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  He walked toward the front of the building. Through the window in the door on the far end of the room, he peered down a long hallway toward a front reception room. Meadows could see a pair of feet propped up on a desk. Men's shoes, blue trousers. A desk drawer was open and a bottle of scotch was protruding from it.

  He nodded to himself, pulled down the shade on the inside of the laboratory door, then pulled the shades on all the windows and the back door before flicking on a light. He locked the door leading to the rest of the building. If he heard the guard stirring, he could turn off the light and flee the building before the man could get into the room.

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  The place was like a zoo, he thought. The entire side wall was covered with cages and inside the cages were rats and monkeys and some kind of lizards and even bowls of worms.

  Jasper Stevens had told him about the animals but he had wanted to see for himself.

  There was one small cage whose glass was painted black. Attached to the front of the cage was an eyepiece so an observer could press his face to it and look inside the cage.

  Zack Meadows pressed his face to the eyepiece. A pair of rats ran around inside the big fishtank. An overhead light brilliantly illuminated the cage. If what Jasper said was true. . . .

  Meadows turned off the overhead light inside the cage. Enough light drifted in through the sides for Meadows to see in through the eyepiece. As soon as the light went ofí, the two rats scurried into a corner and huddled there, squeaking and shivering, the terror that racked their bodies total and crushing.

  Rats afraid of the dark? Jasper Stevens had told him that but he hadn't really believed it.

  "Yes, that's right, Mr. Meadows. They're afraid of the dark," said a voice behind him.

  Meadows wheeled and bunked his eyes once as the strong overhead fluorescent lighting contracted his pupils.

  Standing just inside the connecting door was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had flaming red hair and a complexion that made him understand what people meant when they said creamy skin. She was wearing a light tan sweater with a brown suede skirt and a matching leather vest. She was smiling at him and if a woman who looked

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  like that had smiled at him on the street, it would have made his day. His week. His month.

  But this smile didn't seem all that warm and cozying, because the woman held a .38 revolver in her right hand, pointing unwaveringly at him. She looked as if she had held that gun before and knew what to do with it.

  "How'd you know my name?" he asked.

  The woman ignored the question. "We have other rats who are afraid of other things," she said. "And other animals too. Not just rats. It's amazing, with a little electric shock, a little starvation, a little heat applied to the genitals, you can teach any animal to be afraid of anything."

  Meadows found himself nodding. Jasper Stevens . had explained all this to him in the afternoon. He wished that he had been able to understand more of it. There was something about animals, when they learned to be afraid of something, they created some kind of proteins in their brains. And then if you injected those proteins into other animals, they would instantly become afraid of what the first animals were afraid of. It had sounded like bullshit to Zack Meadows. It still did.

  "How'd you know my name?" he repeated.

  "And just what is it you're afraid of, Mr. Meadows?" the woman asked him. She still had that smile on her full lips, her mouth shining brightly. It looked as if she had just licked her lips with wet tongue.

  "Nothing, lady," said Meadows. "I'm not afraid of you and not that gun either." He waved a hand at her, and turned to walk toward the back door. His senses were sharp, waiting to hear the cock of the revolver's hammer.

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  There was no sound.

  Just as he extended his hand toward the doorknob, the back door pulled open. There were two men standing there, wearing white laboratory clothes. Big men.

  Before he could run, they had his arms pinned between them, and turned him around to the woman.

  She returned the pistol to the purse she had placed on the lab table. Meadows noticed that it was also brown suede. He liked women who coordinated their clothes. He doubted if telling her that would make much difference.

  "So you're not afraid of anything?" she said. "We'll just have to see about that, Mr. Meadows."

  "I asked you. How do you know my name?"

  "I'm afraid your friend, Jasper Stevens, was careless."

  Meadows shook his head. "I hate careless people,"

  he said.

  The woman nodded. "That's right. Carelessness

  kills."

  The two men hustled Meadows down a short corridor to a small office off the laboratory. There were two tall filing cabinets in the corner, and when one of the men pressed a button on the bookshelf, the filing cabinets swung away from the wall, exposing a flight of stairs leading down to a basement. Bebind him, Meadows heard the redhead calling out to the

  guard.

  "Everything's all right, Herman." "That's good, Dr. Gladstone," he said. His voice didn't sound like that of a drunk, Meadows thought. Suddenly he thought of a fourth reason why he might not have seen a burglar alarm. The

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  alarm had been hidden. A trap had been set and he had fallen into it.

  Downstairs, he was pushed into a room with two metal cots in it. On one of the cots was Jasper Stevens. He was curled up in a fetal postion and his eyes opened wide with shock when the door opened.

  "You jerkoff," Meadows growled. "This is what I get for being so trusting."

  He was ticked and he was still ticked when they locked the door and even more ticked a half hour later when the two men came back and held him down and the redheaded Dr. Gladstone injected something into his neck and then into Jasper's, and then unconsciousness overtook him.

