Misfortune Teller

Destroyer 115: Misfortune Teller

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

When a political insider told Michael Princippi that after losing the 1988 presidential race he had as much chance as Mickey Mouse of getting himself renominated to the same lofty post, he sneered condescendingly and boasted a superior knowledge of politics.

When a newspaper columnist pointed out to Michael Princippi that after finally being passed over as a "never-ran" in both 1992 and 1996 he had about as much of a chance of staging a comeback in the year 2000 as Halley's Comet, silent movies and the dodo, he told the man to eat his political dust.

And when, on the day that would begin the strongest push for unification of North and South Korea since 1946 and would also spark a near meltdown between the U.S. and both Korean governments, someone told him that he would soon achieve a power he could never understand and release a force so deadly that it could quite literally mean the destruction of civilization, he would have said that it was about damned time. But what he truly needed to get the ball rolling was for someone to sign his nomination papers.

"It's a bit premature, wouldn't you say, Governor?" his lawyer asked him guardedly on that fateful afternoon.

"What are you talking about?" Princippi demanded. He was a slight man who stood five foot two in his stocking feet and had the personality of a clogged shower drain.

"Well, people still remember you," the lawyer said, uncomfortable with having to broach the subject. "Maybe we should wait a few more decades. I hear they're doing some amazing things with cryonics these days," he suggested amiably.

Princippi's fish-belly face soured. "Where did you go to law school?" he asked.

The lawyer stiffened. "Is that really relevant?" he asked. It was a sensitive subject. The attorney knew that Princippi had at one time had access to the best legal minds in Massachusetts. The former governor had found his current attorney in a booth at the local Sears.

Princippi shook his head. "Look, my mind is made up. The stage is set for the comeback of the century. Of the next century," he added.

"Maybe," the lawyer said. He did not sound convinced.

As he appraised the attorney, Princippi's eyes suddenly narrowed. The lawyer was sitting on a wobbly old chair in the ex-governor's Brookline, Massachusetts, kitchen.

"Is it raining out?" asked the man once known as "the Prince" by his constituents.

Princippi had just noticed that the lawyer's cheaply tailored, off-the-rack suit appeared to be soaked right through. A few roundish patches glistened under the dirty white sunlight that poured through the filthy kitchen window. The attorney shifted. His shoes squished.

"Not really," he hedged. He carried his arms away from his sides, deliberately keeping his hands away from the slick-appearing wetness of his suit.

"Why are you soaking wet? Jesus, you're getting water all over my floor!"

The lawyer sighed. "It's saliva, sir," he said. In deference to his client, he lifted his shoes so that only the tips touched the ancient, cracked linoleum.

Princippi's bushy black eyebrows bullied their way up onto his forehead. "What?" he asked.

The lawyer decided not to sugarcoat his reply. "Those nomination papers you gave me for people to sign? I told pedestrians they were for you, just as you instructed." He paused, suddenly unsure whether or not he should go on.

"And?" Princippi stressed.

"They spit on me," the lawyer blurted out. "A lot. I think some people circled the block just to take a second run." He glanced down at his oozing wet suit.

Princippi shook his head firmly. "No, no, no," he insisted, his eyes beginning to glaze over. "No. That simply cannot be true. Did you tell them that the papers were for their Prince?"

"I did everything you told me."

"You did something wrong." Princippi appeared to have dropped into a daydream. He stared blankly into space as his attorney spoke.

"Yes," the lawyer sniffed tartly. "I allowed you to draw me away from my practice. My booth at Sears wasn't much, but at least I didn't have people hocking loogies on me all day. This is revolting." He picked up his faux-leather plastic briefcase from the Formica tabletop and tipped it to one side. Viscous liquid slopped out of a hole in one corner, puddling into the musty, dirt-encrusted linoleum cracks in the floor. "These people hate you," the lawyer added. With a loud slap, he dropped the briefcase back to the table's surface.

Princippi did not appear to notice his lawyer's outburst. He was lost in thought.

In times of intense personal strife, he had a habit of winking out of reality for long moments. He considered it to be a psychological defense mechanism. It shielded him from the vicissitudes of a painful world. A psychiatrist might have better described it as a grand delusion.

He was having "the Dream."

Princippi was in the Oval Office. Standing at the window in silhouette. JFK, circa 1961 and 1962-Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis. Very statesmanlike.

The brightness of the sun streaming through the window exploded around his image, enveloping it, obliterating it. Nothing remained. Just a sheet of blinding whiteness.

All gone. Snatched away in a heartbeat. He had nearly had it all. Now he had nothing. Just a crumbling house and a two-bit mall lawyer.

The trance was broken. Michael Princippi was back in his grimy kitchen. He was staring at the filthy floor. His eyes were focused on a pair of soaking-wet shoes.

Princippi did not even raise his head as he spoke.

"You are discharged from my service," he informed the lawyer, his face a somber mask. "Please type up a letter of resignation."

The lawyer snorted derisively. "Yeah, I'll get right on it," he mocked. "First, there's the matter of my fee."

"Yes, yes, yes," Princippi said, waving his hand dismissively. "Take it up with Doris."

"Doris quit last week. You hadn't paid her in three months."

"My wife, then."

"She's still in rehab, Governor. Remember the paint incident?"

Princippi looked up. His eyes betrayed his concern that the latest episode involving his substance abusing wife might become public. "Get it out of the slush fund," he said.

"The slush fund melted," the lawyer said. "And before you take the Doris route with me, I'm sure the Boston Messenger would be interested in some of the dirt I've seen around here. Especially concerning your lovely wife."

"Y-you're a lawyer," Princippi stammered. "You can't betray a confidence like that."

"You hired me as a campaign staffer after you hired me as a lawyer," the attorney pointed out. "Campaign staffers aren't bound by confidentiality."

"I'll sue."

"Great. Who's going to represent you?" The lawyer crossed his arms across his wet chest and waited smugly.

Princippi sat gasping for a few long moments, lost for an appropriate response.

Finally, he simply got up. He left the aluminum folding lawn chair with the clumps of frayed nylon that hung from beneath in cobweblike clumps and walked silently up to his bedroom. His feet were lead.

He found a few hundred dollars in an old envelope stashed between his ratty mattress and creaking box spring. He was downstairs with the cash a few moments later.

"Viper," the ex-governor spit morosely as he turned over the wad of crumpled bills.

"Pleasure doing business with you," the lawyer said. He stuffed the money in his soggy pocket. Quickly, he gathered up his briefcase and left.

After he was gone, Princippi sunk to his cheap aluminum kitchen chair. He stared dejectedly at the floor, images of abject poverty battling the Dream for control of his thoughts. Poverty won out.

As he sat in gloomy depression, a few nylon straps snapped beneath his bottom. He barely noticed.

TWO HOURS LATER, Michael Princippi was tinkering under the hood of his rusting 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. He had no idea what was wrong with the car, but there was no way he was going to take it to a mechanic. After his stint as governor, working types seemed to hate him more than most. Besides, it was cheaper this way. And Princippi was nothing if not cheap. At least when it came to his own finances.

Former governor Princippi was not mechanically inclined. Nonetheless, he was in the process of tugging furiously with a pair of pliers at some filthy black thing with other longer things sticking out of it when he became aware of someone standing near him. He glanced up suddenly, banging his head on the underside of the hood. Sheets of rust dropped into the sunlight like startled bats.

"Who the hell are you?" Princippi demanded of the man standing in his driveway. He blinked rust from his eyes.

"Hi!" said the earnest, chirpy young man. "Would you like to change your life for the better?"

Princippi sized up the intruder.

Early twenties. Pale. A little above average height and weight. Bizarre clothing.

The kid wore a flowing white gown with an open pink rote draped over it. A long braided ponytail stuck like a handle from the back of his otherwise bald head.

The governor tipped his head. "Are you a registered voter?" he asked.

"No, sir," replied the young man.

"Then get lost," Princippi suggested. He went back to work beneath the hood.

Maybe the thing he had been working on didn't actually have anything to do with the way the car ran. He yanked at it again, more furiously this time. One of the strange twisty things on one side snapped in half.

"Damn," Princippi complained.

"Everyone wants to know how to change his life for the better." The voice was closer now and more insistent. Near his ear.

Princippi continued working. "My life is going to change," he grunted. "And when it does, the Secret Service won't let nut jobs like you within a country mile of me."

He yanked harder at the little metal thing hanging off of the larger thing. It snapped off. As it did so, there was a rumble of an engine.

For an instant, Michael Princippi thought he had fixed his car. He realized momentarily, however, that the sound was coming from farther down his driveway.

The ponytail kid was standing next to Princippi. He was looking around the hood. "Ah, our ride," he enthused.

Princippi glanced around the other side of the hood. A dark blue, windowless van was backing up the driveway. One rear door was open. Princippi could see a pale forearm holding the door ajar.

This was ridiculous. The Brookline in which Michael Princippi had lived when he was governor had not allowed this kind of riffraff to drive around willy-nilly. Sure, on his watch other nearby towns might have had more nightly gunplay than a spaghetti Western, and convicted murderers had been given the keys to their own cells, but, dammit, Brookline had always been safe.

Princippi ducked back beneath his hood. "Look, I am in the middle of planning my triumphant return to politics, so if you don't intend to vote for me, get out of here before I call the cops."

The young man didn't leave. Instead, he said something strangely enigmatic.

"I'm sorry, Governor, but I'm about to change your life. Whether you want me to or not."

Princippi was almost going to lift his head from the grimy engine to ask what the kid was talking about when he noticed something odd. Through a gap beneath the engine, he suddenly saw a pair of sandals as the white robe rose a few inches around the man's ankles. The kid was standing on his toes for some reason.

All at once, Princippi heard a familiar creaking sound. It spurred him to action.

He tried hastily to climb up from the engine well. Too late. The back of his head slammed solidly against his rapidly closing hood.

Princippi saw stars. He saw bright light. As he lay, stunned, on the driveway, he saw figures in pink-and-white robes swoop from the rear of the van and gather him.

Then he blacked out.

IT SEEMED LIKE only a moment later when he came to.

He was lying on his back in the rear of the blue van. The vehicle was bouncing along a street somewhere. There were no windows.

Blandly smiling faces sat on benches on either side of him. They stared down at the former governor.

He took a good, long look at the shaved heads, the flowing robes, the dim expressions. The tambourines.

Tambourines?

"Oh, my God," Michael Princippi wheezed. The air spun crazily around him. "I've been kidnapped by Loonies."

And as the world swirled a midnight dance of fear, darkness took hold of him once more.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was leaving Germany for what he hoped would be the last time in a long, long time.

Remo sat behind the weirdly angled steering wheel of a rented truck. He fidgeted as he drove.

From all outward appearances, Remo was an ordinary man. Lean and dark haired, Remo looked somewhere in his early thirties. Deep-set dark eyes lurked in a skull-like face that many had said was cruel, but nothing greatly beyond the norm. The only things visibly different about him were his freakishly thick wrists. These shifted now as he twisted in the uncomfortable truck seat.

The seat seemed to have been designed specifically to make one's lower back ache.

Remo was a Master of Sinanju. A man trained to the very height of physical and mental perfection. Most times, such a thing as an uncomfortable truck seat would not even remotely begin to bother him. But although Remo's perfectly attuned body did not experience the pains of ordinary men, he had ridden in this bouncing German truck so long that he was beginning to get a growing sense of prickling discomfort in his lumbar region.

This was the last truck in a seemingly endless convoy he had single-handedly driven from Bonn to Berlin. He could not remember how many times he had traveled the six-hundred-mile round trip in the past few weeks. This last journey was made to seem all the longer by the passenger who had insisted on chaperoning him.

"Cannot this carriage go faster?" the squeaky voice in the seat beside him demanded.

"I'm going as fast as the speed limit," Remo said with a sigh.

"The signs are configured in kilometers. You are used to miles. Perhaps you are improperly converting the speed in your mind."

"I'm going the speed limit, Chiun," Remo insisted.

"Humph."

The sound of displeasure emanated from the inscrutable face of the Master of Sinanju, Remo's passenger and teacher.

He was a delicate bird of a man. One hundred years old if he was a day, but possessed of piercing hazel eyes much younger than his wizened shell. Vaporous cotton-candy hair clung to a spot above each ear. His otherwise bald skull was enshrouded in an almost translucent film of walnut-hued paper flesh. A wisp of beard bobbed at his pointed chin.

The old Korean clasped his bony wrists with the opposing hands and stared glumly out the window. He remained silent for approximately ten seconds.

"Are we there yet?" Chiun asked.

"No!" Remo snapped. "Dammit, Chiun, why didn't you just wait for me in Berlin?"

"I did not trust you," Chiun said simply.

"You trusted me with the first gazillion dollars worth of booty," Remo replied.

"It is not that I thought you would steal any of my treasure," Chiun told him. "You are disgustingly honest and ill concerned with money. I find both character traits more than a little appalling, by the way," he added.

"Compliment taken," Remo said.

Chiun continued, "I did not trust that you would be thorough in your final search. I wanted to be certain that you did not carelessly leave behind a stack of gold bars or a crate of diamond tiaras when we at last shake the dust of this benighted land from our sandals."

"I'm not a six-year-old, for crying out loud," Remo complained. "Why do you think God gave me these?" As he drove he pointed at his eyes.

Chiun shrugged. "I am not privy to the thoughts of deities. A joke, perhaps?" he suggested.

"Har-de-har-har," Remo griped. "Make fun of the round eyes. I notice you weren't yucking it up when I was moving all your damned gold for you."

"That was business," Chiun said. "This is pleasure."

Smiling, he settled back into his seat.

Remo was grateful for the silence. He had been stuck in Germany with the Master of Sinanju for far too long. They were getting on one another's nerves more and more lately. His drawn-out trips to a desolate storage facility in Bonn had been his only breaks from the aged Korean. And they weren't much for breaks.

In Bonn, Remo had spent his time loading literally tons of gold and priceless jewels into his rented truck. He had to work at night to avoid prying eyes. Every once in a while, the owner of the facility would wander over and Remo would steer the man politely away. The steering had gotten less and less polite as time wore on.

Driving, Remo thought of the storage facility's owner. He was a greasy little German with a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a pastry-fed backside. Surprisingly, Remo hadn't seen him before leaving on this last trip. It was surprising because the man usually made himself known.

Thunder thudded somewhere in the distance. A snaking stream of lightning cut through the cheerless gray sky.

Dreary fat raindrops splattered loudly against the windshield. The wipers were attached at the top of the frame--unlike those in America. They squeaked angrily and doggedly across the sheet of bowed glass.

Remo had always thought that the British Isles were famous for their lousy weather. But he was willing to wager Germany could give England a real run for its money. He could not remember one decent day since they had arrived in Germany.

The dismal cast of the sky translated to Remo's attitude. He wanted nothing more than to get the last of the thousand-year-old junk in the back of the truck moved off German soil.

The treasure Remo was transporting across Germany was part of the legendary Nibelungen Hoard. A few weeks earlier, he and the Master of Sinanju had been involved in a race with a secret neo-Nazi organization to retrieve the incredibly valuable fortune. The neo-Nazi organization-called IV-had wanted the money to further its nefarious schemes. Chiun had simply wanted the money. In the end, Chiun had won out.

An eleventh-hour deal made with an interested and greedy third party had reduced Chiun's treasure to half the actual Hoard. However, even after halving the loot, there was a tremendous amount left over.

When he learned that their portion of the Hoard was in a storage facility in Bonn, Remo's employer had insisted that it be moved immediately.

"It's too risky, Remo," Harold W. Smith of the supersecret American agency CURE had said.

"Risk shmisk," Remo had said dismissively. "It's sitting in a half-dozen sheds collecting dust. No one's going near it."

"What if someone gets curious? What if they investigate to see what is in the storage facility? Good Lord, what if someone has already done so?"

"Smitty, don't burst a blood vessel," Remo said. "Chiun and I will deal with it first chance we get."

"Do it now."

"Isn't there anything else more pressing?" Remo begged.

"No," Smith insisted.

In their encounter with the neo-Nazi organization, Smith had been attacked and injured. At the moment he was hospitalized after undergoing emergency surgery to remove fluid from around his brain. With nothing urgent on the table for his two field agents to handle, the recuperating Smith had given Remo and Chiun time to move the Hoard from Germany to Chiun's ancestral village of Sinanju in North Korea. Smith, however, did not offer to help in any way. He did not want to create an international incident that could in any way be traced back to the United States. CURE's participation in the smuggling operation was to be strictly hands-off.

Remo had no idea how much their share of the Hoard came to. Millions, certainly. Billions, probably. That much raw wealth in the wrong hands could spell disaster if dumped into a single nation's economy. An economic domino effect could even go on to topple the world economy. This was Smith's real concern, Remo knew.

Fortunately, both Smith and Remo knew that Chiun had as much of a chance of spending the vast stores of Nibelungen wealth as he had of parting with the rest of his ancestors' five thousand years' worth of accumulated spoils that were even now languishing in the Master of Sinanju's Korean home. That was to say, there was no chance whatsoever.

Chiun's personal riches did not dissuade him from studying every nook and cranny in the storage sheds to make certain not a single ingot of the Hoard had been left. Since they had climbed into the truck cab, Chiun had been eager to return the last meager portion of gold to his tiny village.

Driving without a break for several hours now, they had just come upon a dreary, sprawling industrial city.

"Is this Berlin?" Chiun asked, perking up.

"You know it isn't," Remo said tiredly.

"All Hun cities look alike to me," Chiun replied.

"It's Magdeburg," Remo told him. "We've got another eighty miles to go."

Chiun's face pinched in displeasure as he stared across the visible portions of the gloomy German city.

The Gothic spires of the Cathedral of Saints Maurice and Catherine rose high above the other flat roofs. Industrial grit and grime seemed to be attracted to the steeples as if they were magnetized.

"I see they allowed that monstrosity to be completed," he commented with displeasure. He nodded to the cathedral.

"Gothic architecture doesn't do much for me," Remo admitted, glancing up at the steeples. "Still, you've got to admit it's pretty impressive."

Chiun turned to him, hazel eyes flat. "Do I," he said. His voice was devoid of energy.

Remo shrugged. "Sure," he said. "It's like the pyramids. I don't know how they managed to do anything so huge back then. I mean, we consider ourselves lucky when we get the government to deliver the mail on time."

Chiun extended a bony finger to the steeple. It was still far in the distance. They were not even going to drive within miles of the massive cathedral.

"That eyesore is representative of everything that went wrong with Europe in the last millennium," he said. "It is the direct product of the vile pretender Carolus the Dreadful. And you would defend such a thing?"

"Hey, I only said it was impressive," Remo said.

"It is ugly," Chiun insisted.

"Whatever." Remo shrugged.

They drove on in silence. The cathedral receded behind them along with the city of Magdeburg. They had just crossed the Elbe River and were proceeding along to Berlin when Chiun spoke once more.

"Do you not wish to know who Carolus the Dreadful was?" the Master of Sinanju asked.

"Not particularly."

"You in the West know him as Carolus Magnus-Charles the Great. He was not great, however," Chiun added quickly. "He was quite awful."

Remo scrunched up his face. "Charles the Great," he said. "Wasn't that Charlemagne?"

"See how easily the vile name spills off your white tongue," Chiun accused.

"I thought Charlemagne was a great ruler," Remo said.

"White lies. Perpetuated by whites." Chiun pitched his voice low, as if imparting some heinous secret. "The truth is, Carolus was in league with the Church of Rome."

"That's no secret, Chiun," Remo said. "Everybody knows that. Didn't he even get crowned emperor by the pope, or something?"

"Another reason to dislike him," Chiun sniffed.

"Which, the pope part or the emperor part?"

"Take your pick," Chiun said with a shrug.

