Scorched Earth

Destroyer 105: Scorched Earth

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

In the beginning, no one expected the BioBubble to burst.

Certainly not the national press, which hailed it as being in the vanguard of man's exploration of space-even though it wasn't part of the space program.

When the space program angle became old news, the press hailed it as the perfect tool for solving the global eco-crisis of the moment.

The eco-crisis of the moment changed from moment to moment, of course. Sometimes it changed from newspaper to news outlet.

On the same day, at opposite ends of the continental United States, the BioBubble-a three-acre honeycomb terrarium of thermopane glass supported by white-painted steel trusswork-was simultaneously hailed as the solution to the global-warming crisis and the jumping-off point for man's eventual relocation to a less polluted planet.

Thus claimed the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, respectively.

After a while, the national press began seeing it differently. Even with the decline in readership and the spiraling cost of bulk newsprint eroding the page counts of most big-city dailies, the editors still had column incises to fill.

The first red glimmering of trouble came when to support the faltering project-no one at BioBubble Inc. would say why it was faltering, just that it was-the facility was opened to tourists. Only then was the first discouraging word heard.

"Tourists? Isn't the BioBubble hermetically sealed? With airlocks?" asked a reporter at an outdoor news conference at the BioBubble site with the eroded redsandstone hills of Dodona, Arizona, shimmering in the background. The spot had been chosen for its resemblance to the landscape of Mars, according to the earliest press releases.

"Yes. To simulate every ecosystem on our fragile planet," said the director of information for BioBubble Inc., Amos Bulla.

"If you let in tourists, won't that destroy the BioBubble's eco-integrity?" a second reporter pressed.

"Tourists will not be allowed in. Only to look in. Think of it as a zoo with people on both sides of the bars."

"What if someone throws a brick?"

"The glass is tempered and bulletproof. But no one would be so malicious," Bulla said sanctimoniously.

In truth, no one was. Unless one counted the press and their figurative cast stones called factoids.

There was a spate of editorials criticizing the project for stooping to the level of a scientific Disneyland. But another round of editorials from rival papers, insisting that scientific research needed to hack out uncleared paths, put a temporary halt to that line of criticism.

Then a Japanese tourist with a Nikon and a roll of Fuji Super D Plus film shot the half-chewed pizza crust sticking out from the compost heap on the other side of the sealed glass-and-steel honeycomb habitat.

He sold the shot to the National Enquirer for sixty thousand dollars, and the Enquirer ran it on the front page, with the headline BioBobble Revealed. Because the Enquirer was now a chief news source for the national press, the Boston Globe took it seriously and sent one of its photojournalists to investigate.

"The photos clearly showed a pizza crust in the compost heap," the journalist argued.

"I agree," Amos Bulla said forthrightly. "But not our compost heap."

"The photo definitely showed white-painted steel trusswork in the foreground."

"A clever fake. The BioBubble has been sealed for over a year now. All the food is grown organically, then recycled. There is no pizza being baked or grown in the BioBubble habitat."

"Then why did the Enquirer pay a Japanese tourist sixty grand for a snapshot?"

"To sell newspapers. Just like you're doing," retorted the director of information for BioBubble Inc.

After the pizza-crust crisis blew over, things settled down for a while. And so did publicity. With publicity off, the tourist flow dropped to a lazy, sporadic trickle.

"We need to pump up the volume on this thing," said the financier of the project by long-distance telephone.

"Last time, the whole thing was almost blown out of the water," Bulla told him. When not dealing with the press, he functioned as project director-a position neither demanding nor critical, inasmuch as the facility, once sealed, was supposed to be self-sustaining.

"Whose fault was that?"

"That won't happen again. I laid down the law. Next time we sneak in pizza, everybody eats their crust, too. We can't afford another PR problem."

"Maybe we can manufacture a crisis."

"What kind of crisis?" asked Bulla guardedly, thinking I'm the front man so I'm the fall guy if anything goes wrong.

"An eco-crisis. What else?"

A solemn press release was duly issued, alerting the nation and the universe at large that the BioBubble, the self-sustaining greenhouse that was itself a miniature Mother Earth, was mysteriously, inescapably losing oxygen.

"This may in some way mirror the loss of greenhouse gases our dear Mother Earth is currently experiencing," Bulla announced.

This was said at a press conference at the Dodona, Arizona, site of the BioBubble construct with the hot sun making the Dome resemble an otherworldly gem.

The press was there in substantial numbers. It was a slow news day.

"Do you have any reason to suspect leakage?" Bulla was asked.

"BioBubble integrity stands one hundred percent. There is some atmo imbalance occurring within the habitat. Or one of the ecosystems."

Someone wondered if there was excess methane in the air.

"As a matter of fact, that is one of the rising gases. Why do you ask?"

"Methane is released through intestinal gas. There's a theory that bovine methane emissions are responsible for the ozone-layer problem," said the stringer from Mother Jones.

"There are only a dozen cows in the BioBubble."

"People fart, too. Especially eco-pioneers living off beans and tofu."

This was said in all seriousness, but the assembled press rippled in raucous laughter.

The director of BioBubble information wasn't amused and did not join in the merriment.

"Methane is only one of the problematic ascendant gases," he added. "Nitrogen is up, too. As is carbon dioxide."

"Will you pump in fresh oxygen?"

"Absolutely not," Bulla said firmly. "BioBubble seals must remain intact until the current test period is over. Otherwise, the experiment will be contaminated, and we must start over."

"How about sabotage?"

"Impossible. Who in their right mind would want to sabotage the salvation of all mankind? It would constitute mass suicide for Spaceship Earth."

Because this made a great soundbite, no one questioned Amos Bulla further. They rushed to beat each other to the air or in print with it.

The story made the back pages, and the press and public forgot about the BioBubble until the next crisis: another photograph showing portable tanks pumping oxygen into the supposedly airtight dome.

This time it was a National Enquirer photographer assigned to the BioBubble beat who broke the story. It turned out their first story had raised circulation thirty thousand copies. The Enquirer wanted to hold on to their readers and their quarters.

When the Enquirer broke the oxygen story, the national press jumped on it with all four feet.

Director of Information Amos Bulla fielded new questions like a man before a firing squad dodging bullets. Badly and not at all. His neck kept jerking.

"Why wasn't this oxygen infusion announced?" he was asked.

"Our last announcement was barely covered by you people. We concluded there was no press interest."

"What about the public's right to know?"

"They know now. We are hiding nothing." Bulla spread his meaty palms in a gesture of abject innocence. Every camera caught the slick sheen on his perspiration-drenched palms.

"Is the habitat environment contaminated?" he was asked.

"No. Just refortified. It was either this or start over. Since oxygen is a pure and natural gas, we thought it acceptable to introduce a fresh supply. It's organic, you know."

"What about pizzas? Are you introducing more of those?"

"That story is a fraud," Bulla snapped indignantly.

In the end, the reputation of the BioBubble was tainted, and once the first blot had appeared, the press went scurrying for more.

They found plenty. Falsified resumes. Drug use. Financial diversions.

Despite the rain of discredit, the lame jokes and talk-show ridicule, and every attempt to expose the BioBubble as a glorified tourist trap, it refused to burst. It remained unburst for so long that people forgot their expectations.

The project lumbered on, and the press moved on to the O.J. story and never looked back.

Until the night the BioBubble became a smoking, stinking heap of blackish brown silicon-and-steel trusswork whose pristine white paint framework turned black and bubbly as hot tar.

Nobody saw it happen. Not exactly. The only witnesses were calcified by the tremendous heat that melted them inextricably into the viscous glass-and-steel bubble.

It was after sundown. There were no tourists. And no press.

The BioBubble sat in the red desert, burnished by silver moonlight and looking as dignified as a child's cluster of bubbles. The internal lights were off. The inhabitatants-as they were called-were fast asleep, from the tiniest songbird to Project Director Bulla in his mobile home a quarter mile away.

Only the cockroaches, imported from many parts of the globe to ingest vegetable waste, were awake. In the three years the BioBubble had been operating, they had managed to flourish, proving that the scientists who predicted cockroaches would one day inherit the earth were, for once, correct.

The roaches crawled along the inside of the tempered glass panes as if they owned the project. By night, they did. Nobody was brave enough to stay up after lights out.

No one witnessed the event because nighttime visitors were distinctly prohibited. The official reason was to allow the inhabitatants to get their proper rest. They went to bed at dusk and rose with the sun.

The unofficial reason was nighttime was when the catering truck usually arrived.

This was an off night. There was no catering truck.

So there were no witnesses other than the roaches and the inhabitants of the nearby artist's colony of Dodona, Arizona, some of whom later swore they saw a white-hot column of light sizzle down from the clear, star-dazzled sky for the briefest of seconds.

A crack like thunder sounded, waking others, who also swore they saw the beam of light once they understood it was a sure way to be interviewed on national TV. The pale mushroom cloud of moonlight-illuminated smoke was sighted by several people as it drifted and billowed up from the desert floor.

Since it sounded like the thunder accompanying a lightning strike, no one bothered to check the BioBubble until the next morning. That's when the brown slag heap of vitreous, rehardened glass and steel was discovered and people started to tell their stories-true or otherwise.

The first thing people realized was that the thunder followed a lightning strike. It never preceded it.

And no one had ever heard of lightning that could reduce a project the size of the BioBubble to slag, cooking all its eco-dwellers to burned pork chops.

This once, even the cockroaches didn't survive.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was trying to make liver pate.

The trouble was the livers on the menu of the day were not being cooperative. Their owners wanted to keep them-preferably in their bodies and functioning normally.

Remo had other plans.

It was a simple assignment, as assignments went.

For two years now, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, had succumbed to a triple-digit annual homicide total, fueled by the simple mathematics of the drug trade. In the process, it acquired the disreputable nickname of "Moneyapolis."

At least, that's how Remo's employer, Dr. Harold W Smith, explained it to him when Remo had blurted out, "Minneapolis?"

"An ounce of crack cocaine that sells for five dollars in Chicago and other cities fetches twenty on the streets of Minneapolis. This has attracted drug traffickers in unusually high numbers. Consequently there is a drug turf war going on."

"You want me in the middle of it?" asked Remo.

"No. I want you to neutralize the next round of players. A rising Mafia group, the D'Ambrosia crime family."

"Didn't I nail one of their soldiers a while back?"

"I do not keep track," Smith said with lemony disinterest. "They operate out of San Francisco. But they see an opportunity in Minneapolis. If we interdict them now, the D'Ambrosias may decide to remain in San Francisco, where local law-enforcement agencies can contain them without our intervention."

"Gotcha," said Remo, who was in a good mood because it had been over a year since he'd gotten a simple in-and-out assignment.

"The D'Ambrosia Family is convening a meeting with a local supplier at the Radisson South Hotel, adjacent to Twin Cities Airport," Smith continued. "See that their meeting adjourns permanently. Arrangements have been made for you to join the wait staff."

"Why do I have to go undercover for a simple massacre?" Remo wondered aloud.

"The usual reason-security," said Smith, then hung up.

Since he was in a good mood, Remo didn't rip out the pay telephone at Logan Airport. Instead, he went to catch his flight, knowing that the superefficient Smith had already booked him on the cheapest air carrier known to man.

Presenting himself at the Friendly Air reservations desk, Remo said, "I'm Remo. You have a ticket for me?"

The clerk looked him up on his monitor, and asked, "Remo Bozzone?"

"If that's what it says," said Remo, who often got his cover surname from people not in the loop. He had been Remo Williams most of his life. Until the electric chair.

"What was that?" asked the clerk.

"Remo Bozo. That's me."

"Bozzone."

"That's me, too," said Remo cheerfully, fishing out a driver's license at random and flashing it with his thumb over the last name.

The clerk saw that the face matched and the first name was the same, so he didn't push the issue. "Good news, sir," he said brightly.

"I have a crash-proof plane?"

"No. We're bumping you up to first class."

Remo's face fell. "No way. Stick me in coach."

"But there's more leg room in the first-class cabin."

"My legs fold just fine."

"It's free."

"I'm not paying for this. My employer is."

"Complimentary drinks," the clerk coaxed.

"I can get distilled water in coach. Alcohol and I parted company a million years ago."

Remo now had the bored reservation clerk's interest.

"What's wrong with first class?"

"The stewardesses have way too much time on their hands," said Remo with a straight face.

The clerk looked at Remo as if Remo was John Wayne Gacy come back from the grave. Remo looked back as if he were John Wayne come back from his grave to deal harshly with his namesake.

In the end, the clerk sniffed and said, "We have no seats available in coach. Will you take a later flight?"

"No time. Is there a place that sells luggage in this terminal?"

"Try the main concourse."

"Fine. Give me the ticket."

Boarding pass in hand, Remo went to a gift shop, picked through the luggage until he found a tan leather carryon with a tiny, keyed padlock and purchased it using his Remo Itri credit card.

"It's one of our finest bags," the gift-shop manager said, handing back the card and receipt.

"1 only care about the lock," said Remo, taking the padlock and the tiny wire keyring with its two flat keys and walking out.

The manager called after Remo. "Sir, what about your bag?"

"Keep the change," said Remo.

Going to a men's room, Remo took the padlock hasp between two fingers and began rubbing it vigorously. After a moment, the metal began to thin and elongate until the U shape of the hasp was longer and thinner than manufacturer's specs. When it was long enough to do the job, Remo ran the end through the square hole in his zipper tongue and hooked it in an up position with his belt buckle. Then he locked it with a tinny snick.

Separating the keys, he slipped one in his Italian loafer under his bare foot and the other in one pocket of the tan chinos and hoped the metal detector wouldn't go off.

It didn't.

Already it was a good day.

The flight to Minneapolis had only one hitch. The usual. A stewardess with short russet hair and green eyes like happy emeralds rested her gaze on Remo's trim, 160-pound body, his overthick wrists and the strong planes of his not-too-handsome face and used a line Remo had been hearing from stewardesses for the best part of his adult life.

"Coffee, tea or me?"

This one smiled. Many didn't. Some wore pleading or hopeful expressions. Others actually wept. And one memorable bleached blonde turned their encounter into an unmistakable cry for help by jamming her TWA letter opener into her throbbing jugular and threatening to take her life right there in the center aisle if Remo was brute enough to give an ungentlemanly response.

"I don't drink any of those things," said Remo this time.

The redhead wasn't taking no for an answer. Redheads, Remo had long ago discovered, rarely did.

"But you don't know how I taste," she said plaintively.

"You taste like a redhead. I've tasted lots of redheads. And I'm in a stark, raving blonde mood today. Sorry."

Without missing a beat, the redhead whistled up an ash blond flight attendant from the back of the plane.

They huddled. The blonde, listening attentively, looked at Remo with eyes like small blue explosions of pleasure and nodded animatedly.

They stormed back, the redhead taking point.

"Can you come with us to the first-class galley, sir?" she asked with breathy politeness.

"Why?" Remo asked suspiciously.

"There's more room there."

"For what?"

"For you to jump Lynette here and me to watch."

"You just want to watch?"

"It's better than riding my vibrator to Minneapolis," the redhead said with resigned sincerity.

"There's nothing in the first-class galley I want," said Remo, folding his lean arms stubbornly.

"Well, I guess you'll just have to do him here," said the redhead to the blonde with an air of determination. "Scare me up a blanket, Lyn."

"Nothing doing," said Remo as the blonde hurried back to an aft storage bin.

"Sir, it's our duty as flight attendants to cater to your every need. You said blonde. So you're getting a blonde. And that's it," the redhead fumed, dropping into the empty seat beside Remo and reaching for his zipper.

"Let me make you comfortable." That's when her tapered fingers encountered the tiny luggage padlock and her glossy red mouth made a tasty O.

"What's this?"

"A simple precaution," said Remo.

"Where's the key?"

"In my luggage."

"Oh, my God. It's way down in the cargo hold by now."

"You could go get it," Remo suggested.

"I might miss the flight."

"If you don't get that key, you'll definitely miss the show."

"Don't let the plane take off without me."

"Never happen," said Remo, who watched the redhead scurry up the aisle, not at all hindered by the broken shoe heel lost when taking the turn to the main exit door at 2 G's.

When the ash blonde returned with a fluffy blue blanket, Remo put on an innocent face.

"Your friend just quit."

"Oh! Does that mean it's off?"

"Catch me on the return flight."

"I'll be there."

"But I won't," Remo murmured as the 727 backed out of the gate and taxied to the runway with the redhaired stewardess running in her nylons after them, waving her pumps.

When Remo gave her a little finger wave, she threw her shoes at the aircraft's tail assembly one at a time.

Later the blonde stewardess brought Remo a silver tray from the galley.

"I found you some liver pate."

"Don't eat the stuff."

"Gentlemen who prefer blondes usually like liver pate."

"I only said I like blondes to discourage the redhead. Actually I'm into brunettes this week."

"I'll be right back," the blonde said, rushing back to coach.

When she came back, with a zaftig brunette in tow, Remo had locked himself in the first-class rest room, and no amount of pounding, threats or promises would bring him out until the jet's turbines were spooling down at the Minneapolis gate.

Other than that, it wasn't a bad flight, and it did give Remo the idea for making liver pate.

So when he wheeled the sterling service cart up to room 28-A of the Radisson South Hotel in his starched whites, a Chef Boyardee cap cocked on his head, Remo had his line of attack already planned out.

The door opened, and an overfed hair-bag in a sharkskin suit grunted, "You the guy with the steaks?"

"No, I'm the liver pate chef."

"I don't want your liver," he snarled.

"But I want yours," said Remo, running the cart in despite the best attempts of the hair-bag to block his way. The hairbag filled most of the doorway, so he was the most befuddled man in Minneapolis when Remo was suddenly behind him bringing the cart to a squeaky stop.

The hair-bag turned with all the lightning reflexes of a wooden totem pole. It took him six careful steps to get all the way around.

"I said we don't want your liver, jerk-ass!" he bellowed.

"And I said I want yours," returned Remo in an unperturbed tone.

By that time, the men in bad, tight-fitting suits with bunching unibrows over snarling eyes were getting out of their seats looking belligerent.

"What the fuck is this?" asked a black man who wore a gold chain that linked his earlobes, nostrils and nipples and possibly other portions of his anatomy beneath his white silk shirt and tight-fitting white vinyl pants.

"Liver-pate chef," said Remo, taking the silver domes off six serving dishes.

The bodyguard stumped up, looked down, blinked three times real slow and announced the supremely obvious. "I see only fucking lettuce."

"Haven't pated the livers yet," said Remo.

"We don't want none," the bodyguard growled. "Tell him, Mr. D."

Mr. D. looked all of thirty and as bright as a twenty-five-watt bulb. Remo pegged him for the D'Ambrosia honcho on the scene. That made the guy with all the chains the local supplier.

"Look, we ordered the steak and lobster. You got the wrong room," Mr. D. insisted.

The last dome clanged down, and Remo turned, smiled disarmingly and said, "You first."

"Me first what?"

"You first for liver pate. "

"I don't want-"

The man felt the dull pressure in his abdomen. Being a gangster for most of his short life, he assumed the worst-that the chef had stuck a knife in his gut. It felt like a knife. It punctured the fibrous abdominal walls like a knife, and made his lungs clutch up the way an inserted knife would.

But when he looked down, his eyes horrified, Mr. D. caught a glimpse of his liver, pinched between two hardly bloody fingers, emerging wetly through a round hole in his shirt.

The liver jumped up before his face, unfolded like a fat manta ray and the chef's two thick-wristed hands made some kind of prestidigitation. When the liver flopped down onto one of the service trays, it was a livid paste.

"That's my-"said the late Mr. D as the life oozed out of him through the hole in his 180-dollar silk shirt.

Not everyone had a clear view of what happened. Not everyone's comprehension skills were at their sharpest. Not with all the uncorked Chianti bottles lying around.

