"A man will come to you. Dead, yet beyond death, he will carry death in his empty hands. He will know your name and you will know his. And that will be your death warrant."
The smile left the tall man's face like an exorcised ghost.
"Thanks for the prediction," he said. "I know you too well to ignore it, but I'll worry about that when I come to it. Meanwhile, there's now. I'm sorry it had to be like this." He raised the black pistol to his eye. "Good-bye, Maria."
He fired twice. Two coughing reports, like mushy firecrackers, slipped from the silenced weapon. Maria skipped back under the impact and lost one open-toed shoe. Her body twisted as she fell and the bosom of her lavender coat darkened with blood. She was already dead when her head struck the gravestone.
Death wasn't what Maria had expected. She did not feel herself slip from her body. Instead, she felt her mind contract within her head; contract and shrink, tighter and tighter, until her head felt as small as a pea, then as small as the head of a pin, then smaller still until her entire consciousness was reduced to a point as infinitesimally tiny as an atom. And when it seemed that it could compress no tighter, her consciousness exploded in a burst of white-gold light, showering the universe with radiance.
Maria found herself floating in a pool of warm golden light and it was like being back in the womb, which for some reason she could suddenly recall with perfect clarity. She could see in all directions at once and it was wonderful. It was not like seeing with eyes but more like seeing in the visions she had experienced while she lived. Maria could not understand how she could see without eyes, without a body, but she could. And in every direction, the golden light stretched forever and ever. Far away, tiny specks shone. Somewhere, far beyond the golden light, she knew there were stars.
But Maria did not care about the stars. She just floated at peace in the warm amniotic light, waiting. Waiting to be born again. . . .
At Wildwood Cemetery, the man in the gabardine coat knelt and watched the light go out of Maria's syrup-brown eyes. Stripping off a glove, he closed her eyes with gentle fingers. A tear fell from his face to her forehead as a parting benediction.
He stood up. And then he noticed the bouquet of flowers-peonies mixed with the white pips of baby's breath-that Maria as her last act in life had dropped at the foot of the grave where she fell. It was a simple grave, a small stone of granite incised with a plain cross.
And two words. The name of a dead man. REMO WILLIAMS.
The scar-faced man left the flowers where they lay.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was patiently explaining to his fellow passenger that he actually wasn't dead at all. "Oh, really?" the other man said in an exaggeratedly bored voice while he stared out the jetliner window and wondered how long they'd be stacked up over Los Angeles International Airport.
"Really," Remo said earnestly. "Everybody thinks I'm dead. I've even got a grave. Legally dead, yes. But actually dead, no."
"Is that so?" the other man said absently.
"But sometimes people ignore me as if I were actually dead. Like right now. And it bothers me. It really does. It's a form of discrimination. I mean, if I weren't legally dead, would people like you stare off into space when I'm taking to them?"
"I'm sure I don't know or care."
"Deathism. That's what it is. Some people are sexist and some people are racist. But you, you're a deathist. You figure that just because there's a headstone back in New Jersey with my name on it, you don't have to talk to me. Well, you're wrong. Dead people have rights too."
"Absolutely," said the other man, whose name was Leon Hyskos Junior. He was a casual young man in a Versace linen jacket and no tie, with mild blue eyes and blown-dry sandy hair. He had been sitting in the smoking section in the rear of the 727 by himself, minding his own business, when this skinny guy with thick wrists suddenly plopped into the empty seat beside him. The skinny guy had said his name was Remo Williams but not to repeat it to anybody because he was legally dead. Hyskos had given this Remo, who was dressed like a bum in a black T-shirt and chinos, a single appraising glance and decided he was squirrel food. He had turned away but the man had not stopped talking since then. He was still talking.
"You're just humoring me," Remo said. "Admit it."
"Get lost."
"See? Just what I said. You know, I don't tell this story to just anybody. You ought to be flattered. It all started back when I was a beat cop in New Jersey. . . ."
"You're a cop?" Leon Hyskos Junior asked suddenly, his head snapping around. He noticed Remo's eyes for the first time. They were dark, deep-set, and flat. They looked dead.
"I was a cop," Remo said. "Until they executed me."
"Oh," Hyskos said vaguely. He looked relieved. "They found a drug pusher beaten to death in an alley and my badge was lying next to him. But I didn't touch him. I was framed. Before I figured out that it wasn't a show trial put on for the benefit of community relations or something, they were strapping me in the electric chair. But the chair was rigged. When I woke up, they told me that from now on, I didn't exist."
Maybe talking to him would make him go away, Hyskos thought. He said, "That must have been hard on your family."
"Not really. I was an orphan. That was one reason they picked me for the job," Remo said.
"Job?" said Hyskos. He had to admit, it was an interesting story. Maybe it was those dead dark eyes.
"Yeah, job. This is where it gets complicated. See, back awhile one of the Presidents decided that the country was going down the tubes. The government was losing the war on crime. Too many crooks were twisting the Constitution to get away with raping the nation. It was only a matter of time before organized crime put one of their own into the White House and then, good-bye America. Well, what could this President do? He couldn't repeal the Constitution. So instead, he created this supersecret agency called CURE and hired a guy named Smith to run it."
"Smith? Nice name," Hyskos said with a smirk.
"Nice fella too," Remo said. "Dr. Harold W. Smith. It was his job to fight crime outside the Constitution. Violate the laws in order to protect the rule of law. That was the theory. Anyway, Smith tried it but after a few years he realized that CURE would have to do some of its own enforcement. You couldn't count on the courts to send anybody to jail. That's where I came in."
"You do enforcement?" Hyskos said.
Remo nodded. "That's right. One man. You don't think they run my tail off?"
"Too big a job for one man," Hyskos said.
"One ordinary man anyway," Remo said. "But see, I'm not ordinary."
"Not normal either," Hyskos said.
"There you go again. More deathism," Remo said. "See, CURE hired the head of a Korean house of assassins to train me. His name is Chiun and he's the last Master of Sinanju."
"What's Sinanju?"
"Sinanju is the name of the fishing village in North Korea where this house of assassins began thousands of years ago. The land there is so poor that a lot of times they didn't even have food for their babies and they used to have to throw them in the West Korea Bay. They called it 'sending the babies home to the sea.' So they started hiring themselves out to emperors as assassins. They've been doing that for centuries. They even worked for Alexander the Great. As time went on, they developed the techniques of what they called the art of Sinanju."