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  So Hassan kept his beloved ready, barrel pointed down the trail, eyes alert. He remembered what he had heard of the dead knife fighters and alone among the snipers he did not regard this as just another easy mission.

  And alone among all the snipers Walid ibn Hassan saw 2:30 P.M.

  And then a man was standing right in front of him, as if dropped by magic in the middle of the trail, so close that Hassan could not use the scope. He was a thin man with thick wrists and dark eyes and he was smiling.

  "Hi. Nice jungle, isn't it?" said the man. He was American so he must be one of the three. But Hassan did not wait to make sure.

  In every other service he had performed for Wissex, he had been careful to be exactly right about the target. But this time, he knew no one would punish him for shooting first. So he let his beloved kiss the man's chest. That would fell him. Then he would let his beloved kiss the white man's eyes and then his mouth. Those were Hassan's plans for the next shots.

  But the first shot did nothing. The trigger was pulled and the man seemed to move even before the thought of the shot. He was standing sideways. Hassan squeezed off two more shots where the man's eyes had been, realizing that the man moved again even as his beloved was firing.

  Hassan was now shooting without even aiming, pulling the trigger madly, until his beloved left his hands.

  The man was standing over him, pawing his beloved.

  "What do you call this thing?" Remo asked, noticing how well-polished the rifle was.

  "Beloved," cried Walid ibn Hassan, reaching for the precious one that would return his honor in blood.

  "I could never tell these things apart. I don't even know the names of guns, you know," said Remo. "A man who uses a gun, well, that means he doesn't have it within himself. But, honest, it's a pretty gun. Okay, sweetheart. Party's over," said Remo and Hassan felt his beloved's barrel puncture his belly with eye-popping pain.

  Hassan dared not move because any movement increased the pain. He felt the barrel go higher, into his chest cavity, even to his breathing, and then he noticed he was high off the ground. The man was carrying him easily, high above the ground as a waiter would carry a tray and just as easily.

  He was bringing Hassan back to the village where they had killed everyone— impaled on his beloved.

  He was bringing him to that Oriental sign that the Chocatl chief had been pointing to as some form of protection. The chief had been the first to die with Hassan sending a kiss from his beloved to the man's forehead. The chief was now at the bottom of the pile in the pit. He had died still pointing to that symbol carved in jade before his hut.

  Hassan was now being lowered to that sign, his face very close to it.

  "See that? In Korean, that means house or House of Sinanju. Just house will do. It's become sort of a trade name in the past few thousand years. It means that this village was protected by the House of Sinanju, except we blew it, and protection is impossible since you've already killed everyone. However, the House of Sinanju is also big on meaningless vengeance. Do I have the safety on?"

  "What?" grunted Hassan.

  "Hold it. No, I don't think so. I think the safety will move. Yes."

  And Walid ibn Hassan's beloved sent a kiss up through her master's brain, taking off a piece of cranium.

  Remo discarded the gun and impaled owner in the bushes and returned to Chiun and Terri.

  "I made a perfect shot with a rifle," Remo said to Chiun. "Got the brain easily. Dead center."

  "You shot a man?" said Terri, aghast.

  "Only one. There were nine others I didn't shoot," Remo said.

  "Well, that's encouraging," Terri said.

  "I don't like guns," Chiun said.

  "Of course not," said Terri, gushing over the man in the kimono. "You're too gentle of heart, Master of Sinanju."

  "Guns breed bad habits," Chiun said.

  "I knew you were really against violence," Terri said. "Why is it people don't realize assassins abhor violence? It's the press. Ignorant and shallow as ever."

  "An occasional shot won't hurt," Remo said.

  "One is too much," Chiun said. "Even one. The first can lead to a second and then you will be using it for your livelihood and losing everything I taught you."

  "Beast," said Terri, looking at Remo.

  Barry Schweid had the greatest adventure script he had ever seen, right from the computer tales of the greatest killing weapon in the form of a human being.

