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  The president swore softly. "Do the Americans know about this yet?" he asked.

  "Not that I have been able to ascertain. I have no doubt, however, that elements of their government will eventually make the connection."

  The president hissed angrily. "Feyodov," he growled. "Who knew the coward would grow claws?"

  "It is my belief that he is driven by fear, revenge and greed. All are motivations that can make the most timid man seem brave. Had I been given his dossier as I requested after the events in Chechnya more than a year ago, I would likely have seen this coming."

  "Forgive me," said the president with parched sarcasm, "but when I assumed this post, my predecessor failed to tell me of your clairvoyance." His voice grew firm. "You must stop him," he ordered.

  For the first time there came a flicker of emotion on the director's face. The head of the Institute leaned forward. The rusted metal springs of the desk's matching chair creaked in protest. A soft sound in the small room.

  "You are aware, Mr. President, that the Institute exists only to advise. We have no field agents."

  "You have an entire building of field agents," the Russian president insisted. "Use them."

  This was the one command the director feared. "Those men are not traditional field agents," the Institute head explained. "They were not trained for such a task. Unleashing them on American soil would surely bring unwanted attention directly to this organization. I would advise you to use SVR agents."

  The SVR was the agency that had succeeded the KGB.

  "No," the president declared, his voice steely. "This cannot be allowed to spread any further. If you will not use the men at the Institute, you will go yourself."

  "That would be an unwise use of materials," the director said. "In addition, it would create an unacceptable risk."

  "That was not a request," the president growled hotly. "You were a field agent once. Arrogant enough to think that you were better than any man, as I recall."

  In another life, the two had met briefly. It was back before the director had gone into a decade of deep cover. When the president assumed his leadership of Russia, he had been dismayed to learn that this testament to conceit was still alive. Worse, that the former agent had been made head of something as important as the Institute.

  "You will go to America," the president commanded. "You will kill General Feyodov, and you will suppress this information at all costs. Am I clear on this matter?"

  There was no room for argument. The head of the Institute nodded to the empty office.

  "Yes, sir."

  "And be warned," the Russian leader said. "If you fail, there will be an open grave waiting for you on your return." With that, he severed the connection.

  Coming as it did from a former KGB man, the words were no idle threat. The black office phone fell heavily back into its cradle. So that was that. America awaited.

  And in that small basement office there was an old fear in the director's blue eyes that had absolutely nothing to do with the Russian president's threat.

  Chapter 9

  Remo and Chiun took a late flight from JFK, arriving at San Francisco International Airport at dawn. Although the temperature was only in the high fifties this early in the day, the sun and lack of snow was a welcome change for Remo.

  "This sure beats the hell out of freezing in the New England icebox," he commented as they made their way to the rental-car agency.

  "I like New England," the Master of Sinanju sniffed. "It was near enough to Smith without being too near. And despite the unpleasant name, there were no Old Englanders anywhere to be seen."

  "Both pluses, I suppose." Remo nodded. "Still, if we do get a new house, my vote's for someplace hot."

  "And the moment your vote counts more than mine, you may live in the inferno of your choosing. Until such time, the sacred scrolls dictate that it is for the Reigning Master to decide where he and his apprentice will live."

  "Where do the scrolls ever give a rat's ass about where we're supposed to live?" Remo asked, smelling a scam.

  Chiun waved a hand. "Somewhere in the back, I believe. Now, please, Remo, hurry and rent us a carriage. I do not want some street-reeking lazybones to claim squatter's rights over our new residence."

  Still dubious, Remo rented them a car. They took the Bayshore Freeway across the Oakland Bay Bridge. It was a short trip up the eastern shore of San Paolo Bay to Barkley.

  Remo sensed trouble as soon as they hit town. A battered Volkswagen Beetle came puttering toward them, a faded McGovern For President sticker plastered to its bungee-corded front bumper.

  The Master of Sinanju's face grew displeased the instant he saw the ancient yellow car.

  "Were not those ghastly contraptions banned by your government?" Chiun asked.

