Warren Murphy: Feeding Frenzy

"Sure it is. All over the human body are nerve centers. Sensitive nerve centers. It's just a matter of putting negative pressure on those nerve centers while reminding the subject of what he shouldn't remember."

"Reminding him of what he shouldn't remember? That sounds awfully Zen."

"The Zen guys overheard something they shouldn't have and that's how they got where they are today-which is to say playing with themselves."

"You're losing me."

"It's like this. I just the other day had a nice chat with the last President."

"Oh, him."

"Yeah, that one. I reminded him that he was supposed to forget all about us when he left office, and he let me pressure the nerve that sort of blocks the bad thoughts."

"This nerve-is it in the shoulder?"

"On some people."

"What kind?"

"Ones without a working brain." Hardy Bricker blinked his watery eyes rapidly, and Remo could tell by his expression that last part hadn't quite sunk in.

"If this is true, why are you telling me?" Bricker wanted to know.

"Because I got to thinking if we make every President we work for forget that there is a secret government agency that really runs America, even though we know they'll keep their mouths shut, we really shouldn't leave a blabbermouth like you out."

"Out of what?" said Hardy Bricker as the hand he couldn't see move came back to his shoulder and squeezed so hard he thought he heard his rotator cup pop.

The pop seemed to pop his eardrums too. And out went his brain.

Hardy Bricker lost consciousness so he didn't feel himself being thrown over a lean shoulder that was as hard as petrified bone or feel the coolness of the evening as he was carried out into Harvard Yard and across Massachusetts Avenue to a park where he was set down with his back to a bus port.

Remo scrounged up a discarded paper coffee cup, splashed out the last congealing brown liquid, and placed it in Hardy Bricker's limp fist. Digging some loose change out of his pocket, he shook it in his palm until a thick subway token showed its brassy face. He picked it out along with a shiny quarter and poured the rest into the flimsy cup.

Then he touched the exact center of the man's forehead, right where the caste mark would be if Hardy Bricker were a Hindu untouchable and not an American unmentionable.

Hardy Bricker's eyes flew upon. He looked around. He did not see Remo, because Remo had slipped behind him and was doubling around so that he could casually pass Hardy Bricker.

Hardy Bricker was still seated on the sidewalk when Remo pretended to come up to him. Remo stopped, dug into his pocket for his last quarter and dropped it into the paper cup, where it rattled the rest of Remo's change.

It rattled Hardy Bricker too. He peered into the cup, and then looked up at Remo's face with big uncomprehending eyes.

"I-I don't understand . . . ."

"Understand what?"

Bricker looked around. He seemed in a daze. "Understand anything. What am I doing here?"

"Well, that depends on who you are."

"Who I am?"

"Yeah, who you are. You know, what your name is, where you live, where you work."

"I-I don't think I know."

"I guess that makes you one of the growing legion of homeless, jobless, penniless unfortunates who fill our streets, public parks, and subways, the cruel victims of a heartless military-industrial conspiracy," Remo said. "Any of it coming back now?"

"Yes, I think I've heard those words before."

"Well, there you go," said Remo happily.

Hardy Bricker looked behind him. There was a park, sure enough. "I don't see any others like me."

"Then you're in luck. First one in has squatter's rights."

Hardy Bricker looked down. He was squatting, sure enough. It was beginning to make sense to his dull, foggy brain.

"What do I do?" he asked, watching the cars and buses zip by.

"You could say thank you."

"For what?"

"For the quarter I dropped into your cup. It was my last quarter too."

"Oh. Thank you." Confusion crept back into his face. "What do I do now?"

"It helps if you shake the cup every little while," Remo suggested.

Hardy Bricker gave it a shot. The cup shook, the change jingled and instantly a woman stepped up and dropped a Susan B. Anthony dollar into the cup. She walked on.

Hardy Bricker looked up. A slow smile crept over his puffy features.

"Thank you," he told Remo gratefully.

"Glad to help the dispossessed of the earth."

And Remo walked off, whistling. He did not walk far-only to the closest subway stop, where he took the Red Line through Boston to the city of Quincy, where he now lived.

He wasn't a big fan of the subway. But he had driven in Boston traffic enough by now to understand he had a better chance of survival if he went over Niagara Falls in a Dixie cup.

Chapter 3

From the North Quincy stop, it was a short walk to the place Remo Williams called home.

The sight of it made Remo long for the days when he lived out of a suitcase. Remo had always envisioned that one day he would live in a nice house with a white picket fence-not in a baroque monstrosity of sandstone and cement.

It had once been a church. It still looked like a church. Or more like a church than anything else. Depending on which compass direction you were approaching it from, it resembled, variously, a Swiss chalet, a Tudor castle, or the condominium from hell.

Right now, it looked like a Gothic warehouse because of all the delivery trucks parked around it. There was a UPS truck, a Federal Express van, another from Purolator Courier, and numerous other package delivery service vehicles.

"What's Chiun up to now?" Remo muttered, quickening his pace.

He caught up with the UPS driver as he was dropping off a plain cardboard box.

"This for a Chiun?"

The man looked at his clip. "The invoice says M.O.S. Chiun."

"I'll take it."

"If you sign for it, it's yours. My responsibility stops at the front steps."

Remo signed "Remo Freud" and took the box. He had to put it down in order to climb the steps. The steps were piled with boxes of all types. He was clearing a path as the other drivers came out of their trucks, their arms laden with boxes of all shapes.

"What is all this stuff?" Remo demanded after he had finished signing for six more packages.

No one knew. Or cared. So Remo reluctantly accepted the boxes and added them to the pile.

He carried what he could inside and set them down at the mailbox buzzers. In the days when Remo was a Newark cop and he had to get into an apartment building, he had used a little trick. Press all the buzzers at once. Usually, somebody would ring him in.

In this case, there were only two inhabitants distributed among the sixteen units that made up the church-turned-condo-himself and Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, the ancient house of assassins which had operated at the edges of history for thousands of years, and to which Remo now belonged.

A squeaky voice called down from above, "Remo, is that you?"

"No," Remo called up, "it's me and the entire Sears gift department."

"My packages have come?"

"They're piled to the freaking ceiling."

The Master of Sinanju floated down the steps. He was a frail wisp of a little Korean with a face that was like a wrinkled-up papyrus mask. The top of his head shone under the lights, bald but for the patches over his ears, where cloudy white tufts of hair clung stubbornly. He wore a chrysanthemum pink kimono bordered in white silk that made him look like a thousand-year-old Easter egg.