Warren Murphy: Failing Marks

He marched over to examine the stained-glass rendering more carefully.

It was foolish, really. Staring at a window that had been imported from a centuries-old European castle. But Adolf Kluge had little else to do while he awaited death.

The stained-glass Siegfried had been designed by the artist to be a big, burly man. The creator of the scene had been able to capture a sense of strength in the ancient hero even in death.

How old was the window? Kluge wondered. Several hundred years at least.

The detail was exquisite. He had never really taken the time to study it in all the years the castle had been his home.

Something at the hand of the dead king caught his eye.

Kluge leaned back, surprised. He peered in more closely.

It was there. Plainly evident beneath the gauntlet. To Kluge, it was rather like noticing for the first time one's own passport photograph in the background of the Mona Lisa.

He frowned.

It probably meant nothing. But his experience lately had proved that there was fact in some legends.

Kluge strolled to the door, deep in thought.

He paused once, looking back at the ancient death scene. The windows all along the wall shone like a thousand painted diamonds. For some reason, only one caught his attention.

Since he had been stabbed in the back, Kluge wondered briefly if Siegfried ever knew who his murderer was. Adolf Kluge at least knew who his killer would be. He had met the man who was coming after him.

He even knew his name.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and the tenement rooftops of former East Berlin stretched out before him like the sun-bleached surface of some giant concrete checkerboard.

He stood on the flat tar roof of a tall high-rise and surveyed the city with a disapproving eye.

Remo had been to the eastern bloc countries many times before the fall of the Iron Curtain and had always found them to be dismally depressing. This was his first trip to this part of Germany since the Berlin Wall had toppled, and he was surprised to see that things hadn't changed much.

There was a little more color here now. On the streets below, as well as in the apartment windows. A few blocks away, Remo saw a billboard featuring the red-and-white logo of a famous American soft drink.

But the place was still as somber as a funeral parlor. Of course, the Russians were to blame. Decades of Communist oppression had a tendency to take the fun out of anything.

Remo wasn't certain what building he was looking for. The sameness of the tenements was startling and more than a little disconcerting. To him, it looked as if some Titan with an enormous square bucket and a limitless supply of beach sand had spent a lazy afternoon scooping up and plopping down building after identical building.

Remo didn't realize how true this analogy was until he leaned against the upper rim of the roof he was standing on. The cheap mortar crumbled to sand beneath his hands.

Jumping back toward the roof's center, he slapped the dust from his palms and shook his head in disbelief.

"Good thing this isn't an earthquake zone," he muttered to himself as he surveyed the halfcrumbled wall.

The structure he was trying to find was somewhere east of Grotewohlstrasse beyond the location of the old Wall.

Remo's best course of action would have been to stay on the ground and head east until he ran into a helpful pedestrian. But there were two very important reasons why he couldn't ask directions. The first was simple enough: Remo didn't speak German. The second reason was a bit trickier. The number of bodies Remo had been leaving in his wake lately had begun to attract undue attention. He had been given explicit instructions to eliminate only those who were absolutely necessary.

Of course, all of this would be simpler if Chiun hadn't stopped coming along with him. He understood German. If Remo's teacher had come with Remo rather than sitting like a Korean lump in their Berlin hotel room, the two of them would probably be back home by now.

Thanks to Chiun, Remo's only hope was to find the place himself. And so here he was, standing alone amid the seemingly limitless sea of cheap, Communist-era buildings.

With a put-upon sigh, Remo climbed gingerly atop the crumbling four-foot wall that rimmed the roof.

He was an average-looking man with deep-set eyes and dark hair. He wore a dark green T-shirt and a pair of tan chinos that fluttered in the early-winter breeze. Although the thermometer hovered around the forty-degree mark, Remo seemed unaffected by the cold.

Just beyond the toes of his loafers was a five-story drop into a filthy alley. Thirty feet across the empty air was an identical roof.

Remo hopped over to it.

It was an impossible jump even for an Olympic athlete. Remo made the leap with ease.

One instant he was standing; the next he was airborne. He landed atop the neighboring roof a second later.

Even though he had dispersed his weight in flight so that upon landing he would be no heavier than a handful of feathers, the mortar promptly crumbled beneath his weight. He hopped down to the main roof just as the avalanche of bricks and mortar slipped out from underneath him, landing with a terrible crash in the alley far below.

An angry shout rose up from one of the apartments beneath him. He ignored it.

Remo continued forward.

He picked up speed, running to the edge and leaping for the next building. As he ran, he glanced all around, looking for something in particular. Something the last man he had killed told him would be there.

Building, alley, leap. Run.

Building, alley, leap.

He covered blocks in a matter of minutes.

While he leaped from rooftop to rooftop, Remo found himself thinking of the city's recent history. It was pretty disheartening.

First the fascists, then the Communists. Which was worse? It was a testament to the utter evil of both philosophies that he had a hard time deciding.

Remo finally chose the fascists as being the worst of the two. After all, they were a better reflection of the dark souls of the indigenous population. The Communists had ruthlessly seized control after the Second World War. The Nazis had been voted in.

Remo was above a street parallel to the main concourse of Unter den Linden, leaping to the next building, when something far ahead caught his eye.

Movement. Briefly, he spied someone with a gun. Remo landed softly and skittered crab-like over to a massive vent cap. Twirling slowly in the soft wind, the cover resembled a tin chef's hat.

He peered out from behind it.

Remo didn't know where precisely his leapfrogging had taken him. The man he saw was several buildings away. For all he knew, it could be a guarded government or bank building. It wouldn't help the low profile he was supposed to be keeping for him to assault a few innocent bank guards. Upstairs would blow a gasket.

Remo waited until he spied what he was after. The man turned slowly away from him, scanning the rooftops to the north.

There it was. In plain daylight.

A red armband was wrapped tightly around the armed man's biceps. Within a white circle on the crimson band, the crooked black lines of a swastika were clearly visible.

No doubt about it. This was the place.

He came out from behind the vent cover and strolled casually across the roof. At the edge, he hopped over to the next building. He continued his harmless amble toward the distant rooftop.

Remo didn't want to alarm the sentry. If the man saw him too soon and Remo was running like a maniac in his direction, the neo-Nazi might have time to warn others. This way, as long as Remo wasn't spotted actually jumping from one building to the next, he would look like nothing more than an underdressed apartment dweller who had gone up to fix his antenna.