"I have seen it before," said Chiun. "Many years ago, in j.a.pan. After the big bomb."

Radiation blisters.

In the living room, Remo's first phone call was to Dr. Smith. He told him about Maria's body and told him to make arrangements to have the body collected and an autopsy run upon it.

"Why?" asked Smith. "Isn't it just another of your usual bodies? Necks broken, skulls crushed, dismemberment. I've been reading the paper. People hanging from flagpoles."

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"No," said Remo. "I think it's radiation poisoning and I think you better tell the people who collect it to be careful."

He started to hang up, then added, "And unless you want another missile crisis, you'd better find some neat way of disposing of the body and just let Cuba think their spy was lost."

"Thank you for your advice, Remo. Have you ever considered ...."

Before Smith could finish the sentence, Remo had depressed the receiver b.u.t.ton and was dialing his second call.

No, Mr. Fielding was not in his office. He was out inspecting the four Wondergrain sites around America. Of course, the secretary remembered Remo. She was angry with him for not coming to her apartment as he had promised, but not so angry that she would withdraw the invitation forever. Yes, she understood about business. Some time soon. Yes. And oh yes, Mr. Fielding went to the Mojave site first. He had left only this morning. Now about Remo's brown eyes Remo hung up, satisfaction jousting with dissatisfaction. He was satisfied that Fielding was still alive. Whoever had been behind last night's attacks on Remo had not reached Fielding yet. But Remo was dissatisfied with Fielding's security. That dizzo secretary had been quick enough to tell Remo where Fielding was. She might tell anybody just as quickly.

Because they were now coequal partners, Rerno asked Chiun if he wanted to accompany Remo to the Mojave.

"No," said Chiun. "You go."

"Why?"

"If you have seen one desert, you have seen them 139.

all. I have seen the Sahara. What do I need with your Mojave? Besides, I am going to take your advice and watch my beautiful stories today. I believe your promise that there will be no more violence to mar them."

"Hold on, Little Father, it's not my promise."

"Do not try to go back on your word now. I remember what you said, as if it were just a moment ago. You personally guaranteed that there would be no more violence. I am holding you to that promise."

Remo sighed softly. What it meant was that Chiun had weakened and was going back to his television shows and nothing Remo could say or do would stop him. But if the shows went badly, Chiun wanted someone to blame.

After arranging for Chiun, his trunks, and his television set to be quietly shipped to a new hotel, Remo went to the Vandalia Airport. A quick jet flight and a helicopter ride brought him to the edge of the Mojave and a rented Yamaha motorcycle brought him out into the desert.

Mile after mile, following the narrow road, as straight as a weighted string hanging inside a well, Remo rode on into the heat and sand. Far ahead, on the rise off to the left, he saw the hurricane fencing surrounding Fielding's experimental farm, and he saw tire tracks through the sand.

He ran ahead another mile, then made a sharp left off the road and dug his bike twistingly through the sand, sputtering and spitting, following the other tire tracks, until he reached the fence.

A uniformed guard surveyed him from inside the fence.

"I'm Remo Barker. I work for Mr. Fielding. Where 140.

is he?" Remo could see a small pickup truck with rental plates parked inside the compound.

"He's over inspecting the field," the guard said lazily. He unlocked the wke gate by pressing a b.u.t.ton built into a panel on an inside post.

Remo propped up the motorcycle and walked inside. "Must be kind of lonely duty out here," he said.

"Yeah," said the guard. "Sometimes." He nodded toward the small wooden shack inside the compound. "Me and two other fellows around the clock." He leaned over to Remo and said softly, "Strange. Who'd want to steal wheat?"

"That's what I keep asking myself," Remo said walking toward the area in the back, covered by the almostblack plastic sun shield. The compound itself was almost a hundred yards square. The planting field took up one-quarter of the s.p.a.ce. The only other thing inside the hurricane fencing was the guard's small wooden shack.

