Remo reached out to touch the body and realized that the suit Wimpler was wearing had swollen like a balloon. His arms and legs looked as if they were welded together. The clothing was covered with great bubbles and even as Remo watched they broke open and disintegrated and slipped away into the water, tiny black slicks of paint breaking down.

  He grabbed Wimpler by the neck and swam to the surface with Wimpler’s body in tow. When he got to the boat he pushed the body up and over, onto the deck.

  He followed.

  “I can see him,” Chiun complained.

  “Not much of a looker, was he?” Remo said.

  “The water has destroyed his secret,” Chiun said. “Or the salt.”

  “Yeah,” said Remo. “Something’s ruining his cover.”

  “Throw him back,” Chiun said.

  “I beg your pardon,” Remo said.

  “I said throw him back. The suit is useless and he is dead so he is useless.”

  “Throw him back, like a fish?” Remo said.

  “Just throw him back, like anything you want to throw him back as,” Chiun said. “A fish, a stone, a pound of marbles. Throw him back and let us return to the island.”

  “Sheesh,” Remo said. He hefted the body up, over the rail and dropped it.

  It made a bigger splash striking the water than any too-small fish that had ever been thrown back.

  The big boat lurched. Then Remo could feel it drop a few inches. He went to the other side and looked down. There was a gash in the wooden side.

  The invisible paint had been ripped off and beneath it, Remo could see the torn wood, caused when Wimpler’s small boat had slammed the side. The big boat was sinking.

  Let it, Remo thought.

  “Let’s go,” he called. “Time to go home.” Chiun followed him into their small boat. They cut loose and turned back to shore, back to New Jersey, back to the Emir and Princess Sarra.

  When they returned to the mansion, Remo called Smith from the first floor hall telephone.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  “Wimpler?”

  “Dead. Bottom of the ocean.”

  “His invisible outfit?” Smith asked.

  “You’re getting just like Chiun,” Remo said. “The salt water destroyed it.”

  “And the Emir?”

  “Okay, the last time we looked,” Remo said. “I guess they can relax for a while.”

  “Probably not,” Smith said. “There will always be someone who wants him dead, Remo; someone else who will hire a hit man or a mercenary or a whole army. I’m going to send in new security forces tonight to guard him. You make sure that you don’t leave there until everyone is in place.”

  “Okay, Smitty.”

  Remo hung up and looked over at Chiun who still seemed disconsolate.

  “C’mon, Chiun. Cheer up. Let’s go upstairs.”

  There was no answer to their knock on the Emir’s door. They walked in to find the Emir lying on his back on bed, his arms flung out to his sides in a grotesque parody of death. But this was no parody because there was no life left in the monarch’s body. There was a smile on his face.

  Princess Sarra was seated by the bed, her head in her arms. She was crying. Next to her on the mattress was the revolver with which she was to protect her brother. The candles still burned in the room.

  She looked up as Remo and Chiun entered.

  “Remo…”

  “I know.”

  “He died only moments ago. He was sleeping and then he just stopped breathing.” She said it with a tone of desperation as if she expected Remo to be able to do something to repeal the Emir’s action.

  “His troubles are over,” Remo said.

  Chiun stood at the foot of the bed and bowed his head. “I salute you as a great ruler, a true son of a true throne.”

  · · ·

  The Emir was buried in the United States. The rulers of his country who had offered millions to have him back alive, so they could kill him, refused his body in death, and denied him burial in his native land.

  · · ·

  Sitting at an outdoor café on University Place in New York, Smith asked Remo: “The Princess?”

  “I put her on a plane.”

  “To where?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Chiun sat glumly at the little table, twisting a paper napkin into thread-thin strips.

  Smith nodded toward him, his eyes asking Remo a question.

  “He’s been upset since we lost Wimpler’s invisible paint,” Remo said.

  “Well, those samples you saved us and his car in the garage should give us enough to duplicate the formula,” Smith said.

