Warren Murphy - Brain Storm

SMITH RAISED AN EYEBROW

"Is there something wrong with the Master of Sinanju?" he asked.

"Nothing wrong. He just wanted to ask you for something."

"A trifling item, 0 illustrious Emperor,"

Chiun called.

"If it is within my power to do so."

"Oh, it is," Remo said. "Chiun wants to know if he can have your autograph."

"I am not sure I understand..."

"He thinks since you've been on the news you're going to break into the big time. He wants to get your signature first. Especially since he heard that a lot of autographs fetch big bucks."

"How you like to apply your base motivations to another," squeaked Chiun.

"So, you willing to do it or what?" Remo spoke to Smith.

"I'll see what I can do."

"And, Smitty?" Remo said.

"Yes?"

"Don't forget us little people when you're a star."

Other titles in this series:

#95 High Priestess

#96 Infernal Revenue

#97 Identity Crisis

#98 Target of Opportunity

#99 The Color of Fear

#100 Last Rites

#101 Bidding War

#102 Unite and Conquer

#103 Engines of Destruction

#104 Angry White Mailmen

#105 Scorched Earth

#106 White Water

#107 Feast or Famine

#108 Bamboo Dragon

#109 American Obsession

#110 Never Say Die

#111 Prophet of Doom

Created by

and RICHARD SAPIR

BRAIN STORM

A GOLD EAGLE BOOK FROM

WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • N E W YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN

MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

First edition August 1998

ISBN 0-373-63227-4

Special thanks and acknowledgment to James Mullaney and Daisy Snaggers for their contribution to this work.

BRAIN STORM

Copyright €> 1998 by M. C. Murphy.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

Printed In U.S.A.

For Mary and Red Power.

And the Glorious House of Sinanju.

The thing that scared Andy Frost most that day was the parking.

The crime rate didn't bother him. Everyone he knew had been mugged at one time or another.

Among New Yorkers, it was sort of a twisted badge of honor. In fact, it wasn't uncommon for people to invent stories of violence for the daily water-cooler competition.

The people themselves didn't frighten him, though the Christmas crowds had a tendency to get on his nerves. Everyone had a touch of agoraphobia at one time or another, but not Gothamites. When you were raised in a ten-story walk-up like a nest of rabbits in a squalid hutch with a hundred other human dregs screaming and pounding through the walls and ceiling and floor all hours of the day and night, you learned to live with overcrowding. You complained about it, sure.

Constantly. But you lived with it.

Yes, the murder rate was high. So what? Everyone died in his or her time. Here people were killed over stuff as trivial as a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket. What, they didn't have murders in Wiscon-sin? Facing down the business end of a gun didn't worry Andy. And it was a trade—a high per capita murder rate in exchange for all-night drugstores, fresh bagels on demand and the chance to see Cats or Evita or a dozen other shows seven nights a week.

The other fearful things of everyday life in the city were too numerous to mention. You had to deal with Con Edison, rabid rats, cockroaches the size of ashtrays, greedy landlords if you weren't lucky enough to benefit from rent control and about a million foreign cabbies who seemed to have learned their driving skills behind the wheel of a Kuwaiti bumper car.

All of these things he could shrug off as part of living in the most exciting city in the world. If you complained about them, you were a New Yorker. If you complained about them and meant it, you were a schlemiel.

No, none of these things bothered him anymore.

But the one thing that still made Andy Frost shiver and whimper like a rain-drenched fox terrier was the parking in midtown Manhattan.

Parking condensed every fearful element of the city. You got your ticket from an angry foreigner in a tiny booth. You drove into a drafty underground garage that stank of urine and housed more species of wildlife than the Bronx Zoo. Muggers and murderers were likely skulking behind every other parked car.

And at Christmas? Forget it.

You'd be better off leaving your car in the middle of the Triborough Bridge and walking the rest of the way in.

Fortunately for Andy, the holidays were months away and so the crowds of people heading to work were no worse than usual. It was ridiculous, but ne-gotiable, which was good for him since he was already running late.

The parking garage was less than a block away from the bank where he worked, and as he angled down into the musty bowels of Manhattan, Andy took a moment to quietly curse his parents. Not for the first time today, and it surely wouldn't be the last.

They were the reason he had the car. In fact, it was their car.

The biggest, ugliest conglomeration of metal and plastic Detroit could produce, slapped front and back with the telltale orange-and-green Florida license plates. There was no doubt about it—if the Big Three started making cars with shark fins again, Andy's father would be first in line to buy one.

His parents were up on a visit with his mother's sister and they were going to spend the day taking Andy's aunt around town to see all the sites they had neglected to visit during their fifty-odd years of living in the Big Apple. It was an irony he had pointed out at least a hundred times during the past two days.

They had made Andy promise he would pick them up at Rockefeller Center at five-thirty that afternoon—a feat he still had no idea how to accomplish—and his father had dropped the keys to the Buick in his hand as he went out to work that morning. And so here he was, at 9:11 a.m. on a Monday morning, already more than ten minutes late for work, driving down into some subterranean nightmare and not knowing whether or not he was ever going to see a ray of sunlight again.