Identity Crisis

Destroyer 97: Identity Crisis

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

Dr. Harold W Smith harbored no thoughts of suicide as he pecked his wife of forty years on the cheek, exited his Tudor-style house in Rye, New York, and climbed into his battered station wagon. Not his suicide, not anybody's. Not today, not tomorrow. Hopefully not ever.

Mrs. Smith called after him from the open door. She was a frumpy woman with blued hair and the body of a comfortable sofa chair.

"Harold, will you be working late again?"

"I believe so, dear."

"Shall I leave your meat loaf warming in the oven or in the icebox for you to reheat?"

"In the icebox, dear," said Harold Smith, starting the car.

He barely noticed the unmarked white van parked across the street and had no inkling that he was being videotaped by a hidden camera. Had he known, he might have given some thought to taking his own life-even in front of his sad-faced wife, who stood in the open door, her hand fluttering in its usual goodbye wave.

When Smith pulled out of his driveway, the van stayed put. A burgundy Ford Taurus at the end of his street slithered after him when he turned left. It followed him through the center of town, and when Smith stopped for gas, it kept going.

He paid for the gas with two crisp one-dollar bills and thirty-seven cents in exact change counted out from a red plastic change holder. The minute Smith put the gas station behind him, a delivery truck got in front of him and took the same wooded road that led to Smith's place of work. Smith thought nothing of this, either. It was a well-traveled road up to the fork in the road. Many vehicles took it.

When the delivery van reached the fork, it cut left. Smith kept to the right and had the winding wooded road all to himself, as he did virtually every morning of his six-day work week.

The road was secluded. On either side the black-and-white pillars of poplars stood in lonely ranks, their dead leaves a carpet of yellow and brown on the ground. They were as naked as the telephone poles that switched by every hundred yards or so.

Smith spotted the telephone lineman up on a pole a quarter mile before he came upon him, and was prepared for the NYNEX repair van parked on the soft shoulder of the road. Slowing, he eased past it, wondering if there was a problem with his lines. The poles served his place of work exclusively. It never occurred to him to look beyond the obvious or question the work the lineman was doing.

Smith noticed everything and yet nothing. He had been taking this identical, unvarying route for some thirty years now. There were other ways to reach the winding road to Folcroft Sanitarium, but Smith never used them. He was a man of stultifying but comfortable routine.

The same road, the same exact minute of departure and the identical time of arrival. These things never changed. Smith also wore the same gray three-piece suit to work every day. It was early autumn, so a gray porkpie hat covered the gray hair that was too thin to protect his head from the chill. Since it had been his habit to wear a hat in cold weather all of his adult life, the fact that the hat was twenty years out of fashion seemed beside the point.

When he sent the rust-eaten station wagon through the unguarded brick gate to Folcroft Sanitarium on the shores of Long Island Sound, he didn't have to look at his ancient Timex wristwatch to check the hour. He drove like a machine, and like a machine he invariably arrived at work at the exact same time.

Thirty years, and only once had Harold Smith been more than sixteen seconds late by his self-winding Timex. He took a secret pride in that record. That one exception was due to a flat tire which he had fixed himself and still managed to arrive, technically, on time. That had been on November 24, 1973. The date had remained burned into his memory. He promised himself it would never happen again. Smith had kept that promise.

Smith parked in his comfortable reserved parking spot in the east parking lot and emerged carrying a worn leather briefcase that looked like a hand-me-down.

Being an unimaginative man, he felt no eyes on him. There were boats out on the sound. He noticed them because he noticed everything, but they were ordinary speedboats. He had no inkling that from those boats, six pairs of Bushnell binoculars followed him to the main entrance.

Smith nodded to the lobby guard and took the elevator to his second-floor office, where he greeted his personal secretary with a curt "Good morning, Mrs. Mikulka." His voice sounded the way lemons taste, sour.

His secretary said, "No calls, Dr. Smith."

It was exactly 6:00 a.m. Of course there were no calls at this hour. But over the years, Harold Smith had always asked, and so Eileen Mikulka got into the habit of answering the unspoken question in lieu of a greeting.

"Is there a problem with the phone lines?" Smith asked.

"Not that I am aware."

Frowning, Smith passed on.

"Oh, Dr. Smith."

Smith paused. "Yes?"

"Dr. Gerling reported another one of those mysterious incidents last night."

"The drumming?"

"Yes."

"Which patient reported it?"

"Why, Dr. Gerling himself. He claimed that he stepped off the third-floor elevator and the drumming started up immediately. He chased it around a corner to a utility closet, but there was nothing in the closet when he opened the door. By then, the drumming had stopped."

Smith pressed his slipping glasses back into place. "Odd. Did he say anything else?"

"Yes, he thought it sounded familiar."

"Familiar how?"

"He didn't say, Dr. Smith. Dr. Gerling couldn't place it, but he was certain the drumming was something he had heard before."

Smith made a prim mouth. "When he comes on duty, ask Dr. Gerling to report to me."

"Yes, Dr. Smith."

Smith closed the door behind him and crossed the Spartan office toward the desk that faced away from the one concession to Folcroft's scenic location, a picture window framing Long Island Sound.

The speedboats were still clustered out there. Had Smith been aware that they were filled with men fighting the focusing rings of their binoculars and barking into walkie-talkies in frustration, he might have suffered a heart attack right then and there and been spared the need to take his own life. But he was oblivious and so pressed the hidden button under the edge of his desk. The window behind him was made of one-way glass. He could look out, but no one could see in.

The top of his desk was a slab of tempered black glass. The instant he pressed the concealed button, an amber computer screen sprang into life under the black plate. The buried monitor was set at an angle so only the man seated at the desk could read the tilted screen.

Smith brought his thin fingers to the desktop. Their nearness illuminated the dormant keys of a touch-sensitive keyboard. He went to work, tapping the thin white letters, which flashed with each silent stroke of his fingers.

The computer booted up soundlessly. Smith waited while the virus-check program ran and silently announced that the banks of mainframes and WORM array disk drives that toiled under lock and key in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium were secure and virus free.

ON ONE OF THE BOATS out in the sound, a man scanned Folcroft with an electronic device designed to pick up radio transmissions from any monitor in the building and duplicate the display on a portable screen. He got white noise. There was only one monitor in all of Folcroft, and Smith's office walls were honeycombed with a copper mesh designed to soak up all radio emanations, shielding it against such sophisticated electronic eavesdropping.

Two miles down the road the man dressed as a telephone lineman was hanging from a safety harness and listening to the tap on the Folcroft phone lines, unaware that he was wasting his time. The critical telephone lines left Folcroft through an underground conduit not found on any AT t.

Five minutes later the white van, the burgundy Taurus and the delivery truck that had shadowed Harold Smith on his drive to work pulled up to the telephone pole, and a man in a dark blue suit got out and called up. He had a head that was pinched in at the temples and tapered down to a shovel-shaped jaw. His eyes looked too small for his angular skull.

"Catch anything?"

"No, Mr. Koldstad. The lines are quiet."

"Sever them."

"Yes, sir," said the lineman. He pulled a cable cutter from his leather tool belt and simply cut the lines with three quick snaps.

The man in the blue suit turned and said, "Time to take this place down. Listen up. We go in tough, make a lot of noise, and this operation should go down exactly as scenariod."

Guns came out. Small arms. Ten mm Delta Elites and MAC-10s. They were checked, their safeties latched off, and held tightly or placed within easy reach.

The convoy of vehicles started up the oak-and-poplar-lined road, picking up speed. They passed unchallenged through the gate of Folcroft Sanitarium, which was unguarded except for the severe countenances of twin stone lion heads set on each brick post.

OUT ON THE BAY, a red-bearded man in a blue windbreaker leaned over the technician hunkered above the radio receiver.

"No computer activity?"

"No, Sir."

"Anybody spot our man?"

Another man shook his head negatively. "The sun is coming right off the windows," he said. He passed over his binoculars. "See for yourself."

"Figures." The red-bearded man lifted the binoculars and asked, "What are those things circling the building?"

Five pair of binoculars lifted in unison.

"Looks like vultures," someone suggested.

"Vultures! In these parts?"

"Too big to be sea gulls."

The red-bearded man grunted. "Screw it. We can't wait all day." He picked up a walkie-talkie and barked, "The word is go. Repeat, the word is go."

Immediately the three speedboats sprang into life. Engines revved, the sterns dug into the foaming water, and the lifted noses of all three craft converged on a rickety dock jutting out from the grassy slope of the east side of the Folcroft grounds.

Black hoods were hastily pulled over heads. Weapons were pulled from stowage and handed out. Shotguns predominated.

From time to time, the red-bearded man brought his binoculars to his eyes and tried to focus on the three circling birds.

It was weird. Very weird. They were approaching their target at over ten knots, and the three circling vultures refused to come into clear focus.

He decided it must be an omen. He didn't like omens. He dropped his binoculars and checked the safety on his machine pistol, thinking, I don't need vultures to tell me Folcroft Sanitarium and everyone in it is dead meat.

OBLIVIOUS to the forces converging on him, Harold Smith continued working at his computer. Then he received his first warning of danger.

An amber light began winking on and off in the upper right-hand side of the desktop screen. Smith tapped a function key, and the program instantly displayed a warning message picked up by the roving computers two floors below. Routinely they scanned every link in the net, from wire-service computer-message traffic to the vast data banks of the FBI, the IRS, CIA and the other governmental agencies.

For Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy private hospital dedicated to patients with long-term chronic problems, was not what it appeared to be. And Harold W. Smith, ostensibly its director, was not all what he seemed, either.

The program was designed to work off key words and phrases, extract the data and reduce it to a concise digest. It was the first order of each day for Smith to scan the overnight extracts for matters requiring his attention.

But certain key words bubbling up from the net meant a security problem that couldn't wait for Smith to discover it.

Smith's tired gray eyes-he woke up with eyestrain even after a full night's rest-absorbed the terse data digest and began blinking rapidly.

It was headed by a key phrase that under normal circumstances should never appear on the net.

The phrase was: "Folcroft Sanitarium."

Smith had no sooner read it a second time with incredulous eyes and a cold spot forming in the pit of his stomach than the amber light flashed again. By sheer reflex-Smith was all but paralyzed in his seat by what he had just read-he tapped the function key, and a second digest replaced the first.

It too was headed: "Folcroft Sanitarium."

"My God," said Harold W Smith in a long groan that sounded as if it had been pulled out of his stern New England soul.

Beyond the soundproof walls of his office, the screech of burning tires, the roar of speedboat motors, the slamming of doors and the crackle and rattle of gunfire blended into a single ugly detonation of sound.

Smith stabbed at his intercom button.

"Mrs. Mikulka," he said hoarsely. "Alert the lobby guard."

"Dr. Smith, there's a terrible racket going on outside! "

"I know," Smith said urgently. "Tell the lobby guard to retreat to a safe place. Folcroft is under attack."

"Attack? Who would-"

"Call the guard! Under no circumstances is he to return fire. This is a private hospital. I will tolerate no violence."

"Yes, Dr. Smith."

Smith returned to his computer. He typed one word: SUPERWIPE.

Below, the multipurpose computers geared into high speed. Tape after tape, disk upon disk, offered itself to be erased. The unerasable optical WORM drives came under the glare of powerful lasers, melting them on their spindles. It took less than five minutes to execute. Then a secondary program kicked in and began writing nonsense strings onto every intact disk and tape, making data recovery impossible.

His secrets safe, Smith tapped the button that shut down the desktop monitor.

When they burst in, there would be no trace of the desk being anything more than an executive's desk. Smith reached for the fire-engine red telephone that normally sat on his desk. Then he remembered that he had placed it in the bottom drawer after the direct line to Washington had been severed. If they found it, it would prove nothing. Smith lifted the receiver of his desk telephone, intending to call his wife. But there was no dial tone, and suddenly he understood what the telephone lineman had been up to. Bitterly he replaced the receiver. There was no other way to tell her goodbye.

There was one last book to be closed. Smith pulled out a preaddressed envelope from a drawer and hastily scribbled out a note in ink. He folded it in threes and slipped the note into the envelope. Sealing it with his tongue, he tossed it into his Out basket.

It landed with the name of the addressee facing upward. The name was Winston Smith.

That done, there was no time left to do anything, except what Harold W. Smith had to do.

Smith stood up on unsteady legs. With two fingers he reached into the watch pocket of his vest, extracting a white coffin-shaped pill. He stared at it with sick eyes. He had carried that pill in his watch pocket every day of the past thirty years. It had been given to him by a President of the United States who was then as young as Harold Smith had been. They had belonged to the same generation-the generation that had fought World War II. The only difference was that Harold Smith had lived to grow old in the responsibilities the chief executive had set on his bony shoulders. The young President had been cut down by an assassin's bullet, and so remained eternally youthful in the collective memory of the nation they both served.

Harold Smith was lifting the poison pill to his blood-drained lips when the pounding of feet on stairs came through the thick office door. Mrs. Mikulka screamed once shortly.

And Smith took the pill that would end his life into his dry-with-fear mouth.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he never visited the grave with his name on it.

For that matter, he never visited Newark, New Jersey, where he had grown up in Saint Theresa's Orphanage as Remo Williams. For all he knew, he had been born in Newark. All the nuns knew was that one morning there was a baby on the doorstep, and the anonymous note said he was Remo Williams. They raised him under that name and, when the time came, they sent him out into the world, and he became Remo Williams, beat cop. Young, honest, he was a good cop, and Newark was his world. Except for a hitch in the Marines, he stayed inside that world. He died there, too.

It had been more than twenty years now. A pusher had been found beaten to death in a Newark alley. Next to the body lay a cop's badge. Remo Williams's badge. It had been an unusually fast jump from suspicion to trial and conviction. Remo had found himself sitting in the electric chair almost before it had sunk in that he hadn't been put through a show trial to satisfy Internal Affairs. He had been deliberately framed, but no one believed him. There had been no one on his side. No fancy lawyers, no last-minute appeals or stays of execution. It would have been different had it taken place today. But it hadn't. Remo finally understood he'd been framed. And then he'd been executed.

But the electric chair hadn't worked. It had been fixed. Someone else now lay in a grave marked with Remo Williams's name, and Remo's face had been fixed by plastic surgery, and fixed and fixed again. It was possible to go back to Newark with a new face, but Remo got tired of seeing new faces in the mirror every other year, so there was one last face-lift, and Remo had his old face back. More or less. That meant he could no longer walk the streets of his childhood anymore. Because the people who had framed him, and the people who had fixed the electric chair so that Remo Williams would be legally dead, couldn't let that happen.

So Remo had never paid his respects to his old self.

Arriving at sunset, Remo now stood looking down at his own grave for a very long time. His strong, angular face with its high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes might have been a death mask for all the emotion it revealed. Remo stood perfectly still. For nearly an hour he stood without moving a muscle.

The headstone had been bought on the cheap. There was his name, an incised cross, but no dates of birth or death. No one knew his birthday anyway. Not even Remo. Wildwood Cemetery was not exactly Potter's Field, but it wasn't much of a step above it.

A nameless hobo lay buried in the dirt under his feet. But Remo wasn't thinking of him. He was looking at all that was left of his old life. A name on a granite stone, a cross and nothing more. The leaves of autumn lay scattered about the ground, and from time to time the wind sent them chasing one another like frisky squirrels. For most of his life he had lived like one of those leaves, rootless and disconnected.

After a while Remo crossed his legs at the ankles and scissored down into a lotus position before his own grave. His body compressed the dry, dead leaves of the season, and they crumpled silently under him because he had perfect control over his body and was trained to make no sounds he didn't want heard.

Resting his unusually thick wrists, one on each knee, he let his loose fingers dangle. Remo closed his eyes.

The one who had trained him told him many years ago that all the answers he sought in life lay within him. It was true. He had learned to breathe correctly, not to put the processed poisons civilization called food into his body and to use all five of his senses fully and without succumbing to illusion. And once those things had been mastered, Remo Williams truly began to master his mind and body.

One day, when he was whole in mind and spirit and flesh, Remo had sat before his Master and asked, "I know how to breathe."

"Because of me."

"I know how to kill."

"Because I have taught you the blows."

"I know myself fully."

"Except in one way."

"Yes," Remo had replied, and was surprised. He was always surprised by his Master. "I don't know who I am."

"You are my pupil. You are next in line after me. You are of Sinanju. Nothing else matters."

"Knowing where I came from matters."

"Not to my ancestors who have adopted you in spirit."

"I am honored, Little Father. But I must know who I am if I am to go forward."

"You must go forward because to do otherwise is to wither and die. If on the path before you, you discover the answers to these unimportant questions, this will be good."

"Knowing who my parents were is not unimportant."

"If your parents did not deem you important enough to keep, why do you wish to honor their neglect?"

"I want to see my parents' faces."

"Look into a mirror, then, for no adult can do so and not see the familiar ghosts of those who came before him."

Remo had tried looking into a mirror and saw only disappointment written on his strong features.

Returning to the Master of Sinanju, he'd said, "The mirror told me squat."

"Then you do not wish to see the truth it holds for you."

"What do you mean?"

"In your face is reflected the face of your father. In it also is reflected that of your mother. But they blend in you, so that you may have the eyes of one and the nose of the other. It is necessary to separate the elements to determine the truth. For often a child takes more after one parent than another."

Remo had felt his face. "I never thought about it that way. Is there any way to figure out who I look more like-my mother or my father?"

The Master of Sinanju had shrugged helplessly. "With a Korean, yes. In your case, no."

"Why not?"

"One baboon looks much like any other. Heh heh. One baboon looks much like any other."

Remo had frowned but pressed on over the Master of Sinanju's self-satisfied cackling at his own joke.

"I still want to find my parents."

"Then look into the mirror of memory-your own mind. For no child is born into this world without seeing the faces of at least one of his parents. And while one's first memory may be buried deep, it is never buried forever."

"I don't remember my parents at all."

"But your mind does. You have only to unlock the memory."

Remo had gone away and meditated for five days, eating only cold rice and drinking only purified water. But no faces appeared in his mind's eye.

When he complained to the Master of Sinanju later, Chiun had dismissed his complaint with a curt "Then you are not ready."

"When will I be ready?"

"When your memory allows itself to be unfolded like chrysanthemum petals."

For years after that, Remo had shoved the question of his parents into the furthest recesses of his mind. He told himself that they must have died in a car accident, that he had not been abandoned, that there was a good reason someone had set him, an infant, in a wicker basket on an orphanage doorstep. To think otherwise was too painful.

Now, so many years later, Remo felt he was ready.

So he sat before his own grave and closed his brown eyes. If necessary, he would meditate all night until he had his answers.

The leaves swirled about him, and the rising moon was caught in the creaking copper beech branches that lay against the night sky like dead nerve endings. An owl hooted. He hooted again, and again and again until his calls became part of the lonesome night.

Remo looked deep into himself. Images came and went. The first face he remembered belonged to Sister Mary Margaret, her smooth face framed by the wimple of her habit. She, more than any of the other nuns, had raised him. She was quick with a ruler on the knuckles, but even quicker with a kind word.

The day he had left the orphanage to make his way in the world, the kindly light in her eyes was replaced by the glow of pride. But that was all the warmth she would give Remo Williams that day.

"God go with you, Remo Williams," she had said, shaking his hand with a firm detachment that said,

"We have done our best with you. Visit if you like, but this is no longer your home."

The coolness had stung. But in later years Remo had understood. He was responsible for himself now.