There was no sign of Fielding. Remo went to the edge of the planting area, then lifted up a corner of the plastic sun shield and stepped inside.

It was a miracle.

Thrusting up from the arid, barren sand of the Mojave was a field of young wheat. To the left was rice. In the back, barley and soybeans. And there was that strange smell Remo remembered from the first time he had been there. He recognized it now. It was oil.

He looked around, but could not see Fielding. He walked through the field, through a miracle of growth, expecting to find Fielding crouched down, inspecting some stalk of grain, but there was no sign of the man.

At the back of the planting area, Remo lifted an edge of the sunscreen to find that it had been erected right 141.

against the hurricane fencing. There was no place for Fielding to be. He looked between the sunscreen and the fencing, left and right, toward the angled corners of the hurricane fencing but saw nothing, not even a lizard.

Where could Fielding have vanished to? Then he heard a truck's motor start and tires begin to drive off through the heavy sand.

Remo went back through the planting area, stuffing samples of the grains in his pockets. At the gate, he saw the truck speeding off in the distance. "That Fielding?" "Yeah," said the guard. "Where'd he come from?"

The guard shrugged. "I told him you was here but he said he was in a hurry and had a plane to catch."

Remo walked out through the gate, hopped on his Yamaha, and took off through the sand after Fielding.

Fielding was driving along the narrow road at seventy miles an hour and it took Remo almost two miles to catch up to him. He pulled up alongside Fielding's open window and then thought himself stupid for startling the man, because Fielding jerked the wheel and the truck spun left and sideswiped Remo's motorcycle.

The cycle started to lean to its side and Remo threw his weight heavily in the other direction and pulled back on the bike, but the front wheel lifted as Remo regained its balance, and the motorcycle did a fast wheelie, standing up on its end, while Remo guided it through the deep sand to a safe stop off the road.

Fielding had stopped on the road and looked out the window, back at Remo.

"Hey, you startled me. You could've been hurt," he said.

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"No sweat," said Remo. He looked at the dented bike and said "I'll ride in with you if you don't mind."

"No. Come on. You drive."

Driving back toward the airport, Remo said, "Some disappearing act back there. Where were you?"

"Back at the farm? In the field."

"I didn't see you."

"I must have come out just as you were going in. It's coming like a charm, isn't it? Is that what you came for, to see how my crops are doing?"

"No. I came to tell you I think your life is in danger."

"Why? Who would care about me?"

"I don't know," said Remo. "But there's just too much violence about this whole thing."

Fielding shook his head slowly. "It's too late now for anybody to do anything. The crops are coming so good that I'm moving up the schedule. Three more days and I'm going to show them to the world. The miracle grains. Humanity's salvation. I thought they'd take a month to grow, but they didn't even take two weeks."

He looked at Remo and smiled. "And then I'll be done."

Fielding would not hear of Remo accompanying him to the other planting fields.

"Look," he said. "You're talking about violence but all the violence seems aimed at you. None at me. Maybe you're a target, not me."

"I doubt it," said Remo. "There's another thing too. A girl went to your Denver warehouse." He felt Fielding stiffen on the seat. "She died. Radiation poisoning."

"Who was she?" Fielding asked.

"A Cuban, trying to steal your formulas."

"That's a shame. It's dangerous in Denver." He 143.

looked at Remo hard. "Can I trust you? I'll tell you something no one else knows. It's a special kind of radiation that prepared the grain so it can give such miracle growth. It's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. I feel sorry for the poor girl." He shook his head. "I haven't felt this bad since my manservant, Oliver, was killed in a tragic accident. Would you like to see his picture?"

In the mirror, Remo saw Fielding's lips pull back in a grimace. Or was it a grin? Never mind. Many people smiled when under tension.

"No, I'll skip the pictures," Remo said. As he parked the track at the airport later, Fielding put a hand on his arm. "Look. Maybe you're right. Maybe these attacks are eventually aimed at me. But if they think the way to me is through you, then it's best we're separated. You see my point?"

