So, well, you know."

"I know what?" Grom demanded.

"You know, we couldn't positively ID the killer. Know who he is, of course, but the son of a bitch is walking around free as a bird until we get physical evidence ...and what was it you wanted to talk to me about exactly?"

Grom drank more beer as he tried to catch up to the conversation. "What about the Big Stomp?" he finally managed to ask.

The sheriff nodded, revealing nothing, but his cooperation was a foregone conclusion. The man wasn't stupid enough to not cooperate with a man like Greg Grom.

"The investigation continues," the sheriff said. "There was an interesting development at the crime scene."

"Like what?"

"The crime scene was infiltrated. Based on the evidence at hand, we're fairly certain the Nashville Azzopardi Family has formed a joint venture with aYakuza branch. Their purpose is undoubtedly to launch a protection business specializing in high-profit, private, unregulated businesses, such as the Big Stomp. Their interest in our crime scene is obvious-whoever poisoned the well needs to be taught not to tamper with organized-crime businesses in the Kentucky-Tennessee district. In other words, they want to find the bad guy before we do."

"Oh." Grom's head was swimming. "Do you think they will?"

The sheriff finally showed an emotion in the form of a smug twitch of the colorless lips. "Mr. Grom, we're professionals. Highly trained. Superbly equipped. We're not going to be outsmarted by a bunch of import thugs."

Grom let out a silent sigh, nodding with what he hoped looked like dispassionate satisfaction.

"Good to know you people are on the job," he said condescendingly as he walked the sheriff to the door. "What did these men look like, anyway? The men who came to the crime scene?"

"Well, that's not an easy one to hammer down. Nobody seems to have gotten a good look at their faces. But I'll tell you this much. One of them was a Far Easterner, old as Moses and no bigger than my dog Bert when he gets on two legs to give me a face lickin'. Other guy was just some white feller. I guess he must look like all us white fellers."

As the sheriff was on his way out the door, Grom asked, "That's the best description you have?"

"We have other clues to their identity," the sheriff said, and told Greg Grom about the federal IDs.

The sheriff was the one looking sheepish now. "Who knows?" he said, donning his hat. "Maybe they really was just a couple of nosy Feds."

Greg Grom closed the door, bolted it and moved the annoying little brass thingy into place for extra security. Then he raced to the other doors and windows of the suite, checking and double-checking the locks. All the while he was talking to himself about the possibility of a pair of nosy Feds.

What he actually said was, "Oh God oh God oh God..."

Chapter 13

At first Remo thought it was the snoring that woke him from an easy slumber, but he was accustomed to Chiun's honking and wheezing. His senses told him there's nothing out of place in his environment just the typical squeaks, groans, smells and grumbles of a hotel in the middle of the night.

So why was he not asleep?

Remo Williams, Reigning Master of Sinanju, was not the type to wake in the middle of the night with a niggling problem. But there was something. Wasn't there?

He rose silently from the floor mat that was his bed, strolling to the window and contemplating his view of the gravel parking lot.

"You dreamed it," Chiun squeaked.

"Dreamed what?" Remo asked.

"Whatever scary thing roused you."

"I didn't have a bad dream. I was thinking."

"Of course. And I suppose I was snoring."

"Matter of fact, you were snoring," Remo said.

"No, you were dreaming," Chiun said in kindly condescension. "Where else but dreams do you experience one highly improbable thing after another?"

"Like maybe a talking goat?"

Chiun sat up. "Remo, was there a talking goat?"

"Yes, there is."

Chiun's lips came together as tightly as Remo had ever seen them, his face going crimson. Chiun stood, the door slammed and Remo was alone in the hotel room.

Served the old biddy right. Taste of his own medicine. Slice of his own sour-grapes pie. Chiun had been a thorn in the keister for months. It seemed he had been getting increasingly grumpy and withdrawn ever since the Time of Succession, when Remo had finally donned the mantle of Reigning Master of Sinanju.

Remo hadn't really expected much change. He didn't believe that Chiun was going to start following Remo's lead or stop trying to drill his head full of five thousand years of Sinanju history, and in truth that hadn't happened.

But there had been changes. Chiun was less prone to being the harping teacher to Remo's inattentive student. Sometimes. Well, almost never. For a while the old Master had become extra-antisocial, spending hours watching TV or pretending to. Remo knew he was engrossed in deciphering whatever it was that had happened to him in Sinanju at the Time of Succession.

Remo didn't know what actually had happened to Chiun, and Chiun wasn't talking.

Chiun appeared in the gravel parking lot, slowly strolling away from the hotel in a sort of walking meditation.

Lately Chiun had become impatient with Remo's gaps in learning. The trouble was that Remo had learned the art of Sinanju years ago, and all that was left for Chiun to teach was the boring stuff-occasional bits of obscure philosophy that the old Korean always seemed to be making up as he went along. Legends of Sinanju Masters who were so unimportant or dull that they hadn't been mentioned in all these years. Then there was the stilted prose of the endless written histories.

Remo had experienced a new sense of pride and responsibility when he achieved the title Reigning Master. He had even agreed to undergo training in Chiun's archaic form of Korean calligraphy.

Oh. That was supposed to happen yesterday.

"Ah, crap," he announced to the empty room. "I forgot about the writing lesson."

Far across the parking lot the figure of the Master of Sinanju Emeritus turned and offered Remo a scowl that told him he had at least had the brains to figure out what he'd done wrong.

So that was what was bugging Chiun. But for some reason Remo thought it wasn't what was bugging him. So what was it?

He sensed the tiny surge of electricity inside the phone and snatched the receiver as it started to ring. "Yeah?"

"It's happening." It was Mark Howard. "Not far from you."

"Where's your dad, Doogie?"

"At home, getting some rest. Remo, listen-there's a disturbance going on at one of the bars in town. The police scanner feed says there's some bikers tearing up the place."

"Let me get this straight. You think a brawl in a biker bar is out of the ordinary?"

"Of course not," Howard said. "It's the Nashville Rock Hard Cafe. It's strictly an upscale place-you know, all kinds of expensive rock-star memorabilia and stuff. Caters mostly to tourists. The bikers are outsiders. I don't know what they're up to, but it sounds like they're laying siege to the place."

REMO DROVE across the lot and pulled to a stop behind Chiun, who was facing resolutely in the other direction, his scarlet kimono shimmering in the distant lights.

"The Fresh Prince of Folcroft says it's time for work," Remo called.

For a moment the old Master was motionless, then he turned, the picture of dignity, and entered the car. They drove into the heart of Nashville.

After some silence, Remo spoke. "Little Father, I am sorry I blew off the writing lesson."

"You deliberately avoided it," Chiun said evenly.

"Hey, no, it wasn't like that. Smitty needed me here to look into all the crazy types."

"You could have delayed the trip."

"Aw, come on! What good would that have done?"

"What good have you done since you arrived?" Chiun asked innocently.

"All right, so I'm batting zero. I told Smitty to get his investigators on this instead of me."

"But you did not insist. All this is a sham. Do you even wish to learn the most basic of skills necessary for a true Master of Sinanju?"

Remo was getting ticked. "What the hell have I been wasting my time on for all these years?"

Chiun stared at him coldly. Then he faced forward again. "You have learned just enough to make you the most uncouth and unmannered Master in five thousand years. You're a Mongol. A barbarian."