"Any individual with vile papist inclinations cannot help but be socially maladjusted. Look at you, for instance. The carpenter's sect had you for but a few years early in your life and you still cannot slough off your peculiar notions of right and wrong. Honesty. Pah!"

"Thou shalt not steal, Little Father," Remo reminded him. "That's what Sister Mary Margaret taught me."

"A nun," Chiun scoffed. "If she was so smart, why could she not land a man?"

"They have to take a vow of celibacy, Chiun," Remo said, knowing full well that the old Korean was already aware of this. "And don't dump on Sister Margaret. She practically raised me."

Chiun harrumphed again. "At least her vow prevented her from breeding more squalling papists."

"What about the emperor part?" Remo said, steering Chiun away from Sister Mary Margaret.

The Master of Sinanju glanced over at Remo. "You know at one time Sinanju had much work from Rome."

Remo nodded. The House of Sinanju had been home to the greatest assassins the world had ever known for more than five millennia. Remo and Chiun were the latest in a long line of Sinanju Masters that dated back to prehistory.

"When Charlemagne had himself crowned emperor, it was thought that he would give rise to an empire as great as that of ancient Rome," Chiun said. "This in spite of his dubious flirtation with Catholicism."

"Didn't he?"

"Certainly not. The fool set up educational systems in monasteries and encouraged literacy among his advisers. He aided the Roman church in winding its wretched tentacles throughout his vast conquered territories. His lunacy led to what is called the Carolingian Renaissance."

"I take it from your tone there wasn't much work for the House back then," Remo said.

"Work?" Chiun balked. "The fool created a civilization. Assassins cannot function where men are civilized. Even when he embarked on his idiotic crusades, he conscripted local help. The House never got a single day's work from the impostor Carolus."

Chiun was silently thoughtful for a pregnant moment. "Well, perhaps one," he admitted.

Remo tore his eyes away from the gray roadway. "Are you telling me we bumped off Charlemagne?"

Chiun turned a level eye on Remo. "The man believed in education and religion. His interference in history led directly to the Christian West, the Magna Carta and-worst of all-American democracy. You tell me."

Remo looked back to the road "We did in Charlemagne," he said, shrugging to himself.

"A blot on the European continent that has never been erased. He gave an insufferable air of smugness to you whites that lives to this day."

"Listen, can we get through this last trip without the race-baiting?" Remo begged.

"You brought it up," Chiun challenged.

"All I said was I thought that cathedral was impressive," Remo said.

"It is ugly," Chiun stated firmly.

"Yes, that's right." Remo exhaled, surrendering at last. "Of course. I don't know why I didn't see it before. It's ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. It is the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and Charlemagne deserved to have his head lopped off for doing whatever it is he did that caused it to eventually get built. There, happy?" Remo demanded. He gripped the steering wheel in frustration.

Chiun tipped his head thoughtfully to one side. "It was not that ugly," he said lightly.

The scream that threatened to explode from Remo's throat was drowned out by the sound of a high-pitched siren directly behind them. When he looked into the big side-view mirror, Remo saw the small shape of a German police car trailing the rented truck.

"What the hell's wrong now?" he asked aloud.

"Do not stop," Chiun commanded. "It could be a bandit in disguise who has learned of the Hoard and wishes to claim it as his own."

"It's a cop, Little Father," Remo said, frowning. "We've probably got a taillight out or some thing." He pulled the big truck over to the side of the road.

Remo climbed down to the wet pavement, grateful to get out from behind the wheel if only for a moment. He heard Chiun's door close, as well. They met up at the closed rear of the truck.

The markings on the door of the police car identified it as belonging to the small town of Burg, which was roughly halfway between Magdeburg and Brandenburg. The policeman himself was dressed in a dark blue uniform with gold piping. As he stepped out of his own vehicle, the officer pulled an odd-shaped blue cap onto his graying hair. It reminded Remo of a French Foreign Legion hat.

"You vill open the rear of the truck, bitte," the German police officer announced as he stepped up to Remo and Chiun.

Remo raised an eyebrow. "Is there something wrong, Officer?" he asked.

Standing behind him, Chiun tugged at the back of Remo's black T-shirt. "I told you not to stop," he hissed.

Remo shrugged Chiun's hand away.

"Open it," the officer said, nodding to the door. His hand was resting on his gun holster. Remo noted that the silver snap had been popped before the cop had even gotten from the car. He had been expecting trouble from the start.

"I'm sorry-" Remo began.

He didn't have a chance to finish. The gun was quickly and expertly drawn from the holster. The policeman leveled it at Remo's chest. "I vill not ask again."

"Why do they all sound like Major Hochstetter the minute they get a gun in their hands?" Remo mumbled to Chiun.

"Do not let him see the Hoard, Remo," Chiun insisted.

There had been cars zipping past the busy roadway the entire time they had been stopped. Remo noted the speeding vehicles with tight concern. "I don't have a choice," he said to the Master of Sinanju. He lifted an eyebrow as he looked at Chiun. Reluctantly, Chiun nodded.

"Das is correct," the cop said firmly.

As Chiun stepped back, Remo turned away from the police officer. He found the key to the rear door in his pocket and unlocked the padlock. Turning the latch, he lifted the rolling door several feet from the rear platform.

"Inside," the cop insisted. "Bose of you."

Remo and Chiun glanced at one another. They climbed up from the wet roadway and into the damp, murky interior of the truck. The police officer came in behind them, gun still aimed at the two men. The muted Doppler sound of cars racing by hummed through the shadowy metal walls of the truck. Water splashed from the highway onto the sides of the road.

When the officer caught sight of the open crates of gold and gems packed inside the cold truck, his mouth dropped open. Even though it was only a fraction of the larger amount of the Nibelungen Hoard, it was still a huge amount of treasure. He stared, shocked, at the stacks of ancient wealth.

"I am confiscating all of dis," he announced, voice numb. He had to concentrate to keep the gun aimed at his two prisoners. He wanted more than anything to ram his black-gloved hands into the nearest crate of gold coins.

"Of course you are," Remo said indifferently. "What I'd like to know is where did you hear about this?"

"Hmm?" the cop asked, glancing up. "Oh. My brusser."

Remo looked at the man's chest. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked.

"My brusser told me," the cop repeated. He had turned away from Remo once more and was staring, awestruck, at the glittering gold.

Remo was dumbfounded. "You wear ladies' underwear, and it talks to you?" he asked, incredulous.

"Not brassiere, imbecile," Chiun interjected, in a hissing whisper. The Master of Sinanju turned to the policeman. "Can I assume that your brother is the owner of the storehouse where my treasure was secreted?"

"Ja," the cop said. "He vas upset dat you put your own locks on the place. I helped him to set up a surveillance system outside the sheds you had rented. In dis vay ve vere able to see vat you had stored there vile it vas being loaded onto the truck. However, it did not look like so much." He shook his head in awe.

"Where is your brother now?" Remo asked.

"Vaiting for us," the cop said. "Somevere safe."

"Does anyone else know about this?" Remo asked.

The cop looked up, abruptly annoyed. "Dat is irrelevant. Ve vill go now," he said.

The Master of Sinanju was growing impatient. "Dispatch this one, Remo," he said.

"We've got to find out if anyone else knows," Remo insisted.

"No one knows but this imbecile Hun and his untrustworthy sibling. Make haste."

"You. Qviet," the officer said to Chiun. He pointed his gun at the Master of Sinanju.

"Buddy, wait-" Remo began. Too late.

The gun had been the last straw. In the instant the barrel had been aimed at his frail chest, Chiun's fingers flew from the confines of his kimono sleeves. Fingernails like deadly talons and as sharp and strong as titanium knife blades swept around to the officer's neck. The first rush of nails took out half the man's throat. Blood erupted in a gushing font onto the nearest crate of gold.

As he felt the shock of raking pain in his neck, the officer tried to shoot. Only then did he realize that his gun was no longer there. Nor, it seemed, was the hand that held it.

Chiun's other hand had dropped down onto the man's wrist, severing the policeman's fist just below the cuff of his blue uniform. The impulse to squeeze the gun that was no longer there caused spurts of blood to pump from the raw wrist stump. In another moment, the officer joined his hand and gun on the floor of the truck, a tiny bubble of crimson at the center of his forehead indicating where Chiun's final blow had been struck.

The Master of Sinanju stepped away from the body as it fell to the damp floor.

"Couldn't you have waited another second?" Remo griped. "We don't know how many more like him are out there."

"They are irrelevant. My gold is all that matters." He turned to go. "See to it that that thing does not bleed on my treasure," Chiun added. Kimono skirts billowed as he hopped down from the truck.

Muttering, Remo rolled the body away from the crates.

Moments later, with the truck's rear door sealed once more, Remo joined Chiun in the cab.

"What did you do with the brigand's vehicle?" the Master of Sinanju asked.

"What did you expect me to do, eat it?" Remo asked. "I shut off the lights and locked it up."

"It will be noticed," Chiun said, concerned.

"Well, duh," Remo said.

Chiun rapped his knuckles urgently on the dashboard. "Hurry, Remo!" he insisted. "Make haste to Berlin lest some other highwayman attempts to take that which is rightfully mine!"

"Sure. Lock the barn door after the horse is at the glue factory," Remo grumbled.

Leaving the persistent light mist to accumulate on the parked police car, Remo pulled the truck back into traffic.

Berlin was still some sixty miles away.

Chapter 3

He had awakened more than two hours before.

The shock of his being kidnapped by Loonies had worn off the second time around, so when Mike Princippi opened his eye only to see a fat pale toe peeking from the end of a cheap sandal two inches from his face, he had merely blinked at the digit. The toe wiggled back.

Princippi pushed his cheek from the floor of the van. The imprint of a metal truck seam lined his grayish skin.

Kneeling, the former governor eyed his captors.

They looked back at him with benign-almost deranged-smiles. The men were jostled on their plain seats as the van continued to speed down the unseen road to a destination known only to the Loonies.

Princippi cleared his throat. "What-?" The words caught for a moment. He coughed again, trying to work up his courage. "What do you want from me?" he asked.

One of the men smiled. Princippi recognized him as the man who had spoken to him in his driveway, though with the matching clothes, haircuts and insipid smiles it was hard to tell for sure.

"Want?" the young man asked. "We want nothing of you, friend Michael. What we want is to give you something."

Princippi licked his lips. "Can't you give it to me here?" he asked. He eyed the closed van door. "Stop the car and we'll have a little presentation ceremony right now."

"The gift we give you cannot be given by us," the man said. "I am Roseflower, by the way. If by knowing my name you will become more at ease."

"Roseflower, huh?" Princippi scoffed. "Is that the name your parents gave you or is it your Loonie name?"

The former governor seemed to have found the one thing that erased the smiles from the faces of the men around him. As one, the mindless grins receded into pale faces, replaced by expressions of pinched disapproval.

"That is not an acceptable term," Roseflower said

"What isn't?" Princippi asked. He racked his brain, trying to remember what he had just said. The gathered men did not seem to want to help him in any way. All at once, the light dawned. "Loonie!" he announced.

The expressions grew more dour. Seeing this, Princippi frowned, as well.

"We do not appreciate that appellation," Roseflower said stiffly.

"I thought that's what you were," Princippi said, his voice betraying uncertainty.

"The proper name is Sunnie," Roseflower insisted. "That other is a derisive designation created by the enemies of our leader."

"Okay, so you're Sunnies," Princippi conceded with a shrug of his slight shoulders. "Can I see a little more of the name reflected in your dispositions?"

The rest seemed to follow Roseflower's lead. His smile returned, thinner now than before. Bland grins appeared on the faces of the others.

"Are we friends again?" Princippi asked hopefully.

"Of course," Roseflower said. His idiotic smile widened. The others followed suit.

"Friends would do anything for one another, wouldn't they?" Princippi asked hopefully.

"I'm not going to let you go, Michael."

Dejected, Princippi's shoulders sunk even farther into his slight frame.

"Some friend you turned out to be," he grumbled.

He spent the rest of the long trip in gloomy depression.

THE VAN DID NOT STOP for several more hours. When it finally did, Princippi hoped it was at a gas station. The minute he heard the words "Fill it up," he planned to scream for all he was worth.

Hope gave way to despair when the rear doors of the van were at last pulled open.

Cool air and bland artificial light poured into the fetid interior. Princippi noted that the air smelled vaguely of gasoline and car exhaust.

His legs ached from alternately kneeling and sitting on the hard floor of the van. Helpful hands brought him to his feet and guided him down onto a cold, flat concrete floor.

It was a parking garage. Underground by the looks of it. Black oil stains filled the spaces between angled parallel white lines. A large red number 2 was painted on the wall near a set of closed elevator doors, and 2nd Basement Level was stenciled in cheery green letters beneath it.

His Loonie escort guided Princippi to the elevator. The doors opened as if by magic. He was whisked upward.

The elevator carried them from the subbasement parking garage up to the seventh floor. When the doors opened once more, they revealed a sterile corridor of eggshell white. Princippi was trundled out onto a rugged blue wall-to-wall carpet.

As he was hustled along the hallway, the former governor noted several large signs spaced along the walls that read Editorials, Features, Advertising and the like. Arrows below the names indicated the direction in which one might find each department.

He began to get a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach far deeper than the one he had felt all day. If this was what he thought...

Doors parted at the end of the corridor, and he was escorted into what was obviously the city room of a large newspaper. Unlike most papers this size, however, there was not a hint of staff on duty.

A row of huge sheets of opaque glass fined the entire far wall of the large room. The pink-robed men led him past rows of vacant desks with their attendant idle computer terminals to the single door that nestled amid the glass.

The name on the door gave Michael Princippi a chill: Man Hyung Sun, Publisher.

He barely had time to read the words before the door was opened for him. He was quickly ushered inside amid his phalanx of robed Loonies.

Princippi recognized Sun right away. The infamous millionaire rose from behind a huge gleaming desk, his face beaming.

The man was notorious. A cult leader from the 1970s who was thought to have been discredited, Sun had made a quiet, determined comeback in the past two decades, acquiring even more wealth and followers than he had controlled in the supposed heyday of his notorious cult. One of the baubles the Korean had purchased for his amusement was the foundering newspaper, the Washington Guardian. Princippi assumed that this was where he now was.

"Governor, I trust you are well?" Sun said as he stepped out from behind his desk. Unlike his followers, Sun wore a well-tailored conservative business suit. His face was bright and guileless. The cult leader was approaching eighty but looked a good fifteen years younger.

"Not really," Princippi said. "What do you want from me?" Though it disturbed him to do so, he took Sun's offered hand. The grip was firm.

"Right to the point," Sun said, pleased. "I like that. They called you a technocrat during the presidential race. As if it is an offense to be punctilious."

The man's cheery attitude was infectious. Princippi was beginning to forget he had been knocked unconscious and dragged unwillingly through five states by the cult leader's mindless followers.

"Yes," the former governor agreed, casting a glance at the line of men behind them. Bare arms crossed over pink-and-white-robed chests. They seemed quite harmless now. Princippi nodded amiably. "I agree. It's too bad there aren't more Chinese in America. You people understand precision." He smiled cheerily.

"I beg your pardon," Sun said, hooded eyes abruptly dead.

Princippi got the sudden sense that he had said something desperately wrong. He bit his cheek. "Aren't you Chinese?" he asked weakly.

As had happened with his followers in the van, Man Hyung Sun's smile evaporated. "Korean," he said flatly.

Princippi hunched further in on himself. He glanced at the Loonies behind him. They were no longer smiling, either. Pink had started to appear quite menacing once more.

The ex-governor resisted the urge to say "What's the difference?" Instead, he mumbled an embarrassed apology. This seemed to mollify Sun. The smile returned, cracking the wide moon face of the cult leader.

"We should not squabble," Sun said. "For this is a great moment. A truly momentous meeting. There has been a turning point in the great cosmic cycle." He closed his eyes. A change appeared to come over the Korean. The smile in his fat face grew wider and settled into lines of great contentment. "Do you not sense it?" Sun asked.

Princippi glanced over his shoulder at the line of Loonies. "Um, yeah," Princippi agreed uncertainly.

"I am glad," Sun replied. "For it has spoken to me, as well. It told me to seek you out." He inhaled deeply and exhaled loudly. "Your mere presence stirs it to greater life within me. My mind and heart thrill in you."

Princippi started to get an even worse feeling than any of the ones he had experienced so far today.

Being bashed on the head by his own Volkswagen hood was okay. Kidnapping? Not a problem. Getting hauled in before a notorious cult leader? Piece of cake. There were far worse things that could happen to a would-be presidential candidate. He hoped one was not about to.

Mike Princippi cleared his throat. He glanced at the line of smiling men behind him. Men being the operative word there. There was not a single female face beneath a shining chrome dome.

"Er, is this some sort of gay thing?" Princippi asked nervously. He quickly held up his hands. "Which is perfectly all right if it is, don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends ...you know? It's just that it's not my cup of herbal tea." He chuckled weakly.

Again, Sun's smile faded. This time, however, it was not a look of disapproval but one of mild confusion.

"You have felt it, have you not?" the cult leader asked.

"Only when I go to the bathroom," Princippi said. "And never around other guys." He shrugged to the Loonies: "Sorry," he added to the silent line of men.

"The presence," Sun guided. "In your mind?"

Princippi turned away from Roseflower and his friends. Something had begun to tingle in the back of his mind. Something dreadfully familiar. Something that he always tried to ignore.

"What are you talking about?" he said, trying to appear innocent. Inwardly he was alarmed.

"Do not lie to me," Sun said. "It is there now. I can feel it, as well."

Princippi tried to suppress the weird sensation in his brain. It was a gentle, persistent stinging. As if rogue synapses had begun to spark and fire like faulty wiring in a set of tangled Christmas-tree lights.

"This is getting a little too weird for me," Princippi said. "May I go now?" He smiled weakly.

Sun shook his head. "You have fought it for too long," he said. "It was wrong of you to do so. It has kept us apart. And without you, I cannot be whole."

The Korean stepped up to Princippi. The exgovernor, though not a tall man himself, was almost as tall as the cult leader.

Princippi realized that the strange stimulation in his brain grew stronger the closer he came to Sun. He tried to quell the fire, but knew from experience that it would not do much good. Not when it was this strong.

Sun raised his hands to the sides of Princippi's head. When the former governor balked, he felt strong arms grab him from behind. The Loonies had clamped hold of him.

The sparking in his brain exploded in a crescendo. It was like the dying moments of a fireworks display played out behind Michael Princippi's eyes. But the crescendo did not end. As Sun rubbed at the ex-governor's face, the pops of brilliant light continued to ignite steadily. For some reason, they were all lit in flaring shades of yellow.

"What is this supposed to be? Some kind of mind meld?" Princippi asked. He tried to make it sound like a joke, but the truth was he was deathly afraid. Sweat beaded on his pasty forehead, dripping in rivulets down his face and around Sun's pressing hands.

"He told you to come to me. To seek me out. Why did you not?" Sun asked. His eyes were closed.

Through the haze of yellow that danced across his retinas, Princippi looked over at Sun. The Korean seemed almost to be in a trance. "This is crazy," he said.

A hand withdrew from his face, only to return sharply. Mike Princippi felt the stinging force of the slap against one gray cheek. The yellow clouds of fire burned more brightly, reveling in the pain inflicted.

"Tell us!" Sun demanded. When he opened his eyes to peer accusingly at Princippi, the former governor recoiled.

Something had happened. It must have been a strange optical illusion. The result of the bursts of light before his own field of vision. That was the only logical explanation.

The Korean's irises appeared to have taken on a bright yellow hue. They were like twin beacons of glowing yellow fire, boring through to his very soul. And the words spilled out before Princippi even knew he was speaking them.

"I thought you'd think I was insane," he blurted, not knowing on what level he had even thought this. He only knew that somewhere in the darkest depths of his repressed mind, it was true.