But these were men who had come up from the mean streets, and the thud of one of their own hitting the rug was enough to make them reach for assorted 9 mm artillery.

Remo started moving then.

To his superhumanly developed eyes and senses, the surviving five men were moving in slow motion.

A hand snaked out with a gun butt, and Remo's much quicker hand slapped the knuckles, unnerving the fingers. The gun dropped. While the hands, sensing emptiness, clutched for it, Remo's free hand slipped two chisel-stiff fingers into the man's abdominal cavity, located the liver, flopped it over like a fat, foldable steak and drew it out through the quartersized hole.

Splat. It landed on lettuce, a purply paste.

By that time, Remo was on to mafioso number three, who brandished a switchblade with an illegal-length blade. It went snick as it came out of his belt sheath, and Remo guided the blade so that it debuttoned the owner's sharkskin suit coat before bisecting the front of his white shirt.

The man's exposed hairy belly opened up like a bearded man smiling. And out spilled his lower intestinal tract.

Remo fished the throbbing liver out of the steaming mass of internal organs and slapped the liver between two hands, rolled it in a ball and tossed it casually over his shoulder.

It landed perfectly. By this time, slow brains were beginning to grasp hard reality.

"Get out of here!" the bodyguard started screaming. "It's a hit!"

Remo let him scream.

There was a bald guy with three rolls of fat at the back of his neck. He fumbled his 9 mm pistol out and was sweeping the room with it.

Remo stopped being a moving blur long enough to deal with him.

The gun snapped out shots, catching the bodyguard across the front of his chest. Blood came out of the holes, including his gulping mouth, and he pitched forward as Remo moved in on the rolls of fat from the side.

The edge of Remo's palm connected with the doughy rolls, and the man's head all but jumped off the neck. The dislocation left him looking like a broken-necked puppet, and Remo allowed him to fall dead while he attended to the final live gunman in the room. The local guy festooned with gold chain like some alternative-life-style Christmas tree.

This one had a wheelgun-a chrome-plated Colt Python. Remo handled it with a trick any ordinary man could pull off. He simply clamped the cylinder with his fingers and let the man try to pull the trigger. The trigger wouldn't pull. So Remo plucked the pistol from his hands and showed him a trick no ordinary man could perfect.

He crushed the wheelgun to metallic fragments with a single hard squeeze.

The goon goggled at the chrome bits dropping to the rug. "How'd you-?"

"Do that?" prompted Remo, spanking his hands clean of steel shavings.

"Yeah."

"Easy. I gave it a good squeeze."

"It's steel and you're not."

"I'm alive and you're not," countered Remo.

The "Huh" matched the gunman's dulled-by-shock expression, and Remo used his right index finger to hook the man's network of gold ropes. He gave a quick tug.

The chains were solidly anchored. They came loose, pulling off red pieces of nose, lips, earlobes, nipples and navel.

The belly button was especially well secured. It came out last, taking the twenty-four-carat gold stud and a big swatch of washboard musculature with it.

Remo got another flood of internal organs and caught the liver on its way down.

Quickly he collected the remaining livers of the dead and worked them into pate, which filled the remaining serving dishes very nicely.

Recapping them, Remo smacked his hands together and surveyed the room. "Can I cook or what?"

And he walked away whistling.

Chapter 3

It was Kwanzaa in the White House.

The traditional Christmas tree stood on the White House's sprawling North Lawn. A Douglas fir this year, festooned with traditional holiday lights and decorations.

It had been a tremendous relief to the President of the United States when the First Lady had announced that they were going traditional this year.

"Does that mean no Star of David on top?" he asked, recalling one memorable tree-lighting ceremony he'd rather turn into a repressed memory. Like the 103rd Congress.

"No Star of David," the First Lady had promised on the day after Thanksgiving, which was also celebrated in the traditional way, much to the Chief Executive's unbounded relief.

"No kachina dolls, Eskimo totems or voodoo saints?" the President asked, burping up the fresh taste of turkey.

"Red and green bulbs garnished with silver tinsel."

"Your fans are going to think I had you killed and replaced with a clone," the President said warily.

"I want to celebrate our fourth White House Christmas like Abraham Lincoln did."

"Fighting the Civil War?"

"No," the First Lady said, chewing on a dry turkey drumstick. "In the traditional, all-American manner."

The President realized at last she was serious, grinned broadly and said in his hoarse Arkansas twang, "I'll make the arrangements right away." He bolted for the door before the bluebird of political correctness could settle on the First Lady's cashmere shoulders.

"While you're at it . . ." the First Lady called tartly.

The President froze. "New Year's?"

"A traditional New Year's. See to it."

"Done," said the President, relaxing all over again. His hand was on the door. He paused to issue a warm sigh of relief and forevermore regretted not flinging open the door and charging through to do his presidential duty.

"But in between, we're doing Kwanzaa," said the Voice of Steel.

The President whirled as if shot in the back. "Kwanzaa? The Black Christmas!"

"It's not Christmas," she corrected gently. "Christmas is the 25th. New Year's is January 1. Kwanzaa is celebrated during the six days in between. And don't say 'Black: Say 'Afrocentric.' It's more correct."

"Didn't we have this argument once before?" the President said, thick of voice and tongue.

"And I let you win. But the election is over with. We have nothing to lose by celebrating Kwanzaa."

"I won't have to wear a dashiki or anything, will I."

"No, we light a candle a day and host Afrocentric cultural events."

The President thought that wouldn't be so bad. And the election was behind them. What had they to lose-except a little more of their fading dignity?

"I'll look into it."

"No, you do it," the First Lady said, the familiar steel creeping back into her tone. Then she used her perfect white incisors to gouge a hank of dark meat from the bone.

Closing the door behind him, the President was halfway down the red-carpeted hall when he thought he heard the crunching of dry bone. He hoped she didn't choke on a bone fragment. Even for a lawyer, the woman sure had peculiar appetites.

The First Lady didn't choke. Not on the turkey thigh bone. And not on the Kwanzaa deal.

And so on the second day after Christmas, the President of the United States found himself at a Blue Room photo op standing before the African candelabra called a kinara, lighting the red candle that the First Lady whispered in his ear stood for the basic principle of kuji-chagulia.

"It means 'self-determination,'" she added.

"Maybe you should be lighting this one," said the President, holding the long candle lighter, which smelled exactly like the punk cigarettes he used to smoke in his boyhood days in Arkansas.

"Smile and light it," the First Lady urged with her most steely smile. "In that order."

The President applied the flame to the red candle.

"Now pick up the unity cup," she undertoned.

The President blew out the lighter and laid it aside. He took up the small wooden goblet that sat on the table mat on which the kinara reposed with quiet dignity.

"I drink to unity," said the President.

Flashbulbs popped in his face. The President looked into the cup. The previous day, after lighting the green unity candle, the fluid had been clear. Water. Now it was red.

"What's this?" he hissed through his own fixed smile.

"Goat blood or something," the First Lady said vaguely.

"I can't drink goat's blood!"

"If you don't, you'll insult our Afro-constituents."

"Let one of them drink goat blood."

And overhearing that, the Reverend Juniper Jackman stepped out of the backdrop of Afro-American dignitaries, wearing a gigantic smile and saying, "Allow me to instruct our President on the ways of my people."

The First Lady hissed like a cat. This was mistaken for the hissing of a steam radiator and unnoticed for what it was, while Black national leader and intermittent failed presidential candidate Juniper Jackman brought the cup to his lips and gulped it right down.

When he smiled again, his teeth were as red as melting Chiclets.

"What did I just drink?" he hissed through his own version of the fixed political smile.

"Goat blood," the President and First Lady whispered in chorus.

"We don't use goat blood in our Kwanzaa," Jackman said, still smiling his scarlet-and-ivory smile.

"I improvised," the First Lady said.

And the President clapped his hand on Jackman's back as the flashbulbs popped, stunning their unprotected retinas.

The questions started as the popping subsided.

"Mr. President. How do you feel about celebrating your first Kwanzaa?"

"It's really fun!"

"What is the significance of the red candle?" asked another.

Jackman answered that while the President looked to the First Lady for guidance.

"The red candle stands for the blood of the African people shed by the oppressive white man," he said.

Again the low hissing of the First Lady was mistaken for a leaky radiator valve.

"The green candle stands for our black youth and their future," Jackman continued. "While the middle black candle represents African-Americans as a people."

"I agree with everything Reverend Jackman just said," the President added brightly, happy to be off the hook.

"Mr. President, does it concern you that Kwanzaa has no traditional basis?" a reporter asked.

"What do you mean?"

"It was started in the sixties by a California political-science student who cobbled it together from African harvest feasts he observed during a field trip."

The President looked to the First Lady with an expression that all but said, Is this true?

The First Lady, looking blank despite her pearly, professional politician's smile, passed the ball to the Reverend Jackman.

The good reverend looked as blank as anyone in the room as he stared expectantly at the President, who made one of the few snap decisions of his political career. He simply winged an answer.

"Hell, a lot of things started back then that are cultural icons now. Look at Elvis. And the Beatles. Would you ask me the same question if we were celebrating Beatles Day in the White House?"

Since the media never quoted reporters, only their questions, the President hadn't bothered to answer. Another reporter took up the bouncing ball.

"Mr. President, what can you tell us about the event at the BioBubble?"

"Gosh. You got me there," the President said in his best aw-shucks voice. "Are those folks celebrating Kwanzaa, too?"

"No, Mr. President. The BioBubble ecosystem has been destroyed along with all aboard. It just came over the wire."

The President's normally red face went flat deadfish-belly white. "Oh, my God," he said in a tiny, tight voice.

"Let's get back to Kwanzaa," the Reverend Jackman said quickly, sensing the political spotlight about to shift away from him.

"You do that," the President countered. "I need to look into this."

And he left the First Lady and the Reverend Juniper Jackman to carry the Kwanzaa ball. At the door, he paused to shoot a reassuring wave to the White House press corps-and noticed the First Lady digging two fingernails into Jackman's backside with such pinching force it brought the opportunistic reverend up on his toes in pain. Additional redness came to his welded-on smile-probably from biting his tongue to repress the exquisite agony the First Lady was gleefully inflicting.

All of this was unnoticed by the press.

In the corridor, the President was met by his chief of staff.

"What's this about the BioBubble?" he asked.

"First reports are sketchy," said the chief of staff, following the President into the Oval Office.

"They always are," growled the Chief Executive.

"At an unknown hour this evening, the BioBubble was melted into slag, entombing everyone inside."

"Sabotage?"

"Too early to tell."

"Accident?"

"Think of the BioBubble as a gigantic Habitrail only with people and other animals inside. They don't use gas heat or electricity or anything that isn't natural. Unless the methane inside became combustible, we have to rule an accident out."

"What's NASA saying?"

"Nothing. This isn't their project."

The President looked surprised. "I thought this was a NASA research station."

"A common misconception. The BioBubble is privately funded. They talk up the experimental-Martian-colony angle for the publicity value. So far, NASA has shown no serious interest. Especially with all the gaffes and screwups surrounding the project."

A full-dress Marine guard opened the door to the Oval Office, and the President strode in, his face concerned.

"I gotta call around."

THE DIRECTOR OF THE FBI was at first very helpful. "What can I do for you, Mr. President?"

"The BioBubble just went bust. I want you people to look into it."

"Do you have intelligence pointing to a militia group or interstate or foreign conspiracy?"

"No, I don't," the President admitted.

"Then this is out of our jurisdiction."

"I'm asking you to look into this," the President pressed.

The FBI director's voice became very hushed and anxious. "Mr. President. Sir. Think just a moment. It's a troubled project with communelike factors. It's very controversial. It's in a western state known as an antigovernment hotbed. And something burned it flat. Do you really want federal agents in blue FBI windbreakers traipsing about the smoldering ruins for national media consumption?"

"I take your point," the President said unhappily.

"I knew you would," responded the FBI director, who was polite enough to let the President say goodbye before hanging up in his slack-muscled face.

Next the Chief Executive called the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"I have a preliminary report on my desk, Mr. President," the CIA director said crisply.

"That was damn fast. What does it say?"

"BioBubble burned to a crisp. Further details to follow."

"That's no different than what I have!"

"Then we're on the same page, as it were," the director said proudly.

"What's your assessment?"

"I have calls out. We're in touch with our assets in this area."

"What area is that?"

"I like to call it the cosmic area."

"The CIA has a cosmic department?"

"Yes, sir. We do. And as soon as we have something concrete to share, we'll get back to you."

The President allowed his gratitude to shine through his worry. "Let me know soonest."

Hanging up, he turned to his chief of staff. "At least somebody out there is on the ball."

The chief of staff made a face. "I wouldn't believe that bullcrap about a cosmic department. They're so eager over at CIA to justify their post-Cold War existence they'll tell you they have a Kwanzaa department if you wanted it investigated."

"Was that stuff about Kwanzaa being a sixties thing true?"

"Search me. I never heard of Kwanzaa before the First Lady started talking it up two years back."

"Me, neither." The President frowned with all of his puffy face, producing an effect like a cinnamon roll baking. "Get me a federal directory. There must be some agency we can turn to in a situation like this."

"Are you sure we want to? The BioBubble is an orphaned private boondoggle. Nobody even knows the identity of the philanthropist who's backing it now."

"How many people died?"

"Maybe thirty."

"And no one knows how or why?"

"That's so far. But there's talk about a lightning strike."

The President snapped his fingers suddenly. His baggy eyes lit up. "Get me the National Weather Service. Try for that hurricane expert who's always on TV. He looks like he knows this stuff."

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Frank Nails of the National Weather Service was patiently explaining to the Chief Executive that a lighting bolt powerful enough to melt fifty tons of glass and steel and everything it housed would be, in his words, "a thunderbolt you'd have felt in the Oval Office."

"You're saying it can't be lightning."

"Not unless the BioBubble was filled with propane and natural gas before the hit."

"It's all natural. No additives. No artificial colors. Or whatever."

"And no lightning bolt."

"People say they heard thunder."

"They heard an explosion, is my guess. Or an atmospheric pressure wave they mistook for thunder."

"You've been very helpful," said the President, hanging up and looking serious.

Calling the CIA again, the President got the director.

"I was just about to pick up the phone," the CIA director said. "Our intelligence source suggests natural causes."

"What does that mean?"

"An accident. Propane leak or something."

"The BioBubble uses no harmful chemicals, any more than the rain forest does."

"They also claim they don't eat pizza. But there's a lot of loose talk about catering trucks and midnight snacks coming out of Dodona."

"Who's your source?"

"Confidential. But we've used this person before with acceptable results."

"What's acceptable?"

"This was the source of our report on the Korean famine, Mr. President."

"I had that warning weeks before CIA gave it to me. Korea was in the middle of a crop failure when the flooding started. Anyone could have predicted famine," the Chief Executive pointed out.

"CIA makes no predictive claims. We confirmed the intelligence."

"Find other sources."

"Yes, sir."

"I don't think these people know what they're doing," the President said after hanging up.

"You're not the first Commander in Chief to come to that conclusion," the chief of staff said ruefully.

The President sat down at his desk, his unhappy head hovering between the brazen busts of Lincoln and Kennedy on the shelf behind him. Outside the imperfect window glass, more than a century old, Andrew Jackson's hickory tree groaned under its burden of pristine snow.

"Let's see what the media says."

Picking up a remote, the chief of staff clicked on the Oval Office TV set, nestled in a mahogany cabinet. "At least this should knock the Kwanzaa story out of the lead," he sighed.

"If not off the newscasts entirely," the President said with ill-disguised relief, forgetting there were four more days to go.

The President frowned as a face and voice familiar to many Americans resolved on the screen that showed the CNN bug on the lower right-hand corner.

"With me is renowned astronomer Dr. Cosmo Pagan of the University of Arizona's Center for Exobiological Research."

The President of the U.S. looked to his chief of staff. "Exo-?"

"I think it means life outside the planet."

"Oh."

The reporter shoved his CNN mike into Dr. Pagan's studious face and asked, "Dr. Pagan, what does the BioBubble disaster mean for the space program?"

"It may mean that someone up there doesn't want us up there," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in his chipper, singsongy voice.

And the President groaned like a wounded reindeer.

"Are you suggesting an attack from space?"

Dr. Pagan smiled as if the idea of an attack from space would be a wonderful thing and a boon to his career.

"No one can say what kind of life-forms exist in the vast vastness of interstellar spaces. But think of it-billions and billions of stars each, in all probability, orbited by planets-trillions upon trillions of worlds very much like ours. If there is life up there, and they have chosen to make their presence known in this dramatic fashion, it will once and for all answer that age-old question. Is there intelligent life in the cosmos?" Dr. Cosmo Pagan smiled so broadly his onyx eyes twinkled like black holes. "I, for one, find this development very life affirming. And can only hope they'll strike again."

The President sputtered, "Is he nuts?"

"We've got to put a stop to this kind of scare talk," the chief of staff said worriedly. "Remember Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast?"

The President looked thoughtfully confused. "You mean H. G. Wells's movie, don't you?"

"It was a book, then a radio program, then a movie. The radio program pretended that the Martians had landed and were frying ass all over New Jersey."

"We've got to find out if any of this is real," decided the President, leaping to his feet.

"Sir?"

"If Martians are out to fry the space program, we've got to take countermeasures."

"What kind of countermeasures could-?"

But the question hung unfinished and unanswered in the empty air. The President of the U.S. had abruptly left the Oval Office, his destination unknown.

UPSTAIRS in the Lincoln Bedroom, the President plopped down on the rosewood bed in the rose red bedroom and removed a cherry red telephone from the cherry-wood nightstand.

It was a standard AT el, its face as smooth as its red plastic molding. There was no dial or keypad. Just the shiny red receiver attached by a gleaming red coil of insulated wire.

Placing the fiery telephone on his lap, the President picked up the receiver and lifted it to his concerned face. His eyes were grim. He turned on the nightstand radio and tuned it to an oldies station.

The phone began ringing at the opposite end, and instantly a parched, lemony voice said, "Yes, Mr. President?"

"The BioBubble disaster. I want you to look into it."

"Do you have reason to believe its destruction is a national-security issue?" "All I know is that a major scientific project is dead, and the FBI won't touch it, the CIA is citing unnamed sources and the National Weather Service says it can't be lightning."

"The lightning explanation is preposterous, I admit," said the lemony voice of the man the President knew only as Dr. Smith.

"So you'll take the assignment?"

"No, I will look into it. What is the source of the CIA assessment?"

"I just talked to the director a few minutes ago. He called it natural causes-whatever that means."

"One moment."

The silence of the line was perfect. No buzzes, clicks or humming. That was because it was a dedicated line. A buried cable ran from the White House to some unknown point where the director of CURE held forth in secret. The President had no idea where. Sometimes he imagined a basement off in a forgotten Cold War fallout shelter. Other times he envisioned the shadowy thirteenth floor of some massive skyscraper that wasn't supposed to have a thirteenth floor.

The lemony voice came back and it sounded peeved. "The preponderance of telephone-message traffic in and out of Langley is to various commercial hot lines."

"Hot lines?"

"The Prophet's Hot Line. Psychic Buddies Network."

"The CIA is consulting psychics!" the President blurted.

"They have been doing it for years," Smith said dryly, as if nothing the CIA did would ever surprise him again.

"I thought they put that Stargate stuff behind them."

"Evidently not. I would not accept any of their reports at face value."

"Look into this, Smith. Dr. Pagan is talking of death rays from outer space. I don't think people will buy it, but after Independence Day and Mars Attacks you never know."

"Otherwise intelligent people accepted as fact the 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast when I was younger. And according to polls, a clear majority of Americans believe in the existence of flying saucers. We have to assume the worst where US. public opinion is concerned."

"I already do," the President said ruefully.

And the line went dead.

