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  For his part, Remo kept his irritation in check. Howard was a change to CURE that Remo had not yet accepted. These days he was doing his best to acclimate himself to the young man's presence by ignoring him as much as possible. The same could not be said for the Master of Sinanju.

  "How grave must be the danger to crown and country for the Emperor's young Prince to speak with such passion," Chiun intoned. "Yet even with talk of peril, the sweetness of your voice fills my soul to overflowing."

  Remo had been putting up with a lot of kissing-up these past few months. Too much, in fact.

  "Can you ratchet that down, Little Father?" he griped.

  "Just pretend to care about whatever idiocy they are babbling about," Chiun said in Korean. "Look. The old fidget has made the young one a worrywart like him."

  Remo glanced at Howard. Chiun was right. The young man was looking a little frayed around the edges. There were dark bags under his greenishbrown eyes that weren't there when he started at CURE almost one year ago.

  "You okay, kid?" Remo asked, brow drooping.

  Mark seemed surprised at the attention. "Yes," he said cautiously, expecting a punch line to Remo's setup.

  There was none. Remo only nodded. He returned his attention to the CURE director.

  "Mark's assessment of the C. dioxa is correct," Smith said. "Unleashed on the world, it could disrupt or even destroy the oxygen cycle."

  Sitting, bored, on the floor, Chiun asked Remo what that was. Remo told him he thought it was one of those stationary bikes fat people pedaled at health clubs.

  "You join a gym, Smitty?" Remo asked.

  "Actually," Smith said thinly, "the oxygen cycle is the name for the process by which photosynthetic organisms synthesize carbohydrates from water and carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the atmosphere as a byproduct. At the same time, aerobic organisms-mankind included-use up oxygen and give off carbon dioxide and water through a variety of complex metabolic processes. The one feeds the other on a planetary scale."

  "So you're saying you didn't join a gym," Remo said.

  Smith took a deep breath. "Animals breathe out carbon dioxide," he explained slowly. "Plants clean the carbon dioxide from the air and release the oxygen that the animals breathe. If the plants didn't do this, we would all die."

  "Hey, I think I got that," Remo said.

  "Good," Smith said seriously. "Because we are facing something that could reverse part of that process. If that happens, we cannot begin to contemplate the damage."

  Remo waved a dismissive hand. "Aw, I've been hearing stuff about the world imploding for years, and we're still here. It can't be that bad, Smitty."

  "Yes, Remo, it can. The threat to the environment this plant represents is incalculable. If released into the wild, it would flood the atmosphere with deadly carbon dioxide and ammonia gas. As a consequence, our air would eventually be rendered unbreathable. All life on Earth-plant, animal, marine, everything-would go the way of the dinosaur. The planet would literally suffocate."

  Although Remo had heard doomsday predictions before, the types of people who made them always seemed to have some ulterior motives. Harold W. Smith, however, was a man who dealt with cold, harsh reality and was not the type to indulge in acts of wild speculation. If Smith thought this was serious, in all likelihood it was.

  "Okay," Remo sighed. "So now I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay. Gimme an ax and tell me where it is."

  "The CCS maintains a headquarters in Geneva," Smith said. "But it might not be so simple a thing as merely destroying the existing plants. In fact, it might not be necessary for you to do so at all."

  "They're gonna kill us all, but you want me to save them," Remo said flatly.

  Smith removed his glasses. "It is a little more complicated than that," he said, rubbing his eyes. "The C. dioza was actually developed for a reason. It offers a way to study the earliest stages of plant formation and evolution on this planet. It is conceivable that the data collected could have future scientific applications."

  Remo didn't seem convinced. "Like what?" he asked.

  It was Mark Howard who answered. "They might eventually be able to create a plant that can survive in a completely alien atmosphere," the assistant CURE director offered. "If they can do that, we could send seeds to other planets or moons in our own solar system that could eventually create oxygen atmospheres like ours."

  Remo felt a pinch at his thigh. The Master of Sinanju was tugging at his pant leg with slender fingers. "It is worse that I thought," Chiun whispered quietly in Korean. "The big one has driven the little one mad."