  "No," Remo said as the car passed by. "Worse, they started making them again, even uglier than before. We won the war, but the Germans get the last laugh."

  Chiun didn't hear him. A bony hand suddenly clasped Remo's forearm.

  "There!" the old man screeched, stabbing a quivering nail at the windshield. "Yet another approaches." His breath abruptly caught and he squeezed Remo's arm even tighter. "Can it be?" he exhaled.

  "Hey, trying to drive here," Remo said, wincing at the pressure being exerted on his forearm.

  "It is," Chiun said, with a trace of unaccustomed fear in his voice. "Remo, turn this vehicle around at once!"

  "What the-? Chiun, will you let go of my goddamn arm, for crying out loud?"

  "A pippie!" the Master of Sinanju cried. In a flurry of frightened fingers he ducked below the dashboard as the second Volkswagen chugged by.

  The car was covered with rubber daisies and peace symbols. The driver looked as if he shopped at the dump for his clothes and bathed once every two decades whether he needed to or not.

  "What's gotten into you, Meryl Streep?" Remo asked.

  "Turn this vehicle around at once!" Chiun shrieked in horror from the footwell.

  "Huh? Why the hell should I do that?"

  "Some wicked magic has obviously cast us back in time to the most odious era in your nation's history," the Master of Sinanju insisted. He tried grabbing for the steering wheel, but Remo held on tight.

  "We haven't time traveled," Remo insisted. "This is just Barkley. As long as you keep your hands inside the car at all times, the locals won't bite."

  A gasp from far below.

  "Horror upon horrors!" Chiun wailed. "This is your fault for taunting the gods. I have become victim of their excess wrath. If we reverse our direction, perhaps we can escape this nightmare."

  Chiun blindly tried to shift into reverse. Remo held tightly to both the steering wheel and gearshift lever.

  "Will you knock it off?" he snapped. "I told you, we haven't gone through a time warp."

  Hazel eyes appeared above the dash.

  "I do not know what those words mean, but that was the most warped time since time began. I would gouge my eyes from my head and flee into the wilderness before reliving that dismal era."

  "Okay, first order of business-no gouging," Remo insisted. "We're still in the present, those cars were really old and if you grab the wheel one more time I'm buying a banana plantation on Maui for both of us and having the natives hoist the Sinanju flag."

  Sensing his pupil's certainty, the old man eased cautiously up to the edge of his seat.

  "Purchase what you want where you want, but you will be swinging from your ancestral trees alone," the Master of Sinanju said. "Now explain this place quickly." Wary eyes watched the road ahead.

  "Barkley is lost in time, but not in any supernatural way," Remo said. "I blame the college. There isn't a bigger factory for PC Jim Morrison hashhuffers than higher education. And the freaks they've got running Barkley U are the worst poncho-wearing gladiolis this side of the touring company of Hair. Dopey professors plus dopier kids equals LSD trips on daddy's credit card and vintage Volkswagens still tooling around the streets."

  C
hiun was caught between skepticism and his long-held belief that any lunacy was possible in America.

  "Why would your nation allow a place filled with mental defectives to exist?"

  "Don't know about you, but I'd rather keep all the assorted nuts in one can," Remo said.

  And because it was the first time he could remember his pupil or America ever making sense, Chiun settled cautiously back in his seat. Nevertheless, he kept a careful eye on their surroundings as they drove deeper into the city.

  Remo was surprised by the large number of potholes on the main streets. Their rental car bumped and bounced its way to the center of town. As they drove, he had noted a shape looming up over some of the low buildings.

  At first he ignored it, but when they came to a set of traffic lights, he saw through a break in the buildings two massive black eyes staring down at them.

  "What the hell is that?" Remo remarked, looking up at the huge statue at Barkley's center.

  "It appears to be the image of some god," Chiun observed.

  "Some god is right," Remo said sarcastically. "Looks like a big black turd with the top lopped off."

  "That's right, Remo," Chiun said blandly. "Perhaps this is the one god left that you have not yet insulted. I will bring you back to Sinanju after this latest angry deity has transformed you into a pillar of salt. The fish salter can chip bits off of you to cure the catch for the long winter months." He watched the statue with quiet reverence.

