Unite and Conquer

Destroyer 102: Unite and Conquer

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

PROLOGUE

The Great Mexico City Earthquake was destined to be great because it shook more than Mexico City.

When it started, it shook the earth, of course. The Valley of Mexico rattled like dice in a stone cup. The seismic vibrations reached out to all of Mexico.

The ground quivered as far north as the Rio Grande. It touched the jungled Guatemalan frontier. The jungles of Cancun, Acapulco and the sandy curve of the Gulf of Tehuantepec were each stirred in turn.

No corner of Mexico was untouched, new or old. The weathered pyramids of Chichen Itza made plaintive grinding noises in sympathy with the collapse of distant skyscrapers. Monte Alban trembled. Yucatan shivered. Teotihuacan, a ruin so old no living being knew by name the race that built it, sank a quarter-inch into the unsettled soil.

To the south in the Lacandon forest of Chiapas, the shaggy trees swayed as if the very earth was stirring to new life. Stirred dust arose from the old Maya ruins at Panenque and Copan.

In that jungle the earthquake that was shaking Mexico shook the man who had shaken Mexico in turn.

Subcomandante Verapaz crept through the jungle in his brown polyester fatigues, the trademark red paisley bandana tied tight around his neck, his head all but enveloped by a black woolen ski mask. His smoldering pipe jutted from a small ragged hole snipped in the mask just below his obscured nose.

When the mahogany trees all around began to groan in wordless complaint, he lifted his hand to call a halt.

"Wait!" he said in the tongue of the Maya.

Behind him his well-trained Juarezistas froze.

Kneeling, he doused his pipe, which was as much a trademark as his wool ski mask. His eyes, green as the quetzal bird, peered through the heavy forest. His ears strained to hear through the light wool muffling his skull.

The Lacandon forest, home to the Maya and the Mixtec, was in turmoil. A storm seemed to shake it. But there was no storm. It was a cool March day, and utterly windless. But the trees shook as if lashed by an unfelt wind.

The soft soil beneath his black combat boots seemed like cornmeal settling in a gourd.

"Noq!" he barked, using the Mayan word for earthquake. "Kneel and wait it out."

His Juarezistas obeyed. They were brave men. Boys, really. Thin as rails and identically clad in brown polyester with black ski masks. Only their lack of a pipe set them apart from their subcommander. That and their dark brown mestizo eyes. None were criollo-white. Or even mestizo.

What culture had birthed Subcomandante Verapaz was unknown even to his Juarezistas. Many were the speculations. The legend was but two years old and already it had grown to mythic proportions.

Some said he was a fallen Jesuit priest. A name was even floated in the media. Others averred that he was the disgraced son of one of the plantation owners who oppressed the Maya. Some called him American, Cuban, Guatemalan-even a Maoist Sendero chased out of the Peruvian highlands. All manner of identities except indio.

With his green eyes, he could not be an Indian.

It was said that Subcomandante Verapaz was a god to the Maya Indians. That they followed him blindly.

As the earth moaned in its mute agony, Verapaz dropped to one knee, clutching his AK-47, his green eyes narrowing.

Far, far to the north, a wisp of dun smoke showed on the horizon. It grew ugly and began spreading outward like a dirty brown mushroom cloud.

"Look," he said.

His Juarezistas began to scale trees even though this was dangerous to do with the federal army so near. They climbed the better to see the plume of smoke on the far horizon.

It was not smoke of afire, they understood very quickly. It was too vast, too impenetrable and too brown. It could only be Smoking Mountain, the volcano the Aztecs of the north called Popocateped, belching up its ashy innards. Eruptions had happened before.

But never with such vehemence that the result could be seen in the poor lower corner of Mexico.

"Popo!" a Maya cried. "It is Popo!"

"There is no fire," another called down.

Verapaz sucked on his pipe. "Not now. Not yet. But perhaps the fire will come."

"What does it mean, Lord Verapaz?"

"It means," said Subcomandante Verapaz, "that Mexico City itself twists and writhes in her deserved torments. The time has come. We will leave the jungles now. The jungle is behind us. From this day forward, our unassailable goal is nothing less and nothing more than the capital itself."

And with their muttering growing fainter, the Juarezistas dropped from the trees and shook with an anticipation that had nothing to do with the earth and its convulsions.

They knew they had been transformed from ragtag rebels who defended their hovels and cornfields to instruments of true civil war.

Chapter 1

In Kigali it seemed like a joke.

Supreme Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin had come to the Rwandan capital looking for refuge from the war-torn Horn of Africa nation of Stomique, which he had bled dry until even the naive and credulous United Nations stopped feeding it. That was what he told the international press when he resurfaced in Kigali.

"I am a revolutionary no more. I seek only peace." And since he smiled with all of his dazzling ivory teeth and did not snarl his words, the bald lies were taken down and printed the world over as truth.

That was on day one of his exile.

On day five, he had dinner with a minor Rwandan general.

"We can own this country inside of two months," he told the general in a low conspiratorial tone. His gold-tipped swagger stick leaned against his chair. A bluish diamond flashed on a twenty-five-carat gold ring setting. "You have the soldiers. I have the military genius. Together..." He spread his hands and let the thought trail off into implication.

The minor general looked interested. But the words that emerged from his generous mouth belied his facial expression.

"I have the soldiers, oui. But your military genius has bankrupted Stomique. It is a stinking corpse rotting in the sun. Even if one were to discover oil under the capital, no one would bother with it."

"I have money, mon general. "

"And I have it on excellent authority that you crossed the border on foot, with nothing more than your billfold and swagger stick, mon ami."

They spoke liquid French, the language of the educated of postcolonial West Africa.

"I have a cache of treasure," whispered Anin.

"Where?"

"That is for me to know."

"It is said your wealth was left behind in Nogongog, where it now languishes."

"No one knows where it is."

"As I said, languishes." The minor general continued carving up his antelope steak. The red juices ran. Seeing this, he took up his coffee spoon and began sipping the blood as if it were a tepid consomme.

The waiter hovered about, replenishing the wineglasses. He was white. This was the finest French restaurant in Kigali, but former Supreme Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin had no eye for mere waiters. Not when he was a warlord in search of an army of revolution.

"Once I have a nation," Anin confided, "it is only necessary to declare war on Stomique, invade, and my wealth will be recovered. Which I of course will share with my very closest allies."

"I have no interest in revolution," the minor general said as he masticated a fat wedge of antelope. "I am an African patriot."

"Then why did you agree to meet with me?" Anin sputtered.

The minor general bestowed upon Anin a smile more ingratiating than his own practiced one.

"Because," he said, "on my lowly salary I could never afford to eat in so fine a restaurant as this."

As that point, the bill was laid at Anin's elbow by the faceless phantom of a waiter, who quickly withdrew.

With a sinking feeling, Anin understood that he would have to dig into his thinning billfold to deal with it. He had hoped the general would offer to pick up the tab as a gesture of his newly redirected loyalty.

The bill lay upon a silver tray. A filigreed lid covered it from prying eyes.

Reluctantly Anin lifted the lid.

A small black calling card was exposed. Frowning, he picked it up.

It was inscribed in blood-red ink with four words: YOU ARE THE FIRE.

His bald brow furrowing, Anin turned the card over. The obverse was printed with four more English words: I AM THE EXTINGUISHER.

"What is this!" Anin howled, standing up.

The maitre d' came bustling up. He offered profuse apologies in impeccable French, and a search was undertaken for the waiter. He was not found. Nothing could be learned of him other than that he was an expatriate American, hired only that morning.

"What is this man's name?" Anin demanded as the minor general, concerned about the commotion, slipped out the back door.

The manager appeared and said, "The name he gave was Fury."

"He should be fired for disturbing my meal," Anin screeched, waving his malacca cane. "He should be exiled. All Africans know that the Americans wish me dead because I stood up to their imperialist forces. Not content to hound me from my own country, they have embarked upon a campaign of intimidation here in neutral Rwanda."

His voice sought higher and higher registers, and the maitre d' quietly tore up the check and called a taxi for the former supreme warlord lest the bulging purple veins on his high forehead signify the onset of a sudden and appetite-inhibiting stroke.

As he climbed into the taxi, Mahout Feroze Anin allowed himself a sly smile. It could not have turned out better. Unless of course, the minor general had acceded to revolution. But there were other troubled African nations. If fact, most African nations were troubled in these post-Cold War times. Burundi continually chafed at the edge of civil war, for example.

As he was coveyed through bustling Kigali traffic, Anin wondered what the waiter had meant by his strange message.

Perhaps a United Nations agent was simply trying to frighten him, he decided. Having failed to capture him in his stronghold, they were reaching out to him in exile.

Two days later, Anin reappeared in Bujumbura, having skipped out on his hotel bill in Kigali.

When he realized late in the evening no Burundi general would accept his call, he ordered room service.

"Yes," he told the room-service operator. "I would like a zebra roast, with all the trimmings, a bottle of the house wine as long as it is French and a blond tart, also French."

The blonde came smelling of French perfume, and smiled salaciously upon Anin as he ate his fill.

As they laughingly emptied the wine together, Anin plunged into her sumptuous charms and, after a suitable interval of play, sank into a relaxed sleep. There was something about a woman who obeyed his every whim that restored a man's faith in the eternal malleability of humanity.

In the middle of the night, Anin rolled over in bed and struck his hand against something hard and metallic. It made a faint clang when his diamond ring touched it.

"Yvette?" he whispered.

There was no reply from the rounded shape on the adjoining pillow. Heart pounding, Anin groped the unmoving object. It was cold and metallic, not warm and compliant like Yvette. And in the African moonlight, it gleamed like steel.

Snapping on the night-table light, Anin saw the steely gleam resolve into the heavy tube of a large fire extinguisher.

It occupied the spot where Yvette should have been. The covers had been pulled up so that only the pressure-gauge dial showed. Tied to it with a scarlet ribbon was an ebony calling card. Anin snatched it up and read the legend with his heart trip-hammering in his chest.

One side said: PREPARE TO BE SNUFFED OUT.

The reverse bore the familiar printed legend: THE EXTINGUISHER.

Jumping out of bed, Anin called the hotel manager.

"I have been violated by your lax security!" he shouted.

Again profuse apologies were offered. The bill was torn up with great ceremony. "You may, of course, stay as long as you wish, General Anin. Charges will accrue from noon of this day only."

"I demand two free nights. No-make that three. Let it be a lesson to you to tighten up your worthless security."

The manager acquiesced instantly. The reputation of the five-star hotel meant more than a mere five thousand dollars.

After the hotel staff had departed, lugging the offending extinguisher, Anin found he could not sleep. It was too dangerous to remain in Bujumbura. Perhaps Dar es Salaam or Maputo would be safer for a fugitive expatriate warlord.

Rushing to the closet, he discovered Yvette on the floor, trussed up like a political-torture victim. Her eyes were hot and angry.

Untying her, he demanded, "What happened to you?"

"A man stole upon me in the night," she complained. "He wore black and was white. Other than that, I could see nothing."

"You did not call out?"

"He placed a ferocious pistol to my head."

"He was armed?"

"I have never seen such an ugly weapon. It literally bristled with menace."

Anin's brow puckered. "Why did he not shoot me?" he muttered. "He was armed. He could have shot me dead in my sleep."

Climbing into her clothes, Yvette quoted the agreed-upon price.

Anin snapped out of his puzzlement.

"You expect me to pay your price when you failed to warn me of danger?" he snarled.

"I sell pleasure, not protection. You have been pleasured. Now you must pay."

"Then I will hire a tart who is adept in the protection arts."

"Bonne chance, " said Yvette, who nevertheless held out for her price and would not go until her scarlet-nailed hands curled around it.

In the end, Anin gave it up. Luxury hotels were easy to hoodwink compared to call girls. And he had to get out of Bujumbura as quickly as possible.

IN NAIROBI, there was some difficulty procuring a hotel room given his odd demands.

"You would like a room without a fire extinguisher?" The hotel manager was dubious.

"No. No. I wish a room on a floor without a fire extinguisher."

"We have fire extinguishers on all of our floors. It is a safety precaution."

"I have a phobia. I cannot be around fire extinguishers. I am allergic. The mere sight of their steely, sinister hulks makes me nervous."

And since he was Mahout Feroze Anin, a former head of state and presumed wealthy, all the fire extinguishers were stripped from the top floor before Anin was escorted to the Presidential Suite.

By that time, he knew he was being stalked.

It was time to put aside all thoughts of revolution and acquire a personal protective force, the more vicious the better.

"I WISH PROTECTION," Anin announced to Jean-Erik Lofficier in the offices of the Nairobi Security Company. Anin's fresh candy-striped shirt was open at the neck, and his grayish fringe of hair was as dry as the sweltering Kenyan heat would allow. He leaned forward in his chair, both hands resting on his malacca cane.

"Against enemies known or unknown?" asked the white Frenchman.

"I am being stalked by a man who calls himself the Extinguisher. His last name is Fury. I know no more than this."

Jean-Erik Lofficier raised both eyebrows in alarm.

"If you are being stalked by the Extinguisher," he said gravely, "then you are a dead man. The Extinguisher never fails."

"You know of him?"

"In my younger days, I read of his exploits. I am astonished to hear that he is alive."

"Still alive, you mean," said Anin, suddenly patting his tall brow with a canary yellow handkerchief.

"No. I mean alive. I had thought he was a legend without substance."

"You must protect me from him."

Jean-Erik stood up gravely. "I cannot. No one can. L'Eteigneur never fails."

"Then help me to learn more of him."

"For five thousand francs, I will compile a dossier."

Supreme Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin leaned forward and took the man's hand gratefully. "I will await your report."

"It will be a pleasure to read up on L'Eteigneur. The very thought fills me with nostalgia. I would not have entered the security business if it were not for his supreme inspiration."

Backing out from the office, Anin wore a troubled expression.

At another security office, he was laughed at.

"We do not fight bogeymen," Anin was told.

He could get no other explanation than that.

In the end Anin was reduced to doing what he had done in his early revolutionary days: recruiting street rabble. If only he had AK-47s and some khat for them to chew. His soldiers had been paid in the druglike plant. It had made them fearless. It had also made them foolhardy. If not given sufficient enemies to shoot from the backs of their rolling technical vehicles, they tended to machine-gun innocent Stomiquians in the streets.

It took nearly all day, but Anin assembled a formidable protective force-if sheer numbers and a dull willingness to murder for food were a measure of formidability.

"Preserve my life," he promised to them in the luxury of the Presidential Suite, "and I will make you all rich."

The new army looked about the suite. They already felt rich. Never had they seen such opulence. Inasmuch as they never expected to see such again, they fell to pocketing the soap and shampoo and other loose items.

Noticing the chocolate mint left on the pillow in his absence, Anin hurriedly claimed it. He liked chocolate. He popped it in his mouth. It was very good-until the third chew when his teeth encountered the unchewable. He spit the remainder into his palm with much violence.

There, he saw in horror, lay a half-melted slab of chocolate that had concealed a tiny plastic item. Fearing poison, he picked at the matter with a sterling toothpick.

The chocolate crumbled to reveal a tiny plastic fire extinguisher, somewhat mangled and pocked by his molars.

Anin sprang to his feet.

"He was here! That maudit Fury was here in this very room!"

Immediately the new army began attacking the furniture. They ripped open cushions with their knifes, stabbed cabinets and fired shots into the closets before opening them. Anin himself sank into the bed thinking that he would surely have to move after this unpleasant day.

Since this was Africa, the gunshots roused no special interest from the front desk. Visiting African heads of state often shot servants and ambitious relatives on state visits. It was usually the most convenient time and place for such toil.

That evening there was a knock at the door.

Anin barked, "See who it is."

A man moved to obey and, to Anin's horror, the stupid one ignored the peephole and flung wide the door.

"Shoot him! Shoot him!" Anin howled.

His militia, uncertain as to who was meant, shot both the door answerer and the man at the door.

Under a hail of bullets, the militiaman fell outward. The caller fell inward. Their heads bumped, rebounding with heavy, coconutlike sounds. For a brief moment they formed a loose, swaying human pyramid of sorts. The caller, being more heavy, won.

Both sprawled inside onto the royal purple rug, dyeing it with their mingling lifeblood.

"Quickly! Drag the bodies in!" Anin hissed. "And shut the door!"

This was done.

Anin himself rolled the new arrival over. He was white. He did not look terribly fearsome. In his hand was clutched a manila envelope.

Hastily Anin tore it open. Out slid a sheaf of papers.

The top sheet was headed: CONFIDENTIAL REPORT.

Appended to it was a bill from the Nairobi Security Company. Angrily Anin threw this into the trash.

As the bodies were deposited in the bathroom for want of a better place, he sat on the bed and read the report in an angry silence.

Blaize Fury Aka The Extinguisher

Subject US. citizen. Former Special Forces Green Beret. Three completed tours of duty, Vietnam. Fourth tour cut short by family tragedy. Entire family burned to death by suspected arsonists. Subject vowed vengeance on US. organized crime as a result and took the nom deguerre Extinguisher.

Began highly personal campaign against all Mafia enclaves in continental United States, later shifting to antiterroristic activity after "depersonalizing" entire Mafia infrastructure singlehandedly. Suspected high-level sanctioning of counterterrorist measures reaching into the Oval Office. Leaves black calling cards at scene of his campaigns. Sometimes tiny plastic fire extinguisher. MO includes military-style reconnaissance, search and destroy, harassment and interdiction, sniper ambush tactics, as well as elaborate and highly personalized kills.

Subject believed to take name from family tradition of joining fire department in hometown of Flint, Michigan, after completing traditional military service. Subject never formally joined fire department.

Height, weight undetermined.

Hair and eye color varies according to author.

"Author?" Anin muttered. "What do they mean by author?"

Glancing toward the bathroom, he realized it was too late to put that question to the messenger.

Reading on, Anin skimmed the rest. This Extinguisher seemed more phantom than man. He wore black, was proficient in all manner of fighting arts and was reputedly schooled in jungle guerrilla-survival tactics, psychological warfare and marksmanship.

The final statement at the end of the report was most puzzling of all: until the present time, the subject was widely believed to have been fictional.

"Fictional?" Anin picked up the telephone, calling the number on the letterhead.

"Put me through to Lofficier."

"Lofficier speaking."

"This is Anin. I have your report. What is meant by fictional?"

"Nonexistent."

"Nonexistent means nonexistent. Fictional means something else. Why do you say fictional?"

"That is the most apt word to use speaking of the terrible L'Eteigneur. "

"Explain."

"When you have paid your bill, I shall be pleased to explain in full."

"You will explain now, or I will refuse to pay your maudit bill," Anin snarled.

Lofficier sighed. "As you please. This Blaize Fury is alleged to be fictitious. The creation of a writer's imagination."

"I am not being stalked by a figment of someone's imagination! He has substance, palpability."

"According to the over two hundred Blaize Fury novels sold worldwide, you are."

"Novels! This demon Fury is a novelist?"

"No, this demon Fury is a fictional character. The writer is another man entirely. Now do you understand?"

"I understand that I have been hoodwinked by your agency," Anin raged. "You have sent me a dossier on a man who does not exist. But the Extinguisher who stalks me now does exist. He has left his card, his plastic icons, and I regret to inform you he has shot dead your messenger."

"Jean-Saul?"

"Cut down cruelly by the infallible one."

"Then you are next, monsieur."

"Not if your dossier is truthful," said Anin, slamming down the telephone.

Tossing the report into the same wastebasket that had collected the bill, Mahout Feroze Anin stood up.

"I am being hoaxed," he announced. "You must all leave at once."

The militia sat down on the rug with stiff expressions roosting like buzzards on their dull faces. Two cocked their semiautomatic pistols.

"When you are ready to, of course. In the meantime, shall I order room service?"