Other faces came. He saw his police-academy instructor, his Marine D.I., Kathy Gilhooly, whom he planned to marry before his old life had ended. The judge who sentenced him appeared. So did his lawyer. They had been bought off-although Remo hadn't known it then. The bitter lemony features of Harold W Smith, the man who had engineered the frame, swam into view. Remo made him go away. He skipped over the wrinkled countenance of the Master of Sinanju. He would be of no help now.

A laughing little girl's face came after a while. Freya, his daughter by Jilda of Lakluun, the blond Viking warrior woman he had encountered during one of his trips to Korea. They were far from him now, safe from the dangerous life Remo led. Remo's face softened as he looked upon his daughter again. He hardly knew her, really. And in his mind's eye, Remo thought he could see a little of his own face in hers.

There was something about Freya's face that struck a deep, half-forgotten chord. Remo held the little girl's features before his mind's eye, turning the image sideways, trying to pin the inkling down.

It was there. Something was there. But it was elusive.

Remo refused to let it go.

In the gray hours before dawn, he thought he saw a new face. A woman's face. He had never seen the face before. Not as an adult. But it was familiar to him somehow.

Her face was an oval, and her hair hung down long and straight and black. It was a good face, with warm, loving eyes and a high, intelligent forehead. It reminded him of Freya's face. They had the same eyes.

His own eyes still closed, Remo reached out as if to touch her.

The image faded. He tried to summon it again. But it wouldn't come.

Then a voice spoke. "If I could stand up..."

It was a woman's voice. But it wasn't in his mind. It was here. It was near him. His heart rate picking up, Remo opened his eyes.

There was only the grave with the name on it that might or might not be his true one.

Remo started to close his eyes again when the voice came again.

"If I could stand up where I lie..."

The voice was behind him. His ears told him that. But his other senses, the ones that had been raised to the pinnacle of human ability, told Remo there was no living thing behind him. His ears detected no beating heart, no crackle of rib cartilege from expanding lungs, no subtle friction of blood coursing through arteries and lesser veins. The bare back of his neck and arms detected no warning of human body heat.

But the voice sounded real. His sensitive eardrums still reverberated from its echoes.

Remo came to his feet like an unfolding telescope, whirling, alert and ready for anything.

The woman looked at him with infinitely sad yet warm eyes. Her hair was pulled tight off her high, smooth brow, but it was as black as the hair of the woman in his mind's eye. Her eyes were the same deep brown.

"Who-"

The woman continued, as if reciting a tone poem.

"If I could stand up where I lie, I would see mountains in all directions. There is a stream called Laughing Brook. If you find my resting place, you will find me."

"Huh?"

"If you find me, you will find him."

"You must find him, my son"

"Son?" Remo felt his heart jump like a salmon. "Moth-" The word caught in his throat. He had never called a woman that.

"It is too late for me, but your father lives."

"Who is he?"

"He is known to you, my son." The woman lifted a hand and reached out toward him.

Remo started forward, his right hand up and trembling.

Just before his fingers could touch hers, she faded from sight. Remo swept the empty air with his hands, but caught up only dead leaves.

The owl that had been silent for the past hour resumed its eerie call.

"Hoo. . . hoo.. . hoo."

Remo Williams stood at the foot of his own grave and trembled from head to toe. He had not trembled from fear since Vietnam. He had not trembled with anticipation since the last time he had known true love very long ago. And he had not trembled with any longing since he had come to Sinanju.

Now he trembled with all those emotions and more. He had seen his mother. She had spoken to him. He knew this with a certainty that rested not in his brain, but burned hot in the pit of his stomach.

He had not been forsaken after all.

Remo sank to his knees and wept tears of relief into the cool loam of the grave that was not truly his and slept until the rising sun sent its rays through the pink of his eyelids, snapping him to instant wakefulness.

He walked without a backward glance to his waiting car.

He had looked into the mirror of memory and saw true.

It was time to find himself.

Chapter 3

Jack Koldstad hated jeopardy seizures.

They were the worst, nastiest, most dangerous operational responsibilites in his capacity as special agent for the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service. Citizens were ordinarily touchy about being dunned for unpaid taxes or having liens put on their homes and bank accounts. Touchy wasn't the right word, actually. They often went bug-nuts, throwing insane screaming fits, threatening murder if they didn't get their way and promising suicide if that didn't work. The whole psychotic nine yards.

But at least they had some warning. The thirty-day letter. Then if they ignored that, the ninety-day letter. Followed by no-nonsense telephone calls. A series of firm, escalating steps designed to wear down the deadbeats and promote compliance with the tax code. Usually people came across. It was hard to stay mad at someone for months at a time-especially a faceless arm of Uncle Sam like the IRS.

But where a high risk of asset flight was indicated, the IRS was allowed by law to set aside its rules concerning seizure of assets and swoop down without warning. Jeopardy seizures, as the official terminology put it. The question was: jeopardy for whom?

You went in armed with a warrant, breaking down doors if necessary, and confiscated the disputed assets while the tax violator typically screamed for his lawyer. No polite notice. No warning. No nothing.

Usually the noncompliant taxpayer had the living shit scared out of him, and that was more than enough to cut the bull.

Sometimes it was the other way around.

Jack Koldstad had seized the private homes of Mafia dons, corporate criminals and other high-risk tax cheats many times during the course of a long career. Only rarely did he have to negotiate a standoff or swap fire.

Over the past dozen years, that had changed for the worse. It changed with the coming of cocaine and its derivatives, crack, crank and all that evil stuff. It changed with the rise of the drug kingpin with his unlimited financial power and his ruthless willingness to use that power to preserve his empire of white powder. The drug lords were the only group that never learned to fear the cold arm of the IRS.

Once the service began going after the drug barons, the rules of the game changed. Bulletproof vests became standard IRS issue. So did 9mm side arms, shotguns and-this was an IRS first-casualties. Agents began dying in the line of duty. Some were targeted for assassination. The IRS had instituted a policy of allowing agents to interface with the public under sanctioned on-file aliases to protect them from retribution. It was a whole new ball game.

Which was why Jack Koldstad had come to hate jeopardy seizures. Who the hell wants to take a bullet for the tax code?

So there were precautions he had learned to take. Go in in overwhelming numbers, cut off all escape routes and make damn sure the phone lines are down. Otherwise, you could knock on a door, and while your troops are spreading out, the cheat is calling for reinforcements-or worse, the cops. More than once Koldstad had had police officers draw down on his men, thinking they were black hats or some damn thing.

Folcroft Sanitarium offered a model scenario. One route in and one out. Off the beaten track. And the phone lines were up on poles, not buried in underground pipe.

It should have been a textbook seizure. Go in hard and loud, and flash the warrant. Shout down any resistance. Get the job done.

Folcroft was a private hospital, for Christ's sake. It should have gone by the book.

It started going wrong the second they raced through the open gates, Koldstad's burgundy Taurus in the lead.

They had surveyed the area by helicopter the day before. The fact that the hospital fronted Long Island Sound had been worrisome, but no escape boat was tied up at the dock. Hell, the dock was so decrepit, it looked all set to fall into the water.

A water escape was ruled highly improbable.

But when they came through the gates, Koldstad was shocked to see boats converging on the same rickety dock. Sleek white Cigarette boats, the kind popular with your basic drug runner.

It was Koldstad's absolute worst-case scenario. They had sailed into the middle of a drug drop.

"What do we do?" asked the train, Greenwood. "We're outnumbered."

"Too late to worry about that," Koldstad bit out. Into his walkie-talkie, he shouted, "It's a damn drop! We gotta take them down before we can secure the site. Everybody out-now!"

The vehicles screamed, stewing to a crowded stop. Doors popped. Agents piled out, weapons coming up. They crouched behind their vehicles, pistols steady in two-handed marksman's grips. Koldstad took up a kneeling position with his arms stretched out, the butt of his 9mm Taurus resting on the hood of his car, the engine block protecting his body. Beside him Greenwood copied the stance. He licked his dewy upper lip nervously.

The boats didn't bother with the dock. They ran aground on the shelf of mud below the grass, and men jumped out in blacksuits and cradling Uzis and shotguns. Their faces were masked-black pullover hoods that covered the entire head except for a filly oblong around the eyes.

From behind the shelter of his Taurus, Koldstad called out, "Drop your weapons!" He didn't say IRS. The manual called for it, but hard experience had taught him those three letters usually incited a noncompliant taxpayer to greater violence.

The men from the boats dropped to their bellies and out of the line of fire before a single warning shot could be squeezed off.

"Damn!" Koldstad said. He got down and tried to see under the car. There was no sign of them. They were good.

Greenwood leaned down, his voice excited. "I think I can reconnoiter over to their position by crawling on my belly, sir."

"Quiet!" Koldstad snapped.

Then the first perforated gun barrel poked over the slope of the grass. It angled around like a questing snout.

Greenwood got down on his hands and knees, trying to peer around the right front tire.

Koldstad opened his mouth to warn him. Too late.

The questing perforated snout popped once.

A bullet came and shredded the tread before it mushroomed into Greenwood's brain. It exited, carrying away a piece of skull and scalp the size of a human palm. Greenwood rocked back as if kicked, splaying onto the ground like a beached starfish.

"Open fire!" Koldstead screamed.

After that it was bedlam. The air shivered and shook with screaming rounds. Hot shell casings rolled smoking on the ground. The grassy clods at the edge of the lawn jumped like stung frogs. The return fire was murderous. Punch holes began appearing on the other side of the official IRS vehicles.

The IRS with their handguns and small arms were no match for the superior fire being directed at them. Their only advantage was in having the high ground. Koldstad ordered his men to lay down a sustained fire so the enemy didn't dare poke their heads up to aim.

That didn't stop them. The enemy just angled their weapons up and fired blindly. The sedan, van and delivery truck took most of the damage. Safety glass showered in nuggets. Tires burst and hissed until they were flat. Under the blazing onslaught, the three vehicles actually drummed and rocked on their springs.

"Get behind your engine blocks!" Koldstad ordered.

A man, moving to obey, caught one in the ankle. Screaming, he grabbed himself.

Koldstad shot to pieces a hand trying to angle an Uzi at them in return. That only seemed to make them madder because there came a lull while the enemy regrouped, and suddenly they were coming up over the grass slope, yelling and firing like damn Comanches.

"What's that they're yelling?" Koldstad cried over the din.

No one answered. They were too busy firing back.

Koldstad joined the fire storm. He picked a man at random and perforated his thigh. The man stumbled and rolled. On the black front of his battle suit, there was a white smudge. Koldstad caught a glimpse of it as the man fell. It was unreadable, but familiar.

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Koldstad ordered.

An agent man turned to call, "What?"

"I said cease your damn shooting!"

But it was too late. No one paid any attention. His men were too busy trying to preserve their lives.

"IRS! IRS!" Koldstad shouted. "Dammit, we're with the Internal Revenue Service!"

The window glass was really flying now.

Abruptly Koldstad fell on the body of Greenwood, stripping him of his blue windbreaker with the letters IRS stenciled on the back. The letters were stained with blood now.

Koldstad took a chance. He reached up and snapped off the car antenna. A bullet gouged the car hood less than a foot from his eager fingers. Then he hung the jacket on the thing and with both hands paid it up so it stuck up above the line of the hood.

It began kicking and twitching under the lash of bullets.

"Dammit, read the letters!" Koldstad said through too-tight teeth.

Then, to make matters worse, his agents began running out of ammo.

They looked at him with sick, confused eyes.

Koldstad dropped the antenna and, as the gunmen in black came surging around from both directions, he lifted his hands above his head.

"We surrender!"

His men, helpless, followed suit. Except for those who were trying to hide under the chassis of their vehicles.

A thick-set man in a shapeless white hood came around with a shotgun.

"Freeze!" he yelled, finger white on the trigger. "DEA!"

"IRS!" Koldstad screamed back. "We're the goddamn IRS!"

There was a moment of stunned silence. Jaws dropped slowly, and faces turned gray and then drained bone white.

A DEA man vomited violently. Others began retching. His own face fish white, Jack Koldstad climbed to his feet. But only after the white finger on the shotgun trigger relaxed and turned pink again.

"You in charge here?" Koldstad demanded.

The thick man stripped off his white hood to reveal a shaggy red beard and no-nonsense eyes. "Tardo. Drug Enforcement Administration."

"Koldstad. IRS. You just shot the shit out of three official cars, not to mention my trainee."

"You drew down on us first," Tardo pointed out, his voice surly.

"You barbarians were storming ashore like this was the beach at Normandy," Koldstad said hotly. "Of course we drew down on you first. We thought you were drug runners."

"Like hell."

"We're seizing this hospital for failure to report income in excess of ten thousand dollars and for violating Title 21, Section 881 of the United States Code."

Tardo's blunt face darkened. "This is a suspected turkey-drug factory. It's ours."

"What do you base that on?"

"A telephone tipoff that large wire transfers go through the Folcroft bank account regularly."

Koldstad blinked. "That's what red-flagged us, too. But we have jurisdiction."

"No way. This is our bust."

The two men stepped up to each other until their noses almost met. They glared. Around them their men fingered their weapons uneasily.

"I've got three wounded," Tardo said. "That makes this mine."

"And I have one wounded and one dead agent. Trump that ace."

Tardo showed his teeth as he ground them in anger.

"We gotta cover each other's butt on this," he said, low voiced.

"I'm prepared to let the chips fall exactly where they will," Koldstad said. "Exactly."

"Tell you what. You get the medical equipment and any loose cash. We take the bank account, vehicles and, of course, any drugs we find. And DEA goes in first. Fair enough?"

"We already have a lien on the bank account," Koldstad said. "And a DEA bullet in a dead IRS agent. IRS goes in first."

Tardo scratched his beard thoughtfully. "That building looks to be worth a cool ten mil. It's yours uncontested if we can keep the mutual embarrassment to a minimum. What say?"

"Done."

Tardo offered his hand. "Shake on it?"

"Greenwood does all my hand shaking for me."

"Which one is he?"

"The one with his brains fertilizing the damn grass," Koldstad said tightly.

Chapter 4

The Master of Sinanju usually awoke with the sun.

But there was no sun where he slept. All was dark. There were no windows in this place of gray walls and bad, musty air where the sun never shone.

He was old-so old that in almost the entire history of the human race a man was counted fortunate if he lived half of the current life span of the Master of Sinanju, who had already seen one hundred winters-even if he now slept on a simple reed mat in the lower-most dungeon of the brick fortress of his emperor, which was called Folcroft.

But it was necessary, and so Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, endured it.

And he did not need the rising sun to inform his senses that a new day had arrived. His perfect body told him that. His clear brain accepted the knowledge, and so he awoke each morning at the correct hour.

On this morning his body still slept when his perfect ears were assaulted by rudeness.

Without hesitating, his upper body snapped upward, his mind and eyes coming open simultaneously, as if a spring had uncoiled.

The walls of the Folcroft dungeon-called by Westerners a basement-were thick and made of the ugly sand-and-mud concoction called concrete. Still, sounds could penetrate it if they were loud enough.

These sounds were.

The sharp reports of pistols punctuated by the rattle of the noisier weapons carried by Westerners so incompetent they could not even kill with a single correctly delivered bullet reverberated dully. Men yelled in the coarse manner of the West, their voices high and hoarse.

"Boom sticks!" Chiun squeaked. "My emperor needs me!"

And he flung off his simple linen sleeping kimono, taking up the night black silk one that lay neatly folded at his bedside. It cracked open like a parachute before settling over him like a shroud. His tiny feet slid into simple black sandals.

Face determined, the Master of Sinanju cried aloud.

"Beware, defilers of Fortress Folcroft! Your doom has awakened!"

Then he hesitated.

"What if they have come for the gold?" he squeaked.

The gold lay in neat stacks on the other side of a triple-locked basement vault. Only Emperor Smith possessed the keys-not that Chiun would need keys to get at the gold, which was his payment for the coming year's worth of service. Normally it was shipped directly to the village of his ancestors. But the gold had been hijacked from the submarine conveying it to Sinanju, on the rocky and forbidding coast of North Korea, and had been recovered only with great difficulty.

Since the Master of Sinanju had recovered the gold himself, it was considered salvage. This was replacement gold, offered to seal the latest contract between America and Chiun, who headed the greatest house of assassins in human history, the House of Sinanju. Practitioners of the first and greatest martial art, also called Sinanju, the Masters of Sinanju had served the greatest thrones of the ancient world and now served the most powerful nation of the modern world, America.

While Smith-whom Chiun called emperor because it was traditional to do so-made arrangements for another submarine to convey this gold to Korea, it was being kept in the Folcroft basement. And as long as it remained upon American soil, Chiun had vowed to guard it with his life every waking moment. This was the reason he slept in ignominy.

Chiun regarded the triple-locked door, worry written in every spiderweb wrinkle in his parchment features. What to do? His emperor needed him. But emperors were mortal. Gold endured forever.

The firing continued. It was getting worse.

"What if they have come for the gold?" he squeaked. "I must remain here to guard it."

A man screamed, mortally wounded.

"But if they have come for Smith, it is my sacred duty to protect his life. For if I fail, the gold of America is forfeit."

The Master of Sinanju formed ivory yellow fists with his long-nailed fingers. He stood rooted to the dusty concrete of the floor, his body immobilized by the dire necessity of racing to the side of him whom he had sworn to protect and the equal need to safeguard the gold he had yet to earn. The wispy tail of his beard quivered with his torment. The puffs of snow over each ear likewise trembled. His hazel eyes squeezed into walnuts in his pain.

In the end the Master of Sinanju left the gold.

There was nothing else to do. His ancestors would either honor him or revile him after the events of this day. He did not know. But he would do his duty, and if his decision was a wrong one, a severe penalty would be exacted upon those who forced this odious decision upon him.

THE MASTER of SINANJU padded purposefully up the sloping concrete floor to the corrugated steel door of the loading dock. He did not slow as he approached it. Instead, he lifted one hand, extending his index finger with its long, curving nail that looked so delicate.

Chiun brought the nail up and then down, and when it came into contact with the steel corrugations, the metal squealed and parted vertically.

Taking the sharp edges of the rip in his hand, the Master of Sinanju exerted simple opposing pressure. The vertical rent exploded apart. He stepped through onto the loading dock.

Chiun disdained the steps and dropped off the dock, his black skirts billowing as he landed with a grace that belied his great age.

Keeping to the edges of the building, he moved along the walls, turning corners like a floating black rag dragged by a stick. Even in the clear morning light, a watcher would have not read his movement as those of man, but as something fitful and inanimate.

Thus did the Master of Sinanju come upon the invaders of his emperor's fortress, unheralded and unsuspected.

They stood around the entrance, relaxed in their manner, their weapons lowered.

The faithful guard in blue knelt at their feet in abject surrender, his holster empty, his hands tied behind his back with a plastic loop. It was shameful to behold. The man should have given his life before allowing this to come to pass.

The invaders in their black garments stood watch, obviously confident that their fellows had captured their prize. By their manner, it was already too late. Folcroft had fallen. The way their eyes fell voraciously upon the steel vehicles in the parking lot told him this.

Chiun withdrew. Stealth was called for now, not death. The Master of Sinanju would deal out death in his own time.

The walls of Folcroft were of brick. Coming to a point where he would not be seen, the Master of Sinanju stopped and took hold of the bricks where they met. He began climbing upward, hands and feet bringing him effortlessly to the second floor.

He paused on a windowsill, and the fingernail that had been hardened by years of diet and exercise and will showed that it could defeat glass as well as steel. Chiun traced a circle in the pane with a swift motion that compressed the squeak of the glass into a short bark that might be mistaken for a dog's.

Still, it was a sound, and it carried.

A man entered the room, gun in hand. His eyes swept the room and came to rest upon the figure of the Master of Sinanju floating on the other side of the window glass.