"And so you kept me from him? Him from me?"

"I didn't know," Princippi begged. "I thought it was like a Son of Sam thing. You know, the dog telling me to go out and kill, or some crackpot junk like that. It all sounded too nuts."

"In spite of what you have already been through?" Sun demanded.

"Especially after that," Princippi said, knowing exactly what it was Sun was referring to.

All at once, Sun pulled his hands away from Princippi's head. The flashes of fire burst one last time and then collapsed inwardly, into a pit of great darkness. For the first time in a long time, the schizophrenic sensation of someone else sharing his mind was no longer with Michael Princippi. It gave him a feeling of great relief. And, oddly, an equal mixture of intense loneliness.

The demonic yellow glow in the eyes of Sun grew weak, as well. It died momentarily, like twin vanishing embers in a spectral fire.

Sun looked away from Princippi, across one of the governor's weak shoulders. "The Boston Museum of Rare Arts," he said sharply. "Greek room. Not on display. It is in a rear chamber with other artifacts. Go."

Roseflower and two of the other men left wordlessly. The rest stayed.

The former governor and presidential candidate knew precisely what it was Sun had sent the men to retrieve. He had donated it to the museum himself. Somehow, Sun had gleaned this from his own thoughts.

"Now we wait," Sun said. He walked back around his desk, settling into his chair.

Princippi spoke freely now, without reservation. "You know the people who were involved with this before are either dead or aren't talking. No one wants to be linked to the Truth Church or the crazies who ran it. It's over." He said this last bit as a warning.

"That is where you are wrong, Governor," Man Hyung Sun announced with certainty. He folded his hands with calm precision on the surface of his gleaming mahogany desk. "It has only just begun."

Sun gave him a smile so disconcerting it made Princippi want to dash for the nearest urinal.

Chapter 4

The truck careered wildly down Kantstrasse. The Theater des Westens soared past on the left as Remo floored the big vehicle. He aimed for the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

"Hold on!" he yelled.

Without shifting gears, he whipped around the sharp corner and out across Kurfurstendamm. Cars driving in both directions slammed on brakes or swerved from the path of the seemingly out-of-control truck.

From around the facade of the huge church, dozens of tiny police cars soared. Bumping into one another, grinding paint on paint, they bunched up again. Like a swarm of angry wasps, they roared in the direction of the runaway truck, lights and sirens flashing and wailing.

Remo had taken the curve too sharply. The right wheels of the truck bounced once against the curb and began rising slowly into the air. The world took on a weird angled look as the vehicle began to tilt onto Remo's side.

"Lean over!" Remo commanded. Still holding the wheel, he flung himself toward the Master of Sinanju.

"Do not get too familiar," Chiun complained as the back of Remo's head popped into his field of vision. He tipped his own head to see around it.

"Dammit, Chiun, lean!" Remo commanded. Still on two wheels, they had managed to cross over to Tauenzienstrasse.

"You told me to hold on," Chiun pointed out. Though they had been outrunning the police for more than ten minutes, he was still as calm as a crystal pool.

"It was a figure of speech!" Remo yelled. "Lean!" He felt the van moving farther over. Another few seconds and they would be flat on one side and skidding at a hundred miles per hour.

Chiun sighed. "Very well." He tilted toward his door.

The Master of Sinanju's ninety-pound frame seemed to do the trick. With his weight added to Remo's, the truck collapsed back onto all four wheels, settling in an angry bounce of tires and grinding shocks.

Something broke free from beneath the truck. In the side-view mirror, it seemed to skip back into their wake and beneath the tires of one of the leading police cars.

As it bounced over the long strip of twisted metal, rubber erupted in hot bursts from both sides of the police cruiser. The car did a perfect 180-degree turn into the nose of another oncoming cruiser.

The crash was spectacular. A dozen police cars slammed into one another, buckling and crumpling like paper cups. The rest skipped around the huge crash site, driving even more determinedly after Remo.

"I hope they've got air bags," Remo commented as the horrid scene faded to a rapid speck behind them.

"They eat a diet of pastry and pork," Chiun explained indifferently. "Germans are their own air bags."

"You realize if they catch us they're going to find him in the back," Remo said. He jerked his head over his shoulder to indicate where various body parts of the dead Burg police officer were even now bouncing around amid the remnants of the Nibelungen Hoard.

"They had better not catch us," Chiun warned.

"I'm doing my best," Remo said, irritated.

He swerved in and out of traffic as he drove wildly down the wide street. Cars seemed to move almost instinctively out of his way. Those that did not were batted by the fenders of the truck. The metal was already a crumpled mess.

"That cop's brother must have ratted us out," Remo said, narrowly avoiding a collision with a van that was pulling out of a side street. The other vehicle slammed on its brakes. "Either that or somebody saw us at the cop car."

"I was nowhere near the constable's vehicle," Chiun pointed out. "I am innocent in that matter."

"Yeah, you only killed him," Remo snapped sourly.

"Oh, of course," Chiun sniffed. "Blame me for the dead highwayman. How like you, Remo."

"You killed him!" Remo snapped.

"A technicality," Chiun said dismissively. "Do not assault my delicate ears with trivialities."

"I've got another triviality for you," Remo said. "Your buddies aren't going to be too happy to see us show up with all of this going on around us."

"Do not concern yourself with them," Chiun said with certainty. "They will do as they are told."

"You hope," Remo said.

He cut around another sharp corner, more slowly this time. The truck's tires remained firmly on the street; however, the pursuing police cars seemed to leap dramatically ahead. They buzzed around the corner and into Remo's wake.

"This road appears closed," Chiun mentioned.

Remo had gotten the same impression. There was no vehicular traffic on the long thoroughfare. It hadn't been this way during any of his other trips. Far up ahead, Remo thought he saw why.

"Is that what I think it is?" he said anxiously.

"Where?" Chiun asked, peering through the windshield like a Gypsy looking into the heart of a crystal ball. "Before the line of parked police vehicles or after it?"

"That's what I thought," Remo groaned.

He could see them clearly now. There were two rows of them. One lined up before the other. They stretched from one side of the street to the other, effectively blocking the avenue to through traffic.

Berlin police officers were standing with rifles before the cars, faces taut. Hazy rain dribbled across the stabs of flashing blue light issuing from the roofs of the dozens of parked cruisers.

"We could bail out here," Remo suggested rapidly. "They'd never catch us."

"And abandon my treasure to these stickyfingered Huns?" Chiun asked, incredulous. "Never!"

"That's what I thought you'd say," Remo sighed. He hunched down behind the steering wheel. "Brace for impact."

When it became obvious that the truck was not going to slow down, the order to fire was given by the commanding officer on the scene. The gunfire started before they even slammed into the first line of cars. Rifle fire crackled through the damp evening air.

Quarter-size pockmarks erupted across the nose of the rushing truck. The windshield spiderwebbed then shattered in a spray of thick greenish chunks.

Remo and Chiun had ducked behind the dash board. Glass exploded across their backs as they tore into the defensive police line.

Berlin police scattered out of the path of the truck like timid matadors from a crazed bull. The vehicle lurched as it slammed the first row of cars. Bullets riddled the doors and side panels as the large truck roared past.

Fortunately for Remo, the police cars were of the small European style. They were flung from the crumpling nose of the truck as it plowed forward into the second line. It pushed these aside, as well. More slowly now, it continued onward, bullets and shouts following it.

When he got back up, Remo saw the pursuing police cars winding their way through the twisted wreckage. Wind whipped around his stern face through the open front of the truck. He turned from the side-view mirror.

"This is getting worse and worse," Remo commented. "They'd just better not lock the gates before we can get there," he warned.

Chiun shook his head firmly. "They will not lock the gates," he insisted. "For they would not dare."

"ARE THE GATES SECURE?'' Ambassador Pak Sok asked nervously. He was a squat man with a face as flat as a flying pan bottom. He wiped at his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief.

"Quite secure," replied the ambassador's assistant, who was also an officer of the Public Security Ministry.

Sok did not seem convinced.

It was not that he thought his aide was lying. Although he did not trust his assistant in most matters, Sok knew that he would not lie about something as trivial as a locked gate. He simply was not convinced that a locked gate would make any difference. In fact, it might only make things worse.

As ambassador for Choson Minchu-chuff Inmin Konghwa-guk, otherwise known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Sok was his country's highest-ranking diplomat in Germany. He enjoyed all the perks of his posting, including access to Germany's uncensored television broadcasts. It was on the TV that he had seen an image that made his heart sink.

The television was on now, sound down. In the large living room of the North Korean embassy, Sok turned away from the tall multipaned window, looking back at the screen.

A white truck continued to race desperately down Germany's streets, relentlessly pursued by an ever growing convoy of police vehicles. A news helicopter had been following the action from the sky for the past twenty minutes.

To Sok it looked almost like the internationally famous chase that had taken place in America a few years back. But this time the truck was driving at breakneck speed, not at a snail's pace. And there was not an ex-football player cowering in the vehicle. Sok would have preferred that it be an American celebrity unknown to him. Unfortunately, he knew all too well who was in that truck.

"He cannot hope to come here," Ambassador Sok's aide said, watching the screen intently. The truck was racing down familiar streets. It was only a few blocks from the embassy.

"I would hope not," Sok agreed, his voice betraying his jangled nerves. He turned from the television back to the window. His fingers gripped tightly at the thick silk fabric of the red floor-length curtains. Vines crept artfully away from the walls and across strategic portions of windowpane. "You are certain the gates are locked?" the ambassador asked.

"Yes, yes." The aide nodded. He bit a thumbnail as he stared at the TV screen. Eyes growing wide, he suddenly grabbed for the remote control.

Sok heard the gunshots beneath the serious German voice of the reporter. He wheeled around in time to see the truck barrel into a line of parked police cruisers. Cars flew in every direction as the truck pummeled its way through to the other side. It skidded sideways momentarily and then righted itself, racing away from the smashed cars.

"Where is that?" Sok asked.

"About two-"

"Wait," the ambassador demanded, raising a quieting hand. "Turn that down," he ordered.

The aide did as he was told. When the sound had been muted once more, they continued to hear the muffled gunshots. A moment later, Sok's heart sunk as he heard the frantic squeal of tires. Turning back to the TV, he saw the truck finishing up a crazed turn around a very familiar corner.

"They are here," the ambassador said, his voice dead.

"THE GATES ARE CLOSED!" Remo yelled as the truck screamed up to the North Korean embassy.

"They do not leave them open on a normal day," the Master of Sinanju pointed out. Gusts of air from the open windshield whipped fiercely at the gossamer tufts of hair above each ear.

"The guards have guns!" Remo shouted.

"Do they not always?"

"Not pointed at us!" Remo replied.

At least ten embassy guards were standing in the long driveway just inside the closed gate. Kalashnikov rifles jutted through the spaces in the tall wrought-iron fence, aimed directly at the nose of the approaching truck.

Remo's mirror had been picked off by a Berlin police officer. A big enough slab of glass remained that he was able to see the cruisers closing in behind.

"There's not enough time to stop," Remo warned Chiun.

"Do as you must," the Master of Sinanju conceded. "Just do not lose any of my precious treasure."

"That's the least of my worries right now," Remo said.

Turning the wheel sharply to the right, Remo jumped the truck onto the curb at an angle. The big vehicle tipped slightly to one side. Rapidly, he cut the wheel to the left. The vehicle leveled off as it raced across the sidewalk.

Beyond the gates, the eyes of the Korean embassy guards grew wide as the truck barreled remorselessly toward them. As one, the guards opened fire.

They did not have much time to shoot.

The truck crashed the gates a second later, scooping up four guards and flinging them roughly aside. The others scattered like flung jacks into the bushes as the truck flew crazily up the drive.

The brakes were hit the instant the truck struck the gates. Tires screamed in protest as the vehicle screeched toward the ambassador's residence. Black streaks of smoking rubber spread in crazy zigzags as the truck tried frantically to both stop and remain upright while doing so.

In the end, it could not do both.

Halfway up the driveway the big truck toppled over onto its passenger's side. Sparks popped and paint ripped away as the vehicle slid toward the ivy-covered brick walls of the Korean embassy.

Inside the vehicle, Remo and Chiun kept their bodies loose. The moment the truck hit the driveway, they met the impact with an equal repulsive force. They immediately joined with it. The two Masters of Sinanju floated as safely as babies in a pool of amniotic fluid as the truck skidded to a slow, determined stop.

A slight impact at the last moment indicated that the truck had tapped against the wall of the embassy building. Sideways now, Remo could see oddly vertical bricks piled up through the smashed windshield.

The sudden intense silence was filled almost instantly by the sounds of car after car squealing to a stop back beyond the blown-open gates of the embassy. Shouts in both German and Korean filled the air.

Sitting sideways on the upended truck seat, Remo Williams listened to the yelling voices outside. He had one hand braced against the roof of the truck. "We're not out of the woods yet," he commented. He glanced over to the Master of Sinanju-more a glance down than sideways now.

Beyond Chiun's broken window was driveway. The old Korean had braced one bony hand similarly against the roof.

"You did that on purpose," Chiun accused.

"Did what?" Remo asked, his brow creasing.

"You deliberately tipped this vehicle over onto its side." He looked at the pavement, which was framed in his window like some strange modern painting rendered in asphalt.

"Geez, Chiun, we've got more important stuff to worry about right now," Remo complained.

Scuffling footsteps sounded immediately outside the truck. For a moment, Remo thought that the Berlin police had dared to venture onto embassy grounds. But all at once, a familiar red face appeared in the remnants of the front windshield. Remo recognized Ambassador Sok.

"Sorry. We thought this was the McDonald's drive thru," Remo said with an apologetic shrug.

The Korean diplomat was very undiplomatic in his expression. Clearly, he would have found this whole incident more pleasing if Remo and Chiun had perished in the crash.

His face pinched disapprovingly as he rose wordlessly from his bent posture. Almost as soon as he was gone, he began shouting down to the gathered police. He spoke in English, the accepted international language.

"Diplomatic immunity! Diplomatic immunity! These are Korean diplomats and this is sovereign North Korean soil! Please to stay beyond fence!"

Sok's voice grew more faint as he hustled down the drive to the twisted remnants of the embassy gates. He was greeted with shouts and jeers from the Berlin police.

Somewhere far above, Remo heard a helicopter rattling loudly.

"Let's take stock, shall we?" Remo suggested heartily. "So far we've pissed off the Germans, the Koreans and-when Smith finds out about this-America, as well. All that for a few scraps of yellow metal. Whaddaya think?" he asked with growing sarcasm. "Was it all worth it, Chiun?"

On the seat below him, the elderly Korean turned a baleful eye up to his pupil.

"Yes," droned the Master of Sinanju simply, adding, "and I am not talking to you."

Chapter 5

"No way," Dr. Wendell, the surgeon who had performed the emergency procedure, had insisted. "I will not be a party to it. If you leave, it is with my strongest reservations."

"Listen to reason," suggested Dr. Styles, the general practitioner who had diagnosed the edema. But though he used his most rational tone, his words fell on deaf ears.

"Folcroft Sanitarium is more than suited to handle these cases," the doctors' patient had declared.

The doctors pushed hard for an extended stay-unusual in the modern era of "everything as outpatient" medicine. But this was an extreme case; the patient was at the sensitive time of fife when the seriousness of something such as excess fluid on the brain could not be overstated.

Already, while in the care of New York's Columbus-Jesuit Hospital, he had fallen once on the way to the bathroom. Of course, it had been the night after the operation and he should not have been out of bed in the first place, but their patient was determined.

"Determined to kill himself," Dr. Wendell muttered to Dr. Styles in the hallway prior to their last attempt to keep their patient in the hospital one more day.

He was running a big risk leaving, but their patient had made up his mind. Apparently, that was that.

Of course, he could suffer more dizzy spells that might cause him to fall down a flight of stairs. The fluid could build up once more. Most insidious of all, years down the road he might even develop a tumor at the site. Who knew? In such cases, it was always best to play it safe.

"This is craziness," Dr. Styles said. "You've only been here two days."

"Where are my trousers?" Harold W. Smith asked in reply.

Smith was an absolutely terrible patient. Full of intelligent questions and eager to get everything over with as quickly as possible. Even brain surgery.

The old axiom was true. Doctors did make the worst patients. The fact that the gaunt old man was listed as "Smith, Dr. Harold W." on all of his hospital forms went a long way toward explaining his attitude. But though Smith held the title of doctor, no one-not even his personal physician-seemed to know what he was a doctor of.

He was director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. That much was clear. For it was into the care of this respected but terribly exclusive and secretive care facility that Harold Smith was given over.

Smith accepted the mandatory wheelchair ride out of the hospital without complaint. A parsimonious man, he reasoned that the orderly assigned to escort him from Columbus-Jesuit would be paid whether he wheeled Smith to a waiting car or not. Better that the boy did his job as he rightly should rather than use for idle purposes the ten minutes it took to bring Smith downstairs. And-though Smith hated to admit it-the Folcroft administrator was not sure if he could have walked down on his own.

Dr. Lance Drew was waiting for him downstairs.

Dr. Drew was the chief physician at Folcroft, answerable directly to Smith. He instantly took over from the orderly, aiding his frail-looking employer into his car. It was a forty-five minute drive from the city to Rye.

When the familiar high wall of Folcroft appeared beside the road, the sight seemed to hearten Smith.

He was not an emotional man by any stretch of the imagination. Few physical objects held much meaning to the taciturn Harold Smith. But Folcroft was different. It had-in a large way-been his home for more than three decades. Rarely did a day go by without Smith's passing between the somber granite lions set above the gates of the venerable old institution.

In a sense, this was a homecoming. Although he had never entered the grounds in quite this way before, he felt more energized than he had in a long time. Even when he was feeling perfectly well.

Taking the car past the small guard shack, Dr. Drew drove rapidly up the great gravel driveway to the main building. He parked at the front steps, hurrying around to the passenger's-side door.

At first, Smith was determined to negotiate the stairs on his own. He found, however, that he was having trouble simply getting out of the car.

"Please take my arm," Smith asked eventually. His reserved tone belied his embarrassment.

Dr. Drew did as he was instructed. When he reached a helpful hand for Smith's battered leather briefcase-the only luggage the Folcroft director had brought with him to the hospital-Smith pulled it away. His strength in this seemed quite surprising.

"I will carry it," he insisted.

Drew only shrugged. He held firmly on to Smith's biceps as Smith clasped the doctor's forearm for support.

"Careful, careful," Dr. Drew instructed soothingly when they were at the stairs. "Take them slowly. We have all day."

Smith found Drew's tone patronizing in the extreme. He would have liked to have said something, but all of his energies were being devoted to negotiating the staircase. It had never seemed so high before.

Once inside, Smith settled into a room in the special Folcroft wing. Virtually deserted now, it only held patients on an infrequent basis.

There Smith worked, not only on his recovery, but on the small laptop computer that he kept stored in his precious leather briefcase.

Like the physicians at Columbus-Jesuit, Dr. Drew discouraged Smith from working. There was nothing, he said, that would not keep until the Folcroft administrator had made a complete recovery.

"Hydrocephaly is no small matter, Dr. Smith," Dr. Drew said.

"I am aware of that," Smith replied as he typed away at his keyboard. He was careful to keep the text on the small bar screen turned away from the Folcroft doctor.

"It is an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull. Your skull. Where your brain is?"

"I do not appreciate sarcasm," Smith replied crisply, eyes leveled on his computer.

Dr. Drew merely threw up his hands and left.

Of course, Smith knew how serious his medical condition had been. It was the result of an obstruction caused by a severe blow to the head. The unrelieved pressure had caused Smith much discomfort for many days, including vision problems, nausea, vomiting and a relentless, pounding headache. The headache had been the thing that finally propelled him to the doctor and ultimately to surgery.