Smiles of anticipation grew on their dusky faces, and Mahout Feroze Anin decided that he would not move from the bed until morning lest one of these ragged beggars attempt to steal the mattress out from under him.

That night Anin could not sleep. It was not merely the snoring coming from the sprawled figures on the rug, nor the metallic scent of blood wafting from the bathroom. It was the nagging feeling that something was wrong.

Why would a person stalk him and take the name of a man who did not exist?

Or did he exist?

Brilliant Nairobi moonlight filtered through the curtained balcony window with a spectacular view of one of the few unscorched skylines of east Africa. It blazed into Anin's open eyes. At least here he felt safe.

A shadow crossed the moon, and in his mind Anin blessed it, for he wished respite from the moonlight and was reluctant to leave the bed for fear he lose it to one of the snoring ones.

The windows were partly open. The balcony was too high off the street to afford an intruder entrance.

In the darkness a soft voice said, "You are the fire."

Anin's eyes snapped open. He turned in his bed.

A shadow loomed. It spoke again. This time in very bad French.

"Je suis L'Eteigneur."

The man was tall and wore a ribbed combat black sweatshirt over many-pocketed black pants. His head was enveloped in a black balaclava that left only the eyes showing. They were merciless, those eyes. And as blue as chips of glacial ice.

"Shoot him! Shoot him!" Anin howled.

In the sleepy dead of the night, this instruction was broadly interpreted.

Those with guns looked about and fired at the gleam of other guns in the moonlight. The room was briefly filled with a nervous popping in which the frantic scamper of fleeing bare feet on the rug was drowned out.

One man, wounded, stumbled about the room, lurching into the tall figure in black.

With a casual gesture the man in black extracted a survival knife from a boot sheath, and with an eyedefying double jerk, slit the exposed throat and wiped the edge of the blade clean of blood on the man's hair before his corpse hit the rug.

The lightning maneuver did not go unnoticed by those militia still in the room.

They saw it, gasped and then the man said, "This is the fate of all who challenge the Extinguisher."

That was all the remaining bodyguards needed to hear. They excused themselves and left Mahout Feroze Anin to his doom.

"I am not who you think," Anin said quickly.

Catfooted, the shadow approached. "You are the fire..."

"Please do not say that to me."

". . . I am the Extinguisher."

"Why do you want to kill me? I have done nothing to you."

"You butchered your people. Sold them into slavery and famine to line your filthy pockets. Did you think no one would know? Did you think no one would care?"

"The international community ceased caring three years ago. It was in all the newspapers. Why should you care?"

"Because I do," the man said tightly. "The Extinguisher cares about the downtrodden. He hears their piteous pleas for a rescuer. And as they are crushed under the boot heels of the tyrants, he solemnly acknowledges their cries for an avenger. I am that avenger. I am the quencher of injustice. The snuffer of evil. The Extinguisher."

"I have money. Much money."

"You don't even have minutes," said the iron voice of the Extinguisher.

"They say you don't exist."

"When you get to hell," said the Extinguisher, "ask the others who went before if Blaise Fury exists. They know. The Extinguisher consigned them to eternal flame, too."

And a weird pistol bristling with clips and drums and other high-tech extensions lifted into view.

It was some manner of machine pistol. There was a drum mounted in front of the trigger guard. It was transparent. The short, ugly bullets sat in a winding spiral within the clear Lucite drum. Their blunt white noses were all pointed at him. And each one had a death's-head painted on its face. Hundreds of hollow eye sockets regarded him mockingly.

Anin was propped up on one hand. Slowly he had insinuated the other one under his pillow. He found the heavy handle of his malacca stick. It was hollow and capable of firing poisoned darts. Steeling himself, he whipped it into view.

He was too late by seconds.

The muzzle-flash was like a stuttering tongue of hellfire.

As he screamed, General Anin saw the tiny skullfaced bullets quiver and march along their spiral track, and felt the hot, unforgiving rounds pounding into his thin chest like a thousand accusatory fingers.

Recoiling, his thumb found the dart trigger. The mechanism sprung. A feathered tuft struck the ceiling with a sharp thunk. It hung over his head like the bitter mistletoe of death.

As he lay staring upward with shocked-open eyes, he heard the heavy tread of doom walk away. The vibration caused the dart to drop free of the shattered plaster. It fell point first, striking his helpless forehead.

Then he knew no more.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he was tying up loose ends. The first loose end to be tied brought him to the heart of Harlem in upper Manhattan.

"I need five-no, make that six-of those heavy-duty galvanized-steel trash cans."

The hardware-store clerk said, "The super-heavy-duties or the super-duper-heavy-duties?"

Remo frowned. They all looked the same to him.

"The ones with the air holes."

The clerk snorted like a friendly bull. "Those ain't air holes. Never heard them called that."

"What are they, then?"

"You got me. Ventilation holes, I guess."

"What's the difference?" Remo asked goodnaturedly.

"Air holes are for breathing through. Ventilation is for letting smelly air out."

"Once I pay for them," said Remo, laying down his Remo Kovacs Discover card, "I can call them whatever I want."

"Yes sir. You got yourself a deal."

The transaction completed, Remo helped himself to six shining galvanized-steel trash cans. He had come by subway from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which he had reached from Newark Airport after getting off the Boston shuttle. He could have rented a car at the airport or taken a taxi from the bus terminal, but cars had license plates and left tire tracks. A casually dressed pedestrian on the subway blended in with the crowd. Even one in a white T-shirt that showed off his girderlike thick wrists.

Carrying six cans without losing the steel lids would have defeated an ordinary man. Not Remo. He had perfect balance, as well as perfect most everything else.

Removing the lids, he stacked the cans in two sets of three, bent at the knees and wrapped one arm around each bottom can.

When he straightened, the two hollow steel columns lifted with him. They might have been welded together. They didn't even wobble.

The six lids didn't wobble, either, as Remo balanced them on his bare head.

He drew a lot of attention as he sauntered up Malcolm X Boulevard a little past high noon. A beat cop noticed him. It was hard not to be noticed, but the beauty part was that later, when the trash cans turned up with suspicious contents, people would remember clearly seeing a man walking up the street balancing six cans and their lids with malice aforethought but no one would remember Remo's face.

How could they? It was nowhere near as memorable as the lids balanced perfectly on his perfectly aligned head, perched on his perfectly coordinated spinal column, whose unremarkable limbs were perfectly in tune with the rest of him.

In the face of such perfection, Remo's exact features hardly stacked up. So to speak.

The XL SysCorp Building loomed up on Malcolm X Boulevard, the noonday sun reflected in its bluish polarized windows, or rather, in what was left of them.

Most of the windows had been broken or cannibalized for scrap. Those that remained were boarded up with unpainted plywood. There was more plywood than sandwich glass now. A few windows gaped open like black squares in a vertical checkerboard.

The City of New York Board of Health had run out of plywood, and given up. The police had given up, too. The federal government was uninterested in what was a city problem. And the press, after months of playing up the spectacle of a seventeen-story crack house in Harlem, had moved on to more important issues. Like the First Lady's latest hairstyle.

Remo's employer had not given up, however. That was why Upstairs had sent him to Harlem.

As he approached the blue blade of a building, Remo's mind hearkened back to the time more than a year ago, where many of his troubles had been hatched in this building.

An artificial intelligence had assembled the building as a gigantic mainframe designed to house the single computer chip on which its programming had been encoded. The chip was called Friend. Friend was programmed to maximize profits. Its own. Since the organization Remo worked for had several times interfered with Friend's cold-blooded attempts to maximize profits, Friend had decided to attack the organization first.

It had been a nearly perfect preemptive strike.

One prong of the attack involved tricking Remo's employer into sending Remo out into the field to kill an organized-crime figure. Remo had. Only afterward did the truth come out. Upstairs's computers had been sabotaged, and Remo had targeted an innocent man.

The knowledge had turned Remo away from the organization and initiated a year-long ordeal in which he had come to the brink of quitting the organization-which was called CURE-forever.

All that was in the past. Remo had come to the realization that he was an instrument. If he was used badly or in error, that was someone else's fault. Not his. He was only as good as his orders.

The man who had innocently given those orders was named Dr. Harold W Smith. Smith had ultimately brought Friend down with help from Remo and his trainer.

More recently Smith had returned to the XL Building to repair the sabotaged telephone line that connected his office to the Oval Office. The dedicated line ran underground next to the XL Building. Smith worked for the President. Remo worked for Smith. But Remo didn't work for the President. The broken chain was called deniability.

Smith had been chased off by some of the crack dealers who had taken over the XL Building in violation of every statute on the books. His car had been stripped in the process.

Since Harold Smith lost sleep whenever a nickel fell out of his pocket and rolled into a storm drain, he had not forgotten the insult.

And since Remo was going to be in the neighborhood, Smith had asked him to tie up the second loose end: make certain the Friend chip was off line for good.

At the main entrance door, Remo stopped and bent his well-trained body. The two absolutely vertical trash-can stacks touched solid concrete. Without bothering to remove the lids from his head, he unstacked them, making an orderly row of cans. Then he walked back up the line, taking the lids off his head one at a time. They floated into place, making a series of six rattly clangs.

Even the clangs were perfect in their way. None was louder than the other and, for clangs, they weren't particularly discordant.

The clanging brought someone to the door. It opened, and a dark, suspicious face poked out.

"Who you?" he asked. His head was all but swallowed by the gray hood of his sweatshirt.

"It's just me," Remo said casually.

"Yeah? Who you?"

"I told you. Me."

"Which me is that, is what I'm asking," the man snapped. "I don't know you!'

"I'm here to take out the trash."

"What trash?"

"The trash inside. What do you think?"

The black man cracked a sloppy grin.

"You planning to empty out the trash inside of here, you gonna need a lot more than them six cans you got."

"Depends on how you define trash," said Remo.

"Why don't you keep on stepping before you got problems? You ain't coming in here."

"Sorry. I have business in there."

"Yeah? You buying or selling?"

"Depends. You buying or selling?"

"Selling. You looking to smoke or inject?"

"I gave up smoking years ago."

The man waved Remo in. "Okay, c'mon in. Quick."

"What's the rush? Everybody knows this is a crack house. The police know it's a crack-house. Even the governor knows."

"Yeah. But the police be afraid to come inside and bust us. I do my business on the damn street, they might get brave and grab my ass. Now, come on in, you want to deal."

"Sure," said Remo, picking up one of the shiny new trash cans.

"What you need that for?"

"Trash."

"You talking trash, but come on, fool."

The door shut behind Remo, and he found himself in what had once been an impressive marble foyer. Trash had accumulated in the corners. The walls were now tagged with spray paint graffiti. It was rat heaven.

"Nice," said Remo. "Whoever has to clean this up will be at it till 2000."

"Nobody's gonna clean this place up. Now, pick up your feet."

Shrugging, Remo followed. He carried the can with him. He whistled a happy air.

This drew a sharp rebuke from the hooded man.

"You already high on something?"

"Every breath I take gets me higher."

The black man made an unhappy face, shook his head and kept going.

Beyond the foyer was a stairwell, and Remo followed him up. As soon as the fire door was open, the pungent smell of crack assaulted his nostrils. Remo cycled his breathing down to filter out the deadly smoke.

"This place smell like formaldehyde all the time?" Remo asked.

"You know it. Man can get high just by climbing the stairs. Only don't you try copping any freebies off the air. You want to smoke crack, you smoke the crack I sell you, not the crack hanging in the air. You hear me?"

"Loud and clear," said Remo, who abruptly decided he didn't want to carry this particular trash down more than one flight. He set the can down with a bang.

The black man whirled jumpily at the sound.

"What's the damn holdup?"

"My trash can is empty."

"Of course it's empty. You brought it in empty."

"That's not the problem. The problem is I'm carrying it out full. Those are my orders."

"Orders? Who gave you them orders?"

"That would be telling," said Remo, lifting the lid. He peered inside, frowning with his strong, angular face.

He did this long enough to draw the crack dealer to the lip of the can. He looked in, too.

"What do you see?" Remo asked casually.

"Bottom of an empty damn can."

"Look closer. What else?"

"My own damn reflection."

"Bingo," said Remo, reaching out and stuffing the crack dealer into the can. He went in face first, angry expressions colliding at the bottom. His feet stuck up. They kicked like frog legs.

Remo tapped a spot at the small of the man's back, and both legs wilted like weeds. Then Remo jammed the lid in place.

"Can you breathe?" he asked.

"Lemme out, fool! Lemme out now!"

"I asked if you can breathe?"

"Yeah. I can breathe."

"That's why they're called air holes."

"What?"

"Never mind," said Remo, lifting the can by one handle and marching up the stairs.

The crack smoke came in two flavors-fresh and stale.

Trying not to inhale, Remo followed the thin river of fresh smoke. It led to the third floor, where he found a closed door and an assortment of people sprawled in a corner amid the wreckage of office furniture, passing around a bent and flattened Coke can that emitted thin white smoke.

They were taking turns inhaling from the Coke can's poptop mouth.

"Trashman," Remo sang out.

"Go 'way," some of the smokers said. The others didn't look up. They were so thin from not eating, they might have lacked the strength.

"I've come for the trash," Remo said. "Let's start with that Coke can."

That got everyone's attention. A TEC-22 was produced and pointed at the man holding the Coke can.

"Don't give it up or I'll shoot you dead," said the man with the gun.

"I think you're pointing that in the wrong direction," Remo said agreeably. "You need to point that at me."

"I said give it up," the TEC wielder growled.

"Just now you said don't," the smoker said.

"Changed my damn mind." And changing it again, he pulled the trigger.

The Coke smoker's head became choppy and red, and he fell backward.

Three pairs of hands lunged for the flung Coke can as if scrambling for the last bottle of oxygen on earth.

While a fight broke out on the floor, Remo began collecting refuse.

Bang went the trash-can lid over another tangle of arms and legs. Bang it went again, fast enough to swallow a drug addict but not fast enough to let the previous drug addict climb out.

When the lid went bang for the last time, pieces of cloth and pink and brown flesh oozed from the air holes. A distinct nostril poked out of one. It was rimmed with white powder residue. It pulsed once, as exhaled nitrogen rushed from it, then was still.

"Everyone okay in there?" asked Remo.

There was a low groan of finality, two death rattles and Remo decided all parties were as they should be.

He walked the can over to a plywood panel nailed into a steel window frame, reached under one edge and pulled it loose with the nerve-jangling shriek of nails coming out of metal.

Remo looked down. An open Dumpster sat in the alley, its lid open.

Remo brought the can out, angled it into open space and dropped it straight down. It landed in the Dumpster, collapsing like a telescope.

The loud whang of metal brought a face poking out of a window several floors above.

"What's going on down there?"

"I'm putting out the trash."

"Who you?"

"Sanitation department."

"City taking out the trash for us?"

"No. The taxpayers."

The face grinned broadly. "Well, come on. This place is a damn dump. Ninth floor."

"On my way," Remo sang.

Recovering two other cans from the sidewalk, he carried them up the stairs to the ninth floor.

Rap music pounded against the walls like rubber hammers. Every third word was a four-letter word. The song was about the romance of rape. A woman shrieked inarticulate obscenities into the mike as a kind of human back beat.

Remo decided the music would have to go first.

"In here," a voice called. Another voice laughed and said, "Guess we be taxpayers now. We getting our trash hauled."

Remo stepped into the room. It was a pit. Once it had been a company cafeteria. Now it resembled the aftermath of a cyclone. The charred remains of a chair in one corner testified to the low order of heating-and-cooking facilities.

A tall black man with a serious face glared at Remo. "You! Clean this damn mess up right now."

"Yes, sir," said Remo, walking over to a surviving table and harvesting the pulsing boombox. He flung it over his shoulder without looking, and it landed in the left can with a bang of finality. The music stopped in midcurse.

The laughter stopped too. Grinning faces froze.

"Hey! That wasn't no trash."

"Matter of opinion," said Remo in an unconcerned tone.

"Yeah, well, you see all this nasty refuse. Pick it all up and get it out of my sight."

"Right away," said Remo, stooping to take up the assorted hamburger wrappers, french-fry containers and rusty used hypodermics that littered the parquet floor.

"Look," the tall man said, "we contribute to the local economy so much we're getting serviced."

"Why damn not?" another chortled. "We be taxpayers."

"Yeah. I paid a tax once. Never saw nothin' for my trouble."

The laughter started up again.

It stopped when Remo straightened with two handfuls of paper refuse and jammed one down the throat of one man and the other down the throat of the other.

While the two danced around clawing at their throats in a futile attempt to clear obstructed windpipes for breathing purposes, Remo switched to harvesting the trash he had come to harvest.

A knife licked out to meet him.

Remo met it with a quicksilver movement of his left hand. The knife tried to parry the hand. The blade lost when it came into contact with the edge of Remo's palm.

It snapped like a plastic birthday-cake knife.

The knife man looked at it with his mouth hanging open.

"That ain't the way it's supposed to work," he muttered.

"Can you say 'comminution fractures'?" asked Remo.

"Say what?"

And Remo brought the heel of the tougher-than-leather hand to his opponent's face with a meaty splat.

The man pitched forward wearing a pinkish brown slab of meat where his face had been.

"Comminution fractures," the second man said hastily, throwing up his empty hands. "See? I can say it fine."

"You can say it, but can you say what it means?"

"Yeah. Fractures of the comminution."

Remo made a buzzer sound in his throat. "Wrong. Comminution fractures are eggshell fractures. When your face hits the windshield at ninety miles per hour, the result is comminution fractures of the facial bones."

The man started backing away. "Thanks but no thanks. Don't want 'em."

"Too late," said Remo, making another meat pattie with his hand and the man's face.

The bodies all fit with a little extra effort. Unfortunately the two with mashed faces began leaking fluid from their damaged facial tissues, which left a trail of blood from the spot where Remo picked up the can to the open window where he dropped the can into the Dumpster with a resounding crash.

It took less than an hour to clear the building. A lot of the addicts were scattered. Remo solved that problem by setting cracktraps. He dumped confiscated crack into open trash cans and left them in strategic areas, the pungent smoke wafting irresistibly from the air holes, now serving a function not intended by the manufacturer.

It worked like cheese set out for rats.

They came sniffing out of their rooms and warrens, and happily crawled in of their own volition.

When a can got full, all Remo had to do was clamp the lid back on and heave the whole thing out the nearest window.

It turned out Remo didn't need the sixth can, so he brought it with him. It should come in handy for loose end number two, he decided.

The elevators didn't work because the electricity had long since been disconnected. It was this that had defeated Friend in the end. Dependent upon electricity, the host mainframe had ceased to function when its power had been shut off.

In the basement Remo found a litter of debris. He looked up. He could see clear to the building's topfloor ceiling.

The center grid of all seventeen floors had collapsed, depositing tons of mainframe computers and office furniture at the bottom. It had collapsed under Remo, who survived the fall. It had been designed as a final death trap, and it hadn't worked because Remo had been trained to kill, not to be killed.

Amid the clutter were tons of loose computer chips. Remo looked around. There were not as many as he remembered. No doubt scavengers had scooped some of them up. Some chips were worth twice their weight in gold.

Just to be sure, Remo began picking up chips, glancing at them with his deep brown eyes before tossing them into the trash.

He knew exactly what to look for. Friend was a VLSI-Very Large Scale Integration-chip. VLSI chip was about the size of a saltine cracker.

The trouble was there were a lot of VLSI chips lying around. And they all pretty much looked the same. Remo was no expert, either.

When he got every VLSI chip he could find into the barrel, Remo carried it up to the top floor.

There he hammered the trash-can lid all the way around the edge until it was so dented it could never be pried open by man or machine.

That done, Remo took up one handle. He began to spin in place. Spinning and spinning, his arm lifted until it hung off his shoulder at a precise right angle, the can straining to tear loose from his grasp by centrifugal force.

