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"Gators! Look out! Gators!"

  Remo grinned, letting a solitary air bubble escape through his teeth. If they thought he was an alligator, so much the better. He continued with his work.

  He got a glimpse of brown faces as he pulled the attackers down. Bananamian or Colombian? He couldn't tell. It didn't matter. They were bad guys. Dealing with bad guys was his job.

  Remo quickly brought most of the boats down. He didn't come up for air once. He didn't need to. If necessary he could hold his breath for hours, releasing only a little carbon dioxide at a time.

  Keeping submerged, Remo swam around to the other side of the isle, away from the tumult.

  When he stuck his head back up, he saw that the press had retreated for cover. All except one man, who lay screaming, clutching his minicam with one hand and his bleeding leg with the other. He was crying, "Medic! Medic!" and the look on his face was one of disbelief.

  The FBI and Federal marshals had staked out firing positions. They were returning fire in a steady, methodical way, not wasting ammunition or firing recklessly.

  A shrill voice carried over the concatenation, crying, "I'll sue! I'm suing everyone for violating my civil rights."

  It was Rona Ripper. She was crawling on her stomach for shelter.

  An FBI agent in a blue windbreaker started out to assist her. His head disappeared in a fine crimson mist as a dozen machine pistols sought his head.

  Rona Ripper instantly started crawling backward, crying, "I surrender! I surrender!" Her face dragged in the sand because she was trying to crawl with her hands raised.

  "Damn!" Remo growled, seeing no sign of General Nogeira.

  A surviving cigarette boat veered off from the rest of the attacking flotilla and rounded the isle on the opposite side.

  Remo figured it had gone after Nogeira. He jackknifed under and began swimming at high speed.

  His ears picked up a clumsy splashing and he popped out of the water like a dolphin.

  General Nogeira was stumbling out of the back side of the island. His pocked face was a picture of ugly fear.

  He saw the churning boat, and his expression became ludicrous. He doubled back.

  The cigarette boat piled up on the isle, and its passengers jumped off and gave chase. Some of them wore fawn-colored uniforms not much different from General Nogeira's. One, wounded, had to be helped along.

  They all disappeared into the thick foliage.

  Hanging back in the water, Remo wondered if he shouldn't let nature take its course. The way he saw it, the Bananamanian armed forces had dibs on the man who had ruined their country.

  The decision was made for him. A scream rose up in the close, humid air.

  A few seconds later, a man came stumbling back into the water. He ran blindly, his hands clutching his eyes. His fingers and lower face were slick with blood. The blood was coming from his eyes. The five bronze stars on his shoulder boards more than identified him.

  The general was screaming in Spanish, a language Remo didn't understand. But the horrible tones told him all he had to know.

  The man had been blinded. Probably by a knife across his eyeballs.

  He proved this by stumbling over a twisted cypress root and falling face-first into the water.

  Remo was wondering if he should put the suffering brute out of his misery when an alligator came charging out of the thicket.

  "Charging" was the only word for it. The reptile erupted into view and ran like an absurd, clumsy dog for the water's edge. Its jaws snapped open and shut with every clumsy step.

  The alligator plunged into the water and snapped up the general by one flailing arm. It wasted no time. It dragged the screaming man, pounding against its greenish hide, below the water.

  After that, Remo decided to tread water and count bubbles.

  When the bubbles stopped, Remo had counted forty-two. The water had become a diffuse color resembling pink lemonade.

  Remo climbed onto shore with the intention of taking care of the assailants. They must be pretty dumb, he thought, to let the general get away from them like that. Or maybe not so dumb-since he hadn't actually gotten away.

  The gunfire had died down.

  It started up again, more ferocious than before.

  Remo went through the saw grass like a lawnmower through hay. He got to the high hump and looked down.

  The FBI and Federal marshals were pinned down in a crossfire. The withering fire was coming up, from the surviving boats, and down, from a line of fawn-uniformed attackers not a dozen yards below Remo's position.

  Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was a Colombian hit team, after all.

  Remo slipped down to the line and began relieving the assailants of their weapons. He did this in a novel way. He literally disarmed them.

  The first man to be disarmed was down on one knee hosing the low ground with his Uzi when it happened.

  Remo slipped up behind him, took him by the hard balls of his shoulder bones, and separated his hands. He seemed to exert casual effort. But five thousand years of accumulated knowledge were behind the gesture.

  The shoulder joints went pop!

  The man's arms came away in Remo hands. He threw them in two directions.

  The man jumped up and, squirting blood from each shoulder like a human lawn sprinkler, began to dance and caper until blood loss had turned him into a squirming pile on the ground.

  By that time, Remo was flinging arms in all directions with joyous abandon.

  This spectacle didn't exactly go unnoticed. Gunmen scattered, firing to cover their retreat. Remo was forced to waste time evading the crossfire. He could dodge bullets as if they were spring rain, but this was a slashing rain.

  Remo was forced to drop to his stomach and let the storm pass over him.

  When the firing finally had died down, Remo stood up in time to see the remaining attackers pile into the water under a hail of FBI return fire. The attackers were stubborn: They did not desert their comrades. A few died in the attempt to rescue the others who had fallen.

  This forced Remo to revise his opinion yet again. No drug-killer worked this way. This was a military operation.

  Then, under harassing fire, they waded up on a single air-boat and blasted away at the grassy isle that had been chosen for a baptism but instead had become a baptism of fire for a number of federal agents.

  Hearing the FBI getting itself organized, Remo faded back to the back end of the isle and the water.

  He swam past the bloated body in the fawn-colored uniform. The alligator had hold of it by the head and was vigorously attempting to crack open its skull.

  As Remo, swimming underwater to avoid detection, left it behind, his ears were rewarded by an ugly crack of a sound.

  He hoped Upstairs would be satisfied with the way things had turned out. The target had been taken out, even if Remo had had help. As for the attackers--whoever they turned out to be-they would have a hard time getting out of the country once the FBI had alerted Washington.

  The last thing Remo heard as he put the day's work behind him was the throaty voice of Rona Ripper, threatening to sue everyone from the FBI to the President of the United States.

  It annoyed him-but the thought of General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira, roasting in Hell, unbaptized, more than made up for that.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Harold W. Smith received the first report on the deaths of the governor of California and his lieutenant governor directly from the President of the United States.

  There was a red phone on one corner of Smith's desk, in an office that overlooked Long Island Sound. The phone had no dial. It didn't need one. It was a dedicated line. On the other end, hundreds of miles south of Washington, D.C., an identical red instrument nestled in an end table attached to the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

  When the phone rang, Harold Smith brought the red receiver to his gray, bitter face. He cleared his throat and said, "Yes, Mr. President?"

  He held his breath. He always he
ld his breath at these moments, because if the next voice Dr. Harold W. Smith heard was not that of the current President of the United States, Harold W. Smith was obligated to swallow a coffin-shaped poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his gray vest. After shutting down CURE, the organization that officially did not exist.

  The parched Texas-by-way-of-Massachusetts voice came as an imperceptible relief to Smith. The news did not.

  "The governor of California has just perished in an airline crash," the President said, dry-voiced.

  Smith recalled the governor. Like the President, he was a Republican. He could not recall the name of the next man in line, the lieutenant, and whether or not California's lieutenant governor was a Republican or not: Not that it mattered to Smith. He no longer voted. It was the price he was forced to pay to remain above national politics.

  The President's next words made Smith's unspoken question moot.

  "The lieutenant governor was on the same flight," the President said.

  Smith sat up. His cracked leather chair, his personal seat of power for as long as he headed CURE, creaked in protest.

  "Isn't that against all protocol?" Smith asked. A frown creased his pale forehead. Or rather, the permanent lines of worry that rode his face deepened.

