Feast or Famine

Destroyer 107: Feast or Famine

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

At first, no one connected the hideous death of Doyal T. Rand with the greatest plague to threaten America's breadbasket since the Dust Bowl.

Doyal T. Rand wasn't a farmer. He was a geneticist. His chief accomplishment in life was the discovery of the sex gland in roaches. Learning to shut off the pheromone-producing gland was the same as shutting off a roach's genetic ability to replicate itself. No more replication, no more roaches. While human birth control remained a subject of controversy, many on both sides of the argument practiced roach birth control without giving the moral implications a second thought. Nobody cared about roaches. Not even Doyal T. Rand, who had become a millionaire many times over defusing and frustrating their furtive little sex lives.

Doyal T. Rand was on his lunch hour on a sunny April morning when he forgot a simple truism. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Technically, it wasn't a free lunch that killed him, but a candy sample.

Doyal T. Rand stood on the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in New York City making faces at the rows of restaurants while trying to decide whether he was in the mood for Chinese or Thai. Actually, he hungered for Korean barbecue, but the nearest Korean restaurant was in Herald Square, which was too long to walk, and Doyal T. Rand was too cheap to take a cab.

While he was mentally tasting Bi Bam Bap on his hungry tongue, Doyal T. Rand heard what was to him music.

"Free sample!"

Rand turned. On the corner behind him, a man was standing in the cool of April, with a tray slung from his shoulders like those that cigarette girls carried in old B movies. He wore some kind of team jacket and cap. Doyal T. Rand didn't follow sports, so his eyes flicked from the team logo to the man's hands.

He was handing out free samples of something to anyone who would accept them.

"Free. It's free. Free to all," the hawker kept saying. His face was an animated shadow under the bill of his cap. He wore mirrored sunglasses tinted an iridescent emerald.

Doyal T. Rand stepped closer. At first, it was curiosity. Then greed. And when he noticed people unwrapping the samples and popping them into their mouths, he had to have one. It didn't matter what it was. It was free. Doyal T. Rand liked free stuff. If someone were to can puppy poo and offer them two for the price of one, Doyal T. Rand would buy four cans and walk away grinning.

"I'll take one," he told the vendor.

"It's guarana candy," the vendor said.

"I don't care. Just give me one."

"It's made from a Brazilian berry supposed to have aphrodisiac properties. Not that we're guaranteeing anything."

"I don't care what it is. I just want mine," Doyal T. Rand said impatiently because he took a strict forty-five minutes for lunch. Enough to wolf his food down and slide out the door before the waitress realized she'd been stiffed on her tip.

The tray was filled with what looked like amber marbles wrapped in cellophane. When Doyal got a good look, his undersized heart sank. The stuff looked like hard candy. He didn't like hard candy. He preferred caramel or nougat. Bull's-eyes were his favorite. He loved chewing through sweet caramel to the dry, powdery confection center.

Still, this candy was free.

"Gimme," Doyal T. Rand said.

The vendor ignored the dull amber candies rattling around his waist-high tray and palmed one from his pocket. That one was slightly larger than the others and slightly redder. Doyal, his eyes on all those free samples, failed to notice his came from the hawker's pocket.

"Is it hot?" he asked, thinking of a peppery candy called Red Hots, which he detested.

"No. Sweet."

"I don't like hard candy," Doyal T. Rand muttered, ever the ingrate.

"You'll like this."

"We'll see," said Doyal T. Rand. Just as he turned to go, he caught himself and asked, "Can I have another?"

"One to a customer."

"It's for my secretary. She has a sweet tooth."

"One to a customer."

Shrugging, Doyal T. Rand walked off, absently unwrapping the ball of hard amber sugar. He still had to figure out where to eat. Lunchtime was ticking away.

Rand finally decided on Thai food. He stepped off the curb as the light changed and, without thinking about it, popped the hard amber candy into his mouth.

It was pleasantly sweet. There was a kind of tang to it that took the edge off the sweetness. Doyal T. Rand rolled it around on his tongue, paying more attention to the taste. It began tasting familiar. Then he remembered a soft drink that had come on the market last fall. It tasted just like this. It was good. The candy was good, too. Best of all, it was free.

Rand was halfway across Seventh Avenue when he decided the candy was worth going after seconds.

He turned, biting down on the hard, sweet ball, and instantly his head filled with a weird buzzing.

Not his ears. His head. It started low, then swelled with incredible speed. He had a wild thought. He wondered if this was the aphrodisiac effect the vendor had mentioned kicking in.

Then the buzzing filled his entire head, and the world winked out as if he had been struck blind by the very sweetness of the taste in his mouth.

Doyal T. Rand took a halting step, then another. His head swayed, then jerked, and then he pitched forward on his face in the middle of the crosswalk.

The light changed, and a phalanx of capsulelike yellow cabs surged toward him, honking and blaring for him to pick his lazy ass off the intersection so that Manhattan traffic could flow with its normal multidirectional pandemonium.

When Rand refused to move, they went around him. At first, with care, but once traffic flow resumed, several vehicles left short stretches of smoking tread as testimony to their brake-pad strength.

All that honking brought NYPD traffic cop Andy Funkhauser surging into the blaring congestion, blowing his whistle like a fury.

Officer Funkhauser all but tripped over the body, dropped the whistle from his mouth and used his hands to direct the traffic flow while he tried talking into his shoulder radio.

The ambulance pulled up while the light was red; and a pair of EMTs jumped out.

"I didn't touch him," Officer Funkhauser said, one eye on a fresh barrier of yellow cabs that eyed him with hungry headlights as they waited for green.

"Drunk?"

"Could be diabetic."

One of the EMTs got down on his knees. "Hey buddy, can you hear me?"

The body of Doyal T. Rand declined to answer. So they rolled him over.

Officer Funkhauser had one eye on the impatient traffic. The light had finally turned green, and engines were growling. He was keeping them at bay with only the upraised palm of his hand.

He heard one of the EMTs say "Ugh."

He had never heard an EMT go "Ugh" before. The poor bastards saw everything. Officer Funkhauser thought he had seen everything, too.

So he took his eyes off the line of cars and cabs and glanced down.

What he saw hit him like a mule's kick.

The victim's face was turned up to the sky. The sun was shining down with a clarity New York City only enjoyed on cloudless days.

The victim's eye sockets were scarlet caverns. There was no blood. No eyeballs. Just the red bone that was designed by nature to hold the human eye in place.

"Jesus, where are this guy's eyes?" blurted the EMT who hadn't said "Ugh."

At that point, the dead guy's mouth-there was no question he was dead-dropped open. The sun shone directly into it. It showed the interior of his mouth. And showed without a doubt that the dead man had no tongue. No uvula, either.

"I think we have a homicide here," the first EMT muttered.

"Fuck," said Officer Funkhauser, who knew he had to call for Homicide and a morgue wagon and didn't think his upraised hand and his badge could hold off the growling cabs much longer.

"I think it was a mob hit," Officer Funkhauser volunteered when two homicide detectives made their appearance.

"What makes you say that?" the black one asked while the white one knelt over the body.

"Guy had his eyes gouged out, and his tongue is missing. That says mob hit to me."

The homicide detective grunted and said, "We deal in facts."

"And it's a fact that poor guy's lacking eyes and a tongue. They didn't melt in the heat. It won't break sixty-five today."

"We deal in facts," the detective repeated. "Harry, what have you got?"

"I think we'd better get this guy photographed and off the street before we all get run down."

That took all of thirty minutes, and when the body had been photographed from every angle and the outline traced in metallic silver to withstand tire prints, the coroner's people laid him on a gurney and started to cart him off.

The body wobbled on the gurney, and as they raised it to the level of the wagon, the eyeless head rolled to the left. Out of the left ear poured a pinkish gray gruel, and the seasoned veterans on the scene recognized it as brain matter.

"Jesus."

They gathered around the gurney as it was set back on the ground.

"Brains don't liquefy like that, do they?" Funkhauser muttered.

"How long has this guy been dead?" an EMT wondered aloud.

They poked and prodded and noticed the flesh hadn't even cooled, and decided less than an hour.

"Brains don't liquefy," the homicide detective repeated.

No one disputed him. But they were looking at human brain matter lying like so much custard beside the man's left ear.

The medical examiner got down on one knee and shone a light into the corpse's right ear.

"What do you see?" asked Officer Funkhauser, who was by this time fascinated. He had always wanted to go into Homicide. This was very educational.

"Step aside," the M.E. barked.

When he did, the M.E. gasped.

"What is it?"

"I see daylight. I can see clear through this man's skull."

"Is that possible?"

"If the man's head was empty, it is," he said, climbing to his feet. His knees were shaking. He said, "Load him up and get him out of here."

Officer Funkhauser watched the body slide into the back of the meat wagon and spoke the obvious.

"The mob doesn't normally mess with a guy's brains. Do they?"

AT THE MANHATTAN MORGUE, the body was identified as that of Doyal T. Rand by the contents of his wallet.

Chief Medical Examiner Lemuel Quirk X-rayed his skull and determined it was empty of all soft tissue. No tissue, brains or soft palate. Other organs were missing, too. The pineal gland. The thyroid. The sinuses. And the entire auditory canal.

When they cut him open, they discovered an undigested mass in his stomach that caused Quirk to go as pale as sailcloth.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at human brain matter," he muttered.

His assistant took a quick look, gulped hard and grabbed at his mouth. As he ran from the autopsy room, he could be heard retching all the way down the hall.

Dr. Quirk scooped out the contents of the stomach, weighed them and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, probed them.

Brain matter all right. Liquefied, like scrambled eggs that had set. But mixed in were red bits of pulp and flecks of matter he realized with a heart-pounding start were the clear lenses of a human eye.

"How...?"

Going to the head, Quirk pried open the mouth and shone a penlight down the man's gullet.

"No soft palate ...yes, it was possible."

Somehow the man's brain, eyes and other soft tissues had been churned to a liquid and simply slid down his unobstructed esophagus into his waiting stomach via natural apertures in the basal skull like the foramen magnum, the clivus and possibly the cribiform plate. Since there had been no digestion, the liquefaction had occurred at or just before the time of death. It was all very logical, the biology of it.

Except it was impossible. People's brains did not turn to liquid and go sliding down their gullets.

Not unless there was a terrible new agency of death out there.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he didn't look like a walking sanction.

In fact, he was the United States of America's ultimate sanction. He stepped off the plane at Sarajevo looking like a typical American tourist. Except for the fact that tourists don't come to the former Yugoslavia. No one comes to the former Yugoslavia. They only try to get out. Ethnic fighting had reduced the nation to the status of a Third World hellhole with former neighbors accusing one another of genocide, ethnocide, patricide, matricide, infanticide and even worse horrors.

At the bottom of the air-stairs stood a uniformed agent who directed Remo to customs.

"Where can I get a cab?" Remo asked him.

"After undergoing customs and baggage reclaim, you will find signs."

"I'm not carrying baggage."

"What? No baggage?"

"I travel light," said Remo, who was attired for shooting pool. He wore gray slacks, a crisp white T-shirt and Italian loafers that fit his sockless feet perfectly.

"You must come with me if you have no baggage."

"No," Remo corrected. "I must catch a cab."

"Why?"

"Because the quicker I catch the cab out of here, the quicker I can get the cab back to my return flight."

The uniformed man looked at Remo with unhappy eyes.

"When are you leaving Bosnia-Herzegovina, sir?"

"Four-thirty."

"You are in Sarajevo for only four hours? What is your business here?"

"My business," said Remo.

"You are reporter?"

"No."

"UN observer?"

"I heard the UN got chased out."

"They are forever trying to sneak back in," the customs official said pointedly.

"I'm not UN. If I had a safe area to protect, it wouldn't be overrun by a bunch of big-mouthed goons with guns."

The uniformed agent flinched. "You must come with me."

"If with you means to the cab-stand, sure. If not, go screw."

"Go screw what?" asked the agent, who was obviously unfamiliar with current U.S. slang. Actually, Remo's slang wasn't that current, but it usually got the point across.

"Go screw yourself onto a cactus and go for a spin," returned Remo.

The Yugoslav-Remo couldn't tell if he were a Serb, a Croat or a Bosnian-probably didn't know what a cactus was, but he knew an insult when he heard one. And he was convinced he had heard one. Even if he didn't exactly understand it.

"I am insisting," he said, his voice and spine turning to ice.

"Okay, but only this once," said Remo, changing attitude because he had been ordered to Sarajevo not to clean up Dodge, but to take out one Black Hat.

"Come with me," the man said, turning around like a man used to being obeyed.

In an interrogation room, they sat Remo down and surrounded him.

"Empty pockets, please."

Remo laid his billfold with its Remo Novak ID and approximately three thousand in U.S. bills and the folded article from the Boston Globe. He figured the money would distract them from the clipping. He was wrong. The Serb who detained him slowly unfolded the article. It was headlined A "Wanted" Poster That Leaves Pursuers Wanting.

"What is this?"

Remo decided what the hell. They didn't sound as if they were planning to let him go any time soon, and he had that plane to catch.

"It's the reason I'm here," he said nonchalantly.

"You are reporter?"

"Assassin."

"Again, please?"

"I'm here to nail one of the war criminals on the list."

"This is a reproduction of a Wanted poster for UN war criminals."

"That's right," Remo agreed.

"It is useless."

"Next to useless," Remo corrected.

"These are posted all over former Yugoslavia. There are almost no photos. Just silhouettes. The descriptions are a joke. Look at this one. It said, 'Bosko Boder. Six feet tall. Known to drive a taxi in Sarajevo. Wore gold."'

"Know him?" asked Remo.

"I could be he. It could be any Serb who drives a taxi and stands so tall."

"I'm not allowed to nail just any Serb. I have to nail the correct Serb."

"What means this 'nail'?" asked a brooding-faced man who looked like the local torturer. He had a scar running across his forehead like an exposed red vein. Remo grabbed the clipping from the lead interrogator's grasp. The third blacked-out face down in the second column mentioned a Serb concentration-camp guard with a jagged scar running from temple to temple.

"Your name wouldn't be Jaromir Jurkovic, would it?" asked Remo.

"I deny being Jurkovic!"

"And what if he is?" pressed the lead interrogator.

"If he is, I get to nail his sorry butt."

"It is illegal to nail Serbs in Sarajevo. Whatever that is." And the man snapped his fingers.

At that, Jagged Scar Jurkovic stepped behind Remo and laid two meaty paws on Remo's shoulders. Remo sensed the nearing pressure waves and allowed this to happen, although his reflexes screamed at his brain to strike back with all the power at his command. Which was considerable.

Instead, Remo reached up and casually slapped the crushing fingers to loose sausages.

Jaromir let out the screech of screeches and turned it into a high howling yowl. Coming out of his seat like casual lightning, Remo turned and quieted the man with an equally casual slap. His jawbone flew off its hinges and tried to jump out of his mouth. The envelope of skin that was his stubble-blue chin kept it from hitting the opposite wall. Finally, it stopped wobbling and just stayed slack. Jaromir's tongue hung out like a panting dog's.

He tried to speak, but without working mandibles, all he could manage was a hollow groan and a slow drool.

"That," said Remo, "is one definition of the verb to nail."

The interrogation room was quiet long enough for the alleged Jaromir Jurkovic to finish his groan. Then tensed hands slapped for side arms. That gave Remo permission to defend himself, and he did.

In place, he spun around. Arms floated high. One foot came up and out. Centrifugal force made the rest automatic.

The stiff fingers of Remo's left hand reamed out a man's eye sockets while the right jabbed another's Adam's apple. The foot, still rising, impacted a groin. The groin became suddenly and forever concave. The owner didn't care. The pain traveled up his spinal column and literally short-circuited his brain.

Remo left four groaning Serbs on the floor in various degrees of distress, thinking that it had been a detour worth taking.

Like most Americans, when the fractious ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia had broken out, he hadn't known for five months who was who. If the Russians had declared war on the Canadians, he would have known whom to root for-after some thought. If Germany had reinvaded France, he would have had a clue. If Korea had bombed Japan, he would have had a rooting interest.

But he didn't know what a Bosnian was. A Croat might as well have sat on a grocery shelf labeled Croats. Remo early on figured out that a Serb was a kind of low-rent Russian. But it was months before the TV news anchors had added the qualifier Muslim to the noun Bosnian and Remo was all set to cheer on the Croats because these days the only Muslims fighting anyone were car-bombing civilians. Until the first pictures of the emaciated Bosnians in Serb concentration camps started coming out, and it began to look as if the Serbs were the real bad guys.

To this day, he had no clue what a Croat was or did or looked like. But he knew that the Serbs were being bastards and Bosnians were being victimized.

He gave up on the United Nations before the UN rolled in. The UN was fine if there was no shooting. But they had simply stood around with their hands in their pockets while helpless families were being massacred in so-called safe haven after safe haven.

That lasted until NATO came in, but NATO wasn't much better. They actually surrendered confiscated weapons so Serbs could start up all over again. And when the call came to arrest war criminals and detain them, they ignored it. War criminals were celebrities in the former Yugoslavia. No one dared touch them because it threatened the fragile peace hammered out in Dayton, Ohio-of all places.

The way Remo saw it, a fragile peace in which war criminals were issued free passes was no peace at all.

Finally, Upstairs saw it this way, too.

"Go to Sarajevo," said the lemony voice of Remo's superior, Dr. Harold W. Smith. "And get General Tanko."

"Done," said Remo, who by trade was an assassin. In this case, he was an unofficial U.S. government sanction.

The idea was to nail the biggest war criminal of them all. Maybe that would scare the others into hiding or surrender.

Remo walked through the terminal at Sarajevo past bullet-pocked windows and other evidence of the long war that had shattered a once semicivilized nation and found his way to the cabstand.

The cabs were green. They looked as if they had been salvaged from a junk heap. Consulting his clipping, Remo went from driver to driver asking, "Are you Bosko?"

The fourth cabbie in line said, "I am Bosko."

"I need a ride to General Tanko's house."

"You have business with Tanko?"

"He said to ask for you," Remo lied.

"Come in. Come in. I will take you to Tanko."

The drive was depressing. Bombed-out buildings. Open sewers. All the amenities of warfare. The international community kept talking about rebuilding, but with all three sides still at one another's throat, no one wanted to pour money into the rat hole its inhabitants had made of Yugoslavia. So the people lived in squalor.

"You bring drugs, eh?" Bosko asked.

"I bring the most potent narcotic of all."

"Heroin, yes?"

"Heroin, no. It's called Death."

"Death. Is designer drug, yes?"

"Is ultimate drug," said Remo. "One hit, and you never want to wake up."

"You tip me with Death, of course."

"You read my mind," said Remo, smiling with thin lips that bordered on cruel.

Remo didn't look strong. He looked wiry. His build was average for a six-footer, but his wrists stood out. They were freakishly thick, as if they belonged to someone else. But there they were, holding his longfingered hands to his wiry forearms. The tendons in them stood out like white cord.

He didn't look old enough to have been a Marine in Vietnam, but he was. He didn't look like a former cop, except maybe around the eyes. Remo was that, too. And he certainly didn't look like the most dangerous killing machine wearing white skin. But he was. Remo was a Master of Sinanju, the first and ultimate martial art. The discipline that gave rise to every Asian fighting skill from kung fu to yubiwaza, Sinanju had been practiced exclusively by the head of a Korean house of assassins that originated in the village of Sinanju high in rocky, forbidding North Korea.

For five millennia, the House of Sinanju had been a Korean power. Now the secrets that transformed an ordinary man into the perfect fighting machine had fallen into non-Korean hands and were dedicated to furthering American aims. And Remo was the disciple who was focusing now on one aim in particular.

The house of General Tanko was in a suburb and very well maintained. No bullet holes. Intact glass. The paint looked fresh. It had once belonged to a Muslim doctor whose blood had seeped into the front door after they stood him before it and shot him to bone splinters. The fresh paint was to mask the blood.

The cab rolled up the graveled path, and at the entrance, the driver turned and smiled with big yellow teeth.

"You tip me with Death?"

Bosko's eyes were on Remo's eyes. They were dark and set deep into his skull. They were the eyes of a death's-head. In his last moment, Bosko thought exactly that.

