Chiun stood up.
"I wish you could take a chute," the pilot said.
"Keep your advice on my bodily functions to yourself," Chiun said, then slipped gracefully out of the
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jet, his yellow robe billowing in the wind like a sail.
The pilot looped once to observe the final disappearance of his two former passengers into the Mediterranean. The brass was going to want a report-and-a-half on this one and the details would be important.
Somehow, he noticed, the old guy in the bathrobe had managed to bring himself to the same level as the thin guy in the T-shirt.
The pilot looped again, and came in close. The two men were talking. The old one was waving his arms and shouting, while the young one shrugged and pointed up at the jet. The pilot could hardly believe it. Here they were, sailing toward the ocean, and these two loonies were having an argument. Then, without even taking time to scream in panic, the two crazy civilians sank into the sea at precisely the same moment.
Well, that was that, the pilot said to himself. Maybe two nuts the CIA had to get rid of. They had guts, though, he'd have to hand it to them. Neither of them had shown a trace of fear when they augured in. It had been a death worthy of an aviator.
He climbed into the sky and out of sight. Twenty seconds later, two heads bobbed out of the sea. "No movies, no lavatories, no free cakes of soap, no tea, and a foul-mouthed driver on top of it all!" Chiun shrieked. "I have had better rides in New Jersey taxi-cabs. How can you subject one of my delicate sensibilities to such a primitive mode of travel?"
"It was the fastest way," Remo explained for the fourth time since they'd left the F-16.
"Hurry, hurry," Chiun grumbled. "You have cast aside all the pleasures of life in the empty pursuit of
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speed. You have rejected the fragrance of the lotus in favor of the stench of the public bus. You have-"
"The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can get back to your TV," Remo said.
"Can we make the eleven o'clock update?"
"Maybe."
"Stop dawdling," Chiun commanded, slicing through the water like a torpedo.
Dawn was rising in Anatola, casting pink halos around the white sun-baked buildings. Below the halos, the city's fat flies were beginning to stir, preparing themselves for another day's feasting in a land that seemed created just for them. They buzzed into the fetid streets, stopping to drink at the stagnant, sewage-laden streams that ran freely along the narrow walkways. They lit undisturbed on the delicious three-day-old cow meat, already veiled with the thick scent of decay, hanging from the hawkers' stands. For dessert, they swarmed over a tempting display of rotting fruit that would eventually be fed to the children of the wealthy after the flies had taken their fill. Another good day.
Remo swatted at the flies that buzzed in the city square like a cloud. The meat hawker scurried over to them, waving a stinking gray slab and burbling something through a mouthful of loos© brown teeth.
"You've got to be kidding," Remo said, and walked on. Chiun was silent. At the gates to the city, he had slowed his breathing to a point that wouldn't even register on a life-support system. He explained that it was preferable to experiencing Zadnia and the Zadnians at full consciousness.
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In the distance, the twelve towers of the Palace of Anatoia stood out like needles against the reddening sky.
"Guess that's where we're going," Remo said. "You might as well bring yourself up to capacity, Little Father."
"I'd rather not," Chiun croaked.
A high wail punctuated the endless drone of the flies. At first Remo thought it was one of the vendors on the street, beginning his day's supplication to whatever idiots were desperate enough to buy the food in Zadnia, but it wasn't the call of a Middle Eastern sales-pitch. It was a cry of terror, and it was coming from inside the walled boundaries of the palace.
"He can't shoot me," the voice cried. "It's not fair. I've done everything he wanted. Be reasonable. Take the hundred. Please."
As Remo listened, a second voice, high and singsong, came from within the wall. "When you dead, we take hundred dollah anyway. We take rings off finger. We take gold from teeth. You not have to pay us now, very welcome."
Remo scaled the palace wall and peered over. Facing the wall were twelve men in Zadnian uniforms, their weapons pointed at the solitary blindfolded figure in front of them.
"Ready," squeaked the commanding guard. The men raised their rifles.