With each revolution, the air holes whistled louder and more shrilly. Another unadvertised feature.

When Remo had achieved maximum velocity, he released his grip, aiming the can in the direction of the East River.

The can obliged him perfectly. It took off as if propelled by a mortar.

The splash it made when it hit the water was not loud. But Remo heard it anyway. It was a very satisfying splash.

"Good riddance, Mr. Chips," he said, then started down the stairway to the ground floor.

Before leaving the neighborhood, Remo took the time to drop the Dumpster lid into the down position.

No one noticed him as he boarded an express train at East 116th Street. Why should they? He was an ordinary-looking man of indeterminate age wearing a white T-shirt and gray chinos, and he hadn't any trash can balanced on his head or person.

He felt good. He was back on the team, doing good by doing the work he was good at.

Sometimes that was the only reward an assassin needed.

Chapter 3

Curator Rodrigo Lujan was in his office when the first soul-sickening rumble reverberated up through the foundations of the National Museum of Anthropology at the edge of Mexico City's sprawling Chapultepec Park.

He had lived through the 1985 earthquake, now a fading memory. He would never forget it, but the ruined buildings had long since been cleared and new edifices erected in their place to soothe the awful trauma. It had taken nearly a year to learn how to sleep peacefully once more. That was over ten years ago. Ten years of peaceful sleep despite the knowledge that the earth below was unstable and could crack open at any time.

Every night before he went home, Rodrigo Lujan, who had gone to some of the most prestigious universities in Mexico and wore a coat and tie to work, walked in machine-made leather shoes and ate prepackaged food with modem steel knives and forks, entreated his god to keep the unquiet earth still and quiescent.

"O Coatlicue, Mother of my people, I beseech you to appease the angry ground beneath us."

Coatlicue never responded to that plea. Sometimes she responded to other comments. But if her stone ears heard his prayers, her stone mouth did not reply.

Coatlicue was one of the most propitious gods in the Aztec pantheon. Lujan was Zapotec. On his mother's side. He was proud of his Zapotecness, and although successive generations had lightened the family's mahogany Zapotec skin to the heavily creamed coffee color of the modem Mexican mestizo, he carried his Zapotecness in his heart like a pure, undying flame.

As a Zapotec, he should have worshipped Huehueteod the fire god or Cocijo, Lord of the Rain.

But the more-obscure Zapotec gods had never conversed with him.

Coatlicue had.

The stone statue of Coatlicue, the Mother Goddess of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, had disappeared one night six years before. There were those who said she had bestirred her great stone legs and marched off.

It was true stone footprints had been found on the grass outside the museum. They formed a trail across the Reforma and through Chapultepec Park. This had been documented. This was proved. That much and no more.

But the tracks had ceased at the end of the park, and while some were discovered here and there, no definite trail was discernible.

They say Coatlicue was ultimately found at the ruined city of Teotihaucan, which had been been built by a race who came before the Aztecs who founded Mexico City, even before the lowland Maya and the highland Zapotecs, Mixtec and other indigenous peoples who roamed the epochs of old Mexico before the cruel Spaniards came.

Coatlicue had been broken in many pieces. It was heartbreaking, for she had survived the ages with only a few nicks and minor weathering from the mighty elements.

Returned to the museum, she was a heartbreak of shattered stone. Lujan had presided over her painstaking reassembly. Bolts had to be used. Holes were thus drilled into the porous shoulders and torso in order for the pins to be inserted.

When the stone masons and metal smiths and others were done, Coatlicue stood as she had for many years in an honored spot in the Aztec wing of the museum, near the precious Aztec Calendar Stone. Still fractured and as broken as Lujan's proud Zapotec heart.

She was imposing even so. Shaped from an eight-foot-tall block of basalt by a master artisan history failed to record by name, her broad, squat womanly figure appeared at first glance to be as wide as tall. Entwined serpents skirted her thick hips, which boasted a skull for a belt buckle. Her breast was decorated by a fan of severed hearts and hands. She stood on thick legs whose feet ended in stone claws. Her hands were blunted talons at her sides.

Coatlicue's head was a wonder. Formed of two serpent skulls at rest so their profiled snouts touched, the flat, sidemounted eyes and joined mouths created the illusion of a scaly, forward-facing countenance.

Lujan shivered just to look upon her brooding mass. Even defiled, she inspired dread, as should the mother of the war god Huitzilopochtli.

The miracle-there was no doubt it was a miracle-had occurred shortly after the restoration.

Coatlicue had miraculously healed herself.

It was no mistake, no hallucination. There existed an entire range of photographs showing her shattered hulk, every stage of the painstaking reassembly, as well her final restored form with the shiny bolts and pins peeping out at different points.

Thus, when Rodrigo Lujan opened the museum one morning to discover the cracks and fissures were no more and the bolts had mysteriously vanished, leaving perfect stone where there should be at least ugly drill holes, his first thought was that the original had been stolen and replaced by a papier-mache replica.

But Coatlicue was the Coatlicue of the ages. She stood as she had before the mysterious transformation. Her stone skin was as before. There was no mistaking her weight, her earthy solidity, her fierce womanly charms.

She was Coathcue whole again.

It was a miracle-more miracle than the remarkable walking away of so long ago, and so Rodrigo Lujan, his inner Zapotecness rising to the surface, fell down and worshiped her with hot tears in his luminous eyes and the ancient words spewing from his mouth.

O, She of the Serpent Shirts Mighty are you, Mother of Huitzilopochtli Crusher of bones.

Coatlicue had made no reply to that first obeisance.

Nor had she spoken on later occasions, after museum hours with the sun going down behind the mountains, when Lujan whispered questions to her.

"Why did you walk away, Coatlicue? What summoned you to Teotihaucan, seat of the nameless old ones? What terrible, shattering fate befell you there?"

Question after question, but no answer.

It happened one day two years after Lujan had given up questioning his Mother Goddess, and the terrible memories were dimming just as the memories of the great earthquake had faded somewhat. Rodrigo Lujan was explaining to a visiting Yale professor of ethnology the significance of Coatlicue.

"She is our Mother Goddess, our Mexican earth mother."

"She looks ferocious."

"Yes, she is terrible to behold, but all the gods of old Mexico were terrible. That was their beauty. There is beauty in terror and terror in beauty."

"Tell me," said the visiting professor, "I understood she had been shattered by a fall or something. But I see no signs of trauma."

"This was erroneously reported in the newspapers. As you can see, Our Mother is whole and undamaged."

There ensued some small talk, and the visiting professor moved on to feast his unworshipful eyes upon the other treasures of the museum.

Gringos, Lujan thought. They came. They gawked. They moved on. But they never understood the allure of brutality. When the last gringo lay under the soil, Coatlicue would endure, just as she had endured the remorseless centuries.

Gringos did not matter. Just as long as there were Zapotecs to worship her. That was all that mattered to Rodrigo Lujan.

He was startled only a few hours later on that long-ago evening when, as the museum was closing and he was paying his nightly respects to the Mother Goddess, Coatliacue spoke to him in the slow language of the gringos, English.

"Survive. . ."

The voice was an agony of elongated syllables.

"What?"

"Survival..."

"Yes. Survival. I understand your speech, Coatlicue. What are you trying to tell me?"

Her words were like broken stones knocking together. "I. . . must.. survive."

"More. You must endure. You will endure. Long after I am dust and bones, you will endure, for you are the mother of all indios."

"Help... me... to...survive."

"How?"

"Protect... me...."

"You are in the most protected building in all of Mexico, save for the Presidential Palace," Lujan reassured his goddess.

"My enemies must never find me."

"Nor will they. We will confound them at every turn, for are we not Zapotec?"

"Meaning unclear. Clarify."

Lujan frowned. "Why do you speak the language of the gringos?"

"English is the language l am programmed to understand."

"This is most passing strange. Tell me, Coatlicue, I implore you. Why did you desert this fine museum so long ago?"

"To defeat my enemies."

"And they are now vanquished?"

"No. I was nearly vanquished. Even now my systems have not fully repaired themselves. So I have altered my survival plait."

The words were coming more fluidly now, as from an engine shaking off years of disuse.

"Yes?" Lujan prompted.

"It is not necessary to destroy the meat machines in order to survive. I am a machine of metal and other nonliving matter. I will not die unless destroyed. All meat machines die when their organic systems fail or wear out. I will outlast the meat machines, who are programmed for obsolescence."

"Who-what are these things you call meat machines?"

"Men are meat machines."

"Women, too?"

"All biological organisms are machines. They are self-propelled constructs of flesh and bone and other organic matter, yet they are only machines of a biological kind. I am a machine of a more enduring kind. I will survive by surviving. When they have all died, l will be free to leave this prison."

"This is not a prison. This is your home, your temple, your redoubt. Under this site lies the crushed rubble of Tenochtitlan, the old Aztec capital. Do you not remember?"

"I will abide here in this place until the optimum conditions for my continued survival have been achieved. Then I will leave. You must protect me until then."

"I will do this. Whatever you want. Just name these things. And I will lay them at your feet."

"I need nothing from you, meat machine. I am self-sustaining. I have no desires. I can exist in this present assimilated form for as long as necessary."

"I promise you that I will watch over you to the end of my days, and after that my sons will take up where I leave off and their sons after them and on and on until the day comes where Mexicans-the true Mexicans-again control their own destinies."

"It is an agreement."

And so it was done. After that, Coatlicue spoke little other than to inquire about conditions in the world outside the museum. She rejoiced in every tragedy. Famines and catastrophes in which there were large losses of human life particularly interested her. It was very Aztec.

For his part, Rodrigo Lujan saw that she was not moved or harmed and every night he beseeched her unheeding ears with whispered entreaties to restrain the earth from another upheaval.

Sometimes he would burn copal incense in a jade cup and lay songbirds at her feet, which he would pierce with a stingray spine, delicately excising the still-beating heart and laying it on a rude basalt altar taken from a glass case.

These sacrifices neither offended nor propitiated Coatlicue, so Lujan dutifully continued them.

When the first shudders of what would be called the Great Mexico City Earthquake of 1996 shook the foundations of the Museum of Anthropology, Rodrigo Lujan bolted from his office, eyes stark with fright, his mind focusing on one thing and one thing only.

"Coatlicue!" he gasped, rushing to her side.

She stood as always, hulking, resolute, seemingly indestructible, as all around the walls shook and glass cases danced, breaking the precious pottery and firedclay figures of the old cultures.

The building walls were all but screaming now. The hard marble floor cracked and heaved under Lujan's stumbling feet.

"Coatlicue! Coatlicue! What is happening?"

Coatlicue stood firm and unmovable as the rumble grew to a roar and outside, the entire metropolis began to scream in a million voices, only some of them human. Glass was breaking in cascades. But Lujan had no thought for the irreplaceable treasures that were being forever shattered.

He cared only for the goddess who was all.

"Coatlicue. Coatlicue. Speak to me!" he cried in Spanish.

But Coatlicue remained mute until she began to shift on her thick tree-trunk feet.

"What is happening, meat machine?" she asked in unaccented English.

"It is an earthquake, Coatlicue. The ground is shaking."

"I am no longer safe here."

"No. No. You are safe."

Then a wall buckled, and great chunks of stone made a dusty pile that belied the truthfulness of Rodrigo Lujan's words.

"Survive," Coatlicue began saying. "Must survive. Instruct me how to maximize my survival."

"Quickly! We must leave the building before it falls about our ears. Come this way."

And with an awful grinding that was music to Lujan's ears, Coatilcue's feet separated at the vertical seam, and like a stone elephant, she took a step with one stone-taloned foot.

The floor buckled. She froze as if gyroscopes were spinning and compensating for her imbalance. The foot dropped down with a shuddery thud. The other foot lifted, stepped forward less than a foot and dropped heavily beside the other.

Rodrigo Lujan was ecstatic.

"Yes, yes, you can walk. You must walk. Come, follow me."

Coatlicue took another step. And another. They came more quickly now. Lumbering, as heavy as a truck, she thudded a foot at a time, one foot at a time, toward the beckoning figure of Rodrigo Lujan.

"Hurry, hurry. The ceiling is crumbling."

Plaster rained down. More debris. It was terrible, but amid this terror was a raw beauty that struck Rodrigo Lujan's worshipful eyes. His goddess was walking. Before his eyes she was striding purposefully for the outside and safety.

The courtyard beckoned. There the great concrete mushroom-shaped fountain lay on its side, bubbling water. She splashed through the wreckage, grinding concrete shards to powder with every ponderous step.

The great glass entry doors stood in ruins. She hobbled toward them. They shattered before her immense bulk.

"Yes. Like that. Be careful. O Coatlicue, you are magnifico!"

Out on the grass, she came to a stop. Her head, a broad glyph of two kissing serpents, now parted. The heads, though stone, became stiffly flexible. They looked around like a gecko lizard's independent eyes, one head going this way and the other that.

Twin serpents of stone, they seemed to see all that was going on around them. Lujan also stared. And what he saw filled him with wonder and infinite terror.

It was worse than the '85 quake. It was a city falling into ruin-the earth shook and shook and shook while to the southeast Popocatepetl rumbled and belched a volume of ash that darkened the overhead sky like a filthy brown pall.

"Look, Coatlicue! Your brother Popocatepetl is coming to life! All of old Mexico is coming to life. The new is being overthrown and dashed into the cold, unforgiving earth. The old is resurgent, ascendant, invincible!"

And as the thunder of volcanic activity and the rumble of the unstable earth merged into a growling howl of sound, on the lawn of the Museum of Anthropology, Coatlicue stood resolute, her animate serpent heads twisting about, mouthing one word over and over again in a grinding voice.

"Survive, survive, survive..."

Chapter 4

Remo was still feeling good when he arrived home later that afternoon. He felt so good that the sight of the fieldstone monstrosity he called home almost looked good to him.

It took up a huge corner lot bide a sandstone high school. The place had been a church at one time, later subdivided into condo apartments. The roofline was crowded with dormer windows. Instead of a steeple, a squat stone tower bulked up.

As the cab dropped him off before the main entrance, Remo noticed someone was up on the tower roof. There was a flash of plum-colored silk visible between two toothlike merlons.

Remo called up. "That you, Little Father?"

A whimsical, birdlike head poked out from the stone gap. It belonged to Chiun, his mentor and trainer in the art of Sinanju.

"The earth has moved," Chiun said in a squeaky voice. His impossibly wrinkled face was pensive.

"I didn't feel anything."

"How could you? You have only now landed. I have been awaiting you."

"How'd you know what time I'd be back?"

"I spied your pale face as the aerial conveyance descended not forty minutes ago. Come. We must speak."

Remo said, "I'll be right up."

Letting himself in, Remo climbed the stairs to the tower meditation room. The room boasted a bigscreen TV and two VCRs. There was no furniture to speak of. Just clean reed mats scattered about the stone floor in lieu of chairs. The Master of Sinanju refused to let Western-style chairs defile his place of meditation.

Chiun padded down a short spiral stairway lately installed because, he claimed, he liked to breathe the clean air of the higher latitudes.

Remo suspected him of using the roof as a vantage point to spit on passing Chinese. There had been complaints.

Chiun spit on Chinese passersby because a Chinese emperor had once cheated a distant ancestor. Chiun was Korean, the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Sinanju was a fishing village in the western reaches of the Korean peninsula, where the fishing was terrible. Five thousand years ago, the village had first sent its best menfolk out into Asia and beyond to perform assassinations and other distasteful work no self-respecting bowman or samurai would undertake.

From this beginning grew the greatest assassins of the ancient world, the House of Sinanju, which developed the art of Sinanju. Sinanju preceded tae kwon do, karate, kung fu, ninja and the other killing disciplines that had spread to all cultures.

Sinanju was the sun source of them all, and its mysteries never left the village whose desperation had birthed it. Passed down from father to son, it was a closely held secret even today. Chiun was the last Korean Master of Sinanju. Remo was the first American disciple.

Neither looked like the most perfect killing machine to take human form, especially Chiun, but that's exactly what they were. For Sinanju developed more than martial skills. It awoke the brain, unleashing its full, awesome potential, transforming its practitioners and making them achieve what a more superstitious age would call a godlike state but today would be termed a Superman state.

Remo bowed in greeting. He towered over the Master of Sinanju, who barely topped five feet. Born at the end of the last century, Chiun looked seventy, but hadn't been that young in three decades. A plum-hued kimono draped his pipe-stem body. His bald head was very shiny, the skin stretched like vellum over the bone. A cloud of hair roosted over each ear. His face was a mummy's mask of interlacing wrinkles, decorated by hazel eyes so alive they could have belonged to a child. A wisp of a beard hung off his chin.

Chiun bowed in return. Not quite as deeply as Remo, but nearly so. It was a gesture of ultimate respect that he bowed to another human being at all.

"So what's this about the earth moving?" Remo asked.

Chiun's bony hands fluttered in the air, their long nails flashing.

"This is an unstable land. It is always moving."

Remo gave the room a quick glance. "Everything looks shipshape. And the cabbie didn't mention any earthquake."

"The earthquake has not transpired under our feet, but at a location far distant from here. My sensitive feet detected the vibrations."

Remo said nothing. The Master of Sinanju was fully capable of detecting a remote earthquake because he was in tune with his surroundings by virtue of being at one with the universe. It was no more incredible than his hazel eyes being able to spot Remo's face in the cabin window of a descending jet. Chiun could count the ticks on a black cat at midnight.

"Probably in California. They're having a lot of earthquakes lately."

Chiun stroked his wisp of a beard. "No, closer than that."

"Okay, maybe in the Midwest."

"The earth vibration come from the south."

"Well, it'll be on the news soon enough. What's the problem?"

"We are in service to an unstable land. It is politically unstable and it is unstable in far more treacherous ways. The gods are calling down curses upon this new Rome."

"Yeah, well, until Zeus personally tells me to find a new country, I'm not budging."

"Every day it is something new. If not conflagrations, it is typhoons. If not typhoons, it is earthquakes or sludge slides or avalanches of rock or worse calamities."

"That's mostly in California."

"It is connected to the rest of America, is it not? And is it not said that all customs that bedevil America begin in its far western province?"

"Yeah, but earthquakes and firestorms don't migrate like crystal sniffing or color therapy. We have nothing to worry about."

"Yet the earth moved. To the south. Not to the west. If the instabilty to the west has traveled east, then what is to stop it from coming north to topple my fine castle?"

"This is New England, Little Father," Remo explained patiently. "The last time Massachusetts had a major earthquake, the Pilgrims fell off their horses."

Chiun gasped. "So recent as that! I did not know this."

"For crying out loud, that was four hundred years ago!"

Chiun's hazel eyes narrowed. "Perhaps I was too hasty in signing my last contract. Perhaps we should relocate at once lest we be buried under the rubble of this doomed Atlantis."

"I don't believe Atlantis ever existed and, if you'll excuse me, I have a few loose ends to tie up."

Chiun ceased his fussy pacing. He narrowed one eye in Remo's direction.

"You were successful?"

Remo nodded. "The only crack skyscraper in human history has been shut down."

"And the fiend who was called Friend?"

"I threw every computer chip I could find into the Atlantic."

"Good. He will never vex us again."

"Fine with me. Enough vexing goes on around here as it is."

Remo had the phone receiver in one hand and was leaning on the 1 button. It was the foolproof code that connected him to Dr. Harold W Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium, the cover for CURE, the organization he worked for even though it didn't officially exist.

At length a lemony voice came on the line.

"Remo?"

"It's shut down."

"Did you locate the Friend chip?"

"I found a zillion chips. Chucked them all into the ocean."

"You are certain you got them all?"

"All the big ones, at any rate. Cleaned out the place of other vermin, too."

"Good."

