Fool's Gold

"You won't be burned by me," Smith said. "When can we meet?"

"You say two hundred and fifty thousand is okay and ten points gross?"

"That's right," Smith said agreeably.

"I've got to think about it."

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"Why? That's what you asked for. I agreed. What do you have to think about?" Smith asked.

"That's just it. You agreed. Out here, nobody agrees. You at this phone number regularly?"

"Yes."

"I'll get back to you."

The telephone clicked dead in Smith's ear. He replaced the receiver slowly, then dialed a three-digit number that connected him with Folcroft's switchboard. During the day, he had tried to start rebuilding the sanitarium's computer capability. Now he would see if there was anything happening inside the computers.

After a few seconds, the computer terminal on his desk lit up, and slowly spelled out a message.

Unable to find Telephone number. Call originated in western United States.

Smith stared at the message, then pressed a button clearing the screen.

He took out a pad and pencil and hunched over his desk to try to recreate his entire conversation with the madman. Perhaps he would be able to figure out what it was all about. He allowed himself a sigh. It was going to be another long night.

Eleven

The long oak table occupied a long narrow room, with high vaulted ceilings and intricate hand-carved wooden moldings, but both room and table were overwhelmed by a giant crest, a full six feet across that occupied the center of one wall behind the head of the table.

In the center of the brilliantly polished ceramic crest, a lion reared on its hind legs. At one side of the lion was a sheaf of wheat and on the other side, a stiletto with a diamond-studded hilt.

A ceramic sash looped across the bottom of the crest. It contained the single word: Wissex.

There were not other paintings in the room, no photographs, no wall decorations, nothing but the crest. Around the table were placed a dozen hard-seated, straight-backed chairs. A single black telephone sat on the table.

Six men were talking softly in the room, but they became silent when the door opened and Neville walked in. He wore a herringbone tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, knickers, high socks and heavy walking shoes. He gave off the

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scent of out-of-doors and spent shotgun shells as he breezed inside the room and walked to the head of the table.

"Everyone here?" he called out, then sat down, looked around, nodded, and said, "Good. Let's get started."

Wissex waited until the other men were seated, then tapped on the table with the end of a silver pen he kept in his inside jacket pocket. He said briskly, "The monthly meeting of the House of Wissex will come to order. The minutes and the treasurer's report will wait until the next monthly meeting. I'd like to report on the Hamidian operation."

He looked around as if inviting approval and five of the six men at the table nodded. The sixth was Uncle Pimsy. He was trying to screw his monocle into his eye, so that he could see clearly the cigar he was fondling in his hand.

Wissex waited for the old man to speak, but he said nothing. Wissex began his report. "The Hamidian operation is proceeding nicely. We have already squeezed Moombasa for twenty million. Our goal was twenty-five million and I expect to meet that goal."

"But we've incurred losses," one of the directors said. He was a red-faced man in his early thirties whose voice seemed on the verge of cracking. His principal distinguishing characteristic was an adam's apple that bobbed up and down, seemingly out of synchrony with his speech.

"Yes, Bentley," Wissex agreed easily. "We've had losses."

"How many, Neville?" the young man asked.

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"Eighteen. Seven in America and ten in the Yucatan. And we just lost our bomber in Bombay."

"Why?" Bentley asked. The other directors nodded, all but Pimsy, who seemed to be trying to sculpt his cigar to fit into a one-in-a-million mouth. He was tearing at the stem of the cigar with a silver knife, grunting under his breath.

Wissex waited until the directors stopped nodding.

"I don't know," he said. "The woman is protected by just two men but somehow they have repelled our subcontractors."

"Where do they go next?" another director asked.

"Spain."

"And then where?"

"There is no other place," Wissex said. "They weren't even supposed to get this far."

"Well, we just have to get rid of those bodyguards," another director said. He was a bristly man in his forties with a battalion-grade rust mustache. "Just can't have people running around killing our field hands. Not good form, don't you know?"

"No. No. True." Voices grunted around the table.

"We will get rid of them," Wissex said coldly.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

The sound came from Uncle Pimsy at the end of the table. He had the cigar in his mouth now, still unlit, but the monocle had dropped again from his eye and he was trying to screw it back in.

He took a deep breath and began to speak again.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." It was a terminal rattle, but the men around the table waited for him to go on. They were used to his way of starting to talk.

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Finally, Pimsy polled the cigar from his mouth and said, "Can't get rid of those two. Can't. Don't you understand?" He voice was gravelly and the words came out sounding as if his lips had been frozen with novocaine and were unable to form letters correctly. Spittle flew from his mouth with the words and the directors nearest him leaned away.

Wissex said, "That's nonsense, Uncle Pimsy, and you know it."

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh," came the rattle again. "Tell them the truth, Neville. We're all going to die."

"Oh, come," said Neville. He looked around the table, smiling patronizingly. "Uncle Pimsy has the idea that these assassins are somehow indestructible. From the Orient. He wants us to pay them a tribute, if you can believe that."

The other directors looked first at Wissex, then at Pimsy. The old man had lighted his cigar. It filled the room with smoke as if it were a tubular tear-gas canister.

"Never liked the idea of stealing money from Moombooger," Pimsy said. "Go back to the good old days. Honest men doing honest work. You're ruining this house, Neville."

"By bringing in twenty million dollars?" he asked.

"By making us battle the House of Sinanju," Pimsy said.

"Times change," Wissex said quickly.

"Sinanju never changes," Pimsy said. "Ehhhhh-hhhh."

"What is Sinanju?" asked the director named Bentley.

"Another old house of assassins," Neville said.

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"Far as I can tell, it's been out of business for years. But Uncle's worried about it. Seems we met up once some hundreds of years ago and had some trouble with them. Uncle wants us to give the money back and strike our tents and go open cheese and tea shops." Anybody else want to do that besides Pimsy?"

He looked around the table. The directors were shaking their heads.

Pimsy groaned again. His monocle fell from his eye. He slumped back in his seat, as if exhausted from the effort of speaking. He puffed hard on his cigar and the smelly smoke hung in the air, a tangible fog.

"You're too clever by half, Neville. But you're going to kill all these people before you're done," Pimsy said.

"Shouldn't you go play with your poodle?" Neville snapped.

"Get rid of those bodyguards," Bentley said. "That should satisfy everybody."

"You're right," said Wissex "We concur. We will finish them off immediately. We will send our second best."

"Why second best?" asked Bentley.

"Because I have an appointment to ride to hounds this weekend. But no more foreign mongrels on this job. We will send Spencer."

"Spencer," one of the men hissed.

"Yes," said Wissex. "Commander Spencer."

There were murmurs of agreement around the table, and Wissex stood, signaling that the meeting was at an end. The others rose, still grinning and nodding to themselves.

1 SO

"Oh, yes, Spencer," one of them said.

Uncle Pimsy alone remained in his seat, his chin sunk down onto what used to be his chest before his chest went south into his stomach cavity.

He was shaking his head.

"We're all going to die," he said.

Mrs. Cholmondley Montague was on her hands and knees in the garden, plucking weeds from among her flowers, when she heard the sound. It sounded as if hell had sprung a leak, a whining, screeching sound, and she closed her eyes for a moment, praying that it was an illusion and there wasn't really any such sound; but the sound continued and got louder and louder.

It had long since been arranged among the neighbors that the first to hear the sound would alert all the others, for their mutual protection, so Mrs. Montague dropped her garden tools and ran inside the house.

She looked at the telephone, her British sense of duty pulling her toward it. But self-preservation came first and so she closed and locked her front door and windows before she picked up the phone.

From a list alongside the instrument, she started calling her neighbors.

"Yes. The bagpipes. He's started up again."

"Yes. He's started. Stay inside."

She even called that terrible woman who said her name was Mrs. Wilson, but God knew, she was probably an Italian or worse, a dark thing she was and hairy, but even hairy and dark, she deserved a warning.

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Still, Mrs. Montague had trouble keeping the chill out of her voice.

"I know this is the first time for you, so stay inside. I'll let you know when it's safe to come out. You can light a candle or do whatever it is your type of person does."

Soon, the quiet, dead-ended little mews was still. Only the sound of bagpipes hovered overhead. The houses looked as if they had been designed to keep out all light and air. Every door was bolted shut and every window tightly closed. Shades, Venetian blinds, drapes were pulled tight, as if the sun were a deadly bacteria-carrying enemy. Within moments, the neighborhood resembled one of those everybody-dead-by-occult-intervention neighborhoods from a Hollywood horror movie- still and unmoving as death, with only the eerie sound of the bagpipes hanging over all.

The bagpipe music came from inside a small house at the very end of the immaculate little street. Inside, playing on a stereo system, was a record of the British Black Watch Regiment. Atop that record, awaiting their turns, were a stack of records including Wagner, military music from the Boer War, military music from the Indian campaigns, and songs of the Empire.

Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer, O.G., K.L.M., D.S.C., sat finishing his Stolichnaya vodka neat. He could feel the throbbing in his temples, the throbbing that always signaled that he would soon kill again.

He finished off his drink, strode to a bookcase in a corner of the living room, and reached behind a slim copy of Italian War Heroes to press a button.

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Noiselessly, the bookcase slid into the room, opening like a door to display another small room. Its walls were lined with weapons, handguns and rifles and automatic pistols. There were hand grenades and small one-man rockets, all neatly labeled and stored for immediate use.

Commander Spencer decided he would take a lot of equipment with him and give those two bloody bodyguards a really rousing sendoff.

His temples kept throbbing and he knew the pain would not subside until he was packed and ready to go on his mission. Until that time, he hoped he met no one. He hoped no neighbors were on the street and he hoped no mailmen or deliverymen came to the front door, because while the temples pounded, he was not in control of himself. And he didn't want to kill anybody right-now. Not yet. Not until he had met these two bodyguards.

Twelve

At least at Kennedy Airport in New York, they had predictable hookers and muggers. But here, in the Bombay Airport, they had beggars and cows milling around the main passenger terminal.

"Ridiculous," Remo said. "This country's never going to make it into the twentieth century. Hell, it might not even make the nineteenth."

"You just don't understand spirituality," Terri Pomfret said.

"I understand cowshit," Remo said. "You're standing in it."

Terri looked down, saw she indeed was and tried to shake it from her shoe.

"Pray it off," Remo said. "Flash a buck and you'll have a thousand gurus over here to help you."

"You're back to being nasty," Terri said.

"Something about this country brings out the beast in me," Remo said.

He strolled off, picking his way through the cowchips, toward a bank of telephone booths on the far side of the terminal.

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The first seven phones had dial tones but no sign of sentient life on the other end of the line. When Remo picked up the receiver on the eighth phone, an operator answered him instantly.

He gave her the 800-area-code number in the United States.

"That is wonderful," the operator said.

"What is?"

"That you're calling America. I've never placed a call to America. Are you American?"

"Will it help me get my call through if I tell you yes?" Remo asked.

"You don't have to be sarcastic. No wonder you Americans are hated around the world."

Remo began to sing:

"In the good old colony days, when we lived under the king, lived a butcher and a baker and a little tailor . . . bring back the British."

"Vietnam," the operator yelled. "El Salvador."

"Cowshit. Dirt," Remo yelled back.

"Racism. Colonialism," the operator yelled.

"Please," Remo said, surrendering. "Just get my number."

He leaned against the wall and waited. He noticed a slight dark man, wearing a diaper around his midsection and a terrycloth turban, standing against the wall near the telephones, trying very hard not to be involved with Rerno, trying very hard not to look in Remo's direction, trying very hard not to be noticed. He had a small bale of

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cotton alongside him. He picked it up and placed it on his head, moved a few steps along the wall, closer to Remo, then put the bale down on the floor again.

After a lot of clicking, Smith's voice came on the phone. The operator said, "Imperialist pig calling you."

She clicked the phone loudly in Remo's ear as she got off the line.

"It's Remo. We're going to Spain. Right, Smitty, Spain. Don't ask me. She says Spain, we go to Spain. You're the one who told me to do this. I know. The world depends on it. Right, right, right, right, right."

After Remo hung up, he walked over to the man in the turban and diaper who had just replaced the cotton bale on his head. Remo rearranged it even more with a quick stroke of his hand, slamming the bale down around the man's ears so he looked like a walking sofa cushion.

"We're going to Spain," Remo said. "Just ask. It's not polite to eavesdrop."

They were the only people in the plane's first-class section and Chiun took his usual seat by the window so that he could concentrate on the wing and make sure it wasn't falling off.

While the plane was taxiing, he said, "You did well, Remo."

Remo and Terri were sitting across the aisle.

"Oh, how's that?" asked Remo.

"By not getting us on an Air India plane. I would not fly anything manipulated by these savages," Chiun said.

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"My honor," Remo said.

Chiun nodded and turned back to the wing.

"How can he be so nice sometimes and so mean other times?" Terri asked Remo.

"You think he's bad now?" said Remo. "Wait until you learn street Korean and find out what he's been saying behind your back."

When the plane was airborne, a stewardess came from behind the galley wall and looked over the first-class section.

When she saw Remo, she reached a hand up and opened two more buttons on her blouse. She was a tall brunette, long-legged and slim, and her candy-striped blouse was pulled tight over a full bosom.

"That stewardess is looking at you." Terri sniffed at Remo.

"Probably she's just trying to see to the end of her chest. Quite a set of chest, actually," Remo said.

"If you like cows," Terri said.

"For two days, you've been telling me to love cows. Now, all of a sudden, something's wrong with cows?"