  He didn't know how long he was unconscious, but when he woke his hands and feet were tied and he was blindfolded. His fingertips hurt and when he touched his thumb to his fingers, he felt them raw and mushy under his touch.

  But that did not bother him. It was something else. He heard the roar of an engine and the slapping of water against the sides of a boat, and even though he had gone through four years of the Navy without ever getting seasick, this was something else and he felt the bile rising in his throat and he fought back the impulse to throw up because with the gag in his mouth he would likely choke on his own vomit.

  Water. A watery grave. He felt sweat break out all over his body and then turn to a cold chill. He was a strong swimmer or had been before bourbon had turned muscle to fat but he knew now that he could not survive for a moment in water. The thought of it rilled him with dread. Water surrounding his body.

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  Blocking his nose. Making it impossible to breathe. His body struggling, gasping, trying to get breath, and when he opened his mouth, even more of the water pouring in, trying to fight its way down into his lungs, to blow them up like big balloons and then to burst them and spill his guts and his Ufe all over the sea where fishes could feed on him.

  He fainted.

  When he woke again, there was still the sound of a boat engine and still the sound of water, but he wondered why he felt no sense of movement if he was on

  a boat.

  He heard Dr. Gladstone's voice. "Still not afraid of anything, Mr. Meadows?" she asked mockingly. "You realize where you are? At sea. That's water all around you. Water. Cold, dark water."

  Meadows tried to scream but the gag muffled all sound. Then the blindfold was removed and the gag was pulled from his mouth. He wasn't in water. He was standing near the edge of some kind of lake. Dr. Gladstone was in front of him and the two big men were standing behind him. Jasper Stevens was still unconscious on the ground.

  "Help me. I'll do anything," Meadows pleaded. "Help me."

  "Sorry, friend," she said coldly. "Enjoy your

  bath."

  Meadows felt the ropes being removed fro
m his arms and legs and then he was lifted up into the air by the two men, swung back and forth and then tossed out into the lake. A moment later, Jasper Stevens followed.

  Meadows hit with a splash. He could feel the water wet his clothes and he screamed. He was sur-

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  rounded by water. It was all around him. He tried to climb on top of Jasper Stevens to get away from the water, but Jasper fought him off and tried to climb on top of Meadows. Meadows felt the water all over him and the fear of it brought tears to his eyes and he could feel his heart racing in panic, and then as the water reached his neck, he could feel his heart stopping, but before his brain stopped too, he saw Jasper Stevens in front of him, floating, and the small man's eyes already had glazed over and Meadows knew he was dead and knew he himself would be dead in a moment and he welcomed death because anything was better than the water.

  And so he died, and his body and that of Jasper Stevens floated among the orange peels and pop bottles on top of 17 inches of water in the lake in Central Park.

  Dr. Gladstone picked up the tiny cassette tape recorder with the boat and water sounds on it, turned it off and put it into her pocket. She smiled at her two attendants and they left Central Park to go back to the Lif eline Laboratory.

  The bodies of Zack Meadows and Jasper Stevens were pulled from the lake the next morning by police who had been called to the scene by the 262nd jogger to pass the lake and notice the two floating bodies. The first 261 hadn't wanted to get involved.

  The medical examiner said both men had died of heart attacks. No one thought it strange that both men's fingertips had been mutilated to prevent fingerprint identification, or that two men should choose the Central Park lake in which to have simultaneous heart attacks. The commander of the Central

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  Park police precinct was happy when the heart attack report came back, because if the two floaters had been murdered, he would have had to put some men on duty investigating the murders, and all his men were now busy patrolling the park, giving tickets to people who failed to clean up after their dogs, and watching for other such serious crimes.

  So with no identification and no investigation, no one ever thought to question Flossie, who lay in her bed, eating chocolates, drinking Fleischmann straight, and watching game shows.

  When Zack Meadows did not come back to her for three days, she decided he was gone. She didn't think he was dead. Enough men had left her in her üfe for her to know that it didn't take death to bring it about.

  On the fourth day, her last bottle of Fleischmann's was gone, so she got out of bed and dusted herself with a dry washcloth. She combed the front of her hair and put on lipstick. She looked around for a dress and found several in a pile of clothes in the corner of the room. She took the one that looked least dirty.

  It was a red and blue flowered print that made her look like a sofa. But the neckline was cut low and her giant bosom and cleavage were visible, and since she had to find someone to buy her a bottle, the dress would do. Tit men, she had realized early in Ufe, were not terribly particular. Big was beautiful to

  them.

  As she picked up the dress, a light blue envelope fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and looked at it. She had never seen it before. It was addressed to

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  the President of the United States and had a stamp on it.

  She wondered if she could get the stamp off and sell it to somebody. She tried a corner but the stamp was firmly glued down.

  Anyway, the letter was addressed to the President It might be important.

  She couldn't imagine how it had gotten into her apartment.

