"You don't have to ask," he said.
"Kiss me."
He held her close and pressed his lips to hers. The same electric warmth he had first felt with her surged through him again. "I'm going to miss you while I'm gone," he said.
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She drew a manicured finger alongside his face. "I'll miss you, too. More than you know."
She let him go. Near the door, Seymour Burdich stood waiting, a down parka tossed ludicrously over his toga.
"I don't know what the hell's going on around here, but I'm going with you," he said, looking pale and trembling.
"Forget it," Remo said. "It's too cold, and you'd never be able to follow us, anyway."
"But it's spooky here," Burdich complained. "Everybody's crying bloody murder. There's something terrible happening. I want to help."
"There's nothing you can do. I didn't see a house or a gas station within twenty miles of here. Anyone who went out in this weather longer than ten minutes would freeze."
"You're going out"
"We're different," Remo said. "You just stay inside with the rest. I'll send help when I can."
Before he left, he looked back once more at Posie Ponselle. She was carrying two lit candles into the room from the kitchen. The firelight made her look, in her Grecian gown, like some pale and beautiful statue. He'd come close to loving her, and for that he would always owe her one. As he watched, she lifted her head in his direction. She smiled. At that moment, she was more beautiful than she'd ever been.
Her lips formed one word. "Good-bye," she said, and then she turned away.
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We Interrupt This Book For a Message from Chiun
After ail my warnings, you are still reading this nonsense?
Shame on you.
Have ! not told you that those two paper-ruiners, Murphy and before him, that Sapir, get everything wrong? And if they do not get it wrong, then Pinnacle Books gets it wrong?
Don't you ever learn anything?
But at last, there is hope. I, Chiun, Master of Sin-anju, have finally written a book of my own. It is called The Assassin's Handbook, and it tells the true story of the House of Sinanju and is filled with wonderful, exciting tales about such marvelous Masters as Wang the Greater. It includes my almost-favorite Ung poem and The Assassin's Quick Weight-Loss Diet and 37 Steps to Sexual Ecstasy.
There is a book inside the book that tells of the death of Remo, my student. Nowhere else will you read this true story.
Unfortunately, the book also has some junk in it, including a picture of Sapir and Murphy. But that is the price we artists must pay to bring beauty to a troubled world.
Buy my book. Buy one for a friend so that he too may appreciate the beauty of the real assassin.
You can get this book by filling out the little coupon below. The book costs $6.95. All the money will go to me. This is as it should be. I do all the work.
-Chiun
By his awesome hand in this 2,712th year of the dread Dragon Wind.
114 TH E DESTROYER #50
Available at your bookstore in November 1982, or clip and mail this handy coupon for prompt postal delivery:
PINNACLE BOOKS-Reader Service Dept.
1430 Broadway, New York, NY 10018
Please send me_ copy(ies) THE ASSASSIN'S HANDBOOK
by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir/ compiled and edited by Will Murray (41-847-7/ a hardcover-sized paperback), at $6.95 each, plus $1 to cover postage and handling. Enclosed is my check or money order-no cash or C.O.D.'s.
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Please allow six weeks for delivery. Price and availability subject to change without notice.
Chapter Ten
Chiun was already on the far side of the gate, the toga gone and replaced by the shimmering yellow of his long robe. The tire tracks from Foxx's Jeep traversed both sides of the gate and led off into the snow-drifted road beyond. There were no other vehicles on the grounds. Foxx, Remo realized, had seen to this eventuality long before.
Foxx's departure couldn't have been more advantageously timed. Five minutes after Remo vaulted over the ironwork gate at Shangri-la, the snow had started to fall; within another twenty minutes the tracks were all but obscured beneath the swirling snowstorm that raged all around them.
The cold was not a factor. Like a lizard, Remo had learned to adapt his body temperature to his environment. In the sixties, America's scientific community was stood on its ear when it was reported that Soviet cosmonauts had begun to learn control of their bodies to the point of lowering the temperature of their big toes at will. Remo could tower the temperature of his big toe in his sleep. Controlling his body temperature was as natural as breathing. He was beginning to achieve the stage in his development where he, like
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Chiun, adapted to hot and cold automatically, with the same unthinking speed as a normal person's heartbeat slows when he's asleep.
So the cold meant nothing to Remo. The visibility was a different matter.
"I think we've had it," Remo said when they approached a fork in the road. Both tines of the fork were drifted knee-deep in fluffy banks of glistening snow. Beneath the starless, pitch-black expanse of sky, there was no such thing as a tire tread mark.
"Jokes, always jokes," Chiun grumbled, veering off to the left at a speed so fast that he barely cracked the surface of the new snow. "And not even good jokes at that. Learn to be funny before you make jokes. Old Korean proverb."
"I'm not joking. Hey, what makes you so sure he went left?" From the traces of Foxx and his jeep that remained, the man might as well have veered upward in a helicopter.
Chiun whirled around to face him, his almond eyes rounded in surprise. "You are asking me seriously how I knew? Do you not have a nose?"
"A nose?"
The old man lifted a handful of freshly fallen snow from the road. In his hand the snowflakes remained as they had been on the road, crystalline and unmelted. "Can you not smell it?"
Remo craned down to sniff at the snow. He hadn't been paying attention to his senses, concentrating instead on his lowered temperature and the extraordinary night vision necessary in the blinding storm. But when he pushed his concentration toward his olfactory membranes, he did smell something. High-octane gasoline, motor oil, rubber, and faint metallic traces from the underside of the vehicle. Altogether they
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existed in such small quantities that even an electron microscope might not have perceived the particles, but they were there, wafting through each new layer of snow.
"Oh, yeah," Remo said with some astonishment. "But I couldn't smell it from here, standing up." He felt ashamed as soon as he said it. His words had smacked of excuses,
He looked sheepishly at Chiun, but the old man only smiled. "That is why I am stili the Master of Sinanju and you the pupil."
He was right, Remo thought as he followed the frail old Oriental through the snow. Chiun might act like a loony, but when it came down to it, he could still smell a droplet of motor oil beneath a foot of snow, standing at full height. He could still skim across the flakes with barely a footprint. And his double-spiral air blow had been pretty good, too.
"You're something, all right, Little Father," he said.
Chiun glanced back at him in surprise. For a moment, his face took on the look of a small child, immensely pleased. But it was the briefest hesitation, and the moment passed.
"Fool," he grumbled.
Foxx's jeep was parked, still steaming, at Graham Airport, a small, blue-lit compound some twelve miles outside of Enwood, consisting of a short airstrip, a cinderblock building, an air sock, and little else. Remo checked the car. The distributor had been dismantled. Foxx wasn't taking any chances with a possible tail.