Fade to Black

Destroyer 119: Fade to Black

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Prologue

Excerpt from The Annals of the Glorious House of Sinanju:

To all later generations that they might learn truth!

The words you read have been inscribed by the awesome hand of Chiun, unworthy custodian of the present history of our House and trainer of Remo the Fair, who, though not technically of the village proper, was deemed an adequate receptacle by the Master in spite of his pale complexion, strangely deformed eyes and near total lack of gratitude for the greatness bestowed upon him by the most benign and patient Master Chiun. But there is no sense in complaining about things one cannot control, especially the ingratitude of a thankless foundling, so why bother?

The History of Sinanju

AND LO DURING THIS portentous time, the Master of Sinanju did venture to the most distant western shore of the current Rome. It was called America.

So vast was this nation that it took many days overland to travel from its cold and barren eastern shores to the warmer climes of its west. But because of his special status as royal assassin to America's mad yet generous Emperor Harold I, the Master did not have to waste his time on common ground transport. A flying machine of Korean design (see The Thieving Wrights: Where They Went Wrong) did spirit him to his destination in mere hours, thus sparing him prolonged contact with the dregs and castoffs who did populate this land.

The Master of Sinanju did travel in secret in the dead of night. This he deemed necessary, for though the Master was acting in the interests of Sinanju, he was not acting directly on behalf of his emperor. However, he was on a mission that would ultimately bring glory to the House and, as a result, glory to he who had contracted with the House. For this reason, when the veil of secrecy was at last lifted, Harold the Generous would rejoice in the Master's secret actions. Of this, the Master of Sinanju was certain.

And the Master's airship did travel to that region of America known as California-named thus despite the fact that it was not ruled by a caliph, but by a governor (see White Nomenclature: the Case Against).

As promised by those who had summoned him, a carriage awaited the Master. The coach was a kind reserved for only the most revered individuals in this nation. Called a limousine, it was, and not even the Master's emperor of the time did have one of these special carriages.

The Master was ushered into this regal chariot and was driven in haste to the preordained meeting place. His destination was a wondrous province of this Caliphless-fornia. A place of magic and wonder, the name of which was known in the four corners of the world. Hollywood it was called, even though no woods of holly were immediately visible to the naked eye (ibid).

When first he had ventured there, this province had presented an enigma to the Master. For though the word studious was trumpeted from every building, no evidence of current study or past education was visible in its inhabitants. Only upon closer inspection did the Master realize that the word was actually studio, which in this tongue was roughly equivalent to the atelier of the French.

Once in the Woods of Holly, the Master's limousine did speed him between the heavy castle gates of Taurus Studios. There he was met by those who had summoned him.

The first was called Hank Bindle, the second Bruce Marmelstein. Makers of magic they were. Illusionists were they. Theurgists of the highest order who did transform paper into moving images.

"Hey, babe. How you doing? Looking good," did the first magician, the one called Bindle, pronounce as the Master alighted from his sleek black chariot.

The prestidigitator Marmelstein, not to be outdone, did intone, "Looking great, but what am I talking? It's got to be-what?-a hundred in the shade out here. I'm sweating my mazurkas off. Let's go up to the office."

This they did, Bindle and Marmelstein flanking Chiun, toadying respectfully to the Master.

The air within their fortress of glass and steel was cool, controlled by machines built for men who could not control their own bodies. Only when they were secure in their inner sanctum did the two address the Master.

"The picture's gonna be great," Bindle insisted.

"Gangbusters." Marmelstein nodded, seeming to agree. As was his wont, he employed an odd colloquialism that the Master had not before encountered.

"Boffo," Bindle pressed, seeming to agree with the agreement.

Their confusing use of language did not distract the Master. For it was written in our histories by the Lesser Wang that "there is a time to endure the braying of jackasses and there is a time to talk turkey."

Although the Master had partly ventured to this land because of difficulties with their mutual project, there were also problems with a contract between the Master and the wily sorcerers Bindle and Marmelstein.

"I have been contacted by barristers who claim that you are attempting to rewrite our original agreement," the Master intoned seriously. His piercing hazel eyes searched for deception. With Hollywood producers this was like looking for water in a swimming pool.

"Lies," lied the crafty Bindle and Marmelstein in unison.

"They have informed me that you wish to cut my percentage down from the agreed-upon amount."

"Would we do that?" Bindle squeaked.

"No," Marmelstein answered his partner.

Now, the Master of Sinanju was not a fool. He knew that these two conjurers were attempting to deceive him. And though telling falsehoods to a Master of Sinanju was, under ordinary circumstances, an offense punishable by death, the Master did have need of these two. In his wisdom did Chiun the Brilliant take a new tack.

"I have heard rumors of production delays," the Master said craftily.

"It's a little behind," the worm Bindle confessed.

"More than a little," the spineless Marmelstein muttered, with a furtive eye on his partner.

"A couple of weeks behind," the slimy Bindle admitted.

"What we were wondering..." Marmelstein ventured.

"If you could, you know..." offered Bindle.

"Move things along," Marmelstein finished. There it was. The mendacious magicians had spoken aloud that which the Master already knew.

They needed the Master of Sinanju to move their production forward.

"It would be a pleasure to aid you, O wise Bindle, O learned Marmelstein," the shrewd Master said magnanimously.

With the words of the Master ringing true in their ears, there was much relief in the private halls of Taurus. Their faces-brown from the captured sunlight of coffinlike booths-did brighten with pleasure.

"Great," the sorcerer Bindle sighed.

"Perfect," the toothy Marmelstein exhaled.

But before relief overwhelmed them, the Master of Sinanju held up a staying hand. "When certain contract provisions are met."

Smiles melted into suntanned skin. The round white eyes of the two magicians belonged to animals in an abattoir.

"But..." Bindle spoke.

"B-but..." Marmelstein stammered. The Master cut them off.

"Our contract will be reopened. I have learned much these many months since first I signed. It will be rewritten in such a way as to make impossible any attempts to deprive the Master of that which is rightfully his due. Plus ten points. Gross. This for my agita. Only when this new contract is processed will I agree to aid you with your difficulties."

The tricksters Bindle and Marmelstein were at a loss, thwarted by the superior skills and mighty bargaining position of the Master of Sinanju. They conferred among themselves, but only briefly. Finally, Bindle spoke.

"You can have it all," he said, choking on the words.

"Everything you want," Marmelstein echoed.

"You will give points?" the Master asked craftily.

"Everything's negotiable," the defeated Bindle stated.

"Whatever you say," agreed the dejected Marmelstein.

"I have heard a rumor that a film starring the foulmouthed jester Edward Murphy was said to have lost money. This in spite of domestic grosses exceeding one hundred miilion dollars and a production cost much lower than this," said Chiun the Insightful, who had studied the habits of these Hollywood cretins and was aware of the sly manipulations they were known to make on paper. "This so that the makers of the film did not have to pay the writer."

"A lie," Bindle insisted.

"A mistruth," Marmelstein interjected.

"And if it was true, we would never do that to you," Bindle stressed.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Marmelstein agreed.

"That would be prudent." The Master of Sinanju nodded sagely. "For if I were to ever learn again that you have attempted to cheat me, I would be forced to deal with you thusly."

And in demonstration, the Master of Sinanju did raise a single fearsome fingernail.

The Master did draw this lone Knife of Eternity along the center of Bruce Marmelstein's heavy desk. He expended no effort and when he was finished, a single sharp line-more precise than any manufactured edge could produce-bisected the gleaming piece of mahogany furniture. As Bindle and Marmelstein watched in fear, the Master did slap both hands flat on either side of the line. In the wake of the thunderous clap, the desk did separate in twain, dropping open like the petals of a blooming flower. The rumble of the crashing fragments shook the fortress to its very foundation.

When the Master turned back to face the magicians, he did detect a scent displeasing to him emanating from the lower garments of the wizards. They spoke in haste to him.

"You'll get everything you want," the sorcerer Bindle gasped.

"I'll personally guarantee it," Marmelstein the Magician agreed quickly. His eyes were filled with terror.

"The new contracts will be ready for you to sign in an hour," Bindle insisted.

"Half an hour," Marmelstein said rapidly. "We'll courier them to your hotel."

"That reminds me," the Master said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. "I wish you to pay my hotel expenses, as well."

"Done," agreed Bindle.

"I'll call the limo," said Marmelstein. Pulling at his trousers, the magician went off to summon the coachman who would take the Master to his lodgings.

"I'll get the ball rolling with legal," Bindle said, heading for his telephone.

"I will wait outside," said Master Chiun, the brilliant negotiator, for the odor in the inner sanctum of the titans of Taurus was more than he could bear. He left the conjurer Bindle to talk to legal.

Thus did the Master of Sinanju, in the earliest days of what Western calendars inaccurately deemed the twenty-first century (see Pope Gregory XIII: Calendars, Carpenters and the Confusion They've Wrought), arrive in and conquer the province of Hollywood.

Chapter 1

On the evening of his murder, Walter Anderson steered his Ford Explorer up his driveway at the usual time. A hint of the summer Walter would never see wafted through the open driver's side window, carried on eddies of warm spring air.

Commuting through Washington that morning, Walter had been surprised to see that the cherry blossoms were just beginning to peek from their buds. Since he hadn't noticed them on Friday, they had to have started coming out over the weekend. No matter how lousy his mood, the sight of those tiny pink buds always made him feel a little better.

Walter drew slowly up the slight blacktopped incline from Clark Street in suburban Maryland, stopping his truck tight behind his teenage son's red Camaro. He cut the engine.

Walter paused for a moment, staring at the closed garage door beyond Mike's sports car. The weak 1950s-style overhead bulb that hung next to the frayed, unused basketball net threw amber shadows across the weathered beige garage door.

He was late again.

Penny would be mad at him. Again. But that seemed to be a given lately. This just happened to be one of the busiest times of year for the construction firm he owned. What did she expect him to do-sell the business? The whole argument was stupid and was always the same. But Walter never heard her complain about the money. Oh, no. Sometimes he'd point this out, but it only provoked more yelling. Tonight he just wasn't in the mood.

Walter let out a sigh that reeked of his threepack-a-day Marlboro habit and climbed wearily from his truck.

The flagstone path had been installed in the 1960s and was showing definite signs of age. Walter noted dozens of cracked stones between the slowly disintegrating mortar as he trudged toward the front door.

She'd been on him to fix the walk for at least five years. "You build buildings, for Christ's sake, Walter," Penny berated him with clockwork frequency. "With dozens of men working for you, you can't spare one mason to patch the goddamn walk?"

Heading for the front door for what would be the last time, Walter decided to fix the walk. Just like that. Walter Anderson-a man who hadn't gotten his hands dirty in construction for more than a decade-would go to the hardware store and get a couple of bags of concrete mix. He would personally rip up and redo the walk this weekend.

A spark inside him wanted to be nice. To do something decent for the mother of Mike and little Alice. But mostly he was just tired of hearing her nag. He wouldn't get one of his guys to do it. He'd do it himself.

She'd probably find a reason to complain about that, too. They'd look destitute in the eyes of the neighbors if he did the work himself. They weren't paupers, after all.

He didn't care. His next weekend's plans already set at nine o'clock Monday night, Walter happily slipped his house key from the others on the ring in his hand and brought it up to the lock on his front door.

At just the slightest pressure, the door popped open.

"Damn kids," Walter muttered as he pushed the door open all the way. "Least it's not January." He took one step across the threshold-his hand still on the brass knob-when he felt a sudden blinding pain shoot through the side of his head. He reeled in place.

The living room was swept in dark maroon shadows. Penny was there. So were the kids, Alice and Mike. On the couch. Gray electrical tape across their mouths. Eyes pleading. Hands and feet bound tightly together.

The pain again. Powerful. Overwhelming. A second to realize he'd been attacked.

He lunged at his assailant. Or wanted to. But something had changed. Penny and the two kids were lower now. On his level. Terrified.

No. He was on their level.

He had fallen. Hands reached up to ward off the next blow. Something struck his fingers, slamming them against his own skull. A shotgun butt.

Fresh pain. Fingers, broken.

Blood on his fingers. His own blood from the gaping wound in the side of his head.

The room was spinning. Ceiling whirling high above him. Cracked plaster. He'd promised to fix that, too.

This weekend. Along with the walk. Hell, he'd even clean the garage. Everything this weekend. If only he could live. If only God would spare his beautiful wife and precious, precious children.

The room, and the world around it, was collapsing into a brilliant hot flash of light. Coalescing into a pinprick explosion. Flickering once, then vanishing forever.

One final blow to the head, and Walter Anderson collapsed in a bloody heap to the floor, never to move again. The front door slammed shut behind him, cutting off the view of the cracked flagstone walk, the repairs of which would now be left to the new, future owners of the Anderson house.

"GET THOSE DAMN CAMERAS out of here!" Lieutenant Frederick Jonston had yelled that three times already, growing angrier each time. No one seemed to want to listen tonight.

One of the uniforms disengaged from crowd control and headed over to the cluster of reporters. A few other officers followed his lead. Together, they corralled the members of the press back behind the yellow sawhorses.

It was a zoo. At first Jonston had wanted to string up whoever had alerted the media by their eyeballs, but the detective found out after arriving on the scene that the press had received a cryptic phone call from the hostage takers themselves. Just as the police had.

"They still not answering?" Jonston asked the sergeant on the radiophone in the car next to him. "Nothing, Lieutenant."

Leaning on the open door of the squad car, Jonston looked at the house. Upper middle class. Neatly tended grounds. Nice neighborhood. He frowned.

Lights from the roofs of a dozen cruisers and the dashboards of as many unmarked cars sliced through the postmidnight darkness.

This hostage drama had gone on for four hours. If Jonston had his way, it would not go on another four.

He turned to the sergeant. "How long's it been?"

"More than twenty minutes."

That was the last time they'd heard from the men holding the Anderson family.

One of the hostage takers' victims was already dead. They had let the son-maybe seventeen years old-get as far as the front door before shooting him in the back of the head. There had been a lot of screaming inside after that.

Crouching low, Kevlar-outfitted officers had dragged the boy behind police lines. But he was a lost cause. Jonston's concern right then was the rest of the family. As far as he knew, the other three-father, mother and daughter-were still alive inside. He intended to keep them that way.

"It's been too long," Jonston mused.

Cameras whirred all around. Some were network. The curse of being so close to Washington.

A few men were clustered around him. SWAT-team members, hostage negotiators and other detectives. The microphones were far enough away that they couldn't pick up his words.

"Let's do it," Jonston whispered gruffly. "Take them out if you have to. Whatever force is necessary to save the family. I don't want any more dead. Understood?"

There was not a single questioning word.

The assault began less than three minutes later. Tear-gas canisters were launched through front and side windows. A split second later, doors were kicked open simultaneously in kitchen, garage, basement and front hall.

Two men went in through the shattered livingroom picture window, rolling to alert crouches on the glass-covered floor.

Though their timed movements were textbook perfect, none of the efforts made by police were necessary.

The first men in the living room found the Anderson family. The father was piled in a corner, dead from an apparent beating to the head.

The mother and eight-year-old daughter were on the couch. Each had a clear plastic garbage bag over her head. The mother's had been tied with a bathrobe belt, the daughter's with a short extension cord. Warm mist from their last, desperate breaths clung to the interior of the bags. Their sightless eyes gazed in horror at the vacant air before them.

Across the room the television played; silently turned to a channel covering the hostage story. Although the power to the home had been cut, the TV was plugged into a black battery box. A retractable silver antenna wobbled in the smoky air.

The tear-gas haze cleared a few minutes later. Lieutenant Jonston was ushered into the living room. His face contorted in disgust at the sight of the dead family.

"Where are they?" he demanded, his voice a low growl.

In reply, a shout issued from the basement. "Down here!"

Dozens of boots and shoes clattered on the old wooden staircase as the men hurried downstairs. Several SWAT-team members were gathered before an area at the front of the cellar that had once been sectioned off for use as a coal chute in the old house. Jonston bulled his way through the men into the narrow alcove.

Stones and mortar that hadn't been disturbed in a hundred years were collapsed in a pile near the foundation wall. A black tunnel extended beyond. Jonston heard the radio squawk of officers within the depths of the burrow.

"Where does it go?" he demanded levelly.

"We don't know yet, Lieutenant," replied a heavily armored officer crouching before the opening. "It's pretty deep. Looks like they might have been tunneling it for days. Weeks, even. Must have just broken through tonight."

Jonston glanced up at a small window above him. It sat directly over the tunnel. The dirty panes faced the street, blocked by a thick evergreen. Blue squad car lights swept the window.

The killers had slipped out beneath his own feet. "I want them found now!" Jonston snapped. The escape tunnel led to the sewer system. Fanning out, the police discovered a cap had been loosened on a street near some woods three blocks away from the Anderson house. No one had seen any suspicious vehicles or men on foot. No one had seen a thing. The killers got away scot-free.

After the police were through combing the home, and relatives were finally allowed inside, it was learned that the only things missing were the Anderson daughter's Girl Scout beret and sash. The killer or killers had left both cash and jewelry.

In a further bizarre twist that capped the whole macabre affair, a small independent film entitled Suburban Decay was released three days later. In the film, a family with the surname Anderson was terrorized and finally murdered by a psychotic neighbor. The film's killer-an antihero who was eventually successful in his efforts to elude authorities-used a tunnel to escape.

Because of the real-life similarities, the movie was elevated above the art houses and film festivals where such films generally languished. It was bought by a major distributor and went on to make 14.8 million dollars, a box-office take almost 250 times the original cost of the film.

When it was suggested by a print reporter that the mild success of the movie was based solely on public fascination with the real-life Anderson case, a studio spokesman was quoted as saying, "We are saddened by the loss of the friends and family of the Andersons. It is a loss that we, too, feel. We cannot, however, let bizarre similarities to current events compromise the artistic integrity of this studio. Life goes on."

Reading this report from the comfort of his den, Lieutenant Frederick Jonston made only one bitter comment. "Yeah. It goes on for some."

Afterward, he wadded the newspaper and threw it in the trash bin next to his cluttered desk. He missed.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he had stopped trying to pretend he was interested in what his employer was saying five minutes before. He had stopped actually listening to what was being said four minutes and fifty-eight seconds earlier. What he had gleaned in those first two seconds before his eyes glazed over and his mind wandered had something to do with bombs or guns or some other things that went boom. At least he thought that's what it was about.

Remo didn't like bombs. They always took the fun out of everything. He thought about bombs for a little while. Ticking, exploding. Sometimes, when they went off they were very bright. Almost pretty. Like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Remo watched a bomb explode in his mind. He yawned. "Remo, are you paying attention?"

The voice creaked like a rusted hinge on an ancient door. It yanked Remo from his reverie. When he blinked, he was once more sitting on his living-room floor of his Massachusetts home, legs crossed in the lotus position. From the chair above him, the pinched face of Dr. Harold W. Smith looked down, irritated.

"Yeah, I heard every word, Smitty. Ka-boom. End of the world, all the usual stuff. You hungry?"

"No," Smith replied tightly. "And this is serious."

It had to have been. At least in the mind of Harold Smith. The gaunt old man generally didn't approve of face-to-face meetings. His sharp features were somber. The gray-tinged flesh around his thin lips formed a taut frown. A battered briefcase was balanced carefully on his knees, which were stiff in the neatly pressed gray suit. Confident he had Remo's attention focused once again, he resumed speaking.

"I have found a disturbing sameness to these cases. I am not certain what the underlying connection is-if any. It is possible that they are merely coincidences. Perhaps even copycat incidences."

"Yeah. Copycats," Remo sighed. "Can't have them."

Smith's frown deepened. "You cannot tell me two words I have spoken since I arrived, can you?" he challenged.

Remo's bored gaze suddenly found focus. "Sure I can," he said. "Um..." His dark eyes flicked around the room, as if the clues to Smith's briefing were buried in the wallboard. At last he snapped his fingers, struck with a sudden burst of inspiration. "You said 'Hi, Remo' when I let you in. There. Two words."

"Actually, I said 'Hello,'" Smith said thinly.

"Oh. Well, I got the 'Remo' right." Dejected, he sunk in on himself, a balloon deflating.