Bringing a weapon from under his coat, he identified himself.

"IRS!"

Tapping the circle, Chiun reached in in time to catch the circle of glass before it fell. He flicked his wrist. The disc of glass sailed across the room and through the open door, neatly separating the man standing there from his head.

Chiun entered through the circular opening and padded past the invader who lay quivering in two parts, an expression of wonderment on his upturned face. Chiun erased the expression with the heel of his sandal. It erased his face, as well.

"Barley drinkers," Chiun hissed.

Moving down the corridor, his ears captured sounds.

"Get a doctor," a man yelled. "He's choking!"

"Anybody know the Heimlich Maneuver? Get him to cough it up!"

The shouting was coming from the direction of Smith's office.

Chiun picked up his pace. His feet seemed to but brush the floor, but they propelled him along like a gazelle. His pipestem arms churning in his swishing kimono sleeves, and his pumping legs made his silken skirts swirl in agitation.

No one heard his approach; no one sensed his growing shadow.

They would not be aware of him until his hands were at their vitals--and the moment in which they would recognize their doom would be as brief as a spark.

FROM THE MOMENT he stepped into Folcroft Sanitarium, it only got worse for Jack Koldstad.

The lobby guard was standing in front of his desk, his hands in the air, his revolver at his feet. His arms trembled.

"These premises are hereby seized by order of the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service," Koldstad barked.

"Okay by me," the guard said, his voice quavering. "Dr. Smith said to do whatever you fellas say."

An agent stiffened. "Did you hear that? He knew we were coming!"

"Where is Smith?" Koldstad barked.

"Second floor. Right off the elevator. Can't miss it."

Koldstad turned to his aide. "Hand this flunky off to DEA. It'll give them something to do besides scratching themselves while we secure the building."

Koldstad led his men up the stairs. An elevator could be stopped by cutting the power. It had happened to him twice before he learned to take the stairs even if it was fifty flights up.

There was an ample-bosomed woman about fifty years old trembling behind a second-floor reception desk. Her hands were caught up around her throat.

Koldstad flashed his ID in her jowly face. "IRS. Where's Harold W Smith?"

"Dr. Smith is... is in his office."

They went in, guns drawn. Koldstad took point.

They found Harold Smith behind his desk, clutching his throat and lunging for something behind him.

"Freeze! IRS!"

His face turning purple, Harold Smith ignored the order.

"Dammit, I said 'Freeze!'"

Someone shouted in Koldstad's ear. "He's going for a gun!"

Koldstad fired a warning shot past Smith's gray head. It struck the plate-glass window behind him, bringing it down in large, dangerous shards.

A flat triangle of glass struck Smith on the head. He went down.

Koldstad rushed to his side, knocked the glass away and turned him over.

Smith's face was a strange color-purple gray. The gray was giving way to the purple hue.

"He's going into cardiac arrest!" an agent said.

Koldstad saw the crumpled paper cup in Smith's hand and noticed the water dispenser. "Dammit, he's choking. Get him some water!"

While an agent struggled with the water dispenser, Jack Koldstad fought to pry Harold Smith's strong jaws open. Smith set his teeth, and his jaw muscles hardened to stone.

"Stop fighting me, dammit! I'm trying to save you!"

Smith clenched his teeth all the more. He was coughing violently, and the cough had nowhere to go except out his nose. Expelled air mixed with hot mucus spattered Koldstad across the face.

"Dammit, Smith. I'm trying to help you!"

His eyes rolling up in his head, Smith clawed Koldstad's face with blunt fingernails.

"Give me a hand here!" Koldstad shouted.

Two agents dropped to their knees in the cramped space behind Smith's desk and fought to hold the elderly man down.

"What's wrong with this guy? He doesn't want to be saved."

"Maybe he swallowed poison," an agent suggested.

"Where's that doctor, dammit? Who knows the Heimlich maneuver? We can't have another casualty. It'll be our pensions."

Then a voice like a brass gong filled the room.

"Hold!"

All heads turned toward the sound. Koldstad's head came around. And he couldn't believe his eyes.

A tiny Asian man stood in the room. He was hardly more than five feet tall, looked older than God and wore a kimono that belonged on a geisha. The door was blocked by two armed IRS agents. Yet he had gotten past them. The twin dumbfounded expressions roosting on the guard's faces told that tale.

"Who the hell are you?" Koldstad said hotly.

"I am Chiun, personal physician to that man you are manhandling. Stand aside, barley drinkers, for only I can help him."

"Barley-"

"Make haste if you wish to spare his life."

Koldstad hesitated. Smith let go with another violent suppressed cough, and the hot mucus that splattered across the front of Koldstad's coat decided him.

"Give that man room to work."

The agents withdrew as the tiny Asian knelt.

"O Smith, speak the words I wish to hear."

Smith opened his mouth.

"Kkk-"

"I do not understand you, Smith."

"He's trying to say something, but there's something caught in his throat," Koldstad said.

And as Koldstad watched, the tiny Asian used two delicate-looking fingers to pry apart Harold Smith's jaws. Koldstad had tried the same thing, and his strength hadn't been near enough.

But the old guy acted as if he were picking apart the petals of a rose. Smith's jaws parted. He hacked.

Keeping the jaws apart with one hand, the tiny Asian reached into his mouth to get at the obstructing object lodged deep within.

"You'll need to Heimlich him to get it out, whatever it is."

"Silence! I need silence to save this man."

Then the old guy began massaging Smith's angular Adam's apple with a caressing thumb.

Smith heaved out a violent hack, and something seemed to pop up from his mouth. It was white, and Koldstad tried to track it with his eyes. He lost it as it sailed past the old doctor's shoulder. Koldstad blinked. It seemed to disappear in midair. He approached, face quizzical. He hadn't heard the sound of the white object falling to the floor. The floor was polished pine. There should have been a click.

While Koldstad was searching the floor, Harold Smith subsided.

"Speak, Smith."

"Kikk-"

"Swallow. It will ease your throat." "Here's some water," said Koldstad, handing over a cup filled with water. Smith swallowed. There were tears in his eyes. The first word he got out was "Kill..."

Koldstad asked, "What did he say?"

"I do not know."

". . . me. . ." added Smith.

"Hush, Smith. You are distraught. You require rest."

"Kill me," said Harold Smith. "Please." His gray eyes were locked with those of the old Asian. They pleaded.

"Did he just ask you to kill him?"

"He has been under great strain of late. We must get him to his bed to rest."

"Not before I finish official business," Koldstad said, looming over the stricken man. "Harold Smith, I am seizing this hospital for willful failure to pay income taxes, concealing income from the Internal Revenue Service, violating the Money Laundering Control Act of 1983 by illegally importing into this country income in amounts exceeding ten thousand dollars and failing to pay the lawful taxes thereon."

Smith suddenly fainted. He collapsed onto the floor as if defeated. There was no warning. He had started to sit up when the old Asian simply touched the center of his forehead as if to flick a bead of sweat away. Instead, Smith all but fell apart under the touch.

"Damn," said Koldstad.

The old Asian arose. "Summon a doctor to take him to his bed of rest."

Koldstad narrowed suspicious eyes. "I thought you said you were his doctor."

"You misunderstood. I am his adviser."

"Financial adviser?"

"Adviser. I am called Chiun."

Koldstad whirled on his men, red faced. "Somebody confirm this. Drag that weepy secretary in here."

Mrs. Mikulka was brought in trembling.

"Why are you people doing this?" she asked tearfully. "Dr. Smith is one of the-"

"-lowest forms of life on the planet today," Jack Koldstad said harshly. "A suspected tax evader."

"Suspected! Is that any reason to come into a hospital with drawn guns?"

"Where tax revenue is concerned, Uncle Sam doesn't take prisoners." Koldstad pointed to Chiun. "Do you know this man?"

"Yes, that is Mr. Chiun."

"So you know him?"

"Yes. He is a former patient who often returns to Folcroft."

"Patient?"

"I understand he is completely cured of his delusions."

"What delusions?"

"I don't know exactly. But he has been known to refer to Dr. Smith as 'Emperor.'"

"Emperor of what?"

"Of America, of course," replied the old Asian named Chiun.

All eyes went to him. Koldstad strode up to the tiny Oriental, towering over him. "Did you say America?"

"Yes. Smith secretly rules this land."

"What about the President?"

Chiun shrugged his black silk shoulders. "A mere puppet. Disposable and unimportant."

"And you're his adviser?"

"I stand by his throne and protect him from his enemies."

"Get a real doctor in here!" Koldstad shouted. "Fast. And place this little yellow nut under arrest."

"Catch me if you can," squeaked Chiun.

And in a swirl of skirts, he turned, making for the door.

"Stop him!"

The IRS agents at the door gave it their best. Their best involved dropping into a crouch, hands splayed as if to catch a fumbled football. It looked like a good strategy. But they were playing the wrong kind of ball.

The Master of Sinanju struck them like a black bowling ball. They cartwheeled in midair like tenpins, only to fall clutching one another in the mistaken impression they had grabbed their intended target.

Koldstad stepped over them and looked up and down the corridor. Something reached up and pulled him down by his navy blue necktie. His face struck the floor with so much force he bounced back to a standing position and had to be helped over to a couch.

"Dammit, what kind of madhouse is Smith running here?" Koldstad barked through bloody fingers that clutched his bruised nose.

"This is a sanitarium," Mrs. Mikulka pointed out timidly.

Chapter 5

Remo Williams noticed the circling birds first.

There was something wrong about the birds. He couldn't put his finger on it as he drove up the wooded road to Folcroft Sanitarium, but the birds were wrong. Very wrong.

His senses had been developed to the pinnacle of human achievement and beyond. His eyes could spot a deer tick making its way along its host from a distance of half a mile by the near-imperceptible movement of the deer's guard hairs.

The birds circled Folcroft in high, lazy spirals like condors. Remo thought of condors. Condors were not native to North America, so they couldn't be condors. Vultures, probably. Their wingspreads were too great for hawks, their bodies too small for sea gulls.

As Remo negotiated the winding road, his eyes kept going to the circling birds. They were black against the rising sun, and that made it harder for even his eyes to make out their color and nature.

Vultures, Remo decided. Vultures for sure. But why were they circling Folcroft as if it was dead?

As he got closer, he began to smell blood. The metallic tang hung in the early-morning air. There were other smells-death smells. Sinanju had not taught him to proceed cautiously when he smelled them. He had learned that as a Marine, back in Nam.

Pulling over to the side of the road, Remo got out. There were leaves underfoot. Without having to look down, his feet avoided them perfectly. That he hadn't learned in Vietnam. That was Sinanju, and so deeply ingrained it was second nature.

Remo moved on to the trees, easing from bole to bole until he found an oak tall enough to do him some good. He went up it.

Half the leaves were gone, but there was foliage enough to conceal him provided he didn't move.

From the branches Remo spotted the unguarded gate to Folcroft. There was a sign on one of the brick gate pillars. It read:

NO TRESPASSING

GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

SEIZED BY ORDER OF THE

INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

The black block letters were printed over the IRS seal.

"Damn, damn, damn," Remo said.

In the early days of his work for CURE, the supersecret agency that didn't exist, there had been a number of standing orders. Paramount among them was what to do if Folcroft was compromised in any way: disappear. Since Remo was CURE's enforcement arm, his very existence was a security secret.

In the old days Remo had taken security seriously. The years had taught him differently. He had been officially dead more than two decades now. Although thanks to the succession of plastic surgeries and the strange effects of his Sinanju training, he looked almost exactly the same now as he did then. For all intents and purposes, Remo hadn't aged. That very fact meant that if any old friend from his past ever came across him, knowing Remo had been executed by the State of New Jersey, he would naturally have leaped to a logical conclusion: Remo was his own son.

Remo had never had a son. Had never been married. But the days when he had to stay away from New Jersey and his past were long over. No one would assume that Remo Williams was above ground. Even if they did, the world wouldn't come to an end. Remo could be in the witness-protection program for all anyone knew. It was all Harold Smith bullshit.

Remo had had enough of Smith's bullshit. That was why he had quit CURE the week before. Technically he was a free agent, but he had agreed to stick around for the duration of Chiun's next contract on one condition: that Smith use CURE's massive computer outreach to help Remo locate his parents, living or dead.

Smith had agreed. Chiun, surprisingly, had gone along with it all. But Remo was serious this time. A year hence he would kiss Harold Smith, CURE and Folcroft Sanitarium goodbye. Forever.

Chiun, he would worry about then.

But as he hung in the crown of the oak, Remo understood that something unexpected had happened, something that promised to cheat him out of the one chance he had to unearth his roots.

CURE was under stress as the result of an effort by an old enemy-a superintelligent artificial-intelligence microchip called Friend-to destroy the organization. Friend, whose programming was dedicated to the mindless making of profit and the unremitting accumulation of wealth, had struck at CURE in a brilliant three-prong attack calculated to render the agency nonfunctional.

It had come at a critical time. Chiun had just negotiated the contract for the coming year. The gold had been shipped to the village of Sinanju on the West Korea Bay by submarine. A renegade North Korean frigate captain had commandeered it, destroying the sub and seizing the gold. Without gold, the contract was void. Without gold, the Master of Sinanju had withdrawn his services, along with Remo's.

At the same time Friend had struck at Remo indirectly. By a subtle manipulation of the data in the CURE computer system, a man's name had bubbled up to catch Smith's attention. A fugitive hit man, long wanted by the authorities. Exactly the kind of hit that Remo routinely handled between higher-priority assignments.

Remo had tracked him down on Smith's orders. And killed what was later discovered to be an innocent man in front of his wife and daughter. Their horrified faces still haunted Remo, shocking him enough to question his role as a secret assassin for an even more secret arm of the United States government.

When Chiun had balked at another year's service because of the missing shipment of gold, Remo already had one foot out the door.

The trouble continued piling up from there. CURE's computers became unreliable. Something somehow had managed to sever Harold Smith's direct telephone line to the President of the United States. CURE was cut off from the one US. official who knew it existed.

It was a masterful plan, and CURE should not have survived. But it had. The gold had been recovered. Friend had been deactivated as he was consummating a brilliant attempt to blackmail the U.S. government through computer manipulation designed to paralyze the federal banking system.

But the damage had been done. CURE had been hobbled, and all Remo cared about now was uncovering his past. The future would take care of itself.

And now this.

Remo wondered if the President had had something to do with this. Smith hadn't been getting along with the new President. They were like oil and water. And Friend had managed to divert the last of CURE's operating funds from its offshore bank. Smith had been trying to trace the lost taxpayer funds for over a week now. The President had not been happy to hear about that. The very existence of CURE offended him.

Maybe, Remo mused, he had decided to lower the boom this way.

Stepping to the ground, he decided to find out.

Moving low, Remo made his way to the sound. He eased into it, the cool water swallowing his bare feet. He had stepped out of his Italian loafers. The water drank his thighs, his waist and, after his dark hair dipped into the cool blue surface, the water regathered as if he had never been there.

No disturbance marked Remo's progress. He swam effortlessly, arms trailing loosely, feet kicking easily. So quiet was his progress that a sunfish failed to notice him until Remo had already passed his line of sight. Then it twisted away in staring-eyed panic.

When the rotting piles of the Folcroft dock-a relic of some long-ago period before Folcroft had been built-came into view, Remo arrowed toward the ground.

He came out of the water like a seal, on his stomach. The entire operation was soundless.

Lying on the mud, Remo lifted his head.

The smell of blood was still strong. Over the L-shaped brick building that was the headquarters for CURE, the three circling birds still described their tight looping pattern. Remo focused on them.

For the first time since he had embraced the sun source called Sinanju, his eyes failed him. The birds remained black against the sky of the new day, like living shadows. Remo couldn't make out their true color, never mind their markings and distinguishing features.

Not sea gulls, not vultures, not really like any birds he knew.

The skin along his bare forearms tightened with a vague fear.

Remo shifted his gaze to the window he knew was Harold Smith's. He didn't expect to see into it. The opacity of the one-way glass defeated even his sharp eyes.

The window was broken. Through the angular hole in the pane, Remo spotted figures moving about. Men in suits. Men who didn't belong in Harold Smith's office.

There was no sign of Smith.

Remo shifted his gaze. The water was draining from his clothes, and he was willing his body temperature to rise by fifteen degrees. That would take care of the remaining dampness in his clothes.

There were Cigarette boats beached in the mud not far from him. They were empty. The ground around the rise when the mud became high ground had been chewed up by feet and something more vicious.

The air was thick with stale gunpowder smell, Remo noticed. Digging his fingers into the tiny burrow in the mud, he pulled out an intact 9mm round.

Someone had attacked Folcroft by boat. That much was clear. But who had fought them back? Although Folcroft was technically one of America's most secret installations, Smith had never installed sophisticated security systems. There was only a single lobby guard, no barbed wire or electrified fences, no motion-sensing detectors or other such safeguards. Smith believed that installing such trappings would merely serve to advertise Folcroft's importance. He might as well string up Christmas lights that spelled out Secret High Security Installation. Do Not Enter.

It was Smith's New England sensibleness that betrayed him. Folcroft had been assaulted and taken. It had never happened before.

When Remo's clothes were dry enough to leave no dripping trail, he got up off his flat stomach and started to reconnoiter.

There were men standing about the Folcroft entrance, men in black fighting suits with various assault weapons slung from shoulders and belts. They smoked nervously. The way they hung their heads and slumped their shoulders jarred.

Their bodies screamed failure, not victory.

Remo spotted the letters DEA on the back of one man's jacket.

It didn't exactly clarify the situation, so he moved off to the southern exposure.

He knew Chiun had been sleeping in the Folcroft basement, guarding the gold he had wrangled from Smith until arrangements to ship it to Sinanju could be finalized. The Master of Sinanju had not let Remo forget it. Remo was supposed to take the day trick. And he was a half hour late.

Remo figured Chiun would be with the gold. When he found Chiun, he would start to find some answers.

Remo made it to the freight entrance without being spotted. Once he passed a DEA agent pissing behind a parked car. The man never so much as smelled the odor of sea salt clinging to Remo's clothing.

The corrugated freight door looked as if King Kong had punched his fist through it. The force was clearly outward, not inward. Chiun leaving. Only the Master of Sinanju could split corrugated steel so neatly down the middle before forcing the hole open.

Remo went in anyway.

The basement was dim and musty. The concrete floor sloped downward. There were no sounds or smells of intruders.

Remo reached Chiun's sleeping mat, found the hastily discarded sleeping kimono on the floor and understood that the assault had come with the dawn. Chiun had been lying here when the shooting had started and flung his sleeping kimono aside in his haste. Normally the Master of Sinanju was too fastidious to toss it aside so carelessly.

Remo went to the triple-locked door in an otherwise blank concrete wall. In the dark his eyes saw true. The locks were secure, the door closed. That meant the gold was safe. It was probably the chief reason those DEA agents were lounging about the front lawn and not floating as dismembered body parts on the sound being nibbled at by the fishes.

From behind the door came a bitter tang. Not blood. Certainly not gold, which hadn't a specific smell, although Chiun had long insisted that he could smell gold at a distance of six Korean ri-about three miles.

Remo eased up to the door. He retreated suddenly, holding his nose. The smell was burned plastic. Smith's computers. He had destroyed them. Not a good sign. Smith would sooner take the poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his vest than destroy his precious mainframes.

The realization hit Remo then. "Damn!"

Reversing, he made for the stairs. The worst had happened. Smith was by now either dead or dying.

"Damn that Smith," Remo hissed. "What the hell's wrong with him? The IRS isn't the KGB."

He glided up the stairs.

There goes my last hope of tracking down my parents, Remo thought bitterly.

