He jumped into the freezing, debris-littered water, without any thought for what would happen during the next moment, to rescue a woman who would have died without him.

  He lived.

  Remo would not live, he was almost sure of that. He was better trained than the man standing on the river’s edge, and in a condition superior to any athlete’s. But the odds were still a million to one against him that he would approach the exact speed at exactly the right time, that the impact would be perfect, that the handicaps of a broken hand and excessive air pressure and a snail’s posture wouldn’t hinder him.

  And, somehow, it didn’t matter.

  Suddenly Remo knew how that man on the river’s edge felt, knew as surely as he knew his own name, during that dive into the icy water. There was no heroism involved, no glory, no anticipation, no fear. There was only the air in front of him, and the nerves in his muscles snapping automatically, and the moment he had thrust himself into, pure and free, unconnected with either future or past, moving, soaring, stilled in time.

  The doors loomed up ahead of him. Remo grinned. It was going to be one hell of a fine way to go.

  Five feet in front of the doors, he propelled himself into a horizontal triple spin. His knees bent instinctively. His hair crackled behind him, lighting the dark tunnel with bright sparks. Then, working purely on reflex, he set himself up for the blow.

  The moment had come.

  Three. Two. One.

  The doors flashed with a boom like a dynamite explosion. Abraxas, seated in his wheelchair facing the camera, looked up in horror.

  The room was round and domed. One huge curving window covering half the enclosure looked onto the ocean floor, where primitive dark sting rays fluttered near sponges and red fire coral.

  Remo never stopped moving. Rolling into the circular room, he crossed to the curved window in a fraction of a second.

  The light on the camera glowed red. Abraxas forced himself to turn toward it. “My—my people,” he whispered weakly, his eyes on Remo.

  Remo threw himself against the glass, kicking out with every ounce of strength he could muster. All he saw now was Circe’s face, smiling at him from the past. So there was a past again, he thought. And a future. He had lived.

  The moment was over.

  The glass of the windows starred and burst outward with the impact from Remo’s hurtling body. The sea, in a fury, rushed into the transmission dome.

  He eased his way through the current, his breath suspended. The water, at this depth nearly as dark as the tunnel, burst into blinding light as it reached the electrified doors and set them to fizzling in a wild fireworks display.

  In the sudden brightness he saw Abraxas, first screaming in terror as the ocean rushed toward him, then pitching with the force of the water. He gripped the arms of his wheelchair as it sputtered and bled white sparks. His one eye rolled back into its socket, the eyelid quivering spasmodically as the metal plates on his face and neck blistered and bubbled and steamed in the water. The last thing Remo saw of him was the black voice box falling from its brace.

  Then the lightning stopped, and a ray floated lazily into the wreckage.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SMITH WAS STILL WORKING frantically at the computer console when Remo arrived back at South Shore. Chiun was standing in the corner, banging at the static-filled television monitor overhead.

  “Worthless machine,” he grumbled. “No dramas. No news stories. Not even a variety show featuring trained dogs. Only an ugly man being drowned. Probably a commercial.”

  “What’s up?” Remo asked.

  “I couldn’t scramble the codes in time,” Smith said despairingly. “The world got a full ten seconds of Abraxas getting electrocuted underwater. I don’t know how the president will ever live this down.”

  “The president?” Remo said. “What about me? The TV murderer.”

  “You weren’t recognizable,” Smith said. “All anyone could see was a blur. How did you get to him, anyway?”

  “Well, it was…” he began. But the moment had passed. It was over. It would never be the same again, and no one would ever understand what it had been like. “It was a piece of cake,” Remo said.

  A printout clacked out of the console. “I’ve sent word to the president about this mess by tapping into the White House computers. This must be his reply,” Smith said. He read the printout silently, his face falling. “Helicopters have been dispatched to take out the delegates. Er, I’ll have to explain about the casualty. The advertising man.”

  Smith raised a pencil. “We’ll call it an accident. The mental health of the delegates can be proved to be unstable at this point, I think.”

  “An accident? An ac—”

  “The two of you had better leave the island quickly,” Smith said. “No one will believe what they say about Chiun, but I don’t want him spotted.”

  “One does not need to see the Master of Sinanju to recognize his technique.”

  “Hmmm.” Smith looked stricken.

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “Oh, no bad news,” Smith said quietly. “The White House press secretary has sent out a bulletin to the news media calling Abraxas’s broadcast a hoax. Someone’s even confessed to it. Some independent film producer or something.”

  “Maybe it’ll get his name in the papers,” Remo said. “But what about the bad vibes Peabody and the other zombies caused? You said the United Nations was up in arms.”

  Smith took a deep breath. “It seems that problem is solved, too. New terrorists have come in to replace the assassinated leaders. The countries who were accusing other world powers of sabotaging their images are back to working on the terrorist problem again.”

  “Back to normal, huh?”

  “Normal,” Smith muttered, more to himself than anyone else.

