Bloody Tourists

Grom still felt the Miytec. They were all around him, and they weren't happy to have a grave robber in their midst. He was quivering with fear. A mosquito flew up his left nostril, and he slapped at his face and snorted for fifteen seconds. The moon peeked cautiously over a nearby tree.

Forget this! Grom thought. I'll do it in daylight! But he stayed where he was. There was no way to do this during daylight, when the ruins were full of excavators. Grom was himself part of a team of students from all over the U.S. doing an internship on Union Island. It wasn't a prestigious dig site, but it was mostly unexplored, and all the enthusiastic young people came with high hopes of making a major find.

Greg Grom actually made a major find-and he wasn't telling a soul. He wouldn't share this with anyone, which was why he had to do his excavating in the dark of night.

The second level of the massive stone building had collapsed in on itself during the five centuries since the mysterious disappearance of the Miytec. It was on the ground-floor level that the real finds were being made. Some of the rooms had become sealed by earth or by flora, preserving their contents.

One of the lower-level rooms had been opened just two days earlier, and there the team discovered its first human remains. It was a middle-aged man slumped against a wall. In his hand was a paintbrush. On the floor was a pot of dried, cracked paint. On the walls were painted his final words.

They were in Miytec, which was tough enough to translate. But they were in such crudely penned Miytec as to be almost illegible. None of the others could make sense of it. Not even Burnt Haller, the professor in charge of the group.

But Central American languages were Greg Grom's specialty. And what he read there made his feet perspire with excitement. He took some snapshots to study. He translated them carefully in the hotel bar, when none of the other team members were around.

If true, it was an amazing find.

The dead man and author claimed to be the last Miytec holy man, imprisoned in the tomb by attackers from other islands and from the mainland. The small allied army that had come and wiped out the Miytec on Union Island had been afraid even to touch a Miytec holy man, let alone risk the wrath of the Miytec gods by striking him dead. They had satisfied themselves with sealing him alive in his precious storeroom.

"Here I tell the secret of the Miytec power to rule," the holy man wrote. "With this rite, a man loyal to the pantheon of Miytec deities will gain control of the will of all men."

When Greg Grom read this he thought, Interesting. Something persuaded him to keep it to himself. On some strange impulse he tapped the cracked pouch in the skeletal fingers of the long dead Miytec priest and was surprised when a bit of coarse powder trickled out.

The powder was the source of the Miytec's strange ability to "control the will of all men." It had to be a myth. It couldn't be true. Could it?

Greg Grom knew he had to test it. He had to know. His test was a big success.

Now he was coming back to get the powder-all of it. In the black of night the old corpse was a hideous specter. It stared up at Grom with gaping eye sockets, and laughed at him with yellow teeth. Grom couldn't stop thinking about how the man died.

The old Miytec holy man was trapped underground.

The oil in his lamp was nearly exhausted. "I taste of the powder. I descend into death. I perform the ritual of resurrection upon myself."

Grom knew what that meant. Too much powder worked like Haitian zombie powder. The metabolism slowed and the body seemed to die. Pulse and respiration slowed until they were virtually undetectable. The subject appeared dead. Days later, the subject's metabolism sped up again. The subject, to all appearances, died and came back from the dead.

The holy man took the powder in hopes of extending his life in the unlikely chance that the tomb would be opened up again.

In the irrational, superstitious part of his brain Grom was convinced that now, finally, after seven centuries, the Miytec holy man would resurrect.

It took hours for Grom to get up the nerve to move the holy man. He had to move him-the old Miytec had inconveniently laid himself on top of the stone slab that led into the storage chamber. Using a wide broom, Grom gingerly shifted the body off the stone, only to have it crumble into pieces. After that he felt less anxiety. The old Miytec wasn't a body any longer, just a pile of bones. Grom swept him into a corner, then pried up the big flat stone. Underneath was blackness.

Grom poked his flashlight inside and looked around, and had to clamp a hand over his own mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

There were dozens of stone jars. Dozens of them. Grom worked hard that night, carrying jar after jar out of the storeroom to his rental car. He checked every single jar, and every single jar was brimming with powder. An hour before dawn saw him replacing the stone entrance and shoving the crumbling bones back into place. He drove back to the hotel and used the luggage cart to move the stone jars to his room.

Heidi Fenstermaker was there waiting for him. She helped him pile the jars in the closet, then gave him a nice long back rub. In fact, she did whatever Greg wanted.

Heidi, after all, had been the subject of the very first test.

THE MORNING BEFORE, Greg had waited under a vinecovered arch that had grown shaggy from neglect. It was the only entrance to the hotel's dismal patio restaurant where the crew of archaeology interns took their meals. Heidi Fenstermaker couldn't avoid him.

"Morning, Heidi," Grom greeted her cheerfully. "Join me for breakfast?"

Heidi's eyes flitted around the empty tables as she tried to come up with an excuse to have breakfast with anyone else. However, Grom's bold and overtly friendly invitation gave a polite girl like Heidi no way out.

Grom led her to a tiny round table for two. A surly waiter appeared long enough to deposit two cups of coffee.

"You're heading back to the States in a couple of weeks?" Grom asked conversationally.

"Yes, finally." Heidi sighed.

"I wish you wouldn't go."

"Why not?"

"I like having you around."

She was taken aback. "Greg, you haven't said ten words to me since I got here."

He lifted the cup of coffee out of her hands. "Ugh. A bug just flew in it," Grom said. "I'll get you a fresh cup." He stood and tossed the coffee over the patio rail into the weeds, then got her a clean cup at the waiter's station. He sprinkled in the precious, tiny bits of powder and added fresh coffee.

"Dash of cream, no sugar, no bugs just the way you like it," he announced as he placed the coffee before the lovely Heidi Fenstermaker.

"Thanks."

Grom tried not to stare as she lifted the white porcelain to her full, beautiful lips. The moment of truth. What did dried, ground-up, poisonous octopus powder taste like, anyway? It couldn't be good. He half expected Heidi to spew java all over him.

Instead, she rewarded him with a faint smile. "It's okay?" he asked.

"As good as it gets around here." He nodded. Now the next big test. Would it work?

It couldn't work. How could it work? The Miytec story had to be just a myth.

Well, he would know soon enough.

"I was saying, anyway, I was hoping we might get to know each other," Grom suggested.

"So why'd it take you three months to talk to me?"

Grom tried to look self-effacing. "I'm shy around women." He drank his own coffee, hoping to encourage her by example.

"You're not acting shy now." She sipped.

"You know, for once this is pretty good coffee," Grom said.

Heidi Fenstermaker nodded. "It's not bad at all, really."

"You'd like a little sugar." He said it simply. Not a question. Not a command. He just said it.

Heidi started to say something, then stopped. "I would like some sugar," she said.

Grom poured it in for her.

"It was nice of me to pour your sugar," Grom suggested.

"It's very sweet of you to sweeten my coffee," Heidi said with a wide smile. She sipped it.

"Great joe they have here," Grom observed.

"It is wonderful!"

"I'm attracted to you Heidi. And you are extremely attracted to me."

"I am, Greg. I guess I never really admitted it to myself until this very minute."

"You are in love with me, passionately. You want me. You'd do anything for me, Heidi."

"Yes, Greg, anything. " She leaned over the table, her eyes drinking him in lustily and giving him a fine view down the front of her light cotton shirt. She looked around and surreptitiously opened a couple more of the shirt buttons. Grom's view got even better.

Heidi pulled the rubber band out of her hair, transforming her tight ponytail into a bountiful spill of cornsilk. "Let's skip breakfast and go back to my room," she suggested.

Grom leaned back, brimming with satisfaction. His future was assured. His success would know no bounds. And what better way to celebrate it all than with a morning romp with Heidi Fenstermaker? He said, "Finish your coffee for me first, will you, honey bunch?"

The cup was drained before he reached the "unch" part.

GREG GROM FONDLY recalled those first heady days spent testing the capabilities of the powder. It worked just as well as the translations promised. In fact, it seemed too good to be true. Grom kept waiting for his test subject to develop horrific medical problems or dementia or, well, something.

There were a few glitches along the way. When Heidi Fenstermaker discovered that Grom was regularly bedding nine of the fourteen female interns, she became hysterically jealous. Grom calmed her down and gave her a cup of coffee. He suggested to Heidi that she was not angry with him for sleeping with every other attractive woman in the group. As a matter of fact, Grom suggested that...

Well, that opened up whole new vistas of opportunity. Even after Grom began using his powder for other purposes he still enjoyed many and various sexual exploits. He learned from his mistakes and soon developed a very effective set of suggestions. He took his women, enjoyed them, then discarded them with a code word. They went away just as happily as they had come to him.

Grom could have gone on like that for a lifetime had it not been for the arrival of Dawn Summens. She was just some bikini model hired for a commercial. By then Grom had engineered for himself a rapid rise through the ranks of the tiny Union Island government bureaucracy and was already chief of staff to the island administrator. Grom invited Summens to dinner after the commercial shoot and, somehow, in just one evening, everything changed.

It was as if Summens had used his own powder against him, captivating him entirely. That wouldn't have been such a bad thing if she had not outsmarted him at the same time. She learned about the powder, somehow, and threatened to expose him. She had documented evidence hidden somewhere. She blackmailed him at the same time she was giving him the best sex he had ever had. He never quite got around giving her the Miytec powder until it was too late.

He had to admit that it had all turned out for the best. Summens had assumed control of his ambitious strategies and pushed them further. He rarely let her touch the powder, but she strategized how he used it. Pretty soon Grom found himself elected administrator of Union Island. He changed the office to president, and the islanders loved him for it. His tourism initiative succeeded wildly. Union Island prospered and Greg Grom got rich fast.

Could he sustain this pace? Maybe. Maybe not. There had been a lot of dried-up octopus powder in the stone jars from the Miytec ruins, but those jars emptied fast when he began sprinkling it on the hotel breakfast buffets. The supply was virtually exhausted. The synthetic version of dried-up octopus powder seemed prone to triggering side effects.

Grom was getting nervous. They were at a crucial stage. Union Island had to break away from the United States of America. U.S. restrictions were hindering his income potential. When he was the one and only rule of law on the island, he could tax tourism as much as he wanted.

But independence would come only with strong federal-level support. Since no elected official in his right mind would support Union Island independence, Grom needed the powder to make it happen.

But the powder was almost gone.

Chapter 18

The Union Island Freedom Tour bus was nearing its stop at a restaurant at one of the highest points in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. President Grom was scheduled to partake of the restaurant's famous down-home pie and fresh-brewed coffee, then make a brief speech.

Remo thought it was odd. Why here? It was picturesque, sure, but he couldn't see what connection it had with Greg Grom's independence movement.

Remo stepped off the roof and jogged easily along the hiking trail for the last few miles. The bus was straining against the incline, and it didn't take much effort for Remo to beat it to its destination. He entered the restaurant and found it to have a large two-tiered interior, giving all patrons an unobstructed view of the mountains through the glass wall. He took a table on the top tier and watched Greg Grom perform below, at the best seat in the house.

"What'll it be?" The waitress didn't even look in his direction. She was watching Greg Grom. Remo asked for steamed rice and fresh fish, only to be told there was no rice on the menu. Did he want his fish deep-fried or pan-fried?

"Steam the fish, too, would you?" Remo asked. The waitress took all of six minutes to return with a plate of smoked ham, candied carrots and mashed potatoes under a vast, gelatinous pool of auburn gravy. By then Greg Grom had finished his public pie-eating and was delivering a brief speech on the indomitable spirit on the Smoky Mountain folk. Somehow his compliments dovetailed into an exhortation for the freedom of Union Island. Remo didn't try to follow the logic. Grom made his excuses and headed for the men's room. "Second helpin's on the house," Remo informed the old man in the next booth, handing over his own untouched and inedible plate of country victuals. The old man looked as if he'd won the lottery.

Remo slipped from the restaurant without being noticed by the wait staff, who were busy discussing their brush with a world leader.

With a little fast footwork Remo got outside and under the exterior window to the men's room, but he kept on moving. Union Island staff were wandering the grounds casting their suspicious gaze on any and all patrons. Two of the agents had clearly had U.S. Secret Service training in how to blend into a crowd. The others were regular staff drafted into security duty and spent most of their time actually watching the suit-and-sunglasses twins, imitating their behavior strategies for looking natural. Remo passed through them unseen, but he wasn't sure a passle of teenagers doing a Big Stomp line dance couldn't have passed unnoticed through this self-absorbed bunch.

Still, Remo was interested in some quality alone time in the men's room, and he didn't want to be bothered. He sought a distraction.

The wide, manicured lawn was dotted with wooden lounge chairs inhabited by relaxing guests of the hotel that was attached to the restaurant. Most were elderly widows reading sleazy hack romance novels and occasionally looking up to admire the view. The lawn went down the mountainside for a quarter mile, then ended at a white picket fence. Beyond that stretched a mile-deep canyon. Even in the late-morning sunshine the verdant crevices and mountainsides were caressed by the clinging veils of mists that gave the Smokies their name.

Beautiful, Remo thought. Not the scenery, but the nifty diversion that just popped into his head. As he walked, he reached out with one foot and gave a nudge to one of the lounge chairs.

The chairs were outfitted with large wooden wheels, which were functional enough when it came to moving the heavy chairs from one place to another but were not designed for locomotion. Despite the long decline of the lawn, the hotel management had never worried about one of their chairs rolling off with one of their patrons. Maybe they should have.

The chair shot across the lawn like a rocket, the front legs sheering off so that the front end flattened on the neatly mown grass. One of the federal-trained Union Island security agents was scooped off his feet. He collapsed onto the chair and then just kept going, zipping down the hill at a speed that should have been impossible.

The security detail responded with raised eyebrows, and the other tall agent, the one with the darkest sunglasses of all, showed real concern.

Remo was mildly impressed when the man in the fleeing lounge chair had the wherewithal to operate his radio. "This is Samson-I'm under attack!"

"Oh, shit!" said the agent in charge, snatching at his two-way radio. "Samson, this is Hercules-maintain radio silence! We've got journalists in the vicinity."

"Did you hear me?" squawked the panicking agent. "I'm under attack!"

The Union Islanders ran off in pursuit. The speeding lounge chair lost its wooden wheels a few yards short of the end of the lawn, spun sideways and slammed into the white picket fence. Wood splinters flew in all directions. The chair and its occupant vanished into the brush-filled drop-off beyond. The running bodyguards tried to slow down but realized the slope of the lawn wasn't as gentle as it looked. They tried to stop, but they just kept on going....

"Thought they'd never leave," Remo muttered, entering the men's room. He moved with inhuman silence, and Greg Grom, president of Union Island, never knew the Master of Sinanju was with him.

It was a while before Remo emerged again, breathing for the first time in minutes. "Well, that was a lot of work for nothing," he said to no one in particular. He had been convinced he was going to catch Greg Grom red-handed accepting a pickup of whatever poison he was using, but all that happened in the men's room was what was supposed to happen in the men's room.

Dammit, he wanted to be right about this.

He hadn't seen that minivan that parked out front. There were lots of cars coming and going and this one wasn't unusual, except that the driver wore a navy-blue jumpsuit with a logo on the pocket. He checked his clipboard and jumped from the van, yanking on the sliding door and rummaging in the back. He found a heavy, square box with several Warning! tags, skull-and-crossbones labels and the occasional Danger-Poison label.

"I'm looking for the United States Protectorate of Union Island tour bus," he asked the bus driver.

"You found it."

"I'm the SIC man." His eye twitched involuntarily.

"Sorry to hear that."

"I'm from Ship It Carefully. We have a package."

"Hello!" Grom said, wiping his hands on his pants as he came from the restaurant. He had no idea where his security team had got to, but that was just as well. With a minimum of fuss he showed his ID to the deliveryman, and then practically ran inside the bus with the package. The SIC man wished people would treat their deliveries with a little more respect. The company slogan was Special Shipment? Ship SIC!, but special was euphemistic. They delivered dangerous chemicals, flammables, other specialty items that UPS and FedEx and those other wussies wouldn't touch. SIC had all the hazardous-materials transport permits, federal and state.

They were as expensive as hell. So you would think that people who accepted a package from SIC would treat it with a little dignity. Not go running up the bus steps like a kid with a box of candy.

The side of the SIC man's face spasmed nervously. He returned to his minivan and closed the door-gently. He checked all his rearview mirrors and turned in his seat twice before backing out of the parking place. He drove five miles under the speed limit all the way down the mountains and back into North Carolina, face twitching all the way, but the angry honking of other drivers never bothered him in the slightest. It took a special kind of man to be a SIC man.

AS THE SCRATCHED and tattered army of security agents clambered up the hill, Remo walked away, finding the hiking trail and feeling disconsolate.

He had expected Greg Grom to accept delivery of a package in the men's room at the restaurant. It would have made sense. It would have solved his dilemma. It would have answered a lot of questions. And for once it would have been Remo Williams who did the solving. Sure, it was a long shot. Mark Howard thought so. Chiun had been so sure Remo was wrong he hadn't even bothered to wait around to see the facts prove Remo wrong.

Distantly he heard the tour bus start up and minutes later it low-geared down the Blue Ridge Park past him. Over the fragrance of pine needles and mountain ferns Remo tried not to breathe the diesel smell and just as unsuccessfully tried to come to a decision about what to do next.

He would not rejoin the Union Island entourage. What was the point?

He kind of liked the woods. Maybe he'd just hike his way through the Smoky Mountains for a few weeks, catch his dinner out of the cold freshwater mountain streams, maybe nab any abortion-clinic arsonists he happened to cross paths with along the way.

It wasn't like he'd be missed by Upstairs. He hadn't exactly been doing them a lot of good in recent days. Two things made him stop where he was, on a small rock overlooking a vast space between the mountains. The first thing was the thought that he was feeling awfully effing sorry for himself.

The second was the smell.

It wasn't a smell that belonged in the mountain woods. And it wasn't the diesel smell from the bus, but it had come with the diesel smell and was fading with it. It was chemical and vaguely familiar.

"Mother of crap!" Remo Williams exclaimed when he recognized the smell.

"Crap crap crap," the mountains echoed. "I was right!"

There was silence.

"I said I was right!" Remo shouted, making it very loud.

"Right right right right," the mountains echoed. "That's better," Remo said. "This doesn't happen often, and I want credit for it."

HE JOGGED BACK to the mountaintop restaurant and grabbed a pay phone in the hotel lobby, leaning on the 1 button until the phone system connected him. The voice that answered was not a voice he knew. "Aloo?"

"Who's this?" Remo demanded. "Why, it's Beatrice, luv."

"This is Agnes up the street."

"Agnes, my dear, how are-"

"Give me Smitty, would you?"

A moment later the familiar voice of the director of CURE came on the line. "Where are you, Remo?"

"Hey, Smitty, your new receptionist sounds hot."

"She's not real, Remo. It's the new voice verification system."

"Save it for later, Smitty. I've got news. I've tracked down the source of the run-amokers down south."

"What? Where are you?"

"Uh." Good question, actually, Remo thought. "Some big hill. Don't have time to explain. I've got a bus to catch. Go ask Junior."

"Mark knows about this?"

"Sort of."

"What about Chiun?"

"Departed. Vamoosed."

"I don't think I understand...."

Remo could feel the bus getting farther away, and his patience getting shorter with every passing second and every particle of misgiving transmitting through the line. "Here's the situation in a nutshell-and I know it's gonna be a real mindblower, Smitty. The truth is, I figured it out. I homed in on the clues, I followed up on 'em. I solved it."

"So where is Chiun?" Smith asked.

"Dammit, Smitty, I did it. Just me. Chiun had nothing to do with it. Truth is, he was tagging along until he got fed up and went home."

"Did what, exactly?" Smith probed.

The stainless-steel cable snapped apart like button thread when Remo yanked on it, then he hung up the receiver and left the restaurant, sputtering obscenities like an inconvenienced Teamster.

