The Sky is Falling

Dimitri was not privileged to know exactly how his commanders had done this, but they had taken over crucial points in the many battlements and individual towers of the castle. He was to enter by the Lion Tower, cross the soil-filled moat once deep with water from the Thames, pass the Byward Tower and turn left at Traitor's Gate.

At the Bloody Tower he was to wait until he got a signal from a window. It could be a hand. It could be a handkerchief. Then he was to walk toward the large Tudor building called the Queen's House. He entered with other tourists and the woman. But where everyone else followed the Beefeater Guards to the right, he went toward an unmarked door to the left, where there was a descending stone staircase.

Kathy O'Donnell saw all of this. She knew they wanted something from her. But she wanted more from them. The experiment could wait. Life was too delicious at the moment. She did not care about planning. She only cared about this very moment.

She was left in a stone room with a large bed and a bear rug. It had to be at least fifteen degrees colder in here than it had been outside. Dimitri returned in a bathrobe with a bottle of brandy.

Immediately she realized that his questions were really a psychological test. He didn't know it but she did. His other questions had to do with the experiment. On the psychological test she told the truth. She wondered if people were watching. She wondered if they would watch her make love. She wondered if she would make them want her, if they would suffer for not having her. She made up stories about the test, leading this Russian fellow on. And the gist of her response was that if he wanted more information, he had better entertain her. He took off his pants. She laughed. That was not what she wanted.

"What do you want, beautiful lady?"

"What you do best," she said. It was night. They had been there a long time. She was sure now that people were hidden somewhere in the walls.

"Kill one of them," she said, nodding to the walls. "If you want me."

At that point Dimitri might have killed the head of the KGB for this woman. But there was still that discipline wrought by years of living in a regime that depended on fear. He did not know that outside the very walls at this moment was Remo-the answer to everyone's fondest wishes. Remo did not care that the Tower of London was closed for the night or that it had been closed at this time for the last four centuries.

"I'm coming in," said Remo. His carload of British security and military people was parked just behind him. Lord Philliston was clearly blowing kisses. His words were heard as distinctly as he was seen by a command center. A console copied from American football games showed screens to video cameras set all around this old Norman structure. The American was on screen seven, set above an old Plantagenet standard of gold-and-crimson cloth, lion rampant. Lord Philliston was on screen one.

"Our orders are to put him down now," said someone standing behind the men at the monitors. He had just gotten word back from KGB Moscow. He wore a headset.

He also got other orders, these from the room where Anne Boleyn had awaited Henry VIII's royal divorce, which separated king from mate, queen from head.

"We'll have Dimitri kill him, giving the sociopath her bloodshed, and then we'll get our information," came the voice through the headset to the man behind the monitors.

"Let him find her in the Queen's House. And get Lord Philliston the hell out of there. It would take us years to replace him."

"He doesn't seem to want to leave the American," said the man on the monitor.

"I don't care. He'll leave when the American is sausage. The American goes down now," said the KGB security chief to the man on the monitor.

Outside the gate, with precise British rectitude, an employee of Her Majesty informed Remo that his presence would be perfectly acceptable inside the Tower at this late hour.

"I've got friends," said Remo, glancing back at the car. "Can they come too?"

"I'm sorry," said the woman ticket seller. "I'm afraid they can't."

"That's all right," said Remo just as pleasantly, "they are."

"I am terribly sorry, but they will have to stay." The woman smiled. She was polite. She politely asked the yeoman warders in red tunics with Her Majesty's seal upon their breasts to escort Remo inside the Tower of London. They wore squarish black hats and were called Beefeaters. Remo didn't quite know why these men in particular got that name because everyone on this island seemed to smell of beef-eating.

"And I am even sorrier," said Remo, "but I've got to keep one of these guys." He looked back at Lord Philliston. Britain's top secret agent blew him a kiss.

"Well, sir, I am terribly, terribly sorry but you can't keep anyone. Not in the Tower. These are special instructions I have received from the administration to allow in only you." Remo liked the way the British were always incredibly, cheerfully polite.

Unfortunately, he pointed out that he had found Lord Philliston and that he was his, and he wasn't going to the Tower complex without him, and he certainly was going in the Tower complex.

Lord Philliston rolled down his window.

"I love it when you talk so butch," said Britain's prime intelligence defense. Remo nodded him out of the car and Lord Philliston swished from the rear of the limousine, right to Remo's side.

"Not so close," said Remo.

For the first time in three hundred years, the Beefeaters, yeoman warders of the Tower of London, were called into action. Their orders: Keep the American from bringing the Briton inside. In brief, rescue the Briton, who apparently did not want to be rescued.

The yeoman warders advanced with pike, pick, ax, and bare hand in square formation. Afterward they would all swear the American was a mirage. He had to be. He not only moved through them as though they were air, but dragged the man they were supposed to rescue with him.

Remo had Lord Philliston by the sleeve. Lord Philiiston was giggling and laughing and trying to skip. Remo did not feel comfortable with Lord Philliston skipping, so he kept him off balance.

Lord Philliston pointed out each turn. Dark ravens as large as eagles cawed menacingly. A few lights of the keepers shone soft and yellow, little dots of warmth in a cold stone fortress.

Remo sensed that they were in someone's sights. It could have been a spear or a rifle. The sensation was the same. It was not alarm. Alarm was a function of fear, and that tightened the muscles. It was a quietness about the place. Anyone could feel it, but few would listen to it. Often people would remember how sudden and surprising an attack was, when in reality it should never have been that surprising. Humans were equipped to know these things, unless they were trained to respect their senses, they would never perceive them.

Now, entering the Tudor-style Queen's House, Remo felt that quietness close in on him.

Guy Philliston showed Remo the door that led to the absolute safest safe house in all England. The special dungeon of Henry VIII.

A broadsword came down first, clanging into rock at Remo's side. But he was soon beneath it and beyond it, smoothly, even while he wondered why the large man was using a sword instead of a gun. A second man dropped from a concealed loft just above Remo's head. He dropped, kicking with steel-tipped shoes and stabbing with a sharp dirk, a nasty little dagger good for infighting in tavern and alley.

Lord Philliston stepped back. He was hoping this wasn't going to be messy. Someone behind him was trying to drag him away. When he saw one of the attackers lose an arm in a gusher of blood, he realized that this was going to make a rather untidy mess. He scampered into a stone doorway adjacent to the passage as another four men came hurtling down into the attactive American.

Lord Philliston's contact was motioning for him. Quickly, he stepped inside, and closed the door quietly behind him as the battle went on down the steps toward the room where they had the American woman.

"You almost got killed, Lord Philliston," said a short dark man, squat as a bale of hay. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

"I suppose it would be useless to ask you to let him live."

"I am afraid we cannot do that," said the contact. "You must get out of here quickly and let us take care of this."

"You really are becoming quite British. Do whatever you want and then say you're sorry about that."

"A thousand apologies, my lord."

"He was beautiful."

"There are many beautiful men in your country."

"He was special," said Lord Philliston with a sigh. The Cold War was hell.

Remo knew Lord Philliston was gone and did not bother to stop him. He did not stop him because he heard a woman groan just around the curving stone staircase. And he wasn't sure what it was. It was not pain. And it was not fear. It certainly was not joy.

What he did not realize was that it was practiced. Kathy O'Donnell had been practicing this groan since her freshman year at college. Her roommates had told her how. You made sure you started the groan while the man was working toward his climax. Often, if you groaned properly, that would precipitate his release. And then it would be over sooner. Kathy O'Donnell gave Dimitri this groan as his face contracted and his body tensed, and then he was done. Tragically, he had been no better than the others after all.

"Wonderful, darling," whispered Kathy to the man who had shown so much potential, and because of that been such a failure.

She heard a commotion heading toward the room. A man came hurtling in against the stone wall with a knife still in his hand. He hit like old china in a burlap bag. You could feel his bones break. Blood shot out of his mouth in one spurt and nothing moved.

Now Kathy's body began to tingle the way it had at Malden. Dimitri moved off her, steadying himself, reaching for a lamp. Another body came into the room, headfirst. The body followed an eighth of a second later. She, felt her thighs become hot, sticky hot. Her nipples tightened. Two hard slaps against stone, unmistakably people being crushed. An impossibly tantalizing caress seized her, and drove her beyond control as she lay there alone on the bed.

A somewhat thin man emerged from the passageway. Dimitri's thick muscled body had him by at least fifty pounds. Dimitri squatted, waving the heavy brass lamp, then he charged, a nude man coming in for the kill. She could see Dimitri's muscles perfectly drive the heavy macelike lamp into the thin man, but then, catching all his force, the thin man flipped Dimitri like a frisbee into a wall. The crack made his back into a rubber band and he fell without a twitch. He was dead.

And then the man spoke to her. "Dr. O'Donnell," said Remo.

The answer was a groan. Not like the ones before. Kathy O'Donnell, on hearing Remo's voice at that moment, suddenly found out what all her friends were taking about. She had just enjoyed her first orgasm.

Finally with her body glowing in completed ecstasy, Kathy said, with the most girlish of smiles: "Yes."

"We've got to get out of here. Are you all right?" said Remo.

All right? She was magnificent. She was delirious. She was exalted, thrilled, triumphant, ecstatic.

"Yes," said Kathy weakly. "I think so."

"What were they doing to you?"

"I don't know."

"Can you walk? I'll carry you, if you're having trouble. I've got to get you out of here."

"I think so," she said. She reached out weakly and thought she was pretending to be unable to stand. But the man said:

"You're all right. Get dressed. Let's go." So he knew her body, she realized.

"Yes. I am all right."

She noticed that his movements appeared slow but he got things done quickly. She thought he might be aroused by her nude body, but she sensed he was only as interested as one might be if a platter of hors d'oeuvres was served to someone nibbling all day. He might take her, but he wasn't thrilled. He said his name was Remo. He said he had come to rescue her. He said terrible things were happening because of an experiment in which she was involved.

"No," said Kathy. She covered her mouth as though shocked. She knew how to pretend innocence because she had had a lifetime of practice.

A noise came down the passageway. And then she saw what this man could do. It was no accident of ferocity that had gotten him through all those armed men.

With a slow breathing balance he seemed to run his hand along a five-foot-high stone that must have weighed three to four tans. Then he simply cocked a knee into it, and it seemed to come out of the wall on him, resting on his knee. But the strange thing about it was that it seemed so absolutely un-strange. It seemed so incredibly normal the way the stone rested on the vertical thrust of his body. He simply plugged the passageway.

Only when the stone went in did she realize the massive force Remo had exerted. Several stone stairs splintered into dust.

"That was the only way out," said Kathy.

"Shh. It'll work," said the man.

"What will work? You've plugged our only escape," whispered Kathy.

"C'mon. Shh," said Remo.

"We can't get out of here," she whispered. What a fool. Was this Remo like all the others after all?

"I want to get you out of here. I could go up those steps and make it out in one piece, but you couldn't. So shut up."

"I don't know what you're doing," said Kathy. Beyond the heavy stone she heard noises. Men were beginning to heave at the stone.

"Do you want to know?" said the man. He guided her to a side of the stone, not even bothering to look at her, but concentrating on the blocked passageway.

"Yes," she said.

Remo gave it to her exactly as he had learned it. "What language is that?" she said angrily.

"Korean."

"Would you mind translating it?"

"Sure, but it loses something in the translation. It means 'the strong flower never grows to its food but lets its food come to it.'"

"That makes absolutely no sense," said Kathy, putting on her blouse and smoothing her skirt.

"I told you it lost something in translation," said Remo.

He moved her against the wall, and then when the bodies started to drop, she realized what he had been talking about. To move the stone, several men in the passageway had to put their shoulders into it. And when the stone came rumbling out, she saw that the men had guns. Those guns might have killed her. When she observed the smooth speed of Remo's execution of the guards, she realized he might have easily escaped the gunfire. What he had done was let the danger to her mass itself outside the stone and come in with a rush, clearing the tunnel of danger to her. He took her quickly up the passage where only a single last guard stood at the upper level. It was a yeoman warder who did not know who was who, apparently, but who did see a stranger and, in stout British tradition, attacked same stranger. Also in tradition, he gave his life for Queen and country.

Outside, after they had run through the squares and tunnels, Remo found the car was gone. Eluding several bobbies, they finally came to rest in a charming Italian restaurant off Leicester Square. There, Kathy asked Remo how he knew his plan would work.

He seemed puzzled by that question.

"They were . . ." He didn't quite have an English word for it, but the closest ones were: "too anxious. Too bunched up. They were set on going in. I guess when the tunnel was blocked they had to surmise they couldn't get in and forced it."

"Yes. But how did you know they were going to do that?"

"I don't know. I just knew. Look, grab a bite. And let's get to the source of your experiment. Do you know the whole world may be wiped out?"

I already have been, thought Kathy, looking at this magnificent dark-eyed man who killed so well and easily and smoothly.

"No," she said. "That's awful."

Then she heard how their fluorocarbon stream had somehow panicked another country, and was believed by some American agency to be threatening to destroy the world by removing the entire ozone shield. She could have told him that that danger was past. She could have told him they had solved that problem with the short duration of the shield opening. The blue light that bothered this man was really the shield closing again.

Rather, she told him that all she knew about the experiment was that it came from a company in America. She gave him the phony cover address she had given to the British.

"No good," said Remo. "That's a phony."

"Oh, my lord. These people are evil," said Kathy O'Donnell. But there was not much tension in her voice. She was as warm and content as a milk-full kitten by a warm winter stove.

Chemical Concepts might as well be on the moon, she thought. "Do you remember anything about the people who hired you?" he asked. He didn't eat the food. Kathy sucked contentedly on a breadstick.

"I remember a bit. You look married."

"Not married. What were they like?"

"Never been married?"

"No. Were they Americans? What did they tell you about themselves? What didn't they tell you about themselves?"

She picked a name at random. Someone far away, someone who it might take some time getting to. She also picked one of the deadliest men in the world. He was in a jungle somewhere in South America.

"Do you like jungles, Remo? I hate jungles."

"Which jungle? Lots of jungles in the world."

"It was a jungle. You know, if you don't like Italian food we can leave. What do you eat?" she asked.

"I eat rice and sometimes duck entrails and sometimes certain fish eyes."

"What does it taste like?"

"Tastes like shit. What do you think it tastes like?" said Remo. She identified the jungle. She identified the man positively.

"He promised me it would be for the good of mankind," said Kathy O'Donnell. She said she could lead Remo to him. She did not know what they would do when they got there. But at least she would have Remo for a flight across the Atlantic.

A sign of hope. Remo had phoned in and not only gotten the person in charge of the experiment in Maldon, but had found the whereabouts of at least one machine.

It was not the most secure rope to hold a world together, but it was a rope. And there was no one better to put an end to that machine than the man who was on his way to South America. If only someone could get into Russia and somehow find out why they were linking a first strike buildup to that machine, Smith would feel that both fronts were being covered. But in Russia, America was limited so far to normal means. Normal means could get all manner of technical information, such as missile counts and the kinds of missiles being deployed. This was the stuff of wiring and electrodes. But the why of things, the human factor of things, was as mysterious to the CIA as the farthest side of the dark universe.

Only Chiun's Oriental formula, that Smith had never quite understood, explained in equally unexplainable terms why Russia did things. But Chiun was even more unreachable now than Remo. In desperation, Smith again attempted to work the formula translated into numbers, and then back into English. Often, when all else failed, this strange combination of mysticism and mathematics worked.

And sometimes it didn't. The translation came out "the bear hides in the cave." Was Russia afraid? Was fear prompting those new irresponsible missiles? But why were the Russians so incredibly afraid of America when the ozone shield was something that protected everyone?

And then Chiun got through again. The phone connect to Pyongyang had been reactivated.

"Chiun, we have a problem about the bear and the cave . . ."

"They shall breathe their blood in their vile throats that have dared profane thy magnificence," said Chiun. "But first a humble matter. You, of course, forwarded my message to Remo."

"I did give it to him when he made contact."

"Good. Then he will understand. I can be reached through the North Korean embassy in France."

"Are you working for them now?"

"Only for the greater glory of your throne, Emperor Smith. This is a personal matter."

"We can increase shipments. The future of the world . . ."

"Is the past, O Graciousness. I am defending the past. What did Remo say when you told him about the passage? Did he read it? Did he say anything?"

"I secured the book. It was a school textbook for North Korea. I read it to him."

"In English?"

"I had to. I had it translated. I don't know Korean."

"And he said?"

"He said, 'Anything else?' "

"That was all? Just 'Anything else?' "

"Yes."

"It loses everything in the translation."

"Look, whatever anyone is paying you, we will pay you more."

"Can you give me yesterday?"

"I don't understand," said Smith.

"Can you give me Alexander the Great making his Greek phalanx stand in salute? Can you give me the dipped banners of the moguls, or the homage of the shogun? Can you give me the Roman legions stopping in Syria because an emperor was told that his foot soldiers could take not one more step east? Can you give me knights giving way in a court, and king and emperor saying in tongues, some now unspoken by human lips: 'You Sinanju have found the triumph of man'?"

"Chiun, we can give what we can give. And it will be anything you ask."

"Get the original text to Remo."

"And then you will perform this service for us?"

"As surely as the lotus petal kisses the dark smooth waters of night."

"That is yes, then?" said Smith:

And Chiun had to wearily explain that rarely had a stronger yes been expressed anywhere. It was a yes worthy of such a great one as Emperor Harold W. Smith.

"Well, good then. Thank you. I suppose," said Smith. This one, thought Chiun, is especially slow in understanding. If he had time, Chiun would have tried to fathom what was behind the white's plan to "save tomorrow for the world," as he called it. Was it finally the secret maneuverings of a genius like Charlemagne of the Franks, playing one nation against the other until his desire for world conquest manifested itself? Or was Smith just crazed with his talk of secrecy and saving the world? If he had no intention of conquering it, why did he want to save all of it? Chiun certainly would not care if Bayonne, New Jersey, disappeared from the face of the earth. Why should Smith care about Sinanju or Pyongyang?

Only briefly did Chiun, Master of Sinanju, contemplate such puzzles. For he was in Paris of the old Frankish nation now called France, civilized to these many years since the Romans had called it Gaul, and trod their crude nailed sandals upon its dusty roads.

Chiun was about to give this land its first great history. Paris would be known forever as the city where Chiun, the Great Chiun hopefully, had recovered the treasure of Sinanju.

Chapter 8

It was the rarest auction ever held by the House of Arnaud. And since it was the rarest auction in the House of Arnayad, it was the rarest in Paris. And if it were the rarest in Paris, then most naturally it was the rarest in the world.

