Warren Murphy: Terminal Transmission

"You think there is more than one source?"

"While it is possible to drown out all TV signals through one centrally positioned broadcast tower, we can't discount an array of jamming stations. Each of them must be tracked down and terminated."

"I'll start the machinery, Smith. Please stay in touch."

"Of course, Mr. President," said Harold Smith, hanging up.

It has gone as well as could be expected, Smith reflected. The succession had gone as it always did, noisy but bloodless. Still Smith was going to miss the old President. He was probably the last one of Harold Smith's generation.

Sadly he closed his briefcase, shucked off his slippers, and drew on his well-polished wing tip shoes. He had not so much as loosened his tie upon coming home, but he tightened the knot as he stood up.

Smith was a tall graying man of retirement age, the flesh tight on his prominent bones. His face was pinched, a pair of rimless glasses perching precariously on his patrician nose. A congenital heart defect gave his skin an unhealthy grayish pallor that matched the hue of his three-piece suit. His eyes, faded from years of dull bureaucratic work, were a similar gray. Even his fingernails looked gray. His Dartmouth tie was hunter green.

For the work that lay before him, Smith would need the speed and power of his Folcroft mainframes. He picked up his worn briefcase.

Smith went out into the night, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had tried to impress upon the President the seriousness of the event, but he doubted the President had fully grasped the potential for harm tonight's seven-minute blackout foreshadowed. The man had not turned down the music that had been playing in the background during their conversation. It had sounded like Elvis Presley.

As he drove his battered station wagon to Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold Smith hoped the President would not have to deal with it.

For just the tip of the iceberg filled Smith with dread.

Chapter 4

Remo Williams was on boom-box patrol.

Ever since he and Chiun had moved into the converted-church condominium-occupying all sixteen units-in the city of Quincy, Massachusetts, Remo had been stuck with boom box patrol. It was one of his least favorite duties.

There was a high school next to the Gothic-Swiss-Tudor fieldstone building Chiun considered his castle, and at night teenagers sometimes hung out, playing loud music. Mostly rap. Remo hated rap. He despised heavy metal. Disco gave him headaches. Rock was okay-as long as it was pre-Beatles rock. Why was it, he wondered, that each successive evolution moved further away from melody and toward pure beat? He figured popular music was on its way to extinction. Not that it mattered much. If the local kids were playing Mozart at an estimated 130 decibels, Remo would still have to put a stop to it.

Loud music was offensive to the Master of Sinanju's easily offended ears. Especially with Eyeball to Eyeball with Cheeta Ching about to come on.

So Remo had slipped out the front door and was moving toward the disembodied squawk of a rapper extolling the virtues of shooting uncompliant girlfriends in the face with his Glock.

"This is a no-noise zone," Remo called out by way of greeting.

"And this is a free country," a voice shot back. The voice sounded black but the face was white as bleached flour.

"This is a no-noise zone before it's a free country," Remo countered.

"That's not what they taught us in school, man."

As Remo approached, he saw that the loiterers were a mixture of white and Asian kids, wearing sweatshirts and turned-around Red Sox caps. Somewhere he had read that the biggest, deepest secret in the music industry was the fact that rap music was strictly a suburban teenager phenomenon. Remo wasn't sure what urban kids listened to. Bluegrass, for all he knew.

The sight of the Asian faces alarmed him more than the music bothered him. Chiun had a thing against Asians. True, he was no fan of white people, considering them inferior to Koreans, especially North Koreans, especially North Koreans from his village, and particularly inferior to Chiun's immediate family, but especially inferior to the Master of Chiun himself.

But white Europeans had never invaded Korea, nor their kings cheated previous Masters of Sinanju. Much.

When Chiun had discovered that he had moved into an area with a healthy Asian population, he had all but gone ballistic. It had been all Remo could do to talk him out of embarking on an Sarajevo-style ethnic cleansing campaign.

Reluctantly, Remo had agreed to go door to door and ask his Asian neighbors to kindly, if it was not too much trouble, move to another city. He was almost relieved to discover that almost none of them spoke a word of English. That let him off the hook. But Remo began to feel awkward himself. He personally preferred neighbors who spoke English.

Approaching the mixed white and Asian teenagers listening to black music, his mixed feelings returned. He represented a five-thousand-year-old Korean tradition-the first white man to become a Master of Sinanju-spoke fair Korean himself, and was more comfortable shopping at the local Asian market than the nearby supermarket. He could eat the stuff from the Asian market and survive the experience. The supermarket stuff was 99 percent lethal to his Sinanju-refined digestive system.

Remo had been raised by nuns at St. Theresa's orphanage in Newark. For a long time, he had felt torn between the country of his birth and the honor and responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders. Somewhere along the line, he had become more Sinanju than Newark.

"Tell you what," Remo said in the spirit of compromise, "you can stay if you behave, but the box shuts down."

A quick hand reached for the volume control knob. Remo started a smile that became a grimace when his eardrums were abruptly assaulted by a screeching voice emanating from the dual speakers.

Remo swept in, grabbed up the box and thumbed the off switch.

"Show you a trick," he said.

And like a basketball player, Remo heaved the box into the night sky with both hands. He made it look casual. Five thousand years of Sinanju Masters stood behind the gesture. Five thousand years of unlocking the secrets of the human mind and body. Five thousand years of applying principles Western learning had not even approached.

All eyes shot upward. The box receded into a silvery gleaming dot. And kept going.

This impressed the trio.

"Whoa!"

"Way cool!"

"I wouldn't stand there if I were you," Remo remarked.

"Why not?" one teenager asked, not dropping his gaze from the seemingly stationary gleam above.

"It's going to come down."

"Yeah, I know. And I'm going to catch it. It cost me $47.50."

"It'll cost you both arms of you're lucky enough to catch it," Remo said.

"Says you."

"Says Newton's third law. What goes up, must come down."

"Newton's third law says for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction."

Remo shrugged. "So sue me. High school was a million years ago."

The trio kept their eyes on the night sky. Various expressions played over their young beardless faces. One twitched. Another, the truth dawning on him, took three giant steps backward, his eyes going very wide.

"It's sure taking a long time to fall," one muttered.

"Take the hint," said Remo.

Then the third teenager shouted, "I see it! I see it! It's coming back."

"I got it! I got it!" said the first teenager.

They bumped heads, jockeying for position.

Remo was tempted to let nature take its cruel course, but at the last minute relented.

He swept in, caught a shirt collar in each hand and pulled the two bumping would-be boom-box rescuers out of the way as the box screamed back to earth and shattered into a thousand bits of plastic and electronics, incidentally cracking the asphalt noticeably.