"Remo the Barbarian?" Remo asked.

"Yes. Exactly. That is how I shall address you in the scrolls. Remo the Barbarian is what I shall call you as I record your history during my waning years-because clearly you will not be able to record your own history."

"You make me sound illiterate," Remo protested.

"Your scrawl is hideous. It is an abomination made worse by the unbeautiful Roman characters you choose to use and the despicable hodgepodge of a language you employ. You must learn to make graceful hangul characters in order to keep the chronicles of Sinanju history."

"I'm not gonna be keeping the books in Korean, Little Father. I'll keep them in English."

Chiun turned his head sharply at Remo. "What are you saying? You absolutely will not allow mankind's most important historical record to be sullied with the use of English! It is unthinkable!"

"But that's how it is," Remo said firmly.

"I will not allow it! The writing of the Sinanju Masters has always been in Korean dialects."

"Yeah, well, up until a few years ago the Masters were always Korean. That's changed, too. Now I'm the Reigning Master, and I'm not Korean, mostly."

"The blood of the Sinanju Masters flows in your veins."

"True. But every Master before me was born in Sinanju and grew up speaking Korean and I wasn't. I was born in America and I grew up reading and writing American."

The large and garish Rock Hard bar and hotel came into view. It was past two in the morning, but the lights were blazing and the music was thumping from inside loud enough to rattle the dashboard of the rental car. Crowds seethed in the streets and on the sidewalk. "Lively place," Remo commented.

A human being crashed through one of the glass doors, moving fast, moving backward, and his feet never touched the ground until he crumpled in a broken heap.

"Getting less lively every second, though," Remo added, pulling to the curb.

VIRGIL "VIRGIN KILLER" Miller liked the way the body sounded when he hoisted it into the doors. The doors cracked and the body made breaking noises, too, and then made more breaking noises when it landed. At some point during his brief flight the victim had stopped being alive.

Served him right!

Virgin Killer didn't dwell on the fact that he really didn't have a reason for hating these people. Him and Bork and all the guys, the Road Sharks, they was finally doing what needed doing.

He spotted a weasel in a light blue sport jacket.

"You!" Miller's meaty hand shot out and intercepted the man as he bolted for the exit. Virgin Killer spun Mr. Blue Sport Coat, and the man's spine met the steel support beam between the front doors. Miller grabbed him again just before he fell.

"You make me wanna puke!"

"I don't even know who you are," his prisoner stammered.

"But I know you! Coming in here in your prissy clothes like some fairy boy! I hate you all!"

Virgin Killer Miller turned on the interior of the bar, carrying Mr. Blue Sport Coat over his head. "You hear me, you people! I hate you like I hate my own mother!" He hurled his victim into a lounge area, breaking tables, chairs and bones.

A large crowd of patrons was trapped in the middle of the Rock Hard Cafe. Miller and the other bikers were blocking the doors and the rear emergency exits. Virgin Killer had lots of choices.

"Well, look at all these fancy clothes," he snarled. "You people must spend a lot of money to make yourselves look so fine. You sure are a bunch of prissy-assed bitches and pretty boys."

Miller grabbed one young man by the shirt collar. He went limp with terror. "You know I can't stand pretty boys. I want to do things that'll make them look really ugly. And hey! You're about the prettiest of them all."

"Well, it sure isn't you I'm going to see on next month's GQ," said somebody just behind Virgin Killer Miller. Miller could have sworn there was nobody there a second ago.

Then a hand with unnaturally thick wrists came from behind him and clamped onto Miller's forearm. Miller released his hold on the pretty boy because he couldn't help it. Over his shoulder he saw that the thick wrists belonged to a skinny guy with dark eyes.

Miller put all his considerable body mass into an explosive roundhouse punch with his free fist, but somehow he missed. Miller's weight carried him in a circle, and he found himself facing the same direction he had started in. His head gyrated wildly, but now he was alone. Could he have possibly hallucinated abut a skinny guy with thick wrists?

Something blurred at him from very nearby. Miller's last thought was, Oh, there's the skinny guy now.

DON "FORK" BORK, leader of the Nashville Road Sharks, couldn't believe what he was seeing when the shrimpy little guy did some sort of a judo jab that sent Virgil into a sudden spin. Virgin Killer Miller was a massive slab of meat that should have taken hydraulics and diesel power to manipulate.

Then the shrimpy guy who did the judo trick vanished, reappeared out of nowhere and poked Virgin Killer in the face. Not a two-finger Moe-poke to the eyeballs, but a one-finger stab at the forehead. A red blossom appeared an Virgil's forehead. Virgil rolled his eyes up at the gaping hole, then collapsed without a sound.

Fork wouldn't have thought it possible to get more angry than he already was. The Road Sharks had been so filled with their righteous indignation that Fork postponed their plans for the night. That liquor store and its gook owner would be there for the taking tomorrow. The Rock Hard was an insult that needed to be avenged now. Every man and woman in the place was an enemy of every Road Shark.

And now one of those men had just killed Fork's blood brother.

"You'll pay for that, sonny," he growled.

Remo Williams found himself on the receiving end of a real-estate broker who had been reduced to a mess of wild limbs in a thousand-dollar suit. The real-estate broker made a noise like a siren, which ended in a question mark when he was intercepted with amazing gentleness.

Remo put the guy in the expensive suit on his feet. "Well, don't just stand there," Remo said, waving at the door.

The man sped off. Fork Bork bellowed and came at Remo, and Remo moved to intercept. Fork never saw him coming.

What Fork saw was his own arms leaving, one in either direction. The blood was leaving his body, too, in gushes. That couldn't be good.

As sneering bikers closed in on Remo from all directions, he grabbed Fork about the beer belly and twisted the armless one into a spin. His impromptu sprinkler sent blood splattering in a perfect circle in all directions. Bikers slipped and slid until they collided in a messy jumble around the legs of their friend without the upper extremities, who collapsed atop the pile, his eyes fixed and open.

Amid the confusion and shouts, one of the bikers rose out of the tangle of bodies. And he just kept rising and rising until he stood at seven feet six inches.

"Cripes," Remo observed, now standing outside the mess. "The beer-and-cigarettes lifestyle agrees with you."

"You. You will die."

"Not before he trains his replacement," Chiun announced, emerging from the darkness with a pair of bodies skidding across the floor before him. His nimble feet seemed to reach out here and there to nudge the bodies and guide them in the direction he wished them to go.

"Souvenirs?" Remo asked.

"Did you not say we need to get information from the rabble before they are rendered into rubble?" Chiun bent over the battered bodies and asked in his most polite singsong, "Which is the leader?"

The bodies stirred. One of them raised a quivering finger at the armless corpse. "Him. Fork."

"And Virgin Killer." The dying man pointed at the one with the head puncture.

"Fork and Virgin Killer?" Remo asked incredulously.

"Good work, Remo." Chiun sighed. "I see you've managed to kill just two hoodlums thus far and one of them happens to be the one we needed to keep alive."

"Give me a break," Remo answered. "Hey, you." He snapped his fingers over Chiun's bodies. "Who's next in the line of command?"

One of the bikers who still clung to life raised his eyes to the giant. Then he raised his eyes to heaven and said a strange word, which ended in a final hiss of breath. "What did he say, Belltower?" Remo asked.