Chapter 4

Everything looked good for the return flight to Boston until Remo Williams had to use the terminal rest room and accidentally flushed his fly-padlock key down the john.

No problem, he thought, snapping the tiny padlock shut. I have a backup.

For some reason, the airport magnometer went beep when Remo walked through the stainless-steel frame.

"Empty your pockets," said a brown-eyed, auburn-haired airline security woman in a smart blue Wackenhut security uniform.

Remo dutifully placed two quarters and a subway token along with his billfold into the tray receptacle. He wore a white T-shirt and tan chinos, so there was no question of concealed weapons.

The magnometer beeped on his second try. The security agent blocked his path. Her voice became gravelly. A smoker.

"Excuse me, sir. I need to frisk you."

"Like hell," said Remo, picking up his left-hand loafer and shaking the tiny padlock key out into the receptacle. "It's only this thing," he said, going around for a third try.

But the beeper sounded a third time, and the auburn-haired woman said, "Airline rules say I get to frisk you."

"Have to frisk me, you mean."

"Want to frisk you," the auburn-haired woman said. "Frisk you friskily," she added.

"Maybe it's my zipper," suggested Remo.

"Zippers don't register. Otherwise, hunks like you would trip the alarm every time."

"It's got to be this frigging padlock."

"What padlock?"

And Remo lifted his zipper tongue with a fingertip to show her. She bent over, squinting. Remo made the padlock wiggle in the overhead lights.

"Why do you have your fly padlocked?" the security agent wondered aloud, reaching out to help Remo with his wriggling.

"It's a long story," said Remo, stepping back ahead of her exploring fingers.

She pointed to a room marked Security.

"Tell me as I'm frisking you up and down. Now march."

"Look, it's the padlock. Here, it's yours."

And Remo yanked the padlock loose so hard his zipper came tearing out. Both landed in the tray.

"Airline rules require me to peek into your drawers."

"No chance."

"Padlocked zipper. You may be smuggling something in there."

"There's nothing there," Remo protested.

The redhead assumed a disappointed expression, her fists resting on her trim hips.

"That shouldn't be," Remo amended.

The redhead brightened.

That was when Remo remembered he carried in his billfold a useful ID that covered just these situations.

"I'm with the FAA. Let me whip out my ID."

"Whip everything out and let me see it in the light."

Remo started with the ID and announced, "You just passed a random security check with flying colors. Congratulations."

"I still have to frisk you."

"Not in this lifetime."

The redhead shifted gears as smoothly as a highperformance racing car. "How about a date, then?"

"What?"

The redhead drew near, her perfume filling Remo's nostrils like a feathery lavender cloud, her voice growing husky. "A date. You and me. Maybe a hotel room if I get lucky."

Perhaps it was the absurdity of the moment. Or maybe the concept of a date hadn't occurred to Remo in a very long time, because he hesitated a moment before saying, "Can't. Against agency rules."

"I'll quit," the redhead said without skipping a beat.

"I don't date the unemployed," Remo said, collecting his stuff and hurrying to his gate.

The redhead tried to follow. Remo ducked into a men's room, balanced on a stall toilet and slipped out while she was on her hands and knees peeking up into the adjoining stall.

On board, Remo sat with a magazine open in his lap and thought long and hard.

He couldn't remember the last time he had gone out on a certifiable date. He couldn't recall the name or face of his last actual date. Dating was not something Remo normally did. He had affairs. Sometimes he slept with women as part of a cover personality. But he never dated.

As luck would have it, his flight was staffed with male flight attendants. Although one kept looking at him hungrily, he made no pass. Especially after Remo caught him staring at his lap and made a throat-cutting gesture.

Beyond that, he was not fighting off stewardesses.

It gave him time to think.

Remo did not date because the agency that employed him did not exist. Any more than Remo, once a Newark patrolman, was supposed to exist since that cold day years before when they strapped him into the electric chair at Trenton State Prison and yanked the switch.

Declared dead, Remo Williams became the lone killer arm of that agency, called CURE. Neither the man nor the organization was supposed to exist, because both operated outside the law, breaking the laws of America so that criminals who flouted the Constitution, perverting its letter and spirit to serve their own evil ends, would not escape through the loopholes of the US. justice system.

CURE was the brainchild of a President-long ago cut down by an assassin's bullet-who realized something drastic was required to preserve the nation. That drastic something was Remo Williams, trained by his mentor, Chiun, in the ancient martial discipline of Sinanju until he became a one-man strike force, anonymous and unstoppable. And therefore not likely to be captured or killed, which would betray CURE and force America to admit publicly that its constitutional government did not work. Only Smith-who had framed patrolman Remo Williams for a crime he never committed-Remo himself and each successive president were supposed to know about CURE, and none of them was allowed to be linked to the others in public.

But while all that meant Remo couldn't marry or raise children or fall permanently in love, it didn't mean he couldn't have a social life. Assuming he was careful.

Maybe I should start dating, he thought. Why not? There's nothing in my contract that says I can't. I just can't get involved.

By the time Remo deplaned at Logan Airport, he had resolved to ask the next attractive woman he saw for a date. Just to see what happened.

But not in the terminal. Too many stewardesses in and out of uniform. The last thing he wanted to date was a stewardess. They were too aggressive. He wanted someone nice. Someone demure. Preferably one with D-cups. C-cups might be acceptable, if she had a really nice walk. If not, D-cups or no cups.

ENTERING the fieldstone church-turned-condominium he called home, Remo found the downstairs kitchen empty and the upstairs rooms likewise. So he followed the sound of the steadily beating heart only his ears could detect to the bell-tower meditation room, and informed the Master of Sinanju of the new leaf he was going to be turning come the New Year.

"I need a date for New Year's Eve."

"I do not recommend this," Chiun said in a low, serious voice entirely unlike his normal excited squeak.

"Why not?"

"They will make you flatulent."

"That's not the kind of date I have in mind," explained Remo patiently.

"Figs also are to be avoided."

"I'm not hungry for dates or figs."

"Then why bring these fruits into the conversation?" asked the deadliest assassin alive.

"We weren't having a conversation until I walked in."

"And I was enjoying peace of mind until that moment. But since you are my adopted son and we are related through circuitous and convoluted ways, I will ignore this and listen to your explanations, although I have already judged them the workings of a possibly demented mind."

"By 'date,' I mean going out with a woman."

This lifted Chiun's wizened face, touching its wrinkles with startled interest. "You have met a woman?"

"Not yet. But I will."

"How do you know this?"

"Because I'm going to keep my eyes open for a woman to take out on New Year's Eve."

The Master of Sinanju stirred on his round reed floor mat. Only a knowledgeable anthropologist would recognize him as a member of the Altaic family, which included Turks, Mongols and Koreans. Chiun was Korean. Born late in the last century, he had youthful hazel eyes that bespoke a vitality that virtually guaranteed he would see the next. There was almost no hair on the smooth egg that was his skull. Two cloudlike puffs tickled the tops of his ears. A wisp of a beard curled from his parchment chin. He was the last Korean Master of Sinanju, head of the House of Sinanju, a lineage of assassins who protected pharaohs and popes, caliphs and czars, rulers of all kinds, in an unbroken chain that stretched back to the thin mists of early human civilization.

"I do not understand this concept, Remo," he said, shifting his golden kimono, whose silken sleeves in his lap formed a tunnel that shielded his hands from view. "Explain it to me."

"New Year's?"

"No. Not that. I fully understand the Western dating errors that insist the year begin in the dead of winter when all sane calendars start with the first blooming promise of spring. What is this other dating?"

"You take a woman out and show her a good time."

"Why?"

Remo growled, "Because you like her and she likes you."

"What then?"

"Depends. Sometimes you date no more. Other times you date forever more."

"You marry?"

"That sometimes happens," Remo admitted.

"You are in need of a wife?" asked Chiun, his voice thinning.

"Not me. I just want to slip into a normal life-style for a change. See how it feels."

"So you will take out a woman you do not know, showering her with undeserved gifts and attention and possibly feeding her?"

"Something like that."

"How do you know this woman will be suitable if you have not yet beheld her conniving face?"

"I won't date anyone who isn't suitable."

"This is a strange concept. If you desire a woman, why not take one?"

"I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about companionship."

"Leading to what?"

"Sex, I guess."

"Aha!" Chiun crowed. "So why do you not dispense with this dating hysteria and take a woman you like, enjoy her for an evening, possibly two if she possesses sturdy bones, abandon her to the winds of chance and then resume your normal existence?"

"If I want sex, there are willing stewardesses galore."

"Then I leave you to your stewardesses, just as you leave me to my meditations," said Chiun, his gaze going to one of the big square windows that looked out over the seaside town of Quincy, Massachusetts.

"I don't want a stewardess. They just want to climb my tree. I want a woman I can talk to. One who understands me."

"You can talk to me. I understand your unfathomable ways. "

"You're not a woman."

"I am wiser than a woman. I have taught you more than any woman could. What disease has attacked your weak mind that you would seek out a woman for companionship and wisdom, women being notorious for their utter lack of those qualities?"

Remo started pacing the square room. "Look, I'm an assassin. I can live with it. But I'd like to do something more with my spare time than parry with you and exercise."

"You sleep?"

"Yes."

"You eat?"

"Yes."

"You have me in your life?"

"Always."

"Therefore, your days are full and rich, and your nights serene. What would a woman bring to them?"

"I'll let you know after I start dating," Remo growled.

"If you seek a wife, I will help you."

"I don't seek a wife."

"If you seek a woman, I will leave the sordid details to you."

"Thanks. Appreciate it," Remo said dryly.

At that point, the telephone on the ironwood taboret rang.

Remo grabbed it.

"Remo." It was Harold Smith. He spoke Remo's name with the same warmth he would put into the phrase "Check, please."

Remo returned the touching sentiment in kind. "Smith."

"I have been asked by the President to look into the BioBubble event."

"Why bother? Everyone knows it's a scam."

"Not that aspect of it. The BioBubble was destroyed earlier this evening."

"By what? Cockroach infestation?"

"No. An unknown power that melted it into sticky glass and slag steel."

Remo blinked. "What would cause that kind of meltdown?"

"That is for you and Chiun to discover. Start with the BioBubble founders."

"Isn't this more the FBI's meat?"

"The FBI is reluctant. And there is some urgency here."

"What kind of urgency?"

"Dr. Cosmo Pagan is telling the media that extraterrestrials may be behind the BioBubble's collapse."

"Who would believe that crap?" asked Remo.

"As much as fifty percent of the American people."

"Where did you get that figure?"

"That is the number of Americans who believe in UFOs, according to polls. And once Pagan's views are widely disseminated by the media, it could be the start of a nationwide panic."

"Oh," said Remo. "I guess we go to Arizona."

"Be discreet."

"I'll leave my Spock ears behind," said Remo, hanging up. He turned to Chiun.

"You heard?" he asked.

"Yes. But I did not understand."

"There's a place out west where they've duplicated every environment on earth-desert, prairie, rain forest-under sealed glass to study ourselves."

Chiun cocked his head to one side. "Yes?"

"Something melted it flat."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Yes. Why should something so useless take up precious space? Are there not too many people already? Do Americans not dwell too close together and without proper spacing between their houses?"

"There's plenty of room out in Arizona."

"And now there is more," said Chiun.

With that, the Master of Sinanju lifted himself from his lotus position on the floor. He came to his black-sandaled feet like an expanding genie of gold and emerald, the silken folds of his traditional kimono unfolding like tired origami. His hands, emerging from their sleeves, revealed long curved nails, one of which was capped by what might have been a jade thimble.

"Smith said to start at ground zero, so that's where we're going," Remo said.

"Perhaps while we are in Arizona, we will visit your ne'er-do-well relatives," Chiun suggested.

Remo winced. "We're on assignment."

"It may be that our work will take us to the place where your esteemed father dwells."

"Don't count on it. I don't intend to stay in Arizona any longer than I absolutely have to."

"Why not?"

"Because this is a dippy assignment."

"This is new?" asked the Master of Sinanju.

Chapter 5

No one had ever seen anything like it. No one had ever heard of anything like it.

Project head Amos Bulla walked around the still-warm zone of glazed, brownish glass that surrounded the defunct BioBubble. The striated red sandstone hills of Dodona, Arizona, cooked in the near distance, like Mars without impact craters.

"What could have done this? What the hell could have done this thing?" he was saying over and over again.

"Whatever it was, it produced better than 1600 degrees centigrade of heat," said the planetary geologist from the US Geological Survey in nearby Flagstaff.

"Where do you get that figure, Hulce?" Bulla demanded.

"The name is Pulse. Tom Pulse." He kicked at the red sand with snakeskin boots, pulling the brim of his white Stetson low over his sun-squint eyes. "We know the melting points of glass and steel. Any higher and the thing would have been vaporized."

"Look at it, the glass just ran out like maple syrup."

"No, Mr. Bulla. You are standing on fused molten glass."

"Right. From the dome."

"No. This is new glass. Made by the action of heat on sand."

"Sand turned to glass," Bulla croaked. "My God. What could have done that?"

"A heat source of between 1500 to 1600 degrees centigrade."

"How do you know that?" Bulla demanded.

"No mystery. That's the temperature range at which sand is fused into glass."

"Must have been one hellacious blast."

"Actually all glass is made from superheated sand."

"It is?" Bulla said.

"Yes. Sand, limestone and soda ash. Where did you think glass came from?"

"I don't know, smart-ass. Glass mines, I guess."

"Forget the sand. I think we can rule out a lightning strike."

"It must be a lightning strike."

"The evidence says different. No clouds in the sky to generate an electrical storm. And there are no fulgurites in the sand."

"I can see that." Then catching himself, Bulla added, "No what?"

"Fulgurites. Long tubes of fused glass usually found in sand that has been blasted by a lightning strike. When the electrical charge strikes sand, it naturally follows the metallic pathways in the sand until it expends itself. These pathways fuse into electrically created glass. They're almost works of art in themselves."

Bulla kicked at the red sand. "I still say it's got to be lightning."

Tom Pulse shook his head slowly. He was being paid by the hour. "Lightning might have blown a hole in the BioBubble," he drawled. "It would have shattered as much as it melted. From what I see, a directed energy source the approximate circumference of three acres did this."

"Directed energy! You mean this mess is manmade?"

"If it is, I have never heard of the kind of technology that would focus this much concentrated hell on a piece of the planet."

"You're sounding like that silly-ass Cosmo Pagan character"

"You're just saying that because Pagan is against manned space flight."

"I'm saying this because the man is a sanctimonious ass. He was the clown who first coined the slur BioBoondoggle when we refused to hire him as a consultant during our Mars phase. Man threw a hissy fit to end all hissy fits. You'd think he thought he owned the copyright on anything to do with Mars. Finally shut up when we gave up on NASA participation and went green."

"I hear he's en route."

"Sure. To gloat. Screw him. Don't let him near the area," Bulla ordered.

"What about federal authorities?"

"Who's coming?"

"Maybe EPA. Could be DoD."

"What would the Department of Defense want with this sorry slag heap?"

"If they buy Dr. Pagan's extracosmic theory, they'll be here with bells on and Geiger counters stuttering."

Amos Bulla looked up at the early-morning sky. Even it looked reddish to the eye. "There's no way a beam from outer space did this."

"The force was downward. It came from on high. Other than that, it's anybody's guess."

Bulla licked his fleshy lips. "Should we still be standing here like this? Exposed?"

"Why not? Did Uncle Sugar Able nuke Hiroshima twice?"

Bulla blinked. "Uncle who?"

"Military talk for the US. of A. Whatever did this got what he, she or it wanted. We're safe."

"I hate you tech types. Never use a simple word when a convoluted one will do."

Tom Pulse smiled a tight smile that said Sue me.

Helicopters began to rattle the shimmering red horizon.

"Here they come," Bulla muttered. "I don't know what I'm going to hate worse. The media or the Feds."

"Either way, be sure to smile real friendly-like as they Roto-Rooter your unhappy ass."

Bulla winced. "I liked you better when you talked like a techie, not a Texan," he muttered.

Then he strode off to greet the arriving media.

THEY PILED out of their helicopters, unloading video cams, sound systems and enough equipment to record the end of the world. As soon as the equipment was off-loaded, the choppers took off and began circling the site, taping aerial and establishing shots of the glass pancake that had supported Amos Bulla for six fat, happy years.

The media pointedly ignored him as he started wading into their midst, looking to shake hands and make friends before tape rolled and there was no turning back.

No one was having any of it.

In fact, they were so cold Bulla started to wonder whether he had shown up for an expose with himself scheduled for the hot seat.

"We're ready for you," someone said after the cameras were hefted onto shoulders and the reporters were pointing their microphones at him as if testing his firecracker red necktie for radioactivity.

"I would like to make a brief statement," Bulla began.

The media were having none of that, either.

"What did this?" a reporter asked.

"If I could..." Bulla said, waving the prepared statement.

"Do you believe, as many Americans do, in the existence of extraterrestrial visitants?" another reporter interrupted.

Bulla opened his mouth to reply, and a third question jumped at him.

"Have you ever been abducted by grays?"

"Grays?"

"Highly evolved aliens. Think of little green men-except they're gray. They like to perform medical experiments on humans."

Bulla swallowed his anger. "I have a statement," he said tightly. "It will only take five minutes."

"Too long. We need a soundbite. Thirty seconds or less. Can you boil it down to the pithiest point?"

"Lightning," Amos Bulla said quickly.

"How's that?"

"As far as we can now tell, a gargantuan thunderbolt struck the BioBubble. It was a freak accident. Nobody at fault. Nobody to blame. Let's just keep our heads and the lawyers out of this, shall we?"

"What evidence supports this belief?"

"Fulgurites. They're all over the site. In fact, you could say it's one gigantic fulgurite."

The media failed to ask what a fulgurite was, so Amos Bulla got away with it. Not that he expected otherwise. The media was not one to display its ignorance. At least while the cameras were whirring. Later some would question the lightning-bolt hypothesis. Others would simply report it as fact. By that time, Bulla would know if he were out of a job or not. It sure stank that way from ground zero.

"Will you rebuild?" a new voice asked from in back of the pack.

"That decision has not been made yet," Bulla admitted.

"Who will make it? You?"

"I'm only project director."

"Will the decision be made by the mysterious backer of the project?"

Amos Bulla smiled as he had been instructed to.

"You'll have to ask Mr. Mystery. If you can locate him."

No one laughed or chuckled or even smiled. They were deadly serious. He was hoping for some humor.

"Will BioBubble IV come equipped with a lightning rod?" someone asked.

"This is being looked at," Bulla ad-libbed.

A mistake. He knew it was a mistake the moment the words spilled from his lips. Great communicators did not ad-lib. You tumbled ass over teakettle down the rabbit hole that way.

"Sir, why did the BioBubble, a multimillion-dollar research station, fail to include a common lightning rod-a precaution even the most modest trailer home enjoys?"

"A common lightning rod would not have saved the BioBubble from the gigantic bolt that thundered down from the heavens last night, say our experts," Bulla said, throwing a keep-your-damn-mouth-shut glance over his shoulder to Tom Pulse, who loitered out of camera range.

"Then you anticipated a lightning strike?" a reporter asked quickly.

"No."

"Then you were negligent?" another demanded.

"No one was negligent!" Bulla snapped.

"Then why are nearly thirty scientific volunteers now entombed in glass like so many ants in amber?"

There was no answer for that. No good answer, and Amos Bulla knew that. He swallowed hard and considered giving his reply in cryptic, TV unfriendly Latin when a scarlet Saturn SU sedan came down the winding road and out stepped a serious-faced man with short black hair, professorial glasses and the vague air of a professional stage magician. He wore a camel-colored corduroy coat over a brick red turtleneck.