"And could you please turn off the television?" The big-screen TV had been on since Smith's arrival. On it, four creatures with frozen plastic faces and teardrop-shaped bodies cavorted around a surreal landscape. Each was a different color: orange, maroon, blue or pink. Geometric shapes jutted from the tops of their heads.

For some reason Smith could not fathom, the costumed characters spoke in insipid baby talk while they buttered muffins and bounced balls around the TV screen.

"Don't tell me you've got something against the TeeVee-Fatties, Smitty?" Remo asked. He had been staring blankly at the program through most of Smith's briefing.

"Please, Remo-" Smith began.

"That's Poopsy-Woopsy," Remo interrupted knowingly, pointing to the pink creature. "Jerry Falwell says he's gay."

"Yes," Smith said flatly. His lips pursed. "Where is Master Chiun?" he asked suddenly.

It was the one question Remo had hoped Smith wouldn't ask.

"Chiun?" Remo said innocently, his spine growing rigid.

"Yes. If you insist on ignoring me, I would like to share this information with both of you at once. I do not wish to have to repeat myself a third time for his benefit."

"I'll pay attention," Remo promised. "Honest." He clicked off the TV. Poopsy-Woopsy, Tipsy, Wee-Wee and Doh collapsed into a single bright dot and were gone.

To Smith he seemed suddenly too attentive. The older man's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Is Chiun at home?"

Remo missed a beat. "He's not here," he admitted vaguely.

"When will he return?"

"I'm not sure. He's been keeping kind of odd hours lately," Remo said. "I haven't seen him in days."

Smith's eyebrows slid almost imperceptibly higher on his forehead in an expression of mild curiosity. "That is not like the Master of Sinanju."

"Trust me, Smitty," Remo muttered. "It's more like him than you wanna know."

Remo was being deliberately unresponsive. The two Masters of Sinanju-the only true practitioners of the most ancient and deadly martial art in the history of mankind-had probably had some kind of fight again.

Smith let the remark pass.

"As I said, these cases I mentioned are similar."

"A bomber?" Remo asked, now genuinely interested.

"There have been no bombs involved in any of the incidents," Smith replied, puzzled.

"Didn't you say something about bombs?"

"No. Remo, please pay attention. There have already been seven people killed."

Smith took the battered leather briefcase from his lap and set it on the floor between his ankles. Another man would have extracted files from the valise in order to more thoroughly brief his field operative. Not Smith. He didn't like to rely on paper. Paper was a physical link to the secret work that had occupied virtually all of his adult life. As director of CURE, the supersecret organization charged with safeguarding the constitution, Smith's desire for secrecy approached paranoia. Although he had used computer printouts in the earlier days of his stewardship of CURE, that habit had waned with the encroachment of the pervasive electronic age.

Telephone briefings were the norm, although at this stage of their decades-long relationship a meeting with Smith was the exception to the rule. The odd nature of this assignment had flushed him out of his office in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. For this reason alone, Remo tried to concentrate on what his employer was saying.

"There were two bodies found approximately one month ago in a wooded area in the Florida panhandle. Both were college juniors. Roommates at the same university. They had been hung by their ankles and sexually mutilated. According to police experts, they were tortured for a number of days. Eventually their throats were slit."

Remo's attention was focused now. Smith's dry recitation of the case's facts seemed only to add to the horror of the incident.

"Did they find out who did it?" Remo asked.

"Not as such," Smith admitted. "But there is a pattern." Smith shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "A seemingly unconnected murder took place a few days after this incident. A torso was found in a box near a waste receptacle at a condominium complex in Boise. Authorities are still unable to identify the victim in this case."

"The same killer?"

"Possibly," Smith hedged. "Are you familiar with the Anderson case?"

Remo shook his head.

"It has gotten a great deal of coverage on the news the past few days. A family of four was murdered in their Maryland home."

"Oh, yeah. I think I might have seen something about that," Remo nodded. "The guy dug a tunnel out or something?"

"'In' would be more accurate. This was how the killer or killers gained entry to the Anderson home. They merely used the same route for egress."

"Wasn't there something about it being in some dip-shit movie?" Remo asked. "That's why it was on so much."

"Yes," Smith replied. "A film dealing with much the same themes as the true-life Anderson case has opened to critical praise. It is currently doing well in art houses."

"What's wrong? Outhouses all booked up?"

"That would be a more appropriate venue," Smith agreed humorlessly. "But be that as it may, the Anderson case is only part of a larger picture. In the other two incidents I mentioned, films were also released with themes similar to those murders. Like the Anderson film, these did better than expected in large part because of an apparent public fascination with the true-to-life incidents. It is my belief that the fictitious events on-screen are directly linked to those in real life."

Remo shook his head. "Smitty, this seems like kind of a nothing assignment. I know the FBI can't find their ass with both hands and a fanny map lately, but it doesn't sound like they'd need to pull Efrem Zimbalist Jr. out of mothballs for this one. Can't we just take a break and let them do their jobs for once?"

Smith sat back in his chair. His steely gray eyes were mildly accusatory. "You have been taking a break for the past three months," he advised, voice level.

"It hasn't been that long," Remo said dismissively.

"Yes," Smith said, nodding, "it has."

Remo raised an annoyed eyebrow. "Okay, maybe. But can I help it if the bad guys have been in a slump?"

"I had an assignment for you one month ago. The survivalist group in Utah. There was also the potential Islamic terrorist cell in New Jersey the month before that. In both instances you refused to go."

"Been there, done that," Remo said. "Survivalists and Arab terrorists are yesterday's news. Say, the Russian Mafia's big these days. Or killer viruses. Can't we do something with those?"

Wordlessly, Smith removed his rimless glasses. Tired fingers massaged the bridge of his patrician nose. "Remo, CURE does not exist to alleviate your ennui. Frankly, I have been a little concerned by your attitude of late. Ever since your encounter with Elizu Roote in New Mexico-"

Remo's tone hardened. "You don't have to bring that up."

During his last assignment a few months before, Remo had encountered a man unlike any he had ever met in all his years as CURE's enforcement arm. Surgically enhanced with biomechanical implants, Elizu Roote had offered unexpected resistance. And nearly killed Remo.

"I believe I do," Smith pressed. "Twice in the past six months, your abilities have been put to the test by abnormally dangerous foes. Most recently Roote, and before him, Judith White. I have noticed a creeping apathy in your attitude since then, which I believe is a direct result of these experiences."

"Apathy schmapathy," Remo grumbled. "Maybe I've just learned not to sweat the small stuff. Life goes on, Smitty."

Smith replaced his glasses. His gray eyes were level. "It does," he said, tart voice even. "For some."

Remo sighed. "Okay, okay, I'm in. So these crummy movies hadn't been released yet when these things happened?" he asked, his tone anything but enthusiastic.

"No."

"Could still be a copycat. Some screwball's getting into sneak previews and then getting his rocks off staging the scenes before the movies are out."

"That is a possible scenario. Also, there is much information contained in studio press kits-promotional material mailed to critics before the films come out. It is also possible that prints of the films are being stolen before they are released for general distribution. The movie company is claiming that any of these scenarios is a plausible explanation."

"Wait a minute, Smitty," Remo said, a sliver of concern in his voice. "Studio? All of this shit's being shoveled by one company?"

His thoughts turned to Chiun. The Master of Sinanju was in Hollywood right now working on his top secret film. Before he'd left, Chiun made Remo promise he wouldn't breathe a word to Smith about his film.

Remo had seen the bozos who ran the studio that was making the Master of Sinanju's movie. The stuff Smith had described was so appalling that it could be right up Bindle and Marmelstein's alley. For a sudden tense moment, he held his breath. Smith was nodding. "The studio responsible is called Cabbagehead Productions," the CURE director said.

Remo exhaled silent relief. Not Taurus Studios. "Okay, this seems pretty cut-and-dry to me. Nimrods make lousy movies, kill people to boost ticket sales." Remo nodded. "And at this point, by the way, I think we should all breathe a sigh of relief that this never occurred to Chevy Chase."

Smith had already stood to go, collecting his briefcase from the floor. Remo rose to his feet, as well.

"If this is a for-profit venture, I want it stopped," the CURE director said.

"Can do." Remo nodded. "Just call me Remo Williams, Wrestler of the Mundane. Say, Smitty, this place isn't in Hollywood, is it?"

There was something in his tone that caught Smith's attention. It was almost guilty. "Cabbagehead Productions is a small independent company located in Seattle," Smith said slowly. "Why?"

"No real reason," Remo replied vaguely. "Bad memories from the last time I went to Hollywood."

Smith knew what he was referring to. Nodding understanding, he said, "Do you want me to set aside two tickets to Seattle?"

"Not necessary," Remo said quickly. "I can handle this one on my own." He ushered Smith to the front door.

It was tempting to let the potential headache slide. After all, Smith had had more than his share when dealing with the Master of Sinanju. But in the foyer, dread curiosity got the best of him. As Remo held the door open, Smith paused.

"Remo, is there something going on with Master Chiun that I should know about?"

The bland veneer of affected confusion on Remo's face faded to weary resignation. His shoulders sagged.

"Do you trust me, Smitty?" he asked tiredly. The question surprised the CURE director.

"I suppose," he said slowly. He was already regretting asking.

Remo locked eyes with Smith. "Then trust me now. You do not want to know."

The tone was somber, deadly serious. His expression could have been carved from stone.

For an instant, Smith opened his mouth, about to press the issue further. He thought better of it almost at once. Mouth creaking shut, he stepped out the door.

Remo clicked it shut behind him.

As he descended the steps to the sidewalk, the CURE director thought of times in the past when Remo had worn that same expression in regard to the Master of Sinanju. As he hurried down the sidewalk, Harold Smith decided that it might be prudent to stock up on Maalox and Alka-Seltzer on the way home. Just to be on the safe side.

Chapter 3

Shawn Allen Morris's resume boasted five years of "intimate experience at the frazzled edge of the film industry." In a forum where truth was always subjective, Shawn had raised the art of inflating one's personal experience on a resume to gargantuan proportions.

The implication was clear. He was claiming that, like many young men in Tinseltown, he'd spent years toiling on low-budget "indie" films. Even by resume standards, this was an utter lie. The truth was, the closest Shawn had ever come to the film industry was working on a canteen truck on a vacant tract of land near the Paramount lot.

The high point of that job had been the day John Rhys-Davies-Sallah from the Indiana Jones movies-had stopped by for a cheese danish.

When he had first arrived in Hollywood, Shawn spent his evenings attending film school. For 175 bucks per class per semester, he and his classmates would sit in the dark watching Ingmar Bergman movies and pretend to find meaning in them.

At night, he'd talk for hours with his fellow would-be auteurs. And though the arguments were loud and frequent, Shawn and his friends did have some common ground. They all agreed that they were intellectuals and visionaries while the rest of the world was comprised of nothing but Independence Day-watching troglodytes. When day came, these underappreciated geniuses would emerge bleary-eyed from their coffeehouses only to go back to their jobs parking the cars and busing the tables of the aforementioned troglodytes.

Shawn was no different than his classmates. His years of experience in night school left Shawn Allen Morris qualified for one thing: running a canteen truck.

Graduation came and went, and still, after five long years of school, each daybreak found Shawn wiping down the same cracked Formica counter with the same smelly rag and selling the same putrid egg-salad sandwiches to the same sweaty, hairy teamsters.

He would have languished there forever-his genius never recognized-had fate not finally dealt him a movie-inspired chance meeting.

Business had been slow that fateful afternoon. Shawn was about to close up shop when the fireengine-red Jaguar squealed to a desperate stop in the lot beside his ratty old canteen truck. A frenzied young man sprang out. Wild-eyed, he raced over to Shawn, who was in the process of collapsing the supports to the trapdoor above his counter.

"I need a blueberry bagel with cream cheese!" The customer's intent face was borderline frightening. His cheekbones were high and pointy, jutting out almost as far as his bizarrely elongated chin. His lower jaw extended out, as well, putting his lower teeth in front of his uppers. His face was contorted in a perpetual half grimace, half smirk.

At first, Shawn assumed the man was an actor in creature makeup for some bad sci-fi movie. It was only when he was smearing the cream cheese on the bagel that the customer removed his pair of heart-shaped red sunglasses. Shawn's mouth dropped open.

"You're Quintly Tortilli!" he gasped.

"That's the name on my Oscar," the customer snapped urgently. He waved an angry hand at the bagel. "Give it here, asshole."

Shawn hesitated. He knew of Quintly Tortilli all too well. The man was a hero to every failed filmmaker. Although he was now one of Hollywood's most famous directors, only a few short years before, Tortilli had been employed as an usher in a theater. This in order to be closer to the films he loved so much.

According to all the bios, Quintly devoured films. When he'd made the transition into movies, the young director had borrowed heavily from everyone and everything. Sometimes he regurgitated whole scenes and plots from obscure B movies in his own loud, ultraviolent films. In any other industry this would be seen for what it was: stealing. In Hollywood it was "homage." Quintly Tortilli was a true Hollywood success story. And now he was displaying some of his famous impatience at the canteen truck of Shawn Allen Morris.

As Tortilli flapped an angry hand, Shawn hesitated. He held the precious bagel away from his customer.

Shawn had tried to break into the motion picture business in every legitimate way imaginable. He had nothing more to lose. As Quintly Tortilli waited testily beside the truck, Shawn raised his hand. Fingers uncurling, he allowed the bagel to plop to the truck's floor. For good measure, he ground a heel into the smooshy cream cheese.

Tortilli's already demented eyes widened. "What the fuck did you do that for!" he screamed.

Shawn's voice didn't waver. "I want a job in film," he said softly.

"What?" Tortilli snapped, his knotted face twisting into a caricature of human anger. "Gimme my fuckin' bagel!"

"A job for a bagel," Shawn insisted. "Quid pro quo."

"Quasimodo what?" Tortilli ranted. "What the fuck is this? All I want's a fuckin' bagel, for fuck's sake."

"And I want a job in film," Shawn replied calmly. "Get me one and I'll give you your bagel." Tortilli's voice had been growing in volume and pitch. By now it was a woman's whine combined with a high-pitched shriek.

"What the fuck!"

"That's my offer. Take it or leave it." Shawn crossed his arms firmly over his chest. For added emphasis, he made a show of grinding his foot further into the flattened bagel.

Tortilli fumed for a moment. Finally, his twisted alien's face split apart at a point between his curled, jutting nose and his witch's chin. "You start tomorrow," he hissed. "Now give me my fucking bagel!"

That was that. In two days Shawn was two states up the coast, sitting behind a desk in the Seattle offices of fledgling Cabbagehead Productions.

Cabbagehead had been established by a group of wealthy backers who were hoping to break into the independent end of the film industry. The company was supposed to produce the types of counterculture art movies that invariably got good word of mouth at Academy Awards time.

The motivation of Cabbagehead's anonymous benefactors didn't matter to Shawn. He was home at last. In the motion picture industry. It didn't matter that in his job he had to act as location coordinator, producer, wrangler, set designer, assistant editor, occasional gaffer and-due to his experience on his canteen truck-caterer. Thanks to Quintly Tortilli's lust for instant bagel gratification, he was finally where he belonged.

In the eight months he'd spent in the dreary Pacific Northwest, Shawn had overseen the production of thirty-eight motion pictures. Most were barely above the amateurish level of college films. But that didn't matter because no one here was into big budget Hollywood glitz. They were making "serious" films. All of the wretches who drifted in and out of the Cabbagehead offices knew it was only a matter of time before a dozen gold statuettes lined the empty shelf above Shawn Allen Morris's cheap lobby desk.

During his eight months in that tawdry office, only two people had ever seemed unimpressed by all they were trying to accomplish there. The first was the mailman. That bourgeois bastard always had a smirk on his face whenever delivering the bizarrely wrapped and addressed packages sent to Cabbagehead from would-be filmmakers. The second undazzled visitor walked through the front door one afternoon as Shawn was reading a screenplay entitled Hate Like Me, written by a lesbian Black Panther California university professor named Tashwanda Z.

Cabbagehead couldn't afford secretaries, so Shawn was sitting at the tiny desk in the main waiting room when the man entered. Shawn could tell straight off that he was a prole. Probably thought Back to the Future was great cinema.

The man looked to be somewhere in his thirties. He wore a white T-shirt and a pair of tan chinos. His leather loafers seemed to glide across the floor without touching it. Unlike the bemused expression of the mailman, this bumpkin's dark face was somber. Almost cruel.

Although possessed of a slight build himself, Shawn was not particularly intimidated by the thin young man as he crossed the lobby to his desk. Shawn didn't even put down the script he was reading when the man spoke.

"You in charge?"

Shawn sighed with his entire body. Delicate hands closed the script. "I am President Shawn Allen Morris," the Cabbagehead executive replied disdainfully. "And you are?"

"Remo Valenti, MPAA."

Shawn snorted. "In that getup? Yeah, right. Look, if you're here to pitch a script, forget it. I've got four films in production even as we speak, two more green-lighted for next week that I haven't even read yet and, to top it all off, I just found out one of my shit-head lead actors got called for jury duty and was too stupid to weasel out of it, so my people have to recast. So unless you're good with a bullwhip and a chainsaw, there's the door."

Testily, Shawn reached for another script. He was dismayed to find a hand pressed on the cover. The hand was attached to the thickest wrist Shawn had ever seen. The Cabbagehead president looked up into the dark eyes of his visitor. They were like tiny manhole covers, opened into utter blackness.

"Listen, Sam Goldwyn," Remo said, "I don't want to be here-you don't want me here. Why don't you just tell me what I want to know and I won't slap you with an NC-17."

"You don't even know what NC-17 means." Shawn smirked.

It was Remo's turn to smile. "Sure, I do," he said. "It means No Crap or I Break 17 Bones. First one's a freebie."

The hand flashed by faster than a single movie frame.

Shawn felt a horrible, crunching pain at the ball of his right thumb. The brittle crack of a lone metacarpal filled his horrified ears. He gasped in pain.

As Shawn pulled his broken hand from his desktop, Remo waggled a cautionary finger.

"Now tell the truth," he warned, "or you'll get an NC-17 and a PG-13. Give me the who and where on whoever's killing people to make these junk movies of yours sell."

"That's why you broke my freaking thumb?" Shawn demanded. He stuffed the injured digit under his armpit. "I already told the cops a million times. I don't know what the hell's going on. At first I thought it was just a lucky coincidence, but now I think maybe someone's out to sabotage us. And it's really too bad," Shawn added. "When I heard about that first body I thought ...whoa! My ship's come in. The press was fantastic back then. Rode the crest of that wave straight into Telluride. But it's gotten crazy lately. That Anderson thing was too much. One body, maybe two helps a movie. But four? That's overkill."

Remo's eyes were flat. "I'll show you overkill in a minute," he promised. "For now, there has to be some kind of connection."

Shawn tried to shrug. It was hard to do with his thumb jammed under his arm. "That's what I thought," he agreed. He quickly added, "Not that Crating Sally wasn't an Oscar contender even before that torso showed up in the orange crate. But the press coverage didn't hurt to keep us fresh in the minds of voters. We only missed that one by a couple of votes," he added bitterly.

Remo had seen the Crating Sally poster on the wall on the way in. A woman's frightened face peered out from the shadows of an ordinary wooden crate. It was clear from the size of the box that there wasn't room for any arms or legs inside. A pool of blood formed in front of the box.

It was part of an overall theme. On all of the posters around the room, blood, mutilation and kinky sex seemed to be a recurring motif.

"Don't you make anything with talking pigs or cartoon bugs around here?" he asked, amazed. "We'd never sell out for monetary success," Shawn sniffed in reply. "Cabbagehead is about creating art."

Remo shook his head. "'This isn't art," he informed the youthful executive. "Art is a statue in the Louvre. Art is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Art is a painting of the Virgin Mary that looks like the Virgin Mary."

"We did a movie about her." Shawn nodded. "Updated the whole Christ mythology. Mary was a whore in Canada who wanted to get an abortion. We almost got the jury prize at Sundance for that."

He had hardly finished speaking when he felt another sharp pain. This one in his ring finger. As the sound of yet another cracking bone filled his ears, Shawn swore he saw a flash of movement this time. Remo's hand returned to his side.

"What the hell was that for?" Shawn cried.