But the bandages were gone now, the small incision scar was a puffy memory of the operation and the patch of gray-white hair that had been shaved from his pate was on its stubbly way to filling back in. It was three weeks after the operation now, and Smith was firmly on the road to complete recovery.

Besides, he had work to do.

Not Folcroft business. If it became necessary, his secretary was well trained by her employer to handle long absences. The work that occupied all of Smith's time as he sat alone in the virtually abandoned wing of the big old institution had nothing to do with the grounds or building in which he had toiled tirelessly for thirty-plus years. Truth be told, every last brick of Folcroft could have toppled over into the cold black waters of Long Island Sound and the lifework of Harold W. Smith would still go on.

Unbeknownst to all who worked there save Smith himself, Folcroft was merely a cover. A public face for a most private enterprise.

It would have shocked the staff to learn that the place to which they reported to work every day was in reality the greatest and most damning secret in the two-and-a-quarter-century history of the United States Constitution.

Folcroft was the home of CURE, a supersecret agency of the U.S. government.

In the dusty basement of Folcroft, a hidden bank of four mainframe computers augmented with optical WORM-drive servers toiled endlessly and anonymously. Locating, collecting, collating information from the World Wide Web. The Folcroft Four, as Smith had dubbed the computers in a rare display of creativity, stretched their fiber-optic tendrils literally around the world. The data gathered was brought back electronically to Smith for his perusal.

Ordinarily, Smith would have accessed the information from a hidden terminal in his office desk. But Harold Smith was nothing if not adaptable. Circumstances had forced him for the time being to utilize the small laptop setup that he ordinarily used when away from Folcroft.

As director of CURE, Smith was charged with safeguarding the nation against threats both internal and external. In the most dire circumstances, he was allowed to employ the most powerful force in the U.S. arsenal. But at the moment, there were no dire issues facing either CURE or America. It was for this reason that Smith had allowed the agency's two secret weapons time to retrieve some personal property from Germany.

The Nibelungen Hoard. Smith still did not quite believe that Remo and Chiun had found the Hoard. If the legends were true, it was a dangerous amount of wealth for anyone to have.

The same madman whose attack had caused the fluid buildup on Smith's brain could have used the gold to destroy the economy of Germany. Adolf Kluge was dead now, but that would not prevent another from taking up his banner of destruction. This was the reason Smith had insisted Remo and Chiun transport the Hoard to Chiun's native village of Sinanju as quickly as possible. It would be safe there, languishing amid the other treasure for millennia to come.

The past few months had been very trying. For all of them. But it seemed as if a turning point had at last been reached. And if not that, at least it was a lull. There had been so few of them in the past thirty years that Smith had decided to enjoy this one.

As he typed at his laptop, the CURE director sighed contentedly.

Seconds later, a nurse raced into the room dragging an emergency crash cart behind her.

"Oh," she said, wheeling the cart to a sudden, skidding stop. A look of intense concern crossed her face. "Are you all right, Dr. Smith?"

"What?" Smith asked, looking up from his computer. "Yes," he said, confused. "Yes, I am fine."

"I thought I heard you gasping for air," she said, her tone apologetic. "It sounded like an asthmatic attack. Or worse."

Smith's gray face puckered in slight perplexity. "I made no such sound," he said.

Dr. Drew raced into the room a moment later. He skidded to a stop next to the nurse. When he saw Smith sitting up calmly in bed, he turned, panting, to the middle-aged woman.

"Did you call a Code Blue?" he demanded.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she apologized. "I thought he was going into respiratory failure."

"I do not know what it is you heard, Nurse," Smith said. "But I assure you I feel fine."

Turning away from the doctor and nurse, Smith resumed typing. As his fingers tapped swiftly away at the keyboard, he thought again how calm the world scene was at the moment. As he did so, another pleased sigh escaped his gray lips. It sounded like a dying moose attempting to yodel up a rusted radiator pipe.

Dr. Drew and the nurse glanced at one another in immediate understanding. Without another word, the nurse rolled the crash cart back out into the hallway, leaving Dr. Drew alone with Smith.

"How are you feeling today, Dr. Smith?" Drew asked. He was forced to compete with Smith's clattering keyboard for attention. He tried not to show his irritation.

"As I said, Doctor, I am fine," Smith said. His eyes did not lift from the text on his computer screen.

To Dr. Lance Drew, it was like battling a television for a teenager's attention.

Drew made a soft humming noise. "While I'm here..." he said more to himself than to Smith.

The doctor went over and collected a bloodpressure cuff from a netted holder in the wall. Smith stopped typing long enough with one hand to allow Dr. Drew to slip the cuff up onto his left biceps.

"It would help if you didn't type," Dr. Drew complained as he adjusted his stethoscope under the inflatable bag.

It was as if Smith didn't hear him. The constant clattering noise and the slight arm motion would make it difficult. Frowning, Drew watched the indicator needle as much as listened to the uneven heartbeat of his employer.

Typing furiously at his laptop, Smith had been careful enough to inch the computer to one side in order to keep his work away from Drew's prying eyes. For a moment, the endless staccato drumming of his arthritic fingers against the keyboard paused as he read an AP report the CURE system had flagged.

There had been a break-in the previous night at the Boston Museum of Rare Arts. Three guards were dead, but no valuable artifacts had been taken.

The strangeness of the report was what brought it to the attention of the CURE mainframes. As best as could be determined by a curator, the Greek exhibit of the classical art collection was all that had interested the burglars. And even with the kind of focus the robbers had apparently had, they had ignored the most valuable Greek pottery and Roman glass on display, choosing instead to steal what was being described by the museum as a "common stone artifact."

It was not a job for CURE. Smith was certainly not going to recall Remo and Chiun from Europe to go looking for a useless museum piece.

Smith was about to leave the article when his computer suddenly did so for him. The AP story winked out, replaced by another story, this one attributed to Reuters.

He read the straightforward lines of text quickly, wondering what it was his computers had found so intriguing. It did not take long for him to realize why the Folcroft Four had pulled the story from the Web.

"What's wrong?" a concerned voice beside Smith asked.

Smith's eyes shot up from his computer, shocked. Dr. Drew was standing there. Stethoscope earpieces hung down from either side of his head.

"What?" Smith croaked.

"Your blood pressure," Drew explained. "Your heart rate just shot through the roof."

"No," Smith said, swallowing. "No, I am fine." The words were hollow.

Smith was trying desperately to think. Already his head had begun to ache, bringing back too recent memories of his painful ordeal.

"Is there something I can do?" Dr. Drew offered helpfully. Detaching his stethoscope, he leaned to one side, trying to get a peek at Smith's computer.

Smith instantly slapped the thin folding screen down over the keyboard and hard drive, obscuring the text.

"I'm fine!" Smith snapped. "That will be all."

Dr. Drew stiffened. For a man used to respect, Smith's rudeness at times was intolerable. With only a cursory nod to his patient and employer, he left the hospital room.

As soon as the Folcroft doctor had exited the room, Harold Smith shut down his remote computer. He had wasted far too much time in bed. It was time to get to his office.

Dropping his bare feet to the floor, Smith stepped uncertainly over to the closet in search of his suit.

Chapter 6

Fifteen minutes later, Harold Smith was out of his pajamas, dressed in his familiar gray three-piece suit with attendant Dartmouth tie, and sitting in the more comfortable environs of his Spartan Folcroft administrator's office.

The headache he was experiencing was not as it had been. The pain now was like the ghostly afterimage of the dangerous bout of hydrocephaly. Still, it was enough to remind him of all he had been through.

Smith held firmly to the edge of his desk with one bony hand while with the other he clamped his blue desk phone to one ear. He waited only a few moments for the scrambled satellite call to be picked up by the North Korean embassy in Berlin.

"Apprentice Reigning Master of Sinanju, please," he said to the Korean voice that answered. There was no need for secrecy. A sophisticated program ensured that the call could not be traced back to Folcroft.

It was the word Sinanju that did it. Although the man who answered apparently spoke no English, he dropped the phone the minute it was spoken.

Moments later, Remo's familiar voice came on the line.

"What kept you?" he said by way of introduction.

"Have you lost your mind?" Smith demanded.

"Cripes, what's the matter, Smitty? Someone squirt an extra quart of alum in your enema this morning?"

"Remo, this is serious," Smith insisted. "I have the news on in my office right now." He glanced at the old battered black-and-white TV set. "They are playing videotape of what can only be you and the Master of Sinanju in a highspeed chase with Berlin police."

"Edited or unedited?"

"What?" Smith asked sourly. "Edited, it appears," he said, glancing at the screen. "Why?"

"'Cause over here we're getting the full treatment. They've rebroadcast the whole chase virtually in its entirety a bunch of times since last night."

"Remo, you almost sound proud," Smith said, shocked. "You must know that this is outra-" He froze in midword. "My God," he gasped.

"The gate crash, right?" Remo guessed. "Beautiful piece of driving if I do say so myself."

On the screen of Smith's portable TV, Remo's rental truck had just burst through the twin gates of the Korean embassy. Guards were flung to either side as the truck flipped over, skidding in a spectacular slide up to the front wall of the brick building. Every inch of the incredible crash had been recorded by a German news helicopter.

"This is beyond belief," the CURE director announced. His stomach ached. If his head reeled any more, it would tangle in the phone cord. At this moment, strangulation would be a blessed relief.

"I thought so, too," Remo said proudly. "It was touch and go for a little while there, but we came out of it okay. Except Chiun is a little ticked at me. But he'll get over it."

"No, I will not!" the squeaky voice of the Master of Sinanju yelled from the background.

"Remo," Smith said, trying to infuse his voice with a reasonable tone. It was not easy. "I do not know what to say. You have recklessly and deliberately compromised yourself. According to what I have read, this footage is playing the world over. The German authorities are screaming for your heads."

"Can't do it," Remo said. "Extraterritoriality. As official representatives of the North Korean government we are exempt from the laws of our host nation. That would be Germany. Legally, they can't touch us."

"You are not Korean diplomats," Smith explained slowly.

"I am Korean," Chiun called. "And am quite diplomatic."

"Tell Master Chiun that-semantics notwithstanding-he is absolutely, unequivocally not a representative of the North Korean government," Smith deadpanned.

"You're not a diplomat, Little Father," Remo called.

"Do not 'Little Father' me, flipper of trucks," Chiun snapped back.

"He says he's not talking to me," Remo explained to Smith. "Of course, as usual, that only lasts until he can come up with the next insult."

"Nitwit," Chiun called.

"See?" Remo said.

"This is insane," Smith said, aghast at Remo's flippant attitude. "How can you not realize the seriousness of this situation? My God, Remo, they filmed you."

"Videotaped, actually," Remo said. "And while we're at it-no, they didn't."

"I can see you!" Smith snapped. The image of the battered truck was replaced by a vapid news anchor.

"You see a truck, Smitty," Remo explained patiently. "You didn't see either of our faces. You know how Chiun and I can avoid being shot by cameras."

"That is irrelevant," Smith said. "You are found out. According to reports, the Berlin police have the embassy surrounded. The German government has gotten involved in the situation. North Korea is stonewalling for now, but that will not last. The two of you are sitting in the middle of a growing storm of international scrutiny."

"Not for long," Remo said confidently. "We're getting out tonight."

"How?" Smith asked, instantly wary.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head," Remo said soothingly. "Just rest assured that those police barricades won't stop us. We should be fine on this end as long as we don't get turned in first."

"Is there a danger of that?"

"Unlikely. The ambassador is scared to death of us. He knows all about Sinanju, so he doesn't want to cross us. The guy who worries me is his aide. I think he's with the secret police or something."

Smith closed his eyes as he considered the predicament. "I told you I was not comfortable with your going to the North Korean government for help," he said.

"You're the one who told us we were on our own."

"And I stand by that. CURE's facilities are not at your disposal when you wish to smuggle the Nibelungen Hoard out of Germany," Smith said, restating his earlier position.

"Which is why Chiun turned to North Korea," Remo said. "It's easier this way, Smitty. That dipshit Kim Jong Il pees his pants whenever he hears Chiun's name. He couldn't wait to loan us his personal jet. Diplomatic pouch. No searches. Zip, bang, boom into Pyongyang Airport. Every trip has been flawless. We were home free until today."

Eyes still closed, Smith pinched the bridge of his nose. "How much treasure is left?" he asked wearily.

"Not much," Remo said. "Luckily, we were on our last run. A couple of boxes. Maybe twenty, twenty-five in all. About as big as orange crates."

"You can get them out undetected?"

"Bet on it," Remo said.

"I would prefer not to," Smith said dryly. He exhaled a loud, painful puff of stale air. "Do what you have to as quickly as you possibly can. I want you both off of German soil and back here at the absolute earliest. Is that clear?"

"Not a problem," Remo said amiably. "Consider us already gone. By the way, you don't sound too chipper. How are you feeling, Smitty?"

Smith did not even bother to reply. With an exhausted stretch of his tired arm, he dropped the blue receiver back into the old-fashioned cradle.

Chapter 7

Whenever Dan Bergdorf slept, he had nightmares. The dream pattern was always the same. He was in the middle of some grand disaster movie from the 1970s. Not the actual film itself, but the making of the film. Dan would be on a plane with Burt Lancaster, directing an epic crash. Cameras would roll, Dan would call "Action" and all at once the dummy bomb from props would somehow wind up being real. The explosion would rip through the fuselage, and the plane would make a screaming beeline for the ground thirty thousand feet below. Unlike in the movies, all aboard perished.

Sometimes he was putting out skyscraper fires with Steve McQueen. Other times he was crawling through greasy passageways of a capsized luxury liner with Gene Hackman. Always, the phony disaster would wind up being all too real. At the terrifying moment his dream alter ego perished in whatever the latest calamity might be, Dan would scream himself awake.

Sweating, panting, disoriented, Dan would realize as he came back to his senses that it had all been a bad dream.

And as the horror of reality sank in, he would realize that his sleeping nightmares were nowhere near as bad as his waking one.

Unlike in his dreams, Dan did not work in motion pictures. He was an executive producer of special projects for a small television station in Passaic, New Jersey.

WAST-TV Channel 8 had tried to make a name for itself in the syndication market a few years before. Right out of the box, they had a major hit that the station's top brass was certain would propel them into the vanguard of television's burgeoning new frontier.

New York radio shock jock Harold Stein had branched out into low-budget TV. The marriage between the raunchy radio-show host and Channel 8 seemed to be one made in heaven. Or perhaps somewhere farther south. In any event, The Harold Stein Show was a syndicated sensation. In some markets, it even beat out the tired Saturday Night Live in the ratings.

As executive producer for the Stein show, Dan and Channel 8 had ridden the crest of a wave that would surely take them all on to bigger and better things.

Or so they thought.

After only two seasons working on the hourlong show, Stein called it quits, citing his intense displeasure with the cheapness of the program as his primary reason. Channel 8's stock and reputation instantly took a nosedive.

After a few years of desperate scrambling-in a twist right out of Charles Dickens-the failing station was bought up by a mysterious benefactor. An immediate infusion of cash from this unknown source instantly brought Channel 8 back into the black. Prospects brightened. Some new staff were even hired. For the first time since the Stein debacle, Dan Bergdorf had allowed himself to get his hopes up. That lasted until the day he was brought into the general manager's office to meet the new owner.

All hope for a future in legitimate television and films vanished the moment he learned who his new employer was.

Dan instantly recognized Man Hyung Sun. It was the night of that very first meeting that the dreams had started.

His nightmares had only gotten worse over the years. By the time Sun showed himself as the owner of Channel 8, it was already too late for Dan. He was branded a Loonie by every station in the country.

The flurry of resumes he sent out was ignored. Phone calls to supposed friends who had made it in the industry were not returned. Dan became an outcast. With no other prospects in life, he was forced to remain at Channel 8.

AT WAST, Dan was put in charge of special projects. That was the Channel 8 term for infomercials.

These program-length commercials usually involved cellulite cream, "magic" abdominal exercises or real-estate scams. Apparently, the glut already on the market was not enough to prevent Channel 8 from making a tidy little profit on these syndicated half-hour ads. It seemed that people could not get enough of them.

Dan, of course, was not one of those people.

"What kind of asshole is up at 3:00 a.m. watching 'Professor Brilliant's Amazing Patented Exfoliation Sensation'?" he demanded of his secretary one day after seeing the New York ratings for the infomercial.

"Have you seen it?" she asked. "It's pretty funny."

"I don't have to watch it, honey," Dan deadpanned. "I was there when they shot that disaster. First, it ain't that funny. Plus, Professor Brilliant's wig looks like a dead poodle. Plus, the sets are cheesier than a Wisconsin dairy farm. Plus, get me a cup of coffee now or you're fired."

His attitude at work was at least that bad every day since the Loonie takeover. Worse on days after one of his celebrity-filled disaster nightmares.

On the day he met with former governor and presidential candidate Mike Princippi, Dan Bergdorf was still recovering from the night he had spent stumbling through earthquake-ravaged Los Angeles with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner.

"Governor Princippi," Dan said, trying to force images of tumbledown buildings and devastated streets from his mind. "It's a genuine pleasure to meet you."

After the men shook hands, Dan took a seat on his office couch, indicating that Princippi should sit in a comfortable overstuffed chair.

"I must say, I'm a bit surprised to see you here," Dan admitted. He pitched his voice low. "We don't generally get people of your caliber at Channel 8." His voice dropped even lower, as if imparting a shameful secret. He was. "I voted for you, by the way," Dan added.

Clearly, the ex-presidential candidate was not interested in discussing his disastrous campaign. "Do you know what this is about?" Princippi asked officiously.

Dan clapped his hands on his knees. He shrugged. "To tell you the truth, I'm in the dark. Something about cutting an infotainment spot, I imagine. What did you have in mind?"

"It isn't my idea," Princippi stated firmly.

Dan raised his hands. "No explanations necessary. I'm just a producer here. Probably something your people cooked up, right? Well, I can guarantee you a spot classier than those Ross Perot cheese-ball segments. Laying the groundwork for 2000, eh? I tell you, I'll vote for you again."

"It is nonpolitical," Princippi interrupted. He was beginning to fidget in his chair.

Dan seemed disappointed. "Really?" he asked.

"It's more along the lines of-" Princippi cut himself off. His pasty face had flushed red. "They really didn't tell you anything?"

Dan shook his head. "General manager told me I was meeting with you, that's all. Top guy himself wanted me to. I guess ole king Loonie has seen some of my work. Probably 'Thirty Days to Thinner Thighs.' That gets a lot of airplay in Washington. He's still near Washington, right?"

Princippi glanced at the closed door. "Actually..." he began uncomfortably.

TEN MINUTES LATER, Dan found himself pacing back and forth on one of the Channel 8 stages, trying to force images of a sweating, screaming George Kennedy from his mind.

The Loonies had descended.

Men in pink saris draped over flowing white robes stood crammed like vapid, gaily colored sardines all around the perimeter of the small stage. The focus of their attention was the lone man standing in the wings, waiting to go on.

Man Hyung Sun. The leader of the Sunnie cult himself was waiting patiently for a cue from the stage manager.

It had been bad for Dan Bergdorf before, but never this bad. Sun might have owned Channel 8 but he had only visited the station once seven years ago. Since the Korean cultist was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the station, Dan could pretend that he was working for someone else.

The station manager.

The program director.

Anyone but Sun.

"Look at them," Dan mumbled as he glanced at the sea of blank, beaming Sunnie faces. "They're frigging drones."

On the set, Mike Princippi was pretending to be involved in a high-level meeting of political strategists. Reading from cue cards, he and the three other men were wondering how they could possibly hope to outthink their crafty opponent.

To the right of the action, the stage manager dropped a hand rapidly, pointing a finger at Sun. The cult leader took his cue without missing a beat. He strode magnificently into the shot, much to the feigned amazement of the men already being videotaped.

