Warren Murphy: Holy Terror

Every time this happened, Reverend Powell felt the bliss leave, and when he cried out Jesus' name, there was downright pain. His palms felt crushed with heavy needles, and he cried the name again. And his legs felt a snapping of bone and the crushing through of iron, and with the total breath of his lungs, Reverend Titus Powell cried out the love of his lifelong friend. "Jesus, be with me now."

And then there was a sharp piercing in his right side, and before the dark eternity of nothing, he thought he heard his very best friend welcome him home.

Maharaji Dor was at his electronic game, winning, when one of his priests told him of the failure.

"What do you mean, he's dead? He just got here."

"A week he's been here, Blissful Master," said the priest, bowing a shaved but sweating head.

"A week, huh? What did you do wrong?"

"We did as you prescribed, Blissful Master."

"Everything?"

"Everything."

"What do you know? Huh? Well? Huh? Does the government know about this? Any word from Delhi?"

"We have no word, but they will know. The passport office will know. The foreign office will know. The Third World representative will know."

"All right. That's 300 rupees right there. Anyone else?"

"The Third World representative will want more. While the Reverend Powell might have been a United States citizen, by virtue of his blackness he was also a member of the Third World."

"Tell the Third World representative that he's only getting the hundred rupees to keep quiet because what's his name had an American passport. Tell him if he had been African, there wouldn't even be a pack of cigarettes for him in this, dig?"

"As you command."

"How'd the twirl take it?"

"Sister Joleen?"

"Yeah, her, Jo whatever."

"She cried because she said she truly loved Reverend Powell and now he had lost his chance at bliss."

"Good. Get lost."

"I am still worried about the government."

"Don't be. There isn't anything 300 rupees won't buy in Delhi, and besides, we got the prophecy. They're worried about China. They're not going to hassle us. We're holy men, dig? And they can't pester a holy man in Patna. You'll see. The bread is just to keep things smooth. They really believe that bullshit legend."

"PONG, PONG, PONG." The machine suddenly moved without a lever being pulled. The blip circled crazily, and the glass of the screen rattled, and overhead the indirect lighting cracked out of the wall. There was sudden darkness and then flying glass, and the priest and Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor were tumbled like apples down a ramp toward the far wall, where they lay for hours until hands lifted them up.

The Maharaji heard how lucky he had been. Not everyone had survived the earthquake in Patna, and the next day, government officials arrived to examine the bodies of the holy men who had been killed. All of them who had died, however, had died in the earthquake. No holy man's death had been the cause of it.

No government official, no policeman or soldier or representative of the prime minister herself, bothered to check the ox carts as they squeaked out of town to the dumping pits. So they did not see the one much-darker body at the bottom of the pile of untouchables, the one with pierced palms and legs and the wound in his side.

It had been such a terrible earthquake, they had thought at first that the holiest men had died. But apparently this was not so, especially since the border with China remained quiet. There would be no terror from the east.

But east, even east of China, in a small town on the coast of North Korea, a message arrived. The Master of Sinanju would be returning home soon, because his employment would be bringing him to India, some incident in Patna that was of concern to his employer. On the way there, he would be given, in tribute to his glorious service, a triumphant return to the village his labors had supported for so many years.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo, and he was bored with lacquered plates flying at his head, the ones with the fanged jaws of a dog inlaid over a calla lily background, the ones that came zipping in, sometimes with a curve or a dip or a hop, and sometimes straight for the cranium with enough speed to crack a skull.

Remo's left hand seemed to float up and gently touch most of the plates. Some of the plates he did not bother to block, and in the plates that were not blocked was the skill he was reminding his muscles and nerves to perform. Skill was not muscle but timing, and timing was merely being in unity, making and then keeping his perceptions in tune with reality.

This act of keeping the death plates from harming him reminded him of a simple lesson long ago when the Master of Sinanju had used slow bamboo spears that had at the time looked so fast that Remo had stood in terror as they came at him.

But these plates came five times as fast, just slower than a .22 short bullet. They whacked into the pillows behind him, tearing plush red fabric and snapping the springs of the couch. But the lesson he had learned from the bamboo staves was still the lesson now. Do not defend where you are not, but only that which is valuable to you. The hooking, dipping plates would only harm him if he went at the plates themselves, instead of staying within the zone of his body, and merely protecting it from the plates' intrusion.

The last plate came horizontal at his eyes, seemed to hang for a moment, then arched above his right ear and rose cracking into the wall, which opened a three-foot seam in the white plaster wall of the Rhoda Motel in Roswell, New Mexico. Outside was the Rio Hondo, a slip of a rocky stream that only in this parched summer would be called anything more than a brook.

"Home run," said the hurler of the plates, whose joy, unmitigated and mounting, had made Remo's life hell. If one had to have hell, Remo had thought, why must it be in New Mexico? But that was where he had been told to be and that was where he was. Chiun, the hurler of plates, did not mind being in New Mexico. He was going home to his native village of Sinanju in Korea, which his labors supported, just as the services of his father and his father's father and ancestors back to the earliest recorded time had supported the village.

Chiun was but the latest Master of Sinanju, and the services of the Master of Sinanju were always needed by one emperor or another. By czar and emperor, pharaoh and king, president and ethnarch, there was always work for the assassin, and the ancient House of Sinanju, sun source of all the martial arts, was simply the world's oldest, established, permanent repository of the assassin's skill. For hire.

In America, the services that had been hired were slightly different from usual. The Master of Sinanju had been retained to train one man, a white man, a man who had been made publicly dead, an electrocuted man. Remo—who was then Remo Williams.

And in the years that followed, the training changed the very nervous system itself so that the body and the mind of Remo could see plates come at him and know instantly which required his body's attention and which he could safely ignore.

"It's no home run, Little Father. The pitcher doesn't get home runs. The batter gets home runs."

"You change the rules on me because I am Korean and not expected to know. I am being cheated of home run," said Chiun, and he folded his long delicate fingers over each other so that his golden kimono with the white butterflies settled in repose. Even his wispy ancient beard seemed to rest triumphant. The Master of Sinanju had caught his pupil in an injustice that he was savoring.

It had been like that since Chiun had been informed that since Remo would be going to Patna, India, going west over the Pacific, they would be going near Japan and Korea, and Chiun would be allowed to visit his home village of Sinanju, even though it was in the politically unfriendly northern part of Korea.