Remo didn't know or care. He simply brought the heel of his hand up from his knee and applied it to Bosko's aquiline nose. It was a good nose for shattering purposes. The cartilage bent to the left, snapped and, when the heel of Remo's hand impacted on the bone, it shattered like shrapnel.

Splat!

Bone splinters riddled Bosko's unsuspecting brain.

Remo reached up and pulled him by the hair over the seat and down onto the back-seat floorboards.

Getting out, Remo walked confidently to the front door. He liked front-door hits. No one ever expected his assassin to come knocking in broad daylight.

While he waited for a response, Remo put on his polite-encyclopedia-salesman face.

The door opened. It was General Tanko himself, eyes black as a crow's and his pugnacious features unconcerned. He wore the gold braid and tinsel that was his Serbian army uniform. General Tanko liked to wear his dress uniform. He was proud of the innocents he had butchered.

"General Tanko?"

"I am he. Who are you?"

"I'm from the U.S. Board of Unofficial Sanctions."

"Sanctions?"

"We sanction people like you. I'm pleased to announce that you are this month's sanctioned Serb."

"You cannot sanction a person. It is preposterous. Nations are sanctioned. Not persons. It is unhumane."

"You mean inhumane."

"Yes. Inhumane. Not to mention ethicless. How dare you come to me with this announcement of sanctions."

"We tried sanctioning your country," explained Remo. "But it's so poor, it can't get any poorer. So in its infinite wisdom, Uncle Sam has decided to sanction you personally. Think of it like having the Publisher's Weekly Prize Van roll up and take instead of give."

"I have rights."

"Everyone has rights," agreed Remo, still polite.

"Yes, everyone."

"Except the innocents you butchered."

"I am not butcher, but a Serb."

"In your case, it's the same thing. Now if you'll step out of your nice, ill-gotten house, we can get this sanction over with."

General Tanko blinked. "What does this entail?"

"A lecture on niceness."

Tanko blinked again. Then a slow smile spread over his coarse features. "I am to be lectured?"

"On being nice."

"By you?"

"Yep," said Remo.

"By an undernourished joke of an American such as you? You dare to sanction the great Tanko, the Scourge of Srebrenica?"

And General Tanko threw back his black head and roared his amusement.

Splat.

Remo couldn't wait. It was the description under nourished. Nobody called him that. He was not undernourished. It was that his body contained almost no body fat. He looked thin. He didn't look muscular: But he could erase General Tanko from existence with a sweep of his hand, which he did.

Remo's sweeping hand came up and impacted the cutting edges of General Tanko's upper teeth. The force was enough to shatter the general's teeth, but the angle was perfect. Instead, the teeth were forced into the jawbone, and the entire top of General Tanko's large head snapped back and, like a pineapple breaking off its stalk, it fell to the ground behind his back.

General Tanko's lower jaw remained attached to his stump of a neck. It sagged. The tongue remained attached to the lower jaw. It gave a meaty little toss as the nerves controlling it waited for signals from the disconnected brain and, receiving none, plopped dead onto the sagging jaw.

Remo pushed the tottering body back into the foyer and drew the door shut. Body and door impacts blended in one sound.

Reclaiming the cab, Remo drove back to the Sarajevo airport whistling.

He had made the world a safer place. And he would make his flight.

Chapter 3

Word of the ultimate sanction befalling General Tanko of the Bosnian Serb Army raced from Sarajevo to the capitals of Europe and to Washington, D.C., within thirty minutes of the discovery of his body.

It reached the lonely desk of Dr. Harold W. Smith in Rye, New York, at the same time it hit Washington.

The Associated Press report was sketchy.

Sarajevo (AP)

General Tanko, otherwise Tanko Draskovic, indicted Serbian war criminal, was discovered in his home, the victim of a savage attack perpetrated by persons unknown. General Tanko was found with his head ripped from his body as if by a tremendous force. Initial reports are he was not beheaded. What was meant by this statement in the context of his fatal injuries is not known at this time. Draskovic was fifty-six.

Dr. Smith read this without his gray eyes registering any reaction that it meant something to him. His gray, patrician face likewise registered no emotion. But the news told him that his enforcement arm had succeeded in his assignment.

If all went well, Remo would be en route to Kaszar Air Base in Hungary and safe passage home. If not, well, the Serbian authorities would suffer unacceptable casualties trying to prevent him from leaving the former Yugoslavia. Smith had no concerns for Remo's personal safety.

A long time ago, he had selected Remo to be his enforcement arm, framing him for a murder he didn't, commit. Remo had been a Newark beat cop in those days. Smith had railroaded Remo through a kangaroo court trial to the Death House. He had been one of the last men electrocuted by the state of New Jersey.

Remo Williams, believed dead and buried by the world, had been given over to the last Master of Sinanju for the training that transformed him into a virtually unstoppable killing machine. For over two decades, in missions great and small, Remo had never failed.

A phone rang. There were two on Smith's black glassy desk. One blue, the other gray. It was neither of these. The ringing came from the right-hand middle drawer of his desk. It was muffled but insistent.

Sliding open the drawer, Smith dug out a fireengine red desk telephone and set it on the desktop. He picked up the receiver and said, "Yes, Mr. President."

"I was just handed an intelligence report that General Tanko is dead," the familiar presidential voice said.

"I have read that report," Smith said noncommittally.

"Between you and I, was that your man?"

"Do you need to know the answer?" returned Smith in his natural lemony voice. It wasn't disrespectful. Neither was it inviting. It could be read either way.

"I was just curious," said the President. His voice was not exactly offended. Neither was it hurt.

"Intelligence came to me that General Tanko was considering a terroristic attack on the NATO Implementation Forces in Bosnia. Orders emanating from his political masters in the rump Yugoslavia. An expression of U.S. displeasure had to be undertaken."

"That's good enough for me," the President said. "This conversation never happened, by the way. You won't read about it in my memoirs."

"I intend to write no memoirs," said Harold Smith, who meant it.

The President hung up, and Smith returned the red telephone to the desk drawer and shut it. Before he left for the evening, he would lock it with a small steel key. It was a dedicated line directly to the White House, and was linked with its identical twin in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

For the thirty years since Harold Smith had been plucked out of the CIA's data-analysis department to head CURE, the supersecret government agency that didn't exist, he had lived with the only private hot line to the Commander in Chief at his side. A President of the United States had created CURE in the lonely womb of the Oval Office. He had told no one of his idea until he had found the man to head the organization-Harold Smith.

"The nation is sinking into chaos," the President had told Smith, then many years younger but just as gray as today. Smith thought he was being interviewed for a security position with the NSA. That impression was dispelled once he found himself alone with the young, vigorous President who was soon to die a martyr's death. The month was June, 1963. Smith had forgotten the exact date, but the conversation remained etched in his memory like glass scored by a diamond.

"I see," said Smith, letting the President talk.

"Crime is out of hand. Our judges and unions are corrupt. The police-the good apples-are not equal to the demanding task at hand. I don't control the FBI. And the CIA is forbidden from operating on U.S. soil-not that they don't try."

Smith said nothing to that. He was strictly an analyst. His days of action were far behind him, as were the President's. Both had seen action in the Big One, the President in the Pacific, Smith in the European theater of operations.

"I see chaos, perhaps civil war by the end of the decade," the President continued.

Smith did not contradict that view.

"I can suspend the Constitution," the Chief Executive went on, "or I can declare martial law."

He paused, fixing Smith with his crinkling blue eyes.

"But there is a third option."

"Yes?"

"Have you ever heard of CURE?"

"No. What do the letters represent?"

"Nothing. I'm not even sure what I have in mind should even have a name, but let's call it a cure for a sick world. I need an organization that will watch the watchers, get at the cancer infecting this great nation of ours and excise it like a surgeon. Quickly, cleanly and, above all, quietly. And I want you, Harold Winston Smith, to head it."

"I will require a large staff," Smith said stiffly, neither accepting nor rejecting the offer because he loved his country and if the President asked him, he would head up this CURE entity without reservation.

"You do it with next to no staff. If this gets out, it's my backside and your neck. Or maybe the other way around. You are one of the top computer men over at Central Intelligence. You'll sift though data, isolate the malefactors and arrange for them to be dealt with."

"This is extralegal," Smith warned.

"No. It is extra-Constitutional. Which is far worse," the President said soberly. "But it's this or admit the American experiment is an abject failure." The President fixed Harold Smith with his warm, humorous eyes. They turned steely. "Not," he added, pronouncing each word like a drumbeat, "on my damn watch."

"Understood, sir."

With a handshake, the secret pact was made.

Smith resigned from the CIA, ostensibly for the private sector. He took over Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, as its new director. From Folcroft, he quietly ran CURE. Funded by black budget money, using computers and confidential informants, it reached out to the cancers of American democracy and seared them dead.

In the early months of CURE, the President was cut down. Smith was on his own. The successor President, rattled by his abrupt and bloody ascension to power, signed on for the agency to continue operations.

"Indefinitely," he said. The new Commander in Chief was afraid he was next.

Over successive administrations, Harold Smith had worked to salvage a foundering nation. But the forces of social instability were greater than one man could bear.

Smith was forced to recruit an enforcement arm. A former cop named Remo Williams. Vietnam vet. Marine. Expert rifleman. Skills he would have to unlearn if he were to do the work of a wounded world.

A beeping brought Smith's reflective eyes to his computer screen buried in the black glass of his desktop. The hidden monitor connected to the mainframes and optical WORM-drive servers in the Folcroft basement, the information octopus that reached its tentacles out to cyberspace.

It was another AP report. The system was kicking it out as mission related. CURE's mission, not necessarily Remo's.

Sarajevo-Airport Altercation (AP) Serbian authorities report a massacre at the airport at Sarajevo. As many as twenty-nine security forces were reported dead or wounded. A Serb jet has taken off. Destination unknown. It is believed the hijacker or hijackers are aboard.

Smith read this with a visible sign of relief washing over his lemony face. Remo. He had made it out of Yugoslavia. No doubt there would be a NATO security team waiting to take him into custody once he reached Kaszar.

Smith picked up the blue contact phone and placed a call to a U.S. Army major attached to NATO.

"This is Colonel Smith. Pentagon," Smith said. "The hijacked aircraft due in from Sarajevo has been commandeered by a U.S. security agent returning from a sensitive mission. He is to be granted safe passage on a Military Airlift Command flight home."

"Yes, Colonel. Where is he going? Specifically." "Wherever he wants to," said Harold Smith.

"Understood, Colonel."

Hanging up, Smith turned his cracked leather executive's chair. Long Island Sound danced under the noonday sun. The first sails of spring were ghosting across its blue expanse. For more springs than he ever imagined back in 1963, Smith had looked out through the picture window of two-way glass.

How many more would Harold W. Smith, who had devoted his life to his nation's security, enjoy before he finally laid his aging bones in the rocky soil of his native New England?

Heaven alone knew.

Chapter 4

As opening days went, this one was going to be a bitch.

"It's going to be a bitch," Perry Noto muttered.

"I still think it's a risky idea."

"We had to reconcept. We were going down the tubes," he said as he walked through the deserted restaurant with its French-provincial decor.

"We did better than that last reconcepting of yours."

"The novelty wore off. You can get people to try braised alligator or buffalo steak, but they get tired of it. Our clientele was getting bored. They want excitement. They want adventure."

"They want a decent meal for under forty bucks. Why can't we go nouvelle cuisine?"

"That's too eighties."

"Japanese is still popular. And with the small portions, we could make a bundle."

"Insurance would kill us. Those damn knife juggias flipping and flinging those heavy blades in the customers' faces-before long, someone'd lose a nose and we'd lose our restaurant. No, this latest reconcept will work."

"People are finicky about what they put in their stomachs."

"Hey, they eat blue cheese. And blue corn is big now. Whoever heard of blue food? Show me something edible that's naturally blue. People eat Indian cuisine. That stuff tastes like rat in goat sauce. And Indian desserts might as well be sweetened rabbit pellets. Yet people flock to Indian restaurants."

"People also understand the four basic food groups."

"I thought it was five."

"Four. They learn in school that you need so many grams of cereal grain, fruits, vegetables and meat."

"Dairy products. That's the fifth basic food group. Not that anyone drinks dairy anymore."

"Five. Five basic food groups. I stand corrected. It's five. Not four. Not six. But five." She held up five fingers.

"Well, we just discovered the sixth."

"People will not pay to eat bugs, Perry."

"Not bugs. Arthropods. Or maybe insects. Don't say bugs. You say bugs, you might as well say snots. Or boogers."

"Might as well say boogers. That's what we're serving up."

"No, we are serving fried grasshopper on a bed of romaine lettuce. Chocolate-covered fire ants. Sweet-and-sour crickets. Yellow jacket au jus. Perfect grazing food. We are not serving anything people don't eat in other countries. This is L.A. We knock down cultural and culinary barriers every month. We'll sweep east with this revolutionary restaurant reconcept, and by the turn of the century, we'll be overseeing an empire of-"

"McRoaches."

Perry winced. "Don't say roach. Add it to the taboo list. We don't serve roach in our restaurant. That's going too far."

"Maybe we should put that at the bottom of the menu in Florentine script. 'Positively no roaches served.'"

"Not funny, Heather."

"Not appetizing, Perry."

Perry Noto looked at his wife, Heather. She was not hard to look at. Not after the tummy tuck, the boob job and butt lift. Her face had been spared the multiple plastic surgeries. It was a clean, sunscrubbed face and would be presentable for another three or four years even under the California sun. After all, Heather Noto was only twenty-six.

"You could be blonder," he said, trying to change the subject.

"What?"

"Your hair. It could be blonder."

"The next-lighter shade is platinum. Platinum blond went out with Jean Harlow."

"Blonder."

"Look. I've been ash blond, champagne blond, honey blond-all the way down to summer blond. I'm stopping here. My follicles can't take all this dying and rinsing."

"Image is everything. Especially in our business."

"If we don't imagine up a name for this latest wild hair of yours, our image will be guacamole."

"I got just the thing."

And from a shelf of New Age books-a relic of their failed macrobiotic plunge-Perry pulled down a red paperback, and opened it.

"What's that?"

"Thesaurus."

"My question stands."

"It's like a dictionary, except it shows you every possible variant on a word. Right now I'm looking up 'food.' "

"You're on the wrong page. Try 'bugs.'"

"Shh."

Suddenly, Perry Noto's eyes flew wide. They became two white grapes under pressure with their seeds squeezed out.

"I got it! I got it!"

"What?"

"Grubs!"

"Grubs!"

"It's perfect. 'Grub' is a synonym for 'food.' And a lot of perfectly scrumptious insects start off as grubs. We're serving them up before they get out of the larval stage."

"Why not just call it McMaggots?" Heather asked bitingly.

"Will you cut the shit?"

"Who in their right mind would pay forty dollars an entree to eat in an eatery that calls itself Grubs?"

"It's cute."

"It's death." And with that, Heather Noto went to her own office bookshelf and took down a yellow book with a plastic cover.

"What's that?" Perry asked suspiciously.

"French dictionary."

"We're not opening a French fucking restaurant."

"And we are not opening a goddamn Grubs. Maybe a French name will take the sting out of the concept."

"Sting. Good choice of words. What's French for 'grubs'?"

"Give me a sec, will you, please?"

Heather flipped though the pocket dictionary with peach-nailed fingers. "Damn. I mean maudit."

"What?"

"A grub in French is larve. Too close to 'larva.'"

Perry brightened. "I like it."

"You would." She turned her back on his curious face.

"Try 'bugs,'" Perry prompted.

"I am."

"Well?"

"'Bug' in French is insecte. Wait, there are synonyms galore."

"I didn't known the French had synonyms."

"Shh. Bacille. No, sounds too much like 'bacilli.' Oh, here's something interesting."

Perry got in front of her and tried to read the page upside down. He got an immediate headache.

"There's a French phrase for 'big bug.' La grosse legume."

"I like the 'gross' part."

"La grosse legume. It sounds like that stuff the French are forever putting in their consomme, legumes."

"Are those bugs?"

"No, beans."

"Let me see that." He scanned the page. "Hey, here's a perfectly good word. Punaise. What do you think?"

"Well, it rhymes with 'mayonnaise'.

Perry Noto shifted his gaze to an imaginary spot on the ceiling. "I can see it now. La Maison Punaise..."

"House of Bugs! Are you crazy?"

"Hey, who's going to know?"

"Everyone, once the menu falls open and they see poached dung beetle," Heather said archly.

"La Maison Punaise. That's what we'll call it."

"I like La Grosse Legume much better."

"If La Maison Punaise bites the big one, that will be our fallback name when we relocate."

"If this thing fails, we're not relocating. We're reconcepting. Retro concepting."

"If La Maison Punaise doesn't go over, we're maggot meat."

"That better not be on the menu."

Perry Noto smiled. "I'm crazy, but I'm not that crazy."

LA MAISON PUNAISE OPENED to an A-list crowd of invitees only. The press was there. The stars were there. Most important of all, the food was going down their throats without coming back up again.

"How are the chocolate-covered ants, Arnold?" Heather asked.

A Germanic voice rumbled, "Scrumptious. I can hardly taste the ants."

"What are these?" a famous actress asked Perry, holding up a toothpick on which was speared a blackened morsel.

"That? Let me see, I think it's Japanese beetle, Cajun style."

"I love Japanese food."

"How does it taste?"

"Crunchy."

A ditzy blonde sauntered up and, with a serious face, asked, "I'm a strict vegan except for seafood. What can I eat?"

"Seafood. Seafood," Perry repeated, his success-dazzled gaze wandering the room.

"Silverfish cakes are coming up in a minute," Heather called over.

"Oh, thanks so much."

"Bon appetit, " said Heather, steering Perry aside. "I take back every bad thing I said," she whispered.

"How's the kitchen?"

"Busy as a beehive."

"We're golden."

"Don't count your honey until it's in the jar," Heather said archly.

The insects and champagne flowed freely, washing down swarms of cinnamon chiggers and grubs in duck sauce. There was only one problem, and that was when the LA. Times restaurant critic complimented Perry on the popcorn shrimp and Perry had, not thinking, corrected him.

"Those are locust larvae."

"Larvae..."

"Grubs. You know, you're eating grubs. Your grub is grubs. Hee-hee," he added, giggling at his own joke.

The critic turned avocado and cured his suddenly active stomach by chugalugging a bottle of Chateau Sauterelle '61.

"Let him go," Heather urged.

"It's three hundred bucks a bottle."

"It's a million dollars in free publicity if he's spiflicated when he writes his stupid review."

In the end, the grand opening was a smashing success. The petty problems, liquor-license troubles and health-examiner payoffs were forgotten by the time the last guest left just after midnight.

Perry turned to Heather, beaming. "We pulled it off. Admit it."

"Okay, we pulled it off. Let's see if it lasts."

"Are you kidding me? Insects are forever. They'll outlive us all."

At that point, a weird humming came from the kitchen.

"What's that?"

Perry smiled broadly. "Tomorrow's profits exercising."

They went to the vault door and through the traditional swinging doors into the kitchen. The building had formerly been a major bank. Instantly, their noses were assaulted by a plethora of odors. They had learned not to retch. Bugs tasted okay if they were sauced or simmered correctly. But they sure stank during preparation. Hence the vault door to protect the clientele's delicate sensibilities.

The house chef was stooping over a wooden crate. It was buzzing.

"What's this?" Perry demanded.

"Did you order bees?" he asked, frowning.

"I don't remember ordering bees."

"This box is filled with bees-if I know the sound of bees."

"Bees aren't on the menu," Perry insisted. Heather concurred. Bee bodies contained venom that was impossible to clear out. They were worse than Japanese blowfish, which could kill if the wrong portions were ingested.

"Perhaps someone is making a suggestion."

"No," said the chef of La Maison Punaise, who was, of course, French. Just in case they had to reconcept overnight.

"Well, let's open it."

Remy the chef took a short pry bar off a shelf and attacked the crate. It was held together with black metal strapping. It wouldn't budge.

Perry found a pair of wire cutters and went snipsnip. The strapping spanged apart and coiled back, snapping at him. A piece of strapping caught him on the cheek, producing blood.

"Be careful."

Remy attacked the crate with the pry bar. The lid came off with a sharp screech of nails and the groaning of stressed wood.

