Chiun stared at the fire for some time. "He is ready," he said at last.
H'si T'ang nodded. "Good," he said. "The scroll you took from my collection. Did you send it to him?"
"Yes, Little Father," Chiun said.
"Then you know the prophecy?"
"I do not understand it fully."
The old man smiled. His rnouth was broad and toothless, and he grinned like a baby. "If the prophecies were perfectly understood, they would be history, not prophecy," he said, clapping Chiun on the back. "So. Tell me, son. What do you call your young, white, misplaced, nonbeliev-ing pupil who bends his elbow during combat?"
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Chiun looked up at him, startled. Then he smiled, because through the long years he had forgotten that his old teacher could stiil surprise him. "If you know he bends his elbow, then you know his name."
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and he was crawling into a whorehouse. That's all it was, Remo thought as he inched up the outside of the swank Fifth Avenue apartment house while a small colony of police waited impotently on the sidewalk below. Only a whorehouse wasn't what you called any establishment in a building that rented space by the square inch.
It was an unlikely place for a group of sweat-stained terrorists, but then New York was a city that tolerated eccentricity, a term used to cover every type of pervert from the standard garden variety wand-waver to lunatics like the Managuan Liberation Front.
The MLF, as the group of unwashed, make-believe soldiers inside the whorehouse called itself, was a stock item in a city that specialized in mayhem: A handful of power-crazed fools who used international politics as an excuse to play with bombs. The MLF had tried to blow up four politically significant Manhattan buildings: the courthouse, the prison known as the Tombs, and two police stations. But the bombs were so poorly made and the
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preparations so inadequate that they missed all four targets entirely and managed only to blast a lot of innocent bystanders to smithereens.
The one tactically intelligent thing the MLF crazies had thought up was to take refuge in the Versailles Arms. The tall, white marble building housed some of the richest people on the East Coast, and the MLF went to pains to select the richest and most celebrated among the tenants and hold them hostage in the discreet, thousand-dollar-a-night bordello on its top floor. Because of the danger to the hostages, the police were under orders not to storm the place in an all-out shoot-em-up, and were reduced to hanging around the entrances, waiting for the MLF to come out for air.
Remo didn't work for the police anymore. He was an employee of the United States government, but his name didn't appear on any federal payroll, since the nature of his work demanded a certain lack of publicity.
Remo was an assassin.
And an assassin, especially one as elaborately trained as Remo, could go places where no policeman would think of venturing. Like up the sheer face of a marble building.
When he reached the top story, his feet and hands using the momentum and weight of his body to scale the surface, he pushed away from the building and forced his legs upward into a backward spin that propelled him through a window in a shower of broken glass.
The room he vaulted into was, not surprisingly, a bedroom. The walls were covered with metallic mylar, and a chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. On the oversized round bed were two swarthy young men wearing only purple berets marked by an insignia depicting a clenched fist with its middle finger outstretched. Standing over them was a leggy platinum blonde in a Nazi officer's
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cap satin garter belt, and thigh-high black leather boots with six-inch heels.
"Now they're coming in through the windows," she shrilled, throwing down the snakeskin whip in her hands. "I give up. First these twerps who haven't got two bits between the bunch of them, and now the human fly. I knew supply-side economics was leading to this. I suppose you're not going to pay, either."
Before Remo could answer, the two Managuans jumped out of bed, waving a pair of switchblades. On their hairless chests were tattoos bearing the words, "MLF" and "Free Managua."
"Hey, man, get your own poontang. The madam here's for us."
"Shut up, shitface," the blonde said. " 'Long as I'm giving it up for free, I choose him." She sidled up next to Remo. "At least he smells like he took a bath since last August."
She brushed a white-gold lock of hair out of her eyes. "Honestly," she grumbled. "These creeps are driving me crazy. They take over the building, they drive all my regular customers away. I've taken a net loss of thirty thousand bucks since they got here. And kinky. Let me tell you-"
"What you doing here, man?" one of the Managuans said, brandishing his knife. "This here's a revolution." .' Remo glanced at his naked body, which looked as if it had been nurtured since infancy on a steady diet of tortilla chips and Coca Cola. "It's pretty revolting, all right," he agreed. "You're the terrorists, I guess."
"We're the Front, dude," the Managuans said, ribbing each other jocularly.
"Maybe you'd better switch to the back. The Front looks like it died."
"You gonna die, man." The switchblades moved closer.
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"Look," Remo said. "1 don't want to fight with you. I just washed my hands. How come you're doing this with the bombs and the hostages. . . ." He waved vaguely.
The man with "Free Managua" stenciled onto his chest fixed Remo with a practiced intense stare. "We're doing it 'cause we got political consciousness, baby." He pounded his tattoo. The gesture produced a jalepeno-scented belch. "We want independence from America. You strip our country, man. We ain't putting up with that."
"Aw, come on," Remo said. "There's nothing on Managua except hurricanes."
The Managuan looked uncertainly at Remo for a moment. "What else they done, Manuel?" he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
Manuel thought hard, apparently expediting the process by probing his navel with his index finger. "I got it. We're sick of their honkey foreign aid."
The spokesman sprang to life again. "Right on. We don't need no stinking handouts. We want welfare."
"Wait a second," Remo said.
"Damn straight, man. Welfare's our right. We want to collect, just like the brothers here in New Jork." The two men saluted one another with upraised fists, their middle fingers extended proudly, and broke into a chant. "Free Managua! MLF! Power to the People! Boogie!"
"You know, I used to get a nice class of customer in here," the madam muttered.
The chant seemed to transport the Managuans into ecstasy. Manuel strutted up to Remo, slashing the air around Remo's face with his open blade and shouting, "Free our people. Like let my people go, dig it?" The two men slapped palms, twirling their knives high in the air while they performed the ritual.
Blankfaced, Remo stepped forward and picked the knives out of the air. He closed his fingers around them. For a
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moment there was a crackling sound. Then he opened his hands, and two mounds of metal filings sifted toward the floor. "Dig this," he said, and tossed the two men out the window.
"Hey, how'd you-" the blonde began, when she caught sight of a debonair gentleman standing in the bedroom's doorway. He was tall, with a refined nose and dark hair that was graying suavely at the temples. Remo recognized him as the conductor of an internationally famous symphony orchestra-a man who had been credited with promoting appreciation of classical music in America through his charm and sex appeal, although his tuxedo had been replaced by a transparent plastic shower curtain draped toga-style over one shoulder.
"What do you want now, Ray?" the madam asked irritably.
"1 beg your pardon," the man said in pear-shaped tones. "My captors wish me to bring them a bottle of tequila. Could 1 put you to the trouble?"