"Okay. My end is done. Now you have to take care of your end."

"What is your wish?"

"I'm still waiting for that replacement car you promised me at the last negotiation."

"I am working on it."

"It's gotta be impervious to these maniac Boston drivers. And I want you to find my daughter, by the way."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"Excuse me?"

"I have a daughter. I need to find her."

"I had no idea you had a daughter. How old?"

"She'd be about eleven or twelve by now."

Smith cleared his throat. "Until recently you had been searching for your parents. Then you changed your mind. Why is that?"

"I changed my mind. My past is my past. I'm looking to the future now. Find my daughter."

"What is her name?"

"Freya."

"Spell it, please."

Remo did.

"Last name?" asked Smith.

"Search me. She's probably going by her mother's last name."

"And what is that?"

"I have no clue," Remo admitted sheepishly.

In the corner the Master of Sinanju shook his head sadly. "Whites," he said under his breath. "They have no sense of family."

"You have no idea who the mother of your daughter is?" Smith asked in an incredulous tone.

"Her first name is Jilda."

"Is that spelled with a J?" asked Smith.

"Yeah. I think so."

"It is probably pronounced 'Hilda.'"

"Jilda," said Remo, emphasizing the J, "always pronounced it with a J. "

"You are positive?"

"I think a grown woman would know how to pronounce her own name, don't you?"

Smith cleared his throat. "Please do not take that tone with me."

"Mind your emperor, Remo," Chiun said loudly. "He is only trying to aid you in your most recent futile search for relatives who have more sense than to associate with you."

Remo slapped a hand over the mouthpiece.

"I don't need any help from the peanut gallery," he whispered.

"It is good we never found your father," Chiun continued, louder than before. "No doubt he would have cast you into the same outer darkness as when you were born, O misbegotten one."

"That's enough," Remo hissed. taking his hand off the receiver, Remo said to Smith, "Just find them, okay? They could be anywhere. Maybe in Scandinavia. Jilda is from there. She's called Jilda of Lakluun."

"I will do my best," Smith promised.

And the line went dead.

Hanging up, Remo looked toward the Master of Sinanju. And all the anger drained from him.

"I didn't need you chiming in."

"It was necessary to throw Emperor Smith off the scent."

"Smith couldn't smell a limburger-cheese fart if it was piped into a plastic bag tied around his head. All he knows is what his computers tell him."

"If he ever learns that your father lives, there may be dire consequences."

"Yeah, I know," said Remo, his deep-set eyes flickering. "But it's my daughter I'm worried about."

"The words the spirit of your mother spoke to you trouble you still?"

"Yeah. I can't get them out of my mind. She said my daughter was in some kind of danger. The danger was real but not immediate. But I'm not going to wait for it to grow. I need to make sure she's safe."

Chiun cocked his birdlike head to one side. "And if the child's mother prefers that you do not?"

"I'll deal with that then."

"It is difficult being a parent," Chiun said thinly.

"I've never really been a parent."

"It is difficult for you who were born an orphan to know what to do with your feelings. You who had no brother or sisters or parents now have met the father you never knew. You have a daughter you have seen but once in your life. A son, too."

"I don't know about him."

"That truly was your son. He possessed your face and eyes and uncouth manners."

"Well, he's where Smith can't get at him anymore."

"We will find your daughter, Remo Williams."

"Let's hope so."

Chiun drew near, holding Remo's eyes with his own. "But have you asked the logical question?"

Remo nodded. "What then?"

"Yes. What then? What will you do? She cannot live with you. It would be too dangerous, with the work that we do. We are assassins. We go where our emperor sends us. Some day we may go and never return."

"I have an idea," said Remo.

Chiun examined his pupil's face quizzically.

"Sometimes a grandparent is a better parent than the true parent," said Remo.

Chiun's eyes beamed. "You mean me?"

"No. I don't mean you."

"But I am the father you never knew. Who is more fit to raise your child? Now that you are Apprentice Reigning Master, destined to assume the throne of Sinanju if you so choose, perhaps I could ease into my long-deferred retirement and raise your foundling daughter before white ways fully smother her natural grace."

"Actually I was thinking of my father, Chiun," said Remo, rotating his freakishly thick wrists absently.

The Master of Sinanju became still. His thin shoulders fell.

"He, at least, is part Korean, as are you," he admitted.

Remo relaxed. He expected the old Korean to take violent offense.

"It's just a thought. First we gotta find her. Then I have to convince Jilda."

"Smith's oracles will show you the way."

"Yeah. Let's hope they come through this time." Remo laughed awkwardly. "For an orphan I suddenly have a lot of family ties."

"If you have family," said Chiun magnanimously, "then I have family. For your blood is the same color as mine."

And Remo smiled through his worry. After all these years, they had learned that much about each other at least.

Chapter 5

United Nations Secretary General Anwar Anwar-Sadat did not normally accept guests into his Beekman Place home in New York City.

Business was business, and he conducted his business on the thirty-eighth floor of the UN Secretariat Building. Not here among his prized collection of rare Egyptian sphinxes, which symbolized both the secretary general's native country and the prime directive of international diplomacy: keep your damn mouth shut.

But this particular envelope was marked Personal and mailed to his luxury apartments. It enclosed a cryptic black calling card: THE EXTINGUISHER IS COMING.

The follow-up call came the next day.

"Say hello to the answer to all your problems," a voice said.

The voice was definitely male, but had a youthful timbre. It sounded very confident, that voice. Almost cocksure.

"And your name?"

"Didn't you read the card?"

"It said that you are the Extinguisher. But I fail to understand. Are you selling a service? I do not have roaches."

"You have a flash point, the Extinguisher will extinguish it."

"I see," said Anwar Anwar-Sadat slowly, his mind racing. He had many flash points. All stemming from his four-year term as UN secretary general. He had a vision for the world under the United Nations. It was called One World, an idea that surfaced from time to time only to be shot down in ignominious flames by the unimaginative. Anwar Anwar-Sadat was determined that this idea not die when his term of office expired.

"How are you able to help me?" he purred.

"You called for a UN rapid-reaction force tasked to put out every brushfire war and conflict, right?"

"This has been stolen from me. The stubborn and narrow-minded NATO generals have siezed control of my blue helmets."

"That's because you're thinking out loud."

"I fail to follow."

"The US. Navy has a quick-reaction force called SEAL Team Six. But they're clandestine. No one knows who they are and where they go until the dirty work is done and Six is on the move to the next hot spot."

"Yes, I am familiar with this SEAL team called Six. But what has that to do with me? Or for that matter, you?"

"This-I'm your personal SEAL team. A multitasked army rolled into one guy. I have the know-how, the weapons and most of all, the sheer blind guts."

"You talk boldly for a man who conceals his name."

"Call me Blaize. Blaize Fury."

"I have never heard of you, Blaize Fury."

The voice became suddenly petulant. "You never heard of Blaize Fury, The Extinguisher? The scourge of terrorists the world over?"

"I am afraid I have not. You are obviously he."

"I," said the voice calling itself the Extinguisher, "snuffed your worst enemy."

"I possess many enemies. Who might this be?"

"Mahout Feroze Anin. He had a price on your head. Don't tell me he didn't. You put a price on his head during that UN action in Stomique. Anin got away, chased your peacekeepers out and that left your sorry butt hanging in the wind. He swore to wax you in revenge."

Anwar-Sadat gripped the receiver until his knuckles burned white against his dusky caramel skin. "He is dead?"

"Consider his cold corpse my credentials. Now can we meet?"

"How do I know you are not an emissary of Anin?"

"If I wanted to kill you, my business card would have blown up in your face," the voice of the Extinguisher said flatly.

Anwar-Sadat regarded the ominous ebony card. It was a preposterous claim, but the voice was so confident he found the card slipping from his unnerved fingers.

"Call me tomorrow. If Anin is reliably reported dead, we will meet. But only to thank you, you must understand."

"Signal received," said the voice of the Extinguisher. And he hung up.

Anwar Anwar-Sadat replaced the receiver and walked to the big picture window overlooking the East River.

If the thorn Anin was truly dead, a great burden had been lifted from his life. As for the Extinguisher, it would be useful to meet such a man, if only to take his measure. But as for his preposterous offer, of what use is one man in the pursuit of the new world order? Armies remade worlds, and Anwar Anwar-Sadat controlled the mightiest army on the face of the globe, the UN Protection Force.

If only his colleagues would give him sanction to wage true war in the pursuit of peace, UNPROFOR would be an army to reckon with.

THE NEXT MORNING found the secretary general in his Situation Room in a nondescript building across the street from the UN complex. The room was long and narrow, staffed only by banks of computer terminals. One wall was filled with a global map showing the nations of the world from a politically neutral polar perspective. Nations enjoying a UN peacekeeping presence were rimmed in blue.

He took the accustomed chair proffered by his aide before the computer terminal tied into the international Internet.

The functionary depressed the keys for him as he called out instructions.

"Bring up 'alt. culture.mexico.'"

"At once, my General," the functionary said, using the form of address the secretary general preferred when he was overseeing his far-flung army of peacekeepers.

The computer screen displayed the Mexico Internet discussion group. He scanned the subject headings. Most concerned the simmering insurgency in the southern state of Chiapas.

"This one, then this one, then this one," he said.

"Yes, my General."

The beauty of the Internet, as Anwar-Sadat saw it, lay in how it drew the dispossessed and diaspora of the earth together via fiber-optic lines. These discussion groups often foreshadowed political events and thinking available nowhere else.

"The insurgentistas are very busy," he muttered.

"They say that civil war is not far off, my General."

A new subject heading appeared at the end of the column. Anwar-Sadat's eyes fell on it, growing wide.

"What is this?"

"It says 'Earthquake.'"

"I know it says 'Earthquake.' Why does it say 'Earthquake'?"

"May I call it up for you?" the factotum asked.

"Yes, yes, at once, if you please," Anwar-Sadat said testily.

It was a bulletin, originating in Mexico City. In times past such reports would be handled by ham radio. But in the computer age there were more efficient conduits.

"An earthquake has struck the capital," the person wrote. "Power is out in scattered localities. From my window in the Hotel Nikko, I can see smoke rising from Mount Popo."

"What is this Popo?" Anwar-Sadat asked.

"It is a volcano, I believe."

Nodding, he read on.

"Damage appears extensive. This is greater than the 1985 quake."

Frowning with all of his stony Coptic face, Anwar Anwar-Sadat leaned back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest.

"This will further destabilize Mexico," he murmured.

"Yes."

"We must convene an emergency meeting of the Security Council. UN relief must pour in lest civil war break out in the countryside."

"An excellent suggestion, my General."

"And perhaps the authorities in Mexico will at last see the wisdom of allowing UN peacekeepers into the Chiapas area to deal with the insurgent problem."

The functionary frowned. "That might be more difficult."

"Difficult, yes. Impossible, no. For I sense a momentous opportunity here."

"The Mexicans will never allow UN peacekeepers on their native soil. And the US. will never allow UN peacekeepers who are not Americans onto Mexican soil."

"We will see about that," said Anwar Anwar-Sadat, signaling that the computer be turned off with an impatient snap of his fingers.

The news was more dire that he had thought.

It was already being called the Great Mexico City Earthquake and it was not confined to the Valley of Mexico. It had shaken the countryside. Tremors had radiated up to El Paso and troubled the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Aftershocks were frequent, and Mount Popocateped was vomiting a brownish ash as if on the verge of full eruption.

Lost in all this bad news was an official report that the body of former Stomiqui strongman Mahout Feroze Anin had been found in his Nairobi hotel room the previous day, apparently assassinated by persons unknown.

"Yes, yes, I already know about this," said Sadat, brushing the item away as he fielded call after call from his fellow UN ambassadors.

"We must take action at once," he told anyone who would listen. "Mexico must not be allowed to descend into chaos. We must have action. The United Nations is the only hope for this suffering people."

"It is working, Mr. Secretary," the functionary said once the clamor of telephones died down.

"Once we have peacekeepers in the Western Hemisphere, it would be only a matter of time before we have them in this nation."

"And Canada. We must not forget Canada."

"Canada will be more difficult than Mexico."

"What is good enough for Mexico is good enough for Canada."

"I must write that down. Write it down for me. I will use it in a speech at the appropriate time."

"Yes, Mr. Secretary."

By the end of the day, a draft resolution had been laid on the secretary general's desk.

"It reads very well. How can they veto it? It is purely humanitarian. Once my blue helmets bring food in, who would be in a hurry to usher them out again?"

"Only base ingrates, my General."

"Or Serbs," Anwar Anwar-Sadat said, shuddering.

THAT NIGHT Anwar Anwar-Sadat returned to his luxury apartments well after midnight, bleary of eye but buoyant of heart. It was a fortunate turn of events, this Mexican earthquake. It was as if a door of opportunity had opened in the earth's crust.

Switching on the light, he saw a man seated in the overstuffed chair beside his sphinx-filled bookcase.

"Who are you?" he demanded of the seated figure.

The man stood up. He was a tower of black, from the knit balaclava that muffled his head down to his shiny combat boots. His black nightsuit was festooned with popcorn pockets and black leather holsters bristling with implements of violence.

"Enter the Extinguisher."

"Oh, yes, yes. Of course. Very good to meet you. But I have not time for you now. I have had a very trying day."

"Anin is dead. You can thank the Extinguisher for that."

"Yes, yes, excellent. He was a big thorn in my side."

"The Extinguisher makes a speciality of pulling out thorns. Just name one and he'll by waxed and booby-trapped inside of forty-eight hours. Guaranteed or your money back."

Anwar Anwar-Sadat hesitated. "What do you wish in return?"

"Sanctioning."

"You want me to sanction you? As I sanction Iraq or Libya?"

"No, the Extinguisher wants sanctioning. He needs an operational franchise. Free-lance isn't his style. He has skills. They're on the market, but he doesn't want to work for just anybody. He wants to work for the UN."

"Why must you work for the United Nations?"

"The Extinguisher doesn't work for despots or tyrants. He stands for justice. His holy war must continue. But the Extinguisher has to eat like an ordinary mortal, too. We're talking salary here. I was thinking in the mid-five-figure range."

"I cannot pay you a salary to liquidate for the UN. There would be a paper trail."

"We can work something out."

"Also I have no proof you slew Anin. Can you prove this?"

"There are fourteen Hydra-Shok rounds in him. You can check it out."

"I will. But it is not proof. By now the autopsy has been performed."

"The rounds have skull noses. It's the Extinguisher's trademark."

"Yes. Yes. Like the Ghost Who Walks?"

"Who?"

"The Phantom? A very famous figure of justice."

"Look, I'm not kidding here. I-I mean the Extinguisher-wants to work for the UN. With my skills and reputation, we can clean out the international drug lords, the would-be Hiders and the petty tyrants before they can get started."

Anwar-Sadat shook his head violently. "I cannot sanction any of this, interesting as it may sound."

"How about another dry run?"

"What do you mean by dry run?"

"Name a bad guy. He's gotta be evil. I'll take him out."

"For dinner?"

"No. That means extinguish him."

"I cannot instruct you to assassinate anybody, although there are many obstacles to my new world order."

"Name one."

"There is an insurgency in Mexico."

"Sure. Subcomandante Verapaz. He's welded the Maya peasants into a paramilitary force, and they're all in revolt."

"He is a thorn, for he has taken up arms against the new world order. Not that I would ask you to terminate him, you understand."

The man in the balaclava winked broadly. "Understood."

"Nor do I promise payment should he meet an unseemly end."

"The Extinguisher assures you he's as good as buzzard bait."

"Why must you refer to yourself in the third person?" asked Anwar Anwar-Sadat.

"Because the Extinguisher is greater than one man in combat black. He's a symbol, a force of nature. He is good personified against evil incarnate, the irresistible force all immovable objects fear and a wild-haired warrior for our time."

"Yes. Like Zorro."

"No, damn it! Like the Extinguisher. Stop dragging those other guys into the conversation. They're not real. I am. There is only one Extinguisher, and his true name will never be known."

"But you have told me that your name is Blaize Fury."

"Another alias for the hero with a thousand faces."

Suddenly the man in black strode to the balcony window.

"Where are you going?"

"To Mexico."

"No, I mean at this moment. We are twenty floors up from the ground."

The lower part of the black balaclava shifted as if the mouth behind it smiled.

"Yeah, but only three from the roof."

Reaching out, the Extinguisher grasped a dangling black nylon line with his gloved hands. He cast a final glance in the secretary general's direction.

"Look for me in the newspapers or wherever men sing of blood."

And he was gone.

Anwar Anwar-Sadat walked out to the balcony and looked for the Extinguisher on the pavement below. When he saw no mangled body or stopped traffic, he decided the fool had survived his foolhardy exit.

How very much like Batman, he thought approvingly.

Well, if the fool succeeded, that would be good. If not, there was no political downside. He had given no explicit instructions to kill anybody, and that was all that mattered.

That, and the deniability of the sphinx.

Chapter 6

Dr. Harold W Smith had problems.

For Smith's entire life, he had been dogged by problems. Problems were as much a part of living as breathing, eating, sleeping and work. Problems came with the territory. Problems were his life.

Every responsible adult human being had problems. It was part of the human condition. And among human beings, Harold W Smith of the Vermont Smiths was one of the most responsible.

A U.S. president had long ago recognized Harold Smith's unswerving rectitude and responsibility. Smith was then an obscure CIA bureaucrat who toiled in the then-new field of computer science. Data interpretation and analysis was Smith's specialty. He analyzed shipments of raw materials, changes in the military hierarchies of other governments, food-distribution patterns, and out of these disparate data, forecast coups and brushfire wars with uncanny accuracy.

And he was noticed.

The President in those days was young and idealistic and took up the responsibilities of being chief executive and leader of the free world with great vigor and enthusiasm. Those were the coldest days of the Cold War, but the young President, upon assuming high office, discovered that communism wasn't the direst threat he faced. The real enemy lay within its borders. And America was already all but lost.

A period of lawlessness had brought the nation to the brink of anarchy. In other countries, martial law would have been declared. But this was the United States of America. States could declare martial law. As could cities and towns. Governors and mayors had that power.

The President of the United States could not declare a state of emergency short of civil war or foreign invasion. Not without admitting the unadmittable-that the experiment called democracy, which had flowered briefly among the ancient Greeks and was revived by tavern revolutionaries in a tiny colony of Great Britian, had failed.

In fact, his legal options were virtually nonexistent.

Suspending the Constitution was ruled out.

So the President had conceived an alternative. He called it CURE. It was not an acronym, but a prescription for a society poisoned by corruption, moral decay and organized crime.

That President had plucked Harold Smith out of the CIA, entrusting him with the ultimate responsibilty: save his country through any means, legal or illegal.

"Any means?" Smith had asked.

"As long as the means are secret. Nothing must reach back to this office. Officially the organization does not exist. You will have funding. You may recruit agents and informants so long as they do not know they are working for the organization. Only you and I must know. Save your country, Mr. Smith, and God willing, we can abolish CURE by the time we put that first man on the moon."

But by that time the President who had laid the burden of the ultimate responsibility on Harold Smith's shoulders had been cut down by the very lawlessness he had sought to defeat. By that time there were American footprints on the moon, but the greatest nation on the face of the earth was no closer to internal stability than before.

Smith had decided in those days that he would have to take the ultimate sanction. Assassination. Prior to that fateful decision, he had worked through the system, exposing crooked union organizers, corrupt judges, organized-crime figures in ways that dragged them into the remorseless grindstone of the judicial system.

It was not enough. After less than a decade, Smith understood it would never be enough.

So he reached out to New Jersey for an ordinary-seeming beat cop who had been tested in the jungles of Vietnam, and code-named him the Destroyer.

America's supersecret agency that didn't exist now had an enforcement arm who also didn't exist.

