"Chiun," Remo said, his voice low.
"I know," the Master of Sinanju replied, his face stern.
"Eight?"
Chiun shook his head. "Nine. Beyond the stage." He nodded beyond Sun.
The ninth man in white was just threading through the crowd of couples. Like the others Remo had seen, he was moving in the direction of the stage. By the way he walked, it was obvious he had some sort of weapon hidden beneath the folds of his flowing white garment.
"Catch up with you on the other side," Remo said.
Nodding, Chiun split away from him. The elderly Korean moved swiftly toward the right, across the first-base line and onto the crowded infield.
Remo had already moved off in the other direction. He cut a path directly for the first man in white.
". ..must appreciate the importance of the church in every aspect of your lives together. There is no individual. There is no couple. There is only Sun ...." the cult leader was proclaiming from the stage. His voice boomed out across the stadium.
"Don't we have an inflated sense of self?" Remo muttered sarcastically to himself as he slid between pairs of beaming Sunnie brides and grooms.
The nearest moving robe had vanished in the sea of couples. Remo allowed his instincts to guide him through the knot of people. On automatic, his body brought him in a direct line to intercept the would-be assassin.
Passing a thick cluster of people, Remo came out several yards away from the stage. On the other side of the crowd within the crowd, the first white-robed man emerged.
He was Korean. Remo spotted it straight off. The man's sleeves were wider than those of the other Sunnies. In the next moment, Remo realized why.
A gun slid expertly down the length of the sleeve and into the killer's waiting hand. A rustling at the chest of the robe, and the other hand, which had been concealing the gun, slipped back down the other baggy sleeve.
It was a K-50M. A North Vietnamese knockoff of a Russian Tokarev.
Remo flew over to the man.
The free hand snapped a banana clip into place. Turning toward the stage, the Korean assassin brought his gun barrel up and around, aiming at the fleshy face of Man Hyung Sun.
He would have fired-indeed, he tried to. But something had gone suddenly and inexplicably wrong with his weapon.
It took a second for the killer to realize what was wrong. His gun would not fire without ammunition.
"Looking for this?" Remo asked sweetly. He was standing between the killer and the stage. In his hand was the banana clip from the Tokarev knockoff.
The would-be assassin's eyes grew wide in shock when he saw the stranger standing before him with his gun's magazine. Quickly, his free hand disappeared back up the sleeve, fumbling for a replacement clip. His grasping fingers had just wrapped around one in the pouch at his waist when Remo surprised him by returning the original. However, the way it came back was not the same way it had left.
"Yum, yum, yum," Remo said as he stuffed the curving clip down the man's throat. "Eat up. Bananas are a good source of carbohydrates. They give you that extra burst of killing energy."
The man wiggled and fought. To no avail. Remo jammed the clip down past his epiglottis, blocking the air flow to and from his lungs. Suddenly, respiration became a far more important thing to the assassin than shooting the Reverend Sun. Face turning purple, he sank to his knees, clawing at the rectangular piece of metal that jutted from his open mouth.
To Remo's surprise, the Sunnies in the immediate vicinity did not appear concerned in the least at the display of violence. The faces of those who saw Remo cram the magazine down the Korean's throat held looks of utter indifference. Most of the people around did not even bother to look his way. They simply continued to stare up at their leader, faces rhapsodic.
"Wonder if lobotomies come free with the blood tests," Remo said, shaking his head in disbelief.
He left the killer to choke to death in the grass. Remo dived into the crowd in search of the next assassin.
CHIUN WAS STILL FAR AWAY from the stage when he came upon the first set of killers.
The Master of Sinanju noted with only minor interest that they were both Koreans. Assuming they were agents of some rival religious sect, he forged ahead.
The two flat-faced risen had not even gotten close enough for an unobstructed shot at Sun before Chiun whirled in between them.
Guns were still hidden in the sleeves of their robes. With a move that seemed casual, Chiun sent a single index finger into the baggy cloth at the side of one man. He caught the hollow muzzle of the weapon with his fingertip. Instantly, the gun rocketed up like a missile fired from an underground silo.
The stock had been braced inside the man's armpit. On its path skyward, it wrenched through the shoulder socket with a tearing snap. Arm and gun both plopped from the hollow sleeve. Chiun stifled the man's scream with a toe to the throat. Continuing the move, he brought the heel of his foot into the jaw of the second man.
The killer's head twisted wildly around with the snap of dry, uncooked pasta. Both bodies fell simultaneously.
At the moment they dropped, another armed man sprang from the crowd a few feet away.
Eyes opened wide as the killer saw the tiny dervish whirl out from between his dead comrades. The man tried to fumble his gun free from his robe as the wizened Asian flew over to meet him.
It was no contest.
The barrel had barely emerged from the sleeve before Chiun was before him.
Hand flat, the Master of Sinanju slapped the killer's forehead so hard his eyes sprang loose, popping twin sacs of viscous fluid from bloody sockets. Inside his skull as the dead man fell, his brain quivered like so much gray jelly.
Chiun did not give the corpse a second glance. A remorseless wraith in green, the Master of Sinanju moved on.
REMO DROPPED THE BODY from his outstretched hand. Mouth hanging slack in death, it tumbled atop the other two.
That was four assassins for him so far. There were at least that many in the other direction.
He was much closer to the stage now.
Sun was as oblivious to the threat beneath him as his followers.
"...cannot allow the forces of evil to crush our future. I am your future. I am the future of the world ..."
The cult leader continued to shout into the protesting microphone. In spite of the briskness of the day, his face was coated in a sheen of sweat.
Remo turned from Sun. He looped around the stage, coming up on the far side. This was ridiculous. There should have been police here. He hadn't seen one uniformed officer since arriving at the stadium.
He had no idea how many Chiun might have gotten so far. The crowd in the infield was too thick to see farther than the dozen or so people jammed in any given area. Remo had seen three assassins cutting through the throng on the right. If Chiun had gotten only those, that left two more. At least.
The killers had been weaving and ducking through the vast collection of Sunnies. By this point, the final two Koreans would not be anywhere near the places Remo had first seen them.
He moved swiftly, slipping like a shadow between groups of robed cult members.
Out, look. Around, duck, look again.
No one.
The stage loomed high on his right. He was so close now he could no longer see the Reverend Sun. The cult leader's voice continued to roar out stridently across his throng of faithful as Remo swept around to the rear of the platform.
Nothing. More blissfully ignorant couples. A line of Sunnies stood on the rear of the platform above, backs to the crowd.
He must have missed them on the other side.
Remo spun on his heel and was about to double back when he caught a sudden flash of movement from around the far side of the high-backed stage.