  "Stunning," was the one word he thought appropriate.

  "Won't work," said Hank Bindle. "We need feminine jeopardy. We need him struggling and suffering. So you don't know who is going to win."

  "You thought Superman was going to lose?" asked Schweid.

  "Raiders of the Lost Ark," intoned Bindel.

  "Starwars," added Marmelstein. "And think of what they could have made if they'd had a few nice boobs in there."

  "But how do you make superweapons ordinary?" asked Schweid.

  "Not ordinary," said Bindle. "Vulnerable."

  "With shirts getting ripped," said Marmelstein.

  "Hey, what about the hero walking down the street alone when all his friends desert him?" Schweid suggested. "And he is the only one left to face the killers."

  "That's too weird," said Bindle. "Can't sell it."

  "High Noon," said Schweid.

  "There you go again. When we say we want original and we want fresh, we don't want you to copy the oldies. That's too far out. Copy what everybody else is doing now," said Marmelstein. He fingered the chains around his neck, then shouted, "That's it! Something really really new. I've got it."

  "What have you got?" asked Bindle, and then said to Schweid, "When Bruce Marmelstein has an idea, it's always a great one."

  "For years now we have been waiting until a film is a success before we capitalize on what the box office tells us," Marmelstein said. "Why wait?"

  "What are you talking about?" asked Bindle, suddenly worried.

  "Why not steal the major scripts before they are made and then we come out a week before with our own productions?"

  "Thank God," said Bindle, weakly seeking a chair in the office. He had to take the weight off his legs for a moment. He had thought his partner was going completely berserk. The pressure in Hollywood could do that.

  "Thank God," Bindle said again, now breathing easily. "For a minute, I thought you were actually going to suggest we make up something new."

  "You mean, really new? Out of thin air?" said Marmelstein. "Why would we want to do that? We're producers, not some cockamamie writers in the East. Bindle and Marmelstein stand with Hollywood tradition. We will never produce what is not tried and true. We will never do anything that hasn't been done before. You want inventions, go to General Electric. We're movie makers."

  "Movie makers," said Bindle. It made him feel in some way noble, part of a great tradition stretching back through generations of copiers and idea-thieves.

  "Getting back to the point," said Schweid, "you want the trainer to be white, right? And you want his pupil to be not so good, sort of vulnerable. And you want big breasts."

  "Just write in women. I'll take care of the breasts," said Marmelstein.

  "Women in jeopardy," said Bindle.

  "With ripped shirts," said Marmelstein.

  "What about a big-breasted Hungarian woman trained to be the killing weapon for a secret U.S. government agency?" suggested Schweid.

  "What are you talking about? Nobody's ever done that," said Marmelstein.

  "I'm giving you what you want."

  "I want box office. I want the gross over four hundred million," said Marmelstein.

  "But those things come after you make the movie, not before," said Barry Schweid.

  "Oh," said Marmelstein.

  Chapter Six

  Neville Lord Wissex waited for the message that would tell him the woman had been captured.

  Already his plans had been formulated. He would turn her over to Moombasa, and then�
� at a fair market price— provide her with escorts so she could travel around the world looking for the mountain of gold.

  As he totaled up the costs on a yellow pad on his desk, he felt pleased with himself. He had expected a rock-bottom minimum of five million dollars. When his knife fighters had been bested, the price had risen to ten million. Even for the House of Wissex, it was a very tidy sum, and it would enable them to carry on while he was promulgating similar large schemes. And it saved the house all the trouble of racing around to unmanageable countries with unpronounceable names to silence dissidents, all in the name of anti-imperialism.

  It was the new direction that the young Lord Wissex envisioned for the ancient house: big projects with big returns.

  He waited all afternoon and no radio operator picked up any signal.

  The agent who had been waiting within radio range of the group in the Yucatan phoned at what was midnight for him and predawn in London with a report that there was complete radio silence out of the Yucatan. Not even a peep. He was heading in toward the village.

