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  The man with the rifle walked forward quickly to deliver the finishing touch of a bullet into the temple of the unconscious giant.

  Without knowing who was who, Remo decided against letting him do that. He moved from behind the tree, iri whose shadow he had been standing and walked lightly across the snow until he was standing between, the two men, both of them with guns.

  They were wearing heavy jackets, and ski masks, with cutouts around the eyes and mouth, covered their faces.

  "Hi, fellas," Remo called out. Both men spun around to face him. Their rifles came up to their waists and were aimed at him.

  "I'm doing a tree survey for the federal government," Remo said. "You seen any?"

  "Who the hell . . . ?" said the man closest to the unconscious giant.

  "I told you. I'm a surveyor. Just want to ask you a few questions."

  "You're never going to hear the answers, buddy," the man said.

  "That's not nice," Remo said. He was moving closer

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  to the other rifleman now. Behind him he could sense that the first rifleman had raised his weapon to his shoulder. Then Remo could feel the tension waves fill the air as he closed his finger around the trigger. Remo could feel the finger ever so gently squeezing the trigger.

  Remo jumped across the two feet of ground separating him from the nearer gunman and waltzed him around like a grammar-school boy at his first dance. It took less than a heartbeat do so.

  The other gunman was very good. He had lined up the shot exactly right. The only problem was that in Ihe time between when he had started to pull the trigger and the time the bullet had reached its destination, the target had changed. The bullet never reached Remo, but buried itself instead in-the right side of the other man's head.

  As the dead man fell away from Remo, his finger tightened in a convulsive spasm on the trigger of his gun.

  It fired with a loud crack in the cold, clear night air. As Remo watched, in growing disgust, the bullet from his gun bored a hole in the direct center of the other gunman's forehead. First Remo could see the, black dot where the hot bullet had singed through the woolen ski mask; then he could see the spreading redness of blood on the woolen fabric. And then the man toppled forward into the snow.

  "Goddamn," Remo said in exasperation. First he had two who could talk to him and now he had none. "Nothing ever goes right for me anymore." He walked over to the other man to touch him with a toe, just on the odd chance that he might not be all the way dead.

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  Behind the heater blower, he heard the big man getting to his feet and stumbling around.

  He moved out from behind the machine, saw Remo, and pulled a Bowie knife from his belt, holding it in front of him in an attack position.

  "Try not to pick up ze gun," he growled at Remo. "I sliver your throat before you do."

  The man was a bulky, bull-like giant. Even leaning forward, he was taller than Remo, and his shoulders were as broad as a doorway. He wore a light lumberman's wool shirt, with a sweater underneath it. A knitted stocking cap perched lightly on top of his head.

  "Put that thing away," Remo said, waving at the knife. "I save your life and you pull a knife on me."

  "Hah," said the big man. "And another hah. I not need any squeak-pip to save me from anyzmg." "Squeak-pip?" Remo said. "What you doing here?" the big man said. "I work here," Remo said. "Who are you?" "I Peer LaRue. I a tree-yanker, the very best there is. And one damn good mechanic too," he said "Now you talk."

  "You work up here for this company?" Remo asked. Peer LaRue nodded.

  "So do I," Remo said. "Well, not really. I work for the government. They sent me up here to study trees. I count them like."

  The big man laughed. "Very funny. You one good storyteller. You have fun with Peer LaRue. Now you tell me who you are, and then we go talk to my boss-man, okay, yes?"

  "No, okay, no," said Remo. "I told you, I count trees."

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  "You want to play games with me, we play the games," LaRue said.

  "Tomorrow we'll talk," Remo said. "Look, these two guys are dead and that's annoying. I'm not feeling good. And Chiun wants his thirteen trunks. And nothing's going right, and I don't want to chit-chat. You want to talk, we'll talk tomorrow. Trust me, it'll be better that way."

  He turned and started to go. Peer LaRue jumped toward him from behind. Remo took the man's knife away and threw it deep into the trunk of a big spruce about ten feet up from the ground, catching the back collar of Peer LaRue's shirt, and pinning the squirming, roaring, very angry tree-yanker to the tree.