When they got the box open, they all saw that it was empty.

But it was still buzzing.

"What the hell is making it buzz like that?" Perry wondered aloud.

"It sounds like abeilles," said Remy. "Bees."

"I know it sounds like bees. But it's empty."

At that point, the drone of the bees that weren't there changed in character. It swelled. It seemed to fill the kitchen with an all-pervasive sound. It was all around them.

Perry smacked his right ear. It was a natural reflex. The sound seemed to have attacked his ear. Only it was short and sharp, like a mosquito.

Then Heather slapped her left bosom. It jiggled. And kept on jiggling. Silicone was like that.

Remy ripped his white starched hat off his head and began swatting the empty air around them and cursing in prickly French.

The buzzing swelled and swelled, and as it ascended the scale in an increasingly angry drone, adrenaline overcame the Chateau Sauterelle buzz and they all looked at one another.

"Let's get the hell out of here," Perry said.

"I'm with you," said Remy.

They ran for the swinging doors. No problem. The insistent sound seemed to follow them.

They got to the vault door. It had fallen shut. No problem. Remy tackled the dog wheel.

That was when the buzzing began to attack them. In earnest.

They felt it as a pricking sensation on their skin at first. Then as heat. Hot heat. Painful heat. A million tiny red-hot needles might produce such a sensation.

But when they looked at the backs of their burning hands, they could see nothing except a creeping redness. Like a rash.

Perry looked up from his red palms to his wife's shocked face. It was turning red, too. An angry, embarrassed blush. Before his eyes, her pouty red lips seemed to twitch. And from one corner dribbled something white and vaguely waxy.

"I think my paraffin injection is leaking," she said.

Then she grabbed herself with both hands. "My boobs. They're wet."

"Oh, God! A silicone leak."

Remy had his own problems. He was scratching himself like a man with a million fleas.

"Sacre Dieu! I am undone," he screeched.

Then they couldn't breathe. They gasped and they began to choke. One by one, clutching their swelling throats, they fell to the stainless-steel floor.

As his sight darkened, Perry Noto looked to his wife, and his last coherent thought was, She's breaking out in hives ...why is she breaking out in hives?

THE BODIES later identified as Perry and Heather Noto of Beverly Hills and chef Remy Asticot were found the next night when would-be patrons of La Maison Punaise flocked to the trendy restaurant to sample the delicious popcorn shrimp glowingly described in the LA. Times.

The L.A. County coroner performed an autopsy and discovered high levels of bee venom in the bodies of the three victims.

What he didn't find was evidence of bee stings or the tiny barbs usually left in the skins of bee-sting victims. He searched every square millimeter of epidermis for a full working day to discover any hypodermic mark such as a needle might make. There were no track marks.

Finally, in exasperation, he gave a news conference.

"The victims would appear to have ingested toxic levels of bee venom during their last meal," he announced. "They died of anaphylactic shock, a condition normally the result of allergic reaction to bee toxin, or from massive bee stings."

"Then why didn't the patrons also succumb?" a reporter asked.

"Perhaps they didn't eat the same foods."

"Dr. Nozoki, were traces of bees found in the victims' stomachs?"

"I am no entomologist," said Dr. Togo Nozoki, "but the stomachs of the three victims were packed with insect materials-including antennae, carapaces, legs and other such matter. Digestion had begun. And bees lack the horny outer bodies of other insects on the menu."

"Bees usually die after they sting. Why were no bees found in the premises?" another reporter demanded.

"I can only conclude that the victims ingested every morsel of the bee delicacy that unfortunately felled them."

This seemed to satisfy the media. And if the media was satisfied, the public was satisfied.

No one thought very much of the fact that L.A. Coroner Togo Nozoki himself succumbed to a bee sting several hours later. Lots of people were hypersensitive to bee stings.

Chapter 5

The Military Airlift Command C-130 Hercules turboprop transport lumbered to a jolting stop at the end of the main runway at the South Weymouth Naval Air Station. When Remo had first moved to Massachusetts a few years before, the location had been chosen because of its convenient access to South Weymouth and its many military aircraft standing ready to take Remo to any spot in the world his missions required. The base had been targeted for closure several times. Each time, Harold W. Smith had pulled his invisible strings to get it taken off the closure list.

Finally, the pressure to close the base had gotten so strong that the only way to save it was to risk showing Harold Smith's far-reaching hand.

Harold Smith didn't like showing his hand. So he had allowed it to close. It was still technically open with a skeleton staff during the final environmental cleanup, so when the hydraulic ramp lowered to disgorge Remo, he stepped off the plane thinking that this would probably be the last time he was privileged to fly out of South Weymouth courtesy of Uncle Sam.

A taxi was waiting for him courtesy of "Uncle Harold," who preferred that Remo be whisked from sight as soon as possible. The taxi took him to a shopping mall, where another taxi took over. Another Smith precaution. If Remo were to leave a trail of bread crumbs, Smith would personally eat them off the ground in the name of security.

As he pulled up before his home, Remo reflected that he wasn't looking forward to being back.

The reason why greeted him at the door while he was inserting the key.

The door jumped open. In the foyer stood a tiny Asian woman with iron gray hair and the same faded lavender quilted garment she had worn ever since taking up residence in Castle Sinanju, a former church converted into a condominium.

"Hi," said Remo, who still hadn't learned her name.

"Good riddance," the housekeeper cackled.

"I'm coming back, not going out."

"Bad riddance, then."

Remo scowled. "Chiun in?"

"In meditation room, gay-face."

"Will you cut that out!"

"You not die yet? What take you so long? Every night out on the town, and you still come back alive. Too skinny, but alive."

"Get stuffed."

"Stuff me. Change do you good."

Remo just gritted his teeth. It had been like this since the day Remo had returned home boasting that stewardesses didn't like him anymore.

"Faggot," the housekeeper had said, padding off in disgust.

Remo had tried to correct the mistaken impression. "I happen to like women."

"You supposed to love them. Coochie-coo."

"The trouble is stewardesses love me too much," Remo tried to explain.

"Too much love? No such thing."

The next time Remo saw her, she had handed him a pamphlet on AIDS prevention and a box of rainbow-striped condoms.

"Look," Remo had tried to explain, "women are drawn to me like flies to hamburger. I finally figured out a way to keep them at bay. Shark meat. I eat it by the ton. Something about it cancels out my pheromones and chases women off."

"Pillow biter."

"I didn't mean it like that!"

"Hah!"

It was the only fly in the ointment of Remo's current life. He had finally solved the stewardess problem only to find himself with a housekeeper problem.

Remo still couldn't figure out why Chiun had hired a housekeeper in the first place. This one was old, cranky and she sometimes smoked Robusto cigars-always outdoors.

Taking the steps to the bell-tower meditation room, Remo discovered it was empty except for the round tatami mat Chiun often meditated on. He stepped out of one shoe and touched the mat with a bare toe. Cool. Chiun hadn't been here in at least a half hour.

Descending, Remo scoured the third floor. No dice. There was no sign of the old Korean in any of his usual rooms. Not the room where he kept all his steamer trunks. Not the rice room, which was stacked with enough varieties of exotic and domestic rice for all of them to survive to the year 2099.

The room given over to Chiun's infatuation of the decade was padlocked, but Remo's highly attuned senses told him the Master of Sinanju's heartbeat and rice-paper personal scent were not coming from behind the door. Remo wondered why the door was padlocked. Chiun hadn't had an infatuation since he had grown sick of the news anchor named Cheeta Ching. Before that, he had been smitten by Barbra Streisand. He hoped Chiun hadn't fallen for the First Lady or someone equally inconvenient.

Finally, Remo found the Master of Sinanju in the fish cellar. It had only recently become the fish cellar, since Chiun had grown concerned over the dwindling fish resources of the planet Earth. Sinanju diet was restricted primarily to fish and duck and rice in vast quantities. Without all three of the allowed Sinanju food groups, their lives would be unlivable.

As Chiun once explained it to Remo, "We derive our powers of mind from the goodness of fish. Copious mounds of rice sustain our souls."

"What is duck good for?" Remo asked.

"Duck teaches us that no matter how monotonous fish and rice become, it could be worse. We could be limited to duck alone. Heh-heh-heh."

Remo wasn't sure how much of Chiun's remark was intentional humor, but he personally only looked forward to duck when he got tired of fish.

The fish cellar had been turned into a private aquarium. The walls were set with row upon row of fresh- and salt-water tanks. It looked like one of those multimedia banks of TV monitors all turned to a remote from the New England Aquarium. Except these fish were real. They were brought in from the seven seas, and delivered every month so that Remo and Chiun had their own private food stock. Chiun had won this concession at the last contract negotiation with Harold Smith.

At the far end of the cellar were the ice boxes and smoke rooms where iced and smoked fish waited for their glorious destiny, as Chiun once put it.

Chiun stood in profile before the stainless-steel door.

He seemed oblivious to Remo. In this view, Chiun's face was something made of papier-mache and peeled off an ancient wizard's desiccated skull.

Chiun stood not much taller than five feet. His bony, frail-seeming body was cloaked in a traditional kimono of raw, neutral-hued silk. Its sleeves hung down over the Master of Sinanju's cupped hands, which rested on his tight little belly.

His head was down. He might have been praying. Shifting light from one of the fish tanks played on his wrinkled, impassive features.

At Remo's approach, the Master of Sinanju didn't react.

Instead, he said, "You wear a face I do not care for."

"It's about that freaking housekeeper of yours."

"Who?"

"What's her name?"

"I do not know to whom you refer," said Chiun, gaze not lifting from the fish in the tank.

"I don't know her name. She won't tell me."

"Perhaps it is Grandmother Mulberry."

"Is that who she is?"

"It is possible she is Grandmother Mulberry," said Chiun, nodding. The simple nod made his wispy beard curl in the still air like paper being consumed by an unseen flame. Over his tiny ears, clouds of white hair gathered like storm clouds guarding a mountain.

"Well, if you don't freaking know, who does?"

Chiun said nothing. Remo joined him, and found himself looking at a trio of silver-blue fish zipping back and forth. They looked too small to eat, and Remo said so.

"Perhaps you would prefer suck-fish," returned Chiun.

"Not from the sound of them."

From his sleeve, a bony talon of a hand emerged to tap the screen with a long fingernail that was fully an inch longer than the others, which were very long.

"Isn't it about time you clipped that one?" asked Remo.

"I am enjoying the resurgence of this nail, which was formerly concealed from sight." And he tapped the glass with a metallic click. "There."

The fish was black, as long as a man's palm, and it was attached to the side of the tank with its open suckerlike mouth.

"That's a suck-fish?"

"It is edible."

"If you say so," said Remo.

"But tonight we will enjoy Arctic char."

"Sounds better."

Chiun's eyes were hooded as they remained on the tank.

"You are troubled, my son."

"I am an assassin."

"Yes?"

"You trained me to kill."

"Yes."

"You showed me how to insert my fingers into the intercostal spaces in a target's ribs and nudge his heart into going to sleep."

Chiun nodded. "You learned that technique well."

"You taught me how to pulverize the human pelvis with the heel of my foot."

"A remonstrance, not a killing."

"You taught me the techniques for short-circuiting the spinal cord, bruising the brain and lacerating the liver without breaking the target's skin."

"These subtle arts you also embraced in time."

"But there's one thing you forgot to teach me."

For the first time, the Master of Sinanju's eyes looked up at Remo, meeting them. They held an unspoken question in their clear hazel depths.

"You forgot to teach me how to strangle annoying housekeepers."

"You would not!"

"She's worse than a fishwife, Chiun!" Remo exploded. "What the hell is she doing here?"

"She performs certain services."

"I'll cook every meal forever if you get rid of her."

"She does laundry."

"All the laundry. I'll do it. Gladly."

"She mops floors. You do not mop floors. It is beneath you. I have heard you say this."

"Buy me a mop. You'll have the cleanest floors in town."

"You do not do windows. You have insisted upon this for years."

"I'm a new man. Windows are my business. I'll lick them clean if I have to."

"No," said the Master of Sinanju.

"What do you mean, no?"

"There are other duties she performs that you cannot."

"Like what? Stinking up the back wing with cigar smoke. How come you tolerate it?"

"It is a harmless habit."

"She might set the house on fire."

"Thus far, she has not. If she does, I will reconsider your request."

"I don't get it," said Remo.

"You are too young to get it." And with that, the Master of Sinanju reached out in the wavery light and touched the side of the fish tank he had been contemplating.

It winked out like a TV.

Remo gaped at the tiny white dot in the center of the abruptly black rectangle. "Huh?"

"The Fish Channel," said Chiun. "It is very soothing. Especially when considering complaints of no merit."

With that, the Master of Sinanju padded from the fish cellar, saying, "We will have Arctic char this evening. With jasmine rice. In celebration of the successful completion of your assignment in extinguishing the wicked general so that no one sees our hands."

"I ripped his freaking head off."

"Good. No one would suspect the hand of Sinanju behind such a clumsy and barbaric act. You did well."

"I was planning to strike the breath in his lungs. But I kept thinking of that fishwife of a housekeeper and lost it."

"Visualization is a good technique. Visualize success, and success follows."

"Right now, I visualize a hanging."

As he watched the Master of Sinanju pad up the stairs to the house proper, Remo muttered to himself, "Grandmother Mulberry... I'll bet my next three meals that's an alias."

Chapter 6

It was a stupid assignment.

"Oh, come on," Tammy Terrill complained to her news director, Clyde Smoot, over the din of Manhattan traffic blare and squeal coming through the office window.

"Slow news day, Tammy. Check it out."

"A guy drops dead in midtown traffic, and you want me to cover it?"

"There's some funny angles to this one."

Interest flicked over Tammy's corn-fed face. "Like what?"

"People said they heard a humming just before the guy keeled over. That smells like an angle to me."

"No, it sounds like an angle."

Smoot shrugged. "An angle is an angle. Dig up what you can. It's a slow news day."

"You already said that," Tammy reminded.

"Then why are you standing there listening to me repeat myself? Do your job."

Grabbing her cameraman, Tammy blew out of the studio of WHO-Fox in downtown Manhattan. It was a stupid assignment. But that was what the career of Tammy Terrill had come down to. Covering stupid assignments for Fox Network News.

In a way, she was lucky to be in broadcast journalism. Especially after she had been unmasked in national TV as a faux Japanese reporter.

It wasn't easy being blond and white in TV news in the late 1990s. Everywhere Tammy turned, there was a Jap or a Chinese reporter, perky and stylish, stepping on her blond coif in their scramble to be the next Cheeta Ching-style superanchor. And Tammy wasn't the only WASP left out in the cold. If you were white-bread, you were toast.

Tammy had decided that she wasn't going to let her all-American looks get in the way of her career. Asian anchorettes were the big thing. Her grandmother had been one-sixteenth Japanese, and so with the aid of a friendly makeup man, she had turned Japanese. For on-camera purposes only.

It got her in the door and on the lower rung of network anchor. Until that dark day under the hot lights when her slinky black wig came off, and Tamayo Tanaka was exposed as a blond fraud.

"So much for Plan A," Tammy complained to her agent after she was canned.

"No sweat. You come back."

"As what? A Chinese reporter? I can't claim to be one-sixteenth Chinese. It would be lying. Worse, it would be falsifying my resume--grounds for dismissal."

"Pretending to be one flavor of black-haired, almond-eyed journalist is as legit as another. But this time you come back blond."

Tammy frowned. "As myself?"

"Why not?"

"Blondes don't cut it in this business anymore."

"Times change. Look, it's been nine months. A lifetime. Even Deborah Norville got a second shot at fame."

"I won't do one of those hard-news shows," Tammy flared.

"Look, I think the Asian-anchorette trend has peaked. In the last year alone, Jade Chang, Chi-chi Wong, Dee-dee Yee and Bev Woo have come on the scene. It's oversaturation city."

"Bev Woo. She's been around forever."

"You're thinking of the old Bev Woo. There are two of them now. Both up in Boston."

"Is that legal?"

The agent shrugged. "It's great publicity."

"So I come back as myself?" mused Tammy.

"Sort of. Tell me, what's 'Tammy' short for?"

"Tammy."

"Hmm. Let me think. What would 'Tammy' be short for. Tam. Tam. Tam. Tamara! From now on, you're Tamara Terrill."

Tammy frowned. "Sounds Japanese."

"It's Russian, but we won't emphasize that. And if it doesn't work, next time you can be Tamiko Toyota."

"Are you crazy? I'd come across like a walking product-placement ad. What about my journalistic integrity?"

"Don't sweat it. I already got the ball rolling."

"Where?" Tammy asked eagerly.

"Fox."

"Fox! They're a joke. Half their newscast is UFO stories and Bigfoot sightings. It's scare news."

"That's just to bolster 'X-Files' ratings. It'll pass. See a guy named Smoot. I told him all about you."

"Except that I used to be Tamayo Tanaka ......

"No. I told him that, too. He thought it was a brilliant career move, except it didn't quite pan out."

"Pan out! I fell flat on my pancake makeup!" Tammy muttered.

THE Fox INTERVIEW went too well.

"You have the job," said News Director Clyde Smoot.

"You didn't ask me any questions," Tammy had complained.

"I just needed to see your face. You have a good camera face."

Except that in the six weeks Tammy had been working at Fox, her face had yet to be seen. Instead, they sent her scurrying here and there chasing down rumors of saucer landings and haunted condos. None of it ever aired.

"Don't worry. You'll break a story soon," Smoot reassured her.

As the cameraman wrestled the news van through Times Square traffic, Tammy held no hope that this time would be the charm.

"Always a reporter, never an anchor," she muttered, her chin on her cupped hands.

"Your day will come," the cameraman chirped. His name was Bob or Dave or something equally trustworthy. Tammy had learned a long time ago never to get attached to a cameraman. They were just glorified valets.

Traffic had gotten back to normal at the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Cabs and UPS vans were rolling over a silver-spray-painted body outline.

"Stop in front of it," Tammy directed.

"We're in traffic," Bob-or Dave-argued.

"Stop, you moron."

The van jolted to a stop, and Tammy stepped out, oblivious to the honking of horns and blaring and swearing.

"Looks like he fell on his face," she said

"Get in quick!" the cameraman urged.

Tammy looked around. "But what made the humming?"

"Forget the humming! Listen to the honking. It's talking to you."

Frowning, Tammy jumped back in and said, "Pull over."

On the sidewalk, Tammy scanned her surroundings.

The cameraman lugged his minicam out of the back and was getting it up on his beefy shoulder.

"They say that if you stand on this corner long enough, anyone you could name will walk by. Eventually."

"I saw Tony Bennett walk by my apartment last Tuesday. That was my thrill for the week."

"The guy was struck down about this time yesterday. Lunchtime. Maybe someone walking by saw it."

"It's a thought."

Tammy began accosting passersby with her hand microphone.

"Hello! I'm Tamara Terrill. Fox News. I'm looking for anyone who saw the guy who plotzed in the middle of traffic yesterday."

There were no takers.

"Keep trying," the cameraman prodded.

Tammy did.

"Hello. Did someone see the guy drop dead? Come on, someone must have seen something. Anyone hear a weird humming here yesterday?"

A discouraging half hour later, Tammy gave up.

"Why not try that traffic cop?" the cameraman suggested.

"Because this is his beat," the cameraman said tiredly.

Officer Funkhauser was only too happy to cooperate with Fox Network News.

"I heard the humming just before the guy plotzed," he said.

"Was there anything suspicious about his death?"

"Between you and me, his eyes and brains got eaten out."

"That wasn't in the papers."

"They're keeping it quiet. But that's what I found. Just keep my name out of the papers."

"What is your name?"

"Officer Muldoon. That's with two O's."

"See anything odd or out of place?"

"Just the dead guy."

"Any police theories you can share with me?"

"My experienced eyes say a Mafia hit," Officer Funkhauser said flatly.

"If it was a hit, there had to be a hit man. See anything or anyone who might have been a hit man?"

"No. Just ordinary people. Unless you consider the street vendor."

"Wouldn't that be a good hit-man disguise?"

"Maybe. He was giving away candy samples."

"What'd he look like?"

"Tall. Thin. Wore a Charlotte Hornets cap and team jacket."

"Isn't that kinda strange? A Hornets fan in the Big Apple?"

