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  "As easily manipulated as virtual money itself."

  "Yeah. I see it now. It's all electrons and digital packets of data. Man, this is big. It's so big I can't think of a good word to encompass the magnitude of it all."

  "It is," said Friend, "the biggest cyberscam ever conceived."

  Chapter 19

  Remo Williams never liked visiting Sinanju. He hadn't liked it the first time he'd set eyes on it many years ago. For years he had been forced to listen to Chiun's stories of how Sinanju was the envy of the East, how it was richer and more sumptuous than any modern city. In the ancient days, Chiun had boasted, Luxor and Thebes and Babylon and Alexandria had envied the people of Sinanju, who lived in a true civilization.

  In more recent times, when the cruel Japanese invaded Korea, Sinanju had remained untouched. No Japanese oppressor dared set foot upon its sanctified soil. When the Communists came in the aftermath of the Japanese, a tax collector from Pyongyang showed up to collect tribute on behalf of the new premier, Kim II Sung. He was told to put out his hands—and so caught his severed head.

  No more tax collectors were sent after that.

  When the Korean War was inflicted upon the Korean Peninsula and the East and West struggled mightily all around it, the village went on as it had before, unmolested.

  Sinanju was the Pearl of the Orient, the source of the sun source, the village of peaceful living. It was in the twentieth century exactly as it had been in the beginning.

  That much, at least, Remo had found to be true.

  Sinanju was an apron of mud on the edge of the West Korea Bay. Mud huts and fishing shacks stood about in disorder and disrepair. The better ones were decorated with clam and oyster shells. The lesser homes sagged from too much rain on their thatched roofs.

  In the winter it was bitter and cold, and in the summer plum trees grew wild. No crops were planted. And while most of the men claimed to be fishermen, they did not fish. The waters did not exactly teem with edible fish. Instead, the people subsisted off the largess of the Master of Sinanju and his grain-storage huts.

  Sinanju had not changed, Remo saw as they approached the end of the broad three-lane superhighway that Pyongyang had had constructed to appease the Master of Sinanju over a past slight. They had traveled for several hours, seeing many bicycles, no cars and only two military trucks. Private ownership of cars was forbidden in North Korea. So, it seemed, was food. Remo spotted many peasants hunkered down by the side of the road, eating roots and tufts of grass yanked from the ground by skeletal fingers.

  At one point they came to a sign, ornate and polished, which read Sinanju Eub.

  The arrow pointed to a paved turnoff.

  Colonel Kyung tapped the brake and prepared to take it.

  "Drive straight!" commanded the Master of Sinanju from the back seat of the jeep.

  "But the sign says—"

  "The sign points to the lesser town called Sinanju to discourage tourists."

  "But there are no tourists in—"

  "Drive on."

  Colonel Kyung drove on. "I have always wanted to see the village of the three no's."

  Remo turned to Chiun. "Three no's?"

  "No rice. No fish. No mercy," said Chiun, his face stiff with barely concealed pride.

  "My father told me many tales of his part of the Battle of Sinanju," Colonel Kyung continued.

  "Battle of Sinanju?" Remo said.

  "It was during the days of the war against the Americans. The imperialist Eighth Army of the criminal MacArthur was hurled into the Yellow Sea by the mighty armies of the Democratic People's Republic. With the comradely assistance of China."

  "I never heard of that," Remo told Chiun.

  "It is in your history books," said Chiun unconcernedly.

  The road came to a sudden end as if the earth had caved in. The jeep slowed to a stop at the edge of a sharp drop. Below, the village of Sinanju lay spread out like a clam flat. Without the clams.

  It smelled like a clam flat. It looked like a clam flat. In truth, it was a clam flat.

  It was near dark, and the dying light didn't make it any easier on the eyes.

  Colonel Kyung stepped out from behind the wheel and stated down at the sight with widening eyes. Remo joined him, Chiun following. Chiun's eyes were bright with pride.

  "This—" Colonel Kyung gulped "—this is Sinanju?"

  "Magnificent, is it not?" said Chiun.

