"Aw, come on," Remo said. "There's nothing on Managua except hurricanes."

The Managuan looked uncertainly at Remo for a moment. "What else they done, Manuel?" he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

Manuel thought hard, apparently expediting the process by probing his navel with his index finger. "I got it. We're sick of their honkey foreign aid."

The spokesman sprang to life again. "Right on. We don't need no stinking handouts. We want welfare."

"Wait a second," Remo said.

"d.a.m.n straight, man. Welfare's our right. We want to collect, just like the brothers here in New Jork." The two men saluted one another with upraised fists, their middle fingers extended proudly, and broke into a chant. "Free Managua! MLF! Power to the People! Boogie!"

"You know, I used to get a nice cla.s.s of customer in here," the madam muttered.

The chant seemed to transport the Managuans into ecstasy. Manuel strutted up to Remo, slashing the air around Remo's face with his open blade and shouting, "Free our people. Like let my people go, dig it?" The two men slapped palms, twirling their knives high in the air while they performed the ritual.

Blankfaced, Remo stepped forward and picked the knives out of the air. He closed his fingers around them. For a 24.moment there was a crackling sound. Then he opened his hands, and two mounds of metal filings sifted toward the floor. "Dig this," he said, and tossed the two men out the window.

"Hey, how'd you-" the blonde began, when she caught sight of a debonair gentleman standing in the bedroom's doorway. He was tall, with a refined nose and dark hair that was graying suavely at the temples. Remo recognized him as the conductor of an internationally famous symphony orchestra-a man who had been credited with promoting appreciation of cla.s.sical music in America through his charm and s.e.x appeal, although his tuxedo had been replaced by a transparent plastic shower curtain draped toga-style over one shoulder.

"What do you want now, Ray?" the madam asked irritably.

"1 beg your pardon," the man said in pear-shaped tones. "My captors wish me to bring them a bottle of tequila. Could 1 put you to the trouble?"

"Tell those suckers to buy their own hooch, Maestro," the madam bellowed. "They're getting enough for free as it is."

"Oh, 1 a.s.sure you, I'll pay for the bottles myself."

"Hold it, hold it," Remo said. "You're one of the MLF's hostages, right?"

"Yes." The man showed a mouthful of dazzling white teeth. "I'm Raymond Rosner. Are you one of the liberators?" He extended his hand.

Remo slapped it away. "I don't shake hands with anybody who wears plastic before noon. Why are you buying tequila for them?"

"Well, they lead a very trying life," Rosner said earnestly. "It's the least 1 can do for these fine young men in their n.o.ble cause."

"What cause?"

25."It's too complex to express in mere words."

"Try," Remo said.

The conductor blinked impatiently. "It is quite impossible for pampered capitalists such as ourselves to understand the inner rage of these valiant desperadoes. But I dig it. I absolutely dig it."

"Oh, I get it. You don't know what they want, either."

"Not really. Something about welfare. They abducted me from my apartment rather too hastily for us to enjoy a true rap session. But I'm sure they've got a good cause. I'm going to give a benefit performance for them after they release us."

"If they don't murder you first."

"We mustn't make generalizations about the lawlessness of the socio-economically repressed. Liberalism is more than just a word," Rosner said, winking. The wink changed iato a mask of pain as a fat Managuan rushed in and kicked him in the kidneys, sending him sprawling face down on the floor.

"Where dat tequila?"

"Coming, bro," Rosner moaned.

The Managuan stepped on his neck. "I ain't your brother, honkey." He swaggered out into the corridor, toward a heavy metal door. Remo followed him.

"Right on," he heard Rosner croak from the bedroom carpet.

The door led to a steamy, white tiled chamber dominated by a giant hot tub filled with revelers. Aside from the fat Managuan and his cronies, plus several beautiful girls who Remo a.s.sumed worked for the establishment, there was a portly lady in her fifties, with yellow Shirley Temple curls and an impending case of turkey neck, a balding, pig-eyed little man, a nubile young girl whose chest displaced at least twenty gallons of water, and a skinny, seedy, middle-aged fellow with mercurochrome- 26.colored hair and a nose that seemed permanently engaged in the act of inhaling various drugs. There was something vaguely familiar about the man's distended nostrils.

"Hey, whoozat?" one of the Managuans asked, inclining a smoking joint toward Remo.

"I don't know, but he can come play in my bubble bath anytime," the fat lady squealed.

The young girl eyed Remo's physique and p.r.o.nounced him "totally wow."

Remo looked around. The only member of the group of hostages and terrorists not immersed in the eight-foot round tub was a stringy, morose-looking man wrapped in a towel. He sat on a tile bench swigging periodically from a bottle of vodka.

"Bourgeois hedonists," the man growled in a thick Russian accent.

"Who're you?" Remo asked.

The man drank thoughtfully. "Who am I?" he mused. "What is 'I'? What is existence but the quintessential nothingness?"

