Remo looked after him. Chiun appeared at the upstairs window and saw Remo.

  “It is all right, Remo,” he called. “I saved him for you.”

  “Thank you, Little Father,” Remo said. He walked slowly behind the ambulance to the putting green.

  The Wa assassin, his breath coming nervously in short puffs, watched as the American stopped ten feet away from him and waited, hands on hips.

  “It’s all over, peanut,” Remo said.

  Not yet, the assassin thought. He had missed upstairs, something that had never happened before. But that was no guarantee that he would miss now. The young white man stood facing him, offering up his body to the assassin’s knives, and with both hands at once, the Wa ripped knives from his belt, and flew them toward the waiting victim.

  Remo posed, hands on hips, until the knives were almost on him, and then his hands moved. His left hand slashed against the handle of the knife aimed at his throat and knocked it harmless to the ground. His right hand moved only a few inches upward, just barely touching the knife aimed at Remo’s eyes, but enough to veer the knife off course. It soared over the white man’s head and travelled ten feet more before it buried itself deep into the trunk of a fat tree.

  The Wa turned to run. Panic overcame pride in him and he fled. But as he reached the stand of trees, suddenly, there was a movement alongside him, and then the American was standing in front of him, smiling at him.

  The Wa turned away. He ran back, across the putting green toward the trees on the other side. But again he saw a flash of movement from the side of his eyes, and then there was the American again.

  He was beckoning the Wa to come on, to come closer.

  The assassin stopped. In bitter desperation, he cried: “Who are you? Who are you two?”

  “Tell your ancestors about us,” Remo said. “They’ll know who we are.”

  The Wa reached desperately for one last knife on his belt. One final chance. Even as he reached he knew it would not work, but his hand closed around the red leather grip and he slipped the knife from his belt and raised it up over his head, and then he felt the white man’s hand close over his. The Wa’s knife moved downward, but the white man held the Wa’s hand closed, and the knife, instead of releasing and flashing forward, kept moving down, and then he felt a burst of pressure against his hand, and the knife drove itself into the assassin’s stomach.

  So this was how it felt, he thought, and then the knowledge that he had a knife buried in his stomach came fully to him, and so did the pain, and it hurt. It hurt terribly.

  Remo stepped back and looked at the assassin. Their eyes met.

  And then the Wa’s eyes began to glaze over and a dumb, puzzled look came over his face, and he fell forward onto his own knife. But he no longer felt any pain.

  Remo looked down at the body for a moment, then up at the window of Pruiss’s room. Chiun was in the window, shaking his head.

  “No grace,” he said. “Awkward with no grace.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Remo said. “I thought he was kind of clumsy.”

  “I didn’t mean him,” Chiun said bitterly, and turned from the window.

  Remo confronted Chiun inside Pruiss’s room.

  “All right,” he said. “So you get word that the assassin’s around and maybe I’m in trouble, and you don’t even come to see if you can help me,” Remo said. “Fine partner you are.”

  Chiun folded his arms. “I knew you were in no danger,” he said.

  “How’d you know, hah? How’d you know?”

  “Must we really do this?” Chiun asked.

  “Just answer the question. How’d you know I wasn’t in any trouble?” Remo demanded.

  Chiun sighed.

  “When the woman who thinks like a man called, and told me to come to save you, I knew it was a lie,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Because she is not to be trusted. Did you not see when we were at the place of airplanes that she knew a boom…”

  “Bomb,” Remo said.

  “…was going to explode?” Chiun looked at Remo. “No,” he answered himself. “You did not see that.”

  He turned toward the window. “And of course you never asked yourself why the Wa assassin missed the first time. He missed because he was ordered to miss. But who would benefit by keeping this publisher person alive, but damaged? No. You did not ask yourself that either.”

  “What’s going on here?” Pruiss demanded. “What’s going on here?” He lay on his pillows watching the two men argue, his head moving from side to side as if watching a tennis match.

  “And then of course you told me about your reaching twenty two steps with her and I knew that was not possible for a white woman who acted like a woman. It was obvious she was a manly woman. You would even have seen it if you had looked at the strange size of her masculine fingers. But you look and do not see, look and do not see.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Pruiss roared.

  “So I knew it was a trick to get me away from here,” Chiun said. “And of course I did not go.”

  “All right,” Remo said. “I’ll let it go this time.”

  “What…” Pruiss started.

  Remo turned to the publisher and told him that Theodosia had been behind it all. Her goal had been to get him to sign his empire over to her, and then to kill him.

  Pruiss shook his head.

  “What for? Just for the money?”

  Remo shrugged. “Who knows? Who can figure out lesbians? Probably the money.”

  “I would have given her the money,” Pruiss said. “For that, she left me a cripple?”

  “I wanted to speak to you about that,” Chiun said. “What would it be worth to you to use your legs again?”

  “Anything.”

  “You will publish my stories?” Chiun asked.

  “I’ll publish your damn poetry,” Pruiss said.

  “We have a bargain,” Chiun said. “Go to sleep. I must prepare.”

  He followed Remo out of the room.

  “Prepare?” Remo said. “What are you going to prepare?”