"Oh, hello," Mike Princippi said. "Aren't you Reverend Man Hyung Sun?"

Offstage, Dan groaned quietly.

The set was beyond obscenely cheap. Ratty, space-filling nylon drapes hung in sheets across the gaps in the artificial wall backdrops. The color of everything was washed-out green and drab blue. The furniture was strictly cable access. No question about it.

This was going to be the blackest smear on Dan's resume to date. He'd never recover from this one. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he watched for the cult leader's reply along with the anxious, awestruck Sunnies.

"I am he," Sun intoned to the overly eager men. "I am the future. I am your future. I know your destiny." Sun turned dramatically to the camera. He pointed directly at the lens. "And yours."

Hold...and...

"Cut!" the director shouted.

The gathered Loonies immediately burst into wildly enthusiastic applause.

Sun took the ovation as his due. He did not even look at his followers as he stepped back, allowing the stage hands space to do their jobs.

On the set next to Sun, Mike Princippi looked as if someone had just told him his wife had been picked up again for drinking liquid ant repellent in the ladies' room of the local Stop 'n' Shop.

Stage hands swept in to set up for the next scene. And beyond the row of furiously clapping Loonies, Dan Bergdorf was in a pathetic, mute fog.

Dan was picturing himself in a field with Michael Caine. Both he and the actor were being descended on by a swarm of South American killer bees. With each slap of applause from the Sunnies, Dan literally felt another single bee sting.

Sting after sting after sting.

Until his pathetic career in television at last fell over and died.

Chapter 8

Rim Kun Soe was displeased.

He had been posted to Berlin to assist Ambassador Sok after an embarrassing incident involving a representative of North Korea's Culture and Art Ministry.

More than a month before, the Culture and Art Ministry agent had been implicated in a scandal involving smuggling, accepting bribes, abetting an enemy of North Korea and a host of other infractions. More grave than any of his crimes against the Democratic People's Republic was his crime against the Master of Sinanju. Keijo Suk-the Culture and Art Ministry representative to Germany-had sneaked into the Master's home while he was abroad and had stolen an ancient artifact. For his theft, Suk had paid in blood.

The upshot of the whole sordid affair was a shake-up at the Berlin mission. Many of the older staff were recalled to North Korea. Anyone who was a friend or even an innocent associate of Suk was sent back home only to learn that he or she had been dismissed from the foreign service.

One of the few people to stay after the debacle was over was Ambassador Pak Sok. This did not mean that Sok was above suspicion, by any means. Rim Kun Soe had been specifically assigned by the Public Security Minister's office to keep an eye on the Ambassador. After all, Keijo Suk's indiscretion had taken place on Pak Sok's watch. It was possible that the ambassador had been compromised, as well.

Rim Kun Soe had not been settled into his quarters at the Berlin mission for more than three days when evidence of the betrayal of Ambassador Sok became apparent.

There was a knock on the door. Impossible, given the fences and guards around the embassy building.

Soe had answered the door only to find an ancient Korean standing on the broad steps. He was in the company of a much younger man who was obviously not Korean.

"I would speak with the ambassador," the old one had intoned.

"Who are you, ancient one?" Soe had demanded. "How do you come to stand here without alerting our guards?"

"Guards see only what guards see," the old man had said by way of explanation.

"Yeah. And mares eat oats and does eat oats," the young one had said, peeved. "Can we get this over with?"

American. Obviously. Soe had instantly screamed for the guards. That had been a mistake.

Three armed men arrived. Stunned to see the pair who had somehow penetrated their security, they had instantly raised their weapons. That, too, was a mistake.

The old one stood placidly, eyes resting flatly on Soe's increasingly shocked face, while the young one turned to the North Korean soldiers.

Soe never even saw the hands move. All he managed to glimpse were the obvious aftereffects of the young man's flashing hands.

Six small somethings banged against the door that Soe held open. He found out later that they were kneecaps.

The three men fell to the ground, mouths open in shock.

Guns hopped from hands as if charged with electricity. The young one steepled the rifles together above a nearby rosebush before turning back to the screaming soldiers.

Toe kicks to foreheads finished the trio. Afterward, the young American took the bodies and leaned them against one another much as he had done with the rifles. They formed a macabre tripod on the opposite side of the steps from their weapons.

The soldiers had not fired a single shot.

Soe puffed out his chest, pulling his eyes away from the carnage. "I will die, as well, before I betray Korea," he announced courageously.

"Don't tempt me," the American said, grabbing Soe by the face and pushing him back inside the embassy.

Inside the mission, Ambassador Sok was called. Rim Kun Soe accused him of giving aid to the enemy.

Sok denied the charge.

Only after an emergency call to Pyongyang placed by the old intruder himself was it determined that this was none other than the Master of Sinanju in their midst.

On the telephone, Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of the DPRK and secretary-general of the Korean Workers' Party, had himself insisted that the embassy and its staff be put at the disposal of the great Sinanju Master. In an ironic quirk of fate, Soe who had been placed in Berlin because of the criminal actions of another-was put in charge of a smuggling scheme far greater than the one that had gotten him posted to Germany in the first place.

It was the aide to the ambassador who had made arrangements for each shipment of Chiun's gold to be slipped in secret aboard Kim Jong II's private jet.

There was too much treasure to be sent at one time. The plane never would have gotten off the ground if they had attempted to send the Nibelungen Hoard to North Korea all at once. As it was, the two dozen flights had probably been overloaded. Luck had been with them so far.

At the far end, Soe learned from friends in the security ministry that a caretaker for the Master of Sinanju met every shipment. Soldiers were conscripted into service to haul the treasure back to Sinanju. It was an incredible waste of men and resources, all for one small man who somehow had all of the North Korean government wrapped around his bony fingers.

Rim Kun Soe greatly resented the Master of Sinanju. The old one represented greed more typical of the decadent West than of Soe's beloved Korea. He also had an infuriating habit of casting aspersions on Soe's native city of Pyongyang. These generally involved members of his immediate family.

Soe would have delighted in killing the old one.

And, as bad as the Master of Sinanju was, his pupil was even worse. An American of polluted lineage, he was surly, smart-mouthed and easily annoyed.

Soe had been looking forward to the day when this dubious enterprise was at last over. That was supposed to have been today. Now that was in doubt.

Standing in the basement of the Berlin embassy, the ambassador's aide made certain the crates had been secured as per the instructions of the Master of Sinanju's protege.

The wooden lids were nailed tightly shut. There were no holes through which a single coin or gem could drop.

Soe hefted the nearest crate.

Heavy. It would take two men at a time to bring them out to the wall of the embassy.

He dropped it back to the floor, feeling the heaviness in his straining arm muscles.

"You and you," he said, tapping the chests of the nearest pair of waiting soldiers. "This one." He pointed to the crate he had just lifted.

Dutifully, the men lifted the heavy chest.

"Do not make a sound," he instructed.

They nodded their understanding. The Berlin police still had the embassy surrounded. Soe did not wish them to be alerted to the activity on the far side of the thick embassy walls.

The two soldiers carted the wooden crate across the floor and up the granite-slab stairs to the rear garden.

"You next," Soe said, pointing to the next pair of guards. There was only one more set after them. "Go in staggered rounds. Do not try to carry them out all at once."

As the next soldiers lifted the second chest and headed for the door, Soe left the basement.

He found the Master of Sinanju sitting on the floor of the embassy library.

"I have done as you instructed," Soe said.

"Your men did not help themselves to my treasure?" Chiun asked. His cobwebbed eyes were closed in meditation.

"I watched them myself," Soe insisted. "They did not steal from you. Nor would they, after what you did to their compatriots."

A faint nod. "Fear breeds honesty," Chiun admitted.

On his way to the library, Soe had not seen the Master's pupil. Although the two of them appeared to bicker constantly, they were rarely far apart.

"Where is your American lackey, O Master?" Soe asked.

Chiun opened his eyes. There was bright fire in their hazel depths. "Watch your tongue, Pyongyanger," the old Korean warned. There was a chilly edge in his voice that seemed to actually lower the room temperature.

"I have heard you call him worse," Soe pointed out.

"I may call him what I wish. You may not."

"My apologies, Master of Sinanju," Soe said, bowing.

Chiun's steely gaze bore through to Soe's soul for a few long seconds. At last he drew his thin papery lids across the frightful orbs. "My son is securing us transportation," the elderly Korean said.

"Forgive me, 0 great Master," Soe said. "But there are many police officers outside. This embassy is at the center of a scrutiny far greater than that of the Vatican mission in Panama several years ago. Even General Noriega surrendered eventually. How do you hope to get out alive?"

"Know you this, son of a Pyongyang whore. The Master of Sinanju and his heir are not pineapple-faced despots cowering behind the skirts of the Church of Rome. We will leave when I have deemed we should leave. Until then, be certain that your men take not an ounce of gold, lest your neck suffer the consequences of their actions."

The security ministry agent frowned at the peaceful form of the ancient Korean. How easy it would be to put a bullet in his frail old skull. As easy as it would be rewarding.

In the end, he followed his orders. Rim Kun Soe left the old one to his meditation, wondering as he bowed from the library how the young one could possibly hope to get that much gold out of the North Korean embassy unnoticed.

REMO HAD NO IDEA how they were going to get all that gold out of the North Korean embassy unnoticed.

Under cover of darkness, he scaled the wall at the rear of the embassy, hopping down to the pavement between a couple of milling Berlin police officers. The uniformed men did not even notice him.

Merging with the shadows, he slipped through a line of parked cars, turning backward as he reached the police cordon. Flapping his arms, he was finally noticed by a young police officer who assumed he had slid between the security barricades. As he had expected, Remo was escorted out into the milling crowd of curious onlookers.

Outside looking in now, Remo stood with his hands on his hips wondering how the hell he was going to haul the remainder of Chiun's booty out of the embassy without alerting every cop in Berlin.

There were twenty-six crates in all. Each one as heavy as lead. Remo frowned as he scanned the area.

The crowds were thinner now than they had been. That was a blessing. Although people had been interested the night of the chase and crash, they weren't curious enough to endure the cold on the second full evening.

Unfortunately, the Berlin police had not followed suit. Their interest was as high as it had been the day before. Maybe higher. There was a huge number of police officers milling about outside the ivy-covered walls.

As he looked at all the crisp dark uniforms huddled together outside the high wall, Remo wondered if crime had suddenly been eradicated around the rest of the city. That was the only thing that should have allowed so many men to spend so much time here.

He realized that an end to criminal activity in Berlin wasn't very bloody likely. At least not if the Germany he had seen over the past few weeks was any indication. The only way to end crime would have been to throw a net over the whole damned country.

The day's endless drizzling rain had turned into spits of fat gray snowflakes. As they came in contact with the wet ground, they melted across the saturated pavement.

Already there were indications that the snow would accumulate to slush before the night was through. Remo didn't intend to be around to see it.

It would be easy enough to go out and rent another truck. But then what would he do with it? Drive it through the police lines and right up to the twisted and propped-up embassy gates?

There were about a billion cameras outside the gates at the moment with one cop for every camera. He wouldn't get anywhere near the front of the mission with another rental.

Truck, truck, truck, he thought. As he looked around, he rotated his freakishly thick wrists absently.

There were those tiny European police cars that would be laughed off the road back in America. A larger paddy wagon was parked for some reason away from the nearest cluster of cruisers. Probably preparing for a riot if one broke out. In Germany that was always a wise precaution.

A thought occurred to Remo.

It was a long shot, but it was the only chance they'd have short of sitting out the whole diplomatic fiasco.

Remo slipped back through the police lines, moving stealthily to the rear wall. He kept to the shadows once more, remaining just beyond the periphery of police eyes.

He scaled the wall rapidly, slipping back inside the embassy grounds near the spot where he had instructed Rim Kun Soe to leave the treasure crates.

They were stacked together on the wet lawn in neat piles. Thirteen piles of two each.

A line of huge fir trees grew at the interior of the high wall. Remo grabbed a stack of cases in each hand and slid over to the wall.

Dumping the crates four high into one arm, he used his free hand to scale the wall. He set the cases upon the wall, returning for the next four.

Once all of the crates were lined up amid the jutting branches of the fir tree, Remo dropped back to the sidewalk outside. He went back through the police lines, this time avoiding the police entirely. He found the paddy wagon parked where he'd left it.

The door was unlocked. Remo was ready to hotwire the truck-one of the few mechanical skills he had ever bothered to develop-but was surprised to find the keys dangling in the ignition. He also found a police officer's cap sitting on the passenger's seat.

Pulling the cap down over his eyes, Remo started the truck. Since he was not near the main gates, no one seemed to notice as he backed over to the rear wall.

At the wall, Remo let the engine idle as he sneaked back out of the cab. The rear of the truck was directly beneath the line of crates. Remo could see the lighter wood jutting from the shadows of the big trees.

Without hesitation, he scampered back up the wall.

He had opened the rear doors of the paddy wagon already. Atop the wall, he grabbed one crate at a time and flung it down into the open interior of the truck.

They should have made a racket when they landed, but Remo somehow managed to skim the huge boxes into the back of the police vehicle as easily as if he were skipping flat stones on the surface of a still lake. In less than a minute, he had loaded up all twenty-six.

He got back to the ground, closed the rear of the paddy wagon and was just putting one foot back inside the cab when his luck finally ran out.

"Entschuldigen Me?"

Remo was greatly tempted to just ignore the voice and get in the truck. He decided against it. No one-not Smith, not the Koreans, not Remo himself for that matter-wanted a repeat of the previous day's performance. Instead he turned, smiling amiably.

"Hi," Remo said to the lone policeman standing in the shadows behind him. "Lotta weather we've been having lately, wouldn't you say?"

The young man was far away from the rest of the cops that were assembled near the main gate. His face clouded when he heard the American voice coming from Remo's mouth.

The cop couldn't have been much out of his teens. His wide baby face was filled with uncertainty, even as he reached for his side arm. "You will stay still, bitte," he ordered, voice quavering.

"Sorry," Remo said, shrugging apologetically. "Nein can do. I've got places to go, heirlooms to smuggle."

The young officer had made the tragic mistake of stepping close to Remo as he issued his last order. He had not even unholstered his weapon before Remo shot forward.

Faster than normal human eyes could comprehend, Remo had slapped the gun back into the police officer's holster. Spinning the man in place, he grabbed a cluster of nerves at the base of his neck.

The cop's eyes grew wide in shock. Almost as quickly, his lids grew heavy. He sank gently to the sidewalk. Remo propped the sleeping officer up against the wall.

Hurrying forward to the truck cab, he got quickly inside. No one stopped him as he drove out through a weak point in the police lines. Remo was on the street with the embassy behind him in a matter of moments.

"And they make fun of the Maginot Line," he said.

Tossing off his policeman's cap, he steered the truck up a shadowy side street.

IN THE EMBASSY, the Master of Sinanju heard the car horn beep two times fast, three times slow.

It was about time. The stooges of Pyongyang were beginning to get on his nerves.

Rising like a puff of steam from the library carpet, he hurried outside.

FOUR MINUTES LATER, Chiun slipped in beside Remo in the dark cab of the parked paddy wagon.

"Took you long enough," Remo complained, pulling away from the curb.

"The police are more agitated than they had been," Chiun said aridly. "It seems some lout knocked unconscious one of their fellows without having sense enough to hide the body."

"Don't carp," Remo advised. "Because of me, your gold is safe."

"Only when it is in Sinanju will it be safe. Until that time, make haste."

"Fine," Remo said. "Just try not to kill any cops on the way to the airport."

"I make no promises," Chiun sniffed.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Remo sighed.

"And do not invoke the gods of Charlemagne," Chiun warned. "It is unseemly not only in the eyes of my ancestors, but in those of the greater deities.

Remo thought of a few things he would have liked to invoke. Instead, he held his tongue.

He drove slowly, and the taillights of the Berlin police paddy wagon turned back out on the main drag. The truck quickly disappeared in traffic, heading off in the direction of Tegel Airport.

Chapter 9

The unmarked private elevator whisked Michael Princippi up through the glass-enclosed atrium of Man Hyung Sun's exclusive Fifth Avenue apartment building.

Through smoky one-way glass, Princippi could see placid fountains gurgling soothing, colored water far below.

The centerpiece of the lobby area was a huge marble fountain that shot water four stories into the air. Princippi was above the apex of the spurting water by five stories and was moving swiftly toward the penthouse.

He hung away from the glass wall, huddling into himself near the closed elevator doors. Princippi never thought he could feel more miserable than he had back when he lost the 1988 presidential race. He was wrong.

The Loonie infomercial had hit the airwaves the previous day. Tongues were already wagging about his participation in the program-length commercial.

"The buying of American politics," FOX's Brit Hume had dubbed it. He had done a five-minute cable hit piece on the former governor that reopened all the old wounds of his failed campaign. The reporter had stopped just short of bringing up Mrs. Princippi's substance-abuse problem.

As far as his wife was concerned, it was a good thing she was already hospitalized when the news struck. She had been discovered that morning in a maintenance closet at the Betty Ford Clinic mixing a cocktail of Clorox and Pine Sol.

"If it wasn't over before, it is now," Princippi announced glumly. As if in response, the elevator doors slid efficiently open.

Sighing, Princippi stepped out into the hallway.

The hall was more a foyer. It stabbed off to the right, where the servants' elevator was located, and went equally far on the left, where it stopped at a fire door. Directly across from the elevator was a closed oak door. And standing directly in front of the door was the Loonie, Roseflower.

It was amazing how much bigger and more menacing he looked since the abduction. It was the soothing pink robes that had fooled him. Draping, they hid a lot.

The kid obviously worked out constantly. Crossed over his barrel chest, his huge bare forearms were like pale tree trunks. They could easily have lifted Mike Princippi into the air and snapped him like a twig.

"Good morning, Michael," Roseflower said.

The idiotic smirk again. For some reason, the smile was more disconcerting than if the Loonie had scowled at him.

"Hello," Princippi said, trying to smile, as well. As was usually the case, his smile lacked sincerity or warmth.

Roseflower didn't seem to mind.

"Reverend Sun is expecting you. Have a wonderful day."

The Loonie bodyguard stepped aside, allowing Princippi to enter the penthouse apartment.

Michael Princippi couldn't wait to close the door between him and the perennially perky lapdog.

"Come in," Sun's voice called from deep within the apartment before the door had even shut.

The cult leader's city residence was tastefully and expensively furnished. A broad curving staircase of highly polished wood led to an upstairs balcony lined on one side by a delicately carved balustrade.

Sun's voice had come from this direction. Princippi climbed the stairs, noting as he went the original works of art that were tastefully displayed along the wall.

Upstairs, the smell told him which way to go.

It was a sickly stench. Rotten eggs left too long in a garbage disposal. Sulfur.

Princippi had read before that particular odors were known to trigger specific memories, emotions of a time long ago. He had not really believed it until that moment. He now knew that it was abundantly true.

They were not so much memories that came to him now as he followed that sick sulfur stench to the far end of the hallway. It was more a feeling. Stirring awake after a long slumber. The emotion he felt was fear.

Princippi found Sun in a small room off of the cultist's opulent bedroom.

The room was only tiny in comparison to the rest of the apartment. Actually, it looked as if it was supposed to be a good-size closet. But the clothes were all gone. A few wooden hangers hung on empty racks.

Sun was in the middle of the room. The Korean sat on a plain three-legged stool.

The room was fetid. A greasy yellow smoke clung visibly to the foul air. It was not like smoke produced by burning. It was more a Hollywood interpretation of what smoke should be. A sort of dry-ice fog.

The stench was like a solid mass that Princippi had to push from his path as he stepped inside the room.

"Close the door," Sun ordered. His voice was muffled.

Reluctantly, Princippi did as he was instructed.

