"Oh, my God," Kim Jong Il whimpered. "There's another one of you."
The man offered a smile that not only lacked warmth, but also seemed to drop the room temperature by ten degrees.
"No. There is only one," he said. "My name is Nuihc. You have heard of me."
The way he said it, the premier could tell he should nod. He did so. Vigorously.
"Oh, yeah. Nuihc. Right. I should have known."
Nuihc's expression grew cold. "Do not lie to me," he spit. He shook his head. "Have I been gone so long?" he muttered bitterly. "I am not even remembered in my own land by the son of the man to whom I promised the world."
Kim licked his lips nervously. "You knew my old man?"
Nuihc nodded. "Once, many years ago, I made a bargain with your father. I offered him my services."
"Services? You mean like with the killing and all? Thanks, but I've got folks to do that. Hell, one more winter like last year and we'll all freeze or starve to death. Great of you to think of me, though."
He tried the door again. Though he strained to close it, Nuihc held it open, no strain on his flat face. "My motivation in your father's day was greed," Nuihc said. "That has changed. The world can go to whoever desires it. I want vengeance."
The premier could see he was getting nowhere. With a grunt he released the door handle. "Vengeance against who? The old guy or the kid?"
"Both murdered me. Both will pay."
Kim Jong Il wasn't sure he had heard right. "Did you say murder?" he asked.
There was no response. At least not verbally.
In that moment the premier saw something more than death in this man's eyes. It sparkled beneath the surface. The leader of North Korea had seen it before. The eyes of this Nuihc who stood before him held a touch of madness.
"I extend to you the same offer that I made to your father," Nuihc said, "with the same price. I give you the world, but Sinanju is mine."
Kim Jong Il clenched his hand. The pain lingered where the Master of Sinanju had assaulted him at the airport. "The old Master will have something to say about that."
"He is long past his time. His skills are no match for mine. I will tear his belly wide and scatter his withered entrails that the fish and the gulls might feast upon them."
The leader of North Korea could sense the madness in this man. But then the premier noted the bodies in the hallway. From the evidence before him, this new Sinanju Master might actually be able to deliver on his threat.
"What about the young one?" Kim Jong Il asked. "He'd be a match. That white scares me half to death."
"I have already dealt with him."
He said it with such certainty. So offhandedly. The leader of North Korea could scarcely believe his ears. "He is dead?" he asked, astonished.
"As good as dead," Nuihc replied. "Even now he runs around the world with the fool thought that he will succeed the one he calls father. The soft white imbecile has no idea he is about to fall into a trap."
This Nuihc seemed confident. The premier wanted to believe him. But he had seen those other two in action too many times in the past.
"You have doubts," Nuihc said. "There is wisdom in that. You know what they are capable of. But see-" he waved a hand across the soldiers' bodies "-that I am as skilled as they are. And I am not fettered by the weakness of their emotional attachment to each other. When the young one dies, the old one will be a shell. Easily disposed of."
"I don't know," the premier said.
"They have threatened to harm you?"
"They've done more than that. Every time they're in town I end up covered with bumps and bruises."
"And yet they allow you to live," Nuihc said. His face and tone hardened. "That will not be the case with me. I promise you that I will kill you if you stand in my way. That is your choice. On the one hand unquestioned power, on the other death. And all you need do is allow events to unfold as I have designed. Merely stay out of the way."
Understanding the impossible choice he was being offered, Kim Jong Il felt the life drain from his shoulders. "What do you need from me?"
"There will be a plane arriving here from the South within the hour. Allow it to land in safety. I will need helicopters to transport men and a clear air corridor from the capital to Sinanju. Beyond that, all you will need to do is sit back and the world will be yours."
Kim Jong Il looked at the bodies of the men littering the floor of the hallway outside his impenetrable bunker. They were supposed to be safeguarding his life. The premier of North Korea looked into Nuihc's cold eyes.
"You will have my cooperation," he vowed.
HYUNSIL WAS TENDING the hearth fire when she first heard the sound. It rolled up over the wail of the wind off the bay.
At first she thought it was the noise that had been the terrible harbinger of her beloved father's death. But as she listened she realized this sound was mechanical.
Her tears had dried in the warmth from the fire. Still, she wiped her eyes as she went to the window. The Master of Sinanju had instructed the villagers not to leave their homes. Hyunsil had done as she was told. But there was a little space between the slats on her wooden shutters where she was able to see out.
Putting her eye to the pane, she saw low lights amid the twinkling stars of the night sky.
They moved too slowly to be planes. Helicopters. There seemed to be many of them. The lights came within a mile of the village and then descended, disappearing from sight.
Hyunsil continued to watch, her warm breath steaming up the cold windowpane. A few times she had to wipe the gathering mist away with her apron.
After only a few moments the strange helicopters returned to the sky. They headed back in the direction of Pyongyang. In a minute the noise from the shushing rotor blades was consumed by the howling wind.
All that was left was the rattling of the boards in the old wooden house. So strange a thing was it that Hyunsil stayed at the window for a few minutes. But though she watched the sky, no more helicopters came.