NATIONAL PARK RANGER Ricardo Wegman hated traffic detail. As far as he was concerned, catching speeders was the state's job. Not the National Park Service. But up here on the Blue Ridge Parkway the access was limited. North Carolina ended and Tennessee began halfway through the park. All this made it difficult to persuade the troopers to come in for an occasional look-see.

Tourists in the Smoky Mountains ignored the warning signs as a matter of course. They thought they could get all the way to the bottom riding their brakes, never mind the burning smell. Some flatland geniuses even turned off their engines and tried to coast all the way down, just for yuks. The real laughs started when their heat-stressed brake rotors and pads disintegrated, then there would be a bunch of frantic swerving and grinding of gears as the panicking motorists struggled to bring the car to a halt with a mixture of low-gearing and hard praying. Neither worked too well when you were on a steep downhill grade that wound from an elevation of four thousand feet down to an elevation of two thousand feet in a matter of a couple of miles.

Wegman had to admit that there was something amusing about the speeders-the idiots who got going as fast as they could at the top of the hill before the long slalom down.

When the radar beeped, Wegman was lounging in his seat with his eyes closed. By the time he opened his eyes the speeder had disappeared around the curve. The radar display said fifty-three miles per hour. It took a special machine to get going that fast on this short stretch of mountain blacktop. Of course, the guy had probably gone straight over the lip at the next curve.

Ranger Wegman drove down the road to the guardrail, which was unmangled. The speeder had managed to make the curve. Had to have hit the brakes hard, although there were no skid marks.

He accelerated his Jeep until he was pushing his own safety limits, and only then did he spot the speeder. The speeder wasn't a car.

It was a man.

Ranger Wegman brought his jeep up behind the running man, then pulled alongside him.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked as he paced the runner.

"Jogging," said the runner. "Nice day for it, but the altitude slows me down a little."

Wegman tried to make sense of what he was seeing and decided there was no sense to be made of it. "Son, you're going fifty-three miles per hour."

"Well, I gotta admit the incline makes up for the thin air."

Wegman steered himself around a curve in the road, tires squealing in protest, and tried to figure out what he was missing in this little scenario. The man looked awfully normal. Maybe thirty-something or maybe not. No stringy marathon-runner muscles. No bulging weight-lifter muscles. Nothing abnormal about the guy except a pair of extrathick wrists.

"You bionic or something like that?" Wegman asked.

"Something like that. Sharp curve ahead." Wegman knew this road like the back of his hand and of course he knew there was a sharp curve ahead, but the world wasn't real to him right now. He slowed just enough to take the curve with his tires sliding on stones. Somewhere in the back of his head he was thinking that he was driving like the idiot flatlander tourists who didn't quite understand that a slide onto the shoulder at this height meant a slide into oblivion.

Of course, the running guy had no troubles at all navigating the curve.

"You stop now, son," Ranger Wegman called, head protruding from the window as he floored his vehicle to catch up again. "You're speeding and breaking the law!"

"Better reread your rule books, Ranger Rick," the running man said. "I'm not operating a vehicle, and I can run as fast as I want."

"Son, I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm telling you to pull yourself over and stop, now."

"This next curve's a doozy, Ranger," said the running man.

"Son, you- Shit!"

Ranger Ricardo Wegman suddenly felt the strong strands of reality take hold when he found himself barreling headlong into the Two-Mile Hairpin at better than fifty miles per hour.

Just the kind of fool stunt one of those idiot flatlanders would pull.

Wegman stood on the brakes and steered the Jeep into a sideways skid, maximizing the friction on all four tires in a desperate attempt to slow the car before it hit the retaining wall. It was a hopeless gesture, and he knew it. He also knew they would be shaking their heads and calling him a damn fool for pulling a flatlander stunt like this. They'd be saying it even while they were dragging his broken car and his banged-up remains off the mountainside.

The rubber screamed for a lifetime, and the stench of scorched radials was the smell of humiliation in his nostrils. The big Jeep didn't feel like it had slowed at all before it slammed broadside into the safety barrier. The SUV flipped neatly over the barrier and plummeted into the underbrush that clung to the steep-sided mountain.

The crashing went on and on as if it would never stop, like it would go on for an eternity.

Then it faded away.

Ranger Ricardo Wegman opened his eyes. He was floating in thin air, looking down on the path of ruin created by the tumbling SUV. Then he knew-he was dead. His soul had left his body, which had to still be inside the jeep getting pounded to pulp.

"I'm discorporated!" Wegman gasped.

"You're a dipshit," the skinny guy said. Wegman craned his neck back and down and up, and found that he was in actuality hanging over the sheer mountainside drop. The skinny running man held him by his belt, in one hand.

"What happened?" Wegman asked.

"You drove off the road. Like fifteen seconds ago. Remember-squealing tires, crunching body panels and all that? I pulled you out through the window when your National Park-issue transport went on its gravity-verifying fit."

Wegman looked flabbergasted-then stricken. "You should have let me go with the car!"

"Huh?"

"Go ahead!" he pleaded. "Throw me in! I'll never live down the humiliation!" Wegman didn't even feel the fantastic agony of his shorts and trousers practically splitting his crotch in what had to be a world-record wedgie. All he felt was the disdain that was yet to come. "You don't understand! It was the kind of thing a flatlander would do!"

"It's just a car. So what. You should see some of the stuff I've wrecked. Whole villages and shit."

"Please! End it for me! I'm begging you!" Wegman started twisting and clawing at the iron-hard fist that clung to his trousers, but it was like scratching his fingernails on steel girders. To his mortification, the skinny young man carried him to the shoulder of the road and put him safely on his own two feet.

"If the department of agriculture makes a higher moron classification than Grade A, then you rate it," Remo Williams said. "Listen, just tell everybody you were chasing some guy who was running fifty miles per hour and you got so caught up in it you didn't pay attention to the road."

Ranger Ricardo Wegman gave Remo a disdainful look. "They'll think I'm crazy on top of being stupid. I'd rather be dead."

"Fine. You want to end it, you go ahead. I've got a bus to catch."

Remo ran off. In a matter of seconds Wegman was alone. If it weren't for the obvious signs of the crash, he would have doubted the entire event had really even happened.

Now that the shock was wearing off, he started thinking-who was that guy and how the hell had he managed to pace a jeep at fifty miles per hour anyway?

The enigma was so distracting he entirely forgot about throwing himself off the mountainside before the first emergency vehicle arrived on the scene-and by then it was too late. Killing yourself right there, in front of your peers? It just wasn't done.

Chapter 19

Remo wondered if the fates were aligning against him. Here he was trying to do something good, trying to prove himself, for crying out loud, and he was getting nothing but misery for all his trouble. Chiun throwing a hissy fit, Smitty giving him the third degree and then Ranger Rick driving his car off the hill so Remo had to stop and yank his ass to safety. Only to get a lecture in the strict codes of National Park ranger machismo for his effort.

But the big hill was finally starting to cooperate, and he spotted the tour bus below him on the twisting, curving Blue Ridge Parkway.

"Time for a shortcut," Remo announced to no one and vaulted off the road into the underbrush, slipping soundlessly as a shadow through the bushes and wildflowers that clung to the steep grade. A hundred feet lower the ground leveled out enough to afford purchase to a few deep-rooted trees, and Remo scampered up the trunks into the upper limbs, then vaulted from tree to tree. His hand-sewn Italian loafers, already ruined from the downhill run, landed perfectly every time, supporting him for a second before he was flying on to the next tree. Moments later he landed on the road just a few hundred paces behind the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus, and he caught up at the next curve.

He climbed on the roof and glared at Chiun, who was arranging the fluttering silk of his kimono as if he had not moved from his seat in hours.

"That didn't take long," Remo grumbled.

"It certainly did," Chiun retorted. "The bus has been on the road for nearly twenty minutes."

"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you."

"I, however, am talking about you. Then, lo! what do I see but the Reigning Master of Sinanju flinging himself through the trees like some ungainly combination of Strong Man Jack and Lord Greystoke."

Remo pondered. "Lord Greystoke is Tarzan, right?"

Chiun rolled his eyes and sighed to the crisp blue sky. Remo shrugged. "I give up. Who's Strong Man Jack?"

"Another character from twentieth-century American fiction or folklore or whatever passes for literature in this part of the world." Chiun waved his hand at the sky above, implying that "this part of the world" included the mountains and all the rest of the planet that was west of Pyongyang.

"So you're saying I'm sort of like Jethro Clampett meets George of the Jungle."

"I wouldn't have brought it up at all had I known I would be forced to explain it during the entirety of our downhill journey."

"Just trying to get a handle on the insults that keep getting hurled my way," Remo said.

"Maybe if you had an inkling about the written word, even the florid clutter that passes for literature in the Western world, you would understand what I say and why I say it."

Remo grinned without humor. "Hey, I'm getting smarter already-you just told me my culture is stupid and I'm stupider."

Chiun sniffed. "If the oversize novelty T-shirt fits..."

"Now that we understand each other on that point, let's move on to the next bit of trivia. How'd you get back here so fast? I just got off the phone with Smitty and next thing I know you're back in the saddle. So, what, are you carrying a mobile phone these days that you're not telling me about."

"I would not carry such a device. The waves emanating from them cook the tiny cells of the brain and addle the thoughts." Chiun looked suspicious. "Have you been using one behind my back all these years? It would explain much."

"So what are you doing here? Last I saw you transferred to the eastbound train, bound for Hoboken." Chiun nodded, as if the question was a perfectly reasonable one, and one that he had no intention of answering.

"Well?"

"I am here. Is that not enough?"

"You've got something up your sleeve you don't want to talk about."

"You are mistaken."

"You lie like a rug. Spit it out, Chiun-you realized I was on to something."

"What do you mean? On drugs?"

"The truth. My lead was panning out and you knew it and you came back because you had to be in on it when I solved this mystery."

Chiun, for a moment, looked genuinely surprised. Then he shook his head pityingly. "My son, that is not why I came back."

"Bulldookey. Then why?"

With a reluctant, graceful sweep of his arm the ancient Korean Master waved one hand at the billboard awaiting them on the very boundary of the national park. "There is your answer."

It was a magnificent, tawdry sign that put a blemish on the natural beauty of the mountain scenery the way a slash with garden shears would have blemished the Mona Lisa.

The billboard letters were multicolored, metallic and sparkling, and they spelled out: Mollywood U.S.A.! Just 15 Miles to the Entertainment Hub of the Smokies! Ms. Molly Pardon's Smoky Mountain Theme Park.

Remo groaned. "Molly Pardon as in country music singer Molly Pardon?"

"The same," Chiun enthused.

"Mountainous mammaries, big blond bogus bouffant, that Molly Pardon?"

"I have it on good authority that her hair is not bogus. Her silky tresses are naturally pale and golden."

"As natural as the boobs, anyway." Remo shrugged. "I've heard her sing."

"She has an angel's voice," Chiun enthused.

"Wolverines defending a carrion stash sound more angelic."

"She's no Wylander Jugg," Chiun admitted, "but she sings with the same sincerity and passion. It is the music of real people, music that flows from the heart and soars from the lips, Remo."

"You say soars, I say hurls."

Chiun beamed. "You are an admirer of the beauteous Molly Pardon? I never knew this, my son."

"I wouldn't call it admiration so much as fascination," Remo said when the second billboard followed just minutes after the first. Molly Pardon herself was pictured, a fifty-year-old bleached-blond giantess rendered in thermoset plastic. Her ruby-red lips, open in a wide Southern-girl smile, could have swallowed a minivan. Her famous mass of hair had been constructed with the not-found-in-nature fluorescent yellow of plastic lemons. Her face had been re-created with a photorealistic transfer technique so accurate that a layer of fleshy-colored enamel was added to blot out the crow's-feet around the eyes and surgical scars around the scalp, lips, temple and chin. Not that anyone even saw her face. Remo found it impossible to focus his attention beyond the swell of her re-created cleavage, which reflected the daylight like patent leather.

"That is one immense Molly," Remo said.

Chiun was mildly stunned at the spectacle. "It is large."

"Large? I'll bet they recycled five or six thousand soda bottles into each one of those knockers."

"Pah! You see only her womanly charms," Chiun said.

"How could I see anything else? Those things should have telescopes sticking out of them."

"She is well endowed, granted, and yet her attraction is in her voice, not her bosom."

"On anybody else you'd have called them 'udders.'"

"They would be so if she flaunted them in the same way the women you cavort with parade their milk-producing organs."

Remo laughed. "Come on! You're not seriously trying to tell me that Molly Pardon doesn't trade on her boobs."

"She does not!"

"You're wrong and you know it, but far be it from the Wise and All-Knowing Master Chiun to own up to a mistake."

"Someday I might make a mistake. Then I would indeed be the first to acknowledge it."

"And someday monkeys will fly out of my butt."

Chiun nodded seriously. "Such a feat would certainly be unique among all the Masters who have come before you. Is this the type of outrageous anecdote you plan as your legacy in the scrolls of the Masters?" Remo was about to respond when he caught it again. The whiff in the air, so faint, so fleeting, he was almost not sure of it. Then he saw Chiun lift his head and draw air into his nostrils. Chiun smelled it, too. It was here. Whatever it was that was making people go violently bonkers, it was right here in this bus.

Chapter 20

Frank Curtis always did what he was told. As long as it was Greg Grom who told him what to do.

Frank Curtis had infinite respect and measureless affection for Grom. Every word President Grom uttered resonated with ageless wisdom. Every action Grom took was purposeful and correct. Doing Grom's bidding was so gratifying.

Not everybody understood that, including his best friend since college, Randall Switzer, who would say, "I don't get it. You used to hate that guy, Frank."

"I never hated Greg!"

"Yeah, you did. You told me you did. You said he was the biggest moron ever to belong to Mensa."

"I never said that!"

"You called him an ambitionless, egoist jerk-off."

"Never," Frank Curtis had protested.

"The point is, you used to despise this little schmuck, and now all of a sudden you think he's God's gift to you."

"Don't call him a schmuck, Switz," Frank warned.

"I won't call him a schmuck if you admit that you used to say he was indolent as a sloth but with less personality."

Switz had been Frank's best friend for twenty years, but not anymore.

Frank's wife wasn't much better. "Frank, tell me the honest truth, honey," she demanded finally. "Are you gay? Are you having relations with this young man?"

Frank shook his head sadly. "Pauline, you know I am not gay."

"But Frank, I don't understand this obsession," Pauline wailed. "You're missing work, you're constantly away from home. Whatever this boy wants is your top priority, and everything else comes second. Where did this come from, Frank? You've never acted this way before-it's an infatuation!"

"Pauline, it is simply my respect and admiration for an important and powerful man."

"Powerful?" Pauline snorted.

"He's the elected president of Union Island!"

"It's just a small town that happens to be surrounded by water. If the place didn't make so much money on tourism, the mayor's position wouldn't even be a paying job."

Frank had not cared to continue that discussion. If Pauline Curtis couldn't show a proper level of respect for President Grom, then she could just go to hell.

Just that morning his boss had turned against him, too. "Professor Curtis, is this young man blackmailing you?" asked University Director Jack Holdsworth.

"Of course not! A ridiculous suggestion."

"I cannot think how else a rather unimpressive graduate student-a student you once fervently disliked-could turn you into his errand boy," the university director observed. "He's got you jumping through hoops. You've spent all your vacation days and personal days in his service-not just this year's, but next year's, as well. Hear me out-a few years ago, when Mr. Grom was our student, you disciplined him in a way that he may have found humiliating, although you were perfectly justified. It seems to me that he may have been angry enough to dig up some sort of dirt on you and use it against you."

"Nothing could be further from the truth," Professor Curtis insisted.

The university director sighed. "Well, I'm not going to pressure you on this, Professor, but I am also not going to authorize another day off so you can go propitiate this young hoodlum."

"Hoodlum-?"

"Go to your classroom, Professor."

Professor Frank Curtis left the office of the director of the university, but he didn't go to his classroom. He got in his car and he drove away. Out of town. Out of Virginia. Maybe he'd never go back.

His wife, his friends, his fourteen years of tenure in the department, all those things could wait. Right now he had an important job to do. It was important because Greg Grom said so.

He had been driving for hours when he spotted the tour bus a couple of miles ahead of him on the interstate. He closed to within a half mile and set the cruise control to pace the bus at sixty-six miles per hour, then opened the window and held the digital camera outside to avoid the windshield glare. With one hand he fumbled to get the tiny display adjusted so he could see it, then to max out the digital zoom. It was difficult getting the extreme close-up of the bus into the viewfinder while keeping the car from veering off the road.

When he finally got the tour bus in the shot, he snapped of few dozen high-resolution images and put the camera on the dashboard to see his results.

It was the latest top-of-the line digital camera for use by professional wildlife photographers, and had all kinds of bells and whistles that were beyond the understanding of a professor of anthropological studies. Somehow, though, he managed to take several high-quality shots. There were close-ups of the shoulder of the road that were crisp enough you could count the stones. Quite a few images of the surface of the highway showed contrast so vivid you could practically feel the texture of the concrete.

Only the last few shots finally managed to get the bus in the frame. A fender with some mud spots. The back window with a brilliant reflection of the late-morning sun. And finally, the top of the bus-and two people sitting there.

"Well, I'll be!" Curtis exclaimed. Then he squinted into the display. "Dammit!"

He tried shooting another round of photos. His aim got better but his frustration mounted. The third time he managed to get a total of six shots of the roof of the bus, but he was so irritated with the result he felt like ripping out his comb-over.

He plugged the camera into the data port on his phone and E-mailed the best of the photos while hitting the speed dial for a voice call. "This is Professor Curtis, Mr. President."

Greg Grom sounded tense. "Took you long enough, Frank," his former student said. "I expected you an hour ago. Did you get the camera?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you get good shots of the bus?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Well, come on, Frank, were they there or not?"

"Yes, sir," Curtis said. "A white man and an old Asian. You can see them plain as day relaxing on the roof, as comfortable as you please."

"Oh shit, Frank!"

Professor Frank Curtis, Ph.D., always followed President Grom's orders without question. This time was no exception. Still, he couldn't stifle the grunt that accompanied the sudden but successful effort.

"What's the matter with you?" Groin demanded.

"Nothing, sir. Excuse me, sir. It's just a habit, I guess."

"What's a habit?"

"When I-you know," Curtis stammered.

"Frank, I haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about."

"Just following instructions, sir," the professor said, embarrassment mixing with disgust at the smell and the squishiness. "I sent you the shots, sir."

GREG GROM DOWNLOADED the files onto his laptop. They were so big they seemed to take forever, but the high quality was worth the wait. It was amusing to think how much the professional-grade digital camera had to have cost the old fart.

When the first image filled the screen, Grom wasn't amused anymore.

There they were, sitting on the roof. It was weird; it was eerie. Except for his strangely thick wrists, the white guy could be any one of fifty million Caucasian adult males in North America. The senior citizen from the Far East was another story. He looked too frail to get across the sunroom at the nursing home without a walker. He looked underfed, and it seemed as if the billowing silks of his geisha outfit should have taken him into the air like a kite. And yet he sat cross-legged and relaxed. He looked like he was meditating, for crying out loud.

Grom magnified the image, muttered an insult at the old fart on the phone and moved on to the next image. Then the next.

"You moron, there's not a single good shot of their faces!" he said into the phone.

"I know, Mr. President. But it is very strange. Everything else is perfectly in focus."

What the hell was the old loser talking about? Grom magnified the next shot until the lounging white guy filled the screen. The dark blue T-shirt was perfectly in focus. Grom could count the neat stitches on the expensive Italian loafers with the ruined soles. But the face was unidentifiable, as if his features had been moving too fast for the camera to focus on.

The ancient Asian was the same. Grom could see the perfect stitching in the embroidery, but the face was just an expressionistic mess of colors.

Every photo was the same way. In the last shot, the white guy was shown giving the camera a friendly wave. "Oh, shit!" gasped the President of the United States Protectorate of Union Island.

"I'll try my best, sir," the old professor replied mournfully. He grunted again.