  Wissex examined the description of the bodyguards again. He had fed it into his computer terminal in the London townhouse and now he tried to pull from the machine the probable source and probable training of the bodyguards.

  The House of Wissex knew how the KGB, how the American FBI, CIA, and Secret Service trained. How MI5 trained. He could spot someone trained by any of them, and he could spot even the freelance terrorists because all had their little idiosyncracies. Some did well against knife fighters. Others did well against snipers. But according to the information coming back from the computer, only one agency did well against both.

  That was the Swiss secret agency, perhaps the best in the world, and certainly the most secret. They guarded Swiss banking interests all over the world and on those rare occasions that a cover was blown, they managed to sew another back on immediately, no matter who or how many were killed. The real beauty of the Swiss was that they did things so quietly; none of their killings ever made the press.

  Competent and discreet. These two bodyguards for the American woman could have been working for the Swiss, but they only employed Swiss nationals. And one of the two bodyguards was described as a frail old Oriental in a kimono. Not even close to a hundred pounds. And the other was an American. No particular pattern to their walking, except there seemed to be a smooth shuffle. And a lot of talking.

  Wissex waited for the report from his agent in the Yucatan. A message had come in from Generalissimo Moombasa reporting that "all freedom-loving liberated peoples cheer the heroic struggle for the return of the inalienable rights to their ancient, just resources of the Hamidian people. Vanguard Revolutionary Suicide Battalion awaits your command."

  Basically, this meant that Moombasa wanted to know how the capture had gone so he could get on with his search for the gold. It also meant that someone named Myra Waxelburg had left her home in Scarsdale, New York, because of an argument with her parents over who would get the Mercedes Benz one evening, and Myra had taken it upon herself to volunteer her services to the Hamidian embassy in their honorable revolutionary struggle against the oppressive forces of capitalism. Like her parents who had just told her that she had to use the Porsche because they needed the Mercedes Benz that night.

  It was Myra's conviction that anyone the National Review called a tinhorn dictator had to be a revolutionary hero.

  So Myra and her friend, Dudley Rawlingate III, heir to a chemical fortune, had volunteered their services to Moombasa and ever since, he was trying to palm them off on the House of Wissex, as the Vanguard Revolutionary Suicide Battalion, in an attempt to reduce his bill.

  Wissex cabled back.

  "Congratulations on readiness of your Vanguard Revolutionary Suicide Battalion. They also serve who only stand and wait... elsewhere."

  Then back to deadly business in the Yucatan.

  Finally, Wissex's agent reported.

  "All operatives dead, one grotesquely with brain blown out from below. No apparent harm to woman and her two bodyguards. Bodies of our men being examined. Initial pathologist report indicates something with the force of a hydraulic machine crushed bones and penetrated brains, but no marks of weapons or machinery found."

  Lord Wissex returned to Wissex Castle to think. He did not like London for thinking. One used London for gaming. For business. But not for thinking. One did not think well in a noisy crowded place.

  To really think, Wissex needed the battlements of home and the winds blowing over the countryside that his family had ruled for so long.

  The problem was obvious. Someone had invented a new machine.

  It was portable and it did not use a projectile. But then how could it destroy ten snipers? Perhaps a form of force field.

  Had anyone been working on something like that? Should he look for that? Should he back away? Had any of his now dead men given him away? Would these two strange bodyguards with the deadly new machine come after him?

  Would he have to face them himself? If so, with what? But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. He had counted on Moombasa's stupidity to finance one five-million-dollar score for the House of Wissex, and already the greedy dictator had paid for two. If two, why not more? And Wissex would keep squeezing the insolent turnip until he had drained every cent he could out of the dictator, and, in the process, had killed the two bodyguards. If indeed they were even alive at the moment.

  So engrossed was the young Lord Wissex in his thoughts that he did not hear his uncle Pimsy hobble up the stone steps with his trusted poodle Nancy. He did things with that dog that the Wissexes did not talk about. No one interrupted Uncle Pimsy, however, because if he didn't have the poodle, he might have to go back to little boys and girls. And that always caused a ruckus of sorts.