An IRS agent was standing guard at the top of the stairs. He made the mistake of challenging Remo.

"Halt. Who goes there?"

Remo went for his wallet, intending to flash one of his many fictitious ID cards supplied by Smith. He was wondering if he should try to outrank the IRS agent with his Remo Eastwood Secret Service badge or bluff him with his Remo Helmsley IRS special agent's card.

The point became moot when the agent pulled out a 9 mm Glock.

Remo yanked the Glock out of the agent's hand and inserted the blunt barrel into his mouth. The IRS agent looked surprised, then bewildered, then a thin golden stream began to come out of his left pant cuff to cut into the high polish of his cordovans.

"I'm an innocent citizen," Remo grated. "Who are you?"

The agent managed to get the mushy letters IRS past his chipped teeth and plastic side arm.

"Since when does that give you cause to shoot at an innocent hospital employee?"

The man's explanation refused to get past the Glock, so Remo removed it, keeping the barrel hovering menacingly. The agent understood Remo had no intention of shooting him. His finger wasn't even on the trigger. But having felt the impact on his teeth, he recognized the threat.

"You can't do this to the IRS."

"The IRS did it to me first. Now I want answers."

The thin stream petered out as the agent got his answer organized. "This hospital has been seized by IRS order."

"I saw the sign. Why? And don't tell me for deducting his 900-number calls. Harold Smith is as honest as the day is long."

"The days are getting shorter. Smith failed to report over twelve million dollars of income. That makes him a money launderer. Maybe a drug dealer."

"Drugs! Smith?"

"This is a private hospital. A perfect cover for illicit drug dealing."

"That why the DEA is standing outside, scratching themselves?"

The IRS man nodded. "They landed just as we pulled in through the gate. There were two separate operations. We got the worst of it, fortunately."

"What do you mean, fortunately?"

"Well, we lost a man, but he was only a trainee. And another agent took one in the ankle. That gave us the moral high ground to claim jurisdiction."

"That's gotta be worth a man and an ankle," Remo said dryly.

"Without tax revenue, there is no America," the agent said in a wounded voice.

"Tell it to Thomas Jefferson."

"The founding father who said something about taxation without representation being tyranny."

"Never heard of him."

"Do tell. Where's Smith?"

"They took him to intensive care."

"Dead?"

"We don't know what's wrong with him. He's stiff as a corpse. Paralyzed, but his eyes are open." The agent repressed a visible shudder.

"Sounds scary," Remo remarked.

"I wouldn't want that to happen to me."

"Perish the thought," said Remo, reaching up to tap the man on the exact center of his forehead, where his third eye was supposed to be. The man went out like a human light. Remo grabbed him by his tie and eased him to the floor.

Remo left him lying flat on his back, stiff as a board. But not before he stopped to peel back the agent's eyelids and remove the opaque glass dome from an overhead light so the harsh bulb glare struck him full in his unprotected eyes.

Maybe the guy wouldn't go blind when he came to again, but he'd be wearing sunglasses for the next year.

Remo went up the steps. He met Mrs. Mikulka, Smith's longtime private secretary, who was carrying down a cardboard box. She was fighting back tears.

"What's going on?" Remo asked.

She caught at her throat. "Oh, you startled me."

"Sorry."

"I've been fired."

"Smith fired you?"

"No. The IRS."

"How can they fire you?"

"They have taken over the hospital. I barely had time to get my things together." She showed him the cardboard box, whose top flaps hung open and forlorn.

Remo looked into the box. "It's empty," he said.

"They confiscated my personal effects."

"Why?"

"They called them assets. My poor son's graduation photo was all they let me keep. And only because I fought them for it."

"Look," Remo said sympathetically, "I'm sure we can get this straightened out. You go home and wait for the all-clear."

"Poor Dr. Smith is in intensive care. They burst in on him as if he were some sort of criminal. But he's not like that. Not at all. He's the dearest man. Why, when my son passed away-"

"Smith up on the third floor?"

"Yes."

"Go home. Someone will call you when everything gets straightened out."

On the third floor Remo eased the fire door open. The buzz of voices was a blur. He couldn't make out any one voice in particular. He was in the process of zeroing in on one voice when he became aware of a subtle warmth on the cool stairwell.

Remo whirled.

The Master of Sinanju stood regarding him with brittle eyes.

"What happened?" Remo asked.

"Idiots happened. Why are you not guarding the gold?"

"I could ask the same of you," Remo said pointedly.

"It was our agreement that I sleep with the gold and that you pass your idle waking hours guarding the gold. When I was awakened by rudeness and ignorance, you were not there."

"I was paying my respects."

Chiun made a disgusted face. "You have no respects. Not for yourself. Not for the one who exalted you above all others of your stumbling ilk." Chiun's hazel eyes narrowed suddenly. "Respects to whom?"

"To myself. I went to the grave last night."

"Only a white would mourn for himself."

"I looked into the mirror of memory."

Chiun cocked his birdlike head to one side. "And?"

"I saw a woman's face. She had Freya's eyes." Remo lowered his voice to a whisper. "Chiun, I think it was my mother."

"You did not see your father?"

"No."

"How could you summon up your mother and not your father?"

"Because my mother appeared to me."

"Like a spirit?"

"Exactly."

"What was this lying wench wearing?"

"That's no way to speak about my mother, dammit."

Chiun clapped long-nailed hands together. Dust filtered down from the ceiling in response. "Answer!"

"I don't remember," Remo admitted.

"You have the eyes of a hawk and you do not remember common clothes?"

Remo thought about that a moment. "I don't think she was wearing any."

"Your mother was naked?"

"No. I can't explain it. I don't remember her being naked, but I know she wasn't wearing clothes."

Chiun's hazel eyes narrowed thinly. "You did indeed see your mother, Remo."

"She was trying to tell me how to find my father. She said if she could stand up where she lay, she could see mountains and a stream called Laughing Brook."

"Your mother is dead, Remo."

"I know," Remo said softly.

"But your father is not."

"She thought it was important for me to find him."

"Then it is. But first we have work to do."

"Without Smith, I don't have a prayer of finding anyone. What the hell's going on?"

"I do not know. I awoke to rudeness and boom sticks booming, and then the barley drinkers were swarming over Folcroft."

"Barley drinkers?"

"The lesser English."

"Lesser?"

"The Irish terrorists. Those who break knees and mothers' hearts with their cruelty."

"You mean the IRS?"

"Exactly."

"Little Father, the Irish terrorists are called the IRA. Irish Republican Army. The IRS is the Internal Revenue Service."

Chiun squeaked, "Those who tax! The taxing ones?"

"Exactly."

"They must not find my gold. Quickly! We must go to guard it."

"What about Smith?" asked Remo.

"I have placed him in the sleep from which only I can awaken him. The fool attempted to end his life with poison."

"Just because the IRS landed on him?"

"No doubt he is guilty of skimming vast sums from his overseers. That can await. The gold must be moved."

"We move that gold, and the IRS will be on us like white on rice-excuse the expression."

"Then we must dispatch these IRS confiscators."

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

"Why not? If we kill them all, they will leave us alone."

"You don't know the IRS. They'll keep sending out agents until they get what they want."

"Then we will kill them all!" Chiun proclaimed.

"They'll just keep swearing in more agents. It's a bottomless pit. Forget it, Little Father. We gotta solve this some other way."

"What other way?"

"I don't know, but we can't hang around this stairwell forever. Let's make tracks."

"I would rather make IRS bodies."

But the Master of Sinanju followed Remo down the stairs on cat feet.

On the way down, they heard a steady beating like a drum.

Doom doom doom doom...

"What the hell is that?" Remo wondered aloud.

"I do not know and I do not care," sniffed Chiun.

"Sounds familiar."

"We have more important matters before us than some lunatic beating an animal skin."

Remo stopped abruptly in front of a fire door. "Sounds like it's on the other side."

But when he flung open the door, there was only a deserted corridor. And the drumming had stopped.

Shrugging, Remo started back down. They reached the basement undetected.

Chiun flew to the triple-locked door and saw that it was secure.

"We must guard this with our lives," he said grimly.

"Look, can you hold the fort for an hour or so?" Remo asked, anxious voiced.

Chiun looked up at him suspiciously.

"Better than you, but what is so important that you would leave the one who raised you up from the muck of Christianity and other Western nonsense to defend the gold of his village alone?"

"There was something else my mother said," Remo said.

"What was it?"

"She said I knew my father."

"Then she is not your mother, for she lied to you."

"Her exact words were, 'He is known to you, my son.' She called me 'son.' I gotta find out who she is, Chiun."

And seeing the troubled light in his pupil's dark eyes, the Master of Sinanju said, "I give you one hour. But what do you expect to accomplish in so brief a time?"

"I'm going to get her picture," said Remo in a strange voice.

But before the Master of Sinanju could question his obviously demented pupil further, he slipped out the side door.

Chiun took up a position before the triple-locked door, his face stern, his eyes troubled. Far more troubled than those of his pupil.

For he knew what Remo Williams did not. That he had met his father, unknowing, and must not learn the truth of his parentage. Otherwise, the Master of Sinanju might never be forgiven for concealing this truth.

Chapter 6

Harold W Smith heard the federal magistrate's charges from his hospital bed.

He was awake. They could tell that by his eyes. The attending physician had proved that he was awake even if he could not move his body by getting Smith to blink once for yes and twice for no.

It had been half a day now. A half day since the combined raids by the IRS and the DEA had overwhelmed Folcroft's virtually nonexistent defenses. A half day since the Master of Sinanju had thwarted his attempt to ingest the suicide pill that was Smith's last resort in the event of catastrophic compromise. Once before, he had been forced to take that pill. Chiun had stopped him then, too. Didn't he understand? Once CURE was no more, Smith would have to die.

Perhaps it was the memory of that last wrenching failure that had caused Smith's mouth to go dry as he took the pill into his mouth. Perhaps it was the suspicion that it was the new President's way of shutting down CURE and making certain it stayed shut down that had brought on the raids.

Smith could only surmise these things. Whatever the case, the pill would not go down his dry throat, but had lodged there instead. Chiun had caused it to pop out with his irresistible manipulations, and with that thoughtless act went Smith's final chance to end it all.

Now he lay paralyzed. Again the Master of Sinanju had been very clever. He understood that Smith would find a way-any way-to end his life if he had the strength and mobility to do so.

But as the federal magistrate droned out the charges-the titles and sections and subsections of the Revenue Code-which had come crashing down on his head like a rain of hard brick, Smith began to realize the absurdity of it all.

They thought he was some kind of drug merchant and money launderer. Where could they have gotten so ludicrous an idea?

"These charges include the willful and deliberate failure to report some twelve million dollars in income that were surreptitiously wire transferred to the Folcroft Sanitarium bank account-an account that you, Dr. Smith, have sole control over. No currency-transaction report was generated, and there was no rendering to the IRS of estimated tax payments. How do you plead to these charges? Guilty or not guilty? Blink once for guilty, twice for not."

Smith blinked twice.

"Since you have waived the right to counsel, I hereby place you under house arrest. You are not to leave these premises under any circumstance."

I am completely paralyzed, Smith thought bitterly. What is that man thinking of?

"Pending a federal trial, I have agreed to the petition of the Internal Revenue Service that they take complete operating control of this hospital pending the outcome of said trial. You may of course file a petition with the tax court if you feel this seizure is baseless or excessive."

Smith would have groaned if his throat would let him.

They would search Folcroft for contraband, if they hadn't already done so. They would find the CURE computers. Even with their data banks erased, this would raise unanswerable questions. And there was the gold stored with the computers. It had belonged to Friend. Its recovery by the Master of Sinanju and Remo meant CURE had operating capital for the coming fiscal year. It would be impossible to explain away.

As impossible as the twelve million dollars that now lay on deposit in the Folcroft bank account.

The amount could not be a coincidence, Smith realized.

During Friend's multipronged attempt to neutralize Folcroft so he could blackmail the US. banking system, the relentlessly greedy VLSI chip had infiltrated the computer links that governed the Federal Reserve wire-transfer system. Money began disappearing from bank computers all over the nation, including the CURE operating fund in the Grand Cayman Trust headquartered on Grand Cayman Island in the Caribbean.

The money had disappeared. Smith had coerced Friend into returning all the rerouted funds before shutting him down for good. He had forgotten to specify the missing CURE money. It was a serious oversight, committed at the end of a very taxing operation.

Now Smith understood where the missing funds had gone to. Friend had wire transferred them to the Folcroft account. It was a final scorpion sting from an old foe who had refused to die. Folcroft was already being audited by the IRS. Friend's doing once again, Smith now realized.

No doubt Friend had also dropped a dime with the DEA.

Thus, from the oblivion of his electronic grave, Friend had exacted his final revenge upon CURE and Harold W Smith.

There was no way to explain away twelve million dollars in the operating account of a sleepy private hospital. No doubt the bank that handled the Folcroft business account itself was under great scrutiny.

CURE was finished.

Harold Smith lay on his hospital bed prison wishing for the strength to finish himself, too.

But only the Master of Sinanju had the power to fulfill that particular wish.

JACK KOLDSTAD was wondering exactly what kind of madhouse Folcroft Sanitarium really was.

After six hours it was very clear that it functioned-at least outwardly-as a private hospital. Its patients were generally chronic convalescent cases, older and from moneyed families prepared to warehouse their sick until the inevitable end of natural life. None of that Dr. Kevorkian crap here.

There was a psychiatric wing for the mentally ill. He hadn't checked into it yet. A subordinate had done that. Koldstad wasn't sure he wanted to deal with those kinds of people. He had enough problems on his hands.

First there was Dr. Smith's paralysis. None of the Folcroft physicians could explain it. The man was obviously alert and conscious. His eyes were open. But he couldn't even twitch. Koldstad wondered if it was psychosomatic, so he had slipped into Smith's room when no one was looking and jabbed Smith in the cheek with a needle.

Smith hadn't flinched. He had batted his eyes and glared at Koldstad. But not a twitch otherwise.

Just to make sure, Koldstad had inserted the needle in a couple of other tender places with the same disappointing result.

He didn't try the technique on his own agent. They had found him on the first-floor stairwell on the floor, eyes staring, stiff as a board, but alive and thinking. Koldstad ordered him into an available room and gave instructions to keep a lid on it.

No one could explain him, either.

And no one could explain the drumming.

Koldstad had first heard it while going through Dr. Smith's desk. He'd found a wide array of antacid pills, foams, aspirin and other common remedies-much of it marked Free or Sample-but no drugs or incriminating papers.

The drumming had come from Smith's private washroom.

It was a steady, almost monotonous drumbeat. Doom doom doom doom. It had continued while Koldstad fumbled for the washroom key, and it was still going when he'd jammed it into the lock.

When the door was flung open, the drumming had stopped.

There had been nothing in the washroom, either. Koldstad had checked everywhere, including the toilet tank, which was a common place to hide contraband.

When he closed the door, the drumming had started all over again.

Doom doom doom doom...

It had stopped when he'd thrown the door open.

Three times the phenomenon had repeated itself. Koldstad figured there was some mechanism involved. Close the door, the drumming starts. Open it, it stops. He had gone over every inch of the door and its jamb and found nothing even after he'd removed the door from its hinges. There had been no sign of wiring or strange devices. Not even a microchip. He knew you could buy greeting cards that played little musical notes when you opened the cards, activating a pressure-sensitive microchip.

But there was no microchip to be found, and the sound was too loud for a tiny chip or even a big chip.

Then there were the damn vultures that kept circling Folcroft.

They had been doing that since Koldstad first rolled through the Folcroft gates at dawn. It was approaching dusk now, and they were still at it. No one could explain what they were or how they came to be there.

They never broke off for food or rest or even to take a dump. It was infuriating. It defied all logic, all rules.

Jack Koldstad was a stickler for rules. So he had one of his men fetch up a scope-mounted Ruger rifle and personally went out on the grass to bring those damn birds down.

He went through an even dozen clips. Sure, he missed a time or three. But they were flying lazy circles. Impossible to miss time after time. Yet not a pinfeather came fluttering to earth.

Most unnerving was the fact that they looked exactly the same through the scope as they did to the naked eye. Dark. Indistinct. Unidentifiable.

Koldstad jerked out the twelfth and last clip from the rifle and threw it away in disgust.

"You!"

A G-12 flinched under the lash of his call. "Sir?"

"You have bird duty."

"Sir?"

"Watch those birds. They have to tire sometime. When they do, follow them. Follow them and kill them if you can."

"But why?"

"Those damn birds are flouting the authority of the almighty Internal Revenue Service. That's why!"

"Yes, sir."

Koldstad stormed into Folcroft. This was ridiculous. They'd been on-site for most of the day already and they hadn't completed the search yet. It was all the fault of the damn DEA. They were fighting the IRS every step of the way. The unshaven bastards. Where did they get off trying to usurp IRS authority?

He took the elevator to the second-floor office that bore the legend Dr. Harold W. Smith, Director on the door. When he opened the door, a blast of chilly mid-September air struck him. Hunching his shoulders, Koldstad went in and took the cracked leather executive's chair behind the desk, whose top was a slab of tempered black tinted glass.

The cold air coming through the break in the picture window made the close-shaven skin on the back of his neck creep and bunch, but Jack Koldstad ignored it.

It was time to report in to the local office, and Jack Koldstad wasn't looking forward to it. Still, he dialed the number without hesitation, even if his dialing finger did quiver a little.

"Mr. Brull's office," a clipped female voice announced.

Koldstad cleared his throat. "Jack Koldstad calling for Mr. Brull. "

"One moment."

The voice that came on the line a moment later sounded like two stones grinding together.

"What's your report, Koldstad?"

"We're still in the inventory stage," Koldstad said.

"What the hell?"

"This is a big place, sir. And with the DEA to contend with-"

"Who's the DEA honcho on the ground there?"

"Tardo. First name Wayne. Middle initial P. "

"Social Security number?"

"I haven't developed that information yet, sir."

"Doesn't matter. How many Wayne P. Tardo's can be working out of the New York DEA? Did you ask him the question?"

"I did."

"His reply?"

"He informed me that no, he had never been called in for a tax audit, Mr. Brull."

"The bastard sweat when he answered you?"

"No. But his upper lip twitched noticeably, and since then he's been on the quiet side."

"Then you have no excuses. Get Folcroft buttoned up and locked down. I want answers. What has been going on down there, how long has it been going on, and how much money is the service owed?"

"Understood, Mr. Brull. What about the DEA?"

"Those bastards would seize a rendering plant if they knew it would come up for a government auction three months later. They're seizure happy, and that makes their people all ripe for a field audit. You won't be bothered by the DEA once I make some calls."

"Very good, Mr. Brull."

"And your estimates had better be damn high or I'll bust you down to extractor by the end of this fiscal quarter. Between that dead G-12 trainee and the wounded, this operation is going to send the service's risk insurance premiums into orbit. Make damn certain that Folcroft revenue more than covers the losses. Revenue neutral won't cut it."

"Guaranteed, Mr. Brull. "

The line went dead. Jack Koldstad replaced the receiver with sweaty palms. There was only one man on earth who could set his pores leaking, and that was Dick Brull. God help Jack Koldstad if he didn't squeeze every drop of money out of Folcroft Sanitarium. And God help anyone who got in his way of fulfilling his quota on this one.

The trouble was, so far Folcroft showed no signs of illegal activity outside of that twelve-million-dollar bombshell in the bank account.

As he got up to set the downsizing of Folcroft Sanitarium in motion, his heel struck a piece of the broken picture window lying on the floor. The shard cracked underfoot.

Swearing, Koldstad reached down to pick up the glass. He froze.