"It's New York. Nothing is unusual here."

"Point taken," said Tammy. "Thanks. You can go now."

The officer went back to directing traffic. Tammy went back to accosting the lunch crowd.

"Anyone who saw the death here yesterday gets to be on TV," she announced.

Faces brightened, and suddenly Tammy was surrounded by helpful citizens crying, "I saw him! I saw him!"

"I did, too. He was short and fat."

"No, tall and bean-poley."

"Actually, it was a woman."

"Forget it," said Tammy, disgusted with her opportunistic fellow men.

"I guess we pack it in," she told her cameraman dejectedly.

"You discourage easy."

"It's a discouraging game. I've been in it over two years and I'm not rich and famous yet."

"Life's an ordeal and then you fall into a pine box," the cameraman commiserated.

At that moment, Tommy's steely blue gaze fell on a light pole.

"What's that?"

The cameraman looked up. A thick clump of orange-and-black matter hung from the streetlight hood. It made him think of some kind of fungus, except pieces of it crawled along the surface.

"Bees. They're swarming."

"That's what I thought. Bees hum, don't they?"

"Actually, they kinda drone."

"The cop said the suspect hit man was wearing a Charlotte Hornets cap ...." Tammy mused.

"He didn't say 'suspect hit man.' That was your idea."

"Shut up! Shoot that light pole."

The cameraman shrugged and hefted his minicam onto his shoulder while Tammy chewed her red lower lip and said, "It's too much of a coincidence."

"What is?"

"That the hit man would be wearing a Hornets cap on the same site where bees were swarming."

"We don't know those bees were here yesterday."

"We don't know they weren't. And there's nobody here to say different."

The film shot, Tammy rushed the cameraman back into the van. She got her news director on the cell phone.

"Nice linking," Clyde said.

"Is it a story?" asked Tammy.

"Check out the medical examiner."

"Does this mean face time?"

"Get a shot of the eyeless dead guy, and I guarantee it," Tammy was promised.

As the van lumbered through crosstown traffic, Tammy was musing, "Do bees eat things?"

"Everything eats things."

"No, I mean like meat."

"Depends on the meat if they do."

"I wonder if bees could eat a man's eyes out."

"That kind of meat I don't think so. And weren't you raised on a farm?"

"I didn't pay too much attention to farm stuff. I was too busy trying to get out of the flatlands."

"I've heard of dragonflies sewing people's mouths shut, but not bees who eat eyes."

"Who cares about bugs anyway?"

"I don't know. Sounds like a Fox story to me-killer bees eat man's eyeballs."

Tammy snapped her fingers. "Killer bees. Wasn't that a big story about ten years ago?"

"Sure."

"Killer bees. They were down in Texas or something. Whatever happened to them?"

The cameraman made a nonchalant face. "Search me. I guess they died out."

"Well, they're back and if my theory is on the money, they're going to be the story of the century."

"What theory?"

"Mind your driving. I'm still working on it."

Chapter 7

"Tamara Terrill. Fox News. I'm here to see the medical examiner."

"He's conducting an important autopsy right now," the desk guard said, looking up at the electric sight of the blond newswoman towering over him, her chest puffed out to its greatest expanse. It was a noteworthy chest.

"Great. Stiffs make wonderful TV. C'mon, Fred."

"It's 'Bob,'" the cameraman said.

"Hey, you can't-"

"Shoot us, and we'll shoot back," the cameraman said, turning the harsh glare of his minicam light on the guard.

That was enough to get them into the building.

It was a maze of bone-colored brick, with toe-tagged bodies on rolling carts and formaldehyde aroma. The cameraman happily shot every hanging ice-cold hand and blue tagged-toe he could.

"We don't need that stuff," Tammy snapped.

"If we don't, I can sell it as stock footage to the 'X-Files' people."

The M.E. was bent over a dead man lying inert on a white porcelain autopsy table. It looked as if it had been hosting corpses since before the days of Prohibition. The M.E. didn't look up.

"I am busy here."

"You the medical examiner?" Tammy asked.

"Please douse that light."

Tammy snapped her fingers. The light went off.

"Tamara Terrill. Fox News. I'd like to talk to you about the dead man you autopsied yesterday."

"I autopsied many dead men yesterday. This is New York, after all."

"This dead man had his eyes eaten out of his sockets," Tammy explained.

"Yes, I am familiar with that case."

"In your expert medical opinion, could killer bees have done that?"

The M.E. snapped out of his professional trance and looked up at Tammy for the first time.

"Bees?"

"Killer bees. From Brazil."

"Why do you ask about bees?"

"There's a swarm of them attached to the light post over the crime scene."

"And why do you call it a crime scene, may I ask?"

"We'll get to that. Answer my question and I'll answer yours."

"I did not perform the autopsy on Doyal Rand, I confess."

"Oh. Well, I need to talk to the guy who did."

"I am sorry to disappoint you, but you cannot do that."

"You don't know how determined I am."

"I am sure you are quite capable, but the man in question happens to be the man I am presently autopsying."

Tammy blinked and said, "What?" and then added, "What did you say?"

"I am the new medical examiner. My predecessor lies here on this slab."

Tammy walked up, looked at the dead face and asked, "What happened to him?"

"He was found dead in this very room this morning."

"What killed him?"

"That, I am attempting to ascertain."

"Could it have been killer bees?"

"Killer bees, as I recall, are not normally fatal unless one is stung by great numbers of them."

"Was this guy stung at all?"

"It is a thought." And the M.E. went back to his duties.

Tammy watched.

The M.E. was speaking into a microphone suspended before his face on a flexible snake.

"Subject is a white male 180 centimeters tall and weighing seventy-seven kilograms. There are no discernible marks or contusions visible on the body ...."

"Are you getting this?" Tammy hissed to her cameraman.

The man rolled tape.

The M.E. was saying, "The throat and tongue appear swollen, and there is evidence of cardiac arrest. Lividity is normal, and rigor has not yet commenced."

"What's that?" Tammy interrupted.

The M.E. looked up. He saw Tammy's gesturing finger, and his eyes jumped to the spot on the dead man's shoulder where she was pointing.

Taking up a magnifying glass, the surviving M.E. examined the mark.

"Looks red," Tammy said helpfully.

"I can see that," the M.E. snapped.

"A moment ago, you were saying there were no marks."

"Hush!" the M.E. said.

With a tweezer taken up from a stainless-steel tray, he brushed at a tiny dark dimple embedded in the center of the red mark.

"Odd."

"What?"

"It appears to be insect fragments."

"A bee! Could it be a bee?"

"They appear to be too small for that."

"Oh," said Tammy, deflating.

Carefully, the M.E. scraped the fragments into a waiting envelope. He carried them over to a microscope, deposited the fragments onto a glass slide and inserted it into the microscope.

Bending over, he peered within.

"Can I see?"

"No."

"Okay, can you tell me what you see?"

"I see the crushed remains of a very small insect."

"A killer bee! It's got to be a killer bee!"

"I am no specialist, but bees don't grow to this size. It cannot be a bee."

"It's gotta be a bee. If it's not a bee, I have no killer-bee story. I need a killer bee for my story."

"It is not a bee of any kind," the M.E. said, straightening. "But this is very strange. I don't know what kind of insect could inject a man with fatal consequences."

"A wasp, maybe? Could it be a killer wasp?" No.

"How about a hornet? The alleged hit man was wearing a Charlotte Hornets ball cap."

The M.E. looked at Tammy Terrill as if she were not quite sane. "What are you babbling about, miss?"

"Nothing. Aren't you going to test the body for bee venom?"

"I will examine the tissues for foreign toxins, of course. But I don't expect to find bee venom. And now I must ask you to leave this building."

"You're welcome," Tammy said frostily.

OUTSIDE, SHE SNAPPED Open her cell phone and got her news director.

"I think I have a story, Clyde. Listen to this ...."

At the end of it, Smoot was skeptical. "Killer bees are passe. Strictly seventies."

"I think they're back. Put me on the air, and let's see where this goes."

"You're on. But first get to the library."

"What's there?"

"Books on bees. Do your research. I want this story backed up by hard facts."

"I have film and a chain of coincidences. What do I need facts for?"

"Facts," the Fox news director said, "will keep the snowball rolling down the happy hill. And the longer it rolls, the bigger it will be."

"Not as big as I will be," Tammy breathed, clicking off.

Chapter 8

"Her name is Grandmother Mulberry," said Remo into the pay phone at the Vietnamese market around the corner from Castle Sinanju.

"First name?" asked Harold Smith.

"That's all I have. I think it's an alias. And dollars to doughnuts she's an illegal. I want her deported. Preferably to the dark side of the moon."

"What will the Master of Sinanju say?"

"This time, for once, I don't freaking care. He can storm around like Donald Duck, screaming like Chicken Little and make my life generally miserable. I want the old bat out of my hair and my life."

"One moment, Remo."

Harold Smith was at his Folcroft desk. The buried amber monitor was active. Tapping the illuminated capacity keyboard with his thin gray fingers, he input "Mulberry" and executed a global search of his data base.

He was expecting no results from such meager data, but Smith's gray right eyebrow involuntarily jumped as something popped up. He read it through the lenses of his rimless glasses.

"Remo, I believe I can confirm 'Grandmother Mulberry' is an alias."

"I knew it! What's her real name?"

"According to this, Grandma Mulberry was an historical or possibly mythical person in old Korea. She was left stranded by the closing of the tides over a stone bridge to an island, her fate unknown."

"How long ago did this happen?"

"An estimated five hundred years ago."

"Well, the old bat looks old enough to be that Grandmother Mulberry," Remo said sourly.

"I suspect Master Chiun is playing a joke on you."

"How about if I get you her fingerprints?"

"If she is illegal, they will be useless," Smith answered. "And if she is legal, she cannot be deported."

"What if she's a North Korean spy?"

"That is a farfetched theory."

"I'll grasp at any shaky straw at this point."

The Nynex computer operator asked Remo for another dime, and he deposited the coin.

"Why are you calling from a pay phone?" Smith asked.

"So nobody knows it's me dropping a dime on the old bat."

"We may have to live with this woman until Chiun decides otherwise," Smith said.

"That's easy for you to say. You don't have to live with her."

"She calls me Sourpuss when I answer," Smith said.

"It's better than being a pussy-willow-faced pillow-biter," Remo growled.

"What did you say, Remo?"

"Never mind. Look, I'm going stir-crazy here. Got an assignment for me? I'll happily squash any terrorist or mafioso you care to finger."

"There is nothing on my desk at the moment."

"Are there riots anywhere? Send me to the worst section of Washington, D.C. I'll clean up the crack houses and paint them any color you want."

"Local law enforcement will handle Washington, D.C."

"Not from what I read. The town is practically a Third World hellhole, and no one can do anything about it."

Smith sighed like a leaky radiator valve. "If you stay on the line, I'll see what my system comes up with."

A dollar-fifty in change later, Smith's voice came back on the line.

"Remo, a man was killed yesterday in a bizarre fashion."

"It would have to be real bizarre to impress me. I've seen bizarre. I've done bizarre. What's your definition of bizarre?"

"He collapsed while crossing Seventh Avenue at Times Square and was found with his eyes and brains consumed by some as-yet-unknown agency."

"Sounds like the IRS to me."

Smith's voice actually winced audibly. "That is not funny."

"But it's true. You've been audited. Okay, it's bizarre. Where do I start?"

"I want you and Chiun-"

"Whoa! Where does Chiun fit into this?"

"The medical examiner who autopsied the victim died himself under strange circumstances. Chiun is an expert on exotic deaths, especially poisons. His knowledgeable eye might be useful."

"As long at that Korean battle-ax doesn't tag along," Remo growled, looking over his shoulder at Castle Sinanju.

"See that she does not," said Smith, and hung up.

RETURNING HOME, Remo broke the news to the Master of Sinanju.

"Smith's got an assignment for us."

"You go. I am busy."

Remo saw that the Master of Sinanju was sorting teas. Oolongs and Pekoes and greens in tin containers were arrayed about him on the floor. Chiun carefully opened and sniffed each container, disposing of stuff that had gone bad. He reminded Remo of King Croesus counting his wealth.

"Smith says you're needed on this one."

Chiun looked up, delight touching his wrinkled countenance. "Emperor Smith said that. Truly?"

"Yeah. A guy was killed somehow. When they found him, his brains and eyes were missing. Then the guy who did the autopsy died under mysterious circumstances."

"Someone does not wish the truth to be discovered."

"What truth?"

"The truth which we will soon discover."

"Smith said the second guy died of poison. You know about poisons. That's why your help is needed here," Remo explained.

The Master of Sinanju rose to his feet, a golden puffball with rose-stem limbs.

"I go where my emperor bids me to go," he intoned, his visage suffused with a golden pride.

"You go where he says because it keeps the gold flowing."

"Do not be crass, Remo."

"I call them as I see them."

"That is the motto of the crass."

THE MEDICAL EXAMINER in Manhattan examined Remo's Department of Health credentials, eyed the Master of Sinanju with a mixture of dubiousness and, nodding respectfully, he said, "I have not yet determined a cause of death."

"For which one-the victim or the guy who autopsied him?"

"Either. Come this way."

The two dead men occupied adjoining refrigerated drawers. Dr. Schiff-his card read Norman Schiff-pulled out the body of Doyal T. Rand first, and the Master of Sinanju bustled up to examine it critically.

"For all intents and purposes, this man's head has been emptied of all organic matter except for the skull bones," Dr. Schiff explained.

"What would do that?"

"This is so far into the realm of the unknown that I wouldn't venture a guess. But the brain matter showed signs my predecessor ascribed to having been thoroughly chewed."

"Chewed?"

"Chewed."

"Something ate his brain?" Remo asked.

"It would appear so."

The drawer rolled shut. Out came the cadaver of the chief medical examiner for Manhattan until that morning.

"I have found what appears to be an insect bite on Dr. Quirk's shoulder."

Chiun peered at the bite site and said, "A bad bee did this."

"Insect parts were found, but they were too small to support the bee theory."

"It was a very small bee," Chiun said.

Dr. Schiff frowned fiercely. "I am in contact with one of the most renowned entomologists in the country, and he says no bee that small exists in nature. Therefore, it was not a bee."

Chiun asked, "Where is the corpse of the bee?"

"Follow me."

They were shown the microscope, and it was turned on.

"Without this contraption for the blind," said Chiun.

"Beg pardon?"

"I prefer my naked eyes."

"But you will not be able to see anything."

"Do what he says," suggested Remo. "He's the big cheese in his speciality."

"What is your specialty, might I ask?" Schiff inquired of Chiun.

"Death," said Chiun in a chilly tone.

Shrugging, the M.E. shut off the microscope and extracted the slide. He handed it to Chiun, who lifted it to the light.

Chiun subjected the slide to the critical acuity of first one eye, then the other. Remo leaned over, but Chiun faded back, hissing, "You are in my light, oafish one."

"Sorry," said Remo, stepping around to the other side.

"I see bug parts," said Remo.

Chiun nodded. "Yes, these look like the parts of a bug."

"Of course," said the M.E., who was astonished that these two could discern this with only their unassisted eyes.

"Bee parts," Chiun added.

"No bees are so small," the M.E. insisted. "I have this on the highest authority."

"Who's that?"

"Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger, the renowned entomologist."

"Renown does not equal correctness," sniffed Chiun. He eyed Dr. Schiff. "Do you know the name of the finest assassin in the world?"

"I do not."

"Or his title?"

"Of course not. Therefore what?"

"He is not renowned."

"That makes him perhaps more, not less great," said the Master of Sinanju, handing the slide back and leaving the room in a rustle and swirl of kimono skirts.

Outside, Remo turned to Chiun and asked, "So, we got nothing?"

"On the contrary. We have something terrible."

"What's that?"

"The bee that is not."

And that was all Remo could get out of the Master of Sinanju.

Chapter 9

The New York Public Library near Bryant Park was a lot bigger than Tammy Terrill expected it to be. She immediately got lost among the bewildering maze of book-laden shelves.

"Where's the bug department?" she asked a librarian.

The woman looked up from reshelving a cart full of books. "The what?"

"Uh, the department of insects?"

"Try biology."

"Is that near here?"

Her tone and face were so helpless that the librarian broke down and escorted Tammy to the biology section and indicated a row of fat books so long Tammy blurted, "I didn't know there were that many books in the world!"

"Insects outnumber people by billions. In fact, if you could place every ant on earth on one side of a balance scale and every human being on the other, ants would outweigh mankind."

"Ooh. Neat factoid. You must watch the Discover Channel constantly. "

"No," the librarian said frostily, "I read."

"I read, too. TelePrompTers. Sometimes AP wire stories when I absolutely have to."

"I'll leave you to your digging," the librarian said.

Her eyes widening, Tammy grabbed the woman by her skinny arm. "Wait. I only need to know about bees."

"Bees?"

"Killer bees."

The librarian walked the length of the long rows of shelving and, without seeming to look at the spines, stopped and indicated an upper section of shelf.

"Here," she said.

"You really know this shelf, don't you?"

"I work here," the librarian returned, and walked off, trailing a faint scent of lilac.

There were a lot of bee books, Tammy found. Two on killer bees alone. Both were titled The Killer Bees, but they were not the same book. The author names were completely different. Tammy wondered if it was legal for two people to write a book on the same subject with the same title and decided because they were books, nobody probably read them much and by this time nobody really cared. Reading was so pre-MTV.

She took the books off the shelf and saw they were pretty old-mid 1970s. It gave her a weird chill to think that she herself was as old as an actual book. And vice versa.

The upside was that the prices were really, really cheap.

At the checkout line, they wouldn't accept Visa. Or Discover, Tammy found.

"Miss, I need to see your library card," a prim woman told her.

"Oh, I don't have that one. Must have maxed it out. Will you take a check?"

They wouldn't take checks. Or cash, either.

"You'll have to apply for a card. Or read them here."

Tammy still didn't quite get it, but figured if they were stupid enough to let her read the books on the premises, why should she bother to buy?

At a desk, she skimmed through both books, absorbing factoids by the score. This was how she did most of her research. Tammy had discovered long ago, you didn't need much to get through for a three-minute stand-up report. A necklace of names and facts usually carried the segment.

While skimming, she committed dozens of interesting facts to memory.

Bees, she learned, were very, very important. They gathered the pollen grains that fertilized all plants on earth. Without bees, flowers couldn't reproduce.

"Great! A sex angle."

Bees were good insects, because they fertilized food plants. And they made honey. Another good, beneficial thing.

"Ooh, a diet angle. It's getting better."

Then she got to the juicy stuff.

The proper name was Africanized killer bee. That presented an image problem, but that would be up to Fox standard practices whether or not to identify killer bees by race.

Early on, she read that there was no known geographic or climatic barrier that would prevent the spread of the killer bee into North America. That one she wrote down because it was an actual quote and she wanted to get it right in case someone actually checked. It sounded perfect for her lead.

Killer bees, Tammy further discovered, injected a neurotoxin that was more deadly than the simple toxin of ordinary honeybees. They were also unusually aggressive and easily provoked.

"More people succumb each year to bee stings than to snakebites," she muttered, moving her lips with each enunciated word.

"Deadlier than a rattlesnake!" she cried, instantly coining a new lead.

"Shh!"

Tammy ignored the other browsers at their tables. She wondered how libraries made money. Everyone seemed to be reading, not buying.

She was surprised to find that bees were kept in apiaries.

"Wonder where apes are kept. In honeycombs?"

She shrieked a resounding "Eureka" when she came to an illustration in the version of The Killer Bees, copyright 1977, that showed a projection graph of killer-bee migration that predicted they would reach New York by 1993.

"Perfect!" she added, rushing off to make a photocopy.

Leaving the library, clutching her notes, she found her cameraman eating a hot pretzel with mustard at a vending cart.

"I got everything I need," she said, waving her notes in his slowly chewing face.

"Except a talking head of an expert," the cameraman reminded.

"Expert what?" asked Tammy.

"On bugs, natch."

"Oh, damn. Where do I find one of those?"

"That's what news directors are for. Ask yours."

CLYDE SMOOT, news director of WHO-Fox, listened patiently to Tammy's breathless recitation of factoids and said, "You're on to something."