"He said Belfagore," intoned the seven-plus-footer. "I am Belfagore."

"What kind of name is that?"

"It is one of the names of Satan," the giant thundered.

"Oh, brother."

"And I will dispatch you straight to hell, little man!" By this time the surviving ranks of the Road Sharks biker gang were on their feet, and Remo saw deranged vitality in their eyes. He'd seen it the day before in a certain crack house.

Belfagore raised one long arm and stabbed the air, shouting, "Kill them!"

The Road Sharks struck fast, overpowering the throbbing music with banshee battle cries. Their movements were adrenalized out of human proportions as they tore into the two Masters.

The two Masters were gone, though. The small mob stumbled to a halt, shouts dying in their throats until the shouters started dying themselves. Remo pushed a pair of skulls against each other and removed his hands fast before the gore splashed them. He leaped around their collapsing remains and reached wide with both hands, inserting a finger deep into the ear of one Shark and the chest of another.

Chiun stood watching Remo as the heart-puncture victim flopped to the ground. The old Master was the picture of peaceful composure, hands tucked in his kimono sleeves, as if he were unaware of the three Road Sharks sprawled dead at his feet, let alone claimed responsibility for them.

"What was that 'Kill them' all about?" Remo demanded of the Road Sharks' new leader. "You trying to do a whole Batman TV show thing on us? Were you expecting some CRAACKK!s and KERPLOW!s? Notice that the real world doesn't work that way?"

Belfagore was astonished at the nearly instant annihilation of his gang.

"So?" Remo demanded. "What's the deal? Why are you doing this? What's your problem?"

The Shark closed his mouth and began to quiver.

"He is mad," Chiun declared resignedly.

"No kidding. Belfagore's got serious bats in his belfry."

"No. I mean he is angry."

Belfagore made a sound like a komodo dragon whose goat haunch has been taken by another komodo dragon.

"Ya think?" Remo asked Chiun, then stepped aside and nudged the charging giant, who tumbled with tremendous momentum across the bloody floor and crashed through the last few upright lounge tables. Then he leaped to his feet, shouting incoherently and charging again.

Charging fast.

Belfagore launched himself at Remo but Remo stepped out of the way, so Belfagore was sliding again, head-first this time. A wall stopped him hard.

"Ah, crap," Remo said.

But Belfagore wasn't dead or even unconscious. He used the wall for support as he rose to his feet, and his eyes seemed incapable of focusing.

"I'm surprised you don't make accordion sounds when you breathe, Belf. I think you're three inches shorter. Don't you think, Little Father?"

"Four inches," Chiun said.

Belfagore staggered at the Reigning Master of Sinanju, grunting and croaking.

"Oh, just give it up, would you?" Remo stepped aside and tripped the giant. Belfagore fell down, and it was a long way down.

"That was for your own good." Remo crouched beside the biker. "You'd have killed yourself running around like a maniac, which would rob me of the pleasure."

Belfagore made agonized sounds when he was flipped onto his back. He coughed blood and didn't have the strength to grab Remo by the throat.

"Okay, so you're dying anyway," Remo said. "You've got maybe ten minutes. So why not just tell me what I wanna know?"

Belfagore made animal sounds, gnashing his teeth. "Why'd you guys get all freaked out? Who put you up to this?"

Belfagore's collection of sounds settled into a long, menacing growl.

"He's mad," Chiun pointed out.

"You said that."

"I mean, he's insane."

Remo nodded reluctantly. "Who isn't? I wanna know." He grabbed the dying biker by the base of the neck and turned him off. Belfagore went limp.

"I am not insane," Chiun said indignantly. "You, however, are behaving oddly. For example, I see you have now taken up the noble pastime of looting the dead."

"Ha!" Remo had extracted the biker's wallet, a huge black leather affair on a stainless-steel belt chain, and flourished the driver's license. "Belfagore's real name? Maurice."

Chiun said nothing, but his brows grew heavy as he observed Remo moving among the corpses, pulling out wallets one after another. "This guy's named Bork. This guy is Virgil. No wonder the weird nicknames!"

"This has some meaning to you'?"

Remo grinned and shrugged. "Just looking for the common thread tying these losers together."

"What is common is they are all dead," Chiun noted.

CHIUN WAS STARING at the wing of the 737 as if it might, just might, fall off right then, before they even pushed back from the gate.

"Slowpoke," he said.

"Who? Me?" Remo asked from the next seat. "When was I slow?"

"I've already explained that."

"Did I miss something?"

"You missed me on the way in," said a woman in a blue blazer and a blond hair helmet. "I'm Johlene, and I'll be your stewardess on this flight."

"Fine. Thanks." Remo avoided eye contact and said to Chiun, "Explain it again."

"Who buckled this seat belt?" Johlene demanded playfully. "It's all wrong."

"You know, I've done ten thousand airplane seat belts and I think I've got the hang of it. " Remo shoved her groping hands away from his lap. "Now, when was I slow?"

Chiun sighed. "During the poke. As I explained."

"What poke?"

"Against the smelly bicycle riders in the loud nightclub," Chiun said.

"My poke was not slow."

"I could use a slow-" Johlene interjected.

"Can it!" Remo barked at the stewardess. Her eyes opened a little wider. They glinted. Remo wasn't looking. "Your form was imperfect, as well," Chiun complained.

"You're making up stuff."

"Your form is perfect. Don't listen to him," Johlene said comfortingly to Remo.

"What does it take to offend somebody these days?" Remo demanded.

"Who knows?" the stewardess asked, leaning her bosom into his chest. "Why not call me a few dirty names and see if I leave in a huff."

"Addressing the fraudulent nature of her udders should drive her off," Chiun said with irritation.

Johlene stiffened. "What did he say?"

"Oh, yeah." Remo glared pointedly at the sculpted bustline. "Boob implants. I absolutely can't stand fakes. It turns me off big time."

"But look at them," she pleaded. "They're so firm and symmetrical."

"What have you got in there-aluminum softballs? Yech."

Johlene finally left, and Remo ignored the alternately pleading and disdainful looks she gave him during the rest of the flight.

"Your mean form lacks grace, which is a result of your lack of precision dexterity," Chiun explained when she was gone.

"Say that again, Little Father?"

"Your training was unbalanced. I failed to instill the proper respect for the written word. From the creation of beautiful words on parchment comes the appreciation of beautiful movement of the rest of the body."

"You're joking, right?"

"I joke not."

"Listen, Chiun, the training is done. I'm trained. You did the best you could, and it turns out you are a wonderful teacher. I'm good at my job."

"Your job?" Chiun turned to face him finally. "Is that what Sinanju is to you? An occupation?"

"Of course not."

"Is that why you have decided to stagnate? You have deemed yourself adequate and see no profit in improvement? Oh, Remo, you send all my hopes crashing down like fine crystal goblets pushed off high shelves."

"Oh, brother."

"This is a white attitude. It is the blood of your European ancestors that makes you lazy. I prayed that your Korean blood would give you perseverance. Even the Native Americans who have sullied your ancestry will inherently strive for improvement against the greatest adversity."

"I never said I was going to rest on my laurels!" Remo argued.

"Laurels? How European. How Roman. How like you to use those words."