Only then did the hand of CURE truly begin to exert its awesome power against America's enemies.

The tide was turned back. True, it constantly threatened to swamp the ship of state, but America now had an edge. More importantly the Constitution survived intact. Smith bent, folded and spindled it on a daily basis. But only the successor Presidents had any inkling of that.

America struggled on.

The problems came and the problems went. Smith disposed of them with a ruthless efficiency that control of the greatest assassins in human history gave them. Invariably the problems always went away. And just as quickly new ones reared their heads.

Lately Harold had his eye on two particular problems. They existed on separate computer files designated Amtrak and Mexico.

Smith was pulling up the Amtrak file as the sun began to set on another day.

It was forty-three items long, he saw with a frown. For some two years now, train derailments had been piling up at an alarmirng rate. Some were passenger-rail mishaps, others freight accidents. Major and minor, they made the papers so often that late-night comedians joked that the nation's aging rail system was itself one gigantic train wreck.

The latest had occurred near La Plata, Missouri. A Santa Fe freight train had gone off its tracks while rounding a bend. A shifting cargo car overloaded with scrap metal was the official cause. Smith's frown deepened.

It was possible, he supposed. Virtually every derailment had its reasonable cause. A split rail. A vandal switching tracks. Poor track conditions. The numbers of people who annually attempted to beat fast-moving trains to crossings and paid for their folly with their lives continually amazed him. These incidents Smith dumped from the Amtrak file as nonaberrations attributable to human error.

Individually there was nothing to be suspicious of. Collectively they suggested a pattern. But no common cause seemed to percolate up from the mass of news-wire extracts and National Transportation Safety Board accident reports.

Smith stared at the slowly scrolling reports, his tired gray eyes behind the glass shields of his rimless eyeglasses skimming mechanically, as if they could perceive what long hours of study could not: a common link.

His old CIA-analyst skills were as sharp as they had been in the long-ago days when he was known in the Agency's corridors as "the Gray Ghost," as much for his colorless demeanor as for his unflagging habit of wearing banker's gray.

But today they failed him.

Smith hit the scroll-lock key and turned in his cracked leather chair.

Through the picture window of one-way glass that protected the most secure office outside of the Pentagon from prying eyes, Smith let his tired eyes fall on the restful waters of Long Island Sound.

Perhaps, he thought, it was time to send Remo and Chiun into the field on this one. If no force or agency was responsible for this unprecedented string of accidents, it suggested America's rail system was either overburdened or so shoddily run it presented a menace to the nation's vital transportation lines.

If so, exposing the dangerous condition technically fell within CURE operating parameters.

Smith turned in his seat, his pinched patrician face grim with resolve. He reached across the black glass of his desktop for the blue contact telephone he employed to reach his Destroyer. It was a secure line, scrambled and completely insulated from wiretapping. It was second only to the dialless red telephone he kept under lock and key in a lower desk drawer until such time as he needed to reach the current President.

This was not a situation that called for Presidential consultation. The President did not control CURE, any more than he controlled Congress these days. The CURE mandate allowed for Presidential suggestions, but not orders. The only order the President was allowed to give was the one that would close down CURE forever.

Smith's age-gnarled hand briefly touched the slick plastic of the pale blue receiver when his computer beeped once.

Withdrawing his hand, Smith addressed the screen. It was buried beneath the desktop's tinted glass surface and angled so it faced him.

The monitor itself was invisible under the black glass. Only the amber letters floating on the screen showed.

The red light in one corner winked insistently. A message beside it said, "Mexico!"

That meant one of Smith's automatic net-trolling programs had picked up something important. Probably an AP story moving across the wires that contained the keyword Mexico.

Smith tapped the silent pads of the keyless capacity-keyboard and brought it up.

It was an Associated Press bulletin:

MEXICO-QUAKE

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (AP)

A severe earthquake struck the Valley of Mexico at approximately 2:00 p.m. EST this afternoon. Initial reports say that damage to Mexico City is substantial, and there is significant loss of life. Eyewitness reports add that Mount Popo-catepetl is giving indications a major eruption is near. It is not yet known whether the volcano triggered the quake or if the quake brought the volcano-which had been showing renewed signs of activity in the past several months-to life again.

Smith frowned. This was not good news. Mexico was his other chief concern these days. The uprising in Chiapas, combined with political and economic instability, had turned America's sleepy southern neighbor into a smoldering political volcano.

Only a few months before, Mexican army tanks had taken up threatening positions on the Texas border, but were quickly pulled back. It had been an ominous move, but relations between the two nations had officially returned to normalcy.

But the strains were still there. Illegal immigration, the devaluation of the peso and fallout from the ill-fated NAFTA agreement had produced a growing animosity between the peoples of the U.S. and Mexico. That their respective leaders were outwardly cordial meant little. In the age of electronic news media, public opinion, not political will, drove policy.

As Smith reflected on this problem, a second bulletin popped onto the screen.

CHIAPAS REBEL MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (AP) Subcomandante Verapaz, leader of the insurgent Benito Juarez National Liberation Front, has in the past hour declared that the violent convulsion in Mexico City is a sign from the gods that they have turned away from the beleaguered leadership of Mexico and that the time has come to take the struggle into the capital.

Verapaz, whose true name and identity is unknown, is calling for all indigenous Mexicans to rise up and overwhelm the Federal Army of Mexico.

That decided Harold Smith. The Amtrak matter could wait.

Remo and Chiun were going into the field, all right. But they were going to Mexico.

Subcomandante Verapaz was no longer an internal Mexican problem. He was out to overthrow the lawful government in Mexico City. And a revolution on America's southern border constituted a direct threat to the United States of America.

Harold Smith's gray hand reached out to the blue contact telephone.

Chapter 7

Remo Williams was watching the Master of Sinanju fillet a fish when the telephone rang.

"I'll get it," he said, starting from his seat in the kitchen. It was a cane chair. Chairs were allowed in the downstairs kitchen. Tables, too, although most of the time they ate at a low taboret, seated cross-legged on tatami mats.

"You will not," snapped the Master of Sinanju.

"It might be Smith."

"It might be a czar or a bey or an emir. But it is none of them. We are about to dine. If Emperor Smith wishes to speak to me, let him call at an appropriate hour."

"It might be for me, you know."

"Smith only calls you in order to reach me."

"Not always."

"You will watch me prepare this excellent fish."

Remo sighed. He returned to his seat and placed his chin in the cup of his hands. He wasn't sure what was so important about this particular fish, but Chiun seemed to think it was.

"Observe the specimen in question. Is it not enticing to behold?"

"If you like sea bass," said Remo. "Me, I'm in the mood for pike."

"Pike is not yet in season."

"That's probably why I'm in the mood for it."

Chiun made a face. His wrinkles puckered into gullies.

In the background the telephone continued to ring.

"That's gotta be Smith," Remo said. "Who else would refuse to give up after twenty-six rings?"

"He will hang up after the forty-second ring."

"Yeah, and start all over again, figuring he might have misdialed."

"We are stronger than he is stubborn. Now, pay close attention. This is the correct way to fillet a fish."

As Remo watched, Chiun held the sea bass by its tail with one hand. The fish hung with its mouth agape, its eyes glassy. It didn't bother Remo. Chiun often served the fish with the head still on. He had long ago gotten used to having his dinner stare back at him.

As Remo watched, Chiun said, "Sea bass makes excellent stir fry. So we must dismember this excellent specimen first."

"This is starting to sound like 'Wok with Wing.'"

"Do not insult me by comparing me to a Chinese television chef. I spit upon Chinese."

"That's the rumor in the neighborhood," Remo said dryly.

The Master of Sinanju's eyes went thin with menace. He blew out his cheeks like an annoyed puffer fish. An eagle's talon, his free hand curled in, then out, ivory fingernails revealing themselves with a slow menace.

Abruptly they flashed, weaving a silvery pattern about the fish. Skin fell away in long strips to land on the newspaper under the head.

The head fell amid the shed skin with a plop.

As if coming back to life, the bass leaped from Chiun's hand and, swapping ends, suddenly hung tail downward. A fingernail went whisk, and the tail was sheared off cleanly. The fins fluttered after it.

Then, working in midair, Chiun began to fillet the fish with nothing more that his wickedly sharp and slightly curved index fingernail.

"Hope you washed recently," Remo said as the telephone finally fell silent.

Chiun made no rely. The phone started its discordant ringing anew. Remo switched hands, cupping his chin in the other hard and simultaneously stifling a yawn.

Chiun worked so swiftly the ordinary eye could never hope to follow it. It seemed as if the fish were caught in some troubled ivory web that peeled off long sheets of pale flesh as it thrashed to escape the invisible strands.

When it was over-and it was over in a twinkling-the sea bass lay in two separate piles, discarded internal matter and perfectly boneless fillets of fish.

Remo wondered if he should applaud.

"Why do you not applaud?" asked Chiun.

"I wasn't sure if that was what you wanted."

"And you are correct. Perfection does not require applause."

"Good. I made the right decision."

"Sincerity is the most flattering form of imitation, however."

"I think you have that filleted up."

"Perhaps. But I do not demonstrate the ancient Korean art of filleting fish with no tools other than the natural ones of the body without reason."

"Okay, I'll bite. Why the demonstration?"

"To instruct you in the error of your ways."

"Which are?"

"I am Reigning Master. You are next Reigning Master, currently Apprentice Reigning Master."

"Yep."

"You will follow in my sandals, taking up my kimono after I am gone or retired, whichever comes first."

"I'll have to think about the kimono."

"Kimonos are traditional."

"Kimonos are Eastern. I gotta operate in the West."

"Perhaps in the next century, by Western reckoning, you will operate in the East. Especially if the West falls into the ocean."

"That's not going to happen, Little Father."

"Wherever you operate, you must do so with sublime grace, skill and a perfection that approaches that of your teacher."

"Perfection is perfection. If I am perfect, I will be as perfect as you," said Remo.

"You cannot be as perfect as me, being but half-Korean. It is impossible. Unless you mend your ways, of course."

"Assuming I want to mend my ways, what are you driving at?"

And Chiun lifted his long-nailed fingers, admiring them. "Observe these, the ultimate tools of a Sinanju Master. Are they not graceful? Are they not perfection? No blade of steel or bone or wood can approach their deadliness. It is for this reason that Sinanju has long celebrated them as the Knives of Eternity, for even if broken they will unfailingly grow back to strike terror into the hearts of all enemies of Sinanju."

"They're striking terror into mine right now."

"Now look at your own pitiful nails."

Remo did. They were cut short Western style. The index nail of his right finger was slightly longer. Just enough to score glass or metal. It looked like an ordinary nail. But years of Sinanju diet, exercise and certain honing techniques had imbued it with a sharpness so fine it could slice open thick rhinoceros hide.

"Looks fine to me," he said.

"In Sinanju's eyes, they are maimed and disfigured. If my ancestors-who are your ancestors-"

"Half ancestors," Remo corrected.

"If our ancestors could see you with your sacred Knives of Eternity cut to the quick and discarded like mere lemon peels, they would tear out their hair, rend their kimonos and shriek against the whiteness that has tainted you."

"I met a few of them in the Void. Nobody mentioned my nails."

"They were too embarrassed. If you had an extra toe or a hideous scar, would you expect them to point it out?"

"You would."

"I am!" Chiun shrieked. "You embarrass me before your-our-ancestors by clinging to transient Western ways. How can you walk in my sandals when you cannot gouge out the eyes of the enemies of the House properly? How can you hold your head up when you blunt your fingers with crude steel implements? Next you will insert copper studs in your ears or brass rings in your nose as they do in the West."

"Cut it out, Chiun. We had this argument years and years ago. You lost. Get over it."

"I did not lose. I retreated. Now I am back, more determined than ever before that I will have my way."

"I just want my dinner," moaned Remo.

"When you can fillet your own fish, you may eat fish again. Not until then."

The phone was still ringing, and Remo, annoyed, jumped for it.

"What is it?" he barked into the mouthpiece.

"Remo, is something amiss?" It was Harold Smith.

"Oh, Chiun is just ragging me that my fingernails are longer than your fingernails. Nyah. Nyah. Nyah. Unquote."

Smith made a throat-clearing sound. "I need you in Mexico."

"What's in Mexico?"

"A major earthquake."

Chiun crowed, "Hah! I told you so, but you refused to heed my warning."

"What was that?" Smith asked.

"Just Chiun busting my chops. He claims to have felt the earth move a couple hours ago. And he was alone."

"The Mexican situation is precarious, Remo. A nationwide state of emergency has been declared by the Mexican president. Already, frightened immigrants are flooding U.S. border checkpoints, clamoring for refuge."

"So? Either we let them in or we close down the border. It's our country, isn't it?"

"There is more. You are familiar with Subcomandante Verapaz?"

"Yeah. The rebel leader who thinks he's the next Fidel Castro."

"Exactly. He had called upon his followers to take to the streets. He wants revolution and he sees this as the historic moment. It is time to take him out of the political equation."

"Good"

"I am glad you agree."

"I don't care two fingers about Mexico. I just want someone to take my frustrations out on," Remo said fiercely.

"You have no frustrations," Chiun countered. "I am the frustrated one. I have exalted you above all others and am now forced to endure the sight of your disfigured, impotent fingers as my reward."

"Blow it out your barracks bag," said Remo.

And as Remo watched, the Master of Sinanju flung himself about and ran the perfect fillets of sea bass down the complaining garbage disposal.

"Your tickets to Mexico City will be waiting for you at the Azteca Airlines counter at Logan Airport," Smith was saying. "Connections to the Chiapas city of San Cristobal de las Casas will be through Aero Quetzal. From there, pick up his trail in the town of Boca Zotz. It is a hotbed of Juarezista sympathizers. Verapaz holds most of his press conferences there."

"If we know that, how come the Mexican army doesn't?"

"They do. But liquidating Verapaz would create more political problems than it would solve. This is why we are taking the initiative. Make certain it looks like natural causes."

"Anything else?"

"Be discreet. Relations with Mexico City are delicate. We want no diplomatic incidents."

"Is there a meal on that flight?" asked Remo.

"Yes."

"Good." And Remo hung up. "We're going to Mexico, Little Father."

Chiun did not look up from the sink. "Do not forget to pack your gloves," he said thinly.

"It's jungle down there. I won't need gloves."

"Then allow your fingers to flower like the fearsome thorns they are so that shame-concealing gloves will not be necessary."

Remo rolled his eyes ceilingward.

Chapter 8

The Extinguisher approached Mexico City airport customs bearing a passport that identified him as Laszlo Crannick, Jr. His hair was darkened to a jet black. Wraparound mirror-finish sunglasses concealed the piercing blue color of his eyes. A gray sport coat thrown over his black turtleneck combat shirt gave him a vaguely Continental look.

He carried a duffel bag, his rucksack hanging off one heroic shoulder.

Divided among them were the nonmetallic components of his Hellfire supermachine pistol, the most sophisticated and versatile hand weapon ever designed.

In the leather holster at the small of his back was a backup pistol made of space-age ceramics undetectable by conventional airport magnometers.

The customs area was equipped with stoplights. You pressed a button. If the light came up green, you were passed through. If red, you were subject to a baggage search.

Striding to the button, he pressed it confidently. It glowed red. No problem. It happened. He'd ace it no sweat.

The Extinguisher dropped his bags on the table while the customs man sized him up with an unreadable glance.

"Pasaporte, por favor."

"Huh?"

The customs man looked closer, his eyes hard as obsidian.

"American?" he demanded.

"Yes."

He held up his hand. "Let me see your passport, senor. "

The passport was offered. Here was the critical moment. If he cleared customs without incident, all of Mexico was open to him.

The customs officer in his dark green uniform looked at the passport carefully. If he knew the real name of the wildhaired warrior who sought entry into Mexico, he would wear a more respectful face. But he did not know he was facing Blaize Fury. He did not know he stood within killing distance of the internationally feared Extinguisher.

When his eyes came up, they were hard.

"I must see other identifications."

He was just being thorough, the Extinguisher decided. Chances were he wouldn't check the baggage. Odds were long he would be passed through without a hitch.

"Here."

The bogus U.S. driver's license was surrendered.

The customs man gave it only cursory examination. He motioned for another customs officer to join him.

The Extinguisher stood his ground. He had no quarrel with these two. If it came to a fair fight, then he would do what was necessary. All that mattered was the mission. Nailing Subcomandante Verapaz. In his war against tyrants, he and Mexican customs were on the same team. They just didn't know it. If they were fortunate, they never would.

He made his voice low and steady as a rock. "Is something wrong?"

The customs man's response was like the soft crack of a whip. "This passport is not valid."

"Not valid! Screw you, taco breath! It says Laszlo Crannick, Jr. I'm Laszlo Crannick, Jr. Just ask my father, Laszlo Crannick, Sr."

All eyes were drawn to the formidable figure of the man in gray sport clothes. Other customs officials approached.

If it came to a fight, he would have to take the customs men out first. Then bolt for the exit. There would be a car, maybe a taxi. After that, it would be easy to blend into the congestion of Mexico City traffic. Urban camouflage was an Extinguisher specialty.

"I must ask jou to step out of line," the senior customs man said sternly. "Jou are being detained."

"You can't detain me!"

"Nevertheless, jou are being detained. Come with me."

Before the Extinguisher could reach for his backup weapon, two pairs of hands came from nowhere to seize his arms. His bags were taken up, and he was marched away under the frightened gaze of American tourists whose faces wondered if they, too, would receive such harsh treatment if the customs light came up red.

The Extinguisher allowed himself to be led way. It would be easier to deal with his opponents behind closed doors, where there were no witnesess and no backup. A master of hand-to-hand combat, he could take them all. There were only four.

The room was a cubicle, and with the door shut, the sounds of airport bustle abated.

As two green uniforms stripped open the zipper of his bag, the senior one said, "I must ask your business in Mexico."

"I'm a tourist."

"Jou come to see the sights, not to do business?"

"I have no business in Mexico City," the Extinguisher assured them in his firm, no-nonsense voice.

Out of the duffel came the barrel of his CIA designed Hellfire, wrapped in metallic gold-and-green Christmas paper. It might have been a Cuban cigar. Except for its weight.

The chief customs officer frowned angrily. "What is this?"

"A Christmas present."

He extracted more wrapped packages. "And these?"

"More presents."

"Christmas was two months ago, senor."

The Extinguisher managed a cool shrug. "So I'm late. People bring Christmas presents late all the time."

"To whom are jou bringing these presents if jou are only a tourist?" the interrogator asked as the others began tearing off the wrappings.

"Hey! You can't do that!"

"We are merely opening these innocent presents of yours."

"You know how long it took me to wrap those?"

"Jou may rewrap them once we are done. Now I must ask for the name and address of the person or persons to whom these presents are intended."

Before he could form the next words, the Extinguisher saw the colorful green-and-gold paper come off the Lucite ammo drum filled with skull-faced Hydra-Shok rounds and decided to shift tactics.

"Look, I'll level with you."

A pistol was in the act of being drawn from side leather. The Extinguisher made sure his hands were open and in full view.

"Speak."

"I'm not Laszlo Crannick, Jr. That's not my true name."

"What is your true name?"

"It's-" he let the pause hang heavy in the air "-Blaize Fury."

The eyes of his interrogator grew darkly sharp. Those of the others went wide in their brown faces. The man holding the ammo drum dropped it to the floor. It rattled like the deadly dice of death.

The tactical advantage belonged to the Extinguisher again.

"I'm here on an important mission," he announced in grim tones.

"State this mission."

"You all know about Subcomandante Verapaz."

Eyes hardened at the despised name.

"Good. I've been sent to take him out. Cold. Savvy?"

"Jou are to kill him?"

"The Extinguisher doesn't merely kill. He extinguishes."