The man stood poised by the scarlet Saturn, saw his arrival was unnoticed and slammed the rear door shut. The sound carried but made no impression. So he opened it again and slammed it harder.

And this time heads turned. Gasps came from those turned heads, and as if the media had been sprinkled with magician's magic dust, they turned their attention from Amos Bulla to the media-friendly presence they all recognized.

"Hey! Isn't that Dr. Pagan?"

"He's always good for a snappy soundbite!"

A concerted rush was made for Dr. Cosmo Pagan, who struck a pose by the scarlet Saturn. He was quickly ringed by a horseshoe of reporters straining their mikes and cameras in his direction.

"Dr. Pagan, what can you tell us about this event?"

"Is this the work of extraterrestrials?"

"The BioBubble people say lightning. Can you refute this?"

"I have not yet examined the site," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in the singsongy voice that America had first experienced on a famous PBS special many years ago, and revisited on countless science and astronomy specials ever since. He stepped forward.

The converging media abruptly backed up, parting like the Red Sea before a latter-day Moses.

The glass video lenses tracked Dr. Pagan as if he were some kind of glass magnet. The media throng followed like iron filings trailing after a lodestone.

Dr. Pagan walked up to the outer edges of the BioBubble mass, wearing a studious expression. He sucked on an unlit briar pipe. His corduroy coat had felt patches at the elbows, and the Arizona wind played at his hair like a mother's gentle fingers.

"This is not the work of lightning," he announced.

The hovering media crowded close, as if afraid to miss a single crumb of scientific wisdom. No one asked questions. No one questioned him at all. Such was the reverence in which Dr. Cosmo Pagan was held.

"The absence of fulgurites confirms this," he added.

Out of microphone range, Amos Bulla groaned to himself.

Walking farther along, Dr. Pagan purposefully broke the thin-edged glass under his Hush Puppies as if it were a melting ice bank.

"I see blisters and seeds and stones-things that occur when an impure mix is turned to glass."

Geologist Tom Pulse drifted up to Bulla's side, and Bulla asked, "Is he making sense?"

"Not as much as the press thinks. He's throwing glass-manufacturing terminology around. Not applicable here."

"The black color is interesting," Dr. Pagan continued. "It reminds me of obsidian, which is glass produced in the intense natural furnace of erupting volcanoes."

Tom Pulse snorted. "Arizona isn't volcanic."

"But no volcano did this, of course," Dr. Pagan added thoughtfully. "The brownish tinge that glass has at its edge is very suggestive, however." Dr. Pagan turned to face the expectant cameras then. He looked them square in the eye. "Not many laymen know this, but in nuclear power plants, observation windows are forged of special glass because ordinary glass turns brown under exposure to hard radiation."

The press seemed stunned by this pronouncement.

"Hard radiation may be the culprit in this event."

Someone found his voice and lobbed a polite question. "Dr. Pagan, can you speculate as to the source of this hard radiation?"

"There are many possibilities. Billions and billions of them, in truth." Pagan paused. "Billions and billions," he repeated as if tasting the words. "They are endless in their complexity, in their richness, in their sheer wonderment."

Taking the cold briar from his mouth, Pagan pointed to the eastern horizon of red sandstone buttes.

"Not fifty miles in that direction lies Meteor Crater, where an unknown object from space fell, gouging out a rude cup in the hard stone of Earth's mantle that endures to this day."

"Do you suspect a meteor strike?"

"If this is a meteor-impact site," allowed Dr. Cosmo Pagan, "it is unlike any meteor strike ever recorded by man."

"Then you're saying it's not a meteor strike?" another reporter prompted.

Dr. Pagan shook his head slowly. "Too early to say. For many years, the Tunguska event in Siberia was an unfathomable mystery. Now we think we know that a comet or rocky asteroid exploded before it impacted with our fragile blue planet, flattening a zillion square kilometers of tundra forest. Nothing like it has been documented since."

"Could a comet have done this?"

"No one on Earth knows. We simply don't have the knowledge. This is why our efforts to plumb the depths of space must go on. How can we confront the unknown if we have not ventured beyond our thin atmosphere to challenge it?"

"Are you saying you don't know?" a more astute reporter wondered ahead.

Dr. Pagan shrugged his corduroy shoulders and offered no reply.

At the back of the pack, Amos Bulla nodded. This man knew his stuff. TV, like radio, abhors a vacuum. They would not broadcast his silence. And with it went the reporter's penetrating question.

"Guy's amazing," he said with ill-disguised admiration. "A genius."

Tom Pulse snorted derisively. "Hell, so far all he's done is spout some high-school textbook facts, hardly any of it in his specialty."

"So how come he's famous and you're not?"

"The cameras are pointing his way, not mine," Pulse drawled.

"You got a point there."

"So far, he hasn't offered anything useful you couldn't drag out of an Astronomy 101 student."

Then Dr. Pagan gave the soundbite that led the evening news.

"Visitors from the mighty cosmos can't be ruled out in this inexplicable event. Not with the Hubble telescope discovering new superplanets in distant galaxies every other week. Did you know that igneous meteorites from Mars have been landing on Earth for decades, blown our way by an unknown upheaval? One made planet-fall in Egypt in 1911, killing a dog. We are standing in a perfect approximation of the Martian landscape. Consider the sheer irony, the stupendous odds of a piece of Mars striking the beachhead of man's eventual conquest of the Red Planet. Gives new meaning to the term 'first strike."'

Pagan took a thoughtful suck on his pipe and added, "It is my fervent hope that the BioBubble, despite its troubled past, will be reconstituted as the forerunner of man's first base on the Red Planet, Mars."

That was it. The media began breaking down their sound equipment and putting away their cameras. The helicopters dropped in response to walkie-talkie summonses and, reloaded once more, they left the site like buzzing electronic locusts.

Dr. Cosmo Pagan hopped into his waiting Saturn and departed, his interest in the BioBubble event seemingly as transient as the media's.

"I don't believe it!" Bulla exploded.

"What?"

"No one cares."

Tom Pulse looked back at the sealed tomb that was the BioBubble and summed it up in two words, "No bodies."

"Say again?"

"No bodies. If you had bodies sticking up from the glass, they'd stay with this story till April Fool's Day."

Bulla shrugged. "I don't want bodies. I want the goddamn media out of my hair."

"Now all you have to deal with are the Feds. And they're not going to accept the lightning-bolt hypothesis."

"Screw them," Bulla snorted.

Pulse lifted his white Stetson, replacing it at a cockier angle than before.

"Whether you're the screwer or the screwee, I don't know. But history tells us the federal government has pretty much the upper hand in screwing folks. I'd be prepared for the worst."

Then Amos Bulla felt a hard tapping on his shoulder, and a cold voice that made him all but jump out of his skin said in his ear, "Remo Kobialka, EPA."

"Where'd you come from?" Bulla sputtered, whirling.

"The taxpayers. They want some answers to some questions."

"You just missed Dr. Cosmo Pagan," Bulla said, deciding to toss the ball into another court entirely. "He said it was aliens."

"You believe that?" asked Remo Kobialka, who looked as much like an EPA investigator in his white T-shirt and tan chinos as Tom Pulse in his white Stetson and snakeskin. boots looked like a scientific consultant on earthquakes, volcanos and other Earth hazards.

"I'm only a glorified PR agent. Dr. Pagan is a world-renowned expert," Bulla answered.

"Who once predicted that the firing of the old wells in Kuwait would turn Africa into a winter wonderland," said Remo Kobialka.

"Well, he was off his subject. If it's up in the sky, Pagan knows it inside and out."

"What's your theory?"

"Lightning."

Behind Bulla's back, Pulse shook his head in a slow negative.

"I want to talk to you," said Remo, picking Pulse up bodily and depositing him off to one side. like a barbershop pole.

"You can't," Bulla insisted. "He's a hired consultant. Answerable only to BioBubble Inc."

"What are you getting an hour?" Remo asked Pulse.

"One-fifty."

"Not bad. I pay five hundred. Up front."

"Sold."

They left Amos Bulla sputtering.

"What's your take?" asked Remo, drawing the man closer to the BioBubble remnant.

"You got me. It's not lightning. It's not a meteor impact or any of that stuff. Something up there turned a ray or force of something very, very hot on the BioBubble complex."

"How hot?"

"Somewhere between 1400 to 1600 degrees centigrade."

"Where do you get that figure?" Remo wondered aloud.

"Steel melts at between 1400 and 1500 centigrade. To turn raw sand to glass like this, you're talking anywhere in the 1400 to 1600 range. Those are the BioBubble structural components with the highest melting points. Of course, it could be higher."

Remo looked around the site, frowning.

"What's EPA's stake in this?" Pulse wondered aloud.

"The BioThing was full of different environments, right?"

"Yes, but-"

"EPA watchdogs the environment. Something like sixteen pocket environments just went the way of the dodo. This is exactly what the taxpayers pay us to investigate."

"It is?"

"Today it is. Tomorrow we may be giving mouthto-mouth to the spiny dogfish or doing other important rescues."

The US Geological Survey expert looked Remo up and down, taking in his white-light-deflecting T-shirt and freakishly thick wrists and was about to remark that Remo wasn't exactly dressed for the Arizona heat, when an even more unlikely apparition came fluttering around from the other side of the BioBubble. An ancient Asian with a face like a reanimated mummy's.

"Uh-oh," Pulse muttered. "Looks like the advance man for the harmonic-convergence crowd. I was wondering when the Dodona loonies would start showing up."

"That's Chiun," said Remo.

"You know him?"

"Consultant."

"What's his specialty?"

"Figuring out stuff I can't," said Remo, walking up to the tiny Asian.

If Remo was dressed for one season, Chiun was attired for another. His brocaded kimono was heavy and swayed thickly as he moved. Neither man sweated, which was amazing.

"Find anything?" asked Remo.

"Yes. Melted glass and steel."

"Funny. Besides that, I mean."

Chiun looked around with eyelids slowly compressing until only black pupils showed. "A terrible force did this, Remo."

"No argument there."

"One not of this earth."

Interest flickered across Remo's high-cheekboned face. "Yeah..."

"It can be but one thing."

"What's that?" asked Remo.

"A sun dragon."

"Sun dragon?"

"Yes, unquestionably a sun dragon wreaked this terrible havoc."

"I know what a dragon is, but I don't think I've heard of a sun dragon."

"They are rare, but they appear in the heavens in difficult times, presaging calamity. I myself have seen several in my lifetime. One famous sun dragon twice, at the beginning of my life and again more recently."

"You saw a dragon?"

"A sun dragon, which is different from a landcrawling dragon."

Tom Pulse listened to this as if they were making perfect sense.

"Back up," said Remo. "What's a sun dragon?"

"There is a Western word for this. Stolen from the Greek, of course."

"Yeah?"

"The word is 'comet.'"

"A comet did this?"

"Yes. For they breathe fire, as do certain species of land-dwelling dragon. Only sun dragons breathe fire from the tail, not the mouth."

Remo gave Chiun a skeptical look. "A fire-farting dragon?"

Chiun made an offended face. "Is there not one lurking in the heavens even now?"

Remo shrugged. "Search me."

"He means Hale-Bopp," said Pulse, joining the conversation.

"He does?"

"Comet Hale-Bopp has been visible most of the year. It's on the other side of the sun right now, but it's still up there. When it reemerges, they say its tail will be a sight to see. Brighter and better than Comet Hayakute II was."

"It is not lurking behind the sun," Chiun snapped. "It has pounced upon this place, melting it with its withering breath as a warning to Westerners to mend their ways."

"What are Westerners doing that would upset a comet?" asked Remo.

Chiun composed his face thoughtfully. His hazel eyes narrowed in interesting ways. "They are mistreating Koreans, that is what."

Remo threw up his hands. "I should have seen that one coming."

"Do not become upset, Remo. Doubtless the comet has not taken notice of your existence. You are safe. Especially if you remain dutifully at my side."

"Comets are millions upon millions of miles out in space."

"If this is true, why can they be seen from Earth?" countered Chiun. "If they were so far away, they would be unfindable to all but the keenest of eyes."

"They're very big and they glow. No mystery there."

"So is the den of inequity called Las Vegas. It is not so very distant from here. Yet I cannot see it. Can you?"

"No," Remo admitted.

"Nor can I see many-towered Boston, a mere three thousand miles east."

"That's because of the curvature of the earth."

"A myth. I look in all directions and I see flatness. I look into the sky and I see no so-called comet, though many beheld its fiery tail in the sky not very many weeks ago. Therefore, it has descended to earth."

"Comets when they get too close to the sun are hard to see," Remo argued.

"They are dragons which live in the sun and venture out to punish the wicked. One swooped down upon this very spot, wreaking justice and righteousness."

"It killed thirty people."

"Deserving people," countered Chiun. "Were they not imprisoned for an allotted period of time?"

"Look, let's just save this for another time," said Remo in an exasperated voice. "For right now, all you have to offer is a comet sideswiped this place?"

"Yes. There can be no question."

"Fine. Put that in your report. I'm going to look around some more."

But before Remo could act on his decision, a wrenching scream pierced the dry desert air from the other side of the flat silicon pancake that had been the BioBubble.

"Sounds like Bulla! " Tom Pulse said tightly.

Chapter 6

When the butter-colored official telephone jangled discordantly, Major-General lyona Stankevitch picked it up without thinking.

The butter-colored direct line to the Kremlin was forever ringing these days, what with rumors of plots and putsches and coups in the offing. Most were spurious. After all, who would want Russia in its present state?

"Da?" said Major-General Stankevitch.

"General, there is a report out of the United States that a space-research dome was reduced to molten metal in the dead of night."

"Yes?"

"There is talk of lightning. But according to our best scientists, no lightning could produce this catastrophe."

"Yes?" repeated the general, vaguely bored. Who cared what happened in the faraway U.S. when Mother Russia was crumbling like old black bread?

"There are two schools of thinking here. That the Americans are testing a new superweapon of destructive power, or that some unidentified power is testing it on US. targets, and Washington will naturally blame this event upon us."

"Why would they do that?"

"It is the historic reality of the relationship between the two superpowers."

The general started to point out that Russia-he refused to say Commonwealth of Independent States-was no longer a superpower. But if the leadership insisted upon clinging to dashed illusions, who was the director of the former KGBnow known as the FSK, or the Federal Security Service-to tell him otherwise?

"I see your point," said the general politely.

"That idiot Zhirinovsky is on NTV, warning that the Americans now have the dreaded Elipticon."

"There is no Elipticon. Zhirinovsky made up this conceit to frighten the credulous West."

"And now he is trying to frighten the East by ascribing its awesome power to Pentagon warmongers."

Stankevitch sighed. He hated the old, stale phrases. They suggested an inability to face geopolitical realities. "What would you have me do?"

"Search your files. Try to discover what this weapon might be and who controls it."

"Search my files?"

"It is a first step. Once I have your report, we will issue a directive for action."

Shrugging, the general hung up the butter-colored handset and buzzed his secretary.

"Have all available clerks search all available records for a weapon of destructive power."

"We have no weapons on file," the dull-witted secretary said stonily.

"I meant for intelligence on such a device," MajorGeneral Stankevitch returned tightly.

"Then why did you not say this in the first place?" The secretary harrumphed, disconnecting.

Settling back in his seat, Major-General Stankevitch closed his Slavic green eyes to the lowly state to which he had sunk. If the clock could only be turned back, he could have the dull, impertinent secretary stood before a firing squad and the answers to his inquiry would be on his desk before the body thudded to the bloodstained brick.

But this was late-twentieth-century Russia, harried and abused by former satellites, NATO forces encroaching on her near abroad, her Black Sea fleet operating out of what now amounted to a foreign port, her major cities overrun by gangsters and capitalists, her aging babushkas supplementing meager pensions by selling their own medicines on street corners, while indolent teenagers guzzled Coca-Cola instead of homemade KVASS, which could hardly be found anymore, and grew fat on greasy fast food, and male life expectancy fell to third-world levels.

He leaned back in his creaky chair and napped to relieve the tedium of his position. Outside in the former Dzerzhinsky Square, now Lubyanka Ploschad, traffic hummed and blared in a monotonous cacophony. One thing at least had not changed. The soothing sounds of Moscow.

The answer came by midafternoon in the form of a manila folder stamped Cosmic Secret. To be Stored Forever.

Accepting the folder, Major General Stankevitch frowned. "Cosmic Secret" was the old classification for the utmost secret possible.

Untying the fading red ribbon that sealed the folder from all but the most elevated eyes, he pulled out the sheaf of papers.

At the name Zemyatin, Stankevitch's eyes lost their bored look.

Field Marshal Alexi Zemyatin was the grand old man of the Soviet Republic. He had been with Lenin. He was loved by Stalin. Khrushchev trusted him. As did Brezhnev. Andropov. And on down to the lastgasp Chernenko regime.

He was a tactical and strategic genius who had disappeared off the face of the earth some eleven years ago under circumstances that suggested CIA involvement-except that the CIA would never have dared to liquidate him. Personally Stankevitch had suspected the historical criminal Gorbachev of the foul deed.

The report detailed an incident that had taken place when Major-General Stankevitch was but a lowly KGB captain. He remembered hearing vague rumors. A Russian missile battery had been neutralized by an unknown agency. This was suppressed at the time, only coming out later. It was the later rumors that Stankevitch had overheard.

This report in his hands explained the incident.

An American superweapon had concentrated terrible energies, incapacitating the electronics of the missile battery. Many died horribly from hard radiation of unknown origin.

World War III had nearly resulted. Only a cooperative effort by the USA and USSR-seeing these four initials made a lump of nostalgia rise in Stankevitch's throat-had averted global conflagration.

The file ended with a disclaimer:

Should such a weapon ever be unleashed upon Soviet soil again, an immediate retaliatory strike must be implemented without consultation or delay.

The words stared at Major-General Stankevitch like a cold horror.

Under current FSK rules, he was duty bound to report this to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, if he did, some dunderheaded bureaucrat might actually implement it, triggering a US. counterstrike-or was it a countercounterstrike?-with the greatly shrunken and defanged Russia doubtless coming out a poor, smoking second.

Swallowing hard, Major-General Stankevitch weighed his duty to the Motherland against his desire to live out his normal life span.

In the end, self-preservation won out. The directive clearly specified action if such a weapon were directed against the USSR. It was not. It was directed against the US. Those two missing initials, Stankevitch grimly reflected, spelled the difference between the world going on happily or becoming a charred ball of charcoal.

The thought then crossed his mind. What if the Americans train this weapon upon us next?

Within five minutes, he formulated his response.

The directive clearly said the USSR. There was no more USSR. Only a CIS, and Major-General Stankevitch decided he now loved those inelegant and weak-sounding initials.

"I am a citizen of the CIS," he said. "I love being a citizen of the CIS. The Americans will never attack the CIS. What is there to gain? We have nothing anymore."

When he had recited these reassuring words over and over like a mantra until they lowered his blood pressure, MajorGeneral Stankevitch picked up the butter-hued official phone and pressed the Cyrillic letter K.

"Report," an officious voice said.

"We have found nothing."

"This is unfortunate."

"Perhaps," Stankevitch said guardedly.

"It may be that the KGB files in question were sold to the highest bidder during the chaos of the breakup."

"I do not think so," said Major-General Stankevitch sincerely, cold sweat breaking out on his brow. For he himself had sold some of those very files, as had many of his underlings. But photocopies only. He had no wish to be shot as a traitor to the motherland, now very much in her elderly phase of life.

"Say nothing of this to anyone," said the voice from the Kremlin.

"Da, " said Major General Stankeviteh, hanging up.

With relief, he gathered together the manila folder and its contents and was in the act of retying the red ribbon before sending it back to its file cabinet, when he noticed the faded line at one end of the ribbon. An age mark. The ribbon was discolored where it had been tied once before. Tied and untied.

Someone had consulted this Cosmic Secret file in the eleven years it had been under lock and key.