"You're disgusting," Terri said.

The stewardess came to their seat and leaned forward over Remo's aisle seat so he could see into the dark valley of her cleavage.

"Can I get you anything, sir? Anything at all?"

"I'll have tea," Terri said.

The stewardess ignored her. "Sir? Anything?" she asked Remo again.

"No thank you," Remo said.

"Tea," said Terri.

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"Oh, come on," the stewardess told Remo. "There must be something you want. Maybe you'd like to see the galley where we fix meals. It's just up there. Come on. I'll show it to you." She took Remo's hand but he extricated himself from her grip.

"No, that's all right," he said, smiling at her.

"The washroom," she said. "You'd like to inspect the washroom. Come on." She took his hand again. "I'll show the washroom to you. Show you how the door locks."

"No, thank you," said Remo.

"Tea," said Terri.

"Come on," the stewardess said. "There's got to be something you want." She leaned over farther, exposing more of her bosom. Terri turned away and looked out the window in disgust.

"Something. Anything. I'll get you a pillow."

The stewardess reached into the overhead compartment, standing on tiptoe and pressing her belly against the side of Remo's face as she rooted around in the overhead luggage section. Remo turned to Terri and shrugged helplessly. Terri stuck out her tongue.

The stewardess slipped the pillow behind Remo's head.

"It's a nice pillow. Not as nice as the ones I have in my apartment, but all right. You should try the ones in my apartment. It's all right. My roommate's out of town."

Remo said, "Thank you. Maybe some other time."

Terri said, "Tea."

"The stewardess said, "Here, let me brush those crumbs off your lap."

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"I don't have any crumbs on my iap."

"I'm sure I saw some. Right there."

The stewardess brushed Remo's lap.

Remo sighed and reached behind the young brunette, placing his hand on her back, feeling the vertebrae of her spine.

"It think it's the fifth," he mumbled to himself. "Fifth or sixth. Chiun. Is it fifth or sixth?" he called out, as the stewardess continued brushing his lap.

"On a cow, it doesn't matter," Chiun snapped back, not turning away from the window.

"Hooray for common sense," Terri said.

"Fifth," Remo mumbled. "I'm sure it's fifth." He pressed his left index finger into the flight attendant's back. Her hands froze in position on his lap and a look of tranquillity came over her face.

Remo touched her cheek with his hand.

"Later," he said gently. Carefully, he turned her around and gave her a tiny push down the aisle toward the front of the plane.

As if she had no will of her own, she walked away, pausing to rest, leaning against a seat, then unsteadily lurching down the aisle.

"That was awful," Terri told Remo. She looked at the stewardess who was leaning against the bulkhead wall, her face wreathed in a smile. She seemed unable to move.

"What'd you do to her?" Terri asked.

"I just gave her something to remember me by. It was the only way to get her off me. You saw."

"How did you do it?"

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"I don't know. I touched a nerve. You want one?" Remo asked.

"Keep your hands to yourself, you lecher."

"Just asking was all," Remo said.

Terri watched the stewardess. She had been leaning with her back against the wall, and slowly her feet slid out from under her. In a moment, she was sitting on the plane's floor.

"That's incredible," Terri said.

"It's a pain in the ass is what it is," Remo said. "Women sense it and they just won't leave me alone."

"I'll leave you alone. You know, you don't affect me at all. I don't even really like you."

"Oh?"

"That's right. Nothing. You do less than nothing for me. Zip code. My ideal man is cultured, noble, regal."

"And my ideal woman doesn't have a loose upper plate," Remo said.

Terri harrumphed, got up and stepped across Remo. She moved to the other side of the aisle and sat next to Chiun.

Chiun said, "I prefer to sit alone. Be gone, woman." He spun around and clamped his gaze on the wing again.

Terri rose and moved to a seat behind Remo.

He turned and smiled. "Welcome to the club. When he abuses you, he likes you."

"You must both love me then," she said.

"Only him," Remo said.

Smith regularly awoke at 5:29 A.M., one minute before his alarm was set to go off. Then he turned

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the clock off so that the ring would not disturb his wife.

By this day, he awoke at 5:24 A.M., a full five minutes early, and knew something was wrong. He must have been dreaming. But what was it about?

Then he remembered. It wasn't a dream. It had been a thought. The lunatic he had been talking to in the West somewhere had been talking about motion pictures.

Suddenly, it all made sense-his talking about gross points, his maundering about how everybody was stealing from him.

Somehow CURE's records had gotten into the information system of a moviemaker. No ... a writer, as Smith recalled the conversation. Out there somewhere was a writer with CURE's records and now he was writing a screenplay based on the exploits of Remo and Chiun.

A small chill shuddered through Smith's body.

"Are you all right, dear?" his wife asked in the darkness of their bedroom in a little ranch house in Rye, New York.

"Yes. Why?"

"You're awake early," she said.

"Yes. I had an idea."

"How unusual," she said.

"Sorry to disturb you, dear," Smith said.

"Oh, you didn't disturb me."

"Go back to sleep, dear," Smith said.

"If you're sure everything's all right," she said.

"Everything's all right." Smith leaned over and pecked a kiss on his wife's cheek, then quickly left the bedroom to dress.

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But Mrs. Smith knew something was wrong, two minutes later, when the alarm sounded. Smith had forgotten to turn it off, and that was something he hadn't done in twenty years.

Thirteen

His bags were flawless. The ammunition and auxiliary weapons were stashed neatly in lead-lined cavities on the inside of mock typewriters and dictating machines, so the airport's randomly used x-ray equipment would show only the familiar shape of those ordinary objects.

But most of Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer's arsenal was on his body, built into his suit, his shoes, his sleeves, his belts.

"How will you get past airport security?" Wissex had asked him.

"The same way I escaped from Moscow in 1964," Spencer had said. "Did I ever tell you? I was"

"Well, I really have to go now," Wissex said. "Good luck on your mission."

"Luck has nothing to do with it, old top," Spencer said.

At London's Heathrow Airport, there was a long corridor leading to the waiting and boarding area for Air Espana planes. Only passengers were permitted past the human x-ray security machines that controlled the corridor.

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Forty minutes before he was due to board, Spencer was at a cocktail lounge in the airport, waiting for someone to arrive.

"Stolichnaya, double," he ordered from the bartender.

"How do you like it, sir?" the bartender asked.

"Neat, of course," Spencer said. "And bring the pepper."

When the bartender came, he set the large shot glass in front of Spencer, along with the pepper shaker. Spencer sprinkled some of the spice on top of the liquor. The pepper grains floated there for a few moments, then slowly settled to the bottom of the glass.

Spencer looked up at the bartender and smiled. "The only way to drink vodka, don't you know," he said. "The pepper takes out the impurities and carries them to the bottom of the drink. What's left is pure vodka. I've always drunk it that way."

"I see it all the time," the bartender said in a bored voice. "I read about it once in a James Bond book. Even Yanks do it now."

"Until I told him about it," Spencer said frostily, "that man who wrote about James Bond used to drink his vodka with Coca Cola." His eyes defied the bartender to argue with him, but the man just drifted off toward another customer.

Spencer nursed his drink for about ten minutes until the man he had been waiting for showed up. The man was Spencer's size and wore an identical blue pinstripe suit with a red handkerchief in the lapel. Like Spencer, he had a rust-colored mustache and he wore an ecru-colored Panama straw hat. Standing alongside Spencer in the darkened

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bar, they looked like twins or an actor and his stunt double.

"Are you ready?" Spencer asked.

"As I'll ever be, Commander," the other man said.

"Synchronize watches," Spencer said. "Two forty-three and forty seconds. Forty-two. Forty-four."

"Got it," the other man said.

"All right," Spencer said. "At exactly 2:47, we move."

"Righto."

"Here's the ticket," Spencer said. He handed the other man his airline ticket and the man strolled off down the corridor toward the Air Espana loading gates.

Spencer drained the last of his vodka, careful not to disturb the pepper at the glass's bottom, which he knew was now contaminated with fuel oil. He thought about leaving the bartender a tip, but decided not to. Let his Yank friends who drank vodka and pepper leave him a tip. Spencer picked up his thin nylon gymnasium-style bag and stepped into the men's room next to the bar. Inside one of the toilet stalls, he took from the nylon bag a long doctor's robe, which he put on over his suit. A pair of dark wrap-around sunglasses covered his eyes. From the bottom of the nylon bag came a worn brown leather doctor's satchel.

Spencer rolled up the nylon gym bag and stuck it inside the waistband of his trousers. He checked his watch. Two forty-six and thirty-five seconds.

Almost time.

He stepped out of the men's room, just as the digital clicker of his watch registered the full minute.

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Two forty-seven.

He heard a scream from down the Air Espana corridor. He ran toward the sound. Ahead of him, a group of people were clustered together.

"Let me through," Spencer called out in a heavy German accent. "I am a doctor. Let me through."

He ran past the x-ray detector machines and pushed his way through the crowd until he was next to the man with the red mustache. The man was lying on the floor, gasping for breath, his hands clutching his chest.

Professionally, Spencer knelt alongside the man and felt his pulse.

"Very serious," he said. "I vill need room to work. Stand back. All of you. Schnell."

He hoisted the man into his arms and walked along the corridor toward the planes, then pushed his way through the door of the first men's room he reached.

It was vacant and the other mustached man quickly got to his feet. Spencer leaned against the door, keeping it closed, as he stripped off his doctor's robe. The other man put it on, along with Spencer's wrap-around sunglasses. He tucked Spencer's nylon gym bag into his waistband, turned, and glanced at himself in the mirror.

"Pretty neat if I do say so myself," he said. Spencer checked himself in the mirror on the back of the door. He heard people thumping outside.

"All right," he said. "Let's go. Ooops, the ticket." The man now wearing the doctor's costume handed Spencer the Air Espana ticket and then led the way through the door.

With the same thick German accent Spencer

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had used, he said, "Everything isss all right. Lucky I vas here. Just a piece of candy stuck in ze throat. Lucky I vas here. I fixed him up all right."

Quickly, the man in the doctor's smock walked away. The eyes of the crowd followed him as Spencer stepped from the men's room and walked over to the Air Espana counter, where he got a boarding pass, then took a seat and buried his face in a magazine.

Three minutes later, the passengers were boarding, and five minutes later, his arms and legs wrapped with guns and rockets and knives and bombs, Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer was sprawled comfortably in a window seat in the plane's first-class cabin.

It had been a while, he thought, since he had an interesting assignment from Wissex. And these two, the Yank and the old Oriental, might be interesting. Eighteen men had already died trying to remove them. It might be fun.

Eighteen dead. It did not bother him. None of those eighteen had been Brits. Wait until the Yank and the Chink ran up against British steel.

He smiled, and the faint pounding began again inside his temples.

The union of motion pictures authors had been no help to Smith.

"I'm looking for a screenwriter," he had said, and the woman who had answered the phone had said, "Pick one. We've got seven thousand members."

"This one would probably have a word processor or computer," Smith said.

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"That narrows it down to six thousand nine hundred," the woman said. "It's a great excuse not to work. They can't write movies but they sure as hell can play Pac-man. Got any more clues?"

"Maybe he's doing a script on Oriental assassins," Smith said hopefully.

"Not a chance," the woman said.

"Why not?"

"Nobody's doing assassins. Chopsaki. The movies never gross anything. Bruce Lee is dead but he was dead at the box office long before he died. Afraid I can't help you." And she hung up.

And that was it. Smith realized that he had no choice except to wait for the lunatic to call him again. The telephone rang.

"Smith here."

"You know who this is," the voice said.

"Yes," said Smith. "Except I don't have a name to put with the voice."

"That's all right. No matter what you call it, a rose is a rose."

"Obviously, you're the product of a classical education," Smith said.

"You know," said Barry Schweid, "I don't really trust you."

"I thought we were getting along fine," Smith said.

"We'll see when our negotiations go on," Schweid said.

"What negotiations? I gave you everything you asked for."

"That's why I don't trust you. What kind of producer are you anyway? I ask for 250 and you give me 250. What kind of crap is that? I ask for

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ten points and I get ten points. Gross points. Marlon Brando don't get points that easy and he wanted to play Superman's father in a suitcase."

Crazy, Smith thought. Hollywood had gotten to this one's brain, whoever he was. There was nothing left. What was he going to ask for now?

"Well, what is it you want?" Smith said.

"I've been giving it a lot of thought. I want three hundred fifty thousand and thirteen points."

Smith hesitated a moment. If he offered it, what would this madman want next? He thought for a split second, then reverted to his tight-fisted New England roots.

He slammed his fist on the desk.

"Not a chance," he shouted. "That's it. No three hundred fifty and no thirteen points. And no two hundred fifty or ten points either. The offer's now two hundred and eight points. Take it or leave it. You've got five seconds. One. Two"

"Hold on; wait."

"No wait," Smith snarled. "I'm not going to be jerked around forever. Three. Four. Five "

"Okay, okay," whined Barry Schweid. "You got a deal. Two hundred and eight points. I'll throw in a free rewrite. Don't tell the union."

"I don't know," Smith said. "It's a lot of money."

"One-ninety. I'll take one-ninety."

"Okay," Smith said after a pause, "now who the hell are you? You're not playing games with me anymore."

"All right. I'm Barry Schweid."

"Address and phone number. My lawyers will need it," Smith said.

Schweid rattled off the numbers and said, "I

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don't know much about you, you know. Just who are you?"

