Warren Murphy: Last Drop

Standing among the barrels of nuclear waste in the back of the truck, Remo tried to forget about having fun and concentrate on killing.

It depressed him. Killing was what Remo did for a living, and it held no fascination for him. He could never understand why the subject was such a perennial favorite with the rest of the world, to the point where thousands of people added themselves each year to the undistinguished ranks of amateur assassins. It was crazy. If killing weren't Remo's job, he'd certainly never choose it for a hobby.

But others did. Killing one's fellow man was something the human race had been practicing ever since the first apeish swampdrinkers discovered that rocks and logs could be used to make other human beings lie down and stop breathing.

Some people still killed that way. Hatchets, fire-hoses, BB guns, howitzers, bombs that trailed stinking blue smoke and exploded a thousand feet off target— they were all methods of killing, inefficient though they were. There were one-time killers, little old ladies who focused a lifetime of stored despair and offed former boyfriends in a fit of passion. Bored young men who never learned the seven-times table. Professional soldiers who gloried in the manly pursuits of decimating large groups of strangers. Pervert loonies who popped their cookies while slicing up the jugular veins of teenage disco queens. Cops, robbers, and Indian chiefs. And gangsters, who killed by a code whereby the only legitimate prey were individuals who somehow prevented them from achieving their ends. That was civilized killing at least, Remo thought. But then the mob had been fitting people with cement shoes for a long time. Experience counted in this game.

And then there was sanctioned killing. The Crusaders, murdering for God. Medieval knights, murdering in the name of noblesse oblige, spearing peasants in the gentlemanly way. The Spanish Inquisitors, murdering to further the inventiveness of the human imagination. Not to mention the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks, all of whom managed to find their own particular ways of killing and their own reasons for why murder was okay when they were doing the murdering.

Anybody could kill. Anybody did kill. But nobody killed like Remo. Remo was to killers what Escoffier was to short-order cooks. Remo was as much of an artist in his way as Paganini or Rembrandt or Eliot or Fabergé or Ray Charles were in theirs. He practiced killing like a Renaissance journeyman, under the master Chiun's watchful eye. Before, he had spent ten years of apprenticeship perfecting the art. Ask your local hit man if he spent ten years learning his craft. Hardly. Murder these days was as rough and sloppy as Monday morning at the abbatoir. It was graceless. Lacking form. As Chiun would say, there was no tradition in killing outside of Sinanju, the tiny Korean village whose inhabitants had nurtured and developed the art to its present state.

A note about Sinanju: Outside of producing the most extraordinary killers the world has ever known, the village is practically useless. It is a fishing village that the fish stopped visiting centuries ago, surrounded by rocky cliffs and enveloped in perennially inhospitable weather. Its inhabitants, though Oriental, lack the manual dexterity notable among the race. "Made In Korea" does not mean made in Sinanju.

Nothing of any value whatever is made in Sinanju, with the exception of one baby every hundred years or so. This baby, under the care of the reigning Master of Sinanju, is taught the secrets of the sun source of the martial arts from which the lesser forms of tae kwan do, karate, aikido, and jujitsu are derived. But only one person in a century learns the true methods of Sinanju.

And when that baby becomes himself Master of Sinanju, he sets forth in the tradition of his ancestors to support the village in the only way the village will accept: by hiring his skills to the rulers of other lands. Thus has Sinanju preserved a tradition of having no loyalties, no chauvinistic bias, no political morals.

Until recently. For Chiun's natural apprentice, Nuihc, deviated from the ways of Sinanju and was unacceptable to continue his training. And the Master, advanced in years, had to continue hiring out his services without an apprentice to take his place.

So when an offer came to Chiun, Master of Sinanju, to work not as an assassin but as a trainer to a pupil who would learn the ways of Sinanju as Chiun's natural apprentice, the old Master accepted.

The offer came from the West, from the United States of America. For in the government of the United States was a secret sinecure, an organization called CURE that was known only to three people: The president of the United States, the director of CURE, and Remo, the organization's enforcement arm.

CURE was formed at the direction of a long-dead president to combat crime by means outside the Constitution. It was developed by a computer expert and ex-CIA agent named Harold W. Smith. Smith hired Chiun not to kill, but to teach Remo how to kill.

The selection of Remo as Chiun's pupil occurred almost at random: A rookie policeman with a good record in Vietnam happened to come to the attention of Dr. Smith's computers. After that, nothing that happened was ethical or in any way legal, as if to set a precedent for the kind of extremely illegal operation which CURE was to be.

The policeman was framed for a crime he didn't commit, and was sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work.

On the day following his alleged death, the policeman awoke in a private sanitarium called Folcroft in Rye, New York. Folcroft was an ordinary rest home except that its executive offices housed the most sophisticated computers in the world, and its director had nothing to do with the sanitarium business. His name was Dr. Harold W. Smith.

Smith introduced Remo to the ancient Oriental who was to be his trainer. The Oriental quickly deemed the young policeman with no identity to be an old, white, fat meat eater who was incapable of absorbing the difficult discipline of Sinanju. But for a submarine full of gold to be paid each year to the village of Sinanju, an attempt would be made.

Thus did Remo Williams become the successor of the Master of Sinanju, and one of the two greatest killers on the face of the earth.

And now this great killer was looking at the tops of twelve metal containers with "Hickle's Pickles" stamped on them as they jostled in the back of a covered pickup truck through the traffic of midtown Manhattan, looking at them and knowing that their contents were a billion times stronger than he was.

The view from the rear section of the truck changed from the bright, variegated commercial buildings of Seventh Avenue to the elegant apartment houses of Fifty-ninth Street. Then the truck turned west, and the landscape changed again, to narrow pedestrian lanes lined with trees. The evening breeze rustled through the leaves, which were just beginning to fall.

Remo knew where he was. There was only one place in Manhattan that was deserted after dark, and that was Central Park. A long time ago, Remo guessed, people used to walk in the park on nice evenings like this. That was before mugging became a municipal pastime.

The police never did hang around the park much, except for their annual raid on the Sunday afternoon pot peddlers, so they were never a part of the scene. The park was the DMZ between muggers and nonmuggers, and since the nonmuggers had nonviolently evacuated the territory, there was now no more incentive for the muggers to protect their turf. Now no one but the truly demented ventured into Central Park at night.

But the men in the Hickle's Pickles truck weren't bonafide perverts out for a little air. And the barrels shimmying as the truck ground to a halt weren't just along for the ride.