"It's a figure of friggin' speech. I don't even know what laurels are!"

"I feel grave concern for your future, Remo."

"I thought you felt hopeless."

"I am gravely concerned for your standing among the Masters. I do not want to be known as Chiun, Trainer of Remo the Slothful."

Remo said, "That's what this is about, huh? How I reflect on you in the Sinanju scrolls?"

"Of course! The status of a Master depends in great part on the status of the Master he trains."

"And I'm not good enough?"

"You are not trying hard enough."

"So I haven't been pulling my weight?"

"You are complacent," Chiun replied without hesitation.

Remo didn't answer. He looked at the seat back in front of him and thought about Chiun's words.

This was more than an idle insult-and Chiun was the king of idle insults. The old Master had been considering this. He was sincere.

But was he right?

It sure didn't feel to Remo that he was slacking. He'd had a rough ride of it in recent years, starting with his Rite of Attainment and getting worse as he closed in on the Rite of Succession. Even Chiun had admitted that Remo had faced harder obstacles than most Masters reaching their prime.

Was it possible that his attitude had changed for the worse since he became Reigning Master? Was he slacking?

"Okay, Little Father," he said finally. "First chance we get; I promise, we'll get into the whole penmanship thing."

Chiun narrowed his eyes.

"I mean it," Remo added.

"What are you hiding?"

"I'm not hiding anything. I meant what I said, that's all. I'll take the calligraphy lessons."

"I sense a ploy."

"No ploy. No tricks up my sleeve. I promise you I'll give the lessons a shot."

THE WING SEEMED well anchored to the fuselage of the aircraft, but wings and limbs could become separated from their bodies easily enough. What Chiun had never understood was why such great masses of metal could not be made inflexible. But he had been assured that they were designed to wobble in the wind. And they all did. Wobble.

There had been a time when Chiun was worried about his unlikely protege for much the same reason he was worried now. It was just after Remo had, miraculously enough, passed through the Rite of Attainment.

Common sense decreed that Sinanju skills should never have flourished inside the inherently clumsy body of a white, but Remo had such skills in abundance. His proved Sinanju lineage only partially explained it.

But after his Attainment, after he solved the mystery of his parentage and offspring, there was a time when Remo had become, of all things, content.

Contentment was no good. Contentment led to complacency, and complacency could get a Master annihilated.

Then came a time of increasing hardship as the leaders of the world seemed to descend en masse into idiocy. The U.S. put in place a puppet president whose only possible qualification could be for entertainment purposes. The challenges to Remo became greater, as well, as he became afflicted with the Master's Disease and was haunted by the manifestation of the Master Who Never Was, foretelling worsening hardship.

It all seemed to culminate at the time of the Rite of Succession, when Remo's ritual assumption of the title of Reigning Master of Sinanju was interrupted by the resurrection of old and powerful enemies. Chiun himself was wounded emotionally and almost broken. He still carried in his mind the image of a decimated village of Sinanju. The image was false, a mirage, but for a short time he had believed it, and the distress he felt had left a scar.

When the danger was over, and Remo was Reigning Master, his strange behavior began. Despite his new burden of responsibility, despite new dangers foretold, Remo seemed at ease. Why?

Even for a man of far-reaching wisdom such as himself, Chiun found answers elusive. Could Remo be bluffing through the burden of being the Reigning Master? Could it be that he was in truth straining under the weight of this awesome responsibility? What if, unknown to Chiun, Remo was in distress and approaching an emotional breakdown?

Chiun had thought Remo was sleeping, but then the young Reigning Master sat up straight in his aircraft seat and spoke aloud.

"Pork tamales."

Remo sounded quite pleased with himself.

Then Chiun knew the truth. As good as his body was at making the motions of the martial arts Sun source that was Sinanju, his feeble white brain had simply been unable to keep pace and it had finally folded in upon itself.

Ah, well. Folcroft Sanitarium was a pleasant enough place for an imbecile. Chiun would make sure that Smith gave Remo the nicest room in which to spend his remaining years doodling, sloppily, on the walls.

Chapter 14

It was well past regular hours and the outer office was empty. Folcroft Sanitarium felt abandoned in the depth of the night, and they met no one on their way up to the office of Director Harold W Smith. As they reached the outer office, domicile of Smith's longtime secretary Eileen Mikulka, Chiun turned to Remo.

"Wait here."

"What for?"

But Chiun was already gliding inside Smith's office and closing the door behind him.

"Hey, Chiun, what's the deal?" Remo asked, following him inside and finding the old Korean leaning close to the gray, patrician features of the CURE director, whispering fiercely.

Chiun wheeled on him. "I told you to remain outside!"

"Yeah, but I didn't. You planning a surprise parry for me or something?"

Chiun sniffed disdainfully, but there was a look of worry on his brow. "Yes, something."

Remo tried to read the old man's expression, but it was an inscrutable combination of distrust and-what, concern? Smith revealed nothing. Mark Howard sat in the couch looking like a man who had no clue what was going on around him.

"So let me in on it," Remo demanded.

"Later perhaps," Chiun said, and gave Smith a prompting glare.

"Uh, yes. Tell me about Nashville."

"Southern inhospitality, too much money, too little taste. What else you want to know?"

Smith's gray face puckered sourly. "Anything. A clue. A hint."

"Nope. None of that. Lots of crazy dead dancers, and later lots of crazy bikers. That's about it."

"We're still getting reports on the murders at the Rock Hard Cafe," Smith said. "All the police are releasing is that the biker gang called themselves the Nashville Road Sharks. The gang stormed the Rock Hard seemingly without provocation."

"That's about the size of it," Remo agreed.

"'That's nuts," Mark Howard objected. "There has to be motivation for it."

"You'd think," Remo admitted, relaxing in one of the chairs before Smith's desk. Chiun chose to stand, unusually guarded, Remo noticed. Guarded against what? "We asked the bikers. Politely at first, and then we got persuasive and they wouldn't tell us why. Said they were just really angry."

"Were they hiding their motive?" Howard asked. "They could not hide their intentions from a Master of Sinanju," explained Chiun. "They claimed they were simply filled with rage."

"Here's what we found out," Remo said. "They were at their usual hangout, you know, just having a few beers like every night, and they were talking about overpaid monkey suits at the yuppie bar down the street," Remo explained. "Only this time they decided it was time they stop talking about bashing heads and actually go bash some heads."

"Skilled killers they were not," Chiun sniffed. Remo explained how they stopped in for a visit at the biker bar that had been the Nashville Road Sharks hangout. After delivering the sad news of the demise of Bork, Virgil, Maurice and the rest, they questioned the tearful, mourning patrons about anything unusual that happened in the bar that evening.

"Only one thing out of the ordinary," Remo said. "That night the Road Sharks came in with a friend. A new guy the locals had never seen before. Claimed to be a TV commercial producer looking for a real, honest-to-goodness biker gang for a new ad campaign for beer-flavored vodka."

"You think he was just trying to get close to the gang?" Smith asked.

"Looks like it." Remo shrugged. "He bought them a few rounds and said he would be in touch, then left. Half an hour later the Road Sharks had transformed from peace-loving Harley huggers into homicidal maniacs with a taste for yuppie blood. That's when they headed for the Rock Hard."

"And nobody got a good look at the man who claimed to be a TV commercial producer, I suppose."