"I knew it! I knew it!"

"But you need a talking-head expert," he added.

"Told you so," the hovering cameraman said.

"Where do I find one?" Tammy asked.

"In the Fox research library," Smoot said.

"We have one of those?"

"For paranormal stories, absolutely."

And crooking a finger, Smoot motioned Tammy to follow him.

In a room marked Storage, he flicked a light switch and rummaged through shelves of black videocassettes. Finding a certain one, he popped it into a deck and fast-forwarded it to the end.

"Isn't that Fox Mulder?" Tammy asked, squinting at the off-color image.

"Yeah."

"Since when is an 'X-Files' episode considered news research?"

"Since it's the killer-bee episode."

"They did one?"

"Here's the end credit." Smoot slowed the tape down. Eerie music floated through the air, and he hit Pause.

"What's that?" Tammy asked.

Smoot laid a finger on a jittery line in the end credits and read it aloud.

" 'Special thanks to Helwig X. Wurmlinger, special consultant.'"

"On what?"

"If this were the poltergeist episode, I'd say poltergeist. But it's the killer-bee episode, so it's gotta be-"

"Killer bees!" Tammy cried joyously.

"There you go. Call the 'X-Files' production office in Toronto, and they'll point you in the right direction."

"Shouldn't I air a preliminary report first?"

"With stuff from stuffy old books and morgue shots? No way. We need a talking head for credibility."

"Oh, all right..."

At her desk, Tammy worked the phone.

"I'm doing a story on killer bees," she explained.

"They're old hat," the "X-Files" production office told her.

"My story will prove they've hit New York. A guy's already plotzed with his brain eaten out."

"Damn!"

"What's the problem? You're way down there in Canada."

"Canada is up. And we already did a killer-bee episode. We can't do another. We're already in secondary syndication."

"Tough break. Now, how about Wurmlinger's address?"

"All my Rolodex has is a telephone number."

"Shoot," said Tammy.

After hanging up, Tammy immediately dialed the number of Helwig X. Wurmlinger.

"Hello?" a low, buzzing voice said.

"Is this Earwig Wurmlinger?"

"It is not. And I cannot talk to you at present."

"This is for TV."

"I will have no statements until I have examined the victim."

"Which victim?"

"Why, the deceased medical examiner, of course."

"I saw the autopsy. They think it's bee poison."

"Toxin. Bees produce venom. Poison is another secretion entirely."

"How about I meet you at the New York morgue?"

"Impossible."

"Why?"

"Because I am about to catch a flight for Los Angeles and the L.A. County morgue."

"But the New York morgue is here in Manhattan," Tammy protested.

"I do not know what you are talking about, but the stricken medical examiner is in Los Angeles."

"Are we talking about the same M.E.? Died of a bee sting?"

"A suspected bee sting. After autopsying a person who appeared to have succumbed to the same malady."

"There are killer bees in L.A.?"

"I deal in theories," Helwig X. Wurmlinger said stiffly, over what Tammy realized was a background buzzing.

"And I deal in coincidences," exulted Tammy. "I'm on my way to L.A. See you there."

Turning to her cameraman, she said, "It's a bicoastal story. Can you believe it? Bicoastal. My story has gone nationwide, and I haven't even been on the air yet!"

Chapter 10

On the flight to Los Angeles, Remo found he had time on his hands.

The flight attendants were ignoring him as if he didn't exist. There was only one exception.

"Don't I know you?" asked a fleshy blonde whose lips were so red they were almost black.

"Search me."

"You look familiar to me," she said as she lowered his seat-back tray and laid down a monogrammed napkin.

"All stewardesses look the same to me," Remo said truthfully.

"How's that?"

"Hungry for love."

"I'm happily married," the blonde said disdainfully. Her name tag said Loma. Her eyes went to Remo's thick wrists. Recognition bloomed in them.

"I know you! I served you on a Detroit flight a few years ago." Then, memory clarifying, she blushed a beet red. "Oh."

"Don't tell me," said Remo. "You tried to sit on my lap while I was standing."

"I-I wasn't married then," she stammered. "Would you like a refreshment, sir?"

"No," said the Master of Sinanju, who was indifferent to stewardesses.

"And you?" she asked of Remo.

"Mineral water."

As she poured mineral water into a short plastic glass, the stewardess said, "I want to apologize for my behavior."

"Apology accepted."

"I don't know what possessed me. I never tried to sit in passengers' laps, married or not."

"No problem. I put it behind me a long time ago."

"Did you age or something?"

"No."

"Lose weight?"

"No," said Remo, taking the glass. "Why?"

"It's just ...I don't know what I saw in you." Her fingers flew to her mouth. "Oops. That just came out."

"Don't sweat it," Remo said sourly as the flight attendant bustled on to the next row.

In his seat, Remo's face darkened in cast.

"What troubles you?" asked Chiun.

"I don't know... I think I'm starting to miss stewardesses falling all over me."

"Stop eating malodorous carnivorous fish, and they will return to their former predatory ways."

"I wonder if I'm going through a midlife crisis."

"Not unless you are planning upon dying young, and if you are, I would consider advance warning a boon, for I must train your replacement."

Remo grinned. "No one could ever replace me, right?"

"No one could ever replace you," the Master of Sinanju agreed.

Remo's grin widened.

"Without my guidance and assistance," Chiun added. "And of course I would mourn. For a time. Not long. Enough to be seemly. Too much mourning would be unseemly. I will not mourn long. Only a prescribed interval."

"Can it, Little Father."

Chiun resumed his examination of the sleek aluminum wing, which he feared might fall off. It was a longtime phobia. It had never happened, but as Chiun was forever reminding Remo, aircraft fell out of the sky constantly. At least three per season-which was too many.

Remo remembered what the Master of Sinanju had said at the Manhattan morgue about the cause of death of the late medical examiner.

"Hey, Chiun. When is a bee not a bee?"

"When it is not," Chiun said flatly.

"Care to elaborate?"

"My wisdom would be wasted upon small minds."

"Bees are bees."

"Except when they are not."

"I saw a bee. A very tiny bee."

"And you do not question what your eyes see?"

"Hardly ever."

"Then you saw a bee."

"What did you see?"

"A not-bee."

"Is that anything like a knothole?"

"I will not answer your riddle because it has no answer," Chiun said elliptically.

"Suit yourself. I'm going to catnap. It's a long way to L.A."

"With you snoring at my side, an eternity," Chiun sniffed.

But Remo dropped off to sleep anyway.

He dreamed of stewardesses dressed in bumblebee uniforms. They kept trying to sting him with their fingernails.

Chapter 11

Los Angeles County Deputy Coroner Gideon Krombold was certain of his diagnosis.

"Dr. Nozoki succumbed to anaphylactic shock," he was saying.

"I concur," said his visitor. He was long of body, with the pinched, inquisitive face of a locust. His features twitched. Dr. Krombold thought Helwig X. Wurmlinger was twitchy because he was used to dissecting insects, not humans. But as his dark eyes lifted from a cursory examination of Dr. Nozoki's undraped body, his face continued to twitch. The man clearly suffered from a nervous tick.

"The cyanosis, facial mottling, constricted windpipe and other symptoms all point to toxic systemic shock induced by hypersensitivity to a bee's sting. In other words, death by anaphylaxis."

"Did you discover the ovipositor?"

"No. There is a puncture wound. But no stinger."

"Show me," said Helwig X. Wurmlinger, his left eye twitching to the right. His mouth twitched in the opposite direction. He wore glasses whose lenses were as thick as ice pried off a midwinter sidewalk.

They distorted his tea-colored eyes into the swimmy orbs of a frog.

Dr. Krombold lifted a dead gray arm and turned it so the elbow was visible beneath the overhead fluorescents.

"Here."

Wurmlinger took off his glasses, and his eyes jumped back to normal size with a speed that was unnerving.

He used one lens like a magnifying glass to inspect the dead man's elbow.

"I see a puncture wound consistent with a bee's sting, but there is no barb."

"Maybe he scraped it out," Dr. Krombold suggested.

"It is possible. That is the recommended procedure. But typically, those who are allergic to the toxins of Apis fall into respiratory distress very quickly. He would have to have had great presence of mind to have removed the stinger before collapsing." Wurmlinger replaced his glasses and regarded Dr. Krombold with his froggy orbs. "Was there any evidence of a tool in his hand when he was found?"

"No."

"Any sign of disarray?"

"No. In fact, he was found seated in his chair."

"Wearing long or short sleeves?"

"Long."

"Odd. A lone bee rarely stings though clothing."

"But one could, am I not correct?"

"It is possible. The bee in question might have entered via a sleeve by accident and, becoming trapped, grew enraged. Was a bee found?"

"No."

"Peculiar. No sting and no dead bee. Bees die after they sting, for the barbs prevent the stinger from being withdrawn from human flesh. The effort required for the bee to disassociate itself from its victim literally disembowels it. There should be a dead bee. It is inescapable."

"I had Dr. Nozoki's office vacuumed. No dead bee was found."

Dr. Wurmlinger's face twitched in every direction conceivable. "Peculiar. Most peculiar," he murmured.

"Maybe it flew away and died under something," Krombold offered.

Wurmlinger shook his head firmly. "Upon losing its sting, the bee suffers immediate distress. It cannot fly and can barely crawl. This is much the same as losing a leg. It could not have gotten far."

"Well," Krombold said helplessly, "there was no bee."

"There was no bee found," Wurmlinger corrected.

"True." Dr. Krombold cleared his throat. He was becoming uncomfortable with this pedantic entomologist. "Would you like to see the other victims?"

"No. I would prefer to see the contents of their thoraxes."

"You mean stomachs."

"Yes, yes. Of course."

"This way, Dr. Wurmlinger."

In a laboratory, Dr. Krombold sorted through several blackish green piles of organic matter-the partially-digested stomach contents of Perry Noto, his wife, Heather, and their chef, Remy.

Wurmlinger was as methodically creepy as a night crawler, Krombold thought after watching him pick through the stomach contents and take tiny bits of insect matter to a waiting microscope for study.

Krombold had to leave in the middle of it, but Wurmlinger seemed as happy as a dung beetle in shit.

"I'll wait for you in my office," the deputy coroner said, closing the door after himself.

Wurmlinger nodded absently.

Dr. Krombold wasn't in his office very long when a blond woman with the energy of a hyperactive Ritalin candidate stormed in.

"Are you the coroner who died?"

"Obviously not. That was Dr. Nozoki. I'm Dr. Krombold. Gideon Krombold. Who are you?"

"Tamara Terrill, Fox News." She called over her shoulder. "Joe, get in here!"

"The name's Fred," said a man with a minicam for a face-or so it seemed to Krombold on first impression.

"Has Dr. Wurmlinger got here yet?" Tammy Terrill demanded.

"Yes. But he's busy."

Tammy showed him her portable mike. "I'll talk to you first. Tell me everything."

"You have to be more specific than that."

"No time. Just spill your guts, and we'll edit them in the studio."

Dr. Krombold blinked.

"I'm talking about the killer bees. I know they're out here," Tammy prodded.

"Nonsense. Dr. Nozoki succumbed to an ordinary bee sting. The others-"

"Tell me about the others," Tammy interjected.

"I haven't yet finished telling you about Dr. Nozoki."

"This is TV. We can't dwell on stuff. People lose interest. Especially our audience."

"You know," Dr. Krombold said, picking up his desk telephone, "I think it would be best if you two left the building. I have not consented to an interview."

"Too late. Once you're on tape, the only way not to look bad is to go with the flow."

Dr. Krombold jumped from his seat and pointed an angry finger at the minicam lens that was recording his complexion going from florid to brick red.

"Turn that thing off!" he blazed.

It was spoken in anger. Krombold probably never expected an instant response, never mind compliance. But he got both.

The cameraman let out a strident yell, screamed and the minicam hit the yellowed linoleum with a bang. The light fizzled out.

Tammy shouted down at the man, "What the hell are you doing, you clumsy-!"

The cameraman was on his back, going into convulsions. He gasped, the gasping turning to a wheezing with his face becoming as mottled as wine sprinkled on satin.

"What's wrong?" Tammy demanded.

"B-b-b-b-bee!" he managed to say.

And up from between where his fingers were clutching his belly crawled a fat, fuzzy black-and-yellow insect. With a nasty ziii, it took to the air.

"Killer bee!" Tammy screeched, picking up a chair. "It's a killer bee. Damn, and it's not on tape."

"Don't become excited!" Dr. Krombold said. "Please calm down. It has stung your cameraman. It's only a matter of moments before it dies a natural death."

"I'm not letting it sting me," Tammy shrieked.

"Be still. Don't attract its attention," Krombold urged, coming around from behind his desk. "It will die soon. And it can't sting again. It has lost its sting."

"Tell that to the damn bee," said Tammy, trying to whack it with the chair.

The bee didn't die. It buzzed around but Tammy kept it at bay with her chair.

Finally, it took up a position atop a file cabinet and turned around completely once, then sat there looking at them with its many-faceted eyes.

"Grab a rolled-up newspaper," Tammy hissed, holding the chair between her and the intent bee. She knew that chairs were the best defense against knives. She figured a bee was just a tiny blade with wings.

"No need," Krombold assured her. "It is dying."

"You positive?"

"Bees can only sting once. Then they die. Dr. Wurmlinger said so."

"Well, he's the expert, right?"

Slowly, carefully, Tammy set the chair down.

She knelt over Bob or Ted or whatever his name was and shook him vigorously.

"Get up, you slacker."

The cameraman just lay there. His eyes were swelling shut.

"Hey, I think he's sick."

Dr. Krombold jumped to her side. His expert hands went to the man's throat, felt for a pulse, opened one eye and then the other and tested the open mouth for the warm breath of respiration. He found none of those signs of life.

"This man is dead," he said.

"I knew it! I knew it was a killer bee." And grabbing up the fallen minicam, she trained it on the bee.

"Smile for America, you little monster. I got you now."

The harsh light fell upon the bee. In response, it lifted its wings and launched itself at Tammy.

Venting a shriek, Tammy then launched the minicam at the bee, praying the tape would survive a second jolt.

Bee and camera collided in midair. The camera hit the floor for the second time.

This time, the bee came. roaring back. It flew straight up into the air and attempted to dive-bomb Tammy. She slithered out of the way, grabbed up a newspaper and made it into a tight, hard roll.

"I'll teach you, you little bugger!" she screamed.

Her first swipe missed. The second, coming on the backswing, knocked the bee clear out into the hall. It landed on the black-and-white diamond-pattern linoleum of the hall with a distinct but tiny clink.

"Where did it land?"

Dr. Krombold eased out into the corridor. "I can't see it."

Then the bee crawled onto a white diamond from a black one.

"There!" said Tammy, descending on it with blond fury. The newspaper smacked it hard.

"Got it!"

But the bee wasn't dead yet. It continued to crawl.

Tammy hit it again.

Smack.

She hit it twice more and, when it still wouldn't die, unfolded the paper and dropped it square on the stubborn bee. Amazingly, the paper marched along the floor, pulled along by the still-not-dead insect.

"What does it take to kill you?" Tammy complained.

This time, she stomped on every crumpled inch of the newspaper with both feet.

"I think I got it this time," she panted, stepping back.

"It's dying anyway," Krombold said.

When Tammy lifted the paper, the bee was still intact. It just hadn't moved much.

"I fixed its fuzzy ass!" Tammy chortled.

The bee then resumed its painful crawling.

Before Tammy could descend on it again, it crawled under a closed door. The funereal black letters on the frosted panel said Togo Nozoki.

"Damn, that is one ferocious bee," she panted. "No wonder they're feared from Brazil to Mexico."

"It looked like an ordinary bumblebee to me," Krombold allowed.

"That shows how much you know," Tammy snorted. "That was a killer bee. An Africanized killer bee. Loaded with neurotoxins and other poisons lethal to people."

Dr. Krombold frowned. "I must be mistaken ...."

"About what?"

"I think we should bring Dr. Wurmlinger into this."

"Now you're talking!"

Chapter 12

Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger was no different from any child who went through a normal bug period. He just never grew out of his.

There was no insect on earth he didn't know, but he specialized in what others called pests. He was the leading authority on the social life of fire ants, on scuttle-fly dispersal and migration patterns of the corn borer.

He knew whiteflies from gypsy moths, and could tell the summer temperature from the pitch of the cicadas chirring in the trees.

It was true that not all of the multitudinous species of insects on earth had been cataloged and classified. But Wurmlinger was the first to identify every insect of his native Texas, the state with the greatest diversity of insects in the United States. He could at a glance distinguish an ant thorax from that of a wasp, although they were in fact closely related. He could tell the forelegs of a praying mantis from the hind legs of a grasshopper and separate wartbirt from field crickets.

And after three hours of methodical sorting and classifying, he came to one inescapable conclusion: the owners of La Maison Punaise had not ingested any portion of any species of bee known to man.

He rendered his expert opinion when Dr. Krombold returned with a rather breathless-looking young blond woman in tow.

"The victims in question didn't die from ingesting bee parts or associative glands or toxins," he said.

"Forget them!" the blonde snapped. "We got a killer bee cornered in an office. It just murdered my cameraman."

"How do you know it's a killer bee?" Dr. Wurmlinger said, twitching in curiosity.

"It zapped my cameraman, and he died just like that!" Tammy snapped her fingers once. "It's a damn shame he didn't have the presence of mind to point the lens back on himself. It would have made great pictures. Death by killer-bee sting."

"No, you misunderstand me. How do you know it was an Apis mellifera scutellata?"

"A what?"

"Bravo bee, or so-called killer bee."

"It looked like one. It was big and yellow and fuzzy."

"Africanized killer bees are not distinguishable to the naked eye, and they are not in any way or shape fuzzy," Wurmlinger noted.

"This one was."

"I would like to see this bee with my own eyes."

Dr. Wurmlinger was led to the locked door of the office that formerly belonged to Dr. Nozoki. He gave the dead cameraman a sidelong glance and, evidently finding him less interesting than a live bee, ignored him.

"I have the key," Dr. Krombold offered.

"Is this safe?" Tammy asked. "Maybe we should spray some Raid under the door."

Wurmlinger visibly flinched. "No doubt the bee is dead by now," he said.

Dr. Krombold unlocked the door and pushed it open gingerly.

"There is nothing to be afraid of," Wurmlinger assured him.

Tammy had retrieved her minicam and had it up on her shoulders. The light was burning hot, but the protective glass was broken, exposing the hot bulb. Faint vapor curled out from it.

Dr. Krombold went in first and looked around. His puzzled gropings caused Tammy to say, "It crawled in, remember? Look on the floor."

Dr. Krombold did. "I see no bee," he reported.

Thereupon, Wurmlinger entered and gave the room the benefit of his practiced eye.

There was no bee on the floor. Nor was there a bee, dead or otherwise, under the heavy mahogany desk. He looked in other places. Behind a trio of beige filing cabinets. In the wastepaper basket. Even at the base of a human skeleton suspended from a chain on some kind of dull metal standard.

The brownish white bones, held together by steel wire, rattled.

"No bee."

Tammy had slipped into the room. She directed the hot beam all over, saying, "This ought to flush the little bugger out."

"It is no doubt dead by now," Wurmlinger insisted.

"I'll believe it when I see its fuzzy dead behind."

Wurmlinger started and gave Tammy a goggly look. "You say the bee was fuzzy?"

"Very. It looked like a tiny black-and-yellow mitten."

"You are describing the common bumblebee."

"There was nothing common about this guy. He had more lives than Felix the Cat."

"Bumblebees are not aggressive by nature. They rarely sting."

"That one stung. We all saw it."

Wurmlinger frowned. "It could not be the morphologically similar male drone honey bee. They are not equipped by nature with a modified ovipositor, or stinger. It is impossible for it to sting. Nor do drones possess venom sacs. The drone can neither sting nor inject poison, possessing neither biological apparatus. Yet bumbles are not violent."

"Find that bee, and you'll see different," Tammy insisted. "It's vicious."

This time, everyone searched except Tammy. She was busy working her minicam. She rolled tape as she blazed light in every direction.

In the end, they were forced to give up. There was no sign of the bee or its tiny furry corpse.

"It is very puzzling," Wurmlinger murmured.