  Chiun shook his head. “That is just for effect. There is nothing to prepare.”

  “And you’re going to make him walk again?” asked Remo.

  “Of course. He can walk now,” Chiun said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You did not really believe that that Indian charlatan was bringing life back to his limbs by allowing his legs to sunburn, did you?”

  “No. Of course not,” said Remo who was not quite that sure.

  “But Mister Pruiss felt life in his limbs every morning,” said Chiun. “After his sunbath.”

  “So?”

  “And then the manly woman brought him inside again to give him his medicine and he felt no more life in his limbs.”

  Remo slowly began to nod.

  “She called it medicine to kill Mister Pruiss’s pain. But I tasted it while you were gone. It is medicine that keeps his limbs paralyzed. I have thrown it away. Without it, tomorrow his legs will return to life.”

  “You’re awful, Chiun,” said Remo.

  Chiun looked at him with an angelic blank expression.

  “Whatever do you mean?” he asked.

  “Some people will do anything to get published,” he said.

  Chiun smiled. “And what of the woman?” he asked.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Remo said. “I’ll take care of all of them.”

  The next morning, when the previous day’s medicine had worn off, Wesley Pruiss felt life returning to his legs. The feeling grew stronger all day long.

  Two days later, he was able to stand again, and within two weeks he was walking.

  A day later he held a press conference and announced that he was returning the ownership of Furlong County to the people of the county who had been “so hospitable and gracious in welcoming me among them.” He also announced that he was setting up a private foundation that would go ahead with his plans to make Furlong County the nation’s solar energy laboratory, and he would pick up all the bills for the work.

  His final announcement was that he was beginning a new magazine. It would be dedicated to bringing to the public a realization of the ancient glories and beauties of the great Korean literary form, Ung poetry.

  Pruiss’s announcements did not get the kind of Page One coverage they normally would have. Unfortunately, they were crowded off the front pages by a terrible tragedy at the Furlong County Airport.

  A gang of muggers, whom no one had seen but who must obviously have been a large gang, had fallen upon three people at the airport—Theodosia, Rachmed Baya Bam and Will Bobbin. In the melee all three were killed. The murder weapons were unusual red-handled knives, with rearing stallions engraved on the blade.

  The only person noticed near the scene was a thin, dark-haired white man with thick wrists.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Power Play, maybe you’ll like Bottom Line, too. It’s another Destroyer novel, now available as an ebook.

  Bottom Line

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and he did not know fear. He knew the cold of the slick ice against his body in the dark mountains of New Hampshire. He knew the winds that could pop a person like a wicker ball down the midnight ravine, banging bones to pitiful chips in a skin-slit shell of organs that would no longer breathe or digest food or purify blood or pump that blood. He knew the winds. He knew force.

  And because he understood it, not as some hostile deadly force, but as part of the same universe his breathing was part of, Remo Williams did not skid down the rock hard ice of the White Mountains in late December.

  His body, lightly covered with black mesh, moved as if it had grown on this mountain, up with each reach and press, a perfect unity that needed no stairs or ladders or ropes, the things that other bodies, softer and unused bodies, required to move up a sheer ice cliff.

  He moved now up the cliff, not even thinking of his breathing. He moved because he willed it and the many years of pain and wisdom that had brought him here with the winter taste in his mouth and the low moan of the spruce down below, made him a part of this universe that frightened so many men, which made others stiff of joints and, even worse, robbed them of their rhythms and of the timing that gave some men power.

  Those other men had learned the wrong ways because their food was mush and their lives starved for the daily spring of survival. They had not learned that fear was like a mild hunger or a light chill. They had become unused to fear, so that from them it stole strength.

  To this man with the thick wrists and thin body moving up into darkness under a black, cold sky, fear was, like his breathing, something else, something that existed apart from him, and because he did not need it to climb this slick curtain of glare ice, he did not call on it.

  He came up over the top of the cliff with a small rolling motion that barely dented the deep fresh snow and then was standing at the top, looking at the brightly-lighted cabin, half-hidden behind a band of pine trees fifty yards away. He moved toward the cabin. His feet made no sound in the deep fresh snow. No puff of breath noisily escaped his lips, and he thought of the days when he clumped noisily down a flight of steps and puffed like a tea kettle climbing the same steps.

  That had been years ago, but it had been more than years too. It had happened in a different lifetime.

  He had been Remo Williams then, Patrolman Remo Williams in the Newark, New Jersey, police department, and he had been framed for a murder he hadn’t committed and sentenced to an electric chair that hadn’t worked, and then resurrected to serve as the killer arm for a secret organization that fought crime in the United States.

  That was what the organization, CURE, had contracted for, but what they got was something else. No one had known that the years of training and the discipline of body and mind would have changed Remo Williams from what he once was to… to what?

  To what? Remo Williams grinned as he moved through the night. Not even he knew what he was. An ancient and wise Oriental sitting in a houseboat on the shore of Lake Winnepesaukee fifty miles away thought that Remo Williams was the reincarnation of Shiva, the Indian god of destruction. But the same wise Oriental thought that Barbra Streisand was America’s most beautiful woman, that soap operas, before they got dirty and obscene, were America’s only real art form, and that a depressing little fishing village in North Korea was the center of the universe.