Only the most select bidders had been invited to the great marble building on Rue de Seine, District Seven. On either side, the posh art galleries had closed their doors in respect for what was going to happen this day. One hundred gold Alexanders were for sale. The gold alone would have been worth a half-million strong American dollars. But these coins, 2,500 years old, were as shiny as if minted yesterday. And rarer yet, no other coin ever saved from antiquity bore such markings.

On one side was the unmistakable strong head of Alexander, seen so often in brass, gold, and silver; the flowing locks, the proud nose, the sensuous lips. Alexander the Great, Conqueror of the World.

But on the other side, instead of the sign of the city, such as Athens' owl, was a phalanx of Greek foot soldiers, their spears raised in salute. And Greek lettering for a word unknown in the Greek tongue. The sound could be translated roughly as:

"Sinadu."

The first thought of some was that it was a forgery. Yet scholars identified the tooth-edged die markings as typically Greek. The head of Alexander was also typical. So was the lettering of the strange word.

And then, of course, there was the history itself. The hundred-gold-coin tribute minted by Alexander as he approached India. What the tribute was for, what god of the East he was honoring, history did not tell. But he had minted the coins, and there were one hundred and no more with the saying in Greek. Here was the hundred.

Ordinarily the House of Arnaud would announce a major auction of which even the most famous of treasures were only one object. But such was the magnificence of this collection of one hundred coins that they were given the unique privilege of being the only item on the agenda for the day. Not even the Mona Lisa had had that honor.

The auction was scheduled for three in the afternoon. An invitation to this event quickly became the most sought-after social item in Paris and much of Western Europe.

Even more intriguing was the fact that the owner was listed simply as anonymous. Of course, this famous anonymous was Valery, Comte de Lyon. The joke was that he was the most famous anonymous in all France.

The Count of Lyon was head of SDEC, Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre. While most of the rest of the world had heard of the famous Deuxieme, it was the SDEC that ran the most formidable opposition to Russia in the world of espionage. The count had beaten them time and again, and lived on their death list, everyone knew.

It was said among the knowledgeable that to remove the count would be more valuable to an enemy of France than seizing Paris.

Therefore no one, of course, expected him to show up at the auction. And he didn't, for his whereabouts were always secret. The questions abounded. Were these coins in his family for centuries? Where had he gotten them? Could they have been some bribe?

These questions were not entertained long, however, among the fashionable elite entering the marble floors of the House of Arnaud.

For one, any financial dealings of a man in such a delicate position were always secretly investigated by the government. And many in this audience knew what the investigation had found because they ran the government.

First, the package had been mailed from a Paris post office to the postal drop used by the SDEC. It carried a fraudulent French return address. Since there had been several attempts at destroying the SDEC, all packages were opened by robotic arms in a bombproof room.

Then the logical question posed to the investigators was, had the Count of Lyon accepted a bribe and had it mailed to himself?

Possibly. Except every paper and package he handled was counterinvestigated, because the French, like the Russians, had enough experience in the affairs of men to understand that they were not dealing with a reliable species.

The count had probably not sent the package to himself. Third, had he accepted a bribe and used this as a cover? Maybe. But why a bribe of this nature? Why a bribe of such rare and perfect coins as to become a major item of Paris gossip?

The conclusion was that the coins, as the accompanying note had said, were a gift from someone for the Count's service to France. The paper and ink were French. The handwriting-printing-was somewhat shaky, as if done by someone not used to French script.

The count immediately had the package shipped to Arnaud for auction.

"I have no time to waste men guarding one hundred coins," he had said.

Now, under a glass case, the gold Alexanders sat on one hundred small velvet pillows. Each bidder was allowed to pass by the case twice. Some lingered.

"It is strange. I have the feeling they were just paid out this morning. They're so real. So modern," said one woman. Her bosom was raised in the modern fashion by her white silk gown. Diamonds of inordinate brilliance graced her neck. When she looked down the rows of Alexanders, each on its own velvet pillow, she would have traded all her jewels and all her wealth, including the gown and what was in it, to own them.

"It is like owning eternity," said one French official. The bidding floor was ten million dollars. It was established by an Arab whose main contribution to the economy of the world was having been born over a lot of oil and then having figured out how to gouge the rest of the world for it.

The figure was topped immediately by a million. This from a man who had figured out how to transfer thoughts more quickly from one computer chip to another.

And that was topped, with applause from the audience, of course, by a Frenchman whose family had owned most of a province since Charlemagne forced illiterate bandit kings into a grand nation of Franks.

At twenty-two million American dollars the coins were sold, bid final. A Texas financier, who felt something that fine ought to be his, had made the winning bid. He was planning to make the "little fellers," as he called them, into cufflinks.

"Give 'em out to fifty friends, but shoot, I don't have no fifty friends. Ain't fifty people in the world I know who are worth a set of them little fellers."

Applause echoed through the great hall of the House of Arnaud. Even the auctioneer applauded. The guards stood at attention. They too knew they were part of something important. It was history.

And then amid the applause came the high squeaky voice in a French so ancient that it resembled Latin tinged with Gallic.

"Woe be to you, Franks whose fathers were of the Gaulish race. Heed now a warning. These coins are not yours, but meager tribute to ones who deserved them. Do not traffic in stolen goods but save your lives if you do not have the decency to save your honor."

Guards ran into closets looking for the voice. Detection devices searched out hidden microphones. The best of France in that marble bidding hall looked for the voice and found nothing.

Later the Texan, ashen-faced, would say he happily gave the coins back to the real owner, but would not describe the owner. He would repeat over and over again:

"What ain't mine, ain't mine, and I was durned glad to give it back."

But the Master of Sinanju that day of infamy in Paris did not care who had bought the coin tribute to Sinanju, did not care which thief passed goods to which.

The goods were Sinanju. They would be reclaimed. What the Master sought that day among the Franks was he who had dared defile the House of Sinanju. And the answer to that was not in the coin. The answer came later that night when the proceeds were tallied.

The chief accountant prepared the check for the director of the House of Arnaud. Since the Count of Lyons' whereabouts were always a secret, the director would not even have the joy of mailing such a huge sum. It was to be given in a plain white envelope to a squad of SDEC. The plan was, of course, after such a public display involving the director of the SDEC, to move the check itself through a warren of what were called street baffles.

In simpler terms, if anyone wished to follow that check, he had better be prepared to lose a multitude of agents because each baffle was designed to strip anyone following the squad.

It was a brilliant maneuver, which at best would act as a magnet for any enemy agents operating in France. At worst, the check would be delivered unharmed and untraced to the Comte de Lyon, director of the SDEC.

What they did not know was that this maneuver was as new as the King of Crete, the Ojab of Odab, the Emperor Theodosius. In fact, it was more traditional than deceptive, and the Master of Sinanju easily kept pace with the check through the darkened streets of the French capital. For this night, he had chosen a black velvet kimono with darkened purple lines to smother the light. His shoes were sandals of soft wood, cut round and smooth for the perfection of friction. Because, too, this was Paris, Chiun had swept his hair back, but under a dark night cap, it was raised like a cone.

It was an ensemble to bring the French to their knees. The squad passed through three baffles and saw no one. A younger member mentioned that he felt a frightening presence, but he was ignored, and told if he mentioned such immature fears again he would be put on report. When they were sure no one was following, they delivered the envelope to another squad which took it to the director himself.

"Monsieur le Comte, we are here," said the leader of the second squad. All of them had every right to feel secure. This old mansion on Rue St. Jean was a gigantic electronic trap put together with the brilliance that had made the SDEC the only real counterweight in all of Europe to the Russians.

How many agents had died in the streets of Paris looking to eliminate the director? How many times had the SDEC stymied the triumphant legions of the KGB? If any enemy did find this house, he would only find his death.

"The returns from your gift, director," said the leader of the squad. Already rumors throughout Paris had told of the millions paid for the coins, even before the envelope had made its way through the city streets.

The leader and the squad waited for their commander to open the sealed letter. As a treat for his "boys," as he liked to call the most dangerous men in France, de Lyon opened the letter to show the size of the check.

It was a fortune, but such was the inner calm of this French aristocrat that he had to force a happy surprise. He did not care. If it weren't for minor inconveniences, he would not have minded being penniless.

Valery, Comte de Lyon, was one of those rare persons to walk upon the face of the earth who was always successful.

He had overthrown governments, performed eliminations around the world for France, and whenever it was in the interest of France, Valery de Lyon stopped the Russians every time.

It was not, of course, in the interest of France to see Russia stopped all the time. That was America's problem. The SDEC was inordinately successful and de Lyon was happy for that same reason. Alone in this world, de Lyon loved his work. He knew many of the KGB by name, not because it was his job but because, like boys would admire soccer stars, de Lyon admired the perfect coup, the successful assassination, the theft of state documents done in such a way that the other country did not even know they were missing.

Every time de Lyon sent France up against another power, he imbued his men with respect for the enemy's deeds. He followed details of secret missions in a way a father might inquire about his son's first job. He did not take work home, because it was not work. Parties were work. His stables on the estate in the southern province were work. His wife was work. Even an occasional affair was work.

Fun was observing hand-to-hand fighting by his selected operatives in the sand pits outside of Marseilles, where any blood spilled would be soaked up instantly.

Fun was watching a good Danish counterintelligence operation wither in Eastern Europe because it lacked support. The joy was picking the month it would founder.

De Lyon came by this love of his work not by some quirk but by blood. His ancestors had been the most ferocious of Frankish knights, the first royalty to side with Napoleon. They had been warriors not by greed of, conquest, but by love of the fight.

Thus did de Lyon that dark night have to pretend joy before his men at the fortune coming his way. To this trim, arrogant noble, all the fortune meant was that he wouldn't have to worry about money for his lifetime, which was something he wouldn't worry about anyhow. But the men always liked the show.

"Twenty-two million American dollars. Hah, it will pay for a liter of wine or two, or a woman or two. Or if it is the right woman, one woman on a shopping spree for an afternoon."

The men laughed. De Lyon was about to order drinks for them to salute their good fortune, a ten-minute act of grace before he could get back to an interesting African situation on his desk. Then he saw it.

At first he was not sure he saw anything. It was a darkness in the hallway, moving beyond the open door. Since he did not hear it, he assumed it was a fleeting aberration of his eye. Certainly nothing could move in this house without his own men knowing and reporting it.

But the wine did not come. He sent one of his men out to hurry along the steward. The man did not return. De Lyon checked his buzzer system. It worked, but no one answered it.

"Come, there is something strange going on," said de Lyon. The two operatives unholstered their machine pistols. They made a sandwich of their commander as they left the room, looking for any possible trouble.

It was in a hallway that de Lyon finally saw the darkness. The darkness was a robe, and the count's men fell like pitiful stalks of wheat to movements he could not even see. He only knew they had to have happened when the heads rolled on the hallway floor.

"You," said the apparition in a French so ancient that de Lyon had to translate from the older Latin. "Where is my treasure?"

De Lyon noticed the trunk of a nearby body twitch as the heart pumped out the last blood from the open neck. The head looked dumbly at the ceiling farther down the hall.

The apparition had the face of an Oriental. Its voice was high-pitched.

"I have stolen nothing," said de Lyon. Where were the guards? Where were the safety devices?

If he had not smelled his own fear on his breath, he would have thought he was dreaming. But could a person hear a language he did not understand in a dream?

"Franks steal everything. Where is the treasure?"

"I cannot help you," said de Lyon. He noticed that the strokes this man had delivered were apparently so fast that the nerves in the dead man's hands, still on the machine pistol, had not been activated. A useless hand on a useless body on a useless gun. He stole a short look behind him. The trailing man had also been taken care of. Head gone.

De Lyon sensed that if he could reach that gun, he could put many bullets into the darkness before him. His sense of the fight was overcoming his initial fear. A de Lyon had been confronted. And de Lyons never lost.

He would have to get the gun in such a way as not to look as though he was attacking. There was a small derringer tucked inside his evening robe, but he chose to ignore that. He would use it for another purpose.

"One should not steal like a tawdry thief, Frank," said the man. De Lyon saw the face was old.

"How did you get in here?"

"A thief's home is always a hovel. You may tell me where the treasure is now."

"I would love to," said de Lyon. "May I give you my personal gun as a sign of surrender? It is quite valuable and a treasure itself."

"You have sold my coins. Where is the rest of my treasure?" said Chiun. He would use this man to carry it back to his village. The House of Sinanju had not taken slaves for over three thousand years, but this Frank would be enslaved before being given over to someone else for the lowly task of execution. The House of Sinanju were assassins, not executioners.

"Ah, the rest. Of course. Please take this," said de Lyon. He handed over his derringer with one hand as he seemed to bow toward the darkness which now was clearly an old man in a black kimono. He would shoot off the stranger's knees, and then begin his own questioning.

The old man, for all his awesome talents, made a foolish move. He took the gun, exposing his midsection and allowing de Lyon to get the machine pistol with the other hand. In a motion so smooth as to be the envy of swordsmen from generations past, de Lyon put the machine pistol to the kimono and began firing.

It was a silent firing. The gun was broken. He started to throw it to the floor, but the machine pistol would not throw. De Lyon had lost control of his hand. It was his hand, not the pistol, that was broken.

And then the pain began, a pain that knew his body better than he did. Pain that came when he lied, and left when he told the truth, and then pain that would not stop even when he told the truth.

"The coins were a gift. A gift. I do not know where they came from. Yes, millions of dollars' worth and yet a gift. We did not find out who sent them."

The man, of course, was telling the truth. That was the sadness of it. It was a thing to ponder. They were tribute coins from Alexander. Not enough to make up for all the good markets he ruined by removing his kings of the West to his control, the reason the young Greekling Alexander did have to die.

As, of course, did the Frankish lord who spoke the good French so badly.

He had dealt in stolen goods. And with his good hand, the Count of Lyon wrote out a promise that he regretted having dealt in the treasures of Sinanju. Then he was allowed to join his ancestors.

When the body was found, secrecy was immediately installed around the whole episode. SDEC's sister intelligence factions, the Deuxieme, most noticeably investigated every aspect of the killings in the house. The fact that the check was not stolen. The strange manner of death of both de Lyon and his men.

They were sure, in their final report to the President, that there was a link between the sale of the coins and the death of the director of the SDEC, strange because so many in the international scene had tried to kill him, and now a peculiar personal matter had done him in.

They were sure it was the personal matter of the coins because the same strange word appeared both in the note and on the ancient coins themselves. The word was: "Sinadu."

In the note, a Latin inscription. On the coin of Alexander, a Greek one.

Having recovered the coins, Chiun accepted the services of the North Korean government that flew him back to Pyongyang. At the airport was an honor guard led by Sayak Cang, the Pyongyanger who knew the true history of Korea.

There had been no calls, he reported, from the man called Remo, but the number established for the House of Sinanju had indeed been transferred to the man called Smith.

"And was there any other word? Did the man called Remo read your wonderful little truth?"

"The man called Smith gave no information about anything."

"He is white, you know," said Chiun. He said nothing else as he silently brought the coins by car to the village on the West Korea Bay. There in silence he returned the coins to the great house of many woods, the house that had held the tributelof centuries. And there he placed the coins in their corner, alone, a few pitiful coins in a very big house.

This house had been given to Chiun when his father knew that his time to pass the body into the earth had come. Chiun had spent all his life preparing to receive this house, preparing to pass it on properly. Even during the darkest times, when it looked as though there would be no one to pass the house on to, he had not despaired like this.

For he, Chiun, had lost all that had been gained; all the references in the scrolls of Sinanju to this treasure and the other were now cast in doubt because coin and ingot, gem and bullion, had vanished into the world.

Still and all, the reference to the Greekling with blond hair who ventured too close to the House of Sinanju could be proved again with the tribute coin.

But he who would one day have all of this was squandering his time and Sinanju-taught talents on unworthy causes. Chiun had lost both the treasure to pass on and the one who would value receiving it.

The House of Sinanju, if it was not dying, wished it was dying on that day of dark gloom on the chill shores of the West Korea Bay.

Chiun could feel tremors and then heard far-off explosions. Eventually even the villagers heard them, and with great fear they came to him, saying, "Protect us, O Master."

And Chiun turned them away, saying, "We have always protected you, but what have you done to protect the treasures we left in your care?"

He did not tell them it was just another war going on. Wars never came to Sinanju because generals were taught that they would not survive a battle, no matter who won.

The ground continued to shake and many planes roared overhead, dropping bombs on soldiers in gun emplacements. The battle went on until the morning when the guns on shore were silenced. And then the villagers came again up the path to the house where the Master was and they said:

"Master, Master, two submarines have come with your tribute. They are heavy-laden, and they seek thy presence. "

"What color are the bearers?"

"White, the color of those who used to bring tribute."

"Is there a thin white man there with thick wrists?" said Chiun. He did not know how many could recognize Remo. Long noses and round eyes all tended to look alike to these good simple people.

"There are many whites."

Remo has come, thought Chiun. And while the house was empty still, there would now be two chasing the treasure. They had the coins, he and Remo would get the rest, would make the world respect the property of Sinanju. Who knew what all this public retribution might earn? Governments might bring back the golden age of assassinry, disbanding large expensive armies for the more civilized hand in the night.

Chiun moved quickly into the village and to the loading docks as the people parted for him. He looked on the two submarines. Remo was not there. Gold bullion was being off-loaded onto the dock that groaned under the weight. The white captain wanted to speak to him.

"What happened to the agreement with your government? We had to fight our way in here. We had to bring the fleet and bomb the shore batteries. What happened to our deal?"

"That is a minor diplomatic matter. I will fix it. Tell Remo I do not wish to speak to him. Tell him he cannot make up to me his desertion in an hour of need."

"Who?"

"Remo," said Chiun. "Tell him he cannot leave one day and expect to find me waiting for him with joy. I am coming down for my gold."

"Look, you have ten times the amount of gold ever delivered before, and one message. Contact someone called Smith. You know the number."

"I am going to take my gold and return to the house he should have loved from the very beginning. Tell Remo he is not welcome in Sinanju anymore. One must serve Sinanju to be welcome here."

"We don't have any Remo," said the white captain of the submarine. "Do you want us to drop the gold here on the wharf or carry it up to that warehouse you people keep?"

"Remo is not with you?" asked Chiun.

"No. No Remo. What do you want done with the gold?"

"Oh, whatever. Whatever."

"You will make the phone call to the Smith person?"

"Certainly," said Chiun, but his voice was as dreary as the bay. He walked slowly back through the village to the house.

He had lost the treasure of Sinanju, but more important, he had lost the person who should have cared about it. He had lost tomorrow as well as yesterday.

A child came to the door with a message. A great battle had taken place and Korea had lost. Still, there was a man who wished entrance to Sinanju, for the greater battle might yet be won. The man was Sayak Cang, and he entered the village bowing.

