Chapter 12

Remo didn’t want to go back to Jamaica. He’d had enough of all things Caribbean. He also didn’t like waiting around for things to happen. “I especially don’t like standing around waiting for things to happen in Jamaica.”

“This you have stated ceaselessly.” Chiun was impatient, too, but better at hiding it. They were on foot and they had been strolling the gardens and neighborhoods in the vicinity of Jamaica House, where the prime minister was ensconced, apparently taking the warnings of a possible coup attempt more seriously than his compatriots in Africa.

Hope Road was busier than normal, with a few extra Kingston police on the beat, a few extra Jamaican military folks visible. These were ostensibly the “precautionary measures” the government was taking in light of recent troubles around the world. There were also 4 plainclothes commandos, Jamaican and U.S., roaming the Hope road vicinity, to be on hand should the expected attack come. Some bumbled; others were so good Remo couldn’t be sure if they were undercover or real tourists.

Still, he had little confidence in their ability to halt whatever was coming. “What’ll it be this time, Little Father? Will they attack with dreadlocks? Will they hurl coconuts?”

“There will be no more taking of governments off their guard,” Chiun mused as they strolled by the Bob Marley Museum. “The next strikes will use conventional Western methods of brutality.”

“Booms and thunder-sticks?”

“Perhaps people-killing booms that spare the buildings.”

“How encouraging.”

The hundredth street peddler approached them with a cart of brightly colored souvenirs. “You need a cap, mon, to keep off the fierce sun of Jamaica.”

“Can I have my money back now, Little Father?”

“You would purchase some of these cheap trinkets?”

“I would use the edge of the bill to slit his eyeballs open.”

“That is worse! You need no weapon! Simply slit them!”

The vendor attempted to push a baseball cap with nylon dreadlocks into Remo’s hands. “Just twenty dollars, mon—” he exclaimed, overplaying his accent and his friendliness.

“Twenty dollars for what?” Remo asked.

The vendor’s hands were empty. He stopped smiling, looked on the ground, looked at his customers and shrugged. He grabbed another dreadlocks cap from his cart and presented it to Remo.

Then it was gone. The merchant seemed to sense that it had flown up into the sky, but he couldn’t say for sure that he had actually seen it.

“You do that, mon?”

“Do what?” Remo asked.

“You some kind of magic man?”

“Who knows? We all have a little magic inside us, don’t we?”

“The merchant never took his eyes off Remo as he reached for a dreadlocks cap and held it out in front of him, but nothing happened.

“No, thanks. I don’t get sunburn.”

The vendor nodded at him and took his eyes off the cap in his hands for a second. Just a second. And it was gone. The young, tall American had not moved, and the little Asian grandpa hadn’t moved, although there had been that sense of movement again, like something in fast motion. Or something spiritual.

“Hoodoo?” the merchant whispered.

“Spread the word,” the American whispered fiercely. At least they were bothered by no more street vendors as they wandered Hope Road. By the time they were back at the museum, their peddler friend had discovered his dreadlocks caps perched atop the Bob Marley Museum, the dreads dangling over the side. One of the Marleys were knocking them off for him. He snatched them and ran when he saw Remo and Chiun.

“You shall be feared forever among the trinket-peddlers of Kingston,” Chiun commented.

“Better than being Qetzeel the Destroyer,” Remo snapped.

Chiun looked at him. Remo looked at Chiun. “Sorry, Little Father. Didn’t mean to sound like an asshole. Guess I’m a little bitter about the scene in Brazil.”

Chiun nodded, but he showed a trace of rare confusion. “Why, my son?”

“Not again, Chiun.”

“Humor this old man. Why does this disturb you so, to be the fulfillment of the myth of those peoples? What part of it was disagreeable to you?”

Remo thought about that. “I’m not sure. I don’t like being thought of as the channeler for somebody else.”

“But that is what is.”

It was strange, walking the streets of Kingston on a hot summer afternoon and thinking about the thing that was Shiva, the Hindu god who was called the Destroyer.

