The Color of Fear

"In other words, it self-destructed?"

"Now that you put it that way, yeah. Sure."

Chiun's thin voice added, "You forgot about the man in the pit, Remo. Tell Emperor Smith about him."

"Oh, right," said Remo. "Before the bomb melted. We found a Union guy in the pit. He wasn't like the others, who were scared. He was kinda down."

"Down? Do you mean depressed?"

"Yeah, and he claimed after the yellow light exploded in his face, everything turned blue. That part doesn't make much sense, I know."

"Actually it does," said Smith.

"It does?"

"Yes, it was a phenomenon of color where if one stares at a certain color for a long time, then looks away, he will see the complementary color as an afterimage in his retina."

"Blue complements yellow?"

"I believe it does," said Smith, saving his US. map file and bringing up another file.

"Then I guess red insults green, huh?" Remo chuckled.

"Describe this yellow light," Smith said without humor.

"It was very very bright. But we didn't look directly into it."

"But you say it frightened those who did?"

"Scared the living beans out of them," said Remo.

"Now, this pink light. Describe it."

"Pink. Nice. Pleasant."

"Bright pink?"

"Happy pink," said Remo.

"Very happy pink," said Chiun.

"The happiest," added Remo in a happy voice.

"But it was intense?" Smith prompted.

"I wouldn't call it hot pink, although it sure wasn't cool."

"Where did the pink light come from?"

"The mouse's ears. Didn't I mention that?"

"What mouse's ears?"

"You know how a hot-air balloon supports a wicker basket?"

"Yes."

"The cars were fixed to the baskets. Fours sides, four ears. When the balloons showed up, they started to glow."

"The basket or the ears?" asked Smith.

"The ears. Then everything turned pink."

"And nice," added Chiun.

"I see," said Smith. After a pause he asked, "Was there anything else unusual?"

"Except for the mini-Civil War?"

"Yes, except for that."

"I don't think so."

"Tell Smith about the French woman," prompted Chiun.

"Oh, yeah. There was the French woman."

"Yes, you mentioned her before."

"After the press trucks charged in, she showed up again, trying to figure out what was going on."

"Did she?"

"She was talking into a cellular phone or something. What was it she told the party on the other end, Little Father?"

" 'La charade se perpetre-' "

"No, I mean in English."

" 'This charade is perpetrated by bright colored lights. Bright colored lights are the key.'"

"You hear that, Smith? She said bright colored lights are the key."

"Did you detain or question her?"

"No. Why?"

"Because she obviously knew something about the phenomenon at work on the battlefield!" Smith said testily.

There was a pause on the line.

"Smitty," Remo said in an abashed voice. "No need to shout, you know."

"Sorry," said Smith, making a fist of frustration with his free hand. "Go on."

"That was it. She took off."

"And Mickey Weisinger?"

"Carried off on the shoulders of a unified and grateful nation," Remo said happily. "Don't you love a happy ending?"

"This has just begun," Smith said bitterly.

"What do you mean?"

"Whatever phenomenon affected those men on the battlefield obviously also affected Chiun and yourself."

"Nothing affected us," Remo retorted. "In fact, we feel great."

"You were supposed to stop the fighting."

"Someone beat us to it."

"And seize a Beasley executive and interrogate him about the whereabouts of Uncle Sam Beasley."

The distant sound of snapping fingers came over the wire. "Oh, right," said Remo. "Damn. We forgot."

"We will not forget again, Emperor," Chiun called out.

"Scout's honor," said Remo, a trace of worry in his voice.

"Can you find that woman again?" Smith asked.

"Maybe."

"Learn what she knows. Clearly she is not a newswoman."

"What makes you say that?"

"A hunch."

"You don't have hunches. They require imagination."

"I do this time," Harold Smith said grimly. "Report when you have something."

Harold Smith hung up and turned his attention to his desk terminal. His fingers floated across the keyless keyboard, the letters flashing silently with each stroke of his age-gnarled fingers.

The first reports of cessation of hostilities at Petersburg National Battlefield were coming across the wire. Smith tapped out the command that converted his terminal to color-TV reception.

A network news anchor was looking abashed.

"We still have no confirmation of what has taken place this Memorial Day in Petersburg, Virginia," he said as a graphic titled Civil War II? floated beside his head. He tapped his earphone. "What's that? We have national correspondent David O'Dull on the line. Go ahead, Dave."

"Peter," a chirpy voice said, "we are having just a swell time here in historic Virginia on this glorious holiday afternoon."

"That's wonderful, but tell us about these reports of a major battle."

"All done," Dave chirp.

"What exactly do you mean by 'all done'?"

"It's a wrap. The Beasley people dropped by, made nice and everything's hunky-dory again."

"Dave, you'll excuse me, but we're not getting many facts from you. Are you all right?"

"Wait a sec. They're breaking out the camp coffee and flap-doodle, and newspeople are invited. Hey, call you back. Ciao. "

"Dave? Dave!"

Watching the network anchor grind his teeth in frustration before millions of Americans, Harold W. Smith muttered to himself, "The force has affected the electronic press, as well. But what is it?"

Harold Smith had not long to puzzle over the matter because a red light flashed in one corner of his screen, indicating that the Folcroft basement mainframes, which continually trolled the net in search of mission-related data or news events, had captured something of importance.

Smith tapped a hot-key. And on-screen appeared a capsulized digest of a story just moving on the wire.

BULLETIN REUTERS PARIS, FRANCE. FRENCH AIR ARMY WARPLANES OPERATING OUT OF TAVERNY AIR BASE FLEW SORTIES AGAINST EURO BEASLEY THEME PARK. PARK SUSTAINED SEVERE DAMAGE. ALL PLANES AND PIL0TS RETURNED SAFELY TO BASE.

"Oh, my God," croaked Harold W Smith from his Spartan office overlooking Long Island Sound. "What does it all mean?" It meant that the Second American Civil War was over, and the Franco-American Conflict of 1995 had just begun.

Chapter 13

History duly recorded the Second American Civil War and the Franco-American Conflict of 1995 as two entirely separate and unrelated conflicts.

History was wrong. The Second American Civil War ended at exactly 12:22 Eastern Daylight Time, while the opening engagement of the FrancoAmerican Conflict was logged at precisely 5:47 Greenwich Mean Time, less than thirty minutes later.

Because they were to be forever believed separate and unrelated conflicts, historians never suspected that a satellite phone call placed from Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia triggered the bombing of Euro Beasley.

The call was placed by a secret agent code-named Arlequin to her case officer at the Paris HQ of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, on Boulevard Mortier.

The station chief brought the cryptic report to the head of the DGSE, France's primary espionage service.

" 'Bright colored lights are the key,'" repeated Remy Renard, director of the DGSE.

"That is what the agent said."

"You have no other report?"

"None."

"Thank you, you are excused," said Renard.

After the case officer left, Renard steepled his long fingers and frowned deeply. Here was a conundrum. A possibly important fragment of intelligence had come across his desk, and he had two immediate choices: file and forget it or communicate this data to a higher authority.

After a moment's thought his duty appeared with a crystaline clarity. He would not file it. But even that simple choice led inevitably to another conundrum: to which higher authority did he report?

It was the director of the DGSE's duty to report directly to the president of France on matters of national security.

The question stood before him like an uninvited visitor. Was this mere national security or did it impact upon a greater concern? Namely the honor of France herself?

It was difficult, this conundrum, and so DGSE Director Remy Renard leaned back in his seat, closed his deceptively sleepy-looking eyes and meditated at length.

During that quiet meditation the minutes ticked by, and with it dissolved the immediate historical linkage between the new American Civil War and the Franco-American Conflict of 1995.

Finally he reached for his telephone.

WHEN HIS TELEPHONE RANG, French Minister of Culture Maurice Tourette answered it personally. He always answered his telephone personally. It was the culture minister's wish to receive all communications from his beloved citizens directly and free from interpretation. For the minister of culture fervently believed that the citizens of France were his citizens.

In other nations the title "minister of culture" was a bland euphemism for espionage chief or a mere honorific. Not in France. And least not after Maurice Tourette acquired the singular honor.

He saw his mission in life to purify France, much as Joan of Arc had in an earlier time with her unflinching sacrifice.

To Maurice Tourette the worst calamity in the proud history of his country was the liberation from Germany. Not for a moment did Maurice consider the German occupation a good thing. No. It had been a travesty. But the Germans in time would have withered and gone home to their heavy beers and their unpalatable bratwursts, and knockwursts and sauerbraten. It would have been possible to wait them out. And when they finally left, they would have been gone for good.

The liberators, on the other hand, had left their many stains on the proud soil they had supposedly liberated.

Maurice Tourette had grown up in post-liberation Paris and watched, helpless and impotent, over the decades as the foul and corruptive gangrene of Americanism crept across his beloved city of lights.

First it was the Ford cars, then the McDonald's hamburger kiosks with their hideous golden arches. American movies with their shallow emptiness of spirit began crowding Clavie and Depardieu and the treasure of France, Deneuve, from the cinemas. While Parisians laughed at the brilliant crudities of Jerry Lewis-as they should-they had let down their defenses and had embraced such ugly coinages as le marketing, le cash flow and that impossible neologism, le cheeseburger.

By the time the threat had made itself manifest, and Pompidou had created the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of the French Language, the language had been swamped and the tide was all but irreversible.

And so it seemed when Maurice Tourette had taken over the culture ministry.

In his first public speech as culture minister, he vowed to rid France of junk-junk food and junk words. He went after the fast-food emporiums first, and succeeded in getting most of them closed down.

It was hailed as a magnificent triumph of French culture over Anglo-Saxon barbarism.

For Maurice Tourette saw the spread of American popular culture as nothing less than a dangerous hegemony that, unlike Nazism, would envelop the world and France in a cultural dark age from which it might never emerge.

After that first triumph, Maurice went after the advertising billboards that littered the Champs-Elysees with crude slogans such as Always Coca-Cola and Just Do It and the worst offender, Ford Vous Offre L'Airbag.

He coined a name for the horrid words that mangled French articles with Anglo-Saxon nouns. This, he told the press, was the abominination of abominations, Franglais. He drew up a list and called for such words to be outlawed.

A bill was put before parliament. It passed after much rancorous debate. Henceforth, foreign words were forbidden on television, radio, billboards, public signs and announcements. No work contract or advertisement could be written in anything but pure French, or the offender faced severe fines and six months in jail.

Oh, the multinational companies fought back, but their cause was already lost. Maurice Tourette himself composed a long list of acceptable alternatives to the hated Franglais. No more l'airbag or le video clip or the unpronounceable data processing. Instead, the linguistically acceptable sac gonfable, bande promo, and informantique were the law of the land.

Maurice Tourette felt justifiably proud of what Parisians called La Loi Tourette. He had begun the long battle to reclaim his nation from the hated liberators. It was only a matter of time before all who wished to enjoy the benefits of living in la Belle France learned to speak the lingua franca-or be summarily deported.

When his desk telephone in the culture ministry rang, Maurice Tourette picked it up and said, 'Allo?"

"I have most distressing news."

"I am steeled."

"The Blot. We may have an understanding of it."

"Tell me of this understanding," the culture minister invited.

"We have an agent in Ameri-"

The culture minister pinched the bridge of his nose painfully. "Do not enunciate that horrid name, please."

"The Uncouth Nation, I should say."

"Very good. Proceed."

"The agent code-named Arlequin."

"Ah, yes. An excellent lover. You have had her, I presume?"

"I daresay I have not."

"Pity. Go on."

"She reported the following-'The charade is perpetrated with bright colored lights.'"

"Bright colored lights?"

" 'Bright colored lights are the key,' was her last transmission. Then all communications ceased."

"Was she compromised?"

"In what way?"

"Why, in any way."

"I do not know."

"Advise me if you learn her fate, will you? I should hate to think that her charms should be denied us in the future."

"Of course. Now, as to this other matter."

"Ah, yes. 'Bright colored lights are the key.' What can that mean?"

"You are, of course, aware of our difficulty penetrating the Blot?"

"Pah! It is just a matter of time."

"Agents go in. They come out. They report nothing. Nothing."

"Brainwashing?"

"I do not think so. They show no evidences of such cunning tamperings, but it is as if once they come under the sway of those cultural interlopers, their powers of resistance and duty are abolished. They speak highly of the experience."

"Just as my poor people are drawn into their colorful web."

"Yes. It is very chilling."

"Have you told anyone else of this?"

"No."

"Not even the president?"

"Should I?"

"I think not. He has shown great reluctance to act on this matter, despite the increasing and undeniable gravity of the threat."

"What can we do?"

"You, you may go back to your duties, all the while keeping me closely informed, while I shall make some discreet calls."

"To whom?"

"To those who share with me a higher sense of duty to La Belle France," said French Culture Minister Maurice Tourette, quietly replacing the receiver.

He next dialed the general of the French Air Army, doing so personally. There must be no record of this call.

"Mon General, " he said after getting through to the private, unlisted number.

"Oui, Monsieur Ministere?"

"The secret of the stain on the honor and dignity of your mother nation is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing hour."

"Oui?"

"I cannot now divulge this, but a brave military man, one who can envision himself as the next de Gaulle, could advance his career most wonderfully were he only to made a bold stab."

"How bold?"

"One so bold it might ripple across a certain ocean and lap at the clay feet of a certain ally of doubtful standing."

"I see...."

"The Blot must be pacified and its secrets wrested from within."

"And after that?"

"After that," said the French minister of culture carefully, "who can say? Poof! It might be bombed flat, salt sown into the very soil it once despoiled so that no trace of it passes into the next century."

"I cannot say what I may or may not do, Monsieur Ministere. "

"Nor would I expect you to."

"But if action is to be taken, it will be taken imminently."

The culture minister smiled broadly. "I knew you loved France above all things."

The minister of culture hung up the telephone and turned on the radio. He would pass the tense time to come listening to beautiful music and, if an important bulletin should break, he would be among the first to hear of it.

To his regret all the stations were playing either rock, heavy metal or that abominable cacophony known as rap. The minister of culture endured the unendurable for the sake of his higher duty, reflecting that if he had only known that rap lay around the cultural corner, he would never have moved so ruthlessly to suppress disco.

AT 5:57 PARIS TIME a squadron of six French Mirage 2000Ds rocketed out of Tavemy Air Base and dropped BGL laser-guided bombs onto the tiny village called Euro Beasley in the Averoigne suburb of the city.

The bombs, contrary to first reports, packed not high explosives, but a combination of dense black smoke and pepper gas.

As the first stinging clouds broke and wafted across the blue-and-cream towers of the Sorcerer's Chateau, Euro Beasley patrons, greeters and employees alike broke for the exits.

True, some were trampled to death in the ensuing confusion, so it was not an altogether bloodless engagement. But in less than an hour Fortress Euro Beasley lay naked before any who wished to enter it.

The trouble was finding someone with sufficient personal courage and the political will to do so.

THE PRESIDENT OF FRANCE was considering the problem in America when an aide entered his office unannounced. He did not look up. This was a difficult matter. America had hiccuped. According to the quarter-hourly reports coming across his desk, it was either a highly localized insurrection or the United States of America was poised on the brink of civil war.

If it was a hiccup, it didn't matter. Americans hiccuped several times a year. They were that way. Undoubtedly it was a consequence of their lackluster diet.

But if it was civil war, the president of France would be obliged to choose sides. Perhaps not immediately, and certainly not until a clear victor emerged, or if not a victor, he would wait until an undeniable political opportunity became visible, making either choice advantageous.

In the previous American Civil War-which seemed very recent in France's long history but was only halfway through the lifespan of the United States to date-France had sided with the Confederacy. It was not a good choice, but France had not suffered for it. America was a political nonentity in those lamented days. Unlike today.

Thus, it was politic not to choose a side until at least the second or possibly as late as the third year of the Civil War.

The immediate problem was how to remain neutral during that brief interval. After all, Washington would expect immediate support. The utter infants. But what did one expect from a nation that had occupied a distant corner of the planet for less than five hundred years? They had such growing up to do.

Frowning, the president of France picked up a solid gold Mont Blanc pen and began composing a neutral statement to be issued later in the day. It was very bland. One could read it any way one chose. This was very important, for French attitudes toward the United States were at a crossroads.

On the one hand there was the usual anti-American condescension and distaste always fashionable among the literate elite.

On the other hand the younger generation and even some of the old, their memories of France's liberation from Nazi occupation reawakened by the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the Normandy invasion a year previous, had developed a renewed, if politically challenging, appreciation of certain things American.

The president of France was scribbling a sentence suggesting a youthful and untested country like the United States of America was bound to experience growing pains when the patient aide standing before his desk cleared his throat.

The president looked up. "Yes? What is it?"

"It appears the insurrection in America has been quelled."

The president of France quirked a salt-and-pepper eyebrow to the vaulted ceiling. "How severe were the casualties?" he asked, crumpling his three-sentence draft speech into a ball and tossing it into a waiting wastepaper basket.

"Light."

"Did the Army put it down?"

"Non, Monsieur President."

"Local police units, then? I understood they were neutral."

"Non, Monsieur President."

"Then who? Quickly, speak!"

"The Sam Beasley Company."

The president of France blinked in a kind of stunned stupefaction. "The Sam Beasley Company?"

"They descended from the sky in balloons, and the fighting ceased."

"Were they not the instigators?"

"That is the suspicion of the DGSE."

"How curious," said the president of France. "Then it is over?"

"It is most definitely over."

The president of France sighed. "Perhaps it is just as well. The long-term positive aspects might not outweigh the short-term political embarrassment of remaining neutral while they fought it out among themselves. And we may need their industrial might should the Germans become territorial again!'

"Do you wish to make an official statement?"

"I wish to take a nap."

"Oui, Monsieur President, " said the aide, withdrawing discreetly.

The president of France did not take a nap, however. He had barely thirty minutes to digest the lost opportunity of an American Civil War when the same aide who had so quietly entered now reentered with his face like a cooked beet and his eyes resembling cool Concord grapes.

"Monsieur President! Monsieur President!"

"Calm down! What is it?"

"Euro Beasley. It has been bombed!"

"Bombed? Bombed by whom?"

"Early reports have it air-army Mirages bombed it."

The president of France came out of his leather chair as if hoisted by unseen guy wires.

"On what authority?"

"This is not known."

"Get me the general of the air army! At once!"

But no one could reach the general.

"What is happening?" the president demanded of anybody who proved reachable by telephone. "How severe are the casualties? Are any of our people dead or injured?"

"All pilots returned safely," he was told.

"No! I mean our French citizens on the ground."

But no one had that answer. The event was barely ten minutes old.

Then came the call from Minister of Culture Maurice Tourette.

"Monsieur President, a wonderful opportunity has fallen in our hands."

"Are you mad! We have bombed an American theme park."

"We have bombed French soil. It is our sacred right to bomb French soil."

"We have bombed a symbol of American culture residing on French soil," the president shouted.

"Is this such a bad thing?"

The president swallowed hard and sat down. He lowered his voice, straining to retain his self-control. "I do not wish to get into this argument with you at this moment. This is a very awkward thing. The Americans are supposed to be our friends."

"We own the overwhelming majority of Euro Beasley. The Americans have reneged on many of our understandings. The park has lost over a billion in US. dollars over its first three years."

"That has turned around," the French President pointed out.

"Yes, at our expense. We French have been pouring into it at an alarming rate."