The village was quiet. The houses remained locked up tight. Here or there a slivered beam of light could be seen from underneath a door or shining out through the uneven slats in a set of shutters. Since the death of her father, the lanterns in the main square had not been lit.
Illuminated in the blue light of a million flickering stars, Sinanju almost seemed peaceful.
Hyunsil was about to turn away from the window when she caught something from the corner of her eye.
A glimpse of movement. A man's face. Another. And another.
They came into the village from the north.
Their faces were not Korean. They were white and black and Asians of all kinds. Hyunsil could see a Japanese, a Chinese and a half-dozen others. They carried weapons, these strangers. They brought arms into the village where none-from the Mongols of ages past to the Communists of modern times-had dared set foot to soil.
The men kicked in doors. Hyunsil watched as her fellow villagers were dragged out into the street. Women and children wept. The men of Sinanju cowered in fear as the strangers went about their evil business.
Hyunsil was frozen in place.
The Master had gone. She knew not where. But he had disappeared hours ago. The House of Many Woods sat in darkness on the bluff overlooking the village.
The door across from her home was forced open. Light from within spilled out onto the street. Hyunsil saw a face. Suddenly clear in the stab of yellow light. Her breath caught.
It could not be.
The face was the face of death. Twisted, gleeful. Hyunsil had seen him die. And yet here he was. The people of Sinanju lined up before him. He went from face to face, studying each in turn before moving on.
And then-fear tightening as she watched the man move around the village square as if he was unaware of his own death-Hyunsil remembered something that her father had once told her. Part of an ancient Sinanju legend.
"And he will summon the Armies of Death, and the war they w
age will be the War of Sinanju," Hyunsil whispered.
A shadow fell across her window. She jumped. The front door burst open in a spray of white splinters. A big man stomped inside. Grabbing the old woman by the arm, he dragged Hyunsil from the window.
The rough treatment didn't matter. The caretaker's daughter had already seen the face of death. Hyunsil didn't struggle. She allowed herself to be dragged from her home, confident in the knowledge that she would soon be in the company of her dear father.
Chapter 26
As soon as Remo got to Russia and the secret throne room of the czars, he could see that he was in for more headaches just by the way the Russian leader was fidgeting. The president of the Russian commonwealth nervously told him that Russia's contestant-a very brutal former KGB killer-had gone missing. Remo had had enough. He called the man a govnyuk, broke Czar Ivan's favorite throne into little pieces and assaulted the president's personal security brigade when they swarmed in to see what the commotion was.
"What do you say now?" Remo demanded as the last man fell, a rifle barrel coiled around his neck like a metal snake. "Still can't find someone to try to kill me?"
The president looked at his security detail lying on the floor. Some of them moaned. They were probably alive. Those who didn't moan seemed to be the lucky ones.
"I could make a few phone calls," the president offered weakly.
"Don't bother," Remo grumbled. "I don't even know what I'm doing here. It's not like I'm ever going to work for a country where the only way to tell the difference between its currency and its toilet paper is that the currency absorbs better and flushes without clogging."
Leaving the president and his twitching guards, Remo prowled out of the secret throne room.
Away from the Kremlin, he found a phone at the Moscow Pizza Hut. He stabbed out the special CURE number so hard the metal 1 button cracked. The pieces were falling to the tile floor when Smith picked up.
"I've had it, Smitty," Remo announced. "I don't know if somebody said I pinch like a girl or have B.O. or what, but nobody wants to play with me. I'm coming home."
He didn't even give the CURE director time to answer. Slamming the phone down, he stormed out of the restaurant. He could hear the telephone ringing as he marched out the door.
At Sheremetevo-2 International Airport in Moscow, he bought a ticket for New York. Finding an out-of-the way seat, he sat down and waited for his flight.
A few times while he sat, some agents who worked for the airport came up to tell him he had a telephone call. He had no desire to talk to Smith again. He chased them all away. Eventually they stopped coming.
Disgrace. That's what Chiun would say. And he'd be right. Remo had screwed up. Somehow it was his fault. He could feel the disapproving eyes of a hundred Masters of Sinanju staring into his soul. The soul of a failure.
Dead or not, Remo couldn't look them in the eyes. He looked at his shoes. They were nice shoes. Handstitched Italian leather. He thought of the person who made them. The man was obviously not a failure. He made good shoes. Hell, he made great shoes. Perfect shoes. Remo could beat a cowhide silly and cut and stitch for a million years and not come up with a finer pair of shoes. The man who made the shoes was a success. Unlike Remo. Remo, the first Master of Sinanju to flunk the Time of Succession. Remo, who would get an F for the Hour of Judgment. Remo the Failure.
He sat there in a funk, eyes downcast, for he didn't know how long. A shadow fell over his perfect shoes. He assumed it was another airport agent insisting that there was an urgent phone call for him. Another gruff Russian voice that sounded as if it had been born hoarse and raised on Marlboros.
It wasn't.
"Mr. Remo?" asked a sweet voice that was like a chorus of angels.
Remo looked up from his perfect shoes into a face that put the perfection of his shoes to shame. The face matched the heavenly voice. The woman smiled. Her face was radiant. Her soft brown eyes twinkled with joy.