"Maybe it crawled back out," Tammy suggested.

Wurmlinger shook his head. "Impossible. It should have been in its death throes after all that happened."

"Tell that to the damn bee," grunted Tammy, dousing her minicam.

At that moment, a man poked his head in the open office door and Tammy did a double take. He had pronounced cheekbones and extremely deep-set eyes. One hand held the door, and it was backed by a wrist like a two-by-four.

"Do I know you?" Tammy blurted.

"Were you ever a flight attendant?" asked the man with the very thick wrists.

"No."

"Then probably not."

The man showed his ID card and said, "Remo Teahan. Center for Disease Control. This is Bruce Rhee."

Tammy took one look at the elderly Asian who entered next and said, "I know you, too!"

"Remo, it is Tamayo Tanaka," the Asian flared in a familiar voice.

Remo looked more closely. "Oh, yeah. I didn't recognize her without the phony Japanese makeup. I thought they drummed you out of network news when your Geisha wig fell off on camera."

"I'm with Fox now," Tammy said defensively.

"Then I was right. Drummed out."

"Hey, we're the cutting edge in the next century news. All the Generation Xers watch us instead of those stuffy bleeding ponytails on the majors."

"Wait'll you turn forty," Remo warned.

Tammy shook her blond head stubbornly. "Never happen."

"We're looking for Dr. Wurmlinger."

Wurmlinger actually raised his hand. "I am he."

"Gotta talk to you. In private."

"And this is about what?"

"We're looking into these bug killings. We think there's more to it than bee stings."

Unnoticed by everyone, a pair of feelers emerged from the right eye socket of the hanging skeleton specimen. They quivered.

Remo went on. "This is starting to look like a serial killer bee is on the loose."

"Serial killer bees! What a great lead," Tammy rejoiced.

"Shut up," said Remo, who was making up his theory for the sake of cutting through objections.

"Are you suggesting a serial killer is employing bees?" asked Dr. Krombold.

"Maybe," said Remo, who was suggesting no such thing.

The bee's entire head emerged and looked at Tammy with its compound eyes like black bicycle reflectors.

"This is the story that will make my career," she was saying. "I can hardly wait to tell the world. Never mind my generation. Just call me Blond Ambition."

At that, the bee launched itself toward Tammy. It landed atop her hair, crimped its plump abdomen and inserted its vicious little stinger into the exact apex of her skull.

"Ouch!" she cried, smacking the top of her head. Too late. The bee slipped past her snatching hand.

Then realization hit her. She began doing a syncopated version of the macarena.

"I've been stung! Oh, my God, I've been stung! And I'm going to die. God, I'm going to die. I can feel myself dying."

Remo stepped in, both hands coming together. He had the bee between his hands.

Slap.

"Got him!" said Remo.

"No, you did not," said Chiun, his hazel eyes sweeping the room. He brought his nails up into a defensive posture, turning with each sweep and tumble of the bee's flight.

"I had him," Remo insisted.

"You missed."

"I can't miss. I had him dead to rights."

In a corner, Tammy was searching her hair, trying to locate the site of the bee's attack. "Someone help me. Somebody suck out the poison."

"That is for snakebite," Wurmlinger said, completely unmoved by events.

"What do you do for bee stings?"

"You have not been stung," Dr. Krombold assured her. "That is a drone honey bee. It is stingless."

Then the bee proved him wrong by alighting on his hand and stinging him viciously. Krombold let out a snarl.

"I have been stung," he announced, more in annoyance than anger.

"Are you allergic to bee stings?" asked Wurmlinger, coming over and taking his hand.

"No. I have been stung many times without incident."

Wurmlinger used his eyeglass lens on the sting site. "I see no barb."

"I can assure you I was stung. It was quite painful."

Then Krombold started to turn red in the face and wheeze.

"You are going into anaphylactic shock," Wurmlinger said disappointedly. "This is impossible. You couldn't have been stung."

Dr. Krombold nodded his agreement with Wurmlinger's professional diagnosis of anaphylactic shock but shook his head vigorously at the sting assessment.

Clutching his throat, he lumbered to a wooden chair and sat down, where he went into urgent respiratory distress and then cardiac arrest. With a final convulsive shudder, he deflated like a burst football.

"Is he dead?" Tammy gasped from her corner.

Remo and Chiun, swiping at the airborne bee, were too busy to reply. Wurmlinger strode over to the coroner and examined him with clinical disapproval.

"Yes, he is dead."

"Why aren't I dead?" asked Tammy in a funny, low-to-the-floor voice.

"You are not allergic."

"But he said he wasn't allergic, and look at him."

The weird low quality of her voice brought all heads turning her way.

Tammy had stood herself on her head in a corner. She was supporting her body with her flat-to-the-floor hands.

"What are you doing?" asked Remo.

"Standing on my head."

"We can see that. Why?"

"So the bee poison in my scalp will drain out," Tammy explained.

"That will not work," Wurmlinger said.

Abruptly, Tammy somersaulted to her feet. She grabbed Wurmlinger by his smock lapels. "I'll pay you to suck out the poison! I'll put you on TV. I'll do anything."

If the prospect of a blank check with Tammy Terrill's name on it interested Helwig X. Wurmlinger, he gave no sign. After a twitchy pause, he pulled free and returned his attention to Remo and Chiun.

They had the bee surrounded. It was describing loops, turns, chandelles and other aerial acrobatics over their heads. Remo kept trying to catch it between his hands while the old Korean was clearly attempting to slice it in two with extended fingernails. They were good techniques, but they failed utterly.

The bee was swifter than any drone Wurmlinger had ever before seen. And it seemed to be getting faster by the second. It would hang like a bumble in one spot, as if baiting the pair to strike. Then as hands blurred toward it, it would drop or dart or pirouette out of range. It was very striking. The bee showed signs of intelligence. There was certainly cunning and forethought, at least.

"Do not kill that bee!" he sputtered.

"Why not?" asked Remo, switching to his fists. He let fly as if to sucker punch the bee from behind.

"That is no ordinary bee."

"No fooling," said Remo.

"It appears to be intelligent."

"Well, it is fast."

The bee swooped. Spinning, it dive-bombed Remo. Remo feinted. The bee barrel-rolled out of the way. Recovering, Remo backhanded it smartly.

The bee was nimble. It came close to escaping, but it flew out of harm's way into harm's way. A slashing fingernail like a thin ivory dagger caught it.

Helwig Wurmlinger heard the tiny clip as one of the bee's wings came off in midair.

Buzzing, the bee dropped, fought to regain airspeed and struck the floor.

Landing on its feet, it spun in a frantic circle as if seeking escape. The skirted figure of the old Korean got between it and the door. Remo stepped up behind it.

"We got you now, you little bastard," Remo growled.

"Don't hurt it," Wurmlinger urged.

"It tried to kill us," Chiun hissed. "It must die."

As if the bee understood every word, it suddenly took off. Remo dropped one Italian loafer in its path. It scooted around it. Remo repositioned his foot, blocking it again.

Each time, the bee moved around it.

Helwig Wurmlinger watched in slack-jawed fascination. Bees, he knew, moved in random patterns. They didn't move toward goals, except toward their hives or food sources.

This bee appeared to be moving toward the dropped minicam, whose light was still blazing through its broken protective lens.

"Peculiar," he said.

Chiun indicated the bee's fuzzy black-and-yellow thorax with a long fingernail.

"Behold, the face of death," he intoned.

Wurmlinger bent at the waist and blinked at the yellow markings on the black thorax. They formed a pattern he had seen before. On moths. It was a tiny but very symmetrical skull, or death's-head.

"I have never seen a death's-head marking on a bee before," he breathed.

"Take a good look," Remo growled. "You won't see it again."

Helwig Wurmlinger started to protest. Before the first word could take shape, the bee gave a last convulsive effort and leaped over Remo's blocking shoe.

And jumped into the hot bulb.

With a sputtery sizzle, it died.

The smell that arose with the tiny grayish black mushroom cloudlette stank amazingly for such a small thing.

Wurlinger pinched his long nose shut with his spidery fingers and said, "It committed suicide."

"Bull," said Remo.

But the cold voice of the Master of Sinanju cut the room with a brief intonation. "It is true. The bee killed itself."

Remo made his voice scoffing. "Why the hell would a bee up and kill itself?"

"Because it is not a bee," returned the Master of Sinanju cryptically.

Chapter 13

"Bees," Remo Williams was insisting, "do not commit suicide."

"That one did," Chiun retorted.

Tammy Terrill decided to put in her two cents. She hadn't resumed her standing-on-her-head position after she failed to gain Dr. Wurmlinger's assistance.

"Hey, they commit suicide every time they sting someone, don't they?"

"It's not the same," Remo said. "And you stay out of this."

"I will not," she said. Then, apparently remembering that she had been stung, suddenly turned the color of yesterday's oatmeal.

"Oh, my God. Am I still dying?"

"Die in seemly quiet if you are," Chiun hissed.

"Let me examine you," Dr. Wurmlinger said.

"Will you suck the poison out?" Tammy asked anxiously.

"No," Dr. Wurmlinger answered.

Tammy sat down, and Wurmlinger began massaging her blond head with his spindly fingers.

"What are you doing?" she challenged.

"Feeling for the bump."

She winced. Her scalp winced, too. "It hurts."

"The sting of a bee is painful, but of short duration," Wurmlinger told her.

As he quested about among Tammy's roots, Remo and Chiun continued their argument.

"No bee in its right mind would commit suicide," Remo was saying. "They're not intelligent. They don't think like we do. That's why they sting. They don't know they're killing themselves by stinging people."

"That not-bee deliberately ended its life," Chiun insisted.

"Why would he do a thing like that?"

"To avoid capture and interrogation at our hands."

"Not a chance in hell, Chiun."

"I am afraid I must agree with you," Wurmlinger commented, fingering Tammy's roots aside to expose a reddish swelling.

"Which one of us?" asked Remo.

"Both."

"See?" Remo said to Chiun. "He's an expert. He knows about bees."

Chiun stiffened his spine. "He knows about bees, not about not-bees. Therefore, he does not know what he is talking about."

"He's an etymologist," Remo argued.

"Entomologist," corrected Wurmlinger.

"What's the difference?"

"Entomology is the study of insects. An etymologist studies the roots of words."

"I stand corrected. Now correct him," said Remo, pointing to Chiun.

But Wurmlinger had already focused the entirety of his attention on the site on Tammy's skull where a reddish bump was rising, angry and dull. It was at the exact top, along the depressed sagital crest.

"Ah."

"Is the stinger still in there?" Tammy moaned.

"No, there is no stinger."

"Is that good or bad?"

"You are in no danger," Wurmlinger said.

"How can you be sure?"

"Because you are breathing normally, and the wound did not penetrate your skull."

"Why not?"

"Because it is exceedingly thick."

Tammy, her eyes rolled up as if she could somehow peer over the top of her own head, made a notch between her pale brows and asked, "Is that good or bad?"

"It's not usually considered a compliment to be thick of head, but in your case, it has saved your life."

"What about the poison?"

"I see no sign of venom or infection."

"Suck it anyway."

"No," said Wurmlinger, stepping back in disgust. Tammy's eyes flew to Remo. "Suck me."

"Bite me," said Remo.

Tammy's blue eyes flared. "Hey, that wasn't nice!"

"It's called tit for tat," returned Remo, who then resumed his argument. "That bee was just a bee, only more stubborn than most bees. You know about being stubborn, Chiun. Not to mention mule-headed."

Chiun's almond eyes squeezed down to knife slits. "You are the stubborn one."

Remo addressed Dr. Wurmlinger. "You're the bee expert. Are they naturally suicidal or not?"

Rudely, Wurmlinger walked between them as if they weren't there and got down on one knee next to the minicam. A faint curl of fading smoke was still wafting upward from the broken bulb. Wurmlinger found the Off switch and doused the light.

"This is most peculiar," he said after a moment.

"What is?" asked Remo.

"I see no remains."

"Of what-the bee?"

"Yes. There are no bee remains."

"He got zapped," Remo contended.

"There should be some matter remaining."

They all gathered around the minicam, which was still emitting a wisp of what looked like cigarette smoke.

Tammy grabbed her nose. "Smells like burning garbage."

"Smells like fried bug to me," grunted Remo.

"A bee is not a bug," Wurmlinger said, grimacing as if suffering a personal insult.

"It is a not-bee," said Chiun. "Why will no one accept my words?"

"I am not familiar with that species," Wurmlinger muttered. He was on his knees now and sniffed around the lamp with his eyelashes held before his sharp nose.

Wurmlinger poked and prodded and attempted to scrape some smoky residue from the flash reflector, but all he got was thin black soot.

Frowning like a twitchy bug himself, he climbed to his long, spindly feet.

"There is nothing left," he said in a small, disappointed voice.

"It was a very thorough suicide," said Chiun.

"The bee did not immolate itself," Wurmlinger explained, snapping out of his mental fog. "It merely sought a light source it mistook for the sun. You see, bees navigate through sighting the sun. Any bright light in an indoor setting will confuse them. He sought escape. The light drew him. And, sadly, he perished."

"Better luck next bee," said Remo, who then drew the Master of Sinanju aside and said, "Cover me. I'm going to call Smitty."

"Do not tell him about the not-bee."

"Why not?"

"Because that is my discovery. I do not want you hogging all credit."

Remo looked at the Master of Sinanju dubiously. "Chiun, the not-bee theory is all yours."

"See that it is," said Chiun, who then turned his attention to the shambles that was the office.

As Remo slipped out the door, the Master of Sinanju was poking about the room with all the focused concentration of an Asian Sherlock Holmes, searching for clues while Tammy piped up with a question.

"How can bees have sex? Don't their stingers get in the way?"

Wurmlinger's voice brightened with interest.

"The male bee," he said, "invariably dies in the act of procreation."

"Cool beans," said Tammy.

Chapter 14

Dr. Harold W. Smith was a logical man. He lived in a world that, despite testing his sense of order, ultimately made sense. Or, sense could be made out of it.

Smith had grown up during the Great Depression, although to a family of means. It had been a dark time, and Smith hadn't escaped the meanness and frugality. Nor had the following decade, with its global war, been any better. Nor had the 1950s and the Cold War been a golden age, as some nostalgic writers liked to purport.

But in retrospect, all of those times made sense to Smith. He first began to notice the world going out of kilter in the early 1960s. Over the course of that decade, things began to shift. At first, it was subtle. Much of it eluded him for a long time.

Then one day, during the Vietnam conflict, Smith was watching the television, and nothing he saw made sense. Not the long-haired, bearded protesters trying to levitate the Pentagon with the dubious power of their minds. Not the smug politicians determined to prosecute an undeclared war with doubtful aims. Not the veterans of a prior Asian war, still scarred by conflict, yet willing to encourage a new generation to follow a doomed path.

Eventually, he adjusted. Not easily. After a while, Harold Smith came to a realization that helped his peace of mind. And it was this: any man blessed with sufficient years will ultimately outlive his time.

Smith's time had been the era of big bands and patriotism. He had had the misfortune-or the luck-to outlive the comfortable social context of his formative years.

Still, he liked for things to be logical.

Smith was having trouble following Remo's telephone report. Maybe it was because he had just received a wire-service report that the publisher of the Sacramento Bee in California had succumbed to a bee sting. There were no other details, only that the man had been found in his office dead. It was a very bizarre coincidence. But Smith had dismissed it as just that-coincidence.

And now Remo was telling him things that cast doubt on that very logical conclusion.

"We lost another coroner," Remo was saying.

"I know."

"No, I think you're a coroner behind."

"I understand that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on the medical examiner who autopsied Doyal T. Rand has died," Smith said.

"That was a medical examiner. I'm talking coroners now."

"Remo, where are you?"

"L.A."

"Where Dr. Nozoki succumbed to a bee sting," said Smith.

"That was yesterday's news. Today's news is that the guy who took over his job bought it, too. A killer bee got him."

"Are you saying that another coroner has died mysteriously?"

"Nothing mysterious about it, Smitty," Remo said patiently. "We came in just after it happened. A bee got him. Then it attacked a cameraman and then it attacked a dip of a TV reporter named Tammy Terrill. But she survived. Then it got Dr. Krombold. He's dead. It tried to get us, too."

"A killer bee, you say?"

"No, that's what Tammy says. Chiun says it's a not-bee."

"A what?"

"Uh-oh. I wasn't supposed to say that. It's Chiun's big secret. He called it a not-bee. In other words, it ain't a bee. And you didn't hear that from me."

"If it is not a bee, what is it?"

"Wurmlinger says it was a garden-variety drone honey bee. But we saw it sting one guy to death, so that can't be."

"Why can't it be a drone, Remo?" asked Smith, struggling to follow Remo's illogic.

"To bee or not to bee," said Remo.

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing. According to Wurmlinger, who was with us the entire time, drone bees can't sting. They don't have the equipment. Therefore, it's not a killer bee. But it had these weird markings on its back, kinda like a death's-head."

"There is a moth called the death's-head moth, but it is not poisonous in any way," Smith said slowly.

"Well, I saw the world's only death's-head bee, and it's vicious as a pit bull with wings."

"I am very confused, Remo," Smith confessed.

"Join the club."

"Who is Dr. Wurmlinger? Another coroner?"

"No. He's an etymologist."

"You mean an entomologist."

"Whatever a bug expert is, that's him. He's looking into the bee deaths. He says the bee that was trying to kill us isn't a killer bee. But we saw it kill. In fact, it tried to murder us all before it committed suicide."

"Bees do not commit suicide," Smith said flatly.

"I agree with you there. But Chiun swears it did. We had it trapped on the floor, and it ran into a hot electrical bulb and went blooie!"

"It was probably attracted to the bulb. Sometimes bees mistake ordinary ceiling lights for the sun and fly into them repeatedly."

"This one only got one shot. And that's what Wurmlinger was saying. It mistook the bulb for the sun. Only it bothers him that it went straight for it. Bees are supposed to bumble. Or meander or something. They don't do straight lines."

"The bee made a beeline for the bulb," said Smith.

Remo's puzzled voice brightened. "That's right. They do call it a beeline, don't they?"

"They do." Smith was tapping the rubber end of a yellow No. 2 pencil on his desk absently. "Remo, how did Wurmlinger escape the bee's attack?"

"Good question. While we were here, the bee never bothered him."

"That seems strange."

"Well, he's a bug expert. Maybe he wears Deet instead of Mennen Skin Bracer."

"Let me look Wurmlinger up."

"Feel free. He and Chiun were busy arguing about bees."

Smith input the name "Wurmlinger," and up came a series of newspaper and magazine articles on Wurmlinger and his works.

"Helwig X. Wurmlinger is chief apiculturalist at the USDA's Bee Research Laboratory at Beltsville, Maryland. He specializes in pests, particularly the African killer bee. He has done significant work in the field of insect genetics. The man has a reputation for eccentricity," Smith reported.

"You ask me, he looks like he crawled out from under a rotten log."

"Excuse me?"

"Buggy. He's definitely buggy."

"He maintains a private laboratory in Maryland. You say he is still there in Los Angeles?"

"Yeah, they called him in over those restaurant poisonings."

"While he is preoccupied, go look at his lab."

"Why?"

"Because," said Harold W. Smith, "he is telling you that a stingless bee is responsible for a new string of stinging deaths. Wurmlinger is one of the nation's leading apiculturists. He cannot easily be wrong. Perhaps he is deliberately misleading you."

"You mean he's involved in this?"

"It is possible."

"What's possible?"

"That Dr. Wurmlinger is some new kind of serial killer."

"A serial killer who kills with bees?"

"We know that bee stings are implicated in every death in the present chain of deaths, although in the case of Doyal T. Rand, it's far less straightforward."

"And we don't know that a bee didn't do him," Remo said.

"No bee could devour a man's brains and eyes."

Smith gave Remo the address of Dr. Wurmlinger's laboratory near Washington, D.C.

"Be careful," Smith admonished. "You and Chiun are not immune to bee stings."

"I'll bee seeing you," said Remo.

When the line went dead, Smith took another look at the report out of Sacramento. The publisher of the Sacramento Bee, Lyndon D'Arcy, had been found dead at his desk. There was no obvious cause of death, but a bee had been discovered flying around his office. Once the door had been opened, the bee had flown out.

