“Is that the knife you used to kill Robin Feldmar?” Smith asked.

  “Yes.” Her voice was chilled as ice.

  “Why?” Smith asked.

  “Because she would have talked. She talked too much. You can have cranks around when you’re starting up and all you’re doing is talking. But when you get to action, to doing things, those people are dangerous.”

  “The revolution eats its own children,” Smith said softly. “When did you know it was me?”

  “A few minutes ago. I called the computer at Du Lac College. It said that you were the spy in Earth Goodness. What are you? CIA? FBI?”

  “None of those,” Smith said. “Why do they call you B?”

  “You know about that,” she said with some surprise. “I should have known. From the moment you came aboard, all we’ve had is confusion and death and disorder. I should have known it was you.”

  “Why do they call you B?”

  “Bunny. A childhood nickname,” she said.

  “I thought it meant Birdie. Feldmar,” he said.

  She shook her head. “She was too stupid to be real. With her antics, marching around those lunatic college children, as if they counted for anything.”

  She rose to her feet. The robe hung open over her opulent body. She dropped the knife in front of her on the floor and extended her arms toward Smith and came across the room to him.

  “We can still have it,” she said. “We can have it all.”

  She smiled, and Smith remembered where he had seen that smile. It was in a French farmhouse, and the girl who had smiled had been responsible for the deaths of fifteen of Smith’s men. She had smiled too, and Smith had killed her.

  He concentrated on the smile, and he hesitated, and Mildred Pensiotte’s smile grew wider. Her hands reached to her waist and pulled her robe open wide.

  The smile. The dead weren’t smiling. They were in St. Martin’s and Washington, and they would be all over if this woman had her way.

  She smiled again and Smith smiled back.

  And fired his revolver.

  “Good-bye, Bunny,” Smith said.

  · · ·

  Back in his mid-town office at Earth Goodness, Inc., Smith again called the Folcroft computers.

  He punched his code into the triggering device, then signaled:

  WHAT HOOKUP OF DU LAC COMPUTER WITH OTHER MAJOR SYSTEMS?

  The computer reported back:

  SYSTEM HOOKED BY MICROWAVE TO CUBAN OFFICE OF KGB.

  Smith paused a moment. The Russians had been behind the plot to kill the president. Mildred Pensiotte and, to a lesser degree, Robin Feldmar, had been Soviet plants, spies working in this country to help overthrow it. The awful thing, he thought, was probably that no one would ever know.

  He directed the computers: VACUUM DU LAC, then entered his code and hung up. In moments, he knew, the giant Folcroft computers would be sweeping clean all the memories from the Du Lac computers. Who knew what might be in those files? There might be some little bit of information that one day might provide him with leverage he might not otherwise have in dealing with America’s enemies.

  He looked up a number in his wallet and dialed.

  The Secretary of the Interior answered the telephone himself. He was sleepy, and his voice was thick with exhaustion.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “This is Smith. Tell the president it’s safe to come home.”

  He hung up and thought again of Remo and Chiun. There they were, off, gallivanting around on a vacation, leaving it to him to protect America and the free world. They’d hear about it when they got back. They’d hear what a hell of a nerve they had leaving all the dirty work for Smith while they were off disporting themselves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE DUTCHMAN GROVELED ON all fours, muttering. “You promised me, Nuihc. You said…you said…”

  Remo approached him like a man whose soul had died. His eyes were blank, his face expressionless. He stopped in front of the Dutchman and kicked him in the throat.

  The Dutchman rolled over, startled.

  “Get up,” Remo said. Before the Dutchman could rise, Remo kicked him again.

  “I have no quarrel with you,” the blond man rasped.

  “Think of one.” Remo slapped him flat across the face.

  The Dutchman stood to full height. “Don’t do this,” he warned. “I am trying—”

  Remo sent two jabs to the man’s belly. “I don’t care if you fight me or not,” Remo said quietly. “As long as I hurt you.” He slammed an elbow into the man’s hip, which sent the Dutchman sprawling.

  A mist appeared instantly, settling over the landscape. The hills softened into pastel domes, like melting ice cream.