  She held it in her hand as she slid the blue and red dress over her head and she was still squeezing the letter tightly in her hand as she walked ponderously down the three flights of stairs to the street. As she headed for the corner, she saw the red, white, and blue mailbox and it seemed appropriately colored to receive a letter for the President. She thought for a moment that perhaps the letter was some great spy secret and she maybe would get a medal and maybe a cash reward from the President, so she mailed the letter quickly, before realizing that her name and address weren't on it and they would have no way to track her down to give her her medal and her money.

  The hell with medals and money. She wanted a drink. As she walked away, she decided that even if the President did send her a check, the post office would probably steal it. She didn't trust the post office. Somebody, a long time ago, had told her not to.

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  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and he did not know fear. He knew the cold of the slick ice against his body in the dark mountains of New Hampshire. He knew the winds that could pop a person like a wicker ball down the midnight ravine, banging bones to pitiful chips in a skin-slit shell of organs that would no longer breathe or digest food or purify blood or pump that blood. He knew the winds. He knew force.

  And because he understood it, not as some hostile deadly force, but as part of the same universe his breathing was part of, Remo Williams did not skid down the rock hard ice of the White Mountains in late December.

  His body, lightly covered with black mesh, moved as if it had grown on this mountain, up with each reach and press, a perfect unity that needed no stairs or ladders or ropes, the things that other bodies, softer and unused bodies, required to move up a sheer ice cliff.

  He moved now up the cliff, not even thinking of his breathing. He moved because he willed it and the many years of pain and wisdom that had brought him here with the winter taste in his mouth and the

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  low moan of the spruce down below, made him a part of this universe that frightened so many men, which made others stiff of joints and, even worse, robbed them of their rhythms and of the timing that gave some men power.

  Those other men had learned the wrong ways because their food was mush and their lives starved for the daily spring of survival. They had not learned that fear was like a mild hunger or a light chill. They had become unused to fear, so that from them it stole strength.

  To this man with the thick wrists and thin body moving up into darkness under a black, cold sky, fear was, Like bis breathing, something else, something that existed apart from hun, and because he did not need it to climb this slick curtain of glare ice, he did not call on it.

  He came up over the top of the cliff with a small rolling motion that barely dented the deep fresh snow and then was standing at the top, looking at the brightly-lighted cabin, half-hidden behind a band of pine trees fifty yards away. He moved toward the cabin. His feet made no sound in the deep fresh snow. No puff of breath noisily escaped his lips, and he thought of the days when he clumped noisily down a flight of steps and puffed like a tea kettle climbing the same steps.

  That had been years ago, but it had been more than years too. It had happened in a different lifetime.

  He had been Remo Williams then, Patrolman Remo Williams in the Newark, New Jersey, police department, and he had been framed for a murder he hadn't committed and sentenced to an electric chair

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  that hadn't worked, and then resurrected to serve as the killer arm for a secret organization that fought crime in the United States.

  That was what the organization, CURE, had contracted for, but what they got was something else. No one had known that the years of training and the discipline of body and mind would have changed Remo Williams from what he once was to ... to what?

  To what? Remo Williams grinned as he moved through the night. Not even he knew what he was. An ancient and wise Oriental sitting in a houseboat on the shore of Lake Winnepesaukee fifty miles away thought that Remo Williams was the reincarnation of Shiva, the Indian god of destruction. But the same wise Oriental thought that Barbra Streisand was America's most beautiful woman, that soap operas, before they got dirty and obscene, were America's only real art form, and that a depressing little fishing village in North Korea was the center of the universe.

&n
bsp; So much for Shiva. Remo was not the reincarnation of a god, but he wasn't just a man either. He had become more. He had become what men could be, if they learned to use their bodies and their minds to the full extent of their powers.

  "I'm a man," he said softly to himself, his whisper lost in the wail of wind through the trees. "That's got to be worth something."

  Then he was standing alongside one of the windows of the cabin, listening to the voices inside.

  There were four of them, four men talking. They were talking with the fearlessness of men who know that no one could reach them because the only way up to the cabin was along a twisting road, and that

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  road was spotted with detection devices, and, for the last seventy-five yards to the cabin, with buried land mines.

  So the members of the Cypriot Liberation Alliance felt quite free to discuss which kind of babies were best to plant dynamite sticks under. Little black babies or little blonde babies.

  "Nobody touch a baby carriage, especially when you wheel it into a maternity ward," said one aloud.

  "What that got to do with mainland Greeks?" asked another.

  "We show them, Tilhas," said the first, "what we think of how they not help us when we attack the Turks and lose. All we have are the Palestinians, our spiritual brothers."

  A third voice spoke up. "Anyone who can see the moral imperative in dynamiting babies as part of revolutionary justice knows and understands Greek Cypriot values," he said.

  A fourth voice spoke. "We are victims. Imperialists are the oppressors."

  The man called Tilhas who did not seem to understand all this blood lust asked "But why assault Americans?"

  "Because they supply the Turks."

  "But they supply us also."