"Yes, I saw your confidential figures," said the president of France, who did not think it unusual that the minister of culture tracked French attendance at Euro Beasley. It was not for nothing that the place had been denounced as a cultural Chernobyl when it was first opened. "I understood this was the result of Parisians wishing to experience the cultural abomination once before it closes. Possibly to gloat over the triumph of French cultural resistance to its gaudy blandishments."

"Propaganda. We have reason to believe there is a sinister explanation for Parisian citizenry suddenly flocking to this Blot."

"Blot?"

"It is a blot and a stain upon the bosom of La Belle France."

"I do not disagree with that. Unofficially, of course," said the president of France. "But we can't go around bombing American symbols. This is not the nineteenth century anymore. Perhaps in another generation or two we can spit into their eyes with impunity should we wish to, but not now."

"I have developed intelligence suggesting that Euro Beasley has been exerting a diabolic hypnotic influence upon our citizenry, luring them in and shucking them of their francs and their inborn appreciation of French culture."

"This is a most grave charge."

"Highly serious."

"With international implications. Are you suggesting that Euro Beasley is some sort of espionage platform?"

"Worse."

"Military?"

"Worse still. It is a cultural neutron bomb, dispensing hard, corrupting radiation throughout France."

"Go on."

"I have only limited information, but as we speak, Euro Beasley lies naked, unguarded and undefended. We can take it with minimal difficulties and light-to-negligible casualties."

"Take it? What on earth would we want with it?"

"You must act quickly, Monsieur President. For as you know, this is a difficult predicament, politically speaking. We have bombed an American theme park. Explaining this would be difficult under ordinary conditions."

"Impossible, you mean," the president said bitterly.

"Justifying it is your only option. You must send troops in to secure it and discover its secret."

"What is its secret'"

"Bright colored lights."

"What do you mean by 'bright colored lights'?"

"I am sorry. That is all I have."

"That is not enough to act upon."

"Can you afford to wait for the reaction from Washington? You must act immediately if you are to spare yourself the embarrassment of the hour."

The president of France chewed his moist lower lip until bright specks of blood discolored his incisors. "I must think on this problem."

"Time flees," the culture minister reminded, terminating the connection.

And in his office in the Palais de L'Elysee, the president of France watched the clock tick and click its hands along the dial while he considered which of the few and unimpressive cards he would play this day.

Chapter 14

When DGSE Intelligence operative Dominique Parillaud had been told that her latest assignment was to go to the United States of America, her first impulse was to faint dead.

Upon being revived, she briefly considered suicide.

"Do not send me to that cultural hellhole," she pleaded with her case officer.

"It is for the good of France," he told her in a stern voice.

"I would do anything for France," Dominique said anxiously. "I would give my very life for France. I would spill my blood for her. I would drink the very blood that I spill just to be privileged to spill even more blood for France. You must know this."

"You are one of our most capable operatives," her case officer assured her in the HQ building called the swimming pool because it had been built over an old municipal pool. "Your bravery is well documented."

"Then do not destroy my career by sending me to America."

"How would that destroy your career? This is a career-advancing assignment."

Dominique took her tawny hair in her long, tapered fingers as if to wrench it out by the roots. Her green eyes rolled around in their sockets as if she were having an epileptic seizure.

"I would lose my mind in America. I would go insane. I beg of you. Send another."

"We have no others."

Dominique Parillaud, code-named Agent Arlequin in the confidential casebooks of the DGSE, got off her trim knees and reclaimed her seat. Her manner became professional in the extreme.

"What do you mean?" she inquired.

"You are aware of the denied area called the Blot?"

"I am aware of the Blot. Who cannot be aware of the Blot? It is a...blot. But I have never heard it called a denied area. For does Euro Beasley not charge admission?"

"We have officially designated it as a denied area. Agents have gone in.." The case officer's voice trailed off, and he made a hopeless gesture with his hands.

"They do not come out?"

"They come out," he admitted. "They come out... changed."

"How changed?"

"Happy."

"Happy. Is this bad?"

The case officer waved his cigarette around his head describing distorted helices of tobacco smoke.

"Happy and unmotivated. They were tasked with penetrating the subterranean chambers called Utilicanard in an attempt to explain the sudden and perverse increase in interest in the Blot."

"I have not heard of this Utilicanard."

"The cover story is that it is where they process their trash and refuse."

Dominique Parillaud barked her next words. "Then they should sink the entire park and process that!"

"Agents Papillon, Grillon and Sauterelle, all were sent into the Blot and all returned clutching overpriced Beasley souvenirs and unable to perform their duty to France."

"Because they were made happy?"

"Agent Grillon was made so happy that ever since he has taken great exception to insults leveled at Euro Beasley. But Agent Sauterelle came out quite frightened. He was afraid to go back in. On the other hand Agent Papillon could not stop throwing up for three days."

"What did the poor man see?"

"He could not articulate it beyond the pageantry and bright lights of the Blot. He mentioned a particularly vivid green, as I recall."

Dominique Parillaud shot to her feet. "I hereby volunteer to penetrate the Blot."

The case officer raised his hand.

"No, I must insist. This is obviously a great mystery and must be dealt with." She straightened her spine, chin lifting in defiance. "I will go today. Immediately. I am not afraid. My fierce devotion to my country and my culture make me unafraid."

"You are going to America," insisted her case officer.

Whereupon Dominique Parillaud sank back into her chair and began weeping into a fresh linen handkerchief whose frilly edges were impregnated with cyanide in the event of her capture by hostile forces.

"Your mission will be to monitor all unusual events pertaining to the Sam Beasley Corporation," her case officer explained. "If you can gain employment with them, so much the better."

Dominique Parillaud threw her shoulders forward and plunged her face into the cupped handkerchief.

"You will report daily, and-"

With a cry of anger the case officer lunged across his desk. He threw himself across his best female agent, and the two ended up on the floor, rolling and clawing for possession of the cyanide-laced handkerchief that Dominique Parillaud was desperately holding on to with her strong, stubborn Gallic teeth.

WHEN THE AIR FRANCE flight landed at Furioso International Airport, Dominique Parillaud at first considered hiding in the lavatory and taking the same plane back.

But her duty to her country brought her out of the comfortable seat and out into the humid air of Florida.

It was awful from the first minute, from the very second she deplaned.

The air was hot and sticky. It clung to her perfectly milky skin, dampened her Parisian coiffure into a soggy mass like cornflakes and made her haute clothing chafe and itch like sackcloth.

The people were boorish, their accents rude and bewildering. They actually pronounced their terminal consonants. And as for their attire, the only word to describe their gaudy pret-a-porter rags was abominable.

At the grocery store there was no decent bread to be had. The cheeses were flavorless, and the wine would not pass for swill.

And the food. Lamentable in the extreme. They used no sauces except for sauce piquante, which they spelled sometimes catsup and sometimes ketchup. There was no delicacy in their cooking, no art in their dress. Everything was heavy and oafish, from the food to the men, which Dominique Parillaud also sampled out of sheer need to find some meager comfort in this hot, brutish land.

She found work in Sam Beasley World as an interpreter, but discovered nothing of importance. Except that they treated her-and all other employees-so horribly that she was forced to quit.

It was no better in Vanaheim, California, although the strength-sapping mugginess was replaced by a delicious dry heat that after two months seemed to exert a severely deleterious effect on her motivation, much as the Florida heat had sapped her strength.

At a good Vanaheim restaurant, where a valet parked her car for her, Dominique discovered an item on the menu called French fries. Her eyes lit up and she ordered them eagerly.

"What will you be having with it?" the waiter asked.

"Nothing. Just pile these French fries on a plate and give me your best house chardonnay."

When they came, Dominique saw these fries were neither French nor palatable. If anything, they were fit only for the bland British palate. She toyed with them idly as she consumed an entire bottle of barely passable chardonnay.

On another occasion she came upon French toast on a breakfast menu posted on a diner that she would ordinarily not otherwise enter, the smells coming from within it were so disagreeable.

But Dominique did enter, ordering two portions of French toast. "And your best breakfast Bordeaux," she added.

"No Bourdeaux, sorry."

"Very well. Beaujolais, then."

"We don't have an alcoholic-beverage license, ma'am," the waitress said.

That was another strange thing. It was impossible to obtain beer or wine in many restaurants. Even bad beer or wine, of which the oafs produced in abundance.

"Then give me a pot of coffee. Black."

When the French toast arrived, Dominique saw with brimming eyes and it was not in any respect French, although it vaguely resembled a species of toast.

She drank the entire pot of coffee, which tasted salty from the bitterness of her endless tears.

The cinemas were singularly insufferable. It was all junk, as were the television programs. The only bright spots came twice a year, during the Bastille Day Jerry Lewis movie marathon and again on the American Labor Day when Jerry conducted a telethon. When he sang "You'll Never Walk Alone," Dominique hastily taped it, and it became instantly and forever her favorite song.

She had never known that Jerry could sing.

By the time of the affair of Beasley U.S.A., Dominique Parillaud was a dispirited shell of her former self, who contemplated suicide with whatever was at hand. Her case officer had steadfastly refused to allow her any of the cyanide pills, hollow teeth or deathlaced handkerchiefs of her trade.

Thus she carried a tiny aerosol can of Black Flag bug killer. If need be she could swallow the nozzle and depress the trigger with the very strong and agile tongue whose talents had enabled her to climb the clerical ranks of the DSGE. Men appreciated her agile tongue. Or at least Frenchmen did. American men made disgusting comments about her ability to French-kiss, then would not-or could not-explain why such kissing was ascribed to the French above all others.

She had been in Virginia for three weeks, posing as a TV reporter for the European TV network, Europe 1, when the Second American Civil War unexpectedly broke out. Dominique's had been one of the first news trucks on the scene.

It was the perfect cover. Apparently all Americans were obliged to obey the many rules and laws of the land, but for some reason journalists were exempt. Even foreign ones.

Upon swooping down, Dominique discovered it was impossible to infiltrate the Petersburg National Battlefield, and had to content herself with eavesdropping on other news agencies, some of which had helicopters to spy on the battle below.

It was an astonishing sight. Their country seemed poised to rend itself apart, and instead of showing concern for their future, all that mattered to then was the all-important story.

Had they been French journalists covering a modern Reign of Terror, they would have been guillotined without benefit of trial, their treason was so great and so very apparent.

When the battle finally broke out, the Confederate pickets withdrew and the press surged in. At first Dominique thought they were going to take sides themselves. They did not. Instead, they sought out the roar of battle, and their bravery before the sharp whistling of the subsonic musket balls would have been admirable had it not been so obviously the product of an utterly congenital foolishness.

Nevertheless, Dominique picked her way through the park with its sticky pines and its idle Napoleon cannon and marveled when she came upon the battle how very much like uniforms of Napoleon III the soldiers' trappings were.

It confirmed to her that Americans gave the world nothing of high culture, but only took from it.

"I cannot tell one side from the other," she complained to an American journalist who was snapping pictures like a tourist at the Eiffel Tower. Wildly and without framing his shots.

"It's simple. The blue versus the gray."

"But they are all gray."

"What are you, color-blind?"

"Yes, I am color-blind."

The handicap turned out to be a blessing when the great balloons of the Beasley Company descended moments later.

Their effect was magical. Men lay down their arms and took up expressions of childlike wonder and awe when the cartoon faces showed themselves.

And everyone spoke of the impossible pink color of it all. Dominique saw only bright light tinged with dull gray. For all colors were shades of gray to her green eyes. In her heart she envied the Americans for their ability to become so childlike at what was after all a blatantly commercial spectacle.

But she had a mission to perform.

The balloons did not drop out of a clear sky, she knew. Someone had to guide them to their landing area. And Dominique Parillaud was determined to discover that someone.

For with the pressing crowd of soldiers in dark gray and light gray, and the outer ring of American TV reporters crowding close, it was impossible to reach the man she most wished to reach, Mickey Weisinger.

AS THEY WALKED BACK into the Petersburg National Battlefield, the Master of Sinanju was saying, "It was very understanding of you to accept Emperor Smith's explanations of his failure."

"I know he tried," Remo said unconcernedly. "Guess I have to give this back."

He pulled from his pocket a coffin-shaped white pill.

Chiun regarded it with quirking brows. "Smith's poison pill?"

"Yeah, remember I confiscated it last time out? Swore I wouldn't give it back until he dug up my past."

"You are very understanding today."

"That time Smitty had to erase his computer data bases when the IRS swooped down on Folcroft probably crippled his ability to do deep background searches like he used to."

"You are undoubtedly correct, my son."

"Thank you, Little Father."

As they walked they came to a place where a screen of trees obscured their view of the pink shine that lay over the battlefield like an angelic aura.

Remo's face abruptly darkened. "That damn Smith!" he said suddenly.

"Remo!"

"He had no intention of finding my folks. Never had."

"Remo, what has come over you?"

"When I see him again, I'm going to shake the lame excuses out of him, and then we'll see how motivated he is"

"You are very childish, you know that?" Chiun fumed. "One minute you are well behaved and then next you are throwing a temper tantrum like a spoiled child."

"You should talk."

"Me? I-"

They passed through the pines and came upon Crater Field again. The pink glow touched their face like an angel's kiss.

"I am sorry I raised my voice to you, Remo," Chiun said, suddenly mollified.

"And I am sorry I got out of line, Little Father. You know I think the world of you."

"And well you should," Chiun purred contentedly.

Remo spotted a figure in a slip dress and beret. "Hey, isn't that April May?"

"Yes, she is sneaking away."

"Smith said to find out what she knows. Why don't we follow her?"

They returned to the screen of pines, their feet not disturbing the brown carpet of needles any more than did the passing daddy longlegs spiders that patrolled the area.

As they blended into the intermittent shadows, becoming hunters again, their faces lost their placid cast and they became hard of eye. But they said nothing.

MARC MOISE couldn't for the life of him figure it out. As chief communications officer of Operation Crater, it was he who miked the battlefield so that all enemy operations could be monitored. He had planted the mikes personally. Video cameras were not an option. They were too big to hide in the treetops without running the risk of detection.

But when the balloons landed, they carried remote cameras, and Marc was busy monitoring the feeds from those.

That was the worst part. During the balloon launch, he had been preoccupied inside the mobile communications van parked down the highway. After the balloons had been launched, Bob Beasley had entered the van, saying "Carry on" in a gruff tone of voice entirely unlike his usual avuncular one.

But since he was practically Sam Beasley reincarnate, Marc Moise had carried on.

When the first video feeds came in, Marc duly taped them for later analysis and evaluation. They showed Mickey Weisinger giving the performance of his insincere life and winning the crowd over.

It was the lights. Marc didn't know how it was the lights. But he saw the way the crowd had turned-just as the crying faces of children changed for the better when Mongo or Dingbat or any of those other twodimensional idiot grins flashed their way.

As it happened, the seated figure of Bob Beasley chuckled from the other console. "Give an American kid a choice between the keys to the kingdom of heaven and two free tickets to Beasleyland, and the little bastards will snatch up the tickets nine times out of ten."

The voice didn't sound quite like Bob Beasley's, Marc thought as he struggled to catch every word coming through his earphones.

Then his heart jumped so high in his throat he opened his mouth to let it out.

Bob Beasley emerged from the Crater and gave the cheering soldiers a hearty wave of approval!

"But-" Morse sputtered.

A chill ran down his hunched-over spine. Something was not right here. Bob Beasley couldn't be out at the field. Bob Beasley was seated at his back.

Marc got a grip on himself. This was some fluke, some nutty glitch. Maybe the figure he was seeing was some animatronic robot. Maybe the situation was too dangerous to risk the real Bob Beasley, valuable corporate spokesman that he was, in the field, and that was a double waving to the crowd. Sure. A double. The guy snapping switches behind him was the authentic Bob Beasley. That was it.

But the body language of the man on the field was definitely that of Bob Beasley. No actor was that good. Not when playing to an ignorant audience.

So, while pretending to do his job, Marc Moise turned slowly in his seat to better visualize the man in the console chair.

The face was turned almost away, but the flat cheek and a suggestion of a mustache were visible. It was frosty white. Bob Beasley's mustache was dark brown. It was said he dyed it to seem youthful.

He was talking low and vehemently into his mike, and the words he spoke were repeated by Mickey Weisinger, several miles away.

Then a cold gray eye rolled in Moise's direction, and a frosty voice said, "What the fuck are you looking at, Moose? Get back to work!"

Marc Moise shifted in his seat, trying to keep the contents of his bladder from escaping his body.

The man behind him was not Bob Beasley. That man in the field was. And the voice that had called him by the hated nickname, Moose, made the short hairs at the back of his neck bunch up and squirm.

He knew that voice. It was imprinted on his brain, a part of his earliest childhood experiences. It was the voice that had cheered him up on Sunday nights before a flickering TV screen and assured him that even though school started the next day, all was right with the world.

It was the long-dead yet immortal voice of Uncle Sam Beasley!

Chapter 15

Bilious black smoke was still rising above the Norman ramparts of the Sorcerer's Chateau of Euro Beasley when the first five-seat Gazelle utility helicopters swarmed over the theme park. They did not land. They merely dropped like clatter-winged dragonflies and moved through the park's airspace, cockpits sealed, pilots heavily goggled and gasmasked as their beating rotors whipped up and dispelled the combination of black camouflage smoke and pepper gas that lay like a pall over the so-called Enchanted Village.

When the helicopters had beat the pungent exhalation into harmless dissipating rags, the SuperPumas came floating in.

They did not land, either. Instead, red-bereted French Foreign Legion paratroopers rappeled down in full combat gear.

When their black boots touched ground, they deployed through the deserted Main Street, U.S.A., encountering no resistance.

Before a grid of video monitors Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood groaned and said, "We're screwed. They're onto us."

And he reached for the button marked Supergreen.

YEARS from 1995 learned historians would convene at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to settle the question of the root cause of the Great Franco-American Conflict.

They would argue and hold rancorous panels for five solid days and still reach no consensus, although there would be a memorable fistfight in the apple orchard adjoining the John Hay Library where one professor would repeatedly crack the forehead of a colleague against the ancient monument dedicated to the illustrious H. P. Lovecraft until he had won his particular point.

One side said it had all started with a mouse. A reasonable argument, since the Sam Beasley Company lay at the heart of the conflict and it had started with Mongo Mouse.

Another school of thought held that twentiethcentury French cultural chauvenism exacerbated a minor dispute until it erupted into a full-scale international imbroglio.

And a third said US. cultural imperialism naturally created the friction. America was as unpopular then as now, the visiting professor from Harvard pointed out.

None of them got it right. It did not start with Sam Beasley's famous mouse, any more than it did with U.S. cultural imperialism or French snobbery.

It started with Rod Cheatwood of Vanaheim, California.

More specifically it started the sunny spring day Rod Cheatwood misplaced his TV remote control for the forty-eighth time.

Rod was a concepteer at Beasleyland in Vanaheim, California. By that it was meant that he was a technician.

Although he worked out of Beasleyland, he was no maintainer of attractions. No designer of rides. Instead, Rod was strictly research and development.

Five years out of Cal Tech, Rod was a specialist in lasers. The downsizing of the defense industry put him on the street. He answered a blind ad and was surprised to see a happy cartoon mouse grinning back from the door when he showed up for the interview.

"Why do you need a laser technician for a theme park?" Rod asked the interviewer, a suit with a blank face. "You can order all the light-show lasers you could ever want."

"We want our own lasers."