"Stop it, you moron. Get closer and get me some better shots. I gotta have face shots! And patch me in to the camera feed."

The real-time, frame-a-second images from the old fart's new toy fed into his laptop in low resolution, but the camera electronics stabilized them pretty well. As the professor closed in on the bus, the images of the pair on the roof became vivid.

Grom was squinting at the screen and barking at Curtis whenever he lost the bus from the frame. "Hold it there!" Grom ordered. He was as close as he could get and still have the top half of the white guy in the frame.

The white guy was just staring into the camera. "Take some more high-res shots but keep me on the feed."

"I'll do my best, sir," Curtis said.

"Get one now!"

"Got it, sir."

"Now zoom in on that asshole."

"Yes, sir." The image moved up on the white guy.

"Take another one."

"Okay."

The face. The damn face was still not coming into focus! Even the low-res feed showed the guy's torso in crisp detail, but the face was a blurred mess.

Were they human? Grom's fear mounted. "Keep shooting!"

"Yes, sir."

The guy bent down, and in the next frame he was standing again. He had something in his hand.

"Uh, sir," Curtis said uncertainly.

"Keep shooting!"

The man raised one hand, holding an unidentifiable object, and he waved with the other hand. This time it was a goodbye wave.

The next frame showed the object as large as life, hanging in the air a few feet above the hood of Professor Frank Curtis's Lincoln Continental.

Damn good camera, thought Greg Grom. The threefoot steel tube looked frozen in place, and the crisp detail showed the jagged end where it had been pulled off the roof of the bus. Amazing that you could get such detail when you consider that the metal spear had to have been thrown with tremendous force.

Alone in his little private room, Greg Grom was thinking these things as the muffled sounds of the violently self-destructing Lincoln Continental reached him and then receded.

Then came the screaming. Well, it was more like the hacking of a hyena trying to vomit out rotten meat. It was Amelia Powlik, of course.

The bus was slowing, and there were shouts of alarm and pounding on his door. "Mr. President, there's been an accident," Amelia screeched. "A horrible accident!" Greg Grom was sure it was quite horrible. Shattered wreckage and a mutilated body inside. But somehow that wasn't as horrible as the image on his screen. The last photograph relayed by the camera was still there, waiting to be refreshed for a follow-up image that would never come.

That damn piece of metal tubing, hanging in midair, was coming almost straight at the camera-but not quite. It went just a little bit higher and a little bit to the left, which meant it was targeted directly at the old professor himself. When they finally extracted the corpse from the wreckage, they would discover the old man had a piece of metal skewering his skull-not to mention a pants load of poop.

Well, the old professor had been a total asshole. Grom would have enjoyed Curtis's final touch of humiliation if he wasn't terrified.

He didn't know who these two guys were, where they came from, how they had tracked him down. He only knew that they were ruthless killers, with some sort of Special-Forces training like Grom had never heard of.

And they were onto him. And the bus, it occurred to him now, was stopping.

"Oh, shit!" he shouted, bounding to the door just as the air brakes brought the bus to a halt on the shoulder of the highway.

He burst out the door of his private room. Amelia Powlik was babbling tearfully while the rest of his staff jostled for the exit.

"Get back in here!" Grom shouted. "Get this bus moving now!"

The bus driver, pulling the first-aid kit from its wall mountings, gave him a look of disbelief. "Mr. President, there's a horrible accident and we have to help."

"Help?" Grom's laugh was morbid and humorless. "He's dead! That's why he crashed! And whoever got him is trying to get me!"

"What's going on here, Mr. President?" demanded the ex-Secret Service agent in charge Grom's security detail. His voice always dropped deeper when he became annoyed, and right now the words were rumbling out like the big tumbling boulders.

"How about we discuss it after we get out of range, you idiot!"

"Oh. Yeah." The agent turned on the openmouthed driver and boomed, "What's your problem, driver? Get this vehicle moving now!"

Greg Grom collapsed in a leather couch, his body drained of energy but his mind a riot of conflicting emotions. And none of them were good. He laid his head on the back of the couch and stared straight up.

He expected that any second the ceiling of the bus might begin showing a small round opening to the daylight. Once the killers realized they had failed to flush out their prey, it seemed logical that they would simply start firing into the vehicle at random. Eventually they'd get Grom. Or they'd kill enough people that the bus driver would surrender and the killers would come in and get their intended victim. Isn't that the kind of thing hard-core killers did?

"You feeling okay. Mr. President?"

Grom realized that the two warm bodies pressed up against him on either side were the pair of Justice Department rejects hired for his protection.

"How about some space?"

The bodyguards scooted to the ends of the couch but stayed close, 9mm semiautomatic handguns held at the ready. The agent in charge touched a hand to his earpiece and nodded. "State and local emergency services are on the scene of the accident. One car. They've got the fire out and they can see one victim inside, but the wreck's still too hot to pry open. You want to pass on your information, Mr. President?"

"I got a phone call," Grom lied absently. "A stranger. He said I was about to be ambushed by a group of trained snipers. They'd cause an accident, hoping we would stop to help, then gun down me and my staff."

"I'll have a Justice forensics team called to the scene," the bodyguard said without hesitation. "I'll need your phone to trace the call."

Two exciting ideas came to him at that moment, and Greg Grom stifled his enthusiasm. He scowled at the bodyguard and said, "No way in hell."

Chapter 21

Eileen Mikulka knocked, waited a moment, then pushed open the door to Harold W Smith's office. She entered with a tray. Tea and prune whip yogurt for the Folcroft director, coffee for Associate Director Mark Howard.

She took one step inside and stopped, feeling something in the air that wasn't pleasant. Dr. Smith was as emotionless a man as Mrs. Mikulka had ever known, but right now he was angry. It was there in his hard eyes, his locked jaw. He was actually gripping the edge of his desk. There was a vein, emerging from the sallow flesh of his right temple, that Mrs. Mikulka had never seen before.

Mark Howard was sitting stiff and uncomfortable in the ancient, creaking chair in front of the desk.

She set down the tray. The air in the room was poisonous.

"Will there be anything-?"

"No, thank you."

Mrs. Mikulka left as fast as her arthritic knees would carry her. When she collapsed at her desk, she felt like crying.

Whatever was wrong, Dr. Smith was clearly not happy with his assistant. Whatever could Mark have done that would make Dr. Smith so angry? Dr. Smith never got that angry.

"Oh, dear." She bit her lower lip to stop its quivering. She couldn't bear to think of that nice young man losing his job. Mark Howard had brought life back into Folcroft's executive wing. A little sparkle. A little humor. The years before Mark came seemed so gray and bland by comparison. To lose him would be awful.

AFTER THE DOOR CLICKED shut, Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Mark, I want to know why you did this."

"I understand, Dr. Smith," Mark Howard replied tentatively, as if he felt remorse but also felt unsure of how to proceed. "First of all, when I give you my full report you'll see that there was no real urgency. Remo did not have anything to go on."

"Obviously he did," Dr. Smith replied. "He went after the Union Island tour group and now there's been an assassination attempt on the Union Island president. Remo is up to something."

"He didn't come across as having any agenda other than tracking down the source of the violent outbreaks," Mark insisted. "When he came to my office, he asked me to trace the movements of the Union Islanders. They happened to have an itinerary that meant one of them could cause the poisonings. I tried telling him we had a long list of people whose known movements gave them the opportunity."

"So what made him suspect the Union Islanders?"

"He had no reason, not that he would tell me about."

Harold W Smith frowned, and some of the anger was evaporating. "So why did he suspect them?"

"He mentioned seeing the island president on TV on a talk show, and placed him at the first set of poisonings. But that was all he had. We tried to brainstorm on a motive and couldn't come up with anything. There's nothing that connects the Union Island group to anybody involved in the mayhem. Nothing. We couldn't see any way the island independence movement could benefit from the killings. And that was about it."

Dr. Smith had his assistant start from the beginning and report, word for word, the conversation between Mark and Remo. It didn't take long.

Smith looked drained then. Paler than his typical gray. "Remo either mislead you about what he knew, or else he was simply getting into this avenue of the investigation impulsively."

Mark Howard shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Smith seemed to have lost his quiet anger, but it had been so startling and out of character that Mark simply didn't know where he stood now. He didn't have experience with this aspect of the director of CURE. "Sir, I don't think either of those characterizations is accurate."

Smith had been regarding his hands, folded on the desktop, but he raised his eyebrows and his rock-steady gaze met Mark's.

"Explain."

"I got the feeling there was a lot going on with Remo when he came in. I mean, that was unprecedented in itself. Since when does he come to me for help? I got the impression he was in a sort of strange place."

"You got an impression," Smith repeated evenly. "What kind of impression?"

Suddenly Mark was even more uncomfortable. He had long ago come clean to Dr. Smith on the subject of his special abilities. Abilities Mark himself didn't understand. These abilities manifested as impressions, intuitions, sudden burst of knowledge that came to him out of nowhere. There were times when he would be writing words on a page or entering data into the computer and suddenly realize he had written something unexpected, something that had not come from his own conscious thought.

Those brief riddles had more than once been unraveled and led CURE to the answers it needed.

But Howard's unique mental abilities had proved a great bane to CURE, too, when they opened the door to the reawakening of one of the great enemies of the Master of Sinanju, and the world. This bastard son of Sinanju, Jeremiah Purcell, had been locked away at Folcroft and maintained in a comatose state. For years his bloodstream was perpetually saturated with drugs that kept him unconscious. Purcell had used his own unique mental powers to find purchase in the conscious world, but his reach was limited. There were special minds in the world that Purcell could use, could bend, could manipulate, but none of those had come within the range of his clawing psychic fingers in all those years.

Until Mark Howard was assigned to be the associate director of CURE and, for cover, of Folcroft Sanitarium.

Jeremiah Purcell's malevolent influence on Mark Howard was tentative, but in time he coerced Mark into ordering the termination of the pharmaceutical regimen that kept Purcell comatose. Harold Smith learned of this only when it was too late-after Jeremiah Purcell, the one called the Dutchman, had escaped. Mark Howard nearly died.

Nobody expected Purcell to fade quietly away, but when he inevitably made his move against the Masters of Sinanju he brought with him, or was brought by, an even greater foe.

For months Mark Howard carried a heavy sack of guilt for his responsibility in those events.

"Mark," Dr. Smith asked, "are you saying Remo had some sort of psychic intuition that led him to the Union Islanders?"

"No. Dr. Smith, you remember what you told me the first time I told you about my, well, foreknowledge events. You suggested that they might simply be a heightened level of intuition. My subconscious putting the clues together in ways my conscious mind couldn't."

Dr. Smith looked uneasy. "Yes, I remember saying that." The truth was, he still preferred to cling to that notion, despite the evidence that proved there was much more to it.

"That's what happened here. Remo's investigative skills were kicking in. Maybe he picked up some subtle clues along the way. Maybe his heightened awareness of everything in his environment gave him an idea of who was responsible. He was going with his gut feeling."

Smith nodded. "I see."

"There's more," Mark added, less confidently. "I think Remo's got something to prove, and I think he's trying to do it by tracking down the people responsible for this violence."

Smith twitched his lip. "I find that hard to believe. You heard Remo's last tirade about being sent to do detective work."

"Yeah. He said something like, 'Smitty, we both know I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed.' And you didn't disagree with him. And Master Chiun would have called it a mild understatement."

"So this is all an attempt to throw mud in our eyes?" Smith demanded.

"I think he wants to prove to himself that he's more than just hired muscle," Mark said. "Maybe he wants to show that he's got what it takes to be Reigning Master-that he's got what it takes up here."

Howard tapped his temple with one finger. Smith nodded, considering that.

Mark was on a roll. "You know what they say in business and government and the military, that a talented man will rise through the ranks until he reaches one level above his level of competence. A man who knows his own capabilities knows when to refuse a promotion. Could Remo be trying to prove to himself and all of us that he has not been promoted beyond his skill level?"

Smith's mouth became a hard line. "That aphorism was a cliche when I was in military intelligence. In the middle ranks we used to make our own estimation of who would get the next advancement-into-inadequacy promotion. But there's something more to consider. A man who is a success, who finds himself in a new environment where success eludes him, will remake himself into a man who can succeed. If Remo Williams feels he needs to rise to the occasion to be worthy of the title Reigning Master, then I believe he'll do it."

Mark Howard screwed up his face. "I don't know if I've seen Remo show much genuine determination."

Smith turned to his keyboard and began typing rapidfire, saying, "Then you need to look harder."

"REMO," CHIUN SAID excitedly, "we are just minutes from Dixie's Answer to Disney World!"

"Can't wait," Remo muttered insincerely. He'd be glad when this bus-top ride was done with, though. He had hoped to solve the problem on the highway when he put a stop to the picture taker. The bus had actually come to a halt, and Remo had planned to simply take a stroll among the occupants until he literally sniffed out the guilty party. Somebody inside was going to have a sharp smell like fishy poison clinging to him or her, and that man or woman would have some serious explaining to do.

Then they took off again.

The bus stopped for fuel at a truck stop, but security was high. Nobody got on or off. A gathering of local law-enforcement officials was on hand for added security.

"Why do we sit here doing nothing?" Chiun demanded. They were waiting in the trees a hundred yards behind the truck stop. "Let us simply enter the traveling palace and gather up the guilty parties."

"'Cause there's maybe thirty parties that ain't guilty, and some of them will end up dead."

"You imply that I would slaughter innocent civilians indiscriminately? I am an assassin, not a berserker."

"Yeah. Maybe. But I'm more worried about Agents Anal and Retentive. They've got that shoot-first, file-a-report-later approach to security work. Not to mention that half the staff is probably armed and incompetent."

"Why should that worry us?" Chiun scoffed.

"Come on, Little Father, you know it's not me and you I'm worried about. It's everybody else inside this Playboy Mansion on wheels. There's no way we can protect the whole entourage if the bullets start flying."

"Pah!" Chiun scowled and observed the refueling of the bus and the patrols of the local law enforcement with disdain.

Then, without warning, he vanished.

Remo Williams was the only witness as the Tennessee Highway Patrol Special Response Unit entirely failed to detect the intruder in their midst. They never realized that the very thing they were looking for-a highly suspicious individual-slipped through their perimeter on his way to the truck-stop store. They would have been especially chagrined if they had known he returned a minute later and passed through their midst without their ever noticing him or his brilliant kimono.

"Remo, see what I have!"

"If I know you, Chiun, it's Slim Jims and a Vanilla Coke."

Chiun tried to frown, but he was too excited. What he pulled from the sleeves of his kimono was an inch-thick stack of glossy travel brochures. His eyes sparkled with boyish glee. He felt inclined to share his enthusiasm as they retook their rooftop seats and continued their drive.

"The town of Pigeon Fudge is a veritable country music paradise."

"Who says?" Remo demanded.

"I do, after reading the words in this handbill."

"I wouldn't believe everything I read."

"Remo, it is as if they transformed an entire Southern town into a wonderful magic kingdom. Mollywood is only one corner of this city of delights-there are hundreds of attractions, each more exciting than the next."

"Chiun, you've already got a lifetime pass to Disney World, and when's the last time you used it?"

"Ah, but this is different, Remo. I have learned to love the heartfelt ballads of the South."

"Wylander Jugg's, anyway."

"Jugg. And my tastes are not so limited as you would believe. Look!"

Remo turned to face into the wind and found the bus coming up on the exit for Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee, where the sign promised Mollywood Is Just the Beginning of the Wonders You'll See.

Next to the sign was Molly Pardon herself, re-created as a forty-foot fiberglass automaton. Her upper torso moved from side to side, allowing the nylon ropes of hair to flop this way, then that. Some developer's marketing inspiration had resulted in the Molly-bot getting a genuine red flannel shirt, which was tucked into her disproportionately narrow waist and left entirely unbuttoned. Remo happened to glance over at the exact moment the giant robotic country music star tipped to one side in a strategically programmed manner that allowed her shirt to flap open and provide arriving vacationers a voyeuristic glimpse inside.

"Well, you sure wouldn't get to see nipples as big as beer kegs at the Magic Kingdom," Remo observed.

Chiun sniffed. "It is a cheap display. Perhaps Molly Pardon does not possess the same sincerity as the beauteous Wylander Jugg."

"Yeah, but Wylander doesn't have jugs nearly as bodacious as Molly Pardon."

"We can only hope this monstrosity does not represent what we will find throughout Pigeon Fudge." Remo didn't have time to answer when they merged from the exit ramp onto the thoroughfare that headed directly into the heart of town.

Chapter 22

Remo Williams had seen it all-or thought he had. The long years as the chief enforcement arm of CURE had exposed him to things too bizarre to be explained by science, too incredible to be chalked up to the supernatural. Now, with that wealth of experience under his belt, the Reigning Master of Sinanju was a tough guy to amaze.

But right at that minute he was pretty much stupefied. Even his mentor and trainer, the illustrious Chiun, with his decades of life experience and a breadth of wisdom handed down from all the past Masters, had never seen anything quite like Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee.

Remo observed, "Like it or not, I've heard every Wylander Jugg song that ever was, and not one of them is about dinosaurs."

"For once your feeble mind remembers truthfully. The soulful Wylander does not sing about dinosaurs," Chiun replied.

"Does Molly Pardon?"

"No. She has no dinosaur songs."

The bus stopped at a traffic light near a strip mall with a cigarette store, a pizza place and a purple velociraptor. "So how come that's the fourth dinosaur we've seen so far?"

The next block was dominated by a miniature golf center crowded with people who putted fluorescent orange and pink golf balls through a tropical rain forest. The trees and rocks were plastic. The robotic hippos, elephants and monkeys guffawed, trumpeted and screeched at the players. On the final hole they watched a young boy putt his ball into the hole, which brought an automatronic tyrannosaurus out from the plastic green ferns. The thunder lizard bent at the waist, made a roar like an air horn, stood erect again and slid back into the ferns.

There was a stegosaurus in an enclosed playground at the fast-food restaurant next door. Then came a candy shop with a triceratops holding a giant lollipop in its beaklike mouth.

"I thought this place was about country music," Remo said.

"I, too," Chiun replied. "And what sort of a dinosaur is that?"

Remo blinked and craned his neck at the eight-story pink monstrosity that loomed up out in front of a sprawling hotel. "Flamingosaurus, I guess."

From the beak of the flamingo dangled a twenty-foot sign made to look like driftwood with artificially fading white paint that read Jimmy Jack Jordan's Theater And Water Park.

"Hey, that's one of the guys you listen to," Remo said.

"Absolutely not," Chiun responded as the bus carried them past Jimmy Jack Jordan's complex of low-rise hotel wings with fake thatched roofs.

"Yeah, that one Wylander duet. 'Where the Bayou Meets the Gulf' or something like that."

"You are mistaken," Chiun announced. The water slides were painted brown to simulate logs, and the swimming pools were surrounded with aluminum palm trees.

"No way I'm wrong about this one, Chiun. Thanks to you I know that ugly croaker's repertoire backward and forward."

"And yet you are wrong," Chiun insisted.

Remo wasn't listening. "Holy crap-look at that!" It was a Paul Bunyan figure, complete with blue ox, standing knee-deep in a forest of trees. The entire construction was made of steel-reinforced concrete, and Paul himself was more than fifty feet high. Remo watched a glass elevator rise up and disappear into Paul's gigantic crotch. "It's a hotel."

"It is unsightly."

"Hey, Chiun, look at that! Wailing Mining's Paul Bunyan Resort and Showplace. You listen to Wailing Mining, don't you? Boy, all your favorites are here."

"Wailing Mining never performed with Wylander." Chiun was on the defensive.

"Yeah, he was on that special on pay-per-view-Wylander's Winter Wonderland or something:"

"I never heard of it."

"You tried to get me to watch the damn thing last December. You said it would snap me out of my Christmas depression."

"But you did not watch it-"

"I saw enough of it to get more depressed. And that's the guy who sang the chestnuts-roasting song with Wylander."

"Remo, you are speaking nonsense. You have never paid attention to the music I enjoy and you do not know what you're talking about."

