Warren Murphy: Encounter Group

That was just as the rag pile went orange with a whooosh! D. Desmond, who never carried a gun because loud noises frightened him, dived out the nearest exit, which unfortunately led to the roof. It was a fundamental mistake. You do not go up into a building that is about to go up. You get out. But something about the cold, dead eyes of Remo Williams unnerved D. Desmund. So, he made his first professional mistake.

It was to have been an ordinary job for Remo Williams, too. He hadn't counted on the arsonist getting the fire started, but Remo was delayed because his trainer had insisted on accompanying him on an ordinary hit.

"Damn Chiun," Remo muttered as he shifted to a less hot part of the warehouse roof, where the tar wouldn't stick to his feet. There, the roof was only hot enough to broil a steak, not cook the skin from his feet in sliding chunks. Remo wore a black T-shirt that left his arms bare. It was the lesser evaporation of sweat from his left arm that told Remo that it was cooler to his left, and so he veered left.

Remo could do these things because of his training. It worked this way: Remo ran in a long-legged stride in which only one foot touched the ground at a time. The principle depended entirely on rhythm, which is what made Remo's movements look so graceful, as if his feet floated from motion to motion. The rhythm demanded that Remo keep moving and that one foot remain in the air for the exact length of time the other touched the hot roof surface. With each step, Remo felt the brief flash of heat signaling contact, but only long enough to touch, find traction, and propel him forward another step. Then the other foot took over. Yes, Remo felt the heat but, no, Remo's feet were not burned. They were not in contact with a heat source long enough to be burned. As for the pain, what little Remo felt in the soles of his bare feet was drawn up his legs, through the nerves, where it was diffused into a tingling sensation. Correct breathing technique enabled Remo to handle pain in this manner.

It was not much different from the way Hindu fire walkers moved over hot coals— except that they had the technique secondhand and were sometimes burned. Remo had the technique from its originators, which is to say he had it in its pure form and not the Hindu style, which depended in part on the heat-absorbing properties of human sweat and sometimes on artificial salves. And he knew that as long as only one foot touched at a time and he didn't break stride, he could run across the burning roof safely.

Remo knew how to make the technique work, but he didn't understand how it worked. His trainer understood, but Remo had a long way to go before he completely mastered the art of Sinanju, of which fire walking was but a part. On the other hand, he had only a short way to go across the roof, and he got to the cooler edge just as D. Desmund Dorkley, with a horrified scream, tried to jump out and down to the next roof.

"Uuurk," said D. Desmund, when he found himself hanging in midair by his green jacket collar, his yellow bow tie looking like a bright, vampiritic butterfly at his throat.

"Let me go. Let me go. God, put me down," D. Desmund screeched. His legs kicked like a swimmer's over empty space, and his blond hair was limp with sweat. He didn't look like a man who had torched a museum, a church, two office buildings, a fast food restaurant and a school for the blind in just three weeks, and all in the Baltimore area, which showed up on CURE's computers as an aberration significant enough to call for drastic attention. Those same computers had worked out a probability pattern that pinpointed the warehouse as the arsonist's next target so that Remo Williams could be there.

And now Remo, who had simply extended his hand and caught D. Desmund's coat collar, stood on the edge of the roof and held the arsonist out at arm's length. Although Remo did this casually, it didn't seem possible. For one thing, Remo's arm was too thin and held at too awkward an angle for him to be able to stand on a precipice and hold up a struggling man without both of them toppling over the edge.

If D. Desmund hadn't been scared completely out of his mind, he would have realized that fact and possibly pointed this out to Remo Williams.

Remo, had he been so inclined, might have informed him that his arm really wasn't holding up a 200-pound man by main strength. No, it just looked that way to Western eyes because Westerners always thought in terms of just using their arms and then only the muscles in those arms, as if muscles alone provided strength and weren't really simply a system of pulleys— which was exactly what a muscle was when you thought about it. A pulley.

No, Remo was holding D. Desmund up with Remo's entire body— from the strong toes, which hooked over the roof edge for purchase, to the straight legs and locked knees; and to the stiff spinal column, which provided a fulcrum for the arm, which was held in position by muscle tension, but whose strength really came by the bones within that arm. Balance had something to do with it all. Balance was important in Sinanju, but strength came from the correct alignment of bones that interlocked and spread the dragging weight of D. Desmund's body throughout Remo's body. Balance, bones, muscles, and breathing. All of Remo functioning in perfect harmony with its parts and creating a unity which was greater than the sum of those parts, tapping Remo's inner potential. This was Sinanju.

And so D. Desmund did not fall to his death, taking Remo with him.

When D. Desmund finally stopped screaming and flailing, and said, "Oh dear God almighty" once weakly and shut his eyes, Remo hauled him back to the roof edge, careful not to disturb the harmony of his own body.

"I want the truth," Remo said, after his captive again opened his eyes.

"Sure," D. Desmund said. "You got it. Any truth you want. Just name it."

"Good. I'm glad you're being cooperative. Why did you set that fire?"

"I didn't set any fire," D. Desmund told him.

"I saw you, remember?"

"Oh. That's right."

"Now, why did you do it?"

"I didn't," D. Desmund said with a straight face.

"Right," said Remo. "Let's try a different approach, okay?"

"Okay," said D. Desmund eagerly.

"Listen carefully," Remo said. "You're going to have one chance to answer this question, and then I'm going to push you off this roof. Okay?"

"Okay," repeated D. Desmund, who was as frightened as he'd ever been in his life, which meant he was very, very frightened.

"Good. Stay with me, now. Here's the big question: Did you torch all of those buildings because someone paid you or because you wanted to?"

"Because I wanted to. I like to watch stuff burn."

"That's fine. Thank you for leveling with me. Goodbye." And Remo pushed D. Desmund off the roof.

But D. Desmund, acting by reflex, grabbed Remo's thick right wrist, which felt like a skin-covered girder.

"Wait a minute— you said if I answered your question you wouldn't push me."

"No, no," Remo corrected. "You weren't listening. I didn't say 'You're going to have one chance to answer this question or I'm going to push you off this roof.' I said, 'You're going to have one chance to answer this question and then I'm going to push you off this roof.' "

"But that's not Fa— AAAAIIIRRRR..." said D. Desmund just before he went splat on the hard pavement below.

"That's the biz, sweetheart," said Remo as he jumped across to the next roof and slid down its brick surface like a spider to join the kimono-clad individual who was waiting for him.

"Hear, hear," said Chiun, who was Remo's trainer and, although 80 years old, the most dangerous man on earth. "Excellently done, Remo." He was a small, frail Korean with clear hazel eyes in a wrinkled old face to which clung tiny wisps of hair above each ear and from his chin. A black night kimono concealed most of his form.