  “Of course it is normal,” Chiun said. “Chaos must be maintained to balance order. It is the inviolate principle of Zen. Good and evil, yin and yang. It has existed long before the fraud who called himself Abraxas.”

  “What about Circe?” Remo asked suddenly.

  “I’ll arrange to have her buried. We won’t be able to attend the funeral, of course.”

  “Then who will?” Remo asked. “No one even knew her name.”

  The room fell silent. At last Smith spoke. “It will be a civil burial, I imagine.”

  “You mean a pauper’s burial. Something for the bums nobody cares about.”

  In the distance, carried over the sea, could be heard the faint drone of helicopters.

  “A special plane is coming to take me to Washington,” Smith said crisply, dropping the subject of funerals. His silence spoke louder than words. After all, there’s nothing anyone can do about her now. “I suggest that the two of you head back toward Folcroft as soon as possible. Can the boat you took me on get you as far as Miami?”

  “It’ll get us as far as Trinidad,” Remo said. “Also Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guadelupe, Barbados, Jamaica…”

  “Out of the question,” Smith snapped.

  “I have a broken hand.”

  “We’ll see to it at Folcroft.” He rose to turn off the computer console.

  “I also have your plans to rip off the IRS,” he said.

  Smith looked over to him, gaping. “What are you saying?”

  “You heard me. It was happy hour with the dictator of the world, remember? Either Chiun and I cruise the seas until my hand gets better, or the Internal Revenue boys get a little present from Harold W. Smith.”

  “That’s blackmail!” Smith sputtered.

  “Hey, nobody hired me for this job because I was a nice guy.”

  “You’re walking a thin edge, Remo.”

  “Tell it to the judge,” Remo said.

  Once outside the computer room, he touched Chiun’s arm. “You go back to the ship, Little Father,” he said. “I’ve got something to do.”

  The old man’s face creased. “Do not punish yourself, my son. Some things cannot be helped.”

  “I know,” Remo said.

  He walked back to the room where Circe lay. Her body had stiffened in death. The long scar on her face stood out darkly against her white skin.

  “Enchantress,” he said, lifting her gently.

  He carried her through the French windows to the grounds outside, breaking easily through the wire fence surrounding South Shore. The clouds had passed, and the night sky was again illuminated by the sparkle of a million tiny stars.

  He took her back to the cave where they had loved together. Inside, he dug a grave deep in the cave’s recesses, where the scents of moss and the sea belonged.

  “Good-bye, Circe,” he said, and kissed her on her cold lips. For a moment they seemed to come alive again, warm and loving. But the sensation vanished, and he laid her body to rest.

  He covered the burial mound with colored stones and a starfish he found at the ocean’s edge. Then he stood back, proud of his work. The grave was a small enough monument to the girl with no name, but it was for him, too. For one day, he knew, he would also be an unknown body with no identity. Like Circe, he possessed none in life. His death, surely, would be just as anonymous as hers.

  And so he buried her for both of them.

  He walked out of the cave slowly. At the entrance, he thought he heard something and turned back, but the place was silent. Fitting for a tomb.

  It was not until he was well away, walking through the mild surf of the darkened beach, that it came to him again, soft but unmistakable, the work of the wind and the sea in the echoes of a rocky inlet marked by a starfish: music.

  The cave was singing, and its music was a siren’s song.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Shock Value, no one’s gonna stop you from leaving a nice review with some stars attached. Cheesy? Yeah, but it really helps. That’s the biz, sweetheart.

  And if you did like Shock Value, maybe you'll like Fool’s Gold, too. It’s the next novel in the Destroyer series, and should be available wherever truly fine ebooks are sold.

  Fool’s Gold

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and the sun was setting red over Bay Rouge in St. Maarten as he guided his sloop to a slow anchor in the small bay.

  The West Indies island was the size of a county back in the states, but it was a perfect location to beam and receive information from satellite traffic in space. That was what he had been told.

  The island was half French and half Dutch and therefore, in that confusion, America could do just about anything without being suspected. It was the perfect island for a special project, except that it had too many people.

  Seventeen too many.

  Jean Baptiste Malaise and his sixteen brothers lived in grand houses between Marigot and Grand Case, two villages that were barely large enough to deserve that name, but which had more fine restaurants than almost any American city, and all of Britain, Asia, and Africa. Combined.

  Fine yachts would dock at Marigot or Grand Case for their owners to enjoy the cuisine. And sometimes, if the owners were alone and returned to their yachts alone, sometimes they were never seen again and their boats, under a different name and different flag, would join the drug fleet of the Malaise family.

  The family might never have been bothered except that the island had to be clean. And it had to be cleaned of seventeen people too many. There could be no outside force functioning on the island.

  The initial plan was that Remo would purchase a powerboat, just the kind that the Malaise were known to prefer for their drug traffic—two Chrysler engines with a specific gear-to-power ratio, a certain kind of propeller, a certain kind of cabin, a special decking that they absolutely loved, and a rakish swept configuration that was produced largely by a California man in conjunction with a Florida motor assembly works.