The fragment of glass had broken into three pieces. Three separate mirror reflections of Jack Koldstad's grim face stared back at him.

Koldstad scooped up the largest piece. It was a mirror. But when he turned it around, he could see his fingers through transparent glass.

"Damn!"

He went to the fractured window. The hole was large enough for his head but the edges were too sharp to risk it, so he stuck his hand out, holding the piece of glass mirror-side in.

The mirror's own reflection showed up in the glass. Koldstad should have seen himself reflected. The other side of the window was obviously a mirror, too.

"A damn one-way window," Koldstad growled. "Folcroft isn't so innocent after all."

He dropped the shard into a wastepaper basket as he strode out of the office, his squeezed-in temples making him look like a man with the most excruciating headache in the universe.

Chapter 7

Desk Sergeant Troy Tremaine had seen it all.

During his thirty years on the Port Chester, New York, police force, he had seen every human aberration, every nut case, nut job, dimwit, chuckle head and dip-shit loser come through the frosted-glass front doors and step up to his old-fashioned high precinct desk.

The skinny guy with the thick wrists didn't look like one of those. In fact, he looked very sincere. There was great sincerity in his deep-set brown eyes. They were veritable wells of sincerity. Sergeant Tremaine would have staked his pension on the skinny guy's high sincerity quotient.

He walked up, squeezed the front edge of the desk with his fingers and said in a very sincere voice, "My wife is missing."

Tremaine, who had a wife himself, immediately felt for the poor guy. But business was business.

"How long?"

"Two days."

"We need three days before we can file a missing-person report."

"Did I say days? I meant weeks."

Tremaine's hot button should have gone off right then. But the guy was so sincere. He looked exactly as though he was heartsick over the loss of his wife.

So Troy said, "You said two days."

"I'm upset. I meant weeks."

"Her name?"

"Esmerelda."

Troy looked up. "Esmerelda?"

"It was her mother's name, too. Esmerelda Lolobrigida."

"That would make you..."

"Remo Lolobrigida." And the skinny guy produced an ID card that said he was Remo Lolobrigida, private investigator.

"You try looking for her yourself?"

Remo Lolobrigida nodded soberly. "Yeah. For the past week." His voice dripped sincerity.

"But you said she was missing two."

"I was out of town one week. Look, this is serious. I gotta find her."

"Okay, let me hand you off to a detective." He craned his bull neck and lifted his voice to a passing uniform. "Hey, who's catching today?"

The answer came back. "Boyle. But he's out to lunch."

"Damn. Okay, I'll take it. Give me the particulars, friend."

"She's about, I'd say twenty-eight."

"Say?"

"I think she lied about her age before we married. You know how women are."

"Right. Right."

"She's brown on brown, slim, wears her hair long."

"Recent photo available?"

"No. She was camera shy."

Oh, great, Tremaine thought. He kept it to himself. "How do you expect us to find your wife, buddy, without a recent snapshot?"

"Is there a police artist around? I know I can describe her pretty well"

Tremaine chewed on that as he erased something he had written.

"Guess we can try that." He picked up a phone and said, "DeVito. Got a guy out here who's missing his wife. Yeah. No recent photo. In fact, no photo at all. Want to take a crack at it? Sure."

Tremaine pointed to a door. "Go through there. DeVito will help you. Good luck, pal."

"Thanks," said the skinny guy, walking away. Only then did Troy Tremaine think that it was damn cool out there to be walking around in a T-shirt. By then it was too late.

POLICE SKETCH ARTIST Tony DeVito thought nothing of the skinny guy's light attire, either. He waved him into his office and said, "First I want you to look at some head shapes. Just to get us started."

The skinny guy went through the book and picked out a nice oval. Tony transferred the oval to his sketch pad and said, "Let's start with the eyes. What kind of eyes did-I mean does-your wife have?"

"Nice."

Tony winced. "Can you be more specific?"

"Sad."

"Sad but nice. Okay," Tony said, rolling his own eyes. Why did people think it was possible to draw nice? "Were they long, round or square?"

"Round."

Tony sketched round eyes. "Eyebrows?"

"Thick. Not plucked. But not too thick."

Tony drew Brooke Shields eyebrows, figuring he could subtract hair later on.

"Now the nose. Snub? Ski? Or sharp?"

"Neither. More of an Anne Archer nose."

Tony closed his eyes in thought. Anne Archer had a nice face and a memorable nose. He drew it from memory.

"Can you describe the mouth?"

"Not too full, not too wide."

"Good. More?"

"It was nice. Kind. Kind of motherly."

"I can draw kind, but not nice," he said tightly. "Do better than that."

They argued over the mouth for another ninety seconds before settling on a Susan Lucci mouth.

Tony started to put his pencil to the sheet and couldn't for the life of him remember what Susan Lucci's mouth looked like. Her legs, yes. Her eyes, sure. Her mouth, no.

"Any other actress besides Susan have a mouth like your wife's?" Tony asked.

"Minnie Mouse."

"Her I can draw."

The face came out surprisingly well for a first try. It was a nice face, even if the eyes were on the sad side.

"All we need is the hair," Tony said.

"Long in the back, but combed off the forehead."

"That's easy to do."

In the end Tony turned the sketch around and asked, "How close is that?"

The citizen frowned. "No, that's not her at all. The mouth is too thin, the nose too sharp, and the eyes are all wrong."

"Other than that it's a good likeness, right?" Tony asked dryly.

"The hair looks about right," Remo Lolobrigida admitted.

Great, Tony thought. It's a style twenty or thirty years out of date, but I'm right on the money with it.

"Okay," he said, "let's try tweaking the facial elements." He began erasing. "How about if I do this to the eyes?"

"She looks angry."

"Okay, she looks angry. Does she ever look like this when she's angry?"

"I never saw her angry."

"Married long?"

"No."

"Okay, how about this?"

"That looks about right."

"Let's bring the nose down, too."

It took twenty more minutes, but in the end the distraught husband said, "That's her. That's exactly her."

"Sure? This is going to go on posters everywhere. We want it exactly right."

The worried husband took the sheet of paper from Tony's hand and stared at it for an unnaturally long time. He was searching the face as if seeing it for the first time in a very, very long while.

"It's exactly her," he said in a wistful tone.

"Okay, let's get this on the wire."

Tony started to stand up. The worried husband reached out with an absent hand, his eyes never coming off the sketch. The hand caught him by the right knee and locked. Tony felt as if a pair of steel pliers had taken hold of him. The plierslike hand forced Tony back into his hard wooden chair with inexorable strength.

"Hey!"

The hand let go and found his throat. The man had gotten up, his eyes still locked with those of the woman in the sketch.

Everything went dark after that for Tony DeVito. When he came to, he was slumping in his chair and the desk sergeant was throwing water into his face.

"What happened?"

"What do you mean, what happened?" Sergeant Tremaine exploded. "You were out like a light. You tell me what freaking happened!"

"I was doing this sketch for that guy, Lolobrigida. And he started acting hinky." Tony looked around. "Where is he?"

"Where is he? He never came out!"

Then they noticed the open window. A very cool breeze was blowing in to disturb the papers on Tony's desk.

"What kind of guy goes to the trouble of having us sketch his missing wife and then walks off with the sketch?" Tony wondered dazedly.

"A nut job," barked Tremaine. "I knew he was a nut job the minute he walked into the place."

"He seemed perfectly normal to me."

Tremaine slammed down the window. "It's gotta be forty out there, and he's walking around in a stupid T-shirt. A nut job. Just like I said. I can spot them coming from three miles off."

"Then why didn't you warn me?"

Troy Tremaine shrugged. "Hey, he had a legitimate beef, and I can be wrong about people. But not nut jobs."

"What do we do?"

"Me, I don't do nothing. You, start sketching. I wanna post that nut job's face on the squad-room wall so the uniforms can see it."

Chapter 8

Dr. Aldace Gerling was nervous. Very nervous.

As chief of psychiatry at Folcroft Sanitarium, he was an expert on neuroses, psychoses and every other form of mental illness known to modern man.

He could not account for what was happening to him.

It was a drumming. Others had heard it before him. Unfortunately those others were all patients in Folcroft's psychiatric wing. An orderly had been the first person not institutionalized in Folcroft to report hearing the drumming noise.

Dr. Gerling had dismissed the orderly's report as a mere auditory hallucination. So many others had reported the sound that the staff had begun listening for it. It was only natural that someone would hear something that made them think of drumming. It was the power of suggestion at work. Nothing more.

And then Dr. Gerling had heard it.

It was a distinct drumbeat, slow, steady. Oddly familiar, too. Gerling had raced to the spot, only to find the drumming noise racing ahead of him. Around every corner just ahead of him. As fast as he could waddle, the measured drumbeat outpaced him, its source annoyingly elusive.

Finally Dr. Gerling had turned the last corner on the psychiatric wing and thought he had the drumming trapped in a utility closet.

He had opened it, but there was nothing there. The drumming had stopped cold. There was nothing inside that could have produced the phenomenon. Not even remotely.

Still, Dr. Gerling had felt it incumbent on him to report this event to Dr. Smith, and did.

As he made his rounds, Dr. Gerling wondered if Dr. Smith had ever gotten his report. He wondered if Dr. Smith would ever receive any report at all, considering the regretful state he was now in. Gerling had looked in on him and went pale at the sight. Smith appeared to be in some form a paralytic state. Utterly unmoving, eyes wide, every muscle rigid as if struggling to escape his useless body.

Dr. Gerling paused in front of the door of one of the more difficult patients at Folcroft, Jeremiah Purcell.

Purcell was a thin, pale young man with long cornsilk hair and almost no mind to speak off. When he had first been brought to Folcroft, he was a complete imbecile. He could not feed himself or dress without help, and had regressed to childhood so completely his toilet training had to be redone.

Thankfully he could now take care of most of those personal chores himself. Nevertheless, he seemed frozen in a state of utter befuddlement, watching cartoons and other such childish programs for hours and hours on end. There was no character disorder on record to explain it, so Dr. Gerling had coined one: adult-onset autistic regression. He would have written a paper on this new frontier in mental illness, but Dr. Smith frowned on any publicity that directed a spotlight upon Folcroft, no matter how positive.

Dr. Gerling observed his remarkable patient through the tiny square window in the steel door. Purcell sat in a big comfortable chair, intense neon blue eyes glued to the TV screen, long canvas sleeves buckled to the back of his straitjacket. From time to time he giggled. He seemed very pleased with his program, so Dr. Gerling made a remark on his clipboard that the patient was in elevated spirits today. On the clipboard, he prescribed only half of the daily forty milligrams of haloperidol.

He passed on.

The next patient was not in good spirits. He had been a resident of Folcroft for a much shorter time. About two years.

The man was perfectly normal intellectually, but he suffered from a character disorder whose chief symptom manifested itself as delusions of grandeur. The patient thought he was Uncle Sam Beasley, the famous cartoonist and founder of the Sam Beasley entertainment empire, which included a movie studio and a chain of theme parks around the world.

He was dressed as a pirate, right down to the rakish black eye patch and swashbuckler boots. Why a person who imagined he was a twenty-five-years-dead cartoonist would wear pirate clothes was beyond Aldace Gerling's understanding, so in his first interview with the man he probed these matters.

The patient had growled, "Go fuck yourself."

What was interesting was that the voice sounded exactly like that of the long-dead Uncle Sam Beasley-except, of course, the real Beasley would never have descended to such harsh language.

As Dr. Gerling peeked in, the patient-he was listed as Sam Beasley on Gerling's patient roster by order of Dr. Smith-was seated at a card table sketching. The walls of his room were littered with sketches. They depicted the patient climbing down a rope of knotted bed sheets though a broken Folcroft window and making his escape from the sanitarium. It was quite a detailed series of drawings, and included a self-portrait of himself cutting Dr. Gerling's throat with his pirate hook. The hook was real. The patient had been brought in with his right hand a blunt stump, so Dr. Gerling had taken the liberty of having a hook fitted. It was currently under lock and key because Beasley had tried to cut the throats of two different male nurses, after which Dr. Smith had decreed that the hook was too dangerous to remain attached to the patient's wrist stump.

Dr. Gerling had protested. "Removing the hook will only force the man to withdraw into himself, to become uncommunicative."

"The hook goes," said Smith, who placed a written reprimand in Dr. Gerling's file for endangering the staff.

So it went. Dr. Gerling had never agreed with the decision, but it wasn't his to reverse. As director of Folcroft, Dr. Smith ruled with an iron hand.

Still, the patient was doing quite well with his good hand. His drawings were excellent. It was amazing how deeply and thoroughly he had thrown himself into the role of Uncle Sam Beasley. The drawing looked uncannily like the real Beasley's work. Dr. Gerling had asked the patient to draw him a Monongahela Mouse, and the likeness was exquisite, right down to the perfectly matched black lollipop ears.

"You could easily find work in the Beasley animation studios," Gerling had clucked, unthinking.

"I built the Beasley Studio, you quack," the pseudo-Beasley roared back, snatching the drawing from Gerling's hand and tearing it to shreds between his good hand and his teeth. The look of animal ferocity in his one good eye was frightening to the extreme.

As these memories passed through Dr. Gerling's mind, the patient caught sight of him.

"You! Quack! How is Euro Beasley doing? Is the attendance up or down?"

"Down. Sharply."

"Damn those pip-squeaks. Can't they run anything in my absence? Tell them they're all fired. They should have known better than to try to appeal to those snobby French. Damn frogs think Jerry Lewis is some kind of creative genius and they dismiss me as a mere cartoonist."

"I will see you tomorrow," Dr. Gerling said pleasantly.

"And I'll see you hanging by your stethoscope," Beasley ground out, returning to his drawings.

"Remarkable case," Dr. Gerling murmured as he passed on, scribbling a note to the head nurse to increase the patient's dose of Clozaril, along with a reminder that his blood be tested every week in the event his white count bottomed out from the powerful drug.

The remaining patients were unremarkable. As he looked in on them, Dr. Gerling's thoughts drifted to the events of the day.

Folcroft lay under a very dark cloud. There was a problem with the Internal Revenue Service, which had swooped down like buzzards with guns at the crack of dawn.

When Dr. Gerling had arrived for work, he found a dead man lying on the lawn, and the wounded-who had included Dr. Smith, technically speaking-had been placed under the care of Folcrofts finest physicians.

Dr. Gerling had been challenged by representatives of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the IRS. The two agencies had fought over the right of first interrogation-whatever that was. The DEA had won. And so Dr. Gerling had submitted to a grueling three-hour interrogation, which consisted of repeating the same denials over and over again.

Finally the representative of the DEA had been forced to surrender him to the IRS. There ensued another long interrogation consisting of the same tiresome questions and heated denials.

At the end of it, he was told to report to work.

He had found Folcroft in tatters, staff wise. The lower-echelon staff had been told to go home, and a number of personnel, including Smith's trusted secretary, Mrs. Mikulka, had been terminated.

Dr. Gerling wondered if he too was going to be fired when all was said and done. It was a distinct possibility, he decided.

In the interim, he made his rounds. Perhaps nothing dire would happen and all would be restored to the status quo.

But he knew in his heart this was unlikely. The Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration both had come down on Folcroft Sanitarium like avenging angels. It could not all be a mistake. These were very powerful, very important, very professional governmental agencies. They did not make mistakes.

And if there had been any doubt in Dr. Gerling's mind, it was dispelled by Dr. Smith's state.

He had been asked to evaluate it and, after conferring with the Folcroft doctors-who could find nothing organically wrong with Smith-Gerling was forced to conclude one thing.

"It appears psychosomatic," he'd told the IRS agent named Jack Koldstad.

"You mean he's faking?"

"No, I mean that his mind has created this condition because Dr. Smith cannot face an unpleasant reality."

"What causes this usually?"

"Different external problems. Fear. Depression."

"How about guilt?"

"Yes, guilt. Guilt is a very strong emotion. It could be guilt over something in his past."

"He's guilty of evading Uncle Sam's lawful levies, that's what he's guilty of."

"I do not think I have ever heard of a patient who would fall into a paralytic state over underreporting federal taxes."

"You just said guilt. I'm writing up guilt in my report."

"Yes, I said guilt. But it is a possibilty and no more. Dr. Smith might have other emotions causing this condition."

"Guilt makes sense to me. We found evidence he's guilty of tax evasion. We confronted him with it. He's guilty-end of story."

"Should not that be for a court of law to decide?" Dr. Gerling had asked.

"The IRS decides who is guilty of tax evasion," Jack Koldstad had snapped as he turned away. "Not the damn law."

That was when Dr. Gerling gave up all hope for Harold Smith. The man must be guilty, after all. It was too bad. He was an excellent administrator, even if he was a nickel-squeezing tightwad.

Completing his rounds, Dr. Gerling was walking back to his office when he heard a sound that made his heart skip a beat.

It was the drumming. Doom doom doom doom doom over and over again. Monotonous, relentless and distressingly familiar.

Reversing course, he made a beeline for the sound. It was coming from very close by, but the sound was muffled. The skirts of his white physician's coat flapping about his knees, Dr. Gerling moved with a waddling alacrity, his round head swiveling from side to side.

Very close, yes. The sound was close enough that he could almost reach out and touch it.

Gerling slowed his gait. Yes, quite close. Then he had the sound fixed. It was apparently coming from Purcell's room.

Cautiously Aldace Gerling slipped up to the square window with its thick wire-mesh-reinforced glass. Trying to keep from being seen, he used one bespectacled eye to look inside.

Jeremiah Purcell was watching television. Whatever it was, the program made his pale face light up with glee, and a cackle dribbled from between his laughing lips.

The drumming was definitely emanating from this room.

Dr. Gerling angled his head around, trying to spot it.

Then he saw it. The television set was the source of the monotonous drumming. A commercial. Dr. Gerling caught the last few seconds of it, just as the plush pink bunny narrowly escaped being trampled by a giant gorilla.

He marched into the sunset beating on his drum, the battery on his back showing.

"My word!" said Gerling. "I wonder if it was that silly commercial making the drumming after all?"

He decided not to speak of this to anyone else. The IRS had control of Folcroft Sanitarium now, and there was no telling on what flimsy grounds they would terminate someone.

Or worse, Gerling thought with a shiver, audit them.

After all, if a man were judged not in his right mind, would not his tax returns also be suspect?

Chapter 9

In the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, the Master of Sinanju fumed and paced like an impatient hen.

Where was Remo? He had promised not to be gone long. And it was his turn to guard the gold that now belonged to Sinanju.

The door at the top of the stairs opened. Perhaps this was he.

The clump of footsteps coming down told otherwise. Even in his most crude days, back before the grace of the sun source came upon him, Remo had not climbed like that. This was the tread of a clod, and so the Master of Sinanju glided from the triple-locked door of the basement vault room to meet this interloper.

"Who intrudes?" he challenged.

A stiff voice responded. "IRS. Who's down here?"

"No one. Go away."

"I am an agent of the IRS. We never go away."

"Never?"

"Never."

"That is too bad. No doubt you are here to confiscate wealth."

"What's down here?"

"No gold, despite what you may have heard."

"Gold? Who said anything about gold?"

The agent had reached the bottom of the steps and was splashing the beam of a flashlight about like a blind fool.

"No one said anything about gold," Chiun countered. "And if you turn around and poke your long nose elsewhere, no harm will befall you"

The agent was dashing the light about, trying to pin down the source of the Master of Sinanju's voice. He seemed not to realize that it was impossible to touch the Master of Sinanju even with a harmless beam of light if the Master of Sinanju did not choose to be touched.

Still, he persisted with both his light and his prying questions. "What's down here?"

"It is a simple basement. No more."

