“No. There is no redness. Your eyes are clear.”

  “Maybe I’m immune…”

  “Perhaps the bee had already exhausted its venom.”

  “Guess that’s possible, too, but I still feel kinda cold.”

  “Stupidity. It will pass.” Chiun turned about, coaxing Remo to follow with a crooking finger. “Now come. We must leave this wounded bird that you so clumsily wrecked, lest we are discovered by prying eyes.”

  “Yeah. Okay. We can’t afford to answer too many questions anyway.”

  Passing the first-class cabin, Chiun announced in a loud voice, “Hearken well, for you have been saved by the House of Sinanju. These are your tax dollars at work. Pay your taxes promptly and often. Lest your nation lose our services, and your empire succumb to foreign emperors.”

  The passengers looked too dazed to respond. Many were still fumbling with their seat belts or lifting their heads from the between-knees crash-survival position. Nobody appeared injured.

  “What happened to avoiding problems?” Remo asked Chiun.

  Chiun dismissed his pupil’s objection with a careless wave. “That was advertising. It always pays.”

  Remo tried to open the hatch by hand, but the mechanism was too complicated, so he just kicked it open. The thick hatch jumped outward with a dull sound like a flat bell being rung. It went splat in the foam. That seemed to rouse the flight crew.

  At the emergency exits, inflatable escape chutes were deploying, and the first passengers began sliding down the big yellow chutes, under the direction of the flight attendants.

  In a very short time, passengers were milling around the tarmac as paramedics and other emergency professionals came and got them.

  When the big silver bus came to load the most able aboard, Remo and Chiun were already calmly seated in back.

  It was easier to go this way than trying to walk along the wide-open runway system under the sweep and blaze of emergency lights.

  At the terminal, an airline representative was waving sheafs of official-looking forms and began trying to get the walking wounded to sign away their rights to sue or receive compensation for their injuries.

  Remo took an offered Bic pen and jammed it halfway up the airline rep’s left sinus cavity. The man stumbled off, muttering nasally that he was going to sue somebody. That was the end of airline damage control.

  From a pay phone, Remo called Harold Smith.

  “Smitty, get set for the unbelievable.”

  Smith sighed. “I deal with the unbelievable on an almost daily basis.”

  “We were tailed from the coroner’s office,” Remo said.

  “Yes?”

  “The tail sneaked aboard our flight. We saw him go through the food-service door. Once the plane was in the air, it murdered the pilot and copilot. We would have crashed, but I took the controls and landed the plane.”

  Remo’s voice lifted on a note of pride toward the last. Smith brought it crashing down with his incredulous “You? Flew a jet plane?”

  “The tower kinda helped out,” Remo admitted.

  “The plane crashed,” Smith said.

  “Crash-landed,” said Remo. “It was a crash landing, not a crash. Nobody died.”

  “Except the pilots,” Smith corrected.

  “Yeah.”

  “And, of course, the man who murdered the pilots.”

  “Yeah. Chiun got him.”

  “I assume you interrogated this person?” Smith said.

  “You assume wrong.”

  “How is that?”

  “Because you’re assuming a person, and not what tried to kill us,” Remo said.

  “What tried to kill you?” Smith parried.

  Remo handed the receiver to Chiun, who was hovering nearby.

  “It was a not-bee,” Chiun explained.

  “A bee brought down the plane!” Smith said, his lemony voice skittering high into the stratosphere of the musical register.

  “No, a not-bee.”

  “Talk sense,” snapped Smith.

  “I am,” said the Master of Sinanju in an injured voice. “It had the form of a bee, but it was not a bee.

  “Put Remo back on,” Smith directed.

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to speak with him,” explained Smith tightly.

  Face quirking up, Chiun surrendered the receiver to his pupil, sniffing, “The conversation has taken an unimportant turn, Remo. Emperor Smith wishes to speak with you.”

  “Not-bee theory didn’t exactly go over well?”