"I'm strictly into lasers as a military application."

"You could do that here," the interviewer said, his glassy smile matching his glassy eyes. Did they all become so fatuous working here? Rod wonder.

"I could perfect military lasers working for Sam Beasley?"

"In a manner of speaking. We have a problem at our French base."

"Base?"

"Euro Beasley."

"Never thought of it as a base."

"The French hate us. Won't stand in line in the cold weather. Won't buy our souvenirs. They take day trips so our hotels are practically empty. We've lost billions."

"So close the park."

"You don't understand. We have a great track record in France. Our magazine, Journal de Mongo, has been a bestseller since 1934. The French love us. They just haven't warmed up to the park yet."

"Lower your prices."

"We've tried everything," the interviewer went on as if Rod's suggestion was out of the question. "Aroma therapy. Coupons. Nondiscount inducements. We even broke a long-standing rule and allowed beer and wine to be served in our park restaurants. Nothing seems to staunch the hemorrhaging."

"A laser light show won't do it, either."

"We'll give you a lab to work in, a full staff and anything you could want."

Rod stood up. "Sorry. If I'd known this was you Beasley boys, I'd never have come in for the interview. I hear you treat your employees like dirt."

"If you change your mind, give us a call, won't you?" the inteviewer said without taking offense or losing his fixed smile.

Rod Cheatwood did come around in time. There were no defense jobs in California, true. And he was loath to move out of state, also true.

But the real reason-entirely lost to posterity-that Rod came back to the Beasley Corporation was that he lost his TV remote and it was the forty-eighth time by actual count. It was also the last straw.

The UHF band of the TV dial could not be accessed without the remote clicker, and while Rod flung sofa cushions about with wild abandon and raged at the cruel and unjust gods who had turned their faces from his simple wants and desires, he missed the twopart final episode of "Star Trek: the Next Generation."

The next morning Rod was back in the Beasley employment office.

"I'd take the job on one condition," he said.

"We don't do conditions here at Beasley, but I'm willing to listen."

"In my spare time I use your facilities to work on a side research project of my own."

"What kind of project?"

"A TV remote finder."

"We own all marketing rights outright," the interviewer said quickly.

"Two conditions," said Rod. "I get marketing rights."

After a three-day negotiation involving slamming telephones, harsh words and veiled death threats, Rod Cheatwood agreed to split marketing rights on anything he developed with the Sam Beasley Corporation fifty-fifty.

In his first day they explained color therapy to him.

"Color therapy?"

"It's old. It's very old. The Pythagoreans used it to heal the sick. So did the Greeks and Egyptians. They found that exposing the eyes to different colors produces different psychological effects on the brain. We discovered it works. We just need to make it work on a grander scale."

"With lasers?"

"The brighter the color, the better it works. Lasers are as bright as color gets outside of nature."

"I follow," said Rod Cheatwood, fingering his tufted chin.

"We want you to develop the brightest, most colorful laser light possible."

"We're talking a cold laser here?"

"Yeah. We don't want to burn holes in tourists by accident. It might kill repeat business."

"An eximer laser system is what you need. But I can't guarantee it will do what you want."

"We can prove it to you."

"Go ahead."

"You're still unhappy over our contract negotiation?"

"You people," Rod said bitterly, "probably don't bury your dearly departed dead until you yank the gold fillings from their teeth, sell their bones to make gelatin and remove the fat for tallow."

Surprisingly they took no offense. One even smiled with a quiet inner satisfaction.

"How's your blood pressure these days?"

"My blood pressure has been elevated ten points since I started here," Rod added testily. "And it's only been a day."

"Come with us."

They took him to a sealed chamber in Utiliduck beneath Beasleyland. The door was labeled Pink Room.

The door was not pink, but when it was opened, the room was certainly pink. The walls were a mellow pink. Overhead lights shed a warm pink radiance. Even the recliner chair was pink. And when they closed the door after him, Rod saw the other side of the door was also pink. He was entirely enveloped in a womb of pink.

"Sit down," he was told by intercom.

Rod sat. He reclined in his chair and at first he didn't feel anything. After a few moments he relaxed. Then he really relaxed. His muscles softened. Even his bones seemed to soften.

When they came to take him out fifteen minutes later, he didn't want to go.

"Please let me stay a few minutes," Rod begged.

"Fifteen minutes more. But you have to sign a release."

"Anything," Rod said, signing without reading a sheet of paper thrust under his nose.

After the fifteen minutes were up, he still refused to go. A Beasley doctor was summoned, a blood-pressure cuff was clamped over his exposed bicep and, when the doctor announced that his blood pressure was perfect, Rod was surprised.

"Can I work in there?" he asked.

"No. You won't get anything accomplished."

"I don't mind."

Eventually they had to shut off the lights and leave him alone in the dark room until he begged to be let out of the Pink Room.

"Our research tells us color therapy works through the second visual pathway."

"There's more than one?" Rod muttered, staring at a pink spot on the other man's tie. It brought back calming memories of the Pink Room.

"The first visual pathway goes from the retina to the optic nerve. That's how we see. But there's a second pathway, a more primitive one, that goes from the retina to the hypothalamus, which is in the reptile part of the brain."

"Did you say reptile?"

"Evolution has successively added layers to man's brain structure, sort of like stacking blocks," one of the Beasley boys explained. "The human brain is stacked atop our animal brain, and under that is the most primitive-the so-called reptile brain. That's where the second visual pathway leads. Other than to trigger melanin production, biologists don't know what it's for. But we've determined that strong primary colors follow this evolutionarily abandoned pathway to affect the reptile brain in a very primal way."

"I've always hated green. Hated it with a passion."

"Orange makes me nervous. And bright red can trigger seizures in some epileptics. It's our reptile brains reacting to color stimulation of the retina. As I say, it's an ancient psuedoscience that's still kicking around. They paint prison walls in some penitentiaries pink to calm down the most-violent inmates. Works like a charm, too. In fact, it's the secret behind the success of our Technicolor cartoons. We used only positive hues."

"Okay, you sold me."

"Good. Now, get busy delivering a laser that will pacify a planet."

Rod went to his lab, but he wasn't thinking of pacifying planets. He was thinking of making his TV clicker impossible to lose ever again.

Every TV remote, he knew, operated on the infrared principle. Different wavelengths of infrared light triggered different relays in the TV photocell receptor.

It had been Rod's fantasy to implant a signal beacon in his clicker so that when he lost it, all he had to do was put on a pair of special goggles and hunt around for the constant infrared pulse.

Trouble was, when Rod tended to lose his remote, he really lost it. Infrared light could pulse from under the couch, beneath a pile of magazines or from the bathroom. Rod had TV sets all over his house. And because too many remotes were almost as much trouble as no remote, he carried a universal remote whenever he walked through his house so that every set responded to his commands.

There wasn't a form of light known that could pass through solid walls. Therein lay the problem with the infrared beacon.

A new, more intense kind of color might solve that problem, Rod realized. Just as it might solve the Beasley problem. Two problems with a common solution, just like the condom.

Taking apart a universal remote, Rod got down to cases. He hooked it up to a power source and started converting it to an eximer laser.

"I need a pink several orders of magnitude greater than hot pink," he muttered.

Rod experimented with various pink dyes extracted from natural substances, mostly exotic flowers, pink minerals and gemstones.

And he knew he had it when he started feeling good-really good for the first time-since coming to work for the Sam Beasley Corporation.

The feeling passed the minute he shut down the hot-pink pencil of the laser.

When he showed his bosses what he had accomplished, they grinned under the pink radiance, clapped him on the back and told Rod Cheatwood what a wonderfully inventive employee he was, a credit to the Beasley Corporation, yesiree-bob.

When the laser was shut down, they turned on him.

"Not pink enough," one said.

"We need saturated pink," said another.

"Saturated?" Rod blurted. "I never heard of saturated pink. What is it?"

"We'll know it when we see it."

And they did.

Using a dye laser in which the essence of the pinkest natural substances was diluted in alcohol and beamed out in one huge pulse of light that instantly exhausted the power source, Rod found himself walking his lab in happy circles when the closed door jerked open and a dozen happy faces crowded in.

"You found it!" one Beasley boy crowed.

"It's perfect," exulted another.

"Do it again."

"Can't," said Rod. "It burned out the power source."

"Hookup another."

"Wait a minute," Rod said suddenly. "'How could you know what happened? The door was dosed."

"The pink pulse came right through the wall, it was so powerful"

"Eureka!" Rod shouted, because he couldn't think of anything more appropriate. "I did it! I did it!"

"He did it! He did it!" the Beasley boys said. "We have our saturated-pink hypercolor laser."

"No, that's not what I meant. You saw the pulse through solid wall. It's my TV remote finder. I'm going to be rich."

It was close to that moment when the pink pulse aftereffect began to dwindle, and the Beasley boys grew serious of face.

"Actually," one said, "Beasley gets rich. Not you."

"I own half the rights," Rod said.

"You owned half the rights."

"You signed them away, remember?"

"When? When?" said Rod. "Show me proof."

And they did. It was a short legal document, ironclad, and when he saw his more-flowery-than-usual signature at the bottom, Rod Cheatwood wanted to one by one tear out the larynges of the Beasley boys with his angry teeth and swallow hard.

"When did I sign this?"

"It was the release. You wanted fifteen minutes more in the Pink Room."

"I thought it was a medical release," Rod said in horror.

"Did we say medical release?"

"No one ever said medical release."

And the Beasley boys smiled that inner smile of theirs.

"Damn," said Rod.

"Let's have some more pink," one of the boys said.

"Let's renegotiate that contract," countered Rod.

And when the Beasley boys hesitated, Rod knew he had them. Sort of.

In the end Rod settled for ten percent, because truth be known, he ached to bask in the glow of the pink laser, too.

"It's really pink," the Beasley boys said happily.

"The pinkest."

"Hot pink."

"Let's call it Hotpink. One word. That way we can trademark it."

"What's next?" asked Rod.

"More colors." Try green.

"Then red."

"What will they do?" asked Rod.

"We'll find out when you generate them."

Because the color-therapy charts they had supplied said that green was a particularly soothing and healing color, Rod built a second dye laser that generated an extreme green pulse from the pigments of tropical lizards. Everyone wanted a sustained glow, but that damn eximer laser ate up power too quickly.

This time the Beasley boys stood around in front of the laser while Rod set a timer and, like a photographer wanting to be in the picture with his subjects, he rushed to join them. They were standing expectantly awaiting the green beam, which filled their eyes with the most vivid, hideous, stomach-churning green ever conceived.

When Rod Cheatwood woke up in the Beasley infirmary three days later, his first question was a strange one.

"What day is it?"

"Sunday."

"The sixth?"

"Yes. You've been under three days."

And tears started welling up in Rod Cheatwood's stricken eyes.

"There, there," the Beasley nurse with the starched white cap adorned with paper mouse ears said soothingly. "We expect you to make a complete recovery."

"I missed it...." Rod blubbered.

"Missed what?"

"The season finale 'Next Generation' episode," he said miserably.

When he was well enough to return to work, Rod told the Beasley boys, "I guess green is out, huh?"

"On the contrary, it's a perfect offensive color."

And they showed him a chart.

Most color charts broke down into complementary colors or contrasting colors. The Beasley chart was divided into offensive colors and defensive colors.

And they had new names. Hotpink. Supergreen. Contrablue. Ultrayellow. Optired. Infraorange. Deepurple.

Over time they cataloged their properties and created various beamers.

"How about we call them phasers?" suggested Rod. "They phase light."

"Can't. Not our trademark."

"Oh, right," said Rod.

When they told him he was being shipped out to Paris to install the first hypercolor beamers in Euro Beasley, Rod Cheatwood was horrified.

"I don't want to go to Paris."

"Why not?"

"They hate us. And they love Jerry Lewis." Rod shuddered.

"You don't have to go to Paris. You can live under Euro Beasley."

"Under? They have a Utiliduck there, too?"

"Utilicanard. It means the same thing."

It was not so bad. There were dorm rooms, with kitchenettes and TVs. And when the new pink lights were installed all over Euro Beasley, attendance shot up almost immediately.

"How about a raise?" Rod asked one day when even the Beasley boys could not disguise the dramatic turnaround.

"What do you need a raise for? You have your ten percent royalty."

"I haven't had time to make my remote finder."

"When you do, that will be your raise."

"Mousefuckers," Rod grumbled.

And so Rod lived for the day his work at Euro Beasley was done.

Unfortunately that day never came. Instead, the French Foreign Legion came rappeling out of hovering helicopters and advanced on one of the many entrances to Utilicanard.

When they were all on the ground, Rod knew what to do. He clapped a pair of solid lead goggles onto his eyes and, with his pounding heart high in his throat, he depressed a console button marked Supergreen.

Even though he was spared the awful green light hitting his retina, he threw up anyway.

Chapter 16

The unmarked van was parked on US. 460, south of Petersburg National Battlefield Park. It was the direction the balloons had come from, so it was reasonable to conceive of a link between the two.

Certainly if it was a TV truck, it would have identifying call letters or a network logo painted on the sides.

That was how Dominique Parillaud perceived it as she drove past the van in her Europe 1 satellite truck before parking it well down the highway and out of sight. After exiting the vehicle, she moved low toward the waiting van. There was no sign of life or activity around the van. No one behind the wheel.

But the nest of electronic array atop the van was very suggestive.

Crouching behind a thicket, Dominique unshipped her 9 mm MAS automatic and started out of the hedges. If the van contained the secret of the bright colored lights that had her countrymen literally agog, and she could acquire it, the Legion of Honor medal-not to mention the adulation of all Frenchmen-would be all but hers.

More importantly she could leave this hellish nation of imbeciles and cretins.

She started forward.

And her beret swallowed her head like a Venus's-flytrap made of cloth.

"Merde!"

Some force took her by the shoulders and spun her around inexorably, but still she retained the presence of mind to jut her MAS snout forward. When she felt it come into contact with her assailant's chest, she pulled the trigger.

The gunshot was not loud. A mere snap of sound. The automatic convulsed once.

"Hah!" she said triumphantly, yanking the beret off her face.

Dominique blinked as the familiar features of the American named Remo stared back at her with a slight smile touching his cruel face.

"But-I could not miss."

"Sure you did."

"Never! I am an expert markswoman."

"Was," said Remo, relieving her of her weapon with a casual twist. He tossed it away.

"You're French, right?"

"Belgian."

"You sound French."

"We Belgians speak French. It is our native tongue."

Remo looked to the tiny Asian gray-beard who stood beside him, hands tucked in his kimono sleeves. "This is true, but this woman speaks the dialect of Paris, not Brussels."

"Caught you. You're French."

"French women do not wear berets," Dominique pointed out.

"Sure they do," said Remo.

"It is an impossibility. How can you be so stupid?"

"Practice," said Remo, handing her back her beret.

"The beret is gauche. Do you know nothing of French customs?"

"As little as possible," Remo admitted.

"I categorically deny French citizenship."

The tiny Asian turned his head, "Behold. Is that not the illustrious Jerry Lewis approaching?"

Dominique whirled.

"Jairy? Jairy is here. Where? I idolize him!"

But there was no one there and when she looked back, the tiny Asian was beaming triumphantly. The man named Remo was saying "tsk- tsk" while making some arcane gesture at her that involved rubbing his forefingers in her direction.

"Caught you again," he said.

"I am a tourist."

"You're a French agent. You have French agent written all over you."

"In French," said the Asian gray-beard.

"I deny everything."

"What's the French interest in this?" asked Remo.

"I refuse to say any more."

"We have ways of making you confess," warned the tiny Asian.

"I am notoriously fearless."

Abruptly the tiny Asian stiffened and said, "Hark!"

Remo stopped.

Dominique listened. "I hear nothing."

"Do you hear it, Remo? The pumping sound."

Dominique frowned. "I hear no pumping."

"Yeah," said Remo. "It's coming from that van."

"Two heartbeats. One human. One not."

"Yeah, and the human one sounds pretty scared."

"Let us investigate."

"Heartbeats. I hear no heartbeats."

"Remo, detain that woman while I investigate."

"Little Father, don't you think we should both-"

"No!"

Remo subsided, Dominique was surprised to see. Was he afraid of the old one? It seemed doubtful.

They watched the old one slip toward the back of the van, Remo holding her in place with steely fingers clamped about her elbow. They felt like blunt knives and, when she reached up to loosen them, they refused to budge.

While his attention was on her fingers, she tried a judo throw that never failed.

It involved the feet. A quick step back, crunch down on the handiest instep and flip the opponent with his own reverse impetus. Dominique had once thrown a two-hundred-kilogram Sumo wrestler in this fashion.

"Watch the shoes," said Remo when she brought her stiletto heel onto his instep. "They're new. "

She tried to flip him anyway.

Remo refused to flip. It was as if his feet were set in concrete. He had no discernible center of gravity. None that she could find. Refusing to give up, she twisted and tried to insert her fingers into his nostrils and give them a fierce twist absolutely guaranteed to cause the most stern grip to relinquish.

"Easy. I'm ticklish," said Remo, his nostrils easily evading her darting fingers.

"You are unlike any man I have ever encountered," said Dominique, switching to flattery.

"I hear that a lot."

"I am sure."

"Too much, in fact. I like to be treated like an ordinary guy."

"I would treat you that way if you would allow me."

"You're not my type. Sorry."

"I French-kiss like a sailor," Dominique said, using a line that had been used on her.

"I'm not into sailors. Now stop struggling. I wanna see what Chiun does."

Dominique's head turned toward the van, having no other option once Remo had laid his heavy hand on her head and turned it like a faucet fixture.

Her eye fell upon the old Asian named Chiun as he slipped up to the door and laid a tiny ear to it.

"What is he doing?" Dominique hissed.

"Making sure it's not a trap."

"He can tell by listening?"

"He can tell what time it is by closing his eyes and finding the sun with his face."

"What if it is night?"

"Search me. I never saw him do it in the nighttime."

Dominique glanced at Remo's hard, obdurate fingers. "How can one be so slim and so strong at the same time?"

"Same way Popeye did it."

"How so?"

"Spinach."

"You are making fun of me."

"Tell it to Jairy."

"You insult a great clown."

"Shh."

As they watched, Chiun reached up for the door handle and seemed to freeze.

"What is wrong?" Dominique asked.

Remo squeezed her arm to get silence.

As she watched, Dominique realized very slowly that the old Asian was not frozen, as he appeared to be. He was turning the door handle, but doing it so slowly and methodically that he appeared immobile to the casual eye.

"Ah, he is very clever."

Abruptly the door opened and shut almost as quickly. It happened so suddenly it literally took Dominique's breath away. It was as if the door had been the mouth of a mechanical monster that had snatched the old one from sight to gobble him alive.

Nothing happened for a moment.

Then the edges of the door pulsed with the most vivid gray light Dominique had ever seen. And the door flew open like a frightened ghost.

And the awful light poured out.

REMO SAW THE VAN DOOR outlined in green. It was like a kick in the stomach, that green. Remo had never seen such a green. It was hideous, a violent lizard green. Some Sinanju instinct caused him to begin to turn away, when the door flew open and the Master of Sinanju came fluttering out.

Remo naturally looked back to see what Chiun was doing. What he saw shocked him. Chiun's face was twisted with some terrible strain. His arms and legs pumped as if to outrun the green glow.

The green light stabbed out all around him, and in his last moment of consciousness Remo felt his stomach contract involuntarily and the contents of his stomach erupt from his throat.

