Warren Murphy: The Ultimate Death

Remo found himself in the Ironbound section of the city. It had not changed so much. He paused before the alley where the pusher had been found, Remo's badge gleaming in his drying blood.

The place where Remo Williams' life had taken the wrongest turn possible was no shrine. It stank of urine and maggots and rancid leftovers. Remo tried to remember the pusher's name. It wouldn't come. There was a time, when he was imprisoned up at Trenton, when those kinds of unanswered questions had kept him awake at night.

Now Remo Williams no longer cared.

So long ago . . .

He found his car-it was registered to "Remo Meyers," another in a string of disposable aliases-and drove north.

As he drove, he thought back on the events that had given him his old face.

It was hard to tell where it had all begun. Was it Palm Springs? Or Abominadad, Irait? Or Folcroft Sanitarium, where the surgery he had been tricked into undergoing had taken place?

On reflection, Remo decided it all tied together. If it had not been for Palm Springs, where Remo and his mentor had found themselves playing button-button with a live neutron bomb, he would not have ended up in Irait, a tool of the government that had triggered the Gulf War. And if he had not become the official assassin to Irait, his face would not have been broadcast to the world, making it public and forcing Harold Smith to resort to plastic surgery.

The joke had been on Smith, and on the Master of Sinanju.

The plastic surgeon had discovered that Remo's face had been pared down almost to the naked bone. So he had gone in the opposite direction, building up the nose, the chin, the modeling.

And inadvertently, restoring Remo Williams' original face with nearly one-hundred-percent faithfulness.

Smith had been furious. The Master of Sinanju had been aghast. He had attempted to cajole the surgeon into giving Remo Korean features-Remo still wasn't certain his eyes hadn't been given a slight elongation. No one seemed to agree on this point.

Still, for all Remo's pleasure, there had been a downside. He and Chiun had been forced to vacate their private home, to return to the old cycle of switching residences often.

This time they were in a tower condominium complex on the former site of another landmark of Remo's lost childhood, Palisades Park in Edgewater, New Jersey.

It was there that Remo had left his Master. It was to there he was returning.

Since they had moved, Chiun had lapsed back into his mood of pique, blaming Remo for the fact that the Master of Sinanju had spent three months in a virtual coma at the bottom of a desert structure, where Chiun had taken refuge to escape the exploding neutron bomb.

Three months in which Remo had believed his Master dead. Three months in which Chiun had slept in a watery grave, his spirit appearing before Remo, pleading and attempting to communicate his desperate plight.

And during those three months the Master of Sinanju had hibernated through his one-hundredth birthday, a milestone called the kohi.

Chiun had been bewailing that missed moment of glory ever since. And blaming Remo for it.

Remo decided that he had had enough of the missed birthday. Screw the date. Chiun's hundredth-and-first wasn't far off. They'd have a celebration, regardless. Maybe it would get Chiun off his back once and for all.

On the way home, Remo stopped in at a Japanese supermarket to buy a whole duck.

He selected an oxymura jaimaicensis, better known as ruddy duck, because it was the most succulent, taking care to select a bird with the least subcutaneous fat content. A lifetime of alternating between duck and fish had made Remo, of necessity, an expert on both species.

Whistling, he grabbed a pound of the kind of Japonica rice that had the nutty aftertaste Chiun liked so much.

Yeah, he thought happily as he stepped out into the cool air that smelled of the nearby Hudson River, this will bring Chiun out of his snotty mood.

Chapter 3

The thirty-seventh annual Cahill picnic was memorable, to say the least.

They held it, as always, in the back lot of the Fairfax, Virginia, high school, on the sunniest day of the spring. Back when they started the tradition in '55, the extended Cahill family struggled to predict the sunniest day of the season with the help of almanacs, psychics, palm readers, and astrologers. But soon they discovered that the less they tried, the sunnier it was. Old Mother Cahill started to take for granted the fact that the day she chose for the reunion-picnic-barbecue would be the sunniest day of the year.

And while it wasn't always a perfect blue, never had a drop of rain disturbed so much as a single lock of hair on any Cahill head during the annual reunions, or turned any of their paper plates into soggy cardboard leaves.

They came from all over the South, hauling their pots of picnic necessities and vats of regional delicacies. Ted and Cathy Cahill came all the way from New Orleans with their tongue-searing jambalaya. Jack and Ellen Cahill came from Baltimore with red pepper-steamed hard-shell crabs. Don and Chris Cahill came from Sarasota with their onion flowers-whole sweet onions cut into the shape of roses, deep-fried, and tasting like an apple made entirely of onion rings.

But no matter how many culinary heights they scaled, the single favorite item at every one of the thirty-six prior celebrations had always been Old Mother Cahill's fried chicken. That's what got the family to the first reunion, right after Uncle Dan came back from Korea, and that's what brought them back year after year. For more than three decades it had been the first thing they bit into and the last thing they talked about.

This season was no exception. Fluffy white clouds dotted the deep blue sky, the cars filled the faculty parking lot, and the field was covered with a volleyball net, a croquet set, a kickball pole, and a badminton court; but all the relatives came to Old Mother Cahill's table first-to sink their teeth into a crispy, juicy, flaky, light, delicious piece of fried chicken. The party couldn't officially begin until everybody had coated their palates with chicken juice.

The reunion went on all day, as each group of siblings took their turns at the different sporting events, alternating that with more eating. Following the chicken came the festival of salads. There was garden, Caesar, chef's, macaroni, three-bean, Waldorf, egg, tuna, potato, German potato, potato with egg, potato with egg and onion, potato with egg, onion, and celery, potato with egg, onion, celery, and peppers-and chicken.

Then came the main dishes and casseroles, followed by the desserts. They were as myriad and ornate as the salads. There was chocolate layer cake, German chocolate cake, walnut cake, whiskey cake, lemon cake, and linzer torte. There was coconut custard pie, Boston cream, banana cream, and chocolate cream. There was blueberry, cherry, apple, pineapple, mince, pecan, and lemon meringue pie. There were brownies, blondies, cookies, homemade doughnuts, and fried dough. There were even candies and ice cream.

Was it any wonder that at about six o'clock Ted Cahill was feeling a trifle queasy?

He didn't worry. It was expected in the Cahill family. It wasn't until he was twenty-five that he'd realized the burning sensation in his chest wasn't supposed to be there. And by then he had discovered the wonders of beer. His home town of New Orleans had more kinds and more of it than almost anywhere-with the possible exception of Bavaria.

Even so, he saved his serious eating and drinking for the annual reunion. So a certain queasiness was to be expected. He'd just play another game of volleyball to help his digestion, and eventually the feeling would pass.

He joined the crowd around the net, to the hoots and hollers of encouragement from the others. As soon as he took his place in the back row of the players, he was glad he'd made this decision. Directly opposite him, in the back row on the other side of the net, was Milly LeClare, his second cousin on his aunt's side.