"Inside line?" Remo whispered.
Chiun shook his head. "A waste. There are only twelve of them. We use the double-spiral air blow series."
"What for? That's a trick, shot."
"Aim."
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"All right," Remo sighed. "Whatever you say." He vaulted over the wall.
"Fi-aghhh." The commander's windpipe lodged into his nose as he twirled end over end above the heads of the firing squad.
"Higher," Chiun said. He grasped the rifles of two of the guards and, with a flick of his wrists sent their owners hurtling upward before they could release their weapons. The guards, looking like khaki-colored pinwheels, flew in two different directions up to twenty feet before their trajectory curved into two huge parabolas. They met head-on in the air, their skulls cracking on impact. Chiun smiled. "A little art," he said.
"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Remo said, hefting the fattest soldier he'd ever seen into the air, while another attacked him from behind. "Personally, I'm getting a hernia." An inside line would have been so much easier, he thought as a soldier charged him with his AK-47. At the moment when the machinegun would have made contact, Remo was behind the guard, and then the guard was shooting forward and smashing into another, and then with a light blow to the man in front they were both airborne. Three others spiraied into the air like footballs, deflating as they impaled themselves on three of the palace's towers.
"You see now the double-spiral air blow is not so easy," Chiun said with smiling triumph.
"Who said it was," Remo grunted, propelling another guard into the palace walls.
"You did. You told all those people that I was not responsible for the beautiful attack on the two men at Shangri-la. You gave me no credit whatever."
"Chiun, look out!" Three men stood directly behind the old Oriental, their rifles leveled.
"It was masterful work," Chiun groused on without
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missing a beat, as the weapons in the hands of the soldiers were suddenly buried in the dust and the men sailed upward, one after the other, in a giant oval. As each of them neared the ground, Chiun struck him upward again, bringing each blow in faster until the three men were nothing more than limp, boneless pulps, which Chiun juggled like boiled eggs.
"Okay, it's a tough attack," Remo panted, conceding the point. He flung an arm into the oval and the men crashed into a fleshy pile on the ground.
"What's going on?" came a muted, panic-filled squeak from in front of the wall.
Remo went to Foxx and pulled off the blindfold and the ropes that bound his wrists. Foxx took a look at the carnage in the courtyard, then at Remo. "You," he said, awestruck. "But I thought you were going to kill me."
"Naw," Remo said. "What's a little murder, treason, and assassination between friends? Your next target was only going to be the president of the United States. A little money in your pocket, a new government for America, run by a terrorist. What the hell?"
"I'm glad you see it that way," Foxx said, smiling.
"Just one question. Where's the procaine formula manufactured these days?"
Foxx winced. "Well, there's just a teeny problem with that," he said apologetically. "The lab in Switzerland that was producing it burned down three weeks ago. But we can get around that. Smali amounts of the drug can be extracted directly from certain people. Horses, they're called, people with-"
"Yeah, I know. Like Irma Schwartz."
"Exactly." Foxx's face brightened. "They're rare, but not that rare, and it only takes six or seven bodies to produce the extract used in the mixture. It's easy,
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really. We can make it right at Shangri-la. I was planning to, anyway. The Schwartz woman was the first. With your skills, we can have the rest in no time."
"Great to hear," Remo said. "Just knock off a few strangers, and there you have it."
"The fountain of youth."
"Except for the poor suckers you murder just to get at the juices in their bodies."
"Nobodies," Foxx said dismissively. "Never be missed. What do you say?"
"I say there are too many amateur assassins in this world," Chiun said.
"I agree," Remo said.
"What are you two talking about?" Foxx said. "We don't need assassins. We don't need anybody, now that the three of us are a team." He gestured expansively. "The New Team, that's what we'll be. First we'll approach Halaffa and see if the deal with the president is still on. You two can take care of that one with both hands tied, I'll wager. Halaffa will love us after that."
"Wonderful," Remo said. "It'll make my whole day."
