Warren Murphy: The Wrong Stuff

When standing upright, Virgil was roughly seven feet tall. Squatting now, it was only five feet. Its eight mechanical legs were curled beneath the hard shell of its silver-plated thorax.

Graham noted a set of big spidery tracks running from the lava-formed gorge a dozen yards away from the trailer. His amazed eyes tracked the furrow up to the parasitic cone in the wounded side of Popo.

"He must have climbed out after he lost contact with us," Graham said, bewildered. "He used the cone as an exit and somehow followed the gorge to us."

The rest of his team had clustered at an awed distance. Only Clark Beemer had the temerity to speak. He had gotten over his initial shock and was now shaking his pant legs in a vain attempt to dry the urine stains.

"Is it a homing probe?" the PR man asked absently.

"Don't be an idiot," Graham said.

He was studying the clean silver surface of the Virgil probe. There wasn't so much as a scratch or dent in the smooth heat-resistant plating. Even more, Virgil wasn't even dirty. Despite its stay in the volcano crater and its trip down the muddy lava gorge, there wasn't the slightest visible hint of the punishing ordeal it had been through.

"Homing probe might be sellable," Clark Beemer insisted as Graham ran a hand over the cool surface of the probe. "Not that you'd want this monster following you home." He frowned as he studied the mechanical body of the probe. "You ever think of putting a happy face on it? Like that spider in A Bug's Life? After all, you made it talk. Might as well make the words come from something nice."

Graham didn't hear Beemer's last words. He was continuing to study the surface of the probe that by all logic should at that moment be melting in a pool of boiling magma a mile below the Earth's surface.

"What do we do now?" one team scientist asked. Pete Graham glanced up, a studious frown on his face. Far above, Popo belched a thin stream of black smoke at the pale Mexican sky.

"Crate him up and haul him back to Florida," Graham insisted. When he looked back to the quietly squatting probe, his voice grew soft "I can't wait to get you back in the lab and find out what happened during your trip through Hell."

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was making lemonade. Of course, it wasn't the actual physical variety-with citrus fruit and water and enough sugar to rot a mouthful of baby teeth. Remo had been unable to drink the normal kind of lemonade for many years, and hadn't really enjoyed it all that much even when he could drink it. No, the lemonade he was making this day was the metaphorical kind. And for this particular recipe, he needed the proper tools.

When Remo stepped through the pro-shop door of Rye, New York's Westchester Golf Club, there was only a handful of men inside. None looked in his direction. There was no reason they should. Remo was a young-looking man dressed in tan chinos and a navy blue T-shirt. His casual attire wasn't anything out of the ordinary for the golf club and so went unnoticed by its members. As he strolled up to the counter, Remo's dark eyes were scanning for the tool he'd need for his particularly tricky lemonade recipe.

The middle-aged man behind the counter smiled at Remo's approach. A plastic fishbowl of tees sat at his elbow.

"Good morning, sir," the shopkeeper said. "What can I help you with today?"

Remo didn't meet the man's eyes. He was busy searching the store. "I need a good solid stirrer," he said.

"A Stirrer?" the man asked, puzzled. His deeply tanned face clouded. "I've never heard of that brand, sir."

Remo was glancing beside the register. Two dozen golf clubs jutted in the air in what looked like some sort of Arnold Palmer-inspired work of modern art.

"A stirrer's not a brand," Remo explained absently as he picked through the ring of clubs. "It's a thing you stir with. Here's a good one."

He pulled a club from the circular stand.

"That's a wedge," the proprietor explained cautiously.

"It was born a wedge. Today it's been promoted to stirrer," Remo replied. He slapped his Visa card with the name Remo Bednick onto the counter.

Raising a silent eyebrow, the man rang up the order.

Two minutes later Remo stepped out of the clubhouse into the fresh air. Armed with his one club and a bucket of balls, he headed out onto the fairway.

The calendar had lately stretched into October, bringing many a cold night to the Northeast. In spite of the coolness of the evenings, the midmorning autumn sun this day warmed Remo's bare arms. He headed toward the first tee.

Remo had avoided the club's footwear requirement by blending in with a pack of garishly costumed women golfers. Dressed as he was-in direct contrast to their plaids and paisleys-he should have stuck out like a sore thumb. Somehow he managed to move along unnoticed. His soft leather shoes upset not a single blade of grass as he broke away from the gabbing quartet of housewives and moved off on his own.

Stopping on the lawn, Remo pulled a single white ball from his pail and dropped it to the neatly trimmed grass. He toed it around a few times as groups of people walked by. Straightening, he tapped the ball back and forth, trying to get the feel of both club and ball.

That a nonmember could somehow make it this far into the exclusive Westchester Golf Club was a minor miracle. That he could stand out on the green, in full view of actual members, fecklessly toying with a ball was unheard-of.

Remo wasn't surprised that no one paid him any mind. He had spent much of his adult life dancing at the fringes of people's consciousness, never fully stepping out into the spotlight. By now it was second nature.

And it was a good thing, too. In his line of work, being noticed meant being dead.

Remo was an assassin. No, check that. By today's definition he was much more than that. In the previous century the term assassin had been gutterized, applied to every gun-wielding maniac or bomb-planting psycho.

Remo was the Apprentice Reigning Master of Sinanju, heir to an almost superhuman tradition, the origins of which evaporated far back beyond the edges of recorded history.

Most people used less than ten percent of their brains. That meant that ninety percent of the mush in their skulls was dormant. As a Master of Sinanju at the peak of his awesome abilities, Remo harnessed one hundred percent of his brain. Trained to perfection by the Reigning Master of the most ancient and deadly of all martial arts, he was able to focus that energy into physical feats that seemed to work in complete defiance of the limited human form.

Disappearing into shadows, pulverizing bones to jelly, climbing sheer walls. These were skills long known to the men from Sinanju. Hiding where everyone should be able to see him-on the sprawling lawn of the Westchester Golf Club-was as easy to an individual trained in Sinanju as breathing.

Remo looked as if he belonged. Therefore, he must. With a one-handed swing, Remo tapped his ball a few feet. He walked over to where it rolled to a stop, knocking it back. No eye save his own would have seen that the ball landed precisely where it had begun. The barely perceptible indentation in the grass accepted the pebbled ball.

Actually, Remo thought as he walked back to his starting point, there was another set of eyes that would have noticed the ball's path. Right now they and their owner were in a vine-covered brick building on the other side of town. Those hazel eyes with the fawning gleam that had lately taken root in them were just two of the reasons Remo was at the club.

A sudden commotion erupted near the clubhouse. Remo glanced back over his shoulder.

Four men had just walked into view. Three of them were unknown to Remo. The fourth, however, wore a face recognizable in every corner of the planet. When Remo saw that famous face, his own expression hardened.