"Hey, I'd be in denial, too, Little Father. This place is sleazier than Las Vegas."

"I am not in denial! The powers behind these monstrosities are not in the same league as the beauteous Wylander. This is trash!"

"White trash?" Remo clarified.

"Exactly!" Chiun exclaimed. "More precisely, American trash."

"Does it get any trashier than that?" Remo asked hypothetically, then answered his own question. "Oh. French trash."

Chiun nodded seriously. "Although that phrase is redundant."

It seemed as if every block contained a resort more extravagant and tasteless than the next. A rotating icecream sundae with picture windows turned out to be the revolving restaurant atop Clarabelle Escalande's Candy Castle and Performing Arts Center, Theatrical Home to the Reigning Queen of Country. All Our Rooms Are Sweets! exclaimed the signboard, which wasn't garish enough to compete with the oddly shaped mass of neon across the street.

The neon lit up one letter at a time until it had spelled the word "Arkansas." The billboard below it exhorted them to stay at the Arkansas Hotel, home to the million-selling band State of Arkansas. Experience All the Thrills of Arkansas-Right Here in Tennessee.

Between every resort were gift shops, T-shirt shops, candy shops, refreshment stands and fast-food restaurants. They all had some extravagant sculpture representing them. Purple elephants and flashing aliens. Even the local dive bar sported a human-sized neon bottle tilting to pour neon beer into a neon mug. When they couldn't think of anything better, they resorted to dinosaurs.

"This place is a joke. Or a nightmare," Remo commented. "I'm not exactly sure which."

"Molly Pardon's Magic Country Kingdom will be a welcome relief to this excess," Chiun remarked. "I am surprised that you are not enamored by it all, Remo. There are many bright colors."

"I get my fill from your wardrobe," Remo said. "Don't set your hopes too high for Mollywood, Little Father. Somehow I doubt her standards are head-and-boobs above the rest of this place. And I was hoping you'd give me a hand with the Caribbean king."

"You need help persecuting the freedom fighter?"

Remo sighed. "You know I'm on the right track this time."

"I know no such thing."

"You're full of it. You know the stuff is on board this bus. You know I'm the one who figured it out. Me. Remo the Pale Piece of Pigs Ear Piece of Crap Reigning Lazy Ass Master of Sinanju. But your friggin' ego is so friggin' huge because you're Chiun, Chiun the Wise, Chiun the Patient, Chiun the I'm Never Wrong and Remo Is Never Right."

"Are you through?"

"No, but you are. There's Molly Pardon and her high-class Magic freaking Country Kingdom. Go have a ball."

Chiun examined the distant spectacle of Molly, her inhuman upper-body proportions digitally recreated on a vast screen made from hundreds of lights.

Come On In, Y'All! the sign proclaimed, and several hundred cars were obeying her command, creeping at a snail's pace through the front entrance and into vast parking lots. In the distance they could see the ticket gates, towered over by a roller coaster with several loops, a water ride that tried to replicate a river in the Smoky Mountains and a single ravenous-looking dinosaur. "You are right," Chiun said. "Huh?"

"Mollywood. It looks to be as tacky and low-brow as the rest of this Pigeon Fudge place."

"Yeah."

Chiun sighed. "And you are right." This time Remo said nothing.

"I have detected the smell on this bus. The poison used on the people to make them into killers. It was not here before and now it is. I found it hard to believe."

"You didn't have faith in me."

"You were suffering from the arrogance that comes of being a newly appointed Reigning Master. Your pride tainted your judgment."

"Not enough to make me wrong."

"This is so."

"So?"

"So I will not hold your unseemly outburst against you."

"Thanks a whole lot."

Chiun nodded magnanimously. "You are welcome."

Chapter 23

Just because you were a biker didn't mean you were a bad guy. Some bikers repaired PCs or sold advertising for the local newspaper and restricted their biker activities to a few hours on a Friday night. Then there were the beer-drinkers and hell-raisers. The kind who got arrested every once in a while and maybe had a few turf wars and maybe sold a few drugs.

And then there were the serious hard-case bikers. The true one-percenters. They hated the world because, for whatever reason, the world hated them.

But there were some hard-ass bikers that even the one-percenter subculture thought were beneath its dignity. They called themselves the Smoking Hogs, but other gangs called them Mollyriders, or Hell's Pigeons, or Pigeon Fudge-Packers. From Louisville to Charlotte the Hogs were a laughingstock.

Donald Deemeyer had heard the laughter. It hurt your feelings to be laughed at like that, you know? Some of his gang actually moved away from Pigeon Fudge and tried to integrate into a more respected motorcycle social club. It never worked out. They always found out where you came from, and then you got laughed out of town-in fact, you got laughed all the way back to Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee.

And that kind of ridicule, year after year, it got to you, you know? If made you feel bad. Made you kind of bitter.

Donald Deemeyer found a useful outlet for that anger. It happened one night when the Smoking Hogs attended a biker festival at a roadside motel in the Smokies. It was an annual event, with motorcycle social clubs from all over the region.

The taunting started early this year. The new leader of the Raleigh Rampagers seemed to think the Smoking Hogs came just for his entertainment.

Donald Deemeyer finally got fed up and called the Raleigh Rampager leader a pussy. The Smoking Hogs jumped on their bikes and the Rampagers roared out after them, pursuing them on the twisting mountain roads. When the Rampagers closed in, the Hogs let them have it.

Eight quarts of motor oil.

The Rampagers slipped and slid and piled up on the mountain road. It was a mess, and a miracle that not one of them careened off the mountain. They were still trying to get back on their bikes when the Smoking Hogs reappeared.

"You Pigeon fuckers are dead! Dead!" the commanding Rampager shouted.

But he was incorrect. One too many times Donald Deemeyer had been ridiculed. He dumped the contents of a red plastic gasoline container at his feet. It trickled downhill, mixing with the oil. The other Smoking Hogs had gasoline cans, too. Donald Deemeyer lit a match and the Rampagers burned alive.

When the flames sputtered out, the Smoking Hogs returned to the biker party. It was curious how the raucous, drunken revel became deadly quiet.

"The Smoking Hogs and the Raleigh Rampagers have patched things up," Donald Deemeyer announced. "Haven't we, old buddy?" He dragged a fire-blackened corpse into the light of the bonfire.

"See? No more nasty comments about the Smoking Hogs!"

The bikers knew how to deal with a knifing or a brawl or a shooting, but this one had them stunned. "Does anybody else want to say anything about the Smoking Hogs?" Donald demanded.

Nobody did.

Needless to say, the party was over. And the Smoking Hogs were no longer welcome at regional biker gatherings. They were never charged with the mass murder of the Raleigh Rampagers, but the truth became known. The chief of police of the Town of Pigeon Fudge, Incorporated, let Donald Deemeyer know what he knew. He brought it up several times. He brought it up again that afternoon right about lunchtime.

"Yeah, so arrest me."

"I don't want to arrest you, D.D.," the chief said, ordering himself a beer from Belle, owner and proprietor of the Watering Whole. It was the closest thing Pigeon Fudge had to an honest-to-god biker bar, although the truth was it was way too clean and well-maintained for a biker bar. The place had ferns. It had old-fashioned advertisements for bars of soap framed on the walls.

It had a kids' menu, for God's sake.

"So what the hell do you want?" Deemeyer demanded. "I want you to do a favor for a friend of a friend," the chief of police said.

"A favor."

"Yeah."

"Something illegal, I assume?"

"I don't know and I don't want to know. But I know you'll get paid for the job."

"You're trying to set me up, pig," Deemeyer growled. He tried to sound gruff but, to his humiliation, the wait staff had gathered around a nearby table, presenting the diners with a cupcake stuck with a burning sparkler.

The waiters and waitresses began clapping and singing. "Hap! Hap! Hap! Hap! Happy happy birthday! We! Hope! You! Have-A! Happy happy birthday!"

Everybody applauded the birthday girl. Even the chief clapped. Deemeyer was horrified to glimpse a few of his own Smoking Hogs in a back booth clapping, too.

Deemeyer tried to ignore it all and took a chug from his too-clean beer mug.

"I give you my word this ain't no setup, D.D.," the Chief added.

"Don't call me D.D. Makes me sound like a damn cheerleader."

"Watch your mouth!" snapped the owner as she strolled by with a tray full of her namesake Belle Burgers. "That ain't the kind of talk we tolerate in a family place. This is your last warning, Deemeyer. I hear you cussin' in my place one more time, and you're outta here. Got it?" Deemeyer glared into the beer.

"You wanna go back to drinkin' your beers at the Applebees?"

"I got it!" Deemeyer snapped.

"Don't you take that tone with me, biker boy. I know your momma!"

Belle stalked off. The chief was chuckling. "Life just ain't fair to a hard-ass like yerself sometimes, is it, D.D.?"

"Got that right."

"I think you need a little hell-raising. Get back to your roots."

"I don't need to get back to my roots."

"Then do it for the boys." The chief nodded at a back booth where several of the Smoking Hogs were using complimentary crayons on the placemats Belle had printed up for her twelve-and-under patrons. Cocker was coloring an elephant bright orange, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Could that actually be the same Jake "Shit-Kicker" Cocker who had run his bike over the smoking skull of a North Carolina biker just to see the steaming brain porridge squirt out? Damn, those were the good old days.

"Okay." Deemeyer sighed. "I'll do it."

Even if the chief was setting them up, Deemeyer thought, some quality jail time could do the Smoking Hogs nothing but good.

Chapter 24

"It's a little something for your trouble," said the nervous woman in the ugly orange dress jacket.

"The agreement was for cash," Deemeyer said testily.

"Oh, yes, that is correct. The beer is just a, you know, a bonus." The woman laughed like a coyote. Deemeyer wanted to clap his hands over his ears. Better yet, over her ears. He forgot about that when she pulled out the envelope.

"Here you go."

Deemeyer snatched it, ripped it open and counted the contents.

"And here are your instructions." Timidly, the woman placed a small boom box on the floor of the garage.

"What the hell?"

"They're on the tape," she explained nervously. "Please listen to the entire first side."

Deemeyer shrugged. "Whatever."

The nervous woman practically ran to her little rental car and tore off.

"Man, this is weird," Blackeye Bierce complained.

"The cash is real," Deemeyer said, examining the bills. He counted off fifteen Smoking Hogs. Then he recounted the $4,500 in cash. That came out to, how much again? Was it two hundred each? No, wait...

"The beer's real, too," said Jake Cocker, downing most of his plastic cup in a few swallows.

They gathered around the kegger and listened to the tape. It was a man's voice, and he took a long time to come to the point. First he described in detail the tour bus that was on its way to them. They were not to enter the bus. No one inside the bus was to be harmed. The voice then described two men who would be riding atop the bus. "Did he say on top of the bus?" Cocker belched.

One man would be Caucasian. The other would be an elderly Asian.

"Why we supposed to beat up some old guy?"

"Why the hell would an old guy be riding on top of a bus?"

"This is too weird."

Deemeyer had been thinking the same thing. He poured another beer as he thought about it.

"You like this beer very much," said the man on the boom box. "It is the best beer you ever tasted."

"Weirder and weirder," said a Hog.

"He's right, though," Deemeyer grunted. "I never knew brew this good."

All the Smoking Hogs agreed it really was the best beer they had ever tasted-and they drank a lot of beer.

"You hate the two men riding on top of the tour bus." said the voice on the boom box.

"Yeah, what the hell is with those assholes!" Cocker exploded.

"You hate them! They are the ones to blame!" Deemeyer saw it all. Suddenly it was clear as crystal. All the ridicule. All the jokes. "He's right. It's those two guys on the bus!"

"They're pricks!"

"They're lower than slime! They're lower than the Raleigh Rampagers!"

Yeah, Deemeyer thought. They two guys on the bus had to know pain. They had to pay hugely. They had to suffer agony like the Rampagers never suffered.

The man on the tape said, "Those two men on top of the bus-those are really bad guys. You want to kill them. You want them annihilated. You'll do whatever it takes to wipe them out."

"Wipe them out," Blackeye Bierce said.

"Wipe them out," Shit-Kicker Cocker echoed.

"Yeah," Deemeyer said. "Wipe them out."

Chapter 25

Greg Grom snatched up the phone on the first beep. "Yeah?"

"It's Amelia, Mr. President," said his secretary. "I did what you said."

"You gave them the beer?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"And the money and the tape player?"

"Yes, sir, but I don't know if I feel good about this. They seemed like an unsavory bunch of characters."

"Never mind, Arnelia. I'll call you soon."

Grom made his way to the front of the bus and stood at the driver's shoulder, nervously scanning the hideous extravagance that was Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee. After dropping Amelia at the car-rental agency, he had kept the bus circling for a half hour without a complaint.

"Horrible-lookin' place, ain't it?" the driver said conversationally. "You know why they call it Pigeon Fudge, don't ya?"

"Not really," Grom answered, not really listening. "It ain't from all the fudge shops."

"You don't say."

"Used to be a certain kind of pigeon that stopped by here from Canada in the summertime. But the original settlers came in the fall and set up their village and didn't suspect a thing. Then come summertime, and they had near to six hundred thousand pigeons congregating in the trees overhead. Made a terrible mess of the place."

"I can imagine."

"Word spread that the entire village was covered in pigeon shit, but for purposes of politeness the euphemism started getting used more frequently. And that's a story you won't find in the brochures." The driver chuckled. "In the brochures they say the name comes from all the fudge shops."

Grom pointed. "See that entrance?"

"Uh, yes, sir."

"We're going to pull in there."

The bus driver started to protest, but Grom was already making his announcement to the entourage. "Listen up, people! This is a security alert! Everybody take cover!"

Mayhem followed as men and women pushed and shoved to get under bunks and tables.

"What's going on, Mr. President?" one of the security agents demanded.

"We've got hijackers on board the bus," Grom said acidly. "If you people had provided me with adequate protection, you would know this by now."

The agents were flabbergasted. "Where are the hijackers?"

"On the roof."

"What?" the lead agent almost squealed.

"Prepare to apprehend," he commanded his partner.

"Too little and too late," Grom declared. "I've got my own enforcement team ready to handle the situation."

"That's unacceptable! We will handle this."

Grom snorted in the agent's face. "Listen, dim bulb, you leave this bus and you'll be a target. The people I've hired won't care who you are or what branch of the federal bureaucracy you crawled out of."

The former Secret Service agent gave Greg Grom a haughty twitch of the lip. "We'll see about that."

Chapter 26

"Olly Outlander's Old Tyme Opry," Remo Williams read. "Temporarily Closed for Remodeling-Open Again Soon Folks. What are we doing here?"

"I believe the signage is misleading," Chiun observed.

"Yeah, this place looks like it's been locked up since Dubya's daddy was running things," Remo said. The bus nevertheless rolled across the weed-grown parking lot and headed around the dilapidated lobby entrance. "You know, I have a feeling they're not really remodeling this place, either."

"There you are mistaken, my son. Here are the carpenters now."

The bus came to a halt in the middle of the empty lot. The brakes squeaked and the engine idled.

"You know, Little Father, I don't see any trucks. Just motorcycles. I don't think a real carpenter could carry all his tools on a motorcycle."

Chiun stroked his wisp of a beard thoughtfully. "You have a point, my son."

Remo shrugged. "Let's ask 'em. I think they're coming over for a chat."

Chiun nodded. "We will put on our friendliest faces." The Masters of Sinanju stepped from the bus and plummeted fourteen feet, but their feet touched down almost without a sound and neither of them stumbled. The bikers didn't seem impressed.

"How y'all doin'?" the Reigning Master said with a friendly wave.

"Wipe them out. Wipe them out," came the menacing chant.

"Wipe who out?" Remo asked.

"You're to blame," accused the barrel-chested giant at the head of the pack. "It's your fault!"

"What's my fault?" Remo asked.

"Everything!" The man had a heavy length of chain, which he whirled faster.

"You've been listening to the old Korean fart."

"We'll wipe you out!"

The bikers formed a half circle. Remo and Chiun were in the middle, backs to the bus.

"You are trapped," the leader growled. "Now you die."

"Maybe it's the leather jackets," Remo observed. "Nice warm day like this, they must be making you all hot and cranky."

The biker with the huge chest broke from the circle and bore down on Remo and Chiun, then with a roar he aimed the chain at his two victims. The massive weapon damaged only the side of the bus-Remo and Chiun were no longer there.

"It is your fault," Chiun said. The two Masters were now standing on the opposite side of the bus. Not a biker in sight. "You are to blame. Even strangers sense this."

"They're bonkers," Remo replied. "Whatever they say is obviously the opposite of reality."

"The deranged often possess their own vivid wisdom," Chiun noted.

"Or claim to."

The old Korean gave his protege a look hot enough to cause sunburn.

"Here they are! Wipe them out!" There was a chorus of boot steps coming around both ends of the bus. The Masters retreated across the parking lot.

"Why are you guys called the Smoking Hogs?" Remo called, reading sloppy jacket decals. "Is that like a Dixie version of a Sweat Hog?"

"Wipe you out!"

"Because the Sweat Hogs has been over for, like, decades."

"Sweating does appear to be their only talent," Chiun noted.

The bus lurched to life and spun in a circle. Remo wasn't about to let it escape. He led the herd of Hogs into position to block the bus's exit.

"You run like a dog!" the barrel-chested biker taunted them.

"This is as good a place as any to get wiped out, I guess," Remo said. The Masters were suddenly at a standstill, and the bikers bore down on them with amazing speed.

Remo watched the leader come at him with the chain. The man moved fast. Too fast for an overweight, beer-sodden thug in a restrictive leather jacket.

Not that he had anything to worry about. As the mass of metal careened at his head, he simply ducked beneath it, then reached up, grabbed it at precisely the right point and gave it a nudge for added momentum. Donald Deemeyer saw it coming at him and dropped his mouth wide in surprise. The chain hit. There was a liquid crunch, and then his jaw was all that remained intact of D.D.'s head.

Another biker howled and brought together a pair of crowbars, intending for Remo to be between them. Remo allowed the crowbars to clang together, then he gave them a hard shove. The bars drove forcefully into the guts of the man holding them.

More of them came, their rage spurring them to greater speed. Remo sidestepped a red-eyed, cross-eyed machete wielder and sent the big blade rocketing skyward with a quick kick. The maniac stumbled and looked around wildly for his lost weapon.

"Little to the right," Remo said, stepping in close and giving him a small shove. "Hey, look!"

Remo pointed up. The maniac looked. The machete was falling with tremendous velocity when it went in his mouth, out the bottom of his jaw and into his chest.

Two more stabbed at Remo from either side with more conventional cutlery, but the knives disappeared from their hands, and he inserted a finger into an eye on the left, then the right.

There was a gunshot. Remo stepped around the bullet, then ran at the shooter. Only one more shot slid past him before he had taken possession of the handgun and bent it into a horseshoe. He did the same thing to the shooter until he heard vertebrae crunching.

"Weapons are for amateurs, Remo. Have I taught you nothing?" Chiun grumbled. He had finished off his fair share of leather-clad Smoking Hogs.

It was the machete wielder he was referring to. The man had somehow extracted the weapon from his face and neck and was bearing down on Remo, the howls of outrage bubbling out of his neck. Remo stepped around him and whacked him hard on the back of the head. The machete wielder became airborne, dead already.

Chiun tsked over the body when it fell. "Very messy."

"I was just playing around," Remo protested.

"Are you prepared yet to enter the bus? Or should we take our rooftop perch again and see what other surprises they have in store for us?"

Remo sighed. "I guess we go in. But let's try not to kill everybody, Little Father."

Chiun sniffed. "Don't insult me."

Chapter 27

"Why is everybody screaming?" Amelia demanded.

"Shut up and listen!" Grom barked. "We're going with emergency Plan B."

"But why, Mr. President?"

"Just come get me!"

"Okay-two minutes!"

Grom couldn't believe he was putting his life in the hands of Amelia Powlik.

He strapped on the gas mask. Nobody noticed. Half the staff was cowering under tables while half found it impossible to tear themselves away from the horrors outside.

