Warren Murphy - A Pound of Prevention

"You don't wanna know," Remo replied with a sad sigh.

"Do not try to maneuver me into begging for a response," Chiun warned. "I can see that something bothers you, but I am very busy." He waved one hand at the organized mess of his room. "Speak."

Remo wrestled with a reply, finally exhaling. "It's just that I don't feel good about the hit I just made," he said.

Chiun lowered the purple kimono he'd been folding. "Of course you do not," he said. "You debase our art by calling a flawless Sinanju assassination a 'hit.'" A horrible thought suddenly occurred to him. "It was flawless?"

Remo rolled his eyes. "No," he replied. "My elbow was bent, I used ten machine guns and I was dancing the hoochie-coo. Of course it was flawless. I'm always flawless."

At this Chiun cackled.

"With your hits and poochie-poos, the best you can hope for is mediocre," He placed the carefully folded purple robe into the chrysoprase-green trunk from the Chou Dynasty.

"Mediocre or not, Brad Miller's dead and I still feel like crap," Remo said bitterly. He stared at the floor.

Across the room, Chiun paused in his work. They had been watching a news story on Miller the previous night when Remo up and left the room without so much as a single word. Chiun now knew where he had gone.

The old Korean quietly left his packing. On silent sandals, he padded over to Remo, sinking to the floor before his somber pupil.

"You have done the world a service, my son," Chiun said, the wrinkles of his face drawn into a tight frown. "For a man who would murder a child robs the world of a life that will never be realized."

"So you've said," Remo replied. "But that doesn't make any of this any better." His wrists rested on his folded knees. He clenched and unclenched his hands in frustration. "I met an old woman in Peoria," he announced. "I think she might have been senile or something. She knew where Miller was when everybody else on the planet couldn't find him."

At Remo's words, Chiun's frown only deepened. "She also said the next few years were gonna be hard for me," Remo continued. He laughed sadly. "Can't say I like the sounds of that."

The Master of Sinanju's eyes narrowed. "This crone," the older man asked, "was she a soothsayer?"

"A what?" Remo asked, glancing up. He shook his head. "No. No, she was just some crazy old lady who knew where Miller was. Probably overheard someone mention it at the wake." He deliberately left out the most important detail of the story-the fact that Grandma Carlson had known his name.

Chiun's face was troubled. He tipped his head, considering. "Do you remember, Remo, how I once told you that you suffered from Master's disease?"

That got Remo's attention. The illness to which Chiun referred occurred in every fifteenth generation. It was an old Hindu curse imposed by one of their gods on Sinanju. Chiun had claimed years ago that this was the reason why Remo felt that he alone was charged with righting the world's wrongs.

"Yeah, I remember." Remo nodded. "It was when I met the Great Wang. You dumped that on me at what was supposed to be my final step to full Masterhood. Of course, you neglected to mention the Sinanju Rite of Attainment," he added with creeping annoyance.

With a flurry of long fingernails, the tiny Asian erased Remo's last words from the air. "How else could I keep your wandering mind alert?" he said dismissively. "The important thing here is the Master's disease. It has nearly run its course."

Remo's face took on shades of dark confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I told Smith then that it would take fifteen years for you to get well. It has been that. The disquiet you now feel is from the final phase of the disease."

Remo bit the inside of his cheek in contemplation. "Okay," he said. "So what now?"

The old man's face grew suspicious. "Your prophetess did not tell you?" he asked.

"No," Remo said, shaking his head.

Chiun breathed deeply. "In that case, I do not know," he exhaled. But the depths of his hazel eyes were troubled.

"Chiun-" Remo began.

He was interrupted by a silencing hand.

"I have told you of the legend of my village?" the Master of Sinanju asked abruptly. "How in dark times, when the fishing was poor and there was nothing to eat, the villagers sent their babies home to the sea?"

Remo was confused by this sudden shift in the conversation. "About a billion times," he said cautiously.

"There is wisdom in the retelling." Chiun nodded. He forged ahead, his singsong voice taking on the cadence of instruction. "Sinanju was and is a poor village on the West Korean Bay. The harsh winters and bleak summers punish the land. The soil yields meager harvests, and the frigid waters of the bay surrender few fish. At those times when food was most scarce, the people of my village would gather at the shores of the bay and hold their infants beneath the icy water, robbing them of life."

"And they called it 'sending them home to the sea' even though they knew that it was nothing but mass infanticide," Remo added. "I know the story, Little Father."

"Then you know, as well, O Wise One, how only with the discovery of the Sun Source did this barbaric practice end. For countless years has the Master of Sinanju left our village to ply the assassin's art to courts of kings and caliphs. We are but the latest in an unbroken line extending back into the mists of time."

"So what?" Remo asked. "What's that got to do with me?"

A thundercloud passed over Chiun's features. "You are ill, so I will let that lie," the Master of Sinanju said. "My ancestors toiled so that the children of our village could live. No longer must we resort to the dire practice of drowning our young. The Master's duty to the village has carried down through the ages. I bear that responsibility with pride. One day, you will do so, too."

"I don't know where you're going with this, Chiun," Remo said, "but I'm sorry. I'm not sure it's enough to say I kill to feed the kids of Sinanju anymore."

"And if I reminded you that I was a child of Sinanju once?" Chiun offered. "What if my father was possessed with your attitude?"

"He wasn't," Remo said. "And anyway, he wasn't afflicted with this dumbass Master's disease-which I'm not sure I believe in, either. Sinanju is just a dump infested by fat-faced ingrates who'd bash you over the head with a rock and steal your frigging eyeballs if they thought they could get away with it. You just happen to come from there and you just happened to stumble on me when you hired out to train some faceless American hit man for a couple of sacks of rice and a hunk of gold. We were lumped together by chance, not destiny, I kill people for a living, I hate what I do but I'm really good at it, and I just don't think I'm making a difference anymore. That's it. Case closed." Remo clenched his hands in impotent frustration.

By the end of Remo's tirade, Chiun's papery eyelids had closed to slits so tight a laser could not have penetrated the space between them. "Do you truly mean that?" he asked.

"Which part?"

"That idiocy about hating what you do?"

Remo shook his head. "Yes. No. I don't know. It used to make me feel good sometimes to ice a creep like Miller. Today..." His voice trailed off.

"That is part of your destiny," Chiun said. "A larger part than you know. You still see yourself as the savior of all mankind. It will pass."

And with that, Chiun rose to his feet like a puff of steam. He padded thoughtfully back to his luggage.

Remo remained seated on the bedroom floor. For a long time, he said nothing. When he finally looked up, his eyes were moist.

"When will it pass, Little Father?" he asked quietly.

Chiun glanced to his pupil. He was shocked to see that he held a small shiny silver object in his hand. Remo was staring at it with lost, sad eyes.