There may have been good reason for this. Perhaps not. But it suggested the file had been duplicated-and not by Major-General Stankevitch, who made a point of consulting every file before selling its copy-for who knew whom some of the shady bidders represented?

As he buzzed for the dull secretary to come to restore the file to its proper place in the old KGB archives, a chilling thought ghosted through MajorGeneral Iyona Stankevitch's bureaucratic brain.

Who had the copy, and could that copy cause difficulties for Stankevitch and FSK in the near future?

The worry haunted him all the rest of the working day, until he went home to his apartment directly behind Lubyanka Prison, which was well stocked with the imported, German-made Gorbatschew Vodka-so much better than the thin swill available in the kiosks and markets here in the capital of a dead and dying empire-and drowned his vague fears.

Chapter 7

They found Amos Bulla squatting in the red sandstone dust clutching his eyes and screaming inarticulately.

Reaching down, Remo got his wrists and pulled him to his feet.

Bulla kept screaming, so Chiun brought a sandaled toe down on his instep with excruciating pressure. Bulla took his tongue between his teeth and nearly bit it in half. The Master of Sinanju eased back on the pressure, and Bulla stopped howling.

"What is wrong with you, loud one?" Chiun demanded.

"Blind! I'm blind!" he burbled.

"What happened?" asked Remo.

"I can't see, you idjit!"

"Before that."

"The damn alien did it," Bulla wailed. "He burned out my eyes."

"I'm looking at your eyes. They're still in your head."

"But I can't see."

"Settle down," said Remo, pressing on Bulla's other instep until the bones crackled. "What did you see?"

"It looked like a Martian," Bulla gasped. "Had its back to me. I walked up to it, and it spun around real sudden-like. It had a rod in its hand. Damn thing flashed at me. Felt like hot needles jabbing my eyeballs." Bulla's voice cracked. "Now I can't see my fingers before my poor face."

Remo and planetary geologist Tom Pulse exchanged glances while Bulla waved his hands in front of his blinking bloodshot eyes. There was so much red in the whites, the blue of his eyes looked purple by contrast.

Pulse shrugged helplessly. "I can't vouch for him. We only met today."

Remo looked into Bulla's sightless eyes and said, "Try closing them."

"They are closed!" Bulla insisted, all evidence to the contrary.

"Then open and close them."

Bulla did. They got wider and, if possible, redder.

"Any difference?"

"No. I can't see, open or closed."

"Keep them closed. Just relax. We'll figure this out."

Bulla began walking around in aimless circles, moaning and blubbering.

Remo sat him down and knelt beside him. "You said Martian?" he asked calmly.

"Yeah. It was a Martian."

"How do you know it was a Martian?"

"It looked like a Martian," Bulla said.

"You know what a Martian looks like?"

"No. 'Course not. But he was man shaped. Wore a quilted space suit with a square black glass porthole in front of his face. Had gloves and boots on and was looking around the way the old Apollo astronauts used to poke around the moon. You know, careful and clumsy-like at the same time."

"That doesn't make him a Martian," Remo declared.

"He sure wasn't press!" Bulla said bitterly.

Remo stood up and faced the Master of Sinanju. "Little Father, let's look around some more."

"We will discover who committed this foul deed," Chiun squeaked.

Remo called back to Tom Pulse, "Keep an eye on him."

"Sure thing."

Starting off, Remo undertoned to the old Korean, "He could be making this story up."

"Why?"

"To get the heat off the project."

The Master of Sinanju looked back at the rim of the BioBubble shimmering up heat waves under the broiling Arizona sun.

"If so, he is far too late."

"Not that kind of heat. You saw the way the press was acting when we pulled up."

"Yes. It was good that we remained away from their noise and insanity. Otherwise, they would have committed some barbaric indiscretion, such as interviewing you instead of a more worthy person."

"I don't believe in men from Mars," said Remo, walking with such care that his Italian loafers left no impression on the rust-colored Arizona sands. Chiun likewise disturbed nothing with his sandaled tread.

"Is Mars not a world like this one?"

"Yeah. But there's no air up there. It can't support life. It's a big red desert, kinda like this one."

"If no man of Earth has ever been there, how can you know this?" asked Chiun.

"We sent probes. They sent back video."

"Television probes?"

"Yeah."

Chiun scrunched up his chin. His wispy beard stuck out from under his lower lip like a fluttering tendril of smoke.

"And if there were men dwelling on the Fire Planet as there are Earth men, would they not have have seen these probes coming and showed them deceitful pictures of arid deserts and desolation to confound suspecting Earth men into thinking no one lived there?"

"I don't think so," said Remo, frowning.

They came to a set of footprints that trampled the sandstone ground with no discernible purpose or direction. The prints were humanlike, but heelless and corrugated for extra traction like a pair of running shoes.

Chiun indicated this confusion of prints with the curved jade nail protector that protected his right index finger.

"Behold, Remo. Proof!"

"Of what?"

"That a man of Mars stood on this very spot."

"All I see are boot prints."

"Examine the markings more closely. Do the heels not consist of the Greek letter Mu?"

Remo looked closer.

"Yeah, now that you point it out, the tread is a stack of M's. So what?"

"Mu's. Men from Mars. Clearly the Martians are wearing Martian-made boots."

"Come off it. If there were Martians, they wouldn't advertise their existence with brand-name boots. Besides that, the Martians don't use the English alphabet."

"So you admit Martians do exist?" said Chiun loftily.

"No, I don't."

"Even with the proof etched in the red dust at your feet?"

"Look, let's collar this guy and find out if he's a Martian or not."

"I will agree to this. Let the Martian decide this argument."

"Fine. Let's go."

The footprints led through eroded red rock and sand until, without warning, they just stopped.

"Where'd they go?" Remo said, looking around.

Chiun frowned. "They stop."

"I can see that. How is that possible?"

"It is simple. The Martian entered his space chariot at this spot and was whisked back to his home desert."

"No sale. It don't see landing-gear marks."

"Further proof!" Chiun crowed.

"Of what?"

"That Martians truly exist."

"How?"

"You would not look for the marks of their space chariots if you did not secretly accept their existence," Chiun sniffed.

Remo started to throw up his hands, decided against it and knelt instead. "Something's wrong here," he muttered.

"That is obvious," Chiun sniffed.

"No. This patch of ground. Feel it with your sandals."

Chiun scratched at the red sand experimentally.

"It does not shift like loose sand," he said, papery lips thinning.

"Yeah. It's fixed. Like the sand grains are cemented down."

Exploring with his hands, Remo found that the sand in a sizable rectangle had the feel and texture of coarse-grained sandpaper, and beyond a well-defined area, it became loose and granular again.

"This isn't natural," said Remo.

Then his questing fingers found the ring under a flat rock. It was literally a brass ring, except it was hand, not finger, sized.

Stepping back, Remo lifted the ring up-and up came a long, rectangular trapdoor. The trap fell back, exposing a cavity that was lined with concrete. Remo looked down.

"Looks like a secret tunnel. So much for Martians."

"I accept nothing until it is proved or disproved," Chiun said aridly.

"Let's go," Remo said, dropping into the hole.

It was a tunnel. The beaming sunlight illuminated it for a dozen yards, and then it became as dark as the jungle tunnels Remo used to infiltrate during his Vietnam days.

They advanced through the zone of light into shadow, the visual purple in their eyes compensating until they could see shadows and shapes. Ultimately the details of the tunnel resolved as clearly as if they were in gray twilight.

Odors began drifting to their sensitive nostrils.

"I smell stuff," said Remo.

"Food," said Chiun.

"Yeah. That, too. But a chemical smell, too."

"Skulking Martians," suggested Chiun.

"Not having the faintest clue what a Martian smells like, I take a pass on the argument."

"Therefore, I win," said Chiun.

The tunnel right-angled once and then again. It was taking them unerringly in the direction of the collapsed BioBubble.

After the second turn, the space opened up, and the smell of potatoes and lettuce and other familiar foodstuffs filled their noses. The familiar humming of ordinary refrigerators made the still air vibrate.

The vast, shadowy area was crammed with familiar appliances.

Remo stopped, blurting, "Looks like a restaurant kitchen."

They moved among the stoves and refrigerators and meat lockers, opening them. They found prime rib in plastic, frozen TV dinners and assorted bottled beverages, including thirty gallons of whole milk under refrigeration.

"Still in code," said Remo, replacing a gallon and slamming the refrigerator shut. He went to a big black range and turned on a burner. Blue gas flames whuffed up. A stainless-steel range hood collected the heat and waste gas.

"It is a Martian secret base," said Chiun.

"A food dump?" Remo said incredulously. "Come off it. It's the secret kitchen of the BioBubble. This is where they make their forbidden pizza. This probably explains why the air levels have been screwed up. They cook with gas, and it eats up their oxygen."

"I see no Martian. Nor do I smell one."

"Looks like they get some of their heat from the stoves," said Remo, studying the acoustical-tile ceiling. "There's gotta be a way up into the BioBubble from here. Come on."

Leading the way, Remo found a simple folding aluminum step-ladder. It stood under a submarine-style airlock hatch. It was up in the closed position.

"BioBubble's directly above," he said.

"So, too, is the Martian foe," Chiun said sternly.

Remo climbed the ladder, undogging the hatch with a twirl of his index finger. The hatch squealed in protest, then dropped like a hungry steel mouth. Remo made it look effortless, but three bodybuilders with a monkey wrench couldn't have budged it.

Remo poked his head up into the open space. It smelled of sulphur.

"What do you see, Remo?"

"Looks like the inside of a melted marble. Stinks, too."

"You cannot smell the Martian?"

"Unless his body-odor smell leans toward glass and plastic, no," Remo called down.

Twisting around on the ladder, Remo tried looking in different directions, then said, "I'm going in."

"I am following," said the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun floated up the ladder and joined Remo in what appeared to be a distorted air pocket that had formed when the BioBubble settled and cooled. There were weird flowing tunnels going in three directions from the central pocket.

"Pick a tunnel, any tunnel," said Remo.

Chiun sniffed the air delicately. "I smell nothing that smells like a man of Mars, therefore I pick this tunnel."

"Why that one?" Remo pressed.

"Why not?" And the Master of Sinanju padded into it.

Remo took the adjacent tunnel and ducked in. It was only five feet high at its highest point, and he moved along it carefully.

The walls were mostly glass. Dimly Remo could make out streaks of color and at one point a skeletal human hand, scorched to black bone, evidence of a BioBubble inhabitatant having been cooked in a cauldron of molten glass. He saw an aluminum chair, bright as the day it was forged, suspended in a glass matrix.

It was like walking through a weird aquarium of rippled glass and bizarre objects. There were an awful lot of bugs. Mostly roaches, their feelers wilted.

The ceiling dropped lower and lower. Remo was about to turn back when he detected a muffled heartbeat. It was pounding.

He froze.

And before Remo could zero in on the source of the sound, something flared white-hot, and the tunnel turned the whitest white Remo had ever beheld. He knew before his eyes could completely shut he had been blinded. The searing pain stabbing deep into his optic nerve told him that. The pain went straight to his toenails, and deep in the pit of his stomach he experienced a growing and alien fear ....

THE MASTER of SINANJU was moving through a tunnel of glass whose sides felt slick to his touch. It was like nothing he had ever before encountered, and he therefore resolved to write of this in the scrolls that were passed down from Master to Master for the edification of future Masters of the House of Sinanju.

Chiun had come to a place where the tunnel swelled, forming a dome where the air was especially foul. Standing there, hands in the sleeves of his kimono, he stepped around, his hazel eyes taking in the strange sight of ordinary objects and cockroaches floating unmoving in cooled glass.

A moment's scrutiny assured him that no skulker lurked in this chamber of glass, so Chiun turned to retrace his steps.

At that moment, the glass to one side flared brightly, and through the tunnel came the wordless scream of his adopted son.

"Remo! My son!"

Throwing back his kimono sleeves, the Master of Sinanju flew back through the surreal tunnel of rehardened glass toward the sound of his pupil's scream of soul-searing pain.

Chapter 8

The Master of Sinanju emerged from his tunnel just as a strange figure backed out of the glass tube into which Remo had gone.

The figure was not Remo Williams.

From the back, the Master of Sinanju discerned a bulky gray quilted suit of armor that made him think of Chinese warriors of the old Qing Dynasty. But the style was not Chinese. The head was encased in a featureless bullet of some dull silver material.

"Turn and face your doom, Man of Mars," Chiun thundered.

The creature turned, sweeping a long rod of some white metal that glowed red at the tip before him. It sought him with its evil glimmerings. But no warrior of this or any world was equal to a Master of Sinanju.

Closing his eyes protectively, Chiun twisted his pipestem body, lifting one foot high while pivoting on the opposite toe.

Turning in midair, he spun a complete circle. It looked like a slow-motion windup to some ferocious stroke, but as the turning toe reached a point horizontal with the Master of Sinanju's chin, it accelerated to an unreadable blur.

The toe struck the side of the bullet head just as the square black panel of glass that hid the fearsome foe's face finished turning in Chiun's direction.

The black top of Chiun's sandal connected just as the red rod emitted a burst of pristine white light so pure it shocked Chiun's eyes, even though they were tightly sealed by his papery eyelids.

Chiun felt the impact, recoiled from it and recovered as the body of his foe went whump on the floor of the air pocket at the heart of the BioBubble.

Only when the rattle of death reached his ears did the Master of Sinanju open his eyes and face the defeated one.

Carefully Chiun padded up to the bulky shape on the floor.

The body lay like a bloated starfish, limbs splayed to the four quarters. Where the head should be was an empty space.

That sight satisfied Chiun, who then flew down the tunnel, seeking his pupil.

He found Remo leaning against a glassy wall with one hand. The other was groping at his face. His eyes were open, but they were sightless, the pupils contracted to shocked pinpoints, the whites shot with angry scarlet threads.

For a moment, the Master of Sinanju paused, stricken by the paralyzed expression on his pupil's formerly proud countenance.

Then, steeling himself, he stepped forward. "Remo! What is it?"

Remo's reply came in a squeezed voice. "Chiun, II can't see."

Chiun's wrinkled visage flinched like a web touched by a stick. "What do you see in this condition?"

"Everything is white."

"Not black?"

"No. White."

"This is strange. If you are blind, you should see blackness."

"That guy was in here. Be careful."

"I encountered him. He is no more, Remo. You have been avenged."

Remo hesitated before replying in a thick voice. "Thanks, Little Father."

"I would do the same for any other adopted son, if I had one."

Remo waved a helpless hand in Chiun's direction. "Give me a hand."

Chiun took three quick steps, then halted. No, this was not the time or place to coddle Remo.

"No," he said.

"No? What do you mean, no?"

"If you are blind, you must learn to use your other senses."

"Look, just give me a hand out of here," Remo said angrily.

"No. You know the path that you took to the place of your downfall. You have only to retrace your foolhardy steps."

Remo made a stiff face. He looked to be on the verge of losing his temper. Then, straightening his spine and composing his face, he oriented himself using only his senses of hearing and touch.

At first he employed the tips of his fingers to guide him along the glassy walls. As confidence returned, his hand dropped free and he used his supersharp ears. No doubt the beating of the Master of Sinanju's heart guided him.

Chiun willed his heart to be momentarily still. It did not stop. It merely beat with exceeding slowness, a technique that, if prolonged, would result in a catalepsy that simulated death.

"No fair," Remo complained. "I can't hear your heartbeat."

Chuin said nothing. He was holding his breath. He stepped backward with exceeding caution, his sandaled feet making no sound on the glassy floor. He moved aside to allow Remo to pass him unsuspecting.

Without tripping or stumbling, Remo made it down the glass tube and into the central air pocket, where he immediately fell over the body of the defeated one.

"Is this him?" Remo asked, feeling the padded body.

"Yes," said Chiun, allowing his heart and lungs to function normally once more.

"I don't feel any head."

"Proof of its undeniable Martianness. For it has none."

"I saw him. For just a second. It had a head."

"A helmet. I removed it. But no head lay beneath it.

Remo felt the shoulders, then brought his hands together.

"Feels like there's a stump."

Frowning, Chiun went to the bullet helmet and lifted it up.

Shaking it vigorously, he got a head to fall out with an audible bonk.

"Was that what I think it was?" asked Remo, getting to his feet.

"Yes," returned Chiun thinly. "The head."

"What's it look like?"

"Ugly."

"How ugly?" asked Remo, drawing near, his face curious.

"Exceedingly ugly."

"What color skin?"

"Yellow."

"The Martian is yellow skinned?"

"Yes. With hideous eyes and a flat nose."

"Better save it for Smith, then."

"Of course," said Chiun, dropping the head into its helmet and carrying it like a baseball in a catcher's mitt. "Now it is time that we leave this place of shame."

Remo fell in behind the Master of Sinanju, his face and voice dazed and dull. "I only caught a glimpse of him-it," he said thickly. "I was moving on him, and everything went white."

"You see whiteness still?"

"Yeah. What does that mean? Anything?"

Chiun frowned. "I do not know. Perhaps because you are white, this is normal."

Remo shook his head and felt for the stepladder top rung with his feet. "Blind people see darkness. Everybody knows that."

Chiun said nothing in response. His eyes were clouded and troubled.

Remo descended with careful movements. Chiun followed. They worked their way back through the underground kitchen to the camouflage trapdoor and emerged into the hot Arizona air once more.

"Follow me," said Chiun.

Remo did. He said nothing. His face was loose with a kind of dull shock. Several times he licked his lips as if he wanted to say something, but instead compressed them. The color of his face was very, very pale. His breathing was out of rhythm.

Chiun let these things pass. There was no danger here, so it was not important. No danger. No future, either. Not for Remo. Not for the House.

They came upon Amos Bulla and Tom Pulse near the collapsed BioBubble.

"Something happened inside the BioBubble," Pulse said when he saw them.

"It is not important," Chiun said thinly.

"The whole thing shone white for a moment. It was like a big light bulb. Or a flying saucer about to take off."

"Yeah," said Amos Bulla. "I saw it with my own eyes."

Chiun's voice climbed to the sky. "What! You saw?"

"Yeah."

"You were blind."

"My eyes cleared up."

Turning, Chiun cried, "Remo, did you hear that?"

"Of course. I'm not deaf. Just blind."

"And you are only blind for now. For the affliction is not permanent."

"Whew!" said Remo in relief.

"He got you, too?" Bulla asked.

"Yeah, but we got him," said Remo, sitting down to wait for his sight to clear.

Bulla and Pulse gathered around the Master of Sinanju.

"Is that what I think it is?" Bulla asked, indicating the silver helmet in Chiun's long-nailed grasp.

"Yes. It is his head."

"How'd it come off?"

"It was loose. A mere tap unbalanced it."

"Martians must be made of flimsy stuff," Bulla said, avoiding the sight of the head in the helmet.

"I don't believe in men from Mars," said Remo, not wanting to be left out of the conversation even if he couldn't see what was under discussion.

"It has a yellow visage and horrible, catlike eyes," said Chiun.

"Yeah?"

"Truly."

"Hey!" said Remo suddenly, "I think I'm starting to see again." He stood up. Blinking his eyelids, he waved his fingers before his face. After a while, his features brightened and the pinpoint pupils slowly relaxed to normal size.

"I can see again. I can see again!"

"Clearly?" asked Chiun, concealing his joy with a stern tone.

"No, just my fingers. They're a blur. But it's coming back."

"Try closing your eyes. That'll help some," said Bulla.

Remo did.

"When the whiteness becomes red, you'll know you're okay," Bulla offered.

"It's starting to happen," said Remo.

"Open your eyes, Remo," Chiun instructed.

Remo obliged. The whites of his eyes had already lost much of their thready redness. His Sinanju-enhanced system accelerated the healing process.