"The person who's going to pay you one-ninety and eight points. I want that script in my hands the day after tomorrow." Smith gave him the number of a postal box in Manhattan. "Without fail. You got it?"

"Now you sound like a producer," said Schweid. "It'll be there."

"And I don't want a lot of copies floating around either," Smith said, and then hung up.

As he hung up the telephone, Smith smiled. Maybe he should start treating Remo that way. It might be more effective than trying to reason with him. It was a thought he decided to hold for a while.

And three thousand miles away, Barry Schweid replaced his telephone receiver. By trying to negotiate on his own, he had cost himself sixty thousand dollars and two points.

It wasn't fair. Producers were always taking advantage of writers. He decided he needed help, and the longer he thought, the more sure he was that he had exactly the right people to deal with one thieving producer.

Two thieving producers.

Bindle and Marmelstein.

Fourteen

The crowd sounded far away, but when they shouted "Ole," even the walls seemed to vibrate.

Remo groused, "This is getting absurd. Can't you take us anyplace without cows?" but Terri answered only with an annoyed "Shhhhh."

She was walking through a darkened tunnel, playing a flashlight on the walls. The only other illumination carne from a single small lightbulb fixed to the stone ceiling of the tunnel thirty yards behind them and from a thin sliver of sunlight that snaked in under some kind of large wooden door twenty yards in front of them.

"Ole! Ole!" The crowd roared again.

"It's here somewhere," Terri said in exasperation, waving the flashlight angrily along the sweating stone walls. The air was musty, filled with sour dampness and the sweet decaying animal smell that reminded Remo of hamburgers. From back in the days when he was able to eat hamburgers.

Remo noticed that Chiun, standing alongside the woman, was rubbing the toe of his sandal in the white powder deposits on the stone floor, which

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years of dampness had washed from the tunnel's limestone walls. Chiun's toe scored the powder along the base of the walls, as if he were idly marking time, but Remo could tell, by the concentrated hunch of Chiun's shoulders, that he was not idling.

As Terry Pomfret continue to play her light on the walls, feeling the stone with her free hand, looking for something, anything, Chiun turned away to the other side of the tunnel and began to examine the powder on the floor there.

Toe pushed through the powder. Step. Toe again through the powder.

Remo was bored. He slumped down into a sitting position on the floor. The wall was cold and unyielding against his back and he felt its dampness through his thin black t-shirt. He watched Terri wandering around, shining her light, and Chiun wandering around, dragging his toe, and realized he was tired. Tired of the assignments, tired of the travel, tired of the same damn dullness of it all. He tried to think back to the days, so many years ago, before he had become one with Sinanju.

He had never thought of being an assassin then. He had been just a cop, his head filled with cop's ideas and cop's goals and cop's ambitions, most of which involved staying alive, not letting the bastards put a bullet in your belly, and getting out at age 55 after twenty years minimum service and spending the rest of his life fishing. He never even thought of assassins and didn't know that they existed.

But suppose he had thought about being an

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assassin, what would he have thought? That it was an exciting glamorous life? The spies who came in from the cold? James Bond with exploding suitcases and poison pellets and a license to kill? One-man battles against the Mafia? Women sniffing around?

And what was the truth?

It was all of those things and none of them. It was Smith, always with a new assignment for him, always worrying about the end of the world, the end of civilization as we know it, the end of CURE. And Remo would grumble and take the assignment and almost all the assignments were wait, wait, wait. A few minutes of exercise and then more waiting. Only the exercise, the chance to use his skills, kept him happy and busy. The waiting just made him bored.

He watched Chiun push his toe through the dust.

Was Chiun bored too? Had thousands of years of Masters of Sinanju spent their lives in boredom and desperation, wishing something, anything, would happen?

No. It was the difference between Chiun and himself; the difference between the real Master of Sinanju and the young American who would someday be the next reigning Master of Sinanju.

Chiun could take each day as it came, each part of life as it happened, his being filled with an inner peace and kindness that came from knowing who and what he was. Remo was still unsure, confused, torn between the worlds of the West where he was born and the East where his spirit now

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lived. But Chiun was at rest with himself, and it made Remo envy his peaceful composure.

Chiun, still shuffling his feet through the limestone powder, had reached Remo. His sandaled foot touched Remo's.

"Move your feet, retard," Chiun said.

Remo looked down. His feet were in Chiun's way.

So much for inner peace, Remo thought. Give me confusion every time.

Chiun kicked him to make him move his feet.

Commander Spencer was among the first passengers to leave the plane in Madrid, but he had stopped short inside the boarding area when he saw another metal detector he would have to pass through.

He had no more mock doctors up his sleeve, but he allowed himself a smile when he thought of what he actually had up his sleeves: two heat-seeking portable missiles, designed for hand firing.

He turned back to the ramp to reboard the plane. The last passengers were leaving, giving the obligatory thanks to a male flight attendant of spurious goodwill and indeterminate sexual preference, whose primary contribution to the flight's bonhomie was to refuse anyone who asked a second bag of peanuts.

Spencer brushed by him.

"Left something on my seat," he said apologetically.

"Someone always does," the steward sniffed.

Spencer went toward the back of the plane, past his seat and into the small restroom where he

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locked the door, leaned against the sink, prepared himself and waited.

Five minutes later, the steward knocked on the door.

"Are you in there? You really shouldn't be in there. There are restrooms in the airport terminal. I must ask you to leave the plane now."

The restroom door opened and a strong arm reached out and yanked the steward inside.

With one smooth motion, Spencer cut his throat, then leaned the dying body over the sink, so that the blood from the wound would run into the sink and not down onto the steward's uniform.

Cramped in the close quarters, Spencer stripped the steward's uniform.

"Bloody look like bleeding pilots they do," he mumbled to himself. The uniform was not much of a fit, particularly over his blue pinstriped suit. But it would do.

He opened the door and peered out. The passenger cabin was empty. He shut the door behind him, ripped the lid from one of the passenger seat's ashtrays and jammed it as a wedge into the base of the door. It wouldn't keep anyone out, but it would hold long enough to convince somebody that a tool kit was needed to fix the recalcitrant door. By that time, Spencer would be gone.

A few moments later, he fell in with a group of blond stewardesses who had just gotten off a Pan-American plane. He listened to them chatter in some dogbark accent about the best places in Madrid to snare rich men. They all walked past the airport's metal detector and Spencer waved to the

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young woman on duty there. She smiled back at

him and winked.

Boring, he thought. It was all so deadly boring. He hoped that the Yank and the Chink would at least be a moderate challenge, something to lift his flagging interest.

"Young woman, it is here," Chiun said.

Remo saw Chiun standing in front of a section of wall that looked to Remo no different from any other section. Terri, thirty feet away, hurried down to Chiun.

She shone the flashlight on the section of wall and said, "I don't see anyth . . . oh, there. Under the dirt."

"Yes," said Chiun.

With a handkerchief from her back pocket, Terri began to rub away at the gritty grime on the wall. Remo saw the first faint glimmering of gold begin to appear, reflecting dully in the beam of her flashlight.

Chiun backed away, toward Remo, to watch.

"How'd you know it was there?" Remo asked.

"The powder on the ground."

"Yeah? What about it?" Remo asked.

"You are really dense sometimes," said Chiun. "There was not as much of it there as elsewhere."

"What does that prove?"

"Is it not enough that I found the golden plaque? Must I be subjected always to this merciless cross-examination?" Chiun said.

"I just want to understand how you think," Remo said. "That's not merciless. Except to me."

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"It is intrusive," Chiun said. "Everything is there for you to see. Why do you not see it?"

"Because I don't know what I'm supposed to see," Remo said.

"And if a man with his eyes screwed tightly closed asks what color the sky is and someone tells him, does that mean he can see the next sky with his eyes still closed?" asked Chiun.

"I don't know what the hell that means," said Remo.

"That is your problem, Remo. That is always your problem and it is why you will never amount to anything. You do not know what anything means."

"I'm not that bad. You're just ticked off because that Jap didn't have a Space Invaders game for you to play."

"Yes, you are that bad. But because it will be the only way I will ever have any peace on this earth, I will explain it to you. There is less of that lime powder on the wall here than there is anywhere else. What does that mean?"

"Probably that something disturbed it," Remo said. "Somehow removed the powder."

"Correct. Now since that is the only place in this godforsaken tunnel that is different, is it not reasonable to expect that there is a reason for its being different? A reason such as that plaque being on the wall?"

"I guess that's logical," Remo allowed.

"But that's not all," Chiun said.

"It never is," Remo said.

"Why would that plaque being there ..." Chiun pointed to the wall where Terri Pomfret, oblivious

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to both of them, had finished scrubbing the encaked dirt from the golden plaque, "... Cause any change in the amount of powder there?" Chiun pointed to the floor at Terri's feet.

"Little Father?" Remo said.

"What?"

"Damned if I know," said Remo. "Or care."

"You are hopeless," Chiun said and walked away down the tunnel.

And because he didn't want Chiun to think he was hopeless, Remo tried to think, really think, about the significance of less powder on the floor. What could it mean? Had someone removed the powder? But why had they removed it in that spot? If they had, didn't it mean that someone knew the plaque was there?

He tried to think about it but his mind kept drifting away. Even in the semidarkness of the tunnel, he could see clearly because his eyes opened wide, like a cat's, to pull in every mote of available light. It was a matter of simple muscular control to one of Sinanju, a thing that even cheap cameras and binoculars were able to do, but that most people, whose eyes contained the most brilliantly devised lenses ever seen on earth, found impossible to imitate.

With his light-absorbing vision, he watched Terri Pomfret's rear end jiggle as she scrubbed away at the plaque and he soon forgot to think about the plaque and pleasantly thought about Terri's rear end.

He felt no guilt. It had often been his experience that when he tried to think about things, he could never think his way through them, but when he

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allowed himself to forget them, then the answer to the problem often jumped into his mind of its own accord. As if it were just waiting there, ready to solve itself, but it just wouldn't do it until he stopped bothering jt'.

Maybe that would happen now and he would impress Chiun. But it wouldn't happen if he kept staring at Terri Pomfret's rear end, clad tightly in faded blue denims whose softness seemed only to hint at the softness under them, whose velvet texture he could almost feel under his fingers, whose. . . .

He concentrated on the limestone powder on the floor. He saw Chiun coming back down the tunnel toward them. And he heard Terri say, "Oooohhhh." It was a long, sad, disappointed sound and when she turned to face Reino, her face was sitting Shiva.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"It isn't here," she said.

"What's new?" Remo said. "It hasn't been anywhere we've gone."

"This is new," Terri said. "It's not here and it's not anywhere."

Bullfights were really rather dull. Oh, perhaps they were all right for Spanish heathen who liked to see miniature men in tights and ballet shoes dancing around in front of a dumb beast, but somehow it left Spencer's blood unmoved.

"Ole, indeed," he muttered to himself. The crowd hushed as the matador drew the short curved sword from under the muleta. Slowly, holding the small cape at waist height and peering down the length of the sword which he held near his shoulder, the

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torero advanced on the poor confused bull, which stood in the middle of the arena, bleeding, sweating, tormented. If the beast had had a brain to wonder with, he would be wondering why he was being taunted by this young jackrabbit, Spencer thought, even as the bull, with the bravery born of stupidity, charged the red cape one more time and the matador plunged the curved blade down behind the bull's neck, and rolled off to the left to escape the bull's right horn. The blade curved down, severing the spinal cord and piercing a lung before cutting into the beast's giant heart.

The bull stopped leadenly in its tracks, and then, like a newsreel film of an exploded building collapsing, seemed to come apart in sections. First it dropped to its knees and then its rear legs collapsed and then it coughed, a hacking spray of blood that spotted the sand for fifteen feet in front of his body, and then it pitched onto its side and quietly, heroically, stupidly died.

The crowd leaped to its feet cheering for the torero who now strutted around the ring, looking up at the spectators, waving his hat to the ladies, curiously mincing in his walk, as the fans shouted their approval of his bravery in the face of death.

And Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer, O.G., K.L.M., D.S.C., thought it was all kind of disgusting and pointless, fit only for the brutish unwashed, and got up from his chair and started downstairs to kill people.

Tern looked away from Remo to Chiun. "It says there's no gold," she said. She turned back

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toward the plaque and illuminated it with the flash light in her hand. "It says "

Chiun spoke softly. "It says 'Look no further. The gold is no more. You will not find it.' "

Terri wheeled around. "How did you know?"

"It was many years ago," Chiun said, "in the time of the Master Hup To. He came to Hamidia to do something for the chief of the golden people there. That master learned the language of the people and masters pass these things along." He looked at Remo. "Except some masters who are so unfortunate as to have no one to pass wisdom along to. The life of some is spent in having to shout into cracks in mountains, wishing they were ears."

"I've got it," Remo yelled.

"Keep it," Chiun said.

Terri asked Chiun, "Why didn't you tell me you read ancient Hamidian?"

"Because it was not necessary. You have translated all correctly and have missed nothing. Until now," Chiun said.

"No, I've really got it," Remo yelled again. He got to his feet.

"Be quiet," Terri said. She asked Chiun, "What have I missed?"

Do you not notice something strange about the carvings that made these letters?" Chiun asked.

"No," Terri answered slowly. "They're all the same. Wait."

"That's it," Remo said, "they're all the same." He talked fast so no one would interrupt. "They're all the same because they were all written by the same person. That's why there's less powder on

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the ground under the plaque. Because somebody disturbed it when he came here to hang the plaque. That's why. It was probably the same guy who hung the plaques all over. That's how it was. I figured it out. Me." He looked at Chiun, who ignored him and looked at Terri. Then Remo looked at Terri, who ignored him to look at Chiun.

