Warren Murphy: The End of the Beginning

Nuihc felt the confidence of victory coursing through his veins. His uncle's slavish devotion to the legends of Sinanju would be his downfall.

The legend of Bang. His uncle only saw its significance as it related to Nuihc. He never realized that he himself--Chiun, the last Master of Sinanju of the New Age-had, in his dying years, become Bang.

Chiun was the foolish old Master from that tale. He would assume that Nuihc was copying Bang's death. The threat to the President therefore would come from the basket. So devoted was he to history that he would never expect it to be improved upon. The true threat was not from within. While his uncle wasted time on a diversion, the President would march into the lion's jaws. By the time Chiun realized what was happening, the President would be dead and Nuihc would be gone. With his failure the feeble old Master would return home forever. A pathetic, hollow disgrace.

Nuihc smiled at the thought. And in his head he counted down the seconds to the final humiliation of his hated uncle.

"WELL?" the Master of Sinanju said once he had finished relating the tale of Bang to his American pupil. "Do you see why I have told you the story of my ancestor?"

Remo thought deeply. "I'm not sure. Guy's name was Bang." A thought popped into his head. "You think they're gonna try to blow up the Capitol?"

Chiun's eyes were flat. "Make this easier for me, Remo," he said aridly. "Just how stupid aren't you?"

"That's not it? Too bad. By the looks of it, most of Congress is here today. Okay, I give up. The guy had a basket and pulled a switcheroo. Stuck a snake inside instead of what Bang expec-" His voice broke off. "Oh."

With a sinking feeling Remo turned his gaze to the twin coffins in the middle of the rotunda.

The President was nearly to the gleaming coffins, inching along with his fellow politicians. And as the line of men reached the base of Senator Pierce's coffin, Remo saw the lid begin to lift quietly open.

For an instant it was like an image from some Saturday-afternoon Vincent Price horror movie. All similarities to Hollywood fiction ended when the gun barrel poked into view.

The world seemed to trip into slow motion.

Remo was twenty yards away. Too far to save the President's life. He had to try. He started at a sprint. Confusion already gripped the line of mourners. A woman's scream. Men stumbling, falling to get out of the way.

The President was in the line of fire. Startled, locked in place with nowhere to go. No one to save him.

A flash of yellow. An explosion from the coffin. A blue blur to Remo's right. Simultaneous with the gunshot.

The President buckling, dead. A clean chest shot. No way he could survive. No way Remo could stop the gunman before he fired even more rounds into the chief executive.

But in the moment that should have been precursor to yet another period of national mourning, Remo Williams witnessed an actual, honest-to-God miracle.

The blue flash that had passed by him as he ran somehow caught up with the first yellow flash. It was as if a hiccup in time itself had formed around the United States Capitol.

Remo's eyes had an impossible time reconciling the image. The President wasn't buckling over from a bullet wound. He was being grabbed around the waist by the blue blur, which Remo now knew to be the Master of Sinanju.

Time caught up to Remo's slow-motion vision. Chiun flung America's chief executive from the path of the impotent ball of hurtling lead. The President landed in a crush of converging Secret Service agents.

"See to the boom-shooter!" Chiun commanded back over his shoulder.

The Secret Service shielded the President's body and began hurrying him to the planned exit. With sharp slaps and harsh words, Chiun redirected them deep into the bowels of the Capitol Building.

For the gunman in the coffin there was no longer any pretense of stealth.

Alphonso "Rail" Ravello had missed the President, missed his chance to be remembered with history's great assassins. Roaring with rage and shame, Ravello flung the upper coffin lid wide and began firing wildly into the scattering crowd.

People ran screaming in every direction.

A congressman was hit in the shoulder and spun like a top, sliding to a blood-streaked stop on the polished floor. A woman who had come from Maryland with her two small children was struck in the leg as she tried to flee. Men dragged her to safety.

Ravello killed another man who was running toward him. At least he thought he did.

He shot the man, but for some reason the man didn't fall. He kept running, a look of doom in his deep-set eyes.

Enraged, Ravello fired again. And missed once more.

As Alphonso Ravello fired again and again, the figure kept charging. Somehow he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Skittering left and right as he ran. By the time the specter arrived at the side of the coffin, Ravello had only one bullet left. But it didn't matter, because his gun was no longer in his hands. He sat there, dazed in his coffin, hands empty, looking up into those deep, dead eyes.

Alphonso Ravello shook his head in incomprehension.

"I missed the President," he lamented. "I can't miss. I was supposed to be remembered forever."

"And I was supposed to be Sky King," Remo Williams commiserated coldly. "That's the biz, sweetheart."

Planting the barrel of the gun far back in the gunman's mouth, Remo pulled the trigger. A stew of brain and blood splattered the inside satin lid of the coffin.

Remo tossed the gun into the coffin and slammed the lid.

He regretted using a weapon. Guns always used to make him feel safer. Now for some reason they just felt wrong.

Remo was turning, searching for the Master of Sinanju, when he noticed something out of the corner of his eye.

Twelve feet away across the floor of the rotunda, the second coffin lid was squeaking slowly open. "Geez, Louise," Remo groused.

Marching over, he planted his fist through the opening lid. In training he had practiced this stroke with Chiun on birch trees on the grounds of Folcroft. The coffin wood surrendered even easier than a birch trunk.

The lid slammed down, and Remo's hand buried deep in something soft and squishy. There was a fatal sigh and a sickly gurgle from within. Remo pulled his hand free.

"And don't come out till I tell you," he snapped. That was that. He had stopped the attempted assassination. Now it was just a matter of going back to New York and taking out the man responsible for this madness.

Flushed with success, Remo was turning when he felt something beside him. A sudden displacement of air.

This was something he had worked on in training-to sense an opponent. But he was years away from mastering the technique, years away from proficiency in anything but the rudiments of the perfection that was Sinanju. He had seen but a hint of dawn, was blind still to the hidden sun.

And then his own limitations no longer mattered. The air moved and so did Remo. Up and over the coffin in a flash of brilliant white light that enveloped his brain before coalescing into a single dot of pure energy. It sparked once, then collapsed to black oblivion.

When Remo hit the cold floor, he did not move.

THE FIRST THING Nuihc saw was the coffins. Something was wrong. He knew it when the Secret Service had not hustled out the President by their preordained route.

He saw the hole in the right coffin. It curved in the half-moon shape of a human hand.

Screaming, tripping, crying, the crowd had streamed out the exits. The rotunda was empty. Nuihc was alone.

No. Not alone. He hadn't seen him. Only saw him now because he chose to be seen.

A grave miscalculation. He was old, but not weak. It had been years since he'd seen him. He assumed that his powers would have begun to ebb. An understandable mistake. A deadly one in their line of work.