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  "We are discussing how lovely you are," said Chiun. "How your beauty radiates through your sorrowed eyes, how your travails bear down on not only a fine woman but a most beautiful one as well."

  "Really?" asked Terri.

  "What else would we say, gracious lady?" asked Chiun.

  "Really?" said Terri to Remo. She was starting to like these two a bit.

  "No," said Remo.

  "What?" said Terri. "Did you say no?"

  "Sure," said Remo.

  "He cannot bear such loveliness," Chiun told her and then barked to Remo in Korean: "What is wrong the matter with you? You never understand women. First you go telling them things they don't want to hear and then you complain."

  "I'm not at my best, you know. I've had such troubles— —" Terri started.

  Remo interrupted. "Why don't you tell us all about it on the way to the cave? We've got to check that inscription one more time before we go track it down, right?"

  "Cave?" said Terri.

  "The Albemarle Caves. Where everybody keeps getting cut into pieces," Remo said.

  Terri smiled, excused herself, and then went blissfully into darkness.

  She came to, unfortunately, in the wrong place. She was dressed and in the cave itself. She recognized the high ceiling and the dangling rope. She went immediately into shock and when she came to, she was in the arms of the man who was called Remo.

  The Hamidian writing was coming down to her. Then she realized that she was moving up.

  This Remo was climbing with one hand, as easily as if they were both walking up a flight of steps. He pulled, raised a hand, grabbed, then pulled again. Very quickly and very securely, even as he held her in one arm. She smelled the moisture at the top of the cave. She started to faint and then she felt his other hand do something to her spine.

  She wasn't afraid.

  She hadn't had a Valium and she wasn't afraid.

  "What did you do?"

  "Your fear was in your spine," Remo said.

  "That can't be. It's emotional. My brain isn't in my spine."

  "Don't bet on it," Remo said.

  "It's working," said Terri. "I'm not afraid and I'm not taking Valium. But I'm here again." And suddenly, she did feel a pang of fear and the hand massaged her lower spine again.

  "Stop doing it to yourself, okay?" said Remo.

  "What? What?"

  "Making yourself frightened. You're scaring yourself and pumping adrenalin into your body and that's stupid because you don't know how to use it anyway," he said.

  "Okay," said Terri. "I'll try it. This feels great anyway. I've never been up here without fear before. I'll never be afraid again." She said it and she meant it and then she saw something and she screamed out her fear right in the stranger's face. People with knives were coming into the cave. Ugly curved knives. Agile people and she was on top of the cave, hanging from the wall, protected by two men who didn't even have weapons.

  "Don't scream. He loves an audience," Remo said.

  "The old man," yelled Terri in horror. "He'll be killed."

  "It's Chiun," said Remo, "and if you keep quiet, he'll put them away quietly, but if he knows he's got an audience of someone he is serving, he'll waste time. He always does."

  Terri saw the knife fighters surround the old man in the green kimono. She screamed: "Watch out behind you."

  "That did it," said Remo with a sigh. "I suppose you want to watch."

  She couldn't not watch. The kimono flowed, a Gurkha fell, the kimono danced like wind on the cave floor, first flowing, then circling and the knife fighters fell and tumbled like a carousel where all the horses on the outside suddenly collapsed at once. Finally there was only one and he lunged at the old man and the green kimono suddenly stuttered and then fell. He was dead.

  "Eeeeeeeee," screamed Terri as Chiun fell.

  The knife fighter plunged down, blade first, toward the green kimono, but then kept going into the silica sand of the cave bottom where he twitched and then stopped. The green kimono rose, and then did a bow to the upper reaches of the cave.

  "See. I told you," said Remo. "We would have been down by now but you had to encourage a performance."

  "I didn't even see his hands move," she said.

  "You're not supposed to," said Remo. "If you had, we'd be dead."

  On that word, Terri fainted again and came to with the inscriptions above her. She read them calmly. It was good that she had come back to the cave. She had missed one of the tell-tale punctuations and misread one word. Now she could place the mountain on the Yucatan peninsula, near the old Hamidian empire.