Terri said, "The writing's exactly the same. That shouldn't be. There should be differences if the plaques were engraved by different people at different times. They were all written by just one person."

"Exactly," Chiun said.

"You knew," Terri said.

"Only when I felt the edges of the writing here," Chiun said. "Along the straight lines of the engraving, there is a nick. It comes from a flaw in the chisel used to cut it. There was the same flaw in the other plaques. Written by the same man, with the same tool, at the same time."

"I figured it out," Remo said. "I figured it out."

"Who cares?" Terri snapped at him. "Probably done in one place at one time," she told Chiun.

"Correct," the old man said. "No one could have traveled that far to engrave plaques all over the world. Not in ancient days. The Hamidian boats were just too slow. They were made for cargo, and there is a saying in Sinanju that when offered a Hamidian voyage, one is better off swimming because it is faster."

"I knew it," Remo said. "I knew it." He touched Chiun's shoulder. "It was the powder on the ground," he said. "Somebody moved it when he was hanging this plaque."

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Chiun continued to look at Terri, whose face was illuminated in the glow of the flashlight she held at her waist.

"But why?" Terri asked. "Why would somebody go to all the trouble and expense of forging these plaques for us to find?"

"Because someone wants us to do just what we have been doing," Chiun said. "There is another thing also. There have always been stories of mountains of gold. But there has never been found a mountain of gold."

Terri shook her head. "Who wants us to do what we are doing? I don't understand."

They were interrupted by the sound of a trumpet, playing the Spanish march of the invitation to the bull.

Then behind them, they heard another sound. There was the noise of heavy hooves and the ugly snorting sound of an enraged bull; and then the beast, a whole half-ton of him, stomped around the far corner of the tunnel. He stopped under the bare light bulb. His eyes, fixed on the three humans, were narrowed and malevolent. Heavy breath came from his nostrils, its hot moisture creating little puffs of fog in the damp tunnel. His tail swished back and forth.

"Oh, crap," Terri said.

"Big Mac is here," said Remo.

Several women smiled warmly at Commander Spencer as he walked down the bleacher steps of the Plaza de Toros. He brushed against one woman and murmured an apology.

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"Senor, you can bump me anytime," she said, her doe-eyes flashing at him.

"Perhaps later," Spencer said, without breaking stride. His mind was not on women. His mind was on the game. The quarry waited and he was the hunter.

The tiny pulses in his temple were beginning to throb again.

The bull stood his ground. Remo, Chiun, and Terri looked at the big animal, then suddenly, the tunnel behind them was bathed in bright light. Remo glanced over his shoulder. The giant doors behind them leading to the sunlit arena had been opened, and standing in the center of the sand-floored arena, framed in the rectangle of the doorway as if it were a camera viewfinder, were a matador and two picadors on horseback.

Remo looked back at the bull and Chiun said, "Remo, please dispose of that thing."

"You never showed me how to do bulls."

"You can't see things. You can't do bulls. What good are you?" Chiun asked.

"I'm good in bed," Remo said.

"Will you two stop bickering and do something about that beast?" Terri said.

Remo stepped forward in the tunnel and called out, "Heyyyy, toro." He turned to Terri. "How do you like that? I saw it once in an Anthony Quinn movie."

Terri turned toward the sunlit entrance to the tunnel. "I'm getting out of here," she said, but Chiun reached out, took her arm and stopped her.

"We do not know what is out there. Someone

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brought us here. Someone may wait out there for you."

"Damned if I do and damned if I don't," Terri said, just as the bull charged.

Spencer was in the front row of seats, just behind the high wooden fence. He put a hand atop the thick wooden boards and lightly vaulted over the rail, dropping the eight feet into the sand of the arena below.

The crowd saw him and let out a surprised hiss, then began chattering nervously to themselves as Spencer marched across the sand toward the open doors of the tunnel.

The matador ran up to stop him, but without breaking stride the Englishman backhanded him across the face and he dropped into the sand as if felled with an axe. Then the Englishman in the dark-blue suit reached the tunnel entrance and stepped inside.

Remo was showing off. The bull had pulled up in its charge and Remo had dropped down on his knees so that his nose touched that of the giant creature.

From the side of his mouth, Remo said to Terri, "Wheeew, some breath. How do you like this?"

But Terri did not answer. Another voice did, a man's voice. Spencer stood in the archway, and said with a voice surprisingly devoid of malice, "Not bad, Yank. Too bad you won't have time to pursue it as a career."

With one smooth motion, Spencer slipped off

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his jacket and dropped it onto the floor of the tunnel, then pulled the doors shut behind him.

Strapped to each shirt-sleeve was a thin, eight-inch-long bomb that looked like a fireworks rocket. Spencer peeled one from the snap holder around his left forearm, then laid it over his arm and aimed it down the tunnel toward Remo. He twisted a small pin at the back of the missile and with a whooshing hiss, it flamed off down the tunnel.

Remo rose and turned, but he had no time to raise his arms or react to the weapon. Before it struck him, Chiun flashed across in front of Remo, his yellow robe a blurring fuzzy sun in the semilit tunnel. The side of his hand touched the rocket and it soared over Remo's shoulder to explode against the rear wall of the tunnel.

Without looking, Remo reached behind him and rapped the bull between the eyes with the side of his hand.

"Go to sleep, Ferdinand," he said. The bull moaned and fell onto its side, unconscious. Remo took a step toward the Englishman in the doorway, but Spencer had already ripped the second missile loose from his right forearm. Chiun grabbed Terri and ran down the tunnel and Remo followed.

Behind him, he heard the high-pitched sound of Spencer's vicious laughter.

Chiun hissed, "I know these boom-shooters. They seek out the heat of the human body."

They passed under the small light bulb that illuminated the far end of the tunnel. A thick iron door blocked their way out of the maze which wandered under the arena's stands. When they turned, their backs to the stone wall, Spencer was

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moving toward them. He stepped over the unconscious downed bull.

"Just step toward me, Missie," Spencer said to Terri. "I don't want to have to hurt you, you know."

Terri said, nodding dumbly, "I understand."

Remo said, "You understand? He's trying to kill us and you understand? Lady, put your oars in the water."

Remo looked toward Chiun. He knew the two of them could take off through the iron door and escape but Terri would be too slow, too vulnerable. Their fleeing would cost her her life.

Chiun was staring straight ahead at the burly Englishman but the stare was one of neither threat nor fear. It was a curious, dead stare as if Chiun were embalmed, the look of a man dead, but with his eyes wide open and staring. The color had drained from Chiun's face and in the flickering overhead light; he looked ghostlike.

He stepped forward to meet Spencer.

The Englishman had stopped twenty feet from them. Behind him, Remo heard the sound of the trumpet blaring again from the bull arena.

Now Chiun was only three feet from Spencer.

"Out of the way, old man," Spencer said.

Chiun shook his head, sadly and with finality. Remo noticed how stiffly Chiun moved, as if the life already had gone from him. What was he doing?

"Have it your own way, sir," Spencer said.

From only three feet away, he aimed the missile at the center of Chiun's forehead. Then he twisted the firing mechanism on the back of the rocket. It

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shot forward with a hiss, but then, seemingly by magic, it veered upward and exploded against the overhead lightbulb.

Terri inhaled her breath noisily as Chiun slowly extended a finger toward Spencer and touched the Briton's cheek.

"It's cold," Spencer said. "You're cold."

Remo nodded. Of course. The only defense against bombs that sought out the heat of a human body was an inhumanly cold body.

"Cold," Spencer said again.

"As you soon will be," Chiun said slowly. "Remo, remove this one."

"You're there," Remo said. "You do it."

"You need the practice," Chiun said.

Remo sighed and released Terri's arm.

"All right, I'll do it. But I'm getting tired of being the schlepp around here. Wait. We ought to question him. Find out what's going on with these phony inscriptions. Good idea, Chiun. I'll do it."

"I don't think either of you will be doing anything quite so easily," Spencer said. "You ever see one of these before?" He pulled a small black ball that looked like a regulation handball from a clip on the back of his belt.

"Naaah," Remo said. "Chiun, you ever see one of those before?"

"No," Chiun said. "Ask him if it plays Space Invaders."

"I don't think it does," Remo said. He moved past Chiun as the old man went back to guard Terri.

"It's a deadly fragmentation bomb," Spencer said. "Blow you to bits, Yank."

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"Naaah," Remo said. "That stuff never works. It never goes off and if it does go off, it busts up windows and nothing else."

He heard Chiun behind him. "The British always used toys. That is why they never amounted to anything."

"I know, Little Father," Remo said.

Spencer's face reddened in anger. "We will see," he said. Softly, underhanded, he tossed the fragmentation bomb at Remo, then ran back toward the entrance to the tunnel. Remo picked up the bomb and held it in his hand. He could feel it whirring. There was an explosive charge inside of it, and when it went, it would break through the metal covering, which was already scored to break apart in jagged-edged pieces. But just as water could not rush into an already-full vessel, an explosive force could not explode against a containing force that was exactly its equal.

It would be stalemate: an irresistible force pushing an immovable object, neither giving way until the power of the force just passed its vibrations off into the stillness of the surrounding air. Remo felt the bomb still whirring inside his hand. He stretched his fingers to see if his hand could contain the entire sphere, but it was slightly too large. Some parts of the metal remained uncovered and the explosive force would break through there, and then the whole bomb would blow apart, taking Remo's hand with it.

He cupped his left hand over his right. The delicate flesh of his hands felt the coldness of the metal held inside. He softened his hands, relaxing his muscles, until he was sure that the entire sur-

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face of the spherical bomb was touched by his flesh. Then he began to exert pressure. That was the tricky part-to have the pressure forcing inward exactly equal to the pressure blasting outward at the moment of explosion.

He felt a click as the bomb's firing mechanism went off. Inside his hands, he felt the sudden buildup of pressure against his left ring finger and his right pinky. Instinctively, he increased downward pressure of those two fingers. His hands held and the explosion stayed muffled in his hands.

He could feel the pressure waves of the dissipating force vibrate the air around his hands and then the waves reached his face. He could see them shimmer against the light from the partially open doorway at the end of the tunnel. For a split second his arms twitched in the eddy of the force currents. Then the blast slowed down and in another second, the force had leaked harmlessly into the air.

Remo opened his hands and looked at the pure, unbroken black sphere. He tossed it toward Spencer.

"Told you. You can't trust these things."

Spencer recoiled as the bomb hit the stone floor in front of him and rolled harmlessly away.

The Englishman reached down to the back of his shoe, snapped a pellet from the back of his heel, and tossed it onto the ground in front of Remo. It popped, almost a firecracker's pop, and a dark billow of smoke rose, surrounding Remo's face. He stopped breathing, in case it was poison. Spencer pulled a throwing knife from the back of his belt, raised it over his head, and propelled it at

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the center of the smoky mist, at the spot where Remo's chest would be.

An ordinary man would have been defenseless, unable to see to protect himself against the razor-sharp blade flying toward him. But mist and smoke, Remo knew, were not just one thing; they were a bundle of bits, just as television was not one picture, continuously moving, but a series of still pictures flashed at the rate of thirty per second. It took the cooperation of the average person's mind and eyes to make them into a moving picture.

So with smoke. It did not have to blind or obscure if a person simply realized that it was made up of separate particles. Then he could focus on the particules with primary vision, changing the fog and smoke to a transparent drizzle, and then use secondary vision to see the object behind the smoke.

This Remo did and saw the knife flying toward his chest.

Spencer saw the knife disappear into the column of smoke that was Remo. He expected the usual thud and scream when it bit flesh, but there was no thud and no scream.

Instead there was silence. Then a snap, a hard, metallic cracking sound. And then two halves of the knife, the handle and the blade, came flying back from the mist to land on the stone floor at Spencer's feet.

"Oh, bloody, shit," said Spencer.

Wissex had warned him that these two were dangerous but had not prepared him for this. It was time for Old Reliable. As the smoke dissipated and Remo's form again became visible, Spencer

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reached into a shoulder holster and withdrew a Pendleton-Sellers .31 caliber semimag automatic with the Bolan augmented armature. The pistol fired a shell that exploded into fragments a foot away from the muzzle of the gun. Anything in the immediate area would be downed. It could level a cocktail party of people faster than Norman Mailer talking prison reform could level common sense.

Spencer pulled the slide back to put a shell into the firing chamber. As he did, he backed away from Remo, lest the crazy American make a suicidal lunge.

"Don't back up any more," Remo said.

"An old trick, Yank."

"I'm warning you. Don't go any further."

"You're the one who's going, pally," said Spencer.

Too late, Spencer heard the roar. He wheeled just as the bull rammed into him. The beast's large, curved horns dug deep into the Englishman's belly and the bull lifted him, impaled on the horns, up over his head. The bull stopped and looked at Remo as if he recognized him, then turned and crashed away down the tunnel toward the partially open doors.

The trumpet player was in full throat but his music died in a squawk as the bull broke out into the sunshine, his cargo of dead Englishman avast on his horns.

The crowd screamed.

Remo walked back to Terri and Chiun.

"Damn," he said. "I wanted to get some answers from him."

"He was very brave," Terri said.

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"Your dream man, huh? Good. The next one to come after us, I'll let him have you," Remo said.