"And then I'll go to the Soviets. God knows, there are a million people the Russians want bumped off. And then there are the Red Chinese, of course."
"Of course."
"We'll make a fortune. The New Team. It's the best idea I've ever had. Think of it. Just think of it!"
"Think of this," Remo said, crushing his skull.
Foxx reeled and slumped to the ground. "So much for the New Team," Chiun said.
And then the two of them were silent, their mouths dropping open in disbelief as they watched death work
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a transformation on Foxx that had never been permitted in life.
As the last breath rasped out of his body, the man seemed to shrivel in front of their eyes. His skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, growing translucent and spotted with age. His eye sockets darkened and deepened to ghoulish hollows. One by one his teeth fell out, gray and cracked, and his lips whitened and puckered and sank into his flesh, like the discarded skin of a snake. In seconds, the mass of wavy dark hair on his head turned white and fell to the ground in tufts. His spine bent. His hands curled into gnarled, arthritic fists. His flesh seemed to melt away, leaving only a thin shell of withered skin over the frail bones. Foxx was suddenly old, older than anything Remo had ever seen, as old as the earth itself.
"Come," Chiun said softly. The corpse was crumbling into decay now, the bones turning to dust beneath the papery gray flesh, the eyeballs congealing into black jelly. A host of flies swarmed over it, feeding on the putrid remains.
Chapter Nineteen
Halaffa's palace was eerily still inside. There were no soldiers anywhere. No guards. The gaudy Palace of Anatola was as silent as a desert rock.
"I don't like this," Remo said as they passed through room after empty room.
"The silence of a thousand screams," Chiun mused.
The Prince's Chamber, still reeking of the festivities of the previous night, looked as if it had been abandoned in haste, its occupants vanishing in a moment of riotous merrymaking. The shouts and coarse laughter seemed still to ring in the shadows of the empty room. The stairways were empty, too. As Remo and Chiun walked up to the upper floors of the palace, the only sound was the soft flapping of Chiun's robes behind him.
There were no stirrings of life until they reached the level of the twelve towers. Chiun cocked his head at the top of the stone stairway and listened. "He is here," he said.
Remo nodded. He, too, had sensed the rhythmic expansion of air that signaled the presence of a breathing human being.
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"Over here, gentlemen." The voice sounded loud as a cannon's boom after the weird stillness.
Halaffa stood in a library housed in one of the cylindrical towers. Instead of the Zadnian military uniform, which he usually wore, Halaffa was dressed in the traditional flowing robes of Zadnia's ancient nomadic tribes. On his head was a white turban with a sapphire in the center. He was a handsome man, young and swarthy, bursting with a kind of exaggerated male-ness that gave an air of confidence and strength to him . . . except for the eyes.
Madman's eyes, Remo thought. They held the same look that other eyes had carried once the lust for power overcame their sanity. Idi Amin's eyes, as he starved his people to slow death. Hitler's eyes as he ordered the extermination of millions. Eyes of fire, burning with death.
"I have been preparing to welcome you," he said softly. He took a leather-covered volume from a high shelf. "Your exhibition in the courtyard was most impressive." He looked at them approvingly. "I take it you have traced the unpatriotic activities of our departed Dr. Foxx to me?"
"We have," Remo said.
Halaffa read from the book, seemingly unconcerned. "I see," he said at last. "And what, may I ask, is your purpose here?"
"We are assassins," Chiun said.
"A noble career. Then you have come here to the tower to kill me, I trust?"
"Right again," Remo said. Anytime now. His muscles screamed in readiness. Beside him, he could feel Chiun's energy coiling like a spring.
"Then step forward," Halaffa said coldly. "Make
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your attempt." He slammed the book shut with a bang.
A big bang. Six bullets fired out of the thick binding directly at Remo. He dodged them, but it was a distraction. And as he was distracted, the shelf-lined walls of the tower swung open and a host of fierce-looking nomad warriors swarmed into the room, their sabers slicing through the air like lasers.