"The clientele of the tavern were inebriated, Emperor," Chiun explained. "They remembered a man in his twenties with ridiculous face whiskers. Not another pertinent detail could any of them provide."

Smith sighed. Mark Howard put his hands behind his head and stretched back in the couch, staring at the ancient ceiling tiles, so yellowed with age their original color was impossible to discern.

"Well?"

Remo looked at Chiun. Howard and Smith looked at Chiun.

"Well what?" Remo asked.

"Do you not have more you would like to say?" Chiun said.

"Like what?"

"Do you have something more to report, Remo?" Smith asked sternly.

"Uh-uh. What about you?" Remo looked sharply at the old Korean.

"I have said all I know of the matter," Chiun replied leadingly.

Remo asked, "You think I know something about this that you don't?"

"Naturally not. I have been with you over the past twelve hours. All you have learned, so I have learned."

"So what are you fishing around for, Chiun?"

"I am not fishing:" The bony hands appeared from within the kimono sleeves and waved airily. "I was merely guessing you had some sort of pronouncement to make to the Emperor."

"I don't think I've ever made a pronouncement in my life."

"Fine," Smith said with weary impatience. "What about the bikers' behavior?"

"It was atrocious," Remo stated.

"Compared to the addicts you encountered in the condemned building," Smith added.

"Well, they did a lot less screaming and they weren't as jittery," Remo recalled. "They were more clearheaded than the crack heads, but that's not saying much. What about the drugs I took from the crack house?"

"The analysis shows nothing out of the ordinary," Mark reported.

"I think it is still reasonable to assume that these killers were drugged," Smith added. "The man in Bunsen, Mississippi, Arby Maple, was reported to have shared a drink with a stranger just prior to embarking on his murder spree. That's the same as with the Nashville bikers and the crowd at the Big Stomp. I think it's safe to say it was probably something similar with the addicts."

"What's the difference between the screamers and the nonscreamers?" Remo asked. "Think it was the drugs?"

Smith nodded. "Makes sense. Whatever was used to bring about these fits of violence could have reacted with the crack cocaine the addicts ingested."

"That does not account for the aftereffects, though," Mark said. "The killers in each case seem to have different long-term reactions to the drug," he explained to Remo and Chiun. "Arby Maple claims to remember nothing-otherwise he seems healthy. The addicts who were taken into custody by the police after the killings have gone from paranoid and uncooperative to uncontrollably demented and violent. Some of them are starting to drop into semiconsciousness. None of them seem to have the power of speech any longer. The customers at the Big Stomp have also started experiencing decreased metabolism and slowing brain function. A few have slipped into comas. The medical teams are trying to come up with a treatment to keep them alive."

"Doesn't add up," Remo said.

"You're right," Smith agreed. "None of it does. Yet."

HE KNEW HIS PLOY would never work, but Remo went through the motions anyway. First he waited for the snores like fingernails on slate to fill the confines of the suite that was their Folcroft home-away-from-home, then Remo slipped into the hall. The cadence of the snoring in Chiun's room never changed, but he hadn't gone far before he knew he was being stalked through the Folcroft corridors.

He ignored it and entered an office on the upper floor. The room was so tiny there was barely room for the desk and the single guest chair, and yet the man sitting at the desk never sensed he was not alone until Remo closed the door and said, "Knock knock."

Mark Howard launched himself out of his seat and started to say something, only to find a very solid hand clamped firmly against his face.

"Shh. Keep it down:"

"What's going on, Remo?" Mark demanded when he was released.

"I need a little help."

"What kind of help?"

"I think I've got a line on what's behind the weirdness in the heart of Dixie."

"Why all the sneaking around? Let's go see Dr. Smith."

"No. Uh-uh."

"This is not the time for playing games."

"I'm not playing games, Junior."

"Then why-"

"Last warning, loudmouth. Keep your voice down." Remo nodded at the big oak desk, which dominated the room like a coffin in a closet. "Start typing."

Howard sat and raised the screen from the desktop, hands poised above the keyboard. "I need to know-"

"Get into the air travel records and flight plans. The airlines, the charters, private aircraft."

"You have to know we've done a search already," Howard said. "Want to tell me what I'm looking for?"

"A delegation from Union Island."

"You must be kidding me."

"Do it."

Mark shrugged, and his fingers started flying over the keyboard. Remo leaned over and stared at the screen for a moment. The electronic windows were hogwash. Howard could be checking the balance in his checking account for all Remo knew.

"Huh," Mark said.

"What huh?" Remo asked.

"The delegation was in Boston at the time of the drug distribution. Hold on. They were in Nashville. The entire itinerary matches up."

"I thought so."

"But that doesn't exactly prove anything. The time frames were loose enough that we could put thousands of people in the right place at the right time."

"What's this bunch doing all the traveling around for, anyway?" Remo asked.

"Don't you read the news? Their president is on the talk-show circuit. He's trying to drum up support for their independence movement. They want to break away from the United States."

Remo frowned. "Show me what the president looks like."

Howard tapped a few keys and pushed back from the screen. Remo slid around the desk and looked at a Web page for the Union Island Independence Movement. The page was dominated by the smiling face of the elected leader of the island, President Greg Grom.

"What do you know, it's the same kid I saw on TV," Remo said. "He doesn't look old enough to vote, let alone get elected."

"He's not as young as he looks," Howard said, doing something esoteric with the little blinking line on the screen to make the window change to a biography of the kid in question. "Says here he's twenty-nine."

"For the president of the He-Man Woman Haters Club that's old-for president of anything bigger it's young."

"Doesn't mean he can't do his job," Mark protested. "He might actually achieve his goal."

"The independence thing? Just because he's got Puerto Rican go-it-aloners on his side?"

"That's strictly part of the PR campaign to generate sympathy for the cause. What counts is he's getting congressional support."

"How's he doing that? What's the angle?"

Howard shrugged. "I haven't been following it too closely, but it's all kind of confusing. I haven't heard anyone come up with a real reason Union Island should want independence, let alone why anybody on the Hill would support it. But it's happening."

"Is there any possible way they could benefit from all this killing?" Remo asked.

"That's what I'm looking into," Howard said as he typed furiously. "None of the people involved in the killing have ties to Union Island. There's never been known drug trafficking through Union, so there doesn't seem to be a logical organized-crime link."

"But if they were independent they could run drugs through the place," Remo suggested.

Howard shook his head. "Independence wouldn't help them there. Even if they set up the island as a distribution hub, we'd find out, blockade them and shut them down."

"Yeah, I guess so."

Howard's fingers spidered over the keys for a few more minutes until he sat back in the chair. "I just don't see a connection."

"But it might be there," Remo insisted.

"Might be." Mark clearly doubted it. "Tell me why all the secrecy."

Remo shook his head. "Maybe later. Where's the Union group now?"

"En route to North Carolina for a PR event in the town of Fuquay-Varina."

"You better not be making that up."

"There's a morning talk-show appearance scheduled for the president, then a chartered bus trip through the Smoky Mountains. There's an afternoon photo op for the media at a mountaintop hotel, then on to a late dinner hosted by the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee."

"Why the long drive? Why not just fly to Knoxville?"

"Maybe they want to see the Great Smokies."