Reluctantly Remo nodded. It was logical, but it made him uneasy. For once, he had found a job he wanted to do. Maybe in decades or generations, if Remo's life ever became known, maybe he would not be rated by the people he had killed but for this one life he had saved-the life of James Orayo Fielding, the man who had conquered hunger and starvation and famine in the world for all time.

He thought this while he watched Fielding's plane take off. He thought of it on his own plane back to Dayton and he thought of it when, just on a whim, he remembered his pockets filled with grain and stopped at an agricultural lab at the University of Ohio.

"Perfectly good gram," the botanist told Remo. "Normal, healthy specimens, of wheat, barley, soy, and rice."

"And what would you say if I told you they were grown in the Mojave Desert?"

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The botanist smiled, showing a set of teeth that were discolored by tobacco stains.

"I'd say you'd been spending too much time in the sun without a hat."

"They were," said Remo.

"No way."

"You've heard of it," Remo said. "Fielding's Wondergrains. This is it."

"I've heard of it, sure. But that doesn't mean I have to believe it. Look, friend, there's one miracle n.o.body can do. Rice cannot be grown in anything but mud. Mud. That's dirt and water. Mud, pal."

"In this process, the plants draw their moisture from the air," Remo said patiently.

The botanist laughed, too loud and too long.

"In the Mojave? There is no moisture hi the air in the Mojave. Humidity zero. Try drawing moisture out of that air." And he was off laughing again.

Remo stuffed his samples back into his pockets. "Remember," he said. "They laughed at Luther Burbank when he invented the peanut. They laughed at all the great men."

The botanist was obviously one of those who would have laughed at Luther Burbank because he was giggling when Remo left. "Rice. In the desert. Peanuts. Luther Burbank. Hahahahahaha."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

With the ratchety click of a child's toy, the small 16mm movie projector whirred into fan movement, flashed light, and fired a string of pictures on the beaded gla.s.s screen in front of Johnny "Deuce" Deussio.

"Hey, Johnny, how many times you gonna look at this guy? I tell you, you just give me three good guys. No fancy stuff. We just go and pop him."

"Shut up, Sally," said Deussio. "In the first place, you couldn't find three good guys. And if you did, you wouldn't know what to do with them."

Sally grunted, his feelings hurt, his hatred for this skinny, bone-faced motion picture subject growing by the second.

"Anyway," he grumbled, "if I had a chance at him, he wouldn't be throwing no people off no roof."

"You had your chance at him, Sally," said Deussio. "The night he sneaked in here. Right past you. Right past all your guards. And he stuffed my head in a toilet"

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"That was him?"

Sally looked at the screen again with greater interest. He watched as Remo seemed to stroll casually down a street, while bullets pinged around him. "He don't look like much."

"You dumb s.h.i.t," Deussio yelled. "What do you think you would do if somebody was on a roof across the street, popping away at you with a rifle and a night scope?"

"I'd run, Johnny. I'd run."

"That's right. You'd run. And the shooter would give you a lead and then put a bullet right in your brain. If he could find one. And this guy that you don't think is much made that G.o.dd.a.m.n shooter miss just by walking away. Now you get your stupid a.s.s out of here and let me figure out how."

After Sally left, Johnny Duece settled back in his chair and watched the film again. He watched as Remo climbed a drainpipe as effortlessly as if it were a ladder. He watched as he made the marksman miss up close and then threw him off the roof into the flagpole rope.

He watched Remo come back down the drainpipe and watched Remo pause on the pipe, feeling it with his fingertips, and he knew that at that moment Remo had sensed that someone else had followed him up the pipe.

But Remo had continued down and Johnny Deuce watched the movie and watched his own man come back down and he watched three of them stake out Remo in the alley and the three of them wind up dead.

The last shot was of Remo standing in the light at the opening of the alley, looking upward at the marks- 147.

man's body twisting slowly, slowly in the wind, and tossed a salute.