His last thought was how much he suddenly hated the color green.

DOMINIQUE PARILLAUD felt Remo's grip suddenly relax, and her professional instincts took over. Just in time, too.

She stepped away and by the narrowest margin avoided being splashed by a jet of hot vomit that seemed composed mostly of rice and small chunks of what seemed to be fish.

A horrible expression on his face, Remo fell faces first into his own vomit.

Dominique spun around and saw the old Korean also pitched forward in midstep, a cloud of milky vomit cascading ahead of him.

When he skidded into the grass, Chiun lay still.

Dominique crouched down, her color-blind eyes on the vivid gray light as she searched the grass for her fallen MAS.

The thing came clumping out of the van while she was preoccupied with her weapon.

Dominique experienced a strange stab of recognition mixed with horror. The horror, she thought at first, was a consequence of watching two formidable American agents-she had no doubt that was what they were-succumb to some force she could not comprehend.

But the horror soon resolved itself when the stab of recognition became awful, unbelievable certainty.

"You are Oncle Sam," she blurted as the figure strode toward her.

"Why aren't you lying facedown in your vomit?" the man demanded in a frosty voice.

And as he came on, his left eye began flashing. The livid light. It was coming from his eye somehow. He had an artificial eye. It was like a small strobe light, pulsing and flashing, and he was coming closer and closer. He was aiming it at her as if it were a deadly laser.

And Dominique realized it must be. A laser that did not burn but made strong men give up the contents of their stomachs and pitch unconscious into it.

The realization hit her just as her questing fingers found the cold, reassuring steel of her MAS.

She snapped it up, aimed and pulled the trigger once.

A hand that she saw was fashioned of steel segments clamped over the weapon, pinching her thumb and fingers. Still, she squeezed the trigger.

The weapon refused to discharge, its slide held in place by the hand that then began to whir as hydraulic fingers compressed and compressed with irresistible, inexorable power.

Dominique pulled her fingers free just before the fine-machined steel became a grinding, spitting tangible shriek of steel.

"Mon Dieu!"

"French, eh?"

"Oui. "

"I hate the fucking French."

"You are not Oncle Sam Beasley, who loves all mankind."

"I love only money," said the familiar voice as the steel hand swept up and grabbed her by the hair.

"What do you want of me?" Dominique said, squirming.

"There's just one thing I want from you."

"What is that?"

"Give it to me straight. What does that clown Lewis have that my Mongo doesn't?"

Chapter 17

The first battle-damage-assessment reports from the Blot were most disturbing.

They came in the form of aerial photographs taken by a low-flying Gazelle equipped with a gun-sight camera.

The photographs were laid on the desk of the president of France. "Are these men dead?" he asked.

"We do not know, Monsieur President."

"Is that not blood spilling out from under their still bodies?"

"It is not red."

"Then what can it be?"

"Either piss or vomit. The analysts have yet to determine."

The president of France turned the picture in his hand this way and that. "It is vomit, I think."

"We should leave this to experts, non?"

"Piss is more transparent. This is thick."

"Not all. Some appears soupy."

The president shrugged. "Some could have eaten soup and then thrown it up."

"We have experts who understand these matters," the aide said dismissively. "What do we do?"

"We cannot leave them lying about like so many fallen toy soldiers. These are Frenchmen. Oh, to see them with their proud red berets in the dirt."

"It is asphalt."

"Dirt. Asphalt. The outrage knows no name."

"We must act quickly to contain this matter, before the Americans learn of it and lodge a protest."

"Has there been no word from Washington?"

"Not yet. But soon. That is why you must act instantly."

"I should never have listened to that bouffon," moaned the president of France.

"What clown?"

"The minister of culture."

"He is not such a clown. He has spearheaded the drive against the detestable Franglais, he has banished-"

"Enough. Enough. Order our Foreign Legionnaires to storm the Bastille."

"You mean the Blot."

"I mean to see this matter ended before that bouffon calls to complain," the French president said testily.

"The culture minister?"

"No. The President of the United States."

COLONEL JEAN-GUY BAVARD of the French Foreign Legion had a stock answer for what had brought him to enlist in the toughest, hardest-fighting and most disreputable outfit in all Europe.

"It is a long story."

It wasn't. But that gruff comment was enough to turn away all questions. That it was a long story was the timehonored evasion men of the French Foreign Legion used against prying reporters or too-curious temporary girlfriends.

Thus, no one ever learned that Colonel Bavard had joined the French Foreign Legion because of a gastrointestinal irregularity.

Cheese gave him gas. Not any common gas, but the most malodorous, ferocious gas imaginable. He had only to nibble a corner of Chevrotin, sometimes only inhale the pungency of Brie, when his bowels would churn and boil and begin venting.

It was acutely embarrassing. It drove off lonely women, lost children and hungry dogs. Even flies avoided Colonel Bavard when he was enveloped in a noxious cloud of his own making.

There were only two humane solutions. Give up cheese or join the French Foreign Legion, which would take anyone, no matter his sins or quirks. Colonel Bavard naturally chose the latter course of action.

After all, what self-respecting Frenchman could survive without cheeses? To dwell Brieless was unthinkable. And to be deprived of Rambol and Camembert? Not to mention the sublime La Vache qui Rit?

Colonel Bavard had served with distinction in Kuwait and Rwanda, and elsewhere in the Frenchspeaking world. He had won countless medals for accepting surrenders. That some of those surrendering to Colonel Bavard were his own men was beside the point. Enemy surrenders far, far outnumbered comrades-in-arms who threw themselves gasping on the tender mercies of Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard.

So it was only natural that in their darkest hour, his fellow countrymen would turn to him.

"We have chosen you for this mission for a reason," the commander of the French Foreign Legion told him in his headquarters office.

Colonel Bavard saluted snappily. "I am prepared to die for my nation."

"We need an officer who can lead his men into the darkest quarter of hell."

"I have no fear."

"Your objective is the Blot."

"It is France's."

"It is already France's. Technically we own fiftytwo percent. Or our unfortunate banks do."

"Then I will destroy it."

"We can accomplish that with an atomic bomb, and may we do so at a later point as a lesson to others who would inflict their inferior culture upon us."

Then they handed him a pair of goggles with the lenses crisscrossed by impenetrable black electrical tape.

"What is this for?"

"To protect your eyes."

"From what?"

"The terror of the Blot," they told him solemnly, and Colonel Bavard felt a slow chill creep up his stiff Gallic spine.

"But how will I lead if I am blind?"

"We will guide you by radio from a hovering command helicopter."

"What about my men?"

"They, too, will be similarly goggled."

"That is fine, but how will they follow me?"

His commander allowed himself a slow smile. "You have hit upon the very reason why you have been chosen for this mission, mon Colonel."

And his commander handed Colonel Bavard a blue wedge of malodorous Roquefort.

"Excuse me," Colonel Bavard said, squeezing his cheeks together. Too late. The room was perfumed with the toil of his sensitive intestines.

"Bon appetit!" said his commander, clapping a respirator over his lower face.

WHEN HE EXPLAINED the mission to his men, Colonel Bavard told them it had an extremely low pucker factor.

In military parlance the world over, this meant that the mission was a low-danger one. The pucker factor being the degree to which the anal sphincter contracted with fear under combat conditions.

Normally low-pucker-factor missions were the most welcome.

Not in Colonel Bavard's unit of the French Foreign Legion. The higher the pucker factor, the easier the breathing.

"How low?" asked a lowly private during the premission briefing.

"The lowest possible."

The men looked stricken. Some, in anticipation of their immediate fate, stopped inhaling. Their red berets seemed almost to deflate in resignation.

"We expect to encounter poison gases?" a sergeant asked, unable to keep the hope out of his voice.

"No poison gases are expected."

"Should we not take our gas masks along just in case?" a private suggested eagerly.

"Gas masks are forbidden," Colonel Bavard said sternly. Some of his men, normally brave to a fault, actually quailed.

"You will don these." And he began handing out the taped goggles that sealed the eyes from bright lights.

The men examined the goggles doubtfully.

"If we are blind, how can we follow you into battle, mon Colonel?"

And to their utter horror, their colonel undid the flap of his blouse pocket and flung away the all-important roll of gas-absorbing charcoal tablets that Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard was never without.

"By your proud French noses," he told them.

WHEN THEY LEARNED that they were to assault Euro Beasley in an armored personnel carrier, the men under the command of Colonel Bavard almost deserted.

"Are you mice or are you Frenchmen?" Colonel Bavard demanded, chewing great gulps of cheese as the rear APT door gaped open. It was an AMX/10P APC, its fourteen tons looking like five due to the light desert camouflage streaking, and capable of conveying eleven men into battle.

"I will drive!" a chorus of voices volunteered.

"I will drive," said Colonel Bavard, to the relief of his men.

He sent the APC rolling through the French countryside of Averoigne, humming "La Marseillaise." In the back his men sang an old legion song. It covered the unsettlingly rude noises coming from the driver's compartment.

They barreled through the gates of Euro Beasley unchallenged, accelerated up Main Street, U.S.A., toward the redoubt itself. Still, no one challenged them.

"Goggles on!" Colonel Bavard cried when the drawbridge over the moat came into view. Bavard wore his own goggles high on his forehead and snapped them down. Holding the wheel steady, he bore down on the accelerator.

The asphalt under his wheels hummed. Then the sound became the rattle of rubber over wooden planking. Then a concrete zimming.

The AMX/10P slewed and pitched in response to the sudden pumping of the brakes. Grabbing up his MAT submachine gun, Colonel Bavard threw open the door.

"Out! Out! Out!"

The men tumbled out in confusion, utterly blind.

"This way, men of the legion," Colonel Bavard shouted.

There was a moment of indecision before the rude blatt his men knew too well cut the close air. They pivoted toward it. And when the awful odor found their nostrils, they charged toward it.

They charged, as history later recorded, toward disaster.

In his earpiece Colonel Bavard listened to the guidance of the spotters in the hovering Gazelle.

"You are seeking a niche directly north of the drawbridge," the control voice informed him.

"Oui!"

"In the niche there will be stairs."

"Oui."

"The stairs lead to Utilicanard."

"For France and the legion!" Colonel Bavard cried, trailing a coil of cheesy odor from his backside.

When his combat boots rattled onto the top step of an aluminium spiral staircase, Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard paused heroically. He might have been posing for a recruitment poster.

And despite the blackout goggles covering his eyes, his entire world turned scarlet.

Later those who survived the massacre at Euro Beasley disagreed as to the exact hue that had brought about their downfall. Some said the color was scarlet, others crimson, still others swore that vermilion was the color of the horror.

For his part Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard saw red. It burned through the black electrical tape like laser light. It stabbed his retina with the force of a blow. His brain, receiving input from his eyes, filled with fire.

A great rage exploded in Colonel Bavard's breast. It was pure anger at the cruel fate that had made him, at middle age, wifeless, childless and without any family but for the Foreign Legion. In that instant, he hated the Foreign Legion and all it represented. Hated the very unit that had enabled him to hide from the more discriminating world that could not abide him.

Screaming his red fury, Colonel Bavard pivoted, firing from the hip.

He never heard the first 9 mm round leave the muzzle. He could not. His thick, rangy body was busy being whittled to kindling by the combined firepower of his men, who also saw the red light clearly, although some saw crimson, some scarlet and others vermilion.

None of them saw Colonel Bavard. But they smelled him, and years of pent-up anger came pouring out of their mouths in the form of colorful curses and out of their rifles in the form of hot steel jacketed rounds.

Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard never knew what hit him. He went tumbling down the spiral aluminum staircase, shedding body parts that had been chopped from him by legion bullets,

In the Sorcerer's Chateau the remaining legionnaires, still seeing red, turned their weapons on one another, bespeaking minor faults, imagined slights and other infractions unspoken until the blood-red light of hell brought them out.

And under the castle, deep in the bowels of Utilicanard, Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood took his finger off the button labeled Optired.

"I can't keep this up forever," he muttered worriedly. "I'm running out of power."

Chapter 18

Remo was dreaming of his mother before he awoke in the hospital bed.

He had never known his mother. But an apparition had materialized before him months ago, and he had recognized the face. Some buried glimmering of memory told him it was his mother. She had told him to seek out his father, but not who his father was.

In the dream his mother was trying to tell him something, but Remo couldn't hear her words. Her pale mouth moved, formed shapes and vowels, and as Remo strained to catch the fragmentary sounds, he awoke to bright light.

It was morning. It shouldn't be morning. His internal clock read a little after one in the afternoon. Even in sleep it kept track of the passing hours. Yet the sunlight streaming into the white-walled room where he awoke was morning bright.

Then he remembered.

Remo snapped himself up from his pillow-and the world reeled.

The door flew open with a crash, and Remo slapped his hands over his ears because they seemed suddenly as sensitive as the skin under his fingernails.

"Lazy slugabed! Get up. Get up."

"Chiun?"

The Master of Sinanju began tearing off sheets and bedclothes. "I have been up for hours. Why do you worry me without reason?"

Remo grabbed his head to make the white-walled room stop spinning before his eyes. "What happened?" he said thickly.

"You succumbed to vile sorcery."

"I did?"

"It is no shame."

"Wait a minute. What happened to you?"

"I rescued you, of course," Chiun said casually, as if dismissing a trifle.

Remo glared. "Chiun."

The Master of Sinanju turned his back on his pupil. Remo recognized the evasive set of his shoulders.

"Chiun, it got you, too, didn't it?"

"Why do you say that?" Chiun said aridly.

"Because if it didn't, you'd be telling me how you mounted Sam Beasley's head on a post somewhere."

"Do not speak that name to me."

"You talk to Smith?"

Chiun turned. "I have not had time."

A doctor entered. She carried a clipboard in one hand, and a stethoscope hung around her neck. She was fifty and wore her brown hair up in a bun. "Ah, I see you're awake."

Chiun blocked the way. "Lay not hands on my son."

"I'm his doctor."

"You are a woman. It is not proper."

"I examined you when they brought you in, too, you know," the doctor said.

Chiun blushed bright crimson, and if steam didn't exactly escape from his ears, he gave a good impression of an embarrassed boiler.

The doctor came over and inserted the earpieces of her stethoscope into her ears and laid the other end against Remo's chest. "I'm Dr. Jeffcoat. How are we feeling today?"

"What happened to us?" Remo inquired.

"You tell me. I couldn't get anything out of your friend."

Chiun snorted loudly. "I am not his friend. I am his father."

"Adopted," corrected Remo.

"Which one of you is the adopted one?"

"He is," Remo and Chiun said together.

Dr. Jeffcoat said, "Tell me the last thing you remember."

"Green."

"Green what?"

"Just green. It was a vicious green. I hated how green it was."

"It frightened you?" the doctor asked.

"Maybe," Remo admitted.

Chiun laid a palm over his purple-trimmed black velvet kimono. "He is fearless, but I am even more so."

"Didn't I see you run out of that truck like a bat out of hell?" Remo asked Chiun.

"You did not!"

Dr. Jeffcoat said, "You were found unconscious in your own vomit. Both of you."

Remo cracked a smile. "Good thing I was wearing clean underwear." Then, in a more serious tone, he asked, "Can you explain it?"

"Not from what you just told me. But something caused a massive convulsion of the vagus nerve."

"The what?"

"Vagus nerve. It's in the brain stem. You've heard of the fight-or-flight reaction?"

"Sure," said Remo. "People get scared. Some run, some fight. It depends on the person."

"Unless you train it out of him," Chiun grunted.

"Part of the fight-or-flight response involves an involuntary reaction of the part of the vagus nerve which terminates in the stomach," Dr. Jeffcoat explained. "It causes the stomach to contract with great violence. I guess that's so if you run from danger, you're carrying a lighter load and there's less chance of the stomach cramping if it's empty."

"I don't remember being scared."

"From what you described and the way they found you," the doctor said, unplugging her stethoscope, "you were scared green."

"Scared by green," Remo corrected.

"Have it your way." Dr. Jeffcoat started for the door. "By the way, I hope you're both covered by insurance."

"We have universal health care," said Chiun loftily.

"No one has that yet-if they ever will."

"Ask your President if you do not believe me."

"Cash okay?" Remo asked.

"Cash," Dr. Jeffcoat said, closing the door, "is king around these parts."

After she was gone, Remo said, "Time to call Smith."

Chiun rushed to Remo's bedside.

"Do not tell Emperor Smith of my embarrassment," he pleaded.

"What'll you give me?"

Chiun frowned. "What do you want?"

"How many thousand years do I have to cook dinner for you?"

Three.

"Let's cut it to two, shall we?"

"Robber!"

And Remo laughed as he dialed. His stomach felt as if it had been boiled in carbolic acid. He couldn't remember the last time he had thrown up.

HAROLD SMITH SOUNDED as if he had been gargling with carbolic acid when Remo got him on the line. His voice was haggard.

"Yeah. Who'd you think?"

"I have heard nothing from you for two days. I thought you were dead."

"Neither of us are dead."

"What happened?"

"We ran into Beasley. He was stage-managing everything, I guess."

"Where is he?"

"Search me. Chiun and I are in a hospital somewhere recuperating."

"One moment." The line hummed. "Remo, you are in the popular Spring Hospital."

"How'd you know that?"

"Telephone back trace."

"Beasley got us with something green."

"What do you mean by something green?"

"A light or something. It was the ugliest green you ever saw, Smitty. It made me sick to my stomach. The doctor said my vagus nerve went crazy."

"Are you saying your flight-or-fight response was tripped by a green light?"

"I'm saying I pitched forward into my own puke and it's a day later."

"Two days."

Remo closed his eyes. "Fill me in, Smitty."

"The Beasley U.S.A. matter has been resolved. There is a truce. All combatants have agreed to stand down until the Virginia State legislature has decided the disposition of the parcel of land adjoining Petersburg National Battlefield earmarked for sale to the Beasley Corporation."

"Then it's over."

"It has just begun. We have a problem in France."

"We always have a problem with France."

"This is different."

"Smitty, I'm not up to dealing with the French. Not on an empty stomach, anyway."

"Remo, listen to me. Two days ago French warplanes bombed Euro Beasley."

"Is that good or bad?"

"We have an international crisis brewing. The French have entirely surrounded Euro Beasley and are refusing to allow anyone to enter or leave."

"Is that good or bad?"

"The French National Assembly have rushed through emergency legislation forbidding the speaking of English within the borders of France."

"Huh?"

"American businessmen and tourists are being thrown out of the country. Our Senate has threatened retaliation. A U.S. mob was intercepted in boats near the Statue of Liberty. They were carrying acetylene torches. One confessed to a plan to dismantle Liberty and send her back to France in pieces. Someone blew up the French pavilion at Epcot Center. Quebec is in an uproar. We are on the verge of a war with France."

"Over a theme park?"

"The specifics are difficult to determine. But you and Chiun must go to France and find out why Euro Beasley is under seige."

"Probably the admission prices," muttered Remo. "What about Beasley?"

"Do you know where he is?"

"No," Remo admitted. "I only know where I am because you told me."

"We will deal with Beasley later," Harold Smith said in a biting tone of voice. "Right now I want you and Chiun in Paris as soon as possible."

"I'm not up to this."

But Harold W. Smith had already disconnected.

Hanging up his phone, Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju and said, "We're going to Paris, Little Father."

"That dump," sniffed Chiun.

