Claude cringed, waiting for the sh.e.l.ls to explode. They remained blessedly intact.

"I thank you for holding these for us. They are back in the hands of their rightful owners now." One of the skinheads had come over next to the old man. He stood there patiently.

The wind suddenly shifted, bringing the sharp scent of gasoline to Claude Civray's sensitive nose. The rest of the men hurried away, out of sight.

In that moment Claude understood what these men had in mind for him. He shook his head dully. "No," he begged. The word was a croak.

The old man ignored him.

"Soak them," he said to the skinhead. He turned and walked briskly back to the truck.

Grinning, the young man upended his container over the bodies of Claude Civray and Maurice St. Jean.

The gasoline poured out clear in the dull lamplight. The acrid smell cut into Civray's ?aring nostrils.

As the gas soaked into his clothes and mottled his hair, the truck carrying the old man drove calmly away. The man did not even cast a glance in Claude's direction.

When the man had ?nished dousing him with gas-oline, he laughed uproariously at the two helpless Frenchmen. Dropping the can onto Claude's legs, he ran from sight.

Maurice began to stir groggily. Claude prayed that his friend wouldn't awaken.

The minutes dragged on. It seemed to take forever.

After a time Claude allowed the hope that the men had reconsidered.

As the night insects chirped in the gra.s.sland around the facility, Claude Civray heard something approaching. It was a soft whooshing noise. Like the sound of a distantly racing train or wind across an open ?eld.

The wall of ?ame slipped into sight up the dirt path. It glowed malevolently, illuminating the sides of the guardshack in weird patterns, stabbing streaks of yellowy-orange into the black French sky.

It came slowly. Looping in from the main gate, it almost seemed as if it might pa.s.s him by. But like a dog on a scent the ?ames caught the path of gasoline poured in to the spot where the two guards lay.

Much faster now, the strip of ?re raced toward Civray.

Bracing for the ?ames, Civray didn't have time to be surprised that he felt nothing at all.

He didn't feel the ?re because before the ?ames had reached him they had already found an opening in one of the stacks of sh.e.l.ls.

As the ?rst sh.e.l.l detonated, the rest in the stack of 75 mm sh.e.l.ls exploded, as well. The ground rocked as the huge pallets with their tons of ordnance blew apart in a ma.s.sive eruption of ?re and twisted metal.

In less than a single heartbeat, Claude Civray was shredded into hamburger. Torn to pieces by bombs that had been dropped on his country at a time when his grandfather had been a young man.

OUTSIDE THE DEPOT, Nils Schatz watched the initial eruption with satisfaction.

The other trucks were gone. His was all that was left.

The ?rst explosions set off a chain reaction around the base. The blasts spread in violent white pockets across the length of the depot. Finally, in a concussive burst heard for miles around, the entire base exploded. In the sleepy French countryside it was as if the end of the world had come.

Schatz's truck swayed ever so slightly on its shocks.

Unmindful of the bombs in the rear of his own vehicle and the danger they posed, Nils Schatz watched the entire depot erupt into a single ball of glorious ?ery orange.

The brilliant light danced across his weary eyes, and for a blessed, happy instant the old n.a.z.i was certain he could see an army of jackbooted soldiers marching from out the ?ames of history.

For the ?rst time in more than ?fty years, Nils Schatz smiled. Sitting back in his seat, he tapped his cane on the dashboard.

The truck drove off into the night.

THE SAME DRILL was completed simultaneously and without incident at three separate deminage facilities ranged around northeast France that night.

Of the many trucks laden with stolen ordnance, only one ran into trouble.

In the back of a truck parked the next day at an intersection in the busiest city in the country, a single bomb was accidentally dislodged from a stack. The resulting explosion took out half of the nearest building and most of the street.

Thirty-seven people were reported immediate casualties of the incident in Paris. Another seventy were severely wounded.

A sign had been blown from the column beside the gate of the building that had borne the brunt of the attack. It read simply United States Emba.s.sy.

Chapter 6.

Smith arrived at Folcroft Sanitarium just before dawn and had been working at his computer for the better part of three hours. He wanted to get as much work done as possible before leaving for Europe. There would not be much of an opportunity to get anything accomplished with his wife around twenty-four hours a day.Just the same, Smith planned to bring his laptop computer along on their trip.

His wife had told him the previous night that she would call him at noon to remind him of his ?ight. Mrs. Smith was well aware of her husband's ability to get lost for hours at a time in his work.

When the phone rang, he a.s.sumed it to be her. He glanced at the time display in the corner of the computer screen buried beneath the onyx surface of his high-tech desk. It was still midmorning. His wife wouldn't be calling for another three hours.

The call was on Remo's special line.

"Yes," Smith said, picking up the blue contact phone.

"Morning, Smitty," Remo's voice said. "Just thought I'd check in before you left."

"I take it by this morning's news reports that you had a busy night?" Smith asked dryly.

He had programmed his computers to pull up any suspicious deaths that might be attributable to Remo-who was CURE's special enforcement armor to Remo's mentor, Chiun, the Reigning Master of Sinanju. The body of Linus Pagget-with its knot of compressed skull-bore the unmistakable stamp of the ancient martial art of Sinanju.

"I told you I was antsy," Remo said.

"That was not a CURE a.s.signment," Smith told him.

"It should have been."

"Nonetheless, I would appreciate it if you checked with me before engaging in these sorts of-" Smith searched for a word that would be appropriate when describing the gruesome condition in which the Nashua police had found Pagget's body "-activities," he ?nished.

"Next time. I promise. So, have you got anything else for me before you take off?"

"Nothing pressing," Smith admitted. "You and Master Chiun may enjoy the time off while I am away."