  Chiun looked up sharply.

  “And then what will you do with it?” he said.

  Smith shrugged. “Turn it over to the Defense Department. Some kind of military application, I guess,”

  Chiun went back to tearing his napkin, unhappy as he watched all possibility of commercial enterprise being drained from the invisible, black paint.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Remo said. “In the wrong hands, that paint could have been used for a lot of bad things, Chiun.”

  “Name one.”

  “Well,” said Remo. “It could have been used to paint Sinanju. Then Smitty’s submarine, filled with gold, would never be able to find it.”

  Chiun said something sharply in Korean.

  “What did he say?” Smith asked Remo.

  “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  “He said that when he’s a world-famous writer, people won’t treat him this way.”

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Midnight Man, maybe you’ll like Balance of Power, too. It’s another Destroyer novel, now available as an ebook.

  Balance of Power

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and he was buying dirt.

  He was buying dirt because this was Manhattan, and dirt didn’t come cheap here unless it was New York City dirt, the kind that blew out of automobile exhausts or sifted out of the sky or fell from the bodies of its earthier inhabitants who made their homes on the sidewalks. New York dirt was just too dirty.

  Remo needed clean dirt that flowers could grow in, even though those flowers would be growing in a window of a motel room off Tenth Avenue, where they would be abandoned shortly after they were planted and replaced by candy wrappers and cigarette butts and used condoms—New York dirt.

  He was not a gardener. He was an assassin, the second best assassin on the face of the earth.

  The best was fifty years older than Remo, fifty pounds lighter, with fifty centuries of lethal tradition. He was the gardener.

  Remo hoisted a hundred-pound plastic bag labeled Amaza-Gro onto his shoulder. According to the pressure on his deltoid muscle, it weighed exactly ninety-one pounds. Well, what the hell, Remo thought. Ninety-one pounds of dirt ought to be enough to hold down a couple of geraniums. Ninety pounds, fourteen ounces. Remo glanced down at the other bags in the pyramidal display at the back of the five and ten cent store. A golden sunburst on the front of each bag boasted that the soil was fortified with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.

  Remo was impressed. Imagine that. New York was getting better all the time. Dirt plus pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure, mixed together in this plastic hundred-pound bag weighing ninety-one pounds less two ounces, for only $39.95. What a bargain. In midtown Manhattan, you could barely get a steak sandwich for that price. Then he noticed the pile of dirt on the floor where his bag of Amaza-Gro had been. He did not need to use his eyes to discern that the identical product, composed of earth, potassium sulfate, phosphorus additives, nitrogen compounds, and a heavy dose of pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure was trickling down the right side of his black tee shirt.

  “Yecch,” he said aloud and tossed the bag back onto the floor. A young man wearing a cheap brown suit and tinted glasses over a nose bubbling with fresh acne passed by.

  “What’s your problem, mister?” he sighed, slapping his blank clipboard against his thigh.

  “My problem,” Remo answered angrily, although he had not been angry until the pimply-faced person standing next to him opened his mouth, “is that this bag has just leaked horseshit all over me.”

  “So?”

  With an effort of will, Remo ignored him. His boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, a man who knew more about trouble in America than the President of the United States did, had been on Remo’s back not to cause any more trouble than absolutely necessary. Unless, of course, it was in the line of duty.

  “Duty” meant doing the dirty work for CURE, an organization developed by a young president years before to control crime in America by operating outside the bounds of the Constitution. He thought it was the only means left to a nation that had become so civilized, so fair, so lenient, and so dependent on the whim of lobbyists, protesters and scared politicians that it could no longer function effectively within the Constitution. CURE was dangerous. But so were America’s assailants. And there were many, many assailants around the world, people, organizations and nations who despised America for its wealth and power and used its principle of fairness to cripple it.

