"A thin white man and an elderly Oriental, using false identification police said was almost as good as the real thing, bluffed their way past tight security and stole a key scientific instrument from the lab of chromosome-crazed Dr. Sheila Feinberg.
"Police are not commenting tonight on what this new addition to the scientist's arsenal will mean to greater Boston but all residents are urged to stay off the streets after dark. Do not go out alone. Report any mysterious behavior to the following police number."
Remo turned off the television set. Chiun smiled.
"You know," said Chiun, "if you put strawberry preserves into this thing, the pits go right to the top, the sugar sauce stays in the middle and the pulp goes to the bottom."
Remo signaled for quiet. Already the centrifuge noise had attracted the attention of the one nurse who had to be told it was only a patient in excruciating pain before she lost interest and left them alone.
They were in a room next to the one where the lab assistant lay. He had undergone surgery for his hernia and was now resting. There were no police guards on his door. Remo waited to see if he had a visitor.
He heard footsteps move down the hall, steps so light he almost missed them. He looked out. The woman came with a fashionable, white, draped dress and an expensive, groomed look, as if she had just come from posing for a magazine advertisement selling dresses to housewives fifty pounds heavier than she.
Except for a couple of things. She was a bit too busty and the hair was a bit too golden. Remo put his ear to the wall and heard her talk to the lab assistant.
"I couldn't find it, darling. Where did you leave it? In the inner storeroom? Why there? Yes, of course I love you. Got to run now. Good-bye."
Remo heard her leave the hospital room. He heard her steps down the hallway, remarkably soft for a woman in high heels. Most clomped with sharp bangs of stiff leather on stiff floors.
Remo left the room.
She padded up the hallway, and waited for an elevator. Remo waited with her.
"Nice night," he said.
She smiled coldly.
He let out a bit more of the smooth charm he had, the cool rhythm so many women found deliriously stimulating. He smiled his sexiest smile and let his thin body relax slightly.
"Nights like these are too nice to spend in a hospital," he said.
She didn't answer. He went down in the elevator with her.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Why? Are you afraid of riding four floors with a stranger?"
"I hoped you wouldn't be a stranger much longer," said Remo.
"Really?"
"Yes," said Remo.
"That's nice," said the busty blonde.
Outside in the Boston street it was hot. The smell of exhaust clogged breathing and the pavement felt like hostile rock underfoot. The groan of racing engines reminded Remo that Massachusetts was supposed to have the worst drivers in the nation and what many people believed were the most trigger-happy state police. The woman went to a car in the parking lot.
It was a dark station wagon. Remo followed her.
He touched her arm gently. She snarled.
"Look, sweetie. Don't get uptight. We can be friends or not be friends."
"Not be friends," said the woman.
She got in her car. Remo got in the other front seat.
"How did you do that? The door was locked," she said.
"I'm a magician," said Remo.
"Then make yourself disappear," she said.
"All right, lady, I have a job to do. I think you're a link to that loony cannibal lady who's been running around Boston."
"Why?" she asked. But her voice was suddenly low as if confidence had been drained out of it.
"I told you I'm a magician," Remo said. "Although it's not too tricky to figure out who the hell would need that gunk back in the lab."
"The insulating gel," she said.
"Yeah," said Remo.
"You know, you are cute."
"I know that," said Remo. "I've trained at it. Women sense it. But, you know, the depressing thing is, now that I've got it, it's no big deal. It's only when you don't have it you think it's a big deal. Try to break yourself away from my cuteness for a moment," he said sarcastically, "and get back to the gel."
"Does anyone else know about me and the insulating gel?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because," she said. She gently put a hand on Remo's chest. Her nails kneaded themselves ever so slightly into the finely tuned body. Remo looked at the hands and saw what he wanted to see.
"How long have you had your change?" he asked.
"What?" hissed the woman.
"Your face doesn't match your hands," he said. "Your hands are in their thirties. Your face is twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. How long, lady? And where is Dr. Feinberg? We can do this nicely or we can do this not nicely."
"Dr. Feinberg? She's right here."
Then Remo realized he had fallen into a common trap Chiun had warned him about from the very beginning of his training. Eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, and noses that do not smell. This had been the warning and what it meant was that most people neither saw, nor heard, nor smelled but only lazily remembered things. Thus, seeing something, they would not really be aware of it but treat it like one of many. An example was a hot dog. The first hot dog a child ate would be sniffed, touched, and examined. Thereafter, the child would bite without testing. Which was all right for people and children and hot dogs, but not for a trainee of Sinanju who was to be more alive than others.
Remo felt the mistake in his chest. The nails tore flesh and cut into bones. He had treated this person as a busty, young, blonde woman, as if she had spent more time with her hairdo than her pushups.
Which was obviously wrong. Remo let out a scream of pain as the hand raked across his face, gouging nail slits into his cheeks like someone ripping flesh with pliers. Worse, he had panicked. It was as if a buttercup had suddenly slashed at him with a stiletto.
In that instant, facing sudden death unprepared, it was as if Remo had never been trained. The panic made him throw a simple unbalanced punch that went harmlessly into the air.
He felt his stomach spill from his torn belly with another swipe from the hissing creature. It was like being locked in a blender helpless.
The panic had run its course. The pain was old. It was old because years of training had made it old. Degrees of suffering had been suffered in gymnasiums, on boats, in fields. When he thought his body could stand no more pain, when his early eating and sloth were pulverized within body and mind, he finally let out the greater rhythms of the universe.
Letting out man at his ultimate.
Now this ultimate man, born in America, but with a power of millennia within, forged within, trained within, so marrow-deep it was learned before he was born and in crucial times, cracked down to his essence as a man, and no longer remembered but lived. Now, in full force, bleeding from his belly, terror in his throat, and his own death before his eyes, Remo, adopted son of Chiun, Master of Sinanju, struck back for the human race.
The pain was too much.
The terror was too much.
But retreat was over.
Remo caught a bloody hand sweeping with animal power at his head. A cuff for a kill. But while the yellow-haired killer in the car fought by instinct, Remo fought as man. In his mind he slowed the blow, forcing himself to catch the woman's nails as they went to his head. His left hand caught the soft webbing of her hand between fingers and snapped down, making her thrust work against the drive of his hand.
So fast the human eye could not see it. First her hand out, then her hand an immobilized paw in pain.
And strike again did Remo. Fingers flicking into her crazed eyes. Foot snapping into midsection. He felt her chestbone break. Hit again into the ribs. Driving ribs toward heart. Bleeding into already blood-washed seats.