AT THE CUSTOMS STATION at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Remo defenestrated a French customs officer for speaking French to him.

Remo had started to say "I don't speak French," when the customs officer inspecting his passport pulled a whistle from his uniform blouse and blew on it shrilly.

"Il ne parle pas francais!" he cried.

"What'd he say?" Remo asked Chiun.

"You do not speak French," Chiun translated.

"I just said that."

"Il parle rebut americain!" the customs officer shouted.

"He said you speak junk American."

"Il faut qu'il se comportat."

"And must be deported," Chiun added.

"You're deporting me over your dead body," Remo told the customs man in English.

"Do you not mean over my dead body?" asked the customs officer, also in English.

"Exactly," Remo told him darkly.

Then, catching himself, the customs man clapped his hands over his own mouth. "I have been contaminated!"

Another customs officer strode up and arrested the first. They began arguing. In French.

"What's going on?" Remo asked Chiun.

"He has been arrested for speaking English," explained Chiun.

"Good."

Then a third customs officer tried to arrest Remo and Chiun for speaking English within the natural and eternal borders of the Republic of France.

That was the customs official whom Remo flung through the nearest plate-glass window. He screamed something that sounded inarticulate, but was probably just high-speed French. Both sounded the same to Remo.

Whistles blew shrilly, and airport security converged on Remo and Chiun. They were yelling excitedly in French, and since Remo didn't understand the language, he decided to put the worst possible construction on what they were trying to tell him and began resecting their frontal lobes with his index finger.

By some fluke he got a few speech centers, because the excited shouts stopped while the excited gesticulating continued as the airport security men decided to give the two English-speaking demons a wide birth.

Outside, Chiun hailed a waiting Mercedes cab in perfect French, which, he complained to Remo as they got into the back seat, was not perfect at all, but an abomination.

The cab driver, hearing English spoken in the back of his cab, which was technically French soil, brought the car to a screeching halt and ordered them out.

Since he gave the order in fluent French, Remo felt no obligation to obey and sat tight.

The Master of Sinanju, on the other hand, took immediate offense and hurled a long string of insults back in voluble French. The Frenchman hurled back as good as he got, and after a minute of shrieking cacophony Remo ended the argument by the simple expedient of giving the back of the driver's seat a sharp, sudden kick.

The driver flew out his own windshield, slid off the hood and onto the parking lot.

After Remo got behind the wheel, everything was fine except for the fact that the steering wheel was on the wrong side, and the wind blew back saltlike granules of shatterproof glass off the hood and into his face as he drove.

"So," Remo said as they entered highway traffic, "which way to Euro Beasley?"

"I do not know."

"Damn. That means we're going to have to ask directions from the locals."

They were already out of the city and into what appeared to be farmland dotted by small villages. So Remo pulled off the highway and asked a farmer.

"Euro Beasley?"

The farmer held his nose.

"You're a big help," said Remo, driving on. The next farmer spit when Remo repeated the name.

"How do you say 'Which way to Euro Beasley?'" Remo asked as they continued.

" 'Ou est Euro Beasley?"' said Chiun.

"Say again?"

"'Ou est Euro Beasley?'"

"I don't suppose that's spelled the same way it's pronounced."

"Of course not. It is French."

When Remo repeated the fragment of French for a peasant woman, she picked up a roadside stone and bounced it off their back window. She was shaking a malletlike fist at them as they drove away.

"What'd I do wrong?"

"You mangled that woman's tongue."

"You ask me, her tongue was mangled by its inventors. You know, Little Father, I had three whole years of French at the orphanage."

"Yes?"

"Yeah. French I, French I and French I. After my third French I, the nuns gave up on me and speaking French. Latin, I could handle, though."

"French is to Latin what Pidgin English is to your mother tongue," said Chiun. "And the French spoken today is doggerel."

"Tell that to the French," said Remo. "Hold on, I see some police cars coming up on us fast."

"Excellent. We can ask directions of them."

"My thinking exactly," said Remo, slowing.

In the rearview mirror three caterwauling French police cars came barreling up, driving abreast of one another. They were tiny white Renaults, with flashing blue roof bubbles and rude sirens. The car in the middle dropped back while the two side machines surged forward.

When they had flanked Remo's taxi, one gendarme called out, "Rendez-vous!"

"Did he say rendezvous?" asked Remo.

"He is asking you to surrender."

"Ou est Euro Beasley?" Remo asked.

The gendarme flinched as if Remo had spit in his face.

"What'd I do wrong?" Remo said to Chiun.

"You told him 'He hears Euro Beasley.'"

"Oops. Maybe you should try."

But it was too late. Pistols came up out of police holsters, and Remo knew he had to act fast before their tires were shot out from under them. He accelerated, flung open his door and hit the brakes hard.

"Chiun!"

The Master of Sinanju copied his pupil's action.

The pursuing gendarmes were caught off guard. They hit their brakes too late and took off both taxi doors with a ripping of steel and the crash-bang of the doors smashing into their windshields.

When the third car caught up with them, Remo reached out and wrenched the passenger door off the pacing vehicle. Then he asked, "Ou est Euro Beasley?"

The driver pointed ahead. "Follow ze signs to A301. "

"Did he say follow the signs?" Remo asked Chiun.

"Oui."

"Don't start speaking French to me. How do you say thank you?"

"Merci."

"Oh, right. Merci, " Remo called, kicking out through the driver's side and catching the right front tire with the hard toe of his foot.

The spinning tire blew, sank and the police car went falumphing into a ditch. The driver got out and called "Bonne chance!" after them.

"He has wished us good fortune," Chiun translated.

Remo grinned. "Looks like clear sailing ahead."

Chapter 19

Behind a basement door whose brass plate said White House Situation Room, the President of the United States conferred with his military advisers.

"Options, I want to hear options," he said.

"Do we have a policy?" asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The President looked to his national-security adviser, who glanced guiltily at the secretary of defense, who in turn threw the hairy eyeball back to the Chief Executive.

"Not yet," the President admitted. "I was kinda hoping you'd help us out with that."

"We have to retaliate, Mr. President," said the Joint Chiefs chairman in his musical East European accent.

"We do have to?" the President said unhappily.

"You did say you wanted to hear options," his national-security adviser said.

"Good options. Positive ones."

"I thought you meant military ones," the JCS chair said.

"Every time I send troops somewhere, my polls drop."

"We have to retaliate in kind," the secretary of defense said firmly. "American prestige is at stake."

"Damn."

"Look, the French have bombed Euro Beasley. Now they have it surrounded. We have one of two responses in kind available to us."

"I'm listening."

"One, we liberate Euro Beasley by inserting the Eighty-second Airborne. They'll hold it against further French incursions, wire it up good, slip out under cover of darkness and blow it to smithereens."

"Blow up Euro Beasley?"

"Mr. President, we can't let the French just march up and grab a symbol of American culture and prestige. And we can't exactly dismantle it and ship it back to the good ole U S.A. in crates."

"What's option two?" the President asked.

"Option two is to retaliate in kind. They hit an American theme park. We hit a French theme park." The chair-laid a map of greater Paris on the long conference table. "Here we have Paris. And this red spot thirty-two kilometers east is Euro Beasley."

"Right...."

"This is Parc Asterix. It's twenty-five kilometers north of Paris and both logistically and symbolically, it's a natural."

"How so?"

"It's based on some sissy French comic-strip character, so it has parity with Euro Beasley as a military target. You know, they hit Mongo, we clobber Asterix."

"What is the other red spot?"

"France Miniature. It's a theme park where the entire country is laid out in miniature. You can ride through it in a matter of an hour. Sort of a Lilliput kind of deal, I guess."

"Wouldn't that be a more logical target? It's more French."

"True. But it's an awfully small target. Hard to hit. The goddamn city of Paris they got there is no bigger than this room. Our satellites had a heck of a time getting a fix on the tiny Eiffel Tower, which we'd naturally designate ground zero."

The President rubbed his bulbous nose in indecision. "I don't like the idea of hitting a comic-strip-character park. It seems antibusiness and might turn the next generation of French children against us."

"It's tit for tat, sir."

"If it's tit for tat, shouldn't we strike a French theme park on American soil?"

The Joint Chiefs of Staff sat stunned for several ticks of the clock. They exchanged uncertain glances.

"Er, Mr. President," the defense secretary said, "the Pentagon has no intelligence on any French theme parks on US. soil."

"I don't think there are any," added the nationalsecurity adviser, reaching for his briefcase. Everyone reached for their briefcases and began digging through briefing papers and intelligence abstracts.

The President turned to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had thus far sat through the meeting with his mouth shut and his hands folded.

"What do our ground assets in Paris tell us?" he asked.

"Nothing," the CIA director said morosely. "I regret to inform the President that they were rounded up the first day by the DGSE."

"Their covers were blown the first day of the crisis!"

"We have reason to believe their covers were blown the day they hit Paris."

The President looked his disbelief.

"I know how this looks, sir," the CIA director said helplessly. "But you have to understand, it's an exceedingly difficult language to learn. We drill and drill our people, but when they get into the field, they stumble over the words something fierce. Even the simple words. Like yes. It's pronounced 'we,' but there's no w. It's all goddamn vowels, not one of them an e. "

The President said bitterly, "Obviously we've got another no-win Somalia-style situation on our hands."

"The Somalis speak French, too," the CIA, director volunteered hopefully.

"Do you have any helpful suggestions?" asked the President.

"I have a scenario for introducing Valium into the French drinking-water supply."

"What good will that do?"

"Our people think if we can get the French calmed down, they might get off their high horses-or at least enunciate more slowly, thus putting our agents on a level playing field with their agents, linguistically speaking-"

Everyone stared at the CIA director until the defense secretary said, "Got any Valium on you?"

"In my briefcase."

"Now would be an opportune time to indulge yourself."

While the CIA chief began rooting around, all eyes fell upon the President of the United Stated expectantly.

"I have the Vice President trying to reach the Beasley people on the net. Maybe they can shed some light on this."

"Shouldn't we explore all options?" the JCS chair pleaded.

"We are exploring all options. I have to be able to justify any military action I take to both the American people and the citizens of France. I can't justify tit for tat."

"Did I hear the word 'tit'?" a stern female voice called from the open door.

"Oh, hi dear," said the President sheepishly.

"Mrs. President," said the JCS chair.

"Don't call her that," the President whispered urgently.

"What have I told you uniforms about using sexist language in my house?" the First Lady snapped.

"Sorry, ma'am," mumbled the defense secretary.

"It was just an expression," added the national security adviser.

"Yes, tit for tat."

The First Lady gave them all the benefit of her laser blue eyes. "How would you like it if the expression was 'dick for dock'?"

The JCS chairman looked away and played with his fingers. The President turned red. The CIA director popped his Valium.

"From now on, say 'an eye for an eye' or 'a tooth for a tooth.' Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," the Joint Chiefs chairman and the President of the United States said in little-boy voices.

"At ease, boys," said the First Lady, coming over to her husband's end of the conference table and laying before him a single sheet of fanfold computer paper.

"This just came off the net," she whispered, glaring at the director of the CIA, who was trying to sneak a peak at the paper.

TAKE NO ACTION ON BEASLEY MATTER. AGENT'S EN ROUTE. WILL REPORT AS DEVELOPMENTS WARRANT.

smith@cure.com

"We're adjourned," said the President of the United States, crumpling up the paper.

"What about our retaliatory response?" asked the secretary of defense.

"Our retaliatory response," said the President, "is about to hit the French the way that comet struck Jupiter."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff looked at one another with blank, vaguely fearful expression.

"But, Mr. President, we are your retaliatory response."

"Not for real situations," said the President, exiting the Situation Room with his wife.

Before the door slammed, the First Lady turned and showed the Joint Chiefs of Staff how pink her tongue was.

Chapter 20

The first Euro Beasley sign they came to had a black X spray-painted over it. The second was desecrated by the slash-in-a-circle international symbol for no. The third had a non! scrawled over it.

"I think this is the way," Remo remarked dryly.

Remo recognized the exit off Route A301 that led to Euro Beasley because the sign, which was shaped like Mongo Mouse's head, was completely blacked out with paint.

He slid off the road, and the blue-and-cream Norman battlements of the Enchanted Village came into view.

Sleek helicopters buzzed its ramparts. A ring of desert camouflage AMX 30bis main battle tanks and APCs ringed the theme park.

"These guys look serious," said Remo.

They came upon a roadblock. Remo eased the car to a slow stop and stuck his head out the place where the window would have been had he not kicked the door off.

"Hey! Mind rolling aside for a couple of tourists?"

Green-bereted heads swiveled, and Gallic eyes widened in horror.

"Americain?"

"You bet," said Remo.

"Americain!"

The hated word ran up and down the ranks of the French army unit laying siege to the greatest theme park on the European continent.

A tank turret began rotating with a low, steady whine.

When the muzzle of the 105 mm howitzer was lined up with the taxi windshield, Remo said to Chiun, "I think we've hit a definite anti-American bloc."

They were out of the taxi before the shell coughed from the black muzzle and were accelerating to sixty miles per hour on foot when it struck.

The French taxicab took a direct hit and became the focal point for screaming shrapnel to ricochet in all directions.

When it settled back to the ground on puddling tires, it was a black frame of twisted steel in which flames crackled and danced.

While French army troops huddled behind their steel charges, waiting for the last bits of shrapnel to stop bouncing off, Remo and Chiun rendezvoused behind their siege line.

"That was easy," Remo said as they entered the park.

"These Gauls are very excitable, and therefore easily defeated by superior wits"

"I'll try and remember that," said Remo.

"I was thinking of my superior Korean wits, not your inferior white ones."

They walked down Main Street, U.S.A., unchallenged. Remo, who had been through Euro Beasley before, trying to locate Sam Beasley, was surprised how empty it was. Without the crowds who normally thronged the pavilions and attractions, there seemed to be no magic to the place.

Part of that may have had to do with the fact that most of the attractions had French-language names. Remo recognized the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse despite the sign saying, La Cabane Des Robinson, but what La Taniere du Dragon was, he had no idea.

"Last time I was here," Remo told the Master of Sinanju, "there was a way into Utiliduck-or whatever they call it here-through the castle."

"Therefore, we will not enter through the castle."

"I don't know any other entrance."

"Which only means that they will be expecting you to enter through the castle and will not be expecting us if we enter another way."

Turning a corner, they came upon red-bereted bodies around a grassy mound in the town square where Mongo's grinning face was reproduced in a varicolored flower pattern.

Everybody breathed, everyone's heart pumped, yet everyone lay facedown in a dried puddle of vomit, dead to the world.

"Looks like they got greened, too," Remo remarked.

Holding his nose, Chiun hurried on.

They passed an area called Parc Mesozoique, and Remo said, "I don't remember that from last time. What's it mean?"

"Mesozoique Park."

"That helps a lot," said Remo. "I thought you understood French."

"I understand the good tongue of the Franks, not this tongue-twisted patois."

The section of the park was walled off by a high bamboo fence, three times as tall as a man, lashed together with fibrous, ropelike vines. Remo tried to see through the chinks, but the spaces were caulked tight.

"Seems to me," Remo said, "something fenced off this tight might be important."

"I agree," said the Master of Sinanju, examining the fence carefully.

"Looks like something out of King Kong. "

"We never worked for him," Chiun said vaguely, attacking the vines with his long, knifelike fingernails. They began parting with dry snaps, and a section of bamboo began to sag outward.

"Your turn," Chiun invited.

Remo made a spear with his right hand and began chopping. Bamboo splintered and crackled in surrender. When he got an opening, Remo stepped in.

CHIEF CONCEPTEER Rod Cheatwood watched the two strange intruders amble around the park curiously. They weren't French. Certainly the Asian wasn't. The white guy was dressed for shooting pool, so he couldn't be French, either. He looked as American as Bruce Springsteen. But he wasn't a tourist.

Rod stabbed console mike buttons trying to pick up shreds of their conversation, but they seemed to somehow sense the electrical fields surrounding the concealed mikes. They lowered their voices every time they came within audio range.

And when he moved the concealed security cameras, trying to track them, they seemed to sense those, too, always turning so their backs faced the lenses, as if to foil lip-readers. Not that Rod had that talent.

When they came to Parc Mesozoique, Rod smiled slightly.

And when they began chopping away at the imported bamboo fence, he swallowed his smile and stabbed at console buttons.

It would be messy, but it was the best way. Since the French government had cut off all power to Euro Beasley, he didn't dare use the hypercolor eximer lasers unless he absolutely had to.

The things drank electricity the way a whale ingested water, and the Euro Beasley backup generators hadn't yet recharged from that French Foreign Legion incursion.

And his orders were to hold Euro Beasley at all costs until the cavalry came.

REMO DETECTED NO SOUNDS or scent of living things behind the bamboo wall so he entered Parc Mesozoique with confidence, stepping into an impenetrable rain forest.

There were birds squatting on the trees, but they weren't real. They simply perched on branches and looked glassyeyed. Animatronic. No doubt about it.

"Coast looks clear, Little Father," Remo called over his shoulder.

But Chiun had already entered. "This place is not real," he said, looking around with stern eyes.

"The trees are plastic," Remo explained.

"I do not like this place, where even the trees are not real."

"Hey, it's Beasleyland. Everything is plastic here. Come on, maybe we can find our way downstairs from here."

They melted into the plastic trees under the blind, watchful eyes of the jungle birds.

At the first earthshaking thud, Remo said, "What's that?"

"Something is coming this way."

The thud was followed by another. Foliage shook, and shook again. The thudding picked up.

"Something alive," Chiun added.

"If something living is coming this way, why don't I hear its heartbeat or lungs?" asked Remo.

"Perhaps it does not have any."

"Can't be animatronic. It's too big, whatever it is."

The trees continued to shake with each lumbering footfall, and branches snapped with a sound that was not right because the branches were not made of natural wood, but man-made polymers. They squealed and groaned instead of snapping and splintering as they should.

Remo hesitated.

"This is really starting to remind me of King Kong. "

Then the trees parted, and a leathery chocolate snout lined with countless ivory needle teeth dropped toward them.

"T-rex!" Remo shouted, breaking left. The Master of Sinanju stood his ground, staring up at the great behemoth, whose head waved back and forth like a serpent trying to fix its prey with its side-mounted lizard eyes.

Remo stopped, turned. "Chiun!"

"It is not living."

"It weighs as much as a truck and it has teeth. Move it."

The chocolate snout dropped lower. The mouth opened, and a mechanical roar issued from the sharklike mouth.

The Master of Sinanju cocked his head like a spaniel. "It is looking at me."

"It can't. It's a machine."

"Then someone is-looking at me through it," said Chiun stubbornly.

"Now that's possible," said Remo, slipping up behind the full-size Tyrannosaurus rex.

DOWN IN UTILICANARD, Rod Cheatwood couldn't believe his eyes. Or the eyes of the T-rex, rather. The little old guy wasn't scared in the slightest. He looked back at the animatronic T-rex with a serene indifference that made the short hairs on Rod's bare forearms lift like spiders walking.

"The little guy sure has balls." And he pushed the traction lever that set the T-rex lumbering toward the old man.

The view through the T-rex's eyes jumped, then retreated. Something was wrong. It wasn't advancing. It was impossible. He had green lights all over the board.

Then one light turned red. It was a square panel and it was blinking so the red and black letters showed on and off. They read, "Overload."

Yanking the traction lever back, Rod rammed it forward again. Hard.