"All the nuns at St. Theresa's Orphanage," Remo said. "Okay, so you don't know who's behind this. You the owner?"

"No," Shawn answered quickly, hiding the rest of his fingers below his desk. "We're sponsored by a consortium of investors out of Hollywood. I don't even know who they are."

"You don't know who your own boss is?" Remo asked doubtfully. "How'd you get the job?"

"I-" Shawn stopped dead.

A look of inspiration. Almost delight. Shawn shot to his feet. He winced at the pain in his hand. "I'll show you," the independent film executive enthused. He bounded from behind his desk. As he headed for the door, his face held all the enthusiasm of a Roman centurion who was about to shove a Christian into the mouth of a ravenous lion.

THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER AND THE CANDLESTICK MAKER was the type of film no one would ever see even after all the major film critics in America placed it on their year-end ten-best lists.

As Shawn Allen Morris guided him onto the Butcher set, Remo was first surprised by the lighting. He doubted anything being shot in the shadowy Seattle supermarket parking lot would be visible once the film was developed.

A grisly orgy was taking place on a pile of rotting garbage. Softly chugging pumps spurted red goo from nozzles buried under latex in the faux-mutilated corpses of five deathly still actresses.

Guiding the actors off-camera was a thin figure in a purple polyester suit. His back to Remo, he was hunched beside a camera watching the scene play out in all its lurid glory. As Remo approached, the man raised a hand, slicing it down sharply.

"And ...cut! Fucking beautiful! Perfect! That's a wrap everybody! Dailies at my place by midnight. And don't lose them in the fucking cab."

When he spun around, triumphant, Remo saw that he was wearing a flowered disco-era shirt open to the navel. Gold chains hung in layers over his mottled black chest hair. Surprise bloomed full on Quintly Tortilli's knotted face.

"Morris, you idiot, this is a closed set," he barked.

"He's with the MPAA, Quintly," Shawn Allen Morris confided, aiming an unnaturally crooked finger at Remo. The oily rag from the car that he'd wrapped around the digit unspooled. On the cloth, the yellow, grease-smeared image of Wee-Wee the TeeVee-Fattie beamed at Tortilli. Wincing, Shawn rewrapped his makeshift bandage around his broken fingers.

"What the hell happened to you?" Tortilli didn't wait for a response. He wheeled to Remo. "And since when do you MPAA ratings fascists kamikaze a movie that's still in production? You go back to those fossilized dictators in Hollywood and tell them they can shove their butcher knives. Every single instance of the word fuck in this film is artistically essential. I'll release it without a fucking MPAA rating if I have to. I'm holding a fucking mirror up to society, man. Deal with it." Eyes wild, Tortilli's pointy chin trembled with passion.

Once the diatribe had reached its passionate conclusion, Remo extended a single, uninterested finger at the panting Quintly Tortilli. He looked at Shawn Allen Morris. "Who the hell is this?"

Shawn gasped. "That's Quintly Tortilli," he hissed. When Remo's expression failed to change, Shawn pitched his horrified voice low. "The Quintly Tortilli. Only the most famous director in America Quintly Tortilli."

"Oh." It was clear Remo still didn't know who on earth the director was. "He ever do anything good?"

Shawn's nervous eyes grew wider. He glanced at Quintly Tortilli, who was now glaring more than enough hatred for both Remo and Shawn.

"He won an Oscar for Penny Dreadful," Shawn instructed hoarsely. His eyes pleaded with Remo to recognize Tortilli. Even if he had to pretend.

It was the movie title that finally sparked recognition in Remo's eyes. "You mean he's responsible for the piece of garbage that revived Jann Revolta's movie career?"

Shawn Allen Morris felt his stomach collapse into his bowels. "Is that the phone?" he announced abruptly. And with that, he turned and ran for all he was worth. As he bounded back to the highway, his filthy bandage flapped a TeeVee-Fattie flag at the air in his wake.

Turning from Shawn's retreating form, Tortilli crossed his arms over his chest. "Okay, storm trooper of the Hollywood thought police, what do you want?" he demanded.

"For you to promise me you're not going to resurrect Gabe Kaplan, too," Remo said. "Barring that, a list of Cabbagehead's backers will do."

Tortilli snickered loudly. "Fuck you," he offered.

He turned and walked away from Remo. Or tried to. When he attempted to take a step, his foot froze above the ground. Something held him firmly in place.

When he looked down, he found a hand wrapped around his neckful of gold chains.

"Look, I don't even want to be here," Remo said.

As he spoke, Quintly Tortilli felt himself being lifted into the air. Remo was using the director's necklaces like a handle. A knot of linked gold jutted from Remo's hand.

"I wanted to stay home," Remo continued, not a hint of strain on his face. "But I'm being punished because I've been too picky about boring assignments."

Tortilli stretched his toes. They didn't reach the ground. Arm extended, Remo was holding him a good six inches off the damp parking lot.

"On top of that, I've gotta make sure my boss doesn't find out about any of this freaking hush-hush movie junk."

"Chlckkkkggghhh..." said Quintly Tortilli.

"What?" Remo asked, distracted. "Oh, yeah." Reaching over with his free hand, he swatted the director in the shoulder.

Tortilli felt the entire revolving world screech to a halt. As the Earth stopped, he alone began to spin. It was like an amusement park ride gone wild. He twirled and twirled and twirled in place until his brain felt as if it would spiral out his ear. The parking lot around him turned into a smeared horizon of indistinct blots.

He was moving too fast to even vomit. Centrifugal force kept his bile-charged food in his stomach.

It seemed that he was spinning forever. After an eternity of twirling, the blurs around him finally began to coalesce back into recognizable shapes.

Quintly dangled woozily above the ground. Distant buildings rolled in waves.

"Not that I should really care one way or the other about his stupid movie deal," Remo continued without missing a beat. "Smith'll find out sooner or later."

Remo was still holding Tortilli's necklaces. The chains bit into the director's neck. His face was purple.

"Ghhhhkkhhhh..." Tortilli gagged. The choking pressure made his head feel it was about to burst. Vomit was trapped in his throat at a point just below the gold knot.

"What?" Remo asked, annoyed.

"Ggggg ..." Tortilli begged.

"Oh. Save it for after the return trip," Remo advised.

Another swat to the shoulder. Tortilli felt himself spinning back in the opposite direction. The pressure at his neck lessened as the chains uncoiled. In less than thirty seconds, he'd twirled back to the starting point.

"Now," Remo said, dropping the reeling director to his feet, "same question as before. Cabbagehead's backers. And this time, try to limit gratuitous use of the F word."

Quintly's answer was distinctly nonverbal. Grabbing his stomach, the director doubled over. He promptly vomited the churning contents of his stomach onto the pavement. Bile and half-digested Cocoa Puffs splattered the outdoor set.

"Ew!" shrieked an appalled actress, whose naked torso was decorated with oozing rubber stab wounds. Quintly had discovered her behind the counter of a local pharmacy. Long legs smeared with artificial blood recoiled from the vomit.

"Darn," Remo complained. "I always forget the second part."

As Tortilli continued to heave, Remo reached out and pressed two fingers against a spot behind his left ear.

The director's throat froze in midvomit.

At Remo's touch, the retch caught in Tortilli's throat. He waited for a second, expecting it to come. It didn't. Not only that, but the desire to vomit was gone.

Panting, he looked around. The fuzzy world was beginning to take firmer shape. As he swallowed a gulp of sticky saliva, the bitter tang of bile burning in his mouth, one word croaked up his raw throat. "Schoenburg," Tortilli hissed.

"Huh?" Remo asked.

"Schoenburg's a Cabbagehead backer." Tortilli's voice grew stronger. "He's one of the biggest." He massaged his neck where the links from his chains had bitten into flesh. A flash of misplaced enthusiasm sparked in his bugging eyes. "Man, that was some trip."

"Stefan Schoenburg?" Remo asked. "The director?"

Tortilli nodded. "And George Locutus. Damn, you're strong. But you don't even look it. Can you do that thing again?" he asked hopefully. A long finger twirled the air.

Remo ignored him.

Stefan Schoenburg was arguably the most famous director in the history of film. And George Locutus was one of the most successful producers. Together, these two men nearly had a lock on the top-ten most profitable movies of all time. It didn't make sense that they'd have anything to do with a backwater company like Cabbagehead.

"Those two guys must be multimultimillionaires," Remo said. "What do they want with a dippy operation like this?"

"That's nothing," Tortilli boasted. "They're just the two biggest investors. There are dozens more." Tortilli quickly rattled off a few more names. If they weren't immediately familiar, most at least tweaked at the back of Remo's consciousness. Since he wasn't exactly up on all things Hollywood, they had to be famous. The Cabbagehead backers list was like a Who's Who of filmdom.

"Don't they make enough with their own bad movies without leeching off other people's?" Remo said. "What are they doing here?"

"Prestige," Tortilli explained. "Schoenburg was a box-office king for two decades but he wasn't happy till he finally got an Oscar. All of those guys are the same. Some want their first award, some want their tenth. That's Hollywood. It's all about the statue, baby."

Remo frowned. No matter how cutthroat the movie industry might be, he doubted that a man like Schoenburg would kill to extend his fame. That left few other options.

"Do you know of anybody who might have a grudge against the company? A fired employee? Maybe someone who actually paid good money to see one of your movies?"

"I don't handle that shi-" Quintly paused. After Remo's F word comment, he wasn't sure if another curse might incur his assailant's wrath. "That stuff. I'm creative."

"Tell that to somebody who didn't see your big hit."

Tortilli bristled. Then he remembered who he was talking to. "All the critics agreed Penny Dreadful was a great movie," Quintly pointed out meekly.

"It was a lot of great movies," Remo agreed. "I counted about ten before I pulled the tape out the VCR and heaved it out the window. And that was only in the first twenty minutes. You make a guy like Schoenburg look creative."

Skipping around the director, Remo headed back for his rental car. To Remo's great irritation, Tortilli hurried to keep pace with him.

"You've killed people, haven't you?" Tortilli ventured abruptly, bug eyes growing crafty.

"Not today," Remo replied sweetly.

"Wow! You're a real-life natural born killer!" Tortilli shouted, jumping with enthusiasm. "Man, that's so cool."

"I never said that," Remo said, glancing over his shoulder. The people back at the pathetic movie set hadn't heard. Most of the actors were already gone. Judging by their pupils, the apathetic attitude of those actors and crew that remained was chemical in nature.

"You didn't have to say it, man," Tortilli continued, his voice enthusiastic. "It's written on your face. In your eyes. Man, those are the deadest eyes I've ever seen."

As they walked, Tortilli began reaching toward Remo's face. Remo slapped the hands away. "Wowee! I didn't even see you move," Tortilli squealed, his tone a mixture of excitement and awe.

"Keep watching."

Remo doubled his pace. Tortilli jogged up beside him.

"You know, you never asked me if I, you know, actually knew the killers," the director said slyly from Remo's elbow.

Remo stopped dead. The killer's eyes that Tortilli had so admired a moment before became as frigid and menacing as the icy depths of space. "Talk fast," he said coldly.

Quintly registered his tone with some alarm. "I'm not sure I actually do," the director said quickly, raising his hands defensively. "I just hear talk sometimes. I didn't tell the cops, 'cause I don't trust them. But I trust you. Killers are always a lot more trustworthy than regular stiffs. It's a recurring theme in my movies. I can steer the way if you don't mind the most brilliant director in the history of film riding shotgun."

Remo considered this for a moment. He hated to admit it, but Tortilli could be helpful.

With a resigned sigh, he reached out and grabbed a cluster of Quintly Tortilli's chains. "If your voice gets any louder than your clothes, you're riding in the roof rack," he warned.

Pulling the director like a dog at the end of a leash, Remo headed for his rental car.

Chapter 4

His head was little more than a skull covered with a barren sheet of ancient parchment pulled taut. Gossamer tufts of yellowing-white hair above shelllike ears bobbed appreciatively with every birdlike movement of his neck.

Chiun, Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju, the most ancient house of assassins on the face of the planet, was being given a tour of his movie's soundstage.

The finishing touches had been put on the various sets weeks before. To the tiny Korean in his triumphant saffron kimono, they all looked authentic. And beautiful.

"All of the interiors are being shot on this stage," Hank Bindle said to the beaming figure at his side.

"What of locations?" Chiun asked, adding knowingly, "This is a term I have heard many times. It is when a movie goes outside. My film takes place largely in the province of New York in the filthy city of the same name."

"We've got a New York mock-up on a back lot here at Taurus," Bruce Marmelstein explained.

"We've already gotten some pretty good shots there."

"But we've shot in New York already, too," Hank Bindle said to his partner, the cochair of Taurus and the studio's business-affairs manager. Bindle was the creative member of the team. "That part of production wrapped two weeks ago."

"That's right," Marmelstein agreed. "We're all set there."

"Maybe a little second-unit stuff," Bindle cautioned.

Marmelstein turned to his partner. "This late? Did the A.D. tell you that?"

"This morning."

"That's gonna cut into time and production costs."

"Not my department," Hank Bindle said with indifference.

The Master of Sinanju wasn't listening to their insane prattle. The two of them talked incessantly without ever saying anything. After a trip to the men's room, they could sometimes blabber for hours nonstop. At least until the sniffling wore off.

"Two weeks," Chiun trilled. The very air around him seemed alive with joy. "Then it is nearly complete."

Neither Bindle nor Marmelstein disputed the assertion.

Chiun's shoulders shuddered visibly as he considered the implications of completed location work. His dream was that much closer to fruition.

He was a wizened figure who appeared to be as old as time itself. Anyone meeting him for the first time invariably assumed him to be nothing more than a frail old man. Bindle and Marmelstein knew better, which was why the cochairs of Taurus Studios were willing to take time out of their schedules to give a personal tour to the lowly screenwriter.

"The squad room," Hank Bindle pronounced. He swept his hand to the left.

The interior of a New York police precinct had been reproduced in meticulous detail. All that was missing was the ceiling and the side wall through which they now looked.

Chiun's radiant face beamed pure joy. "It is as if my words have come to life," he enthused, hazel eyes tearing.

"Chiun, baby, didn't you know? We're in the business of making magic," Bruce Marmelstein confided.

The three men walked onto the set. Paper-strewn desks were arranged haphazardly around the room. Behind the desks sat actors dressed in the familiar blue of the New York City Police Department.

Chiun frowned as they walked between a pair of desks. The two men nearest him seemed bored. They stared blankly into space. The phones atop their desks were silent.

The old Korean stopped so abruptly Bindle and Marmelstein almost plowed into him. The Master of Sinanju appraised the two men a moment before turning back to the studio cochairs, his wizened face perturbed.

"I do not believe these two are constables," he intoned.

"Constables?" Marmelstein whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

"Cops," explained Bindle, sotto voce.

"Oh," Marmelstein said aloud. "Well, that's 'cause they're not contribbles. They're just actors."

"Actors?" Bindle scoffed. "Not even. They're just extras. Walking props."

Chiun turned back to the nearest man. The uniformed extra had been drawn from his boredom by the conversation. He looked up to find the three men hovering above his desk. He seemed uncomfortable at the attention.

"I-I am Juilliard-trained," the man offered, knowing he had been insulted but not wishing to upset the studio heads.

"Give me your diploma," Bindle snorted. "I have to go to the can." He snorted loudly, glancing to his partner for support. Marmelstein choked at Bindle's wit.

The Master of Sinanju ignored the idiots. He tipped his head to one side, as if listening for something. After a moment, he reached a single long finger toward the actor. His nail-like a sharpened talon-pressed into the muscled shoulder of the man.

The flesh beneath the uniform was warm. Frowning, Chiun spun from the confused young man.

"This is not a prop," Chiun said. "It lives."

"Barely," Marmelstein mocked. "Uncredited, nonspeaking, union-scale drone. He might as well have a tattoo on his head saying, 'Hi, I'm the least important thing in this picture. Ignore me.'"

The young actor seemed crushed by the harsh assessment.

"It is being compensated for its time here?" the Master of Sinanju demanded. "Compen-whazzat?" Marmelstein asked Bindle. This time Hank was at a loss, too. Most four-syllable words that weren't the names of prescription drugs were beyond him.

"Paid," the seated actor supplied.

"Ohhh," Bindle and Marmelstein nodded in unison.

"Of course it's being paid," Manmelstein continued. "The union would have all our asses on a silver platter if we didn't pay the scene fillers."

Chiun crossed his arms over his tiny chest. "If it receives remuneration, why is it indolent?"

"Union-mandated break," Bindle explained. The young man was growing more and more perturbed as the conversation went on. With his acting skills, it was bad enough accepting a nonspeaking role to begin with. But to be continually referred to as little more than a chair or a mop was too much.

"Excuse me, sirs," the actor sniffed haughtily, "but I am a human being, not an 'it.'"

Sitting at his desk, arms crossed, face a mask of self-righteous anger, the young man almost dared the three of them to dispute him. He expected an argument. He expected more verbal abuse. He expected to be fired on the spot. He did not, however, expect what happened next.

The hand flashed out faster than any of their eyes could follow. Five bony fingers smacked with an audible crack into the back of the actor's head. The man's teeth came alive. They clattered like rattling dice inside his mouth. A filling in one molar popped out from the vibrations. And with that wash of sudden, blinding pain, all thoughts of self-righteous actor's anger died a Method death.

The Master of Sinanju wasn't even looking at the man he had just struck. It was as if the actor didn't exist.

"This brotherhood you speak of," Chiun said to the Taurus cochairs, "who are they that they would dare meddle in my wondrous production?"

Bindle and Marmelstein frowned in unison. "He means union," the seated actor offered timidly. Fingers and tongue searched his mouth for his AWOL filling.

"Oh, the union. Everything's union in this town," Bruce Marmelstein explained. "Bastards tell us what to do and what to pay everybody. Hell, they practically time the shitting schedule." His brow furrowed, genuinely confused. "But you must have joined the screenwriters' union."

"Ixnay, ixntay, " Bindle whispered to his partner.

"Ah, this is familiar to me." Chiun nodded, remembering now an early conversation he'd had with Hank Bindle about his union membership.

"Mr. Chiun doesn't believe in unions, Bruce," Bindle whispered.

"Of course not," Chiun sniffed. "A Master of Sinanju does not pay dues. He accepts tribute."

"I admire your integrity." Hank Bindle nodded.

"In-gritty what?" Marmelstein asked his partner. The definition of the unfamiliar word was never explained to the Taurus financial expert. Kimono swirling, the Master of Sinanju spun away from the two executives.

"You!" Chiun announced, aiming an imperious finger at the man he'd just assaulted. "Resume your work! "

The Juilliard graduate wasn't sure exactly what was expected of him. But his skull was still reverberating from the blow Chiun had struck. Flinging his filling to the floor, he grabbed up the prop phone from his desk. His weak smile sought approval.

But Chiun was no longer there. The old Korean had already whirled on to the next extra.

"Return to your duties, player!"

When the confused young actor hesitated, the Master of Sinanju's hand found a cluster of nerves at the small of his back. To the extra, it felt as if someone had poured boiling acid down his spine. Screaming, the man leaped obediently for his own desk.

The commotion brought the attention of everyone on the set. Chiun stormed into their midst.

"Hark, unimportant playactors!" he intoned to the gathered extras. "You are charged with the awesome task of breathing life into a story written by me! A more glorious duty you will never have in your pitiful lives of make-believe. Therefore, you will allow this joy and honor to sustain you, breakless, throughout the duration of filming."

There was muttering from the crowd.

Most of the actors merely seemed confused. A burly man at Chiun's elbow who understood exactly what was being said tapped the Master of Sinanju on the shoulder. His beefy face wore a surly expression.

"Or what?" he challenged.

Later he swore he'd gotten both words out before he became airborne. Most of the other extras told him he only got as far as the first syllable before he went sailing over their heads.

The rest of the cast and crew watched in shock as the 240-pound extra sailed over the mock-up walls of their squad room. He landed with a heavy thud somewhere distant. Judging by the ensuing hail of shrimp and finger sandwiches, he'd touched down in the vicinity of the craft-services tables.