There was a weight in the name, or nickname or whatever it was. Somehow Harold W. Smith had come up with the code name Destroyer when Remo was first brought into CURE, years ago. That was before he was a Master, before Chiun had come to the belief that Remo Williams was, in fact, the earthly avatar of the genuine god Shiva.

Remo would not believe the outlandish notion at first, or for a long time afterward, but now he believed that there was something that came through him, and it did use the name Shiva. It called itself the Destroyer.

Remo had learned to retain his awareness when this thing called Shiva came into him. He had learned to summon it and control it—sometimes, and just barely— at will.

But he didn’t like it. He didn’t understand it.

“It’s not me. It lessens who I am.”

“It is who you are,” Chiun chided mildly.

“Cut the crap, Chiun,” Remo said, feeling hostile. “You get to be in your body all by yourself. Me, the mind that is me, Remo, doesn’t. I have to share it with this supernatural creep who is not me. Do you get that?”

“I get that, and yet I get not the fighting of that. It is not a choice you have to make, Remo Williams, so you must choose instead to make the most of it.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard. And I do that. I make the best of it. But sometimes I think it’s getting crammed down my throat, like the scene in Brazil. I’m already Shiva. Why do I have to be Qetzeel, too?”

“They are the same,” Chiun answered.

‘Yeah. Probably.” Remo was dissatisfied by all these answers—and dissatisfied more by knowing that there were no better answers. “Man, I wish this business would get started. I feel like going Shiva on these British knights.”

They were facing Jamaica House again. The afternoon was at its hottest, and even the die-hard tourists were abandoning their sightseeing until later. The guards around the home of the prime minister and King’s House, the government offices, were looking droopy.

“Now would be the ideal time to hit ’em,” Remo observed.

“But not the ideal time for a walking tour of Kingston’s fabulous Hope Road,” Chiun added, as a tour bus pulled up, bearing the freshly painted billboard, Walking Tours Of Kingston’s Fabulous Hope Road!

It was an old school bus, painted sky-blue and allowed to rust for twenty years. Lately, however, the sign was added and the windows, inexplicable, changed to black mirror windows.

“Let’s catch that bus,” Remo suggested.

Then came the second bus. And the third. Remo stopped counting at six.

“First we keep the prime minister from getting whacked or napped,” Remo said. “Then we’ll worry about the rest of them.”

They moved down Hope Road as the bus pulled to a stop at the unloading zone. The driver of the bus pressed his fingers into his eye sockets—for a moment he thought he had seen human beings shimmering in the haze of heat coming off the asphalt.

The doors of the bus were removed from their hinges noisily.

“Hi.”

“Mother of gawd!”

“You here for the King’s House tour? I’m Remo Lee, and I’ll be leading the tour.”

The passengers were stunned for all of three seconds. Then they began muttering among themselves in Spanish and Haitian Creole.

“All men on this tour?” Remo asked.

“Who are you?” the driver demanded. Remo sensed the man was suitably outraged and fearful to be sincere. He dragged the driver out of the seat and onto the sidewalk in a flash. “Get out of sight or you’re gonna get killed.”

“Wha’? Wha’ ’bout dem passengers?”

“Dem haffa getta beatin’.” Remo shoved the large Jamaican driver, slamming him through the front doors of a gift shop, where he dropped out of sight, and then he was on the bus.

There was a rattle of machine-gun fire that took out the front windows and Remo lunged for the gunner, pushing the gun into his stomach and into the seat behind him. Then he went down the row snatching weapons and tapping heads. “Guns are not allowed on my bus. No cigarettes, no alcohol, no pornography. Give me that, mister!” He snatched a length of cable from a dark- skinned man in a pink golf shirt, looped it around the man’s neck and pulled it taut. The man’s head bounced on the aisle and rolled toward the rear. A group of four in the rear came to their senses and dived for the rear emergency exit. As soon as they went out, they came flying back inside, bouncing off the ceiling and crumpling onto the seats, lifeless and limp.