The T-rex lunged-and bounced back like a rubber band.

"What is wrong, dragon-beast?" the little Asian asked in a squeaky voice that reminded Rod of Dingbat Duck's cartoon voice. "Are you afraid to approach the Master of Sinanju? You, the master of a long-ago time?"

Rod didn't know what the Master of Sinanju was, but he hauled back on the traction control and, grabbing the head joystick, began twisting.

The T-rex head swung left, saw only jungle, then swung right. More jungle. Rod pushed it all the way, and the T-rex craned to see over its shoulder.

Directly behind, the white guy in the T-shirt and chinos was standing with his arms casually folded, one foot pressing down hard on the thick tail.

"How can this fucking be?" Rod gulped.

Then the white guy called out, "Show us the way down, or the lizard buys it."

Rod stabbed the Roar button. The T-rex roared its rage.

But the man with the foot of lead stayed put.

"Okay, if that's the way you want to play it," Rod said, deactivating the T-rex. "It's time to bring on the allosaur pack."

Chapter 21

Dominique Parillaud might have had difficulty getting through U .S. customs at Richmond's Byrd International Airport except that US. customs was only too happy to eject any French nationals eager to return home before the conflict became hot.

"Au revoir," she told the customs man.

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," the man snarled.

When she came to the magnometer, it naturally beeped as she stepped through the sensitive metal frame.

"Empty your pockets," the security guard commanded.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?" she said, wrinkling her smooth brow.

"I said, empty your pockets."

"Je ne comprends pas, " she said.

"Damn. Another frog. Parlez-vous anglais?" he asked, flattening the lilt of the vowels and utterly demolishing the sweet consonants by actually pronouncing them.

"Non," she told him.

"Just keep going, Lewis-lover," the security guard said impatiently. "We don't want your kind here."

"Anglophone," Dominique muttered under her breath.

And so the greatest military secret since the hydrogen bomb sauntered past United States authorities and boarded an Air France jet bound for Paris, France, safely nestled between DGSE agent Dominique Parillaud's shapely legs.

When she crossed her legs, she winced. But the pain was exceedingly reassuring. It meant the Legion of Honor medal was hers.

Then she settled down to await the stewardess and the Air France meal that, although airplane food, true, was also French. And thus was exquisite even if the mussels simmered in white wine had cooled by the time the dish reached her.

The in-flight movie was a double feature, Terry Chez les Cinques and Doctor Jerry et Monsieur Love.

It was wonderful to see him in the original French.

Upon reaching de Gaulle Airport, Dominique had the taximan stop at a grocer while she purchased a warm, reassuring baguette of bread.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, she began tearing great chunks off with her bare teeth.

"U.S.A.?" The cab driver clucked sympathetically.

"Oui, " Dominique said through a mouthful of cooked dough.

"I have seen strong men weep at the sight of a wheel of cheese hanging in a shop after spending a week in that awful land. But enough. You are home now. Where do you wish to go?"

"The DGSE. But not until I have finished this luscious bread."

"The Americans, they do not understand good bread."

"They do not understand good bread, fine wine or even cheese."

"Not to understand cheese. Unpardonable."

"But most of all, they do not understand French. Or speak it well."

"How can they? They are so gauche as to put junk into their mouths-how can anything but junk come out again?"

"Garbage in, garbage out," Dominique said, smiling as the taxi entered the gray city where a raging mob was sacking a Haagen-Dazs shop, tarring and feathering its manager with his own faux-European product.

It was delightful to be back in civilization again.

WHEN SHE WAS ANNOUNCED, the director of the DGSE flung open his office door and regarded Dominique with stark eyes.

"You live?"

"I have conquered. The secret of l'affaire Beasley is mine."

"Enter, enter, Agent Arlequin."

When the door shut behind her, Dominique Parillaud said "Pardonnez-moi, " and lifted her skirt to reveal hex lack of underwear.

"This is the device that has unmanned our citizens," she said.

"I have always thought thus," said the DGSE director, looking away, not out of modesty but because a white string hung in plain view. He was squeamish about such womanly things.

To his consternation, he heard the squishy sound of a tampon being extracted and tossed onto his desk. It landed with a distinct click.

"Please . . . " he said.

"No, I mean what is inside that."

"Will you not do the honors?" he asked delicately. Frowning, Dominique Parillaud picked the tube apart with her nails, exposing an object slightly larger than a child's marble from the cotton packing.

Gingerly the DGSE director picked it up. He saw that it was of machined steel.

"I do not understand ...."

"Turn it around."

The DGSE director did and, when the other side looked at him with a frosty gray glare, he all but dropped it.

"An eye?"

"An electronic eye. I think it is-how do you say cybernetique."

"Hush! That is now a forbidden word."

"Sorry," said Dominique. "I took this from the skull of a man the world has believed dead for many years. "

"Oui?"

"A man made of machine parts. A man of evil. The mastermind behind the wicked terror of the Blot."

"Who is this evil one?"

"He is Uncle Sam Beasley himself."

The director of the DGSE blinked rapidly.

"Impossible!" he exploded.

"I do not know how this can be, but it is true."

Rapidly she explained her encounter with the American agents who seemed more than human but who fell before the pulsing fights from the cybernetic eyeball the DGSE director now rolled around between his nimble fingers.

"How did you best him?" the DGSE director added.

"Judo. He is part machine and, while stronger than I, very clumsy. I used that strength against him. While he was flat on his back, I took a rock to his skull, and as he lay insensate, his good eye rolled up in his head, while that abomination you now hold pulsed at me angrily. So I took it."

The DGSE director winced. "Did you employ a . . . knife."

"No. I merely unplugged it."

"Just like that? Poof!"

"Just like that. Poof. Then I fled with my prize."

Eyebrows jumping up in astonishment, the DGSE director assayed a very Gallic shrug. "This is remarkable work, Arlequin."

"The light that compels men to do its bidding exists within that orb."

"What could it be?"

"I believe it is a laser."

The director of the DGSE hissed violently. "Do not say that word! It is a junk word. It, too, has been banned."

"I forgot. It is so hard. My brain is starved for true nourishment. I have been in America so horribly long."

"I sympathize. Just yesterday I caught myself using the word waterbed when I should have said aqualit. "

"It is the horrid influence of American movies, all of which should have long ago been banned."

"Except for Jairy's, of course."

"It goes without saying," Dominique said carelessly.

The DGSE director held the orb up to the light, inspecting it curiously. "I wonder how you make this function?"

"There is an aperture in the back."

"Perhaps it will respond to electric stimuli," said the DGSE director, ripping the cord from his desk telephone and braiding the wire until it was small enough to be inserted into the hole.

"Is this wise?" Dominique asked.

"I will close my eyes. You say you are immune to its effects?"

"Oui."

"What color was its pulse?"

"How should I know? All I see are grays."

"Of course, of course."

"But it was not pink. Pink has a very positive effect, making even uncouth Americans positive and gentle in manner. The color that it pulsed made them vomit. "

"What kind of color makes a man vomit?"

"For all I know, gray," said Dominique, shrugging her slim shoulders.

The director winced. "I will definitely close my eyes." And he did as he guided the copper wire into the eyeball that locked back at him like a disk of dirty ice.

The copper wire scratched around inside for a few seconds before a tiny spit of a sound triggered a faint click. The gray pupil brightened, and the black pupil seemed to explode.

That was what the DGSE director saw even through his closed eyes. An explosion of intense green. It stabbed like a thousand piercing jade daggers into his retina.

Then his stomach exploded out his throat.

WHEN THE DGSE DIRECTOR awoke a day later, he moaned, "Vert..."

"Eh?" a voice murmured.

"It was green. Green is the hue of vomit."

"Actually it was more yellowish."

"It was green . . ." he groaned.

"I myself cleaned the vomit off your face before you were brought here, mon Directeur."

"I meant the color that makes men vomit," he murmured.

The DGSE director snapped open his eyes. They roamed around the room. He saw Dominique Parillaud's face hovering over his, looking cool and the epitome of Gallic sangfroid.

"I am hospitalized?"

"Under a false name, of course. But your vital signs are well."

"Brief me, Arlequin."

"The electronic eye pulsed, you puked and fell forward into your dinner. Escargot, if I am not mistaken."

"It was very good. And the light was very green. Hideous to behold."

"It has been analyzed. It is a laser."

"Shh."

"I mean a rayon de l'energie. DGSE scientists have gotten it to emit pink, green, red and yellow. They have remarkable effects upon the nervous system."

"You do not have to tell me that, Arlequin," said the DGSE director, sitting up. "I am famished."

"Would you like a Bosc pear?"

"Merci." The director reached out to take it, saw that it was green, and began heaving into his pillow.

"What is wrong?"

"It is green. Take it away. It is green."

"I cannot tarry. I have been ordered into the Blot."

"Why?"

"American agents have been seen in that area. It is suspected they are the same ones I encountered in the Uncouth Nation. I am the only agent who is immune to the evil eye."

"Where is the awful orbe?"

"That, I am forbidden to reveal on the grounds of French national security."

"Say no more," said the director of the DGSE, burying his head under his pillow to keep out the sight of the ugly green pear that sat on the bed stand like an evil Buddha whose plump stomach reminded him how distressed his own was.

Chapter 22

The allosaurs charged out of the brush like a stampede of angry plucked chickens running on pumping drumsticks. They were a vivid Purdue yellow.

"Now I know what this place is," Remo said to Chiun.

"What?"

"It's based on that hit movie they did a couple years back, Mesozoic Park. "

"What is a Mesozoic?"

"One of the big dinosaur eras millions of years ago."

"I prefer my era," Chiun sniffed. "And these beasts appear hungry."

"They're machines. They won't eat us. Probably just tear off chunks of flesh with their teeth and spit them out."

"A good idea," said Chiun, reaching up into the chest of the immobile chocolate brown tyrannosaur. One clawlike hand sunk its curved nails into the slick plastic skin and wrenched out a clot of machinery and wiring.

The Master of Sinanju reared back and, without seeming to take aim, let fly.

The tangle made a low and controlled zizzing arc and, when it struck the lead allosaur in the pack, removed its head.

The allosaur kept up its birdlike hopping run, but blinded, it stumbled into the path of two others.

The resulting allosaur collision was nothing if not spectacular. No doubt real allosaurs were not subject to blind collisions, but these were mere machines. When they got their pistoning legs tangled, they kept running anyway.

Allosaur drumsticks wrenched loose with metallic screams, and three of the animatronic dinosaurs pitched snout first into the AstroTurf, trailing wiring and sparks.

Even lying legless on the ground, they fought to crawl forward. One took a bite out of another, and within seconds they fell into a cannibalization frenzy.

"Nice," said Remo, setting a foot onto the T-rex tail and stamping. The tail went flat where he stamped. Remo reached down and harvested the thin end with a quick twist.

Spinning in place like a discus thrower, he got the tail moving smartly, then stopped suddenly. He let go. The tail kept going.

Like chain shot out of a cannon, it flew, striking two of the remaining allosaurs across their throats. The heads snapped back, and while the bodies kept moving, they didn't get far.

That left one allosaur, which came on like a chicken gone amok.

"You wanna do the honors or shall I?" Remo asked Chiun.

"I vanquished three. You only accounted for two of the lizards."

"Actually they're birds."

"Chicken-lizards, then."

As they talked, the surviving allosaur roared and lunged low.

Remo took point, waved in a friendly manner even as the allosaur emitted a scream and lunged with gaping jaws for his head.

Remo stepped off to one side and stuck out his foot, catching a pebbled shin.

The allosaur stumbled, pitched its entire length and went sliding on its belly, whereupon the Master of Sinanju caved the crown of its skull in with a sandaled foot.

"So much for the superiority of dinosaurs over man," said Remo.

They went in search of a way down into the bowels of Utilicanard.

DOMINIQUE PARILLAUD watched the awesome battle through field glasses from her hovering Gazelle helicopter.

"It is they," she told the pilot. "Set me down."

"The park is alive with dinosaurs."

"Zut! They are but machines designed for the amusement of children."

"They are deadly machines. They could devour my helicopter."

And Dominique unshipped her 9 mm MAS pistol and showed the pilot its hard, merciless snout. "You will land for the good of France and for the sanctity of your living brain"

The pilot wrestled the Gazelle to the ground, cursing the DGSE and the Americans by turns. He did not come all the way to this hellish place to be devoured by American-made dinosaurs, which, as everyone knew, were the junkiest dinosaurs ever constructed by man.

ROD CHEATWOOD SAT with his jaw hanging almost to his lap. He was alone in the main computerized control room of Utilicanard. He had been alone since the forced evacuation.

When the gas bombs had first dropped, he had been the one to relay the word to Vanaheim general HQ.

And the word back from Vanaheim was, "You are sanctioned to self-destruct. Initiate countdown."

"I'm not dying for my job," Rod had snapped over the satellite uplink.

"If you're captured, they'll prosecute you under a zillion French laws. You invented the hypercolor laser."

"I didn't order it installed all over this white elephant! I was just following orders."

"Tell it to a French magistrate."

"I will, because I don't plan on dying."

"This is disloyalty and punishable by termination."

"Duck you. I just declined to commit suicide for the company. I'm not exactly about to change my mind to hold on to my job."

"That is not what we mean by termination."

"Blowing myself and Euro Beasley to smithereens is not in my job description."

"We pay excellent survivor benefits."

Rod sighed. "My cats will be delighted. Now, let's get real, shall we? What's plan B?"

"Defend our hypercolor technology at all costs. It must not fall into unfriendly bands. We have loose ends and damage control to do back here. Once we're done, we'll extract you."

"How do I know you're not hanging me out to dry?"

"You could implicate the company."

"True..." Rod said slowly. "Tell you what, you fax me a release on the TV remote finder, and I'll stick it out as long as I can."

"Robber," growled the voice of Bob Beasley.

"Takes one to know one," said Rod, who knew he had the company by its ratlike tail.

The fax arrived within fifteen minutes, and after he had read the fine print, Rod called Vanaheim back.

"It's a deal. Don't keep me waiting too long, okay?"

For twenty-four hours it had not been bad. The French had given up after the first two assaults. Every time they showed signs of advancing, Rod activated the low-power pink periphery light. That made them grin and purr and try to lick the pink air as if it were cotton candy. It also forced the French field commanders to rotate their troops every few hours.

Now, according to the radio they had the park under what was being called cultural quarantine. It was a perfect standoff.

Then the two Americans showed up and made mincemeat of the Mesozoic Park population.

It was patently impossible. It was true that as dinosaurs went, the animatronic constructs weren't exactly perfect. They tended to stumble a lot, and the complex software that controlled their movements got their commands fouled up sometimes. Either that or some joker had deliberately installed a cannibalize program.

Still, they were several tons of mobile metal monster. They should have flattened the skinny white guy and the old Asian. Flattened them dead.

Unfortunately it had been the other way around. And now the unstoppable duo was creeping through Mesozoic Park, and Rod Cheatwood had a pretty damn good idea where they were headed.

The access tunnel to Utilicanard.

As the first droplets of cold sweat began popping out on his forehead, Rod Cheatwood went to check the generator.

There was enough power for a fast hypercolor pulse, he found. Maybe two or three if it wasn't juice-sucking Optired or Supergreen.

"Okay, let's see if you guys can take it as well as you can dish it out."

And Rod Cheatwood reached for a joystick that sat above a brass plate reading Supersaurus.

"UH-OH," SAID REMO, looking up through the trees. "More company."

The helicopter looked like a prehistoric dragonfly skimming low over the treetops. It circled, whipped up the plastic ferns and settled in a clear patch by a stagnant pool of plastic algae.

Out stepped the French agent they knew as Avril Mai. She advanced with her nose in the air and her cold green gaze fixing them.

"I see someone has wiped ze vomit from your sorry faces," she said haughtily.

"Have a care how you address the Master of Sinanju, Frankish wench," warned Chiun.

Avril Mai stopped dead in her tracks. The ice in her eyes seemed to shatter in shock.

"You are not-I mean, do you claim ze title of Master of Sinanju?"

"Does the sun claim to shine?" Chiun retorted coldly.

Avril Mai lost her color. Her face became slack. She made a red O with her mouth, and it began contorting into ovals and hoops of uncertainty. "Wha-what is your mission here?" she demanded at last.

"Tell us yours and we might tell you ours," said Remo casually.

"Nevair!"

"Suit yourself. C'mon, Little Father, we have things to do."

They started off. Avril Mai hurried to catch up. She wore a formfitting taupe unitard and a black balaclava rolled up on her head like a knit cap.

"I am coming with you," she said.

Remo noticed the balaclava. "Lose your beret?"

"Parisians do not wear berets except in stupid Americain cartoons. My beret was a disguise."

"Tell that to the troops camped outside the gates," said Remo.

"Zat is different. Zey are military men."

"And what are you?" demanded Chiun. "Deuxieme?"

Avril Mai compressed her red mouth.

"We're with the CIA," said Remo.

"Moudi! I knew it. You are a CIA agent and because you are an incompetent Americain you 'ave hired ze House of Sinanju to assist you."

"Looks like you got our number," said Remo.

Abruptly Avril Mai got in front of the Master of Sinanju and paced him walking backward.

"Whatever ze Americains are paying you, France will double it. I vow zis."

"Their gold is very soft."

"Our gold is softer."

"Their gold ships on time. French gold is slow."

"Slow?"

"Yes, the gold of the Frankish kings was exceedingly slow. By the time it arrived in my village, the babies were being drowned in the cold gray waters of the bay."

"I 'ave not heard zis story."

"Slow gold is the bane of all French lieges. It is the reason my House has not served the House of Bourbon in many centuries."

"I offer speedy gold, gold zat moves with ze speed of light."

"Hey, isn't it illegal to speak English now?" said Remo.

"No. It is illegal to speak junk Americain. I am speaking the king's English."

"English is a serviceable language," Chiun admitted.

"Thanks to Guilliame le Conqueror, who gave it a certain insouciant flavor," said Avril.

"Guilliame le Conqueror?" said Remo.

"She means William the Conqueror," explained Chiun.

"After ze Battle of Hastings, Britain became a vassal of the Normans, and our language elevated ze true, good English. It is much like ze way your junk tongue debased our pure French, except in reverse."

"Le crap," said Remo.

They were walking along a footpath that meandered through the plastic ferns and other trees. From time to time a branch-dwelling bird would track them with dark, glassy eyes.

"We are being watched," Avril said.

"Your name really Avril Mai?"

"Non."

"Betcha I can make you tell ...."

"Impossible."

"Her name is Dominique Parillaud," said the Master of Sinanju, striding along with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his kimono.

"Mouth! How'd you come by zis intelligence?"

"Very simply," said Chiun.

Dominique Parillaud gasped. "I am Agent Arlequin in all but ze most confidential files of ze DGSE. Merde! I 'ave given myself away."

And the Master of Sinanju separated his sleeves. Out came one ivory hand, a slim black leather wallet tucked between two fingers.

"I picked your pocket," he said. "Your true name was inscribed on a card."

"My driver's license!" Dominique said, snatching the wallet away.

Remo laughed. "Some agent."

Then he stopped laughing. They all stopped.

Not far away the branches were squealing and rustling.

"I don't hear any thudding," said Remo.

"What is zis zudding?" Dominique said.

"I said I don't hear any-"

"Ze word! What does ze word zudding mean?"

"Look it up sometime," said Remo, who fixed the sound with his ears and decided to climb a tree. " Under z."