As food rained down, the men and women on the set nearly plowed over one another in their haste to return to work. The soundstage exploded in a frenzy of activity. For the first time since Chiun's arrival, it looked like an actual police station. Standing amid the chaos, the old man beamed proudly over at Bindle and Marmelstein, who were standing near the edge of the set.

When Chiun looked away, Bindle elbowed Marmelstein in the ribs.

"What do we do?" Hank Bindle muttered nervously. His lips didn't move. Though his heart raced excitedly, he dared not even smile.

Bruce Marmelstein was equally unemotional. "We shut up and tell the A.D. to roll 'em," he whispered in reply. "This production is finally back on track."

Plastering on the phoniest toothy smile he could muster, Marmelstein strode across the chaotic set to the Master of Sinanju. Hank Bindle trotted to keep up.

Chapter 5

"I don't know if I know anything," Quintly Tortilli cautioned. As they drove through Seattle's suburban streets, a light mist collected sullenly on the windshield.

"You don't," Remo informed him blandly.

Tortilli missed the sarcasm. "It's just that I hear things," he persisted. "Some true, some not. People confide in me 'cause I'm at the vanguard of the new culture."

"You look just like the ass end of the old one," Remo said. "And what was our rule about annoying Mr. Driver?"

Tortilli instantly dummied up.

The last time he'd spoken out of turn, Remo had followed through on his roof-rack threat. Tortilli had spent fifteen minutes up in the rain clutching on for dear life as Remo tore down the highway.

His ugly purple suit was stained dark with water. He never thought polyester could absorb so much. On the floor, water pooled at his soles. His Skechers were soaked through. Dead bugs filled the gaps in his teeth.

Thankful to be in out of the cold and rain, the young director remained mute as Remo headed into a less reputable part of town. He offered directions with a pointed finger.

Along the street on which they now drove, squalid tenements scratched at the joyless earlymorning gray sky. The tiny front yards were pools of rain-spattered mud. In spite of the deteriorating neighborhood, the sidewalk seemed fairly new. The street itself was in good repair.

Remo suspected that the bombed-out look was affected. It had as much to do with Generation-X atmosphere as anything else. In the new counterculture, disrepair was chic.

"Mmm-mmm-mmin," Tortilli hummed abruptly. His bugging eyes were frantic. He tapped the dashboard.

"I told you to go while you were on the roof," Remo reminded him.

Tortilli shook his head violently. "Mmm-mmmmmm."

When Tortilli began to nod and point desperately, Remo realized they'd reached their destination. He pulled to the curb between a pair of matching rusted Ford Escorts.

"Okay, limited talking privilege is restored," he said to the shivering director. "Which one is it?" Quintly Tortilli scrunched up his already overscrunched face. It resembled a tightly balled fist.

"The guy I called said it was that one," he said. His pointed chin singled out a four-story building down the block. "But he could be wrong. He's just some guy I met in a bar who likes my movies. He said the group in there bragged about doing the sorority girls in Florida, the ones they found hanging from that tree. But they weren't in on the others. At least not according to my source."

Remo popped the door. "Then they'll only pay once," he promised thinly.

His tone made Tortilli shiver all the more.

As Remo rounded the curb, Quintly Tortilli opened his own door a crack. He jutted his protruding lips through the narrow opening.

"You gonna be okay?" Tortilli asked in a whisper. "My boy says there's a whole gang in there."

"Stay here," Remo said in reply. He slapped the director's door shut.

Tortilli had barely enough time to pull his pursed lips to safety. Just in case, he crossed his eyes and did a rapid inventory. He was relieved to find both lips still attached below his drooping, broad nose.

Trembling at the damp and cold, he glanced back up.

In both directions, the sidewalk that ran before the row of crumbling tenements was empty. Remo was already gone.

"Shit, a guy moves like that ought to be on film," Quintly Tortilli muttered, impressed. Suddenly recalling Remo's objection to his cursing, he bit his lip. "I hope his freakin' puritanism don't make me lose my knack for gritty, true-to-life urban dialogue," he said worriedly.

Frowning across every unnatural angle of his twisted face, the famous director began patting his soaked suit jacket. He needed a cigarette.

LIFE SUCKED.

Leaf Randolph knew it with certainty. He'd come to this drear conclusion during a single, drug-inspired epiphanic instant on his fifteenth birthday.

Until that moment of insight nearly ten years earlier, Leaf had been so consumed with the mundaneness of life that he hadn't really been aware of its pervasive suckiness.

Back then Leaf's father programmed for Macroware-the software giant based in Seattle. The Randolph patriarch was always too busy trying to eliminate the bugs du jour from the company's latest behind-schedule software to notice anything about his son's life. The fact that Leaf had become a junior high-school junkie wasn't even a blip on his radar.

Even though Leaf's mother had to know something was amiss, she turned a blind eye to his drug use. As his habit worsened, she retreated further into blissful ignorance. Whenever he was exceptionally stoned, she'd take to polishing the furniture. By the time Leaf was thirteen, the Randolph family had to wear sunglasses to Thanksgiving dinner in order to dull the glare from the credenza.

On that fateful day that would alter his outlook on life forever, Leaf and his two closest friends, Ben "Brown" Brownstein and Jackie Fams, had scored some Scandinavian Mist from a dealer who'd just smuggled it back from Europe. The stuff was powerful.

"Man, no wonder them Vikings, like, kicked the Pilgrims' ass," Brown commented as he exhaled his first puff of the extrastrong European marijuana.

He was perched on Mr. Randolph's tidy workbench. An electric guitar lay behind him.

Since it was Seattle and they were teenagers, the three of them were just expected to be in a band. Brown had gotten the expensive instrument two birthdays ago. He had yet to figure out how to tune it.

"Dude, don't Bogart it," complained Jackie when Brown started to take another hit. Grumbling, Brown passed off the joint to him. "Try not to drool all over it this time," he muttered.

Only when it came time to pass the marijuana back to where it had started-the soft, uncallused hands of Leaf Randolph-did the other two boys notice something was wrong.

Leaf was staring into the corner of the garage where his untouched drum set had been gathering dust for the past five years. But as they studied the expression on their friend's face, they realized that Leaf was looking at a place far beyond the confines of the two-car garage.

Since Leaf had been first to try the weed, his eerie silence and glazed expression were troubling to the others.

"Dude, what's up?" Jackie asked, afraid this

Euro junk was some kind of secret Russian podpeople plot to hollow out the brains of America's youth. He didn't realize that for years MTV had been doing a more effective job at this than the most diabolically inspired Communist mad scientist.

When Leaf spoke, his words were a croak. "It sucks, man," he said.

Jackie and Brown relaxed. Their brains-such as they were-were still their own.

"Are you shittin' me, dude?" Brown scoffed. "This shit is, like, the best."

"Not this, dude," Leaf said, accepting the joint in his clammy hand. "This. " As he took a massive toke, he swept his hand grandly. "The whole suckhole world."

"Oh," Jackie said, the light of understanding at last dawning in his glazed eyes.

The three of them pondered the implications of Leaf's remark for several long seconds.

Finally, Jackie broke the silence. "Your mom got any Twinkies?" he said, scratching his nose. Leaf didn't try to press his revelation any further. The implications were clear to him. That was enough.

The knowledge that life was grim and pointless made the following few years even more miserable for young Leaf. He was the only one who understood. Truly understood.

Life was just one bleak minute after another.

Stretching into hours, crawling into days, oozing into years, collapsing into decades.

You died young, you died old. Whatever. It didn't matter. No matter what you did, you still died.

Only single moments of pure intensity broke up the endless, tedious minutes between his fifteenth and twenty-fourth years. Some of these were caused by drugs. If life was a dotted line, his drugged moments were the dots that broke up the empty sameness of the rest of the page.

The only other moments for Leaf that most approached happiness were those of greatest agony. Pain-like any drug-was intense. And Leaf found that he liked to inflict pain. On himself, on others. It really didn't matter.

The razor-blade scarification he practiced on himself and on his strung-out girlfriends inevitably led to murder. A slit arm, a slit throat-what was the difference?

The first girl had been a whore. He was underage at the time. Circumstances were such that they hadn't even bothered to try him as an adult. He walked when he turned twenty-one.

After that, Leaf had picked his moments more carefully. There were other bodies, but they weren't as likely to be traced back to him as the first. Like that pair he and his buds had been hired to take out in Florida.

That one had been sweet. Two girls, tons of screaming and-best of all-money. Leaf was about to enjoy the last of the dough he'd made on that weird job.

He was sitting on the damp floor of his dingy basement apartment. A couple of hard-core friends-he'd long outgrown Jackie and Brown-had just returned with some brown gold.

Grimy needles were passed around. Leaf was lifting his syringe to his scarred forearm when something caught his eye.

A flash of movement.

A small rectangular window at the top of the foundation wall looked out on the backyard. When he looked up, Leaf saw a pair of legs glide past.

The other four men weren't paying attention. In the corner of the shadowy room, the TV hummed softly. Looking at the bright colors on the screen, a pair of the men muttered unintelligibly to one another.

"Shh," Leaf hissed.

When they glanced at him, the others saw that he was looking toward the window. All eyes turned that way.

As he strained to listen, the only noise Leaf could hear was dull music from the TV. Otherwise, all was silent.

Maybe he'd imagined the legs. "What?" one of the other junkies said.

Leaf shook his head. "I guess it was noth-" he began.

All at once a horrible wrenching sound came from the rear of the room. Whipping his head around, Leaf briefly saw something big and flat sail past the window. He swore it had the wedge-shaped contours of the entire bulkhead assembly-concrete base and all. The crash was far away.

The garish gray light of dawn spilled down the wet stairs. Carried down with it came a voice. "Surprise! You've been selected a winner in the official Marion Barry Needle Giveaway Sweepstakes!"

Leaf saw the legs again. They seemed to melt down the backstairs. They were attached to a lean young man who screamed "trouble" with every confident step. In the shadows of the basement, his eye sockets were black and menacing.

The five men scrambled to their feet.

"Oh, there's five of you," Remo lamented as he came across the basement floor. "Sorry, but according to contest rules, you can't all be winners. We have to save some drug paraphernalia for our sponsor. Who's in charge here?"

"Who the fuck are you?" Leaf demanded.

"That answers that question." Remo nodded. The druggies had fanned out around him. Each carried some sort of weapon, but judging by the way they walked, only two of them had guns. Remo singled out one of those.

"In the spirit of tobacco companies paying for antismoking public-service announcements, I am required by the official terms of the Marion Barry Needle Giveaway Sweepstakes to offer a live PSA on the evils of drug use."

The men clearly didn't know what to make of this strange intruder. When they glanced to Leaf for instructions, Remo was already sweeping his arm up and around.

He clapped a cupped hand on the top of the head of one of the gunmen, creating a vacuum. Shocked, the man tried to pull away but found he could not. It was as if Remo's hand were welded to his head. "This is your brain," Remo intoned somberly.

Remo pulled up. The resulting tug of air pressure popped skull bones that had been fused since childhood. Weak flesh surrendered to a force more powerful than a fired cannon ball. With a sucking sound, three pounds of gray matter launched out of the top of the man's head. The brain landed with a fat wet splat at the feet of the four surviving drug addicts.

"This is your brain on the floor," Remo continued. He looked at the others, eyes dead. "Any questions?"

For lifelong drug addicts, the reactions of the remaining four were remarkably quick. Three switchblades snicked open. One of the men whipped a revolver from the back of his waistband, swinging it at Remo's face.

Remo concentrated first on the gunman. "Here's another PSA for you," Remo began. As the young man's finger tightened on the trigger, Remo's hand flashed out. With a quick tug, he pulled the man forward, steering the barrel of the gun into the open mouth of another junkie. With a muffled pop, the gun took off the back of the startled drug addict's skull.

Clouding eyes wide, the dead man joined the first body on the concrete floor.

"Guns don't kill people," Remo concluded to the startled gunman. His voice was cold. "I kill people."

As the gunman tried to take aim a second time, a slap from Remo steered the barrel of the weapon deep into the man's own forehead. He collapsed with a life-draining sigh.

Beside Leaf, the last junkie tried to run. Remo snagged him by the scruff of the neck, flinging him back absently.

Soaring backward, the drug addict hit the foundation wall at supersonic speed. Every bone in his body was crushed on impact. As the gelatinous body slipped to the floor, the cracked concrete veneer revealed a man-shaped silhouette.

With a horrible sinking feeling, Leaf realized that he was alone. He dropped his knife and threw up his hands.

"I surrender!" he pleaded.

"That's not how this works," Remo replied, voice hard. "What happens now is I ask you questions in exchange for mercy points. Each question answered truthfully brings you a step closer to the mercy you don't deserve. Each lie erases a single mercy point. Understand?"

Leaf had fallen to his knees. Tears welled up in his bleary eyes. He knew that he was minutes away from death. And in those moments that he now knew would be his very last on Earth, Leaf had another realization-in its intensity much like the one he'd had back in his parents' garage so many years ago.

Life was worth living. "Please," he begged, sniffling.

Remo ignored him. "The girls in Florida..." Leaf sucked in an involuntary mouthful of air. Guilt flooded his fearful eyes.

"The ones you mutilated and hung from a tree," Remo persisted. "Give me the who, how and why."

Given the surroundings, Remo expected to hear that they'd been influenced by the Cabbagehead movie that depicted a similar scene. Since Quintly Tortilli had said that this group was involved only in the Florida murders, Remo assumed that Leaf and his cohorts were part of some larger gang that got off on mimicking the violence depicted in the low-budget films. But Leaf Randolph's response surprised him.

"We were paid."

Remo blinked. "Paid?" he said.

"Yeah." Leaf nodded. "This guy called me on the phone one night. Told me what we should do and where we should do it." He glanced at his dead compatriots. His frightened eyes grew sick. He closed them, hoping full disclosure would buy him some of Remo's promised mercy points.

Remo's thoughts were beyond Leaf and his companions. He was right back to his own suggestion to Smith that this was a scheme to enrich Cabbagehead's backers.

"You recognize his voice?" he pressed.

"No. He said he knew about me, is all."

"If he paid you, how'd you get the money?"

"He mailed it here."

Remo glanced around. The place was a shambles. Empty fast-food wrappers and dirty laundry were spread everywhere, interspersed with a multitude of used needles.

"I don't suppose you filed the envelope?" Remo asked.

Leaf bit his lip. "That was weeks ago. I tossed it somewhere. But my mom's come to clean once since then. I guess it could still be here." Leaf hugged himself for warmth. "Weird about that Cabbagehead flick that came out after. It was like seeing myself on screen."

Remo turned back to him. "You didn't know about the movie beforehand?" he said.

Leaf shook his head. "No way. When those other ones happened-like that family in Maryland-I thought, wow." He tipped his head. "You think someone got paid there, too?"

As he leaned his head to one side in a questioning pose, Leaf's exposed neck was too tempting an invitation to refuse. Remo dropped his hand against the drug addict's throat.

A short, meaty buzz, and Leaf's head thudded to the floor. His body joined it a split second later.

Hands on hips, Remo surveyed the grisly scene, a troubled frown across his dark features.

There hadn't been a lone group of killers. In spite of Tortilli's source, Remo assumed this would be the case. But now this seemed too organized to be the work of any of the dolts he'd seen at Cabbagehead. Something was going on here. Something that somehow seemed bigger than either he or Smith had originally suspected.

Turning on his heel, he headed back up the mossy stairs to the backyard. On the flickering television, the warm pastel colors of Tipsy and Doh reflected against the dull plastic surfaces of the many scattered syringes.

AS REMO REACHED the sidewalk out front, a thought occurred to him.

"Dammit," he muttered suddenly.

"What's wrong?"

Quintly Tortilli was standing next to Remo's car, a cigarette hanging desperately from his lips.

"I probably should have asked how much they got paid," Remo said. "Oh, well. Let's go." He rounded the car.

Tortilli stayed on the sidewalk.

"You did more than talk, didn't you?" he said knowingly over the roof of the car, an excited gleam in his eye. "You kacked them, didn't you?"

Remo popped the driver's-side door. "Remo leaving," he warned. "Is bad director coming, too?"

"No way, man," Quintly Tortilli said, shaking his head excitedly. "You've got real-live dead bodies piled back there and you expect me to leave? I only get to see fake violence in my line of work. This is like a fu-" He caught himself. "It's like a dream come true."

Flinging his cigarette to the mud, Tortilli spun away from the car. He fairly danced down the street, a gangly figure in a soaking-wet leisure suit.

As Tortilli disappeared around the alley beside Leaf Randolph's tenement, Remo climbed behind the wheel.

For a moment, he considered waiting for Quintly Tortilli. After all, the director had already given him a lead. And this was a dangerous neighborhood. On the other hand, Remo would be doing the entire moviegoing public a favor if he abandoned Tortilli and allowed the natural savagery of an area like this to take its course.

In the end, it was no contest.

"That movie was really bad," Remo said in justification.

He turned the key in the ignition.

Remo drove off into the mist, abandoning the young auteur to the mercy of the mean streets he loved so dearly.

Chapter 6

Polly Schien didn't like the way the men looked at her.

There were a lot of them. All dressed in the same bland gray jumpsuits with the same logo on the back-GlassCo Security Windows of New Jersey, Inc. For most of the past week, it seemed as if the offices of Barney and Winthrop had been taken over by the men in GlassCo gray.

Polly had decided on day one that she could have done without them. This tired thought flitted through her brain for what seemed like the hundredth time as yet another one of the workers passed her desk.

The black stubble around his mouth cracked into a leer as he glanced at her chest. Even though she'd been wearing turtleneck sweaters the past few days, she still felt naked.

Polly used one hand to gather the wool more tightly at her neck. It was a move she was all too familiar with.

"Do you mind?" she demanded angrily.

"Not at all. Just gimme a time."

The comment brought a rough cackle from the other jumpsuited men nearby. Polly's coworkers-especially the women, but even some of the men of Barney and Winthrop-looked on in mute sympathy.

It wasn't a very nice atmosphere. The window people were horrible. Gross. Totally unprofessional. The only one that seemed like a human being was their supervisor.

He was English. Polly always had a thing for Englishmen. If an American male had had the same pasty skin, unmuscled body, overbite, big nose and awkward hunch as the GlassCo supervisor, Polly wouldn't have given him the time of day. But on this man the whole package somehow seemed regal.

It was the accent, of course. Polly knew it was her one true weakness. In Polly Schien's mind, all you had to do was slap a British accent on a man who was a hillbilly in every other discernible way and suddenly Jethro Bodine became Prince Charles. But she couldn't think about that right now.

The rude GlassCo worker wasn't leaving her alone. He was still standing beside her desk, holding a tube of that special caulking he and his coworkers had been using to further cement the windows in place. For what reason, Polly had no idea. None of the windows on the thirty-second floor of the Regency Building in Midtown Manhattan so much as rattled, let alone popped out of their frames.

"What time do you get off?" The man leered.

Beyond him, near the huge gleaming panes of glass that overlooked the busiest city in the world, some of the nearest GlassCo men on ladders paused at their work. They, too, held tubes of the same caulking. They rested them on the top tiers of the collapsible steps as they watched the drama at the desk below. Farther down the line of windows, bright midmorning sun beat in on other similarly dressed workers, still busy at their pointless task.

"Leave me alone," Polly said, annoyed. The scruffy man had made advances before, but this day he seemed particularly aggressive. She had already considered a sexual-harassment suit, but dismissed the idea. The guy looked like he drank everything he ever made. Going after GlassCo itself was out of the question. She dared not risk upsetting you-know-who.

"Edward, would you please return to work? I'd like to finish this morning."

The voice came from behind Polly. It was the purest, most flawless upper-crust British accent she had ever heard. The English language distilled. Him.

The GlassCo worker-whose jumpsuit patch identified him as Ed, not Edward-glanced behind Polly in the direction from which the voice had come. A frown blossomed. Reluctantly, he left the desk. With the party over, the rest of the GlassCo workers turned back to the panes.

Polly felt her heart trip in her fluttering chest as she heard the precise footfalls on the drab carpet behind her. A moment after he had spoken, he slipped gracefully around before her, a silhouette carving a noble shadow from the flaming yellow sunlight behind him.

"I am most dreadfully sorry," Reginald Hardwin purred.

"That's al-"

Polly never finished the sentence.