  "That'd almost be worth it just to get someone in that dump of a village to do an honest day's work," Remo said.

  The eyes of Huitzilopochtli followed them as they headed for the main square.

  The driving soon became impossible. Remo ditched his car on a rutted side street. The two men continued on foot.

  Like a full moon at midnight, the Huitzilopochtli statue seemed to always be in the sky at their shoulder as they walked along the sidewalk.

  "Let's hope the Buffoon Aid benefit's inside somewhere," Remo said. "That statue's giving me the creeps."

  They found a reed-thin woman on a street corner near the town square. Dressed in a big, filthy muumuu, she looked like a dirty stick draped with a circus tent.

  The woman sat on the sidewalk cutting colored scraps of paper into clumsy flower shapes. As she worked her scissors, the white tip of her tongue jutted from between her pale lips. A cobblestone pried up from a hole in the street kept her paper flowers from blowing away.

  As they stopped before the squatting woman, Chiun's face took on a glint of quiet fascination. "Excuse me, ma'am," Remo said.

  The scissors paused in midsnip.

  "'Ma'am?'" Lorraine Wintnabber sneered up at him. "What kind of patriarchal cave did you crawl out of?"

  "The kind with liquid Tide and bars of Dial that aren't dehydrated from nonuse," Remo replied.

  "Soap pollutes our precious waterways," Lorraine said. She resumed clipping away.

  "Since you're the first noncartoon person I've seen with actual stink lines floating off them, my vote's for sudsing up the mighty Mississip," Remo said. "Now, while my nose is still attached, you mind telling me where that big stand-up comic show is being held?"

  The woman was still deeply involved in her work. She hadn't even looked up while Remo spoke. "That way," she snarled.

  Lorraine waved to a big auditorium across the street from Barkley's city hall. Remo saw HTB vans parked out front, their rooftop satellite dishes aimed skyward. The legend "An AIC News-Wallenberg Company" was stenciled in small print on the side panels of each of the vans.

  "Now, beat it," she said. "I've got eight hundred of these things to do by the day after tomorrow and I've only got twelve done so far."

  She finished clipping another ragged flower. With great care she delivered it to the pile of finished ones, clapping the muddy cobblestone back in place.

  "This may be none of my business, Dirty Harriet, but wouldn't it be easier if you did that inside?" Remo asked.

  "It's too dark," Lorraine said, her eyes on her scissors.

  "Turn on the lights."

  "Electricity is an invention of the military-industrial complex designed to keep the masses weak and pliable by making them stay up late watching Johnny Carson."

  This time when Chiun squeezed Remo's arm, there was a look of questioning joy on the old man's face. He was watching Lorraine intently.

  "Can it be?" the Master of Sinanju whispered under his breath to his pupil.

  Something else down the block caught the old man's eye. With sudden glee he bounded a few yards away.

  Brow furrowed, Remo tracked his teacher. The wizened Korean stopped near a college-age man. The Barkley University student was passing out colored fliers to pedestrians. Remo noted that they were printed in the same colors as those the woman at his feet was cutting.

  "In case you didn't hear out on Neptune, Johnny Carson retired years ago," Remo said to the seated woman. "Thanks for the directions."

  He started to leave, but Chiun was hurrying back toward him, dragging the pamphlet-hawking student in his wake. The old man's face was rhapsodic.

  "I have found another one!" Chiun squealed.

  "Another what?" Remo scowled. "And stop pointing that thing at me."

  He leaned back from the kid the Master of Sinanju held before him. The young man had a black sweatshirt, scraggly goatee and a shaved head.

  "You wanna know the truth behind all those cattle mutilations?" the college student confided to Remo. "Think genetically engineered supercows. It's the secret Ronald McDonald doesn't want you to find out about."

  He stuffed a photocopied flier into Remo's hand.

  On the bright pink paper several stick-figure dead cows formed a bovine border around illegible text. "Next time you might want to write your manifesto after they let you out of the straitjacket," Remo suggested. He crumpled the paper and tossed it over his shoulder.