  Colonel Kyung swallowed twice. "Yes," he said in a voice that wore truth like a tattered rag.

  "Now that your life has been fulfilled," intoned Chiun without warmth, "you may depart in safety."

  "The Battle of Sinanju must have been terrible indeed," Kyung said, unhearing.

  "It was. For the Americans."

  "So my father said," Kyung said. "As a child, he told me often of his struggle against the white invader, of how they fought day and night for sixty days until the imperialists fled licking their wounds and eating the body parts of their fallen dead to sustain themselves."

  "Your father lied," Chiun spat out.

  "Why would he lie about the glory that was Sinanju in those days before it was reduced to this terrible state by the great battle?" Kyung demanded.

  "Fool! Sinanju is unchanged since Nineveh was new."

  "What?"

  "No Korean or Chinese engaged the Americans on this spot. There was no battle. Only a rout when Chiun the Defender sowed death and terror among the invaders who in their ignorance had surrounded Sinanju with their noisy cannon and machines, disturbing his precious sleep. They fled, and to cover the cravenness of their flight, invented stories of a great battle that never took place."

  "But my father—" Kyung protested.

  "Every layabout in the armies of the elder Kim later claimed to have taken part of the Battle of Sinanju. Since no one had, it was a safe he to speak. Except here. Now begone, offspring of a lying father."

  Woodenly Colonel Kyung retreated to his jeep and sent it whining backward. He watched them with strange, stunned eyes. He progressed nearly half a mile before it occurred to him to turn the jeep around to face the way he was going.

  "That story you told is true?" Remo asked Chiun after the jeep was out of sight.

  Chiun's eyes narrowed. "I always speak truth."

  "Remind me to look it up when we get back."

  "It is good to be home," said Chiun, turning to drink of the sight of the village of his birth.

  Remo said nothing. This was not home. In fact, it was a place of difficult memories. They started to flood back. Here, he once thought he'd settle down. Here, he intended to take a Korean bride and have children. It was the last time Remo could remember being truly content. But an old enemy had followed him here, and his betrothed had been murdered.

  His eyes went to the plum-tree-sheltered burying ground, the one well-tended spot in the entire village.

  "You are remembering the past," Chiun said.

  "I never liked this dump," he said.

  "Think of the road that stretches before you, not that at your back," said Chiun, starting down a narrow dirt path to the village proper.

  Remo shook his head as if to dispel the unhappy thoughts. He had enough recent bad memories without dredging older ones. A lonely wind whined as if to announce their coming.

  Shadows were gathering all over the village. The air off the bay smelled of salt and dead clams. The sun finished going down, its dying red rays silhouetting the rocky coastline.

  There was a hump of dry ground too squat to be considered a hill on which stood an ornate pavilion- roofed building—the House of the Masters, the legendary treasure house of Sinanju and Chiun's home.

  The Master of Sinanju headed toward that.

  Reluctantly Remo followed.

  At first no one seemed to notice their approach. Then a child, splashing in a mud hole, happened to look up and, spying Chiun, leaped to his feet and ran shrieking into the village.

  "He comes!" the boy cried in Korean. "The Maste
r comes!"

  They came out of their huts then and up from the clam-flat beach. It was high tide, so the sandy end of the beach was completely covered.

  Chiun stopped as the people of Sinanju began gathering around him. Their faces were flat and unreadable.

  Out of the crowd came a bony old man with leathery skin whom Remo knew as Pullyang, Chiun's appointed caretaker in his absence.

  Approaching, he got down on hands and knees in the full bow prescribed by long custom.

  "Hail, Master of Sinanju, who sustains the village and keeps the code faithfully. Our hearts cry a thousand greetings of love and adoration. Joyous are we

  upon the return of him who graciously throttles the universe."

  This recitation was given with all the enthusiasm of children reciting the multiplication tables.

  Chiun seemed not to notice. His eyes were closed, and his chest was puffed up with pouter pigeon pride.

  "It is good to be among one's own people again," he said. "And I have brought my adopted son, Remo, whom you have not seen in some time."