“Okay, I think we can all see that there is going to be no government takeovers by this bunch of ill-mannered boys today. If I get some honest answers out of you hoodlums, I’ll go easy on you later. First question— who’s the boss?”

There was a chorus of answers. Even the ones in English were too accented to understand.

“Little help?” Remo asked. Chiun was now standing in the fear entrance.

“Have I not assisted enough? I count four assassinated by me, and just two for you, who are the Reigning Master.”

“I mean translating, Chiun. What the hell are they saying?”

“Muffa Muh Mutha,” repeated one of the attackers. “That is the name.”

“Muffa Muh Mutha?”

“He is star of reggae from Brighton in England.” Remo understood. “Sir Muffa Muh Mutha?”.

“Yes, mon.”

“I see. Is he a part of today’s activities?”

“Yes, mon.”

Remo smiled. “I see!”

Sir Muffa Muh Mutha didn’t take the news well. “Get everybody back to the Mutha-rev,” he ordered. “I’ll personally make the move on the PM.”

“That’s not safe thinking. Sir Mutha.” Sissy Muh was his chief of security and general of his army. She was also his foremost lay at the moment—a smart woman and quite adorably beautiful. She wore her glossy black hair braided down to the small of her back, like an elegant Egyptian princess. Like Muffa, she was from the streets of Brighton, where she grew up being unexceptional in every way, until she dropped out of school and started looking for a cause.

For the young man named Reginald Parkins, the cause became music. Using a personal computer and illegally downloaded music files, he learned to splice together bits of sound, thus creating something entirely original and new. He took on a new name to go with the career—nobody would take Reginald Parkins seriously, but Muffa Muh Mutha sounded like reggae and American street combined.

No matter what anyone said, he was an artist who created music that was new and fresh.

Skirting and dodging copyright-infringement lawsuits around the world, Muffa became a star of the British reggae scene. Jamaica was another story. His first visit, he had been heckled the moment he was off the plane. His concert sold well—but it turned out the tickets had been sold to vehement Muffa-haters. He was booed offstage before he finished performing his first track, “I Knifed the Constable.”

‘Thief! Thief! Thief!” the crowd chanted.

“I’m no thief. I wrote the damn song,” he snarled to an entertainment reporter later on. Being from the British press, the reporter sided with Muffa.

“They claim that a similar song was performed by another reggae star some time ago,” the reporter said.

“Maybe it was—how should I know?” Muffa said. “Let’s face it, there are hundreds of thousands of songs that have been done throughout the years and I can’t know them all, right? But I didn’t steal my songs. The music is my own creation.”

The reporter steered around the subject of the borrowed music samples. It was widely known that one hundred percent of the music used by Muffa was electronically appropriated and altered enough to make it legally “new.” Until Muffa fell out of favor, the subject was out-of-bounds.

Muffa, amazingly, stayed in favor for almost eighteen months. Even more amazingly, he was given a knighthood.

Filling A Quota? asked a prominent British newspaper, which implied that the reggae star had simply been the only potential black candidate in the year’s crop of potential knights. Was Muffa Knighted Because He’s Black? the paper wondered.

Cicilia Garen took a different course in life, joining radical groups without finding a cause worth fighting for. She gained an education in street fighting and changed her name to Sissy Gard. When she was paired up with Muffa, she changed her name to Sissy Muh. Muffa was flattered.

She was trying to take the measure of this man. The man who hired her for the job wanted to know if Muffa had the guts to do what needed doing. “He was humiliated in Jamaica,” she reported. “He’ll do it for the sake of vengeance.”

“Oh, very good!” replied her employer, who sounded like one of those wealthy snits with old British titles.

The British snit had come through with mercenaries and equipment, enough for eight Jamaican tour buses. Within minutes of the start of the battle, the first report of casualties had come in. Strike Force A was gone.