  "It is. That's why I'm calling you. The FAA will naturally be investigating this, but I thought, given the bizarre circumstances, that you might look into this-discreetly."

  "I understand," Harold Smith said. "Discreetly" meant that Smith was not to send in Remo. When Remo went in, bodies piled up. This was not that kind of situation. Yet.

  "Do you have any idea where the two men were bound when the plane crashed?" Smith asked.

  "It didn't actually crash. It flew into the side of a mountain."

  "That is unusual. I will get on the matter directly," Smith said.

  "Remember. Be prudent."

  "Always."

  Smith hung up. When the President had interrupted his workday, Smith was going over the overtime logs for the institute whose management was his day-to-day responsibility-and CURE's cover.

  The brass plate on Smith's closed door read: HAROLD W. SMITH, DIRECTOR. There was a larger brass plate on one of the brick posts that framed the wrought-iron gates to the institution. It read: FOLCROFT SANITARIUM. Smith headed Folcroft. But Folcroft business could wait.

  He slid the overtime logs into a desk drawer, and his thin hand paused over a bottle of Maalox. It was his habit to take a tablespoon of this every day at this time, in the normal course of events. On bad days, he took Zantac. On hectic days, children's aspirin. A triple dosage. Then there were his Alka-Seltzer days, and his mineral-water days, and his warm-milk days.

  Today, Harold Smith felt like none of these things. He wondered if this had anything to do with the recent ordeal he had undergone-in which an ancient enemy of the Master of Sinanju had ensnared them all in his web. It had been a disturbing experience, which Smith only dimly recalled. Smith had not been himself. The doctor had pronounced it a virus. Both he and Chiun had been infected. It was invariably fatal.

  Smith might have died but for a quirk of fate.

  He had suffered a heart seizure. Only quick action by the Folcroft staff, and the electrical restimulation of his diseased heart muscle, had pulled him back from the brink.

  Miraculously, it had also burned all trace of the virus from his bloodstream.

  Now, months later, Smith was back to normal. No, he was more than normal. His stomach no longer bothered him. His blinding headaches had abated. He no longer needed his Zantac, or Maalox, or Tums, or Flintstones-brand aspirin, or any of those common remedies.

  Another man would have been relieved. Smith was worried. He was a chronic worrier.

  He decided against taking a tablespoon of Maalox, just in case, and closed the drawer. Pressing a concealed stud on the other side of his shabby oak desk, Smith watched a panel drop and slide away. An ordinary computer terminal hummed up and clicked into place.

  It was no more ordinary than Smith. It connected to a bank of mainframes deep in the Folcroft basement. These in turn fed off virtually every computer in the country that could be accessed by modem. Their memory banks contained a vast reservoir of raw data on people, companies, and organizations that could conceivably be of use to Smith in the performance of his secret duties.

  Smith got to work. He was relieved that he would not need Remo and Chiun on this one. They invariably brought results-but also problems.

  Smith logged on to the wire service news-feeds. He got the preliminary bulletins that were now breaking all over the nation.

  These told him the bare facts. The airline; flight number, and confirmation that the governor and lieutenant-governor were on the passenger list although the bodies had yet to be recovered.

  This scant information was enough. Smith logged over to the airlines reservation data banks, using the access code of a mythical travel agency.

  The governor's ticket had been purchased by a third party, Smith discovered, through a Sacramento travel agency. He called up the purchaser's name.

  Behind his rimless eyeglasses, Smith's puritanical gray eyes blinked.

  The name was Emmanuel Nogeira.

  "This must be a joke," Smith muttered.

  Smith next went to the lieutenant governor's ticket file. It, too, was a third-party purchase, charged to the same Mastercard number.

  This time Smith gave vent to a gasp as dry as the New England soil that had nourished him.

  An "Emmanuel Nogeira" had purchased that ticket as well. He had also paid for the Federal Express shipping cost to the recipient ticket holder's name.