"Yeah," Remo said. "Maybe I do, too."

Chapter 15

"I would appreciate knowing where we are going."

"Uckfay-Farina, North Carolina," Remo answered as he balanced Chiun's chests on each shoulder and ducked to get them below the top of the airport door. "From there maybe to Tennessee."

"You have not yet told me why we are doing this."

"And I'm not going to. That's the deal if I let you tag along."

"The Master Of Sinanju Emeritus does not 'tag along.'"

The uncomfortable silence continued all the way to Raleigh.

THE REAL PEOPLE HOUR out of Raleigh, North Carolina, was as amateur as any TV talk show got. Some folding chairs and a stage pounded together out of plywood. A couple of digital camcorders from Walmart. One of them had a tripod.

The Real People Hour had been broadcast on the whim of a retiring station manager and met with unexpected success. Now, as it celebrated its one-year anniversary, The Real People Hour was seen in fifteen markets throughout the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, even Florida. And more stations were interested.

"It's a barn," Remo said as they emerged from the rental car.

"It sure is," said the boy in the orange vest who was waving cars into parking places on the flattened grass. "This was a working farm up until a year ago. My mom's the one who started the show and my daddy does the production work. Tickets?"

"No, thanks."

"We flew in an airplane to come to this place?" Chiun sniffed. "They raised pigs in this place."

"Yeah. And never bothered to clean out the sty when they made the switch to showbiz," Remo observed. The kid in the orange vest hustled past and chatted seriously with a pair of older boys at the barn entrance. The pair stiffened and eyed them as they checked ticket stubs, then closed ranks on Remo and Chiun.

"You'll need tickets to see the show," the taller boy declared. He had a face full of patchy whiskers. His younger brother had the girth of a gorilla and was even hairier.

"Shouldn't you be in school?" Remo asked.

"Don't go to school. We got a TV show to run," the taller one explained scornfully. "Now, you got a ticket?" Remo extracted an ID from the front pocket of his Chinos.

"Remo Rottweiler, Secret Service, foreign diplomats detail. Let's see some ID."

The tall one went slack-jawed, then turned and gestured frantically into the barn. A moment later a beerbelly and its owner emerged. The man had the same scruffy whiskers as his sons.

"You the man in charge here?" Remo demanded before the tall kid could get out an explanation. He pushed his ID in the man's face. "I assume you've got federal diplomatic access clearance for all employees?"

"I never heard of federal diplomatic access clearance," the father responded, unable to decide if he should be belligerent or agreeable.

"You've got heads of state on the premises. You'll need FDAC on all personnel."

"Nobody told me that." The beer belly and its owner swung pendulously at them. He apparently decided on belligerence.

"Sorry. You can start the show when you have them. Phone the Department of Justice, and they'll take care of it."

"Oh. Okay. I'll phone right now. How long it'll take, you think?"

Remo shrugged. "Eight weeks is what they'll tell you, but really it'll take twelve."

"What? We got a show to do in ten minutes! You can't make us stop the show!"

"Wouldn't dream of it. But we will be required to escort your guest away from the premises immediately."

"But then we got no show!"

"Then maybe you tell Scruff and Scruffier to cough up some ID. You, too."

Remo glared at the IDs, then ordered Scruff the Youngest and the car-parking kid to go to school. Scruff the Youngest began sobbing. Remo reluctantly allowed the show to go on, under his supervision, and he and Chiun took seats in the audience. The Real People Hour got under way just fifteen minutes late.

"Don't worry about it folks. We're on tape anyway, and we want everything perfect before we get the show on the road!" The host was Missy Glosse, whose complicated hair design and makeup contrasted with her rumpled farm-wife dress and the cheap set. In fact, the only change made to the show since the very first program was the host's new hairdo and several new folding chairs.

After a few handshakes and bad jokes, Glosse disappeared into the curtained livestock stalls that now served as dressing rooms. Minutes later the house lights dropped and the show started with a blare of music from a portable stereo. Missy Glosse came on stage and brought out her guest without delay.

"Who is this whelp?" Chiun asked in a voice so quiet only Remo could hear it.

"Don't let his age fool you. The kid is an elected government leader."

Chlun shook his head sadly. "I am not surprised. You elect felons. You elect actors. You elect professional wrestlers. Why not elect a playground brat? Democracy inspires idiocy."

"Well, he wants out of our particular democracy," Remo explained. "He wants Union Island to go independent."

"Ah. Emperor Smith opposes this."

Remo shook his head. "I don't think Smitty give two hoots in a holler about Greg Grom or Union Island."

Chiun's face pinched. "Then why are we here?" Remo ignored the question. Missy Glosse was effusing to the audience about her recent vacation on Union Island.

"President Grom, your island is just the most beautiful tropical paradise! I have never experienced anyplace like it!"

"Thank you very much, Ms. Glosse. You know, we can only try to protect our beautiful country from the ravages we know are coming-no less than total destruction of the entire island."

"What?" demanded a mortified Missy Glosse.

"You know the poor people of Puerto Rico have been terribly inconvenienced by the military exercises on their out-islands," the youthful-looking Greg Grom recited. "The political backlash has been tremendous and the U.S. is looking for another site-one without a minority population. We have it on good authority that Union Island has been designated. It's close, it's a U.S. property and the population is more than fifty-percent white, so the military can't be accused of racial discrimination."

"But what about that beautiful island and those shining, happy people?" Ms. Glosse wailed.

Greg Grom hung his head. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked up a moment later.

"I am sorry. It just makes me so sad to talk about."

"I can't believe anybody falls for this guy," Remo muttered.

"Most of the charlatans vying for ballots in this failing democracy have some crude acting skills, if nothing else," Chiun observed. "This young faker is entirely insincere."

Grom was looking straight at the camera now. "Our friends in Washington says there is a lockdown on these plans, and we've met with nothing but falsehoods and denials from federal officials. They do not even have the guts to tell us the truth."

"I haven't seen acting this bad since we did Gift of the Magi in fifth grade," Remo complained. "Come on."

"What? Going?" Chiun said. "The show has just begun."

"There's more to see and it's not in here. You coming?"

"Not until I know where."

"Suit yourself."

The entrance had a hand-lettered sign that forbade opening the door during the taping of the show. A padlocked steel bar kept the door firmly closed. Standing guard was another family member-in fact, his age suggested he might be the progenitor of the Glosse species.

"Terlet's in the rear. Can't be opening this door while tape is rolling."

"Terlet's on the stage, if you ask me," Remo replied as he tapped the padlock and it cracked like brittle glass. It clanked noisily on the wooden plank floor. Remo handed the steel crossbar to the dismayed old-timer, but the weight of the bar carried it right out of the old man's fingers. The racket was tremendous. By then taping had come to a stop and Producer-Director Beerbelly Glosse was yelling about "a closed set" and "federal meddlers!"

"I see you are now abusing all the elderly, and not just me." Chiun had slipped through the door of the old pig barn just before it slammed shut.

"I don't know what President Grom is up to, but he's sure telling a tall tale about the U.S. using his island for target practice," Remo commented. "I wonder why."

"There are many other questions one must ask at this time," Chiun said. "Why did we come here? Why did we leave? What insidious plot do you conceal from your Father-in-Spirit?"