  Remo shot him a quieting glance. "So what's our involvement, Smitty?" he asked.

  "Go to Geneva and see who or what is behind the murders of the C. dioxa scientists," the CURE director said. "If someone has evil designs on the tree, it may become necessary to destroy it. However, it is entirely possible that someone merely wants the research stopped. In either case, until you determine which it is, I want the two of you to protect the remaining scientist on the CCS team."

  "Maybe chop tree, protect CCCP scientist, save world," Remo said. "Got it."

  He stood. Beside him, the Master of Sinanju floated to his feet. Remo was turning to go when a thought occurred to him.

  "What's the name of the guy we're supposed to be bodyguarding?" he asked.

  Replacing his glasses, Smith glanced down at his monitor. "Her name," he said, "is Dr. Amanda Lifton."

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Amanda Lifton, of the Massachusetts Liftons, was frightened out of her Brahmin, Ivy League-educated Mensa brain. The utter, stark, unbearable terror had left her almost beyond the point of all reason. It was only due to her oppressively reserved Lifton upbringing that she didn't run screaming into the tidy streets of Geneva.

  If she had been back home in the Boston suburb of Wellesley, she would have been able to work out some of her anxiety on one of the servants. Old Nan, the prim Englishwoman who had raised Amanda, had taken more than her share of clouts to the head during those troubled teen years. Nan was long gone now, but there had to be some dusty butler or upstairs maid who could fill in.

  Amanda considered calling Daddy to ask him to send over Reginald for a good old-fashioned shoe beating, but she knew that she couldn't. Not after the very public display of temper she had given vent to at her sister Abigail's wedding. Most of it had been directed at Daddy, but for good measure she'd tossed in a fairly hefty helping of invective for the rest of the Lifton clan.

  It had happened six years ago.

  "I'm an adult!" she had proclaimed loudly and angrily to the ballroom full of Lifton relatives.

  She did this for two reasons. First and foremost was that younger sister Abigail had the gall to go out and get married first. Second was Abby's insistence that Amanda wear the same hideous turquoise gown as the other bridesmaids. Amanda waited for the reception for maximum dramatic effect.

  In her tirade, she insisted that she wanted to be treated as an adult. She'd had it with the entire Lifton family. She yelled at her startled relatives that she was going to finally make a clean break from them all. She started her new life on the dance floor, stripping off the appalling gown that Abby knew full well made a Lifton derriere look much bigger than it actually was. Amanda left the dress that malice bought on the floor and, in her underwear, marched proudly from the reception.

  She was still reveling in her act of emancipation the next day when the phone rang.

  It was precisely 9:00 a.m. Amanda knew it was important when it was Daddy on the line and not some servant or secretary telling her to hold for her father.

  She was lounging back in bed, the delicate pink phone pressed to her pale, perfect ear.

  "That was quite a performance yesterday, Amanda," Daddy said. "Bravo." He spoke in the lockjaw manner of old New England money.

  "I meant every word, Daddy," Amanda huffed.

  "Of course you did, princess. That is why as of five minutes from this moment you will be cut off f
rom the rest of the Lifton family."

  "No great loss," Amanda said, her tone snippy. She flopped one of her fuzzy pink slippers against the soft wrinkled skin on the underside of her pumiced foot.

  "That includes the money, Amanda."

  The slipper went flying as Amanda shot up in bed. "I was completely out of line, Daddy!" Amanda insisted. Her free hand clutched a panicked knot of pink sheets. "Is Abigail there? No. Honeymoon. She'll be in the islands. I'll fly down, Daddy. I promise. I'll apologize in person. I'll even wear that damnable dress to do it."

  "You will do no such thing," Daddy Lifton said. "You were most impressive yesterday. And you have no idea how much it takes to impress your father."

  "Let me find another way," she said fearfully.

  "Too late. I've decided to take you up on your exciting little challenge. You are going to be our own little lab experiment, Amanda. You are going to be the first Lifton in more than five hundred years to have to actually go out and earn a living. Isn't that just thrilling, princess?"