  "You see the sign says that all gold from the country had to be moved to the Yucatan, because the mountain is the one safe place for the gold," Terri explained to Remo.

  "Wrong," he said. "There is no safe place." He repeated what he had learned a long time ago from Chiun. "The only safe place is in your own mind."

  "How do I get there?" she asked.

  "You got ten years and nothing else to do?" asked Remo and then he took her down the wall, again as easily as if descending stairs. On the soft sand floor, she said she didn't want to see any more bodies.

  Chapter Four

  Barry Schweid was giving Hamlet what Hank Bindie called "punch" when something strange came up on his word-processing computer.

  Bindle had said he basically liked Hamlet but could Schweid improve Hamlet's character by having him win at the end?

  "We don't want this 'to be or not to be' stuff. People don't like indecisive," Bindle had said.

  "No box office in it. Never was," said Bruce Marmelstein.

  "Instead of 'to be or not to be,' have him say what he is really thinking," Bindle had told Schweid.

  "What's that?"

  "I'm going to kill the guy who killed my father and is sleeping with my mother," said Bindle.

  "The mother with the big jugs," said Marmelstein.

  "Ophelia's got the jugs," said Schweid.

  "No law against two women with a nice set each," said Marmelstein.

  "Too much on the breasts. This is Shakespeare, you know. You have to respect it," Schweid insisted.

  "Okay, Barry," said Bruce Marmelstein.

  "But I'll give you him saying something about getting the man who is sleeping with his mother now," Schweid said.

  "Right. We want the tension of Jaws, the excitement of Raiders of the Lost Ark," said Bindle.

  "We're going to have a problem with people who know that Hamlet loses the big sword fight at the end. You know, there's somebody out here in Hollywood who's actually read the play and he says people won't like Hamlet losing."

  "Lose?" said Bindle, shocked. "Nobody loses. The hero never loses."

  "And he gets the woman with the tits," said Marmelstein.

  "But Shakespeare's Hamlet loses," said Schweid. "I was told that."

  "What lose? You want to make a hundred and fifty dollars doing an off-Broadway nothing?" said Bindle. "We're talking big bucks here. Big-budget picture. Nobody is going to do a big-budget picture about a loser."

  "Legs. Ophelia's got to have legs," said Marmelstein. "But we've got an artistic problem. What about full frontal nudity?"

  "Shakespeare was an artist," said Bindle. "We must stand up for his right to express his highest emotions, no matter what the cost to us personally."

  "Sex act?" said Marmelstein. "Watch her and him balling on film?"

  Bindle shook his head. "I said no matter what the cost. I didn't say getting an x-rating. That'll kill us at the box office. And you, Schweid, we want some winning violence. Make Hamlet the toughest mother ever to come out of England."

  "Somebody told me he was Danish," said Schweid.

  "I thought Shakespeare was English," said Bindle.

  "Somewhere over there. Europe," said Marmelstein.

  "Shakespeare was Danish," said Bindle. "Hmmmm."

  "No. The character, Hamlet, was Danish," said Schweid.

  "Big tits," said Marmelstein, who
had been worrying about flat-chested English women. He had been thinking of using Swedes and dubbing in English voices. Now he could use Danish women with Danish-sized fronts.

  "It's always acted by Brits," said Barry.

  "Hey, we're doing your picture. Do us a favor. Get us what we need. We need the violence. We need Hamlet punching his way, fending his way through evil, protecting Ophelia, revenging his father's death," said Bindle.

  So back to the word-processor computer went Barry Schweid and, in anger, he punched out calls for force, for violence, for destruction. And suddenly appeared on his screen the code system for reaching someone.

  The code word was Shiva and Barry looked it up in the encyclopedia that had come with the house. Shiva was an eastern god, known as the Destroyer of Worlds.