There was no description of the suspect bee.

Smith wondered if it might have been a bumblebee and set about looking into it.

As he worked, he wondered if perhaps he shouldn't have sent Remo and Chiun to Sacramento, especially since they were already in California. Too late now.

WHEN REMO FOUND the Master of Sinanju, Chiun was arguing with Wurmlinger over something clutched tightly in his old-ivory-and-bone fist.

"I demand you surrender that to me," Wurmlinger was saying in an agitated voice.

Chiun presented his back to the tall entomologist. "I found it. It is mine."

"You have no right, no authority to keep it. I am here in an official capacity, at the behest of the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office."

"Finders keepers," intoned Chiun.

"What is it now?" asked Remo.

Hearing this, Chiun moved to Remo's side. "Tell this elongated cretin that he has no right to what is not his."

"Okay. What's going on here?" Remo demanded.

Wurmlinger pointed a shaking-with-rage forefinger in the old Korean's direction. "He has confiscated evidence in a crime," he spluttered.

"What did you find, Little Father?"

"Look."

And the Master of Sinanju opened his antique ivory claw. Nestled in the withered palm was a tiny-veined bee's wing.

Remo studied it a moment. "That come off the killer bee?"

"The correct term is 'Bravo bee,'" Wurmlinger interrupted. " 'Killer bee' is press invention. And I demand the right to examine that artifact," he said tightly, his long, bony mandibles clicking with each enunciated syllable.

"If Chiun found it, it's his," Remo countered.

"Are either of you qualified to judge insect parts?"

"Maybe yes. Maybe no. But like he says-finders keepers. Come on, Little Father. Let's go."

Chiun preceded Remo out the door of the deceased Dr. Nozoki's office.

"Where are you going?" Wurmlinger called after them, his fists shaking at his sides.

"None of your beeswax," said Remo. "You stay here and tell the next coroner in line what happened here."

"You cannot leave me alone with these deceased persons. You are both witnesses."

"You carry our water for us."

"And I'm here, too," Tammy Terrill piped up.

Wurmlinger looked at Tammy as if she were a particularly uninteresting specimen. Tammy didn't notice.

"Tell you what," she said, hoisting her Fox minicam on her shoulder. "I'll interview you, and then you can interview me. We can be cointerviewers. I usually don't do this, but I'm part of the story, too, and I'm grabbing for all the face time I can hog."

Dr. Wurmlinger groaned deep in his long throat. It was a pitiable, almost unearthly sound.

"First, ask me how I got into broadcasting ...." Tammy chirped.

Chapter 15

On the way to their rental car, the Master of Sinanju noticed the lingering bee. It was hovering in the top of a eucalyptus tree, but dropped lower as they passed it.

"Behold, Remo. A spy."

Remo followed Chiun's indicating finger with his gaze. It was a fat bumblebee, hanging there in place like a miniature helicopter. Its jeweled eyes seemed to be regarding them.

"Looks like an ordinary bee to me," Remo grunted.

"It resembles the nefarious not-bee."

"It's a bee. An ordinary bee."

Chiun frowned darkly. "Let us see if it follows us, then."

"Why would it do that?"

"If it is a lurking spy, it will naturally follow us. For that is the mission of a spy."

"Not a chance."

They found their car in the lot. Remo slid behind the wheel, while Chiun got into the passenger seat. It was a cool spring day, so Remo rolled down his window instead of turning on the air conditioner.

"No," said Chiun.

"No, what?" asked Remo, turning.

"No, we do not want the not-bee to accompany us."

"Why would it do that?"

"Because it harbors ulterior motives," said the Master of Sinanju.

Shrugging, Remo reversed the window control, and the glass hummed back into place. A moment later, Remo heard the tiny but distinct click. He turned.

The bumblebee-he couldn't tell if it was the same one that followed them out-was hovering outside his driver's-side window on whirring wings.

"That's funny," muttered Remo.

"There is nothing funny about it."

Then the bee banged its metallic-looking face against the glass. It bounced off. Hovering, it tried a third time. The glass defeated it. Every impact resulted in an audible click like a ring stone against glass.

"Maybe it's upset over something," Remo said slowly.

"Bees are attracted to the color blue," Chiun suggested. "This is well-known."

Remo looked at Chiun's amber kimono, and his own black-and-white clothing.

"We're not wearing blue. The car isn't blue, it's maroon. Nothing blue in here."

"Yet the bee-that-is-not attempts to gain entrance to our conveyance."

"Maybe he's seeing his own reflection in the window and thinks it's another bee. One he doesn't like."

At that point, the bee gave up on Remo's side and zoomed around to Chiun's window. As it passed before the windshield, it showed its fuzzy thorax with a black-and-yellow dappling that made them sit up straighter in their seats.

"Did you see what I just saw?" muttered Remo.

Chiun nodded. "Yes. A death's-head."

"Guess there's more than one of the little devils ...."

"Leave this place, Remo," Chiun hissed. "Now."

"Why?"

"So that we may see if it follows."

"Not a chance in hell of that happening," said Remo, keying the ignition.

Backing out of the lot, Remo took the San Diego Freeway back to LAX. The bee followed them as far as the lot, whereupon Remo accelerated, leaving the tiny black-and-yellow nuisance behind.

"Lost it," he said, grinning.

"There are other bees," said the Master of Sinanju cryptically.

"Or not."

RETURNING THE CAR to the airport rental lot, Remo and Chiun walked to the main terminal.

From time to time, Chiun turned without breaking stride, making a complete walking circle, as if to check for trailers.

"See anything?" asked Remo.

Chiun shook his bald head. "No bees."

"Anything else?"

"No not-bees, either."

"What the hell is a not-bee?"

"That I do not know. But I possess the wing of a not-bee. Perhaps Emperor Smith can enlighten us."

There was a Federal Express collection box in the terminal. It gave Remo an idea.

"Let's FedEx it to him."

"Good idea," said Chiun, surrendering the bee's wing to his pupil.

Remo dumped it into a FedEx mailer and addressed it to Harold Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, Rye, New York.

When he turned, he saw a bumblebee hover outside, on the other side of a plate-glass window. It hovered low enough that the fuzzy death's-head marking on its back was discernible.

"That can't be the same bee," Remo said.

"It is a not-bee," Chiun declared.

"Whatever it is or isn't, it can't be the one we lost back in the city."

Chiun's hazel eyes grew sharp. "Remo, he was watching you all along," he hissed.

"So what?"

"He saw you inscribe that package to Emperor Smith. The address of Fortress Folcroft is now known to outsiders."

"Oh, come off it. A bee that can read! What's he going to do? Hop a flight to New York State and sting Smith?"

"It is not impossible ...." Chiun breathed.

"It is ridiculous," said Remo. "Let's find our gate."

The bee followed them as far into the terminal as there were outside glass windows.

At their gate, they stood watching the planes take off and land. Their jet was at the gate, being serviced. A foodservice truck moved into place on the opposite side of the 727 where the jetway ramp hugged the open passenger door.

As they watched, the driver opened the top forward part of the truck body over the cab and manipulated a fold-down ramp. The food-service trolleys rolled across this ramp into the food-service door of the aircraft.

It was not particularly interesting, but it was something to look at.

During this procedure, Remo and Chiun spotted the fat bumblebee.

At first, the bee appeared to flit about aimlessly like any other bee. Then it came to their window, hovered there with tiny black eyes that seemed vaguely malevolent. Abruptly, it dived away and swooped toward the open access door, showing the unmistakable skull on its fuzzy thorax.

"Uh-oh," Remo muttered.

"It has boarded our sky conveyance," said Chiun, stroking his wispy little chin.

"Maybe it's just lost."

"It is a spy. It saw that we awaited that aircraft. It seeks to accompany us."

"Wait a minute. Now I sound like you. That's just a stupid bumblebee. It's not even the same bee from the morgue."

Chiun looked at Remo with thin, narrowing eyes.

"Can you be certain of this, Remo?"

"No," Remo admitted. "But bees are just bees."

"But not-bees are dangerous."

They boarded their flight with wary eyes.

They saw no sign of the skull-marked bee as the 727 rolled out onto the runway. As it idled, awaiting clearance for takeoff, Remo said, "I'm going to reconnoiter."

He went to the forward part of the plane, looking for a pillow. He came back with a nice fluffy one and checked the men's room. No bees lurking there.

"You should be in your seat, sir," a flight attendant warned.

"I think there's a bee on board," Remo told her.

"This happens from time to time. They wander aboard. Are you allergic to bee stings?"

"No."

"Then don't worry. Please take your assigned seat."

Over the intercom, the pilot announced, "Final cross-check. Flight crew prepare for takeoff."

"Now, sir," the flight attendant said edgily.

Reluctantly, Remo took his assigned seat.

The takeoff was smooth. The gleaming aluminum wings took to the air, and the rumble of the wheels whining into their wells told them that they had committed to flight.

That was when the death's-head bee popped out of the galley. It flew back into the cabin, hovered in midaisle and seemed to hesitate at the sight of Remo and Chiun eyeing it back.

Then, as if having second thoughts, it retreated into the first-class section.

"I don't like the looks of that," said Remo.

Chiun made a satisfied mouth. "It fears us. Good."

Remo shrugged. "It's just a freaking bumblebee."

Then a scream ripped out of first class.

"Ahhh!"

Remo came out of his seat so fast his seat belt snapped in two. Chiun followed, a wraith of silken skirts.

They moved through the first-class cabin and collided with a panicky knot of flight attendants jamming the aisle.

"Back in your seats. Back in your seats, please. We have to land," one was yelling.

"Why?" asked Remo.

"Because the pilot's been stricken. But it's all right. Stay calm. The flight engineer is capable of landing the plane without help. Return to your seat, please."

Beyond the stewardess's worried face, Remo saw through the open cockpit door the pilot convulsing in his seat.

Then the copilot slapped the side of his neck-and just ahead of it danced the fat black-and-yellow honey bee with the death's-head markings, free and unscathed.

"If the flight engineer's out of action, who lands the plane?" Remo asked the stewardess urgently.

"Don't be worried. We've never lost two crew members."

"Answer my question," Remo demanded, shaking the stewardess. "Who lands the plane?"

"No one. There's just the pilot and flight engineer."

Remo set the stewardess aside like a hat rack and moved into the cramped cabin.

The pilot was slumping to one side, completely out of it. The flight engineer had one hand on the yoke. The other was fumbling about among the controls weakly.

But even from behind, Remo could see that he was going into shock.

Chapter 16

The flight engineer was definitely going into shock.

There was no question what was happening to him. He took his free hand off the yoke and grabbed his throat. He began to wheeze. His face turned a smoky reddish hue. He gasped audibly.

"Easy, fella," Remo said, reaching his side. "You got stung by a bee, that's all." Remo kept his voice calm. But the flight engineer was gasping for air now. His windpipe was closing off, like an asthmatic's.

"Stay with me," Remo urged, squeezing the man by the back of his neck to encourage adrenaline production. "The pilot's gone. You're the only one who can land the plane."

The flight engineer started to nod. The nod turned into the shaking that shivered down the length of his body and became a convulsion.

"Easy," Remo warned.

Then he saw the reddish swelling over the carotid artery on the left side of the man's neck. The bee had injected its venom directly into the man's bloodstream. There was no way to save him, Remo knew.

Meanwhile, the plane continued its screaming climb.

"He's out of it," Remo cried to Chiun.

"Where is the not-bee?" Chiun hissed, his eyes questing about the cockpit.

"Forget the bee. Someone's got to land the plane."

"You do it. I will watch the wings for signs of treachery."

"I don't know how to freaking fly a 727!" Remo exploded.

"How hard can this be?" asked the Master of Sinanju. "You have a wheel with which to steer. You know where the ground is."

"I don't know squat about flying a big bird like this."

"Where are the parachutes?" Chiun wondered aloud.

"They don't equip passenger aircraft with parachutes, Chiun," Remo said heatedly.

Chiun blew out his cheeks in indignation. "We have been cheated, for we paid full fare!"

"Never mind that, help me get these guys out of here so I can work."

Chiun bustled forward and took the blue-faced pilot by his shoulder epaulets. He pulled him back into first class, which caused no little consternation among the passengers.

A pale-faced man stood up. "Is this a hijacking?"

"No. We are only going to crash," returned Chiun thinly.

That reassured absolutely no one, although a few people did faint.

Remo slid into the pilot's seat, and drew on the earphones and mouth microphone.

"Pilot to base," Remo said.

"Say again. This is LAX Tower. Repeat message."

"This is TWA flight to Baltimore."

"Say flight number?"

"Let me get my ticket," Remo said, fumbling in his pockets. Then he remembered leaving it in his seat pocket. "Hey, Chiun what's the freaking flight number?"

"It has two zeroes in it."

"Are they in front or back?"

"Back."

"Tower, this is a flight number zero-zero," said Remo, clearing his throat on both sides of the zeroes and hoping for the best. It worked.

"TWA, confirm you are flight 600."

"Confirm," said Remo, making up his lingo. "We have an on-board emergency here."

"Flight 600, state the nature of your emergency."

"The pilot and copilot are dead. It's up to me to land this thing."

"Is this a hijacking?"

"No."

"Are you qualified to pilot a passenger aircraft?"

"No."

A silence cracked in the earphones. Then in a drained voice, the tower said, "Stay calm, sir. And we will attempt to talk you down."

"Better put a lot of foam on the runway for this one," Remo warned.

"Acknowledge."

The tower ran Remo through the essentials of piloting a big bird. They told him where the throttle was. How to trim flap and deploy the thrust reversers. It sounded easy at first. Then they began piling on the details.

"Look, we need to keep this simple," Remo complained.

"This is the simplest version, sir."

"I need a simpler version. There's a lot of distractions up here."

Just then, another one reared its bulging head.

"Remo, the not-bee has returned," squeaked Chiun.

"Swat it. I'm busy," Remo called back.

The Master of Sinanju stepped around and blocked the door, saying, "Bumblebee-who-is-not, do not dare intrude, for here stands the Master of Sinanju to deal with you."

The bee, if it understood, only grew more determined. It swooped at Chiun's bald head, encountered a sweeping backhand and went corkscrewing away. Striking a bulkhead, it ricocheted, rebounded and came again.

This time, it tried to zip between Chiun's outstretched legs.

Chiun gathered up the hem of his kimono skirt, ripping out a swatch of silk lining. Snapping it between tense hands, he waved it before the bee like an Oriental matador with a too-small cape. The bee bobbed and weaved, but refused to retreat.

"Come, bee. Come to your doom ...." Chiun invited.

The bee zigged, then zagged, trying to get past the snapping silk. It made a dive for the space between Chiun's black sandals.

Twisting the swatch into a knot, the Master of Sinanju bent his deceptively frail-looking body, enveloping the bee expertly in a ball of fabric.

The bee hummed and buzzed in frustration.

"I have the culprit," Chiun announced to Remo.

"Good," returned Remo.

The tower was assuring Remo that he would land safely. They were telling him to lay his nose on the main radio beacon. Remo understood none of it in the technical sense. But when the nose was pointing toward the foaming runway, he began to feel a slow surge of confidence.

"Okay, I'm riding the beam," he said, copying the tower's terminology.

"Drop gear."

Remo pulled on the heavy lever that deployed the landing wheels. They rumbled out of their wells.

Remo lined up on the main runway.

"Now ease back. Not too hard on the throttle," the tower instructed.

Remo obliged. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. It came from concentration, not fear. He kept trying to fly by the seat of his pants, the way he drove a car-by feeling every component of the vehicle, and becoming an extension of it. But this was a big, lumbering jet that operated by hydraulics and electrical controls. It was worse than power steering. It was power everything. Remo preferred to be the power in the cars he drove. Here, he was disconnected from total control of the aircraft. It made everything feel wrong.

As the jet dropped lower and lower on its Pacific approach, Remo heard a rare Korean curse emerge from the Master of Sinanju's papery lips.

"What now?" he demanded of Chiun.

"The bee ate through my kimono lining. It is ruined."

"What?"

Then the bee was dive-bombing Remo's head. And the tarmac came rushing up to meet the nose.

"Not now," Remo groaned. "I've almost got this thing on the ground."

The bee dancing before his eyes, Remo slapped at it in sheer frustration. It bounced off the side of his hand, unharmed, and regained its aerial equilibrium.

"What does it take to kill one of these things?" he complained. "Chiun, get in here!"

The Master of Sinanju was in the cabin now. There was hardly any room for him. Chiun made a lunge for the dancing bee.

"I have him."

"Get him out of my freaking hair."

Chiun's fists knocked the bee around the cabin. He was on Remo's right. Then his left. Finally, Remo called out, "You're worse than the freaking bee! Leave it alone!"

"It is trying to kill you."

"I gotta save the plane," said Remo as the rear tires unexpectedly made contact with the blacktop. They barked like stung dogs. The plane bounced, settled, and the barking came again.

Steadily, Remo lowered the nose. It touched down. Then the plane was rolling into the patch of waiting foam.

I did it, Remo thought. I saved the plane!

And he felt a tiny sting over his left carotid artery, and a very cold sensation began to well up inside him.

Chapter 17

At first, it sounded like a tornado.

Gordon Garret heard it as he walked between the corn rows.

The corn was coming up. Last week, there had been a goose-drowner of a rainstorm in this fertile corner of Iowa. That helped some. Not like it was down in the Southwest, where they were suffering from drought. In Texas and those parts, the winter wheat hadn't come up at all. There was a lot of suffering.

Gordon Garret understood suffering. His patch of earth, Garret Farms, had been in Garret hands going clear past the forgotten depression of the 1850s to before the Civil War. There had been a lot of hard times since then. It was a constant battle with corn borers and funguses and the like.

And, of course, there was the weather. Some years, it didn't rain, but it poured. Others, the fertile earth fell apart under the broiling sun. The Great Flood of '93 was still fresh in Iowa minds.

Tornados weren't that common. They happened, sure. But the last thing Gordon Garret expected to hear was the dull roar of an approaching twister.

For a moment, he froze, his boots sinking into the heavy soil. He felt no wind. That was peculiar. There was that dull, distant, freight-train roar, but no breeze.

On either side of him the rows of the new Super Yellow Dent corn-guaranteed to resist corn borers by fooling them into thinking corn smelled like uninteresting soybeans-three months from tasseling, just stood there like so many dull students with their long green-turbaned heads held up off the earth.

But the roar was the roar of a twister. So Gordon shook the fear out of his coveralls and made a dash for the barn.

He ran like the wind, boots crunching dirt. But the roar was moving faster. It was the wind.

The roar swelled. Weirdly, it didn't become that full, big-train roar he associated with twisters. It stayed low. Had a metallic kind of sound in it, like heat bees in summer. But this was April.

Flinging a glance over his shoulder, Gordon expected to see a funnel cloud. But there was no funnel. It was a cloud.

What he saw made him stop, stand stock-still and scrunch his seed cap in his uneasy hands.

The low sky was a mass of gray, hazy blackness. It hummed. Weird, that hum. Spooky. Not loud. Just insistent. Angry, maybe. But all hell-winds sound angry.

It looked like a dust cloud, but there was still no wind.

Then it hit.

Like a fury, it hit. The noise was the worst of it. It came churning in, all rage and viciousness. The fury of it dropped Gordon to his knees. He threw his arms across his flinching face and pushed the front part of himself into the dirt.

A whining buzz roared over and across him. The sound of it assaulted his ears. The sound changed as he cowered for protection in the good earth that supported him.

It chewed and ripped and tore, and it seemed to go on forever in its voracious frenzy.

Then, like a miracle, it passed.

Like a train moving down its assigned track, it had passed on by.

Fearfully, Gordon Garret uncrossed his arms and lifted his body.

The air was settling down. There was no dust, no grit-none of the airborne debris the natural wind stirred up.

Yet green things were falling from the sky. Green, and the smell was the smell of corn-shucking time. A fall smell. Here it was April and the air smelled of autumn.

Gordon looked to his left and to his right. And that deep, cold fear that comes to every farmer in his lifetime settled in his empty stomach.

The corn. The young corn was falling from the sky in tatters. Cornsilk drifted down like thin golden tinsel. The baby kernels were scattered like yellow hail. The green protective leaves were only now coming down on the quieting air. The stalks were gone. Chewed to ribbons as if by buzz saws.