Chiun sat in the empty treasure house, his legs crossed, his eyes vacant as Cang talked. They had thought the extra submarine signaled an invasion, but now that they had seen it was tribute, they would allow future submarines in as before.

"For the tribute to Sinanju is a tribute to everything proud in our great race." Thus spoke Sayak Cang before he gave the important information.

His intelligence network had found yet another who dared to sell the treasure of Sinanju. This time it was the modern form of the old Roman office, Pontifex Maximus. The modern people called him pope.

"A Christian holy man," said Chiun.

"Yes. It is disgusting how their shamans add to material treasure already so great."

"Yes, holy men are sometimes not holy," said Chiun, who now knew who had really stolen the treasure. It explained why the Frankish knight had told the truth, and why people could move so freely into the village of Sinanju.

"The pope must die," said Sayak Cang, the Pyongyanger.

Chapter 9

For the last fifty miles the roads were ice and rock and a vague outline that some other vehicle had been there before. That was called a road. Up ahead on the map, where Colonel Semyon Petrovich was leading the command, were no roads.

Behind him were enough hydrogen warheads to incinerate the entire Yakut region of Siberia and irradiate Mongolia as well. What absolutely terrified this missile officer leading the eighty-seven-truck convoy for the four-missile battery were the missiles themselves. He had never been near missiles like these, and had been assured that Russia would never build them, for "the safety of mankind." The problem with these "burning hells," as he made every one of his men call them, was they could go off right here, right behind him, right in the middle of Siberia, leaving a crater the size of two Leningrads. The road, what there was of it, was colossally bumpy, and the warhead had come out of the factory armed, a lunacy never before heard of in atomic weapons. Even the Americans with the first atomic bomb did not arm it until the airplane carrying it was near the target. You did not arm the weapon until just before firing. Everyone knew that. And now all Russia had gone mad.

This madness, this strange new missile he and every officer had once been promised Russia would never build, was all over Russia. It would be mass murder, not war. He would murder millions without even the flimsiest excuse. There could be no excuse for the madness he was now so carefully trying to guide to its new base in Siberia.

It had started just a few days before. In his apartment at Saratov, a central farming city southwest of Moscow, Petrovich had received the first strange word. He had just finished waiting in line for a fresh batch of writing paper for his grandchild. He had retired the year before, and getting fresh paper had always been difficult when he no longer had access to military supplles. His wife was waiting in the apartment with a block leader of the party who had not even taken off his coat, but stood with his hat tapping his side and his feet tapping the floor.

"His telephone has been ringing all day," said the retired colonel's wife, a round, sweet-faced woman. "Your command has called using my telephone," said the block leader.

"They could not phone me, of course," said Petrovich, who had applied for a telephone in 1958.

"There are other phones they could have used, but this is an emergency. You are to report to Evenki immediately. You have top priority on any aircraft in the area, any car to get you to the aircraft, any telephone line at your service."

"Are you sure, me? What would they want an old man for?"

"They want you. Now."

"Is there a war? Where is there a war?"

"I don't know. I don't even know who is running Mother Russia anymore. That they would rudely instruct a party member to act as a messenger is obscene. I could see it if there were a war. But nothing is happening."

"Maybe something is wrong. Maybe something has failed. Maybe an entire missile army has blown itself up somewhere."

"We would have heard," said the party member.

"No. You would not have heard. Although there may have been a rebellion somewhere, and people have to be replaced."

"Is that possible?" asked the party member.

"No," said the retired colonel, shrugging. "It is not. Everyone who attends a missile is reliable to the extreme. They are all like me. We do what we are told, when we are told, and if we are lucky we get a telephone. If we are not, we settle for fresh writing paper. I take it the car to the airport is to be provided by you."

The party member gave a short nod. The retired colonel hugged his sweet-faced wife and tried in his kiss to tell her how much he loved her, how good a wife she had been, in that remote case he did not come home again. The communication was perfect, and when she cried, no denial on his part would convince her it was only some silly bureaucratic mistake that had called him to Western Missile Command in Evenki.

The party member carefully laid out plastic strips on the front seat of his black ZIL limousine, warning the retired colonel not to sit too heavily because the material underneath the plastic could wear. Petrovich felt like flinging the strips in the party member's face. But his wife might be vulnerable to this man's reprisals, so he only nodded dumbly. He even offered an apology to the self-important pip with the Communist party card and automobile and telephone and all the things that Communism had come to mean in the land where it was practiced longest.

It was a very small airport, but the runways, like those of all commercial airports in Russia, were built to handle the newest, most powerful jets. They were not only long enough for anything that flew at that time, but for anything that might be flying in fifty years.

The terminal building was virtually a shack. It was there that the nightmare began in earnest. There were young boys who had not yet shaved and old men from the original nuclear bomber commands. All of them had been called up like Petrovich.

Every thirty seconds a loudspeaker above warned everyone to keep silent. When they boarded the plane for Evenki and Western Missile Command headquarters, they received another warning. This time in person, from an officer of an elite KGB unit with special patches on their especially expensive green uniforms. No unbuttoned shirts in that unit.

"Soldiers of Mother Russia," the officer said, reading from a piece of paper as he stood in front of the airplane. "You are called in a dire time in the history of your people and in the history of your motherland. As much as it may be tempting to discuss what is happening with another soldier of the motherland, we must forbid it. Because of this ergergency, violators will be dealt with in the severest manner."

The airplane was quiet. No one spoke. The jets hummed, the KGB officer left the compartment, and then everyone spoke.

"It's war," said an old bombardier. "Got to be."

"You are jumping to conclusions," said a young man whose face was smoother than the colonel's wife's. "No," said the old bombardier. "If it is not a war, we hear about the wonders of the Communist party and what it is doing for the people of Russia. But when they want the people to fight, they never mention the party. I remember the great patriotic war against the Nazis. It started with defending communism against fascism, and very quickly became Mother Russia against the Hun. When they want you to die, it's the motherland. When they want you to wait in line for some goods, it's the party."

"Is he jumping to conclusions?" the young man asked the colonel.

"If there is a war, he is not. If there is not, he is," said Petrovich with very Russian fatalism. "But look around. I think it is more important who is not here than who is here. I have not seen one active officer of a missile command."

"In an emergency why would they call up all those who are less qualified?" said the old bombardier.

Their question was answered with the nightmare. One did not need expertise in missile technology to use what they were all shown at Evenki.

They drove through columns upon columns of trucks whose cargo was covered with tarpaulins. Guards stood by each truck. A missile-command officer entered each transport bus to insist that no one turn on anything. Some of the older retired officers' hearing aids were snatched away and smashed, leaving them helpless.

They were herded into a shell of a building. A strange crude missile sat on a gun carriage on a stage. Ordinarily, to show how safe the missile was before arming, an instructor would stand on it. This time, he very gingerly walked up to the stage and stood on its very edge. He did not move.

"Here she is," he said. He did not use a loudspeaker, and he spoke without yelling. Everyone leaned forward. Those whose hearing aids had been removed waited to be told later what was being said. They just looked at each other.

"She has been designed so that you need exactly thirty seconds of additional training."

There was a buzz in the room.

"Please. Quiet. Most of your training with nuclear weapons-and she is nuclear, comrades, nuclear as hell-has been in the areas of safety and guidance. We will be using the old guidance systems which are not that accurate. We are making up for this with a warhead that had previously been discontinued. A dirty warhead. The big blasters. That's what she has got in her nose."

And then, just before he got down from the stage, he added:

"She's primed and loaded and ready to go."

For a moment there was the silence of a blank universe and then even the youngest of cadets understood. Eleven months out of every training year had to do with all the safeguards to prevent an accidental nuclear war. The reason they needed no more training was that there were no safety devices.

This new ugly weapon was the first nuclear weapon produced in any country without safeguards. The nickname being bandied about for it was the "raw button."

You pressed the button and the missile went. It was like the trigger of a gun. So that was the reason active missile-command officers were not chosen. Any fool could use a first-strike weapon. There were only two choices. War or no war. And to produce something like this meant someone was sure of war, because moving these things was a nightmare.

The weapons had no electronics whatsoever, and they wouldn't need much more aiming than an old cannon. They might hit anywhere, and the warhead was so big that it didn't matter. One warhead could take out an entire quarter-country. All the sender had to hit was North America. Mass murder.

If Petrovich hadn't been so concerned about his wife he would have stepped down. But he had not. For a week now he had been driving incredibly slowly along the bad roads; now there were no roads. He faced bumpy hills, and slowed everything down to less than a mile an hour.

His chart was equally crude. He would establish a new base, one that America could not have identified before because it would not exist until he created it. Then he would take rough aim, and according to his instructions, unless otherwise heard from, he would fire the missile at a specific time two weeks hence. He had been given an old Swiss winding watch so that he would not mistake the time. He was going to start World War III unless he was told not to.

His movements did not go unnoticed by the CIA. It was not the missile itself that was detected from outer space, because it could have been one of the thousands of dummies the Russians had scattered over Siberia. Rather, it was the telephone communication from the retired colonel informing home base he was primed and ready.

From the frequency and the analysis of the code, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that another of the raw-button batteries had been activated.

Harold W. Smith had privileged access to this information. And more. While the Russians were getting edgier, the President had received a protest from England about the violence attributed to one American agent. He passed it on to Smith, who provided a routine denial used in such instances. The first part was official, bemoaning any violence and offering to help the country in which multiple killings had occurred track down the perpetrator. Informally, the President added a little joke he used when Remo and Chiun were operating outside of the United States:

"If you get their names, we'd like to hire them." The insinuation was that the protesting party had been misinformed, that people really couldn't do those sorts of things. It struck Smith at that time that his country's denial of a weapon threatening the ozone layer was quite similar to the normal cover used for Remo and Chiun. In other words, a lie. Russia had every good reason not to trust America. The truth sounded so much like the normal lie. He could almost understand Chiun's formula:

"They see evil in their own evil."

Of course, the House of Sinanju did not consider the bloodiest Russian czar, Ivan the Terrible, evil. That was because he paid them well. So what Chiun meant by evil and what the West might mean by evil were different things. Smith did not know what Chiun meant by evil, and that made Chiun's formula difficult to use.

The red phone rang again. Smith answered it, glancing out through the one-way windows of Folcroft, that sanitarium in Rye, New York, that covered for the organization. It faced Long Island Sound, gray and bleak this autumn day. Normally the President's line rang three, perhaps four times in a year. This was the third time this day.

"Here," said Smith.

"I think the British believed us. But do you know what your operative did? He went around England collecting security personnel like baggage and then killed I don't know how many men in the Tower of London itself."

"He's located the weapon."

"Where?"

"In the Chitibango province of San Gauta."

"Another Central American problem. Damn. Maybe we should just bomb that province."

"Wouldn't work, Mr. President."

"Why not? In this instance you have to get the weapon and the people behind it. Just destroying one device won't do. It would be like trying to end an atomic threat by destroying one atomic bomb."

"There is no good news out of Russia," said the President.

"Are they close to launch? How much time do we have?" asked Smith.

"They could launch now, with those damn raw buttons. They might have enough to do us in. But they're still building."

"So we do have time," said Smith.

"Until they get frightened enough."

"When is that?"

"Can you read a Russian mind?" said the President. "By the way, we also had to answer to the French on the head of the SDEC. What do the French have to do with this?"

"Are you sure it's our people?" said Smith. "Word I've heard is that he was on some Russian hit list for something. Has been for years."

"They'd like to get rid of him, we know. That's been established. The Russians sent in the Bulgarians some years ago, and then a Rumanian team for hire. Then they gave up. The way he was killed smells of your people."

"What do you mean?" said Smith.

"They're not looking for the person who killed him, but the machine. Some of his bones were fused."

"Maybe one of ours," said Smith. He wondered if it were Chiun. Remo could do many things, but being in two places at the same time was not one of them.

"These are dark days, Smith. I am glad we have you and your people," said the President. He did not know that neither of Smith's personnel was heading anywhere near the fluorocarbon gun.

The generator was sitting in the Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts, Inc. complex off Route 128 outside of Boston, being prepared for another shot.

The news was not good from any front. The Premier had asked Zemyatin to his dacha beyond the city to reassure select members of the Politburo that everything was in control, that Alexei, the Great One, was making the right moves.

Zemyatin was brief and to the point.

"We are not in control of events. We are still struggling to survive them."

"Is it better or worse than it was at the beginning? I've got to have something to give my Politburo."

"Do you mean when should you all go to your shelters?"

"No. Good news. I want good news."

"Then read Pravda. You will see that capitalism is falling on all fronts and we are gaining ground through the will of the masses."

Zemyatin looked at the faces of the other old men. If he had time for pity he would have shown more of it. But he had no time. The old men looked as though they were staring into their own graves. Despite all the talk of being ready for war, none of them were. Despite all the talk of continuous war for the socialist revolution, they were comfortable old men in their dotage who were suddenly at war.

No one spoke. There weren't even any questions. Zemyatin saw the chairman of all armed forces, an accountant by training, lift a trembling glass of vodka to his lips.

Zemyatin turned and walked out. There were scars on his body and they did not make moving easy.

What he had now was what he'd feared. A svstem so confident of its superiority that it had become useless. At almost every level there were ones like those old men, especially now when they could least afford it.

The Premier and the rest of the Politburo would have been even more frightened if they had known that their vaunted KGB, the biggest, most efficient, most feared intelligence structure in the world, was underneath it all even worse than the other useless men in the Premier's dacha. A thin man with large wrists had beaten his way through all of them and taken back the one lead they had to the American weapon. This had happened quite naturally in the one other country where they felt most secure. This Zemyatin found out from his own men within the KGB, even before they tried to cover for themselves.

Zemyatin knew that if his Russia were going to survive, he would have to make all those comfortable KGB boys much less comfortable. The world was not a fine desk from which you ordered someone killed. It was blood. And pain. And treachery. And very, very dangerous.

Even as he entered 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, the massive concrete building in Moscow that was KGB headquarters, he felt the tiredness of combat. But this time there was a sense that events could not be turned. Zemyatin brought with him two old combat soldiers he could rely on to put a bullet in someone's head without arguing. Nothing fancy. Stick the gun in their faces and pull the trigger. He could reasonably expect everyone to follow his orders, but he was too tired now to work with people who might ask him questions.

He went right to the British desk of the KGB and ordered the heads of other desks to be in the room. He ordered the general who had seen what had happened at the missile base to be there also.

Assembled in this one office were forty-two generals. Zemvatin told no one why they had been called. The young general in charge of the British desk tried to restrain his tension. He had phoned the field marshal just an hour earlier to report the minor difficulty encountered in England. The field marshal had hung up on the general after telling him he would be over soon. Stay there, had been the only order. All of them had been kept there for half a day. Good. Now the room buzzed with the upper echelon of the KGB. Some looked to Zemyatin, who sat in a chair with his two old friends behind him. Zemyatin said nothing, gathering his strength by drinking a glass of water.

The conversation among the generals drifted to personal things. Zemyatin did nothing. He let their talk wander to all the things they thought were important: watches, dachas, special Western goods, the price of a woman in Yemen. Several were embarrassed to be standing near him, because no one took it upon himself to ask why they had been called. They all wanted someone else to do it.

Finally Zemyatin nodded to one of the two old soldiers he had brought with him.

"Anyone but this one," he said, pointing to the young general of the British desk. "I'll need him for a while," He said it so casually that no one seemed to notice. They continued talking. The shot rattled every eardrum in the room. It shivered the gilt on the chairs. The old soldier had taken a big-caliber pistol, still smoking acrid gunpowder now, and shot the brains out of the KGB officer closest to him, the one who had smiled when the old soldier approached.

For just one moment there was incredible silence in the room. Everyone was stunned, everyone but Zemyatin and his old Russian infantrymen.

"Hello," he said. "I am Alexei Zemyatin. I am sure most of you have heard of me in one way or another." The Great One had just gotten their attention.

"We are engaged in a battle of survival of the motherland. This man has failed," he said, pointing to the young general sitting behind the desk. Little beads of perspiration now formed under the young general's immaculately combed hair, slick with Italian lotion. The young general gulped. Zemyatin wondered if he had ever seen a dead body before. The others were all wondering, of course, why the British desk officer had not been shot if the British desk had failed.

"I want you to listen. We had been assured that we had a fancy psychological profile coming in on a woman who could lead us to a weapon we deem vital. Correct?"

The young general nodded. He tried not to look at the body. So did the other superior officers of the strongest intelligence network the world had ever seen.

"I wanted information. I wanted what was simple. We had been assured that an American operating alone was no danger, even though Americans do not operate alone. It takes three of them to go to the bathroom. But America had sent one man looking for this woman. And what were we told?"

The young general's voice barely got out the words: "We said he had been taken care of."

The other officers in the room were sure the general was going to be shot. Some of the older ones had not seen an execution in an office since the days of Stalin. They wondered if the bad old days were coming back.

"He'd been around the block or something like that. London was downtown Moscow, you said. You were so sure, weren't you?"

The general nodded. "Louder," said Zemyatin.

"I was sure," said the young general. He wiped his forehead with the perfectly tailored sleeve.

"I said here, as I said fifty, sixty years ago, that your enemy is perfect until he shows you how to kill him. No tricks. No games. Blood. Think. Blood. Think. Think." No one answered.

"There is no gadget so exotic and useless that you will not copy it from the Americans. Well, we don't have time for that. Your motherland faces destruction. Your motherland faces a threat far more powerful and odious than anything we have seen before. Your motherland needs your brains, your blood, and your strength. Now, boychik. Tell us all about this American."

"He penetrated our most secure London system, and got the woman who knows about this weapon that ... concerns you, a weapon I am not sure about . . ."

"Anything else?" asked Zemyatin.

"I guess I failed," said the young general. He adjusted his gold Rolex. He had thought he might be killed someday in some foreign land, but not here at KGB headquarters in his own office.

"You don't even know how you failed. That is the danger. You don't even know how you failed."

"I lost the woman. I underestimated the American."

"Anyone can lose a battle. Do you hear me? Do you all hear me? We have lost many battles," boomed Zemyatin, and then he was quiet to let it all sink in. "We are going to lose more battles."

And he was quiet again.

"But," he said finally, raising himself from his chair and purposely stepping on the dead body of the man he had ordered shot at random, "we need not lose any war. The failure of our young boychik here has probably escaped every one of you."

Zemyatin paused for only a moment. He knew he wasn't going to get an answer. They were all too shaken. Which was exactly as he had to have them.

"The failure is something this young man did not do. He did not find out the methods by which this American operated. Today we know little more than we did before we lost that battle. We did not find out how to kill him. Now, from this day forth, I want the entire world network to look for this American and the woman. And I personally will prepare the team to go after them. Who is in charge of execution squads?"

There was an embarrassed mumble in the rear of the room. Finally someone said:

"You're stepping on him, sir."