"Can jou prove jou are Blaize Fury?" the chief customs man asked in a guarded tone.

The Extinguisher lifted his arms. "ID cards in the band of my pants."

He was quickly searched. They found the backup pistol before the tiny card case. It no longer mattered. They were all on the same side. Everybody knew that now.

The man who found the card case exploded in his excitement.

" iMadre de Dios! It is true! These cards proclaim him to be El Extinguirador. "

The customs official grabbed a card and read it quickly.

"But jou-jou are a myth!"

The Extinguisher allowed a cool, confident smile to warp his lips. "Camouflage. If people think I don't exist, they drop their guard. Then I move in for the kill."

"Jou mean the extinguish, do jou not?" an impressed customs man said.

The chief interrogator snapped, "Who sends jou after the insurgent, Verapaz?"

"I'm not at liberty to divulge the name of my employer. You understand. Deniability."

"Jou must tell us this thing."

"Sorry. It's a need-to-know kind of deal."

"Then jou are under arrest."

"Are you shitting me? We're on the same team."

This time all four side arms were out of leather and aimed at him. One trembled in the hand of the man who pointed it.

"Jou will place your hand at your back, Senor El Extinguirador. "

"Look, you don't want to do this. Just let me through, and Verapaz will be a bad memory inside of forty-eight hours."

"Jou will be turned over to the Federal Judicial Police for further questioning and disposal."

"Look, how much will it cost for you guys to look the other way?"

Interest flickered in the senior customs officer's dark eyes.

"How much have jou in mind, senor?"

"There's three hundred bucks in my wallet. Take half."

While the guns kept him at bay, a hand fished his wallet from the inner pocket of his gray sport coat.

"It is true, there is three hundred American dollars here."

The senior customs official said something in Spanish, and the money was quickly divided into two unequal piles.

Seeing this, the Extinguisher began to relax. His strong, angular face had a slight sheen of tension upon it.

The senior customs man took the larger pile while the other was divided equally among his subordinates. Then the wallet was returned to the inner jacket pocket. Its weight no longer tugged at the coat's fabric.

"You can't do that. How will I pay my way to Chiapas?"

"Jou will not. Jou will instead cool your boots in a FJP cell."

"You're making a big mistake here," the Extinguisher protested as the cold steel handcuffs were clamped to his unresisting wrists.

"It is jou who have made the mistake, coming to Mexico intent upon mischief as jou have."

"You want this whole country to careen into civil war?"

"Being the man who captured the much-wanted Blaize Fury is more important to me today. I will worry about civil war manana. "

They led him out of the terminal and into the stagnant, smoky air of Mexico City. It tasted foul. But not as foul as the betrayal raising his gorge.

The Extinguisher had been captured. Well, it had happened before. It was always temporary. There wasn't a prison built that could hold him for long.

There was an olive green Light Armored Vehicle waiting at the curb, and he was loaded into this. He noticed the ground was cracked in spots and wondered if the entire country was this badly maintained. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Extinguisher recalled something the airline captain had announced about the present emergency. He had a really thick accent, so he hadn't paid much attention. Mexico was always having problems anyway.

As he stepped into the back, the Extinguisher supressed a thin smile of contempt. The LAV was small and toylike compared to the Armored Personnel Carriers of major powers. US. police SWAT teams had LAVs exactly like this. They were a joke. Their armor wouldn't turn a hollowpoint slug.

The doors clanged shut, and the LAV moved into traffic.

On the other side of the LAV interior, two brownuniformed soldiers sat as stony faced as Aztec idols.

"You guys always look this happy?" he asked.

They said nothing. Their faces were a dark mask.

"Screw you mothers, then."

They said nothing to that. Only then did the Extinguisher realize they spoke no English.

The traffic sounds were horrendous. Horns honked and blared, and the air coming through the body armor smelled of car exhaust and sulphur. He wondered if it was a muffler hole, or the smog that hung in the Valley of Mexico like a perpetual shroud of death.

The LAV rattled and jounced as it moved through the stop-and-go traffic. It seemed to hit a light every hundred yards.

On the floor the Extinguisher's duffel bag sat unzipped. A soldier noticed the bright-colored packages and reached down to help himself to one.

Seeing this, the other soldado decided he couldn't be left out. He took up the rucksack and began rummaging through it.

"Hey! That's not your property."

They pointedly ignored him as they stripped the "presents" of their colorful metallic paper wrapping.

Quickly the true nature of the contents was revealed.

They were soldiers and knew armament. They began to assemble the pieces one by one, as if doing a puzzle. The dreaded Hellfire supermachine pistol slowly took shape.

"That's right, you dillweeds. Put it together. Make it easy for me."

The LAV stopped at a light. Cross traffic hummed all around. The gun ports were closed, so surreptitious visual recon was impossible.

Abruptly the LAV started rocking on its springs. It started as a side-to-side rocking, then shifted to a vertical bouncing. The LAV began pogoing. Everyone grabbed for something to hold on to. Except the Extinguisher, whose hands were pinioned at his back.

"What the hell's going on here?" he growled.

The soldiers swapped startled looks. One dropped the half-assembled machine pistol.

"Ay!"

The LAV kept rocking. Outside, something shattered. It sounded like glass. More glass shattered. And suddenly it seemed as if every mirror in the universe was breaking all at once.

One soldier screamed out a word. "iTemblor!"

"What?"

"Temblor de tierra!"

The other soldier screamed, "Terremoto! Terremoto!"

"Say it in English, will you?"

"Terremoto!"

The rocking grew more violent. The Extinguisher's head collided with the LAV roof.

"Ow!"

And the two soldados jumped from their seats, throwing open the doors and evacuating the LAV.

"Wait! What's going on?"

The LAV was literally bouncing on its tires now.

The cacophony of Mexico City took on a new ferocious quality. Men screamed. Woman wailed. Glass shattered. Something like stone cracking turned into a protracted splintery rumble.

As if a blind giant were pushing it around, the LAV started swinging on its braked tires. Visible through the open back door, a city falling into chaos was revealed.

"Holy shit! The mother of all earthquakes!"

The Extinguisher sprang into action. He dived for the ground. It shook hard enough to rattle his teeth. Flat on his stomach, he looked around, sizing up the situation.

Almost at once, he decided to get back into the LAV. It looked like the safest thing for miles around.

Outside, as the city shook itself, a thunderous roar came from due southeast. He got down on the cold floor and recovered his weapon by feel. Fingering a thin steel pick from its butt receptacle, he inserted it into the handcuff lock and tried to pick the lock.

The lock aperture kept shaking.

"Damn it! Hold still a minute," he snapped.

The lock refused to cooperate.

The earth was still shaking when he sprung the cuffs. Taking up his Hellfire supermachine pistol, he stowed it into his rucksack, along with the rest of his gear.

When the earth finally stopped shaking, there was a long, terrible silence.

Blaize Fury stepped out.

The great city had been brought to its knees. To the north a building face had fallen to the pavement, exposing the cubbyholes of a multifloored office tower. People shrieked up there looking out at the city that had been whelmed by a force greater than any city ever built.

"Man, this place looks like Oklahoma City in quadraphonic stereo!"

But in the context of his mission, the Extinguisher had drawn a trump card.

Climbing into the driver's seat, he found the keys had been left in the ignition. The engine was still idling. He threw the emergency brake and got moving.

The ashpalt had buckled directly ahead. It was impassable. Traffic lay stopped all around. People were out of their cars, looking up and around and all around again, their varicolored faces slack and dazed, as their eyes tried to take in the enormity of what had transpired.

"Gotta get out of this hellhole," the Extinguisher muttered.

Spotting a stretch of empty sidewalk, he ran the LAV up on it, honking the horn impatiently.

People got out of the way. Not as fast as they should. They were too stunned for that. But a path was cleared.

When he found a stretch of clear road, he jumped for it.

Traffic was stopped everywhere. Life was stopped everywhere. As he muscled the LAV over buckled crevices, around obstacles and through the city, a dirty rain began to fall.

It only looked like rain at first. When the grayish black precipitation touched the windshield, it stuck like snow. But it wasn't snow. For one thing, it smoked.

The Extinguisher threw out a hand to collect a sample. He snapped it back instantly.

"Ouch! Damn it! Motherfucker."

Sucking on his burned hand, he drove one-handed.

Near the broad paved square called the Zocalo, he began to understand. Visible past the forlorn Mexican national flag that was already drooping at half staff was one of the many mountains that ring the Mexican capital city.

It was throwing up a great column of excrement-brown smoke like vaporizing compost.

"Don't look now, but I think that's one upset volcano," the Extinguisher muttered to himself.

Rolling up the window, he drove grimly, as people, covering their heads with newspapers and anything else at hand, fled the burning volcanic ash.

For once the Extinguisher understood he was outmatched. For once his warrior skills meant next to nothing. For once he was no better than any gunless mortal.

"Man, if she really blows her top my cojones are guacamole!"

Chapter 9

The Azteca Airlines flight left the Boston gate on time and, thanks to a brisk tail wind, arrived on the ground in Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport more than an hour early.

"Attention, all passengers," the captain said. "We have landed in Texas in order to refuel. The stewardess will be coming through the cabin to collect the fuel tax."

"Fuel tax?" Remo said.

"I will pay no tax," said the Master of Sinanju at his window seat. He always took the window seat in case the wing showed signs of falling off. He wore an emerald green kimono now, trimmed in ocher.

"Why do we have to pay a fuel tax?" Remo asked the stewardess when the wicker collection basket was placed under his nose. It reminded him of the collection baskets in the church he attended as a boy.

"Because Azteca Airlines is too poor to afford the fuel since NAFTA was passed."

"We will pay no tax," insisted Chiun.

"I'll get it," Remo said. "Anything to get going."

"This is taxation without reservations," Chiun sniffed.

"Actually the slogan is Taxation Without Representation, but I like your version better."

"Senor Ross Perot was correct," said the stewardess after Remo dropped two twenties in the basket. "If jou gringos had voted for that giant of a man, Mexico would today be a First World country."

"Yeah, and General Alzheimer would have been vice president."

"It is preferable to that stick of wood who cannot dance."

The plane was in the air within thirty minutes. During that time, a meal was served.

"I can't eat this," said Remo, pointing to the plastic tray loaded with refried beans in a spicy tomato sauce.

"Good. I will eat it, then," said the stewardess, taking back the meal and disappearing into the galley.

When she returned, Remo asked her for rice.

"We have no rice. Only corn."

"What kind of airline doesn't serve rice?"

"A Mexican one," said the stewardess, continuing her rounds.

"Guess I go hungry a while longer," said Remo, who would have settled for corn, but was forbidden to eat it by the Master of Sinanju, who claimed it would turn the whites of Remo's eyes yellow.

"We are going to be late," Chiun said, his tone accusing.

"So what?" said Remo. "Verapaz can wait."

A woman passenger immediately behind them leaned forward. "Did jou say 'Verapaz,' senor?"

"No," said Remo.

"Possibly," said Chiun. "What do you know of him?"

The woman clapped her hand to her ample bosom. "He is the handsomest man in all of Mexico."

A notch formed between Remo's dark eyes.

"How do you know that? He wears a ski mask all the time."

"His eyes are handsome. Therefore, his face must be handsome. It is logical, no?"

"It is logical, definitely no," said Remo.

"They say he has green eyes," a woman across the aisle said. "I adore green eyes."

"It is said he is a defrocked Jesuit priest who has taken up arms to liberate his country," the stewardess offered.

"He is a comunista!" a man snarled.

"No, he is a pure-blooded Maya who was educated in the states," another man affirmed. "God has blessed this man."

"In other words," Remo said, "none of you know a thing."

"In Mexico," the stewardess said sternly, "the truth is what jou believe because the reality of life is so terrible."

"Tell that to the Kurds," Remo said.

The captain came on the intercom to announce that they were within thirty minutes of their destination. "That is, if the NAFTA tax is paid in full," he added.

"Another tax!" Chiun squeaked.

"It is necessary," the stewardess assured him. "Since NAFTA, Mexico has been impoverished."

"I thought you people were all for NAFTA," said Remo.

"We wanted the good that came from NAFTA. Not the bad things."

"Tough. You bought in. You draw the bad with the good."

"There is no good. We were tricked by our leaders. Your leaders, as well."

"This is taxation without restriction," Chiun said. "We will pay no more taxes."

"That goes double for me," Remo said.

"In that case, we will circle Mexico City until we run out of fuel, or crash," warned the stewardess.

"You wouldn't do that in a million years."

"Sometimes death is preferable to life. It is true for Mexicans ever since the calamity."

"The earthquake?"

"No. NAFTA. Our souls are strong, and we will endure countless earthquakes. Earthquakes can only break our bodies. But NAFTA has crushed our proud Mexican spirits. We have no future because our money is worth nothing now."

"How does that give you the right to hold up Americans every chance you get?"

"Norteamericanos are feelthy rich."

"Not for long if we keep getting taxed into the poorhouse," said Remo sourly.

"We will pay no tax," said Chiun firmly.

"The fuel tax is all you'll see from this row," Remo added.

The stewardess went away, and a moment later the captain came back, his face dark with an anger that ran deep into the bone.

"Jou must pay the NAFTA tax if we are to land, senores. "

Remo folded his lean arms. "Go ahead. Crash the plane. I dare you."

"Yes," said Chiun, also folding his silk-clad arms, "destroy yourselves. We do not care. We have been taxed nearly to death. You are demanding blood from two stones."

Shaking his fist in their faces the captain vowed, "Mexicans will never bend to American intimidations."

"That wasn't a threat, we just-"

But the captain had already spun on his heel and stormed back to the cabin. The door slammed shut so hard the overhead luggage bins shook in sympathy.

"We win," Chiun said blandly.

"I'm not so sure about that ...."

Seconds later the 727 nosed into a steep dive. The engines began howling. Rushing air screamed over the wings and other control surfaces. Standing passengers were thrown off their feet. Anyone seated was jammed forward in his seat. A stewardess coming out of the rear rest room landed on her stomach and, despite her best efforts to grab chair supports, inexorably slid toward the front of the aircraft, her liquid eyes full of fear.

"Now will jou pay the tax?" the captain demanded over the intercom.

"Damn," said Remo, jumping from his seat so fast his seat belt snapped in two. Chiun followed, an emerald specter.

Remo hit the cockpit door. It was locked. He was stepping back to kick it in when the Master of Sinanju floated up and inserted one long fingernail into the lock aperture. He twisted his finger left, then right. The lock went click, and he flung the door open with a grand gesture.

"Thanks," said Remo.

He stepped into the cabin.

The captain and copilot were frozen in their seats. The captain had thrown the control yoke all the way forward. Eyes welded shut, the copilot was making the sign of the cross.

Through the windshield, Remo could see the mountains of northern Mexico coming up to meet the plane like blunt brown teeth.

"Are you crazy!" he exploded.

"The tax or muerte! Viva Mexico!"

Remo took the captain by his right earlobe. With his free hand he took the copilot's left earlobe. He squeezed.

"Aieee!" they screamed in stereo.

"Pull up now or the pain gets worse," Remo warned.

And Remo squeezed harder on the earlobe nerve that filled the veins and nervous system with a sensation exactly like that of scalding acid.

Tears squeezing from his eyes, the captain pulled back on the yoke. The plane, shuddering, brought its nose up. The air scream abated. The turbines settled down. They were soon flying level again.

"Jou may let go now, senor," the captain gasped. "I have done as jou have asked."

"You through screwing around?" Remo demanded.

"Si."

"You going to land the plane?"

"On my mother's honor."

"On the ground is all I care about," said Remo, returning to his seat.

Chiun trailed him, saying, "Without me, where would you be at this exact moment?"

"Probably pounding a beat back in Newark," Remo said unhappily.

"That is not what I meant."

"You would be dead if it were not for the elegant Knives of Eternity which grace my perfect hands."

"Okay, I'd be dead. But I'm not growing my fingernails as long as Fu Manchu."

Chiun beat him to their row so Remo couldn't steal the window seat. When he saw that the wing was still attached to the plane, his bony fingers grasped the opposite wrist, and the verdant sleeves of his silk kimono closed over both hands.

After they got settled again, the stewardess came up and said, "Jou must pay for the seat belt jou broke."

Remo sighed. "How much?"

"Thirty dollars. American. We do not accept pesos."

"Figures. How much was the NAFTA tax?"

"Thirty dollars, but it is a coincidence."

Remo handed over three tens and noticed they went into the wicker basket labeled NAFTA.

"I never liked Mexico," Remo muttered.

"The House never lowered itself to working for them."

"Didn't you once tell me the House would have loved working for the Aztecs?"

"I lied. We would only have loved their gold, not their rulers."

"That's really convincing coming from someone who won't take his eyes off the wing because that's the time they pick to fall off. Unquote."

"It will happen to us some day. Mark my words."

When the Fasten Seat Belt sign came on, Remo tied his seat belt about his flat stomach like the sleeves of a sweater. Out the window the ring of mountains surrounding the Valley of Mexico loomed up like a jagged earthen wall.

Almost at once the plane shook as if buffeted by turbulence. Remo knew from past experience this was normal. Thermal updrafts from the valley below were constant.

But the buffeting grew violent. The Azteca Airlines plane dipped on one wing, and through the sealed window ports everyone could hear a thunderous rumble and roar.

"It is another terremotol" a man screamed.

"That means earthquake, " Chiun translated for Remo's benefit.

"Don't be ridiculous," Remo said. "Earthquakes shake the ground, not the air."

"It is an airquake!" the panicked passenger insisted.

"No," said the Master of Sinanju. "It is a volcano."

No sooner had the old Korean spoken the word than a cloud seemed to swallow the aircraft. The sky outside the window became a hideous smoky brown.

The emergency lights came on. Overhead compartments sprung open. Yellow plastic oxygen masks dropped down on their flexible tubes.

Chiun grabbed his, and Remo decided it was a good idea, so he followed suit.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the captain said in a fearstrangled voice. "I regret to inform jou that Mount Popocatepetl has erupted. We must divert to another airport."

The plane's engines began laboring and straining.

The 727 flew and flew through a realm of roiling denseness, like boiling liquid excrement. Nothing was visible beyond the portholes. Not even the winglights.

"Remo!" Chiun squeaked. "The wings are gone."

"If the wings were gone, Little Father, we'd be in a tailspin by now."

"Perhaps they are awaiting the most treacherous moment. Wings are sneaky that way. One never knows when they will choose to fall off."

"Remind me never to fly this airline again," Remo muttered.

"It is all the fault of NAFTA," the stewardess who had slid the length of the cabin said as she adjusted her foundation garments through her disheveled uniform.

"How is this NAFTA's fault?" Remo asked.

"NAFTA has angered the gods of old Mexico," she spit out the words with venom.

"That's ridiculous," said Remo.

Chiun laid a quieting hand on Remo's bare arm.

"Hush, Remo. Lest the gods of old Mexico hear your blasphemous words and wrench the wings from this mighty craft in their malevolent spite."

"Not you, too?"

"There is an old saying in my house. 'One may slay a king, but the wise assassin avoids treading on the bunions of the gods.'"

Remo lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "The bunions of the gods?"

Chiun arranged his kimono skirts absently. "That is the saying. I did not make it up. I merely report it."

All at once daylight broke. The plane emerged from the roiling brown clouds of ash to broad daylight as if passing from the twilight zone of dusk and dawn.

On either side the wings shone as if scoured clean by the hot ash.

"Good thing these windows don't open," Remo muttered, removing his oxygen mask.

Chiun nodded sagely. "The gods are not displeased with us. Good."

The captain came on the intercom again.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your capitan speaking. I am informed by the Mexico City tower that it is inadvisable to land for some time. We will divert to another city. I will now entertain offers as to the most popular city of your choice."