Remo led them to the customized tour bus parked in the rear of the barn. The engine was running, and a uniformed driver stretched out on the steps in the open door. He smiled easily but made no move to get up.

"We need to check out the vehicle," Remo flipped out the badge and stalled on the name and agency du jour. The driver waved the badge away.

"Whatever. Coffee's in the pot."

The driver scooted to one side so the Masters of Sinanju could use the steps. Inside they gazed at a vast suite of living spaces created out of compact furniture and built-in appointments.

"Remo!" Chiun exclaimed. "What is this place?"

"The Lost Naugahyde Graveyard?"

"It is beautiful," Chiun enthused, strolling through a small parlor made by a tight grouping of sofas. He descended a few steps into the media center with theater seating and a huge, flat television display mounted in the wall. "Look how carefully it is crafted! See how they have used the finest fabrics and design to create compact living spaces inside a truck!"

"It's a sleazy Vegas hotel room on wheels," Remo said.

"No, it is a palace on wheels!"

Remo didn't like the sound of that one bit. "Help me look, will you?"

"How can I help when I do not know what I am looking for? This kitchen is a miracle-small and yet complete down to the smallest detail. There is even a warming drawer!"

"We eat rice, fish and more rice. What would we warm in a warming drawer?"

"The drawers are made with a tiny catch to keep them from sliding open while the vehicle is in motion!"

"Wait," Remo said. He stopped and looked around the room. He sniffed. Chiun creased his eyes at the young Master.

"Smell anything?" Remo asked.

"I smell a thousand aromas. I assume you smell something out of the ordinary."

"Not yet, but I'll find it." He sniffed loudly.

"Pah. You smell like a horse-and I mean that in every sense," Chiun said. "Tell me what we are attempting to locate, if sharing the secret is not too troublesome."

"Well, I don't know exactly. Some sort of a drug or chemical or something that would make people act crazy."

Chiun's white mouth drew up in a hard line. "As in violently maddened? Is that why we are here, Remo, to hunt down the source of the tavern brawl troubles?"

"Yep. That's the reason."

"Why did not Emperor Smith inform me of this purpose?"

"Emperor Smith doesn't know we're here, okay?" Remo said. "It was my idea to come here. I'm the one who started thinking that maybe this bunch of Caribbean nincompoops was making all the bad stuff happen. The only person I told was Prince Junior and only because I needed to get some of my facts straight."

Chiun nodded, uncharacteristically thoughtful. Remo tried to ignore him as he opened cabinets and sniffed under coffee tables.

"What did the Prince Regent think of your deductions?"

"You know what he thought, Chiun! He thought-I was grasping at wild geese and I am sure you do, too. So what do you say we skip all the sarcastic remarks this time."

Remo felt the Master Emeritus watching him. The old man was just standing there. Remo hated it when Chiun acted all quiet, as if pondering weighty matters-such as the magnificence of the ignorance of the man who was now Reigning Master.

"Well, like it or not, here we are," Remo announced finally. "So why don't you humor me and see if you can find anything suspicious."

"Very well," Chiun replied quite agreeably.

For the next ten minutes they ransacked the customized touring bus and went through the two bedrooms in the rear. They found prescription bottles, several stocked liquor cabinets and a plastic bag of Mary Jane's Delight Brand Legal Pipe-Blend. Even in a sealed plastic bag Remo could tell it was only catnip and oregano.

"I do not believe we will find what you are seeking, my son," Chiun said as they finished their rounds. Remo said nothing, just stood in the small dining area with a realistic-looking electric-log fireplace. His freakishly thick wrists twisted absently.

"Any bombs?" asked the driver with a smile as he strolled through the curtains that partitioned off the driving area. He made for the kitchenette, where he refilled his insulated mug.

"Can't be too careful," Remo replied as his wrists stopped twisting.

"I 'preciate your thoroughness."

As soon as the driver left, Remo went to the kitchenette. He snatched open the doors of the golden oak cabinets.

"I have already searched the kitchenette," Chiun said.

"Maybe it's in the coffee. They used to try to hide cocaine in coffee shipments because the drug dogs couldn't sniff it out that way."

"My sense of smell is superior to that of any drug-sniffing dog. If there were drugs in the coffee I would have found it "

"I know you would, Little Father," Remo said through gritted teeth-as he opened a five-pound can of Folgers and plunged his fingers into it. He scooped up several handfuls of coffee.

Just coffee.

Chapter 16

"All right, let me have it," Remo said after an hour of excruciating silent treatment.

"Let you have what?" Chiun asked.

"You're mad at me, and you're dying to tell me about it."

Sitting with legs crossed, Chiun modestly adjusted the skirts of his kimono. Every loose bit of silk fluttered in the wind. "I do not know what you are talking about."

"Overpass," Remo announced, nodding his head low on his chest. The big tour bus rumbled at sixty-five miles per hour under the concrete supports of a county highway that had been routed over the interstate. There was just an inch of clearance between the windwhipped tips of his close-cropped dark hair and the underside of the overpass. Chiun didn't even bother to bow his head. At about five feet tall, he was already as low as his adopted son was ducking.

The overpass was left behind in a flurry of rushing air.

"I didn't trust you or I second-guessed you or something when we were in the bus. You told me the drugs were not in the coffee and I went and looked in the coffee anyway. You're mad about that."

Chiun said nothing. The white tufts of hair decorating each of his shell-like ears looked as if they would fly off any second.

"Well, I guess I can understand why you'd be mad. I don't know why I checked the coffee. Even I could smell that it was just coffee. Aw, crap."

A state trooper, lying in wait behind the viaduct, was now speeding up behind the tour bus.

"Why couldn't he be sleeping?" Remo complained.

"You did not expect to ride half the morning atop this vehicle without being noticed," Chiun said. "Besides, the first two police were sleeping."

They stood and walked to the front of the bus, which alarmed the trooper into sounding his siren. They stepped off at a point near the front where they would be unseen by the trooper and bus passengers, then jogged alongside as the bus slowed. Finally they veered off into the wildflower field that encroached on the two westbound lanes.

"I guess I really wanted to find the stuff in the damn bus," Remo continued as the two of them stepped up into a comfortable looking tree and watched the trooper clamber all over the tour bus. They heard the derision cast on the trooper by the bus driver and several of the occupants, who had debarked to watch the entertainment. The trooper's face was bright pink by the time he crawled onto the roof himself and searched it, expecting to find a trapdoor or a hiding place.

"Is that why we are staying with the bus? Because you cannot stand the thought of being mistaken?"

"No, because I don't think I am mistaken," Remo said. "I've got a strong intuition that there's a link between this entourage and the outbreaks of violence. Like when I was in Boston putting the screws to Jorge Moroza. The TV was on in the restaurant to a Spanish language station, and they showed one of the news items with Greg Grom. Then we saw him on the news again in Nashville. And I think I saw him at the Big Stomp-remember the limo that pulled in right after we got there? I saw half a face inside it. Just the eyes. And it was through the dark glass. But I think it was him. Grom."

Chiun looked at him as if waiting for a punchline. "I had this sort of feeling that I was missing something, you know. I couldn't put my finger on it, but for some reason I kept smelling pork tamales in my head." Chiun looked more interested, and slightly pitying. "Crazy, maybe, but I couldn't shake it out. Then I was just sitting there on the plane, not even trying to think about it, and that's when I remembered smelling pork tamales. It was when I questioned Jorge Moroza. He must have eaten thirty of them. That was when I remembered that I had seen Grom on the TV when I was with Moroza. Everything clicked into place."