The ex-Secret Service agent turned and was about to make some sort of a pronouncement. Instead he said, "What's that for?"

Grom brandished a stainless-steel canister: It had been a part of the special package delivered for him just that afternoon at the mountaintop restaurant. It looked like a can of Pledge without the label. He shot the agent in the face.

Hope this works, Greg Grom thought. Before long he was spritzing everybody on the bus and issuing orders. He had never used the stuff in aerosol form before, and he wasn't one hundred percent sure it would work. Also, he had never used this specific formula. Who knew what it would do?

Soon twenty-three employees and hirelings of the United States Protectorate of Union Island piled from the bus and ran screaming in different directions. All the security agents jumped off with a hooded figure held hostage, their guns pointed at the figure's head. The bus jerked into motion, heedlessly rolling over dead Hogs.

CHIUN STOOD with his hands inside the sleeves of his kimono, which fluttered in the diesel fumes coming from the tour bus's tailpipe. "It is the prerogative of the Reigning Master of Sinanju to determine our next course of action."

"Of course it is," Remo said in exasperation. "You go after the bus, I'll get the hostage. Then we both go round up the civilians. Unless you have a better plan."

"I will do as you ask," Chiun said agreeably.

Remo bolted after the Feds, muttering. "Why am I not surprised that this is the one time you're going to let me make up strategy?"

He stooped as he ran and picked up a pair of rocks, then let them fly after the trio of agents. They never saw the rocks coming, and they never got the chance to fire their guns at their captive. Both awoke hours later in the Pigeon Fudge Lutheran Hospital with huge headaches and no memory of what had happened after lunch at that nice restaurant up in the mountains.

Remo pulled the hood off their hostage and found himself staring at a young woman named Betsy Shak, assistant in the Union Island budgeting department. She kept walking until Remo pulled her to a stop. Then she just stood there, smiling slightly, eyes closed and snoring. "Ah, crap!" Remo exploded.

Even that didn't wake up Betsy Shak.

REMO AND CHIUN INTERSECTED seconds later, both sprinting at speeds that would have broken Olympic records.

"Any luck, Little Father?"

"No one was on the bus except the driver, who was under the delusion that he was hauling a trailer filled with ripe hogs to a sausage factory in Wauconda, Illinois. He called me Good Buddy Mao."

Remo's heart sank. "Oh, no."

"I did not kill him," Chiun said. "But he will not make such a mistake a second time."

"The hostage was a ruse. Let's assemble the civilians," Remo said. "Any one of them could be our guilty party."

"A lunatic round-up. I am honored to be a part of your great undertaking." Chiun sped away like an arrow shot. Remo went in the other direction, muttering. "Two dozen maniacs running loose in a city designed by nutcases, and my only help comes from the sun source of all oddballs," he complained to no one in particular. "I need a vacation."

It was at about that moment that he jumped the ten-foot security fence around Olly Outlander's Old Tyme Opry hotel and found himself face-to-face with a billboard that said, Why Not Take ALL Your Vacations in Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee? See Our Luxurious Condominiums-Models Now Open!

The realty office had a pink-and-purple seismosaurus, bigger than a toolshed, squatting in one corner of the parking lot.

A handful of the bus people had run pell-mell in this direction, but Remo couldn't see any of them anywhere. The seismosaurus grinned inanely.

Remo Williams, the man who was created the Destroyer, felt his blood boil. "I have had just about enough of you." He snatched the thing off the ground and brought it down. Hard.

He felt better, but as he raced down the street in search of bus people there were more grinning dinosaurs everywhere he looked. Remo knew they were laughing at him.

Chapter 28

Eileen Mikulka had made up her mind about something. She was up until the wee hours of the morning mulling it over, but when she finally came to a decision she felt such a surge of joy and relief that she knew it was the right thing to do.

Eileen Mikulka was going to confront Dr. Harold W. Smith and give him a piece of her mind.

She had never done such a thing, but there was a time for everything. She couldn't stand by and let Dr. Smith fire Mark Howard, no matter how serious his transgression.

And how bad could it be, whatever Mark had done? There hadn't been any sign of trouble. Mrs. Mikulka considered herself as intimately involved in the operations of the place as Director Smith himself. Even if he made the decisions and set the procedures, Mrs. Mikulka communicated his edicts and collected feedback. Over the years she became increasingly responsible for reading the piles of reports that came to the director from every department, distilling them into the briefs that Dr. Smith preferred. Deciding what details did and did not get passed on to Dr. Smith made her, in reality, a very powerful figure in the sanitarium hierarchy. It also meant she thought she knew everything about everything at Folcroft.

That's exactly what she intended to tell Dr. Harold W. Smith. She would follow it up with this concluding and irrefutable argument. "Whatever mistake Associate Director Howard made, I have not heard a word about it. Therefore it can't be as significant as you believe it is, and it is most certainly not worth terminating the boy over."

Dr. Smith would likely say something like, "I've never seen you so determined about anything, Mrs. Mikulka."

She knew exactly how to answer that, too. "Because, in all my years as your secretary, this is the first time I thought you were making a serious error in judgment."

There were other things she could have said, but she didn't dare. Like she knew that whatever Mark had done that was so horrible, it was probably just a minor and accidental deviation in the painfully rigid procedures Dr. Smith insisted upon for his tiny executive staff. She would not point out that it took almost superhuman patience and self-discipline to work in his environment.

She would also not point out that Mark was good for Dr. Smith. Mark's easy-going nature had rubbed off in subtle ways.

Finally, she would never bring up the fact that Dr. Smith was as old as the hills and his life spent behind a desk had left him with a frail constitution and persistent digestive irritation. For the future of Folcroft it was a good idea to have an assistant on hand to take over day-to-day operations. Just in case.

Shame on you, Eileen, for even thinking such morbid thoughts.

But it was true. She wasn't a spring chicken herself, and lately the brevity of her remaining years had been much on her mind.

Maybe she should retire.

With her head of steam up, she didn't waste a moment. She knocked on the doctor's office door as soon as she walked in that morning.

When she entered, Mark Howard was lounging in the creaky chair in front of Dr. Smith's desk. Dr. Smith was doing something strange with his mouth.

He was-what? At first she assumed he was on the verge of being sick.

"Dr. Smith, are you feeling ill?"

"What? No, I am just fine, Mrs. Mikulka. Would you bring us tea, please."

"Yes. Of course."

Mrs. Mikulka left the office feeling flustered. Dr. Harold W. Smith had been suppressing amusement. Not a laugh, certainly, and probably not even a chuckle. But as close to it as she might have seen in years. Why, Dr. Smith and Mark were sharing a joke.

You could have knocked over Mrs. Mikulka with a feather.

She felt like a silly old biddy for having wasted all those hours worrying that Mark was in Dr. Smith's doghouse. At the same time she was fervently curious.

What in the world could have been so funny to an old sourpuss like Dr. Smith?

What she wouldn't give to know.

"OH YEAH, REAL FUNNY, Junior," said the disgruntled voice out of the speakerphone.

"The Associated Press took a really nice photo, Remo," Mark Howard said, unfolding the newspaper when Mrs. Mikulka was gone. "The Rye Record's got it right on the front page. 'Who Smashed Digger-And Why?' Listen to this-"

"No, thanks."

"No, just listen," Mark Howard insisted delightedly. "'Digger the Dinosaur never hurt a soul during his short life. In fact, the purple dinosaur with pink spots was only six weeks old. Yesterday, however, his brief existence was snuffed out when vandals smashed the two-ton fiberglass figure to pieces in the parking lot of the Carefree Vacation Condominiums development in Pigeon Fudge, Tennessee."'

"Boo-hoo for the Carefree Vacation Condominiums," Remo said sourly out of the speakerphone. "There's more. 'The vandalism occurred yesterday afternoon, but police say they do not know how the dinosaur was destroyed. "He was so new he was still shiny," said Max Scheaffer, president of Carefree. "Who would have thought somebody could do such a heinous act."'"

"I know you think this is the most fun ever, but could we get on to business?" Remo grouched.

"This is business," Mark protested. "Your stunt turned out to be the curiosity-of-the-day in papers and newscasts around the country. You came pretty close to exposing the organization. Not to mention that it was just, well, a heinous thing to do."

Mark Howard stifled a chuckle.

One corner of Dr. Harold W. Smith's mouth twitched, very slightly.

"Hello?" Remo demanded. "Are there any adults in the room?"

"Remo, this could have been a real problem," Dr. Smith said, his voice almost, but not quite, as sour as ever.

"You're welcome. Thanks. No, really. Just doing my job."

"What are you referring to?"

"Tracking down the source of the poisoners? Remember? The job you couldn't do?"

"Yes, I assumed you would be able to do so," Smith replied. "But the little melee in Pigeon Fudge scared the islanders back home. A Union Island spokesperson claimed President Grom and his entourage were attacked by American ultranationalists. All the islanders were rounded up and flown out before they could be examined at the local hospital."

"They wouldn't let that happen because they've all have their brains melted, except maybe for the president himself," Remo said. "I think it's him, Smitty. That punk kid Grom. He's a sniveling, self-important little brat. I don't have to tell you about those kind."

"What evidence points to Grom?" Smith asked. "The same evidence that led me to this can of nuts in the first place. None."

"So why do you think it is Greg Grom behind all the outbreaks of violence?" Smith demanded. "We still don't know what he has to gain from any of it."

"You got me there," Remo said. "Maybe he's using some kind of mind-control potion. Maybe that's what got him where he is today."

Smith stared at the phone. "You mean, he drugged the people of Union Island to get himself elected? That's absurd."

"You wearing that butt-ugly green tie every day for forty years, that's absurd. Greg Grom spiking the coconut milk on Union Island, that makes perfect sense."

"If he did, then every resident of the island would be violently insane," Smith protested. "That's clearly not the case."

"Yeah. I don't have all the details worked out, but I do know Grom didn't get elected because of his charisma or his credibility. He doesn't have either."

"Maybe," Smith said. "We must consider the possibility that whoever is causing the poisonings had no connection to the islanders until he or she joined up with the group on the mainland. Which means we could see continued outbreaks in the South-Central U.S., even with the entourage back on their island."

"Nope," Remo said determinedly. "It won't happen. My gut says it's Grom."

Smith stared thoughtfully at the newspaper photo of fiberglass splinters. "I don't feel as confident, but going to Union Island is the logical next step until we have another occurrence. Mark?"

Mark Howard nodded. "I agree. Even without evidence it seems likely that whoever it was behind the poisonings, they were with the islanders."

"But we need hard evidence before we start assassinating the presidents of U.S. protectorates," Smith warned. "President Grom is off limits until proved guilty."

"Don't worry, I'll find proof," Remo said. "I won't snuff the punk until I have it."

"That would be heinous," Mark Howard said.

"Ha-ha-ha click," Remo said acidly.

Dr. Harold W Smith suppressed a subtle spasm in both corners of his perpetually sour mouth.

Chapter 29

The short buses were painted with parrots and palm trees. Tropical Transport was the name of the tour company. All the buses had a cardboard sign duct-taped to the front window with Chartered hand-lettered with a big black marker.

More cardboard-lots of it-had been used to cover the windows.

There was nobody inside yet. The four buses waited at the end of the Union Island International Airport's one and only runway. The bus lights were out. The runway lights were out. There were no flights scheduled to come in until the first morning tourist shuttle out of Miami at 6:00 a.m.

That was five hours away. Still, the lights of an aircraft appeared in the distance. They came closer, descending for a landing.

The runway lights blazed to life at the last minute, and the wheels of the chartered 747 touched down seconds later. It slowed fast, then came to a squeaking halt at the buses. The aircraft powered down at the same moment the runway lights faded to blackness, and there was nothing left except for a few yellow flashlight beams.

The Union Island Police Department wheeled the stairs into place and marched up to the aircraft doors. They had their billy clubs out. The doors opened and the police went in.

"Jesus Cheee-rist," Chief of Police Checker Spence grumbled. "It's a damn loony bin."

The aircraft was stuffed to the gills with lunatics. Most of them had the dead, sightless, unfocused eyes of a human vegetable. Their mouths hung slack, and when they turned to look at the police, their heads lolled from one side to the other, as if too heavy to control properly. A few of them were excited, yanking and pulling at their belts. Not one of them spoke.

Every man and woman had their hands cuffed behind their backs, which had to be a pretty uncomfortable way to fly. They all had their seat belts on. Otherwise the limp ones would have flopped to the floor.

"Hey, it's Alan from the tourism department!" One of the officers was aiming his billy club at a drooling, cadaverous figure in an aisle seat. The island government was tiny-everybody knew just about everybody.

"Hey, Alan, you feeling okay?" The officer leaned close.

Alan, from the tourism department, turned to face the officer. Spence could see the utter lack of vitality in the eyes, eyes that belonged in a corpse. He and his officer were both taken off guard when Alan from the tourism department bit a huge chunk of flesh out of the officer's neck. The officer went down screaming in the aisle.

"Jeesus!" Spence stormed down the aisle. He wasn't sure what he intended to do. For one thing, get the hunk of skin and muscle that was dangling from the teeth of Alan from the tourism department in hopes it could be reattached to the officer who was now pumping blood onto the aircraft floor.

Captain Spence didn't let his shock slow him. "Get the ambulance!" he shouted back to his other officers as he dropped to the floor beside the wounded man and applied heavy pressure to the wound. He felt the spurt of blood against his hand like water from a garden hose, and he knew he was feeling an open carotid artery. How many pints of blood had his man lost in just the past few seconds?

"Captain, watch out!"

The warning came almost too late. He felt someone leaning over him and he twisted fast. A pair of teeth chomped down, locking on to the material of his shirt. Captain Spence retreated up the aisle on all fours, dragging the shirt free. It wasn't Alan from tourism but a woman on the opposite side of the aisle. Agnes. From the island public relations administration. She was in her late sixties and her dentures fell out and bounced on the floor.

Spence grabbed his wounded officer's ankles and dragged him to the front, out of the reach of the passengers, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the lunatic face of kindly old Agnes. She used to baby-sit Captain Spence's kids. They called her Grandma Aggy.

She had just tried to chew out his liver.

DIRECTOR OF TOURISM Dawn Summens never went to sleep that night.

She got her first clue of looming catastrophe when she checked her voice mail. There was a message from Grom. "It's me. We've had some problems at this end, and I think it's time to pull the plug on the tour. We'll be heading back tomorrow morning. Let's meet for breakfast and discuss our next move."

Summens had been taking off her earrings when the message started and she stood there now with one of them, a glimmering emerald stud, twirling in her fingers. Then she replayed the message.

No doubt in her mind. Grom was suppressing his excitement-or agitation. Had he achieved success? Or had everything blown up in his face?

Something told her it was bad news, not good. Grom was hiding something, which was a dangerous sign. Summens and Grom had an agreement. Greg was never, ever to hide anything from his right-hand man-bikini model-honesty was the key to their working and personal relationship.

Her apartment was a luxurious penthouse atop the Union Estates building. It was seven stories, the tallest structure on the island, and the surf rolled at its feet with a faint whisper. Summens strolled onto the balcony and regarded the moonlit waves carefully for a moment, looking for her answers there.

Something was afoot. She felt it in her gut. And she was going to find out what it was. Nobody screwed with Dawn Summens's well-laid plans and got away with it. Especially not that pudgy jerk Greg Grom.

She wheeled and headed for the desk in her bedroom. It looked like a very feminine dressing table, complete with a small mirrored tray of the world's most expensive perfumes. Summens sat at the frilly vanity chair, moved the tray aside and swung up the top of the desk. The levers inside lifted the keyboard to working height. She slid the top of the desk out of sight into its wall recess, revealing a twenty-inch flat screen monitor.

She snatched up the phone as she began her on-line search for information. Her first call went to her airport contact. She had a lock on at least one employee on each shift of the airport security staff. Her call automatically went to whoever was currently on duty.

"Ashecroft," he announced. "It's me."

Ashecroft's voice immediately lowered. "I was about to call you, Minister. We just got word about the president's flight coming in."

"What's their ETA?"

"Forty-five minutes," Ashecroft said. That lying son of a-!

"The police are here already," Ashecroft added.

"Yes?" Summens said. Why police?

"They look ready to go to war," Ashecroft said. "But they said they'll enter the aircraft with billy clubs. The guns and stuff are for emergency use only-you know, in case of real trouble."

Summens's mind spun in several directions, but she exercised great control when she spoke. "What do they expect?"

"They haven't told us a thing." The way he said it made it clear he wished Dawn would fill him in.

"Phone the minute you learn anything more. I'll be in touch." She snapped off the phone.

She had just accessed the flight plan for the inbound chartered 747, which was three minutes ahead of schedule and expected to be on the ground at Union Island International Airport before midnight.

She found her next set of answers in the on-line edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Rampage In Pigeon Fudge, the headline read.

She scanned the story and made a quick conclusion. Grom dosed his own tour-bus staff with synthesized GUTX. That was a desperate move even for an idiot like him. He'd been in bad trouble-or thought he was.

But what else had happened? Why was he keeping it a secret from her? When Grom got in trouble, she was usually the first one he turned to. She was the brains behind this outfit; they both knew that.

What was she missing?

She quickly jumped to another conclusion.

Grom was scheduled to take delivery today of a new batch of GUTX synthetic distillates. There was an upstart pharmaceutical specialties lab in Minneapolis. It claimed to have a molecular mapping and replicating technique. Their scientists had promised their synthesis would be as close as was possible to the real thing. But it took a little longer.

Grom was making all the arrangements with the labs. He never entrusted Dawn with the original GUTX except in very specific cases, like the senator who visited in his absence. He wasn't about to entrust her with the synthetic GUTX, either. She never even knew where the deliveries took place.

What if the Minneapolis lab did the job as good as it said it would? What if Grom had tested the Minneapolis GUTX samples and found one that worked without side effects? Crisis averted, he'd start feeling cocky. He'd start feeling like he didn't need a business partner-not one with a will of her own.

That betrayal would violate the terms of their agreement, but the beauty of GUTX was that he could dose her-maybe spike her wine or her bottled water-then simply suggest that she thought he had done the right thing. Then she would agree.

She'd be his little pet. His puppet. She'd follow his every suggestion. She'd perform whatever act he wished her to perform and she'd like it-if he wanted her to like it.

The thought repulsed her.

If only she could have found his stash of GUTX, she could dose him first. As stupid as he was, he somehow managed to keep that one secret from her for almost two years. She had never seen the full supply, so it had come as a complete surprise when Greg announced that his stores were running low.

For months they had contracted all kinds of marine biologists and less scrupulous rare-animal collectors to search the waters worldwide for surviving members of a subspecies of the Blue Ring Octopus that had once existed in small numbers off the shores of Union Island, and, as far as they knew, nowhere else.

The Blue Ring was a small, poisonous octopus today, but the Union Island Blue, as it was known, had been as much as a yard in length and with a greater girth. One preserved specimen was known by the scientific community to exist today-an intact, desiccated mummy found on the island by President Greg Grom himself, back when he was an archaeological student working the local sites on a summer internship.

The truth was, he had found hundreds of Union Island Blue Rings that day, but the specimen now on display at the Union Island Museum of Natural History had been the only one not crushed into powder.

As the sign at the museum explained, the Union Island Blue Ring was described in the surviving writings of the original island habitants. It had great ritual value to them, but was notoriously difficult to catch because of its lethal sting. The sting, the museum display said, contained a poison that was chemically similar to tetrodotoxin, one of the world's most deadly naturally occurring toxins. TTX was also found in several varieties of puffer fish and was famous for being the secret ingredient in Haitian zombie potions. Indeed, the Union Island Blue Ring Octopus appeared to have been used in rituals in which the priests would "kill," then "resurrect" a subject as a demonstration of supernatural power.

A chosen subject was fed a crumb of octopus flesh. The poison, dubbed guaneurotetrodotoxin, or GUTX, probably had an effect similar to TTX, slowing the metabolic rate to a point of near-death unconsciousness. Outward signs of life were suppressed until no heartbeat or respiration could be detected. Days later, the GUTX would wear off and the body's metabolism would speed up again. The benevolent priests would restore life to the "corpse."

