"See for yourself," he was told.
"Watch this man," Rashid warned. "Do not kill him." Rashid went below. The passageway was strewn with bodies. Gold crosses were red with fresh blood. One man wore a purple tunic. Rashid turned him over with a boot. Breath hissed through the man's bared teeth. He was still alive. Rashid ended his life with two bullets in the stomach and three more in the face. The man's face broke like a dropped mirror.
Rashid worked his way forward, stepping over hands and bodies. The trail of corpses led into a long room filled with overturned cots. A few bodies lay there, huddled in corners, as if these warriors had shrunk from the conflict and were eradicated where they cowered.
Rashid Shiraz returned to the deck.
"What does this mean?" one of his Pasdarans asked him.
"It means-" Rashid began. He looked down at the unconscious man in the white tunic and began kicking him in the ribs, slowly and methodically. "It means war," he said at last.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he wasn't going to jump. No matter how much the crowd begged him.
It had started with one man. The fat guy in the peach-colored hooded sweatshirt. He had been walking along the street ten stories below on the cracked sidewalk. He looked up. It was as simple as that. The guy just happened to look up.
He saw Remo sitting on the ledge of the dirty brick apartment building, his legs dangling over space.
The guy in the sweatshirt stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his body to get a better look. It was nearly dusk now, the air cool.
"Hey!" the guy had shouted up at Remo.
Remo, who had climbed the plaster-chunk-strewn steps of the apartment building to the roof because he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, at first attempted to ignore the man.
"Hey, you. Up there!" the man repeated.
Remo pointedly stared off toward the Passaic River and the gray spire of Saint Andrews Church. He used to go to Saint Andrews as a boy. Every Sunday at eight in the morning, and none of this modern alternative-service-on-Saturday-afternoon crap either. He had been raised by nuns. They were strict. Especially Sister Mary Margaret, who ran Saint Theresa's Orphanage, where Remo had spent the first sixteen years of his life. He never thought he would feel nostalgic about Saint Andrews or the orphanage. But he did. He wished he could drop in and say hello to Sister Mary Margaret and tell her thanks for being so strict and for showing him the right way. But he couldn't. Saint Theresa's had been razed years ago. He had no idea what had become of Sister Mary Margaret.
Down the street, the peach sweatshirt was determined to be heard.
"Hey, buddy, I'm talking to you-you bastard!" Reluctantly Remo looked down at the man.
"Go away," he said. His voice was even, quiet. But it carried.
"You gonna jump?" the peach sweatshirt called up.
"No chance," Remo said.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"You look like a jumper."
"And you look like the worst judge of character since Neville Chamberlain. Now, beat it."
"I think you're a jumper. You got that look. Kinda sad. I'm staying."
"It's a free country. Despite Neville Chamberlain." Remo stared north. He tried to spot the old Rialto Theater. It used to be on lower Broad Street. There was nothing on Broad Street. Just a row of storefronts that looked like Hiroshima after the bomb fell. He wasn't surprised that the Rialto had been shut down. This part of Newark, New Jersey, had gone to hell a long time before. But it would have been nice to see the old marquee. Remo felt nostalgic about that too.
Down on the sidewalk the peach sweatshirt was talking. "I think he's gonna jump," he said. Remo looked down. The fat guy was speaking to two teenagers with green hair and black leather clothes.
"Oh, wicked," the pair said in unison.
"Hey, guy," one shouted. "We're here. So what's the holdup?"
"Oh, great," Remo mumbled.
"He said he wasn't going to jump, but look at him perched up there. What else would he do?" This from peach sweatshirt.
"Probably a druggie," one of the green-haired teenagers was saying. "They're always going into abandoned places and doing weird shit. Hey, man, if you're going to jump, could you do it by seven o'clock? I wanna get home in time for Wheel of Fortune."
"I'm not jumping," Remo repeated in a weary voice.
"Then what are you doing up there?"
Remo didn't answer. He wasn't exactly sure. He wasn't supposed to ever come near Newark again. Someone might recognize him as Remo Williams, a patrolman who once walked these streets to protect its citizenry. The same Remo Williams who made headlines when he was sent to the electric chair for the senseless beating death of a local drug pusher. Remo hadn't committed that crime. He wasn't believed. They pulled the switch, and when Remo regained consciousness, he was told to forget his past existence.
It hadn't been hard at first. What was there to cling to? He was an orphan who pulled a tour of duty in Vietnam, and a conscientious beat cop whose life had ended tragically. No parents. Few friends. There had been a girlfriend. They had been engaged. The ring arrived at his cell one night, without a note, and only then did Remo give up all hope and resign himself to the inevitable.
Now, twenty years later, Remo could barely remember what she looked like.
All his friends had deserted him on Death Row. That had been part of the frame, which was what it was. A man named Harold W. Smith had engineered the whole thing. It was Smith who had warned Remo never to come back to Newark ever again. It was not the whim of a hard-nosed government official, although Smith was all of that. It was a matter of national security. Remo had broken the rule a couple of times before. But national security had not been compromised in either case.
So what? Remo thought. So what if they discover that Remo Williams is still alive? It wouldn't necessarily link him to Smith, head of the supersecret government agency known as CURE, which had been set up to fight crime outside of constitutional restrictions. There would be a lot of ways to explain Remo's continued existence. The world would never have to know that Remo Williams had been trained in the ancient Korean art of Sinanju to be America's secret weapon in the unending war against her enemies. There wasn't a document or file anywhere that linked Remo Williams to the House of Sinanju, the finest assassins in history. There was no record of Remo's long service to America. He had saved the country from certain ruin several times. Saved the world at least twice that he knew of.
And all he wanted, right now, was to put the two parts of his life together.
Staring out at the shattered pieces of his old neighborhood, he could not. It was as if there were two Remo Williamses. One the orphan boy who grew up in an uncertain world, and the other the heir to the five-thousand-year tradition of Sinanju, which served pharaohs and emirs long before there ever was an America, and which now served this newest and greatest power on earth.
Two Remo Williamses. One an ordinary man. The other, one of the most powerful creatures to walk the earth since the age of the tyrannosaur. Two men with the same memories. But still two different men.
Somehow it didn't seem real anymore. It was hard to look back and accept the early past as his own. Had he ever been that young and that confused?
Down in the street, the three gawkers were now seven. The newcomers were calling for Remo to jump. "C'mon man. Get it done with!" a black man called. "We don't be having all night."
"One last time," Remo called down. "I'm not jumping."
"And I say he is," said peach sweatshirt. "He just needs to get his courage up."
"That right. He don't wanna audience 'cause he afraid he'll wimp out and everybody laugh."
"That right, Jim?"
"Anybody know what happened to the old Rialto?" Remo called out.