  So CURE had been created. Officially, it did not exist. Only three people on earth knew about it: the President, who passed along the knowledge of CURE to his successor. The young President who began CURE did not wait for an election to determine who his successor would be. He told his vice president, because he knew he would not live to the election, to such an extent had crime grown out of control. The young President was assassinated. But CURE would continue, so that other presidents and other Americans could live in safety.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith was the second man who knew of CURE’s existence. Smith worked alone in a sealed area of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, nursing the most sophisticated computer hookup known to man, trying to treat some of America’s wounds. When greedy entrepreneurs, under total Constitutional sanction, threatened to unbalance America’s hair-trigger economy by cornering commodities on the stock exchange, those commodities suddenly devalued dramatically through the efforts of a thousand people who performed their regular jobs without suspecting that Smith and CURE had begun the avalanche that toppled the sandcastle.

  When death stalked the streets in riots, assassinations, political plots, or organized crime waves, CURE quelled it.

  When people sought to break America’s back, those people were destroyed. That was CURE’s main job: to destroy evil.

  And there was one other man who knew about CURE, a former cop who was officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, to begin a new life as the enforcement arm for the secret organization, a life spent in the most arduous training known to all the centuries of mankind to make him a human weapon more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

  His name was Remo.

  Remo Williams.

  The Destroyer.

  Remo brought under control the almost overwhelming impulse to rid the young man in the five and ten cent store of the burden of existence and decided Harold W. Smith was a pain in the ass.

  Killing forty-three men in broad daylight at a union rally was okay. Knocking off a fake army installation, with the arms and legs of a complete squadron of trained thugs flying dismembered through the breeze like link sausages, was peachy. But let Remo Williams pop a snotty dime store floorwalker in his acned cauliflower nose, and Smitty would be on Remo’s case with razor blades for words.

  Remo picked up another bag, weighing eighty-eight pounds. He picked up a third. It was also leaking. As he moved from one bag to the next, the floor beneath his loafers took on the appearance of Iowa farmland. The seventeenth bag emptied its contents at Remo’s feet before it was two inches off the ground.

  “This is ridiculous,” Remo said. “These bags are all torn.”

  “You’re not supposed to handle them so rough, lunkhead,” the man sneered to Remo, who could count the legs on caterpillars as they walked over his hands, whose fingers had been exercised by catching butterflies in flight without disturbing the pollen on their wings. “You’re just clumsy. Now look at this mess you made. You’ve wrecked my display. It took me three hours to set this up.”

  “To set me up, you mean. You knew these bags had holes in them.”

  “Look, it’s not my job to make sure your hands don’t get dirty.”

  “Oh yeah? What is your job, then?”

  The man smiled, pushing a lock of greasy hair off his forehead, raising the curtain on another field of acne. “I’m the assistant manager, wise guy. Manager, hear? My job is to see to it that customers take what we got, or get out. You want something, buy it. If you don’t like what we stock, blow. This is New York, jerk. We don’t need your business.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” Remo said politely. To hell with Smith. “I forgot my place. I must have been thinking I was in a store, where the employees were supposed to be friendly and helpful.”

  The assistant manager snorted a laugh, sizing up the thin man with the abnormally thick wrists, figuring that he would bully him into buying a half-empty bag of potting soil for forty dollars, just as he had bullied his other customers into buying defective irons, soiled baby clothes, torn paperback books, dying parakeets, dented pots, and other items which customers bought because they knew they would be in approximately the same condition in other stores where the employees would be just as rude.

  There was rudeness, plain old run-of-the-mill New York rudeness, and there was that special rudeness that separated the retail world from the rest of the citizenry. That special rudeness, the assistant manager knew, could not be learned. It was a gift.

  The assistant manager had the gift. He was born to his calling, and he was a pro in his field. He knew how to make his customers feel so miserable, so beaten, so helpless, that they would not dare spend their money elsewhere. Since he began his job six months before, sales had gone up more than fifty percent. In another month, he would be manager. In a year, he’d be heading up the entire chain of thirty-five New York stores.