Sun's head had been invisible beneath a thick bathroom towel until now. Sitting on his low stool, he was bent forward, the towel draping across something at his feet. He was like a man fighting cold symptoms. Three humidifiers hummed incessantly around him.

Once the door was closed, Sun came up from beneath the towel. He was breathing deeply at the air of the room-a hiker catching his breath atop a mountain.

"What news have you for me?" Sun asked, draping his towel across the mysterious object at his feet.

"I, um, just talked to Bergdorf at Channel 8. The, uh, Sun Source infomercial has been distributed around the country as per your instructions."

Princippi was finding it difficult to speak. Sun's eyes held the same weird yellow glow they had taken on back at the Washington Guardian offices. It looked as if someone had screwed two yellow Christmas bulbs into his eye sockets.

"What of the switchboards? Do the people of this land seek out my oracular wisdom?" The yellow eyes flashed hypnotically.

"Switchboards?" Princippi gulped. "Um, yeah. Yeah, they're doing okay. I guess. You know, there are business people more suited to this. These psychic hotlines are a big deal. I'm sure you could lure someone away from Kim Smiley or the Amazing Mystico. Maybe even some of Dionne Warwick's old people might want to jump from that sunken ship."

"We have chosen you," Sun announced.

Man Hyung Sun had recently taken to speaking in the royal we. Michael Princippi was one of the few people who understood why.

"Okay, fine," Princippi said, forcing affability. "But could we maybe tone down my public participation a little? The press is having a field day with this. It's really going to put a hitch in my plans for the presidency."

"We have judged it should be so," Sun said, ending the argument. He pulled the towel off the hidden object on the floor, draping the rank fabric around his neck.

Princippi recognized the stone urn instantly. He hadn't seen it in almost a year. Chiseled Greek characters ran up the sides, worn with age. A thick yellow film rose from the heavy urn, inspired by the closeness of the humidifiers.

The former governor gulped nervously as he looked at the ancient piece of carved rock. Inside was a clumpy yellow crystalline substance. It sparkled in the wan room light. The color of the wet sand matched the fierce brightness in the cult leader's eyes.

"What of Boston?" Sun asked suddenly.

Princippi had to tear his eyes from the urn. "Huh?"

"Boston," Sun repeated. "Has the Sun Source program run there?"

"Uh, yeah," Princippi said, swallowing. His heart was pounding. "Just like you said. We bought more time there than anywhere else. A couple of stations are carrying it, morning and late night." Fear, coupled with the swirling sulfur smoke, was making him dizzy. He needed to go to the bathroom again. The ex-governor wished Sun would hurry up and cover the urn with his smelly towel.

"That is where we shall find them," Sun said in satisfaction. "And we shall finally have our revenge."

The smoke grew stronger. Squinting in displeasure, Princippi flapped one hand in front of his face as he covered his mouth and nose with the other. "Find who?" he asked.

But Sun did not answer. He had pulled the towel back over his head, draping the far end over the ancient urn. The cult leader breathed deeply at the sickly fumes.

Chapter 10

The cab from Boston's Logan International Airport dropped Remo and Chiun off on the sidewalk in front of their Quincy, Massachusetts, condominium.

They had taken the North Korean jet from Germany to England, switching to a commercial flight at London's Heathrow Airport. The private Korean jet flew east into the sunrise while Remo's 747 headed in the opposite direction across the Atlantic. They landed a little after 3:30 a.m.

It was the dead of night by the time they climbed the stairs to their home.

"You hungry?" Remo asked once they were inside.

"Rice," was all Chiun said in response. He left Remo to make their meal while he went off to the living room.

As Remo was rummaging through the kitchen cupboards in search of a pot, he heard the familiar blare of the TV coming from the other room. Fifteen minutes later, Remo set a bowl of steaming rice and a pair of chopsticks at the feet of the Master of Sinanju. He joined his teacher cross-legged on the floor before the big set.

"What are we watching?" Remo asked. Unlike Chiun, he used his fingers to eat his rice.

"Drivel," Chiun replied. He hauled a thick clump of rice to his papery lips.

"I guess TV hasn't changed much since we left," Remo observed.

On the television, a pudgy man who was-physical evidence to the contrary-trying to pass himself off as an exercise expert, screamed at an enthusiastic audience about something called the Butt Blaster. Said Butt Blaster was apparently the cureall to flabby derrieres around the nation. By investing only two minutes a day, the pudgy man promised that those who used his product would have bottoms as tight as a snare drum. He had models behind him to prove his case. They looked as if they exercised for breakfast, fasted for lunch and starved themselves while exercising for supper.

"How many of those things do you think broke during taping?" Remo asked, nodding to the strange exercise contraptions on the screen.

"How long is this program?" Chiun asked.

"Infomercials usually run half an hour," Remo said.

"One hundred and sixty-three," Chiun announced firmly. "See?" He aimed a long ivory fingernail at the action on the television. "The metal on that one gives even as the fat announcer blabbers on."

Remo instantly saw what he was pointing at. A stress fracture had appeared on one of the workout devices. Theirs were the only sets of eyes on the planet that would have seen the tiny crack. Long before it broke entirely, the scene changed. The actor sweating in the background of the shot suddenly had a brand-new Butt Blaster. It wasn't even the same color as the original.

"A great value at only $29.99!" screamed the raspy-voiced pitchman. "Plus $59.99 postage and handling," he said, suddenly speaking so low and quickly that the words were virtually indecipherable. His blond ponytail bobbed excitedly as he browbeat the studio and home audiences into purchasing his product.

"You want to know something, Chiun?" Remo said. "In spite of stuff like this, I'm glad we're home."

Remo meant it. They had spent a great deal of time traveling in the past few months. From Europe to South America to Asia and back to Europe. It had been a grueling, frenetic cycle. He wanted nothing more than to sit back and relax for a couple of weeks.

Chiun did not respond to Remo's comment. The half-hour-long exercise advertisement had come to an end. The Channel 8 Productions logo was followed by a burp of dead air before the too loud intro music of yet another infomercial began.

By this point, both their bowls were empty. Remo got to his feet, collecting their dirty dinner dishes. He was straightening up and turning to go when a familiar voice caught his attention.

"...what we can do," said the insipid voice on the TV.

"It would help if we could somehow know the future," came the reply.

"Keep dreaming," said the dull voice.

Bowls in hand, Remo turned back to the screen.

The face was as he remembered it. Dull, gray. Giant black bushy eyebrows, more appropriate to a Muppet than to a politician, hung over beady, porcine eyes.

Remo scrunched up his face. "Isn't that Mike Princippi?" he asked uncertainly.

"Hush," Chiun instructed.

"I've always had trouble with the future," the TV Mike Princippi was saying.

"Knowing the future would not only help in politics, but in all walks of life," his television companion opined.

"No way," Remo said, sinking back to the floor. A light had begun to dawn. "This can't be what I think it is."

"The future is hard to predict," Princippi said. He was obviously reading from cue cards. "If I knew how, I'd be President right now." Even though he laughed along with the other men on the set, his eyes were sick.

"Dammit, I was right!" Remo enthused. "It's a psychic-hotline infomercial. I'll be goddamned if Mike 'the Prince' Princippi isn't on TV hawking some crackpot fortune-teller's 900 number." He positively bubbled with excitement.

Chiun turned a baleful eye on him. "Do I take it you do not approve?"

"Are you kidding?" Remo said. "This is great. I love when politicians have to sink even lower than politics. It's almost impossible to do."

"Why is it you believe he has sunk at all?" Chiun asked.

"Look at him!" Remo said happily. He flung out a hand at the TV. "The guy is on a psychic infomercial squirming like fish on a line. He looks about as happy to be there as the guy who beat him looked in the presidential debates four years later."

Chiun looked back at the screen. "Perhaps," he admitted. "It is also possible that he is ill."

"Of course he is," Remo said. "I'd be sick, too, if I had to endorse that check." His broad smile stretched so far across his face it threatened to spill beyond both ears.

"Why are you so gleeful?" Chiun asked suspiciously. "It is not like you."

"You don't get it. This is the American dream, Little Father," Remo explained. "We live to see our politicians fail. Especially a smug little creep like Princippi. It's the grease that oils the gears of this great democracy."

Chiun shook his head. "This nation is unfathomable," he said. He turned his attention back to the television.

On the screen, Mike Princippi was saying, "I wish we could outthink my opponent."

There was a sudden flurry of movement from the right side of the screen. All at once, a new figure strode onto the set. He was short and wore an expensive business suit on his pudgy frame.

As he noted the nationality of the latest player to join the others, Chiun's interest was immediately piqued.

"Chiun, isn't that-?" Remo began, suddenly worried.

"Silence!" Chiun commanded.

Princippi was in the middle of saying, "Oh, hello. Aren't you Reverend Man Hyung Sun?"

"I am he," Sun intoned seriously.

"This is worse than I thought," Remo muttered. The glee he had felt before had begun to dissipate the moment the cult leader made his appearance.

"...future. I am your future. I know your destiny." Sun pointed out at the television audience. "And yours."

The image quickly cut from the studio-produced scene to an outdoor segment. Pink-robed Sunnies interviewed men and women on the street about the amazing prognosticating abilities of the Reverend Man Hyung Sun.

Everyone was thrilled with the information the seer's hotline helpers had given them. Throughout the anything but spontaneous interviews, a 900 number flashed at the bottom of the screen. It was accompanied by the phrase "Your personal psychic is standing by."

The videotaped outdoor segment lasted for only a few minutes. When it was done, Man Hyung Sun reappeared. He and Mike Princippi were sitting together in a faux living-room environment. It held many of the same furnishings as the faux conference room in the lead segment.

"Holy flying crap," Remo murmured.

"Must you continue babbling?" Chiun complained, peeved.

"Chiun, don't you get it? It was bad enough when it was just Princippi up there. Now he's having a powwow with the head of the freaking Loonie cult. Before it was a joke. Now it's just plain embarrassing."

"Perhaps the Greekling is wiser than you," Chiun pointed out. "If Sun is indeed a seer, he could have prescience to alter events yet to be."

"Sun is a con man," Remo said, rolling his eyes.

"You do not know that."

"I know enough, Little Father. That guy shanghais kids into his dippy cult. He had the mindless drips banging away on tambourines in airports all over the place back in the '70s and '80s, remember? He was also found guilty of tax evasion, I think. He's an A-number-one asshole-creep-conman-millionaire-rat-bastard. With a capital B."

"He is Korean," Chiun said somberly.

Remo frowned. "So what?"

"He would not shanghai anyone. Shanghai is named for the vile Chinese practice of putting men aboard ships against their will."

"Okay, so what do Koreans call it?"

"Unexpected oceangoing journeys filled with wonder and delight."

"Fine," Remo said. He pointed to Sun on the television. "That's what he does with mushbrained teenagers."

Princippi was in the middle of asking Sun about his qualifications as a clairvoyant.

"I have been aligned with cosmic forces for as long as I can remember," Sun said. His English was better than that of most Americans. "Through heightened perceptions impossible for mortals to understand, I have seen these forces recently arrange themselves in such a way as to foretell a great end. And a new beginning. For those viewing this program, know you this-the Omega Time has come."

"What the hell is he going on about?" Remo asked.

"Silence!" Chiun commanded. His voice was sharp.

"I am the Sun Source," Sun proclaimed. He looked out at the camera as he spoke.

In their living room, both Remo and Chiun were surprised by his words. They glanced at one another. Chiun's face was severe, Remo's puzzled.

When they looked back at the TV, Sun was finishing his spiel. "The pyon ha-da is upon us. Birth of death, death of birth. Call now. Operators are standing by."

The pink-robed Loonies reappeared. The same videotaped man-on-the-street segment as before began playing. Chiun did not watch it this time. Gathering up the remote control, he clicked off the television. He was deep in thought.

"I can't believe it," Remo said, shaking his head. "Mike Princippi. How the almost mighty have fallen. You think Smitty knows about this?"

Chiun looked over at Remo, annoyance creasing his wizened features. "Do you not know what this means?" he asked impatiently.

Remo was surprised by the harshness of his tone.

"Um, no matter how bad you've got it, there's always someone worse off than you?" Remo suggested.

"You are uneducable," Chiun spit. "Did you not hear the words he spoke to us?"

"To us?" Remo said. "Not that Sun Source stuff?"

"The same."

"Chiun, that's a coincidence. He can't know that Sinanju is called the Sun Source, too. His name is Sun. They just cooked up some silly Madison Avenue twist on his name-that's all."

"I must make a pilgrimage to see this holy man," Chiun proclaimed. He rose like steam from the floor, smoothing out the skirts of his scarlet kimono.

"Holy my ass," Remo said, also standing. "He's a scam artist, Chiun. Worse than that. He's a bad scam artist. You can't have fallen for that pap."

"You will telephone Smith in the morning," Chiun instructed, ignoring Remo's complaints. "Have him consult his oracles to learn the location of the holy one. I must meet with the wise and all-knowing Reverend Sun."

With that, Chiun turned abruptly and left the room. Remo heard his bedroom door close a moment later.

Alone in the living room, Remo shook his head wearily. "I can't believe it," he sighed. "Not even home for an hour and I already miss Germany."

Picking up their empty rice bowls, he skulked morosely back to the kitchen.

Chapter 11

One of his first acts in office had been to stop vagrants from frightening drivers at intersections.

The city homeless had somehow gotten it into their heads to stagger up to cars stopped at traffic lights and spit on their windshields. They would then wipe the slimy ooze away with a filthy rag and hold out a grimy hand for a gratuity. Frightened drivers would hand over money, fearing reprisal if they did not.

It was extortion, plain and simple. In a crazed bow to the lords of political correctness, the city of New York had looked the other way for years. That practice changed the minute Randolph Gillotti was elected mayor.

The panhandlers were arrested in a clean sweep.

Homeless activists screamed. Television reporters screamed. Hollywood celebrities screamed. Everyone screamed but Randolph Gillotti. As mayor of the greatest city in the world, he didn't have time to scream.

He had attacked the Mob at the Jacob Javits Center, forcing out illegal activities. He had flooded sections of New York with police, dramatically reducing certain types of street crime. Briefly, he had even scored points with the rightbashing media by endorsing a candidate for governor who was not of his own political party. And that was only in his first term.

Hated by men on both sides of the political aisle, loved by as many on either side, Randolph Gillotti was the king of controversy in a city that thrived on conflict.

However, on this day, as the mayor of New York fidgeted in his seat behind his city-hall desk in lower Manhattan, Randolph Gillotti felt like anything other than controversy.

The Loonies were back in town.

It seemed like only yesterday when the crackpot cultists were harassing everyone at airports around the country. But after the Reverend Sun's run-in with the IRS, they had all but disappeared. Gillotti-like most reasonable Americans-hoped that they were gone for good. It turned out that they had only been dormant all this time.

The return of the Loonies to active life meant a fresh headache for the mayor of New York.

He frowned as he looked over the latest manpower reports sent by the police commissioner's office on the event Sun had scheduled for noon today.

It was ridiculous. The expenditure of time and manpower was absolutely crazy. Insane beyond belief. The cost to the city was astronomical. And worst of all, it was not anything that could possibly be twisted into good press.

A mass wedding. According to the documents forwarded by the Washington headquarters of the Grand Unification Church-as Sun's bogus religion was officially called-there would be nearly fifteen hundred couples tying the knot today.

Gillotti was not unlike most good New Yorkers. Most days he blamed the Yankee organization for everything-from the weather to the potholes in the Bronx. But today, it really was their fault. The Yankee people were the ones who had rented their stadium out to the crackpot cult leader and his tambourine-banging minions.

The leather padding beneath him crackled as Gillotti tossed the police reports aside. Moaning wearily, he dug at his eyes with the palms of his hands. As if responding to his cue, his desk intercom buzzed efficiently.

"Governor Princippi to see you, Mr. Mayor," his secretary announced.

Gillotti removed his hands from his eyes. Briefly, he considered letting the former Massachusetts governor stew in his outer office for an hour or two, but decided against it. Better to get this whatever-it-was-about meeting over with.

"Send him in," Gillotti lisped tiredly.

Princippi was ushered into the room a moment later. After exchanging polite handshakes, the exgovernor took a seat in front of the mayor's desk. Princippi noted with distaste that the mayor had not bothered to put on a jacket for the meeting. His Honor sat in shirtsleeves, hands cradled on his broad polished desk.

"What can I do for you, Mike?" Gillotti asked. "May I call you Mike?" he added. His smile was that of a cartoon squirrel, so, too, his sibilant S-filled speech.

"I suppose," Princippi said, clearly unhappy with the familiarity. "May I call you Randy?"

"My people tell me you said this was urgent, Mike," the mayor said, dodging the question. "What's up?"

The tone was set. Though Princippi frowned, he pressed on. "You know about the Sunnie ceremony today." It was a statement, not a question.

"The Loonie ceremony, yes," the mayor said.

"A bunch of middle-class whack job kids trying to get even with their parents for not buying them that Porsche when they turned sweet sixteen. Frankly, Mike, I'm surprised to see you mixed up in all this."

Princippi cleared his throat. "Be that as it may, the Reverend Sun has sent me here as his emissary."

"Is that a step up or down from running for President?" Gillotti laughed. "Sorry," he said instantly, raising an apologetic hand. "We've all got to make a buck somehow."

Princippi's bushy eyebrows furrowed. His embarrassment at the infomercial he had cut for Sun was rapidly turning to annoyance. "You know about the ad," he said flatly.

Gillotti leaned back in his chair. "Yeah, I've heard something about it. Brainwashing wasn't good enough for Sun. He's branched out into fortune-telling, right?"

"In a sense," Princippi agreed. "But he doesn't just see the future. He sees the past and present, as well."

"What is he," the mayor scoffed, "some kind of Korean Magic Eight Ball?"

"It's not a question of whether you believe it or not," Princippi said with a displeased frown. "It's the truth. As much as I hate to admit it."

"Come on, Mike. Don't tell me you buy that bullshit?" the mayor taunted.

Princippi forged ahead. "Can we get back on topic? The ceremony?" he pressed.

Gillotti sighed. "What is it, Mike? Cops? You've got a ton of them. Uniforms on foot in the stands and on the field. I've even got you horses in the parking lot. It may bankrupt the city of New York, but you can go back and tell that halfcrazy millionaire boss of yours that his ass is safe for his marriage-a-thon, or whatever the hell you Loonies call those sham wedding things."

Princippi pursed his lips. "You are correct," he admitted, thinly hiding his displeasure. "This is about the police."

"I figured as much."

"However, the specific numbers faxed to Sunnie headquarters are unacceptable to Reverend Sun."

"Geez, come on," Gillotti complained, his lisp becoming more pronounced. "You've been around a few crowds in your life, Mike. You know we can't have an equal cop-to-spectator ratio. I can't believe he'd send you here to try and strong-arm me. You go back and tell that old fraud he doesn't get a single blue-suit more than the commissioner has allocated."

Princippi smiled. It was an oily expression devoid of mirth. "You don't understand," he said evenly, "we do not want more police. We want less. Specifically, none."

Gillotti had been readying another mild diatribe but paused in midbreath. He blinked once. "Come again?"

"Sunnie security can handle the day's events. Reverend Sun wishes for this to be a private ceremony. A police presence will only interfere with the solemnness of the occasion."

"Private?" Gillotti said, dully. "With three thousand candy brides and grooms propped on top of the cake?"

"This is what Reverend Sun wishes."

"No way," Gillotti said. "If something goes wrong, Sun will be the first one screaming bloody murder."

"Nothing will go wrong," Princippi assured him.

"Who told you that?" Gillotti snorted. "Your buddy the soothsayer? Tell him I am not letting a bunch of frolicking, robe-wearing, head-shaving psychos loose in the Bronx without an armed escort. The cops are there," he added firmly. "Whether the Loonie leader wants them there or not."