"Now we do the inside-line attack," Chiun said.
The sabers flew. Blood flowed like fountains over the intricate designs on the carpets in the tower room. The screams of the dying echoed down the stone stairways and empty corridors. And then all was still again.
Remo, Chiun, and Ruomid Halaffa faced one another. Halaffa's caftan was streaked with blood. His madman's eyes shone with terror and the knowledge of doom. For several moments he stood stock still, his eyes darling around the death-filled room, seeking an avenue of escape.
There was none. Only the small turret window behind him offered a way to the outside world, and that way was several stories straight down. He looked out the window. The pavement of the filthy street below was already teeming with people. They stepped laconically over the fly-studded carcass of a dead dog lying near a vendor's cart filled with melons. The city was fully awake now, already blistering under the glare of the sun.
Halaffa faced his two assailants. "You will not take me!" he shouted, then turned and scrambled onto the window ledge. "My followers will smite you with wrath. They will finish you for the vile murderers you are. They will wreak vengeance on your paltry nation."
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Below, a few scattered onlookers glanced up to see their latest dictator ready to jump from a window ledge in one of the palace's twelve towers. He was shouting something. They were always shouting something. The last dictator, Anatole, shouted something before he died, too. So would the next one. The onlookers turned away and went about their business.
"Citizens of Zadnia," Halaffa bellowed. "The foes of our country have come to spread destruction and calamity in our midst. Rise up! Fight them! Fight them in the beautiful streets I have given you. Fight them in your comfortable homes, which have been my gift to you. Storm the palace and fight them as they stand ready to take your leader from you. Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Enough of the pep talk," Remo said irritably. "Are they coming or aren't they?"
"Get up here and save my life, you miserable cretins," Halaffa yelled. "For the glory of ... glory of . . ." His arms windmilled. "Zad . . ." he shrieked, falling off the ledge.
He landed with a thud at the base of the melon vendor's cart, next to the dead dog. The vendor, seeing the wash of blood spray onto his pul
py fruit, screeched with annoyance at Halaffa's body. The flies on the dog quickly left their old meal and swarmed onto the new delicacy that had fallen into their midst. The people on the street stepped lazily over both of them.
"Thus dies the mighty rock," Chiun said. "Crumbled to dust and lost among the forgotten sands."
Remo looked at him. "Say, that's pretty good," he said.
"An old Korean saying." He stepped across the bodies strewn around the room and lifted a large painting of Haiaffa framed in ornately carved gold.
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"This will do nicely," he said.
"You want a picture of him?"
"Of course not," Chiun said. With his thumbnail he etched four lines along the sides of the protrait, then punched it out. He handed the empty frame to Remo. "For you," he said.
Remo stared at the strange gift. "Well, thanks, Little Father, but! really--"
"It will make a nice frame for my picture of Cheeta Ching."
Remo groaned.
"In Korean dress," Chiun said.
Chapter Twenty
Harold W. Smith sat at his desk in front of the computers at Folcroft Sanitarium, looking even more lemony than usual. In front of him was a tangle of green and white striped printouts.
"Where is Remo?" he asked, his voice acid.
"He wil! be here shortly," Chiun said.
Smith shook the sheaf of paper on his desk. "Fifteen old soldiers dressed in World War II military uniforms were found dead of various symptoms of old age in the Black Hills of South Dakota this morning," he said. "Do you know about this?"
"Should I?" Chiun asked innocently.
"They died of old age," Smith repeated.
Chiun shrugged. "We all have our time."
"This was the Team, wasn't it?" he sputtered. "Foxx's Team. Remo didn't kill them. They were under orders to murder the president of the United States, and he didn't kill them. That's the truth, isn't it?"
Chiun sighed. "What do I know," he said philosophically. "I am but an old man, a being in the twilight of his years, who wishes only for a small ray of beauty to bring light into the weary darkness of his life. My one
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