"Forget it," Remo said. He walked over to a pile of dirty T-shirts and jeans. There was some grumbling from the hot tub as Remo scattered the clothes to reveal several shoddily constructed- explosives and an Uzi submachine gun.

"Oh, great," he said, as he dismantled the bombs. He noticed a pair of long legs in boots standing next to him.

"I'm Francine," the madam purred.

"1 recognized you." Remo's fingers moved swiftly.

"You're serious, aren't you?" she asked with some surprise. "About rescuing the hostages and my girls, I mean."

Remo expelled a gust of breath. "I'm supposed to rescue them. 1 don't have to take them seriously."

27.A smile spread across Francine's face. "You're cute. Maybe you want to party?"

"Can it, lady. I left my traveler's checks at home."

"I take American Express." She gestured toward the tub. "Now just look at those people. They're having a wonderful time. That little man's a millionaire builder, and that's his wife beside him, with the cocaine spoon. The groupie's with Freakie Dreems, the rock star. You've heard of him, haven't you?"

So that was why the nose looked familiar. It had become famous twenty years ago, in the "ugly is s.e.xy" movement that Mr. Dreems had pioneered.

"Who's that?" Remo inclined his head toward the man with the vodka.

"Oh, that's Ivan Nyrghazy, the Russian novelist. He defected to America two years ago. He moved into this building after his book, Nothing Is Everything was made into a TV miniseries."

"Uh," Remo said as he unraveled the fuses of the bombs. He stood up. "I guess that takes care of the explosives, at least."

"What'd he do?" the fat Managuan said, rising out of the tub like a tattooed porpoise in gold bikini trunks.

"I defused your bombs, Baby New Year. They could have gone off any minute."

"I'll tell you what's going to go off, nosy." He grabbed the machine gun. "This."

Freakie Dreems clutched his forehead. "What is this drug?" he rhapsodized. "It's bending my mind. I just thought I saw someone pick up a machine gun."

"Gag me with a spoon," the groupie said abstractedly.

The Managuan fired. Bullets sprayed around the tiled enclosure like popcorn. Remo flung himself into a recess in the wall. The groupie leaped out of the tub, shimmying 28.frantically as a cloud of white bubbles traveled spectacularly from her neck to her ankles.

Remo peeked out at the barrage of gunfire coming his way.

The Russian drank. "A moment of boredom, then nothingness," he intoned.

"I face bullets for this?" Remo muttered. But he couldn't afford to think about that now. Pulling himself up the tile wall quickly, he somersaulted away toward the gunner. He landed with his feet in the Managuan's soft abdomen. The machine gun flew into the air. Remo caught it and wrapped it like a scarf around the man's neck.

A second Managuan charged him. As he came forward, Remo studied the man's chest. Standing among the garish lettering of his tattoo were five lonely hairs. Remo used them as his focus. He thrust at the chest and tore off the man's tattoo, along with several layers of epidermis. The Managuan screamed.

"You pay for that, mother," another MLF representative said, pulling a knife from his beret and throwing it expertly toward Remo's throat. Remo stepped aside and waited for the blade to come within range. Then he flicked it with the end of his fingernail to send it boomeranging back to its owner.

The Managuan's face registered blank terror. He turned to run, but before he reached ninety degrees, the knife struck home, sliding through his temples with a swish. The Managuan stood still for a moment, then fell, the knife quivering in his forehead like a large silver fish.

"Grody to the max," the groupie said, chewing her gum energetically.

Francine wound her silken arms around Remo as the last two Managuans pulled themselves cautiously out of the hot tub and stalked over the tiles. "Violence excites me," she whispered, breathing heavily. "How about you?"

29."It wears me out," Remo said, throwing off her embrace and darting forward to collar the two men. He picked them up, one in each hand, and propelled them against the tile wall near the tub. They landed with a splinter of bones, then slid noiselessly into the water, their corpses draping themselves over the hostages.

The fat lady and her husband screamed. Freakie Dreems stared hard at a gla.s.sine packet of pink powder.

"I don't care if it is two hundred simoleons a pop. I want some more," he said.

The Russian novelist waved his bottle over the throng. "Being . . . nothingness," he p.r.o.nounced sagely.

Remo pulled the plug in the tub. "Okay, out." He prodded the hostages toward the entrance.

"Going so soon?" Francine asked, running her metallic-green fingernails through Remo's hair.

"I'm on my lunch hour."

She pouted. "You can't leave me like this. I've got to face all those police, and I'm probably going to get busted. So just a quickie for the road, okay?"

Remo sighed. Women were always doing this to him. "Will you settle for this?" he asked, pressing a small cl.u.s.ter of nerves on the inside of her left wrist.

Francine shivered. They always did. The left wrist was the beginning of a long series of steps that brought women to arousal. Remo had learned them as part of his training. Sometimes it was insulting, because most women preferred being touched on the wrist to making love. But then, n.o.body made love anymore. Pleasure seemed to be enough for women these days.

