Warren Murphy: Bamboo Dragon

It was several hours before Remo had to meet the others. Wasted time if he remained at the hotel and tried to guess which way the game would go. He and Master Chiun had a nice room at the Hotel Merlin, on Jalan Sultan Ismail, and he couldn't have dragged Chiun out with a team of horses while the reruns of his beloved soaps were on the tube, much less to mingle with a population that was heavily Chinese in origin.

"At least they are not half-breed Japanese," Chiun had remarked while they were waiting for a taxi at the airport. From his tone, a perfect stranger could have guessed the frail Korean's view of half-breeds generally and the children of Nippon. For Chiun, the Japanese invasion of Korea, back in 1910, had more immediacy than the latest rumbles in Kuwait and Bosnia.

"It is unfortunate," he liked to say, "that they remember nothing of the lesson taught them in Korea."

"Back in 1945, you mean?" asked Remo. "When the U.S. Army and the Russians threw them out?"

"Your textbooks are predictably inaccurate. It was the Master of Sinanju who convinced the foul invaders to depart."

"And how did he accomplish that trick, Little Father?"

"Through a bargain with their emperor," Chiun replied. "The occupation troops withdrew, and Hirohito was permitted to survive."

"What took so long?"

Chiun's expression conveyed disappointment. "You still think like a white man when it comes to time. What is thirty-five or forty years compared to all eternity? The immortal House of Sinanju had more-important tasks than dealing with a few barbarian usurpers of the throne."

"Like earning gold?"

"The second-most-important task of any Master."

"And the first?"

"Pursuit of personal enlightenment," said Chiun, "about Sinanju."

At the moment, Remo would have settled for enlightenment about his current mission, but the final show-and-tell would have to wait a bit, until he met the others at the Shangri-la. Meanwhile, he had some time to kill before that rendezvous, and it would help to put his mind at ease if he could satisfy himself that he hadn't picked up a tail within the past two hours.

The Frumps would help him there, and all they had to do was be themselves.

The contract was a relatively simple one. It called for one dead round-eye, half the payment in advance, the rest when Sing Hop Ma returned with proof of execution.

Easy.

It could even be a pleasure.

He had picked up half a dozen Malay thugs to do the dirty work and make the hit seem like a random street crime. The police were strict about this sort of business, and the locals worked for pocket money—what the Yanks called chicken feed. If they were caught, he trusted them to keep their mouths shut, out of fear and the survival instinct.

Sing Hop Ma had been a red pole—an enforcer—for the local Ben Hoa Tong these past eleven years, since he turned twenty-one. He was a Malay-born Chinese whose father and grandfather served the tong before him, raising Sing to honor the traditions of his clan. The first time he had killed a man, at seventeen, he had been feted by the tong and welcomed to their brotherhood with open arms, a celebration that had nearly made his father weep with pride. Now, as a full-time soldier for the tong, he handled jobs and problems that required a certain killer instinct. Most arose from matters of internal discipline or economic competition, but a few—like this job—were accepted on a contract basis from outside. Another family, or even round-eyes, could procure the services of an assassin if they had sufficient cash in hand.

The target this time was a nondescript American. Six feet, dark hair, brown eyes, no visible tattoos or scars. Sing had a candid photo, taken from a distance at the airport as the target passed through customs, but it told him nothing of the stranger. He looked fit enough, without the bulging muscles that would mark a bodybuilder in the States. Only his wrists looked unusual, huge and sturdy. Perhaps he was a businessman or lawyer, dabbling in some enterprise that earned him lethal enemies.

It made no sense for Sing to speculate. He had no personal investment in the contract, other than the payoff for successful execution. Sing wasn't concerned with what may have provoked the killing, or the impact it would have on foreign shores. His reputation was at stake, dependent on attention to the technical details, but he had supervised this kind of work a hundred times before.

He was sure that nothing could go wrong.

His mark was staying at the Hotel Merlin, one more piece of information from his sponsors to facilitate the work. It had been simple for the Malay thugs to follow him when he went out, along Jalan Ampang, beside the river, walking south until he reached the central marketplace. Most round-eyes hired inexpensive taxis to conserve their energy, but this one liked to walk. He browsed in several shops, paused now and then to speak with sidewalk vendors, but he purchased nothing, even waved off the advances of a stylish prostitute on Market Street.

It would be best to kill him in or near the central market, Sing decided, passing the instruction to his Malay go-between and watching as the man slipped off to find his soldiers in the crowd. The kind of mugging Sing envisioned was uncommon, but it happened. Deaths were rare—the random murder of a round-eyed tourist almost unheard-of—but the only fair alternative would be a manufactured accident, and Sing Hop Ma did not trust his associates to pull it off. That kind of ploy would force him to recruit more soldiers from the tong, and thus reduce his private income from the contract. Better to be happy with the Malays, keep it simple and collect his payoff when the contract was fulfilled.

He could have done the job himself, enjoyed it for the rush of pride he felt whenever he was able to defeat a round-eye, but he didn't care to risk his life and freedom on a mission that had no importance to the family. If this man had done something to invite the wrath of the tong, it would have been a different matter. There would be no need for payment, nothing but a word from his superiors to send him on his way. Sing Ma still executed contracts on his own from time to time, when summoned by the hill chief of his tong, but that was always family business, when the master wished to send his enemies a special message. This was something else, a job for hire, and no sworn member of the tong would soil his hands if it could be avoided. Let the Malay mongrels do it for him, while he split the cash with his superiors.

He was a businessman, no different than a banker or attorney, with the sole exception that his stock-in-trade sometimes included sudden death.

What difference did it make? The men and women he had killed were all deserving of their fate, sworn enemies of Sing Ma's family. They were informers, turncoats, thieves, assassins, spies for the authorities—no good to anyone, themselves included. As for contract killings hired from the outside, he reckoned there must be an urgent motive—fear, perhaps, or hatred, even jealousy—to make a stranger part with so much cash.

Sing Ma was watching when his target fell in step behind the two obese Americans. They weren't friends, from what the tong enforcer could discover, watching from his vantage point across the street. In fact, they didn't speak at all, the two in front ignoring Sing Ma's target absolutely while they bartered with a sidewalk vendor over trinkets.

Three could make the job more difficult than one, if they were fighters, but a passing glance was all it took for Sing Ma to dismiss these bloated round-eyes as potential threats. In this case, he suspected that their presence might prove beneficial. Afterward, when it was done, police would think his hirelings had gone trolling for Americans in general, instead of picking out a special target from the crowd.