"Doesn't matter. Give me his number-two man. As for the rest of you, there is nothing more important in your lives right now than finding the whereabouts of that American and the woman. We do have her picture and identifying material, don't we? Or are we just dealing with her psychological profile?"

"No. We have her picture," said the young general. The man in charge of Russia's execution efforts was simply named Ivan. His last name was Ivanovich. He was really a staff officer and explained at the outset that he had never actually killed anyone. Perhaps, suggested Colonel Ivan Ivanovich, Field Marshal Zemyatin would prefer one more skilled in the art of killing. The young paper shuffler had a face clean as a washtub, and lips like rosebuds.

What were they making policemen of nowadays? wondered Zemyatin. Still, he had to have some intelligence to have risen so far.

"No, no," said Zemyatin. "You're all the same. What we are going to do, Ivan, is let this American show us how to kill him. Until then, he is perfect."

This time there was no reference to old theories being outmoded. The first random shot into the crowd had settled that. It had unsettled the most settled bureaucracy in the Kremlin. Now he might be able to get some work out of these incompetents.

There had been no reports of weapons testing in the last two days. This lull had given Russia time to build more raw-button missiles. Meanwhile, a man and a woman had to be found somewhere in the world, and if the KGB did one thing well, it was keeping track of the world. There was more useless information coming into Moscow than even the computers stolen from the Americans could handle. But on this day, the entire network shifted to searching for three things. A man. A woman. And a weapon.

Alexei Zemyatin felt the tingle of war come just a touch closer that cold night. The Americans had sent their best to protect the woman in charge of the experiment. Therefore, there wasn't even the slightest doubt that they were behind this weapon as a weapon.

If they had been honest, a fact Zemyatin would never have believed too readily, why steal the woman back? And why use a heretofore secret force? One only exposed a secret to protect a geater one. It meant war. And yet, the millions who would die in this one made Alexei Zemyatin push the waiting time to the limit. They would look for things. Watch America closely. Maybe the experiments would stop. Maybe there was a flaw in the weapon. Maybe it did not work in certain situations.

Russia would continue to build its raw-button missiles.

The day of war would remain the same. He had designated it to make America prove to him that they were not preparing their own final solution to communism. And the only way it could be proven now was for his security system to find the three things he had requested of them.

Zemyatin walked with just a single bodyguard that night through the streets of Moscow, hearing drunks sing sad songs and watching an occasional dark car head busily out of the city toward the better apartments, He breathed deeply. The air was good. He even wondered, if they did get a good first launch, how much-if any-of this would be left.

He also wondered what the Americans thought they would win by such a conquest. Stupidity in an enemy bothered Zemyatin. There was still time for him to stop the crude nuclear assault system which continued to add more sites. Still time. He did not know that even now an American was going to erode the very mildest hope of peace, because he had something more important to think about than the survival of the human race. His career was in jeopardy.

Chapter 10

Reemer Bolt hadn't heard from Kathy since immediately after the test. It did not matter. The system had cost CC of Massachusetts more than the magic fifty million dollars. The figure was magic because now the corporation could not, under any circumstances, fail to push forward without being destroyed. In a way this financial disaster had put Reemer Bolt in the driver's seat, and he realized there was only one last bug to work out. One little obstacle that had nothing to do with the machine itself.

"Praise the Lord," said the chairman of the board. "It does work, then?"

The board was meeting in the director's room, a comfortable spacious room with wood floors, open windows, and a sense of an exiting tomorrow in it. It was used for board meetings and for presenting possible customers CC's solutions to their chemical problems.

"We can direct the ozone opening across an entire ocean for a controlled period," said Bolt. "Gentlemen, we have put a window into the ozone and we control the sash cords. What we can deliver is no less than the most powerful force in our universe."

Bolt stood up when he said this. He paused. There were smiles on the faces of the board of directors. Reemer Bolt had dreamed of a day like this. And now it was happening. Men with the money giving him approval. Actually, if he had told them that everything was still not a disaster, they would have been pleased. But this had replaced their fear with greed. He smiled back.

There was applause. Light at first, then hearty. Reemer Bolt knew how to work an audience.

"And we have the patent." More applause.

"And we submitted this patent in such a way that no one will know exactly what we have until we make our announcement."

More applause.

"Gentlemen. You have gambled and you have won." Applause.

"You have bet on tomorrow, and that was yesterday. You own today. The sunlight and all."

There were a few technical questions which Bolt delayed answering "until Dr. O'Donnell returns."

"This is CC of M's most important project," said one of the directors. "This is the whole story now, so to speak. Why isn't Dr. O'Donnell here?"

"She has phoned and told us she is taking what I believe is a well-deserved rest."

More applause. Even for this. Reemer Bolt owned these men. The phone call was not so much a request for a vacation as a hurried message from a phone booth, saying she would get back to him soon and not to do anything without her. And then: "He's coming back now. I have to hang up."

"Him? Who's him? A he?"

"Not like you, darling," Kathy had said, blowing a kiss through the phone and hanging up. So his orders had been to do nothing. But he knew what that was about. She wanted to take the big share of the credit for the device's success. If there was one thing Reemer Bolt prided himself on, it was his knowledge of women. After all, he had been married many times.

So he told the board that Dr. O'Donnell had done well within her limited area, and that her presence was not necessary for pushing on the success of CC of M's sun access device.

"I don't know if I like the name 'sun access,' " said one of the directors. "Everybody has access to the sun. We've got to sell something exclusive."

"Good point, sir. 'Sun access' is just a working name," said Bolt.

"I think 'Mildred' might not be a bad working name," said the director. He was a stuffy sort, quite erect, who smoked long cigarettes neatly and then tortured the cinder into submission.

"Why 'Mildred'?" asked another director.

"My mother's name," he said.

"Perhaps something more sellable," said the other director.

"Just a working name. I like it."

"Why don't we let Mr. Bolt continue? He's brought us this far."

More applause. Reemer Bolt had dreamed of a day like this.

"Where to now, Reemer?" said the chairman of the board. He did not smoke. He did not drink the water set in front of him, and his applause was the weakest. He had a face with all the human warmth of cold cooking fat. "Toward making you all the richest men in the world." Applause.

"Good. What's your direction?"

"Multifaced, yet with a strong directional thrust, only when we devise the maximum benefit avenue for us to drive down. In other words, we have so many damned streets to take, we want to make sure we have the best one."

"Sounds good, Mr. Bolt. Which streets are you considdering?"

"I don't want to lock us in right now. I think the worst thing we can do is go running off in a direction just to run. I don't want to look back at these days and think we had the power of the unfiltered sun in our hands and then we let it get away because we didn't think."

"I am not asking you not to think. What direction?"

"Well, let's look at what we have. We have controlled access to unfiltered sun, the power rays, so to speak. They are ours. And they are ours safely. You know that in any experiment like this there was a danger we could rip the ozone shield and turn the earth into a cinder. Then none of our ideas would have been any good." Bolt looked everyone in the face and paused. There was no applause. "So," said Bolt. "We now move into the applications phase with a fantastic advantage."

"Yes?" said the chairman of the board. "What are we going to do with this thing to get our fifty million dollars back and make money? Who are we going to sell this to? What are we going to use it for? I have read your secret reports, and so far all we can do is ruin lawns and kill animals painfully. You think there is a market for that?"

"Of course not. Those were just experiments to define what we have."

"We know what we have. What are we going to use it for?"

The chairman of the board had hit the last little bug. "I don't want to rush this. I want Marketing to come up with a good range and a direction I can stand behind," said Bolt.

"Bolt, that fifty million dollars costs us one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a week in interest. Please don't take your time in coming up with an application we can sell."

"Right," said Reemer Bolt. And he got out of that boardroom as quickly as he could because he didn't want anyone asking him about ideas for commercial use.

The problem with something that cost fifty million dollars to develop was that you couldn't use it for something small. You had to have something big. Big. Big.

That was what Reemer Bolt was yelling at his staff the following morning.

"Big industry. Big ideas. Big. Big."

"What about as a weapon? It would make a great weapon. And fifty million dollars would be pennies for something that might end all life on earth if used improperly. "

"Not fast enough. The money's there, but the government takes forever. A weapon is the last resort. There has got to be something we can do with this thing. Something big: Big industry. It's got to revolutionize something."

Then a lower-level employee had a magnificent idea. It didn't have to do with animals. And it didn't have to do with lawns. But it did have to do with a baking effect.

None of them knew as they were congratulating themselves that even to a lower-level Russian general, the experiment they were planning could only be a prelude to ground action all across the European front.

Even if Bolt had known, he might not have dwelt on that. Here was an idea that would not only get CC of M out of the hole, but possibly revolutionize a major industry. And even better yet, a lower-level employee had thought it up. He would have no troubie taking full credit for it.

"Are you sure this is the right jungle?" said Remo.

"Sure," said Kathy. She was still suffering from jet lag and the atrocious landing at Chitibango airport in San Gauta. The runway was built for smuggling out cocaine and bringing in tourists who liked to discover new vacation spots unspoiled by other tourists. San Gauta was always being discovered for the first time. It was the sort of place that photographed magnificently.

What did not appear in the photographs were the bugs and the room service. In all Gauta there were only four people who could tell time. And they were all in the Cabinet. The rest of the people thought that the only time one had to respect in this little tropical paradise was bedtime and dinnertime. Bedtime was determined by the sun and dinnertime by one's stomach.

Only crazy foreigners and the Maximum Leader for Life had to tell time. The Maximum Leader needed the time device to know when to meet airplanes, start parades, and most of all to declare when time was running out.

In the 1950's Generalissimo Francisco Eckman-Ramirez declared time was running out against atheistic communism. During the sixties it was imperialism. During the seventies it became, on alternate days of the week, either Cuba or America. Now, the new time running out was for population control.

The Generalissimo was not exactly sure how it worked, but somehow the Western World, especially America, was to blame for the incredible promiscuity of the San Gauta maiden and the magnificent sex drive of every San Gauta male. Ordinarily bad sanitation disease, and the starvation that had afflicted this area for aeons kept an almost mathematical balance of people.

But because of all the warnings that time was running out, Western agencies began shipping food, cleaning up sewers, and teaching new methods of living longer. They sent down doctors and nurses. There was medicine. The shame of so few babies living to maturity had been conquered. Which led to more grown-ups. Which led to more grown-ups making more babies. The whole place was like a giant guppy tank run amok. And now time was truly running out on San Gauta for Generalissimo Eckman-Ramirez. With all the people crowded together, pollution was getting worse. Starvation was getting worse and then came the worst assault of all. It was a combination of liberal Protestants, Jewish intellectuals, and an order of nuns. Between them they came up with a massive social program to eradicate all evils.

They presented it in such a way that anyone who allowed the current state to persist appeared to be some form of devil. Therefore, anyone fighting that person was on the side of good. Willing to fight the Generalissimo were the usual hill bandits who had specialized for generations, even before the arrival of the Spaniards, in pillage, rape, and the murder of innocents: women, children, unarmed farmers in the field.

But now they put a little star on a red flag, called the pillage and rape "guerrilla warfare," and announced their goal as liberation. What they wanted to liberate was what they had always wanted to liberate: everything the townsfolk couldn't protect.

They were immediately armed by the Cubans, which left the Generalissimo reaching out for the Americans to help him counter their new and better weapons. Whereas before, a village or two might suffer an attack by the hill bandits once a year, now the attacks came weekly. Whereas before, the national army might respond once or twice a year by shooting some cannon into the hillsides, now there were daily fusillades.

The death count became enormous, especially as the nuns returned with stories of atrocities to America, where they called upon their countrymen to donate money to fight barbarism. This was not altogether a lie. The Generalissimo was indeed barbaric. But so were the liberating forces whom the nuns in their innocence now declared as saviors. The one thing the nuns never seemed to entertain was the possibility that they themselves were indeed innocents and didn't know what was going on. But they were always good for a story of suffering.

There seemed to be no end to the blood running daily through the streets of Chitibango, because not quite enough people were killed to balance out the new advances in medicine and agriculture. This was a problem typical of a Central American country.

And thus did San Gauta receive journalists who detailed the atrocities of the Generalissimo. And thus did Kathy O'Donnell, like anyone else who followed the news, hear of Eckman-Ramirez the butcher, the man whose estates were guarded by fire and steel and barbarous henchmen.

It was this time that came first to Kathy's mind when this magnificent specimen with the thick wrists entered her life. She wanted to see the butcher of Chitibango pulped.

She could have chosen someone else. This wonderful man she was with could destroy anyone. But she wanted someone far away from Boston and the fluorocarbon generator. She wanted someone who would be a challenge for her brutal stranger. The Russians apparently weren't. And so, in that one instant, she fondly chose the butcher of South America. She thought of the nice fight his notorious guards would put up. If this man called Remo lost, she could always buy her way out, but if he won, well, she would be there for the magnificent thrill of it.

Even more important, now she didn't care what happened. She just wanted more of Remo.

"Yes. I am sure of it. This does look like the right jungle. He had a magnificent hacienda."

"All these dictators down here have one," said Remo. "He had a high peaked hat."

"That's standard, too."

"He had a nose that didn't look like a balloon," said Kathy. "And hair that didn't look like it was manufactured in a Bayonne plastics factory."

"Might be Eckman-Ramirez," said Remo. He had seen his picture once in a magazine.

"He said he would pay well for my conducting the test. I didn't know there would be all that suffering. Those poor animals."

"Did you see the weapon?"

"He said he had it. He had it hidden. I should have known."

"Why?" said Remo. He noticed she was having difficulty moving along the path. The natives had looked at his wrists and trusted him immediately. Why, he wasn't sure. But he was sure that they were looking at his wrists when they told him not only where the Generalissimo lived, but that he was there now.

"All the news articles. I didn't believe them. I didn't believe they were telling the truth, and now you tell me this device can do harm to people."

"You didn't see the animals there?" said Remo.

"I saw them. I saw them suffer. Yes," said Kathy. She allowed her blouse to open, revealing a rising bosom glistening with San Gauta warmth. Ordinarily Kathy could allow her blouse to open with such artistry that she could play with almost any man's eyes, getting him to lean over a table, keep his head cocked at an awkward angle, and usually not think about what he was supposed to be thinking about. It was a lovely business tool. A properly opened blouse was as useful to her as a desktop computer.

But this man didn't seem to dwell on her body. He seemed to be involved with everything around them, knowing where the path went when of course he couldn't have known. He told her he felt it.

"Your blouse is open," said Remo.

Kathy let her chest rise and looked at him coyly.

"Is it really?" she said, letting him get the full magnificence of what was pressing up out of her bra.

"Yeah. Now, why didn't you believe you would be doing any harm?"

"I trust too much," she said. She felt the whole jungle slither with things she couldn't see. Things with hairy legs and little teeth that some television show had probably photographed laying eggs or eating some other thing with legs just as hairy and almost as many teeth.

The magazine article did not show the smells, or the fact that your feet sank into the jungle floor, into dark leafy substances that she was sure must have contained millions of those hairy-legged things.

"Are you married?" she said.

"I think I told you no. Don't walk so heavy," said Remo.

"I walk beautifully," said Kathy. Suddenly she didn't mind the jungle. She minded the insult.

"No you don't. Clunk clunk. Try not to crush the ground. Treat it like your friend. Walk with the ground. It'll be easier on you and the ground and we won't be announcing ourselves to whatever it is behind that hillock up ahead."

Kathy couldn't see anything beyond the dense green foliage. She couldn't even see the hillock.

"How do you know there's something there?"

"I know. C'mon. Walk with the ground, not on it." Exasperated, Kathy tried walking with the ground to prove to herself it didn't work. But she found that by watching Remo walking and trying to think as he had instructed, she was not so much pressing forward, as gliding forward. She shut her eyes. And stumbled. She had to watch him to do it.

"Where did you learn this?"

"I learned it," said Remo.

"It's wonderful," she said.

"It's all right. What is Eckman-Ramirez like?"

"He is a sociopath. They are the best liars in the world. After all, he convinced me. I should have believed the magazine articles. I thought they were propaganda."

"No. They just don't know what they're doing. No one knows what he is doing. Nobody. These yo-yos are going to fry the earth with that thing."

"Some people know," said Kathy. "Whoever taught you to walk like this knows. He must know something. Or was it a she?"

"A he."

"Your father?"

"Shhh."

"Who?"

"Someone, that's all," said Remo. He thought of Chiun going off for some old dusty pieces of gold and wood, the collection of centuries of tribute. Some of the stuff was almost worthless now, as modern man had learned to manufacture some of those materials once considered valuable. But even so. What was a ruby worth if there was no one left on earth to say it was valuable? And still Chiun had gone.

"I don't miss him, you know," said Remo.

"The one who taught you?"

"Crazy. That's all. He's got his ways. And that's it. You can't reason with him."

"The one who taught you?"

"Never could. Never will. I don't know why I bother."

"The one who taught you?" asked Kathy again.

"Watch how you walk," said Remo.

"That is the first time I have seen you angry about something. You don't ever seem to get angry."

"Try walking where you're told," said Remo.

That was the second time. It was clear there was someone he loved. But what sort of a relationship was it? Was there a reason he was not attracted to her? Was it all women he wasn't attracted to?

"Watch how you're walking," he said.

He turned out to be more than right. There was a hill up ahead. And just over it, set like a white jewel topped with red ceramic tile, was a classic hacienda surrounded by unclassic machine-gun nests. There were fierce-looking guards at the gates and enough antennas set into the tile roof to direct an air attack on the rest of South America. The land around the hacienda was cleared to prevent any possible hiding place.

"Oh, wow," said Kathy. "We'll never get in there."

"No. Those defenses are for bandits. Where did he put that device?"

"He would know," said Kathy.

"If you're frightened, you can wait here, and I'll come back for you."

"No. That's all right. I owe it to mankind to try to make up for any harm I've done," she said. She certainly wasn't going to waste this filthy walk through the jungle to miss all the crunching of bones and breaking of bodies. If she wanted safety she would have stayed somewhere in London and sent this one off to Tibet or someplace.

"Stay with me."

"I'll never leave you."

The thing about Remo; the thing she noticed most, was that he used people's reactions to operate. Like walking pleasantly up the road right past the machine-gun nests. He waved. They waved back. She realized that perhaps his greatest deception was that he was unarmed. He presented no threat of danger. It was as hidden as it was magnificent. Kathy could feel the sense of danger vibrate into her body. She wondered if he was going to kill a guard for her.

"Hi," said Remo. "I'm looking for the Generalissimo. I've got good news for him."

The guard did not speak English. Remo spoke in Spanish but it was the strangest Spanish Kathy had ever heard, more Latin than Spanish and strangely sing-song, as though an Oriental had taught him.