Gillotti crossed his arms determinedly. On the far side of the mayor's desk, Mike Princippi allowed himself a small smile. This one genuine.

"I can't tell you how he gets his powers of divination," the former governor said. "But they really are remarkable. Always right on the money. And speaking of money, he told me a little something this morning about the way you financed your first campaign for mayor."

A tiny squeak came from the mayor's chair. His eyes were dead, unreadable. "I conform to all of the rules of New York's election commission," he said.

"Of course you do."

"The finances are all out there for everyone to see. Even you. And I resent you coming into this office proxying for a thief like Sun and suggesting that anything I've done isn't aboveboard. This meeting is over."

Rather than buzz his secretary, Mayor Gillotti stood abruptly. Sweeping around the desk, he stepped briskly across the wide room, flinging open the door. In the outer office, the eyes of aides and secretaries looked up at the mayor in surprise.

Back near Gillotti's desk, Princippi stood. Slowly, he stepped across the room to the door.

The mayor's jaw was firmly set. He intended to say not another word to the former governor.

As he stepped past the mayor, Princippi paused, as if considering something. All at once, he whispered a few quick words, too soft for anyone in the outer room to hear.

Although no one outside heard what was said, they all witnessed their boss's reaction. Mayor Randolph Gillotti's eyes grew wide in shock and anger. But he did not turn away.

When he slammed the office door violently a moment later, Mike Princippi was still inside.

Chapter 12

"Where are all the cops?" Remo asked. As he walked, he was glancing around the grimy parking lot of New York's Yankee Stadium. He didn't see a single blue uniform.

"Perhaps they have journeyed inside for an audience with His Holiness," Chiun suggested, strolling beside him.

"This guy's not the pope, for crying out loud," Remo griped.

"Perish the thought," Chiun said, horrified. "Seer Sun must guard against papist influence. I will advise him so when he honors me with an audience."

Not wanting to get into another pointless Charlemagne-Church of Rome argument, Remo bit his tongue.

At Chiun's insistence, he had called Smith that morning to find the location of the Reverend Man Hyung Sun. Relieved that they had returned from Germany without further incident, Smith had readily supplied the information, warning only that they should keep a low profile. When the CURE director asked why they were looking for Sun, Remo artfully dodged Smith's question by hanging up the phone.

So here he was, strolling across the parking lot of Yankee Stadium amid a sea of pink-robed Loonies. Remo looked with displeasure at the cult members' costumes.

"Don't they get cold wearing those dresses?" he asked.

"Must you take pains to display your ignorance?" the Master of Sinanju sighed.

"What, you're saying they aren't dresses?" Remo said.

Chiun inspected a cluster of Sunnies as they walked past. "The white section is a simple robe," he said. "I detect Roman influence, although in Rome white togas were strictly worn by those running for political office."

"I thought everyone wore a white robe back then."

"That is why you are only Apprentice Reigning Master," Chiun replied. He nodded to a Loonie. "The length of these robes is far too great. Only on state occasions would high officers wear anklelength tunics."

"What about the pink wraps?" Remo asked.

"Indian sari," Chiun answered. "Although worn entirely incorrectly. A Hindu woman drapes her sari over the left shoulder, a Parsi over her right. These cretins have them thrown all higgledy-piggledy, without regard to caste or sect. It is quite disgraceful. I will have to mention this to His Holiness, as well."

Nearer the stadium, entrance booths had been set up by vendors. As he approached, Remo was surprised to find them staffed not by hot-dog or beer salesmen, but by more pink-and-white-robed Sunnies.

They were walking past one of the open booths when a blank-faced Sunnie vendor called out to Remo.

"Hello, friend. Would you care to test your skill? It is for the good of the Grand Unification Church."

Remo looked at the rear of the booth. A large corkboard had been fastened to the wooden structure. A few inflated balloons were scattered across the face of the board while still more deflated bits of rubber hung limply from red thumbtacks. The asphalt floor of the booth was littered with the remnants of destroyed balloons.

"Sorry," Remo said. "Not interested."

"Speak for yourself, paleface," Chiun said. He muscled in front of Remo, taking a spot before the counter.

"Three dollars," said the smiling Loonie.

"Chiun, let's go," Remo insisted.

"Pay the simpleton," Chiun said in reply.

Remo knew from experience that it would be pointless to argue. Grumbling, he dug into his pocket, producing three singles. He handed the bills over to the Loonie. The man laid three darts atop the counter, which Chiun scooped up into his bony hand.

Tapping a lone dart on the fingertips of his right hand, Chiun's arm wound from behind, looking like a cross between a major-league pitcher and a windmill. When his hand reached the release point of the throw, the dart zoomed from his loose fingers with an audible snap.

The metal-tipped projectile flew at supersonic speed across the length of the booth, exploding a bright red balloon into rubbery fragments before burying itself deep into the surface of the board.

Before the popped cork from the first dart was settling to the ground behind the booth, the second dart was airborne.

This missile passed through a balloon at the lower left of the booth and continued on into the next kiosk. The last anyone saw of it, the dart was heading out toward the Major Deegan Expressway and the Harlem River beyond.

"Watch this, Remo," Chiun cried. "Wheeee!" The third dart was loosed.

Chiun seemed to have lost control of the final missile. Instead of heading directly at the board, the dart fired up to the top of the booth, where it snapped off a metal securing clasp with the report of a rifle shot. The ricochet carried it down to where it clattered amid an explosion of tiny sparks against another small piece of metal attached to a side beam.

A few rusty flakes of metal fluttered to the whitewashed railing below.

The new trajectory of the dart brought it at an angle across the face of the corkboard. As the Loonie barker watched in amazement, the dart wiped out a line of seven fat balloons in a series of rapid-fire pops. In a wink, it had buried itself up to its plastic feathers into the cold tar floor of the booth.

Before the booth, Chiun clapped his hands in glee. "I destroyed nine of the orbs, Remo," he announced proudly. He turned to the vendor. "What do I win?"

"Win?" asked the Loonie vendor. He was still looking in shock at the remnants of his balloons.

"Uh-oh," Remo said.

"My prize," Chiun insisted, still beaming. "It must surely be magnificent for one who has performed as I."

Before the baffled vendor could explain that the only prize was the knowledge that Chiun's three-dollar gift would go to the Grand Unification Church, a voice piped in behind them. Luckily for the vendor, for the interruption allowed him to keep his head.

"It is," the voice proclaimed warmly.

When they turned around, they came face-to-face with yet another pink-robed Loonie.

Remo glanced around. There was no one else in the immediate vicinity. The man appeared to be talking to them.

"My name is Roseflower," explained the Loonie. He smiled a disconcerting, Valium grin. "I have been sent to bestow on you a most valuable treasure."

Remo groaned at the word.

Chiun clapped his hands again. "You see, Remo?" he chirped happily. To the Loonie, he said, "What is my reward?"

"A personal audience with the Reverend Man Hyung Sun himself," Roseflower smiled, nodding.

Chiun could scarcely contain his joy.

"Vat's behind door number two?" Remo asked, just before Chiun elbowed him in the ribs.

Chapter 13

The brides wore white. All fifteen hundred of them.

The giggling women were stretched out in zigzagging lines and clusters that extended from the edge of the dugouts behind home plate to the product-endorsing billboards on the outfield wall.

The grooms wore white, as well. Unlike their brides-to-be, the men still wore their pink saris. Blue sashes knotted around their waists distinguished them from the other male Sunnie disciples inside Yankee Stadium.

A groom had been assigned to each bride that morning. In most cases, the men and women had never met before.

Roseflower led Remo and Chiun down the stands behind the home-base line.

"You mean these are all arranged marriages?" Remo asked as they climbed down the steps. He looked out across the sea of faces awaiting the start of the marriage ceremony.

"That's right," the Sunnie said.

Remo laughed. "I hope you're planning on renting out Shea Stadium for the mass divorce," he said.

"Actually, in those parts of the world where arranged marriage is the custom, divorce is low to the point of being nonexistent," Roseflower explained.

"Baloney," Remo said.

"It is true," the Master of Sinanju said with a nod.

Remo frowned. "Yeah, well, that's probably because you'd get your eyes gouged out by a witchdoctor judge if you even mentioned it," he grumbled.

The stands had been opened onto the field to allow mingling among the Reverend Sun's followers. Roseflower led Remo and Chiun down into the periphery of the crowd.

"Where is the Holy One?" Chiun asked as they walked along just outside the first base line.

"He is preparing himself for the ceremony," Roseflower said. "Your meeting will take place afterward. I thought you might wish to get a better view of the service. This is a good spot, I think."

The Sunnie stopped, still smiling, a few yards away from first base.

Remo looked around. A platform had been set up in the middle of the diamond near the pitcher's mound. It rose high enough above the heads of the many gathered bride-and-groom sets that it was visible from anywhere on the ground.

A few Sunnies were making last-minute preparations atop the stage. Women arranged flowers of yellow and white. The men tested the public-address system on the floral-painted podium. When Remo glanced back at their escort, Roseflower was smiling blandly at the proceedings.

Remo cleared his throat guiltily. "You know, this probably isn't the best time to tell you this, Rosebud," Remo said. He shot a glance at Chiun. "But I don't think we're who you think we are."

The Master of Sinanju scowled. "Of course we are," he insisted. Hazel eyes flamed. "Remo, hold your tongue."

"Chiun, maybe he's supposed to meet somebody important."

"Who is more important that I?" the old Korean demanded.

"I was sent for you," Roseflower interjected.

"No," Remo insisted. "It couldn't be us. No one even knows we're here."

"The Reverend Sun does. He knows all."

Remo raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Forgive me if this insults one of the basic tenets of your religious faith, but bulldookey."

"I do not understand," Roseflower said, his bland Midwest face clouding.

"Hokum. Bunk. Crap. Bullshit," Remo elaborated. "I don't believe in any of this fortune-teller malarkey."

Chiun grabbed Roseflower by the arm, steering him away from his pupil. "Do not listen to the heretic. If he blasphemes, it is merely the product of latent Catholicism. Perhaps Good Seer Sun might perform an exorcism," he suggested, shooting a hateful glance at Remo.

"I am confused. Are you not of the Sun Source?" Roseflower asked.

"Yes," Chiun said quickly.

"Ye-es," Remo hedged. "But not the way you mean it."

"See how he qualifies? It is a nasty habit learned at the feet of wimple-wearing dowagers."

Remo rolled his eyes. "What time are the nuptials?" he asked, surrendering to the two men.

His question was answered by a cheer from the crowd.

The roar started suddenly, at a point beyond the platform. It swept rapidly across the packed stadium like a thundering tidal wave.

Pale arms draped in white rose wildly into the air. Trailing pink ends of saris flapped liked flags caught in a crazed wind as the frantic screaming grew.

And the chanting began.

It was low at first, shouted only by a few Sunnies planted at strategic points in the crowd.

"Sun! Sun! Sun! Sun!"

Others around the few screaming men took up the cry. It spread like wildfire. Inarticulate cheering was soon overshadowed by the single, shouted word.

"Sun! Sun! Sun!"

Clapping gleefully, Roseflower joined the chorus of chanting voices. Veins bulged on his reddening neck as he screamed the name of the Sunnie cult leader.

Remo shot a look at the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun had not joined in with the crowd. His hands were tucked inside the voluminous sleeves of his sea-green kimono. Yet even though he did not cheer, his face belied his elation. Hazel eyes danced merrily as he stood on tiptoe, trying to catch a first glimpse of the Reverend Sun.

None of them had to wait long.

All at once, the head of the Korean cult figure began to rise siowly and majestically above the crowd. it was a perfect fluid motion. Sun did not mount the stage in the jerky fashion of someone climbing stairs.

A few dozen yards away from the cult leader, Remo's finely tuned ears picked up the sound of gears grinding over the crowd noise. Sun stood on a small elevator platform.

The shoulders appeared, then the rest of the torso. Sun wore his usual business suit. A white alb was pulled over the conservative blue jacket.

The robe was open in a wide V-shape that extended down to the gathered waist.

"Sun! Sun! Sun!"

The screaming grew more intense. The Sunnie leader reveled in the accolades of his wild-eyed disciples. He raised fat hands in a gesture of triumph above his head.

Everyone in the stadium had gotten to their feet. Men and women in the stands stood cheering, as well, their voices raised along with those on the field waiting to be married.

To Remo, it was like being in the middle of someone else's mad dream. He looked around at the sea of zombielike faces. Grinning, beaming. Screaming.

Even for someone like Remo, who had seen much that was alarming and horrifying in his life, standing in the midst of the crowd of frenzied Sunnie disciples was a truly terrifying experience. It was not a fear of injury or death. Remo had been trained beyond both of those childlike things, The frightening characteristic of the Sunnies was their blind devotion to a man whom the rational world knew to be a fraud.

At that moment-as he gazed out upon the sea of rabidly devoted disciples-Remo Williams knew that these demented followers would kill for their leader. Man Hyung Sun need only give the order.

"Friends in the Sun!"

The Reverend Sun's voice boomed out over his screaming flock. Flapping pink saris continued to wave victoriously as the Sunnie throng grew hushed.

"We are gathered here today for a most joyous occasion!"

The brides and bridegrooms cheered as one. Almost three thousand voices rattled across the stadium.

"We must remember that this occasion," Sun continued when the crowd had quieted once more, "while joyful-is also one most solemn!"

Remo sidled up to the Master of Sinanju. "Don't get in my way for the bouquet, Little Father," Remo warned beneath the continuing amplified voice of Sun.

"Must you make a mockery of even sacred ceremonies?" Chiun asked. He was still standing on tiptoes, trying to see Sun more clearly.

"Come on," Remo said. "This is about as sacred as one of Liz Taylor's weddings. In fact, she's probably here somewhere. Don't you find this all a little bit over-the-top?"

"It is not my place to question the wisdom of a holy man," the Master of Sinanju replied.

"I'll take that as a yes."

Sun was still speaking. Feedback squealed occasionally from the tinny speaker system as he continued with the mass wedding ceremony.

As the cult leader was lecturing his followers on the solemnity of the vows they would take this day, Remo began to notice an odd movement taking shape within the crowd.

He wasn't quite sure how he became aware of the men. It was as if some sort of internal trip wire had been struck.

When his unconscious mind steered his conscious mind to the strange intruders, he saw that there were six of them.

No.

Seven ...eight. Eight in all.

They wore white robes minus the blue sashes of the rest of the grooms. But these men had no brides next to them. These were not the only differences between the new arrivals and the grooms, however. These men were armed.

"Chiun," Remo said, his voice low.

"I know," the Master of Sinanju replied, his face stern.

"Eight?"

Chiun shook his head. "Nine. Beyond the stage." He nodded beyond Sun.

The ninth man in white was just threading through the crowd of couples. Like the others Remo had seen, he was moving in the direction of the stage. By the way he walked, it was obvious he had some sort of weapon hidden beneath the folds of his flowing white garment.

"Catch up with you on the other side," Remo said.

Nodding, Chiun split away from him. The elderly Korean moved swiftly toward the right, across the first-base line and onto the crowded infield.

Remo had already moved off in the other direction. He cut a path directly for the first man in white.

". ..must appreciate the importance of the church in every aspect of your lives together. There is no individual. There is no couple. There is only Sun ...." the cult leader was proclaiming from the stage. His voice boomed out across the stadium.

"Don't we have an inflated sense of self?" Remo muttered sarcastically to himself as he slid between pairs of beaming Sunnie brides and grooms.

The nearest moving robe had vanished in the sea of couples. Remo allowed his instincts to guide him through the knot of people. On automatic, his body brought him in a direct line to intercept the would-be assassin.

Passing a thick cluster of people, Remo came out several yards away from the stage. On the other side of the crowd within the crowd, the first white-robed man emerged.

He was Korean. Remo spotted it straight off. The man's sleeves were wider than those of the other Sunnies. In the next moment, Remo realized why.

A gun slid expertly down the length of the sleeve and into the killer's waiting hand. A rustling at the chest of the robe, and the other hand, which had been concealing the gun, slipped back down the other baggy sleeve.

It was a K-50M. A North Vietnamese knockoff of a Russian Tokarev.

Remo flew over to the man.

The free hand snapped a banana clip into place. Turning toward the stage, the Korean assassin brought his gun barrel up and around, aiming at the fleshy face of Man Hyung Sun.

He would have fired-indeed, he tried to. But something had gone suddenly and inexplicably wrong with his weapon.

It took a second for the killer to realize what was wrong. His gun would not fire without ammunition.

"Looking for this?" Remo asked sweetly. He was standing between the killer and the stage. In his hand was the banana clip from the Tokarev knockoff.

The would-be assassin's eyes grew wide in shock when he saw the stranger standing before him with his gun's magazine. Quickly, his free hand disappeared back up the sleeve, fumbling for a replacement clip. His grasping fingers had just wrapped around one in the pouch at his waist when Remo surprised him by returning the original. However, the way it came back was not the same way it had left.

"Yum, yum, yum," Remo said as he stuffed the curving clip down the man's throat. "Eat up. Bananas are a good source of carbohydrates. They give you that extra burst of killing energy."

The man wiggled and fought. To no avail. Remo jammed the clip down past his epiglottis, blocking the air flow to and from his lungs. Suddenly, respiration became a far more important thing to the assassin than shooting the Reverend Sun. Face turning purple, he sank to his knees, clawing at the rectangular piece of metal that jutted from his open mouth.

To Remo's surprise, the Sunnies in the immediate vicinity did not appear concerned in the least at the display of violence. The faces of those who saw Remo cram the magazine down the Korean's throat held looks of utter indifference. Most of the people around did not even bother to look his way. They simply continued to stare up at their leader, faces rhapsodic.

"Wonder if lobotomies come free with the blood tests," Remo said, shaking his head in disbelief.

He left the killer to choke to death in the grass. Remo dived into the crowd in search of the next assassin.

CHIUN WAS STILL FAR AWAY from the stage when he came upon the first set of killers.

The Master of Sinanju noted with only minor interest that they were both Koreans. Assuming they were agents of some rival religious sect, he forged ahead.

The two flat-faced risen had not even gotten close enough for an unobstructed shot at Sun before Chiun whirled in between them.

Guns were still hidden in the sleeves of their robes. With a move that seemed casual, Chiun sent a single index finger into the baggy cloth at the side of one man. He caught the hollow muzzle of the weapon with his fingertip. Instantly, the gun rocketed up like a missile fired from an underground silo.

The stock had been braced inside the man's armpit. On its path skyward, it wrenched through the shoulder socket with a tearing snap. Arm and gun both plopped from the hollow sleeve. Chiun stifled the man's scream with a toe to the throat. Continuing the move, he brought the heel of his foot into the jaw of the second man.

The killer's head twisted wildly around with the snap of dry, uncooked pasta. Both bodies fell simultaneously.

At the moment they dropped, another armed man sprang from the crowd a few feet away.

Eyes opened wide as the killer saw the tiny dervish whirl out from between his dead comrades. The man tried to fumble his gun free from his robe as the wizened Asian flew over to meet him.

It was no contest.

The barrel had barely emerged from the sleeve before Chiun was before him.

Hand flat, the Master of Sinanju slapped the killer's forehead so hard his eyes sprang loose, popping twin sacs of viscous fluid from bloody sockets. Inside his skull as the dead man fell, his brain quivered like so much gray jelly.

Chiun did not give the corpse a second glance. A remorseless wraith in green, the Master of Sinanju moved on.

REMO DROPPED THE BODY from his outstretched hand. Mouth hanging slack in death, it tumbled atop the other two.

That was four assassins for him so far. There were at least that many in the other direction.

He was much closer to the stage now.

Sun was as oblivious to the threat beneath him as his followers.

"...cannot allow the forces of evil to crush our future. I am your future. I am the future of the world ..."