  “And you can save the artwork, too. I know where you are.”

  “Do you?” the voice came from behind him. Remo turned. Five identical figures, all the Dutchman, peered at him through the fog. “Where am I, Remo?”

  The five figures disappeared. Another materialized beside him. Remo swung at it. It faded into smoke. “Or am I everywhere?” In a flash of light, the ice cream mountaintops glowed in phosphorescent colors. On the peak of each stood the Dutchman, hundreds of him, like tiny paper cutouts.

  Remo stood still and watched. There were no birds in the sky. The fields were quiet. The Dutchman was real, he told himself, no matter how many figments of himself he could produce. And that one real being moved on two legs like anyone else. Remo shifted his eyes out of focus and concentrated entirely on his peripheral vision.

  Through the fog, to the right of Remo, a figure ran, crouching. He moved swiftly and silently, using all the skill of a lifetime of training. He climbed the highest hill in the area, stopping behind a large dead tree.

  Another figment appeared directly beside Remo, prepared to strike. Remo clenched his jaws and walked through it. He had things to do now.

  Kiree…Kiree and Ancion. They had both known things that were new to Remo. Things that could help him against an enemy more powerful than himself. If he could just remember. He stooped to gather two handfuls of grass and a rock the size of a baseball. He stuffed the rock inside his belt and began to rub the blades of grass.

  Lightning flashed across the sky. A high wind gusted out of nowhere. Remo ignored them, and was left untouched. He concentrated on disintegrating the grass, as Kiree had done, his hands moving so fast that the moisture in the blades evaporated instantly. He spat, slapping his hands together in rhythm.

  He had to take the Dutchman by surprise. No matter how fast he ran, the Dutchman would see him coming in plenty of time to perform one of his tricks. Remo knew that the changes in weather and the constantly shifting landscape were visual lies, but the Dutchman could be subtle. What if he made Jilda burst into flame? Or caused the top of Griffith’s head to explode like a firecracker? They weren’t invulnerable to his ugly games. No, this contest had to be between Remo and the Dutchman, one on one. Remo didn’t expect to win, but he wasn’t about to make anyone else take the loss with him.

  “Fool,” the Dutchman sneered. “You waste my time.”

  Remo spat into his hands again. The pulp was almost the right consistency. He pulled his hands away, and like taffy, the wire-thin fibers formed. He worked quickly, weaving the fine, transparent net around the rock. His hands were moving too fast to see.

  “Your skin is burning,” the Dutchman insinuated. “Your eyes are dry and withering. Blisters cover your body.”

  “Go eat a toad.” It was ready. With one swing, Remo wound the net around a tree and swung up. The second propelled him to a boulder. On the third orbit of the net, he flew toward the crag where the Dutchman waited and landed with both feet in the blond man’s chest.

  “Thanks, guys,” he said to the spirits of Ancion and Kiree. Somewhere, he felt, from some unknown vantage point, they were watching.

  With a whoosh of air from his lungs, the Dutchman fell down the hill. At its base, he righted himself awkwardly and ran. Remo followed him. The ground was soft and covered with holes. The snakes, Remo remembered. Watch it. He can make them come out your ears if he wants to.

  But the Dutchman had no hallucination waiting. He stood beside an open pit, absorbed in its swarming interior. Remo approached, standing across the wide hole from him. The pit contained the skeletons of four men, picked clean by scavengers. They were loosely draped in rags that had once been uniforms of some sort. Over them crawled more snakes than Remo had ever seen in one place.

  The two men circled the pit. The Dutchman’s eyes were pale and lucid, the maniacal fire in them gone. Instead, they held a look of bewilderment as he searched Remo’s face.

  “Who are you?” the Dutchman asked. It was a plea.

  Strange music came to Remo on the wind. Faint but insistent, the dissonant melody was the same as the strains he had heard when he first came to the shores of Sinanju with Jilda and the others. It had filled him with terror then, but now the music carried no more fear than a passing breeze. It was the Dutchman’s music, but devoid of the Dutchman’s power.