  Smith switched off, and called up the Mastercard file after a brief tapping of keys and the press of a hot key. Smith had set up his system so that by pressing the hot key marked F4 on his keyboard, whatever computer system he had called up would be immediately attacked by the proper password, kept on permanent file in the mainframe.

  The Mastercard system surrendered in a twinkling.

  The file showed that the "Emmanuel Nogeira" in question currently resided at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Miami, Florida. His occupation was given as "Displaced Dictator and Prisoner of War."

  Reflexively, Harold Smith reached for his drawer of pharmaceuticals.

  He pulled it open, looked inside, and realized that, despite the horrific discovery he had made, he felt no need for medical support. Slowly, he closed the drawer.

  The card file showed that Emmanuel Nogeira was carrying six months' worth of debt. He was just a hair under his credit limit.

  It also showed that he had purchased two front-row tickets to a Nana Mouskouri concert at the L.A. Music Center for eight P.M. on this very night.

  Smith swallowed what little saliva remained in his rapidly drying mouth. The fatal flight had had a Los Angeles destination.

  Harold W. Smith was a man who believed in order. He understood that he lived in a mathematical universe, one ruled by variables and constants. Coincidence abounded, but unbroken chains of coincidences did not.

  In a rational universe governed by mathematical principles, the green alphanumeric symbols that wavered before Harold Smith's eyes told of a clever plot to lure the governor and lieutenant governor of California to their deaths.

  Smith did not yet know how. He was a long way from understanding why. But he had a working model of the problem-and he had pulled it all together in just under five minutes.

  Smith sat back in his chair, his gray eyes still on the screen, but no longer seeing the displayed data, except as abstract green lights. His eyes were focused inward.

  Smith was a gray man. He was thin and pinch-faced. He might have been a stern headmaster out of the nineteenth century. His clothes, although twentieth-century, had that flavor too. His lanky, angular frame was swathed in a three-piece gray suit of conservative cut. His hair was white and thinning. His school tie bore Dartmouth stripes. It was the only splash of color on his otherwise colorless
person.

  No one looking at Harold Smith could imagine his burdens, or grasp the fact that, next to the President of the United States, he was the most powerful man in the U.S. government, which of course meant the entire world.

  Through his nondescript computer, Smith ran CURE. He enjoyed full autonomy. Although he reported directly to the President, just as he had to the current President's predecessors going back to the one who had died in office after creating CURE, a victim of an assassin's bullet, Smith was not answerable to the Executive Branch. He took requests, reported concerns. That was as far as it went. Smith was empowered to take whatever action he deemed necessary to deal with internal problems and external threats.

  Technically, this arrangement made him more powerful than the President. But there was one presidential directive Smith was obligated to accept: the shutdown command. If invoked, Smith would, without hesitation, erase his massive data banks, put into motion a plan of action that would take his sole enforcement arm, Remo Williams, out of the picture. And when that was accomplished, and only then, he would swallow his vest-pocket pill and go to his reward-whatever that might be.

  Right now, Smith wasn't thinking about any of that. He was wondering what plan General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira had in mind-and for the first time, he was worried that his enforcement arm might succeed in an assignment.

  Because right at this moment, Harold W. Smith wanted General Emmanuel Nogeira very much alive. And only hours before he had sent Remo to Miami to liquidate Nogeira.

  "Damn."

  The curse was barely a breath. Smith rarely cursed. He was of taciturn New England stock. Vermont Smiths didn't curse, although sometimes they kicked the furniture.

  There was no way to contact Remo in the field. He was the perfect field agent in some respects. He almost always came through. But a dismal failure, insofar as carrying communications equipment was concerned. In desperation, Smith had simplified his contact phone number to an unbroken succession of ones. Even Remo could not forget that code.

  If only he would call in, Smith thought, his weary eyes going to the blue contact telephone.

  They were still on the blue instrument, several minutes later, when it shrilled suddenly.