So Remo usually pleasured them for no reason other than to keep them peaceful. They didn't care about love, and neither did he. The mechanical execution of a pleasure formula, unfeeling, uncaring, unthinking, served everyone well.

30.When Francine began toTtioan, he switched to a place on her thigh, then progressed to an erogenous zone on her back. She shrieked and panted in ecstasy. He touched her neck, and she came screaming and writhing on the slippery floor.

Four steps. There were many more, but they usually weren't necessary. They certainly weren't for Francine.

"Well, that was fun," she said, brushing herself off.

The groupie was drooling. "To the max," she drawied reverently.

"Out. AH of you. Get going." Remo herded them into the corridor.

"I must teil you that our rescue was quite satisfying," the Russian said as Remo lifted the still crumpled form of Raymond Rosner. "It was rather amusing, in fact. A speck of being in a sea of-"

"I know. Nothingness."

The Russian's eyebrows rose. "Very astute. I shall dedicate my next slim volume of verse, ent.i.tled 'Holes in the Fabric of Life' to you."

"Don't bother," Remo said. "I don't exist."

The novelist pondered. " '1 don't exist.' That's very profound. I don't exist."

Remo dumped the conductor into Ivan's arms. "Yeah, and I wish you didn't, either."

When the police 'stormed up the stairways and elevators, Remo left the way he had come. Down the building's side.

What he'd toid the Russian had been true. There was no Remo Williams anymore. That man was dead, a young policeman executed in an electric chair for a crime he didn't commit. Ah, justice, he thought. Raymond Rosner was going to raise money so that the Managuan Liberation Front could make more bombs, but a rookie cop with some faked evidence against him gets fried in the chair.

The chair hadn't worked. It was planned from the begin- 31.ning that the young policeman wouldn't die. He was only to appear to have died so that his name and face and fingerprints and files were taken permanently off everyone's records.

Remo's ident.i.ty had been so effectively erased so that he could serve a new agency of the United States government. No one except the president and the director of the organization, were to know about it, or Remo. The agency was called CURE, and it was illegal in every sense of the word. CURE operated outside the Const.i.tution to fight crime with the ultimate means: an a.s.sa.s.sin.

Remo had not wanted to be the enforcer arm of a secret, illegal government organization, but once he had been declared dead, there were few options left to him. At first, Remo had felt as if he were living in a nightmare: the frame, prison, the chair. . . . And then the endless days at Folcroft Sanitarium, a quiet nursing home in Rye, New York, run by a mild-mannered, unimaginative, middle-aged man named Dr. Harold W. Smith, who was the director of CURE. Smith hired a teacher to undertake the task of Remo's training, and the nightmare became worse.

The teacher was a crazy old Korean named Chiun, who seemed to feel that an ordinary man could be taught to achieve the physically impossible. Remo would have written Chiun off as just another strange element in the weird circ.u.mstances that surrounded him, except that the old Oriental could himself perform all the outlandish tasks he a.s.signed to Remo.

Chiun could walk with such lightness that he did not even break the membranes of dried leaves that lay under his feet. He could move so swiftly that he could not be seen, and so silently that he could not be heard. He could hear the ultrasonic calling of insects. He could see the pollen on a b.u.t.terfly's wings in flight. And he could kill more effectively than anyone on earth.

32.Chiun was from a village named Sinanju in a remote area of North Korea, where the martial art had been born and had been evolving for thousands of years. But the teachings of Sinanju went further than the acquisition of physical strength. It was the sun source of the martial arts, the original from which the pale knitations of jujitsu, karate, aikido, t'ai chi chu'an, and tae kwon do sprang. As such, the followers of Sinanju learned to develop their senses and minds to an uncanny degree as well. It was for this reason that the Masters of Sinanju had been in demand as a.s.sa.s.sins in wealthy, distant lands since the time of the first Master w.a.n.g more than a millennium ago.

The training was a long and difficult process. Only one man of Sinanju at a time was groomed to be Master, and he spent his entire life in learning and practice. When it was time, the Master trained a new pupil to take his place.

Chiun had trained his own apprentice, Nuihc, to manhood. But something went wrong. At the time when the Master's pupil should have been preparing himself for a life of service to his village, Nuihc turned on Chiun and held Sinanju in terror. He was stopped, but not without great sacrifice to Chiun. At Nuihc's death, Chiun, who was already an old man, was left without an heir. There would be no Masters of Sinanju after him.

Then, called into service for Harold Smith and CURE, he found an answer in the white boy named Remo. It was not a suitable answer, since Remo was not even from the village, but he showed some promise.

He worked with Remo and changed him from a beefy ex- G.I. who wasn't bad in a fistfight to a thin, finely tuned instrument of death. In those years Remo had also become, spiritually and emotionally, Chiun's son. The rare and magnificent tradition of the Masters of Sinanju had been pa.s.sed down to him. He was now a Master and would someday be the Master.

33.And he was using it all to rout a bunch of gun-happy adolescents from a bordello. Old w.a.n.g was surely turning over in his urn, Remo thought as he recalled the events of the day.