  "Litterbug!" snarled the woman snipping out the papers. She snatched up the flier and began carving it up.

  "Thought I had an easy target," Remo said. "I was aiming for your mouth. What's up?" he asked Chiun.

  "Do you not see?" the old man asked, delighted. He held out his hands in proud presentation. "This, Remo, is a village idiot. It is a wonderful old English tradition."

  "There's nothing wonderful about the English, Grampa," Lorraine insisted as she worked. "Just a bunch of dead white males spreading syphilis and the language of conquerors."

  "Lady, I got news for you," Remo said. "I've been almost everywhere there is to go on this benighted rock, and the most civilized places by far are the ones where they speak English. Furthermore, even a dead guy would jump out the window before spreading syphilis to you."

  The sidewalk-squatting woman didn't even hear the last of what he said. At his use of the demeaning and sexist term lady, she immediately tried to stick the blunt end of her childproof scissors into Remo's leg.

  "See?" Chiun said, ecstatic. "She is another village idiot. And there!" He pointed out to the road. "There are two more!"

  Two flabby middle-aged men in short shorts and too-tight tanktops were just pedaling past on a bicycle built for two.

  Chiun clasped his hands together with giddy glee. "Why did you not tell me this was a training ground for village idiots, Remo?" Chiun asked. "Or perhaps it is a national secret. When the time is right, wave after wave of idiots will be dispatched from this province to amuse and delight the citizenry of this land. Look!" he squealed.

  Wrinkled face rapturous, he flounced down the street.

  "Yeah," Remo agreed as the Master of Sinanju began joyfully stalking a placard-wearing vegan. "And that time comes every spring at Barkley U graduation. Will you knock it off?" he snapped down at the sidewalk.

  Lorraine was still trying to jab him with her scissors. When he walked off, she gave up and instead stuck the nearby college kid in the calf. Yelping in pain, the young man promptly dropped all his fliers. As he rubbed the bruise the blunt scissors had made, Lorraine
swept all of the colored papers between her folded knees.

  "Go litter on someone else's planet," she accused.

  Ever on the lookout to do her part to save Mother Earth, she began recycling the college student's discarded trash into more respectable, environmentally conscious daisies.

  Chapter 10

  Boris Feyodov was trotting down the broad front steps of Barkley's city hall when the voice called out to him.

  "General. I mean, Supreme Military- Hey, you!"

  Feyodov considered ignoring the man altogether. With great reluctance, he paused in midstride. He turned.

  Gary Jenfeld was huffing down the staircase, a container of Jane Funday Sundae Ice Cream in his hand.

  "I am already late," the Russian said impatiently. Feyodov was not wearing his Red Army uniform. He had agreed to that ridiculous term only on the condition that he not have to march around the street in it.

  "Yeah, I know," Gary said. "You gotta get that special part. I didn't want to keep you, but-" he cast a glance back up the steps "-it's about Zen."

  The look on Feyodov's face made clear his opinion of Gary's partner in the ice cream business. "I'm not allowed to tell you some of what's really going on here," Gary whispered conspiratorially.

  "It's all very hush-hush. But me and the rest of the council are getting kind of worried. Zen seems to be losing focus."

  Feyodov raised a bland eyebrow. "That is of no concern to me," he said. "I am aware that you receive your money from some secret source. You pay me, and I supply that which you need. That is as far as I care."

  "But I'm not sure you should leave," Gary hissed. "He's been coming unglued ever since that takeover of our ice cream company a couple years ago. With everything that's going on now, he's getting this Oliver North glint in his eye."

  Feyodov scowled. "That is your problem, not mine. He leads your council until someone else takes over. If you are bothered by him, do what has been done to political opponents in Communist nations for a hundred years."

  Gary's brow dropped in confusion. "Prison?" he asked.

  Feyodov's eyes were flat. "Kill him."

  This was obviously not the solution Gary had been hoping for. "No one ever built a socialist utopia by murdering people in cold blood," the ice cream man scolded.