He took her hand. Actually took it in his!

His hands were soft. Not a callus on them. Not like those of the American lunkheads always working out at the gym, pumping iron to prove how macho they were. Here was a real man. Soft skin, yellow teeth and all.

Polly felt her face flush crimson.

"This has been a trying week. For all of us." Still holding her hand, Reginald sat on the edge of her desk. "These creatures that I am forced to work with are oafs."

"Oh, they're not-" She swallowed hard. "They're okay."

Reginald smiled. "You're too kind."

She was disappointed when he released her hand. A moment later, he was back on his feet. As he turned to walk away, Polly Schien leaned toward him.

"I hope I'm not being too forward, but..." She seemed flustered. "Are you a lord or something?"

Pausing before her, Reginald smiled sadly. "While the aristocracy has fallen on difficult times of late, things have not gotten so bad for the royals that they must work for GlassCo Security Windows of New Jersey. No, I'm afraid I am just a simple expatriate doing a simple job."

"Oh." Polly seemed embarrassed. "It's just your use of language. It's so precise. We don't get much of that here."

"You really are too, too kind." Reaching out, he brushed her cheek with his velvet fingertips.

And with that, he was gone.

The GlassCo men finished whatever it was they were doing half an hour later. They-along with Reginald Hardwin-left ten minutes after that.

Polly cursed herself inwardly the entire time they were cleaning up and climbing aboard the elevators. "'Are you a lord?"' she muttered sarcastically after the gleaming elevator doors closed on her Prince Charming for the last time. "Was that the best you could do? Dammit, how stupid can I get?" She slapped herself in the forehead.

Her one chance at landing a real man, and she'd blown it. Horribly.

Polly had been unable to approach him as he was packing to go. She was too embarrassed. Now that he was gone, she replayed the moment over and over.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid."

The embarrassment lingered for a time, but as the minutes wore on, it was rapidly eclipsed by anger.

Her mother used to say that no opportunity was a lost opportunity. Maybe she could still turn this around. Maybe he'd think it was funny. Maybe the two of them could laugh about it over dinner at her place.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Before his elevator had reached the lobby, Polly Schien had made her decision.

One of the workers had said that GlassCo was located over in Jersey City. She had a few Jersey phone books on her desk. Finding the right one, she scanned the business white pages for GlassCo.

It wasn't there. Nor was GlassCo listed anywhere in the Yellow Pages.

She had already decided on a course of action. There was no turning back now. Boldly, she picked up her phone, stabbing in the number for information.

"Yes, hello. In Jersey City. The number for GlassCo?"

An electronic voice told her that the number had been disconnected.

Polly slowly replaced the phone.

Her face a puzzled frown, she slumped back in her chair, trying to think of a possible explanation for why the GlassCo company would just up and disappear.

As she stared out the windows her dream man had refurbished, the late-morning sunlight seemed to take on a brighter, more dazzling hue. It was as if the rays had broken up and taken flight, soaring brilliantly toward her.

Polly didn't have time to think about the beauty of it. The split second after she'd noticed the breathtaking optical illusion, shards of glass from the exploding windowpanes ripped mercilessly through her face and chest. Her body was shredded to pate. The shock wave followed, picking up the raw meat of Polly's corpse and flinging it backward.

Heavy desks were thrown through cubicle walls. At the same time the plastique on the windows was detonated, dull explosions at the interior of the building blew the debris back outward.

The offices of Barney and Winthrop, as well as the entire thirty-second floor of the Regency Building, were wiped out in a matter of seconds. Dust and powdery glass exploded through the gaping holes all around the building.

Glass panes above and below the blast zone separated from their frames. They broke away in sheets, like ice sheering from the side of a massive glacier. And as the Manhattan skyline trembled, enormous deadly shards soared down toward Madison Avenue.

THIRTY-TWO FLOORS BELOW, Reginald Hardwin replaced the retractable silver antenna of his portable detonator with a single crisp slap of his palm.

"'Are you a lord?'" he mocked. "Daft bint." The other trucks had already gone. His was the last.

He watched in satisfaction as the windows around the thirty-second floor began separating from the building.

As the huge slabs of deadly glass began raining on Manhattan, Hardwin climbed quickly behind the wheel of the final GlassCo truck.

"And we did it all in one take," his smooth-asbutter English voice commented proudly.

On the sidewalk beside him, a smartly dressed woman was impaled through her upturned face by a sheet of glass.

While numerous screaming pedestrians met similar ends, Reginald Hardwin drove calmly away from the scene of carnage.

IN A DINGY APARTMENT in Queens, a solitary figure watched the news replay the shaky footage of the events in nearby Midtown Manhattan.

Video cameras were ubiquitous these days; a tourist visiting New York had caught some of the initial blast.

At the sound of the explosion, the camera whipped up the side of the Regency just in time to film the windows blow into empty air. The glass rushed out, seemingly in tiny fragments. Catching sunlight, the fragments fell like pixie dust onto the crowd far below.

The news edited out much of the resulting gore. A little blood here, a staggering pedestrian there. And a lot of screaming and running.

In his tiny room, the man smiled. Behind him, a ragged American flag had been slung across the water-damaged pressboard wall. On a rusted hook next to the door hung Alice Anderson's green Girl Scout beret and sash. Dark circles indicated where the merit badges had been removed.

"And Act One goes off without a hitch," Captain Kill announced proudly to the squalid room. Leaving the TV on, he focused his attention back on his typewriter. He scrolled another sheet of crisp, clean paper into the carriage.

As the television murmured softly in the background, the sound of two-fingered typing clacked slowly and methodically, rebounding against the stained walls of the tiny apartment.

Chapter 7

Harold W. Smith watched the aftermath of the explosion in Midtown Manhattan on the small black-and-white television in his office at Folcroft Sanitarium.

The old TV sat at the edge of his gleaming hightech desk, the sole modern intrusion in the otherwise Spartan office. Hidden within the depths of the onyx slab on which the television rested was a computer screen, angled so that it was visible only to whoever sat behind the desk. The familiar alphanumeric arrangement of a keyboard was buried at the edge of the slab. Smith's gnarled fingers drummed swiftly away at the keys.

The computer monitor also functioned as a television screen, but the director of CURE was already using his system to monitor both police and press reports of the incident.

The blast had occurred no more than twenty minutes before, so there was little information beyond the immediate hysteria that normally accompanied such an occurrence.

Smith was certain only that there had been an explosion and that, as yet, no one was taking credit for the blast. His tired eyes were scanning lines of text, hoping to learn something new, when a familiar jangle sounded at his right ankle.

Continuing to read the latest data, Smith reached into the bottom desk drawer. Removing the cherry-red phone from its eternal resting place, he tucked the receiver between shoulder and ear.

"Yes, Mr. President," he said crisply.

"You hear about New York?"

The hoarse drawl would have been familiar to all Americans. In the past two years, it had become an irritant even to the those who had twice installed him in the highest office in the land.

"I am monitoring the situation even as we speak," Smith replied.

"And?"

Smith paused in his work, the telephone receiver balanced in the crook of his neck. His fingers rested at the edge of his desk. "And what, Mr. President?" he asked.

"What the hell's going on?" the President demanded.

"Very little," Smith admitted. "You are aware that this happened only twenty-two minutes ago?"

"Dammit, I know that," the President said impatiently. "But this isn't like those African embassies two years ago. This is goddamn New York City, Smith. That and Hollywood are my two fundraising cash cows. If they're pissed at me in Manhattan, it could seriously impact my legal-defense fund."

Smith's fingers dropped from his keyboard.

He wanted to be appalled. After all, there were bodies at that very moment still oozing warm blood on Manhattan sidewalks, and the President of the United States was more worried about how a domestic terrorist attack could affect his fund-raising apparatus. Yet, though he wanted to be shocked, Smith could not be. That sharp edge had been dulled by this particular President a long time ago.

"Plus the ball-and-chain's still got her eye on a Senate seat there," the President pressed. "Now. Six years from now. She won't even tell me for sure. Whatever you have to do to nail this thing down, do it fast. I didn't squeak out of that impeachment thing only to have something like this overshadow my last year in office."

Smith considered letting it pass. After all, they'd been down this same road more times than he cared to remember over the past two years. Yet a response was necessary.

Worn leather chair creaking in protest, Smith leaned forward. He touched a firm hand to his desk. "Mr. President," he began, as if reciting by rote. "I will take this opportunity to remind you once more that CURE is not here as a quick fix to any passing political crisis. Your seven predecessors all understood that. For nearly four decades, this has been the arrangement and it will remain thus as long as I am director."

The President's reply was preceded by an angry snort of air. "Get off your high horse, Smith," he growled. "They bombed New York, for Christ's sake. Stuff like this is right up your alley."

"Yes," Smith agreed, "but if CURE is to get involved, I want you to be clear why. It will be because I have determined that there is a threat warranting our attention. It will not be to protect your reputation with your donors or to aid your wife in a political campaign. Is that clear?"

There was a pause during which Smith expected to hear the President hang up the phone. That had happened a few times lately, as well. But the Commander in Chief remained on the line. When he spoke, it was as if he were biting off every sour word and spitting them at Smith.

"Do I still get to suggest assignments?"

"Suggest, yes," Smith admitted.

"Then I suggest you move the hell into New York and find out what's going on. And I suggest you put those two guys on it."

"I am afraid that is not possible at the moment."

"Why not?"

"One of them is already on assignment."

"Pull him off."

Smith tried to sound reasonable. "Mr. President, there is nothing as yet to direct him to. If this bombing proves to be part of a larger problem, I will bring him in. Until then, it is more important to learn precisely what we are dealing with. One of the earliest reports I read indicated that it may be no more than a ruptured gas line."

"Do you think that's what it is?"

"I am dubious," Smith admitted.

"So what are you arguing for? There's a bomber loose out there. I had TWA, Oklahoma City and Centennial Park take place on my watch. Those things dragged on forever. I want this one finished fast and neat. Is that understood?"

Smith's bloodless lips thinned. "Mr. President, do I need to repeat myself yet again?" A hint of impatience colored his lemony tone.

There was icy silence for a long moment. At last, America's Chief Executive spoke.

"It's within my power to disband your organization," the President of the United States said, hoarse voice flat.

Smith would not be baited. "Mr. President, if you wish for CURE to cease operations, you need only give the word."

There was another pause, during which Smith heard only the President's labored breathing. "You don't like me much, do you, Smith?" The words seemed to come from nowhere. Smith was surprised at the frankness of the question.

"It is not my place as director of this organization to either like or dislike a sitting President," he replied.

"But you'll be happy when I'm gone."

"Mr. President, I am no longer a young man. It is possible that you will outlast me."

"Anything is possible, Smith," said the President of the United States. "Anything at all."

The line went dead in Smith's hand.

Slowly, the CURE director replaced the receiver. He pushed the bottom desk drawer closed.

In the background, the grainy television continued to play its visions of horror. Bland announcers described the carnage in soft, measured tones. Smith was no longer listening. He turned slowly in his chair.

The one-way glass at the rear of his office overlooked the sprawling back lawn of Folcroft, which crept down a steady slope until it was swallowed up by Long Island Sound.

In his cracked leather chair, Smith watched the gently rolling water lap the shore.

The President was right. Smith didn't like him. Since taking over the helm of the secret organization, the director of CURE had found something to like in every President. There had been only two who, in his opinion, had neither decency nor integrity, but they were at least easy to get along with on a professional level.

Every man he had served under had been from the World War II generation. Smith's generation. Whether they were saints or sinners, he flattered himself to think that he had understood them all.

But this new Chief Executive was cut from a different cloth. There were those who said this younger man represented a tidal shift in American politics. And if he was the future of America, then perhaps at no other time was it more obvious that Smith was part of its past.

There was no doubt that the President's last words had been a cryptic threat to remove Smith from CURE. It didn't matter. Smith had known from the outset that that time would one day come. Lately, his aging body had been warning him that the time might nearly be at hand.

When his last day finally came, Smith would leave willingly, knowing that he had made a difference. To ensure that any secrets he possessed died with him, he would swallow the coffin-shaped pill hidden in the pocket of his gray vest. And with his last breath, Harold W. Smith would pray not only for America's future, but also for the men who would lead the nation there.

But all of that would come another day. Until then, he had work to do.

Tearing his eyes away from the rolling black waves, Smith spun quietly back to his computer.

Chapter 8

Remo heard about the bombing in New York on his car radio while driving back to the Cabbagehead Productions offices. He pulled over at the first pay phone he saw. When he got out of the car, the air in the street was thick with the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

Beside the booth, a street performer flailed away on an electric guitar. The screeching sounds emanating from the wobbling amplifier at his feet rattled windows five blocks away. To remove the noisy distraction, Remo punted the musician's amp half a mile down the street. It splintered into blessedly silent fragments in front of a coffee shop.

The performer-who looked about nineteen-spun to Remo. Filthy blond bangs slapped against his pasty face.

"That was Nirvana, dude," he snarled as Remo scooped up the telephone receiver.

"No," Remo explained, pressing the multiple-1 code that would connect him to CURE's special line. "Nirvana is a transcendent state in Buddhism of pure peace and enlightenment, achieved by stuffing a guitar down someone's throat. Wanna help me get there?"

The look in Remo's eyes cowed the sidewalk minstrel. Gibson guitar in hand, he beat a hasty retreat down the damp street in the direction of his smashed amp.

Smith answered on the first ring.

"What is it?" the CURE director asked tensely.

"I just heard about the explosion in New York," Remo said. "You want me to fly back?"

"There is nothing concrete yet," Smith said, voice flirting on the edge of exasperation, as if he'd already been through this with Remo.

"Is something wrong, Smitty?" Remo said, brow furrowing. "You're not generally on the rag right out of the gate."

The tension drained from Smith's voice. "I'm sorry," he sighed. "It's been a trying morning." He cleared his throat. "The explosion in Manhattan is barely forty-five minutes old. No useful information has yet been learned."

"They're saying terrorists on the radio."

"That is not known yet. And speculation is pointless and potentially dangerous at this juncture," Smith cautioned. "I need not remind you of the wild accusations that followed in the wake of the federal building bombing in Oklahoma City. I will continue to monitor the situation in New York and will decide on a course of action once the facts are known. Until then, do you have anything to report there?"

"It's weirder than I thought," Remo began. "Turns out this is a profit-making scheme after all. I met some of the entrepreneurs this morning."

"Explain."

Remo provided a rapid rundown of what he had learned from Leaf Randolph, including the fact that he'd been hired over the phone and that he and his companions were responsible for only the two Florida murders.

"I will have the apartment searched," Smith said once he was through, "in addition to checking phone records."

"Start with calls from California," Remo suggested. "I know independent movies usually love being up to their ankles in corpses, but this plot's way too complicated for them. Which reminds me, you didn't tell me the Cabbagehead backers list reads like the Fortune 500."

"What do you mean?" Smith asked.

"I mean you can't fling a dead cat at their offices without it landing on a check from some slumming Hollywood moneybags. They've got millionaires up the wazoo up here."

"Remo, according to my information, the studio is owned by one Shawn Allen Morris."

"Don't believe everything you read," Remo advised.

Smith hummed thoughtfully. "Give me some of the names, please," he said, his tone betraying mild intrigue.

Remo could almost hear the CURE director's fingers poised over his keyboard. He decided to go for the bombshell first. "Try Stefan Schoenburg on for size," he suggested.

The CURE director paused. "I have heard of him."

"So's everyone else on the planet. He's been picking all our pockets for the last twenty years." Remo then mentioned a few of the other names he could recall. Even though the rest were celebrities in their own right, Schoenburg was the only one Smith recognized. When he checked the others, he found that all were millionaires. One was actually a billionaire.

"One moment," Smith said, puzzled.

A few minutes of rapid typing ensued. When Smith returned to the line, his confusion was unmistakable.

"I believe I have found a partial list of investors," he said. "There are many more individuals than those you named. I have rarely encountered a more convoluted money trail. It is a veritable Gordian knot of finance."

"Must have hired Gary Coleman's accountants," Remo said. "So what's the deal?"

"I am looking at one producer's financial information now," Smith said. "He seems a typical Cabbagehead investor. Roughly half of the funds he invested in the Seattle film group seem to have been filtered through companies that distribute films of an, er, adult nature. The other half was routed circuitously through real-estate ventures."

"Were they just fronts?" Remo asked.

"No. The distributors and land transactions were legal. That some of the money was then siphoned to Seattle seems almost an afterthought during the normal course of business."

"Hmm. I'd heard that everybody in Hollywood was into either land or porn," Remo mused.

"Yes," Smith agreed uncomfortably. "Although knowing this does not answer the underlying question. Why would men who are successful in their own right seek to associate themselves with such a small-time film operation and then seem to act to cover up that association?"

"They'll only cover up until Oscar night," Remo explained. "After that they'll be pushing each other into the orchestra pit trying to grab the gold."

"I am being serious, Remo."

"Me, too," Remo insisted. "I'm only telling you what I heard. And given our past experiences in Hollywood, I don't think it stretches credibility. These numbnuts already have all the money in the world. Now they want recognition."

Smith mulled Remo's argument. "Perhaps," he admitted after a moment. "But what is the likelihood that Cabbagehead films could produce an award-winning movie?"

"C'mon, Smitty. Get out of the office once in a while. The sort of junk they make wins awards all the time."

The weary sigh of Harold Smith carried over the line.

On the other side of the country, alone in his Folcroft office, Smith was thinking of his conversation with the President. Perhaps he was a relic of another age, too far behind the times to be useful in this new era.

"If it is as you say, then it is possible the motivation here is egocentric," the CURE director admitted tiredly. "I will attempt to follow the money chain further. In the meantime, I would advise you to return to your source. He was helpful already-perhaps he knows something that could be of further use."

Remo balked. "Oh, come on, Smitty," he complained. "There's got to be some other way. Quintly Tortilli is a dingdong with a capital ding. You've got to stick him on the roof just to shut him up, and he dresses like a Latvian pimp. I got motion sickness just from looking at his shirt."

"Please, Remo," Smith pressed.

From his tone, he sounded too fatigued to argue. At the Seattle phone booth, Remo spun to face the road.

Row after row of coffeehouses faced one another across the street as far as the eye could see. Too many, it seemed, for all of them to be sustainable. Yet people continually entered and exited shops at a pace so steady Remo was certain they had to be going out one door and into the next. He closed his eyes on the seemingly choreographed activity.

"Fine, I'll track down Tortilli," Remo relented. "But if he isn't dead already, I just might kill him myself."

Before Smith was able to ask if he was joking, Remo dropped the phone back into its cradle.

WHEN THE SLACKER generation had first found a home in the independent-film industry, it seemed a match made in heaven. Every loafer with no job and an eight-millimeter camera could be a genius in his parents' basement without suffering through the mundaneness of everyday family, work or life responsibilities. But with the elevation of indie films beyond cult status, a new pressure was brought to bear on an industry not famous for its strong work ethic. The success of low-budget movies at Telluride, Cannes, Sundance and other film festivals had upped the ante even more. The Blair Witch Project only made matters worse. The urgency to be the studio to create the next Quintlyesque counterculture hit grew more intense with each season. At the moment, no one felt the pressure more than Shawn Allen Morris.

"We can't survive this," Shawn wailed to the gray, mist-filled sky. "How can we have a Quintly Tortilli film without Quintly Tortilli?"

"Everyone else does," pointed out a soundman who worked part-time bagging groceries at a local supermarket.

"They are producing knockoff shit. We had the real Tortilli. A Tortilli original out of Cabbagehead would have gone all the way to March."

"The studio has had a few hits lately."

Shawn waved a dismissive hand. "Flukes. Arthouse hits. We could have had a box-office bonanza here."

He was sitting on a plastic milk crate on the parking-lot set of The Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick Maker. The blood machines were idle. The cast and crew of locals hired for the production sat glumly on crates around the roped-off area.

The ropes were just for show. In a week of shooting, the only thing that had dropped by the set was a single stray dog. It had wandered away from a pack that stalked the woods around the nearby reservoir. At the moment it was sleeping at Shawn's feet. The filthy reservoir dog snored loudly, unconcerned for Shawn Allen Morris or his studio's plight.