  Oscar Brack was sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of the roaring fireplace when Remo got back to the A-frame at Alpha Camp.

  He looked up as Remo came in through the front door.

  "Well, well, well," he said. "The tree reclamation technician. How's it going? You find any trees to reclaim?"

  'JBrack, I'm going to let that go this time," Remo said. "You got a guy working for you named Dock LaRue or something like that?"

  "Dock? No, Piere. Right. He's our foreman."

  "Yeah. He calls himself Peer," Remo said.

  "What about him?"

  "Well, he's stuck to a tree up above the copa-ibas, and somebody ought to get him down before he freezes to death. And somebody cut off the gasoline engines. I don't know how long those trees can live in the cold, but I guess you want to fix them."

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  Brack was already rising from his chair.

  "Joey," he called.

  Joey Webb came out of her room. She was still fully dressed.

  "Trouble up at the tree site," Brack said. "We better go."

  They moved quickly to a coat rack on the wall and took down heavy plaid jackets.

  "Thanks, O'Sylvan," Brack called back.

  "My pleasure."

  As Brack and Joey went to the door, Remo said, "One other thing."

  Brack turned.

  "Yeah?"

  "There's two dead guys up there. I think Stacy ought to run an identity check on them. They're the two who turned off the heaters."

  "Dead? How?"

  Remo didn't feel like explaining. "A suicide pact, I think. They shot each other."

  He looked at Brack, his face bland and expressionless. Brack just nodded.

  "Another thing," Remo said. "If you see an old Oriental guy up there, leave him alone."

  "Who is he?" asked Brack.

  "Never mind," Remo said. "Just leave him alone."

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  r

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At last. Alone at last. The only sound in the A-frame was the crackling of the hardwood logs in the fireplace and Remo sprawled out on a chair in front of the hearth. He needed a nap. He had not done anything particularly strenuous during the day, but accommodating the body to the extremes of outside temperature took" a toll on one's endurance. His batteries needed some recharging.

  He had just closed his eyes when he heard the door to the cabin open behind him and a set of light footsteps come across the room. They were too light to be Peer LaRue's or Oscar Brack's; they were even more tentative than Roger Stacy's; and they were not rhythmic enough to be Joey Webb's. And they could not have been Chain's because if Chiun had entered the cabin, Remo would not have heard him.

  He would ignore whoever it was and maybe they would take mercy on a sleeping man and go away. Whoever it was walked past him. Then Remo could hear the person turn around and look in his direction. Then he heard the person settle down into a chair alongside the fireplace, facing him.

  Remo waited, but there was no further sound. Finally he opened one eye and looked up.

  The man who was sitting there reminded Remo of a mouse; like a mouse close enough to his hole to be as-

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  sured of safety might watch the goings-on in a busy, catless kitchen, this man was watching him intently.

  A mouse. Maybe it was the way he was dressed: a polyester, double-knit, reddish-brown suit; an off-b
rown dress shirt; a cocoa-brown tie covered with white splotches; brown Hush Puppies. Maybe it was the watery brown eyes that looked at Remo, then darted around the room, on the lookout for God-alone-knew-what. Or the way the man sat with his cheap brown government-issue vinyl briefcase upright on his knees, holding it tightly with both hands and hunched over its top. Or maybe it was the way the little guy's nose kept twitching and moving around, always sniffing the air, managing to give the impression that he didn't quite approve of what he smelled. Maybe it was the little guy's high, squeaky voice when he saw Remo's eyes open.

  He finally introduced himself. "Mr. O'Sylvan, I'm Harvey Quibble."

  A mouse. Definitely a mouse. Harvey Quibble. It was even a mouse's name. "Will it wait till morning?" Remo asked.

  "No, sir. It will not wait until morning. No, definitely not, sir, it will not wait till morning."

  "Can I get you something?" Remo asked. "A piece of cheese?"

  "No, sir," said Harvey Quibble. "I don't believe in mixing business with pleasure."