  He looked back at the computer. He saw patterns of training on a graph. He saw where an ancient house of assassins had created a single effective killing arm for a secret organization, the first white man ever to learn those skills. He knew that because there were some old questions more than a decade before about whether the student could learn. It was all right there on the TV screen.

  What a fantastic idea, he thought. The greatest assassins that ever lived, tiny Orientals, infusing their knowledge and power into a white man. And why not? The white man could be Hamlet.

  He was so excited he called Hank Bindle at home.

  "Okay, we got it," yelled Barry into the telephone. "Hamlet gets training from assassins. The greatest assassin who ever lived. An Oriental."

  "No," said Bindle.

  "But the teacher is Korean, see. He's got to be Korean because this one house of assassins is the sun source of all the martial arts. You see, martial arts get weaker the more they get away from the original power these people taught. Everything else is an imitation. People saw these Koreans in action and imitated them. That's why all the martial arts come from the east."

  "No way," said Bindle. "Chopsaki. Bruce Lee. A five million dollar picture that grosses fifteen million. We're talking about a twenty-two million budget. The guy has got to be white."

  So Schweid made the teacher white. It didn't hurt, because he had the whole story. Right on the computer, there were hundreds of cases of intrigue and danger and how the pupil had created solutions through force.

  Barry had the script done in three days. He thought it was grand, maybe even the best thing he had ever copied.

  "No, absolutely not," said Bindle. "Where is the woman in danger? Where are Hamlet's problems? You've got to think he can't make it before he makes it. Nobody is going to care about some guy who goes flip-a-finger and kills somebody. Have the finger break off. Have him bleed. Have him suffer. And then he wins."

  "And gets the Danish broad with the big knobs," said Marmelstein.

  "I like it," said Bindle.

  "It'll jiggle," said Marmelstein.

  But Barry Schweid was a bit nervous about returning to the computer. The story lines he had seen there had seemed real and in every one of them, people had really died. It explained many killings in the world which had been unsolved.

  He looked at the computer reports for a long afternoon before deciding to plunge ahead. After all, how could it all be true? So many killings by one secret assassin?

  And besides, he wasn't into politics. He was a creative artist, and he had a right to follow his muse, no matter what it told him to copy.

  So he started writing.

  Chapter Five

  The gardener had been taking the unwanted rose blossoms for his daughter.

  And so the gardener would die.

  He would die piece by piece. The bullets would carve him like a chisel.

  But save the legs for last. That would enable him to try to run.

  The roses were just an excuse. Walid ibn Hassan needed to blood his new Mauser with the special .348 long barrel. There were those who preferred to use only paper targets before work, but those were lesser gunmen. They did not have tradition.

  Back before guns, Walid's great-great-grandfather would not use a sword unless it had been cured in the body of a strong man, according to the Arab tradition for the manufacture of good steel blades. The Spaniards would use oil, and the Italians water to quench the red-hot steel of a sword.

  But the really good steel, the Damascus blade of the Arabs, had to be quenched in blood.

  Walid was enough of a realist to understand that the water in the blood did the quenching of the steel. But he also understood the real meaning of curing a blade like that. It meant the weapon was for killing. It was not for ornament and it was not for beauty. It was a killing tool.

  And that was why, this day, in his mansion overlooking the blue Mediterranean of the Tunisian coastline, he waited for his gardener to steal one more rose.

  The bushes were in blossom and the perfume blended with the vigorous salt of the Mediterranean and breezes coming in from Crete and Greece and the wondrous places where man first laid the foundations of Western thought.

  Walid ibn Hassan saw the gardener's red and white checkered kaffiyeh come around the high stone wall. He saw it pause and go down as the man picked a rose blossom, go further and then down as he picked yet another.

  Walid could have used the cook. The cook-was stealing meat from the kitchen. But the cook was fat and could not run, so Walid waited for the gardener.

  He saw the kaffiyeh go down, then up, then down, then up, and then the man came around the bend of the wall, smiling.

  In his robe, he cradled seven perfect blossoms.