He got to the top in about the time it would have taken a monkey to do it.

"Do you see anyzing?" Dominique asked anxiously.

"I think we're okay. It's just an apatosaur."

"What is zat?"

"Brontosaurus," said Remo.

And the head burst into view. It was gray and blunt and decorated with dark, soulful eyes. It hovered in the ferns like a disembodied python. The rest of its body was lost in the greenery.

"Oh, one of zose," said Dominique, lowering her MAS automatic.

Chiun's voice quavered. "Remo, is it alive?"

"You know better than that," said Remo, pushing the nudging brontosaurus head back. He made it look easy. It kept trying to knock him off his perch, but he held on with one arm while using his free hand to reverse the thrust of the stubborn head.

"For if it were alive, I would lay claim to its bones," Chiun said.

"Why would you want ze bones?" Dominique asked.

"Because dragon bones, mixed in a proper potion, prolong the life span."

"I can see why you would wish such a thing. You are very old."

"Thank you," said Chiun. "But I wish to see a greater age."

The bronto changed tactics. It began butting the trunk below Remo's feet. The plastic bole shook and shook.

Chiun called up, "Remo, stop playing with that ugly machine."

"I'm not playing with it. It's playing with me."

And Remo kicked down at the top of the beast's skull.

THE MONITOR PICTURE jiggled wildly before Rod Cheatwood's startled eyes. Again and again.

"What does it take to nail this guy?" he complained. "That's a damn supersaurus. The biggest radio-animatronic construct on the face of the earth."

But try as he might, he couldn't knock the guy off the tree or the tree out from under the guy. Every time he sent the head forward on its long gray neck, the guy batted it aside as if it were a garden hose.

Rod couldn't make the supersaurus advance. It was one hundred fifty feet long and stood on four truncated legs the size of redwood stumps. They were fixed in place. Not even Beasley animatronic science could make such a behemoth mobile. Only the head and tail moved.

Pulling back the neck-motor control, Rod positioned the head so it was looking at everyone.

Then he uncapped the lemon-yellow protective cap and laid his thumb on the button labeled Ultrayellow.

"Here's looking at you ...."

REMO WAS STARING at the brontosaurus's head, thinking how much it reminded him of an elephant in the color and texture of its hide, when the dark, soulful eyes began strobing.

The first pulse of light seemed to stab Remo in the stomach with the kick of a lightning bolt. The second was hotter, more yellow, and if it lasted only a nanosecond, it was a nanosecond too long.

"Run, Little Father!" he shouted, letting go of the tree trunk.

"I am running," Chiun cried, his voice twisted.

When he hit the ground, Remo ran, too.

"Why are you running?" Dominique called after them.

"Look into its eyes and you'll find out!"

Dominique turned. The eyes of the brontosaurus were pulsing every second and a half. The light was quite bright. Very white from her perspective. It was not green or pink. They would appear gray.

"What color is zis?" she cried.

"Yellow," shouted Remo, not looking back.

"Yellow?"

"Sickeningly yellow," Remo said.

"Disgustingly yellow," said Chiun.

"Interesting," said Dominique Parillaud, reaching into a slash pocket of her unitard.

ROD CHEATWOOD COULDN'T figure out what the problem with the French girl was. She was actually staring the supersaurus down while the other two were tearing ass as if their shoes were on fire.

Rod was eating power he couldn't afford even if it was pulsed bursts of low-draw Ultrayellow. He was going to have to get serious.

One eye on the screen, he snaked his finger under the blue protect plate marked Contrablue while the French woman facing down the animatronic supersaurus lifted what looked like a tear-gas pen in both hands and aimed it upward.

When he had the button, Rod faced the screen and said, "This is going to hurt you a heck of a lot more than it hurts me."

Then the pen point flashed, the screen turned Supergreen and Rod Cheatwood was upchucking all over his console, which went bang when his unconscious forehead slammed into it.

Chapter 23

In his office at Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold W. Smith was trying to pull the puzzle pieces together.

He thought he understood the objective in Virginia. The Sam Beasley Corporation, desperate to establish a new American theme park to offset the massive public-relations and financial losses of Euro Beasley, had set the stage for a public-relations coup by triggering a low-risk but high-impact media event significant enough to dominate the headlines but sufficiently isolated that it could be quelled before it raged out of control.

It had worked. Typically the press had run with the story, blowing it up bigger than it was. Even though the rebellion had been almost entirely limited to reenactors and civilians, it was being called by virtually every media personality the Second American Civil War.

Video footage of the pink Beasley-character balloons descending on the battlefield had been telecast nationwide. It was a propaganda bonanza for the Sam Beasley Corporation. They had already announced a multimedia product stream that included a TV miniseries, cartoons, comic books and a complete line of action toys dominated by America's latest overnight sensation, Colonel Dixie.

The participants in the Third Battle of the Crater were being signed up by every newspaper, magazine and TV talk show in the nation. Renewed interest in the Civil War and the steady stream of tourists already pouring into Petersburg had turned the tide of Virginia public opinion-already divided-toward allowing Beasley U.S.A. to go forward.

The Sam Beasley Corporation appeared to have won that campaign.

The Euro Beasley crisis was another matter. There was no question in Harold Smith's mind that Euro Beasley was the flashpoint for what the media was already calling the Great Franco-American Conflict.

But why? Why would the French air force bomb a theme park? Especially one that was technically owned by such institutions as Banc Frontenac and Credit Hollandaise?

Nothing was coming out of the corridors of the French government.

Nothing was coming out of the PR machinery of the Sam Beasley Corporation, either. After the first flush of victory in Petersburg, it had fallen silent.

Mickey Weisinger had dropped out of sight, as had Bob Beasley.

The whereabouts of Sam Beasley himself would be impossible to track. He had no more official existence than Remo Williams, whom the world also believed dead.

That was not true of the other Beasley officials, however.

Smith had to find them. He began calling up the airline passenger-reservations networks, beginning with Apollo. Punching in the names of Robert Beasley and Mickey Weisinger, he drew a blank at Continental Airlines.

Switching to Paz, Smith input both names. If they were moving by air, their names would pop up, and Harold Smith would find them.

The trouble was, their names were not popping up. And the airlines reservation system was overloaded with French nationals fleeing the United States and US. citizens evacuating an increasingly hostile France.

Determined to locate them, Harold Smith switched to the credit-card data banks. Beasley executives all had use of company credit cards. If they rented cars, purchased gasoline, ate in roadside restaurants and made any other purchases along their route, their names would surface and their courses could be plotted simply by electronically connecting the dots.

All Harold Smith had to do was locate enough dots.

Chapter 24

Remo Williams caught up to the Master of Sinanju, who was tearing through the plasticky stink of Parc Mesozoique. Side by side they zipped through ferns that flew apart at a touch of their scissorslike fingers.

"You scared?" Remo asked Chiun.

"A Master of Sinanju does not acknowledge fear."

"If he did, would you be as scared as I am right now?"

"You are a Master of Sinanju. You are not afraid, either."

"Then why are we running like two scared rabbits?"

"Do not underestimate the rabbit. In my village it is considered wise beyond all other creatures."

"If you're a rabbit, how come you look like a scared little rabbit, not a wise rabbit?"

"A wise rabbit knows when to embrace fear," Chiun snapped.

Remo started to look over his shoulder, then remembered how spine-chilling yellow the brontosaurus's eyes had been.

"How come we're scared of that yellow light here, and we weren't back at the Crater?"

"At the Crater we did not look directly into the awful eyes of the gray dragon."

"Good point, we only saw the back-glow, which wasn't so bad."

"This is no back glow now," said Chiun.

"You want to stop and take a chance?"

"No."

"One of us should."

"I am not afraid, so you should."

"If you aren't afraid and I don't mind admitting that I am, why don't you stop?"

"Because I have conquered my fear, and you have yet to conquer yours. Therefore, you need to test your mettle against your fears."

"Nice try, Little Father. But no sale."

Eventually they ran out of park. The other side of the high bamboo stockade fence came rushing up.

"You stopping?" asked Remo.

"No."

"Then I'm not stopping, either."

They hit the wall in unison. Bamboo splinters flew in jagged chunks as they blew through the stockade.

They came to a halt only when they reached a lagoon that bore a sign saying Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers De Jules Verne, which Remo figured translated as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but only because he recognized the submarine from the movie.

At the quietly lapping edge of the lagoon, they stopped and drank in the tranquil color of the water.

"Boy," said Remo, "that water is sure blue."

"Exceedingly blue," Chiun agreed.

"I love blue. Always have."

"It is a good color, perhaps not as good as gold, but good."

"I can never look at gold with the same eyes again. Too yellow for my tastes."

"Yellow is not gold, nor gold yellow."

"Gold is still too yellow for me. But man, I just love looking at this blue."

And as they stared deep into the placid, soul-calming blue waters, the deep blue turned indigo.

"Oh, shit."

"What is it, Remo?"

"Remember that soldier in the Crater? The one who saw a blue color when everyone else saw yellow?"

"Yes."

"I think that blue is catching up to me."

"I see it, too. It is like a burning in my eyes, except it burns deep blue and not a correct burning color."

"Damn," said Remo. "I feel awful."

"I, too, feel unhappy."

"Well, at least it's not yellow."

"It is not much of a blessing, but it is a blessing nonetheless," agreed the Master of Sinanju.

"Maybe if we blink up a storm, the blue will go away."

"It is worth a try."

When they had blinked the deep blue from their burned retinas, Remo and Chiun mustered up the courage to turn and face Pare Mesozoique.

The stockade fence still held.

Remo licked his dry lips to wet them. "You up for going back in?" he asked.

"It is our duty."

"Then I guess we gotta, although between you and me, I feel more like going back on strike."

"It is a worthy idea. Worthy of Jool Phairne."

"Who?"

Chiun gestured over his shoulder. "That brilliant writer whose name adorns that sign."

"You means Jules Verne?"

"That is not how you pronounce it."

"You mean Jules Verne is pronounced 'fool Phairne'?"

"Yes."

"No wonder these people keep getting conquered."

"It is part of their problem. From the Romans and Vikings to the Prussians and Germans, they have fallen before invader after invader. Perhaps it has given them an inferiority context."

"It's 'complex.' And you wouldn't know it to talk to a Frenchman. Or woman."

As they approached Parc Mesozoique, the whine of a rotor disturbed the stillness of the park. A moment later a small French army helicopter lifted, canted west and droned out of sight.

"Damn, there goes that damn April May!"

They reached the spot where the helicopter had lifted off. There was no sign of anyone or anything.

Then the Master of Sinanju noticed the drag marks in the dirt at their feet.

"Behold, Remo. A man was dragged to the helicopter."

"Yeah. And these small footprints on either side belong to Dominique. She must have dragged someone away. The question is who?"

"Let us discover that."

They followed the footprint-decorated drag marks to an upthrust protuberance on the park grounds. It was a small volcano, as volcanoes go. Probably twenty feet high. The sides were molded of some kind of streaked red clay. When they climbed it, the skin crumbled under their feet, setting bits of clay rolling and bouncing down to the base.

At the lip of the crater, they looked down and saw a ladder disappearing into a very black hole.

"Looks like the back way in," muttered Remo.

"Come," said Chiun, swinging around so he could take hold of the ladder's rungs.

They climbed down into the darkness, which proved to be a flat plug of glassy obsidian.

"Dead end," said Remo.

The Master of Sinanju said nothing as he moved about the inner walls of the cone. It was rough but not terribly irregular. Except for a single knob of obsidian. Chiun took hold of it, pushing and pulling it experimentally until, with a jolt, the obsidian plug dropped two inches, then continued dropping with the smoothness of an elevator.

Black-and-yellow safety stripes appeared on the walls as Remo and Chiun rode past.

"How do we know this isn't a trap?" Remo asked.

"How could anyone trap a Master of Sinanju and his trusty badger?"

"That's 'gofer.'"

"Consider it a promotion to a higher order of animal," Chiun said magnanimously.

At the bottom of the cone, they found themselves standing before one end of a concrete tunnel with a great black mouse-head silhouette painted onto the floor.

Then they smelled a smell they knew very, very well.

"Death," said Chiun.

"A lot of death," said Remo.

There were a lot of dead, they discovered as they crept along the concrete tunnels and corridors of the French Utilicanard. People lying dead at their desks, in their dormlike rooms, even lying fallen over their maintenance brooms.

And every one of them clutched an amber lollipop shaped like the head of Mongo Mouse and smelling of almonds.

"Dead about two days," said Remo, touching a cool fallen body.

The dead all wore the jumpsuits they associated with Utiliduck workers except these weren't white as they were in the States but a very chic peach.

"Looks like a mass suicide," Remo said, straightening up. "When the French bombs started to hit, they must have decided to take the hard way out rather than risk capture."

"This is very sinister. Could a color have done this?"

"I dunno. In fact, I don't get this color stuff. How can colors affect us this way?"

"Colors are very powerful. The ancient Egyptians knew this. Pharaoh slept in a red room because it helped him to sleep. And when he died, he was entombed in a room of gold because this helped his body to retain its royalty throughout eternity. In my village it is well-known that scarlet wards off evil demons."

"I don't buy that superstitious bulldooky. Color is color. I don't even have a favorite color."

"Not even pink?"

"Well, maybe pink. Pink is good."

"Pink is exceedingly good."

And they both found themselves smiling at the thought of the color pink.

As they walked along, a sour smell assailed their sensitive nostrils. They followed it.

"Fresh," said Remo.

It was, they discovered when they entered a control room marked in French, Defense D'Entrer.

It was the master control room. There was no mistaking that. There were grids of video monitors showing every approach and attraction in the park. Control consoles literally ringed the room.

And on the main console was a still-dribbling splash of fresh vomit.

"Someone did not take their poison," said Chiun, looking about the empty room.

"No, but someone took him."

"I detect the faint perfume of the French woman."

"Yeah. Great. Now we're the only ones here with the entire French army laying siege outside. Time to call Smitty."

Remo picked up a satellite telephone and tried to dial Harold Smith in America. The trouble was Remo didn't know the country code for U S.A. And when he finally got an operator speaking French, she hung up on him the minute he spoke two words, one of them "please."

Sighing, Remo tossed the handset to the Master of Sinanju. "Just get me past the language barrier."

When Harold Smith came on the line, Chiun tossed the handset back to Remo.

"Smitty. We're not doing well here."

"One moment, Remo," said Smith absently. "This is very strange."

"What is?"

"I have unusual activity on Beasley company credit cards."

"Well, I can guarantee you the big spenders aren't over here in Euro Beasley."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because Chiun and I just penetrated their lower regions, and they're all dead."

"Dead. How dead? I mean, how long dead?"

"A day or two. They took poison."

"Cyanide," hissed Chiun.

"Chiun says cyanide. Looks like Jonestown, except with lollipops."

"Remo, this is very suggestive. Obviously Euro Beasley is not what it seems. It is much more than a theme park."

"So far, every Beasley theme park has been more than a theme park. But we missed one guy."

"You have a prisoner?"

"No, French Intelligence does. For all our troubles, we got yellowed."

"Remo, I think you are breaking up. Did you say yellow?"

"Yeah. The yellow light got us. I'll never look at a canary the same way again. Chiun and I took off for the hills when it hit."

"It is a wise rabbit which knows when to employ the ancient and honorable strategy of retreat," Chiun called out.

"By the time we got back," Remo continued, "that French agent had taken off with the one survivor. Whatever he knows, the French will have it by tomorrow is my guess."

Smith was silent a moment. "This is twice you have encountered mysterious colored lights."

"No," said Remo, "this is twice Chiun and I have been run over by these colored lights. I thought green was bad, but it was over quick. I never want to be yellowed again."

"Yet you enjoyed the pink light."

"Oh, yeah, that," said Remo, breaking into a pleasant smile at the memory. "I'd gladly walk through a football field lit by greens and yellows if there's some pink on the other side."

"Remo, listen carefully. These lights must represent some new technology the Beasley people have discovered. Look around for some sign of controls."

"Controls?"

"Yes, someone had to be controlling the yellow light."

"Hey, Chiun, check around the room. Smitty wants-"

"I have found many buttons with the names of strange colors on them," Chiun announced.

"Smitty, we found it."

"I have found it," Chiun said loudly.

"Remo, I am unable to locate any Beasley corporate officers. That means that man is our only lead. I want you to find him and extract from him what he knows. Only by determining the reason the French have seen fit to quarantine Euro Beasley can we get to the root of this conflict."

"Gotcha. How're things on the home front?"

"The Senate is debating a resolution outlawing the teaching of French in our major universities."

"That has my vote."

"The Modern Language Association has issued a strong statement condemning the French ministry of culture."

"You want my opinion, the only culture the French have belongs in a petri dish."

"They are calling for the expunging of all borrowed French words from American dictionaries. And the Academie Frangais has retaliated by demanding their French words back. They are also renaming Parisian streets named after Americans."

"How many of those can there be?"

"There are the Avenue du General Eisenhower, Avenue du Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Rue Lincoln, to name just three. Or were," Smith added.

"This is ridiculous," said Remo.

"This is a cultural war. But it threatens to escalate into the real thing. Remo, find that Beasley employee and get him out of French hands at all costs. No doubt he knows the secret behind this colored-light technology. I have a problem to solve."

"What problem?"

"Why the Beasley Corporation is sending scores of its employees to London."

"Good luck," said Remo, hanging up.

He turned just in time to see the Master of Sinanju bring a tiny ivory fist into contact with one of the control panels.

It shattered. Buttons flew upward to ricochet off the ceiling, and the smell of burning insulation curled up in smoky tentacles.

"What now?" asked Remo.

And when Chiun pointed to a now-broken bank of shielded buttons marked with names like Supergreen and Hotpink, Remo said, "Good job."

Chapter 25

When he woke up, Rod Cheatwood knew he was in deep trouble.

The last thing he remembered was the green light coming back at his console video screen. It was Supergreen. No one had ever tried to project hypercolor by video. Technically it should not have worked. But it did. Rod had upchucked and blacked out. Splat.

When he woke up, he was on a hard bunk in a windowless concrete cell. The walls were nice, though. Teal. Very chic. Worrisomely chic, inasmuch as Rod had no idea where he was or who had him. But he did have his suspicions.

Rod glanced around the cell. There was a stainless-steel toilet, washbowl and a third plumbing fixture he realized with a sickening sensation was a bidet.

"I am definitely in deep," he muttered.

When they came for him, they wore black balaclavas pulled over their heads with only their eyes and mouths showing. They conducted him to a featureless room and sat him down on a hard wooden stool.

Something that looked like a dessert cart was wheeled up, but when he looked into the tray, Rod saw implements that made his empty stomach quail.

"You don't have to torture me," he said weakly.

"Parlez-vous francais?"

Rod had picked up a little French during his stay, but only enough to get by. This was no time to stumble over shades of meaning. "No, I speak only English."

The eyes behind the balaclavas winced. They began whispering among themselves. Rod caught the gist of it. They were asking how they could be expected to interrogate an American who did not speak French if they faced a six-month jail sentence for speaking American. No one wanted to go to jail for six months. Not even in the service of his beloved country.

After conferring by telephone, the interrogators obtained some kind of a special dispensation from the ministry of culture and they brought out the crude electronic device resembling a toy railroad transformer with two wires and steely alligator clips at each end.

Rod instantly crossed his legs, thinking, They're out to fry my balls.