"You didn't have anything to do with it," Terri said. "His bomb didn't go off. And his knife fell apart before it hit you. And the bull got him before he could shoot you."

"Lady," Remo said.

"What?"

"You're an asshole." Remo turned his back on her and said to Chiun, "I wish I knew who sent him."

"I know who sent him," Chiun said.

"You do? Who? How?"

"Did you not see the crest on his jacket?"

"No."

"Then you did not see the crest on the jackets of the others who tried to kill us?" Chiun said.

"No."

"The same crest will be on that knife," Chiun said.

Remo trotted back down the tunnel and picked up the hilt of the knife. He looked at it as he walked back to Chiun. A lion, a sheaf of wheat, and a dagger.

"What is it?" Remo asked.

"The House of Wissex," Chiun said.

"Who the hell are they?"

"Some upstart Englishmen," Chiun said. "I thought we had taught them a lesson." He shook his head sadly. "But some people never learn."

Fifteen

"Here's a big one." Hank Bindle was looking at the pictures in Variety's International Film Annual and he stopped to point out a full-page ad to Bruce Marmelstein.

"What's it about?" Marmelstein asked, craning his neck to look at the page.

"I don't know," Bindle said. "Let's see. It's got a picture of an airplane and a girl falling off a building and a guy with a sword."

"New guy or old guy?" asked Marmelstein.

"Old guy, you know, wearing like some kind of fur. With muscles. Like Conan. And there's like a missile heading for the city."

"Sounds like Conan meets Superman. I didn't hear that anybody's doing that," Marmelstein said. "You can't read any of the words?"

"I think this one is the. Is the T-H-E?"

"I think that's the. He pronounced it thee.

"What's the difference between the and thee?" Bindle drew out the long sound of the syllable.

"They're different words," Marmelstein said. "That much I know."

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"What about when you say the book and thee apple?" Hank Bindle said, scratching his head in bewilderment. "You mean they're different words?"

"Well, how could they be the same word if you sound one the and the other one thee?'''' Marmelstein asked. He twisted the chains around his neck as he always did when he was involved in a deep philosophical discussion.

"You just did it," Bindle said.

"Did what?"

"You said the same word and then you said thee other one. You used both of those words in the same sentence."

Marmelstein smiled warmly. "I sure did, didn't I?"

"You know a lot of words, Bruce," said Bindle.

"You have to work hard to stay ahead of the crowd. It's a jungle out there."

"You know," Bindle said, "I'm glad we both know now that the other one can't read. It's made us closer, kind of."

"Partners should always be honest," Marmelstein said.

"Right," said Bindle.

"Good. Now who can we rip off?" Marmelstein asked. "Did the new incorporation come in?" asked Bindle.

"Yes," said Marmelstein. "Just today. So now we have a new corporate structure."

"I hope we keep this one longer than a week," Bindle said. "I always have trouble remembering the names of whatever corporation we're supposed to be each week."

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"Just leave the business side of it to me," Marmelstein said. "You know, I wish I knew what that Barry Schweid was up to."

"Yeah," said Bindle. "He's got some nerve going to another producer."

"Especially after we produced his other movies. Teeth. Space Battle. Distant Encounters of the First Kind."

"Don't forget On Silver Lake," Bindle said.

"That's right. We've done some good ones." Marmelstein said. "A few more and we might even think about stopping selling cocaine."

"I don't know about that," said Bindle. "There's a lot of money in cocaine."

"Are we interested in money or creating enduring cinematic art?" Marmelstein asked. He pronounced it "cinemackic."

The two partners looked at each other for a few long seconds as the question hung in the air, unanswered. Finally, they nodded.

"Right. Money," they said in unison.

The telephone rang inside Marmelstein's desk. The desk was a large pink Italian marble slab, resting at both ends on two slices of highly-varnished wood cut from redwood trees. On Marmelstein's side of the desk, the redwood had been hollowed out so that a file cabinet could fit into each side of the pedestal.

There was nothing in the file cabinet except the telephone. Marmelstein thought it was tacky to have a telephone on the desk. He had gotten that idea when he first came to Hollywood and went into a producer's office and there was no telephone

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on the desk. It was the only real producer's office he had ever been in and he assumed that all producers spurned the telephone, especially since he had never been able to reach any of them by phone. If he had been able to read, he would have seen in the local press the week after he had met the phoneless producer that the producer had been indicted for embezzlement, for diverting money to his own personal use and letting production company bills go unpaid. Among the unpaid bills was the telephone bill. His phone had been removed by Earth Mother Bell, the Hollywood phone company.

Marmelstein opened the desk drawer, but before he answered the phone, he said to Bindle, "Listen to the new name."

He lifted the receiver.

"Hello. Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Productions speaking. How may we help you?"

He smiled at Bindle. The name of the company had been carefully chosen to allow the two partners to tell people that they were with Universal and mumble the rest of the words, or that they were with MGM, short for Mammoth Global Magnificent. Every little bit helped, Marmelstein thought. And often said.

"Bruce, this is Barry Schweid. I want you to help me."

"That's what I said on the phone. 'How may we help you?' " Marmelstein said. "Right after I said Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Productions. That's our new name."

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"Yeah, yeah, I know all that. I want you to come in as partners on one of my movies. Minor partners," Schweid said.

"We'll start raising money immediately," Marmelstein said. "Do story boards. Talk to directors and stars. There's still time for us to "

"No," Schweid said. "You're going to get an agent's cut. That's all. I already got a producer."

"What do you want us to do?"

"Negotiate for me," Schweid said. "I think this guy is screwing me."

"What do you want that he won't give?" asked Marmelstein.

"That's just it. He's giving me everything I want."

"I don't trust him," Marmelstein said.

"When I asked him for money, he said yes," Schweid said.

"He's a thief," Marmelstein said.

"I wanted gross points, he gave me gross points."

"Oh, the dirty bastard. Trying to work you over that way," Marmelstein said. "It's hard for me to believe sometimes what kind of thieves there are in this town."

"I need you two," Schweid said. "I know you're drug peddlers but you know how to negotiate."

"You've come to the right place, Barry. Just tell me what you want."

"All I want is what I got. But I don't want him to be so damn agreeable about it," Schweid said.

"We'll end that," Marmelstein promised. "When do we see this guy?"

"I'll talk to him tonight on the phone. A conference call. You guys can take over," Schweid said.

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"You've got it. We'll straighten him out."

After Marmelstein hung up, he rubbed his hands together and looked at Hank Binde.

"We're back in with Schweid," he said. "He's got a producer for a movie but he doesn't trust him."

"He can trust us," Bindle said.

"That's what I told him."

"What movie?" Bindle asked.

"I don't know. He said art. Probably that Hamlock thing."

"I think it's Hamlet," Bindle said.

"Yeah. Hammerlet. With tits. I hope this guy wants to do it with tits."

"What's in it for us?" Bindle asked.

Marmelstein started to answer, then paused. "Wait," he said. "Listen, anybody can do Hammerlet, right? I mean, the screenwriter died or something and so it belongs to everybody?"

"Yeah. I think it was a play. Shakespeare. Or some name like that."

"Okay," Marmelstein said. "What we do is we get this producer away from Schweid. If that no-talent can write Hammerlock, we get can somebody else to write Hammerlock and then we take it back to that same producer. Without Schweid."

"Good thinking, Bruce," said Bindle.

"All we've got to do is queer this deal tonight," Marmelstein said.

"Right," said Bindle.

"And that shouldn't be any trouble for us at all," Marmelstein said.

"It never has been before," said Hank Bindle.

201

Chiun was on the balcony of their Madrid hotel room, sitting quietly, looking at the city sprawl, the buildings golden in the afternoon sun.

Remo placed a call to Smith. The operator did a lot of clicking and then reported in precise English, "I'm sorry, sir. The line is busy."

"Are you sure?" Remo said. "That line's never busy. Maybe we dialed wrong." He repeated the number.

"Just a moment," the woman said. Remo heard more clicking, and then a busy signal and then the operator's voice. "No, sir, it's busy."

"Thank you," Remo said. "I'll call back."

He hung up the phone and stood up from the sofa. Somehow a busy signal didn't seem right. In all the years with CURE, he couldn't remember Smith not answering the phone on the first ring.

A busy signal made the CURE director seem more human and Remo didn't want to deal with Smith as a human. He didn't necessarily like the bloodless, emotionless wraith he pictured in his mind, but at least he was used to Smith that way. Every time things had changed in his life, they had changed for ... well, if not for the worse, at least in the direction of more disruption. He didn't want any more disruption, irritation, or aggravation.

Peace and quiet. That was what he yearned for.

"That's what I want in the world," he said as he stepped out on the balcony behind Chiun.

"A brain that works?" Chiun said.

"Please, Chiun. Don't carp. I've made a resolution to myself. From now on, I'm going to lead a simple life, clean and pure. No more trouble. I'm

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going to try not to fall asleep when you recite an Ung poem. When you blame it all on me because you can't finish your screenplay or your soap opera about Sinanju, I'm just going to nod and take the blame. I'm going to lead a different life. When that dingaling Dr. Pomfret starts yapping at me, I'm just going to smile. When I talk to Smith, I'm going to humor him instead of arguing. Even when you tell me those stupid stories you always tell me, I'm going to listen. Really listen."

"By stupid stories, I presume you mean the wisdom of the ages, contained in the legends of Sinanju," Chiun said, without turning.

"That's right."

"The dog can promise not to bark," Chiun said, "but still he barks. Even the promise is expressed in a bark."

"Yeah?" Remo said. "Go ahead. Tell me a story. Watch me listen. Tell me about the mountain of gold. What's that about? I know you know more about it than you've been telling that twit."

"It is a terrible story. I don't want to talk about it," Chiun said.

"Awwww, please," said Remo, because he knew Chiun wanted him to.

"Really?" said Chiun. "You insist on hearing it?"

"My life wouldn't be complete without it," Remo said. "I'd go to my grave wondering what it was."

"Well, all right," Chiun said. "But only because you asked. It is a terrible story."

"The deal's off. If you do anything, we'll sue you for every cent you can borrow."

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"Wait a minute," Harold W. Smith said. "Who is this?"

"This is Bruce Marmelstein, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Productions and we're prepared to top any paltry, piddling illegal offer you think you may have made to Barry Schweid."

Schweid's voice piped in. "That's right, Smith. Any offer."

"So now it's up to you, Smith," said Marmelstein. "Make an offer."

"What do you want, Schweid?" Smith asked.

"A half a million dollars and twenty percentage points. Gross," said Schweid.

"You've got it," Smith said.

"There you go again," said Schweid. "See. He's doing it again."

"We'll top it," Marmelstein yelled.

"That's right," shouted Hank Bindle. "We know a winner when somebody reads it to us."

"I'll give you six hundred thousand and twenty-two points," Smith said.

Before Schweid could answer, Marmelstein yelled, "Chickenfeed. We'll top it. You're not going to screw our friend Barry with these pittances of offers."

"That's right," said Hank Bindle. "No pitnesses of offers."

Smith said, "Barry, listen to me and think for a moment. Six hundred thousand dollars. And twenty-two points of the gross. And I'll have the six hundred thousand dollars in your hands in

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forty-eight hours. In a certified check. All yours. That's cash. Not a promise. You want to turn that down?"

Marmelstein shouted, "Are you inferring that our word is no good? That our credit's bad?"

"Yeah. Don't you ever infer that," warned Bindle.

"Well," said Barry Schweid. His voice was hesitant.

"You're not conning him like that, Smith," said Marmelstein. "You think you're talking to some greenhorn? Barry Schweid is one of the most brilliant writers in Hollywood. What he did for us on Teeth and On Silver Lake was absolute genius. What's six hundred thousand dollars to him?"

"Wait a minute," Barry told Marmelstein. "Six hundred thousand is a lot of money."

"A pitness," Bindle said.

"We'll top it," Marmelstein said. "Goodbye, Smith. We've got nothing more to talk about. You've insulted Barry so much he can never work with you."

Smith heard the phone click off in his ear. So that was that. He thought the whole thing had been a simple mistake and he would be able to buy CURE's records back from Barry Schweid. But now, with these other two in it, things had changed. Schweid was no longer just an annoyance, he was a menace. The three of them had become Remo Williams' next assignment.

Remo.

Where was Remo?

Why hadn't he called?

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The telephone rang again and Smith answered.

"Smith, this is Bruce Marmelstein."

"I thought we were done talking," Smith said.

"No, that was just for Schweid's benefit. He's a schmuck. You really want this movie?"

"Yes."

"Six hundred thousand dollars worth?" asked Marmelstein.

"Yes, I'll pay that."

"We'll save you a hundred thou. You've got a deal at 500,000 dollars. But it goes to us. That's Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Productions."

"You don't own it. It's Schweid's property," Smith said.

"That doesn't matter. Tonight we'll tell him our deal fell through. We lost our backers. We'll get him to sell it to us cheap and tomorrow we'll give it to you."

"That's wonderful," Smith said.

"Good," said Marmelstein. "We're going to do the best Hammer let you ever saw."

"Hamlet?" asked Smith.

"Right. The immortal Barf of Afton. Hammerkt. Am I saying it right?"

"You're saying it fine," Smith said.

"Who needs Schweid to write Hammerkt? Everybody can write Hammerkt" said Marmelstein. "You'll have a movie to be proud of. 'Mr. Smith presents Hammerlock, a Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Production.' You'll love it."

"I can't wait," Smith said.

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"You'll hear from us," Bruce Marmelstein said. "And you'll hear from me," Smith said as he replaced the phone in the darkened office.