  He feeds on fear, Remo thought. When he had stopped caring whether he lived or died, he had lost his fear of the Dutchman. And without the fear, he was no longer a victim.

  The music swelled again, and suddenly Remo recognized it for what it was. It had sounded oddly familiar the first time he heard it, but didn’t understand why. Now he knew. He had heard the same notes long ago, in a small boat setting off to carry him to the first stop in the Master’s Trial. It was Chiun’s music, note for note, only distorted, a perversion of the songs of Sinanju.

  And as he watched the Dutchman standing in mirror image of himself, he understood the music’s meaning. “I am you,” he answered.

  Yin and yang.

  Light and shadow, good and evil, Remo and the Dutchman were opposite sides of the same being. They were born of the same traditions, both white men taken out of their societies and created anew in the ways of Sinanju. They both claimed Masters of the discipline as their fathers.

  Only fate had kept them apart for so long. Now, together, they formed a whole that could only end in destruction.

  “If I kill you, I will die,” the Dutchman said, sounding almost relieved. “It was you all along. I have been seeking the wrong man.”

  “You killed him.”

  “As I must kill you,” the Dutchman said.

  In one perfect spiral leap, he crossed the pit and delivered a blow to Remo’s chest. His ribs broke under the impact. He tried to right himself, but the Dutchman was too fast. Remo felt a shattering pain in his kneecap that sent him flying toward a boulder. He landed on his shoulder.

  The Dutchman kicked him off the rock. “It can’t be done quickly,” he said softly. “I’ve waited too long. The victory must be complete.”

  He stepped back. Remo stirred. The Dutchman crushed his elbow with his heel. The pain flooded over Remo like a wave. His vision receded to a wash of color: black, red, iridescent blue…

  “You will hear me now, and obey,” the Dutchman commanded.

  It was the fear. Stop the fear in yourself, and his power will vanish.

  But he was afraid. No man had ever attacked him so fast. No man had ever beaten him so completely. The Dutchman was better than he was, better than anyone. In the Master’s Trial, the Dutchman would have conquered the world.

  “Feel the knives in your legs, Remo.”

  Remo screamed with the pain. Thousands of blades were suddenly embedded in his skin, cutting to the bone.

  “They are in your hands now, your arms…”

  He felt his palms flatten. The knives, slicing his flesh by inches, moved up his arms. Each thrust was an agony. Each knife brought him closer to the welcome numbness of death.

  “Oh, Chiun,” Remo whispered.

  His eyes fluttered open. In the distance were three moving figures, barely visible. Remo tried to concentrate on them to lessen the pain. He was going to die, but Chiun had once told him that death did not have to be painful. “Take yourself out of the pain,” Chiun had said. Chiun…

  It was Chiun. The old man was alive, walking between Jilda and the boy. The three of them stopped beside H’si T’ang, seated on the ground. Chiun picked his teacher up and moved in a wooden gait toward the cave. As he walked, Chiun turned his head right and left, searching.

  “I am here, Father,” Remo said, too weak to be heard. “I, too, am still alive.”

  Then, from a place deep in his soul, another voice spoke:

  I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds;

  The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.

  Remo rose. He was covered with the wounds he had permitted in his fear, but the knives were gone.

  The Dutchman regarded him, puzzled. When he spoke, his voice was full of false confidence. “You can’t fight me now. Look at you.”

  Blood dripped off Remo’s hands in pools. But the Dutchman’s eyes were afraid. He prepared to strike.

  Remo attacked before the Dutchman’s hands could reach him. Through the pain, despite his broken bones and the blood that covered him, he struck three times, three perfect blows. The Dutchman fell, screaming, into the snake pit.

  Remo watched the sinuous creatures slither over the stunned man who sat sprawled among the bones of the dead. The Dutchman made no attempt to move. Instead, a thin half-smile spread over his face. A drop of bright blood appeared at the corners of the Dutchman’s lips and swelled to a stream.

  “It is here at last,” he said weakly. “The peace I have sought all my life. It is a great comfort.”