"The Generalissimo does not see everyone," said the guard, noticing Remo's wrists. There was no wristwatch, therefore the gringo was not a gringo, but a citizen of the country. The guard asked why Remo was not out in the fields working or in the hills with the bandits or in the army of the Generalissimo. Also, what was he doing with the beautiful gringo woman? Did Remo want to sell her?

Remo said he didn't want to sell her. But he was here to give the Generalissimo the best deal he could ever make for himself. He might let the Maximum Leader live to see the sunset. The guard laughed.

Then Remo moved. His hand seemed to brush across the guard's arrogant face. It was not a fast move, but fast enough so that Kathy only noticed it leaving the face. The laughter on the guard's face disappeared. It was impossible to laugh without lips or teeth. The guard couldn't even do anything with his hands but try to stanch the flow of blood. He also quickly indicated the Generalissimo was in the top floor by pointing. There was another guard nearby. He pulled the trigger on a machine pistol. But the pistol didn't fire. The finger pulled again. The pistol did nothing but jerk with a little gush of red. The gush came from the hand. Even on the ground the finger was still pulling. Remo walked right on through with Kathy. The guards back at the machine-gun nests didn't even notice. She knew that because they were still looking at her and blowing kisses.

The guards back at the gate were trying to patch themselves as Kathy tugged at Remo's shirt.

"Aren't you going to finish them off?"

"No. I wouldn't even have touched them if I could have gotten in with a letter."

"But you started something with them. I mean, how can you get something going and then not finish? You know break a neck or something."

"I didn't want to kill them unnecessarily."

"Why the hell did you get everyone so excited, and ther just leave? Wham, bam, not even a thank you ma'am."

"You want to finish them, lady, you finish them."

"I don't know how to kill," she said. "I hate that. I hate that in men. You know, a touch here, a touch there, and then nothing."

"Shhh," said Remo.

"What?"

"I'm thinking."

"Well, don't strain."

"Where did he meet you when you came here?"

"Remo, everything was so strange. So reeking with ... the strangeness, I guess, that I couldn't tell. They may have done this on purpose. I don't know."

"Sometimes they do that. I am asking because if people have something they really treasure, they don't go far from it. Not really far."

"Has that been your experience?"

"No," Said Remo. "A lesson."

"From that man?"

"Will you lay off that subject?" snapped Remo. "Just lay off. There must be something you don't want to talk about." He looked around the palatial hallways with their cool polished marble floors and tinted glass windows two stories high. Rich wood polished to a warm luster. Highbacked chairs. Gold in the chandeliers.

He heard laughter on the second story, and headed toward it.

"Does laughter tell you where the lord of this manor is?" asked Kathy.

"Nah. Maybe. I hate places like this. You know. A bit of Spanish, which means a bit of Arab because they were the real architects of Spanish styles. A little Mayan. A little Aztec and some California American. The place is a mess. You can't get a read on where the owner is. I hate it when they mix styles on you."

He went up the stairs with Kathy running to keep pace.

Outside there was some noise from the guards. An alarm sounded somewhere. Remo seemed to ignore it all. And then he saw an officer running into a room, locking the door behind him. Remo followed, springing the lock like a stone from a slingshot. Panting, Kathy caught up with him. It was safe to stay behind him. Perhaps the only safe place. That is, if he knew it was you.

"It's me," she said.

"I know," said Remo.

"How did you know?"

"I know. C'mon. I'm working."

Work was disarming two bemedaled officers who were aiming pistols at them. When Remo disarmed, he did it at the shoulders. Again he did not finish them. He didn't even touch the two brutes who dropped their weapons when they saw the horror of the officers losing their arms. He was even pleasant as he walked into the next room, where an officer was excitedly telling Generalissimo Eckman-Ramirez about the dangers of a single man who had come here to threaten His Excellency.

Remo, Kathy realized, could be a tease. And she also realized that she needed him to finish one of these men, or she would go crazy with want.

"Get on with it," she said.

Remo nodded her way. The Generalissimo, it turned out, spoke English. He spoke English rather well, in fact, and quite rapidly when it was pointed out to him that the man who had gone through his guards like tissue paper was now standing there.

"What can my humble house offer you, friend?" asked the Generalissimo. He had fine features: a thin small nose, sort of blondish hair, and dark eyes. He also sported a glistening yellow tooth right up front. When one had gold, one apparently flaunted it in this country.

He kept looking at Remo's wrists. "I want your fluorocarbon thing."

"But, sir, I have no such thing. But if I did, you, sir, would be the first to have it."

"Oh what a liar," gasped Kathy. "These butchers are such liars. "

"Who is your beautiful friend who calls me a liar?"

"You mean to say you didn't stand right there and tell me to measure oxidation and liquid refraction of ultraviolet intensity on a transatlantic angle?"

"Senora?" said the Generalissimo helplessly.

"Malden. In Malden, you bastard," said Kathy.

"Malden. I don't know of a Malden."

"You don't know of little dead animals? You don't know of the ozone layer? What else don't you know?"

"I don't know what you are talking about, lady."

"He's the one," said Kathy.

What happened next posed an immediate problem for her. She had been planning on Remo's killing off the Generalissimo and leaving her free to her own devices.

Unfortunately Remo could do things with bodies that she hadn't even suspected. Like run just two fingers along a spinal cord, creating pain, turning the general's fierce eyes to watery tears, and his pallid face to red pain. What if the Generalissimo denied any knowledge of the machine to his death? Would Remo find out she had tied to him? "They usually tell the truth under this," said Remo.

"Apparently he's more afraid of the person he works for than you. Look at his face. He's in pain."

"That's why they tell the truth. To stop the pain." Kathy saw the face flush red, ease, then flush red again; it was as though this man had gotten control of the Generalissimo's entire nervous system.

"It was the North Vietnamese, wasn't it? You showed them it could work didn't you? That's how you used me, wasn't it? To develop a weapon for Hanoi," said Kathy. She felt her body alive with his pain.

The Generalissimo, who would have admitted to murdering Adam and Eve at that point, let out a resounding yes. Especially when the pain eased. So delicious was this lack of pain that with Kathy's help he embroidered on the sale to North Vietnam. He even confessed guilt and asked forgiveness.

"But Hanoi isn't west of Great Britain."

"It is if you go far enough," said Kathy.

"I did it. I did sell this horrible ... thing?"

"Fluorocarbon generator," added Kathy helpfully.

"Yes, fluoro ... thing. I did. I confess."

"Where in Hanoi?" said Remo.

"I don't know. They just came and put it in a car and drove off," said the Generalissimo.

Remo looked at Kathy. She was shaking her head. "You're a scientist," said Remo. "Does that sound right to you?"

"Could be. Could be," she said. What they would do in Hanoi, she did not know. What she would do, she was not certain. But she needed a climax to all this excitement.

"Are you going to let him live? Maybe he'll warn the others."

"Sometimes it's a help," said Remo. "Then they all run to protect what they don't want you to have."

"I'd feel safer if you killed him. I can't go with you knowing this butcher and his officer would be phoning a warning ahead. It's been so hard on me, Remo. I couldn't."

And then she cried. She was good at tears. She had found out just how good she was at them when, at five, she had strangled her own hamster and had the house looking for the killer who had done that bad thing to Kathy's Poopsie Woo, her pet name for the little rodent who had squirmed his furry last in her hands.

"All right. All right," said Remo. "Stop the crying. Look, they're dead."

There were two very quiet bodies on the floor, the Generalissimo's sandy blond hair facing the ceiling, his nose pressed into the floor, the officer's arms out in the same hysterical motion he had used to warn his Maximum Leader that a horrible man and a beautiful woman had just breached his security like butter.

"I didn't see you do it. How did you do it?" said Kathy.

"Never mind," said Remo. "I did it."

"Well, don't be so fast. Why did you have to rush? Don't you have any consideration?"

Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell did not see the small swellings on the back of the necks of both men. But the general's physician did. It was unmistakable. Two spinal vertebrae had been cracked and fused as though with heat. An extraordinary feat, especially since the guards reported that no machinery had been brought into the Generalissimo's room. It was just one man and a redhead. The doctor very carefully got their descriptions. And then he phoned a large embassy in a nearby country.

"I think I have the answer to your problems," said the doctor.

"This had better be major for you to break cover," came back the voice.

"If it was major enough for you to warn me to look for, I assume it is major enough for me to get back to you."

"That was a general warning this morning,"

"I think I found them."

"The man and the woman?"

"Yes. She had red hair and was beautiful."

"We've had ten reports like that this morning from all over South America. One of the beautiful redheads turned out to be an orangutan in the Rio de Janeiro zoo whose keeper was taking her to the veterinarian,"

"This man killed two persons by fusing cervical vertebrae with what I have to assume were his bare hands."

"What did he look like?"

The doctor heard the tension in the man's voice. Every bit of anxiety would mean many dollars for him. He gave a description of the two, told where he thought they were, and then added an afterthought.

"He did not wear a wristwatch," said the doctor. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"All foreigners and cabinet ministers wear wristwatches. They must have thought this man was one of their own. The peasants, I mean."

"You wear a wristwatch, doctor," came back the voice from the KGB control center.

"Yes," said the doctor. "But I am also Minister of Health for San Gauta."

The report was sent immediately by radio message-because it had maximum priority-to Moscow, which had been receiving similar messages all day. But this one was different. In all the others the man had either shot or stabbed someone, but this message indicated a person who, with his bare hands, could create enough pressure to fuse vertebrae as though they had been baked in an oven.

"That's him," said the KGB colonel Ivan Ivanovich, who now first had to report to Zemyatin and then, with the old one's help, prepare the way to kill him.

"Good," said the Great One, And then he found out the news was even better: the couple was still in San Gauta. "We can dispatch a team before they leave the country," said the young colonel. He felt his hands begin to sweat just talking to the field marshal. Who knew whom he would kill and when?

"No," said Alexei Zemyatin. "This time we do everything right."

Chapter 11

Reemer Bolt didn't know whether it was the heat or his excitement, but he was sweltering in his silver radiation suit. One of the experiments at Maldeti had proved that a radiation suit could protect a person under the sun's power rays for a maximum of twenty minutes. What else had been discovered was not quite certain because he had not heard from Kathy O'Donneil again. He missed her luscious body, her exhilarating smile, her quick mind, but most of all her body. When he really thought about it, he didn't miss her smile or her mind at all. In fact, without her here he would be the sole architect of the most amazing industrial advance of the twentieth century, Perhaps ever. The person who invented the wheel may have been forgotten, but Reemer Bolt would not be.

Credit would be given where credit was due. Reemer Bolt had worked out the last bug this bright autumn day. He had not only found a use for the device, but one in a major world industry. In one paltry year CC of M would be able to recoup their entire investment and they'd all be on their way to exotic wealth forever.

The cars and trucks had been arriving all morning, their bare metal skins glistening in the sun. Some were old, with deep, mud-red primer patches. Others were new, with rivets still visible, A small valley had been cleared of trees just north of Chester, New Hampshire. Into this valley came the cars and trucks all morning. Into this valley came the board of directors of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts.

Into this valley came a crate of glistening radiation suits. Reemer Bolt had the board of directors put them on. The chairman of the board looked at the fifty cars and calculated a cost of more than two hundred thousand dollars and probably less than five hundred thousand dollars. He looked at the suits and figured that they had to go for a thousand apiece. There were fine brass fittings over the face plates, and soft padding under the silver skins of the suits. Reemer Bolt was talking in a hushed voice as though someone over his shoulder would hear him. The chairman of the board noticed it was quite effective. Other members were being caught up in this as though they were part of some great secret raid.

"Reemer," said the chairman of the board; beckoning Bolt with a finger. He spoke loud enough to break the spell. "Reemer, this experiment must have cost us at least a half-million dollars. At least."

"Two million," said. Reemer almost with joy.

The other directors, most of whom still had the face masks of their suits in their hands, turned their heads. "The cars here and things cost about a half-million. But the real money went for something even more vital," said Bolt. And then as though he had not baited this hook, he went about helping another board member don a radiation suit.

"Reemer," said the chairman of the board.

"Yes," said Bolt. "Your face mask goes over the shoulders, almost like a driver's suit, except we don't have to screw the helmet down into the shoulders."

"Reemer," said the chairman of the board. "What is the one-point-five-million-dollar 'even more vital'?"

"You don't think one-point-five-million-dollars is worth securing control over the entire auto industry? Trucks, cars, sports cars, off-the-road vehicles, tractors. Do you really think, sir, they are going to give up control like that?" Bolt snapped a finger and gave a knowing smile.

"One-point-five million dollars," repeated the chairman of the board. "How did you spend that additional money?"

"In providing you all with drivers who didn't know who they were working for. In setting up interlocking dummy corporations, each one providing a greater maze than the next. In buffering all of us, especially the name of our company, which I asked you not to mention today in case the ears of these people pick it up. It costs money to set up dummy corporations leading to the Bahamas. It costs money to hire people through these corporations. It costs money to weave a web that cannot be traced, because, gentlemen, when we leave here today we will leave a paltry two million dollars sitting in a field we bought but will not claim. Yes, gentlemen, we leave a few dollars, and we walk away with control of the entire auto industry."

Bolt grabbed his helmet tightly in both hands.

"We have something so valuable, something that will become so necessary that the auto industry will do everything to break our secret. And until we are ready to dictate our terms, we must keep what happens today to ourselves."

Bolt placed his clear face mask over his head and turned his back, knowing that there were still more questions. But these would be answered in a moment. He had wooden stands built for the board of directors, very much like those in a football stadium. He wondered if they would raise him to their shoulders and carry him off the field when the experiment was done.

Almost tripping on the padding over his shoes, Bolt waved an arm. A score of workmen advanced on the cars with spray nozzles. Pink and lavender clouds filled the air.

Then there was fire-engine red and living-room beige. Mushroom and melon. Daisy and chartreuse. The paint hissed onto the cars moist and glistening.

With a control radio, Reemer Bolt, who had purchased a new scrambler system, contacted a technician back at Chemical Concepts. He had purposely kept from this technician the exact nature of the experiment. He had disguised it as something financially meaningless, like saving the air for people to breathe.

The device was now secured under a small office. When the technician heard the signal, he lifted the red shield over the initiating button. The floor above the device opened. The roof of the building opened.

Sunlight poured in over the device-now reduced to the size of a desk-with a five-foot chrome nozzle pointing upward; much like a small cannon. Except this cannon had two storage drums, and an iron beam generator that acted like a sluice for the fluorocarbons, transferring them just short of the speed of light up to the ozone shield.

The roof closed, the floor above the device closed, and the machine had done its work. It was now down to less than five seconds in operating time. The directional problems had been overcome at the Malden experiment. The duration time, namely protecting the remaining parts of the thin globe-girdling shield, had been determined in the first; Salem, New Hampshire, experiment. The technician knew by the almost upright angle of the generator that the experiment point had to be very close.

Up in the treeless valley near Chester, New Hampshire, a miraculous blue light opened up above. For five seconds it seemed to bubble and then it closed rapidly. The fifty cars and trucks did absolutely nothing. Wettish reds, pinks, blacks, browns, grays, and blues glistened from the cars.

Reemer Bolt took off his mask. He signaled the board of directors to do the same.

"Is it safe yet?" asked one.

"Safe," said Bolt. He glanced up at the sky. The ring was now down to a circle. The technicians had even gotten the ozone shield to close faster. The air smelled faintly of burned grass. Small plops like bags of candy could be heard hitting the field. Birds caught again.

Bolt's feet crushed dried dead grass. The ground itself felt brittle underneath.

"C'mon," he called out to the board of directors. "It's safe."

He signaled the workmen to stand off. In case they didn't move fast enough, one of his dummy corporations had hired guards. They moved the workmen away. With great ostentation he nodded to a man with a control box sitting to the right of the stands. With so many people in glistening silver shield uniforms, it looked as though Martians or other spacemen had landed in this little valley in Chester, New Hampshire, where the device had been used for the third time.

Despite careful instructions the workmen tended to mill about confused, and the man at the sound shield box looked the most confused.

"Turn it on," yelled Bolt. He had been assured that certain sound waves obliterated other waves. He had been assured that even the CIA was just getting this device. He was assured that a person could yell five feet from another person and not be heard if the sound shield was in effect. The man at the box shrugged.

"I said turn on the damned sound shield," yelled Bolt. The man mouthed the word:

"What?"

Reemer saw one of the delivery cars take away a batch of workers who would no longer be needed. He saw the cars cough out exhaust and move silently along the woodland road out of sight. The man at the sound shield box was turning red in the face mouthing the word "What?"

But he wasn't mouthing.

"Perfect," said Reemer with an extra big grin and an extra-obvious nod. "Perfect."

And then the men who had provided the money and his future:

"Nothing we say here must be heard by other ears."

"There is nothing about a bunch of paint-wet cars that I care to keep secret," said the chairman of the board. If he knew nothing else, Bolt knew drama. He took the hand of the chairman of the board and forced it down into the glistening pink of a sedan roof. The chairman yanked it back and was about to wipe it off when he realized it was dry. He rubbed the car again. Glistening and dry. He rubbed another car. The other directors rubbed metal that shone with a luster they had never seen in an auto showroom.

Now Reemer spoke, hushed and precise.

"We can take three hundred dollars off the price of any top-grade auto finish. We can transform the cheapest grades of paint into top quality. In brief, gentlemen, we can hold the entire auto industry hostage to our cheaper method of applying finish paint. In brief, gentlemen, to the robots of Japan, to the workers of Detroit, to the technicians of Wiesbaden, Germany, we say: your car-painting days are over. There is one finish worthy of the name, and only we can apply it."

The chairman of the board hugged Reemer Bolt like a son. He would have adopted him at that moment. "Don't applaud. Don't carry me away from here. Very quietly, as though this was routine, walk to the cars I have rented for you and leave."

They nodded. A few gave Reemer Bolt a wink. One of them said the hardest thing in his life at that moment was not jumping for joy.

"And on your way out, tell that sound-shield guy to turn it off."

When wonderful was made in this world, Reemer, thy name was you, thought Bolt. On his face was the delicious glow of magnificent success. Reemer Bolt loved the world at that moment. And why shouldn't he? He planned to own much of it soon.

Suddenly he heard noise from the cars leaving and knew the sound shield was off. In a few moments he was alone. He waited, whistling. The next phase was about to begin.

Buses pulled up, chugging to a halt. Fifty people got out, some men, some women. Each with a ticket. They poured out onto the field, a few of them stumbling because they were reading their tickets.

The ones who had driven in the cars were gone before the paint went on. The ones who would drive them out would not know that they were freshly painted.

Bolt unpeeled his suit when he realized he was getting glances. He would go out with the last car, and then be dropped off at a nearby town two blocks from where another driver in a normal car would pick him up.