  "Is Mother there?" Amanda asked weakly. "She's with the man from Tidwell Vintners. Problem with the '91, don't you know. But she sends kisses and a hearty 'job well done.' This will be our last chat for a while, I expect. The phone company will be terminating service after I'm through."

  "Daddy, you can't do this," Amanda pleaded. "I can't go out and make a living. I don't know how." Her father laughed in that constipated, ultrarefined way of his that sent shivers down her spine. Amanda had only heard him laugh two other times in his life. Once when Gran Lifton had been found face-down in the azaleas, and once during the stock-market collapse of 1987.

  "You'll show us all the way, Amanda," Daddy said.

  And with that, the line went dead. There wasn't even a dial tone.

  Amanda stared at the eerily silent phone.

  "I don't want to show anyone the way," she cried to the pink papered walls of her bedroom. "I'm an heiress."

  The walls cared as little for her plight as Daddy and Mother Lifton. A moment later there came a pounding on her apartment door.

  Amanda slipped a fluffy pink bathrobe on over her shimmering pink silk pajamas and answered the door. On her doorstep was her landlord, four movers and a pair of highly paid Lifton family lawyers.

  Amanda Lifton was on the street six minutes later. Daddy let her keep her wardrobe. Everything else went back. Credit cards, jewelry, furniture. The works. She never had a savings account. Never needed one.

  Her checking account was vacuumed clean by Daddy's shysters.

  Penniless, Amanda found herself on the outside of an empty apartment surrounded by suitcases filled with a lifetime's worth of clothes.

  Actually, it was worse even than that. The clothes were only a month old. She had thrown the older stuff out when she'd gotten her new spring wardrobe. As she trudged the streets of Boston, she found herself wishing she'd kept a few of those older things. Maybe some rag merchant somewhere gave cash to indigents for old Versace.

  Her endless, terrible wandering proved to be the most dreadful eight minutes of her entire life. She had heard an awful rumor that there were people who stayed out here all the time. She had no idea why. Probably a tax dodge. There couldn't be that many spiteful daddies out there.

  Half a block from her apartment Amanda spied a familiar sight. The call letters of the local PBS affiliate shone down on her from the front of an office building like a beacon of hope.

  For years Amanda had been volunteering at the station answering phones during its annual pledge drive. Like all good blue-blooded Boston liberals, Amanda Lifton was no hypocrite. For one hour one night a year-whether convenient or not-she actually practiced what she preached. It was her way of staying grounded.

  She staggered into the foyer of the station under the weight of a dozen Gucci suitcases and demanded a job. And, in the great PBS tradition of wasting money and not caring, the woman with zero qualifications and a stack of luggage that was vomiting Armani and Christian Dior all over the lobby was hired on the spot.

  She started as a receptionist. A day later, when the station manager discovered she was a Lifton, she was promoted to producer of a local-affairs talk show. Two days later, when the same man learned that she was indeed one of those Liftons, she was promoted to public-relations director, where her duties consisted of looking out the window and long lunches. Sometimes she was trotted out to wine and dine the various celebrities who showed up at the station, usually around pledge time. One such celebrity was the famous and respected astronomer Sage Carlin. Although it had happened six years ago, Amanda remembered it as if it were yesterday.

  Carlin arrived in an old corduroy suit jacket with patches on the elbows. He had a comb-over that looked like a helmet of hair, an overbite, no chin and black-rimmed buzzard's eyes.

  In spite of his creepy appearance and his vague odor of fish, Amanda knew Dr. Carlin was brilliant. She wanted to prove to him that she was no intellectual slouch herself.

  Amanda explained how she had graduated at the top of her class at Yale. She had taken her degree in botany to the Massachusetts University of Technology, where she received doctorates in morphology, cytology and palynology. Dr. Lifton had been actively courted by some of the biggest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the country. But because Liftons frowned on women in the workforce, Amanda had been encouraged to turn her attention to finding a man of adequate social standing and sire a male Lifton child. "To begin this wretched mess all over again," Daddy had said in one of his more honest moments.

  Now all that was gone thanks to her silly outburst at Abigail's wedding.