  So much for Shiva. Remo was not the reincarnation of a god, but he wasn’t just a man either. He had become more. He had become what men could be, if they learned to use their bodies and their minds to the full extent of their powers.

  “I’m a man,” he said softly to himself, his whisper lost in the wail of wind through the trees. “That’s got to be worth something.”

  Then he was standing alongside one of the windows of the cabin, listening to the voices inside.

  There were four of them, four men talking. They were talking with the fearlessness of men who know that no one could reach them because the only way up to the cabin was along a twisting road, and that road was spotted with detection devices, and, for the last seventy-five yards to the cabin, with buried land mines.

  So the members of the Cypriot Liberation Alliance felt quite free to discuss which kind of babies were best to plant dynamite sticks under. Little black babies or little blonde babies.

  “Nobody touch a baby carriage, especially when you wheel it into a maternity ward,” said one aloud.

  “What that got to do with mainland Greeks?” asked another.

  “We show them, Tilhas,” said the first, “what we think of how they not help us when we attack the Turks and lose. All we have are the Palestinians, our spiritual brothers.”

  A third voice spoke up. “Anyone who can see the moral imperative in dynamiting babies as part of revolutionary justice knows and understands Greek Cypriot values,” he said.

  A fourth voice spoke. “We are victims. Imperialists are the oppressors.”

  The man called Tilhas who did not seem to understand all this blood lust asked “But why assault Americans?”

  “Because they supply the Turks.”

  “But they supply us also.”

  “How can you call yourself a Cypriot if you don’t blame others for what happens to you? If you put up a bad roof, blame corporate imperialism. If your daughter gets pregnant, blame Hollywood movies. When you rob your father and he breaks your bones for it, blame the Egyptians. You must remember at all times you are a Cypriot and that means you will never invent anything or build anything or grow anything anyone else will want. Therefore you can never be on the side of doers. They must always be your enemies, Tilhas. America is made up of the worst doers in the world. Therefore, we must hate them most. Besides, it’s easiest to dynamite baby carriages here. If we get caught, nobody pulls our arms out our shoulders. Nobody peels our skin off our back. Nobody starts bonfires on our bare stomach. No one hurts us. They just put us in jail and let us go a little later.”

  “Wrong,” came Remo’s voice. He stood inside the door, looking around at the four men. “There are still some of us who think that evil ought to be punished.”

  “Who are you?” asked one of the Cypriots.

  Remo raised a hand for silence. “Which one of you is Tilhas?”

  A small man with a scraggly mustache and basset-hound eyes raised his hand meekly. “I Tilhas. Why?”

  “I heard you from the window,” Remo said. “I’m going to do you a favor. You’re going to die easily.”

  He did. The others didn’t.

  Remo looked down at the thrashing body of the last one still to live.

  “They’ll find you in the spring,” he said. “When they see what happened to you, I think everybody else in your ragtag little gang is going to go back to Cyprus and forget about dynamiting babies. So don’t look at it like you’re just dying. You’re giving your life to save your fellow Cypriots.”

  The man mumbled.

  “I can’t hear you,” Remo said.

  The man mumbled again.

  Remo reached down and removed the man’s right elbow from his mouth.

  “Talk up now. What’d you say?”

  “To hell with fellow Cypriots,” the man said.

  “That’s what I’d thought you’d say,” Remo said. “If I meet any more, I’ll pass on the message.”

  And then he was back out into the cold windy night, moving smoothly across the snow back toward the icy cliff.

  Yes, that’s what he was, he was a man. Remo Williams smiled. Sometimes that wasn’t a bad thing to be.

  · · ·

  When he got back to the houseboat on Lake Winnepesaukee, that illusion was shattered. He learned that he had two left feet and compared with him, hippopotamuses were ballet dancers and an elephant trumpeting was a whisper and “I don’t know why I let you hang around with me.”

  Remo had changed from his black mesh suit into black chinos and a white tee shirt. He lifted his head up from the built-in couch on the houseboat and looked at the old Oriental who had spoken.

  The man was sitting on the indoor-outdoor rugging of the floor. He was surrounded by inkwells and quill pens and on his lap, he had a large sheet of parchment. Behind him were a half dozen more sheets.

  All the sheets, including the one on his lap, were blank.

  “Can’t write again today, huh, Chiun?” Remo said.

  “I could write anytime I wanted,” Chiun said, “if my heart were not so heavy.”

  Remo turned away and looked out the window over his head. The stars still twinkled in the nighttime sky but already the horizon was lightening as dawn grew near. Without looking back, Remo said:

  “I suppose you better tell me how I’m ruining your life this time.”

  “You are very cooperative,” Chiun said.

  “Just thoughtful,” said Remo. “I’m a thoughtful man. I figured that out tonight on the mountain. I’m a man. Nothing else. All your silly Korean legends about Shiva, the Destroyer, and me being a god are all just that. Hogwash. I’m a man.”