It was massive. It was brilliant. It was, thought Bolt, Boltian, expressing audacity, complexity, and most of all success. And then the little idiots just sat in their cars doing nothing.

"C'mon. Move along," he said. But they just sat there staring at their wheels, straining with something. Reemer went to the closest car and flung open the door. A young woman was at the wheel.

"Start it," he said.

"I can't," she said.

"Well, try turning the key," he said.

She showed him her fingers. They were red. "I have been," she said.

"Move over," he said.

Outside of Kathy O'Donnell, all women were good for only one thing, he thought. He turned the key. There wasn't even a groan. He turned the key again. Not a flicker on the dashboard. The car was still.

"See," said the young woman.

"Proud of yourself, I bet," said Bolt, and he went to a man's car. Again nothing. Not in the Beige Buick or Caramel Chrysler. Not in the Peppermint Pontiac or Sun Shimmer Subaru. Not in the Tan Toyota, the Mauve Mustang. The Porsche, the Audi, the Citroen, Oldsmobile, Bronco, Fairlane, Thunderbird, Nissan, Datsun, or Alfa Romeo.

Even the Ferrari was dead. Dead. Reemer Bolt's fingertips were bleeding as he told everyone they would be paid, just get in the darn buses and go. Go, now. "You can do that, can't you?"

As the buses pulled off, he was left alone with a field full of cars that would not start. Alone was the word for it. Failure nestled sorely inside his belly.

He couldn't move the cars. He wouldn't know where to begin. So he just left them and walked away. No one could trace them, he thought. But two worldwide networks had already zeroed in on the brief and dangerous puncture of the ozone shield. And no one in Moscow or Washington was calling it a window to prosperity.

The President had always known the world would end like this, with his looking on as a helpless bystander. The beam had been shot off; Russia had spotted it, too, and would not, under any circumstances, according to the best reports, accept the fact that America could not find a weapon being activated in its own land. But it was true.

The FBI reported that its search for something that produced a fluorocarbon stream had been fruitless. No one knew what to look for. Was it a gun? Was it a balloon? Did it look like a tank? Did it look like a giant can of hair spray?

But there was one good report as the world stumbled blindly toward its death. This from that most secret of organizations, the one he found out about on inauguration day, when the former president had brought him into the bedroom and showed him that red phone.

The President had used it more in the last week than all his predecessors had during their terms of office. The man on the other-end was named Smith, and his voice was sharp and lemony. It was a voice from which the President drew reassurance.

"We tracked down the source to one place, but it had been moved. It's in Hanoi."

"Are you sure?"

"We will only be sure when we get our hands on the damned thing. But our man tracked it to San Gauta and then that led to Hanoi."

"So the commies have it. Why are they being so mysterious?"

"I don't understand, sir."

"More than anything, I would like to get into the Kremlin and find out what the hell is going on. Could you use the older one for that? The Oriental?"

"He's on sort of a sabbatical."

"Now?" screamed the President.

"You don't order this one around like some officer. They have traditions a lot older than our country, or even Europe for that matter, sir."

"Well, what about the end of the world? What about that? Did you make that clear?"

"I think he has heard that before also, sir."

"Wonderful. Do you have any suggestions?"

"If I were you?" said Smith.

"Yes. "

"One of the problems, perhaps the main one, is that the Russians don't believe we are helpless about this fluorocarbon weapon, if it is a weapon."

"But if it's in Hanoi, they have it."

"Maybe they have it now and maybe they don't. If they do, I think they might step away from the brink. Let's hope they do. My man is only following the best lead we have, and frankly, Mr. President, I am glad we have that man doing it. There is no one better in the world we could have."

"I agree. I agree. Go on."

"I would suggest something I have been thinking about for a long time. Give them something to show that we want their trust in this matter. That we are just as interested in finding out about that fluorocarbon device as they are. We should give them some powerful secret of our own. That secret would be a proof of trust."

"Do you have one in mind?"

"Some device. We must have scores that they would be interested in. But make sure it is not one they think we think they already know about. The one thing we have to be in this matter is absolutely open. We have no choice, sir. I mean you'll have to open it all up."

"That is frightening, Smith."

"This is not a springtime of peace, sir."

"I wonder what my cabinet will think. What the Joint Chiefs will think."

"You don't have much of a choice, sir. You have to give orders."

"You know, Smith, the buck hasn't stopped here. The whole world has."

"Good luck, sir," said Smith.

"And good luck to you."

"Good luck to all of us, sir," said Smith.

The man chosen to bring the secret to Moscow was in his early sixties, a close friend of the President's, a billionaire, a fervent anticommunist, and the owner, of among other things, a technological corporation in the forefront of science.

When he saw what he was supposed to deliver, he almost accused the President of being a traitor. Laid out quite neatly, even to partial Russian translation, was the diagram of America's major missile defense system.

"I won't do it," said McDonald Pease, who possessed a crew cut, a Texas twang, and a doctorate in nuclear physics.

Then he heard about the new missile sites, and he softened a bit. Then he heard about a device that may have been the cause of the Russians' alarm, and he softened totally,

"Of course I'm going. We could all fry like biscuits in a desert. What sort of hound dog lunatic would play around with our little ozone shield? Sweet rib-snappin' muskrat. There won't even be a roach left on this planet. Give the Ruskies everything. Let's get this world back to being just generally dangerous. Holy cowdung. What is going on?"

"Your plane's waiting, Hal," said the President. That was McDonald Pease's nickname. With a first name like his, a nickname became mandatory.

With this one move the President was not only revealing a major American secret, but committing perhaps the shrewdest bargainer in the West. Pease would need it all, the President knew. What he did not know was that McDonald "Hal" Pease did not stand a chance, and was going to make matters even worse by being honest.

Chapter 12

McDonald Pease arrived in Moscow aboard a specially chartered jet given clearance to land in a vacant airstrip by the Soviet government.

He wore a Stetson hat and a four-thousand-dollar London suit. The chill wind of the autumn snows almost ripped the skin off his face. He didn't care. He hated these people. The only thing they ever did was steal technology and put poison into the minds of people better left to their own devices.

But more than that. He felt they were the most consistent liars the world had ever seen-and that was going some, considering his business partners and worldwide diplomacy, which he knew was a polite term for fraud.

The reason the Ruskies and other Marxists excelled at the blatant lie, Pease calculated, was the way they treated the word. In the tradition of the monotheistic religions, the word was supposed to carry the truth. Not that Christians, Jews, and Muslims always told the truth. But they were supposed to.

In Marxist-Leninist ideology, words were just tools to exhort. Agitprop. It had been that way since the beginning of Marxist-Leninist ideology and it was that way now. So even though the world was at the brink of destruction, it still turned the stomach of McDonald "Hal" Pease to be bringing plans for an American defense to the Russians themselves in an effort toward mutual trust.

Trust? Who knew what they meant by trust? The word probably had a special meaning, like their meaning for "peace." Namely, that lull in fighting between wars that would ultimately lead to their conquest of the world.

A Russian offered his own coat so that Mr. Pease would not freeze.

"No," said Pease. He let the wind tear at his skin.

Besides, they had brought cars right to the airplane. He counted all his people entering the cars and counted them again when they left. He'd started with twelve, and twelve got out of the cars inside the Kremlin walls.

The Premier had that typical Russian face: something that looked squashed. He had thick stubby hands. He expressed cautious optimism that America was willing to share her secrets.

They were in a large room. Behind the Premier were twelve Russian officers in wicker chairs. There were two translators and a large mirror on one of the walls. The fluorescent lights wouldn't have passed muster, thought Pease, in a Mexican junk heap.

"I am here," said Hal Pease, his twangy voice almost cracking in pain, "because we face a common danger. I understand that you do not trust us, and I am here to convince you that we are on the same side in trying to save the world."

The Russian Premier nodded. These Russians had necks like barrels, thought Pease. They'd make good football players.

"We know that you are building great amounts of new nuclear weapons, weapons that we believe are lacking the usual safety devices. For the first time in the history of atomic warfare, a nation has not taken proper precautions. "

Pease heard his words translated as he spoke. He saw the bull neck turn. The Russian Premier answered, and the translator began:

"We did not introduce atomic weapons into the world. We, like the rest of the nations, are victims of the atomic weapons which you introduced to this planet. Now you tell us we do not have the proper safety precautions. That is a lie. We are a peace-loving people, and have always been so. We would not endanger ourselves or the world with devices so heinous as you say."

"Get off it," said Pease. "We know you have 'em. You know you have 'em. Now, dammit, we're here to give you something to show you our good faith. You don't have to keep up that silly lie, fella."

The Premier and the translator exchanged a few words. Hal Pease didn't need the translation. He had been told to go to hell.

"All right. Here it is. We're going to give you our command defense structure. What we want is your understanding that we are not behind this irresponsible attempt to pierce the ozone shield. All we ask is that you pause in your march toward world destruction."

The translator began explaining the Russian love of peace, and Hal Pease told him he wasn't interested. It made him want to vomit when the Russian officers began poring over the layout of the American defenses. He saw several nods. They knew they were getting the real thing. One of the officers disappeared for about five minutes and then returned. He only nodded to the Premier. Then the Premier disappeared. The Premier was gone for a shorter time.

The translator was not even needed. Pease could tell by the way the Russian Premier folded his arms that he had been rejected.

The translator started on a denial of the new, more unreliable weapons, and Pease cut him off.

"Hey, buddy. Are you out of your mind? We just laid out our belly to you bastards. What do you want? You want a war? What are you going to win? Will you answer me that? Will you go to your boss and tell him he is crazy? You're starting something no one will win, and meanwhile, if we don't blow ourselves up, we're all sure as hell going to fry like a mess of chili beans."

He got the same blunt lie about Russia's peaceful intentions.

"Look, there is a thing going on with the ozone layer that scares us as much as it scares you. We wanted to prove it to you by showing you our defense plans. Now here they are and you're still stonewalling. We need your help in getting to the base of the fluorocarbon danger. Dammit, we know it hit your territory. We know you have to know about it. We want to work with you toward saving the whole damned world. What are you going to win if the world is a damned parched cinder?"

The Premier thought a moment, left, and then returned. "If you want the truth," said the Premier through the translator, "we know for a fact that you Americans are the biggest liars on the face of the earth."

Hal Pease almost went right at his thick Russian throat, right there in the Kremlin. Trembling, he contained himself. He needn't have bothered. If he had punched out the eyes of the Russian Premier, he couldn't have done more damage than he already had.

Alexei Zemyatin watched behind the one-way mirror. He watched and heard the American claim that he knew there was someone else pulling the strings and that that person should realize that the end of the world was the end of the world for both Russia and America.

By the man's passion, Zemyatin was almost willing to trust. Except Alexei Zemyatin knew what the man was doing, and long ago he'd learned not to trust his emotions. Too many people depended on his decision for him to trust something so unreliable as instinct. Sometimes it could be correct, of course. But it never supplanted a fact.

And too many men had already been lost trying to find out facts for Zemyatin to indulge in that absolute essence of egotism: a hunch.

So he felt that the man was telling the truth. But that wasn't nearly as important as what he had known for the last half-hour.

Even as Mr. McDonald Pease's plane had taken off for Russia, the Americans were testing their weapon. And there was no question that it was the American government, not some renegade, some little business somewhere that didn't report to the government. Zemyatin could accept that businesses would run wild. He knew how healthy and uncontrollable the black market was in Russia, where there wasn't supposed to be a black market. No market at all except the state providing beautifully for everyone's needs.

But the price had already been paid for the truth. The report, compiled from many sources-some of them now in American prisons because their safety had-ceased to be a factor-had ironically arrived the very moment Mr. Pease began his speech. Alexei had listened with only half an ear. What he read in the report froze his bones. It was like all the German troops massing just before their invasion of Russia: The trains, the armor, the munitions, the food. None of it could be missed. The Americans were far shrewder, shrewder even than he had previously thought.

The Americans had just determined the day before that they could make all Russian armor in Europe and Asia useless. They could leave Mother Russia with only infantrymen and tanks that could not move.

America was preparing to slaughter the armor-denuded Russian infantryman in numbers that would make the Nazis blush. There was going to be a land invasion of Russia itself. And it was going to work, even with the lesser forces of NATO. A push right into Russia's heart, and any resistance would be ruthlessly crushed. First the missiles, next the armor, then Russia's heart would be taken out and baked dry. Of course.

Even while the American technicians and Russian military technicians were poring over the large maps and the fields of detection, which were, as the Russians were determining, absolutely genuine, Zemyatin was demanding details. In the details lay the truth.

Officers were running in and out of the field marshal's private room with scraps of paper, reports, and sometimes the officer who had received the initial report.

The Americans had indeed done a test. It was picked up immediately because Russian monitors had been on the alert. Incidentally, he was told, the British had picked it up, too. Although badly damaged, the British system was still functioning.

"The Americans did not warn the British of our penetration. They had to know. From what I have been informed they had to know."

"They did know, sir, but there is no indication at this time, Comrade Field Marshal, that they have notified their supposed allies in any way."

"Didn't bother to notify," said Zemyatin. He felt he needed water on that one.

"Something bad, sir?"

"When you are in a fishing contest, and your opponent has caught a minnow, do you stop to take it away from him?"

"The Americans are after bigger fish?"

"The Americans are far shrewder than we ever imagined. At this point, if they believed I had a secure advantage, should they disabuse me of it? Go ahead."

"Shorter duration this time in firing. More precise."

"Weapons-grade accuracy," said Zemyatin.

"Apparently, sir."

"So that if they used it on, say, an entire front, it could be so brief as to not endanger the rest of the world." Zemyatin, of course, had hit upon the key giveaway: the device was a weapon. There was a time that Russia itself had stacked so many heavy atomic weapons that to use them, their scientists determined, would ruin life for themselves. Ironically, when cleaner weapons, as they were called, were invented, that would be the signal not that the inventions were more humane, but that they were more likely to be used in a war.

The Americans had made the fluorocarbon device weapons-grade.

"I might add, sir," said the officer, "that we had networked the entire American continent to locate the source."

"It failed?"

"No, sir. We located the source, at great risk of manpower. I think the Americans must have caught about fifteen of our people. The priority was not safety but success."

"Yes. Good."

"We had cars alerted. Actually, people driving with dishes on their vehicles once the device was fired."

"That would attract attention."

"That is why we lost so many operatives. But it also enabled us to establish that the beam was generated just north of the American city of Boston, in an area of high military and industrial technology."

Zemyatin knew the area. It was a secondary atomic target in the Russian order of battle, war nuclear. The primaries were the missiles and then came the bases that created them. The armies, of course, could be ignored, considering the leadership.

But far from rejoicing, Zemyatin had warned the Russian generals not to rejoice in American incompetence. If one remembered the Second World War, the Americans had also been considered incompetent then, and they had won a war on two seas defeating armies that had had years of preparations.

In the Russian order of battle, American ground forces had been designated as a low priority. Now, with what he was seeing out of America, they were suddenly becoming a major priority if there was no great Russian armor to oppose them.

The test had consisted of fifty new cars, expensive cars, finer than the Russians could build.

"Within five seconds, Comrade Field Marshal, every one of those cars was inoperative. Not even the paint was damaged."

"How inoperative?"

"All the electronics had failed."

"Not another mark on them?"

"Not a scratch. But more important, the agent who got this information was picked up by the Americans. And they questioned him as to what he knew about it, as though he were the cause."

"Correct deception."

"But that is not all. As you know, America is a commercial country. We discovered who owned that land, who had bought the cars, and who had paid for people to attempt to start them."

"Yes."

"Not the military."

"Of course not," said Zemyatin.

"Dummy corporations. We have estimated that it cost them at least three times as much to disguise who ran the experiment as it did to conduct it."

"CIA." said Zemyatin.

"Of course," said the officer. "Dummy corporations, money without end. Our old friends."

Zemyatin let out a grunt as though he'd been punched. And then, with a sense of helplessness he had not felt since he was a boy, said to the young officer:

"See? I have said it a thousand times. Here it is. You are laughing again at the American officer corps. You thought their invasion of Grenada was a sloppy operation. You were so confident. Look at this. Look at what they have done."

"We still have our missiles, Field Marshal," said the young officer.

"Yes. Of course we still have them," Zemyatin said, dismissing him as the Premier left the table on the other side of the soundproof one-way mirror. If the young officer should find out about that missile battery made useless, he would probably have to be killed along with any of those who had told him.

The Premier entered.

"The officers say the American diagrams are genuine. Absolutely genuine. I guess we should share with them now what we know about this weapon. After all, Field Marshal, what is the point of any of us living in a world where we cannot live? It is a good point that the American millionaire made."

"If he came to you with a bow and arrow, would you take down your pants, bend over, and spread your cheeks, Premier?" said Zemyatin.

"I am still your Premier."

"They give you their defense arrangements because they don't need them. They will not matter in the next war. The only thing between us and an American tank outside these walls is their lack of knowledge of what they can do to our missiles. That's all."

And then he explained what the Americans had done with the cars.

"If they can make useless the advanced technology of Porsche, Cadillac, Citron, and all the glossy Japanese junk, do you really think they will have problems with the crude electronics of a Russian tank? Is that what you think?"

"They lied to us," said the Premier.

"Did you think they were honest? Our tanks will be useless. Our infantry will be useless. They will only provide a bloody road on which the American armies can march to Moscow and take it. And Leningrad. And Siberia. This time there is no retreat. There is only one thing we want, and that is for them to give us that weapon. Admit they have it, and hand it over."

"They are liars. They are the biggest liars in the world."

"The other side of the one-way mirror, Premier," said Zemyatin, nodding to where the American was waiting. Both American and Russian staffs were still exhanging information in the friendliest manner engineers could manage, the neutrality of scientific fact. "That they gave us this information about their defenses is the final proof for me that they have the better one, the one that opens the skies and makes our missiles and tanks useless."

Zemyatin watched the Premier return to the American and tell him he was a liar. He saw that the American was outraged. It was the sort of act he would have believed, if he did not have proof that the Americans were lying.

Later, on the way back to America, Mr. McDonald Pease was told that the coin of cooperation was to be paid in the weapon he was still insisting America wanted help in tracking down.

He was told, in case America did not know, that it was north of Boston. Pease wired this information directly back to America.

America knew that, he was informed. They were still looking for the weapon.

Harold W. Smith heard from his President again and this time the trust was tinged with doubt.

"The weapon is not in Hanoi. It's here. Somewhere north of Boston," came the President's voice. "I have given the search for it over to our public agencies."

"Good," said Smith. He did not have the sort of ego that demanded that he stay in charge of a project to which he had been assigned. That was one of the requirements of his having gotten this job in the first place.