Most of those who were exposed to TTX today, often through consuming puffer fish, received a dose far larger than what the Union Island priests used. Victims could die in as little as twenty minutes. From the written records found on the island, GUTX was just as dangerous.

"No Union Island Blue Ring Octopus has been seen in at least four centuries," the museum display concluded. "Have no fear of swimming in the beautiful waters of Union Island-this poisonous marine dweller is extinct!"

Their hunt confirmed that.

After months of failure, Grom and Summens had even risked a little publicity and offered a substantial reward for anyone locating a recent specimen. The word was circulated among fisherman throughout the Caribbean. The specimens that came in bore no resemblance to the Union Island Blue Ring. More than one marine biologist and rare-marine-animal collector shipped them hopeful-looking samples, but in all cases the pickled octopus were proved to be simply uncommonly large standard Blue Rings. DNA testing proved they weren't from the same subspecies as that of the mummy in the Union Island museum-and more tests showed that these standard twentieth century Blue Rings produced no GUTX.

Thus they embarked on the effort to analyze and create GUTX synthetically.

Easier said than done. Every lab they approached was able to make something very similar to GUTX and none had so far produced an identical molecule. The synthetic versions didn't work on the human metabolism in the same way, either. They found out the hard way when Grom tested a batch on a honeymooning couple from Portland.

The couple was flattered to have the island's president stopping by their restaurant table to chat. They were honored when he bought them a bottle of fine wine and decanted it himself. They never saw the extra ingredient he slipped into the wineglasses.

After drinking their wine, Grom suggested to the couple that they were having a fabulous honeymoon and they absolutely loved everything about Union Island.

The GUTX synthesis seemed to be working fine at first, then the newlyweds became agitated. Grom left, feeling the first twinges of alarm, and watched what happened next through the restaurant's front picture windows.

The couple began jumping around, boisterously conversing with other diners. Grom learned later that one of the other patrons mentioned that, while Union Island was indeed wonderful, the beaches could stand a little less litter.

That was all it took to set off the honeymooners. "It's perfect!" the blushing bride screeched at the naysayer. "Do you hear me! Do you understand, bitch?" The lady who had complained about the trashy seaside understood nothing except that she was being slashed to pieces by a maniac with a steak knife.

It wasn't easy downplaying the only murder in Union Island's recent memory. Reporters made much of the island's increased tensions resulting from its exploding tourism business. There were a few damaging "indepth" investigations by reporters who had never even been to the island.

Summens knew how to take care of assholes like that. She hurt those reporters in the worst possible way-by compromising their credibility. She invited them to the island personally, turning on her feminine charms full blast. "All I ask is that you join the president and myself for a welcome dinner," she explained. "After that you can spend as much or as little time as you like on the island and really get to know what it has to offer."

"What's your angle?" a Washington Post reporter demanded warily.

"My angle is that I believe you will see that most of what you wrote about is untrue," she said matter-of-factly. These hard-nose reporter types liked you to be straight with them.

"What if I think I was exactly right?" he probed.

"Then you let your first article stand," she said simply.

"What if I think it's even more of a shit hole than I wrote about the first time?" the Post reporter said with a sneer.

"You write whatever you think is true," Summens said, putting a smile in her voice. "We'll trust your judgment." It took a lot of persuasion, but persuasion was what Dawn Summens did best. Once she got two high-profile yeses, the other reporters fell in line.

As promised, she and Grom hosted a private dinner party at the presidential beach house. Oh, how smug that bunch had been when they arrived, just brimming with journalistic integrity.

"Giving journalists a dinner with the president is not going to influence our reportage," said one blackhaired woman from some big East Coast newspaper, then added, after an insulting pause, "Ms. Tourism Minister."

"Is 'reportage' a word?" Summens replied innocently. The newspaper bitch and her colleagues left the dinner with a new frame of mind, thanks to a healthy dose of GUTX-real GUTX, not the synthesized junk. They all wrote retractions and self-condemnations for their irresponsible and inaccurate earlier reports on the problems at Union Island.

The black-haired bitch was writing for the police beat now, from what Summens heard. Good riddance. All the others had suffered similar career disasters.

But that was enough trouble at home. Summens and Grom decided to take the testing abroad and arranged a PR tour for the president that would take him to some of the hottest vacation spots in the U.S., where he could test the GUTX samples on unsuspecting tourists. If the subjects went amok, it wouldn't be Union Island's problem.

Grom had taken delivery of more than thirty sample types from eight labs, and surely one of them would do what original GUTX did. One of them had to work, because their original GUTX supply was down to the dregs. However, each and every formula had ended with the subjects running amok. Grom created a swath of violence and insanity across the south-central United States. Now, if Dawn Summens was reading the clues correctly, Greg had finally found a formula that worked. Now he would betray her.

Summens's notebook computer was a sort of cybernetics nerve center for most of the systems on the island, and she tapped into the security cameras at the airport, witnessing the police preparations for the arriving 747. Grom and his dippy secretary were the first off. Even the small, grainy image from the security camera showed Greg looking haggard and nervous. His dippy secretary Amelia was a different story. Walking with confidence and a slight, assured smile, her eyes never left Greg Grom, and she never left her proper place-to his left and two steps behind him.

That was all the proof Dawn Summens needed. Before Dawn came along, he had dosed up hundreds of women, and he always made them subservient-and that meant walking two steps behind him, always. Now he was back to his old ways. He had given his secretary a fresh dose of the new GUTX and she was playing the part he wanted.

That would be Dawn if she wasn't careful.

She almost began doubting her conclusions when she witnessed what happened next. Police stormed the aircraft and retreated minutes later with a severely wounded man. The next time they went inside they had guns and riot gear.

They hauled out prisoners too numerous to count, but enough of them were recognizable on the security video feed to assure Dawn that these were, in fact, island government employees. All appeared violently insane.

Why were they given the bad stuff and Amelia given the good stuff?

Dawn's system could tap into video signals from around the island. Hotels and department stores. Emergency vehicles and street-pole cameras. She was able to watch the convoy sneak across town, without emergency lights or sirens, and pull into the lot of the small police station.

She opened a line to the station cameras and audio feeds and saw the lunatics herded into the basement lockup.

She clicked over to her feed from the presidential beach house, finding Greg Grom in his bedroom. Grom didn't know she had tapped into his home security system. She had watched him perform some very vile deeds in that bedroom-deeds he never admitted to her.

There he was now, performing one of his favorite and most revolting acts with a screeching, sobbing Amelia Powlik. Oh, yes, he loved it when they cried in pain and begged for more in the same breath. Amelia didn't disappoint.

"Did it hurt?" he asked her afterward.

"I thought you'd rip me apart," Amelia whimpered. "How soon until we do it again?"

"I don't know. Maybe never. I have tastier fish to fry." Amelia was clearly hurt by this, but she was an innovator. "I know what would get you interested again, Mr. President."

Dawn had no inclination to view another such display, but she was mesmerized when the plain, unattractive Amelia came out of the bathroom seconds later wearing one of Dawn's very own bikinis. She had to have left it there months ago.

"I am Union Island," Amelia said in a pouty imitation of a Dawn Summens commercial. "Come to me." It was an unflattering imitation.

Greg Grom had not proved to be strong when it came to instant replays in the bedroom, but all of a sudden he was bolt upright and ready for more.

"Dawn!" he barked at Amelia Powlik. "Time for you to get what's coming to you."

"Will it hurt?" Amelia asked in a falsetto voice as she scampered to kneel at Grom's bedside.

"You better believe it will. It's been a long time coming."

Grom was true to his word. He made it painful, and he made it humiliating, and he made the fake Dawn sob. All the while he was violating her he was rattling off an endless litany of petty crimes that had been committed against him by Dawn Summens, and how she would endure endless nights of suffering and degradation as punishment.

When he was done, Amelia Powlik collapsed on the woven rug. "That was magnificent," she gasped finally.

"Wait until I get the real thing," Grom said. "I went easy on you compared to what I'm gonna do to her."

"Ooh, can I watch?"

Grom considered that. "Sure. Why not? Maybe I'll let you have a go at her, too. I'm bound to need a break sometime."

"And what would you like me to do to her?" Amelia asked, raising her head, eyes glinting in the darkness. "Maybe you should demonstrate."

Incredibly, Greg Grom rose to the occasion. Soon he was taking out his anger once again on the Dawn Summens stand-in.

The real Dawn Summens could not tear her eyes away. She had never seen Grom so confident, or so cruel, and she had certainly underestimated his anger.

What if she ended up in that role? One dose of GUTX and Grom would have her, body and mind. She would accept whatever he dished out, and she wouldn't stand a chance of escaping. She wouldn't want to escape.

She watched the performance for hours. By sunrise Amelia was a mess of small wounds and bruises, and she finally passed out from exhaustion. Grom finished off with her anyway and then fell into a dead sleep.

But Dawn watched him still, her plans ripening in her brilliant, devious mind.

It was a desperate plan with no small risk, but she never even considered taking the safest approach-getting off Union Island and never coming back.

This bikini model was fated for greatness, and she would not back down in the face of danger-no matter how terrible the consequences of failure.

Chapter 30

Chiun stood outside the cab and slowly craned his ancient head to take in the entire facade of the faded pink Many Palms Resort. Clearly he wasn't pleased with what he saw.

"This," he said, turning to Remo, who was extracting chests from the overstuffed cab trunk, "is your fault."

"Huh? What?" Remo balanced the chests on his shoulders, "My fault? What is my fault and why is it my fault and why the hell can't it be some other guy's fault this one time?"

"This hotel," Chiun said evenly.

"Finest on the island," piped up the taxi driver.

"That's what you keep telling us," Remo muttered. "It's a frigging dump, but you know what, Chiun, it ain't my hotel."

"You brought us here," Chiun said reasonably.

"American Airlines brought us here."

"It was your investigation that led us to the Caribbean. Again."

"So you think I should have come up with different suspects or what?"

"It's a vacation paradise," the taxi driver enthused.

"Shut up," Remo told him. "You keep telling me to use my head and this time I used my head, and I'm getting nothing but grief for it. From you. From Smitty. From Junior. You think I'm any happier about coming back to the Caribbean? You think I want to spend time in this sleazy little junkyard with a beach?"

"Everybody says that at first," the taxi driver assured them. "I promise-by the time you leave, you'll love it!"

"Didn't I tell you to shut up?" Remo snarled. "You can't blame me for this, Chiun."

"I do."

"Stick it in your ear."

They passed through the front entrance into an open-air lobby with a stone floor and a freshly thatched roof. The walls were open to the beach.

"See?" Remo said. "Not so bad."

"It's ugly," Chiun pronounced with a dismissive wave. Remo went to the front desk, leaving Chiun standing there to wait.

"You wanna see ugly, go look in a mirror." Chiun turned slowly to face the insulting party.

"I like your pretty dress." The comment dripped with sarcasm.

Chiun found himself face-to-face with a bird. A big one. It was a strange and vibrant bluish parrot with a huge beak. Its small, shining black eyes were set in big yellow patches. There were other parrots inhabiting the display of driftwood in the middle of the open air lobby, but they were green and tiny, dwarfed by the macaw. "Don't make trouble," Remo called as he returned.

"Ringing its neck would be no trouble at all," Chiun commented.

"Not from Smitty's point of view."

"Old man wanna prune?" the parrot demanded.

"Who would teach a bird to be impolite?" Chiun asked.

"How should I know?" Remo said.

"I was not asking you." Chiun leaned close to the big parrot. Then leaned closer.

"Halitosis halitosis!" The bird squawked.

"Yellow and blue make a hideous color combination," Chiun told it, moving in even closer.

"Awk!" The bird tried to peck him, but Chiun held its beak in his fingers. The great black eyes rolled and the bird shifted on its driftwood perch.

"Not so long ago, in Rome, the Caesars considered parrots a delicacy," Chiun said.

He released it and the bird scrambled away, trembling. Chiun chuckled.

REMO WAS on the phone as soon as he had settled into the presidential suite at the Many Palms Resort. Settling in consisted of putting down the assortment of eight trunks Chiun had chosen for their short jaunt to the Caribbean, while the old Master himself plopped down in front of the television and began channel-surfing for Spanish-language soap operas.

"I think you sent us to the wrong island, Smitty," Remo declared.

"I doubt it," Harold W. Smith replied curtly.

"This place is a dump. And by place I mean the whole island, including this hotel."

"The Many Palms Resort is supposed to be the finest hotel-"

"Oh, Christ all-mighty, not you, too," Remo said, cutting him off. "Okay, it's not so awful, but it's strictly two-star and that doesn't bode well for the rest of the island."

"You don't know that. The U.S. has invested a half billion to improve the island infrastructure."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"You're not there to look for evidence of a public works embezzler," Smith reminded him. "You're there to put a stop to the killing."

"Yes, of course. I'll call you."

Remo replaced the phone as Chiun gave a disgusted sound, flicking off the TV and tossing the remote, which buried itself in the wall.

"No soaps?" Remo asked.

"None."

"My fault?"

"Of course."

Remo sighed. "I'm going for a walk."

Chapter 31

Dawn Summens didn't move. Her face was blank, as if her emotions had been erased.

"I had to do it," Greg Grom apologized. She just stood there.

"I had no choice," Grom insisted.

"Christ, Greg," Dawn said, turning away from the small barred window in the steel door. "It's horrible."

"They'll snap out of it. I'm sure they'll snap out of it," Greg Grom said worriedly, his own alarm growing. Dawn had been too shocked to react at first, but now her face was pale and she looked frightened. She leaned against the bare concrete wall.

"I had to do it," he whined. "The Feds were there. Those special agents I told you about? They were right there! The only way to get away was to cause such a big mess I could get lost in it. So I dosed everybody on the bus."

She looked at him with a stark eye. "Then what happened?"

"They went crazy. Just like all the others. They went on a rampage. It was just, just insanity."

"Rampaging?" she asked.

Greg nodded vigorously. "Yes. Not like they are now. This didn't happen until a few hours ago. They were still full of energy when we locked them up. Then this morning-this."

Dawn didn't want to look again, but she was drawn to the steel door. Through the bars she saw a large, low-ceilinged room containing fully half the administrative staff of the island government, maybe forty people in all, and not a word was spoken. Most of them simply stood in one spot, eyes wide, looking slowly around with bloodshot eyes. Several were pacing the cell slowly. One woman was putting her hand to the cold concrete wall again and again, and Dawn realized she was trying to flatten a spider. It wasn't fast, but the woman moved as if in slow motion and she kept missing it.

"Are they dying or what?" Grom whined.

"I don't know," Dawn Summens said slowly, although her thoughts were beginning to race. Schemes and strategies began to construct and collapse rapidly as she considered how she might use this development to her own advantage.

"What about the others on the mainland?"

"Some are normal and don't remember a thing," she said. "Some of them, if they weren't killed, are just like this."

Grom's jowls and baggy eyes drooped. He was worried. Dawn was delighted. Grom had intended to turn the tables against her, but the tables had lurched a little back in her direction.

"Greg, I'm scared," she said, putting a vulnerable lilt in her voice. "None of the ones on the mainland turned this fast. It took days and days. But it hasn't even been twenty-four hours since you dosed our people. What if they all die? We won't be able to cover it up. Not without GUTX."

"Yeah," he admitted, nodding and avoiding eye contact.

"What about Amelia?" she asked, and was satisfied to see him stiffen.

"What about her?"

"She's the only one missing from the lockup. Don't tell me she was killed?" Dawn pleaded.

"No. She was the only one who didn't get a dose. She's fine."

"Oh, thank God. How's she dealing with all of this?"

"She's fine," Grom said quickly. "Dawn, they're here."

"The agents. The two who've been after me. They were on the morning flight out of Miami. That's where I really need your help now."

"What can I do?"

Grom gave her a sick smirk. "You're Dawn Summens. You know what to do."

THE BEACH WAS rocky and dirty. The ocean wasn't so much turquoise blue as it was sea-slime green. The clientele were less attractive. Around the swimming pool, lounge chair after lounge chair strained under the massive pasty skin-sacks of American vacationers. Not one of them was flattered by the tiny straps and G-strings that were standard swimming attire.

The waiters, all local islanders, strolled among the vacationers and looked tiny by comparison.

Remo went the long way around the pool, but he could feel the eyes on him. There were a few catcalls and three drink offers. One woman jumped off her lounge chair-quite agile, considering her age-and started toward him with a gleam in her cataracts. Remo sped up.

"Not so fast, sweetums! Let's get to know each other over foreplay."

Remo often had problems with overamorous admirers, a side effect of Sinanju training. It had been fun for a week or two, but that was a long time ago. These days, his control over this animal magnetism was inconsistent. Right now he seemed to have lost his edge. He zipped around the side of one of the resort wings and leaped skyward, slipping over the rail of a second-story balcony. He sat there listening as his pursuer came around the corner and stopped below him, wheezing. "Oh, shit," she said.

Somebody else was coming up behind her and making a lot of noise doing it. Through the narrow gaps in the balcony floor he saw a steel walker appear, followed by its owner, who made a deep frown out of her wrinkles. "Where's the kid?"

"Got away. Sorry, Sally."

"Shit!" Sally thumped the walker in frustration. "We still have Duncan and Buck in the suite across the hall. They're eager to please."

"I suppose, but they're so second rate," Sally complained. "The kid with the big wrists, now that was prime beefcake."

Remo was on a private balcony, and now he heard the faint swipe of a keycard and the door opened in the room behind him. The bleached blonde who entered could have been any over-the-hill waitress from any truck stop in the U.S.A. Her sunburned face brightened with happy surprise.

"Hiya, sweetie!" she called to Remo through the glass. She peeled off her I Came To Union Island T-shirt as she headed his way.

Beneath him Remo heard Sally and her friend turning back to the pool.

The bleached blonde had a one-piece bathing suit, and two steps later the bathing suit was wadded up in the corner.

Remo preferred not to make a miraculous disappearance that might get people talking, but Sally wasn't exactly moving at lightning speed and she'd see him if he just jumped down to the ground. If he escaped via the roof, the blonde might start asking around about the flying skinny guy. He was stuck between a skank and a wrinkly place....

The peroxide waitress unlatched her door and at that moment Sally and her companion were gone around the corner. Remo jumped off the balcony-fast enough to escape the blonde but slow enough to look normal.

"Come back!" wailed the blonde, her voice muted behind the glass of the balcony door. "Look what I have!"

Remo tried not to look. He tried hard. But then he looked.

The blonde had pressed up against the patio glass, flattening and expanding her impressively large breasts into pale white circles of flesh that were big as dinner plates and, with a little mashing, getting bigger.

On the beach he marveled at the variety of skin shades. Some vacationers were pale as death. Several of the great quivering mounds of flab were pink turning to scarlet with nicely progressing burns.

Alice Aberwicz, however, was in a class by herself. "Hello, Remo!"

The Reigning Master of Sinanju looked this way and that. There was nobody else in his vicinity who might possibly be named Remo.

"I'm talking to you, silly boy!" Alice Aberwicz waved and smiled from her beach chair. Remo approached cautiously and gazed down at a vast, glimmering, bronzed body.

"Do I know you?"

"I saw you check in last night and asked the front desk for your name. I'm Alice Aberwicz."

Alice Aberwicz wasn't pale or pink. She had a beautiful, bronze tone to her skin. Many hours of careful sunning, turning and basting had to have gone into achieving her perfect overall doneness. Her coating of coconut oil was so thick that it dripped from her elbow when she shielded her eyes from the sun. Being topless, the gesture also hoisted one massive breast off her lap and it, too, dripped oil.

"Nice tan," Remo said politely, trying not to stare. Alice was certainly-something.

"I thought you'd like it. Join me for a drink?"

"No, thanks."

"Want to just go to my room right now and get it on?"

"Maybe later," Remo said as he strolled off.