  Remo would take this boat and dock on the eastern side of the island. Then he would go to a restaurant alone, allow himself to be followed by one of the seventeen Malaise brothers, and then quietly dispose of him somewhere off the island.

  He would continue to do this until the remaining brothers stopped following him, and then he would quietly remove whoever was left.

  But the plan didn’t work. The problem was the boat. He had bought the right boat in St. Bart’s, a neighboring island, right on time a month ago.

  But the boat needed what Remo understood was a “fuesal.” Everybody else he brought the boat to didn’t know what a fuesal was. When someone finally figured out he was mispronouncing the item, three weeks of his time had gone and no one could get the part for another month because it had to be flown in from Denmark.

  He never did find out what a fuesal was exactly. He pointed to another boat.

  “Give me that,” he had said.

  “That is not a powerboat, sir.”

  “Does it run?”

  “Yes. On sail with an auxiliary motor.”

  “Sails I don’t need. Does the motor run and does it have enough gas to get me to St. Maarten?”

  “Yes. I imagine so.”

  “I want it,” Remo said.

  “You want the sloop,” the man said.

  “I want the thing that has enough gas to get me from here,” said Remo, pointing to his feet, “to there.” He pointed to the large volcanic island of St. Maarten, squatting under the Caribbean sun.

  So instead of a powerboat a month earlier, a powerboat that the Malaise family would have coveted, he had a sloop and now he had only 24 hours to clean the island.

  He made it to St. Maarten easily in the unfamiliar boat because he did not have to turn too much.

  He was a thin man and he slipped into the water of Bay Rouge without a wrinkle on a wave. No one on the beach noticed that his arms did not flail the water like most swimmers, but that that body moved by the exact and powerful thrusts of the spinal column, pushing it forward, more like a shark than a man.

  The arms merely guided everything. There was hardly any wake behind the swimmer and then he went underwater so silently one could have watched him, and thought only, “Did I really see a man swimming out there?”

  He moved up out of the water onto a rocky part of the shore with the speed of a chameleon, like man’s first ascent from the sea. He was thin and without visible musculature. His clothes clung wet and sticky to his body but he allowed the heat to escape from his pores and as he walked in the evening air, the clothing became dry.

  The first person he met, a little boy, knew where the Malaises lived. The boy spoke in the singsong of the West Indies.

  “They are all along the beach here, good sir, but I would not go there without permission. No one goes there. They have wire fences that shock. They have the alligator in the pools around their houses. No one visits the Malaise, good sir, unless of course they invite you.”

  “Pretty bad people, I guess,” said Remo.

  “Oh, no. They buy things from everyone. They are nice,” the boy said.

  The electric fence was little more than a few wide strands that might keep an arthritic old cow from trying to dance out of its field. The moat with alligators was a moist marsh area with an old alligator too well fed to do anything but burp softly as Remo passed its jaws. Remo could see the house had small holes in the walls for gunbarrels. But there were also air conditioners in the windows, and nothing appeared to be locked. Obviously the Malaises no longer feared anyone or anything.

  Remo knocked on the door of the house and a tired woman, still beating a food mixture in a bowl, answered the door.

  “Is this the home of Jean Malaise?”

  The woman nodded. She called out something in French and a man answered gruffly from inside the house.

  “What do you want?” asked the woman.

  “I’ve come to kill him and his brothers.”

  “You don’t have a chance,” said the woman. “They have guns and knives. Go back and get help before you try.”

  “No, no. That’s all right,” Remo said. “I can do it by myself.”

  “What does he want?” called the man’s voice in heavily accented English.

  “Nothing, dear. He is going to come back later.”

  “Tell him to bring some beer,” yelled her husband.

  “I don’t need help,” Remo told the woman.

  “You’re just one man. I have lived with Jean Baptiste for twenty years. I know him. He is my husband. Will you at least listen to a wife? You don’t stand a chance against him alone, let alone the entire clan.”

  “Don’t tell me my business,” Remo said.

  “You come here. You come to our island. You knock on the door and when I try to tell you you don’t know my husband, you say it is your business. Well, I tell you, good. Then die.”

  “I’m not going to die,” said Remo.

  “Hah,” said the wife.

  “Is he going to bring back beer?” called the husband.

  “No,” said the wife.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he is one of those Americans who think they know everything.”

  “I don’t know everything,” Remo said. “I don’t know what a fuesal is.”

  “For a boat?”

  Remo nodded.

  “Jean knows,” said the woman, and then, full-lung: “Jean, what is a fuesal?”

  “What?”

  “A fuesal?”

  “Never heard of it,” the man called back.

  Remo went into the main room where Jean Baptiste, a large man with much girth and much hair on that girth, sat on a straight-backed chair. His hair glistened with oil. He had shaved no sooner than a week before. He belched loudly.

  “I don’t know what a fuesal is,” he said. He was watching television; Remo saw Columbo in French. It seemed funny to have the American talk in loud and violent French.