"Do you know what misleading damage might have been done if we had based everything on the belief that the weapon was in Hanoi? They don't believe us, and dammit, I wouldn't either, Smith. Now, get your people into the Boston area and we'll close in with them when and if or if and when we find it."

"Can't do that."

"Why not?"

"One's on the way to Hanoi."

"And the other?"

"I don't think he is speaking to us, sir."

"I want you to remember, Smith, that when the human race depended on you, you let it down."

"I know, sir."

"Get back to me as soon as you reach either of them. I can't believe it. You, America's last and best hope."

"Yessir," said Smith. When Remo checked in again, he was going to have him give more information on that woman. Was Remo somehow falling in love?

Harold W. Smith didn't know. He used to think it was Chiun he didn't understand.

In Moscow, the Russians were beginning to understand many things. The young colonel in charge of the assassination squads was getting the reports on the whereabouts of the lone American agent and the red-haired woman. They checked out in San Gauta. They checked out at the airport. He was headed for Hanoi.

"I think, sir, that Hanoi would be the right place to put him down," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich. He had been trained in Russian schools. His father before him was KGB and had served with Zemyatin in the great patriotic war. Therefore, the young colonel had been precisely taught not to pray. It was at this time, speaking to the man who terrified him, that he was discovering ways to ask the Almighty for help.

"Yes," said Zemyatin. "But I will plan the details of the putting down."

"Sir, yes sir," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich to the brute who had so shocked his senses within Dzerzhinsky Square itself. The old wretch had purposely killed an innocent officer.

Without the terror in the young colonel's heart, there would have been a thousand reasons not to take certain actions and a thousand more memos.

But the strangest fact of all was that Zemyatin was not a cruel man. He had never been a cruel man. He had never killed another person without a reason. He was ruthless, but then he never really had much choice. Events had made him what he was. All Alexei Zemyatin had ever really wanted was to be a good butler.

And because Field Marshal Alexei Zemyatin, the Great One of the Russian Revolution, had once been a butler, nothing an American or anyone, even his superiors, could ever hope to say would stop his planned attack. He had been taught too bitterly and too well that there was no one in the universe who could be trusted.

Chapter 13

"Alexei, Alexei," his mother called. "The count wants you now."

Alexei Zemyatin heard the calls while he was in the pantry supervising the silver, which had to be polished in the French manner. No matter that it lacked the sheen of fine Russian silver. The count, like so many Russians, wanted everything French. That was why he had taken young Alexei to France with him before the war. There was enough silver in the daily service to feed two hundred serfs for a year. At the time, young Alexei Zemyatin did not give this much thought.

The silver belonged to the count, and the most important thing about two hundred hungry serfs, thought Alexei, was that he was not one of them. And he would devote his life to keeping it that way.

In his youth, Alexei had had fine sharp features, not unlike the count himself, giving life to rumors that in his veins flowed noble blood. This he did nothing to discourage, although his mother told him his father was really a merchant who had passed a night on the estate, paid her a compliment, and left her with Alexei, whom she felt was the true joy of her life.

Alexei did not rush from the pantry when the count called. He made sure the silver tally was correct when he handed it to the older butler. He had discovered early that just because it was logical that people should be honest, it did not necessarily make them that way.

Alexei trusted none of them. The only person he trusted besides his mother was the count. He was the perfect man. Count Gorbatov was the big father of the manor that stretched for over a hundred miles and contained forty to eighty thousand souls. No one knew the exact number. At that time, no one counted the tillers of the field, or those who were born and died in the cold darkness that was the peasant's hovel.

The peasants believed Count Gorbatov was above lying. In some way, like many of the peasants, Alexei had come to believe that if there were no master for the estate, the fields would no longer provide sustenance. It was the count and God who gave them life, many felt.

"Alexei, hurry," said his mother. She was a maid on one of the floors, and this was a very important thing. To be a maid in the manor house instead of a serf meant ten to twenty more years of life. It was that simple and that valuable.

"Hurry, hurry, he calls," said his mother. She was always afraid that Alexei would not respond quickly enough and be sent to the fields.

He smiled at her and knew that she was proud of him in his gilt uniform and powdered wig, looking ever so much like a royal servant from some ancient French royal court. Even his shoes cost the equivalent amount of a peasant's income for a year.

Alexei walked crisply to the morning sitting room where the count sat in a silk-covered chair so plush that it threatened to envelop his frail old body.

"Your Excellency," said Alexei as he formally entered the vast well-carpeted room. He stood, his legs symmetrical, shoes touching at the heel, his hands rigid at the side, for a crisp bow. He could smell the sweet seasonings of the master's morning drink. Like every servant, he had learned early to control his hunger, among other things. These controls would prove to be of enormous value in his survival, and later the survival of an entire nation. For hunger, like panic, was only an emotion. If one could ignore the one, one could ignore the other. Young Aiexei stood waiting for the old man to speak.

"Alexei, I am going to take you into my confidence, young man."

"Thank you, Your Excellency," said Alexei.

"There is a great war going on. Very great. We will not win it."

Alexei bowed, showing he had heard.

"You probably cannot understand military strategy. That is for people of different blood. But that is not your fault, nor is it your duty. Very soon many soldiers will be coming here."

"You wish us to make ready for the Germans, Your Excellency?"

"Not Germans. They will be Russian soldiers."

"You wish us to prepare to receive Russian soldiers?"

"No. There is nothing we can do about them but get out of the way. Alexei, our soldiers are retreating and disorganized. A disorganized army is a mob. They will loot. They will pillage and they will rape. We must remove the valuable things, but we cannot give alarm to the rest of the people on the estate. We must prepare things in secret. The silver and the gold and the good porcelains must be hidden in carts."

At the time Alexei believed that somehow this was for the good of the estate. Days passed, days in which the peasants could have fortified themselves, could have been warned of the approaching mob. But no one was warned and because Alexei trusted the count, he did not even tell his mother. He packed the silver before dawn and packed the gold before the next dawn. He personally made lists and told other servants that their labor would not be needed. This they accepted readily as a chance to get out of work and they did not ask questions.

One night, the count himself awakened Alexei and ordered him to dress immediately and quietly for a long journey. The carriages and carts had been packed for days. "I must wake my mother, Your Excellency."

"Don't worry about her," said the count.

And Alexei, trusting the count implicitly, followed his orders. They left before dawn. When they stopped it was evening, and they were still on the estate. The count, as it was explained to everyone, was taking a little trip to Moscow to confer with the new government. The Czar had abdicated, a parliament was vainly trying to run things in Moscow, and the count was headed there to give what help he could. It seemed just like an ordinary journey with a few more carriages than necessary. When they stopped, Alexei looked for his mother. He had been assured, after all, that he was not to worry about her, therefore she must have been brought along.

He did not find her. But it was impossible he did not see her because his work around the carriages kept him so busy. On the second day he still could not find her, nor on the third.

By the fourth day, he realized she was not there, and asked to speak to the count.

"Your Excellency, you said that I should not worry about my mother. But I cannot find her in this caravan."

"Your mother? Your mother?"

"Yes, Your Excellency, Zemyatin. A maid on the second floor, Natasha. Somewhat heavy. Not very."

"I don't know. Why are you bothering me about this?"

"Because I do not see her. When you told me not to worry about her, I was so relieved I could have kissed your blessed hand."

"I don't know about her. Get back to the carriages," said the count. He had tents pitched by the side of the road for his nightly rest.

And then Alexei realized the count had meant she was not worth worrying about, not that she was safely protected. Only his years of training, that perfect control of a Russian servant under a ruthless master, kept him from screaming out his anger.

"Thank you, Your Excellency," he said simply, and bowed away. But outside the tent, he was determined to save his mother. He thought first of stealing a horse from one of the wagons and riding back. But a horse would be noticed. He thought of heading back on foot. But wild rumors already had hundreds of thousands of men looting the countryside. His mother, if she had time, would be smart enough to flee, in which case she wouldn't be at the estate. She might be hiding, in which case he might not be able to find her.

Without even comprehending what was going on, young Alexei Zemyatin was discovering his awesome talent for strategy and tactics. He realized that running hysterically back to the estate was no way to find his mother-indeed, he might be killed by the count, who feared anyone leaving him who knew about the treasure.

In Moscow, Alexei very simply separated the count from his gold by supposedly getting it onto the one train heading to the one open port heading toward the west: Murmansk. The gold crates, of course, were dummies. The count was also assured that Zemyatin would sit with the crates all the way from Moscow to Murmansk.

When the count told Alexei at the train station he would always have a job with him, Alexei knew his plan had worked. He kissed his master's hand and sent him off to a life of racking poverty with a perfect bow and a lie.

"I will be in the baggage cars with the crates," Alexei said.

He didn't bother to board but went to Lenin's Moscow headquarters. Even then Alexei knew he needed people to find his mother. The communists had them. They also had discipline and he had quite coldly calculated they were going to seize the government. They did not believe in democracy. They did not even believe in the proletariat. They believed in winning. That was all the former butler now believed in also.

The day before, he had devised the plan whereby the communists could steal the gold and silver most easily, and thus help finance their rebellion at this crucial time in their history. All he wanted, he said, was to serve the revolution. But he chose to serve in the party's young secret police organization as secretary to Lenin.

He was the only ore who had no background or belief in Marxist theory, and that quickly enabled him to become Lenin's confidant. His genius enabled him to become the Great One.

He never did find his mother. Millions died during those first cruel years. Famine spread throughout the land. Wars were fought inside Russia on several fronts, and when Alexei could finally spare the manpower for the search for his mother, the estate no longer existed. So brutal were the conditions that cannibalism reappeared in Russia for the first time in thousands of years.

A junior officer who knew of the search and Alexei's beginnings once asked him if he had planned his revenge of making Count Garbatov live in poverty to make up for his never finding his mother.

"Revenge?" he asked. He was puzzled by the word. No. There was never an idea of revenge. He had needed the gold and silver to help this new party seize power. He couldn't have cared less about Count Gorbatov. He never sought revenge, or even practiced cruelty. He was, in the hardest of times, the perfect butler, keeping emotions like hunger under control. He did what was necessary.

But shrewdly, he did not let the subordinate think he was above revenge. People who thought you might want to get even were less likely to cross you. Revenge was only worthwhile if you advertised it. The real target was never the person you punished, but the one who thought you might punish him.

Thus, many years later, with the world on the brink of destruction, when a young KGB colonel dispatching a kill team toward Hanoi mentioned that "now we will get him for what he did to us in London," Zemyatin did not discourage this stupidity. He absorbed the messages that made up the pre-kill picture, and asked a simple question.

"Why did they mention that he does not wear a wristwatch?"

"I imagine, Comrade Field Marshal Zemyatin, that San Gauta is a poor country, and most North Americans wear watches. This one did not. It was mentioned."

"Why didn't he wear a wristwatch?"

"I don't know," said the colonel, feeling perspiration form under the neck of his uniform.

"Let's find out. Maybe we can find out. Don't you wonder that here a person functions in the civilized world and does not wear a watch?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Zemyatin, "that it might behoove us to find out why he does not need to tell time, or whether he is able to tell time without a watch. It could even be that he has a watch hidden somewhere. I don't know. You don't know. Find out."

He did not bother to repeat that an enemy was perfect until he showed you how you could kill him. The young colonel would do as he was told. The young colonel would do exactly what he was told, because he believed that Zemyatin was cruel and ruthless, when the truth was the Great One was only ruthless. He did not trust the young colonel's word. He had never trusted anyone since the count. What he did trust was the colonel's fear.

But as he left the office, something akin to fear in himself emerged. It was not something that halted thought, or demanded that every body function be turned to its service. Rather, it was a question he was asking himself. When was this lone American going to show them all how to kill him?

On the flight to Hanoi on board a Swiss aircraft, Remo allowed himself five minutes' sleep. Kathy tried to make it four. Her hand was on his thigh.

"Have you ever done it in an airplane?" she whispered.

The lights were dim, and the other passengers were asleep. Remo hated the use of the word "it" for copulation. "It" seemed to represent copulation on every stupid car bumper that rolled along on American highways. Divers did "it" deeper. Bridge players did "it" with finesse, and horseback riders did "it" bareback.

"It?" said Remo.

"You know," whispered Kathy as her tongue touched his ear. She could have sworn his ear ducked.

"Yes, of course I know. And the answer is probably. I have done it on airplanes but with people I wanted to do it with."

"Do you find me unattractive?"

"No," he said. "You're beautiful."

"Don't you like women?"

"I like women. I just don't like people who use the word 'it' when they mean copulate."

"It's so unsexy to say 'copulate.' "

"Not to me. Try it," said Remo.

"All right. Remo, let's copulate."

"No," said Remo. "See, isn't that easier than a lot of beating around the bush?"

"I'd rather beat around the bush," said Kathy.

Remo took her hand and gently moved it to her own thigh, where he combined the heat of her body with his, creating a raging urge up the thigh through Kathy's body.

She groaned. A stewardess poked her head out from behind the curtain. She saw two people sitting upright next to each other. The man waved.

"I've heard of people doing it on airplanes, but not in five seconds," she said to another stewardess. "They were just sitting upright a few seconds ago."

Kathy snuggled her head into Remo's arm. "How did you do that? That was wonderful."

"I didn't do it, your body did it."

"You do so many amazing things," said Kathy. She did not think he would actually go to Hanoi, at least not right away like this. She had thought that it might take him a while to get into that communist country. That would have given her time to get a good change of clothes and, with some luck, get control of the fluorocarbon beam generator. That wouldn't be hard. It would require all the corporate maneuvering of rubbing against Reemer Bolt for a few moments.

But there was no time. As soon as they got out of San Gauta this man lost no time in getting a passage to Hanoi. Kathy was sure he worked for some government, probably her own. He was, after all, very American although he had some strange eating habits.

In a large South American city outside San Gauta, he had made a single phone call. And within an hour, a rather prosperous-looking woman in the back of a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up to the phone he was using in a little kiosk outside a large store.

"Are you looking for Valdez Street?" the woman had asked.

"Just a moment," Remo had said. And then he had whispered to Kathy, "Do you remember those words I asked you not to forget?"

"Yes," Kathy had answered.

"What were they?"

"I am looking for the large groceryman."

"The large groceryman?" said Remo.

"Yes," said Kathy.

Remo winked. "I hate this code pippyding."

"A supermarket," he said loudly to the woman.

The woman tapped her driver on the shoulder, indicating that he should leave.

"He's looking for a large groceryman," yelled Kathy.

"Right," said Remo.

The woman stopped her chauffeur and handed Remo a small briefcase. Then she drove off. The briefcase had a simple clasp lock. Remo fumbled with it for a moment and then simply broke it off. Kathy noticed he only would have had to slip a bar free.

Inside were two wallets with passports and a plastic camera. The passports had names but no pictures. There was also a metal device to make impressions, much like a corporate seal.

Kathy recognized the camera. It had a picture of two smiling children on it, with the sun shining brightly behind them. It was called "Insta-Tot," the first instant camera a four-year-old could use. The directions were in pictures and the words were addressed to parents. They said what a thrill a child would get mastering this absolutely simple device. It was so easy to use that words were not even needed. Just follow the pictures. It suggested that the parents let their children figure it out themselves if they had already had preschool experience.

"I don't know where the film goes," said Remo. "Why do they make things like this? Where does the film go?"

"In the bunny's mouth," said Kathy. She pointed to the side of the camera where a smiling bunny's teeth surrounded a square opening. Then she pointed to the film. The film was an oblong square just the shape of the hole. On one end of it was a picture of a bright orange carrot. "The carrot goes into the bunny's mouth," said Kathy.

"Why didn't they say so?" said Remo.

Kathy pointed to the picture on the Insta-Tot package. There was a click.

"You just photographed your foot," said Kathy.

"Why don't they tell you these things?" said Remo.

"I presume these pictures are for our passports."

"Yeah. This will get us both into Hanoi."

Kathy O'Donnell pointed the smiling Insta-Tot sun toward the real sun. Then she put the big blue eye on the camera to her eye. Then she pressed the bunny's nose.

The picture came out in a minute, only somewhat blurred, good enough for a passport.

"You have talent," said Remo. Then she put the camera in his hands, put his fingers on the bunny's nose, pointed the camera at her face, stepped back, and told him to snap. On the third frame he got her picture.

He crumpled the camera in his hands and gave her the metal seal. She imprinted both pictures into the passport with the seal. Someone had gotten Remo the seal of the United States of America in the course of an hour. He had been instructed to destroy it. He did so quickly with his hands, as though polishing it. He made the seal into a solid block of metal which he threw with a clank to the street.

"How did you do that?"

Even more amazing was his answer. In terms of force and essence, the mystical concepts he explained, came very close to intricate atomic theory.

On one hand, he could do things with his body that were awesome. On the other, he rattled off metaphysical explanations like nursery rhymes. Yet, he couldn't get through the directions for a four-year-old.

She asked him about this.

"I have some difficulty with mechanical things," Remo admitted. "But when they unnecessarily confuse you with directions, then things become impossible."

"What is confusing about pressing the bunny's nose?"

"Well, you see, you're scientific. You understand things like that," said Remo.

"I also understood the carrot in the bunny's mouth," said Kathy.

"Okay, you can be smartass about it, but you were employed for the project in Malder. and you do know what we are looking for. You would recognize it if we found it."

"I think I would," said Kathy. She was not sure how they would be able to get out of that Communist capital, but just watching the power of this magnificent man would satisfy her forever, even if she were held in some prison camp. If worse ever came to worst and she was captured, she could trade off what she knew for her safety. Besides, men were men. She would work out something if she had to.

But she did not think she would have to. She would more than likely see a trail of shattered bodies, each one a glorious thrill to her entire nervous system.

She hoped there might even be a problem getting into the group on its way to Hanoi and that he would have to kill to get them out. Just a little killing to make the day bright, to make her feel womanly again.

But the covers were perfect and unchallenged. They were part of the International Media Committee for Truth in Southeast Asia, Their first names were correct, which told Kathy that Remo had informed his superior about her already. It also told her that Remo had to have the highest priority possible with an agency that could get things done quickly.

She thought about these things in the dim light of the Swiss airliner, totally satisfied by the miraculous hands of this wonderful man called Remo. Actually, Reemer seemed like most men to Kathy. But Remo was unlike all the rest.

"I've never met a man like you," she said. "You're so different from other men."

"No, I am not."

"Who are you like?"

"Someone else. Except he doesn't seem to function in the modern world. I don't know. Don't bring up that subject."

"Is he your father?" asked Kathy.

"Sort of."

"I'd like to meet him."

"Go to sleep," said Remo.

Before landing in Hanoi, the International Media Committee for Truth in Southeast Asia had discussed the main draft of their conclusion to their investigation of the truth. It declared that Hanoi had been maligned, that its living standards and freedom should be copied by the rest of the world. It blamed the American media for distortion.