He found himself looking at the Martian's dead face. "That's the Martian?" he blurted.

"Yes. Is his countenance not terrible to behold?" said Chiun.

Frowning, Remo took the head in both hands. "This Martian looks suspiciously Chinese."

"I have always wondered about the Chinese. They seem unsuited for this planet," Chiun sniffed.

"This guy is Chinese," Remo exploded.

"There's something written inside this helmet," Pulse said.

"What's it say?" asked Remo, striding up.

" 'Property of FORTEC.'"

"What the hell is FORTEC?" asked Amos Bulla.

"It's the Foreign Technology Department of the U.S. Air Force," Tom Pulse supplied.

"Never heard of it," Bulla scoffed.

"It's ultrasecret. People say it investigates alien technology."

"Space aliens?" said Remo.

"That's the rumor. The truth is they're interested in exotic technology. Foreign to the US. Unusual propulsion systems. New laser applications. That sort of thing."

"So they could investigate flying saucers if they took a mind to?" Bulla asked.

"It's in their mission. Technically."

"This Chinese guy is one of ours?" Remo asked.

"He is not one of mine," spat Chiun, dropping the head back into its helmet and kicking the gleaming shell away.

From the cell phone in their rented car, Remo put in a call to Harold Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE.

"Ever hear of FORTEC?" Remo asked Smith after the call was rerouted through sixteen states and scrambled to avoid eavesdropping by National Security Agency monitors.

"Yes. You have FORTEC credentials yourself, and have used them in the past."

"I can't keep track of all my covers," Remo growled.

"Why do you ask?"

"They sent one of their guys out here. He blinded me with something that looks like a flashlight."

"Laser blinding technology is under development by the Army."

"He was wearing some kind of quilted spacesuit," added Remo.

"A high-tech battle suit also under Army development."

"Why wear combat gear on an investigation?"

"Perhaps because he is not certain what he will encounter," suggested Smith. "You could ask him."

"I could, but Chiun knocked his block off. So to speak."

Smith groaned. "Are there witnesses?"

"Not to the act, but a crowd is gathering around the head."

Smith groaned again. "Pull out," he ordered.

"We haven't got anything. Unless you like Chiun's theory."

"Which is?"

"A sun dragon. It's Korean for 'comet.'"

"The Korean word for 'comet' is hyesong, " returned Harold Smith.

"I stand corrected," Remo said dryly.

"If you have nothing better," said Smith, "pull out."

"The BioBubble PR head is here."

"Find out who is backing the project."

"That should be easy. Hold the line."

Remo walked up to Amos Bulla and said, "We found the big kitchen under the BioBubble."

"I'm only director of public relations. I don't handle logistics or supply."

"But you're not supposed to have any kitchen," Remo persisted.

"You'll have to take that up with the the project's angel."

"Angel?" said Chiun.

"Another word for financial backer."

"Who is he?"

"No clue. I was hired by telephone. His name is Mavors. Ruber Mavors. That's all I know. I don't know who he is or how to reach him."

Chiun narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "You have never met this Ruber Mavors?"

"No. He's just a voice on the telephone who gives me my instructions."

"He tell you to install a full kitchen?" asked Remo.

Bulla wiped sweat off his face. "If there's a kitchen, it was built before my tenure. I came in after the Mars-colony scam-I mean phase-went belly-up. The whole Mars colony project was supposed to be a joint U.S.-USSR space mission. Neither country could do it alone. Folks thought it would be a great way to encourage superpower cooperation. Then the Soviets up and died, and the project went bankrupt. That's when Mr. Mavors came in, hired me and bailed the project out. It's been an ecological-research station ever since."

"This man called Mavors," said Chiun, fingering his beard, "does his voice fall strangely upon your ears?"

"Yeah. He kinda sounds like Rod Serling, if you really want to know the honest truth." Bulla squinted at the Master of Sinanju. "How'd you know that?"

"Yeah, Little Father," said Remo. "How did you know that?"

"Because," intoned Chiun, "in the Latin of old Rome, Ruber Mavors means 'Red Mars.'"

"That's as phony a name as I've ever heard," said Remo.

"It's the name he gave me," Bulla insisted.

"He is telling the truth," Chiun confirmed.

"Yeah, I can hear," said Remo disappointedly.

"Hear what?" asked Bulla.

"Your heartbeat. If it accelerated, that would tip us off. It didn't, so you're telling the truth."

Bulla touched his heart as if to make sure it was still beating.

Remo went back to the telephone and filled in Harold Smith.

"A dead end," said Smith when Remo was through. "I will search through Bulla's telephone records. Something may turn up. You and Chiun leave immediately."

Hanging up, Remo rejoined the others.

Amos Bulla was kicking at the red sands of Arizona disconsolately. "Well, if that's the end of EPA's investigation, I guess I'm out of here-and out of a job, too. Unless Mavors wants to start from scratch." Bulla shot a sick parting glance at the flattened dome of rehardened glass. "Sure would like to know what caused this flop, though."

Everyone took a final look at the BioBubble, baking in the Arizona sun like a candy-glass flapjack.

"A sun dragon," intoned the Master of Sinanju. "Mark my words. A sun dragon is loose in the heavens and will strike again."

No one disputed him this time. The sheer size of the destroyed research station beggared any better explanation.

Chapter 9

The bad news came by e-mail:

To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Possible product failure Staff here in R t the situation in Arizona may be a by-product of current testing, which at first appeared to suggest product failure, but which now appears to be the result of a bug in the software.

Long pale fingers hesitated at the keyboard and, after a moment, typed a furious reply while rain beat a steady tattoo on an office window.

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Your mail Explain software glitch. The reply was not long in coming:

To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Your mail Probable cause is defective Platinum chip unknowingly installed in guidance system.

Pale fingers typed swiftly.

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Your mail. Defective chip installed where?

To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Your mail In working prototype.

And the pale hands went paler. They shook as they pecked out a response.

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Ozone layer

Does product failure have any impact on ozone layer?

The reply: "Why do you always ask that?"

To which, the pale fingers shot back: "None of your damn business. Answer the question."

"None." The reply made the pale fingers relax.

Color slowly returned to the poised fingers. The owner cracked his knuckles and attacked the keyboard with renewed energy.

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Your mail I am on vacation. I have been on vacation for two weeks. Erase this e-mail and all previous electronic communications. I will do same. Project ParaSol is defunded this date. Furlough all nonessential personnel. Remember-loose lips sink careers.

Chapter 10

The BioBubble event was the best thing to happen to astronomer Cosmo Pagan since he'd married his third wife. Or the Galileo flyby. Or maybe Shoemaker-Levy colliding with Jupiter. It was hard to say, on a cosmic scale. All were pretty spectacular events in the Big Bang that was his terrestrial sojourn.

Every time the heavens burst forth with a new wonder, or Cosmo Pagan fell in love, his career went up like a happy rocket. It was amazing. It was life affirming. It was exhilarating.

And it all started around the time the Viking 1 probe landed on the red sands of Mars and began transmitting pictures of the dead planet's arid surface.

Cosmo Pagan was an untenured astronomy professor in those days back at the University of Arizona. There, he met Stella, tawny, tenured and on the fast track, career-wise.

"So how does a guy get tenure in a place like this?" Cosmo asked on their first date at the Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill outside Flagstaff, where they took turns looking up at red Mars through the same refractor Percival Lowell had used to study the canals of the Red Planet a century ago.

"You earn it. Usually by publishing."

Cosmo swallowed. "That sounds like work. I'm a people person. I do better in front of a class than on the printed page."

"There isn't a back door to enter, you know," Stella reminded him.

But Cosmo Pagan found one. First he married Stella Redstone, then after two years of marital stargazing, he popped the real question. "Why don't we collaborate on your next book?"

"Why?"

"Because you have tenure and I need it."

Stella thought about it. She thought about it hard. She had a growing academic reputation to protect.

"We'll give it a shot," she said guardedly. "But you have to pull your own weight."

"Deal," said Cosmo, shaking hands with his wife of two years-three tops, if things worked out. He was already shtupping the occasional undergrad.

They started with a strict division of labor, just as they did with the household dishes. Stella did the research, Cosmo the first draft and she the polish.

But typing was not Cosmo Pagan's strong suit, and no one could read the smeary Sanskrit that passed for his penmanship.

So they tried alternating chapters. Cosmo kept getting sick when his turn rolled around. Or he made Stella redo her chapter before he tackled his. The project fell further and further behind schedule.

Then in exasperation, Stella pulled out of the project. "You write your damn book. I'll write mine."

That's when Cosmo Pagan filed suit for divorce and his half of the book, as yet untitled.

It took three months of protracted litigation, arguments over commas, theories and metaphors until Stella threw in the towel.

"Look, just give me my freedom from that lazy leech," she told her lawyer. "He can have the book, the house, everything."

When Universe was published, it sold better than anyone ever dreamed, earning Cosmo Pagan full tenure and a cool quarter-million dollars, an unheard-of sum for a popular-science textbook at that time.

While the book was climbing the bestseller lists, Pagan received a telegram from his ex wife: "You turned my elegantly written prose into popular junk."

Cosmo fired back an equally succinct reply. On a postcard. "Popular junk is the future of this country."

When PBS approached Cosmo to adapt Universe for a twelve-part science special, Cosmo Pagan saw an opportunity undreamed of by tenured professors of astronomy.

"I have to write it. And host it," he insisted to his agent.

The PBS executive producer turned him down cold.

"How can he do this?" Pagan asked his agent.

"She. Her name's Venus. And she calls the shots over there."

"Did you say Venus?"

"Yeah. Venus Brown."

"I never slept-I mean met a woman named after a planet," Cosmo said wonderingly. "Especially one as interesting as Venus. It's my second-favorite planet after Mars."

So Cosmo Pagan asked her out. On the third date, he asked Venus Brown to marry him. She turned him down flat. It took two more tries until she succumbed to his boyish charm, but finally they were married in a brisk outdoor ceremony with the planets Mars and Venus hurtling through the evening sky overhead.

On the honeymoon, after visiting multiple cataclysmic orgasms on his new bride, Cosmo Pagan popped the question again: "Let me write and host the show."

"Why should I do that?" the newly named Venus Pagan asked.

"Because I'm your husband and you want me to succeed in life," Cosmo answered with his usual boyish directness.

She wrapped him up in a warm hug and said, "You already succeeded. Wildly. And repeatedly."

"I need to succeed bigger. And better."

"Let me sleep on it. Okay?"

"I haven't given you the galactic orgasm yet."

"Galactic orgasm?"

"It's the one after you scream you can't handle another one," Cosmo explained. "The perturbations are marvelous."

"Oh, really?"

Three orgasms later, she said "Yes! Yes! Yes!" to the heavens, and Cosmo Pagan took that as his green light. And no morning-after protestations of temporary nuptial insanity were accepted.

It was a wonderful marriage. It led to fame, wealth, a Tucson, Arizona, suburban home with its own private astronomical observatory where the seeing was best and more groupies than even a studiously handsome astronomy professor in the space age could ever wish for.

It might have gone on forever and ever if Cosmo Pagan hadn't gotten caught in flagrante delicto.

"We're done," Venus Pagan snapped after slapping Cosmo's face in both directions while the future unnamed third party in the divorce suit yanked on her panties.

"You can't divorce me," Cosmo blurted.

"Why not?"

"Think of how our careers are intertwined."

"What careers? You're famous. I'm a behind-the-scenes producer. You get all the glory. Hell, you hog it. I'm Mrs. Cosmo Pagan who gets thanked on the dedication page in small print."

"Look," Pagan said, getting down on bended knee, "we have a lifetime of split royalties ahead of us. Don't tear that apart over one eager-beaver blonde."

"You must be thinking of a prior beaver," Venus said tartly. "That was a brunette who just scampered away."

Cosmo made his voice as serious as nature would allow. "I won't give up the house."

"The Mars observatory, you mean. I'm sick of it. Don't think I don't know you point that kaleidoscope of yours at the neighbors' windows."

"It's called a telescope. And what about the children?"

"What children?"

"The two asteroids orbiting the sun named after us. They're our celestial offspring. They'll be together long after we're gone."

"Maybe they'll break up, too," Venus said thinly.

And the door slammed.

It might have been a career wrecker, except neat cosmic stuff kept happening. Comet Kohoutek.

Comet Halley's return. The Challenger disaster. Shoemaker-Levy. Every time the cosmos hiccuped, Dr. Pagan was invited on news programs and talk shows to interpret the burp.

When comet fragments struck Jupiter, Pagan was on the phone trying to convince the planetary society to strike the name Asteroid Venus until further notice.

"We've never had a precedent for renaming an asteroid," he was told.

"I can't orbit the solar system with my ex-wife for all eternity," Pagan lamented. "Think of how bad it looks. Besides, I'll probably remarry. Just leave the name blank until then. I guarantee my next new wife will be worthy of celestial immortality."

The response was disappointing: "No. Sorry. Not even for you."

Hanging up, Dr. Pagan silently vowed to get around the galactic red tape somehow.

He found it while flipping through interview requests from news organizations interested in interviewing him on the Jupiter-impact event.

A name both familiar and unfamiliar leaped out at him.

"Who's this Venus Mango?" he asked his secretary.

"CNN reporter."

"Is she cute?"

"Depends on your taste."

"Is she up and coming?"

"Yes."

"Tell her we're on."

Venus Mango was in fact what Pagan liked to call a heavenly body. And she was science editor for CNN.

She knew the Crab Nebula from the Trifid, and recognized over fifty other Messier objects. That made them compatible in Cosmo Pagan's eyes.

Dr. Pagan invited her to dinner after the interview. Of course, she accepted. Who wouldn't say yes to the famous boyish face, the erudite manner and easily tousled hair?

"Marry me," Cosmo asked in the middle of dessert, a red Jell-O dome with black-licorice decorations that Cosmo called Martian Moon Jelly.

"What!"

"I love you, Venus."

"You say 'Venus' as if you've been saying it all your life."

"Marry me and I promise to have an asteroid named after you," Cosmo promised.

The future Venus Pagan said yes in the second hour of their first date. They were married by the weekend, and Cosmo Pagan proudly showed her the documentation on their honeymoon at China's Purple Mountain Observatory by the light of a nifty lunar eclipse.

"Why is this dated ten years ago?" Venus asked.

"I had a premonition."

Venus Pagan wept openly. "This is the most amazing thing any man has ever done for me."

"Wait'll you experience the galactic orgasm."

Venus Pagan in truth didn't so much advance Cosmo Pagan's career as she maintained it. Cosmo decided to settle for that. He wasn't a spring chicken anymore. There was an actual worry line seaming his high forehead now. Fortunately on-camera makeup shielded his adoring public from the unnerving sight.

Besides, how high could an astronomer go?

For the first time in his life, Cosmo Pagan was content to settle down for the easy ride.

This year was turning out to be a comet year. Hayakute II. Then Hale-Bopp. The public lapped it up, and Dr. Pagan was only too happy to feed their curiosity.

So when the BioBubble burst, it was just another cosmic event engineered to further that career, and a break from explaining the Oort Cloud for the gazillionth time.

The phone began ringing off the hook immediately. Of course, the first call he returned was Venus's. Cosmo was no fool. Where was he going to find another earthbound Venus who could do anything for his career?

By the next morning, he was quoted in virtually every newspaper and TV news program in the nation and beyond.

This time he discovered they played it for laughs.

" 'Someone up there doesn't like us'?" he sputtered, reading back his own quote. "Everyone used that comment! It was a throwaway. I gave a detailed, reasoned, poetic analysis, and they print a side-of-the-mouth attempt at levity?"

"You gave a windy speech to a TV camera," Venus returned. "You know better. All TV wants is soundbites."

"I'm used to having a forum," Cosmo lamented. "And editorial control."

"Not this time, honey. Get over it."

But Dr. Cosmo Pagan wasn't about to get over it. Twenty-five years of popularizing astronomy and the heavens had made him famous from Anchorage to Asia, but one last honor still eluded him.

Respect from his fellow astronomers. They hated him to a man.

"I have to do something about this," he fumed.

"Why bother? The story has a half life of maybe three days."

"I'm going to the BioBubble."

"I won't recommend being tied to this one. The BioBubble is a joke. You said so yourself."

"That was when it first started. I've since changed my mind," he growled.

"Suit yourself."

And Dr. Pagan did. He drove his Mars red Saturn with the license plate that read BARSOOM-1 to the Martian-like landscape of Dodona, Arizona, and stole the spotlight out from under the BioBubble people.

By the time he had returned home, the ink was drying on the print-media story.

" 'Dr. Pagan says Martians crushed BioBubble!'" he screamed. "I never said that!"

"I saw it on CNN," Venus said. "You came darn close."

"I said visitors from outer space. I was being poetic. By 'visitor,' I meant an asteroid or meteor. Not little green men!"

"Nobody says 'little green men' anymore. They say 'grays' now."

"I don't believe in that UFO conspiracy crap."

"You don't believe in the current shuttle program, either."

"Listen, there's an entire cosmos out there I'll never get to explore at the current technological rate. We went to the moon. It was a dusty rock. Big deal. The next logical step is Mars. But do we take it? No. We just send these stupid space trucks into low Earth orbit and bring them back. I'd rather see deep-space probes, sending back images that I can see in this lifetime. Screw the shuttle. They won't get to Mars until after they sprinkle my ashes in Tunguska."

"You said visitors. They took you literally. Relax. By the time Hale-Bopp comes back, this will all be forgotten."

Dr. Cosmo Pagan screamed like a cow in distress. "I'm going to be pilloried by every astronomy society on the planet. And beyond."

"Poor baby," Venus II said, hugging him tightly. "Look at it this way-at least you still have me. And we'll orbit the sun until the end of time."

"I need some face time."

"I need some suck-face time," his wife returned, pinching his boyish cheek.

Cosmo considered this. "Trade?"

"Throw in a galactic orgasm. I haven't had one in moons."

"That's going to take all night, knowing you."

"What will a few hours' delay cost you?" Venus said, giving his hair a muss and starting to pop his shirt buttons with her strong white teeth.

Chapter 11

On a beach in Cancun, a pale man in a Speedo bathing suit lounged on a candy-cane folding beach chair as turquoise waves creamed against the pristine sands. Unfolding his laptop, he booted up his system and began typing. To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Current project status. Update, please. The reply took twenty minutes, even by e-mail. In that time, his skin began to burn. And remembering how fragile the ozone shield had gotten in the past eleven years, he applied supersunblock to every exposed area. He smeared his forearms as he read.

To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Update No feedback from corporate. Media currently ascribing event to space aliens. Specifically Martians determined to nip planned NASA Mars colony in the bud.

The fingers, greasy with sunblock, pecked out a response.

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Update Sounds good. Go with it.

The reply came back almost instantly through the miracle of orbiting communications satellites: "What do you mean, go with it?"

Greasy fingers went to work: "Encourage media's thinking."

The reply: "How?"

To which, the greasy fingers typed: "That's your job. If you can't do it, I'll find someone who can."

A long time-by information-age standards-passed before the next e-mail appeared on the laptop screen. Actually it was only twelve minutes.

To: RM@qnm.com From: R Subject: Directive What about legal ramifications?

The man on the beach snapped out an impatient response:

To: R From: RM@qnm.com Subject: Re: Directive You're protected by the corporate shield. Do what's best for the corporation.

There was no response to that, and the pale hands powered down the laptop, folded it up and went back to enjoying vacation.

After a while, the pale man on the beach threw on a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. With all that UV radiation pouring down from the sky, there was no sense in taking chances. Basal-cell skin-cancer rates over the last decade had skyrocketed higher than the stock market.

Chapter 12

Somewhere over the Ozarks, Remo Williams leafed through a newspaper.

"It says here that Hale-Bopp was last seen three thousand years ago."