"I'll tell you anything you want!" he bleated.

"Tell us who is behind this outrage against our country."

"Sam Beasley."

"He is dead."

"I mean the Sam Beasley Corporation."

"Why did you not commit suicide like the others? Why are you so important?"

"I'm not important. Not that important."

"But you must be. You did not consume your suicide candy."

"What are you, nuts? I'm not dying for the fucking Sam Beasley Corporation. You have any idea how they treat their employees?"

"So many others did ...."

"Well, I don't think they got screwed quite the way I did."

"How did you get screwed?" one interrogator asked, wincing at the ugliness of the junk word.

"I don't think I can tell you that," Rod said, thinking if he spilled the beans on the TV-remote finder, the French would leap to patent it. Never mind standing him in front of a firing squad for coming up with the hypercolor laser in the first place.

"Trade secret," he said.

That was when one of them approached with the alligator clips extended in each hand, looking like he intended to jump-start a Tonka truck.

"No, not my balls. Anything but my balls."

When he felt the clips dig into his earlobes with their serrated steel teeth, Rod Cheatwood almost laughed with relief.

A voice said, "Last chance to talk freely."

And then someone spun a crank.

The pain was so severe Rod Cheatwood saw sparks dance behind his clutched-tight eyelids and he began wishing the electric current would find another part-any part-of his body. Even his sensitive testicles.

THE TRANSCRIPT of the interrogation of Rod Cheatwood was faxed to French Minister of Culture Maurice Tourette within ten minutes of being transcribed.

He read it with quick sweeps of his eyes, a blue pencil poised over the document that was stamped Secret-d'etat.

Finding a junk word, he crossed it out and inserted the correct form. Then he finished his perusal.

When Tourette was at last done, he called the president of France.

"Allo?"

"I have just read the transcript of the Beasley prisoner interrogation," he said.

"How can this be?" the president sputtered. "I myself have not yet received my fax copy."

"Please. Do not say 'fax.' It is an outlaw word."

"I will say what I please. I am le President. "

"And I am the minister of culture. Do you wish to land in jail for six months?"

"What have you learned?" said the president wearily.

"They have developed a hypnotic rayon de l'energie which bends those exposed to it to their will."

"Rayon de l'energie. What is a rayon de l'energie?"

"It is the word that has replaced l-a-s-e-r, " said the culture minister, spelling the junk word because he knew that he, too, could technically land in jail merely for enunciating it.

"I fail to grasp how a laser-I mean rayon de l'energie-could hypnotize. Do they not cut things?"

"Oui. But this rayon de l'energie uses tinted light. Pink pacifies. Red boils the blood-"

"Literally?"

"Non. Figuratively. Yellow makes the heart quail in fear, and green insults the brain and stomach so that one vomits and loses one's wits."

"What about blue?"

"Blue?"

"It is my favorite color. What does blue do?"

"Blue," said the culture minister, "depresses."

"Depresses? I have always believed that blue soothed. The sky is blue, non? And the oceans. They are very soothing to look upon."

"True. But you are forgetting that when you are sad, you feel blue. Forlorn music is called le blues. "

"Is that not a forbidden word?" the president asked pointedly.

"Les bleus, then," the culture minister said, adding it to his working copy of his dictionary of official terms.

"Proceed," said the president of France in a purring tone.

"They have installed pink lights all over that Blot. It creates a sense of well-being and receptivity. Like cotton candy for the eyes and the brain."

"It is no wonder that our poor citizens flock to the Blot."

"This is an indefensible provocation, an act of cultural imperialism. They have subverted our people, our culture, our way of life. What do you intend to do about it?"

"I must evaluate this fully."

"France cries out for strong action. Retaliation in kind."

"Do you propose that I have built a Parc Asterix on American soil and install pink rayon de l'energie lights everywhere?"

"I meant military retaliation."

"I am not yet convinced this is the doing of Washington, but the lawless depredations of a private company. I will not be stampeded into-"

"'Stampeded' is a junk word. I do not wish to report this conversation to the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of the French Language."

Unseen by the minister of culture, the French president rolled his eyes ceilingward. "What do you propose?" he asked through politely clenched teeth.

"We gave them the Statue of Liberty. Let us demand it back."

"Absurd!"

"Then let us destroy it."

"I understand that there are restive elements over there which have called for Liberty to be torn down and sold for scrap."

"That would be an act of war!" Maurice Tourette cried. "If they dare to harm Liberty, we should nuke them flat. Stamp out their junk culture and its uncouth language at one blow."

"I will have to speak with the minister of defense."

"He is on my side," Tourette said quickly.

"Have you spoken with him on this matter?"

"Not yet. But I know he is on my side. If you wish to ensure your political future," the culture minister said, "you should be on my side, as well."

"I will think about it," said the president of France, hanging up.

Then the expected fax entered the room, attached to the hand of an aide, and the president of France leaned back to read it over.

It was good, he considered, that the US. President was so indecisive. Between that and his own leisurely approach to this crisis, perhaps a solution would present itself before the minister of culture prodded both sides into something infinitely more dangerous than a war of words over words.

Chapter 26

Harold Smith knew he was onto something when a computer check of the Beasley credit-card airline-flights purchases started concentrating in three states, Florida, California and Louisiana.

The first two he understood. Beasley employees. But there was no Beasley theme park in Louisiana. No corporate office, and no discernible connection to the Sam Beasley Corporation.

They were all going to London. Why were they going to London? It was not to catch connecting flights to Paris and thus Euro Beasley, Smith deduced.

First, no record of a massive block purchase of such connecting flights was showing up in any of the airline-reservations nets.

Secondly American citizens were being pointedly kept out of France as "undesirable aliens."

In fact, as Smith worked his keyboard, a bulletin told of the American ambassador to France being declared persona non grata and sent home for "conduct incompatible with his station."

This was diplomatic jargon used to describe illegal espionage activity. It was absurd. The US. ambassador had nothing to do with this matter-whatever it was.

Smith returned to his task.

Beasley employees were evacuating to France with the speed and single-minded fervor of lemmings seeking the water. Why?

"They can't be going to London," he murmured. "That would make no sense."

Then the truth struck Smith with the force of a blow.

Americans were persona non grata in France. But British citizens were still welcome-or as welcome as the French made any non-French-speaking people feel welcome.

Smith brought up a detailed map of the British Isles. He shrank it so the English Channel came into view, along with the northern coast of France.

Gatwick to de Gaulle or Orly was a matter of an hour's flying time. But any American attempting to land at either airport would certainly be intercepted by French customs. Even in overwhelming numbers, they could not get very far.

Smith considered the channel. Taking a ferry or landing craft was a possibility. But a sea invasion, even a small one, had a limited operational viability.

Frowning, he tapped a key that converted all English words and place-names to French in the wink of an eye.

The channel became La Manche, which was French for "the sleeve," and was the name the French had given what the rest of the world called the English Channel. There was nothing else provocative or helpful.

Smith was about to log off when his gaze alighted on an unfamiliar landmark that lay across the channel.

It was a red line.

And it had a label: Le Transmanche.

His weary gray eyes froze. Was there something he had missed before? Smith tapped the key that restored the English tags.

And on the map where Le Transmanche had been, appeared a new word. A word Smith instantly recognized. A word that made the skin prickle and crawl along the bumps of his spine.

The word was Chunnel.

BECAUSE THEY worm no uniforms, they were not considered an army. An army comes wearing uniforms, bearing arms and marching to the threatening roll of drums.

The combined California Summer Vacation Musketeers, Florida Sunshine Guerrillas and Louisiana Costume Zouaves arrived in London, England, carrying American passports, their uniforms discreetly tucked away in their luggage.

And so they were considered tourists not soldiers.

When they showed up, in groups of two and three at London's Waterloo International railway station, they were carrying forged Canadian passports. They boarded the high-speed Eurostar trains as FrenchCanadian tourists and kept to themselves as the train rattled over the old track to Folkestone at a decorous eighty miles per hour because the brand of Louisiana Creole they spoke wouldn't exactly cut it in Paris.

Upon entering the special rapid track of the English Channel Tunnel they sped up to 186 miles per hour.

The combined forces kept their tongues still, although their hearts lifted with each mile that raced by.

French customs could be forgiven for not sounding the alarm. Who would expect an invasion force arriving by Le Transmanche, as the French called the Chunnel? It was the British who for centuries had resisted the link to Europe. It was they who feared invasion from the Continent, not the other way around.

Their passports were in order, their uniforms were neatly folded, blue and gray cottons nestled deep under their very British tweeds and linens.

And by the time they left Coquelles Terminal in Calais, bound for Paris, there was no stopping them.

For they bore no weapons recognizable as such.

And while it was unusual to bring personal universal TV remote-control units into a foreign country, it was not illegal.

AT FIRST Marc Moise welcomed the promotion to task force group leader.

"You will lead the Louisiana Costume Zouaves," he was told by no less than Bob Beasley himself. They were in a conference room in Sam Beasley World's underground Utiliduck, in Florida.

"Lead them where?"

And when Bob Beasley told him that the objective was to retake Euro Beasley to keep special technology out of French hands, Marc Moise swallowed very, very hard and said, "That sounds dangerous."

"It's for the good of the company."

"I understand that," said Marc hesitantly. "But-"

Then Bob Beasley fixed him with his crinkled father-figure eyes and whispered, "Uncle Sam asked for you by name. He said, 'I want Moose to spearhead this operation.'"

Chapter 27

Dominique Parillaud felt proud. Remy Renard, director of the DGSE, had convened a high-level meeting of the directorate's Planning, Forecasting and Evaluation Group and had invited her.

"We would appreciate your input," he had said, then catching himself, corrected, "Your thoughts, Agent Arlequin."

"But of course."

Now in the somber room whose high windows were heavily curtained to keep out the incessant clangor of Parisian traffic and to foil observers, they sat about the long oak table on which the detached eye of Uncle Sam Beasley lay. It was still attached to the penlike activator DGSE technicians had hastily devised to enable it into a weapon.

"The heart of the device is a prism," a DGSE technician was saying. "As you know, white light passing through a prism has the property of scattering into rainbow hues. This orb emits light according to cybernetique command impulses, delivering the desired supercolor."

"Excellent summary," said the DGSE chief. "Now, of what use can this tool be to French national security."

"Our agents, equipped with such devices, would be impossible to foil in the field," said Lamont Mont grande, head of the political police known as the Renseignements Generaux, who had been invited as a courtesy.

"Good, good, but there is the risk of losing the technology to an adversary nation."

"If this is American technology, as we suspect, it is as good as lost," said Fabian Rocard, the chief of Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. "Our industrial-espionage bureau has been highly successful in acquiring American technologies, often, as you know, by procedures as simple as rooting in the unsecured garbage of aerospace companies."

"Still, if lost to others, it will be turned against our advantage," Renard said. "More thoughts, please."

There were several moments of quiet rumination as a scrumptious pork wine, cheese and crackers made the rounds of the long table.

At length the minister of the interior and nominal overseer of the French Intelligence community spoke up. "Imagine this orb magnified greatly."

The table of Intelligence chiefs focused on the orb. In their minds it grew to great size. It was not difficult to envision. They understood that this object loomed very large in their nation's future.

"Now, further imagine this orb in orbit."

"In orbit?"

"Oui. In orbit circling the globe, the eye of France."

"A spy satellite?"

"No, the fearsome protective eye of France. Imagine the Germans nibbling away at our borders again."

This was not very hard to imagine, either.

"Then imagine as they marshal their foes to storm or invade, an irresistible pink radiance spilling down from the heavens to bathe them in its quelling radiations."

This vision was much more difficult to envision, but they put their concentration into it. Scowls came, as did facial contortions.

Eventually they saw the beauty of it.

"Or should the British become even more of a nuisance than they are already, bathe them in the awful green that causes the stomach to rebel."

"Their stomachs should already be in rebellion, with the unpalatable foods that they devour."

A combined roar of laughter floated toward the high ceiling.

It was the lowly Dominique Parillaud who had the best idea of all, however.

"Imagine," she said in a soft, conspiratorial voice, "bathing the US. with the yellow radiation that brings fear and consternation. They will never vex us again."

"We could keep them in thrall indefinitely," Remy crowed.

"Unless, of course, we require liberating again," said the minister of the interior. "Then we would naturally release them. Briefly. Until they have succored us once again with their industrial might and brave but foolhardy soldiers."

"Provisions, of course, will have to be made to scrupulously avoid infecting the habitation of Jairy, of course."

"Of course. This goes without saying."

"When is the next Ariane launch?" asked Remy Renard.

"Next week. A communications satellite, I believe it is."

"It is possible to substitute this?"

"Non. A larger package must be created using this technology."

"If we have the technology, how long can it take to recreate this larger package?"

No one knew, but everyone promised to get to work on the problem. For all understood they held a power, a force greater than the atomic bomb itself. One could not nuke another nation without incurring certain lamentable unpleasantries in return. Criticisms. Condemnations. Even unsympathetic retaliations.

But if the afflicted nation had no inkling that their distress was caused by colors emanating from outer space, who could criticize France?

As the meeting broke up, Dominique Parillaud decided to look in on the Beasley spy whom she had interrogated not an hour before.

The man had been asking for a television, which had been provided to him. Dominique was curious. What would a man in the difficult position of captured industrial spy want with a television set? Was there something he expected to see on it?

THE TAXI DRIVER a mile outside the Euro Beasley RER train stop didn't hear the rear doors open as he waited, drinking coffee, for a fare.

He barely heard them close. He should have felt the shifting of his rear springs because when he glanced up into his rear mirror, two men were sitting in back.

"Mon Dieu!"

"Take us to Paris," said the taller of the two, an obvious and unspeakable Anglo-American type. If not because of his gauche dress, certainly because of his painful pronunciation of the elegant name of Paris.

Pierre Perruche had been hauling unspeakable Americans and their unspeakable accents around Paris all his life. Many times he yearned to throw them bodily from his car when they announced their destinations with impossible words, but there were considerations other than his deep-seated desires. Namely income and the risk to tourism, which also impacted upon his income.

But with all American tourists ejected from France and their hideous accents also outlawed, Pierre Perruche saw no need to hold back any longer.

"Out!" he shouted.

"Look, we don't have time to argue. Just take us to Paris."

"It is pronounced 'Par-ee!' Out, impossible ones!"

Then the other man, the old Asian, spoke up. In perfect French that broke the heart and made Pierre Perruche, a lifelong Parisian, realize that his own speech was shamefully deficient, the Asian instructed him to go climb a tree.

"Va te faire pendre ailleurs!" he said haughtily.

And such was his pronunciation that Pierre relented. "You may stay," he said, tears starting. "The other, he must go. Now!"

What happened next was not entirely clear to Pierre Perruche, although he lived through the entire ordeal.

A steely hand took him by the back of his neck and impelled him to drive to Paris.

Pierre Perruche had no volition other than that which he received from the hateful American. He drove. When his head was turned like a horse, like a horse he drove obediently in that direction. He felt very much like a dumb beast.

From the back the old Asian spoke commands. Not to Pierre, but to the other. The other then compelled Pierre to drive that way or this way.

It was not the most efficient system but it worked quite smoothly, especially after they pulled onto the Ring Road and into Parisian traffic at its most frightful.

Pierre Perruche was astonished to find himself driving more skillfully than ever before in his life.

It was a strange feeling made ever stranger when he was forced to drive past DGSE headquarters on Boulevard Mortier.

There was no mistaking DGSE HQ. A hodgepodge compound of stone-and-brick buildings, it was isolated by a brown stone wall. A weathered sign prohibiting filming or the taking of photographs was the only outward indication of its sensitive nature. Its roofmounted surveillance cameras followed every passing car, jogger and pigeon that chanced by its tracking lenses.

"That it?" asked the American of his Oriental companion.

"Yes."

And a thumb slipping up to squeeze one jaw muscle somehow caused Pierre's foot to depress the brake with the correct pressure to bring the cab to a smooth stop.

"The fare is-" he started to say.

"What fare? I did all the driving."

And before Pierre could protest, the American squeezed all awareness from his brain.

THE ROOF CAMERAS tracked them as they approached the DGSE HQ.

"Looks easy enough to crack," said Remo. "What say to climbing to the roof and dropping through the ceiling?"

Chiun regarded the ten-foot-high wall whose top was toothy with embedded bayonets to foil vaulters, and said, "Too obvious."

"I don't see a better way," said Remo.

"We will enter by the front door."

"Why is that not obvious?"

"Because they do not expect us."

Remo followed the Master of Sinanju up to a metallic beige door set in the wall. There was no knob, only an electric button.

Chiun pressed this, the door started to open and the Master of Sinanju bustled through and into the teeth of a DGSE security team.

One said, "Arretez!"

Remo asked, "Parlez-vous franglais?"

This was not well received, and when the Master of Sinanju showed every sign of breezing through the guards with a blithe disregard for decorum, one guard yanked up his MAT submachine gun and said, "Allen y! Dites-le!"

Remo didn't need to draw upon his three years of French I to know the guard had just ordered his comrades to open fire.

He picked his target and started in, confident that the Master of Sinanju had already chosen his.

Chiun had. He pivoted in place and lifted one sandaled foot to the height of his own head.

It seemed only to brush two sets of jaws, but the jaws came off their hinges with a matched pair of cracks, hanging askew. The guards lost their weapons and went down trying to clutch their chins, which were no longer quite where they were accustomed to being.

Remo decided to offer up his own brand of professional courtesy and not kill anyone who was only defending his place of work.

Moving low, he let a stuttering Mat burst burn past one shoulder close enough that he felt the hot bullets pass. Then he popped up not an inch before the guard's comically astonished face.

Remo poked him in the eyes with two forked fingers, and the man recoiled, howling and clawing at his tearing eyes.

A second guard swung his stubby-snouted weapon on line with Remo but held his fire. Remo had grabbed the first guard by the back of his coat and held him between himself and the place where the bullets would come out.

The guard tried to angle his way around, the better to shoot Remo without harming his compatriot.

The blinded guard continued howling and dancing-not entirely of his own volition-while it soon became apparent that there was no shooting the intruder without also shooting his fellow DGSE agent.

Remo saw the subdued resignation creep over the guard's face and propelled the blind guard in his direction. They collided, knocking heads, and both collapsed, weaponless, to the floor.

Remo joined the Master of Sinanju as he swept into the main DGSE building unchallenged.

In the empty foyer Remo asked, "Which way?"

"Follow the sour trail," said Chiun.

And Remo smelled it, too. The faint scent of vomit. The man who had upchucked over the Beasley control console had passed this way, probably prior to being cleaned off.

They found the cell in the basement, and while they were getting ready to rip the blank door off its hinges, Dominique Parillaud stepped off an elevator.

She took one look at them, and her jaw dropped.

Remo was on her before her hands could make up their mind to stab the Door Close button or unship her pistol.

She did neither. When the elevator door closed, she was out of the car, her pistol in Remo's hand.

"How did you? How could you--" she sputtered.

"This place is a candy box," said Remo.

"You will never get what you 'ave come for."

Then the Master of Sinanju approached the door. Its hinges lay on the outside of the cell for obvious reasons, so he simply sheared them off with three quick slashes of one fingernail.

The door came out like a portrait from a frame.

"You will never take him away," Dominique insisted with less conviction than before.

"Wanna bet?" said Remo. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

A blondish head poked out. The face under it was tanned and tentative.