The man reading the communique was an actor. He knew the news business as few did. He had played a newspaperman on Broadway and on television.

"We just want to see the truth come out," he said.

"What about the hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to die to get out of Vietnam now that it's liberated?" said Remo. There was no purpose in mentioning this. He wasn't going to change anything. It was just that these peopie were so sure that their intelligence was superior to the average American's. It had been grating to hear them discuss how provincial the Americans were, how distorted the American news was.

"They're not Vietnamese. They're Chinese," said the spokesman, his craggy face had appeared on many TV commercials announcing his willingness to work for the betterment of mankind.

"So?" said Remo.

"Well, they weren't Vietnamese who were fleeing, but families who had once come from China," said the spokesman for the truth committee.

"You mean they have to be racially pure to have rights?" asked Remo. He had heard this bandied about often in the States when it was obvious that Vietnam had become a bloody concentration camp. Otherwise, why would people flee?

This man, whose every other sentence was about fighting fascism, was unwittingly spouting the fascist line. He could have been a Nazi and not known he wasn't a humanitarian. The last thing in the world of which he could conceive was his own stupidity. By the time the plane touched down in Hanoi it was resolved that the American media grossly distorted the progressive nature of the Hanoi regime.

The news release for tomorrow was to be about the bombing of Vietnamese rice fields that destroyed the ground and created agricultural problems.

The truth committee was still working on the draft denying Hanoi still held American prisoners, but they had to get that cleared first by the Vietnamese military.

When they arrived in Hanoi there were reporters waiting for the leader of the group to read his statement. He tousled his hair and opened his shirt to look like a newsman. He read the statement with a sense of remorse that his own country's media were distorting the nature of a people whose only desire was to live in peace.

The committee had been scheduled to read a statement at the hotel about industrial progress, but they were late. The rickshas had broken down.

The nice thing about communism for this actor was that if the towels were dirty you didn't have to wait for new ones or suffer insolence from the help, the maid was beaten right on the spot by a policeman.

"How are we going to find the beam?" said Kathy. "It's obviously hidden."

"If it is hidden, then someone has hidden it. Therefore, someone knows where it is."

"How do you find that person?"

"Well, if it is not a person but the government, and everything in these places is, you grab the highest government official and get him to tell you about anyone who might know about a new device."

"What if he doesn't talk?"

"They always do."

"But if he honestly doesn't know."

"Too bad for him."

"I love it," said Kathy O'Donnell. "I love it. Start with that guy with the machine gun and the pith helmet."

"I'll start where I want," said Remo.

"Where are you going to start?"

"I don't know," said Remo. The streets were bleak and plain; even the trees seemed to be stripped of bark. Apparently the people had eaten it. No wonder there wasn't any garbage on the streets of Hanoi. The lucky ones had already found it and made it their dinner.

Soldiers were everywhere. Slogans were everywhere. Remo rcognized old Chinese formations of letters. Much of this land had belonged to China at one time. Chiun had talked of insidious rebellions against the Chinese emperors. What differentiated an insidious rebellion from other kinds was whether the emperor had paid a Master of Sinanju.

Often just a few people were behind a rebellion. What they did was work on the grievances of the many and get the people to follow them. The new liberation movements of the world were 3,500 years old at least.

Looking around the streets of Hanoi, Remo noticed that the only fat people he saw were of high officer rank. Everyone else was thin beyond belief.

"Look at how thin the people are," Remo said.

The leader of the truth committee heard this. He was standing in front of his hotel, stuffing a caramel bar into his face.

"Capitalism doesn't encourage them to eat properly," he said. He dropped the wrapper. The doorman fell to his knees to lick it, but was kicked away by the manager of the hotel, who also had the rights to lick the crumbs off the Americans' shirts.

The American actor was told what an intelligent man he was. He was told this often. He was also told how much smarter he was than the average American, who did not know the real truth about the world.

"I owe it to my countrymen," the actor said, "to make them aware of the real world, not some comfortable beerswilling Formica version of it."

"What is Formica?" asked a Communist minister.

"It's a shiny material that you can spill things on, and it never stains and you wipe it off easily. Always looks new. No character," said the actor.

"Could you get us some?" asked the minister. The actor laughed. They asked again. He was sure they couldn't want something as bourgeois as Formica.

He asked to be taken to visit a typical Vietnamese family. Remo understood what the two officials were saying, but not word for word because he had only been taught the emperor's tongue. Rather, little snippets of phrases these officials never knew had come from old Chinese lords. The Chinese this committee so casually dismissed as having no rights in Vietnam had been in that country longer than the Normans had been in England.

The words Remo recognized were, "Stall the fat fool until we get the family set up correctly."

"Won't he be suspicious?"

"If that fat pig can think he is intelligent by saying things that people write for him, then he will believe anything."

"Yes, he does have the mind of a wooden puppet." The American actor put on his most concerned intelligent face for the photographers. He also asked to be taken to the scenes of brutal American bombings.

"Americans have a right to know what their government has done in their name," he said.

Remo let the group go off, even though some official was pushing him to follow. He was getting quiet within himself.

Remo walked around Hanoi with Kathy and a guide all morning in what seemed like an aimless pattern. The guide, of course, was not a cultural "enhancement," as he was called, but a Vietnamese police officer.

One building among many, not an especially large building, gave Remo the sense by the way the people walked by it that it was a building of authority.

"You can't go in there," said the cultural enhancer.

Kathy gave Remo a nod. Even she could understand his sign that the building was important.

"How did you do that?" she asked.

"I just did it. You keep looking, that's all."

"Would you teach me?" she asked.

"Teach me how to use that camera?" asked Remo.

"You cannot go there. No, no, no," said the cultural enhancer.

"Remo, you put the carrot film into the bunny's mouth. You point the camera at the person and then you press the bunny's nose."

"I did that," said Remo. There was a tinge of hardness to his voice.

"No camera allowed in liberated country," said the cultural enhancer. "No camera. No talking. You go back to group to get real story of truth of Vietnam. Real truth. Real peasants with real truth. Our truth the good truth. You see. Good truth. Yes."

"I had trouble with the film," said Remo.

"I don't see how," said Kathy.

"Well, I did," said Remo.

"You go. Now," said the cultural enhancer.

Kathy shrugged and looked at the building. The man's real genius was going to show itself now. She sensed an uncontrollable excitement seize her, almost mesmerizing her, making her limbs weak, her body warm. She imagined all the people Remo was going to have to kill in a building like that, the one the guide had confirmed was a security place of the government.

"That place is big enough to house the beam in any one of its many rooms," said Kathy.

Remo moved toward the building. The cultural enhancer grabbed one of his arms, but his hands closed on air. Inside the building, a Russian with a microphone and a tape recorder commented dryly:

"He is coming toward us. Mark that the subject might be initiating action."

As he spoke another Russian was making notes. Halfway up the page was a comment that positive identifications had been made on the plane and reconfirmed at the airport. The female was Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell. The male was the American.

"We're not ready yet," came a voice from behind him. The man with the tape recorder looked around with contempt. He was also afraid. The microphone was becoming significantly moist in his hands. He had ordered many people killed in his life, but now he was actually going to have to see the results of his orders.

"It doesn't matter that you are not ready," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich. Field Marshal Zemyatin had told him to allow no special requests from his execution team.

Chapter 14

Pytor Furtseva had been primed to kill for so many years that when he was told the target was advancing on him before he was ready, he didn't even mind. He would not have minded if he had to kill the target with his teeth right in the streets of Hanoi. He had practiced with his teeth on cows, and he had made his execution squad do the same.

"Blood faces," they were later called, but rarely to their faces. At one training base in Byelorussia another officer had commented that the chef should throw away his carving knife and let the "blood faces" butcher the cows.

Furtseva killed that officer with his teeth. He killed him in the mess hall where the officer had made that comment and, with the man's throat still in his mouth, he went to every table and stuck his face next to every officer at every place in the hall.

No one peeped. No one left. Furtseva had stood there in that hall waiting to be arrested, to be tried and then hung. He did not care. Eventually one of his fellow officers had the nerve to carefully get up and leave. Then the rest left and he spit out the throat onto the ground. Shortly thereafter armed soldiers filled the hall, surrounding him. He spat blood at them from the dead officer's throat.

As Furtseva was escorted out of the mess hall, his execution squad cheered him. It was the proudest moment of his life. He was ready to die.

The court-martial was held the next day and the execution was scheduled for the following week. The presiding officers were split. Some wanted hanging. The others said he had the right to be shot.

It was unanimous, of course, that he would die.

Pytor Furtseva stood for the verdict. His head was high. He felt a sense of relief, as though nothing mattered anymore. The shame and burden of being trained for something and never used was over. It would all end with a bullet or a rope.

The chief officer at the court-martial read slowly, occasionally adjusting his glasses. The other officers sat with faces passive as sand.

It took twenty minutes before Furtseva realized that he was not being sentenced to death.

"It is the verdict of the defense forces of the Soviet Socialist Republics that you and your entire unit be punished collectively. You will march one hundred miles through the Siberian frost with only knives for protection. You will have minimum clothes. You will have no matches. No food. No water."

"What?" Furtseva said. He could not believe the verdict. The army would never let a recalcitrant officer live. The most important thing in the army was getting along. To bite out the throat of a fellow officer for an insult was perhaps the most extreme example of not getting along.

And then the strange punishment. Why should his unit be punished? He apologized to his men, the only apology he could ever remember making.

They had asked him before he was assigned to the execution squad why he had never apologized to anyone.

"To admit being wrong is to admit weakness. More than anything in the world, I fear weakness."

That answer was scarcely out of his mouth when his Red Army file was stamped:

"This man is never to be allowed near nuclear warheads or to undertake diplomatic missions."

That did not bother Furtseva. He had never met any officer assigned to nuclear weapons he had even mildly respected. They were uniformly phlegmatic, and none of them had ever had even a strange idea, much less a lust for life. Or death.

Still, his actions in the mess hall undoubtedly would get some of his men killed on that hundred-mile starvation trek through the deadly Siberian chill. And it was not his unit's fault. It was his.

So he called them together to explain the punishment. And then came the time for his apology.

"And because it was my fault, I am now saying I am..."

The word "sorry" did not come. He gave his pistol to a sergeant.

"If you wish to shoot me, go ahead."

The sergeant stepped back and saluted. The entire unit snapped to attention and saluted. Then they applauded.

"Better to die with you as blood faces, sir, than to live like clerks in the Red Army," said the sergeant. They all had similar psychological profiles. There was something about them Pytor Furtseva liked. At that moment, the liking had turned to love.

Almost half the men died on the hundred-mile trek. They hunted with knives, they burned whatever they could for warmth, they made clothes from elk hides and from the canvas they found. They even stumbled on a stray police unit that was lost. The unit never turned up again, although somehow they had left their clothes with the blood faces.

When the hundred-mile trek was over, Furtseva's blood faces were the strongest unit man for man in the entire Red Army. Any one of them would have died for him. Every one of them thought they were the best killers in the world and were dying to try out their skills, ready to pick fights with ten times their number.

But also as part of the punishment they were sent to a base far away from all the other Red Army units. The sentence was indefinite. The blood faces took it proudly.

The only hard part of their punishment was that they did not get a chance for combat. Not even during the delicious invasion of Afghanistan. All over the world assassinations had become a tool of governments, and Furtseva's unit remained on their lonely base.

Their leader was told that was part of strategy. Telling him this was one of those smooth-faced officers who probably thought a knife was for opening presents and a gun to hold out in a parade.

The strategy was that the Soviet Union would use its satellites for assassinations. This would leave Mother Russia free of terrorism charges and the leaders of the Communist world free of taint. They would use the Bulgarians and other East Europeans for the dirty work: Who cared what taint stuck to a Bulgarian when Russia could remain a socialist beacon of morality?

His unit would only be used as a last resort. It was then that Furtseva heard the rumor that the man behind that strategy was an old field marshal from revolutionary days. The old man-he'd heard the phrase "Great One" used-had been the one responsible for his strange punishment.

If the commander of the blood faces had been told the Great One's reasoning he would not have understood. He was not supposed to understand. It was all part of a very logical scheme that had brought Furtseva to Hanoi to kill a lone American while a KGB staff officer looked on.

When news of Furtseva's revolting act in the mess hall reached Alexei Zemyatin, he inquired rather casually what the army officers intended to do with the man.

He did not use the word "man." The word he used was Russian for "crazy animal."

"Get rid of him, of course," Zemyatin was told.

"Has any of you thought this through?" Zemyatin had asked.

"You can't keep a crazy animal in the army," Zemyatin was told.

"This man is an executioner, yes? His unit was trained like commandos with all the knives and garrotes and things they use," said Zemyatin. The accent on "things" showed the old man's dictate.

"Yes."

"Then who else would we want for this sort of work but a crazy animal? Who are you going to train for this?"

"We thought someone who would make a better soldier."

"You mean one who would cause no trouble. Who would work well with others."

"Of course. What else would you want of a soldier? He must get along with others, because if he doesn't, you don't have an army. You have a mob."

"Soldiers parade, and soldiers surrender, and soldiers sometimes will not even fire their rifles. I know soldiers. This man Furtseva is a disgusting killer, and sometimes we need just that. So let us not only remove him from the army, but make him an even greater hero to those lunatics in his command."

And so it was then that the "punishment" of the hundred-mile death march through Siberia was determined. The hardships molded the crew into an even tighter unit.

When the commander of the blood faces heard his unit was finally going to be used, his only regret was that it was against one person. He wanted hundreds. He wanted to be outnumbered by ten to one. His unit could tear the throats out of animals with their teeth. They could fell squirrels with knives, and shoot out the eyes of birds with pistols. "Give us combat," Furtseva had said.

"You will have plenty," he was told by the smoothfaced KGB colonel with the rosebud lips.

He was given only one man.

And not only was that man not going to give him a chase, but he was coming to him. Just one man on those pathetically bare Vietnamese streets of this northern city, Hanoi.

Even worse, the commander of the blood faces had to explain several methods of killing, and promise to use them all. The officer, Colonel Ivan Ivanovich, was also having this entire execution photographed, convincing the commander that the people who ran Mother Russia were lunatics. On one hand they refused to use him because they wanted satellites to take the blame; on the other hand they were taking movie pictures of him, recording him, and making notes.

There were to be three men with knives, followed by an assault with pistols, backed up by snipers on the roof, grenade throwers, and then a three-man team. The KGB colonel had written this down.

"Do you really think any single human being is going to escape my knife fighters?" Furtseva had asked. He had been hoping for perhaps a little war with the Vietnamese, and that way they could fight their way out of Hanoi.

Colonel Ivanovich knew the commander was thinking that absurd thought or something like it. That was what made him so nervous. He did not know if Furtseva would frighten the American, but the commander of the blood faces certainly terrified him.

"He is advancing on us. We won't even have a chase," said Furtseva.

"Subject seizing the initiative," Colonel lvanovich said into his microphone. His words were written down for backup.

The knife fighters went out first.

Rerno saw them coming. They were healthy and moved well on their feet.

"Oh no! They're attacking us," screamed Kathy. She had thought Remo would do the attacking. Suddenly she felt very alone and frightened in this strange Communist capital. And the man she had entrusted to provide magnificent killings had suddenly gone mad. He was whistling. Remo liked to whistle occasionally while working. Not familiar tunes, but the rhythms of his body to make everything more harmonious. One of the problems with three people was that they had difficulty moving in unison. So when he caught the first knifer's wrist, he had to make a little adjustment to swing him around like a throwhammer. The stroke was good, accelerating as he brought the first man's feet into the second man's eyes, and then around again to catch the third in the stomach. Precisely in the middle.

The first knifer was good for the following screen of pistol wielders, except that his feet tended to wear out from impact. Remo was through the second screen, and up the walls toward the snipers, before Kathy had a chance to scream in delight. The snipers were duly surprised when their scopes showed the faces too close up, and then showed nothing because eyes whose accompanying brains had been turned to jelly tended not to focus all that well.

Colonel Ivanovich had caught most of it with his microphone. Every crushing death blow had sounded like an explosion before Furtseva's last line had a chance to throw grenades. The commander was running upstairs toward the action while Ivanovich was ordering the cameraman to pack, and everyone else to get out of there immediately.

The commander stopped his grenade throwers from finishing the man because he wanted him to himself. He lunged at the thin American, showing his teeth.

Remo saw the man drive toward him with his mouth open. The man obviously wanted to help, and Remo let him. He offered his throat momentarily, let the man pass, and then caught the back of the man's neck with his chin, driving a neck vertebra out through the man's mouth.

The man had obviously been trying to bite his throat. Chiun had told him that there would be a time when someone would be that foolish.

Remo never understood why anyone would expose himself like that. Chiun had explained that usually people that stupid were white. The man had been white. Remo made sure the grenades did not go off by implanting them through the mouths of the throwers into the cushions of the upper intestines. Then he went on through the building, looking for anyone who knew something about the fluorocarbon beam.

Outside, Kathleen O'Donnell was giddy. "I love you, Remo," she cried. "I love you."

Ivan Ivanovich ran past the laughing woman with his cameramen and note-taker. He thought for a moment that he should seize her, but he was sure from the horrible force of the noise coming from inside the building that he would not be able to get out of Hanoi alive if he laid a hand on her.

And he was going to get out of Hanoi alive. He paused only to make sure of the damage done by the lone American. The entire blood-face team had been dispatched like so much old cabbage. And according to Hanoi security, the American had gone on a killing spree and was still killing as of the phone call from the airport.

Colonel Ivanovich had caused a grave international incident, strained relations between two close allies, and, by his failure to stop the American, had launched a plague upon a capital city. Even now every policeman was looking for the killer, afraid to find him. What had the colonel done?

By the time Ivanovich and his photographers and notetakers reached Moscow, a formal message of complaint and the mounting damages had reached the halls of the Kremlin.

Alexei Zemyatin heard them all, and said when he received the trembling Colonel Ivanovich.

"Good. At least something has finally gone as planned."

Chapter 15

The man had used another human being like a whip. Everyone saw it.

"He used him like a whip," said someone in the darkness.

"No," said someone else.

"Slow it down. You'll see. He used him like a whip. I swear."

The picture stopped on the screen, and whirred back. "Who is it? Who is that man? Was this trick photography?"

The picture started again. A single man advancing into three. The three had knives. The single man had no weapon.

The pictures themselves seemed extraordinarily smooth. Everyone in the audience had seen pictures like that. If a top athlete were going to perform internationally, the coaches were allowed to use one very valuable half-hour of that film. It was for shooting at ten times the number of frames per second of ordinary motion pictures. While it couldn't stop a bullet, it could catch the bullet's blur going across a screen.