Warren Murphy: Master's Challenge

The fat lady and her husband screamed. Freakie Dreems stared hard at a glassine packet of pink powder.

"I don't care if it is two hundred simoleons a pop. I want some more," he said.

The Russian novelist waved his bottle over the throng. "Being . . . nothingness," he pronounced sagely.

Remo pulled the plug in the tub. "Okay, out." He prodded the hostages toward the entrance.

"Going so soon?" Francine asked, running her metallic-green fingernails through Remo's hair.

"I'm on my lunch hour."

She pouted. "You can't leave me like this. I've got to face all those police, and I'm probably going to get busted. So just a quickie for the road, okay?"

Remo sighed. Women were always doing this to him. "Will you settle for this?" he asked, pressing a small cluster of nerves on the inside of her left wrist.

Francine shivered. They always did. The left wrist was the beginning of a long series of steps that brought women to arousal. Remo had learned them as part of his training. Sometimes it was insulting, because most women preferred being touched on the wrist to making love. But then, nobody made love anymore. Pleasure seemed to be enough for women these days.

So Remo usually pleasured them for no reason other than to keep them peaceful. They didn't care about love, and neither did he. The mechanical execution of a pleasure formula, unfeeling, uncaring, unthinking, served everyone well.

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When Francine began toTtioan, he switched to a place on her thigh, then progressed to an erogenous zone on her back. She shrieked and panted in ecstasy. He touched her neck, and she came screaming and writhing on the slippery floor.

Four steps. There were many more, but they usually weren't necessary. They certainly weren't for Francine.

"Well, that was fun," she said, brushing herself off.

The groupie was drooling. "To the max," she drawied reverently.

"Out. AH of you. Get going." Remo herded them into the corridor.

"I must teil you that our rescue was quite satisfying," the Russian said as Remo lifted the still crumpled form of Raymond Rosner. "It was rather amusing, in fact. A speck of being in a sea of-"

"I know. Nothingness."

The Russian's eyebrows rose. "Very astute. I shall dedicate my next slim volume of verse, entitled 'Holes in the Fabric of Life' to you."

"Don't bother," Remo said. "I don't exist."

The novelist pondered. " '1 don't exist.' That's very profound. I don't exist."

Remo dumped the conductor into Ivan's arms. "Yeah, and I wish you didn't, either."

When the police 'stormed up the stairways and elevators, Remo left the way he had come. Down the building's side.

What he'd toid the Russian had been true. There was no Remo Williams anymore. That man was dead, a young policeman executed in an electric chair for a crime he didn't commit. Ah, justice, he thought. Raymond Rosner was going to raise money so that the Managuan Liberation Front could make more bombs, but a rookie cop with some faked evidence against him gets fried in the chair.

The chair hadn't worked. It was planned from the begin-

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ning that the young policeman wouldn't die. He was only to appear to have died so that his name and face and fingerprints and files were taken permanently off everyone's records.

Remo's identity had been so effectively erased so that he could serve a new agency of the United States government. No one except the president and the director of the organization, were to know about it, or Remo. The agency was called CURE, and it was illegal in every sense of the word. CURE operated outside the Constitution to fight crime with the ultimate means: an assassin.

Remo had not wanted to be the enforcer arm of a secret, illegal government organization, but once he had been declared dead, there were few options left to him. At first, Remo had felt as if he were living in a nightmare: the frame, prison, the chair. . . . And then the endless days at Folcroft Sanitarium, a quiet nursing home in Rye, New York, run by a mild-mannered, unimaginative, middle-aged man named Dr. Harold W. Smith, who was the director of CURE. Smith hired a teacher to undertake the task of Remo's training, and the nightmare became worse.

The teacher was a crazy old Korean named Chiun, who seemed to feel that an ordinary man could be taught to achieve the physically impossible. Remo would have written Chiun off as just another strange element in the weird circumstances that surrounded him, except that the old Oriental could himself perform all the outlandish tasks he assigned to Remo.

Chiun could walk with such lightness that he did not even break the membranes of dried leaves that lay under his feet. He could move so swiftly that he could not be seen, and so silently that he could not be heard. He could hear the ultrasonic calling of insects. He could see the pollen on a butterfly's wings in flight. And he could kill more effectively than anyone on earth.

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Chiun was from a village named Sinanju in a remote area of North Korea, where the martial art had been born and had been evolving for thousands of years. But the teachings of Sinanju went further than the acquisition of physical strength. It was the sun source of the martial arts, the original from which the pale knitations of jujitsu, karate, aikido, t'ai chi chu'an, and tae kwon do sprang. As such, the followers of Sinanju learned to develop their senses and minds to an uncanny degree as well. It was for this reason that the Masters of Sinanju had been in demand as assassins in wealthy, distant lands since the time of the first Master Wang more than a millennium ago.

The training was a long and difficult process. Only one man of Sinanju at a time was groomed to be Master, and he spent his entire life in learning and practice. When it was time, the Master trained a new pupil to take his place.

Chiun had trained his own apprentice, Nuihc, to manhood. But something went wrong. At the time when the Master's pupil should have been preparing himself for a life of service to his village, Nuihc turned on Chiun and held Sinanju in terror. He was stopped, but not without great sacrifice to Chiun. At Nuihc's death, Chiun, who was already an old man, was left without an heir. There would be no Masters of Sinanju after him.

Then, called into service for Harold Smith and CURE, he found an answer in the white boy named Remo. It was not a suitable answer, since Remo was not even from the village, but he showed some promise.

He worked with Remo and changed him from a beefy ex- G.I. who wasn't bad in a fistfight to a thin, finely tuned instrument of death. In those years Remo had also become, spiritually and emotionally, Chiun's son. The rare and magnificent tradition of the Masters of Sinanju had been passed down to him. He was now a Master and would someday be the Master.

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And he was using it all to rout a bunch of gun-happy adolescents from a bordello. Old Wang was surely turning over in his urn, Remo thought as he recalled the events of the day.

The Managuans weren't an assignment. They were an embarrassment. Not to mention the people he'd stuck his neck out to save. Anybody who used phrases like "quintessential nothingness" deserved to drown in a hot tub.

Things weren't supposed to turn out this way. Chiun didn't spend the best years of his life watching interpretive dances to machine gun fire. Where was the challenge of the traditions of Sinanju for Remo?

He had left Manhattan and was striding along a river-bank leading upstate. Instead of bringing him serenity, the clean, still air of the countryside made the burdens of his emotions even heavier. It occurred to him that perhaps he had just been born too late. Maybe the glory of Sinanju was just a legend now, relegated to the distant past where legends thrive. The modern world, Remo's world, had no place for heroes.