  “That man is old. No doubt his faculties are failing. It is the burden of the kingly. Nero was much like this in his snowy years.”

  Remo took the phone and said, “I can’t tell what he’s talking about, either.”

  “Remo, start at the beginning.”

  “Which beginning?”

  “From the time you left the morgue.”

  Remo did. He told about the bumblebee that had followed him from the parking lot and all that had transpired at the airport.

  “And he had the same death’s-head markings as the morgue bee,” Remo finished. “The outside morgue bee. Not the inside one.”

  “It could not be the same bee,” Smith stated flatly.

  “Why not?”

  “Bees do not fly that fast.”

  “This one was pretty light on his wings. Speaking of which, we mailed you a wing from the first bee.”

  “I will be very interested to see that.”

  “That was the good news. The bad is that the second bee looked like it read your address when we mailed the package.”

  “Preposterous!”

  “This bee was out to get us,” Remo said heatedly. “I’m just letting you know what it knows.”

  “It knows nothing. It is dead. And I want the body.”

  “Well, that’s going to be kinda hard,” said Remo, looking out through a plate-glass window to where the 727 was awash in fire-retardant foam. “Chiun mashed it flat as a wafer, and the plane is crawling with airport personnel. The NTSB should be along at any moment.”

  “Then I will have the bee’s remains requisitioned on my end,” said Smith.

  “Good luck,” said Remo. “So what do we do now? Risk flying again or what?”

  Smith was silent for a long space. “I want that bee’s wing.”

  “It’s on the way via Federal Express.”

  “Not soon enough. I want it today. Recover the package and bring it here. Wurmlinger can wait.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so,” said Smith, terminating the connection.

  Hanging up himself, Remo addressed the Master of Sinanju. “He sounds pretty P.O.’ed.”

  “I heard. We will bring him the wing of the not-bee.”

  They had their first stroke of luck that day when they went to the Federal Express pickup box. A driver showed up. He was in the act of unlocking the deposit box—which saved Remo the bother of ripping it apart with his bare hands in front of witnesses—when Remo tapped him on the shoulder.

  “I need to get back a package I sent.”

  “Sorry. Once it’s in the box, it’s ours. Company rules.”

  Remo smiled pleasantly. “Sure. I understand.”

  And he and Chiun followed the man to his awaiting orange-and-purple-splashed white van. They were not at all secretive about it. In fact, they carried on a loud running conversation.

  “Don’t you hate it when big companies take your money and blow you off when you have a problem?” Remo told Chiun.

  “Customer satisfaction is the soul of the professional assassin,” Chiun replied. “So said Wang the Great, who understood such things.”

  The driver, knowing he was being followed, cast several nervous glances over his shoulder. He looked more worried each time. Just as he inserted his key into the door, he looked back again.

  He saw no sign of the thick-wristed white guy or the old Oriental who had been following him.

  Still looking back over his shoulder, he rolled the rear van door up.

  Then he climbed aboard, threw his satchel in the back and lowered the door. It locked with a resounding chink of steel latching.

  He drove out of LAX at a good clip, pausing only at the main entrance.

  That was when the rear door unexpectedly rattled up, and he saw California sunlight beaming in from the back.

  Braking and swearing, he ran back.

  The cargo door was fully up, but there was no sign of whoever had opened it. He ran it down again and decided not to report any of what had happened.

  But as he eased onto the freeway, he had the uneasy feeling that at least one of those two had been hiding in back of the van.

  How was another matter. The only way into the van was through a locked side or rear door. And the rear door had been unlocked only long enough for him to check to see that the coast was clear and climb aboard.

  Surely that was too short a time for a grown person to slip on board. Surely.

  . . .

  Back at the terminal, Remo was saying to Chiun, “That guy was looking everywhere except where we were.”

  “No,” corrected Chiun. “We were everywhere his gaze did not fall.”

  Remo shrugged. “Same difference. Okay, let’s get this thing to Folcroft.”