“I don’t know wha’ tah tell ya. One American guy goes charging into the bus before ya guys even starts comin’ out,” reported the shopkeeper who was being paid to watch the situation in front of Jamaica House. “He drags out the driver and goes in, and the windshield goes flyin’ all over from guns. Then, whatchoo know? The American guy comes out again. Everybody be dead on the bus.”

“There were twenty-two men on that bus!”

“Now theh be twenty-two corpses.”

“He must be wrong,” Sissy said.

“Maybe. I’m not taking a chance. The PM’s gotta go. Sis, or this all’s for nothin’.” Muffa looked grim. “I want all them to come to the PM’s house and we’ll take it together for sure.”

“But that means we’ll get none of the other targets. It won’t be enough to take just the PM, Muffa.”

“We’ll take the rest. We’ll just take the PM first. Then we start goin’ door tah door.”

Muffa cut her off when she tried to press her point and Sissy felt a dismal sense of failure. There was a reason the attacks were planned the way they were. Hit the Jamaican government targets quick and all at once. Don’t give them time to muster a defense.

Sir Muffa Muh Mutha’s bus began moving toward the city center and Hope Road, where it would converge with all of Muffa’s attack buses.

“It will work, Sis,” Muffa assured her. “We’ll have a human shield. Once we have the PM, we can strike at them and they won’t strike back.”

Sissy Muh smiled. “Sounds lovely.” But in her heart she had serious doubts.

The first of the buses halted on squeaking brakes before the cordon around Jamaica House, then quickly swerved in a half circle. The side windows dropped open and gunfire exploded from inside, mowing down security soldiers as they ran for cover.

Remo sprinted alongside the bus and slapped at the guns, bending and breaking them. Some of the hands holding them broke, too. A man in a body armor leaped from the door and opened fire, his rounds peppering the side of the bus until Remo turned and ran back to him, removing the gun from his grasp before the man fell dead with a finger-sized hole in his skull.

Another bus screeched to halt nearby, and something large protruded from the emergency exit. Behind him, Remo heard the frantic snaps of windows being closed and the thumps of men diving for cover inside.

Something big whumped out of the barrel from the second bus. Remo watched a bulbous, gray, round object arc through the air and hurtle down on him. He stepped aside, using the front of his own bus for cover from the blast, which rocked the vehicle from side to side. When he looked again, his bus was blackened but undamaged.

They were lining up for a second shot when Remo jumped onto the hood, looked back over his shoulder in what appeared to be abject panic and scrambled onto the roof.

They were laughing at him in the second bus. He could hear it all the way over here, even over the whoof of the second round.

The slow-moving projectile was going to come down right on top of Remo Williams. He wondered if he had enough time to do what needed doing.

He thrust his stiffened fingers into the metal of the roof of the bus and used his entire body to pull. The roof was rusting old metal on the outside, hardened blast- proof composite underneath, but it wasn’t designed to be tear-proof. Remo felt it come up in his hands and he dragged it back hard, peeling it away and exposing the interior through the ragged gash. The mercenaries inside had just enough time to figure out what was happening when the flying grenade deposited itself directly inside. Remo felt the bus lurch under his feet.

He laughed boisterously. “You’re right,” he called to the second bus. “Very funny.” He pushed the roof sloppily back in place to hold in the billowing black smoke. That ought to asphyxiate any survivors.

There were angry, disbelieving shouts from the other bus, and the occupants triggered their weapon at Remo again, but something went wrong. As the grenade launcher was firing, the emergency door on the bus slammed shut, pushing the launcher inside. The grenade fired and detonated instantly. Fire and smoke shot from the open windows, and more explosions followed as the heat reached the ammunition.

Chiun stood holding the emergency door closed with one hand as smoke whistled from the seams. “Sir Mutha assembled a cultimultural assortment of rabble, but few Reagans,” he pointed out.

“Huh?”

“To what does your ‘huh’ refer?”

“Never mind. Look who’s coming to dinner.”