  Remo folded his arms and waited to be ignored. Instead, the villagers crowded around, searching his face with their narrow, suspicious eyes.

  Pullyang turned to the Master of Sinanju. "He is still white."

  "Examine his eyes closely."

  The searching eyes returned. Remo frowned.

  "Are they not more Korean than last time?" asked Chiun.

  "They are not!" snapped Remo.

  "Some," allowed Pullyang.

  "Not likely," said Remo.

  "Yes, the Koreanness is definitely coming out of him," Pullyang said. Other heads nodded in agreement.

  "I have nearly beaten Christianity out of him," added Chiun.

  The villagers brightened and a few applauded.

  "A few more years under the Korean sun, and his skin will be as perfectly golden as yours or mine," he added.

  "Bulldooky," said Remo. "Now, you may return to your duties," Chiun said, clapping his hands peremptorily. "Pullyang, stay."

  Pullyang remained as the others scattered.

  Chiun plucked at his servant's sleeve and drew Pull- yang's ear to his mouth. "Quickly! Has the gold still not arrived?"

  "No, Master."

  "There has been no word, no whispers, no signs?"

  "No signs of gold. Only omens of your return."

  "Omens?"

  "Yes, Master. Last night thunder came from a clear sky. And today there were rainbows on the bay."

  "Rainbows?"

  "Yes. It is as if they knew of your return and, understanding their glory to be inferior to yours, threw themselves into the cold waters."

  "Remo, did you hear? There were rainbows. Even the Great Wang, greatest of all Masters, never had rainbows foretelling his return."

  "Truly you are to be known to future generations as Chiun the Great," said Pullyang.

  "I want to see these rainbows," said Remo.

  "They are gone. The Master has returned, so they are no longer necessary."

  "Show me where they were."

  Chiun snapped, "Remo. We have more important things to do than chase dead rainbows."

  "I don't think they were rainbows, Little Father."

  "If not rainbows, then what?"

  "Oil," said Remo.

  Chiun frowned. "Do not be ridiculous. Oil is not a favorable omen."

  "It is if you're trying to find a lost submarine," said Remo, looking down toward the beach whose outer boundaries were marked by the twin rock formations known as the Horns of Welcome to the friends of Sinanju and the Horns of Warning to those who came to do the village harm.

  Chapter 20

  Harold Smith did not fly home to Rye, New York, after leaving the Grand Cayman Trust in Georgetown.

  Instead, he flew to Washington, D.C., rented a cheap room and purchased a laptop computer at a local Radio Shack, paying in cash both times so as not to leave a paper trail. He set the PC up in the room and plugged his modem wire into the phone jack.

  Booting up the computer, Smith dialed up a free bulletin board called Lectronic LinkUp.

  In the days before the information superhighway had been paved, Harold Smith could never have done this. Now a vast pool of useful information was accessible to him just as it was to any computer-literate American citizen through the on-line net.

  Smith paged through the menu prompts and found an index to newspaper, magazine and even talk-show topics. He typed in the name XL SysCorp and asked for a list of articles.

  Exactly 567 separate entries began scrolling before his eyes in the soothingly cool fluorescent green he preferred. Smith had made a special point to get a green monochromatic monitor—after making sure the system he had purchased was not a product of XL SysCorp offered under a chain trade name.

  Methodically, one by one, Harold Smith began calling up abstracts of the 567 articles on XL SysCorp and reading those that promised to be illuminating.

  In short order he learned that XL SysCorp had gotten its start as Excelsior Computers in 1974, became Excelsior Systems in 1981, then Excel Systems Corporation in 1990 and finally metamorphosed into XL SysCorp last year.

  It was a model of a modern, vertically integrated company, and after a severe downsizing three years before, lean and mean and extremely competitive in a softening information-systems market.

  Smith saw with horror that XL SysCorp serviced

  any government accounts, including but not limited to the CIA. An article on the eight-billion-dollar XL program to upgrade the Internal Revenue Service's antiquated Zilog computer system made Smith gasp audibly.