As Shawn sat bemoaning his fate, an engine purred to a stop beyond the string of ropes. When he glanced up, his dispirited gaze alighted on a familiar car. The Cabbagehead executive watched glumly as Remo Williams got out.

The dog at Shawn's feet lifted its nose. After sniffing the air, it laid its head back down to the damp asphalt.

Remo's expression was sour as he crossed to Shawn.

"Where's Tortilli?" Remo asked, glancing around.

Shawn wanted to snort derisively, but the ache beneath his new wrist cast warned him against it. Instead, he settled on a self-pitying sigh.

"In jail," Shawn said morosely from his milkcrate seat.

"Grand theft plot?" Remo frowned, unsure whether or not he should be pleased that Tortilli was even alive.

"No. Something about killing people or something." Shawn waved, uninterested. "I didn't talk to him. And who cares about that now? How am I going to finish this picture? I need a genius that rivals Quintly Tortilli."

Rerno pointed to the sleeping dog. "Give him a beret and megaphone," he suggested. He bit the inside of his cheek.

It was bad enough to have to ask the director for more help; he didn't want to have to spring Tortilli from jail.

Remo was considering leaving Tortilli to take the rap for the murders of Leaf Randolph and his friends when a new engine's roar overwhelmed the parking-lot background noise.

When he turned, he saw a yellow cab speeding quickly across the lot. It hadn't even rocked to a stop behind Remo's rental car before the rear door popped open. A familiar purple leisure suit sprang into view.

"Veni, vidi, vici!" Quintly Tortilli announced grandly.

Whirling to the cab, he flung a fistful of crumpled bills at the driver.

Shawn clambered to his feet, face ecstatic. "Thank God!" he proclaimed. He spun to the cast and crew. "Quintly's back!" he shouted. "Places, everybody! Let's go!"

With grunts and groans, the set began to come alive.

Beaming joyfully, Shawn hurried to meet up with Tortilli as the cab headed back to the street. "Quintly, I didn't think you-"

Tortilli marched past Shawn and straight to Remo.

"It was great!" he enthused. "What a rush! And I owe it all to you. Dead bodies. Blood, heads and brains everywhere. The whole Starsky and Hutch and Baretta jail thing. Man, what a high-flying, hightailing, highfalutin trip!"

He tried to shake Remo's hand. Somehow, it was never where it seemed to be. Tortilli kept clutching air.

"Damn, how do you do that?" the director gushed.

"Let's go, dummy," Remo replied, peeved. Shawn had hurried up behind Tortilli. At Remo's suggestion, he shrieked. The Cabbagehead executive quickly inserted himself between them.

"I thought they said they'd booked you or something," Shawn said through clenched teeth. As he spoke, he leaned toward the set, trying through body language to guide Quintly back to work.

Tortilli didn't budge. "Booked, fingerprinted and stuck in a cell with Otis the freaking town drunk," he enthused. "My lawyers did the whole Clarence Darrow/L.A. Law thing. Bidda-boom, bidda-bing, I'm back on the street. Christ Almighty, how I love the revolving-door prison system."

"That's great," Shawn said, with a total lack of conviction. "See, the thing is, Quintly, it's Tuesday. A lot of our cast skipped school for this..."

"He's leaving," Remo said. Grabbing Tortilli by the arm, he began bouncing the director toward his rental car.

"I am?" Tortilli asked. "Cool!"

"He's not," Shawn begged, running alongside them. "Quintly, you've got a movie to finish here."

"You don't get it, Shawn," the director announced, his balled-fist face red with excitement. "This is the man. I mean, there are men. And there are men who are the man. But this is, like, the man." Beside the rental car now, he turned to Remo. "You are protoman. You are like the first monkey to swim up out of the primordial ooze. I prostate myself at your feet."

"Prostrate," Remo corrected, opening the passenger's-side door. "Prostate is where your head's gonna be if you don't shut up." He tossed the director inside, slamming the door.

As Shawn stomped impotently on the pavement, Remo rounded to the driver's side.

Inside the car, Remo turned to Tortilli. "A-shut up. B-your last lead was a bust. You think you can find another?"

Tortilli was torn by the conflicting commands. His worried eyes darted left and right. "I guess so," he ventured at last. He threw his hands protectively in front of his face. His ferret eyes squinted, awaiting the blow.

None came.

All he heard was the car engine turning over. Tortilli opened one cautious eye. They were driving across the parking lot. The director's shoulders relaxed.

"There were five of them," he enthused, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. "You knocked off five at one time!"

"Think how easy one would be," Remo cautioned.

Tortilli nodded in understanding.

He still had one more question. Since Remo seemed to be in a more agreeable mood than normal, he decided to risk it.

"How long you gonna leave Shawn up there?" he asked.

He nodded to the hood. Shawn Allen Morris lay plastered to the wet surface, his legs dangling out over the grille.

"Please, Quintly!" Shawn's muffled voice shouted.

Remo's response was nonverbal.

At the supermarket entrance, Remo cut the wheel sharply. Shawn flew off the hood into a cluster of shopping carts.

Over the rattle of the carts, Quintly Tortilli swore he heard the sound of crunching bones. Just like in the movies.

The rented car tore off down the street.

Chapter 9

"I don't think we can last much longer under these conditions," the assistant director pleaded. "He's got us all walking on eggshells. He screams at us. Bullies us. He's never happy with anything I'm doing. I've never been on a set where the tension level was this high. And I spent six months on the Rosie O'Donnell Show."

Arlen Duggal was in the Taurus Studios office of Bindle and Marmelstein. The studio cochairs sat behind a gleaming pair of matching stainless-steel desks.

"Are you sure this isn't just a personality conflict?" Bruce Marmelstein asked calmly.

The assistant director shook his head frantically. "When I told him I wanted to break for the day yesterday, he threatened to eviscerate me if I didn't get back to work," Arlen said pleadingly.

"That doesn't sound so bad," Hank Bindle suggested.

"Oh, no? I looked it up. It means 'disembowel.' He's a maniac. He's completely out of control. You've got to do something."

Bruce Marmelstein was leaning back in his swivel chair, salon-tanned hands steepled beneath the nose he'd ordered from his plastic surgeon's summer catalog.

"Bottom line," Marmelstein said. "This production was twenty-three days behind schedule before he got here. He's only been here forty-eight hours and we're already through twelve of those lost days. Even at this rate, Assassin's Loves will be finished just barely on schedule."

"Can't we change the working title?" Bindle asked, his face pinched in displeasure. "That was just to cover Lance during location shooting. I mean, Assassin's Loves? Pee-yew."

"It's already on the crew jackets, hats and script binders," Marmelstein said. "Belt-tightening time. Remember?"

"Have you seen what we've shot in the past two days?" the assistant director begged, steering them back to the topic at hand. "It's crap."

"Editing will punch it up," Hank Bindle assured him. "We'll fill it with digital fluff. Hell, we'll even see if we can get John Williams to score it."

"We can't afford John Williams," Marmelstein cautioned.

"Oh. How about Danny Elfman?"

"Think second-string."

Bindle was horror-struck. "Not Henry Mancini!" he gasped.

"He's dead, isn't he?" Marmelstein frowned.

"Oh, thank God," Bindle replied, clutching his chest in relief. "We'd be the laughingstock of the industry. In the first testosterone-injected blockbuster of the summer, the hero doesn't blow up a helicopter or bang a broad to 'Moon River.' Course the fags might like that. Maybe for homo crossover appeal we could get Celine Dion to do a 'Moon River' cover for the banging scene."

"Probably too much, but I'll call her people," Marmelstein said.

Nodding, Bindle leaned back in his chair.

"We still have a problem on the set," the assistant director interjected. Arlen was nearly crying now as he stood, shifting uncomfortably before their desks.

"Are you still here?" Bindle asked, frowning. "I thought we'd settled this."

"We had," Marmelstein stressed. "The picture was hopelessly behind schedule. Now it's only behind. In two days it won't even be that anymore. Problem solved."

"It wasn't my fault we were behind," the assistant director whined.

Hank Bindle tapped a finger on his desk. "Look, who's directing this picture?" he asked.

"I wasn't contracted to," the A.D. argued.

"That's not the point."

"But he put two union reps through a wall today," Arlen pleaded, his tone desperate. "Through a freaking wall."

"They were insolent louts."

The unexpected reply didn't come from either Hank Bindle or Bruce Marmelstein. The singsongy voice came from the direction of the office doors. Arlen jumped a foot in the air. He wheeled in time to see the big office doors swing quietly shut. The Master of Sinanju was padding silently across the carpet.

Chiun stopped next to the panicked assistant director.

"O Magnificent Oneness," the A.D. said, terror in his quavering voice. "I thought you were at the commissary."

"They did not have proper rice," Chiun said, his eyes slivers of suspicion. "Why are you not at work?"

"I...it...I-I was just reporting on our progress."

Hank Bindle smiled. "Arlen was telling us how pleased he was with your managerial skills, Mr. Chiun."

"Yes," Bruce Marmelstein agreed, an overly white grin spreading across his deeply tanned face. "He's very impressed. Says you're a real motivator."

Heavy lids parted a fraction, revealing questioning hazel orbs. "Is this true?" Chiun asked the A.D.

The man glanced desperately at Bindle and Marmelstein, then back to the old Korean. "I...that is...yes. Yes." He nodded emphatically.

A sad smile cracked through the harsh leathery veneer of the Master of Sinanju. "I am deeply touched," he intoned. "But alas, your words of praise cannot be true."

"Of course they are," Arlen said, sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the terrifying old man. He forced warm enthusiasm into his voice.

"No, no," Chiun said, raising a hand to ward off further undeserved approval. "For if this were the case, would you not be on the set right now?"

Chiun's thin smile vanished in an instant, replaced by a granite-cold glare. His protesting hand was still raised. Arlen's sick eyes traced the contours of the old man's daggerlike fingernails.

The assistant director gulped audibly. "I, um...better get, um... Look!" Pointing out the big office window, he turned and ran from the room.

As the door swung shut, a placid expression settled on the weathered creases of the Master of Sinanju's face.

"Damn, if the movie business doesn't fit you like a glove, Mr. Chiun," Marmelstein said, genuinely impressed at the way the old Korean had handled the assistant director. "Why, the look of pure terror you just put in that man's eyes? It's like Jack Warner's come back from that big projection room in the sky." His own eyes were misting.

"You've really given the production a kick in the pants," Bindle agreed enthusiastically.

"These people lacked discipline," said Chiun. "Their leader did not inspire order."

"Leader," Bindle snorted sarcastically. "Don't even get me started on that one."

Chiun raised an eyebrow. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing," Marmelstein shook his head. "Sore subject. Anyway, your presence here is really working out great. We're tearing through script pages like a runaway train."

As usual, Chiun didn't know what the executive was saying. "This is good?" he asked.

"Good? It's great! It means we'll make our May premiere date after all, which means we get a jump on the rest of the summer competition, which means we get a bigger chunk of the summer box office, which means those gross profit points you negotiated are worth even more."

This the Master of Sinanju understood. "I love the movie business," he enthused.

"And it loves you, baby," Hank Bindle said warmly. He rose from his desk, coming around to the tiny Asian. Bruce Marmelstein came behind him.

Bindle put his arm around Chiun's bony shoulder. Such a move of familiarity would ordinarily cost someone at least one arm, if not his life. But Chiun felt such love in the room that he didn't object to the touch. Nor did he protest as Bindle and Marmelstein began to lead him from the office.

"You're an asset this town can really use," Bindle said. "I can see a long relationship between the three of us. You as writer and set inspiration, us as resident executive geniuses. The sky is the limit. Anything you want, you just ask your old pal Hank Bindle."

"Or Bruce Marmelstein," Bruce Marmelstein offered as he pushed the door open. They entered the lobby.

"Since you mention it, I had come here to suggest higher quality rice at the eating place of the commissar," Chiun said.

"Huh?" Marmelstein asked.

"Commissary," Bindle explained to his partner.

"Japonica rice. And fish," Chiun said. "Perhaps some duck. Duck is always nice."

"Whatever you say." Bindle nodded.

"We'll get right on it," Marmelstein agreed.

"If I think of anything else, I will tell you."

"We're anxious for your input," Marmelstein enthused.

They ushered Chiun onto the elevator. After the doors had closed on the Master of Sinanju, the two of them let out a single relieved sigh. They returned to their office, plopping down behind their huge executive desks.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Hank Bindle asked once they'd settled in. He was staring at the glass office doors.

Marmelstein nodded. "That old fart's sold us a bill of goods," he said. "This thing is a bomb waiting to go off."

"Why didn't we see it before?" Bindle wailed. "We wasted our money on the rights. I mean, come on. An honest cop fighting the system alone? Snore, snore, snore."

"We should have seen it wasn't workable."

"Workable? We'll be lucky if we're not severanced off with a big fat check and a pile of stock."

"Golden parachute?" Marmelstein asked.

"It's happened to all the biggies at one time or another," Bindle moaned.

"Ovitz, Katzenberg. Remember Tartikoff? Most of them never recovered. The worst day of my life will be the day they give me that hundred-million-dollar check."

Marmelstein shuddered. "Don't worry. It'll probably never come to that."

Bindle sighed. Leaning an elbow on his gleaming desk, he looked over at his partner. "So what's the story on our little mini-sneak preview?"

"No one's made the connection yet. I think it might be because of the chaos on the set. No one's seen the reports."

"Hell, if it goes on much longer, I'll go down and tell them," Bindle said, slouching in his chair.

"That wouldn't be smart. We really shouldn't link ourselves to it. If it goes on another day, I'll leak it by e-mail to Entertainment Tonight from one of the dummy accounts."

"I don't know how one little blown-up building in New York is going to pull this turkey out of the oven," Bindle grumbled, "let alone bring it back to life."

"It probably won't," Bruce Marmelstein explained. "We take it in steps. New York first, then the really big one. With the interest we'll generate, we could have a box-office hit yet."

"Or the biggest bomb in history."

Bruce Marmelstein laughed. "That's what's going to give us the box office."

Hank Bindle nodded, bracing his forehead against his palm. "Movie promotion can be so demanding," he sighed.

Chapter 10

Pink plastic lawn flamingos lined the wall behind the hideous paisley sofa. The living-room rug sported images of cavorting blue Smurfs. The thick glass sheet that was the coffee table was held aloft by a single faux elephant foot.

A substance resembling clear gelatin filled a thirty-gallon fish tank on the shelf near the kitchenette. Suspended at various points in the tank were severed doll limbs.

Posters from films such as Surf Nazis Must Die, A Bucket of Blood and Frankenhooker adorned the walls, held in place by cheery multicolored thumbtacks.

It was a lot to take in all at once. Remo wasn't sure if he wanted to throw up or run screaming into the hallway. Settling reluctantly on a third option, he followed Quintly Tortilli inside his Seattle apartment.

"You like it?" the famous director asked as he dropped his keys near a plastic Fred Flintstone bank on the table near the door.

"Blind whores have better taste," Remo said.

Frowning, he flicked at the grass skirt on a tiny hula dancer attached to a table lamp.

"Yeah," agreed Tortilli. "They always know, like, the best yard sales. My book's in the bedroom."

Leaving Remo, he danced down a short hallway. Every inch of space in the living room was crammed with forced kitsch. From Felix the Cat wall clocks whose eyes moved back and forth with each tick of their tails to upright ashtrays fashioned to look like cowboy boots to a closet from which spilled clothes made of fabrics that had been to the moon. Anyone unfortunate enough to enter the apartment was pummeled by Quintly Tortilli's obnoxious personality.

On an oil-stained desk, which looked as if Tortilli had rescued it from an abandoned factory, lay a dozen scripts. When Remo opened one, he found that the margins were filled with notes. The others he checked were in the same condition: all loaded with crazy pencil marks. He was about to turn from the desk when one of the script covers caught his eye. Surprised, he picked it up. He was skimming through it when Tortilli returned.

"We're in business now," the director enthused, waving a mint-condition 1970s Josie and the Pussycats binder.

"What the hell is this?" Remo asked, holding up the script.

"Huh? Oh, I do script-doctor work sometimes. Blood Water, The Lockup. Strictly uncredited. Million bucks for a week's work. Those are the latest. I get 'em all the time."

Remo looked at the cover of the script in his hand. "You're doing the rewrite on a TeeVee-Fatties screenplay?"

Tortilli nodded. "Yeah, man. That's a great one. Originally it was all magic clouds and happy sunshine. In mine Tipsy gets cheesed off at Poopsy-Woopsy for using his scooter, so he beats him to death with a bag of frozen TeeVee-Fattie muffins."

"Unbelievable." Remo tossed the script back on the desk.

"Yeah," Tortilli agreed. "The violence and drugs were always, like, there in TeeVee-FattieLand, man. I just brought them to the surface." Notebook in hand, he went over to his Starship Enterprise telephone.

While the director looked up numbers and dialed, Remo leaned against the door, arms crossed.

"Do you have to try so hard all the time?" Remo asked.

"I have an image," Tortilli explained. "Unfortunately, I don't know where it ends and I begin anymore." He straightened.

"Hi, Bug?" He said into the phone. "Quint. How ya doin'?"

After a few minutes of questioning, Tortilli gave up. The director had learned nothing. The next three calls proved fruitless, as well. He got lucky on the fifth.

"Where?" Tortilli asked excitedly. He fished a Mork and Mindy pencil from his polyester pocket.

Though he was poised to jot the address on his notepad, he didn't have to. "I know the place," he said. "Yeah. Yeah, I heard about it. One of them cut off his head shaving, right? Ouch. Break out the Bactine."

Covering the receiver, Tortilli snickered softly. Pulling himself together, he returned to the phone. "I'm all set," he said, clearing his throat. "Remind me to make you a star. Later." Hanging up, he looked expectantly to Remo. "I think we've got something. The guy I called knows a guy who claims another guy was bragging he was in on the box murder. You know, the one with the torso."

"I heard," Remo said flatly.

"On the phone? You mean you can hear both sides of a phone conversation?"

"It's hard to hear anything over your suit," Remo said dryly. He pulled the door open. "Let's go."

Jogging to keep up, Quintly Tortilli hurried after Remo into the hallway. As he shut the door, he flicked off the lights, drowning the garish decor in blessed darkness.

SEATTLE'S DESPAIRING youth had early on established the Dregs as the city's premier grunge bar. For a time, the pervasive gloom and hopelessness of its clientele was money in the bank. But then disaster struck. Resurgent optimism suddenly began to sweep the nation. One morning, the bar's owners woke up to find hope and enthusiasm saturating the popular culture. The change seemed to come overnight.

The morose lyrics set to mournful tunes that had made Seattle the rage of the music scene only a few short years before were replaced by the upbeat sounds of the Backstreet Boys and Dixie Chicks.

With grunge fading and alternative poised to die a sudden death, the Dregs had become the last bulwark for the music that had made the city famous.

When Remo Williams walked through the front door, it was as if a pop-culture time machine had taken him back six years. He scanned the sea of plaid shirts, torn denim pants and goatees that filled the bar.

"Looks like a beatnik lumberjack convention," he grumbled.

A few of the nearest slackers looked his way, some suspicious of his T-shirt and chinos. But when a second figure popped in behind him, they instantly relaxed.

Quintly Tortilli. The Hollywood genius was a frequent visitor to the Dregs. Accompanied by the young director of Penny Dreadful, the stranger couldn't be all bad.

"Isn't this place great?" Tortilli yelled to Remo over the blaring sound system. Tables wobbled from the pounding bass. Ragged figures moped around the dance floor.

Remo nodded to the crowd. "Stick a two-by-four up their asses and I could get them all work scaring crows."

"Yeah," Tortilli agreed. "The ripped-jeans-and-flannel thing is still only a couple years retro. But if it holds on long enough, it'll come back into style." He sized up Remo. "Actually, if you don't mind, Remo, maybe you should think about updating your look. Don't take this as criticism-I'm saying this as a friend-but, I mean, how long have you been doing the whole T-shirt-chinos thing? Retro's one thing, but maybe you should think about keeping up with the times, man."

"Look, dingbat, it's bad enough I'm stuck with you and that Teflon jumpsuit you're wearing without listening to your cockeyed fashion tips," Remo growled. "Hurry up."