  She was happy during her long diatribe on the travails of her life to find that Sage Carlin was a terrific listener. The whole time she spoke, the famous scientist never took his eyes off her. Granted, he was staring at her chest and not her eyes, but you really couldn't blame him. In addition to being brilliant and beautiful, Amanda Lifton knew precisely how to fill out a sweater.

  "I'm sorry to go on like this, Dr. Carlin," she apologized. "It's just that my daddy has been very, very mean to me."

  "No need to apologize," Sage Carlin said. "Of the billions of people on this overpopulated planet, you're the one I most want to talk to right now. What's morphlology?"

  "You mean morphology," she replied with a smile. "It's the branch of biology that concerns the form and structure of plants and animals."

  "Plants?" Carlin asked, intrigued.

  "That was a particular interest to me. That's why I went on to palynology and cytology. Palynology is the study of mold and spores-cytology is cell structure and function." She suddenly realized whom she was talking to. "But of course you know that already," she said, face flushing red. "I'm humiliating myself, aren't I?'

  "Not at all," Sage Carlin said. "I do some work for a group called the Congress of Concerned Scientists. Perhaps you've heard of it? If you're interested, I might have a job for you."

  It was, according to Sage Carlin, a one-in-a-billion chance meeting. That very afternoon he hired Amanda as a palynologist for the CCS.

  The team in Geneva soon learned how lucky it was. All her life Amanda had been hiding her light under a bushel basket. She was a natural in her field. In her first months in Geneva, her brilliance put her fellow scientists to shame.

  She helped lay the groundwork on the C. dioxa. It was she, along with Dr. Brice Schumar, who improved and refined the seed design. The last two seed cycles had only gotten better.

  But the greatest victory was personal. She had done what she had-albeit inadvertently-set out to do. She had proved to Daddy, Mother, Abigail and all the rest of the Lifton family that she could stand on her own two feet.

  But, sadly, her success was marred by tragedy. Dr. Carlin passed away. While tragic, it was five years old now, and truth be told, he had always given Amanda the willies. A more recent death and one far more disturbing was the unfortunate accident of her team leader, Dr. Schumar. How he had gotten himself locked in the C.
dioxa greenhouse was a mystery to everyone. He above everyone else at the CCS in Switzerland should have known enough not to go inside the greenhouse with the skylights closed. The police were saying it was suicide. Amanda had reluctantly accepted their conclusion. Until the next body turned up.

  This one was a young American botanist she had recruited herself. Fried to a crisp when a carelessly dropped appliance landed in his bathtub. That the appliance was a microwave and the dead scientist had been fully clothed at the time was glossed over by the authorities. Amanda might even have accepted the official verdict on the tragedy if old Dr. Cross hadn't been found the next day.

  The English geneticist had been cooked to death behind the steering wheel of his car. No one quite knew how it happened, but apparently he had been burned to black slag. His fillings and most of his car had partially melted.

  Dr. Lewandowski went the same way the day after. When the Geneva police declared both bizarre deaths to be unfortunate skiing accidents, Amanda began to suspect that their hearts weren't in uncovering the truth.

  It became epidemic after that. CCS scientists were all dying or disappearing, taking with them to their graves all knowledge of the process by which the C. dioxa had been created. The bodies mounted until there was only one left.

  The thought that, at any minute, she might join her deceased colleagues gave Amanda Lifton an involuntary shudder as she walked along the chilly abandoned halls of the CCS headquarters.

  The complex was like a high-tech ghost town. The corridors were a tidy white. Color-coded stripes on the floors directed visitors around the buildings: blue was for the administrative offices, red for the labs and green directed one to the greenhouses. Amanda walked nervously along the green line. At one point the sole of one lab sneaker squeaked on the concrete floor, and the resultant echo nearly caused her to jump out the nearest window.

  She had a right to be jumpy. All the deaths couldn't be coincidental.

  Amanda had finally worked up the nerve to phone the head of the CCS about her theory. Dr. Hubert St. Clair seemed very interested in what she had to say. He asked her to meet him at the main greenhouse in twenty minutes so they could discuss the matter.