More buses were converging on Jamaica House, flanked by jogging ranks of soldiers in dark urban fighting uniforms, and their faces were of all colors. The troops and buses quickly formed a half circle and began filling the streets with gunfire. The Jamaicans guarding the prime minister’s residence took dangerous chances to return the gunfire, and were shot down for their risk-taking at every chance.

Remo drifted into the open space, drawing the gunfire to him, then running directly at the runners, doing a quick series of sidesteps to avoid the hail of bullets. Chiun was alongside him, and together they landed in the midst of the gunners. The direct approach in a firefight was always so disconcerting to the gunners that they usually had trouble responding in the most logical manner: by ceasing their gunfire. Attempting to follow the impossible movements of the Masters, they inevitably ended up shooting their comrades.

Five of the attackers toppled before the gunfire halted and the soldiers attacked man-to-Master.

Remo slithered through the mayhem, kicking rib cages to splinters, snapping arm bones, opening skulls. One of the gunners placed the barrel of a handgun within inches of his head and triggered the weapon. The fighter was perplexed to see that the American had transformed into a Colombian mercenary named Dinito—the gunner’s own brother—but there was no time to stop the blast of the bullet. Dinito sprayed all over Hope Road.

“My brother!”

“You’ll see him soon enough. But first, where’s Sir Mutha?”

Remo held the gun, and the Colombian couldn’t make it move. It was as if the thing were locked in place.

He kicked savagely at Remo’s shin to shatter it, but the shin seemed to have a life of its own. It was never where the Colombian thought it was.

Then Remo grabbed him by the elbow and applied pressure. The Colombian howled like a coyote.

“Sir Mutha. Yes, you know where he is, or no you don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Fine.” Remo pushed the gun into the Colombian’s face and just kept on pushing. The gun didn’t break. The face did.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Remo complained as the last of the attackers collapsed at his feet. “We don’t get paid by the scalp. We need to locate the man in charge.”

Chiun nodded at the wave of reinforcements coming their way and looking wary.

Twenty jogging troops half encircled the Masters of Sinanju.

“Hands up,” ordered a black man with a dangerous scowl.

“You are Haitian, not Jamaican,” Chiun observed. “Do none of this country’s people feel compelled to battle alongside Sir Mutha?”

“You can ask him when you see him.”

“Will we see him soon?” Chiun gave Remo a cocky look.

“In about thirty seconds. Now put your fuckin’ ’ands in the air.”

“Is he in the bus in back?” Chiun asked.

“Yes. Now put you ’ands fuckin’ up.”

Chiun cocked his head. “Whatever you are telling me to do, it sounds lewd and impossible. I decline.”

Remo wanted to get out of there soonest. He glanced at the ground, and Chiun gave him an imperceptible nod.

“Kneecap that old fuck!” snarled the Haitian, but as the gunfire rang out, the victim vanished. One second they had their prisoners backed up against a burned bus, the next they had nobody.

Remo and Chiun went to ground and came up on the other side of the bus before the Haitian had figured out they were gone. “Thanks for getting what we needed out of that guy, Little Father.”

“It was no great skill to do so. All you had to do was think to do it.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t.”

It took them seconds to come upon the rearmost bus, which had a number of visible differences. Welded-on steel plating, extra-thick glass for added blast resistance. It was also guarded, but the guards never even got the chance to deny admittance to the Masters of Sinanju. Remo gave them each a blow to the chest that flattened their hearts as if their chests were compressed by a toppled snack machine. The door wasn’t a standard bus door, but a locked steel vault door.

The weak spot was in the bolt, which possessed a minuscule structural defect in the cast-alloy housing. Remo found the defect and gave the housing a few fingertip taps. The defect was transformed by the perfect vibration into a crack in the metal. The housing fell apart

“Sir Mutha? You home?”

Chiun heard a tiny creak of metal above and chose not to follow Remo into the bus. He placed his fingers against the plating and pushed the bus down, which effectively lifted the old master up. His sandals were noiseless when he touched the roof, and he padded to the round porthole without creating so much as a squeak.