  Lord Pimsy was nationally known as the founder of Children Scouts, a Britannic approach to nature and youth. It had 3,000 members before anyone found out what Uncle Pimsy was doing at those camps that he provided for London's "city-bound waifs."

  Quite a scandal but as British scandals went, it was good for only a week until some other lord was found with all those bodies he had promised to bury free. Hadn't buried them at all, but kept them in a freezer locker in his basement. Two hundred of Her Majesty's subjects had to be thawed, washed, reclothed, and buried. Bit of a mess.

  "Problem, Neville?" harrumphed the old Lord Pimsy.

  "Business," said Neville.

  "Steel. Good British steel. Honest steel. Steel."

  "Thank you, Uncle," said Lord Neville.

  "British steel. You can count on it."

  "Yes, Uncle."

  "Steel to the gut."

  "Well, Uncle, it's a bit more complicated than that," said Lord Neville.

  "Nothing is so complicated that good British steel can't cut through," said Uncle Pimsy.

  "We've already used knife fighters and failed."

  "Knife fighters?"

  "Our trusty Nepalese Gurkhas."

  "Wogs. Can't use wogs. Good British steel with English lads behind them. Will take the measure of any man."

  "Yes, that is an option."

  "Option? It's your course, boy. Charge."

  "Yes, well, thank you, Uncle. How's Nancy?"

  "Bit off her feed but a fetching lass, isn't she?"

  Pimsy petted the poodle who wearily stood her ground as she was trained to do.

  "Uncle Pimsy, we are up against a new machine that we can't fathom. It is a new age. There are no more kings to service, no more crowns in the West to assure. This is a new world. With new machines and new clients."

  "Your wogs again, boy," said Uncle Pimsy.

  "The wogs have the need and the money, Uncle. The industrialized world has its own in-house staff. They don't need us. If we went to Number 10 Downing Street and offered our services, they would laugh us out. Yes, wogs."

  "Steel's good against wogs. But powder's better. The little yippie beasts run at the big bangs."


  "Not anymore, Uncle. We can't survive murdering girl-friends for Henry VIII forever."

  "That's a lie," said Pimsy heatedly. "We put away one embarrassment and our enemies have bruited it about for the past three centuries. And you believe them. You've always thought the worst of the Wissex. I don't mind telling you, I was against your taking over. Yes. There you have it. Out in the open. The truth."

  "You've been telling me that every month for the past seven years, Uncle."

  "Have I? Well, doesn't hurt to restate it."

  "Yes, but we have grown rather wealthy in that time. And look. My hands are clean," said Neville. "I have never skulked in an alley or had people blazing at my backside as I ran from an open window."

  "You demean the name of Wissex."

  "You're not limping, Uncle, because someone didn't get a round off at you."

  "Honorable wound," Uncle Pimsy sputtered. "On an honorable mission. Not like these things you have the house involved in now. Fleecing some towel-head with the brains of a porcupine. Frightful form, Neville. Mine was an honorable wound."

  "And you got an honorable seven thousand pounds for it, and already this week, I've made ten million dollars for our House from that towel-head Moombasa as you call him. And now I have a problem with a machine that fires no projectile, yet crushes bones, is so portable that no traces of it exist, and can be worked by one of those wogs you complain about and a white. That is what I have to wrestle with while you play with your doggy and talk of the old days."

  "A wog?"

  "Yes, wog," said Lord Wissex.

  "What kind of wog?"

  "Oriental."

  "What kind of Oriental?" asked Uncle Pimsy.

  "I don't know."

  "What was he wearing?"

  "Clothes, I imagine," said Wissex.

  "What kind of clothes?"

  "I think a kimono of some sort."

  "Neville, lad, find the design of that kimono," said Uncle Pimsy. His voice was suddenly low. The bluster was gone and the old man was deadly serious.