"How are you?" she lilted.
In the lonely corner of Moscow's airport, Remo Williams had met the most beautiful woman who would ever kill him.
AFTER REMO HUNG UP the phone, Smith allowed the CURE system to redial for him automatically. He let the phone ring a dozen times. When a Russian voice eventually answered, he hung up.
He was back in his office in Folcroft. Entering a few commands into his computer, he found that Remo had called from an American chain restaurant that now had a franchise in Moscow. Marveling at the changes the world had undergone in the past ten years, he returned to his computer.
Smith couldn't say he blamed Remo for wanting to come home. His time in Europe couldn't exactly be termed a rousing success. Still, the Master of Sinanju would not be pleased if CURE's enforcement arm returned in defeat from this crucial phase of his training. And Chiun had a tendency to make his private gripes disturbingly public.
The CURE director would give Remo a little time to cool off. He would call him at the airport.
As he typed, Smith felt the weariness of his quick round-trip to Florida. Thankfully, Mark Howard was now safely tucked away in CURE's basement security wing.
The Folcroft doctors had concurred with the prognosis of the physicians in Florida. The assistant CURE director was in no immediate danger. It was only a matter of time before he came out of this strange unconscious state.
Smith was more than a little concerned about his assistant's blackout. It was the sort of thing that could cause a security problem for the covert agency. After all, the FBI men on the scene had used Mark's phony ID to contact Smith. The line was untraceable and, thanks to the orders they had been issued at the start of the Dilkes affair, no one had filed a report about the incident. Still...
Smith took some comfort in the fact that there was nothing in the young man's medical record to indicate that anything like it had ever happened before. Howard didn't abuse drugs or alcohol. He had submitted to regular testing since his assignment to Folcroft. Disturbing though it was, with any luck this was an isolated incident.
As he worked, Smith couldn't shake the nagging sense that the incident with Howard had something to do with the young man's strange sixth sense.
Smith was sifting through the latest data on Remo's missing assassins when the blue contact phone jangled to life. It was half an hour since the last time it rang. Assuming Remo had had a change of heart, he scooped it up.
"Remo," he said sharply.
The urgent voice that replied didn't belong to CURE's enforcement arm.
"I need to speak with Remo," the squeaky voice of the Master of Sinanju announced sharply.
"Oh, Master Chiun," Smith said. "Was there a problem--?"
"Remo," Chiun interrupted. "Where is he?" There was an anxiousness bordering on fear in the old man's voice.
Frowning, Smith checked the time display in the corner of his monitor. "At the moment he is in Moscow," the CURE director replied. "He should be at the airport by now."
"Find him," Chiun commanded. "I must speak with him."
Smith cleared his throat, uncomfortable to be dropped in the middle of this. "There might be a slight problem," he admitted slowly.
"Is he injured?" Chiun asked with tight concern.
Smith was surprised by the question. "No, not at all," he replied. "It is just that he has been having a slight problem with some of the men he is supposed to meet with in the Time of Succession."
He felt unhappy to be the one delivering this news. Given the circumstances, he was certain this was a private matter between Master and pupil. And he was just as certain that Chiun would find a way to blame him for not shepherding Remo properly through the Time of Succession. Smith was surprised, therefore, at the old man's response.
"The Time of Succession is meaningless," the Master of Sinanju snapped. "There is something greater here. Remo is in danger. You must find him."
There was pleading now. Smith had never before heard such desperation in the old Korean's voice. The CURE director typed a f
ew commands into his computer. He pulled up Remo's Visa card record. In Moscow, Remo had just purchased a ticket to New York.
"Please stay on the line," Smith instructed. Using the outside line, he called the airport in Russia and made arrangements for someone to collect Remo. The Russian returned to the line a few moments later.
"I am sorry, but the gentleman is seeming not to be want to speak to anyone," the airport representative apologized. "He is saying that you to. . . 'blow it out your ears'?" The helpful man seemed confused by the unfamiliar expression.
Smith tried a few more times with no success. He finally gave up. He returned to the blue phone. "Remo will not answer, Master Chiun," he apologized.
The Master of Sinanju didn't speak immediately. There seemed a great hesitation over the line. As if the old man were considering options, none of which pleased him.
"You must give him a message," Chiun said eventually. "Tell him to stop what he is doing and return to your side. If an assassin comes near, he must not confront. Tell him to run. For in distance there is safety."
"I don't understand, Master Chiun, but Remo is returning here. He called me to tell me so."
The news didn't seem to much hearten the old Korean.
"That is good. But tell him not to resume the Time of Succession. And he is to stay away from Sinanju. Tell him if he values me and all that I have given him, under no circumstances is he to return until he hears directly from me. Tell him that. Under no circumstances."
There was great resignation in his voice. As if he expected never to give his pupil permission to return. Smith glanced down at his monitor. The data reflected in his owlish lenses.
"You are not calling from your home phone," he said, adjusting his glasses.
"I am at a building. The first I could find with a working telephone. It is some sort of garrison. And that does not matter. I will have someone from the government come repair my telephone. Tell Remo I will call him when I know more. Will you give him my message?"
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