  “What of the bug man, Earwig Wormfood?”

  “Smitty said he can wait.”

  “Thus, he waits.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Harold Smith was deep in cyberspace when his secretary buzzed him that he had visitors.

  “It’s those two,” she whispered.

  “Send them in, Mrs. Mikulka,” said Smith, looking up from his desktop screen. It was a relief, he thought, not to have to reach for the old concealed stud under the edge of his old desk to send the oldstyle monitor humming down into its concealed desktop well. That was in the days before he had the new system with its screen mounted flush under the black glass desktop. He still sometimes missed that system with its comforting green monochrome screen. It matched his Dartmouth tie.

  When Mrs. Mikulka popped her blue-haired head in, Smith merely looked up and nodded his gray head. No one could see the buried screen except the man seated before it.

  Mrs. Mikulka withdrew as Remo and Chiun entered.

  Remo said, “Hiyah, Smitty,” and tossed the FedEx envelope across the room.

  It went sailing over Smith’s head, out of reach. At the last moment, it abruptly boomeranged back to settle before him, square with the corners of the desk, unnoticed by Smith, who was still looking over his shoulder, expecting it to bounce off the office picture window.

  Smith blinked, looked about and finally saw the package, resting on the desk as if it had been there all along. He cleared his throat, unimpressed with Remo’s theatrics.

  Stripping back the cardboard zipper, he emptied the contents on the smooth desktop.

  A single wing fluttered to the black glass. It was backlit by the amber screen below. Touching a key, Smith reset the screen to a pure white. The light highlighted the outline and veins of the tiny wing.

  Chiun was uncharacteristically silent as Smith studied the wing's delicate structure.

  “You’re being ignored,” Remo whispered to him.

  Chiun shook his head. “I ignored him first.”

  “Well, he’s ignoring you back.”

  “He is too late. He is the ignoree, while I am the true ignorer.”

  “Well, you know the etiquette of ignoring,” said Remo in an unconvinced tone of voice.

  Smith’s patrician nose was almost touching the desktop now. He made assorted faces he was entirely unaware of.

  “What do you say, Smitty?” Remo prompted.

  Smith looked up, squint eyed. “It appears to be a bee’s wing. Unremarkable.”

  “Well,” said Remo. “Is it a bumblebee or a drone?”

  Smith sat back and began working his keyboard.

  Remo came around the desk to watch.

  Smith had brought up a color replica of a drone honey bee and was manipulating it. One wing broke off and enlarged itself. It matched in outline and vein patterns the detached wing resting on the desk.

  “It is a drone’s wing. An ordinary drone,” he said.

  “No, it was a not-bee,” Chiun corrected.

  “I am unfamiliar with that terminology,” Smith admitted.

  “Examine that wing more closely,” Chiun suggested.

  Smith did.

  “What do you see?” asked Chiun.

  “A common drone honey bee wing, according to my data base.”

  Chiun shook his head slowly. “The creature that possessed that wing owned intelligence and malevolence. It was not a bee, common or otherwise.”

  Smith brought up an image of a killer bee.

  It was completely different and the wing structure was different, as well. The killer bee was no different than a typical honeybee—long of body but not as long or distinctively colored as a yellow jacket. The drone, on the other hand, was plump and fuzzy.

  “This is not a killer bee’s wing,” Smith said flatly.

  “True. It belongs to a killer not-bee.”

  Smith looked to Remo for help. Remo rolled his eyes and pretended to find the overhead fluorescent lights of interest.

  “I fail to understand,” Smith said helplessly.

  “You are excused,” Chiun said, and floated over to the picture window to contemplate Long Island Sound.

  “I guess we came a long way for nothing,” Remo told Smith.

  “There is word out of the L.A. Coroner’s Office.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The new coroner has pronounced the deaths of Dr. Nozoki, Dr. Krombold and the others as the result of killer-bee stings.”

  “That can’t be!” Remo exploded. “We saw how those people bought it. A garden-variety bumblebee got them.”