"You equate an obsession with pork tamales with investigative insight?" Chiun pondered. "Pork tamales no less, Remo. Pig fat and corn. There must be no more appealing food on the planet to one with your bizarre and degraded pedigree."

"Chiun, I guarantee I will never eat a pork tamale, especially not after watching what they did to Moroza. And I must have been onto something. I had Prince Junior check into it, and he figured out that this bus has been within strike range of all the outbreaks of violence."

"Was anyone else?"

"Well, yeah, a few hundred people, according to the flight schedules."

The trooper was standing outside his car having an animated exchange with whoever was on the other end of his radio. Someone was reading the trooper the riot act for harassing a politically sensitive elected official.

The trooper's face was as red and hot as a freshly murdered lobster being lifted out of the boiling pot. "Go!" He shouted at the bus crew. "Get out of my state!"

The occupants joked and tittered at the expense of the trooper as they filed back inside and the bus pulled off the shoulder. The trooper kept his lights on until the bus was getting up to speed, then he zoomed ahead. Remo and Chiun ran up behind the bus, keeping themselves in the blind spots of the windows, and leaped aboard. By the time they had seated themselves again, they could see the trooper up ahead in a U-turn lane reserved for emergency vehicles.

Remo waved. The trooper snatched off his mirrored sunglasses, uttered a handful of profanities, then slammed his car into Reverse.

"Not again, you don't." Remo tossed one of the rocks he had gathered during their stop. The little stone sped through the air too fast to be visible and tore through the sidewall of one of the trooper's rear tires. A second rock deflated a front tire. The trooper jumped out of his car and danced in frustration.

"So why are we again on this bus?" Chiun asked.

"To see if my lead pans out."

"Did you not admit that the lead already panned in? We are wasting time. Let us look for an eastbound bus. Perhaps we'll find one that will even allow us to take passage on the inside. I understand this part of the nation has loosened its bus travel restrictions."

"Look, this is my gig. I thought it up. I'm doing what I think I ought to do."

"And I have warned you that thinking is not always your best skill, my son."

"Cram it, Chiun."

"This advice I offer with the best intentions...."

"If you mean your intention is to be a first-class son of a bitch then you pull it off with flying colors." The youthful eyes seemed to withdraw into the eggshell skull.

"Why do you insult me with bitter words?"

"Me? Insult you? I'm so freaking stupid I don't know that you just called me a moron. And you know what? Now that I think about it, you called me moron the very first time we met. And, wait a second, unless I'm a total moron, you've called me a moron every day in between!"

"Control yourself."

"Smith thinks I'm an idiot, the Little Prince thinks I'm a dull-witted playground bully and every President whose life I every saved thought I was a dumb bouncer. You know what, they even thought I was a dim bulb back when I was on the force. Hell, when I was in the freaking Marines they used to say behind my back that I could fight my way out of a steel cage, but I couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag. And you know where it started? The nuns used to whack me on the shoulder blades when I'd get it wrong and say, 'Think, Remo. Why won't you just think?'"

"Is that the cause of this outburst?" Chiun demanded. "Have you been carrying around this anger toward the Virgins of the Carpenter sect for so long that it has finally boiled to the surface?"

"What brought it to the surface was you treating me the same damn way as the Sisters," Remo said hotly. Chiun gasped and shot to his feet. The wind turned his kimono into a furiously flapping flag, like a hundred silk fingers wagging disdainfully at Remo Williams.

"You compare me to the foolish nuns of the Christian cult?" Chiun challenged.

"If the habit fits, wear it."

"I will not stay and be insulted!" Chiun warned.

"Don't let the overpass hit you in the ass on the way out."

Chiun stamped his foot in impotent fury, creating a foot-deep crater in the aluminum roof of the bus, then turned and jumped up. It looked like a light hop, but the leap carried him twelve feet into the sky and his feet settled perfectly on the rail of an overpass.

He walked along the steel rail, then leaped down again, alighting atop a moving van heading east, and sat with his back to Remo Williams as the distance grew rapidly between them.

Remo had not even bothered to watch where his mentor went. Right now, just the fact that Chiun was gone was good enough.

Chapter 17

The elected president of the United States Protectorate of Union Island was sporting a bad case of bed head and rubbing the sleep gunk out of his eyes when he emerged from his bedroom into the outer cubicle occupied by his secretary.

"You missed the excitement." Amelia Powlik made a sound like a small dog choking on a chicken bone.

"What's so funny?" Grom asked.

"We got pulled over by one of North Carolina's finest. He said we had people riding on the roof."

"What?"

"When he looks on the roof and can't find anybody, he says there must be a trapdoor on the roof to let people get up top from the inside. You know what I think?" She pantomimed drinking out of a flask and then rolled her eyes like a drunk. Amelia thought she was immensely humorous and hacked at her own hilarity.

"So what happened?" Grom demanded.

"He wanted to get into your private room to look for this trapdoor, and that's when I called and got the Feds involved. By the time he goes to his car to radio for backup he's got his CO on the other end telling him to back off."

Grom felt like he was missing a piece of information. "But did he really smell like he'd been drinking?"

"Naw, but he was out of it. Wacko." She barked delightedly. "By the way, we're twenty minutes from the photo-op stop."

Grom retreated into his room to get washed up in his phone-booth-sized shower. Funny how talking to his secretary made him feel strangely unclean. In fact, every woman on board the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus was less than attractive. This was one of the attributes that got them their high-ranking positions on the president's staff.

President Greg Grom didn't have much say in the matter. At some point the personnel responsibility had been usurped by his minister of tourism, although Grom couldn't quite explain how or when it had happened. Somehow Dawn Summens had wiggled her way into the role as personnel manager, and Grom's access to women was curtailed. That was fine so long as he had access to Dawn Summens. There wasn't a straight guy on the planet who wouldn't trade his own mother for a taste of Dawn Summens's goodies.

But pretty soon that well had all but dried up, too. It hadn't always been like this. Before Dawn Summens came onto the scene, Greg Grom had been awash in women. There had been women by the boatloads, women of every color. Shy ones and bold ones. Fresh faced college girls on spring break and sophisticated aristocrats. Even royalty. It didn't matter to Greg Grom as long as they were attractive. He scored with just about every woman he went after.

Greg Grom, once upon a time, had made a very important discovery.

THE DARK AND FOREBODING shadows of the pile of rubble would have frightened your run-of-the-mill, superstitious rabble. Greg Grom was highly educated superstitious rabble, and he was scared out of his socks.

Even in daylight the overgrown ruins were ominous. At night, the shadows held primordial demons that disregarded all the education and sensibility of a twentyfirst-century man.

Greg Grom stood in the open area that had once been the town center. Around him the earth swarmed at knee level with weeds and shrubs. All around the periphery of the buildings waited the dark, huge malevolence of the rain forest trees, silent minions of the long-gone inhabitants. Once this was home to Miytec, which, as far as anyone could tell, was a little-known Mayan-Toltec breakaway group that thrived on Union Island briefly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the time Columbus landed in the New World, Union Island was empty.