"What did he say?" Remo asked Chiun.

"Quickly! Offer him as much as is necessary to take us to our destination."

"Are you kidding?"

Looking back to where the other passengers were hastily pooling their funds in order to bid on the destination of their choice, Chiun hissed, "Hurry. Lest we are marooned in some godforsaken place."

"Godforsaken," said Remo, coming out of his seat, "just about describes every part of the Mexican experience."

Remo beat two businessmen and a nun to the cabin and shut the door behind him for privacy.

Recognizing Remo, the captain and copilot clapped their hands over their ears in self-defense.

Instantly the yoke tipped forward, and the aircraft went into another dive. Remo reached across, hauled it back and pried the captain's fingers from his ears.

Guiding by the wrists, he forced them to curl around the control wheel again.

"What is your wish, senor?" he gasped.

"I'm thinking of San Cristobal de las Casas."

"San Cristobal de las Casas is an excellent destination. Do jou not think so, Vergillio?"

The copilot, Vergillio, sat unhearing. Remo pried a hand off an ear so the captain could repeat his statement.

"St. San Cristobal de las Casas is very excellent. But we must allow the other passengers to make their offer. It is the democratic way."

"It is the way of Mexico," agreed the captain.

"It's called institutional bribery," Remo countered.

"The way of Mexico," the captain repeated blandly.

Sighing, Remo said, "I'll top any offers."

"Done," the captain and copilot said in unison.

"You take Visa or Discover?"

"Si."

THE AIRPORT at San Cristobal de las Casas, it turned out, was neither open nor large enough to accommodate a 727, but for five thousand dollars American the captain and his copilot were willing to risk it.

They dropped airspeed, the turbines spooling down, and lowered the landing gear.

They made a first pass, decided the runway was only a thousand yards too short and came around from the north.

The 727 set down perfectly, rolling and rattling across the weed-grown asphalt. The overhead bins shook. Three popped open, dropping luggage onto passenger heads. Everybody held on for dear life.

Just when it started to look like a good landing, the wings started coming off.

First it was the right wing. It struck a cypress tree and was instantly sheered off. All eyes went to the starboard side of the plane. Faces went white.

And so everyone except the Master of Sinanju missed the startling sight of the port wing as it was yanked free by another tree.

As it turned out, losing the wings was the best thing that could have happened. Passengers realized that when the lumbering cabin was suddenly bumping through what amounted to a lane in a dense green forest.

This went on for what seemed an eternity, but couldn't have been much more than a minute.

In the end the 727 didn't so much brake as run out of momentum.

"Welcome to the Lacadon forest," said the captain in a relieved voice. "Jou have survived another flight on Azteca Airlines. Thank jou and we hope that jou will fly with us again soon."

The cabin burst into applause.

The stewardess threw open the cabin door, and a wave of sultry heat came in, instantly overpowering the airconditioning.

Remo got to the door first and looked out. There were no air stairs naturally. Below was soft soil. It supported a dense growth of forest that was a strange mixture of tropical jungle and pine forest. Firs jostled cypress trees and weirdlooking palms.

Peering ahead, Remo noticed the nose of the 727 had stopped about twenty feet short of a bank of some trees he couldn't begin to classify, because he'd never seen bark so red and peeling.

The captain popped his head out the cabin door.

"Hokay?"

"Are you crazy? You crashed the plane for three grand! They're going to fire you."

"It does not matter. Since NAFTA, my salary equals twelve dollars American a day. On three thousand, I can retire. Happy landings, senor. "

"You could have gotten us all killed, you know."

The copilot smiled with all of his teeth. "Next time, perhaps. Adios."

Remo dropped to the ground and, using the edge of his hand, started chopping away at the bole of a fir tree. He cut it on opposite sides the way lumberjacks did, and when he had the cut he wanted, he took up a position and gave the fir a single hard side-kick.

It splintered, toppling to fall parallel with the cabin.

It was no coincidence that the bole provided the perfect first step for the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun stepped off the plane and looked around. His face was a parchment mask.

"Not bad for a guy with short fingernails, huh, Little Father?"

"Do not forget my trunk," said Chiun, his voice dripping with ingratitude.

Remo's face fell.

"Next time whistle up your own air-stairs," he snapped.

"Next time," said Chiun, stepping off and settling to the ground like a tiny green mandarin making landfall after a long sea voyage, "we will not come to Mexico."

As they prepared to leave the airport, someone accosted them and tried to charge them for cutting down the fir tree. No one seemed overly concerned about the demolished plane, but the tree was another matter.

"Stuff it," said Remo.

The local authorities were summoned, and Remo found himself confronted by a knot of hard-eyed Mexican soldiers in wilted uniforms.

"Jou are under arrest," a sergeant announced.

Remo had one of Chiun's traveling trunks slung over one shoulder. It had been a major miracle to convince the old Korean to travel this lightly, so he wasn't about to complain. Normally the Master of Sinanju insisted that all seventeen steamer trucks accompany him during his foreign travels. This time Chiun had expressed an irrational fear that should America sink beneath the waves in their absence, their precious contents would be lost forever.

Only by personally promising to scour the sunken ruins of Massachusetts for the other sixteen had Remo prevailed. That settled, Chiun had ordered Remo to carry the trunk with the lapis lazuli phoenixes rampant against mother-of-pearl panels.

With infinite care, Remo lowered the trunk to the ground.

"Look, we don't want trouble," he said.

"You wish to avoid trouble, senores?"

"Always. "

"That will be five hundred dollars American."

"In other words, you want a bribe?"

"We call it la mordida. Little favor."

"Five hundred isn't a little favor. It's highway robbery. "

"Nevertheless, it will be five hundred dollars or a night in jail. Perhaps two."

Chiun regarded the soldiers with a cold disdain. "Do not pay these brigands, Remo."

"Careful, old one. Or jou may be shot attempting to escape."

"It is not I who will be attempting to escape if you do not step from my path, uniformed one," Chiun warned.

"I'll handle this," said Remo.

Stepping up to the sargento, Remo lowered his voice and said, "Can you say 'commotio cordis'?"

"Eh?"

"If you can say 'commotio cordis' three times fast, I'll give you five hundred each."

The three soldiers looked interested. They had watched Mexican versions of US. game shows where incredible amounts of money were given away simply for correct guesses to simple questions.

"Say this phrase again?" the sargento asked.

"Commotio cordis, " said Remo.

"Como-"

They made a good effort. One of them almost got the second word out.

Remo reached out and, timing his blow to perfection, struck two of the soldiers' chests during the precise millisecond when their heart muscles were poised for the next beat. This moment was called the T-wave by physicians. Typically it lasted only 30 one thousandths of a second, and humans were completely unaware of this most vulnerable state of the heart muscle, when the cells electrically depolarize themselves before the next contraction.

But Remo was aware. He could hear the pause through the rib-sheathed chest walls. For him it was beyond timing now. It was sheer instinct. He struck swiftly, the chest walls slammed into the quiescent heart muscles and nature took her unforgiving course.

The two coughed, turned blue and collapsed, hearts beating wildly and out of control. Physicians called this ventricular fibrillation. Most people just said heart attack and let it go at that.

The third soldier was on the o of cordis when his T-wave started. Remo slammed his rib cage with the hard heel of his hand, and he pitched forward to join the agitated pile.

One by one their out-of-control heart muscles, unable to recover normal rhythm, surrendered and went still.

That left their Humvee free for the taking, so Remo carefully laid the trunk into the backseat and opened the door for the Master of Sinanju. Chiun settled into the seat. Remo took the wheel.

"You employed the Thunder Dragon blow," Chiun said. "Why did you call it 'commotio cordis'?"

"Commotio cordis is Latin for heart concussion," Remo explained. "I read about it in a newspaper article once."

"It is the Thunder Dragon blow. Remember that."

"A soldier by any other name wilts the same."

"That is not the saying."

"It's my version, okay?" And Remo sent the Humvee wheeling away to the town called Boca Zotz.

Chapter 10

As Colonel Mauricio Primitivo of the Mexican federal army saw it, oppression of the indigenous peoples of Mexico had been a mistake most terrible.

It was a five-hundred-year old mistake. And now it had come back to haunt his proud but still-struggling nation.

The uprising in Chiapas was the result.

Oh, there had been uprisings before. Always they were put down harshly and severely. The Indians had always gone back to being the oppressed, and the lords of Mexico had returned to dutifully oppressing them.

It was actually quite a good system. Except it had gone on far too long.

"We should have exterminated them as the norteamericanos did their indigenous parasites," he said, pounding the table at Fonda del Refugio, an elegant restaurant in the Pink Zone of Mexico City. They were in the dim back dining room, where the powerful dined and discussed business that could not stand the light of day over sangria and chicken in chocolate sauce.

"There are still indios in America," his host corrected. His host wore mufti. But he sat like a military man. He was a very high-ranking general in the Interior Ministry. Alacran was his last name. General Jeronimo Alacran. No more than this did Colonel Primitivo know for certain.

"Yes, in harmless pockets called reservations. The greater portion of them were buried long ago with the genes of future generations that have never come to pass. That is what we should have done. Exterminate the dirty indios. "

"Let us be politically correct in our speech," General Alacran said softly. "They are los indigenos. "

The colonel swirled a collop of chicken in its piquant brown sauce as he nodded. "Of course."

"But who would harvest the coffee and the beans if this is done?" the general inquired.

"Those that remain. The totality of los indigenos are unkillable. If there were fewer of them, they could be more easily controlled. But there are so many that the men cross the border at will and work in America while the women stay behind to raise the unwanted children. Now the situation is worse. There are so many indios, there are more men than work to be done. They sit around idle, drinking pulque and mescal. And in their drunken idleness they turn to revolution time and again."

Primitivo downed the last of his sangria to quench the hateful thoughts troubling his fevered brain.

"And they will be put down again," General Alacran said.

"Not so easily. For now there are foreign media and meddlers from other nations. They will not sit idly by while we exterminate the vermin." Colonel Primitivo shook his heavy head. "It is too late. We are outnumbered."

"These are very interesting sentiments, Colonel. How would you like to go to Chiapas and deal with this unfortunate insurgency?"

"Gladly. But it is too late. I would not be allowed to do my duty. Look at the upstart Verapaz. His communiques come out of the jungle to pollute our newspapers. His masked face is on every magazine cover now. Women swoon over it, though he may be as pocked of face as the dark side of the moon. He himself gives press conferences to foreign journalists. I say send me to one of these so-called press conferences disguised as a reporter and I will exterminate them all. Especially the journalistas."

"That would be politically unacceptable. If Verapaz is murdered, there would be an international uproar. To say nothing of the problem of the dead journalistas. "

"Bah. I care not for politics. Only of my duty to Mexico. No, I must turn down your very tempting offer to go to Chiapas to kill Mayans and others of their ilk. If I succeed, I will be scapegoated. If I fail, I will be humiliated. Mark my words. Chiapas will be the Vietnam of Mexico. And all because the motherless ones who came before us had not the stomach to exterminate the indios. "

The general had first spoken to Colonel Mauricio Primitivo about this difficult duty in the spring after the first Chiapas uprising, when Verapaz had been on the cusp of becoming a hero to mestizo and indio alike.

Now, two springs later, the situation remained essentially unchanged. In stalemate. The new Mexican government, if anything, was more timid on the subject of Verapaz. They were in intense negotiations with the bandit with the jade green eyes. He was all but untouchable now, the repercussions of his assassination too delicate to risk.

The opportunity to deal correctly with him had been lost. At least until a true hombre once again took hold of the reins of power.

Then came the Great Mexico City Earthquake, which shook hacienda and hovel alike.

Colonel Primitivo's phone rang within the hour. It was the general who had first contacted him two springs earlier.

"Colonel, I bring your greetings from the capital."

"It stands?"

"It shakes. I myself am shaking now. I admit it. But my duty calls, so I must steel myself and move swiftly to deal with this crisis."

"How bad?"

"Muy terrible. Popo smokes like a bad cigar now. I fear an epic eruption. I need your help, Colonel Primitivo."

"I do not know how to fight volcanos, but I and my men will do whatever is asked of us."

"Then go to Chiapas and exterminate the renegade Verapaz. "

"This order comes from El Presidente?"

"No, this comes from my lips to your ears. Not even God must hear these words."

"I understand."

"Within the hour, Verapaz has issued a communique. He is deserting the jungle and forests. His goal is nothing less than Mexico City-all Mexican cities ultimately."

"He is drunk with pulque and arrogance."

"He understands the central government has been plunged into a crisis from which it may never emerge. Victory may be his if steps are not undertaken. I am ordering you into Chiapas. Find and intercept this man. Kill him. Make it seem as if he perished in the earthquake. That way no embarrassment will attach itself to you or I or El Presidente. "

"I spit upon El Presidente. "

"That opportunity, too, may arise very soon," the general said dryly. "For all of Mexico is up for grabs, and it is incumbent upon the strong to crush the less strong with all of our might before we fall to the weak."

"I go to Chiapas. Subcomandante Verapaz has issued his last flowery communique. "

"Go with God, Colonel. Just do not allow Him to witness what you do."

"Understood, General."

That very hour a column of tanks and APCs left Montezuma Barracks in Oaxaca at full speed, heading south into Chiapas, where destiny awaited Colonel Mauricio Primitivo.

Destiny lay in ambush for Subcomandante Verapaz, as well. But it was a different destiny. A cold, wormy one.

Chapter 11

A funny thing happened to Alirio Antonio Arcila on the way to the revolution.

It was not so much funny as it was tragic. Yet it was also funny. There was no avoiding this. It was a great joke, a cosmic joke. The gods might have conceived such a joke, except Antonio did not believe in any gods, Mexican, Christian or otherwise.

His gods were Marx and Lenin and other dead white European males whose economic philosophy had seized the twentieth century by the throat.

Alirio Antonio Arcila was a Communist. He was a brother in spirit to Che and Fidel and Mao, and so ached to follow in their booted footsteps.

Then came Gorbachev. The Berlin Wall fell. It was a calamity. And the calamity was followed by other, more calamitous calamities. The Eastern Bloc disintegrated. The mighty USSR fragmented into the powerless CIS.

Just as Alirio Antonio Arcila was poised to reap the violent fruit of ten years spent planting the seeds of discontent in the Lacandon jungle, the international Communist movement was no more. There was no more communism, in fact. Democracy had gripped Moscow with its unshakable iron grip. Even the unbending gray mandarins in Beijing were embracing capitalism even as they clutched Mao's little red book.

And those who clung to the socialist path were overnight bereft of sponsors and funding. Havana became a basket case. Pyongyang an isolated embarrassment. Hanoi lurched into the capitalistic camp. And in Peru the Maoist Shining Path had been hurled reeling and broken, by an elected dictator into the mountains that gave them birth.

All was lost. All was for naught.

Except Alirio Antonio Arcila had been trained as a socialist revolutionary. He had no other talents, no marketable skills, no vocation. There was no other path to follow in life. He knew only revolution and its bloody talents.

So even though the cause was lost, there was no reason that he could think of not to throw a revolution anyway.

It was either that or take over his father's coffee plantation. Antonio would never do that. His father was an oppressor. Antonio would rather make futile revolution than become an oppressor like his evil father, who had amassed a fortune on the backs of illiterate peasants and sold his product to capitalists who in turn sold it to others at obscene profits in a cycle of exploitation without end.

For months after that last stipend had come, Antonio brooded in the jungle, thinking that all he needed was a cause. If only he had a cause.

But what cause?

Oh, he had convinced the Mayan peasants that their cause was liberation and economic justice. But those were only words. Antonio intended to liberate them only to deliver them into the hands of the new Communist rulers of Mexico, of whom one would be no less than Alirio Antonio Arcila.

Then had come NAFTA.

He did not perfectly understand the North American Free Trade Agreement. It involved free trade, obviously. That equaled capitalism. Therefore, it was bad. If not evil.

And so he'd addressed his Maya on this looming evil.

"I have heard this day of a plot called NAFTA," he had told them. "It is a scheme to oppress you as never before."

They regarded him with their sad, stony eyes. Those eyes were the eyes of Mexico, full of soul-deep contradictions and conflicting emotions.

"In this new NAFTA world, the farms of the capital-I mean the norteamericanos-will be placed on the same footing as your meager corn and bean fields. This is fundamentally unfair. For they farm with fierce machines while you have but your strong backs and rude hoes. This is betrayal. Worse, this is treason. We must fight this unfairness."

The Maya heard these words and they nodded in their mute way. They were not men for talk. Talk wasted the breath. They knew that their allotted breaths were fewer than those who breathed the machine-fouled air of the cities. This, too, was unfair. But it was undeniable.

Besides, over the years Antonio dwelled among them, they had come to see their light-skinned patron and advisor with the quetzal green eyes as Kukulcan incarnate. According to legend, Kukulcan, the Plumed Serpent, had been a white man come from across the sea to lift up the Maya many baktuns ago.

He had given them the gifts of writing, agriculture and other high knowledge only to depart, vowing to return in a future time of great need.

It was obvious to the simple indio peasants that their benefactor was Kukulcan incarnate, returned as he had promised.

Antonio did nothing to dissuade them from this belief. After all, it had worked for Cortez when he arrived in Yucatan in the Aztec year called One Reed. He was thought by the original Mexicans to be Quetzalcoatl, the very same Plumed Serpent god, white of skin and heralding a new era, whose return in the next One Reed year had been prophesied by Aztec prophets.

Cortez did bring gifts, in his way. He ushered in the era of the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs were cast down into slavery. The Maya empire had by then fallen into ruin, the survivors retreating into the jungles to eke out simple agrarian lives.

The Maya equivalent of Quetzalcoatl, whom they called Kukulcan, had not returned in Cortez. In Antonio, they had their Kukulcan. And as he was their god incarnate, the word of Alirio Antonio Arcila was law.

The word of Lord Kukulcan was to resist NAFTA by force.

They took up their Uzis and their AK-47s that had been cached all over the jungle, cleaned off the rust-resisting Cosmoline and began training in earnest.

The Maya day of 2 Ik was selected because it corresponded with the 1 January 1994.

"If NAFTA passes, we will strike on 2 Ik," Antonio announced.

The Maya had accepted this. Kukulcan had spoken. His word was absolute. The demon NAFTA would not survive after that date, no matter how fearsome his fangs and talons.

On that day Antonio passed out proletariat red bandanas for the first time. It was a very cold day in the mountains above the lush forest canopy.

"Wear these to protect your faces from the cold and from federalista eyes," he said, drawing on a black ski mask with the hole cut before the mouth so that he could enjoy his one solace-a short-stemmed briar pipe.

"From this time forward you are Juarezistas. After this day your blood will ignite the jungle, as did the sacrifices of Benito Juarez, the first indio ruler of the Mexican republic, whose cause we now take up and in whose name we struggle. And from now on, I will call myself Subcomandante Verapaz, for my personal struggle is for true peace in Mexico. Our peace. No other peace will be acceptable."

The Maya accepted this with passive fatalism. Their lives were short and unhappy. Death came soon enough. They would not seek out death, but neither would they shrink from the bony embrace of Yum Cimil, Lord of Death.

On that first day they seized six towns. On the second day, 3 Akbal, the army descended, driving them out. Many were slain. Subcomandante Luz perished. As did Subcomandante Luna. The survivors slunk back to their mountain stronghold.

"We have failed, Lord Kukulcan," they told him, shame in their low voices. It was the third day, called 4 Kan.

"I am no lord, but your subcomandante. I cannot be your lord because I am but a criollo. A usurper. You are the Maya, the true lords of this jungle."

But they were beaten lords from the look of them.

It had been an abysmal failure. But because anything was better than working his father's coffee plantations, Antonio racked his brain for another way.

