"He is long past his time. His skills are no match for mine. I will tear his belly wide and scatter his withered entrails that the fish and the gulls might feast upon them."
The leader of North Korea could sense the madness in this man. But then the premier noted the bodies in the hallway. From the evidence before him, this new Sinanju Master might actually be able to deliver on his threat.
"What about the young one?" Kim Jong Il asked. "He'd be a match. That white scares me half to death."
"I have already dealt with him."
He said it with such certainty. So offhandedly. The leader of North Korea could scarcely believe his ears. "He is dead?" he asked, astonished.
"As good as dead," Nuihc replied. "Even now he runs around the world with the fool thought that he will succeed the one he calls father. The soft white imbecile has no idea he is about to fall into a trap."
This Nuihc seemed confident. The premier wanted to believe him. But he had seen those other two in action too many times in the past.
"You have doubts," Nuihc said. "There is wisdom in that. You know what they are capable of. But see-" he waved a hand across the soldiers' bodies "-that I am as skilled as they are. And I am not fettered by the weakness of their emotional attachment to each other. When the young one dies, the old one will be a shell. Easily disposed of."
"I don't know," the premier said.
"They have threatened to harm you?"
"They've done more than that. Every time they're in town I end up covered with bumps and bruises."
"And yet they allow you to live," Nuihc said. His face and tone hardened. "That will not be the case with me. I promise you that I will kill you if you stand in my way. That is your choice. On the one hand unquestioned power, on the other death. And all you need do is allow events to unfold as I have designed. Merely stay out of the way."
Understanding the impossible choice he was being offered, Kim Jong Il felt the life drain from his shoulders. "What do you need from me?"
"There will be a plane arriving here from the South within the hour. Allow it to land in safety. I will need helicopters to transport men and a clear air corridor from the capital to Sinanju. Beyond that, all you will need to do is sit back and the world will be yours."
Kim Jong Il looked at the bodies of the men littering the floor of the hallway outside his impenetrable bunker. They were supposed to be safeguarding his life. The premier of North Korea looked into Nuihc's cold eyes.
"You will have my cooperation," he vowed.
HYUNSIL WAS TENDING the hearth fire when she first heard the sound. It rolled up over the wail of the wind off the bay.
At first she thought it was the noise that had been the terrible harbinger of her beloved father's death. But as she listened she realized this sound was mechanical.
Her tears had dried in the warmth from the fire. Still, she wiped her eyes as she went to the window. The Master of Sinanju had instructed the villagers not to leave their homes. Hyunsil had done as she was told. But there was a little space between the slats on her wooden shutters where she was able to see out.
Putting her eye to the pane, she saw low lights amid the twinkling stars of the night sky.
They moved too slowly to be planes. Helicopters. There seemed to be many of them. The lights came within a mile of the village and then descended, disappearing from sight.
Hyunsil continued to watch, her warm breath steaming up the cold windowpane. A few times she had to wipe the gathering mist away with her apron.
After only a few moments the strange helicopters returned to the sky. They headed back in the direction of Pyongyang. In a minute the noise from the shushing rotor blades was consumed by the howling wind.
All that was left was the rattling of the boards in the old wooden house. So strange a thing was it that Hyunsil stayed at the window for a few minutes. But though she watched the sky, no more helicopters came.
The village was quiet. The houses remained locked up tight. Here or there a slivered beam of light could be seen from underneath a door or shining out through the uneven slats in a set of shutters. Since the death of her father, the lanterns in the main square had not been lit.
Illuminated in the blue light of a million flickering stars, Sinanju almost seemed peaceful.
Hyunsil was about to turn away from the window when she caught something from the corner of her eye.
A glimpse of movement. A man's face. Another. And another.
They came into the village from the north.
Their faces were not Korean. They were white and black and Asians of all kinds. Hyunsil could see a Japanese, a Chinese and a half-dozen others. They carried weapons, these strangers. They brought arms into the village where none-from the Mongols of ages past to the Communists of modern times-had dared set foot to soil.
The men kicked in doors. Hyunsil watched as her fellow villagers were dragged out into the street. Women and children wept. The men of Sinanju cowered in fear as the strangers went about their evil business.
Hyunsil was frozen in place.
The Master had gone. She knew not where. But he had disappeared hours ago. The House of Many Woods sat in darkness on the bluff overlooking the village.
The door across from her home was forced open. Light from within spilled out onto the street. Hyunsil saw a face. Suddenly clear in the stab of yellow light. Her breath caught.
It could not be.
The face was the face of death. Twisted, gleeful. Hyunsil had seen him die. And yet here he was. The people of Sinanju lined up before him. He went from face to face, studying each in turn before moving on.
And then-fear tightening as she watched the man move around the village square as if he was unaware of his own death-Hyunsil remembered something that her father had once told her. Part of an ancient Sinanju legend.
"And he will summon the Armies of Death, and the war they wage will be the War of Sinanju," Hyunsil whispered.
A shadow fell across her window. She jumped. The front door burst open in a spray of white splinters. A big man stomped inside. Grabbing the old woman by the arm, he dragged Hyunsil from the window.
The rough treatment didn't matter. The caretaker's daughter had already seen the face of death. Hyunsil didn't struggle. She allowed herself to be dragged from her home, confident in the knowledge that she would soon be in the company of her dear father.
Chapter 26
As soon as Remo got to Russia and the secret throne room of the czars, he could see that he was in for more headaches just by the way the Russian leader was fidgeting. The president of the Russian commonwealth nervously told him that Russia's contestant-a very brutal former KGB killer-had gone missing. Remo had had enough. He called the man a govnyuk, broke Czar Ivan's favorite throne into little pieces and assaulted the president's personal security brigade when they swarmed in to see what the commotion was.
"What do you say now?" Remo demanded as the last man fell, a rifle barrel coiled around his neck like a metal snake. "Still can't find someone to try to kill me?"
The president looked at his security detail lying on the floor. Some of them moaned. They were probably alive. Those who didn't moan seemed to be the lucky ones.
"I could make a few phone calls," the president offered weakly.
"Don't bother," Remo grumbled. "I don't even know what I'm doing here. It's not like I'm ever going to work for a country where the only way to tell the difference between its currency and its toilet paper is that the currency absorbs better and flushes without clogging."
Leaving the president and his twitching guards, Remo prowled out of the secret throne room.
Away from the Kremlin, he found a phone at the Moscow Pizza Hut. He stabbed out the special CURE number so hard the metal 1 button cracked. The pieces were falling to the tile floor when Smith picked up.