The porthole was apparently a complicated affair in the opening. Chiun folded his legs beneath him to await the port opening. Finally, the wheel ceased turning and the mechanism clicked. The port opened six inches, and a pudgy black face looked into the face of Chiun, the ancient Master of Sinanju.

Chiun smiled his warmest smile. “Good afternoon, Sir Mutha.” He closed the porthole lid, which made a deep musical note against the head of the famous pop star.

Sir Muffa Muh Mutha felt the blackness almost claim him, but he somehow managed to hold on to consciousness. He pushed himself off the floor of the War Room, the electronics hub from which his war was coordinated.

When he was sitting upright, he saw the same old Chinaman, smiling at him in exactly the same way.

“Good afternoon, Sir Mutha.”

“Who are you devils?” shrieked Sissy Muh. “Who are you?” She cut savagely at the arm of the younger white man, who was holding her off the ground by her long French braids. Sissy wasn’t short, and the white man wasn’t extra tall; still, he managed to keep his arms out of the reach of Sissy’s mean-looking hunting knife.

“Come on, let me cut you!”

“No, thanks, sweetheart.” The white man pinched the blade with two fingers and flicked it out of Sissy’s grasp. It buried itself in the plastic interior walls—ten feet away.

“Devil!” She kicked and clawed but she contacted nothing but air, every time, until she was as furious and wild as a hooked eel landed in a rowboat.

The white man sighed and snatched at Sissy’s neck as if he were flicking a switch. Sissy stopped, as if she had been turned off, and she slumped into one of the console chairs.

“Did you kill ’er?” Mutha asked.

“Naw, she’s still alive and kicking on the inside. See?”

Sir Mutha observed that his security chief’s eyes were flickering around the room like a wild animal’s, but her body was absolutely limp.

“You paralyzed her!”

“Not permanently. The peace and quiet is nice, though, isn’t it? And now to restore some peace and quiet to Kingston town. Would you call off your coup, Sir Mutha, please?”

Sir Muffa Muh Mutha careened to his feet, overtaken by the urge to self-defend. Joining his hands into a club, he walloped the little Chinaman with all his body weight, but the Chinaman was gone. Sir Mutha felt himself carom off the plastic wall and descend onto his knighted backside once more.

And the Chinaman was right back where he had been, and he was giving Sir Mutha the same Chinaman smile.

“Sissy’s right—you be devils! Demons!”

“Not I, Sir Mutha,” the Chinaman said cheerily. “He is another story.”

“Don’t go there,” the white man said. “Time to call off the dogs, you Mutha.”

“Never!”

Never lasted for all of ten seconds. By then, Mutha had endured all the earlobe pinching a human being could ever expect to endure. The agony was unbearable.

“Fall back. Retreat. This is Mother. I’m calling off the holiday. Repeat. I am calling off the holiday.”

“Get them out of Jamaica,” Remo added. “And tell them not to come back.”

Sir Mutha urged his soldiers to evacuate, then Remo sat the British pop star down for a chat.

“Even you are not a Reagan,” Chiun pointed out. He was still smiling, and the smile had Sir Mutha’s flesh crawling…

“Iya, dunno…a what?”

“A Reagan. You are not. She is not, although she has one long hair thong, at least.”

Sir Mutha couldn’t make sense of it. “As in reggae music?” Remo asked, seeing the light. “Don’t think they call them Reagans, Chiun. Some are Rastafarians. Some are just Jamaicans. This mutha, I have no idea. What are you?”

“I’m an artist.”

“’Course you are. You go right on believing it. Me, I like to pretend I’m master of my own destiny. Now, here’s the important question. Who put you up to this?”

“Nobody. I’m my own man.”

“Your turn, bad cop.” Remo nodded at Chiun, who intensified his smile and took Sir Mutha by the elbow again. Seconds later, Mutha was begging them to let him speak.