"How do they know this?" demanded Chiun.

"Search me. It orbits the sun, and once every three thousand years or so, it comes within sight of the earth." Remo frowned. "Who was Master three thousand years ago?"

"If you were a true Master of Sinanju, you would not need to ask such a question." "I know the lineage of the Masters. I can recite almost every Master's name, but I can't reconcile them with Western dating."

Chiun puckered up his facial wrinkles. "Yes. Of course."

"What do you mean, of course?"

"You were raised to worship the crucified carpenter. To those of your doubtful creed, the universe began only two thousand years ago."

"That's not true-" Remo started to protest.

"Before the carpenter, there was nothing. All was darkness, without form, without light, without substance," Chiun said bitterly.

"That's not how it works. There was a time before Jesus. We just count the years backward from that point. Three B. C. is three years Before Christ."

"We count forward from Tangun, who created the first Korean. That was five thousand years ago. Before then, no one was."

"According to modern science, man has been around for about three million years or so."

"Your hairy-ape ancestors, perhaps. But not Koreans. We came along to rectify the wrongs done to this world by your simian forebears."

Remo started to protest, but decided it wasn't worth it. They had had this argument before. Instead, he changed the subject. "How's the nail?" he asked.

Chiun winced painfully.

For several months, he had been wearing the hornlike jade nail protector to guard his maimed right index fingernail, which had been sliced off by a foe wielding a supersword. It was unheard-of for a modern Master of Sinanju to be bested in close combat. Chiun was still sensitive about it.

"It grows apace," he said aridly.

"Good."

"But it lacks its full length yet. Thus, I am forced to wear this."

"It goes with the kimono."

"That is the problem. I am forced to wear only kimonos whose colors harmonize with jade. I have not worn my royal purple kimono in months. The black lies folded in darkness, wondering if it has been abandoned forever. The cinnabar wilts from disuse. The pink-"

"You'll be back in pink before you know it."

"It was Master Salbyol."

"Who?"

"Master Salbyol. He was Master when the sun dragon of three thousand years ago was seen."

Remo lifted an interested eyebrow. "Any interesting legends go with him?"

Chiun considered. "He was an indolent Master. Egypt was too far for him to travel, so he relied on Japan and China, who were not as rich as Egypt in those days."

Remo shrugged. "The House got by, I guess."

"There is no excuse for sloth," Chiun sniffed. "He blamed it on the arrow star, not himself."

"Arrow star?"

"The thing you call a comet was unknown in the Korean sky of the days of Salbyol the Indolent. It was called the arrow star because it flew like a feathered shaft through the slower stars, and was considered an evil omen. Much later other such stars appeared, and a wiser Master determined that the arrow star was no star at all, but a sun dragon."

"How'd he come to that brilliant conclusion?"

"Very simply, Remo. Every time a sun dragon rampaged among the Korean stars, a calamity would result. No arrow brought such bad luck. Therefore, it could only be a dragon."

"You know, there probably isn't a time when there isn't a calamity somewhere."

"What are you saying?" asked Chiun, eyes thinning.

"Comets don't cause calamities. That's all. It's just superstition."

"I agree with you. They do not."

"Good."

"They merely presage misfortune."

Remo suddenly noticed the full-figured woman with the cloudy black hair and jade green eyes and said, "Excuse me."

"Where are you going?" Chiun queried.

"I promised myself I'd ask the next gorgeous woman I saw for a date and I just saw her."

"She is fat."

"Voluptuous."

"Fat."

"Catch you later," said Remo, unlocking his seat belt and moving back to the rear of the cabin.

The woman sauntered as far as midcabin, where she began stretching in a way that made Remo look forward to their first date. That she would say yes was guaranteed. No woman ever turned down a Master of Sinanju. Remo sometimes thought the attraction was pheromones. The perfect grace of a body in harmony with itself might also explain the phenomenon. He'd once read that the human brain was programmed by nature to respond positively to a certain symmetry of form. Sinanju training had symmetrically harmonized Remo's body. Where most people had one eye or hand or side of their body larger than the other because the muscles were used more, Remo's form had achieved total symmetry.

Women sensed this symmetry, even if they didn't perceive it on a conscious level. This was part of Remo's innate sexual attraction.

Any way it was sliced, the green-eyed woman wasn't going to say no.

"Hi," said Remo, putting on his best disarming smile.

"Hello," she said, her voice smoky, like dry sherry. "My name is Coral."

"Remo. Going to Boston?"

"I live there."

"Me, too."

"That's great," she said, inching closer.

"I have some free time tonight."

"Me, too."

"Why don't we get together, have dinner?"

Coral was beaming now. "I'd love to." Her breath was a moist, inviting musk.

"Great," said Remo, thinking this was the way to go.

"Let me clear it with Fred first."

"Sure. Who's Fred?"

"I'll be right back"

The cloudy-haired brunette brushed past him, leaving the scent of White Diamonds on Remo's lean body, and he tried to enjoy the fragrance while she went back to her seat. He ended up having to close off his olfactory receptors. The scent, though subtle, was too powerful for his highly sensitive sense of smell. He made a mental note to ask her to go scentless on their first date.

The woman came back and said, "Fred's a little out of sorts, but it's okay."

"He'll get over it," Remo said agreeably. "Who's Fred?"

"My husband."

"Husband?"

The woman lifted her left hand and let the overhead lights play on a plain gold wedding band.

"Why didn't you tell me you were married?" Remo said angrily.

"Why didn't you look at my ring finger?" She was smiling as if it were no big deal.

"Out of practice," Remo said dispiritedly.

"I'll help you with that," she said brushing up against him with her bullet-shaped bosom.

"Look, I don't do married women."

She ran long gold nails down the front of Remo's T-shirt and purred like a lion. "Fred will get over it. He always does."

"Not the point. I don't poach on another man's preserve."

"Hey, don't I get a say in this?"

"Sure. You get to say goodbye. Goodbye," said Remo, retreating to his seat.

"You have your date?" asked the Master of Sinanju blandly.

Remo folded his arms. "Don't give me that. You overheard every word, you old reprobate."

"I would prefer to hear the story from your own lips."

"She's married."

"I knew that."

"Goody for you."

"In this land, Remo, it is customary for a married woman to wear a gold circlet about the ring finger of the hand that is closest to the heart. This signifies a woman who is taken."

"I know that!" Remo flared.

"It is good that you did not take her."

"There are other women."

"You are going about this the improper way," Chiun warned.

"Go grow your nail," growled Remo unhappily.

"And you may jump over the moon as you chase your white cows," the Master of Sinanju said huffily.

Chapter 13

The director of operations for NASA's shuttle program was only too happy to answer reporters' questions.

Shuttle flights were so routine the press didn't bother to cover them live anymore. There was always a token media presence, of course. The Challenger disaster guaranteed that. Everyone wanted tape if another in-flight catastrophe shook the world. So the national media duly sent a sprinkling of bored reporters each and every time an orbiter was launched.

This time it was the newest of the shuttle fleet, the Reliant. It was to be her maiden voyage. Task-deploy a National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite, name and mission classified.

Usually the reporters showed up the day before launch and waited. Sometimes the wait stretched out over three or four days, and they grumbled. They always grumbled. They especially grumbled when the launch went off without a hitch. Sometimes they cursed and complained bitterly that the pictures were "always the same."

"What do you want?" the director once asked a CBS reporter. "Another Challenger?"

Without hesitation, the reporter said, "Hell, yes."

The director of operations walked away rather than clean the man's blue-bearded clock.

Today the Reliant stood on the gigantic crawler-transporter that moved her toward the launch pad, and the reporters were already here. In droves. The weather had been cold for Florida in late December. Maybe they had hopes of a catastrophic failure, the director thought angrily.

The media assembled in the director's office, which looked down over the most reinforced road in the world, with Launch Complex 39-A in the background. The crawler-transporter was rumbling along. It was a 2500-ton battleship gray converted surface coal-mining machine as big as a baseball diamond moving at a sedate three and a half miles per hour on four double-tracked tractor units. Each of the shoes that made up one of the massive treads was capable of exerting thirty-three tons of crushing force. Strapped to the gigantic external tank and flanked by the dual rocketlike boosters, the shuttle sat upright as if poised for launch, as it was borne to the launch pad.

It was an impressive sight, but since it wasn't spewing smoke and flame, the press showed no interest in it.

"Are you afraid for this mission?" asked one reporter.

"Why should I be?" the director shot back.

"If Martians did fry the BioBubble, wouldn't NASA be high on their target list?"

"There are no Martians, and there is no target list. Get off it."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I saw the Kking and Mariner probe pictures. It's a dead world."

"Then why is NASA talking about going there in thirty years?"

"It's not completely dead. There are probably lichen. Maybe some microbes or one-celled organisms."

"How do we know one-celled microbes aren't advanced enough to point death rays at Earth?" a seasoned science reporter asked.

"Because," the director of operations patiently explained, "a one-cell organism doesn't have a brain. It's a primitive lifeform." He swallowed his biting Like reporters, only smarter.

"We don't know what a one-celled Martian might be like. Maybe the cell is all brain."

"Yes, a giant brain," a reporter piped up from in back.

"If he was all brain," the director of operations said with ill-concealed impatience, "then he wouldn't have hands to point his death ray with, now would he?"

"Maybe some of his Martian comrades are just hands. Or feet. They gang up and make a whole person. Nassau'd be a sitting duck."

"It's NASA, not Nassau," he returned, correcting a sacrilegious mispronunciation reporters had been committing since the halcyon days of the Mercury Program. "And the program is not at risk. Take my word for it."

"You don't mind if we film the crawl?" one said.

"Be my guest."

Cameras were set up all around the giant transporter. They recorded every laborious inch and foot as the gigantic treads crept along. It typically took a full day to move a shuttle from the launch-assembly hangar to the pad. The media dutifully committed to tape every millisecond of the transfer.

Somewhere past midnight, after the launch director had gone home for the evening, the tireless cameras recorded the biggest disaster to strike NASA since the Challenger dropped into the Atlantic Ocean.

Floodlights bathed the gleaming white shuttle. The crawler crawled along the crawlerway with painful ponderousness, making a low mutter.

Without warning, night turned to day.

There came a white-hot flash, a thunderous baroom, and the space shuttle Reliant was instantly consumed, along with her wilting twin solid booster rockets. The big, empty external tank fed the blaze, its thin orange skin turned black in the instant before it collapsed utterly.

Shuttle, tank, boosters and transporter were fused into a single hot blob. Most of it melted down into molten metals arid sublimed rubber and other toxic fumes. Heat-resistant ceramic tiles rained down-literally rained. They came down as white-hot liquid precipitation that made smoking black teardrops on the ground.

The remote cameras were also consumed, so there was no footage.

Except for one still camera.

A National Enquirer photographer, denied admission to the facility on general principles, happened to be shooting from a vantage point in the marshes outside of NASA property.

He was taking shots of the Reliant silhouetted against the moonlit sky, clicking the shutter rapidly, not paying much attention, knowing that at least one good shot would emerge from the roll.

The image in the viewfinder was so small he missed seeing the important phenomenon in person. It was only after he developed the roll, looking for the "before" shot to go with the "after" image of the cataclysmic disaster he had captured, that the faintly glowing letters in the sky were discovered.

Because of what they spelled, all hell would break loose on both hemispheres.

Chapter 14

The President of the U.S. was awakened from a sound sleep by the urgent voice of his chief of staff.

"The new shuttle blew up, sir."

The President roused from the rosy haze of his dream life.

"Shuttle?"

"The Reliant. It went the same way as the BioBubble."

"Damn. Don't tell my wife. She'll find a way to blame me."

A stern kick to his ankle reminded the President of the U.S. that he happened to be in bed with his wife-contrary to his interrupted dream.

"Sorry. Didn't recognize the new hairdo," he muttered, throwing off the bed covers.

His chief of staff followed as the Chief Executive hurried from the room, tying a blue terry-cloth robe with the Presidential seal about his waist.

"You have to give a speech to reassure the nation," the chief of staff said anxiously.

"Have it written," the President snapped.

"We have to come up with a plausible explanation that won't trigger nationwide panic."

"I'll leave that up to you," the President said, stepping into the tiny White House elevator.

The chief of staff started to step aboard but a pudgy Presidential hand pushed him back.

"Meet me in the Oval Office. Ten minutes."

"Where are you going?"

"Upstairs."

"Oh."

The elevator took the President to the Lincoln Bedroom, where he got the tireless Smith on the line. Smith sounded sleepy for almost five seconds, then the lemonade started coming out in his voice.

"Smith, the space shuttle Reliant was just destroyed. It looks like whatever melted the BioBubble got it."

"I will look into it."

"I thought you were looking into it."

"I did. My people came up with nothing tangible. Although I am pursuing leads."

"How do I explain this to the American people? It looks like Martians are attacking the space program."

"The BioBubble was not part of the space program," Smith clarified.

"Try convincing the American public of that. With Dr. Pagan telling everyone space aliens are angry at us, they're sure not going to believe me. I don't have his credibility."

"Do your best. I will put my people on it."

The President lowered his voice, knowing the First Lady's office was just down the hall.

"Do you think someone is out to crush our space program?"

Smith cleared his throat. "The possibility cannot be excluded."

"The Russians, maybe. They're getting shirty again."

"Except for the Mir space station, their space program is in the doldrums."

"And they're on short rations up there ever since their shuttle failed to dock with Mir last month."

"Exactly. Russian involvement makes no sense. Should they have an emergency on Mir, their best rescue option rests with our shuttle fleet."

"Guess you're right. We can scratch the Russians off our short list."

"The French, the Chinese and the Japanese all have active commercial space programs and are trying to compete with NASA," Smith continued, "but I cannot conceive any of those nations targeting our space agency. The technology is beyond them."

"The Japanese have been pretty mad at us lately. I'm not even sure why."

Smith said nothing to that. He knew why. He had ordered Remo and Chiun to punish a certain Japanese conglomerate for acts of commercial sabotage the President knew nothing about. The Japanese understood America had been behind the dropping of a steam locomotive on Nishitsu headquarters in Osaka, but couldn't complain without exposing their own complicity in an attempt to destroy the U.S. rail system.

"I will be back to you, Mr. President," Smith said, terminating the conversation.

The President hung up, knotted his bathrobe and shuffled in his fuzzy slippers to the White House elevator. Just once he'd like a major crisis to come in the afternoon. He hated being pulled out of bed at these ungodly hours. If he didn't get his ten hours' sleep, he was out of sorts all day.

HAROLD W SMITH HAD excused himself from his marital bed, and was rewarded by a brief interruption in his wife's steady snoring before taking the briefcase containing his satellite uplink to the CURE telephone line. It was the only weak link in his direct line to the White House. When he wasn't at Folcroft, the call was forwarded through his computer system to the briefcase, which also contained his laptop connection with Folcroft.

Of course, the line was scrambled. But a conversation that was relayed from a ground station to an ordinary communications satellite and down again could be intercepted. Theoretically it could be unscrambled-if one had the correct technology and perhaps five years in which to untwist the conversation. By that time, the conversation would be moot, Smith assumed. Thus, he felt reasonably safe with this emergency-only link.

After he terminated the White House call, Smith hit the autodial button to Remo Williams's Massachusetts home. He was a gray man with gray eyes and hair, the complexion of weathered, unpainted wood and a matching personality. Even in his CIA days, more than thirty years ago, he was known as the Gray Ghost.

Smith waited patiently, knowing that the Master of Sinanju would ignore the ringing and Remo would, depending on his mood, also ignore it because Chiun was ignoring it, or possibly break the telephone and keep on sleeping.

It was an unlisted number. Neither man had anything remotely like a social life, but these days telephone salesmen were unafraid to call at the most ridiculous hours, and Remo had no patience for such interruptions.

Fifty rings later, Remo answered, clear as a bell but slightly peeved. "If you're selling something, I'm going to spoonfeed you the contents of your scrotum."

Smith cleared his voice. "It's me."

"Me who?"

"You know my voice," Smith said carefully, knowing this was an uplinked call.

"I know a lot of voices."

Smith decided to skip the game-playing. "The space shuttle Reliant was destroyed on its transporter midway between the launch-assembly building and the launch pad."

Remo's voice sobered instantly. "Anybody killed?"

"Unknown at this time. But no astronauts were aboard." Smith paused. "Remo, it was hit by a bolt from the night sky, turning it to slag."

"Damn. Somebody's trying to wreck the space program."

"The BioBubble wasn't part of the space program," Smith said testily.

"Maybe whoever's doing this doesn't know that."

"It is possible."

"Speaking of which," said Remo, "any luck on tracking down the mystery guy who funded the BioBubble?"

"No," Smith admitted. "I have combed Amos Bulla's personal and business telephone records, and accounted for all persons and calls. None trace back to a man named Ruber Mavors. "

"There's no such person. Not going by that name."

"I looked into the backgrounds of everyone in those records. None had the financial wherewithal to rescue the BioBubble project."

"Unless you believe in Latin-speaking Martians with a sense of humor, you're overlooking something," Remo said dryly.

"Remo, see what you can learn at the Kennedy Space Center."

"Won't the place be crawling with investigators?"

"Yes. But you saw the BioBubble aftermath. I want positive confirmation that these two events were the work of the same agency."

"That's all?"

"Perhaps you will stumble upon something."

"Should I leave Chiun behind?"

"Why would you do that?"

"Because he doesn't exactly blend in with a highsecurity investigation," Remo said dryly.

"Will he agree to remain behind?" Smith asked doubtfully.

"Sure. Why wouldn't he?"

"You know him better than I. Go in as a National Transportation Safety Board investigator."

"NTSB! Aren't they just airplane and train crashes?"

"Yes, but every other logical agency will be represented. Any other cover would put you in contact and conflict with legitimate representatives of other agencies."

"Gotcha. I'll call you from Florida."

The line went dead.

When Remo padded to Chiun's room at the other end of the L-shaped building, the Master of Sinanju was already rolling up his sleeping mat, attired in an avocado-trimmed ivory kimono.

"I am going with you," he squeaked.

Remo decided on the nonconfrontational approach. "It's not a good idea, Little Father."

"I will be the judge of that."

"It's going to be a zoo."

"Perhaps I will encounter some apes I have never before beheld," Chiun said aridly.

"Just give me one reason why you should go when you don't need or have to."

Chiun's hazel eyes flared in a brief twinkle that quickly died. "I have read that the Americans are taking Japanese into space now."

"Yeah, some Japanese astronaut went up on the shuttle to help salvage a Japanese satellite earlier this year. What's that got to do with anything?"

"If a Japanese can go into space, why can not a Korean?"

"It's not that simple. You have to be selected. Then you have to train for years."

"I have trained all my life."

"Not for outer space."

"Are there deadly assassins and killers in outer space?" Chiun demanded.

"Not that we've found so far," Remo admitted.

"I have slain the most-ferocious killers on this world. Why can I not visit the celestial realm, where death does not walk in human form?"

Remo thought fast. Chiun was looking up at him hopefully, and his bald head only came up to Remo's breastbone.

"Because you're too short," he said quickly.

"What!"

"It's true, Little Father. Cross my heart and hope to die in old age. Astronauts have to meet a height requirement."

"There is nothing wrong with my stature!" Chiun flared.

"You gotta wear a protective space suit, and they don't come in your size. I think you're at least two inches shy of regulation astronaut height."

Remo held his breath as Chiun studied his face for signs of insincerity.

"And I suppose you will be allowed to ascend the heavens, stilt-legged one?" Chiun asked at length.

"I'm not planning to go into orbit, Chiun. Honest."

"The Chinese promised that I would be the first Korean into space when I was last in China."

"They were trying to launch you into the Void, Chiun. You know that. They wanted you dead. They figured a fast ride on an ICBM would be the quickest way to get rid of you."