  He came to Walid ibn Hassan and offered to show how beautiful they were.

  "You grow the finest roses in Tunisia. Nay, the entire North African coast," the gardener said.

  "Thank you, friend. You are not just a servant. You are a son to me."

  "Thank you, Pasha ibn Hassan," said the gardener.

  "But I only see seven blossoms."

  "Yes," said the gardener. His eyes could not stay away from the gun.

  "You bent down ten times."

  "Did I, great Pasha?"

  "Where are the other three blossoms?" Walid asked.

  "They were not fit to grace your home. I have them in my pocket."

  "And what do you do with those blossoms you keep in your pocket?"

  "Those," the gardener said with a laugh, "those are not nearly good enough for your house. Not nearly. I give them to my daughter."

  "You give my roses to your daughter. I have been like a compassionate father to you, and you take my roses in return?"

  "But you would not use them, O Pasha."

  "That is not for you to decide. When one takes a gift instead of waiting for it to be given, that then is stealing."

  "Oh no, great one."

  "Still I am compassionate and generous. I am your friend and a man of honor. You may run. I will not shoot you close-up for your thievery. Run."

  The gardener fell to his knees, crying "Please."

  "Run or I will shoot you here and you will see the end to my compassion."

  The gardener stood up, trembling.

  "Run," said Walid ibn Hassan and, true to his word, he did not fire until the man was fifty yards away. At that point, he sent a slug into the flailing left hand and got the first finger. At sixty yards he got the second finger and at seventy he had to take the hand. By a hundred yards, the hand was a stump on the wrist, breathing blood.

  Hassan had the Mauser at his cheek and working well. She was a good gun. She took a piece out of the right shoulder, and at 180 yards when the distance was becoming too great for perfect accuracy, she put a perfect slug into the left knee.

  It dropped the man. Hassan worked his beauty, quickly, before the man could die of blood loss. He took off the feet, changing clip after clip to keep shooting.

  The gardener twitched and jerked each time Hassan's beauty sent a lead kiss across the grounds to their target. She tortured the man beautifully, even taking off his manhood, and when she was asked, she sent the gardener
to eternity with a shot through the eye.

  Walid ibn Hassan kissed his beauty on her grip and very tenderly put her into a velvet case. She was ready.

  The gardener would be buried among the roses where his body could, in death, nourish the roots as he had in life.

  Hassan had cured his weapon in blood.

  He was ready. That afternoon he was on an airplane bound first to Mexico City and then to the nation of Hamidia. To get his beauty through all the airport checks, he had her disassembled into several sections; but finally, after the flight from Mexico by a small airplane to the People's Democratic Republic of Hamidia, he was at the gates of the People's Liberation Palace with his beauty, as he had been instructed to be.

  Nine other men waited with their rifles.

  "Hello, Mahatma," he said to the Indian. "Blessings upon you, Wu," he said to the Burmese.

  "Walid, my brother," said the Ghanaian, dark as pitch with a killing eye that Walid knew was as accurate as a beam stretched to the dark side of the universe.

  "What is it this time, Walid?" Wu asked.

  "I do not know. Mahatma always knows."

  Mahatma shrugged and readjusted his turban. "I do not know. But we always do well with Lord Wissex."

  On this, everyone agreed.

  They waited for half an hour in the hot Hamidian sun with the odors of Liberation City wafting to them from unfinished sewers. They did not mind this, mainly because their own countries were run remarkably like Hamidia. It was a requirement of the Third World that one's grandiose ambitions for a new world order were in inverse proportion to how well your government treated human waste. Thus sewers were delayed while delegates built the new infrastructures of world governments. This was best done, however, away from Third World countries because their streets stank. It was no accident that the Third World countries never moved the United Nations away from New York City.

  Finally Lord Wissex emerged from the People's Palace.

  "Are we all here?" he called out.

  There were ten yeses amid wishes for his long health, the fecundity of his wife concerning male children, and various assorted gods wishing him all manner of eternal life and wealth.