"I smell something funny ...."

"It is beef. You reek of it."

"Smells like burned plastic."

"You have a good nose, considering its length."

"Look, as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service, I order you to stop horsing around and step into my light!"

"This is an order?"

"It is."

"I hear and obey."

The Master of Sinanju stepped into the light. It touched his chest, swung up and illuminated his wise face.

The man blurted, "You're that crazy Chinaman."

"I am neither crazy nor Chinese, beef-brained one."

"I hereby place you under arrest."

"You cannot do that."

"As an agent of the Treasury Department, I am empowered to detain any United States citizen."

"Then it is too bad that I am not a United States denizen."

"You'll have to prove that in court. You're under arrest."

The Master of Sinanju said, "Cuff me, if you dare."

"I don't carry handcuffs" And the white man from the IRS reached out to profane the Master of Sinanju's outstretched wrists with his unwashed hands as if to haul him away like some common thief.

The Master of Sinanju made quick, dazzling motions with his hands that momentarily confused the white clod, whose fingers became entangled in one another. It was plain from the look on his face that he did not understand what was happening to him.

And so when the Master of Sinanju sent out a tiny fist that was as hard as a wooden mallet, the white's dull wits never saw the blow coming that struck his chest and jellied his heart.

He collapsed, his nostrils leaking a sigh like a balloon losing air.

The Master of Sinanju left him at the foot of the steps as a warning to others of his ilk that to trespass into the basement of Fortress Folcroft was to die.

He hoped he would not have to dispatch too many before they understood the meaning of this act. White corpses emitted the most disagreeable odors after the fourth day, and he did not want his gold to pick up the stink, like butter left near beef.

"YOU KILLED an IRS agent," Remo exploded when he nearly tripped over the body at the foot of the stairs. "For God's sake, why?"

"He offended me," said Chiun, turning away.

"You don't kill a government agent because he offended you."

"I did not kill the wretch," Chiun sniffed. "He killed himself. He reached out to profane the Master of Sinanju's personage with his grubby hands. Were he educated, he would have understood such an act to be the equal to committing suicide. It is the fault of your public schools, where they teach useless trivia like geometry and speaking the tongue of the French."

"So you're just going to leave him here?"

Chiun made a dismissive gesture with the flapping sleeve of his kimono. "Of course. Let it be a warning to the others."

"Warning? They're the IRS. You can't wave them off. They keep coming and coming. Like killer bees."

"I do not fear their sting, for I am not an American denizen, and thus not subject to their burdensome taxes."

"Yeah? Well, if they find that gold down here, they're not going to tax it. They'll confiscate it all."

Chiun whirled, face hard. "They cannot do that. It is my gold."

"Some of it is Smith's, remember? He got his share of Friend's gold, too. And some of it is mine."

Chiun made his tiny mouth tinier. "The smallest portion is yours."

"Thanks to you gypping me out of it."

Chiun shooed the comment away. "He who dwells in the past has no future."

Remo waved a piece of paper in Chiun's averted face. "Check this out."

Chiun took it. "Where did you obtain this drawing?"

"A police artist. It's my mother."

Chiun looked up from the drawing. "She is very beautiful, Remo."

Remo's face softened. "I think so, too."

"Therefore, she cannot be your mother," said Chiun, tossing the drawing over his shoulder.

"Hey!" Remo said, snatching it from midair between two fingers. "Watch what you're doing to my mother. This is the only picture I have of her."

"That is not your mother."

"Look again. She has Freya's eyes. Or Freya has her eyes."

Chiun peered at the drawing, which Remo held up at a safe distance from the Master's sharp fingernails.

"Pah!" said Chiun. "Coincidence. Besides, you describe the eyes you wished to see. It is a fragment of your imagination."

"That's 'figment.' And this morning you were convinced I saw my mother's ghost."

"This morning I was beside myself with worry over the gold. Now I am serene in the knowledge that it is safe from the confiscators because it is being protected by the greatest assassin to walk the earth since the days of the Great Wang."

"I want to show this to Smith."

"Why?"

"Maybe he can help me find who this face belongs to.

"If she is dead, what good would that do?"

"I don't know. All I know is that Smith owes me and I mean to collect."

"Very well. I have business with Smith, as well."

"You bring him out of it yet?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I know that he will do himself in if I restore to him the means to do it."

"Good point. We gotta find a way to get Smith back behind his computer terminal so he doesn't take himself off."

"It will not be easy," squeaked Chiun, taking the stairs with his hands clasped before him, concealed by the joined sleeves of his kimono.

Chapter 10

Harold Smith lay in the darkness, cursing the darkness.

Folcroft was quiet. The night shift moved past his door, down the two-tone green corridors with the slow, shuffling feet of zombies. No light came through the chinks in the door frame, so in his hospital room Smith lay in darkness, unmoving.

He still could not move, except to open and close his eyes. His stomach churned. The ulcers that had tormented him for years were flaring up, the result of the strain of the past week.

There was no doubt in Smith's active mind that CURE was through. It was ironic. Only a week before, he had, through his vast resources and superior mind, outwitted one of CURE's most implacable foes. The Friend operation designed to destroy CURE had nearly succeeded. Smith had blocked it, countered it, then smashed it utterly.

It was one of his greatest victories-measured by how close to the brink the supersecret organization had all come.

In the end it turned out to be a temporary respite from a plan that continued beyond the grave of its originator.

By now Folcroft must have been turned upside down in the IRS's blind determination to uncover Folcroft's supposed illicit secrets. In ordinary times there would have been so little to uncover. The secret terminal in Smith's desk. The computers, rendered mute and forever dumb by the Superwipe Program. Nothing more. He had run a totally paperless office. The true secrets of CURE were stored in his own perishable brain.

But there was the gold in the basement. Even if Remo and Chiun had been able to remove their portion, Smith's own would remain. It amounted to several million dollars in pure bullion. Millions in gold ingots in a sealed room in the basement of a sleepy private hospital, while American citizens were forbidden by law from owning gold except in the form of jewelry.

There was no way to explain all that gold away.

So Smith lay in darkness, cursing the darkness and wishing-actually willing-his heart to stop beating.

And without warning, the darkness around him seemed to swell.

At first Smith thought it a trick of the irredeemable darkness.

It was too dark for shadows. He might as well have been set in a block of breathable basalt.

But the blackness swelled on either side of his hospital bed, even though his frantic, darting eyes couldn't make the shapes resolve. His rimless glasses lay on the side table. Without them, the universe was a painful blur.

A light flicked on, blinding him.

And over the needle of pain in his brain, he heard a voice.

"Hiyah, Smitty."

Remo!

"Greetings, Harold the Resolute."

And Master Chiun.

"If we let you sit up," Remo was asking, "will you promise not to make a fuss? Blink twice for yes."

Smith was still trying to get his eyes to stop blinking from the sudden light. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to make his face relax.

"Is that a no?" Remo asked Chiun.

"I do not know. Let us bring him out of his sad state anyway, for I know his heart is filled with words intended for our ears alone."

And Remo tapped Smith on the exact center of the forehead once, lightly. His motor functions instantly returned.

Smith sat up groaning. Blurred hands placed his eyeglasses onto his sharp patrician nose.

"You have failed CURE," he said bitterly.

"Now, is that any way to talk?"

"And you have failed your country, Remo. And you, Master Chiun, have failed your emperor. You above all know that once CURE is compromised, certain instructions are inviolate."

Chiun stiffened. "There is always time to die, Smith," he said in a frosty voice. "If it is your wish, it will be carried out."

"It is my order."

"Hold the phone," Remo interjected. "You're not going anywhere until you pay off a debt."

"Debt?"

"You promised to help find my parents."

Smith frowned. "That debt is cancelable by death."

"Then don't plan on dying."

"What Remo says is true, Emperor. You owe my adopted son a debt that must be discharged ere you can be granted the boon of oblivion."

"CURE security supercedes personal obligations," Smith snapped.

Remo shook his head. "Not to me. I gave twenty years of my life to the organization. It took my old life and my future from me. It owes me some answers."

Smith fell back on the pillow, his tired eyes closing. "I am sorry, Remo, but I can no longer help you in your search."

"Why not?"

"I erased the CURE data banks the minute the IRS and DEA burst in. Without them, I have no resources."

"We'll buy you a new computer," Remo said.

"With your own gold, of course," Chiun added hastily.

"Why is the DEA in on this, too?" Remo asked.

"Evidently Friend dropped a dime on us before he was destroyed. As you both recall, he had a three-pronged plan of attack to destroy the organization. I was so busy dealing with the simultaneous loss of the submarine with the gold, the failure of the Folcroft computers and Remo's distress over having killed the wrong target that it never occured to me that the IRS's sudden interest in Folcroft was anything other than a routine field audit. No doubt, the DEA investigation was under way without arousing suspicion on my part. Clearly that insidious little artificial intelligence left nothing to chance. We were set up from all angles."

"Remind me to go to that office building down in Harlem and pick through all those computer chips until I find that little creep. I'll crush his circuitry to powder," Remo said, demonstrating by grabbing the bed rails. The steel tubes seemed to melt under the touch of his fingers. They creaked once sharply, and when his hand came away, two fistsized sections of tubing had been squeezed down to the thinness of wire.

"Friend is no longer the problem," Smith said. "The IRS is. Have they found the gold?"

"Not yet."

"It is only a matter of time," Smith said dully.

"Smitty, what do we have to do to get the IRS off your back and set things right?"

"You don't understand, Remo. The IRS is remorseless. Evidently Friend wire transferred the CURE operating fund from the Grand Cayman Trust to the Folcroft bank account. I never suspected it. When he restored the banking system to normalcy under my threat of destruction, he left those funds where he knew the IRS auditor would find them. It was exceedingly clever. Tantamount to a doomsday device. He knew I could never explain away such a vast sum, especially from an offshore bank of such dubious repute."

"I do not understand this mumbo jumbo," Chiun said tartly.

"You don't have to," Remo said quickly. To Smith, he said, "C'mon Smitty. We've been in deeper holes than this."

"Never. The IRS is effective, inexorable, remorseless and a law unto itself. Even if you are not guilty of any wrongdoing, they can ruin an individual or a business. Unlike our judicial system, the burden of proof lies with the accused, not the accuser. In IRS eyes, the twelve million dollars and the gold in the basement constitute unreported income that can never be explained away. Folcroft is compromised, CURE is finished, and my life and career are over. I will not live out my remaining years in a federal penitentiary."

Smith's voice was emanating from his barely moving mouth like the last breath from a corpse. There was no life in it.

"We can set up elsewhere," Remo suggested.

"Where? We have no funds."

"Hey, our credit cards are still good. We can go on the float."

"You do not understand, Remo. The White House may have written us off. For all we know, even if the President knew of our predicament, he might simply let matters play out."

"Want us to ask him?"

"No!" said Smith, his gray eyes snapping open. "CURE was not meant to operate indefinitely. It is just that the end of the line has come with much work unfinished."

Remo folded his lean arms. "I'll say. You can't send your kid to school without risking he ends up in a body bag. Guns are everywhere. Drugs are everywhere. And the police can't be everywhere. It's practically the fall of Rome all over again."

"The problems of this county have grown too great, too deeply woven into the fabric of American society, for CURE to remedy," said Smith.

"Fine. Given. But our problems are solvable. Somehow."

Chiun spoke up. "Remo is correct, O Emperor. We are not defeated. Surely there are ways around these tax terrorists."

Smith closed his eyes again and lay in thought for so long they began to wonder if he had fallen asleep.

"I do not know how we can solve these problems," Smith said at last, his voice tired and tentative. "But I will agree on a course of action to minimize our exposure."

"Shoot."

"First move the gold to a safe place."

"Done."

"Second we must cover our tracks."

"What tracks?"

"The CURE money trail."

"Just say how," said Remo.

"No currency-transfer report concerning the twelve million-dollar wire transfer to the Folcroft bank account was filed with the IRS. That means the people at my bank, the Lippincott Savings Bank, were either negligent or unaware of the transaction. If the president of the bank can be persuaded to testify that this was accomplished without my knowledge or express permission, it may be possible to evade IRS sanctions."

"Count on him being persuaded," Remo said tightly.

"If he so testifies, he may fall under IRS sanctions himself."

"He'll testify."

"The CURE funds were wire transferred from the Grand Cayman Trust. I visited the president, Basil Hume, during my investigation of the banking crisis Friend instigated. He knows my face and can link me to the missing twelve million. He must not be allowed to do so."

"I will be pleased to wring the neck of this parasite."

"Parasite, Chiun?" said Remo.

"Banks are inventions of the Italians, who as a race can only make their way in the world by levying illegal taxes upon others. Remind me to tell you about this sometime, Remo."

"Pass," said Remo.

"Spurner of wisdom."

Remo addressed Smith. "Okay, Smitty. We're in business again. We'll catch you later."

The light went out. And Harold Smith thought for a dark moment that he would have his freedom again. But a finger-he had no idea whose-tapped him on the exact center of his forehead, and his body froze in an excruciatingly awkward posture.

Hours later he still lay awake, his right arm going to sleep, cursing the darkness.

But at least he now had hope.

Chapter 11

Jeremy Lippincott's silver Bentley circled the bank bearing his name three times before he received the high sign signifying that it was safe for the president of the Lippincott Savings Bank to enter.

"My usual spot, Wigglesworth," Jeremy said tartly.

"Yes, Mr. Lippincott."

The Bentley purred into the space, and Jeremy waited for the door to be opened by his brown-liveried chauffeur before alighting.

He noticed a slightly loose button on Wigglesworth's tunic. It dangled from two threads.

"Have you no personal pride?" Jeremy Lippincott, scion of the Lippincott family wealth, complained in his clipped lockjaw accents. "That button is dangling."

Wigglesworth looked down. His thin face went ashen. "I had no idea, Mr. Lippincott," he gulped, clapping the button close to his barrel chest.

"I believe you know the inviolate rule about faultless attire."

Wigglesworth puckered up his face in perplexity. "I don't believe I do, sir."

"Faultless attire earns one's salary. Attire at fault results in the docking of a day's salary for the day the sartorial lapse was committed, and for every day thereafter if it is not satisfactorily corrected."

"But Mr. Lippincott-"

"Stop sputtering, you latter-day hackney driver, and beat my usual path to the door."

Wigglesworth set his teeth and turned smartly on his booted heel, walking ahead of his master and opening the door for him.

"That will be all, Wigglesworth."

"Yes, Mr. Lippincott."

"Remain with the machine in case there is a sudden need for flight. But do not use the heater. In fact, why don't you stand at attention before the passenger door until instructed otherwise?"

"Might I point out that it is a tad nippy today?"

"If you catch your death, no doubt that loose button will make a fit epitaph," Jeremy drawled as he passed into the marble-and-brass bank lobby.

The Lippincott Savings Bank was the picture of an old-money bank. Oils hung high on the crackled and faded marble walls. The half-open bank vault had the look and feel of an old pocket watch magnified by the passing of years. The decor was so staid that even the red crushed-velvet guide ropes were gray.

All looked sound, Jeremy saw. Tellers were busy telling. The loan staff seemed underoccupied, but perhaps it was a seasonal quirk. No need to lay off anyone prematurely. Too difficult to break in new stock, and with the hiring quotas these days, there was no telling what color person one would be forced to employ. Better a slacker with some pedigree than some low Mediterranean type.

Rawlings, the manager, met him at his office door.

"What took you so long?" Jeremy hissed. "I had to circle the block three times."

"I expected you at ten-thirty, not eleven, Mr. Lippincott," Rawlings said apologetically.

"I lingered over my scones and tea," Jeremy said. "One must eat a hearty breakfast if one is to endure the travails of this trade."

"Yes, sir."

"Speaking of travails, have those rotters been about?"

"The IRS? No, sir."

"Are we rid of them, then?"

"I doubt it, Mr. Lippincott. They were not satisfied with my explanations."

"Then give them explanations they are satisfied with, you unmitigated dunderhead!"

"It is not as simple as that."

"Exactly how simple is it?"

"As I have tried explain to you, Mr. Lippincott, it is not simple at all. The bank is in violation of several strict laws governing wire transfers, including the Bank Secrecy Act and the Money Laundering Control Act. Not to mention IRS reporting requirements regarding the transfer funds in excess of ten thousand dollars from other banks. I'm afraid we've failed to exercise due diligence."

"And whose responsibilty is that?"

"For the hundreth time, sir, these funds simply appeared in our system overnight. I brought this to your attention at the time, and you said to ignore it. And so I did. Emphatically."

"You obeyed my instructions?"

"Yes, sir. Implicitly."

"And thereby called down the combined wrath of the Federal Banking Commission and the Infernal Revenue Service!" Jeremy thundered.

"Please, sir. Not in front of the staff."

"The staff be hanged! This is your mess. Clean it up or clean out your desk."

"Yes, Mr. Lippincott," said Rawlings as the cherrywood door with the brass nameplate slammed shut in his face.

"Carry on," he told his staff in a voice as weak as his knocking knees.

JEREMY LIPPINCOTT crossed his cherrywood-paneled office in a blind tizzy. The nerve of that man, Rawlings. Trying to foist his personal failings on a Lippincott. Why, the Lippincotts had landed on Plymouth Rock in the first ship. The Rawlings were easily three sails back, yet he had dared stand up to his betters and speak as if an equal. After this ugliness was done with, he would suffer summary dismissal if Lippincott Savings had to replace him with an Italian-or worse, a damn Irishman!

By the time Jeremy Lippincott had doffed his slate gray Brooks Brothers suit and climbed into his habitual workaday attire, he had revised his thinking. It might be better if Rawlings only went to jail for his failings. That way it might be possible to hold his post open for him and avoid hiring a common type for the long term. Certainly the barbarous equal-hiring laws allowed an employer to hold a spot in reserve for a convicted felon like Rawlings. It only made sense. Rehabilitation and all that nonsense.

Jeremy Lippincott idled the difficult first hour of the working day before lunch by indulging in some witty repartee with one Mistress Fury on the Leather Line 900 number and had nearly recovered his good humor when the sounds of commotion came from the other side of his closed office door.

"You can't go in there!" Rawlings was protesting.

"No, you can't," Miss Chalmers chimed in. "That happens to be Mr. Lippincott's office. And we have express instructions to admit no one when the door is locked."

"So open the door," an unfamiliar voice said. It sounded rather lower-class. Rough would not be too strong a descriptive.

"Only Mr. Lippincott can open that door."

"Then I'll open the door."

"Are you with the IRS?" Rawlings demanded with positively nervous solicitude. The utter coward!

"Worse," returned the impatient voice.

"What is worse than the IRS?"

"The people who sent me. Now, get out of my way."

"I must see proper identification," Rawlings insisted. Good man, that Rawlings. His job was secure once the unfortunate prison interlude was out of the way.

"I left it in the car."

"I will not see anyone without proper identification," Jeremy shouted through the door. For good measure, he repeated it into his intercom, where it was certain to be heard by the intruder. He used his most stentorian voice-the one he employed to berate young Timothy-for additional intimidating power.

"Proper identification coming right up," the voice called back.

Jeremy did not like the way that sounded.

A moment later Rawlings began entering the room, yet the door remained firmly shut. Jeremy would have thought there was no way anyone could enter his office with the door locked.

But there was Rawlings's hand. He recognized it at once, despite its distressingly flattened condition. The man's plain wedding band was unmistakable, as was the inferior fabric of his coat sleeve.

The flattish hand was followed by a very flat arm, and the screams Rawlings emitted were quite shocking to the refined ear.

"Is this ID enough?" the crude voice demanded. "Or do I send the rest of him in?"