"It happened just a few years ago," Chiun said. "About the time that Columbus was stumbling all over your country."

"Chiun, that was 500 years ago."

"Yes. So it was not long ago and there was a master then and his name was Puk. You may not believe this, Remo, but sometimes the Masters of Sinanju have not been nice. And sometimes they have not been flawless. Some have not been perfect human beings, even though you find that hard to believe."

"I'm absolutely devastated by the news," Remo said.

"As well you might be, it being so alien to your experience," Chiun said. "At any rate, this master, whose name was Puk, left the village of Sinanju one day without explanation. He told none of the villagers where he was going and none could guess.

"He was gone three years. Three years without report and without sustenance to the village and many babies were sent home to the sea then. In the old days, Remo, when we could not feed our babies, we "

"I know, Chiun," said Remo. "You drowned them and called it sending them home to the sea. I've heard it hundreds of times."

"Please don't interrupt," Chiun said. "Then one day, Puk returned to our village. He was filled with wondrous tales of the faraway land he had

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visited. It was in a place no one had ever heard of, in what you now call South America, and he told of the wonderful battles he had fought and how he had brought honor to Sinanju. And most of all, he told of how the country he had visited had a mountain of gold.

" 'So where is this bounty?' the villagers cried, and Puk said 'It is coming.' But it did not come and Puk found himself an outcast in his village with none believing him."

Remo said, "South America. That's where Hamidia is. He went to Hamidia."

"Yes," said Chiun. "But he brought back no mountain of gold. Everyone talks about mountains of gold, but no one has ever seen one, it seems. No one except Puk, that is, and who could believe Puk?"

"Is that how you learned to speak Hamidian?" Remo asked.

"That was another master some time later. He went to Hamidia, but he never mentioned any mountain of gold."

"So it's a fairy tale," Remo said.

"For all we know," said Chiun.

"Okay. What happened to Puk?"

"Puk had many assignments around Korea for the rest of his life and helped support the village but he was never truly forgiven for the terrible story he told about the mountain of gold. And when he died, there were none of the ceremonies that usually attend the death of a master. In fact, few mourned. The villagers wrote a song instead. It said, 'Puk, those who would have mourned were

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sent to the sea while you were out chasing moonbeams. If you seek mourners, go to the bottom of the sea.' "

"It's a sad story," Remo said.

"Yes," said Chiun. "Puk did work in Hamidia and didn't get paid for it. That is very sad. Anyway, when you come next to Sinanju, I will show you Puk's grave. The headstone says, 'Here lies Puk the liar. Still lying.' "

Remo left Chiun on the balcony, still shaking his head over the irresponsible liar, Puk. This time the operator got his call through quickly and Smith answered it on first ring.

Quickly, Remo filled him in on what had happened and said, "A scam, Smitty. That's all it was. I don't know why but somebody faked all those plaques and put them around. Chiun says it has something to do with some British assassins, the House of Unisex or something. Yeah, the girl's all right. I think she's mad at me for getting rid of the last Limey who tried to kill her. I don't know. She's wacky. Something about him being her dream man. Anyway, that's the bottom line. No mountain of gold. The dip is out shopping. Naturally. We'll be leaving here tomorrow. No, she doesn't know who we are."

Remo paused and listened as Smith rapid-fired instructions into the phone.

"Hold on," Remo said. "I've been halfway around the world and I need a rest. I don't want to go to Hollywood. Sure, it's important, everything's always important. No, no, no. We; We'll talk about it when I get back. Smitty, you're babbling. Ham-

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let and assassin movies and producers and points. Take a Valium. We'll talk when I get back. All right, all right, if you want them gone, they'll be gone. That make you feel better?" He listened to Smith's answer, then slammed down the phone.

"Yeah, sure," he grumbled to himself. "Thanks for telling me it was a good job. Sure. In a pig's ass. I'm tired of being unappreciated."

Sixteen

"Cuanto?" asked Terri Pomfret.

"For you, Madam, six dollars."

"Es demasiado," Terri said.

"It took many weeks to make," the merchant said. "Is six dollars too much for the work of the three women, day after day, trying to make something that they can sell at a fair price to put bread on the table for their starving children?"

"I'll give you four," Terri said. She was annoyed at herself for her lapse into English. She spoke fourteen languages, and she did not like some Spanish merchant bandit conning her out of a language she used as well as her own.

The merchant shook his head and turned his back to walk away.

That was part of the mercantile courting dance too. Terri put down the shawl she had been looking at and began to inspect a row of shirts hanging randomly from a pipe rack.

The scene was being watched by a man in a tan poplin suit. He looked around and saw that he was, in turn, being watched by a street urchin.

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The young boy was physically small, but he had the wary untrusting eyes of an adult who had lived many years.

The man in the poplin suit called him over and when the boy dutifully stood in front of him, the man leaned over to whisper in his ear. The boy listened, then nodded brightly. His eyes Sit up with pleasure, and the pleasure was redoubled when the man put two dollars into his hand.

"You are a woman without heart," the merchant said in Spanish.

Terri answered in English. "Not without brains though," she said. "Enough brains not to pay six dollars for something worth only a fraction of that. Four dollars."

The merchant sighed. "Five dollars. That is my very last and best price and the memory of those starving children will be on your head, not mine."

"Sold," Terri said. "But you must promise never to r,eveal to my friends the outrageous price I paid for this or they will begin to doubt my sanity."

"I'll wrap it," the merchant said. "Although even the price of the wrapping paper makes this transaction a loss to me."

He took the shawl to the counter in the center of the store and measured off a piece of paper to wrap it. He seemed intent on making sure he did not use one millimeter more paper than was absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, Terri reached in her purse. She was watching the merchant and feeling into her purse with her hand, when suddenly the pocketbook was yanked away from her.

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She shrieked and turned to see a small boy holding the purse, running toward the front of the tent-topped shop.

She turned to run after him, but then stopped. A big man reached out a big hand and grabbed the little boy's shoulder. The boy stopped as if he had run into a wall. The big man removed the purse from him, then gave him a paternalistic and not unkind rap on the rear end. The boy ran away without looking back.

The big man in the tan poplin suit looked at Terri and smiled and she felt her heartbeat speed up.

The man stepped forward and handed her the purse.

"Yours, I believe." The accent was British.

Terri just gaped, open-mouthed, for a second, at this quintessential man of her dreams. Then, flustered, she said, "Yes. Thank you."

She took the purse, nodded to the man, and turned back to the merchant, who was still measuring the wrapping paper.

"How much are you paying for that shawl?" the Briton asked.

"Five dollars," Terri said.

"Very good. A very fair price for a fine piece of work. Congratulations."

"She stole it from me," the merchant said.

"I know," the Briton laughed. "And tonight, children will be dying of starvation all over Madrid."

The merchant looked down to hide his smile.

It was love at first sight. Terri had never believed in it because it had never happened to her. Until now.

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"Thank you," she mumbled to the man.

"Spot of tea when you're done here?" the man said.

Terri nodded dumbly.

"Well, then, I really should have your name, shouldn't I?" the man said.

"Errr, Terri. Terri Pomfret," she said.

"A lovely name for a lovely lady. My name is Neville," said Neville Lord Wissex.

"Bad news, Little Father," Remo said.

"You're still here," Chiun said.

"If you think that's bad, try this," Remo said. "Smitty wants us to go to Hollywood right away. That's where CURE's records wound up. I told him we needed a vacation."

"Never argue with the emperor," Chiun said. "We will go to Hollywood."

"Hold on, you're up to something. That was just too agreeable and too fast."

"We must go where duty call takes us," Chiun said.

"I got it. You think you can con some producer into making your movie about Sinanju, don't you?"

"I really don't wish to discuss this with you, Remo. You are of a very suspicious turn of mind and it is not flattering to you at all."

"I'll fix you. Every producer I see, I'm going to kill on sight," Remo said.

It was the day she would remember all her life, spent with the man she had wanted to be with all her life.

Terri Pomfret found herself wishing she had a

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camera so she could record just the way it had gone. Having tea at a small cafe and then strolling along the riverfront. Spending a long, leisurely, wonderful hour inside a historical chapel, looking at seventeenth-century murals and frescoes.

And now here she was, following Neville, sweet, kind, handsome, charming, cultured Neville, up the steps toward his hotel room. How like him the hotel was. Not flashy or gaudy or tacky. A quiet, genteel building, in a quiet corner of the city, elegant, old-world charming.

She put her hand on the small of his back and Wissex stopped on the stairs and looked down into her eyes. His eyes were the brightest blue she had ever seen. Not dark and hard like Remo's but soft and gentle and caring.

"I've always dreamed of a man like you," she said. He smiled, the smile of one neither embarrassed nor patronizing; the smile of a sharer of the heart's deepest emotions. The smile of a man who understood; who would always understand.

As soon as they entered his room, Neville locked the door behind them, and then drew her into a clinch.

She felt his hands around her back, unbuttoning her blouse, as he steered her into the room, toward the bed. The bed seemed to be beckoning her, calling. She felt her heart pound and her breath catch in her throat and she closed her eyes tightly and buried her face in his neck.

"Oh, take me. Take me," she whispered.

Neville Lord Wissex smiled, and said, "I intend to."

And then he pushed her into a large steamer

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trunk at the foot of his bed, slammed the lid and locked it.

At first she shouted, then screamed, but the sound was muffled by heavy styrofoam insulation on the inside of the chest.

Wissex walked to the phone in the room, dialed a number, and said:

"That package is ready."

Remo was wondering where Terri was and when a knock came on their hotel room door, he grumbled, "It's about time," and yelled out, "It's open."

A smartly uniformed bellhop opened the door and stepped inside. To Remo, he said, "Pardon, Senor. There is an old gentleman in this room?"

Remo was lying on the couch. Without rising, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward where Chiun stood in a corner of the room, looking out the window.

The bellhop approached the old Korean.

"Senor?"

Chiun turned and the bellhop handed forward a small package wrapped in plain brown paper.

"This was left at the desk. I was told to give it to you," the bellboy said.

Chiun took it and nodded his thanks. The bellhop lingered a moment, as if expecting a tip, then turned and left. Chiun inspected the package, turning it over in his hands.

"What is it?" Remo said, raising himself to a half-sitting position.

"I will not know until I open it," Chiun said.

"Then open it."

"Whose package is this?" Chiun asked.

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"Yours, I guess."

"You guess? You didn't guess when that vicious little creature barged in here and asked for an old man. You pointed to me. Old? Since when am I an old man?"

"Since you were eighty years old," Remo said.

"That is old?" Chiun said. "Maybe it is old for a turnip, but for a man, it is not old. Never old."

"Why are you getting all bent out of shape?" Remo asked.

"Because I cannot rid your mind of your Western nonsense, no matter how I try," Chiun said. "Are you always going to go through life, thinking people are old, just because they have seen eight full decades?"

"All right, Chiun, you're young," Remo said. "Open the package."

"No, I am not young," said Chiun.

"What are you then? Christ, help me. I want to know so I don't offend you again."

"I am just right," said Chiun.

"Good," said Remo. "Now we've got that squared away. If we ever get a bellhop asking for the just-right man, I'll know right off it's you."

"Don't forget," said Chiun.

"Open the package," Remo pleaded.

Chiun delicately slit the paper with the long nail of his right index finger. Inside was a small box which he opened and took out a golden object.

"What is it?" Remo asked. "It looks like the handle of a knife."

"It is the handle of a knife. It is a challenge. They have the woman."

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Remo got up from the sofa. "Who does?" he asked.

Chiun tossed the knife handle across the room to Remo. Remo caught it and examined the engravings on it: a lion, a sheaf of wheat, and a dagger.

"Same crest we saw back at the bullrun," Remo said. "This is them? The House of something or other?"

"The House of Wissex," Chiun said.

"You're sure this means they have the girl?" Remo asked. He turned the knife handle over in his hand, as if by inspecting it closely he might find something more there than just a knife handle.

"Of course they have the woman," Chiun said. "It is the tradition of the challenge. First they take something of value to you, and then they send a knife to challenge you to come and reclaim your property."

"She's just more trouble than she's worth," Remo said. "Let them have her."

"It is not that simple," Chiun said.

"It never is."

"She is our client and her safety is our responsibility. The House of Sinanju cannot walk away from such a challenge."

"I knew she was going to be troublesome," Remo said.

"It is our responsibility, but it is my challenge," Chiun said. "It is from one assassin to another."

"And what am I, a chicken wing?"

"No. You are an assassin, but this is a challenge from the Master of Wissex to the Master of Sinanju."

"Tough luck," Remo said. "We go together."

Chiun sighed. "You are truly uneducable."

"Probably, but let's go find the girl," Remo said.

219

When the long yacht came within sight of the Hamidian coast, the first faint streaks of sun were smearing the gray sky with pink smudge.

From a telephone in the main cabin, Neville Lord Wissex called Moombasa and awoke him in bed.

"I hope this important," Moombasa said thickly.

"It is. This is Wissex. I have the girl."

"Good. Where's the gold?"

"We don't have that yet," said Wissex.

"Why don't you call me back when you find it?" Moombasa said.

"Wait," said Wissex. "There's more."

"What?"

"Those two men who have been guarding her. I'm sure they will be coming here."

"Should I leave the country?" Moombasa said worriedly. "I can easily schedule my triumphant tour as national liberator. Cuba and Russia keep inviting me."