“Even I’m getting creeped out by you looking so happy,” Remo said. “Now, Mutha, spill it.”

Mutha stopped screaming from the agony. “Okay! I’ll talk! What was the question?”

“Who put you up to it?” Remo asked impatiently.

“I don’t know.”

“Somebody is behind this. Somebody got you on board. Who is that somebody?”

“Oh. Easy. It was Sissy.”

“Convenient scapegoat, her being right here with us.”

“No, it was her, really. She’s my go-between with the Royals. That’s what she always called them. The Royals.”

Remo nodded. “You hush now.” He turned to Sissy Muh and adjusted her spine with a touch.

“Now, young lady,” was as far as Remo got.

When she had her voice back she began screeching at them. “You don’t scare me, freaks!”

Remo shrugged. “I can be bad cop, too. See?” He touched her on the elbow. She stopped screaming and started singing.

Remo thought that any self-respecting revolutionary with his or her own mobile command center ought to have a telephone. Chiun pointed out that there were various devices that could be used to communicate with the outside world. Sissy was eager to help them place their call.

‘To a delicatessen?”

“Not just a delicatessen—Oppheim’s is the delicatessen in all of Sioux City.” Herschel Oppheim himself— or the computer-generated equivalent of an Iowan deli owner—was on the line now.

“Yeah, we’re the best. Now what do you want?”

“What’s good today, Mr. Oppheim?”

‘It’s all good. You name it, it’s good. Now name it, bud.”

“My mouth’s watering for com beef on rye,” Remo said. “Extra, extra mustard. Chiun?”

“Fah!”

“Let’s have the usual for my dad. Pastrami on white bread. Pile it on high.”

“Pile what high?” Mark Howard asked.

“I think you know. Where’s Smitty?”

“He’s monitoring another situation. He asked me to get your report.”

Remo heard the hesitancy in the voice of the young assistant director of CURE. Remo was almost starting to like Mark, and he had come to respect the man’s capabilities. But Mark Howard wasn’t a good liar, even when it was a lie of omission.

Remo played along for the time being. “We managed to stop the recolonization of Jamaica,” he said.

“We’ve heard,” Howard said. “The Jamaicans are arresting mercenaries all over the island.”

“Quite a rainbow coalition,” Remo said. “He got Colombians, Haitians, Americans, you name it. But no Jamaicans. You wouldn’t believe this guy. Says his name is Mutha.”

“That would be Sir Muffa Muh Mutha,” Mark Howard said. “He was at the top of our list of possible ringleaders of the Jamaican coup attempt. Did he survive?”

“Oh, sure, he’s here with me now. Funny thing is, Jamaicans hate this guy, from what he says. I guess he’s some sort of hack reggae imitator who steals everybody else’s good bits and repackages them as his own. Says he was run out of the country when he tried to stage a show. Now he’s back to take over the place and exact a little revenge.”

Howard sounded impatient. “Yes, but what about the organizers? Who put him up to it? Who organized it?”

Remo reported the interrogation of Sissy Muh, who was the real brains behind the operation. It was she who recruited mercenaries from throughout the Americas, who purchased intelligence, who equipped the forces. Her instructions and her funding always came anonymously. “She calls them the Royals. Says her contact has an accent like a rich British type.”

“Have you questioned her thoroughly?” Howard asked, sounding impatient.

“Yeah. Thoroughly,” Remo replied, feeling a little annoyed. “We also thoroughly stopped the takeover of the government of Jamaica. Isn’t that a good thing? Didn’t we buy you some time?”

“Yes. Well, not really.” Mark Howard was flustered. “Another former colony is being taken over even as we speak.”

Remo looked at Chiun. Both of them heard the strange discomfort in Mark Howard’s voice.

“Which former colony?” Remo asked pleasantly.

“Nowhere near you. You’d never get there in time. It’ll be over within the hour.”

Remo asked again, slowly, “Junior, which former colony?”