"I believe I accept your credentials," Jeremy Lippincott admitted in a gulping voice. He unlocked the door, retreating to the stolid safety of his desk.

The door pushed open and the man stepped in.

"Please shut the door," Jeremy said quickly. "I do not like the help overhearing what is not their business."

The man obliged. That was a good sign. He shut the door, kicking Rawlings's flapping arm out just ahead of the closing panel. He was possessed of a wiry musculature that made the freakish thickness of his wrists all the more arresting, yet had the deadest-looking eyes Jeremy had ever seen. They held a positively merciless light.

Jeremy Lippincott drew himself up to his full imposing height as the man crossed the room. A pinklined ear drooped, slapping his nose lightly. He flung it back with a jaunty toss of his fuzzy head, and squared his lantern jaw.

"I am Jeremy Lippincott, president of Lippincott Savings Bank. How many I help you?"

"You can start by telling me why you're wearing a pink bunny suit."

"Because they do not come in blue. And I consider that an extremely impertinent question, coming as it does from a man in a T-shirt and jeans."

"These are chinos."

"I stand corrected. Will you sit?"

"I'm just here for some answers."

"Then I will sit as I entertain your questions."

"A week back twelve million bucks was wire transferred into the Folcroft Sanitarium account. Who did it?"

"I have no idea. The funds simply appeared in the computers one morning."

"You tell the IRS that?"

"Of course not."

"Why not?"

"They would not believe so unlikely a tale, however true."

"How do you know till you try?"

"Because to admit to these facts is to incur the wrath of various meddlesome governmental agencies.

"As opposed to whose wrath?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I told you I was worse than the IRS."

"I do not believe that is possible."

"All the IRS come after is your money and property. I usually don't stop at anything. Ask Rawlings."

Jeremy swallowed hard, absently wiping his moist brow with a convenient ear.

"No need. Actually you should be speaking to Rawlings. Commercial accounts are his responsibility."

"I'm speaking to you." And the man reached over and took Jeremy Lippincotes long fuzzy pink ears and used them to drag him unceremoniously across his own desk. Pens, papers and other items tumbled and spilled over the imported rug.

"Oof!" said Jeremy, crushing the nap with his spun-glass whiskers. He rolled over, throwing up his poufy pink paws.

"What do you mean to do?" he demanded of the looming brute.

"You look to me like the ticklish sort."

"I am nothing of the sort."

"I have an eye for these things." And the man planted a foot that had actually touched dirty sidewalk on Jeremy's fuzzy pink stomach. The air whoosed out of his lungs. Then the toe of the shoe began to insinuate itself into some of the most sensitive portions of Jeremy Lippincott's anatomy. Such as the inner arms, the belly button and that gooshy spot under the floating rib.

"Hah hah hah haha... Stop it! This instant!"

"Not till you promise to call the IRS."

"What . . . hah! . . . do I call them?"

"Place the call and repeat after me."

"Never. I will. .. hah! ... not... hah! ...incriminate myself. Heeee."

"People have been known to die laughing"

"Hah hah. You would not dare."

"There's nothing I wouldn't dare do to a snotty banker in a rabbit suit."

After five minutes of unbridled hilarity, the tears streaming out of his eyes, Jeremy Lippincott saw the supreme expediency of calling the IRS about the Folcroft account.

At first they would not take him seriously because he was tittering so, but eventually Jeremy calmed down and was connected to the proper person.

"That is correct," he told the official on the other end of the line. "The auditor was misinformed. No currency-transaction report was filed because we were completely unaware of the transfer. We thought it was a computer twitch and were awaiting the customer's response to the unexpected twelve-million-dollar credit on his next statement. Well, yes, we did invest the money. Purely as a good-faith gesture. Just in case the transfer was legitimate. No, we do not normally conduct our interbank transactions in so loose a manner. And I must say, I take exception to the term loose. It is inappropriate. The Lippincott family has been in the banking business since before there was such an entity as the Infernal Revenue Service-"

Jeremy winced painfully.

"I stand corrected. Internal. Yes, it was a slip of the tongue. No, I was not making light of the agency that is solely responsible for keeping the wheels of our great nation greased, as you so aptly put it. Yes, I will remember that in the future. Yes, I will expect your auditors to come round next week." Jeremy's voice turned wheedling. "Please, don't hurt us. We're only a savings bank, trying to make our way through these very trying times."

The line went click in Jeremy Lippincott's ear, and the receiver was taken from his hand and replaced on its cradle.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" the thin brute with the thick wrists asked airily.

"We are to be audited, and that means the Federal Banking Commission will be poking their nasty little noses into our books. Not to mention the State Banking Commission."

"They'll stand up to scrutiny, won't they?" the intruder asked with entirely appropriate solicitousness.

"How am I to know? I only come in three days a week and leave the fine details to my incompetent staff. I never wanted to be a banker, but I only managed Cs at Yale. Although they were excellent Cs. Poppy positively beamed when he saw them. Oh, what shall I do?"

"If I were you," said Remo Williams, exiting the office, "I'd find a cleaner suit to wear."

Jeremy Lippincott put his head down on the desk and sobbed into it. Twenty minutes passed before he came up snuffling and noticed the door to his office had been left open and he had been exposed in all his poufy glory for the underlings to behold.

Mustering his strength, he got up and slammed the door shut. But not before calling out his righteous indignation, "I will have you all know that I am correctly attired for morning. My evening ensemble is an elegant sable, with silver accents on the paw pads and ear linings! "

EVEN AFTER the miracle, Basil Hume wasn't taking any chances.

Barely a week ago, he'd spent his days cowering in fear for his life. That had been a new experience for Basil Hume, director of the Grand Cayman Trust, situated in the colonial city of Georgetown on the balmy Caribbean island of Grand Cayman.

It was true that he did business with the scum of the earth. Drug barons, mafiosi and even lower forms of life such as US. senators. It was true also that these people were dangerous in the extreme. They were even more dangerous in the extreme where their money was concerned, and Basil Hume's bank had undertaken the very grave responsiblity of safeguarding their money. That was why it was called the Grand Cayman Trust.

In reality, its sole function was to be the bank of last resort for ill-gotten gains. There was no dollar or franc or kroner too soiled to be shoveled into the Grand Cayman Trust's bulging vaults.

In fact, most of the money that came to Grand Cayman Trust arrived by telephone, not delivered in satchels by armored car. That was the old-fashioned way. In the computer age, money moved as electrical impulses through the sophisticated medium of the international wire transfer of funds.

It was a very elegant way of shuffling large blocks of currencies of all nations. If francs were sent, they arrived as dollars. If yen, dollars also. Credited as dollars in the computer system of the Grand Cayman Trust. No client need ever set foot on Grand Cayman Island. He needn't leave a paper trail of any kind. His money was as good as the next rogue's. And when he had need of it, whether it be drachmas, lira or pounds sterling, it was wired back to him in the currency of his preference.

It was a wonderful system for those who wished to evade the snooping of their native governments into their personal finances.

But it had a downside. Oh, what a downside.

Basil Hume never believed there would be a downside-just as he long comforted himself with the belief that he would never ever have to concern himself with the actual clients who seldom came to his bank. Just their currencies, thank you very much.

Then came the banking crisis.

Now, more than a week after the near catastrophe, Basil Hume still had not quite grasped the matter. One morning he'd arrived to find the books in utter disarray. By books, of course, computer data bases were meant. All banking was a system of balances and bottom lines, debits and credits. It had simply moved from black bound ledgers to computer workstations. The principle was exactly the same, except safer, smarter, more efficient, and as Basil Hume discovered to his unending horror, subject to electronic tampering.

The computers had lost the electronic digital packets-the bits and the bytes that quite literally represented hard currency-virtually overnight. There was no explaining it. It was simply impossible.

Not lost, actually. Transferred to a New York City bank that claimed not to have received the funds. Overnight, Grand Cayman Trust had become electronically insolvent-a first as far as Basil Hume knew.

It would have been embarrassing even under ordinary circumstances, if the clients were not extraordinary people.

With no funds available to be transferred out of Grand Cayman Trust, the phones had begun ringing at once. It was a nightmare. The D'Ambrosia crime syndicate. The Cali drug cartel. The survivors of the late and very much missed Pablo Escobar. And others too hideous to contemplate.

They all wanted to know where their money was.

In the midst of this, a US. Treasury agent named Smith had put in an appearance. He had had no jurisdiction, of course. Basil Hume very nearly threw him out, despite his claim to represent a depositor whose twelve million dollars was also missing. Some obscure federal agency, FEMUR or some such. The U.S. government was the least of Basil Hume's worries. They did not put out hits on those who misplaced their money. Often they simply gave them more. The US. government was a very curious business entity.

Smith had claimed knowledge of computers, and since he was grasping at straws already, Basil Hume has allowed the man access to the computer room, where he very quickly determined that the mess was not the work of a Grand Cayman Trust employee. It was a very convincing bit of logic there. No employees were unaccounted for; therefore, none were guilty. The murderous and vindictive nature of the trust's depositors absolutely guaranteed that. No one guilty of siphoning off the bank's assets would dare have shown up for work if that knowledge were rattling around inside his skull, knowing that at any minute an irate depositor would send his emissaries in with Uzis blazing to butcher everyone.

For a full day Basil Hume had suffered the nervous tortures of one who knows there is no place to hide.

Then miraculously the computers were restored to their proper bank balances within a day.

They had been working far into the night with guards picketed around the bank three deep. There was no hint, no forewarning, but as they hunched over their terminals, amazingly the bank balances began righting themselves. Within a matter of a minute or two-no more-the balances were all restored to the proper integers.

All, that is-an audit soon determined-except for a missing twelve million dollars in one account.

When this information was brought to his office by a sweaty manager, Basil Hume had shot bolt upright out of his chair and said, "Very good!" Then he had realized that he could end up just as dead from one irate customer as several. He'd asked, "Which is the short account?"

"The FEMA account, sir."

"And they are?"

"An agency of the United States government."

Basil Hume had collapsed back into his Corinthian leather chair, leaking a whistling sigh of sheer relief.

"They have no jurisdiction here," he said in an unconcerned tone.

And that had seemed to be the end of that. Later Basil heard through his network of informants in the world banking arena that the US. banking system had been similarly affected at the same time. Somehow all had been put to rights. No one knew how any more than Basil Hume understood how his computers had been corrected. But since all banking-system computers talked to each other electronically, he just assumed some sort of vile virus had been the culprit and the US. Federal Reserve people had squashed that particular bug.

Once the money began flowing through the system again, the telephones had stopped ringing so irately. Nothing like cash to placate the agitated. The threats likewise abated. And not surprisingly not a single customer deserted the bank. Where else would they go? Switzerland? The climate was positively alpine.

Each day Basil Hume had allowed one layer of guards to stand down. Now, some two weeks later, only a slightly stronger than normal complement remained, certainly enough to deal with any lingering bitterness on the part of the depositors. And more than enough should the US. government send their representatives where they were not welcome.

After all, they had no jurisdiction in the Grand Caymans, and without jurisdiction, they were just another depositor. One of the smaller ones, at that. Smaller and without teeth.

THE MASTER OF SINANJU saw the guards with their holstered pistols and their machine guns slung across their shoulders by straps. They wore tropical khaki, which made them look more like soldiers than guards. But they were guards. The way they formed a ring around the glass building in the sun-drenched city called Georgetown told him that. Professional soldiers would know enough not to present themselves like so many khaki ducks in a row.

"This is my destination," he told the taxi driver who had ferried him from the airport.

"Grand Cayman Trust?"

"Yes."

"Odd choice. They don't see much walk-in trade."

"They are a bank, are they not?"

"If you're looking for a place to cash a check," the driver suggested in his accent that blended a Caribbean lilt into a Scottish brogue, "I can take you to a nice neighborhood bank. You don't want to be going in there, sir. It's what they call a B-license bank. Strictly offshore trade-if you take my meaning."

"This is my destination. What is the fare?"

"Thirteen dollars American or ten dollars CI."

"Robber!"

"It is as the meter says, sir."

"The meter lies. I will pay half."

"And if I accept half, I must make up the balance."

"Better half than none."

"If you don't pay, I must call a constable."

"I see many strong and brave police standing before that bank," said Chiun, indicating the guards in khaki.

"You give me no choice, sir."

The cabbie whistled through the gap in his front teeth and waved toward the guards. Three broke ranks to approach. The space in the ring of khaki closed up like a wound healing.

"This old fellow, he won't pay his fare," the driver complained, jerking his thumb at the rear seat.

The three guards in khaki looked back and asked, "What fare?"

The driver craned his head around and saw not even a depression in the seat cushions to show that he had had a recent fare.

"Didn't you see him leave my cab?" he sputtered.

"No."

"But he was just there. A tiny bloke, dressed in an Oriental costume. It was black and gold, rather like the markings of a monarch butterfly."

The guards looked at the driver and opened the rear door.

"He is not hiding on the floorboards?"

"And the back is empty."

"Feel the cushions," the driver implored. "You will certainly feel the heat of his body."

A guard did so. He reported no warmth.

"The cushions are cold," another added.

The immediate vicinity was searched. Despite the fact that the cab had been in full view of the ring of guards at all times and the flamboyance of the missing fare, no one had seen a thing.

The driver was sent on his way, his face a knot of unhappiness, his pockets lighter by the amount displayed on the meter.

THUS did the Master of Sinanju breach the ring of guards that surrounded the stone building he had been sent to penetrate. No one had seen him approach. No hand was raised to stay him. For all eyes were on the frantic, greedy taxi driver and the three guards he was attempting to convince with his stumbling lies.

No one looked up when the Master of Sinanju entered the back lobby. There were minions seated at desks, their faces bathed in the emeralds and the ambers of their computer oracles. They were too intent upon their unimportant toil to notice him.

There was only one teller and one teller's cage. And no customers. Truly it was a bank unlike any other.

The Master of Sinanju glided through the aisles, his silken kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of the butterfly whose markings they bore. He was a figure calculated to be noticed, yet no one noticed him.

That is, until he came to the door marked Basil Hume, Director.

A tanned young woman sat at a desk beside the door. A secretary. She looked up at the Master of Sinanju only when his shadow deliberately intercepted the overhead lights.

"May I help you, sir?" she inquired, smiling with her teeth but not her heart.

Chiun indicated the door with a long-nailed finger. "I seek audience with this man."

"Mr. Hume has no appointments today."

"Then he has no excuse not to treat with me," replied the Master of Sinanju, grasping the doorknob. It resisted his thin fingers. Locked. The Master of Sinanju increased the pressure, and the knob squealed, coming off in his hand. He handed it to the secretary, who reached out for it by reflex.

The Master of Sinanju left her juggling the friction-heated brass doorknob from hand to hand, squealing, "Whoo whoo whoo. My goodness, it's hot!"

BASIL HUME Loop up from his desk and saw the tiny Asian in the riotous costume. His hand snaked to the guard buzzer, then froze momentarily in indecision. The figure confronting him, while dramatically gaudy, was impossibly old and frail, and therefore no conceivable threat to him.

"Yes?" he said.

"No," said the tiny Asian, who cleared the considerable length of the office with a graceful leap in which his wide-flung arms resembled the outspread wings of the monarch butterfly. His hand smacked down on the buzzer and the buzzer should have gone off from the impact. It did not. When the yellowed claw of a hand lifted, instead of a brass bump on the desktop, the buzzer button was now a crater.

Blinking, Basil Hume looked down. He could see the black button deep in the pit of the tiny brass-lined crater.

It seemed impossible for a sturdy buzzer housing to go from dome to crater under the force of one light smack, but there it was. So Basil dismissed the problem with a casual, "And how may I assist you, my good fellow?"

"You may die and save me the trouble," the old man squeaked.

"The trouble of what?"

"Dispatching you."

Basil Hume blinked. "Do I take that to mean what I believe it means?"

"Your death warrant has been signed."

Now Basil Hume's blood pressure was rising. Trying to keep the man occupied, he let his finger creep toward the buzzer crater. Perhaps the electronic connection still functioned.

"By whom-if I may ask?"

"The emperor of America has called for your extinction. For you have lost funds entrusted to you."

"America has no emperor," Basil Hume pointed out.

"He is a well-known secret."

Basil Hume said, "Ah, I see," and his fingers touched the brass lip of the buzzer. "Well, my good man, if you are here to dispatch me-" he lifted his other hand airily "-then dispatch me by all means. I am guilty as charged." And he laughed selfconsciously while his finger found the black enamel button deep in his desktop.

A fingernail nearly as long as the finger it grew from circled upward before his eyes to lash out like a slim asp.

When it withdrew, it did so with such speed that Basil Hume at first did not comprehend that he had been struck and if so where. He examined the front of his coat. His tie was intact. There was nothing unsightly fouling his pearl white shirt. His coat buttons were still in place.

It was only when he looked toward the buzzer crater that he noticed the blood. It was filling the depression like an inkwell. He wondered where the blood had come from and examined himself again.

When Basil Hume brought up his left hand, the one that had slipped into the buzzer, he felt the blood falling down his sleeve. He examined his left wrist, and it was a wash of red. His wrist veins had been severed so quickly and cleanly he had felt nothing.

"My word," he said.

"Your last word," said the old Asian. "To ensure your silence."

And the fingernail that had cut with sure purity inserted itself into his Adam's apple, disconnecting his voice box.

Basil Hume knew this for a fact when he tried to speak and managed but an inarticulate gurgle.

Rising from his chair, he began thrashing about him in annoyance. Whereupon his right wrist suddenly opened up. It fountained blood. The hand that had done this was less than a blur in motion.

Dimly he heard a squeaky voice cry out, "Come quickly! Come quickly! This man had gone mad!"

Basil Hume's secretary thrust her head in and saw all the blood. Surprisingly she didn't faint. She turned guppy green and walked unsteadily to the ladies' room, not leaving until many hours later.

"What's going on here?" a man asked indignantly.

"I only asked him where my money was and he slashed his wrists," explained the cunning old Oriental, stroking his wispy beard in feigned agitation.

"Mr. Hume, is this true?"

Basil Hume thrashed around his desk, spattering blood everywhere. He tried to speak but could not. He tried to point an accusing finger at the old Asian, but he moved about so cleverly Hume's shaking finger could not indicate him with any accuracy.

"My God. It is true!"

The cry went out. "Call an ambulance."

The ambulance arrived inside of ten minutes. By that time the guards had all swarmed in to lay Basil Hume on the fine nap of his imported rug and tried to administer first aid. All of them at once.

Basil Hume was trampled, kicked and spent the last futile bits of his life giving new vibrancy to the maroon of his office rug and realizing he had underestimated the anger of the United States government. And its mighty secret emperor, whoever the cold uncaring bastard was.

No one saw the Master of Sinanju leave the Grand Cayman Trust, just as they failed to see him arrive.

Not long after, a taxi driver pulled over the main street of Georgetown upon being hailed.

"Convey me to the airport," a familiar squeaky voice insisted.

The driver stuck his head out. "Not you again!"

"I have never seen you before in my life," said Chiun in an injured tone.

"Pay me for the last fare, or I take you nowhere."

"How much?"

"Thirteen dollars American."

"Too much."

"Then you can enjoy the stink of my exhaust, you can."

The driver took off. He never heard the sound of his rear door open and close, nor did he notice that he had acquired a passenger. Not until he stopped at a traffic light near the clock monument to King George V and the door opened.

The driver looked back. To his astonishment, the tiny Asian had stepped over to an adjoining cab-which was also stopped at the light-and entered.

"Airport, O fortunate one," he cried. "And bear in mind I tip heavily for haste."

The light changed. The other cabbie took off before the first driver could warn him of the deadbeat fare.