  "I don't think there's much chance of our doing that," Remo said. "What's on your mind?"

  "We have a dreadful problem," Quibble said. He opened his briefcase.

  "Maybe you ought to tell me who you are," Remo said.

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  "I am from the federal job occupational survey team," Quibble said, "and we find that your agency is trying to define your occupational title in an entirely inappropriate manner."

  Remo sighed, got up, and walked to the fire, where he rubbed his hands together. He wondered if Harvey Quibble would burn if thrown into the fireplace. Did mice burn? Or melt?

  "Mr. Quibble, I'm very tired. Can we talk about this in the morning?"

  "No. Problems should be solved as they arise," Quibble said. "Now, the Forestry Service wants to define your worker-function rating as a three-nine-eight-four seven-six, and I'm afraid we could never agree to that."

  "Well, then, change it," Remo said.

  "I thought I should talk to you," Quibble said. "I'm sure you'll agree, Mr. O'Sylvan, that your worker function is hardly a three, which after all is synthesizing. I mean the title of your job, to say nothing of its description, almost certainly makes it a six, which is only comparing."

  "Sounds good to me," Remo said.

  "And I'm sure that your 'people-function' is certainly not mentoring, which is what nine means. In fact, Mr. O'Sylvan, I would dare say that it really hardly amounts to 'taking instructions—helping,' which is an eight. I would make it a nine, perhaps, if it were only up to me, but of course, it isn't, and besides I really think an eight or maybe even a seven is more accurate."

  "Fine, Mr. Quibble," Remo said. He walked back to the chair, sat down and glowered at the small man. , "Anything you want."

  "Good. You can trust me to do right by you. A lot of

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  people resent my work, but I have to tell you I'm really delighted by your attitude. I mean, it's important to know exactly what federal workers do. For instance, your setting-up classification—that's what that eight means, you know—it seems to me that what you're doing is really more on the order of handling, which is actually only a five. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. O'Syl-van?"

  "I think you've hit it right on the head," Remo said. "I was worrying about it myself."

  Harvey Quibble stood up and carefully put on his brown stocking cap, wrapped his dark brown knit scarf around his neck, closed his briefcase, and put on brown plastic mittens. "I'm so glad you feel that way, Mr. O'Syl-van. You have no notion of how nasty some people can become."

  Remo was trying to close his eyes for sleep. "Anything you want," he said. Then he realized Quibble was standing in front of him. The little man had thrust out a mittened hand for him to shake. Remo took it.

  "Good," Quibble said. "I'm glad you agree with my assessment. I'll send the paperwork through to Washington the first thing in the morning."

  "What paperwork?" Remo asked, suddenly suspicious as he always was of anything called paperwork. He did not trust people who called paper work. Paper was paper and work was work.

  "Why, the papers that will cut your salary by seventy-five percent, Mr. O'Sylvan. Just as we agreed." Then the mousy little man was gone.

  Remo just wanted to sleep where he was, but who knew what Harvey Quibble's second wave might look like.

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  He went to the bedrooms in the back of the A-frame and found one that looked unoccupied. He slipped off his loafers and lay on the bed. A hell of a day. Two men dead before he could get anything out of them. So tomorrow, instead of having this all wrapped up, he was starting from square zero again.

  He closed his eyes. He slept.

  The night sounds filled the room and Remo sampled them, first one by one, then in combinations: the howls of coyotes and the echoes of their howls; the screeches of night-hunting owls; the death shrieks of tiny, furry creatures; some cat-pawed creature stalking along the tree line; the fire crackling in the main room; snow shifting hi its drifts; ice melting and water running; someone moving in the corridor outside his room and stopping at his door. It took a split second for that last sound to penetrate.

  He lay still on the bed, waiting for whoever it was to make a final decision and come through the door. He did not want to kill anybody tonight; that meant having to get up later and get rid of the body.

  The door creaked open, then squealed shut. There were no lights in the room, but Remo did not need them. He knew whrf it was.

  Joey Webb carefully extended one foot hi Remo's direction, set it down on the floor, and transferred her weight to it. The floorboard squeaked, and the night-walker pulled back, startled, causing the floor to squeak again.