That was what Gordon thought of right off. A million tiny buzz saws. Hungry, vicious buzz saws. They had sickled the new corn into so much fragrant trash.

Climbing to his weak-kneed legs, Gordon turned around on dull, heavy feet like a wooden Indian.

The dust cloud was moving on, having eaten him into bankruptcy.

That was when total understanding took hold of Gordon, and he threw himself to the useless soil and bawled his brains out.

Chapter 18

Remo Williams had been schooled by the Master of Sinanju to dodge bullets, arrows, spears and even thrown rocks. It was not enough, Chiun had told him, on that day many years before when the elderly Korean sullied his pristine hands with an old Police Positive revolver and emptied its chambers at Remo, who successfully-if clumsily-evaded every snarling slug.

"You must learn to evade the flying teeth you cannot see coming," he added after Remo caught his breath.

"How is that possible?" Remo asked, already full of himself because up until that time in his life, only Superman could dodge bullets-and he wasn't real.

"You must learn to feel the breeze the flying tooth pushes before it as it seeks your life," said Chiun.

"Let me get this straight," Remo asked incredulously. "I gotta feel the shock wave coming?"

"Yes."

"Im-freaking-possible!"

But he had learned. Week by week. Month by month. Year after year, Remo had learned how to slow time in his brain and speed up his supercharged reflexes so that a bullet fired at his back, moving ahead of the sound wave of the exploded gunpowder, couldn't catch him off guard.

He learned to feel the approaching shock wave on the exposed surfaces of his skin. The delicate hairs on his forearm became like sensitive antennae. Remo had always thought they were just hairs-remnants of mankind's primitive, hairy ancestry. But he understood they served a sensory function, too.

Later, after he had become attuned to his body hairs, Remo learned to sense the presence of a threatening mind. And to anticipate the firing of the shot or the throwing of the blade before even the attacker had made the decision to kill.

Nothing could touch Remo after that. Not guns, not exploding shrapnel, not anything other than Chiun's own remonstrating fingernail. Remo never learned to evade Chiun's blows.

As the lumbering 727 skidded to a sloppy stop, its wheels awash in fire-dampening foam, Remo experienced a moment of combined fear and shock.

I should have felt the little bastard's legs on my neck, he thought.

I should have felt the stinger pressing into my skin.

And, I'm dead.

Eyes sick, Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju and voiced the fear that was in his mind. "I'm dead, Chiun."

Chiun had stepped in, and his angry eyes were fixed upon the buzzing bee, once more aloft. Remo could hear its tiny, annoying ziii sound.

The Master of Sinanju made two claws of his hands and lifted them. His wrinkled features were extremely intent. His concentration was ferocious.

"It's too late," Remo said.

"Never fear. I will capture the dastard!" Chiun hissed.

"That's not what-"

And Chiun brought his palms together in a short blur. His nails intersected. Fingers nested. Palms met with a meaty slap.

The ziii stopped abruptly.

Chiun squeezed his hands, grinding them together. A crackly sound came from the thin plane where his palms met.

With a flourish, the hands separated, and what was left of the bee fell to the floor. A black sandal snapped down, grinding the remains into the rubber floor mat.

"You are defeated, bee-who-is-not," Chiun intoned.

"You're too late, Little Father," Remo said thickly.

Chiun shook his aged head firmly. "No. It was too slow. Although it was exceedingly swift for a bee."

Remo stood up. "I got stung."

Chiun flinched. "Where?"

Remo had his hand over the carotid. "Here."

Reaching up, Chiun slapped Remo's hand away and pulled his neck into view by the harsh expedient of dragging down on his pupil's dark hair.

"Let me see."

"Ouch!"

Chiun scrutinized Remo's pulsing carotid artery. "I see a tiny wound. How do you feel?"

"Cold."

"You should feel stupid. To let a mere bumblebee sting you."

"You saw what it did. You saw how fast it was. Even you had trouble catching it."

"I did not allow it to sting me," Chiun spat.

"What do I do?" asked Remo.

"Try standing on your head. If the poisoned blood is drawn from your brain, little will be harmed." Remo's eyes went into hurt shock. "How can you say that?"

"It is easy," snapped Chiun. "For you are not poisoned."

"I'm not?"

"No. There is no redness. Your eyes are clear."

"Maybe I'm immune ...."

"Perhaps the bee had already exhausted its venom."

"Guess that's possible, too, but I still feel kinda cold."

"Stupidity. It will pass." Chiun turned about, coaxing Remo to follow with a crooking finger. "Now come. We must leave this wounded bird that you so clumsily wrecked, lest we are discovered by prying eyes."

"Yeah. Okay. We can't afford to answer too many questions anyway."

Passing the first-class cabin, Chiun announced in a loud voice, "Hearken well, for you have been saved by the House of Sinanju. These are your tax dollars at work. Pay your taxes promptly and often. Lest your nation lose our services, and your empire succumb to foreign emperors."

The passengers looked too dazed to respond. Many were still fumbling with their seat belts or lifting their heads from the between-knees crash-survival position. Nobody appeared injured.

"What happened to avoiding problems?" Remo asked Chiun.

Chiun dismissed his pupil's objection with a careless wave. "That was advertising. It always pays."

Remo tried to open the hatch by hand, but the mechanism was too complicated, so he just kicked it open. The thick hatch jumped outward with a dull sound like a flat bell being rung. It went splat in the foam. That seemed to rouse the flight crew.

At the emergency exits, inflatable escape chutes were deploying, and the first passengers began sliding down the big yellow chutes, under the direction of the flight attendants.

In a very short time, passengers were milling around the tarmac as paramedics and other emergency professionals came and got them.

When the big silver bus came to load the most able aboard, Remo and Chiun were already calmly seated in back.

It was easier to go this way than trying to walk along the wide-open runway system under the sweep and blaze of emergency lights.

At the terminal, an airline representative was waving sheafs of official-looking forms and began trying to get the walking wounded to sign away their rights to sue or receive compensation for their injuries.

Remo took an offered Bic pen and jammed it halfway up the airline rep's left sinus cavity. The man stumbled off, muttering nasally that he was going to sue somebody. That was the end of airline damage control.

From a pay phone, Remo called Harold Smith.

"Smitty, get set for the unbelievable."

Smith sighed. "I deal with the unbelievable on an almost daily basis."

"We were tailed from the coroner's office," Remo said.

"Yes?"

"The tail sneaked aboard our flight. We saw him go through the food-service door. Once the plane was in the air, it murdered the pilot and copilot. We would have crashed, but I took the controls and landed the plane."

Remo's voice lifted on a note of pride toward the last. Smith brought it crashing down with his incredulous "You? Flew a jet plane?"

"The tower kinda helped out," Remo admitted.

"The plane crashed," Smith said.

"Crash-landed," said Remo. "It was a crash landing, not a crash. Nobody died."

"Except the pilots," Smith corrected.

"Yeah."

"And, of course, the man who murdered the pilots."

"Yeah. Chiun got him."

"I assume you interrogated this person?" Smith said.

"You assume wrong."

"How is that?"

"Because you're assuming a person, and not what tried to kill us," Remo said.

"What tried to kill you?" Smith parried.

Remo handed the receiver to Chiun, who was hovering nearby.

"It was a not-bee," Chiun explained.

"A bee brought down the plane!" Smith said, his lemony voice skittering high into the stratosphere of the musical register.

"No, a not-bee."

"Talk sense," snapped Smith.

"I am," said the Master of Sinanju in an injured voice. "It had the form of a bee, but it was not a bee.

"Put Remo back on," Smith directed.

"Why?"

"Because I need to speak with him," explained Smith tightly.

Face quirking up, Chiun surrendered the receiver to his pupil, sniffing, "The conversation has taken an unimportant turn, Remo. Emperor Smith wishes to speak with you."

"Not-bee theory didn't exactly go over well?"

"That man is old. No doubt his faculties are failing. It is the burden of the kingly. Nero was much like this in his snowy years."

Remo took the phone and said, "I can't tell what he's talking about, either."

"Remo, start at the beginning."

"Which beginning?"

"From the time you left the morgue."

Remo did. He told about the bumblebee that had followed him from the parking lot and all that had transpired at the airport.

"And he had the same death's-head markings as the morgue bee," Remo finished. "The outside morgue bee. Not the inside one."

"It could not be the same bee," Smith stated flatly.

"Why not?"

"Bees do not fly that fast."

"This one was pretty light on his wings. Speaking of which, we mailed you a wing from the first bee."

"I will be very interested to see that."

"That was the good news. The bad is that the second bee looked like it read your address when we mailed the package."

"Preposterous!"

"This bee was out to get us," Remo said heatedly. "I'm just letting you know what it knows."

"It knows nothing. It is dead. And I want the body."

"Well, that's going to be kinda hard," said Remo, looking out through a plate-glass window to where the 727 was awash in fire-retardant foam. "Chiun mashed it flat as a wafer, and the plane is crawling with airport personnel. The NTSB should be along at any moment."

"Then I will have the bee's remains requisitioned on my end," said Smith.

"Good luck," said Remo. "So what do we do now? Risk flying again or what?"

Smith was silent for a long space. "I want that bee's wing."

"It's on the way via Federal Express."

"Not soon enough. I want it today. Recover the package and bring it here. Wurmlinger can wait."

"If you say so."

"I say so," said Smith, terminating the connection.

Hanging up himself, Remo addressed the Master of Sinanju. "He sounds pretty P.O.'ed."

"I heard. We will bring him the wing of the not-bee."

They had their first stroke of luck that day when they went to the Federal Express pickup box. A driver showed up. He was in the act of unlocking the deposit box-which saved Remo the bother of ripping it apart with his bare hands in front of witnesses-when Remo tapped him on the shoulder.

"I need to get back a package I sent."

"Sorry. Once it's in the box, it's ours. Company rules."

Remo smiled pleasantly. "Sure. I understand."

And he and Chiun followed the man to his awaiting orange-and-purple-splashed white van. They were not at all secretive about it. In fact, they carried on a loud running conversation.

"Don't you hate it when big companies take your money and blow you off when you have a problem?" Remo told Chiun.

"Customer satisfaction is the soul of the professional assassin," Chiun replied. "So said Wang the Great, who understood such things."

The driver, knowing he was being followed, cast several nervous glances over his shoulder. He looked more worried each time. Just as he inserted his key into the door, he looked back again.

He saw no sign of the thick-wristed white guy or the old Oriental who had been following him.

Still looking back over his shoulder, he rolled the rear van door up.

Then he climbed aboard, threw his satchel in the back and lowered the door. It locked with a resounding chink of steel latching.

He drove out of LAX at a good clip, pausing only at the main entrance.

That was when the rear door unexpectedly rattled up, and he saw California sunlight beaming in from the back.

Braking and swearing, he ran back.

The cargo door was fully up, but there was no sign of whoever had opened it. He ran it down again and decided not to report any of what had happened.

But as he eased onto the freeway, he had the uneasy feeling that at least one of those two had been hiding in back of the van.

How was another matter. The only way into the van was through a locked side or rear door. And the rear door had been unlocked only long enough for him to check to see that the coast was clear and climb aboard.

Surely that was too short a time for a grown person to slip on board. Surely.

BACK AT THE TERMINAL, Remo was saying to Chiun, "That guy was looking everywhere except where we were."

"No," corrected Chiun. "We were everywhere his gaze did not fall."

Remo shrugged. "Same difference. Okay, let's get this thing to Folcroft."

"What of the bug man, Earwig Wormfood?"

"Smitty said he can wait."

"Thus, he waits."

Chapter 19

Harold Smith was deep in cyberspace when his secretary buzzed him that he had visitors.

"It's those two," she whispered.

"Send them in, Mrs. Mikulka," said Smith, looking up from his desktop screen. It was a relief, he thought, not to have to reach for the old concealed stud under the edge of his old desk to send the oldstyle monitor humming down into its concealed desktop well. That was in the days before he had the new system with its screen mounted flush under the black glass desktop. He still sometimes missed that system with its comforting green monochrome screen. It matched his Dartmouth tie.

When Mrs. Mikulka popped her blue-haired head in, Smith merely looked up and nodded his gray head. No one could see the buried screen except the man seated before it.

Mrs. Mikulka withdrew as Remo and Chiun entered.

Remo said, "Hiyah, Smitty," and tossed the FedEx envelope across the room.

It went sailing over Smith's head, out of reach. At the last moment, it abruptly boomeranged back to settle before him, square with the corners of the desk, unnoticed by Smith, who was still looking over his shoulder, expecting it to bounce off the office picture window.

Smith blinked, looked about and finally saw the package, resting on the desk as if it had been there all along. He cleared his throat, unimpressed with Remo's theatrics.

Stripping back the cardboard zipper, he emptied the contents on the smooth desktop.

A single wing fluttered to the black glass. It was backlit by the amber screen below. Touching a key, Smith reset the screen to a pure white. The light highlighted the outline and veins of the tiny wing.

Chiun was uncharacteristically silent as Smith studied the wing's delicate structure.

"You're being ignored," Remo whispered to him.

Chiun shook his head. "I ignored him first."

"Well, he's ignoring you back."

"He is too late. He is the ignoree, while I am the true ignorer. "

"Well, you know the etiquette of ignoring," said Remo in an unconvinced tone of voice.

Smith's patrician nose was almost touching the desktop now. He made assorted faces he was entirely unaware of.

"What do you say, Smitty?" Remo prompted.

Smith looked up, squint eyed. "It appears to be a bee's wing. Unremarkable."

"Well," said Remo. "Is it a bumblebee or a drone?"

Smith sat back and began working his keyboard.

Remo came around the desk to watch.

Smith had brought up a color replica of a drone honey bee and was manipulating it. One wing broke off and enlarged itself. It matched in outline and vein patterns the detached wing resting on the desk.

"It is a drone's wing. An ordinary drone," he said.

"No, it was a not-bee," Chiun corrected.

"I am unfamiliar with that terminology," Smith admitted.

"Examine that wing more closely," Chiun suggested.

Smith did.

"What do you see?" asked Chiun.

"A common drone honey bee wing, according to my data base."

Chiun shook his head slowly. "The creature that possessed that wing owned intelligence and malevolence. It was not a bee, common or otherwise."

Smith brought up an image of a killer bee.

It was completely different and the wing structure was different, as well. The killer bee was no different than a typical honeybee-long of body but not as long or distinctively colored as a yellow jacket. The drone, on the other hand, was plump and fuzzy.

"This is not a killer bee's wing," Smith said flatly.

"True. It belongs to a killer not-bee."

Smith looked to Remo for help. Remo rolled his eyes and pretended to find the overhead fluorescent lights of interest.

"I fail to understand," Smith said helplessly.

"You are excused," Chiun said, and floated over to the picture window to contemplate Long Island Sound.

"I guess we came a long way for nothing," Remo told Smith.

"There is word out of the L.A. Coroner's Office."

"Yeah?"

"The new coroner has pronounced the deaths of Dr. Nozoki, Dr. Krombold and the others as the result of killer-bee stings."

"That can't be!" Remo exploded. "We saw how those people bought it. A garden-variety bumblebee got them."

"Drone honey bees," Smith said carefully, "cannot sting. And more importantly, the venom of the Africanized killer bee is a neurotoxin, which is to say it affects the nervous system, not merely the breathing passages, as does ordinary bee venom."

"That makes no sense."

"It does if someone has crossbred a new kind of bee.

"That's possible ...."

"Since the advent of killer bees in this hemisphere, Remo, there have been many attempts to interdict the killer bee in its northern migration. All have failed. The defense of last resort has been to cross these feral bees with more-gentle domestic bees in order to obtain a less virulent and aggressive strain."

"How's it coming?"

"It has been an utter failure. But that is not to say that someone could not attempt to create a more virulent strain of bee, if they chose to reverse the breeding program."

"What's the point of that?"

"It is obvious," said Chiun, turning from the window.

Remo and Harold Smith looked at him, unspoken questions in their eyes.

"To kill," said Chiun.

Remo and Smith looked at one another, their faces undergoing various changes of expression-Remo's dubious, Smith's lemony.

Clearing his throat, Smith swept the bee's wing into the FedEx container and attacked his keyboard. He brought up a list of the dead to date, including the two pilots.

"Doyal T. Rand was the first," he said.

"We don't know that," said Remo. "He wasn't stung. His brains were eaten out."

"Let us assume he was the first because the man who autopsied him subsequently died of anaphylactic shock."

"Okay," allowed Remo.

"That was Dr. Lemuel Quirk. The New York coroner-"

"M.E.," Remo corrected.

"-also was killed by the sting of a bee, although no bee was found."

"Why?"

"Simple. To cover up the first killing."

"In Los Angeles, three people died at a new restaurant of bee venom, although none appeared stung and no bee parts were found in their stomachs, according to Dr. Wurmlinger."

"How did you know that?" asked Remo.

"I talked to the assistant deputy coroner in Los Angeles."

"Oh."

"A Dr. Nozoki who autopsied them died of a bee sting. As did a Fox cameraman. As did Dr. Gideon Krombold. Again, let us assume a cover-up."

"By bees."

"Using bees," said Smith.

"Idiots," said Chiun.

"What was that?" Smith asked the Master of Sinanju.

"Nothing," said Chiun, resuming his enjoyment of Long Island Sound.

Smith returned to his glowing amber list. "The bee attempted to kill you and Chiun. It died. Yet another bee followed you from the coroner's office and apparently attempted to finish the job by bringing down your flight."

"It's a chain of BS, but it's solid," Remo admitted.

"That leaves but one question."

"Actually, it leaves a zillion. But what's the one on your mind?" Remo asked.

"If the intelligence behind this-and there can be no mistaking that one does exist-is intent on killing everyone involved with those two deaths, why are Tammy Terrill and Dr. Wurmlinger still alive?"

"Search me."

"Because they are useful," said Chiun.

"Useful to whom?" asked Smith. "Who could so perfectly control this new strain of feral bees that they function as assassins?"

Chiun made a face at the misuse of the honorable term assassin.

"And how are they controlled?" added Smith.

"Sounds like Bee-Master to me," muttered Remo.

"Who?"

"Bee-Master. It was a comic-book character I used to read about back at the orphanage."

Smith made the lemony face of a man who had bitten into a persimmon unsuspectingly.

"We are dealing with reality here," he said.

"Not if bees can think and attack people they don't like," Remo returned.

Smith made an uncomfortable noise in his throat.

"If this chain of deaths began with Rand and the owners of that restaurant, what do they have in common?" Remo queried.

Smith posed the question to his computer, and it came up with side-by-side profiles of Doyal T. Rand and the Notos.

"Rand is a genetic genius. It was he who perfected the current method of roach-population control by shutting off their pheromones."

"What about the others?" asked Remo.

"They had just opened a restaurant that served bugs."

"I sure hope the thunderbug isn't back," said Remo to Chiun. Chiun made a disgusted face.

"Ordinarily," Smith mused, "I would not connect two such dissimilar deaths were it not for the fact that in both cases the medical examiner who autopsied the victims succumbed to bee stings. That is the only link. The cover-up of the attacks. It is wrong."

"It's criminal," Remo admitted.

"No, it is wrong in this sense-if a serial killer is at work, his signature should be static. The cause of death-the modus operandi-may vary."

"You think we're dealing with a serial killer?"

"I am nearly certain of it. And the only connection between the two victims involves insects."

"The killer is a bug on bugs, you mean?"

"An insane person who must be identified and apprehended."

"Well, what can we do?"

"At this stage, little. I believe it is time to bring in the FBI. They have psychological profilers who can glean remarkably accurate information on the subject from details surrounding the killings and crime scene."

"What about us?" wondered Remo.

"Go home. Stand by. I will call upon you when I need you."

"What about Wurmlinger?"

"He is in police custody, according to my sources. He is going nowhere for now."

Smith had already turned his attention to his computer system, so Remo motioned for Chiun to follow him out.

Chiun passed from the room, presenting his disdainful back to the emperor who had neither heeded his wisdom nor understood it.

Before closing the door, he allowed himself to peek back at Smith the Mad.

The Mad One was still intent upon his oracles, so Chiun closed the door with a nerve jangling jar.