The first driver buried his head in his steering wheel and sobbed until a traffic constable ticketed him for blocking the right of way.

Chapter 12

Remo Williams kept looking at his inner watch.

Some people had an inner child. Remo had an inner watch. No matter what time it was, Remo always knew it to the nanosecond just by looking into his mind. He also had an inner compass, an inner alarm clock and inner thermometer.

The inner watch wasn't like his inner compass, which was the natural magnetic crystals in his brain recently discovered by biologists. Or his inner alarm clock, which was his biological clock. Or his inner thermometer, which biologists hadn't discovered yet because it was hidden in the left earlobe. The inner watch worked off whatever time zone Remo happened to be in. It was a function of his Sinanju training, just as all the unusual abilities Remo had come to take for granted were. But watches, as Chiun was fond of saying, were a Swiss confidence trick. It was not possible to have an inner watch any more than it was possible to have an inner can opener, Chiun had once insisted to Remo.

"So what time is it?" Remo had asked back on that long-ago day.

"Three hours before sunset."

"Four of five by my inner watch."

"There is no such technique," Chiun had scoffed. "Next you will be claiming you have an inner can opener."

"Not so far," Remo had retorted lightly. In time, he figured it out. He didn't have an inner watch. He had a perfect time sense-the same as Chiun. But where Chiun's sense of time was Eastern, and expressed in terms of hours past dawn or before sunset or moonrise, Remo's was calibrated into hours, minutes and seconds. In other words, Western style.

He figured that whenever he saw a clock, his brain simply and silently ticked off the seconds, minutes and hours after that, resetting itself whenever he came upon another clock.

It even compensated for daylight saving time. Provided Remo didn't forget twice a year.

It was exactly 3:48:09 by Remo's inner watch when the door to the Folcroft basement opened, sending a slowly elongating triangle of light down the concrete steps and falling on the body of the dead IRS agent Chiun had left there.

Remo was dreading this. All day long he had dreaded this moment. He had hurried back to Folcroft after paying a visit to the Lippincott Savings Bank, and relieved Chiun, who then left for Grand Cayman Island. Even with good connections and no hitch on the ground, it was bound to take the Master of Sinanju all day to complete his assignment.

That left Remo to baby-sit the all-important gold while Folcroft was being turned upside down by IRS agents.

Eventually he knew someone would come looking for the dead guy. And Remo was right.

"Anybody down there?" a voice from the top of the stairs called down.

Remo stood motionless in the dark. There were no windows in the Folcroft basement, so no betraying light beyond the spear of illumination coming from the stairs. He said nothing.

With luck the guy would go away. Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone ventured down. No one had gotten around to searching the basement yet, so the gold was safe.

The man at the top of the stairs started down. His hands brushed the rough concrete walls audibly, feeling for a light switch. When he found one, it went click. That was all.

"Damn!"

The man snapped the switch again rapidly. He was wasting his time. Remo had pulled the fuse on the basement lights.

The man came down anyway. He hadn't any flashlight-that much was sure. So when he tripped over the body at the foot of the stairs, he was surprised.

"Hey!" he said, getting up.

Remo could see perfectly in the near darkness, so he saw the man fumble on hands and knees until he encountered the inert body of the first IRS searcher.

"Jesus H. Christ!" he said, recognizing the touch of cool, dead human flesh.

The IRS man scrambled to his feet, stumbling back toward the stairs.

Remo had no choice then. The guy was going for help. He moved in.

His feet whisking silently over the concrete, Remo caught up with the man just as his hand got hold of the worn wood railing. Remo's hands went to the man's throat and squeezed hard.

The man went stiff, and Remo eased him off the stairs and laid him out beside the other stiff. Remo knelt down and whispered into the man's ear. "You'll be all right, pal. Consider this a caffeine-free coffee break."

Then he squeezed again, and the man went out like a TV.

Maybe, Remo thought as he crept to the top of the stairs and eased the door shut, the lid would stay on the basement until Chiun got back. Of course, that meant they still faced the problem of getting a ton of gold out of Folcroft under the noses of the IRS.

So he retreated to the triple-locked door and checked his inner watch again.

It was 4:01:28 and Remo hoped Chiun got here soon. Between the burned-plastic stink coming from Smith's computers and the disagreeable odor emanating from the dead IRS guy, this was no pleasure post.

Chapter 13

It was damage-control time.

IRS Special Agent Jack Koldstad hated doing damage control.

It was the second day, and so far, they had found no sign of illegal activity in Folcroft Sanitarium. It was exactly what it appeared to be-a private hospital.

Except for the drumming. Everyone was reporting it now, but no one could find the source.

The birds still circled the building, too. Koldstad had put an agent on them around the clock. The man had reported the birds always vanished around sundown and were back in place at the crack of dawn.

"I told you to follow them to their roost."

"That's just it, sir. They don't appear to fly off."

"Are they roosting on the roof?"

"No, sir, it's just that when it gets dark, it's hard to see them. I lose sight of them in the darkness. But they're always back with the sun."

"Well, they have to go somewhere."

"If they do, sir, it's not clear where."

"Tonight I want you up on that roof with a high-intensity spotlight and that scoped rifle. I want those birds taken down."

"Yes, Mr. Koldstad."

And there was that damn phantom Chinaman. No one could find him, either.

Koldstad then put the call he dreaded in to his superior.

"What's the latest?" Dick Brull demanded.

"I'm sorry to report little progress, Mr. Brull. "

"What do you mean by little?"

"We've uncovered no contraband, no illegal activity, no money laundering and no unauthorized operations such as plastic surgeries, abortions or other legal or quasi-legal sources of unreported income. The pharmaceutical department checks out. Their records are impeccable. No turkey drugs are flowing through this place in the guise of prescription drugs. No indication of a secret designer-drug factory, either."

"Well, the DEA must have had some good Intelligence. Otherwise, they wouldn't have seized the place, would they?"

"I know, Mr. Brull. But Folcroft checks out clean."

Brull's crushed-stone voice began to grind more harshly. "This is not satisfactory, Koldstad. Not satisfactory at all. The service seized this hospital at great cost to its morale and personnel."

"I know, sir."

"The service has a sacred mandate to seize people and businesses wherever justified. We have an excellent record in that respect. Over ninety percent of our seizures hold up in court, lawful or otherwise. The DEA can't say that. If our numbers ever go down, Congress could take away IRS power to do jeopardy seizures. If they start chipping away at the service's special powers, next thing you know they'll be hammering us on withholding rights. We have a great thing going here. And you don't want to screw it up like some candy-ass trainee."

"What do I do? Just say it, I'll do it."

"Until we have chapter and verse on Folcroft, it's your campground. You stay there. You run it. You pare its operating costs to the bone. Fire whoever you have to, deinstitutionalize whoever you have to. Get to the bottom of that place, and then we'll sell it off brick by brick to satisfy its debt to Uncle Sam. You got that?"

"Yes, Mr. Brull."

Right then and there, Jack Koldstad knew his career with the IRS's CID was dead on the water unless he turned Folcroft Sanitarium into the most lucrative jeopardy seizure in the past twenty years.

He began calling in his troops, issuing marching orders.

"We're invoking the hundred percent rule here. That means Harold Smith's personal assets are forfeit. Seize his car and house and throw out into the street anyone you find living there."

"Yes, sir."

"Get the staff down to manageable levels. Every person we can cut from the payroll means more payroll for the service."

"Right away, Mr. Koldstad."

"I'll have our people in Martinsburg run a deep background check on Harold Smith. The master file will have his tax records going back to day one."

"I never heard of a filer who didn't fudge a return somewhere along the line."

"That's the beauty of the voluntary compliance system. The odds are long the taxpayer will hand us the pole we shove up his noncompliant ass, and the lubricant to boot."

"Understood, sir."

All morning long they came and went. One agent came in as the last was leaving. His face was pale. "Skinner is missing, sir."

Koldstad's small eyes got smaller. "I thought it was Reems who was missing."

"He still is, sir. Now Skinner has gone AWOL, too."

"No one goes AWOL from the service. There's no place to go AWOL to-unless you want to forfeit your citizenship. Where did you last see him?"

"I think he was sent to look into the basement."

"I thought the basement had been checked."

"That was Reems's job. It doesn't look like he completed it."

"Let me get this straight. Reems goes into the basement and doesn't come back?"

"That was yesterday, sir."

"And today Skinner goes in and isn't heard from?"

"That seems to be the size of it."

Jack Koldstad brightened. "Looks like the basement is where we hit the jackpot. Assemble the troops. We're going into that basement."

"Of course armed. The IRS doesn't walk into situations where it doesn't have the upper hand going in. And if that damn Chinaman is hiding down there, he's going to pay for assaulting an IRS special agent. And I don't mean in interest and penalties."

REMO HEARD THEM coming from two floors up.

Even surrounded by the soundproof concrete foundation of Folcroft Sanitarium, it was impossible not to know that the IRS was closing in force and armed to the teeth.

They pounded down the stairs in the lead-footed tread typical of armed men. They jacked rounds into chambers and communicated by walkie-talkies.

A smaller contingent was circling around to the freight entrance, feet crunching grit.

That gave Remo plenty of time to step up to the two prone IRS agents, tuck one under each arm and stash them in the coal furnace. It was cold, fortunately. Not that it would matter to the first agent to have made the mistake of venturing into the Folcroft basement. But the guy who was still alive was probably relieved to be folded up and stuffed into the bed of cool brown ash, considering the other possibility. Even if a day-old dead guy was set on top of him.

"Try not to inhale too much," Remo whispered as he shut and dogged the fire door.

Remo looked around quickly. Chiun's sleeping mat and spare kimonos were out of sight. Remo had hammered the corrugated door shut with his bare hands, but a crack still showed. He had patched the rip from inside and locked the adjoining door.

The basement looked as ordinary as possible now.

So Remo went to the toolshed and pulled out a longhandled push broom.

When the IRS pounded down the inner steps, flashlights blazing, they found him coolly sweeping the dusty concrete floor, the happy-go-lucky strains of "Whistle While You Work" coming from between his pursed lips.

"Who they hell are you?" demanded a man with a long jaw and painfully pinched temples.

"Name's Remo. I'm the basement janitor."

"How the hell did you get in here?'

Remo pointed to the side door. "The usual way. Through the janitorial entrance."

"Didn't you see the IRS sign out front?"

"Nope. Can't read. Why do you think I'm pushing a broom in a basement?"

The IRS agent eyed Remo closely. "You a nonfiler, Remo? You look like a nonfiler to me. What's your Social Security number?"

From the side door came the pounding of fists on stubborn steel.

"Open up! IRS!"

"Open it up for them," the agent ordered Remo.

"Why not?" said Remo, setting the broom against the door to the computer room.

When the door opened, it really opened. Remo faded back only inches ahead of the inward surge of armed IRS agents.

"I thought you guys were from the IRS," he said as a fan of gun muzzles tracked him.

"We are." The agent with the pinched temples stepped up to flash his ID. "Jack Koldstad. With the IRS Criminal Investgation Division."

"You act like Paddy O'Toole with the IRA knee-capper squad"

"Shut up. I'll ask the questions around here. An agent came down earlier."

"Haven't seen him. And I've been here all day."

Koldstad eyed his agents. "Sweep this place."

"I think I beat you to it," said Remo.

"I meant sweep it for contraband."

"My job description covers dirt only," Remo said.

The agents moved through the basement with grim purpose. One of them found the fuse box and noticed a switch in the red position. He reset it. The overhead lights came on.

"Didn't you notice there was no light?" Koldstad asked Remo.

"I notice it now," Remo said.

An agent came upon the triple-locked door and called out, "Mr. Koldstad, I think I found something."

"What is it?"

"A door with a lot of locks."

Koldstad hurried over, saying, "Bring that smartass along."

"I'll go quietly," Remo offered as the gun muzzles closed in on him.

Koldstad was looking over the door.

"Where does this lead?" he asked Remo.

Remo shrugged. "To the other side."

"Don't get smart."

"If I knew, I'd say," Remo lied.

"Who has the keys?"

"Dr. Smith."

Koldstad grabbed an agent by the arm. "You go upstairs. Bring me every key from Smith's office."

While the agent was gone, Koldstad turned to Remo, "What's your name again?"

"Remo."

"Okay, Remo, we're the IRS. You know what that means?"

"I get a refund?"

"No!"

"Shucks."

Koldstad lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Work here long?"

"Too long."

"Good. You must know a lot of what goes on here."

"I know which end of a broom to hold." Remo swept the men around him with his deep-set eyes. "I also know not to point a weapon at a man unless I intend to use it."

"The IRS doesn't shoot compliant citizens," Koldstad assured him.

"I'll try to remember that."

"We've seized Folcroft."

"That explains all the guns."

"We suspect illegal activity is going on here."

"What kind?"

"You tell us."

"Got me. It's a hospital. The only thing out-of-bounds are the doctors' bills."

"You ever notice unusual activity here? Late-night deliveries? People coming and going after hours?"

"I'm the day-shift janitor."

"Ever been audited, Remo?"

"No."

"Keep acting stupid and we'll remedy that."

"Keep threating me and I might get mad."

"Don't mouth off. This is the IRS you're talking to."

"What about my constitutional rights?"

"IRS regulations supercede the Fourth Amendment protecting against search and seizure without due process."

"Since when?"

"Since the Civil War."

Just then the agent came back with a fistful of keys.

"This is everything I could find," he said.

Koldstad focused his too-small eyes on Remo. "Last chance to tell us what we need to know."

"I don't know what you want to know," Remo said.

"Okay, open that door."

They tried every key twice. None fit.

"Damn," Koldstad said. "Okay, get the ram. We're battering it down."

Remo tried to keep the worry off his face. The way they were going, it was just a matter of time. And Chiun might be back at any minute, or not for hours yet.

Mouth thinning, Remo decided to let things play out a little while longer. There were only eight of them. Not too many to handle if it came down to that.

The ram was a solid slug of steel weighing maybe fifty pounds with two handles welded to each side. The nose looked as if ball-peen hammers had gone at it.

"Okay, let her rip."

Two of the beefiest agents took up the ram and swung it back and forth until it built up momentum. They sent it crashing into the door on a dead run.

The door was chilled steel painted gray to blend in with the gray-painted concrete wall. The first hit didn't even mark the paint. The second cracked a paint chip loose. The third hit bounced off.

"What's wrong with you milk balls! Hit it harder!"

This time they backed up a dozen yards, got a clumsy running start and slammed the door dead center. The door shuddered on its heavy hinges. The ram bounced back, taking the agents with it. They ended up on their asses on the dusty concrete, the ram cracking the concrete floor with a loud bang.

"There's something behind that door," Koldstad said, pacing like a caged tiger. "I know there is."

"We could shoot the locks off," an agent suggested.

"They only do that in movies," Remo said quickly.

"It's worth a try," said Koldstad.

"If there is something, then you could wreck it with bullets," Remo pointed out.

Koldstad whirled. "Then you do know something!" he crowed.

"Not me," Remo said grudgingly.

"Blow it open," Koldstad said, one eye on Remo.

Remo stood there, rotating his thick wrists anxiously. He wasn't worried about Smith's computers. They were a lost cause. But Chiun's gold was not bulletproof.

A man brought a MAC-11 up to the padlock, testing the angle of fire a couple of times, and fired once. The padlock combination became a smear. The hasp held.

"I'll try again, sir."

This time he fired a short burst. The hasp broke clean, and the padlock fell to the floor with a dusty clank.

"Great. Now the other locks."

Another agent came up with a .357 Magnum and put five shots into the remaining key lock. Each shot made a bigger dent.

Then they brought up the ram and finished the job.

Remo held his breath.

Koldstad turned to Remo. "By the way," he said smugly, "you're fired."

"You can't fire me. I work for Dr. Smith."

"And the IRS owns Smith's illegal ass. Now clear yours out."

Without waiting for Remo's reply, Jack Koldstad strode up to the battered steel door and used both hands to pull it open.

And his jaw dropped at the sight of stacks and stacks of gleaming yellow ingots that reached to the ceiling. They were packed together so tightly there was only one narrow walkway between the ingots. Even under the weak overhead lights, they shed a warm golden radiance that picked out yellowish details on every face turned toward them.

There was a collective intake of breath. In that crucial moment no eyes were upon Remo Williams. Everyone was gaping at the tall stacks of gleaming yellow ingots, realizing what they had to be.

"We hit the mother lode," someone whispered.

"Our careers are saved," another murmured.

And from the corrugated door came a fierce screech, followed by a burst of raw sunlight, and a voice boomed, "Stand back from the gold of Sinanju or face the wrath of its awesome protector!"

Chapter 14

The voice of the Master of Sinanju was still echoing off the concrete walls when Remo faded back and took out the two IRS agents directly at his back with his elbows. He brought them back and up and nailed the agents on the point of their chins too fast for their dull senses to see him coming.

They dropped like wet oatmeal poured into off-the-rack suits.

From a standing position, Remo pivoted and took out a MAC-11 that was swiveling toward the corrugated door. The machine pistol lost its barrel, and the agent clutching the grip lost his weapon to the sudden fury of Remo's side kick. He was clutching his gun hand when something that felt like a ball-peen hammer knocked him flat.

Remo began weaving among the others, tapping them on their skulls with a steel-hard forefinger. Nobody got off a shot. Everybody went down hard.

"Take them out clean," Remo called.

"They have profaned my gold," Chiun squeaked.

"They only just found it. Now, do as I say."

The Master of Sinanju leaped into the basement like a great monarch butterly taking wing. But he landed on Jack Koldstad with the ferocity of a pouncing tiger.

Koldstad threw up his arms to shield himself, but his arms were forced aside so that the raking fingernails scored vertical lines in his surprised face. His mouth opened in a frozen scream, and two thumbs found the indentations on either side of his narrow forehead.

Jack Koldstad never felt the long thumbnails plunge into his brain. He just rolled his eyes up and made a pile of clothes-covered meat on the floor where he had been standing.

Remo saw all this out of the corner of his eye as he finished his sweep of the IRS. He went for knees and, when collapsing legs brought agents' heads down, he slapped the consciousness out of them with the flat of his hands.

Smack smack smack.

The last agent collapsed onto the one just before him, and Remo turned toward the Master of Sinanju, who was shaking the dust from his wide kimono sleeves like a flustered black-and-orange bat.

"I said not to kill anyone," Remo complained.

"I did not."

"I saw you drive your nails into the head guy's skull."

"I drove them into the part of the brain he obviously did not use. He will live."

"I'll believe it when I see it," grumbled Remo, joining the Master of Sinanju at the open door to the computer room.

"Well, the cat's out of the bag now," said Remo, surveying the scattering of unconscious IRS agents.

"They must all die. It is Smith's edict that any who trespass upon his kingly preserves forefeit their lives."

"We'll check with Smith first."

"I will not leave my gold unattended, for obviously you are not equal to the task."

"So sue me. I didn't think they'd get the door broken down."

"You should have broken their empty skulls."

"Look, I'll take this up with Smith, I said."

"I do not trust you to return with the correct answer. We will both take this up with Smith."

"Fine with me."

HAROLD SMITH would have groaned had his body been his to command.

But the Master of Sinanju hadn't restored his bodily functions. It was a terrible feeling because it was the second day, and even though they had hooked up an IV tube and were feeding him intravenously, his bowels felt like sausages filled with cold, soggy bran meal. But his body refused to release the inert matter that made him feel as constipated as an elephant in tall sugarcane.

He forgot his inner distress as the Master of Sinanju tried to explain the situation. "The tax terrorists have breached your holy of holies, your sanctum sanctorum, O Smith."