  “Drone honey bees,” Smith said carefully, “cannot sting. And more importantly, the venom of the Africanized killer bee is a neurotoxin, which is to say it affects the nervous system, not merely the breathing passages, as does ordinary bee venom.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It does if someone has crossbred a new kind of bee.

  “That’s possible…”

  “Since the advent of killer bees in this hemisphere, Remo, there have been many attempts to interdict the killer bee in its northern migration. All have failed. The defense of last resort has been to cross these feral bees with more gentle domestic bees in order to obtain a less virulent and aggressive strain.”

  “How’s it coming?”

  “It has been an utter failure. But that is not to say that someone could not attempt to create a more virulent strain of bee, if they chose to reverse the breeding program.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “It is obvious,” said Chiun, turning from the window.

  Remo and Harold Smith looked at him, unspoken questions in their eyes.

  “To kill,” said Chiun.

  Remo and Smith looked at one another, their faces undergoing various changes of expression—Remo’s dubious, Smith’s lemony.

  Clearing his throat, Smith swept the bee’s wing into the FedEx container and attacked his keyboard. He brought up a list of the dead to date, including the two pilots.

  “Doyal T. Rand was the first,” he said.

  “We don’t know that,” said Remo. “He wasn’t stung. His brains were eaten out.”

  “Let us assume he was the first because the man who autopsied him subsequently died of anaphylactic shock.”

  “Okay,” allowed Remo.

  “That was Dr. Lemuel Quirk. The New York coroner—”

  “M.E.,” Remo corrected.

  “—also was killed by the sting of a bee, although no bee was found.”

  “Why?”

  “Simple. To cover up the first killing.”

  “In Los Angeles, three people died at a new restaurant of bee venom, although none appeared stung and no bee parts were found in their stomachs, according to Dr. Wurmlinger.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Remo.

  “I talked to the assistant deputy coroner in Los Angeles.”

  “Oh.”

  “A Dr. Nozoki who autopsied them died of a bee sting. As did a Fox cameraman. As did Dr. Gideon Krombold. Again, let us assume a cover-up.”

  “By bees.”

  “Using bees,” said Smith.

  “Idiots,” said Chiun.

  “What was that?” Smith asked the Master of Sinanju.

  “Nothing,” said Chiun, resuming his enjoyment of Long Island Sound.

  Smith returned to his glowing amber list. “The bee attempted to kill you and Chiun. It died. Yet another bee followed you from the coroner’s office and apparently attempted to finish the job by bringing down your flight.”

  “It’s a chain of BS, but it’s solid,” Remo admitted.

  “That leaves but one question.”

  “Actually, it leaves a zillion. But what’s the one on your mind?” Remo asked.

  “If the intelligence behind this—and there can be no mistaking that one does exist—is intent on killing everyone involved with those two deaths, why are Tammy Terrill and Dr. Wurmlinger still alive?”

  “Search me.”

  “Because they are useful,” said Chiun.

  “Useful to whom?” asked Smith. “Who could so perfectly control this new strain of feral bees that they function as assassins?”

  Chiun made a face at the misuse of the honorable term assassin.

  “And how are they controlled?” added Smith.

  “Sounds like Bee-Master to me,” muttered Remo.

  “Who?”

  “Bee-Master. It was a comic-book character I used to read about back at the orphanage.”

  Smith made the lemony face of a man who had bitten into a persimmon unsuspectingly.

  “We are dealing with reality here,” he said.

  “Not if bees can think and attack people they don’t like,” Remo returned.

  Smith made an uncomfortable noise in his throat.

  “If this chain of deaths began with Rand and the owners of that restaurant, what do they have in common?” Remo queried.

  Smith posed the question to his computer, and it came up with side-by-side profiles of Doyal T. Rand and the Notos.

  “Rand is a genetic genius. It was he who perfected the current method of roach-population control by shutting off their pheromones.”