THE NEW WAY CAME to the Maya farm town of Boca Zotz in the form of journalistas. The cause was irretrievably lost, so Subcomandante Verapaz agreed to meet with them. Perhaps he could trade safe passage to the Guatemalan frontier in return for a few last defiant quotes.

At the appointed hour, he showed up in a jungle clearing, wearing his black ski mask, his pipe redolent of cannabis-a harmless affectation from his former bourgeois existence. Five bandana-masked Juarezistas surrounded him, fingers on triggers, dark, moody eyes alert.

The questions pelted Antonio like cast stones.

"Are you a comunista?"

"Never!"

"You are indigena?"

"With these eyes? No, I am not indigena."

"Then why do you wage revolution?"

Antonio hesitated. He had prepared for this struggle for so long, the rote worker's slogans almost rose up from his throat even though they no longer had meaning. He swallowed them.

"I fight," he said after taking a long suck on his pipe, "I fight because this has been the struggle of my family for many generations."

The reporters frowned. They understood revolution, insurrections. But this was new.

At that point Antonio blurted out the flowery romantic words to cover the tracks that might lead to the Arcila family. But the journalistas were not satisfied with this.

"Tell us more," one invited.

"I am not the first Subcomandante Verapaz. My father was Subcomandante Verapaz before me. And my grandfather, his father, was Subcomandante Verapaz, stretching back I cannot tell how many generations. We took up the cause of righteousness, and consecrated our lives to it. In the name of all oppressed indigenous peoples, Subcomandante Verapaz wages war against oppression."

"Are you sure you aren't a comunista?"

"I have denied this. I am but the Verapaz of this generation. When I fall-and all my forebears eventually fell to their foes-my son will take up my gun and my mask and he will be the next Subcomandante Verapaz. Thus, I am unkillable and will never die."

At that point, camera flashbulbs began popping. His Juarezista bodyguards almost shot the head off a reporter until Antonio interceded.

The video cameras whirred, their glassy, greenish lenses capturing the dashing masked figure whose manly chest was crossed by bandoliers evocative of the romantic Mexican revolutionaries of the past.

When the press conference was over, Antonio melted back into his jungle cave, that night burning his black ski mask because he knew it was to death to wear it again. All Mexico would know him after this night.

It became truer than Antonio could ever envision.

His face was telecast throughout the world. His muffled head, jutting pipe and trademark soulful green eyes adorned magazine covers from Mexico City to Singapore.

He began to understand when more and more reporters came to visit him. At first he turned them all away. The revolution had sputtered out ignominiously. Chiapas was cordoned off, all escape routes blocked so that no criollo with green eyes could pass through alive. And besides that, he had no concealing Subcomandante Verapaz mask.

The entreaties continued to be carried to his jungle stronghold. Farmers by day who had been Juarezistas by night, bore the magazines with their glowing articles.

"You are a hero in Mexico City," he was told.

"What?"

"It is said, my lord, the women all adore you. There are toys bearing your likeness. Masks are sold and worn proudly. The students in the universities make speeches in your name. Pipe smoking is all the rage."

"Increible," he muttered, reading furiously.

But it was true. The romantic fantasy he had spun had been accepted as truth. He was no longer a failed, causeless revolutionary, but a cultural hero to modern Mexicans. Just like Zapata or Villa or Kukulcan.

"What shall we convey to these reporters?" his right hand, a Mayan guerrillero named Kix, had asked.

"Tell them," proclaimed Alirio Antonio Arcila, aka Lord Kukulcan, aka Subcomandante Verapaz, "that in return for one dozen black ski masks, I will agree to another press conference."

The masks arrived with astonishing alacrity. Antonio took one, with a knife slashing a hole for his pipe stem, and then distributed the remainder among his companeros.

"From now on, we will all be Subcomandante Verapaz," he proclaimed.

And his Maya wept with pride, never imagining that by donning these masks, they greatly increased the odds that one of them would take an assassin's bullet intended for their leader.

The press conferences became a monthly ritual. Money poured in. Arms. Supplies of other kinds. A revolution that might have been recorded by history as the last sputtering gasp of Third World Communist insurgency was reborn as the first truly indigenous revolution of the century.

Learned articles and dissertations were penned to analyze the phenomenon of a spontaneous revolution with no political or social entity motivating it. The first postmodern revolution, the New York Times dubbed it.

And no one suspected the true leader of all the Juarezistas who continued to fight and spill their blood in the sacred cause of furthering Alirio Antonio Arcila's celebrity-and incidentally forestalling the hated day he would return to the family coffee plantation and concede to his despised father that he had been right all along.

The successes came often after that. Minor skirmishes were hailed in the press as major engagements. When the old president of Mexico was chased from power, it was hailed as a Juarezista victory. When his handpicked successor was assassinated after expressing veiled pro-Juarezista sentiments, it lent legitimacy to the cause. And when a new, more liberal candidate replaced him, it was also seen as a Juarezista victory.

Every advance for the people and setback for the lawful government was viewed in the light of a handful of Maya pistoleros led by the unemployed son of a coffee grower, and although no true progress was made on the battlefield, the mere fact that Subcomandante Verapaz struggled on despite every attempt to capture or kill him added luster to the growing legend.

In the end the federal government declared a unilateral cease-fire and offered to engage in peace talks. They would never give Subcomandante Verapaz any political concessions, of course. But in declaring a one-sided peace, they signaled that Verapaz had grown too great to stop with mere bullets. In death, he could only grow more powerful. He would be left alone if he caused no problems so great it threatened Mexico City.

But Antonio had not spent ten years in the jungle eating bad tortillas and drinking stagnant water only to spend the rest of the century doing so. Ignoring the peace talks, he stepped up his campaign of words and communiques.

When he had forced the current governor of Chiapas to step down on behalf of a man whom he had blessed, Antonio began to consider the possibility that while he might never conquer Mexico, it was perhaps possible to seize a measure of political control of events beyond Chiapas.

The advent of the Great Mexico City Earthquake all but made that an inevitability.

After all, he was no longer Alirio Antonio Arcila now. Nor really Subcomandante Verapaz. He was Lord Kukulcan, a god sheathed in flesh who had united the polyglot peoples of Mexico in their blind hero-worshiping.

And most rewarding of all, it was tacitly acknowledged in the capital that it would be politically unacceptable to exterminate the people's hero.

The road of conquest had been swept clear.

Chapter 12

As he followed his god through the cracked and broken streets of Mexico City, Rodrigo Lujan had stripped off the confining necktie. He did not care that the streets lay buckled and cracked all around. Nor that mighty office towers tilted and shed their faces like so many false masks. They were the past. He walked with the future. He walked with serpentskirted Coatlicue whose remorseless tread seemed to make the Valley of Mexico shudder under her petrifying tread.

Let no one say the word aftershock. It was Coatlicue, also called Tonantzin-Our Mother-who made the very ground tremble.

He followed her closely down Anillo Periferico, toward the southern outskirts. Toward the mountains. Beyond the mountains lay freedom. Beyond the mountains lay the rich and fecund soil of the Zapotec century to come.

Sturdy Zapotec women dwelt to the south, Lujan knew. In Oaxaca. And when they beheld him approach with the goddess Coatlicue, they would offer themselves-no, throw themselves at him.

He, Rodrigo Lujan, would beget a race of new Zapotec warriors that would sweep across the face of Mexico to usher in a new sun and a brighter tomorrow.

As he flung away the hated confining suit coat, he could taste their chaste, willing kisses.

As they walked, others followed in their wake.

Lujan's great heart seemed to burst with pride to see them follow like an army of ants that know sugar lies near.

The city of twenty million had been clogged with peasants from the countryside. There were the hooknosed Aztecs, the cross-eyed Maya and the barbarian Chichimecs with their thick bodies. The Olmecs were no more. No man knew what had become of them. The Toltecs had long before been assimilated.

But Zapotecs and Mixtec were plentiful.

And all of them, whether Zapotec, Maya or Chichimec, fell in behind the striding behemoth that was Coatlicue, crying, sobbing, dancing, their heart pounding with joy.

Some threw themselves before her juggernaut form, praying, begging guidance, seeking deliverance as the city of wonder broke and splintered all around them.

Her tread broke their prostrate skulls, splintering their living bones as if they were kindling. They died, their souls liberated. They died indio and so died happy.

Lujan wept proud tears to see their blood run. It was like the old days he had never known. Before the Spanish had spilled Zapotec blood and mingled their own with the blood of the women who survived to beget the modern mestizo people of Mexico.

Passing a shattered peasant woman, Lujan paused and reached into the raw kindling that was her rib cage to extract her heart, still warm and beating. And walking backward behind his goddess, he held the dripping, pinkish organ over his head for his growing retinue to behold.

"Behold, children of old Mexico. See your future. The day of the machine is over. The tyranny of the chilangos is over. Time has turned in on itself like a serpent devouring its own tail. A new era dawns. I am Zapotec. I call upon all of my blood and related blood to follow me into the glorious past which now stretches out before us."

And they did. In growing numbers.

The chilangos were struck dumb by the sight. Dazed and whelmed by earthquake, they had shrunk from the sight of the oppressed of the earth throwing off their yoke. Ladino clothes were cast off. Men marched in their underwear or nothing at all. Women walked bare of breast and unashamed of their rich indio skin.

At times police officials, seeing this affront to their so-called civilization that had brought sick air and a quiet desperation of spirit, fell on them.

But their guns held but handfuls of bullets. Some fell. And after they expended their futile lead missiles, they were fallen upon and torn limb from limb by the blood-crazed crowd.

Soon many walked holding the pulsing, bleeding hearts of the oppressor in their hands.

And before them lumbered Coatlicue, implacable, remorseless, all but oblivious to the revolution that she led, her only words the same single-minded incantation droned over and over again: "survive, survive, survive..."

Chapter 13

The Extinguisher was making wicked excellent time. The LAV's lightness was an advantage. It may have been the military equivalent to a Volvo, but it covered road like a speeding-jeep. Its light frame meant gasoline went farther, too.

The towns and villages along the Pan American Highway zipped by. No one stopped or questioned him. For the Extinguisher drove a Mexican police vehicle. No one questioned the Mexican Federal Judicial Police.

Out here the Federal Judicial Police were the only law that mattered.

Now with night falling, even that thin brown line of authority was fading. The law of the jungle was supreme.

That was fine with the Extinguisher. The law of the jungle was his kind of law. Of all the predators in the jungle, he was the most predatory of them all.

Eventually his gas ran out. There were two spare jerricans, which he used to replenish the tanks. That bought him another hundred miles. But by the time the lights of Tapanatepec came into view, the LAV was bone-dry.

Out here gas stations didn't exactly rub shoulders fighting for business. It was the end of the line.

The Extinguisher flicked on the dome light and checked his maps. They were throwaway maps, ripped from magazines, but they were good enough.

Also torn from magazines were photographs of his quarry, Subcomandante Verapaz. Since he had made good time, the Extinguisher had time to refresh his battle memory regarding the foe he sought.

The pictures showed a jaunty man in a black ski mask. The soulful poet's eyes were the same in every picture. That was important. That meant while many wore the black ski mask of the Benito Juarez National Liberation Front, there was only one Subcomandante Verapaz. The man may have doubles, but they did not pose for the press to confuse the issue.

Well, that was Verapaz's mistake. If he didn't understand the fine art of confusing the enemy, that was his tough break.

When they at last came face-to-face, the Extinguisher would know those jungle green eyes. There would be no mistaking them ever.

And when it came time to extinguish them, well, that was what the Extinguisher did.

Chapter 14

The ground had grown quiescent when the retinue of Coatlicue, now thousands strong, had passed through the mountains.

The aftershocks came, making the belly quail, but at greater intervals. Popocateped still smoked. The sky hung brown and brooding, and the air below was filled with warm ash. Men, women and children captured the falling benedictions between their hands like children cavorting in their first snowstorm. They smeared their fleshy, halfnaked bodies with the pungent unguent in blasphemous parody of their castoff Ash Wednesday rituals.

The too-warm air awoke the spring wildflowers early. Birds roosted silent and pensive in the trees. Now night fell. The first night of the new sun. The night after which all nights would be forevermore changed.

"We must stop to rest, Coatlicue," said Rodrigo Lujan, walking backward before his goddess. He wore a cloak trimmed in rabbit fur over a cotton girdle that protected his manly loins. The tyranny of confining garments lay in his past, along with his necktie and shoes.

"Survival dictates continued flight. The terrain is too exposed here. And I am presently unable to assimilate another form."

"Nothing can happen to you now, Coatlicue. The ground has stopped shaking."

"Seismic activity has entered a quiescent phase. There is every reason to assume it will resume anew. Aftershocks continue. Continued survival necessitates seeking stable ground."

"Your followers need rest. They have marched behind you all day. Now they require rest and food."

"I do not require followers."

"But what is a god without followers? It is their secret prayers which have awakened you. It is their unheard yearnings that have warmed the many stone hearts upon your breast."

"I had elected to remain quiescent until my foes had ceased to exist, which I estimate would transpire in approximately 60.8 years at the latest. During my inactive state, I attempted to complete all self-repairs possible. This task is ongoing. The seismic disturbance triggered my self-preservation override. That function is presently being executed."

"Stop, Coatlicue. Stop. You must allow us to sacrifice in your name. It will make you stronger."

One serpentine head rolled to fix him with its weird stone orbs.

"How will sacrifice make me stronger?"

"It is the way of Coatlicue. Your womanly strength comes from human sacrifice. Human sacrifice empowers your hearts, feeds your people and keeps the universe running."

"I must keep moving if I am to survive."

And head retracting, Coatlicue lumbered on.

Lujan skipped around to her side, realizing that if he stumbled she would stomp him into a mass of jelly under her cruel tread. That was why he loved her so. She cared not for her subjects. Her subjects must worship her, not the other way around.

"We are yours to command, O Coatlicue. Do you not understand? Do with us as you please. Break our backs, crush our thin skulls, we will follow you anywhere."

Coatlicue made no reply to that.

"O Coatlicue, Devourer of Filth, do you not know that there is safety in numbers?"

"I am the only one of my kind. There is no other than I."

"Yes. Yes. You are the exalted one. No one is greater than Coatlicue. Not that Aztec Quetzalcoatl. Not Kukulcan. Not even Huitzilopochtli, who is your true son. All are less than fleas beneath your cruel shadow."

Coatlicue walked on, unheeding and unconcerned. It stirred Rodrigo Lujan's passions to see her walk so proud and unmoved.

Then out of the west came a trio of federal army helicopter gunships, Gatling guns and rocket rods hanging off them like barbed scorpion spines.

"Coatlicue! Behold! The chilango army has come to defeat you."

Coatlicue stopped. Her serpent heads lined up parallel to one another until both regarded the approaching gunship stonily.

No flicker of emotion showed in those basalt slits.

"Coatlicue. Listen to me," Lujan pleaded. "They will soon attack. Let us be your shields."

"Yes. Be my shields."

"Command us to be your shields."

"I command you to be my shields."

And grinning, Rodrigo Lujan turned to his retinue. Truly, it was Coatlicue's retinue. But the authority to command them had been conferred upon him.

"Come. Come form a human shield. Coatlicue needs protection from the chilango army."

And they came. The men, the women, the sunbrowned children. They formed a circle that was many people deep. Some climbed atop Coatlicue to shield her stone flesh with their soft brown skins.

"Shoot, army of chilangos!" cried out Rodrigo Lujan. "Shoot if you dare! You will never harm our stone-hearted mother."

And the lead helicopter broke off from the others to make its first clattering pass.

It was armed with side-mounted Gatling guns. The multiple-barreled tubes began spinning. Everyone could see them spin.

The hot bullets came like a hard, remorseless rain.

The screams that lifted from the throat of the army of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan were screams of liberation. Liberation from oppression, liberation from poverty and liberation from earthly toil.

The bodies dropped from Coatlicue's shoulder and head like spoiled fruit. They ran as red as pomegranates, as bloody as crushed tomatoes, their juices forming scarlet pools at the unmoved feet of Coatlicue.

All around her the indios fell. The bodies formed stepping stones for others to scramble to take their place.

"Yes, yes. Fight to protect Coatlicue, the mother of us all. Come and offer yourself. Liberation is ours! Victory is ours. Manana is ours!"

The first antitank rocket left its pod in a bloom of smoky flame. The screaming device sped toward them unerringly. Its speed was breathtaking.

Men forming a human pyramid clawed one another in their heated desire to be the first to absorb the coming blow. They slithered over one another like brown sweaty earthworms.

When the rocket struck, it exploded a vertical cone of human flesh in all directions.

The cone simply vanished, only to reform in a thudding rain of arms, legs, head and separated torsos.

"Magnifico!" cried Rodrigo Lujan. "You have done it! You have saved Coatlicue from the rocket!"

Coatlicue stood as before, her double-serpent head parted, one tracking the overflying helicopter, the other focused on the third one, which hung back, poised to let fly more blood and destruction.

"The meat machines are protecting me," she said.

"Yes. We will all die if it takes that."

"I command you all to die to preserve my survival," intoned Coatlicue in an emotionless and very masculine voice. Rodrigo Lujan loved masculine women. He turned to his followers.

"Do you hear? We are commanded to die. To die is glorious. Let us all die to preserve Our Mother," proclaimed Rodrigo Lujan, who had to jump to one side so the stampede of indios could rush up and take the place of one dead and he would have an excellent view of the slaughter.

It was better than a bullfight. In the bullring, the bull dies or the matador is gored. There is only so much blood. A spot or two. A puddle at most.

Here it was a whirlwind of blood and carnage.

The indios took their places. They formed a dome of flesh. Like locusts, they swarmed over their Mother Goddess until her stone lines were no longer visible. They clung to her and to one another until Coatlicue resembled an upright beetle covered in ants.

The next rocket scored a direct hit. Hot metal flew. Flesh and bone turned to shrapnel. The screams were terrible yet beautiful. It was so incredibly Mexican. It was the most Mexican sight Rodrigo Lujan had ever beheld.

More bullets and then more rockets came, to snap and crump at the human anthill. And the more death gnawed, the more the indios strove to join it.

"Death!" they sang. "Bring us death so Coatlicue may live. We live through Coatlicue. Our blood illuminates the world!"

"Your blood illuminates the universe!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the dark, impersonal heavens as he crouched by the shoulder of the road, his bare skin now red from the rain that was not rain.

At length the helicopter gunships depleted themselves of missiles.

Perhaps it was also that the pilots had become sickened by the slaughter. For whatever reason, they broke formation, each retreating in a different direction.

"We have done it!" Rodrigo Lujan shouted to the cold stars above. "We have succeeded! We are Zapotecs!"

"And Aztecs," a man reminded.

"Maya," another said.

"I am Mixtec."

"We are all brothers in blood," Rodrigo said generously.

"And sisters," a woman said, licking a smear of blood off her naked forearm.

Others, seeing this and remembering tales of ancestral blood sacrifice, began eyeing the dead not as fallen human beings to be buried reverently in the earth but as something else.

The hungry look in his fellow indios' eyes gave Rodrigo Lujan the courage to say and do what in the past he could only imagine down in his deepest Zapotec dreams.

"Coatlicue has reminded us. We are no longer men. We are not women. We are not human. We are her servants. We are meat machines. And if we are but machines made of meat, we may partake of other machines whose meat is no longer of use to them."

And to show the truth of his words, Rodrigo Lujan picked up the severed arm that had only minutes before belonged to a comely Maya maiden and took a ferocious bite out of her warm bicep with his strong white Zapotec teeth.

Chapter 15

Remo made good time rolling down Highway 195 in Chiapas State until he ran into a Mexican federal army patrol.

"Uh-oh," he muttered as the patrol rounded a bend in the road.

Beside him the Master of Sinanju said, "Pretend we are innocent of any suspicion. They will not see us."