"No," said Wissex. "I'll deal with those two men. I just wanted you to know."

"Where are you now?" Moombasa asked.

"Just off the coast."

"Don't bring the girl here," said Moombasa.

"Why not?"

"If you bring her here, those two are liable to follow. I don't want them here unless they're already in pieces."

"I won't bring her there. I'm taking her to that hill near your border."

"Mesoro? Why there?"

"Because it suits my purposes," Wissex said.

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"It's flat and high and they won't be able to sneak up on me."

"I'll send the Revolutionary Commando Brigade or whatever they call themselves to help you."

"Perish forbid, Wissex said. "Just leave it to me. You could help by keeping patrols and army and everybody else out of the area. I don't want my equipment to be hindered by your people marching around."

"Hokay. I want that woman to talk," Moombasa said.

"She will."

"What does she look like?"

"She's attractive but not your type," Wissex said.

"Too bad. Keep in touch," Moombasa said.

Wissex smiled, replacing the phone. Of course she was not Moombasa's type. The woman had an IQ over 70.

Wissex left the cabin and herded Terri, her hands tightly bound behind her, into the back seat of a helicopter, lashed to a takeoff pad on the small ship's bow.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"To await the arrival of your friends," Wissex said. He smiled at her and she noticed that his blue eyes were cold and unfeeling. The eyes of a killer. She shuddered at his touch as he pushed her roughly into the aircraft.

From the airport, Remo called Smith again but the CURE director had not been able to find out where the girl had vanished to.

"What the hell good are those computers of yours, Smitty, when they can't find anything out?"

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"You forget, Remo. I don't have the computers any more. All the records are still missing. That's why I want you to forget that woman and get back here to the States. Get our records back."

"What about the mountain of gold?" Remo asked. "The death of Western civilization as we know it? What about all that?" Remo asked.

"You know now there is no mountain of gold. So all this is is a kidnapping. The mountain of gold might have been more important than our records, but that woman professor isn't. Come back."

"I can't do that," Remo said.

"Why not?"

"Because her safety is my responsibility. Because the House of Sinanju can't walk away from a challenge."

"I don't understand all that tradition business," Smith said.

"That's because you're uneducable, Smitty. You just hold the fort. We'll get there when we get there," Remo said as he hung up.

As he walked away from the phone booth, Remo saw the same spy who had been dogging his footsteps earlier through Bombay Airport.

The short, squat man was now wearing a flamenco dancer's costume. Little puffballs hung from the fringes of his flat-brimmed hat. He stood by the wall next to the phone booth, edging closer to Remo. His satin trousers squeaked as they rubbed against the marble airport wall.

He smiled at Remo as Remo stepped nearer, the smile one gives a stranger he doesn't really wish to talk to.

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"Where is the girl?" Remo said.

"Beg pardon, Senor?"

"The girl."

"We Flamenco dancers have many girls," the man said.

"You know the girl I want," Remo said.

The man shrugged. He was still half shrugged when Remo upended him and dragged him by one fat ankle over to the railing of the observation deck.

Remo tossed him over. The fat man hung upside down, suspended only by Remo's grip on his ankle.

"Where have they taken her?" Remo growled.

"Hamidia," the man screamed in terror. "Hamidia. To Mesoro. True. True. I tell the truth, Senor."

"I know you do," Remo said. "Have a nice trip."

He let the man fall and walked away, even before the scream died out with a fat splat. Chiun was standing in front of an arcade filled with electronic games.

"They've gone to Hamidia. Some place named Mesoro," Remo said.

Chiun nodded and said, "Japs are treacherous. I bet we could have played Space Invaders on that other one's machine."

Generalissimo Moombasa didn't like to rise before noon. It was his opinion that in people's democratic republics, anything that happened before noon deserved to wait for the great man to get out of bed.

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But the call from Lord Wissex had disrupted his smooth sleeping pattern and he rested only fitfully for two more hours until his private telephone rang again.

If this kept up, he was going to have it disconnected, he decided.

"Hello," he yelled into the phone.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. This is Pimsy Wissex," a voice rattled.

"Sony, you got wrong number. You want asthma clinic, you look up number. The house of fancy boys is down the street too. You look up their number."

He hung up the telephone but it rang again instantly.

"What now?"

"Listen to me, you bleeding wog," Pimsy snarled. "I've got something to tell you."

"This better be important."

"It is," said Uncle Pimsy.

Seventeen

Night was falling. She had hung there through the brutally hot sun of the day with not a drop of water for her lips. Her arms felt that they were going to snap out of her shoulder sockets and twice during the day when she could stand the pain no more, she had screamed and Wissex had lowered her to the ground for fifteen minutes before hoisting her up again.

Her throat was parched and her lips were dry. She touched them with her tongue but it felt like rubbing wood over wood.

At least the night would bring some coolness, some relief from the day's heat. But in the grassy fields below that surrounded the flat-topped hill they were on, Terri could hear the insects and then the sounds of larger animals-a snarl, a growl- and the thought of what was out there chilled her.

She was hanging from a long boom, extended out over the edge of the Mesoro Hill. Ropes tied roughly around her wrists were fastened to the boom, and she was able to rest only by grabbing the boom with her hands and holding on, to rest

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her wrists, until her hands tired of supporting her weight and she had to let go. And then the pain in the wrists began again.

The boom was attached at its other end to a heavy, complicated tripod in the center of the flat table of rock. And Lord Wissex sat there, at a table which he had unloaded from the helicopter, a table with controls built into it. During the heat of the day, he had opened a bottle of white wine which he had carried in a cooler, had poured himself a glass, and had toasted Terri Pomfret's beauty.

But he had offered her none for her dry throat.

He was a sadist and a brute. She had fallen for the accent and the superficial charm and the tweedy British clothes and she realized that if Jack the Ripper had ben been soft-spoken and full of "yes, m'dears" and worn an ascot, she probably would have crawled into a blood-stained bed with him.

She saw Wissex looking at her and she asked again, "What are you going to do with me?" He had not answered her all day when she had asked that question.

Wissex smiled at her. "Do you know that that imbecile Moombasa still believes there is a mountain of gold?" he asked.

"And there isn't," she said.

"Of course not," Wissex said.

"Why did you put up all those plaques? It was you, wasn't it?"

"Of course m'dear. It was my plan. There is, you know, this idiotic Hamidian legend about a mountain of gold. It was my idea that if I got Moombasa to believe the United States was looking for it, then he would spend any amount of

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money to find it. So far, he has been good for twenty million dollars."

"He's not going to be happy when he finds out there's no mountain," Terri said.

"He thinks there is one. He thinks you'll tell him where it is."

"It doesn't exist," Terri said. "I'll tell him that. And that it was all your idea."

Wissex chuckled. "I know that and you know that. But I'm afraid you won't get a chance to tell him. Unfortunately, m'dear, you're going to have an accident. A fatal accident."

"But why the plaques?" she asked again.

"That was to lend authenticity to the scheme," he said. "You should realize that true genius involves painstaking attention to detail. I wanted everything to look correct. It had to be good enough not only to fool Moombasa-I could fool him with a map drawn in the sand with a stick-but also to fool you and the United States until I extracted enough money from that idiot. He is not a trusting sort. Did you know that he has had one of his would-be spies traipsing around, trying to keep an eye on you and your bodyguards?"

"That fat man at the airport?" Terri said.

"Yes. I made sure to tell him where we were going. I have no doubt that your friends have, by now, extracted that information from him."

Terri felt her heart add a little extra happy beat. "But why?" she asked him and because she guessed it would feed his macho sense of himself, she added, "I don't understand. Why would you want them to know where we went?"

"Because I am going to kill them. Those two

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have spoiled my calculations long enough and they have been a shadow over the House of Wissex for far too many years. When they come for you, all three of you will die."

He spoke with an unemotional flatness as if he were discussing the score of last year's semifinal soccer game.

"They'll get you, you know," Terri said, the anger spilling out of her, fueled by his smugness. "They're better than you are."

"Don't you believe it, girl. Don't you believe it. And now I wish you would please be still. I have some cogitation to do to prepare my welcome for the House of Sinanju."

"Still? I won't be still. I'll shout and scream and let the world know I'm here." Terri opened her mouth to scream, but it changed to a shriek of pain as Wissex pressed a button on the panel in front of him and the boom yanked her upwards, almost dislocating her arms from her shoulders. She bit her lip and hung there in silence, looking across at him, at the helicopter parked on the hilltop behind him. Wissex must have set a trap for Remo and Chiun-but what could it be? She would not let them die, not if she could help it. When she saw them, she would shout and scream and let them know it was a trap. And if she died, then maybe she deserved it for being stupid, but at least she would have evened the score with this English monster.

But while the night grew darker, her resolve and her courage weakened, as the night sounds surrounding the hilltop grew in intensity. She tried to spin on her ropes, to look around her in a full

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360-degree circle, to see if she could see a light that might be Remo and Chiun, but even as she made the effort, she heard Wissex' mocking voice.

"Don't trouble yourself. When they arrive, I will let you know. Nothing can move out there without being detected by my sensors. That is why we came to this godforsaken lump of dirt. It is the only high ground in this entire country and I will know they are coming long before they get here. So just hang there and rest." He laughed again and Terri felt her heart sink.

There was just no hope, no chance for survival, no way to save Remo and Chiun from this evil madman.

"Oh, that's awful," Remo said. He was looking up at Terri, perilously extended from the boom out over the edge of the hill. "That bastard."

He dropped back to the ground alongside Chiun.

"Do you feel it?" Remo hissed.

"Of course," Chiun said softly.

"It's some kind of force field," Remo said. "Probably a detection device to tell him we're here."

"I know what it is, you untrained monkey," Chiun said.

"How do we avoid it? That's the problem."

"There was once a Master Yung Suk," Chiun started but Remo interrupted.

"Now you're going to give me a history lesson? Now?"

"There are no new answers; only new questions," Chiun said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Remo.

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"It means that there was once a Master Yung Suk," Chiun said.

"Can we keep this one short before Terri dies hanging up there?"

"And Yung Suk was supposed to storm the castle of an evil prince. This was in Mongolia. Don't worry about the girl; I noticed she has very strong arms. And the evil prince knew an attack was coming and he had all his best soldiers atop his castle, along the walls, looking off in all four directions. And the prince had his spies about too and the spies found that the attack would come from Yung Suk and four of the best men of the village. So when five men came out of the woods surrounding the castle, a great cry and shout went up from the soldiers and they attacked and overwhelmed the five men and killed them."

"That's some freaking cheery wonderful story," Remo said.

"It is not over."

"What else?" Remo asked.

"And while the soldiers were laying waste these five, Master Yung Suk entered the castle from the other side and killed the evil prince and got paid and everything ended happily."

"What's the moral?" asked Remo.

"The moral is that armies and Englishmen see only what they have been warned that they might see. This Wissex upstart up there is expecting two. We will give him two and he will concentrate on two and then there will be a third and that will do the trick," Chiun said.

"There's only two of us. How are we going to be three?"

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Chiun stood up and stepped back into the darkness a few yards. Remo heard a soft wrenching sound as if a grave were giving up its cargo. A moment later, Chiun was back, his arms wrapped around a small eight-foot-high tree. He tossed the tree toward Remo.

"I get it," Remo said. "We use the tree to divert him and make him think it's one of us."

"At last the dawn," Chiun said. "Even after the darkest night."

"You want me to go with the tree?" Remo said. "How about you?"

"You already clomp around with enough noise for two," Chiun said. "You are much more believable imitating a crowd."

"Okay."

Chiun pointed Remo off toward the left side of the hill, and as the old man watched, Remo moved away into the darkness, lugging the tree, as silent as a wisp of air. When he knew that Remo could not see him, Chiun nodded his head approvingly. Some never learned to move. There had even been masters who were lead-footed; but Remo had learned in the earliest days of his training to center his weight, so he could move smoothly in any direction. One of the fairy tales Chiun had been told as a child was the story of a master who could run across a wet field and leave not a crushed blade of grass behind him. When he was growing up in his training, Chiun thought it impossible, a fairy tale, but now he thought that someday Remo might be able to do it. Perhaps even better than Chiun himself.

Chiun listened but heard nothing except the

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sounds of the night. No movement from Remo, not even the hiss of a breath, not even the rustling of a leaf on the small tree the young American carried.

And then Chiun drifted off toward the right side of the hill, above which hung the terrified form of Terri Pomfret.

"Here they come," Wissex said softly.

It was fully dark now and from Terri's point of view, Wissex's face was distorted in the green flickering light of a television monitor built into the table before him. The green light threw long fright shadows up across Wissex's face. Terri wondered how she had ever thought he was handsome.

Wissex looked at the screen and laughed softly at their crude attempt to deceive him. The screen was built into a television but it was the latest form of radar screen, picking up the movement of objects over the size of a child.

Four overlapping cameras that Wissex had mounted on the edges of the tabletop mesa scanned the area around the hill,

Wissex watched the movement of the two men on the screen. First one of them would dart forward, fifteen feet or so, close to the edge of the camera's range. Then the other would move forward, and join with the first. Then the first would move forward again. It was obvious to Wissex that they were trying to find a pocket of space that the cameras didn't cover.

Not a chance, he thought. He reached under the table and opened a small case from which he took a submachine gun. He clicked off its safety and set

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the first round into the chamber, then waited, his eyes watching the screen, as the two figures continued their unusual leapfrog motion toward the base of the hill. Only forty yards more and they would be at the bottom of the cliff.

