"You care about Iraq now?" Rebecca asked.
"I told you," Remo said. "I care about people."
"Mm-hmm," Rebecca said, clearly not buying.
Remo shook his head angrily. "Forget about the wedding," he grumbled. "I don't think I love you anymore."
This time when Rebecca laughed her heavenly laugh, there was something else behind it.
They were met by guards who led them to a grand audience chamber. The Iraqi leader was there, grinning tightly beneath his bushy mustache.
Rebecca handled the introductions. When it came time to translate Remo's "screw you," Rebecca apparently sweetened it into something that made the Iraqi leader smile happily.
The meeting was quickly concluded. Barely five minutes had passed before the two of them were back out in sunlight.
"I don't think you translated me right," Remo groused as they climbed down the steps.
"Right and accurately are two different things," Rebecca said absently as she glanced around the large courtyard. "I might not have been accurate, but for the impression Sinanju wants you to give, I was right."
"How do you know so much about what Sinanju wants?" Remo asked. "I'm not even sure what Sinanju wants."
As he spoke, he thought of the Masters who surrounded him even as they walked through the courtyard.
"I know things, Remo," she said, squinting in the sun as she scanned the yard. "There it is."
There was a Jeep parked over near a row of garage stalls. The Iraqi flag was painted across the hood. The keys were in the ignition. Rebecca climbed in behind the wheel. Remo felt the press of all the Masters of Sinanju surrounding him as he got in beside her.
They didn't leave the palace grounds. Instead, Rebecca drove around the main buildings within the high walls.
Although there were guards in towers and along the walls, they kept their distance.
The palace had been built against some low mountains. In the shade of the rear towers, a wide shaft had been tunneled through the solid rock. A paved road led inside. Rebecca steered the Jeep through the opening.
"I like humanity okay," Remo announced abruptly.
Rebecca seemed distracted. "But you don't like people."
"I did," Remo said. "I mean, I still do. I like people well enough as individuals. It's when they come at me in groups that I don't like them so much." Rebecca didn't answer. She drove on.
The paved tunnel road had a single white stripe up the middle. The walls and ceiling were rough-hewn, as if formed by men with iron tools. The road angled downward. Remo could feel the change in pressure in his ears.
"Whose turn is it to kill me now?" he asked, exhaling.
She didn't have time to respond. Before Rebecca could answer, Remo suddenly latched on to the dashboard with one hand. The other hand he slapped flat to his temple.
"Whoa," he said, wincing.
"What's wrong?"
He looked at Rebecca. She was only a foot from him, but all of a sudden she seemed a million miles away. Her words echoed as if carrying across a great chasm. For a moment Remo couldn't speak. He felt dizzy, nauseous. And alone.
The Masters' Tribunal was gone. Just like that. In this desolate cave in the middle of Iraq, the thing he had been awaiting for almost a year finally happened. The spirits of the deceased Masters of Sinanju had finally vanished. For the first time in ages Remo didn't feel the collective disapproving gaze of countless generations of Korean assassins. The Hour of Judgment had ended with a whimper.
"Guess that's it," Remo said, his hand pressed firmly to his suddenly throbbing head. "I must have finally done something right." His own voice sounded far away.
The pain was bearable. The disorientation was something he hadn't expected. He thought when the moment finally came it would be a relief. But the sudden departure of his silent companions seemed to have thrown his senses into diearray.
In the driver's seat, Rebecca didn't quite know what to make of Remo's sudden strange behavior. "Do you want to stop?" she asked.
"I'm fine," he insisted, waving her onward. Blinking seemed to help. The world was beginning to come back into focus. "What is this place anyway?"
She tore her eyes from Remo, turning her full attention back to the underground road.
"A poorly kept secret," she explained. "After the Gulf War, Iraq continued its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Everyone knew the labs were probably being hidden under these palaces. It was like a big shell game. This is where Iraq's assassin is going to finish you off."
"Him and what Republican Guard?" Rerno grunted.
They had come to the end of the road. Buried deep beneath the mountains was a complex of offices and labs. Metal catwalks surrounded the man-made cavern. It looked like a James Bond set on a Roger Corman budget.
"This is it," Rebecca said, stopping the Jeep. They had gone through the same drill in a half-dozen countries. Rebecca would drop him off to be attacked by the latest assassin, then swing by to pick him up later.
This time as Remo got out of the vehicle something felt different. Rebecca didn't seem right.
Probably not her. More than likely it was Remo. His senses were still recovering. And then it was there. Her dazzling smile. Plastered across her beautiful face.
"Good luck," she said.
Blaming everything on the strange disorientation he was still feeling, Remo shut the door of the Jeep. "See you in a few," he said.
Rebecca nodded tightly. Without a word she turned the Jeep around and headed back up the long road. Alone in the subterranean chamber, Remo shook his head once more. "Thanks a lot, guys," he muttered.
Turning, he headed deeper into the complex. As he walked, he slowly began to extend his senses. It was like flexing sore muscles. He had spent so much time focusing around the spirits of men who weren't there that everything was out of whack. Still, he could feel his body adjusting.
It took another minute for his senses to return to normal. Once they did, he frowned.
"What the hell?" Remo grumbled.
There were no life signs. The cavern was a few hundred yards around. Except for the road in, he couldn't detect any other tunnels or chambers. It was small enough that he should have been able to sense an enemy. But there wasn't so much as a single heartbeat in the entire underground complex.
"I'm warning you," he called, "if there's a smelly Russian monk floating around down here, this time I'm harvesting eyeballs."
With great disappointment he suddenly remembered he'd left his eyeball-poking stick on Rebecca Dalton's plane.
"Crap," complained Remo Williams.
And in response there came a loud animal roar. The sound came from the direction of the tunnel. For an instant Remo thought Iraq had sent a herd of stampeding elephants to kill him. He wondered briefly if elephants were legal to use as tools of assassination in the Sinanju Time of Succession.
And then the choking dust cloud rolled in along with the growing, terrible roar, and Remo realized that it wasn't a herd of elephants after all, but an explosion so massive that it rocked the ground beneath his feet.
And in the same instant Remo realized who Iraq's hired assassin probably was, but it was too late to do anything about it because the roaring dust cloud was upon him.
OUTSIDE THE COLLAPSED entrance to the tunnel, Rebecca Dalton neatly tucked the tiny silver antenna back inside her cell phone. It had taken just a three-digit number and the pound key to set off the explosives buried in the rock above the tunnel. The shafts in which the bombs had been placed were drilled down from the mountain above so that there was no evidence of them inside. Men trained in Sinanju had amazing abilities of perception. She hadn't wanted to take the risk of drilling up from the inside.