  Remo wanted to turn away, but he was unable. His eyes were locked into the Dutchman’s. He felt himself weakening, warming with a flood of quiet resignation. Involuntarily, he dropped to his knees.

  “Don’t you see?” the Dutchman said. “We are the same being. Not men, but something else.” He grimaced with a stab of pain. Remo felt it, too, at the same moment. “We grow closer now, in death. I am sorry to take you with me, but it is the only way. With you, I can finally find rest.”

  Remo nodded slowly. He understood the prophecy.

  The Other will join with his own kind. Yin and yang will be one in the spring of the Year of the Tiger.

  The Dutchman had to die, it was necessary. And when he died, Remo would have to die with him. Yin and yang, light and darkness, life and death, together. It was the prophecy come to fruition.

  He arranged himself in full lotus before the pit and waited, his spirit entwined with the Dutchman’s, to enter the Void.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SOMEONE SLAPPED HIS FACE. The jolt pulled Remo out of his deep trance. Jilda, bruised and cut, was kneeling close to him.

  “I’ve looked everywhere for you,” she said, kissing him. “You’ll be all right now. Put your arm around my shoulder.” Gently she tried to lift him up.

  Still stuporous, he picked up Jilda’s rag-bandaged hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You had no choice. It is forgotten.”

  He pulled away from her. “Chiun. He’s alive. I saw him.”

  “Yes. He lost consciousness, but he is well now.”

  “And H’si T’ang?”

  “Chiun does not think the Venerable One will recover. It is his heart.”

  Remo fumbled to his knees. “Wait,” he said. In the pit, the Dutchman was still sitting, motionless, his eyes frozen into a stare. The snakes were gone.

  “But he couldn’t have died without me.” He made a move to enter the pit.

  Jilda pulled him back. “Come, Remo. You have lost so much blood. What did he do to you?”

  “Don’t…remember,” Remo faltered. “But he shouldn’t be…shouldn’t be…” Confused, he followed her back to the cave.

  Chiun was pale, but his eyes sparkled when he saw Remo. H’si T’ang lay on his back in a space cleared of the rubble from the Dutchman’s lightning attack. The floor, stripped of its straw matting, was bare and cold, but Chiun had laid one of his brocade robes beneath his old teacher. Griffith knelt beside the old man, who smiled.

  “Your return is welcome, son of my son.”

  “Thank you, Master,” Remo said.

  “There is no danger in the air. Has the Other gone to the Void?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “You think?” Chiun asked.

  Something was wrong. The knowledge that Remo and the Dutchman would die together was not a figment of anyone’s imagination. They had both known it as surely as they knew the sun rose in the east. Yet Remo was still alive.

  “He’s dead,” Remo said.

  “Remo,” H’si T’ang said, his ancient hands groping forward to touch him. “You are badly hurt.”

  “Not too badly. I can walk.”

  The old man frowned. “No power,” he said. “I cannot heal you anymore.”

  “That’s all right,” Remo said, composing H’si T’ang’s hands in front of him.

  “But you are too weak…”

  “I’m all right. You’re the one who needs to get better. You saved us both.”

  “Thank you,” H’si T’ang said gently, “but only the young wish to live forever. I am but one step from the Void. It will be an easy step, one I am eager to take.” He smiled. “Besides, it is our belief that a man’s spirit does not enter the Void with him. It is passed to another, and thus lives forever.”

  Remo remembered Kiree, who had fought so bravely in the hills of Africa. “I hope that’s true,” he said.

  The old man coughed. His breath came in spasms, swelling the features of his face. “Chiun?” He raised his trembling hands. “Chiun, my son.”

  H’si T’ang struggled to speak, but no words came. In time, the withered hands stilled, and the ancient parchment-skinned face sank into blankness.

  After several moments, Chiun spoke, in a quavering voice, the benediction for the death of his teacher: “And so it came to pass that in the spring of the Year of the Tiger did the Master of Sinanju die, as was foretold in the legends of ancient times. And thus did the Master become one with the spirit of all things.”

  Jilda led Griffith away. “What was H’si T’ang trying to say?” the boy whispered. Remo left, too, to leave Chiun alone with his grief.