"The Chinese know I work for America now. As do the Russians. As do many of this nation's mortal enemies."

"Yeah. So what? They don't know about CURE or Smith or even me."

"If the nations of this world know this, it cannot be the nations of this world who are attacking the New Rome. Fear of Sinanju wrath would stay their treacherous hand. Therefore, it can only be the work of a nation from some other world."

"Let's leave the Martians out of this. Come on. Let's just go, if you're going."

"I am going," Chiun said firmly.

"No steamer trunks this time."

"I will not pack for the voyage into space until I have been formally invited," Chiun sniffed. "I have my pride."

"Good. I don't suppose you still have that threepiece suit from a few years back when you were on your last Western kick?"

"Will wearing such a garment increase my opportunities for travel beyond this world?"

"Can't hurt," said Remo.

"Then prepare the scarlet chariot. I will join you."

Grinning, Remo went downstairs to wake up the chariot.

It was Harold Smith's latest attempt to fulfill a contractual obligation Remo had insisted upon. He needed a vehicle that was equal to Boston traffic and capable of being sideswiped, rear-ended and otherwise abused by insane Boston drivers. And it had to be red.

The last chariot, an armored personnel carrier, had been APC-jacked. The replacement was a little more down-market, but Remo had decided it would do. After all, if the Humvee was good enough for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was good enough for Remo Williams.

The engine turned over without any trouble despite the subzero temperature.

The Master of Sinanju floated out of the condocastle a moment later, wearing a severe black threepiece suit that was ordinary in every way except the tailor had widened the sleeves so that they flapped like bell-bottom pant legs.

This sartorial compromise enabled the Master of Sinanju to conceal his hands in his sleeves, hiding the shame of his maimed fingernail from an uncaring world.

Chiun took the passenger seat, and Remo backed out, the Humvee engine surging powerfully.

It was night and the Southeast Expressway was all but deserted. They took the new Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan International Airport, parked and grabbed the first flight to Orlando, Florida. Which turned out to be the last flight of the night.

It wasn't empty, but the stewardesses outnumbered the passengers by half. Remo, realizing they would probably fill the idle flying hours by trying to sit on his lap all at once, told the Master of Sinanju, "Tell them I'm in a coma."

"You are not."

"I didn't say I was. Just fib for me."

"I will tell my own lies, not yours," Chiun snapped.

"Just so long as I get to sleep the flight away, undisturbed," said Remo, slapping a pillow behind his head and nodding off without further ado.

The first stewardess to check on their aisle after the 747 vaulted into the night sky was told, "Do not bother. He is gay."

"He does look kinda gay."

"He is very gay."

"Damn."

The second stewardess came up and said, "When he wakes up, will you let me know?"

"Why?" asked Chiun.

"Because I have a thing for gay guys."

"He is also VIP positive."

"He's famous?"

"He is diseased."

"Double rubbers. They work for me. Tell him, okay?"

"Of course."

The third stewardess came up, took one look at Remo and lamented, "Why are all the good ones married or gay?"

"Because they cannot be both," replied the Master of Sinanju.

The braking of the wheels touching tarmac triggered Remo's waking reflexes, and he looked out the window at the blue runway lights speeding by.

"We're there?" he asked Chiun.

"Yes."

"Any problem with the stewardesses?"

"I told the first that you were very happy, the second that you were a VIP and not to be disturbed under any circumstances, and the third expressed regret that you were married."

"You told her that I was married?"

"No, it was her idea," said Chiun blandly. "I merely did not contradict her mistaken impression."

"Nice going, Little Father. I owe you one."

"And I will collect in a time and place of my own choosing."

As they left the plane, the flight attendants said their goodbyes, insisting on shaking Remo's hands warmly, and Remo accepted because they had been good enough to leave him alone.

Once in the terminal, he opened his fist to check the folded papers they had surreptitiously slipped him, thinking they were the usual hastily scribbled phone numbers.

"Why did all three give me AIDS-prevention pamphlets?" Remo wondered aloud, tossing them into the nearest trash can.

"Perhaps they recognize you for the promiscuous rake that you are."

"I'm the reverse of promiscuous."

"If you fall into the foul habit of dating women, promiscuity will be your epitaph."

"You sure you didn't put them up to this?"

"Lust kills," sniffed Chiun. "Remember this as you sow your wild goats."

"It's 'wild oats.' And stop trying to get my goat."

"Do not complain to me if your voracious goat consumes all of your wild oats and you have none left when you are my age."

Chapter 15

Sometimes Radomir Eduardovitch Rushenko forgot himself. It was very easy to forget. Just as it was very difficult to fully lose the old Red ways.

Rushenko parked his dull black Volga automobile within sight of Iz Tsvetoka's modest tailor shop on Tverskaya Street, not far from the hideous yellow double arches of the most popular McDonald's restaurant in the heart of gray Moscow. It was very gray now, with the heavily overcast skies like lead and the freshening smell of snow coming out of Siberia.

The bell over the door tinkled as Rushenko stepped down from the sidewalk to the sunken establishment.

The balding, fuzzy-haired tailor did not look up from pressing a pair of trousers until Rushenko said, "Good morning, tovaritch."

"I am not your comrade," the tailor said harshly.

"Excuse me. I meant, good morning, sudar. "

The tailor nodded, satisfied.

Rushenko laid his suit on the counter and said, "It requires special attention."

The tailor gestured to the fitting room. Rushenko stepped inside, drew closed the red curtain and, just as the surly tailor made his pants presser spurt steam, Rushenko gave a coat hook a certain twist.

The rear panel of the fitting room pivoted on a middle hinge, and Rushenko quickly stepped back. The panel finished its revolution, and it was as if he had stepped off the face of the earth instead of entering the bowels of the most secret security organization in Russian history.

There had been at one time the Czarist secret police. Then the Cheka. Then VCheka. After that OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MVD and KGB. Now there was the FSK, a toothless organization good for nothing more than wardening the old KGB files and taking horrific casualties in Chechnya.

The best and brightest of the old KGB, having no stomach for detente, perestroika, glasnost and the cold consequences of these failed policies, had banded together to form a clandestine ministry that was responsible to no one in the sickeningly democratized Kremlin. Until the red-letter day Soviet rule would be restored, they would operate in secret, overseeing, manipulating and protecting Mother Russia from its deadliest enemies-which in these days was itself, and its drunken, incompetent leaders.

His footsteps echoing down the corridor, Rushenko came to a blank nickel-steel door. There was no name on the door. To place a name there would be to give a name to the ministry that had no official existence.

In the beginning, it had been called Shchit-Shield-a name suggested by the sword-and-shield emblem of the old KGB. It was completely paperless, having no files or public phone number. But after a while, it became clear even a name was a security risk. So a formal name was dispensed with. A ministry that enjoyed no official sanction should not enjoy a name, reasoned the architect of Shield, Colonel Rushenko.

The headquarters of the ministry changed from time to time. At first it was a Moscow prison. Later it masqueraded as a publishing company specializing in Russian-language sequels to Gone with the Wind.

The current incarnation had been the brainchild of Rushenko, because it enabled his people to keep an eye on the American FBI, which in this most insane of eras had itself established a branch office in the very same part of Moscow.

Rushenko stood before an ivory panel, his firm mouth addressing a copper microphone grille. A laser lens emitted a steady crimson glow at eye level.

A voice crackled, "Identify."

"Radomir Eduardovitch. Colonel."

"Place your fingertips to the five lighted spots."

Touching a fan of five points of light that appeared beneath the laser eye, Rushenko allowed the optical reader to scan his fingerprints. He was then asked to peer into the red laser lens.

The laser-harmless unless his fingerprints were not found on file-scanned the unique vein pattern in his retina, and only then did the door hum open. The alternative was a smoking hole bored from brow to the back of his skull.

Inside was a reception area done in old-style socialist heroic decor, with a honey blond woman in a simple maroon skirt and red turtleneck jersey seated at a massive desk. It was a different blond woman each month. A different heroine of the Motherland who would willingly drink poison in the event of unauthorized penetration so that the secrets of Shield would go to the grave with her.

"You are expected, tovaritch."

And Rushenko smiled to hear the old form of address again.

"Thank you, comrade."

Nowadays people were sudar-"sir"-or gospo-din-"Mr." It sounded too elitist for Rushenko and his socialist ears for he had been educated under the old system. Only here in the labyrinth of Shield was it acceptable to address others as "comrade."

In a red-walled conference room without windows but illuminated by high-intensity floor lamps to defeat the depressive psychological effects lack of sunlight caused, Rushenko met with the other section chiefs of Shield. They only convened in case of crisis or intelligence and policy discussion. It was safer that way. All wore the insignialess black uniforms of the defunct Red Army, as did Colonel Rushenko, revealed when he removed his greatcoat and astrakhan hat.

"There has been an event in the United States," he was told by a man whose name he didn't know, a former KGB operative like himself.

"Interesting," said Colonel Rushenko.

"An installation called the BioBubble was destroyed utterly by a power of unknown destructiveness."

"A bomb?"

"We think not. We think a ray."

"A laser?"

"No laser is this powerful. To do this, the laser beam would have to possess a circumference of three acres."

Glances of unease passed among stone-faced men. For security reasons, no one knew the identity of his comrades. The people's hero who had recruited them had taken his life once his task was accomplished to ensure their anonymity.

"Star Wars?"

Rushenko shook his head. "Such a laser in orbit would be so large as to reveal itself. It is not a new weapon of the supposedly cancelled US. Strategic Defense Initiative."

"Could it be ours?" a shaggy-haired man with suspicious Georgian eyes asked.

"Zhirinovsky talks of the Elipticon," an Estonian remarked.

Colonel Rushenko shook his heavy Kazakh face. "Zhirinovsky talks of foolishness. But he is useful to us."

"Colonel Rushenko, I have in my possession a file copied from the old KGB archives. It speaks of a weapon such as this."

"I am listening."

"It is a very dangerous weapon. If deployed, it could render our nuclear deterrent obsolete."

Colonel Rushenko frowned darkly. "Our nuclear deterrent is all but obsolete. Half the missiles are inoperative or under repair. We no longer test, so there is no way to know if they will launch or detonate on impact. For all we know, the current leadership has its collective finger on the trigger of a water pistol."

"You mistake my meaning, comrade. This weapon could make the surviving good missiles useless hulks resting in their silos and launchers like so many loaves of bread in so many paper sacks."

"How?"

"We have only a flimsy grasp of the event, but if the Americans are experimenting with this device, we will stand naked beneath it."

"We have assets in the Evil Empire?"

"Yes. Kinga the Bitch."

Rushenko shuddered. "A true nutcracker, that one."

"Let us send her into the field. Perhaps she will learn something useful."

"And if she is caught?"

"She has been hypnotized to give up under interrogation the name of an FSK control she once dallied with and who left her. Let the FSK take the blame."

Colonel Rushenko nodded. "Then I will see that it's done."

With that, the meeting was adjourned, and Rushenko was left with a computer linked to a Chinese-red telephone that, thanks to a friendly telephone lineman, ran through the FSK switchboard and thus accessed the superior government Vertushka phone system.

It took three hours to obtain a modem connection with the international Internet. It was another embarrassing proof of how much Russian technology had deteriorated since the old regime was overthrown.

In the glory days of the USSR, it would never have taken more than two.

Chapter 16

When Dr. Cosmo Pagan heard that the U.S. space shuttle had been melted down en route to the launch pad, he was trying to find Mars through the twenty-four-inch antique refractor at Lowell Observatory outside Flagstaff.

As observatories went, it wasn't much-a white, wood-frame Victorian structure perched on a promontory. In the cloudless dry Arizona air, it was a perfect spot to observe the Red Planet.

Here, Percival Lowell had mapped out the canals that later astronomers sought in vain. But Lowell had seen them, and before he died, Cosmo Pagan wanted to see them, too.

Mars wasn't being cooperative. Unable to sight it by fiddling with the right ascension and declination, Pagan swung the blue telescope tube by hand and peered through the brass-bound sighter.

Finally he got a fix.

There it was, the Red Planet, just as Lowell had described it in his notebooks over a century ago. Lowell saw a dying planet kept alive by a planetwide network of irrigation canals. His findings had fired the imaginations of H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other great chroniclers of the Mars that had in turn ignited Pagan's youthful dreams.

Regrettably the Mars of canals and princesses and four-armed, green-skinned giants had evaporated with the Viking and Mariner probes and subsequent discoveries.

It was too bad. Even at his mature age, Dr. Pagan would rather green Martians than red deserts. After all, there were red deserts on earth, too. Here in Arizona. And in Mongolia, where the Red Gobi had an uncannily distinct Martian feel to it-not that Dr. Pagan had ever been to the Red Gobi. There were no news cameras in the Red Gobi. He never went anywhere where there wasn't the possibility of face timeor at least good black ink.

Though discredited, Lowell hadn't toiled in vain, Cosmo thought. If not for him, there would have been no "War of the Worlds" or Warlord of Mars to set Cosmo Pagan on the road to his red destiny. By that reasoning, Percival Lowell had not lived in vain.

And it was Cosmo Pagan's deepest wish to one night see the phenomenon that had caused a great astronomer to believe he saw Martian canals.

His cellular phone shrilled as he was drinking in the sight of Mars, and without taking his eyes from the eyepiece, he flipped it open and began speaking.

"Dr. Cosmo Pagan, world-renowned authority on the universe and everything under the heavens."

"Dr. Pagan, this is the Associated Press."

"Would you like a quote?"

"Exactly."

"The universe is transcendent in its awesome greatness. An ocean of stars in a whirling cosmic whirlpool whirling about, oblivious to the paltry human concerns of us mere molecular bio-machines."

"That's great, but I was looking for a specific quote."

"Right now I am looking at the Red Planet, Marsseat of war, according to the ancient Romans. But to me it is a place of peace and scarlet tranquillity. Some day man will set foot on Mars, but for all its grandeur it is but the steppingstone to the greater, grander cosmos."

The AP man cleared his throat and tried again. "Dr. Pagan, do you think Martians are behind the shuttle meltdown tonight?"

"I wish..." he breathed. Then, catching himself, he blurted, "Meltdown? What shuttle?"

"The Reliant was turned to molten metal not twenty minutes ago."

"Wonderful," Pagan breathed.

"What?"

"Mars. It seems to be looking back at me. The north polar icecap looks like the cool wink of a painted concubine. No canals, though. Lowell saw canals. I'd love to see the canals he saw, even if that turned out to be just lichen patterns."

"So you think the Martians theory has credence?"

"I think," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan, "the universe loves me."

"Say again?"

"Every time I have a lull in my lecture itinerary or I'm between specials, the universe conjures up an event to perpetuate my name."

The AP man grew tense of voice. "Dr. Pagan, I'd like a comment on the shuttle disaster."

"I regret the loss of our brave astronauts' lives."

"No astronauts died. It was a prelaunch accident."

"Then perhaps it was for the best."

"Sir?"

"Do you know how much vile carcinogens one of those thundering monsters puts out? The noise pollution alone is enough to deafen the manatees in the Straits of Florida. Migratory birds are driven away from their natural flight paths. And that doesn't even take into account the damage to the ozone layer. Do you know that at the rate we're depleting the biomass, our polar icecaps are going to start melting, raising the ocean level everywhere? Spaceship Earth could go the way of dead Mars. For all we know, we earthlings are repeating history. Martian history."

"I thought you were pro-space flight, Dr. Pagan."

"I am pro-peaceful exploration of space. One missile. One probe. The shuttles require a main external fuel tank and two boosters. That's three times the noise, three times the pollution and for what? We're only filling the near heavens with junk that falls to earth and might hit somebody. They go 125 miles up. Hell, Chris Columbus went farther than that in a wooden sailing ship. The human tribe needs to look beyond our Earth-moon ghetto to Mars, then the better neighborhood of the Jovian planets, and ultimately Alpha Centauri and beyond. That's using space to our advantage."

"One last question."

"Go ahead."

"Do you think the shuttle was destroyed by the same power that melted the BioBubble, and if so, why?"

"Perhaps," Dr. Pagan said thoughtfully, "it has something to do with our thinning ozone layer. The way those shuttles tear through the ozone shield, it's a miracle we all don't have basal-cell scalp sarcoma."

"Thanks, Dr. Pagan. That's just what I needed."

"I'll send you a bill," Dr. Cosmo Pagan said smoothly. Hanging up, he exulted, "The universe loves me. It truly, truly does." Taking a last, wistful peek into the eyepiece, he sighed. "But I have eyes for only you, my scarlet hussy."

IN CELEBRATION, FLORIDA, an always-running Compaq computer beeped twice, signaling an incoming e-mail message.

Kinga Zongar heard it even in the early sleep of the sultry Florida night with the cold moonlight coming through her bedroom screens like cool fingers of silver and steel.

Throwing off a scarlet satin cover, she strode nude to the system, whose color monitor splashed varicolored light against the sitting-room walls. Her long russet hair, brushed back from her high brow, fell back in a ponytail that swished with her every step.

Accessing her e-mail file, she read the message in the Cyrillic language:

To: AuntTamara@aol.com From: UncleVanya@shield.su.min Subject: Assignment Greetings from the Motherland. Consider yourself activated this date. Go now to Cape Canaveral, where an unknown force has reduced an American space shuttle to worthless, bubbling materials. This appears to be the same phenomenon which, as you may have read, similarly destroyed the BioBubble. Learn what you can. Report everything.

Kinga erased the message from her system. She didn't know who Uncle Vanya was, other than the commissar of Shield-or whatever they were calling it this year. Neither mattered. Only her sacred duty to the Motherland.

She dressed with brisk care, a demure maroon dress that bespoke casual professionalism. A notebook and press card completed her cover ensemble.

It was amazing, Kinga thought as she claimed her blood-red Maxima GTE and sent it spinning out into the evening, how America allowed just anyone to obtain journalist credentials. Were journalists not de facto spies without portfolio? Yet this was how it was done in America.

And since this was how it was done, this was how Kinga Zongar would do it.

If it became necessary to resort to "wet measures," well, there were other slots in other newspapers for an expatriate Hungarian reporter, if Kinga the Bitch was forced to revert to type.

Secretly she hoped it would come to that. It had been a long time since she had killed a man in the line of duty.

Far too long, she thought, licking her very scarlet lips.

Chapter 17

Getting past the gate to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral was the easy part.

The area was a crush of reporters doing stand-ups, supported by white satellite trucks and floodlights.

Behind the gate, an eerie whitish exhalation arose from the spot where the shuttle Reliant had melted down like an ice-cream cone under withering sunlight.

Remo and Chiun moved through the media throng as if they were two molecules slipping through a placer miner's pan.

At the gate, there were two white-faced Air Force guards at a guard box.

Remo presented himself and his ID. "Remo Cupper, NTSB. This is my assistant, Chiun."

Chiun started to bow, then remembering his Western garments, nodded instead.

"NTSB? What are you guys doing here?"

"It was a transportation accident, right?" said Remo.

"Technically."

"Nobody can say NTSB isn't on the job, no matter where the trouble is," explained Remo.

The two airmen exchanged dubious glances.

"Let me kick this upstairs," said one. "Our orders are firm-keep all non-NASA personnel out."

"Can't let you do that," said Remo, taking the telephone from his hand.

The man stared at his empty hand as if doubting the evidence of his own eyes. His hand was still in clutch mode. It held only air and the vague memory of plastic contours. Yet he had gripped the handset tightly. He was sure it would be impossible to remove the handset without disturbing his grip. But there it was.

The second airman sputtered, "What do you mean by this?"

"It's not an investigation if the brass has a chance to cover this up," explained Remo.

"Nobody's covering up anything. It's all over the-"

"Just open the gate," said Remo, handing the phone to Chiun, who broke it in two and returned the pieces to the airman who was still trying to figure out the physics of Remo's telephone trick.