They would have to climb up. And he would be waiting.

Remo tossed the tree forward fifteen feet and waited until it hit. Then he ran forward himself until he was on a line with the tree, then turned sharply to his right and moved over to the tree. He waited a few seconds, then tossed the tree forward again and repeated the maneuver.

Chiun should be at the base of the hill now, Remo thought.

Terri saw him as the moon came out from behind a cloud for a brief moment. It flashed on the dark purple of the kimono and she saw Chiun's face, looking upward, as he came silently up the stone face of the hill. She had been looking at that wall all day and it had been smooth and seemed impossible to scale, but Chiun was moving upward as rapidly as if he had been climbing a ladder.

She glanced over toward Wissex at the platform in the center of the hill but he had seen nothing. His eyes were still riveted on the television screen.

And Chiun was climbing.

Remo had reached the bottom of the hill. He dropped the tree and looked up at the smooth stone walls. If he went up, Wissex had only to

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look over the edge and he could pick Remo off like a wingless fly clinging to a wall.

He hoped Chiun's scheme was working and the Briton was still focusing his attention on Remo. Maybe ... if he kept that attention.

Remo backed off from the wall and shouted out.

"Wissex, we're here for you. Surrender the girl."

He waited a split second, then got his answer, a deep, rolling laugh that shattered the quiet of the night.

And then Wissex's voice.

"Come on up. I'm waiting for you. You can join the wench."

She saw Chiun put a hand over the top of the cliff and then, like smoke rising, he moved up onto the edge. Wissex had moved to the other side of the hill, from the bottom of which had come Remo's voice. His back was to Chiun but the old man did not move. He had his head cocked as if listening to something far off.

Suddenly, Terri heard it too.

It was a distant rumbling, like the sound of machinery.

Wissex heard it too and spun toward the noise and he saw Chiun. Even as he said, in confusion, "How . . . what are you doing here?" he aimed the spray machine gun in Chiun's direction.

The Korean did not answer.

"There are three of you?" Wissex said.

"Perhaps four or five," Chiun said.

"It doesn't matter," Wissex said. "However many there are, they are all dead."

The sound came from trucks. Terri could rec-

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ognize the noise now. And then the sound lessened, and search lights flamed from out of the darkness toward the hill. Then a voice boomed through the night, powerful amplification making it seem that it came from every direction at once.

"Wissex, I know all," shouted Moombasa. "And now you die, thieving Englishman."

"That damned wog," Wissex said. "I'm getting out of here." He raised the gun toward Chiun. "But first you."

Remo had lingered at the base of the hill but when he heard the first machine gun blast, he leaped upward, grabbed a finger hold and began to move up the face of the smooth rock. It had been the hardest of lessons when he was young in Sinanju, learning to put the pressure of his weight into the face of the wall he was climbing and not down toward the ground. Harder still to learn was to harness the fear of falling that brought tension to the muscles and made the act of climbing impossible.

There was another burst from the machine gun and Remo raced toward the top of the cliff.

Moombasa heard the machine-gun fire too and he ducked down inside the 1948 Studebaker that was the pride of Hamidia's armored corps. He dropped his megaphone on his driver's head.

"That limey is trying to harm my royal person," he said. "Attack," he shouted. "Attack. Reduce that hill to rubble. I don't want a stone left."

His driver moved the Studebaker out of the way of the seven cannons, mounted on the backs of

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flatbed trucks, as uniformed soldiers loaded the big guns and began sighting in on the flat mountain top.

Even though she had seen it, she didn't believe it. Terri had seen Wissex aim the gun at Chiun and press the trigger. The old man hadn't seemed to move and yet somehow the bullets had missed and Chiun was ten feet away from his previous position. Then he circled slowly away from Wissex and Terri realized that he was turning Wissex away from her, to protect her from being hit by a stray shot.

Wissex wheeled toward Chiun. He held the machine gun at waist level and then squeezed the trigger again, this time letting out a spray of bullets in a wide arc. And again, they missed, because when Wissex released the trigger, the old man was still standing, still smiling, and then he moved forward toward Wissex.

"My ancestor let yours live," Chiun intoned. "You will not be so lucky. This is the last time you pretenders attack the House of Sinanju."

Wissex looked at Chiun and the gun, then threw the gun on the ground and bolted toward the helicopter on the far side of the mesa.

He got only two steps before being hauled up short. Terri saw him. It was Remo, moving out of the night, wearing his regular black chinos and black t-shirt, and he had his hand on Wissex's shoulder.

Wissex wheeled to face him.

"No, no, no," he cried. "My challenge was not to you, American. It was to Sinanju."

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"And I am the next Master of Sinanju," Remo said.

Terri saw Wissex' face pale. Then he pulled away from Remo and tried to run but again Remo stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

Terri saw Remo flick a finger toward Wissex' neck. Wissex reached up to touch his throat.

"What was that?" he asked. "I hardly felt it."

"Don't turn your head," Remo said.

"Why not?" asked Wissex.

He turned his head.

And as Terri looked on, his head fell off.

Remo looked down at the body and said, "That's the biz, sweetheart."

He ran over toward Terri. "You all right?"

"Just arm weary," she said. "Get me down from here."

"Coming right up," Remo said.

He scampered up onto the long boom and walked out along it to where Terri was hanging. She looked up between her hands and saw him break the ropes between his fingers, and then take her hands in his. Easily, he lifted her and walked back along the boom until they were both over the safe rock of the hilltop. Then he set her down carefully.

Chiun came over to look at the girls' wrists in the illumination from the floodlights on the trucks below. He began to massage them gently.

"Too much thumb," he said to Remo.

"What?"

Chiun nodded toward Wissex' body. "With him," he said. "Too much thumb on that stroke."

"It needed thumb," Remo said.

"You are a disrespectful galoot," Chiun said.

2 3 8

This was a new word he had learned only a few weeks before watching a cowboy movie and he was practicing using it on Remo. "Yes," he said. "Heh, heh. Just a galoot."

Suddenly, they heard the whistle of an approaching shell, and then felt a shudder as the shell hit and exploded near the mountain's base. Then they heard Moombasa's voice, shouting out over the loudspeaker.

"Fire. Destroy the British devil. Level that mountain. Not a stone left."

"We'd better get out of here before they get the range," Terri said.

"That probably gives us till next month," Remo said.

Chiun pointed toward the helicopter. "There is that whirly thing. Can you fly it?"

"If it's got wings, I can fly it," Remo said.

"Actually, it does not have wings," Chiun said.

"Actually, I can't fly it," said Remo.

"I can," Terri said.

"Thank God for liberated women," Remo said.

The shell bombardment was slowly getting closer and as the three clambered into the helicopter, a shell exploded only 20 yards from them on the hilltop.

Quickly and competently, Terri started the helicopter's motor and turned on the craft's lights. She looked outside at the hill, then jumped from the pilot's seat and ran back onto the hilltop.

"Remo, Chiun. Come quick," she called.

When they got to her, she was kneeling over the shell hole. At the bottom of the hole, the ground

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was glittering. Chiun reached in and pulled out a small pellet.

"Gold," he said.

"It's the mountain! The gold mountain. This is it. Yahooooo," Terri yelled.

They heard the whistle of another shell. It hit only 25 feet away and the concussion of the explosion pitched Terri onto her back.

She scrambled to her feet and shook her fist in Moombasa's direction.

"It's the gold mountain, you imbecile!"

From his vantage point below, Moombasa saw only a figure on the edge of the hill shaking a fist at him.

He picked up his loudspeaker and bellowed, "Taunt me, Englishman? We will destroy you. Fire. Fire. Fire. Bury that hill in the dirt."

Remo and Chiun helped Terri Pomfret back into the helicopter and she lifted the craft. It hovered for a moment, and then swooped down along the far side of the mountain, out of sight of Moombasa's artillery.

"The idiot's going to bury the hill," Remo said.

"Good. Then he'll never know the gold was there."

"And maybe our guys can sneak in some time and take it out and nobody'll be the wiser."

Chiun was silent and Remo asked him, "Something on your mind, Little Father?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"The House of Sinanju owes an apology."

"To whom?" asked Remo.

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"To Puk. No more can he be called Puk the Liar. He told the truth."

"Good old Puk," said Remo.

"You know what must have happened?" Terri said. She was flying the copter low now, barely skimming tree tops, on her way toward the ocean. "When the Spanish came, the Hamidians brought their gold out here and built that hill around it. Then they told the Spanish that the gold had been sent all over the world. And nobody ever knew. The Spanish massacred the Hamidians and the secret died with them. It's been sitting here all that time."

"Until now," Remo said. "When that nutcake is done, it won't even be a smear."

"Maybe it's best," Terri said. "Let the Hamidian legend die with them."

"I guess so," Remo said.

"It's a lot of gold," Chiun said.

Eighteen

Sometimes things just seemed to work right, even when they started out wrong.

That thought occurred to Barry Schweid, after he received the telephone call from the mysterious producer, Mr. Smith, to meet him right away at the offices of Universal Bindle Marmelstein Mammoth Global Magnificent Productions Inc.

But when Barry went outside, all four tires were flat on his 1971 Volkswagen.

But the bad luck turned good right away because, just by chance, there was a cab parked in front of his house.

The cabbie was a dark-haired young man who didn't talk much. From the back seat, Schweid noticed that the driver had very thick wrists.

He also noticed that the driver didn't seem to know his way around Los Angeles too well, because he couldn't ever seen to find Wilshire Boulevard.

"Can't you get me there?" Barry Schweid said. "This is an important meeting."

"Don't worry," the driver said. "He'll wait."

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Inside Barry Schweid's home, Dr. Harold W. Smith had the telephone hookup in place. He had learned a lesson from the last fiasco of trying to move CURE's records to St. Martin Island. Never again would he put all his eggs in one basket.

He listened over the telephone for the signals that indicated both receivers were ready.

Then he pressed the transmit switches on Schweid's word processor computer, and listened as the tapes began to whir.

It took seventeen minutes for all CURE's records to be transmitted across telephone lines to St. Martin. And back to CURE headquarters at Folcroft. From here on in, CURE would maintain double files.

As the computer continued to whir, Smith allowed himself a small smile. CURE was still operating; the battle against America's enemies had not yet been lost.

Twenty-seven minutes later, the taxicab pulled up to the curb.

Schweid looked out the window and squawked, "Hey. This is my house again. What are you doing?"

The driver ignored him. He rolled down the front passenger window and called out: "Got him, Smitty."

As Schweid watched, a thin man in a three-piece gray suit stepped from the bushes alongside his front entrance, walked quickly to the taxi, and got into the backseat alongside Schweid.

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"You want me to drive, Smitty?" the cabby said.

"No. Just stay here." The gray-suited man turned to Schweid. "I'm Mr. Smith."

"Well, I'm really glad to " But before he

could extend his hand, Schweid was cut off by Smith.

"You should know this," Smith said. "Bindle and Marmelstein are planning to steal your screenplay. They've already tried to sell it to me."

"My assassin movie?" asked Schweid.

"Right," Smith said. "According to them, they've got it tied up tight."

"I'll burn it before I let it be stolen," Schweid said.

"That's just what I want you to do," Smith said. "I want you to go inside your house and erase that screenplay from your computer. Wipe the tapes clean. And there'll be a check for you in the mail tomorrow."

"I knew it was too good to be true," Schweid said. "I just knew that movie would never be made. I'm going to destroy the screenplay right now. And all that other stuff I've got in my machine."

"Good," said Smith.

Schweid started out of the cab. "It didn't have a chance," he said. "I knew that."

The cabdriver said, "What do you mean? It didn't have a chance?"

"It was just too farfetched and too unbelievable," Schweid said. "A superkiller working for the government. No one would buy that."

"I guess you're right," said Remo Williams as Schweid left the cab and walked toward his house.

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After he had gone inside, Remo turned around from the driver's seat and said to Smith, "Suppose he doesn't wipe his tapes clean?"

"It doesn't matter," Smith said. "I already did. There's nothing left on them. And he just didn't have any idea of what the information was. He's harmless."

"Good," said Remo. "Where to?"

"Let's go see Bindle and Marmelstein," Smith said.

Hank Bindle and Bruce Marmelstein smiled in unison as Mr. Smith walked into the office, followed by a dark-haired young man in a black t-shirt and chinos.

"Mr. Smith, I presume," said Marmelstein, extending a hand in greeting.

"I want Schweid's screenplays," Smith said coldly.

"Which one?" said Marmelstein.

"All of them."

"You're going to produce them all?" asked Bindle.

"Yes," said Smith. "I want my creative people to read them over first. Then the three of us will have a meeting to discuss them. And the price."

"Okay," said Marmelstein. "We'll give a meeting." He pointed to Remo. "Who's he?"

"He's my creative people," said Smith. "Do something creative."

Remo creatively broke Marmelstein's marble desk top in half.

The two partners handed Smith a packet of screenplays.

245

"They're all in here," Bindle said. "Every one of them."

Smith glanced through them to make sure the one he wanted was there. He saw the title: Loves of an Assassin.

"Did you two read these?" Smith asked.

"Actually, no," said Bindle.

"Why not?" asked Smith.

"Actually, we don't read," said Marmelstein.

"Good," said Remo. "Then actually you don't die."

Smith turned toward the door and Remo followed him.

Bindle called out: "Mr. Smith. When you see that Hamlet script, you're going to love it. And we can do it for you. Every step of the way. We Can give you the greatest Hamlet of all time."

"With tits," said Marmelstein.