  He was nearly lost in his reverie when he noticed the thin man in the dirt-spattered black tee shirt was doing an amazing thing. He was picking up one of the Amaza-Gro bags with one hand. With his other hand, the thin man was wrapping a green garden hose around the assistant manager from neck to ankles. It all took place in less than three seconds.

  “Just tidying up,” Remo said. “Don’t want you to be upset because of messy customers who dare to criticize your merchandise.” He yanked the assistant manager’s hair so that his eyes bulged and his mouth popped open and every follicle on his head screamed in anguish.

  The assistant manager also screamed, but no one heard him because Remo had stuffed his mouth with pure dehydrated Kentucky horse manure.

  “Yum, yum, eat ’em up,” Remo said, kicking the assistant manager’s feet out from beneath him so that he toppled to the floor and bounced on his rubber tubing exterior like a beach toy.

  “Mff. Pfft,” said the assistant manager.

  “Beg pardon? Speak up.”

  “UHNNK! MMMB!”

  “Seconds, you say?” Remo dumped the rest of the bag’s contents into the man’s mouth. Since it didn’t all fit, Remo helped the Amaza-Gro through the man’s quivering esophagus with a nearby trowel. The metal spade broke in two, so Remo used the handle to tamp down the dirt.

  When the assistant manager stopped asking for more and only opened and closed his eyes in blind terror, he saw Remo do another amazing thing. With no discernible preparation, the thin man with the big wrists vaulted over aisle after aisle of factory-rejected merchandise, laying waste to the contents of the store. Broken Kewpie dolls zoomed across the length of the ceiling with the speed of jet fighters. Dog-eared greeting cards sprinkled the store in a cloud of confetti. One female checkout clerk screamed. The others, seeing the assistant manager immobilized, were too busy robbing the cash registers.

  A very old lady, dressed in black and carrying a cane, looked up apologetically to Remo as he sailed over a pile of plastic shoes tossed randomly in a heap. The lady was holding one of the shoes in her hands, the thin sole flapping apart from the rest of the shoe.

  “I didn’t break it, sir,” the old lady said quiveringly, offering the shoe to Remo. “It just fell apart when I touched it.” She had tears in her eyes. “Please don’t make me pay for these, too.” Remo saw that she was wearing a similar pair on her feet, the soles held on by dozens of rubber bands. “I only wanted to see if they were all—all—” Her wrinkled old eyes crunched up around her tears. Remo grabbed the shoe away from her. It cracked and crumbled in his hand. “Lady,” he asked wonderingly, “Why don’t you wear sneakers? These shoes are worthless.”

  “I can’t afford sneakers,” the lady said. “Do I have to pay for the one you broke, too, sir?”

  Remo reached into his pocket. “I’ll let you go on two conditions,” he said, handing her a wad of bills. She stared at the money in astonishment. Hundreds peeked out. “That you buy yourself a good pair of shoes, and that you never return to this store again. Got it?”

  The old lady nodded dumbly. She began to totter away, but Remo pushed her gently to the side when he heard the heavy breathing of a man with an obesity problem waddling toward him three aisles away. Remo sensed from the man’s uneven footfalls that he was carrying a gun. Remo waited.

  When the manager appeared, the .38 poised amateurishly in his hand, Remo was leafing through the paperback book section, a pile of loose pages at his feet where they had fallen as the book was being opened. A sign above the books read No Browsing.

  The man raised his gun and fired. Remo yawned. “Missed,” he said.

  The store manager looked unbelievingly at the gun. He had fired it point blank at Remo’s chest, and he had missed. Directly behind Remo, a bullet hole smoldered through a stack of school notebooks with lines misprinted diagonally down the page.

  “How’d you do that?” the manager asked. Remo felt no need to reveal the obvious: that he had moved faster than the bullet. The man fired again. Again, Remo shifted his weight off his heels, and then back onto them, and then there was another hole in the notebooks.