  The possibility had not occurred to him before, but the suggestion was so obvious it filled Harold Smith with cold horror.

  The unknown mind had sicced the IRS on Folcroft. It was part of the master plan. Smith knew he had not received written notification of a coming audit. Somehow the IRS computers had been penetrated and a file changed to show both the notification and a reply Smith had never given.

  It was very neat. The IRS's computer checks and balances had been satisfied, so the system kicked out instructions to audit Folcroft, and human beings, with no way of differentiating reliable on-screen data from a fabrication, had obeyed like mindless robots.

  Grimly Smith read on as the day lengthened. He learned that XL had successfully transformed itself into a so-called virtual corporation. That brought a hard frown to Smith's thin face.

  It meant that any one of possibly thousands of freelance programmers or installers or subcontractors might in fact be responsible for the looting of the Grand Cayman Trust and the multipronged electronic assault on CURE.

  Smith had secretly hoped—even as the notion filled him with dread—that the plot could go to the highest reaches of XL SysCorp. It would mean a more grandiose plan, but the problem would be infinitely more tractable than the prospect of investigating every far- flung employee of the largest virtual corporation in America. Individual background checks alone could take months.

  Harold Smith pressed on, sustained only by an iron will and regular glasses of water fortified by Bromo- Seltzer to soothe his growling stomach. As he roved cyberspace looking for answers, one thought kept nagging him.

  Where on earth did the money go?

  Jeremy Lippincott was to the manor born, but he worked in a bank.

  Jeremy Lippincott had by his twenty-fifth year shown absolutely no discernible aptitudes in life. He possessed no known skills, no overriding interests that suggested gainful employment and only managed to balance his personal checkbook because his personal valet helped. He had graduated from Yale on the strength of his very gentlemanly C's—and because the university understood that the Lippincott Chair of High Finance depended on the goodwill of the Lippincott family. And the goodwill of the Lippincott family manifested itself in the form of raw money, and no other way.

  Jeremy Lippincott did, however, possess a lockjaw old-world accent and the imperial bearing of an East Coast WASP.
He was the kind of a person whom old money found comfortable to be around. He projected solidity, reserve and frugality.

  There was only one thing that could be done with him: get him a job in a bank.

  Since he came from wealth—the Lippincotts were among America's oldest, most monied families—the matter was as simple as his uncle William dropping in on his personal banker and dropping a broad hint.

  The hint, couched in crisp sentences that emerged from teeth that did not part even as the lips around them writhed in time with the bitten-off words, did not actually come out and say, Employ my idle and useless nephew or I will withdraw the family millions and entrust them to your worst rival. But they conveyed that unmistakable message nevertheless.

  This was how it was done. By oblique suggestion rather than pointed request, or worse yet, implied threat.

  Jeremy Lippincott was installed in a corner office of the Nickel Bank of Long Island where he could do no harm. He looked properly conservative in his Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip oxfords. His haircut was eternal. His jaw tightly shaven. From time to time he was sent to the homes of rich widows to sip weak tea and murmur to them in terse but reassuring sentences so they continued trusting the bank with their investments, which they understood very little and Jeremy Lippincott understood not at all.

  It was a perfect but boring existence, and on weekends Jeremy could sail the sound in his forty-foot yacht, dreaming of the America's Cup and looking forward to retirement twenty-some years into the next century.

  It all went amiss during the banking crisis. The Nickel Bank of Long Island fell victim to a mountain of troubled loans during the savings-and-loan crisis. Only a transfusion of investment capital could bail it out.

  And so the Lippincott family dug into its very deep pockets and purchased the bank. They had three reasons for resorting to this awkward remedy. One, although the Lippincott family owned Lippincott Bancorp, which in turn controlled numerous banks bearing the name Lippincott, they were fast running out of banks in which to safely house the Lippincott family fortune beneath the wholly insufficient one- hundred-thousand-dollar FDIC insurance limit and stood to sustain staggering losses.

  Two, Nickel Bank was a fabulous bargain. The Resolution Trust Corporation people were virtually giving it away.