"I'll take that as a promise!" Alice called after him. Remo kept seeing that great, golden, greasy image in his mind. He was turned off probably for good. And all at once he was turned on again.

She came out of the water not fifteen feet away. The late-morning sun shimmered around the figure in the emerald-green bikini, emerging with the natural grace of an auburn panther. Her skin was slightly dappled with the cutest freckles Remo had ever seen, and her tan had the depth of great art, rich and dark in some places but lighter in other places, as if inviting you to explore those places. Her hair was dark, swirling around her neck and shoulders, with a few dark strands clinging to the gentle swelling of her breasts as if they were directional arrows pointing the way.

Her features were strong, almost severe, but then she looked at Remo Williams and smiled a warm, provocative smile and she could not be more beautiful. "You look hot," she said.

That wasn't what he had expected her to say, and for the life of him he couldn't think of a response that sounded intelligent, although he tried hard.

The girl in the emerald bikini added, "The long pants, I mean. They're too warm for the beach."

"Oh. Oh yeah. Well, I forgot my swimsuit."

"You're joking!" She laughed.

Remo was convinced at that moment that he was the funniest, wittiest man ever. "No, really, I did," he said. "I guess I should buy one at the gift shop."

"I'll have somebody get it for you," she volunteered.

"That's not..."

She gave a brief wave and three of the hotel staff came running. She gave them quick instructions and they were gone again. "Yes, Minister," one of them said as he went.

"So," Remo remarked, trying not to stare at her below-the-neck parts, "you're a man of God."

She laughed again, enchanted by his refined sense of humor, "Not that kind of minister," she explained. "I'm minister of tourism, here on Union Island."

"Really?"

"Really. Maybe you've seen some of our commercials?"

"I avoid TV, when possible."

"Ah, that is wonderful! Most people watch far too much television. It is nice to meet someone who doesn't recognize me."

There were heavy footsteps on the beach behind him. They came unhurriedly but they came in his direction, without question. He maintained an awareness of them, using the part of his brain not needed for ogling. "You mean you're in your own commercials?" he asked.

"That's how I started out, doing the commercials. The government jobs came later."

Remo had been really enjoying himself for thirty seconds or so, but now he was suspicious. How had he just happened to come upon this very, very attractive member of the island government when he was on the island trying to track down a guilty party who was part of the government?

But the funny thing was that this woman was not one of the government people he was looking for. She had not been among the passengers of the tour bus on the mainland-he would have remembered.

"Care for lunch?" she asked.

"Yes, Ms. Minister," he answered, "I do care very much."

The footsteps were close now. Somebody said, "Lunch is going to have to wait, wrists-for-brains."

"What's going on, Alice?" Remo asked as he turned to find Alice Aberwicz closing in. Now that she was standing up she was simply awe-inspiring-tall and proud, her giant body endless, her massive breasts swaying ponderously over her stomach, which cascaded in thick rolls of flesh that completely hid the bikini bottoms she may or may not have been wearing. She was like some goddess of prehistory, the Earth Mother herself, carved life-size by an ancient artisan from pure gold. But the face was all wrong. Forget solemn or jolly, Remo thought. More like wrathful.

"You are a slimeball!" Alice spit foam in her fury.

"You should get out of the sun maybe," Remo suggested.

"Arrgh!"

"You know, if you're the Earth Mother, then I'm hitching a ride on the very next shuttle off the planet."

"I'm more than Earth Mother. I'm pure woman!"

"Several of them," Remo agreed.

"I've been cast aside by cheap pieces of meat like you for the very last time!"

"Didn't mean to hurt your feelings," Remo said insincerely. He couldn't help but notice the others coming. Five more women. All in swimwear. Every one of them had come on to him in the past half hour. Sally was in the rear but coming faster than seemed possible, her walker kicking up sand.

"I'm sick and tired of taking your crap!" Alice said.

"We just met."

"I mean you men! You fifth-limbers are all the same. Filthy, shallow ingrates!"

The spurned women were forming a half circle, and there wasn't a smiling face in the crowd. They had wild eyes. Sally was frothing.

Remo sighed. "Look, I'm really sorry. You're right, of course. I'm a male pig. I think with the wrong head. I treat women like crap."

"Unless they're women like that!" Alice jabbed one padded finger at the freckled beauty in the emerald bikini.

"Leave her out of it," Remo said. "In fact, just leave us both out of it. Go relax, have some drinks. Charge them to my room."

"Forget it! This time you face the consequences!" Alice Aberwicz put one arm behind her back and brought out a machete. It was two feet of curved gleaming steel-and there was only one place she could have been carrying it.

"Oh, God," said the minister of tourism, grabbing Remo's arm and hiding behind him. Remo glanced at her, reading stark terror on her face.

For some reason he had assumed this was a setup; the woman in the emerald bikini had to be in on it. But her fear was no act.

"Okay. Enough, Alice. Shoo."

"You pricks aren't getting away with it anymore-you will be the first to taste our vengeance."

"Scapegoated again."

"You are the symbol of the eternally evil penis!"

"And you're nuts."

With Remo's insult, Alice slipped the surly bonds of sanity and she thundered across the sand, the machete whistling in the hot air. The ranks of his spurned victims charged after her. The woman in the green bikini dug her fingers into Remo's arm and gasped, "Oh my-"

But by then the attack was already starting to be over. Remo was no longer in her grip, but slipping up alongside the golden Earth Mother that was Alice Aberwicz, ignoring the slashing machete as if it were of no consequence, and pinching her by the scruff of the neck. Then he ran away, skimming fast over the sand to the next wild-eyed woman.

The woman in the green bikini wasn't even sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Again Remo seemed to do no more than touch a woman's neck.

Alice Aberwicz had come to a stop and stood there for a long moment with a kind of contentment relaxing her anger. The fiery coals of the rage in her eyes were being doused as if by a heavy, cool fall of peaceful rain. She smiled crookedly and collapsed heavily on the sand. Her massive bottom flattened, her gargantuan bosom flopped and by then Remo was giving the same sort of neck adjustment to the last of the menacing ladies.

Alice rolled onto her back and her eyes closed. She was almost smiling. Like punctured water-filled balloons, the others collapsed one by one into the sand and went limp.

Dawn Summens was wide-eyed. "What happened?"

Remo found a green filmy wrap on a nearby beach chair. "This must be yours."

"Did you kill them?"

At that moment Alice snored raucously.

"They're not hurt," Remo said. "Not by me, anyway. As far as I know, they'll wake up just as pissed off as before, so what say we take lunch off the property?" She couldn't take her eyes of the unconscious women. "Hello? Ms. Minister?"

Dawn looked at the man with the dark, cruel eyes.

"Dawn," she said. "Dawn Summens."

"Hale Jr. Remo Hale, Jr."

Summens nodded, forcing her mind to work as she donned the wrap. This was the third major shock she had received in just twelve hours-each unexpected, each a red flag warning her that she was no longer in control of this situation. There was nothing she despised more than not being in control. First the enigmatic sudden return of Greg Grom. Then his startling revelation of this morning-when Grom found his impromptu detention camp for violent maniacs was instead full of emotionless, mute semihumans. Zombies. Their minds erased.

Summens knew she had been told the secret of the prisoners only because Grom was desperate. He didn't know what to do. He had hoped she would have a solution. But she had nothing to offer. She wasn't helpful, and now Grom saw her as expendable.

Next Grom asked her to try getting close to the U.S. agents. That pair had to be dealt with, one way or another. Obviously, Grom had other plans he wasn't telling her about. He had tried to have this Remo Hale Jr. killed by these crazed women. Dawn knew that she was supposed to die, as well.

She grabbed the phone from her beach bag and called the island police, then forced a smile, determined to downplay the event. "The police will come and give your admirers a good talking to," she said to Remo. "You really should use more sensitivity when you reject amorous women."

Remo picked up the curved machete. "Now, where do you suppose...?"

"Beach bar," Dawn said, nodding at the thatched hut a hundred yards down. "They use it to chop the tops off coconuts. It wows the tourists."

Remo Williams snapped the blade off of the hilt and tossed the pieces away. "Bloody tourists," he muttered.

Chapter 32

Greg Grom watched his secretary, Amelia Powlik, relaxing out on the deck of the presidential beach house. He smiled.

It all added up. Everything made sense. He knew what to do.

The synthesized GUTX, batch 42CD, was the batch-the Grail batch. The formula that worked. Amelia Powlik was living proof.

He had given her a dose that was tiny, just micrograms. But it was enough to work. Amelia was completely under his control. No uncontrolled fits of violence, no regression into a mute, zombielike state, nothing except a perfect adherence to his suggestion.

The synthesized GUTX samples had come in sealed containers of one kilogram each. Diluted for optimal dosage, Grom had enough to dose hundreds of people. And he would order more from the lab. He'd do it today.

He had some problems. That pair of bizarre federal agents who were hounding him. Dawn Summens was getting suspicious. He'd take care of both those problems today. Maybe they were already taken care of. He had made some arrangements with the bartender at the hotel where Dawn was making her move on the agents. Grom honestly wasn't sure if he wanted Dawn to survive that encounter or not.

Then he remembered his night with Amelia. It had been fun pretending she was Dawn. It would be more fun with the real Dawn. Well, even if she did survive the beach brawl, she would no longer be a problem. Dinner would see to that.

GUTX-42CD was on the menu.

"IS THAT YOUR BIRD?" asked the black woman in the lightweight but formal-looking jacket. The pocket was embroidered with the words Manager Selena Teller.

"Certainly not," Chiun answered. "It is an impolite, arrogant brute of a bird."

"You seem to enjoy talking to him," she said. "You've been standing here for half an hour."

"You must understand," Chiun said. "I am alone most of the time."

"I thought you came here with your son?" Ms. Teller said, her voice softening.

"Yes, and now he is off somewhere without me. Seeing the sights, I suppose, while I am reduced to sitting in the room watching television, which I despise, or sharing my thoughts with a hideous chicken."

"Stuff it, slant eyes," the parrot squawked.

"And he is not the best company," Chiun concluded, his head drooping sadly.

"Full of it! Full of it!" the bird clucked.

"The thing is, the bird has never even talked to anybody else. We've all tried, ever since it showed up a few days ago. My assistant said it is a hyacinth macaw, worth maybe five thousand dollars. The way it took to you I thought maybe it was yours."

"I think it simply recognizes a figure worthy of its respect."

The bird blew a loud raspberry and made droppings. "Well," the manager said, "let me know if it says anything that might be a clue to whoever owns it." Ms. Teller left them alone.

Chiun looked down his nose at the big blue bird. The sun was no longer shining directly into the lobby and the plumage had a purplish glow to it.

"You," Chiun announced, "are the color of something horrible that has been eaten and then regurgitated." The bird glared at him.

"Heh heh heh."

The bird turned its back to him. "Heh heh heh."

Chiun crossed the lobby and waited for Remo, who was coming up the quarry tile sidewalk. The ancient Korean in the bright robes attracted stares from the vacationers in their resort wear. He ignored them all.

"You smell of cow!" Chiun said by way of greeting. "Oh, Remo, has your uncontrollable lust for bovine flesh finally overcome your self-control?"

"You mean, did I eat a steak?"

"It was inevitable. You are a beef addict. The lure of cattle flesh was bound to overcome your meager self-discipline."

"I'm not a beef addict," Remo responded. "I haven't had a burger in decades. What's with the staff?"

The hotel manager was nodding meaningfully at Remo and Chiun. The other clerks glared at Remo and/or cast sympathetic glances at Chiun.

"You've been telling the story about the lonely old man and his negligent son, haven't you?" Remo demanded.

"Don't change the subject. Did you eat a cow?"

"Of course not. I had a lunch date and she ate a cow. Some cow. A steak."

As they walked by the bird display, the hyacinth macaw bobbed its head in greeting.

"Hi, bird," Remo said.

"Hello."

"Shall I tell you what I told the bird?" Chiun said. "Heh heh heh."

The macaw turned its back on them.

"Glad to see somebody here likes me instead of you," Remo said. "Okay, tell me."

Chiun repeated his regurgitation insult, then laughed uproariously-as uproariously as he ever laughed. "Heh heh heh."

"You need to get out more often, Chiun," Remo said. "It's not even really an ugly bird:"

"I have seen more attractive vultures," Chiun said dismissively.

Far behind them the macaw squawked, "Prettier than you! Prettier than you!"

REMO GOT ON THE PHONE in the room, got an outside line, then held down the 1 button.

Chiun heard him argue briefly with whoever it was that answered the phone and then say, "Smitty, it's me." Remo went on to detail his unproductive lunch date with the island minister of tourism. Chiun walked to the glass doors that opened onto a large balcony. He and Remo shared a spacious suite with a deck large enough for a dinner party. He slid open the door and stepped outside.

He was the Master of Sinanju Emeritus, and he felt restless.

At the time when Remo assumed the title of Reigning Master, in all the chaos that accompanied that event, Chiun had experienced something phenomenal. Amid a battle against horrific foes of Chiun's own making, he had been visited by Wang, greatest of all Sinanju Masters.

To meet with Wang while one was earning the title Master, undergoing Attainment, was a great honor. To meet with the great Wang at any other time in the career of a Master of Sinanju was unique in the annals of the Masters.

Wang told Chiun that his own future would be unprecedented in the history of Sinanju, but what Wang foretold was also less than crystal clear. Chiun's future would be magnificent, Wang said, but he hinted that a magnificent price would be paid.

But what price?

Chiun had slowed down in recent months, dwelling endlessly on the words of Wang, on the histories of Sinanju. He had sought to resolve in meditation the mysteries of Wang's prophecy, but had come away with only speculation. He had no clearer picture of his future now than he had when he was in the village of Sinanju, after the Time of Succession, after the final obliteration of Nuihc and the Dutchman.

Chiun didn't even have a path to follow. But he knew he needed to be more active again, escape the thrall of inactivity. Distantly he heard a familiar voice coming from the open-air lobby a few hundred feet from the balcony. "Prettier than you! Prettier than you!"

He allowed himself a slight smile. He did thoroughly enjoy berating that unbeautiful bird. But it was idle entertainment. He needed to clear away the cobwebs of his months of idleness.

There was a meaningless squawk, and then the bird spoke again.

"WHAT THE HELL?" Remo exhorted.

"What?" Smith said.

Remo hung up the phone and went onto the balcony, where Chiun stood with a shocked tightness to his face, as if his parchment skin were being stretched.

"Little Father?"

"Listen!" Chiun hissed.

Remo probed the grounds of the resort with his ears. Lots of air-conditioning noises. Vacuums from rooms being cleaned. The hush of the surf and laughter from the swimming pool. All the noises expected from a beach resort. Cutting through it all was the big macaw calling out from inside the lobby, "Prettier than you! Prettier than you!"

"What am I-?"

"Be still and listen!"

Remo shut up and listened. He knew Chiun well, and he knew something was wrong. But all he heard was the piercing squawk of that idiot parrot. Then even the parrot shut up.

"It is gone," Chiun said finally.

"What is gone?"

"Something strange," Chiun said ambiguously, looking out over the resort to the sea.

"That tells me a lot. Why'd you get so excited?"

"I was not excited," Chiun said, but without vehemence.

"Then why did you get so alarmed?"

"You may be assured I was not alarmed."

"Whatever! You were not your usually sunny self for a second there, so how come?"

"If you were ever to focus your attention away from Remo Williams, you would notice that I go through a range of emotions in any given day that we are in each other's company," Chiun said. "Sometimes I am aggravated, sometimes I am frustrated and sometimes I am irritated. There are times when I am exacerbated, disgusted, offended, sickened, shocked, galled, annoyed and appalled."

"Okay-"

"There are times when I am disturbed, or perturbed, or distraught, and sometimes I am just sadly amused."

"Well, whatever it was, you're sure back to normal now," Remo snapped and retreated inside the suite to call back Smith.

Chiun stayed on the balcony, watching the Caribbean glimmering in the sun but not seeing it. His concentration was on the sounds.

He did not hear it again.

Had he been mistaken? Could his ears have fooled him? Could he have been so engrossed in his momentous thoughts that his mind tricked him into thinking that he heard something that wasn't there?

Was his hearing starting to fail? He furled his brow and probed the sprawling resort. Down on the beach an obese and hirsute man was walking to the small shack where intoxicating beverages were dispensed, and Chiun concentrated on it.

"Can you make me a Singapore Sling?" the hairy one asked.

"Of course, sir," the bartender said with a habitual smile.

Chiun felt satisfied. He heard every word perfectly, despite the distance and despite the slurred speech of the hairy one. His hearing was still as good as ever-that is, well beyond the capabilities of every other human on the planet except for Remo.

But his moment of relief turned to worry. If not his ears, had it been his mind?

Losing his senses would be terrible; losing his mind would be worse. It would be humiliating.

No, by Sinanju standards he was far too young for senility or the infirmities of the elderly. A spring duck. But that meant what he heard was genuine. What could that mean? For his own peace of mind he would need to prove it. To himself.

DR. HAROLD W. SMITH HAD a pallid gray complexion on his best days. When he grew pale, he looked like nothing less than a days-dead corpse.

"Mark?"

"Yes, Dr. Smith?" Mark Howard was hunched over his keyboard, oblivious to the display on his screen. Smith had come halfway behind the desk to get a look at his associate's progress.

"What are you doing?" Smith asked.

Mark Howard stopped and looked up at Smith. "Researching. You asked me to create a profile on that minister of tourism."

"So instead you are downloading pornography?" Mark Howard's mouth dropped open, then he followed Smith's gaze to the monitor. In one corner was a looping video window showing a woman in a bikini.

"That's not exactly pornography," Howard said, grinning. "I mean, she's not even naked."

"That is very close to naked," Smith said, lips pinching together.

"Well, that's her. The minister of tourism."

"Where? In the bikini?"

"It's a commercial," Howard said.

"That's the one Remo ran into?" Smith asked incredulously. "Dawn Summens?"

"Yeah. Lucky SOB."

Smith stared at the image for a moment and then turned away with a sort of painted-on shock. "I'll wait for your profile."

Mark grinned. The profile was just about complete, and he sent the batch of electronic files across the network to Smith's office.

He included the commercial.

"WHAT DID YOU MAKE of her," Smith asked Remo.

"Huh? Oh, Summens?"

"That is who we were discussing," Smith reminded him. "Are you sure you are feeling well, Remo?"

"I'm fine," Remo said, pulling his thoughts away from the strange behavior of Chiun, who was still standing on the balcony and was abnormally alert. Something had spooked him. That worried Remo. Chiun was his mentor, his father, his friend. Remo loved the old man more than any human being on this Earth.

Chiun was also one of the most powerful human beings on the planet by virtually any measure. He was a Master of Sinanju, for crying out loud. Masters of Sinanju don't spook easy.

So what just happened out on the balcony? What had Chiun heard, or thought he heard?

"So?" Smitty asked.

"Huh?"

"Minister Summens?" Mark Howard prodded.

"Where'd you come from?" Remo asked.

"I've been on the line since you called back," Howard said. "Remember, about ninety seconds ago when you said, 'Hiya Beav.' You were just now telling us about Minister Summens."

"Yeah. She's a strange one. You know she started as a bikini model?"

"We know," Smith said icily.

"We found some of the commercials that are traded on-line," Mark Howard announced. "She has her own fan clubs."

"I'd believe it," Remo said. "But she may be a part of whatever badness is going on. I don't know yet. She's about the most guarded person I've ever talked to. I had lunch with her and got nowhere."

Silence.

"I mean I learned nothing," Remo clarified.

"So what leads you to think she could be tied into the mainland troubles?" Smith asked. "She was not on the U.S. bus tour."

"My background checks show she does have strong ties to President Grom," Howard said. "They were romantically linked at one time. She's heavily involved in the proindependence lobbying effort, and with an uncanny degree of success. Senator Sam Switzer visited Union a few days ago, and today he came out in favor of granting the island independence and providing it an aid package to help it start a national government."

"Brainwashed?" Remo asked.

"I doubt that," Smith said.