According to Tortilli's source, the man they were looking for was someone the director knew-if only vaguely. As he turned to the packed bar, his dull eyes narrowed. He looked from pasty face to pasty face.

"I don't think I see him," Tortilli said in a disappointed tone.

"Your pal seemed sure he'd be here," Remo insisted. As he spoke, he rotated his thick wrists impatiently.

Quintly was still glancing from face to face. "You really could hear him, couldn't you?" He grinned, impressed. "You know, we should really talk about me writing your life-" He stopped dead. "Got him," Tortilli announced abruptly.

With laserlike precision, Remo honed in on the director's line of sight.

The man was a burly slacker in red flannel. He sat alone at a cheap plastic table on the other side of the bar.

"I don't know, man. He's kinda big." Tortilli frowned. "You might have trouble wasting this one. Whaddaya think?"

When he turned, he found that he was talking to empty air. Quintly glanced back across the room. It took him a minute to spot Remo's white T-shirt. When he finally found it, he was surprised that Remo was already halfway across the bar. He was gliding through the dense throng like a silent spirit. Though people crushed in all around him, he seemed no more substantial than air.

Tortilli shook his head, impressed.

"How much for your life story, man?" he said in wonder. He ordered a rum punch from a passing waitress and quickly found a seat of his own, settling in to watch the floor show.

IN THE COUNTERCULTURE environment of poseurs and criminal wanna-bes, Chester Gecko was the real deal. All 211 pounds of him.

In an age where nearly every high-school student got a diploma and a pat on the head, regardless of academic achievement or lack thereof, Chester had failed to meet even the basic, lax requirements for graduation. Twice forced to repeat his senior year at Bremerton's Coriolis High School, he was finally thrown out after his geometry teacher made the mistake of asking him to demonstrate the use of a protractor in front of the class. It was eight years later, and the woman still used makeup to mask the scars on her cheek.

Chester had been in trouble with the law nearly all his life, but thanks to a criminal justice system that sometimes seemed even more hesitant to deal with unruly elements than the public education system, he had yet to do any major time. It was actually a shame, really, for Chester was the type of individual who would have been happier in prison than he was in civilized society.

Whenever he stopped in the Dregs, people instinctively knew to steer clear of Chester Gecko. He was easy enough to avoid; a burly, slouching figure with ratlike eyes, Chester drew more flies than friends. He generally sat alone at his table, practically daring someone to approach. And in five years, no one ever had.

Until this day.

Chester was sullenly sucking at his beer when he saw the skinny guy show up with Quintly Tortilli. Chester didn't like Tortilli anymore. Mr. Bigshot didn't answer his mail. Besides, he'd seen the director in the Dregs before, so it was easy enough to lose interest.

He glanced away for a second. When he looked back, the stranger with Tortilli had disappeared. Just like that. Vanished. As if the floor had opened up and swallowed him whole. Chester assumed he'd ducked back out the front door. But when he returned his bored attention to the dance floor, he saw something that made his stomach twitch. A few yards away, Tortilli's companion was melting out of the crowd.

That was the only way Chester could describe it melting. It was as if he didn't exist one moment and in the next had congealed into human shape.

Chester blinked. And in that infinitesimally brief instant when his eyes were closed, the stranger materialized in the chair across from his.

Chester jumped, startled. He quickly recovered. "Get lost," he grumbled, forcing a gruff edge to cover his surprise. With a flick of his neck, he shifted his dirty brown bangs from his forehead. He took a swig from the half-full beer bottle clutched in his big hand.

Across the table, Remo nodded. "After I've killed you," he promised. "Now, there's an easy-"

"What?" Chester Gecko snarled, slamming his bottle to the table.

"Hmm?" Remo asked.

"What did you just say?" Chester demanded.

Remo frowned, confused. "About what?"

"Did you just threaten me?"

"Oh, that. Yes." That settled, Remo continued. "Now, there's an easy way and a hard way to do this."

"Go pound sand," Chester growled. Stuffing his bottle back in his mouth, he took a mighty swig.

"I see we've opted for latter," Remo mused, nodding.

And as Chester pulled the bottle from between his lips, Remo's hand shot forward.

Too fast for Chester Gecko to follow, the flat of Remo's palm swatted the base of the bottle, propelling it forward.

It skipped out of Chester's hand, launching back into his stunned face. As Remo's hand withdrew, Chester suddenly felt a great tugging just below his eyes, as if something were pulling on his nose. When he reached for the source, he found his beer bottle dangling from the tip. It hung in front of his slack mouth.

He snorted in pain. Beer stung his nostrils. He gagged, spitting out the liquid.

"I'd gobba kill you," Chester choked. But when he looked up, Remo's eyes were cold. Frighteningly so.

"Bet you I can fit your whole head in there," Remo said evenly.

The confidence he displayed was casual and absolute. And in an instant of sharp realization, Chester Gecko knew that this thin stranger with the incredibly thick wrists was not joking.

Chester held up his hands. "Dno," he pleaded. The bottle on his face clacked against his front teeth. He yelped in pain, grabbing at his mouth.

"Okay, let's establish the ground rules," Remo said. Reaching over, he gave the bottle a twist. The pain was so great, Chester couldn't even scream. His eyes watered as his bottle-encased nose took on the shape of a flesh-colored corkscrew.

"Those are the ground rules," Remo said, releasing the bottle. "Understand?"

Chester nodded desperately. The dangling bottle swatted his chin with each frantic bob of his head. Remo's expression hardened. "Who hired you to butcher that girl?" he asked.

Chester felt his breath catch. Yet he dared not lie.

"I don gno," he admitted. "Phone caw. Don gnow who he wath." He fumbled to twist the bottle back to its starting point.

Remo frowned. Another phone call. The same method that had been used to hire Leaf Randolph. "How'd you get paid?" he pressed.

"Potht offith boxth," Chester said. Blood streamed from his encased nostrils, dribbling into the bottom of the bottle. The golden liquid was taking on a thick black hue. This time, Remo remembered the question he had forgotten to ask at Leaf's apartment. "How much?"

"Pive hunred thouthanth."

Remo thought he had misheard. He made Chester repeat the amount. He found that he wasn't wrong. Chester Gecko had been paid five hundred thousand dollars to butcher a woman and stuff her torso into an orange crate.

It was a lot of money. An insanely Hollywood amount.

Remo's thoughts instantly turned to Cabbagehead's wealthy backers. That much money would have been chump change to any one of those men.

Chester had told him everything of value. He just had one question left.

"You know who killed that family in Maryland?" he asked.

Chester shook his head. "Wathn't uth," he promised.

"Who's the rest of 'us'?" Remo asked.

Even as Remo spoke, Chester's fearful eyes darted over Remo's shoulder to the front door. For an instant, a glimmer of hope sprang alive in their black depths.

Remo squashed it immediately.

"Three guys. Three guns. Just came in the front door," Remo supplied without turning. "Are they 'us'?"

Chester's shoulders slumped. He nodded.

As he did so, his dangling beer bottle banged somberly against the table's damp plastic surface. "Okay, let's take it outside," Remo said thinly. Rising to his feet, he grabbed Chester's bottle in one hand. He was pulling the grunting killer to his feet when he heard a familiar determined crinkling of artificial fabric hustling toward him.

"Remo," Quintly Tortilli urged, bounding up beside him. He was glancing over his shoulder to the main entrance.

"I see them," Remo said, voice level.

"They hang with him," Tortilli insisted, pointing a pinkie and index finger at Chester. "I seen the dudes in here before. Maybe we better fly?" Tortilli was more skittish than usual-even by Quintly Tortilli standards. Gone was all of his earlier bravado. Dropped in the middle of a real life-and-death scene, the director's natural instinct for self-preservation had kicked in.

Remo nodded tightly. Tugging Chester by the bottle, he led them to the rear exit. He waited long enough to be sure the trio of armed men had seen them before ducking outside.

The rear door of the bar spilled into a cluttered alley. A mountain of garbage bags was heaped against the grimy brick wall. Swinging Chester by the bottle, Remo tossed the thug onto the trash heap.

"I think they saw us," Quintly Tortilli whined. He bounced from foot to foot a few yards down the alley from Remo. His body language screamed "Retreat."

"They didn't..." Remo began. Tortilli's shoulders relaxed. "...until I waved them over."

"You what?" the director asked, fear flooding his darting eyes. "You're kidding, man, right?"

Remo held up a finger. "Hold that thought." He hadn't even lowered his hand before the rusted door burst open. The three hoods he'd waved to from across the bar spilled into the alley.

"Guns!" Quintly Tortilli shrieked. He became a flash of purple polyester as he dived behind a cluster of trash bags.

All three weapons were drawn before the thugs had even bounded out the door. Although they twisted alertly, none of the men had expected their target to be standing a foot from the door. Before they knew it, Remo was among them.

He danced down the line, swatting guns from outstretched hands. At the same time, his flying feet sought brittle kneecaps. Guns skipped merrily away along the soggy alley floor, accompanied by the sound of popping patellas.

When the men fell, screaming, Remo was already pivoting on one leg. A single sweeping heel punished three foreheads. All three men dropped face-first to the ground. As the life sighed out of them, Remo turned to Chester Gecko.

Chester was attempting to sit up on the pile of heaped trash, blood-filled bottle still dangling from his nose.

"That was the preview," Remo said icily. "Time for the feature presentation."

Chester tried to scurry backward up the garbage mountain. Bags tore open beneath his kicking heels, spilling their rotting contents into water-filled potholes.

"Wait!" he cried. "I gnow more!"

When Remo paused, Chester sensed his opportunity. But before he could speak, they were both distracted by a shrill sound issuing from beside the garbage mound.

"Whoa, you are heavy duty," Quintly Tortilli whistled.

Sensing the end of the battle, the director had just come crawling into view. His eyes darted from the trio of bodies near the door back to Remo. "I am going to option your story," he stated with firm insistence.

"Put a sock in it, Kubrick," Remo snarled. He returned his attention to Chester Gecko. "Spill it," he demanded.

"Da one we did wath juth a little job," Chester insisted. He was panting in fear. "I gnow thome guyth who dot hired to pland a bunch ob bombth. Dey were hired to blow up a whole thtudio."

Remo glanced at Quintly Tortilli. The director's balled-fist face was drawn into a puzzled frown. "Cabbagehead?" Remo asked Chester.

The hood shook his head. "Thmall botatos. Dith ib a Hollywood thtudio. Ith going down today. We arranged da bomb thupplieth." When he nodded to his dead friends, his expression weakened.

"Where'd you hear this?" Tortilli asked.

"Da guy who dold me already dot paid." Chester shrugged.

Remo's stomach had twisted into a cold knot the instant Hollywood was mentioned. "What studio?" he said hollowly.

Chester sniffled. He winced as he inadvertently sucked a noseful of bloody beer back into his mouth.

"Tauruth," Chester burbled.

It was the last word he ever spoke.

Quintly Tortilli didn't even see Remo move. In a mere sliver of time, the dangling beer bottle had swung up and launched forward.

Facial bones surrendered to the thick glass spear, puckering Chester's face in at the center.

As the hood collapsed to the garbage heap, beer bottle skewering his brain, Quintly Tortilli let out a low whistle. More a reaction to Chester's revelation than to the killer's abrupt death.

"Taurus," he said. "Man, they've taken their hits over the last few years but-ka-blammo!-this has got to be the mother of them all." He turned to Remo. "You know, I-"

Tortilli found that he was alone. Glancing around, he spotted Remo racing toward the mouth of the alley, arms and legs pumping in furious, urgent concert.

At Chester's revelation, unseen by Quintly Tortilli, a rare emotion had sprung full-bloom on the cruel face of Remo Williams. And that emotion was fear.

Chapter 11

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, tightened federal regulations had made it increasingly difficult to purchase massive quantities of fertilizer without proof of need. This was deemed necessary to keep terrorists from visiting explosive death on another unsuspecting domestic target. But difficult wasn't the same as impossible. Lester Craig could attest to that.

"You realize we've got enough shit back there to take out half a city block?" Lester asked proudly from the driver's seat of a large yellow Plotz rental truck.

It was as if his seatmate didn't hear him. "Guard," William Scott Cain said in icy reply. Lester had met William the day they'd started work on this project. Lester didn't like his partner at all. Lester was more of a good-old-boy type. His passenger was more an Ivy Leaguer whose snobbishness was never more evident than in the condescending way he gave out commands.

Guard. William Scott Cain made that simple, five-letter monosyllabic word sound like an insult.

"I see him," Lester griped, muttering under his breath, "ya smug little bastard."

They were at the north gate of Taurus Studios in Hollywood. The high white wall of the motion-picture studio ran in a virtually unbroken line all around the complex.

Lester steered up the slight incline in the road where the high walls curved around to the simple guard shack. They stopped at the plain wooden barricade.

"Passes," the guard said tersely.

The attitudes of studio guards traditionally ran hot and cold. Hot was reserved for celebrities and executives. For the likes of Lester and his companion, the attitude of all guards bordered on hostile.

"He wouldn't ask Tom Hanks for his pass," William groused even as Lester flashed each of their laminated cards at the guard.

Once the guard was satisfied, he leaned in his booth. A moment later, the gate rose high in the air.

"Thank you kindly." Lester smiled at the guard, for what he knew would be the last time.

The two-and-a-half-ton truck with its cargo of ammonium nitrate eased past the uplifted wooden arm. With an ominous rumble, it headed deep into the Taurus lot.

THE MASTER OF SINANJU stomped his sandaled feet angrily as he whirled onto the exterior set.

It was a mock-up of a New York slum. Post-production computer effects would erase the large Taurus water tower that rose proudly in the background.

"I cannot leave you for a moment!" Chiun cried, his high-pitched voice sending shock waves of fear through the gathered cast and crew. The hems of his scarlet kimono billowed about his ankles as he flounced up to the assistant director. His hazel eyes were fire. "I take but one rice break, and the instant my back is turned you lapse into indolence! Why are you not working, goldbrick?"

Arlen Duggal was clearly petrified. At Chiun's typhoonlike appearance, he broke away from the female assistant he'd been talking to, backing from the fearful wraith in red.

"It's not my fault...." he pleaded.

"It is never your fault, slothful one. Nor will it be my fault when I remove your sluggish head from your lazy neck." Chiun glared at the comely young assistant.

"Let me explain," the A.D. begged.

The old man didn't hear. "Have you halted production on my epic saga to chatter with this hussy?" he demanded, pointing at the assistant. He raised his voice to the crowd. "Hear me, one and all, for I do issue a decree. From this moment forth, there shall be no females on this set. Remember to tell this to this slugabed's successor."

"Mr. Chiun," Arlen's assistant interrupted.

"Silence, harlot!"

Tears were welling up in Arlen's eyes. "It really isn't my fault," he begged. "The extras aren't here."

Chiun's eyes narrowed. He spun from the director and his assistant, scanning the gathered crowd. Most of the faces he saw belonged to behind-the-scenes crew. Very few appeared to be actual performers.

"Where are my overcasts?" he asked all at once. "The scene we film today requires a multitude."

"They haven't shown up yet," Arlen informed him.

Chiun wheeled on him. "This is your doing," he said, aiming an accusing fingernail. "Your laxness infects the lower orders like a plague."

Arlen ducked behind his assistant, grabbing her by the shoulders. Positioning the woman like a human shield between himself and Chiun, he ducked and wove fearfully.

"I think they might be afraid," the A.D. squeaked.

Chiun's furious mask touched shades of confusion. "Afraid of what?" he demanded.

"Of all the tension on the set?" the A.D. offered.

Chiun's face flushed to angry horror. "Are you creating tension on my set, as well?" he accused, his voice flirting with the early edges of cold fury. Hoping to defuse the situation, the woman behind whom Arlen was cowering spoke up.

"They are here," she offered, wincing at the painful grip on her shoulders. "I saw a couple of them not five minutes ago. They were over by Soundstage 1."

For an instant, Cluun seemed torn. As the old man stood stewing, Arlen saw his opportunity. Releasing his assistant, he began tiptoeing away in an awkward squat. He got no more than four teetering feet before a blur of scarlet swept before him. A daggerlike nail pressed his throat. When he looked up, he dared not gulp lest he risk piercing his Adam's apple.

Chiun's eyes were molten steel.

"Know you this, lie-abed," the Master of Sinanju hissed. "Your skills alone preserve your life." Spinning to the crew, he called, "Make ready, malingerers! I will see to the missing overcasts."

As the old Korean marched away, the gathered throng let out a collective sigh of relief. Arlen Duggal dropped to his knees. After touching his throat with his fingertips, he relaxed. No blood. The tension drained from his shoulders.

"Worst thing about this is I'd still rather put up with him than Rosie," Arlen muttered.

He watched as the wizened figure disappeared around a building mock-up. Unbeknownst to Arlen, the tiny Asian was marching straight into the blast zone of the first of six powerful truck bombs.

REMO STOOD ANXIOUSLY at the bank of phones in the bustling terminal building at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Beyond the huge tinted windows at his back, massive idle aircraft sulked along the tarmac. Far off, a 747 rose into the bleak sky. Remo was on hold with Taurus Studios for five minutes before someone in the movie company's executive offices finally deigned to answer.

"Taurus Studios. This is Kelli. How may I direct your call?" The woman's voice was bland and efficient, with a faint Midwestern twang.

"Get me Bindle or Marmelstein," Remo insisted.

The woman didn't miss a beat. "Who's calling?"

"Tell them it's Remo."

"First name or last?"

"First."

"Last name, please?"

Remo stopped dead. He couldn't remember the cover name he'd been using the year before while on assignment in Hollywood.

" 'Remo' will do," he said after a second's hesitation.

"Oh. Like Cher," the woman droned doubtfully. He could tell she was about to hang up.

"Wait! How about their assistant, Ian?"

"He was hired by Fox to produce the next Barbra Streisand picture," the woman said frostily. Remo was getting desperate. He had to get through to warn Chiun.

"Okay," he pressed. "There's a movie being made there right now. I know the screenwriter. Just-"

But it was already too late. At the mention of the word writer, the line went dead.

Remo slammed the phone down into the cradle. The receiver cracked and split open at the midpoint between earpiece and mouthpiece. Strings of multicolored wires were all that held the dangling plastic receiver together.

He stood there for a moment, frozen. He had to warn Chiun.

Smith. He'd call Smith.

Remo hurried to the next phone. Scooping up the receiver, he quickly began to punch in the special code to CURE's Folcroft headquarters. He had only depressed the one key a few times-not enough to make the connection-when he froze.

He couldn't call Smith. Not without telling him why Chiun was at Taurus. And if Remo blabbed to Smith about the Master of Sinanju's upcoming movie, the old Korean would resolve to make Remo's every waking moment a living hell for the rest of his life. If he was lucky.

Even if he told Smith, that was no guarantee of guarding Chiun's safety. If the CURE director sent a swarm of police to Taurus, the bombers might turn skittish. Cops could spook the terrorists into setting off the bombs sooner.

"Dammit, Chiun, why do you have to complicate everything?" Remo griped. He snapped the next phone down in its cradle.

Exhaling angrily, Remo spun away from the bank of phones. The instant he did, he spied a familiar purple leisure suit bobbing and weaving toward him through the main terminal concourse. Quintly Tortilli had caught up with him in the parking lot at the Dregs. On the way to the airport, Remo had been in too much of a hurry to throw him out of the car.

A few heads turned as Tortilli shoved through the crowd, waving a pair of airline tickets over his head.

"We're all set!" Tortilli panted, sliding up beside Remo. He slammed into the phones, out of breath. "Two tickets on the next flight to L.A. We've got about seven minutes." His famous face was slick with sweat.

Remo was trying to think. "Yeah, and the bombs could go off before that," he muttered.

"But maybe not," Tortilli stressed. "This is a business charter jet," he added, flapping the tickets at Remo. "We can be in L.A. in an hour and a half. Maybe less."

"And stacked up over LAX for two days," Remo complained. There had to be another way. Every minute in the sky worrying about the Master of Sinanju would be torture.

Tortilli shook his head. "I can get us cleared to land as soon as we get there," he insisted. Remo's head snapped around. "How?"

"Puh-lease," Tortilli mocked, raising an eyebrow. "I'm me."