The cult leader continued to shout into the protesting microphone. In spite of the briskness of the day, his face was coated in a sheen of sweat.

Remo turned from Sun. He looped around the stage, coming up on the far side. This was ridiculous. There should have been police here. He hadn't seen one uniformed officer since arriving at the stadium.

He had no idea how many Chiun might have gotten so far. The crowd in the infield was too thick to see farther than the dozen or so people jammed in any given area. Remo had seen three assassins cutting through the throng on the right. If Chiun had gotten only those, that left two more. At least.

The killers had been weaving and ducking through the vast collection of Sunnies. By this point, the final two Koreans would not be anywhere near the places Remo had first seen them.

He moved swiftly, slipping like a shadow between groups of robed cult members.

Out, look. Around, duck, look again.

No one.

The stage loomed high on his right. He was so close now he could no longer see the Reverend Sun. The cult leader's voice continued to roar out stridently across his throng of faithful as Remo swept around to the rear of the platform.

Nothing. More blissfully ignorant couples. A line of Sunnies stood on the rear of the platform above, backs to the crowd.

He must have missed them on the other side.

Remo spun on his heel and was about to double back when he caught a sudden flash of movement from around the far side of the high-backed stage.

White robe. Asian features.

Yet another Korean assassin.

Remo didn't give much thought to the man's nationality. He was nothing more than a threat to be neutralized.

Spinning back, Remo raced along the rear wall of the platform toward the lone killer. He was not even halfway there before he knew he would be too late.

The gun was already out and up. Clip in place. Finger caressed the crooked trigger. The explosive rattle of automatic-weapons fire drowned out the electronic bellow of Man Hyung Sun.

Hot lead blasted the backs of the men lined along the rear of the platform. Flesh exploded into flecks of crimson-streaked pulp as the bullets ripped through the Sunnies clustered on the platform.

Like too real ducks in a macabre shooting gallery, the men began toppling over. Some fell face forward onto the stage. Still more dropped in lifeless heaps to the grassy field behind the platform.

The killer had a look of demonic possession in his eyes as he continued firing upward. Round after round rattled into the men on the stage, each bullet coming that much closer to the Reverend Man Hyung Sun.

Oddly, there was no screaming.

Remo assumed the reaction from the crowd would be one of terror. The instinct to flee-for self-preservation-would surely surface among the Sunnie multitude. It did not.

The cult members remained mute spectators to the carnage. The only visible change was that the ones at the rear of the platform seemed a bit more attentive as Remo flashed over to the man with the gun.

The Korean had nearly exhausted the bullets in the clip. He slipped the weapon back to one side, expecting to make a final sweep across the men on stage before the magazine was spent, when he felt an abrupt tug at his hands.

Popping and wrenching sounds flooded the auditory void that a second before had been filled with the persistent clatter of autofire.

The killer looked down for the source of the strange new noise. He found it at his hands. Or rather, where his hands had been.

The hands were gone, as was the gun. Replaced by twin stumps of spurting red blood.

As he looked down in dull amazement at his lifeblood pumping onto the ground, the assassin became briefly aware of his gun. The barrel was pointed back in his direction and was floating gently toward his face.

Wait.

Not floating.

Hurtling.

In fact, zooming in faster than the fastest thing he had ever seen.

The bone-crushing impact of his own weapon a split second later was the last thing the killer would ever feel.

Remo dumped the body with the gun sprouting from its forehead onto the ground. He was picking his way back through the carnage when a voice exploded on the PA system.

"As I have foretold, so it has come to pass!" the booming voice of Man Hyung Sun announced proudly.

Remo could not believe it. Sun was actually going on with the ceremony.

"I am the seer of legend. I augur great things for the chosen few. Revel in the Sun Source, disbelievers! Let Man Hyung Sun be your guide to blessed pyon ha-da! Great shall be the rewards for him who joins our righteous cause!"

"Sun! Sun! Sun!"

The crowd began to chant his name once more.

It was almost as if there had not been an attempted assassination a moment before. For all anyone knew, there were still killers lurking amid the crowd.

The Sunnies didn't care. The bodies strewed around the rear of the stage did not matter. They screamed and chanted with religious zeal, eyes wild with righteous fire.

Hands waved pink saris like trophies. As Remo came around to the front of the stage, he fought his way through the waving streams of silk, still searching for the last of the Korean hit squad.

"One has come to deliver us to that which I have foretold!" Sun screamed, quieting the frenzied crowd.

Remo stumbled on the last body. It was at the base of the stage. Every bone beneath the robe appeared to have been pounded to dust. Chiun's handiwork.

He glanced around, looking for the Master of Sinanju in the sea of Sunnie faces.

"It is he who saved your sacred leader! He of the Sun Source whose arrival I have presaged!"

There it was again. Sun Source. The most ancient description of Sinanju, known only to a handful of people. For some reason, it angered Remo to hear the cult leader speak the words. Coming from a fraud like Sun, it was almost a desecration.

"He will help lead us to glory!"

Remo half heard the words.

Chiun was nowhere to be seen. From the direction Remo had taken, there was really only one place the old Korean could have gone.

"Speak that we may hear your words, Great Protector!"

A thought struck Remo. It dropped like a lead ball into the pit of his stomach.

Limbs stiff, face unreadable, he turned to the stage.

The wizened form of the Master of Sinanju stood high on the platform next to the Reverend Man Hyung Sun. The cluster of wrinkles on his parchment face bunched into a tight fist of pleasure as Sun twisted the microphone over to Chiun.

"All hail the Sun Source," the Master of Sinanju's squeaky voice boomed out over the public-address system.

As the world spun and twisted and finally dropped out from beneath Remo's feet, the crowd of Sunnie disciples burst into frenzied cheers.

Chapter 14

The men wore the blue uniform of the New York City Police Department. Hip radios squawking, they forced their way through the crowd of mingling Sunnies to the pile of three bodies lying on the infield of Yankee Stadium.

Remo was gone. He had seen the police arriving at the very end of the mass wedding ceremony and had taken off in the opposite direction with Chiun. The two Masters of Sinanju had left with the Reverend Sun's entourage.

It was a testament to the brainwashing techniques the Sunnie cult employed that the men and women could ignore all the corpses lying around their makeshift chapel.

Chatting among themselves in the postwedding euphoria, they paid little attention as the police slipped the first trio of bodies into black zipper bags.

Oddly enough, there were no homicide detectives on the scene. Stranger still, the police who were present used no gloves when handling the corpses. They merely stuffed the remains into the bags, zipped them up and moved on to the next bodies. They could have been state workers collecting litter at the side of the highway.

Not one question was asked of the Sunnies.

Not one fingerprint was taken.

Not one hair or fiber or blood sample was lifted from any of the bodies, the ground or the stage.

Nothing besides the actual collection of the corpses seemed to interest the police.

It took little time for them to bag up the assassins, as well as the Sunnies who had fallen victim to the single successful gunman.

The nine bodies of the hit squad were placed in the back of an unmarked van. The remains of the more than one dozen slaughtered Sunnie cult members were put in the back of another nondescript vehicle.

Without a single siren or light to herald their way, the trucks took off in different directions.

The bodies of the Sunnie victims turned up over the course of the next two days, scattered in a wide area around the East River near Riker's Island and in Flushing Bay near LaGuardia Airport.

The remains of the Korean hit squad showed up in a completely different place.

Chapter 15

It was the beginning of his second full day of work back behind his familiar desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, and Harold W. Smith felt like a new man.

The winter sun reflected brightly on Long Island Sound, dappling in shades of white and yellow the waves that lapped at the rotting dock behind the private sanitarium's administrative wing.

Though the calendar had lately crept into December, a substantial snowfall had yet to come. The crispness of the air and lack of icy buildup on the ground erased images of the deep winters of years past. Residents of the Northeast were enjoying the guiltless lie that this was merely an extended autumn. True winter was still far off.

Typing at his desk computer, Smith was basking in the comforting fiction, as well.

For a time the day before yesterday, he had thought he might be having some kind of relapse. Of course, he knew that was not likely. He had been assured that his recovery would be complete.

However, after he had hung up from Remo, he had a creeping, unnerving sensation in his skull.

It was a strange afterimage of his illness. Almost like exploring the spot where a troubling canker sore had been, expecting the pain to still be there.

Of course Smith was nothing if not logical. He knew exactly why he had felt the way he had. But Remo and Chiun had gotten out of Germany without further incident.

According to the latest information he had gotten from the wire service, the police cordon was still in place around the North Korean embassy. They did not know their quarry was long gone. Let the Koreans at the Berlin mission try to explain their way out of it. It was not a CURE affair.

Just to be certain that every loose end was tied up, Smith was in the process of checking the records of Kim Jong Il's personal jet.

His gnarled fingers ached as he drummed them swiftly and precisely against the surface of his desk. Buried beneath the lip of the onyx slab, alphanumeric keys lit up amber when struck. Dancing fireflies entombed in a sea of black.

While he was convalescing, Smith had gotten used to typing on his small laptop. The sensation was different with the high-tech keyboard on his desk. His body was not as adaptable as it had once been. It would take a little time for his fingers to get used to the different sensation.

Smith soon learned that the aircraft had touched down in North Korea the previous day. That meant that the Master of Sinanju's share of the Nibelungen Hoard would be halfway to his village by now. Away from the world for centuries-perhaps aeons-to come.

The CURE director breathed a sigh of relief on learning the news. The Hoard would not be a threat to world commerce in Harold Smith's lifetime. And for Smith, that was the best he could hope to accomplish.

As he was exiting the record of flight-log data, Smith's computer system emitted a small electronic beep. It was a signal that the massive mainframes in the basement beneath him had dredged something of interest from the vast stream of facts and curiosities coursing endlessly along the invisible information stream that was the World Wide Web.

Closing out his current application, Smith brought up a window containing the information.

It was a news story from nearby New York City. Eight bullet-riddled bodies had washed up from the East River. Although the features had been carefully mutilated to make identification impossible, police were willing to admit that the victims all appeared to be rather young-ranging from their early twenties to midthirties.

It was being treated as a mystery. The deceased were white males. They did not appear to be victims of a gangland slaying, nor was there evidence of drugs. There had been no missing-persons reports filed.

Until new evidence came to light, the men had each been given a John Doe classification.

Smith wondered briefly if this might not be the work of some new serial killer. If it was, it did not fit any pattern Smith knew of.

He decided that an explanation would most likely present itself eventually. Smith was about to close out the file when the blue contact desk phone rang. He left the story on his computer as he turned his attention to the telephone.

"Yes, Remo," Smith said efficiently.

"Smitty, I figured I'd better let you know about the bodies before those damned computers of yours flagged the story," Remo's familiar voice announced glumly.

"What bodies?" Smith asked, sitting up in his chair. He became instantly aware of his surgery scar. He felt gingerly at it with his gray fingertips as he spoke.

"The ones Chiun and I whacked at the Loonie wedding yesterday," Remo explained. "I know you've got some screwy program that recognizes mine and Chiun's techniques. Before you go apeshit, we are not freelancing."

"That is comforting to know," Smith said dryly. "However, I have received no such information."

"Really?" Remo said, surprised. "I figured those machines of yours would have read the police reports by now."

"Perhaps we should begin at the beginning," Smith said. "Who did you, er, remove?"

"Nine Korean killers," Remo said. "They were armed to the teeth and tried to bump off Man Hyung Sun himself."

"There was an assassination attempt against Sun?" Smith asked. It was his turn to be surprised.

"You didn't hear about that, either?" Remo asked.

"No, I did not."

"Gee, maybe it's time for an upgrade or a lube job or something," Remo suggested. "Your computers are slipping."

"That is not possible," Smith insisted. But even as he denied the possibility that the Folcroft Four could fail, Smith was diving into the system.

He quickly found the reports on the mass Sunnie wedding ceremony. There was nothing to indicate that it had not gone off without a hitch, so to speak.

"Remo, the stories I am reading recount a rather dull ceremony," Smith said, puzzled.

"Whoever wrote that wasn't there," Remo said. "Come to think of it," he added, "I don't remember seeing anyone who looked like a reporter there."

"I think I see why," Smith said, scanning the lines of text on his computer screen. "All of these stories appear to be pretty much identical to one another. Typical for reporters who have written their stories from either a pool source or a press release."

"You're saying the Sunnies kept the assassination attempt under their hats?" Remo asked.

"So it would seem."

"That doesn't make sense. Sun doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would hide from something that might give him positive press."

"No, that does not seem to be in keeping with the character of the Sunnie leader," Smith agreed.

"You knew he had a new psychic infomercial on," Remo said. It was not a question.

"I have heard as much," Smith replied crisply. "It is my understanding that former presidential candidate Michael Princippi is a featured performer." He did not attempt to hide the distaste in his tone. "Apparently, he has sunk even lower since his dealings with Mark Kaspar and the Truth Church."

Remo stiffened at the reference. "Don't even mention that, Smitty," he complained. "Those ghosts are all behind us, so let's just forget about it." He took a deep breath, banishing thoughts of a more painful time. "Anyway, it seems crazy that Sun wouldn't want to capitalize on some screwballs trying to kill him on the same week he goes national with some new scheme."

"I am at a loss to explain it, as well," Smith admitted. "You say these men you eliminated were Korean. Did you think to question any of them?"

"There wasn't time," Remo explained.

"That is unfortunate. Sun is a fervent antiCommunist who has at different times been accused of involvement in illegal activity against both North and South Korea. It is possible that one of the governments on either side of the Thirty-eighth Parallel sent agents to dispose of him for some reason. Why they would choose to do so at this time, I would not begin to speculate."

"Maybe they just don't like weddings," Remo suggested.

"Yes," Smith said humorlessly. "In any event, I will be on the alert for any report concerning the Korean deaths. If there is any new information available, I will let you know. You are at home, presumably."

"Not exactly," Remo hedged. Before Smith could press further, he changed the subject. "By the way, Smitty, the other weird thing about the whole mess is that there weren't any police there during the assassination attempt."

"Did Sun not wish them inside the stadium during the ceremony?" Smith asked.

"In or outside," Remo explained. "There weren't any cops around anywhere. More than twenty bodies raining down all around us, and not even a beat cop with a billy club to give me and Chiun a hand."

"Twenty?" Smith asked, gray face creasing in tart displeasure. "You said there were only nine."

"Oh," Remo said. "I guess I forgot to mention the Sunnies who were killed."

"Yes, you did," Smith said aridly.

"There were about fourteen of them," Remo explained. "One of the hit men got off a couple of rounds before I could get to him."

Smith's pinched face grew troubled. "And they did not report that, either?" he said. "How is it possible they could have kept it sec-?" Smith paused, a sudden realization dawning on him. Typing swiftly, he brought back up on his computer screen the original story that the mainframes had collected.

"Remo," the CURE director said flatly when he was again scanning the familiar lines of text, "I am looking at an Associated Press story out of New York that concerns a number of unidentified bodies that have washed up along the banks of the East River this morning. All eight victims died of gunshot wounds."

"They can't be the ones, Smitty," Remo said. "The police collected the bodies."

"You said there were no police," Smith said slowly.

"They showed up after."

Smith considered. "One moment, please." The aching in his fingers long-forgotten, Smith rapidly accessed a stealth program that allowed him to slip into the computerized homicide records of the NYPD. "There is no evidence of any bodies being removed from the Sunnie ceremony," he said after only a quick perusal of the files. Leaving that aspect of the police system, he logged in to another area.

"That's impossible," Remo insisted while Smith worked. "I saw them myself."

"No," Smith said firmly. "You did not." He had stopped typing. "Whoever you saw was not with the police. There are no records of any officers being placed on duty near Yankee Stadium during the wedding ceremony. Nor were any summoned there for any type of disturbance."

"They were phonies?" Remo asked.

"So it would seem."

"So you think the bodies in the East River are who? The hit squad or the Loonies?"

"It seems that the ones who have washed up so far would be with the Grand Unification Church. All young white males. But there have only been eight in all. Your Korean assassins might still be out there. I will alert the authorities to begin conducting searches along beaches and in the waters between the Triborough and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges. The bodies collected thus far have been tightly concentrated roughly at the midpoint of this area."

"I don't know, Smitty," Remo said doubtfully. "If they dumped twenty-three bodies into the river at once, doesn't it seem like at least one of the eight corpses that have turned up so far would be one of the killers?"

"Possibly," Smith conceded. "But not necessarily. We will learn more when the Korean bodies are recovered."

"I'm kind of curious to know who they were," Remo said.

"As am I," Smith agreed. "I do not enjoy the prospect of assassination squads running loose on American soil. I will contact you when any new information presents itself." Smith was typing as he spoke. "I asked you before if you were at home, but I do not believe you answered."

"Yeah, you did, didn't you?" Remo said.

Instead of a reply to his query, Smith heard the familiar flat buzz of a dial tone.

Chapter 16

The first government agent to peer into the mysterious box from America threw up. He pressed his hands tightly against his mouth as brown rice launched from between his tense fingers.

"What is wrong with you?" demanded the security agent assigned to watch his colleague. For suspicion rather than security, there were always at least two men in each detail. The second agent's face was angry.

The first agent was vomiting so hard it was impossible for him to speak. He merely turned away at the question, shaking his head as he continued to retch uncontrollably.

The second agent scowled. As he sidestepped both the still vomiting agent and the pile of clotted rice-thick with stomach fluids-gathering at the man's feet, the second North Korean official peered inside the cardboard case.

His lunch immediately joined that of his comrade on the cold concrete floor.

They vomited and vomited until there was nothing left but air. For several long, painful minutes, they continued to dry heave.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was starving yet again. Food was being strictly rationed, and every meal was meager.

When they were through vomiting, rather than leave the former contents of their stomachs for the cleaning staff to take home to divide among the members of their starving families, the two men got down on their hands and knees. Like dogs, they began scooping up and eating their own vomit. Only when they had licked the floor clean did they leave the room, careful not to peer at the ghastly contents of the innocuous open box.

THE HEAD OF THE People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle was immediately summoned to the locked airport room. He arrived from his Pyongyang office by official car twenty minutes later.

As he entered the small secure room, he noted with disdain the stench of stomach fluids.

The two security agents accompanied him inside. They hung back by the door, faces ashen, as the PBRS head strode over to the cardboard box.

The head of North Korean intelligence did not have the same response to the box's contents as his subordinates.

"When did this arrive?" he asked, hooded eyes peering inside.

"An hour ago," was the reply from one of the sickly men.

"Directly from America?"

"America? No. It came from the South."

"With a message from America," the intelligence head said leadingly.

The men glanced at each other, puzzled. "None that we know of," one admitted.

Hmm.

For a few moments, the older man merely stared into the box, tipping his head to see inside from different angles. But all at once, to the horror of the two men across the room, the director of PBRS reached inside the box. He used both hands, shoulders making a shrugging motion as he clasped the object contained within.

He lifted it out into the wan fluorescent light of the drab little room located off the main Pyongyang terminal.

For the second time within a half hour, the first security agent's lunch spewed out onto the floor.

The other man had braced himself. Covering his nose and mouth, he managed to keep his rice down, though his stomach knotted in waves of churning acid fire. He swallowed the clump of rice that had gathered in his throat.

Across the room, the director of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle turned the object over in his hands. He was like a woman in a market carefully appraising a large melon. Except melons did not have noses.

The severed head had distinctly Korean features. But it was somewhat desiccated, even though it had been encased in some kind of plastic shrinkwrap.

The wrapping twisted the nose to one side and flattened the eyes even further than nature had. Deep maroon pools of blood had gathered, mostly dry now, at the bottom of the tight bag. Through the congealed blood, the director could make out jagged tears in the flesh of the neck. The object employed to remove the head had not been particularly sharp.

Without warning, the director tossed the severed head to the subordinate who had yet to throw up in his presence.

"Have this taken to the PBRS forensics laboratory immediately," he ordered.