"You know I'd prefer to keep busy. C'mon, Smitty, there must be something."

Smith was surprised at Remo's eagerness to work.

It was not long before that he had been pushing for a vacation.

"Remo, if I had an a.s.signment, I would use you. There is simply nothing large enough to warrant putting you into the ?eld at the present time."

"I'm not a tractor, Smitty." His tone bordered on disgust.

Smith raised a thin eyebrow. "Is there something more to this than a simple desire to keep busy?"

Remo sighed. "You should be a shrink," he said glumly.

"I actually do hold a doctorate in clinical psychology," Smith noted.

"Yeah, right," Remo said absently. "It's just that there's always something more to do. One more creep determined to wreck the world for everybody else. Pagget left that nun barely breathing."

"She died this morning," Smith said tightly.

"I heard," Remo replied. His voice was laced with bitterness. "A fat lot of good I did her. I'm great at retribution, Smitty. What I stink at is getting there in the nick of time."

"Perhaps I am not the best person with whom to discuss this," Smith said, clearly uncomfortable. "Have you spoken to Chiun?""He thinks it's the same old story. Every year I get the blahs about the business. But it really isn't the same this time. I can't explain it. It's as if I know there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, but I ?nally realize that I can't do it all. I mean really realize it." Remo exhaled loudly. "I don't know. Maybe it's time I ?nally packed it in."

Smith had only been half listening while Remo spoke. Like Chiun, the CURE director had grown used to Remo's frequent bouts of melancholia. But when he raised the desire to abandon the dangerous life he was in, Smith took notice.

The CURE director frowned. "Remo, someone told you something a long time ago. He used to say the same thing to me. 'One man can make a difference.'"

He heard a pensive intake of breath on the other end of the line as Remo considered the words.

"I don't think I believe that anymore," Remo said after a long, thoughtful pause.

Smith pressed ahead. "It was true enough for him. Conrad MacCleary believed that his entire life. That was why he recruited you.

He knew that you could make a difference."

"MacCleary died more than twenty years ago," Remo countered. "He never lived in this America. He never saw anything as bad as what's going on out there today."

Smith paused. How could he tell Remo of the shared horrors Smith and MacCleary had witnessed as members of the OSS during World War II? It was a time when darkness threatened to engulf the entire planet. Subsequent generations had never known such a struggle. It was already history before Remo was even born.

In the end Smith decided not to even try.

"I will try to ?nd something for you," the CURE director promised.

"Thanks, Smitty," Remo said. The news appeared to do nothing to lift his spirits.

Smith hung up the phone, turning his attention back to his computer.

While he had been talking to Remo, a news story had come in from one of the wire services. Smith had failed to notice the interruption on his computer screen. The electronically reproduced story had waited patiently for his perusal.

Smith's lemony features grew more pinched as he read the details, spa.r.s.e for now.

There had been several large explosions in the north of France during the night. All at deminage depots. The French government was attributing the nocturnal blasts to recent procedural changes in the storage of old war supplies. Unwise changes, it had turned out.

The interior minister, speaking on behalf of the president, had a.s.sured the public that in the future there would be no more such alterations in the handling of the dangerous items warehoused on the bases. In the meantime the military and police were conducting house-to-house searches in the towns around the blast sites. They stressed that they had no desire to alarm the public, but they admitted that there was a possibility that some of the unexploded mustard-gas sh.e.l.ls that had been stored on the bases could have been corrupted in the blasts. The gas would have been released during the explosions. They wanted to be certain that everyone in the surrounding communities was all right.

Something about the report struck Smith as false. Of course the mustard-gas sh.e.l.ls would have gone off along with everything else.

Why would the French army be involved for so simple a matter as this? Surely the gas would have dissipated long before it reached a populated area.

Smith dumped the story from the screen and began typing swiftly at his special capacitor keyboard. In a moment he had accessed the private lines within the Paris headquarters of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, or DGSE.

Electronic mail inside France's premier spy organization was ?ying fast and furious. No one seemed to know precisely what was going on, but one thing was certain. The army was not conducting a door-todoor search for mustard-gas victims.

The explosions at the depots were not large enough, the resulting devastation not great enough, to account for all of the stored ordnance. According to reports, there were tire tracks leading away from every site.

All indications pointed to the fact that a ma.s.sive amount of unstable surplus World War II explosives had been stolen. By whom and for what end had yet to be determined.

Smith was reading the most recent memos, dated 3:02 p.m. Paris time, when his computer beeped impatiently. His system had found something that warranted the CURE director's attention.

Smith quickly exited the DGSE network and returned to his own system. He found a fresh news report waiting for him.

The ?rst stories were coming in of the bombing at the American Emba.s.sy in Paris. Smith read them with growing concern. Some members of the press were already connecting the Paris bombing with the explosions far north of the city.

When he had ?nished reading the news reports, Smith sat back in his creaking leather chair, considering. Through the one-way window behind him, Long Island Sound lapped lazily at the sh.o.r.e below Folcroft's rear lawn.

His plane took off from JFK International Airport at ?ve that evening. It was a direct transatlantic ?ight to London's Heathrow Airport. His wife's itinerary wouldn't bring them to France for another two days.

If the situation there-whatever it might becould be cleared up before then, there wasn't much of a chance he and Remo would run into one another.

It would also give Remo something to keep his mind off quitting the organization.

The decision was made.

Chair creaking as he leaned forward, Smith reached for the phone.

Chapter 7.

Helene Marie-Simone watched as the medical examiners pried the charred bodies from within the twisted remnants of the truck's cab. They cracked like crusted bread sticks.