"So he was already in favor of this little hot rock getting a free ride?"

"Actually, he was on record as being opposed to it," Smith admitted.

"There's more to it than that," Mark added. "Switzer was calling for federal corruption charges to be brought against President Grom. He flip-flopped on that issue, as well."

"So why do you think he's not brainwashed?" Remo asked.

"The newspapers have charged the senator with caving into the womanly wiles of the minister of tourism," Howard said.

"He was on the island for less than twenty-four hours," Smith added. "It takes quite a bit longer than that to brainwash someone."

"Depends on how you go about it," Remo replied. "I do think that's what's going on around here, Smitty. I think that's the key to all of it."

"Are we back to the poison smell again?"

"Yeah. I thought you were coming around to my way of thinking on the subject."

"Only to a point," Smith protested. "Remo, we know the substance is responsible for the acts of violence and the ensuing degradation of mental dynamics."

"You also know that there was somebody on the UI tour bus that was doing the poisoning," Remo added.

"Maybe somebody wanted us to think that," Smith said. "Even more important is the lack of motivation. Why would somebody on the tour bus set out to cause that kind of havoc?"

"Why would anybody do any of this?" Remo demanded.

"I do not know."

"So we can't rule out the UI president," Remo declared flatly. "We can't rule out brainwashing of visitors."

Smith sighed. "I fail to see the causal link between the poisoning and the ambitions of the Union Island leaders."

"So how long was Senator Shitzer here? A day?" Remo observed. "I bet he's just the latest victim. I'll bet there have been others. In fact, I have a feeling that just about everybody who comes to this place gets a quick cranial fix."

Smith made a sound then stopped. "Remo, I will not believe Union Island is brainwashing public officials and visiting tourists. It's outlandish."

"Yeah," Remo said. "Maybe."

Chapter 33

Few people knew about Cafe Amore.

Cafe Amore wasn't listed in the travel brochures. The Official Visitors Guide to the Caribbean Paradise of Union Island made no mention of the restaurant. Often tourists would spot the unassuming little beachfront establishment and try to get in. Usually they were denied reservations. Most days the Closed for Private Party sign was propped up in the front window.

Dawn Summens ate most of her dinners here. It was the only safe place. There were actually few other restaurants on the island that weren't a part of one of the resorts, and anything you ate in any of the resorts had a chance of being, well, poisoned.

When Greg Grom originally embarked on his campaign to control the island, he had not been careful. As a demonstration of her usefulness when she wriggled her way into his confidence, Dawn Summens had mapped out a plan for a zone of noncontamination. "Are you going to trust that some minimum-wage fry cook at the Centauri Beach Resort isn't going to use some of the contaminated breakfast supplies in the dinner entree?" she asked him.

"I told them not to," Grom had protested. "So they won't."

"So they won't deliberately," Summens said. "Who knows what they'll do accidentally. Greg, if they were smart they wouldn't be fry cooks."

Grom saw her point and agreed to make one restaurant entirely off-limits to their special brand of generalized GUTX contamination. They chose Cafe Amore. It served swill, but it served a higher grade of swill than the other places. Some of the new island profits were funneled into its accounts, and the fare was upgraded even as the clientele was reduced to a select handful. It was here that visiting dignitaries were entertained. If necessary, their dinners were salted with GUTX carefully, on an individual basis. The Cafe Amore staff had been carefully programmed to follow a strict regimen of safety rules developed by Dawn herself to reduce any chance of cross contamination.

When she and Grom arrived for dinner, they found the tables mostly empty. Just a few minor dignitaries and ranking locals. Grom shook hands and patted shoulders.

"Join us, please," said the mayor of a large Midwestern U.S. city. He had been dragged on this vacation by his insistent wife, on the advice of her sister Rosie. The mayor hated his wife's sister. Somehow, Rosie's obstinate opinions had a way of making their way into his political policy making. For once, though, Rosie was right. This place was wonderful. The mayor was already planning to retire here. Maybe he'd even opt out of the next election and move here that much sooner....

"Sorry, can't tonight," Grom begged off, smiling and holding up his briefcase.

"This is a working dinner for the president," Dawn Summens added. "You know how it piles up while you're away."

"Oh, sure!" the mayor agreed. He, for one, had no work piling up while he was away. He prided himself on his skills as a master of complete delegation. His workday consisted mainly of listening to his secretary read the summary conclusions of various city committee inquires and issuing decisions based on those reports. Some days he was on the job for less than an hour. That left time for golf.

Grom and Summens took the president's private booth and laid out piles of paperwork. Summens boated her government-issue notebook computer and they ordered without looking at the menus.

"Well?" Grom asked when the waiter was gone. "How was lunch?"

"Difficult to say," Dawn Summens admitted. "He's a strange one. He was wary."

"Suspicious?" Grom asked.

"Not as far as I could tell. But definitely slow to become interested."

"You mean interested in you?"

Summens nodded, thinking over her lunchtime encounter.

"Did you pull out all the tricks?"

"No," she replied quickly. "No tricks. He would have seen through them."

"He didn't look all that sharp to me," Grom said.

"Maybe not sharp exactly, but insightful."

"Hmm."

"I felt I had to be quite careful," she added. "I kept my questions neutral."

"You mean you learned nothing." Summens nodded.

"Nothing."

"Didn't you show him your tits?"

"Yes, Mr. President, I showed him my tits. He seemed to like them very much, but there was some trouble on the beach. He got distracted."

Grom's eyes flickered from side to side. They were beady little rat eyes. "What kind of trouble?"

"Woman trouble," Summens said. "Our friend had apparently spurned the advances of another tourist, and she took offense. There was some shouting."

"Really?" Grom said insincerely.

"I think he's very careful," Summens observed.

"Maybe gay."

She considered that. "I don't think so."

"Whatever," Grom declared, sitting back and tapping his Mont Blanc pen against the edge of the table. "Is he or is he not a federal agent?"

"Too early to tell," Dawn Summens said, and her voice reflected none of her rampaging thoughts. Greg Grom was acting differently. He was a little too confident. He was a little too belligerent. Dawn Summens was a student of human relationships, and she had made a point of studying this man especially carefully. She knew all his moods, and she knew when he had something to hide.

He intended to turn against her. Finally. Tonight. The betrayal was oozing from him, and she could almost taste the reek of it in the air.

"You struck out, Dawn," Grom said brusquely.

"I gained some measure of his confidence. We have another date planned for tomorrow."

"A lot could happen before tomorrow. Did you happen to notice that we're in a bad fix? We need some damage control, and we need it now. If those misfits really are federal agents-and I know they are-they're going to make things even worse."

"Maybe you shouldn't have led them here."

It was the kind of tart remark that would make Greg Grom fly off at the handle-or at least break out in an uncomfortable sweat that would start him scratching his itching palms and shifting in his seat.

He just sat there, looking at her.

"I don't appreciate you speaking to me in that way," he said finally in a low voice.

"And I don't appreciate you screwing things up for us," she said even more quietly, and she saw the anger blossom in his eyes. Had she overdone it? She couldn't be acquiescent. She couldn't risk letting on that she knew what he was about to do.

She and Greg Grom had been a team in a high-stakes poker game, but they were about to play the most important hand of all, and it was against each other. He knew it. She knew it. But he didn't know she knew it. Martin came to the table. He was the only waiter who worked Cafe Amore, ever. The less staff, the better the quality control. He flourished a small tray and placed their drinks before them. Stoli and tonic with a twist for President Grom. White wine for Summens.

"Minister Summens," Martin said apologetically, "Gerhard has suggested a change of entree. The mahimahi is off."

Of course it is, Dawn Summens thought. Steamed white fish would not disguise the taste. "What does he suggest, Martin?"

"A flavorful pasta Puttanesca, Minister."

"A little spicier than I am in the mood for tonight," Summens said thoughtfully, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Grom fidget. "But sure. I'll have the Puttanesca."

Martin nodded and left. Grom's shoulders slumped slightly with relief.

"Back in a flash," she announced to Grom. She strolled to the ladies' room, carrying her purse. Locking the door behind her, she stared into the mirror and considered the huge risk she was about to take. She could let her guard down when she was alone, and what she saw in the mirror was the face of a young woman. Smart. Pretty. Ambitious. The young woman in the mirror had a long life left ahead of her. The only way she could guarantee that long life was to leave now. Climb out the bathroom window and get off the island fast. Get away from Greg Grom and start fresh elsewhere.

Or she could go through with this, and take the huge risk. If she gambled, and she lost, then the woman in the mirror would be gone forever. Dawn Summens would no longer exist. There would be only a soulless puppet in the hands of puppet master Greg Grom.

But if she gambled and won...

Then she would hold the strings to Greg Grom and to all of Union Island. And Union Island was only the launch pad.

She had her sights set high.

Without further contemplation she opened her clutch purse and yanked out the black inner liner, then opened the small protective case hidden there. She snapped it open and twisted the lid off the bottle of charcoal capsules, upended the bottle into her mouth. She swallowed them all, washing them down with cupped handfuls of water from the faucet. That was a total of thirty-five charcoal capsules, each 260 milligrams, for a total of 8.32 grams or double a normal maximum supplemental dose. But would it be enough to absorb the GUTX that would surely contaminate the pasta Puttanesca she was about to eat?

Next she withdrew three prepared, sealed syringes and packets of alcohol wipes. She pulled up her skirt and swabbed a spot on her thigh, then jabbed in the first needle.

She was too preoccupied to even feel it. Would this work? Would it save her? She yanked out the needle, sterilized a second skin patch, and jabbed in the second syringe, squirting the contents into her leg. The first two syringes contained neostigmine and edrophonium, both of which were used to restore muscular strength in victims of intoxication by tetrodotoxin.

Hopefully she wouldn't even need it. Hopefully the charcoal would absorb most or all of it before it got into her system. But she just didn't know.

The third syringe contained 4-aninopyridine, a nondepolarizing neuromuscular blocking agent. It was used in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, and it had been shown to reverse tetrodotoxin toxicity in some animal experiments. She shot it into her thigh, then put the empty syringes away, snapped the case shut and tucked it back in her purse.

She left the ladies' room without even a backward glance at the girl in the mirror.

Chapter 34

Martin, the waiter, cleared their plates. The president had hardly touched the big chunk of pork loin but he didn't seem displeased. In fact, President Grom wore an ear-to-ear smile.

Minister Summens had made thorough work of her Puttanesca, though. Not a scrap of a noodle remained. "I'm glad to see you smiling, Greg," the minister said.

"You will be spending the night with me tonight," Grom announced.

"That makes me happy."

"I'm glad it makes you happy."

They packed up the paperwork and left Cafe Amore. They had walked just a few steps along the wide Bay Street walkway when Grom halted and turned on Summens. He smiled condescendingly. "Dawn, you know better than that. Tsk tsk."

They started down Bay Street again, but now, instead of side by side, Dawn Summens walked a few steps behind him.

It was a pleasant five-minute stroll to the presidential beach house, and Greg Grom was cheerful. He whistled. He tipped an imaginary hat at the waving police officers.

The cops waved to the tourism minister, too, who waved back, her nose crinkling in its delightful way, and the cops couldn't tell that inside she was screaming.

THERE WAS ALSO a policeman stationed at the beach house every night from dusk to dawn. The President of the United States had to worry about assassination attempts, but the president of Union Island had to worry about drunks who had a tendency to wander in thinking it was their hotel, or any hotel where they could spend the night. On average the officer on duty at the presidential beach house would taxi two drunks per night back to their resorts, Three on Saturdays and Sundays.

Tonight it was still early. The cop was pacing the grounds, just because he hated being locked up in his squad car. He had no problems serving as doorman for the leader of his island and soon, he was convinced, his country.

As they approached, Greg Grom gave Summens a suggestion, off-handedly and over his shoulder. "Good evening, Mr. President," the officer said respectfully.

"It is a good evening, isn't it, Officer?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. President. Ms. Powlik has already arrived. Good evening to you, Minister Summens." Like the damned she screamed. Like eternal agony the wails echoed inside her skull. She struggled to make the sound come from her lips. She had to let someone know this wasn't the real her.

"Good evening, Officer," she said. "Your tie is a little bit crooked."

She adjusted the police officer's uniform tie, her lips parted provocatively, and for a moment her slender, tanned fingers rested on his shoulder. The officer didn't know quite how to react, and before he could figure it out she was gone inside with the president.

He never guessed that, on the inside, she was howling like a rabid animal latched inside a steel cage.

AMELIA POWLIK WAS wearing nothing except a sparkle in her eye.

"Been waiting for you, Mr. President. Did everything go as planned?"

"It all went perfectly, Amelia."

Amelia Powlik barked happily. "I have more good news. Your federal friends just stopped by for a little dinner at the cafe."

"Oh, really?" Grom said.

"I was watching from the balcony. You just missed them."

"Pity," Grom said, wondering how the night could get any better, really. "Well, Martin knows just what specials to serve our honored friends from the federal government."

"Let's watch what happens!" Amelia bounded out the open balcony doors and put her eye to the telescope, which was angled down into the heart of Union Island's urban center, right at Cafe Amore.

"I'd much rather watch what happens in here than down there," Grom suggested.

Amelia jostled back inside, barking. And Grom was chuckling. And, on the inside, despite the smile on her face, Dawn Summens was screaming and screaming.

Chapter 35

Chiun stood in the doorway of Cafe Amore and scowled at the decor, the potted plants and the hammered-tin ceiling. He scowled at Martin the waiter, who was coming at them in a smooth glide. Finally, he awarded his best scowl to the one who had brought him to this place. "What's the matter with it?"

"It is someone's home," declared Chiun.

"Believe me, it's a restaurant."

"Excuse our intrusion," the ancient Korean declared to the entirely emotionless man in the tuxedo. "My ill-mannered son was under the impression that this is a restaurant."

"Hiya, Martin," Remo greeted the waiter. "Set him straight, would you?"

"This is indeed a restaurant, sir," Martin said stiffly. "Two will be dining, sir?"

"If this is a restaurant, why is there no garish advertisement on the street?" Chiun demanded.

"Relax, Little Father, it's a VIP place," Remo said.

"For visiting dignitaries, royalty, business tycoons. They don't want the regular street rabble coming in. Isn't that right, Martin?"

"This is an exclusive establishment," Martin agreed as he led them to a table.

"Maybe a little too exclusive," Remo commented as they took their seats. They had the place to themselves.

"Drink, sirs?"

"No, thanks."

"I shall fetch menus, sirs."

"No need, Martin. Just bring me whatever's the freshest fish you've got back there. Steamed, with steamed rice."

Martin pointed his utterly emotionless face at Remo for a long moment and was about to comment.

"Do you have duck?" Chiun squeaked.

"No, sir."

"Do you, perchance, serve parrot?"

"We do not, sir."

"Then bring me fish, as well," Chiun said offhandedly. "Whatever is more fresh than what you serve him. Prepared the same way."

Martin opened his mouth, closed it and left.

"The plastic guys who model flannel shirts at Sears, Roebuck emote more than that waiter," Remo commented.

"He is attempting some sort of deception," Chiun announced.

The kitchen doors swung open again.

"The fish is off," Martin declared in a monotone as he stood stiffly at their table.

"Give us the fish that is not off," Remo said. Martin, finally, proved that he did have working facial muscles. He looked puzzled, as if he were trying to think through a brain teaser. "Um, all the fish is off, sir." Chiun rolled his eyes.

"Let me get this straight," Remo said. "This is the most upscale restaurant on the island. There's an ocean so close I could probably toss you in it from here. And you're trying to tell me you're out of fresh fish?"

"Um," Martin said, "yes, sir."

"Um, bullshit. Okay, just bring us the rice. Steamed."

"We are out of rice, sir," Martin said finally.

"You served me rice not seven hours ago."

"That was the last of it, sir."

"Um," Remo grumbled. "I see."

"I see a man who is seconds away from death unless he ceases to tell falsehoods," Chiun said in Korean.

Remo nodded and asked Martin, "My father would like to know your recommendations:"

"Your father would like to throttle the help," Chiun added in his native language, but he nodded agreeably.

"The chef has prepared an intriguing pasta Puttanesca," Martin orated.

Remo nodded. "We'll take it"

"And we'll force-feed you on it," Chiun added in Korean. But he smiled when he said it.

Chapter 36

"Bon appetit," Martin declared, presenting plates of steaming, odoriferous pasta.

"Well?" Remo asked when the waiter departed. Chiun looked distastefully at the platter before him. He sniffed very slightly. "Boiled gelatinous wheat flour," he stated. "Chemically solidified oil of corn."

"Yeah?"

"Tomato, smashed and burned for hours. Dehydrated pungencies added to mask the soot. Compressed anchovies to further confuse the flavor. Brine-cured olives mixed in because this is what American palates demand of their 'authentic' Roman cuisine."

"What else?" Remo asked.

"Various forms of curdled cow's milk and enough salt to taint a village well," Chiun said with a nose wrinkled in repulsion. "Also, poison."

"Mine, too," Remo agreed. "Oh, waiter!"

THE KITCHEN DOOR SWUNG open and Remo poked his head in.

"Oh, there you are, Martin."

"Is there something I can help you with, sir?"

"The name of whoever put you up to dosing the dinners."

The cook emerged from a walk-in cooler with a large fish held by the tail. He dropped it and charged Remo a second after Martin made his move. Both of them had large knives conveniently at hand.

Remo smacked Martin's knife away before the steel tips touched his T-shirt. Martin's butcher blade made a vibrating musical note as it embedded itself in an exposed wooden ceiling beam, and Martin looked at it in surprise. He missed seeing Remo's deft swat at the chef, whose scaling knife somehow ended up rocketing across the short space in Martin's direction. The scaling knife sliced thinly into the waiter's scalp before burying itself in the wall behind him. Frozen, Martin's eyes crossed to stare at the humming knife handle and then to watch the blood trickling down his nose and cheeks.

"Talk," Remo said, and he started squeezing earlobes.

"WELL?" Chiun asked.

Remo sat at the table. "They were lying. They did have fresh fish. It's in the steamer."

"I knew it."

"The whole bit about trying to poison our pasta is a mystery to them. They don't even remember doing it, or why or who told them to," Remo added.

"They were lying," Chiun said.

"I would have known if they were lying," Remo insisted.

A very shaky Martin emerged from the kitchen and came to the table. "I came to take away the unsatisfactory entrees." He was whimpering, yet he still managed to retain some of his condescending-waiter attitude.

"The unsatisfactory entrees are no longer here, obviously," Chiun pointed out.

Martin's eyeballs rolled in his head until they focused on two extremely valuable oil paintings adorning a place of honor on a wall behind a velvet rope. They were nineteenth-century Italian portraits, and their combined value was more than that of the restaurant itself. Their value had been much reduced, however, when the Italian duke and duchess were hit in the face with pasta Puttanesca.

Chiun took Martin's wrist and applied pressure. "Did you lie to my son?"

Martin's mouth opened and closed. He had been in pain when Remo interrogated him. Now he was in pain. "No!" he gasped like a suffocating carp.

Chiun frowned at him, then let go of the wrist. "You have cut your scalp open, careless oaf," Chiun told the man. "If you bleed on my fish, I'll throttle you with it."

Martin gulped. "Very good, sir."

Remo wasn't paying attention. "I'm sick of this tiptoeing around," he announced. "I think we should go see the president after dinner."

"Emperor Smith will be displeased."

"Smitty can stuff it."

"Good!"

"Good?" Remo asked. "Why good?"

"I have thought all along we should go interrogate the whelp, despite Emperor Smith's dictates."

"So why didn't you say so?" Remo asked.

"I was waiting for you to make the decision. Now, if it becomes a political brew-a-ha-ha it will be your responsibility, not mine."

"If he's the guilty guy it won't matter," Remo said.

Chapter 37

Dawn Summens was experiencing hell.

Greg Grom wasted no time in creating a repeat performance of the role-playing she had witnessed the night before. Only this time, instead of Amelia standing in as Dawn Summens, he had the real Dawn Summens to play with.