Remo frowned. "What kind of perks do you get when you make a good movie?" he asked.

Before Tortilli could mention a word about his People's Choice Award, Remo reached over and grabbed an extrawide purple lapel. Dragging the director behind him, he sprinted for the departure gate.

"YOU THERE!"

The sharp words sliced into Lester Craig's marrow. He pretended he didn't hear the voice. Averting his eyes, he continued walking briskly alongside the massive building that was Soundstage 1.

"Hold!" the singsong voice commanded. Lester wouldn't have listened under ordinary circumstances. Never would have listened under these particular conditions. But at the moment, the fury in that voice was more frightening to him than the jury-rigged truck bomb he was fleeing.

Lester stopped dead. William Scott Cain stumbled into him.

"What do we do?" William demanded.

"Remember the extra who tried to run from him yesterday?" Lester said from the corner of his mouth. "Traction for six months, minimum." Flies in amber, the two men remained stock-still as the Master of Sinanju bounded up behind them. "Are you two layabouts not employed as overcasts on my magnificent film?" the tiny Asian demanded as he slipped in before Lester and William. Narrowed eyes squeezed glaring fury.

They knew better than to lie. The two men nodded dumbly.

The Master of Sinanju's tongue made an angry clicking sound, "That man's laziness is a disease," he hissed to himself.

"Actually-" Lester ventured.

The word was barely out before long-nailed hands appeared from the voluminous sleeves of Chiun's kimono.

"Silence!" he commanded. Angry swats peppered the faces and heads of both extras. "Return to work immediately or you will never breathe in this town again."

They didn't need to be told a second time. Turning from the furious, slapping dervish, the two men ran off in the direction of the dummy New York exterior. In spite of the knowledge that, in less than two hours, a massive, earthshaking explosion would reduce the entire set and the studio on which it sat to smoking black rubble.

Chapter 12

The charter jet skimmed over the border between Oregon and California with steady, confident speed. In the cabin, Remo watched the skimpy white film of clouds dissipate beneath the sleek, gently shuddering wings. Glinting sunlight illuminated tense lines on his hard face.

Quintly Tortilli had gone to the cockpit while they were still over Washington. To Remo's relief, he didn't return for a large chunk of the flight. Only when they were flying over California's Salmon Mountains did the young director wander back down the aisle.

Tortilli plopped into the seat next to Remo. "I'm back," he announced.

Remo continued to stare out at the wing.

"I'm thinking of doing a disaster movie on a plane," the director said enthusiastically.

"It's been done," Remo grunted.

"Not with curse words," Tortilli replied happily. "I plan on using a lot of them. Every other word will be an F word." He held up his hands defensively. "I apologize in advance. I know you don't like that kind of language."

"What?" Remo frowned, finally turning from the wing.

"You don't like swear words." Tortilli nodded. "You made that clear when you were strangling me. But when I use swear words in my movies, it's like poetry. All the critics say so."

Remo couldn't even remember what he had said to the director at their first meeting. He decided he didn't really care. He turned back to the window.

The ensuing moment of silence between them was filled by the constant hum of the engines. Soft murmurs of conversation rose from around the cabin. Somewhere close behind, a flight attendant banged items on a serving cart.

"Anyway," Tortilli continued after a short time, "the airplane movie is just one idea I'm working on. Do you realize I've got seventeen sequels in production for my werewolf movie From Noon till Night?"

"I'm sure whoever invented Roman numerals is committing suicide right now," Remo muttered.

Tortilli didn't hear him. "Course the first five sequels tanked, but we're bound to hit with one of them," he mused. "Say, do you remember that invasion trouble in Hollywood last year? All those tanks and troops from that Arab country? I forget the name."

In spite of himself, Remo found that he was being drawn in. It was probably good to get his mind off Chiun.

"Ebla," he supplied. "Yeah, I remember."

Tortilli grinned. "That's it. Well, something you might not have heard about was the bombs. There's a rumor that the terrorists wired all of Hollywood to explode. Boom! Everything gone, just like that." He snapped his fingers.

"No kidding," said Remo Williams, the man who had stopped those self-same bombs from going off.

"Oh, sure. It was kept quiet afterward. I think the government was embarrassed about letting all those tanks and troops and explosives into the country. They gave them all a pass because they thought it was part of a movie."

Remo was rapidly losing interest. "Is this like one of your movies, or do you have a point?" he asked.

Tortilli nodded conspiratorially. "The first movie of the summer season is a make-or-break actioner from Taurus based on those events. Die Down IV. Don't or Die."

Remo's face clouded. "They turned all that into a movie?" he said, appalled.

"It's a fictionalized account," Tortilli replied. "A lone cop is dropped into the middle of the occupation and has to fight his way out. It's gonna be a blockbuster. Opens two weeks before Memorial Day."

"Did it ever occur to whoever's responsible that it's in incredibly bad taste to capitalize on an invasion of America?" Remo asked.

Tortilli frowned at the unfamiliar term. "Bad what?"

Remo shook his head. "Does Hollywood at least get blown up?" he asked hopefully.

"Among other things." Tortilli nodded.

Remo crossed his arms. "Good," he murmured. "The point is, in the movie, the terrorists smuggle the explosives onto the studio lots. Ring any bells?"

Remo frowned. He'd been so concerned with the Master of Sinanju that he hadn't thought about how all this might relate to his current assignment. Worse, it took Quintly Tortilli to explain it to him.

"They're copying the movie," Remo said dully. "I guess Cabbagehead wasn't mainstream enough. They've branched out from indies to the summer blockbusters."

Remo considered the implications of what Tortilli was saying. Summer movies were notoriously big on mindless destruction. If the same people responsible for duplicating the plot points from the small Seattle film company had moved on to big-budget Hollywood films, the real-world terror could have just shifted from the equivalent of a firecracker to a nuclear bomb. Literally.

Beside Remo, Quintly Tortilli seemed unfazed by his own deadly deduction.

"Die Down IV. Now, that's got some action that'll knock your socks off," the director confided. "The cop is the same one from the first three movies. He has to run through Hollywood, as well as other parts of the country, fighting terrorists and defusing bombs. It's wall-to-wall action."

"Can't you people make a single summer movie without blowing something up?" Remo asked, annoyed.

Tortilli shook his head. "You need explosions," he argued. "Each big action sequence adds at least ten million to the domestic gross. And they eat the stuff up overseas. My theory is, the more bombs you have going off in a movie, the less dialogue. If no one's talking, foreigners can forget they're watching Americans."

Again, Tortilli was making sense. It was unnerving.

"Die Down IV is so loaded with explosives Lance Wallace-he's the star-barely has to open his mouth," Quintly said, pitching his voice low. "Which is a good thing if you've ever seen him act. But don't tell him I said that. I directed him in Penny Dreadful. The guy's a loose cannon. If he heard what I really thought of him, he'd probably shoot me, then claim he thought I was one of the IRA terrorists."

"What IRA terrorists?" Remo asked.

"They're the villains in Die Down."

"I thought you said it was based on what happened in Hollywood last year?" Remo said, confused.

"It is."

"Those maniacs weren't IRA. They were Eblans."

"And Eblans are Arabs, and Arab villains are a big no-no in movies. You can only use white guys. We've replaced the Arabs with a fringe IRA group led by a fey Englishman."

"That's insane," Remo said. "An Englishman is the last person on earth a fringe faction of the IRA would listen to."

"Hey, Hollywood only reflects reality," Quintly Tortilli argued. "Therefore, anything produced in Hollywood must be reality. Therefore, the Arab terrorists must really have been IRA. Maybe they had suntans."

Remo had known it couldn't last. Tortilli was starting to sound like Tortilli again. Blinking wearily, he turned away from the director.

"Here's some Hollywood advice," Remo said, eyes firmly on the wing. "Every second of screen time doesn't have to be filled with dialogue."

Tortilli scrunched his already scrunched face. "Is that a polite way of saying shut up?"

Remo didn't answer. Face concerned, he stared unseeing out the small window.

Quintly Tortilli eventually grew bored.

Getting up from his seat, he wandered up the aisle. He found a stewardess to talk to for the rest of the trip to Los Angeles. When he asked for her number, he told the woman it was all in the name of research. He was thinking of doing a movie where the main character was a female flight attendant. Tortilli was sure it would make a ton of money.

THE RED STUDIO JEEP with its white-striped cloth canopy roof tore off Fifty-seventh Street onto Broadway. Driving crazily through the dodging crowd, it came to a screeching halt in the middle of Times Square.

The vehicle had been built with no doors. Through the wide opening behind the driver's seat flew two frightened blurs. The pair of men slid to a flesh-raking stop at the edge of the crowd. Several bruised hands reached down to help the shaking men to their feet.

The Master of Sinanju emerged from the jeep. "These are the last," Chiun announced darkly. He had enlisted a driver to help him locate the rest of the missing extras. Luck proved to be on his side. The extras had all been located in the vicinity of six very similar trucks that were parked all around the studio lot.

There was a total of only nine men. All of them seemed afraid to move away from one another. The two new arrivals blended in with the huddled group.

Chiun scanned the line of men, turning with fresh disapproval to Arlen Duggal.

"Why are there not more?" he demanded of the assistant director. "I have been to the vile city after which this fabrication is patterned." He nodded to the mock-up of New York. "Hordes fill its fetid streets."

"This is after the first bombing," Arlen explained as he made some quick notes on his shooting script. "Panic's gripped the city. Most people are afraid to go out."

Chiun allowed a nod of bland acceptance. Padding over, he took up a sentry post behind the A.D., hands thrust deep inside his kimono sleeves. He glowered at the crowd.

Finishing a notation, Arlen looked up from his script.

"Okay, we've wasted enough time already," he called to cast and crew, "so I want this thing done fast and I want it done right."

"Or else," Chiun interjected from behind him.

Arlen flinched, then forged ahead. "We've gotten strong first takes the last couple of days, so let's try to nail it down out of the gate."

"Or the next nails you will see will be those being hammered into your coffins," Chiun said menacingly.

Arlen couldn't take this much longer. Everyone's nerves had been rubbed raw by this maniac screenwriter. The backseat driving and constant threats were already more than he could bear. It was worse than if they'd hired Kevin Costner to star.

It would help morale if they could get the old man off the set, even if it was just for an hour or two. But his vanity was such that he didn't trust Arlen alone for a min-

A thought popped into the assistant director's head.

"People," he muttered, nodding. He wheeled to the tiny Korean. "Mr. Chiun, you're right," he said excitedly, snapping his fingers.

Chiun's face was bland.

"Of course I am," the Master of Sinanju sniffed. "What is it that I am correct about this time?"

"People. We do need more on the streets. A bomb scare wouldn't keep everyone inside. Not in New York. The bravest, wisest, handsomest people would still go outside."

"Perhaps," Chiun admitted, stroking his sliver of beard. "If I needed to."

"Exactly!" the A.D. enthused. "You're wasted behind the scenes. You belong in front of the camera!"

Chiun's hazel eyes sparkled. "Do you really think so?"

"Absolutely. Wardrobe!"

One of the wardrobe mistresses hurried forward. "I want Mr. Chiun outfitted with an appropriate costume," Arlen insisted. "I want him to look perfect, so be sure to take your time," he stressed.

"Is there something wrong with your eye?" Chiun questioned.

Arlen stopped his frantic winking. "I was merely blinded by your dazzling charisma," he covered quickly.

On the sidewalk, the sweating extras seemed thrilled at the thought of Chiun leaving. All nine simultaneously glanced at their watches.

"I understand." The wardrobe woman nodded.

"Sir?" She directed Chiun toward the jeep he'd commandeered.

The Master of Sinanju was only too delighted to go.

"I cannot wait to tell Remo," the old man said, beaming. "I have been discovered."

As Chiun got in the back, the woman climbed in next to the driver. A moment later, they were zipping back in the direction from which Chiun had come mere minutes before.

"Thank God," Arlen exhaled as the jeep vanished down Fifty-seventh. "Next film I work on? No writer," he vowed.

Script in hand, he hurried over to his assistant.

REMO KNEW they were dangerously close to Hollywood airspace when the copilot and navigator came back to discuss the scripts they'd each written. Tortilli took their numbers and shooed them back to the cockpit.

Not only did the director arrange to have their plane land immediately upon arrival over Los Angeles International Airport, but he'd also used the phone on the jet to call ahead for transportation. A long black limousine was waiting for them on the tarmac. They were speeding away from the sleek aircraft less than thirty seconds after they'd deplaned.

"Any news about Taurus?" Tortilli asked the driver.

"Taurus?" the limo driver said. "Are they still in business?"

In the backseat, Tortilli glanced to Remo. "Guess that means it hasn't blown up yet, huh?" Hope tripped in Remo's chest.

"Put on the radio," he commanded the driver.

"There's one back there, sir," the man offered. Remo looked down on the row of knobs and buttons arranged on the seat panel. It looked more complicated than the cockpit of the plane he'd just left behind. He saw a TV screen set into the console. Remo opted for this over the radio.

He flipped a switch. A panel opened over an ice bucket. He hit another button. The sunroof slid open, revealing sunny, blue California sky.

"Just put on the damn radio," Remo ordered sourly.

The driver did as he was told.

There was nothing about Taurus Studios on any of the local stations. If a bomb had leveled the place, it would have merited a bulletin. He listened for only a few minutes.

"Shut it off," Remo insisted, sinking glumly back into the plush seat.

His heart thrummed an anxious chorus. As he tapped nervously on the seat, his eyes alighted on the car's phone.

He could have called Smith. Under any other circumstances, would have called him without hesitation. But thanks to Chiun, he couldn't. This was all his fault.

"Old egomaniac," he muttered to himself.

"What?"

The voice drew him from his trance. When he glanced at Quintly Tortilli, his gaze was immediately pulled beyond the director. There was a car parked next to them.

Remo suddenly realized they'd stopped. "Hurry up," he ordered the driver.

"I'm sorry, sir," the limo driver apologized. "The freeway's clogged."

Craning his neck over the driver's shoulder, Remo saw that it was true. Bumper-to-bumper traffic extended as far as the eye could see. At this rate, it would take forever to get to Taurus. By the time he got there, anything could have happened. "Dammit, Chiun," Remo barked.

Tortilli shot him a worried glance. "Did you say Chiun?" he asked, voice betraying concern.

Remo raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. Why?"

Tortilli bit his cheek. "Oh, no reason," he said with forced casualness. Tugging the creases from the knees of his purple pants, he leaned forward. He rapped his knuckles on the lip of the lowered privacy screen.

"Hurry up," he whispered urgently to the limo driver.

When he glanced back at Remo, his smile was weak.

THE WARDROBE TRAILER for Chiun's film had been stuffed mostly with police uniforms gathered from the main wardrobe department of Taurus Studios. Since the film wasn't a period piece, the street clothes the bit players and extras wore onto the lot were generally usable for any given scene. Even so, there were still a few costumes other than uniforms hanging on the racks. These mostly consisted of ordinary suits. The wardrobe mistress directed the Master of Sinanju to one of these.

"It'll be a little big on you, but we can fix you up," she assured him, holding out the doublebreasted suit.

Chiun looked first at the suit, then at the woman. "You are joking," he said dryly, as if she'd just asked him to crawl into the belly of a dead horse. "I will not wear that."

The wardrobe mistress was surprised by his strong reaction. "It's just a suit, sir," she stressed.

"'Just' is correct," Chiun sniffed. "The Master of Sinanju does not wear 'just' an anything. The garment defines the man. I am defined by more than just a 'just.'"

Spinning, he marched boldly over to the racks of police uniforms. "I would wear one of these," he proclaimed after an instant's inspection.

The woman laughed, assuming the tiny Asian was making a joke. After all, he'd make about as convincing a police officer as Wally Cox. But when she saw his withering glare, the laughter died in her throat.

"I guess that's okay," she ventured slowly as she replaced the plain gray business suit on the rack. "But any of those would have to be taken in to fit you, as well."

"Yes, yes," Chiun dismissed. He stroked his wisp of beard as he made his way down the line of blue uniforms.

The wardrobe mistress trailed behind him. She'd indulge the little man, even though it didn't really matter. Whatever he picked out, it would absolutely not make it into the finished film. She was only supposed to keep the old nuisance busy. This in mind, she forced a patient expression as she stood at Chiun's shoulder.

As he walked, Chiun periodically reached out to feel material. A sleeve here, a lapel there. He harrumphed his disapproval each time.

At the far end of the rack, the Master of Sinanju stopped abruptly. "This is my costume," he gasped, ecstatic.

Grasping hands stuffed deep into the rack, from the knot of uniforms, he extracted an ornate outfit. Gold piping surrounded the cuffs. Matching braids hung from epaulets on each shoulder. It looked as if it hadn't seen the light of day since the silent era.

"That's a little out of date," the woman warned.

"Fashion is fleeting, but style is timeless," Chiun sang happily. He thrust the uniform at the woman. "Tailor it."

The wardrobe mistress bit her tongue. "Whatever you say, sir," she said tightly. She gathered the material in her arms.

"I will endeavor to find more to complement my costume," Chiun chimed. Face gleeful, he dived back into the racks.

As the wardrobe woman turned from the squealing lump of bouncing costumes, she had already made an important career decision. If this uniform actually made it into the final print, she would petition to have her name struck from the film's credits. For the survival of the uniform into the finished print would be a sign of something much larger. A box-office bomb.

Eyeing the garish uniform, she doubted her career would survive an explosion of that magnitude.

"I THINK he's gonna be gone for a while," William Scott Cain said in a hoarse whisper. Sweat dotted his upper lip.

The simple boom shot they'd just finished had taken more than forty minutes. The crew was setting up to film the same shot from a different angle.

Lester Craig nodded anxiously. Cold perspiration stained his underarms. "Now would be a good time," he hissed. "While they're busy."

"The setups aren't taking long," whispered another extra, whose truck bomb had been parked closest to the outdoor set on which they stood. Nervous red blotches had erupted all across his chiseled face and tanned neck. "They could be ready any minute."

All nine of the bombers wanted desperately to leave, yet not one of them moved. Fear of the crazed Asian screenwriter rooted them in place. Lester's panicked eyes scanned the New York set. There was still no sign of the psycho Korean. "Look," he said reasonably. "We don't have a whole hell of a lot of time to get out as it is. Either we get blown to bits or he kills us as we try to escape."

"He's so damn fast, though," someone said softly.

"And he sneaks up on you like a frigging cat," another offered. "I bet he's out there right now. Watching us."

Nine pairs of worried eyes scanned the area. Lester shook his head sharply. "This is ridiculous. We're gonna be blown up, for Christ's sake. I'm taking my chances."

Shoulders tensed, he took a single sidestep from the group. The rest of the men held their breath. Nothing happened. The demented old Asian who had filled their lives with fear for days didn't come swooping like an angry hawk out of the shadows. Lester took another hesitant step. Then another. The crew failed completely to notice, they were so occupied with their own tasks.

Lester made his increasingly rapid way through the cluster of technical and service people toward the edge of the set.

He was home free. It was clear the old man wasn't hiding nearby after all. The fuse was lit for the rest.

They had almost no time left.

The remaining extras went from zero to sixty in one second. They flew-running, shoving, screaming-across the set. Scripts and wires flew everywhere. Booms toppled into cameras in their frantic rush for safety.

A cameraman was pushed into Arlen Duggal. Staggering, he looked up in time to see his handful of extras fleeing the set like the people of Pompeii before the rushing lava.

Even as he shouted after them, his first thought was that Chiun had returned to the set. But the old Korean was nowhere to be seen. And soon neither were his extras.

THE FREEWAY CONGESTION gave way near an offramp. It was a mad dash to the Hollywood studios of Taurus. To Remo, the time spent in the limo seemed longer than the plane ride that had preceded it.

Remo was greatly relieved to see the familiar broad white walls of the studio and the huge silver water tower rising high above the lot. He had feared they'd find nothing more than a smoking crater.

The limo squealed to a stop at the main gates. Unimpressed by one limousine in a town of thousands, the guard on duty was taking his time walking from his shack until Quintly Tortilli shoved his frantic, knotted face out the back window. "Get your fat ass out of the way!" the director screamed, squinting against the bright sunlight.