  She let out a liâle gasp at the noise she had made.

  "Hello," Remo said casually.

  "Hello," Joey replied.

  There was a pause while Remo waited for her to talk.

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  "This is very awkward," she said.

  Remo looked her up and down in the darkness. She was dressed in only a lumberjack shirt and brief silk panties. Remo noticed that her legs were remarkably long and beautiful. There was something appealing about the way she looked, nothing blatantly sexual, but a look that could make a man want to cuddle her for a long time, until she could be gently joined and then ridden like a bronco until a body-shaking explosion of passion. It was a shame, Remo thought, that sex held about as much appeal for him as did his breathing exercise. It had all become a matter of body control, mixed in equal parts with dedication to perfecting his skills.

  "Then why'd you come?" he asked.

  "I don't know," she said. "To talk to you, I guess. To ask what happened tonight."

  Her fingers fiddled with her shirt.

  "If you keep doing that, I'll never believe you," Remo said.

  "Doing what?"

  "Unbuttoning your shirt."

  "Oh," she said. Her hand fell away from her shirt as if the garment was hot. Then she blushed, deeply and thoroughly. She rebuttoned her shirt, right up to the neck.

  "Can I sit down?" she said.

  "Go ahead," Remo said.

  She sat on the end of the bed.

  Remo waited a few seconds and when she didn't speak, he said, "Well?"

  "I really botched this all up," she said.

  "What all?"

  "Finding out who you are and why you're here."

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  "You know who I am. I'm a tree inspector here to look at your trees." "I don't think so," Joey said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because of that act you were putting on earlier. I don't think you're that much of a jackass."

  "Just doing what comes naturally," Remo said.

  "I don't think so," said Joey.

  "Why not?"

  "Because anyone who can leave Pierre hanging in a tree has been doing something besides hanging out in Jersey City ward clubs. I think . . ."

  She stopped in mid-sentence because Remo suddenly sat upright
in bed and put his hand over her mouth. For a moment, Joey's eyes filled with shock and surprise. She was certain that she had badly miscalculated this thin, dark stranger and that she was about to pay a price. Then he put his mouth next to her ear, and she felt a shiver of anticipation—one that she reluctantly admitted to herself was a pleasant shiver.

  But Remo only whispered in her ear. "Be quiet," he said. "There's someone outside. Understand?"

  He looked at her, and she nodded yes.

  He took his hand away from her mouth and moved to the curtained window in a motion that would have made a cat look clumsy.

  "I don't hear ..."

  The hand was back over her mouth.

  "I told you to be quiet," he" whispered in her ear again.

  Joey could feel the short hairs on the back of her neck prickle, and a shiver run down her spine. Then she surprised herself and felt a warmth between hei legs. My god, she thought, it's impossible. I'm not one

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  of those neurotic bitches who fantasize rape. Then she began to tingle and shiver all over again.

  "Quiet," Remo said. "Understand this time?"

  It took all her concentration to ignore the feeling of warmth in the lower part of her body and to nod yes. Then he released her and moved away again. The door closed behind him.

  Remo was out in the now dark and quiet main room of the lodge. He stopped at the front door and listened again. This time there was no sound. Remo opened the door and slipped outside, waited again, heard the sound he had been listening for, and moved off to the right.

  Alongside the A-frame he found Chiun.

  The old man was sitting on the snow, in a lotus position. With his long-fingered hands, he was scooping up snow and throwing it at the wall of the cabin.

  "I thought you were going to watch the machinery," Remo said, "not throw snowballs to try to wake everybody up."

  "There are so many people up there, I do not need to watch the machinery. Everybody else is. So I tried to sleep. But could I sleep? First, there was you sloshing around with your big feet. Then guns going off. Then that big bulhnoose shouting with that funny accent. Then more people. Then that machinery going on and-off. I could not sleep. And then I knew I was freezing to death. So I came down here so that, when I die, you can easily find my body before it is eaten by the jackals and bury me correctly."