“Nope,” Remo said. “Not that one. She wouldn’t care. Besides, I’d make up for it. For God’s sake, I’d do anything for her.”

  “It would not be enough. And you, my son, who are so eager to throw off your responsibilities to Sinanju. Without you, there will be no Master of Sinanju after me. Except…”

  Suddenly Remo understood. “The Dutchman,” he said.

  “And while the Dutchman wields his power, unchecked, your abilities will have diminished beyond help through lack of use. Why do you think I have you work for Emperor Smith? You are still growing in the ways of Sinanju. You must work for many more years before you may take my place as reigning Master. But after even one year of idleness—or what you think of now, in your dreams, as happiness—all I have taught you will be gone. You cannot rest, any more than the Dutchman.”

  Remo could still hear the distant waves lapping on the shore. “Did you talk Jilda into leaving me?”

  “I said nothing. She is not stupid. Nor am I willing to force you to accept the destiny of Shiva as your own. But you must know the truth. That is why I have broken my promise to Jilda. If you go to her now, at least you will go with some understanding of the consequences.” He released Remo’s arm and walked away.

  Remo stood very still. The sea called to him. Green and blue and gray, the colors of Jilda’s eyes. Soon there would be a child, Remo’s child, with the same strange, unworldly gaze. A beautiful child, born of a love and passion that would never be duplicated.

  A child for the Dutchman to find and kill…

  Remo covered his face with his hands. It would happen, he knew. The Dutchman would never be sane. In his search for death, he would surely come for Remo, because he understood now that their lives were permanently enmeshed. And Remo would have weakened. Even if he practiced the exercises of Sinanju every day, he would not have Chiun to guide him.

  It would be so easy, with Jilda and the baby, to forget the Dutchman altogether. A peaceful life, quiet, comfortable. But one day the Dutchman would come back for him. And Jilda. And the child. The beast inside him would see that Remo had no heirs.

  He whispered, “Jilda, I can’t do it.”

  But she had known that all along, he realized.

  He turned, cold inside, from the sound of the waves and walked back to Chiun. The old man was waiting for him.

  “I wonder if I’ll ever see the baby,” he said.

  “Do you think you could bring yourself to part with them then?”

  Remo thought. “No. No, I guess not.” They walked a long way. “Never, then.”

  “Jilda is a fine woman. She will raise a good son.”

  “Or daughter,” Remo said. “I’ve always wanted a daughter.”

  “A son,” Chiun said simply.

  “What makes you so sure what it’ll be?” A thought occurred to him that made him feel as if his heart had just shot into his throat. “Not another one of your crazy legends.”

  “Some traditions must be continued,” Chiun said, walking ahead.

  “Oh, no. No kid of mine is going to go through this. I won’t let it happen.”

  Chiun turned and smiled. “Then you do believe, after all.”

  Remo scowled. “You old conniver,” he said, strolling beside him.

  Jilda. Oh, Jilda, how I’ll miss you.

  It was a clear night, a night of beginnings and endings. Somewhere on a starlit sea a child was growing. And here, a world away, Remo was alone. Again. It broke his heart.

  “I wish…”

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Go ahead. Sometimes it helps to talk.”

  Remo swallowed. “I wish things didn’t have to turn out the way they do.”

  Chiun put his arm around him. “I know, my son,” he said gently. “I know.”

  Remo felt in his pocket. His carved jade stone from the Master’s Trial was still there. He clutched it tightly. It was all he had to remind him.

  His eyes filled. “Go on without me,” he said. The old man walked ahead. When Remo was alone, he turned his face to the trunk of a tall tree and wept. For himself, for Jilda, for the child he would never see. The Golden Lady would never be his until the day he died. All he had left of her was a cold jade stone.

  A breeze cooled his face, carrying with it the faraway scent of the sea. He looked up. Not all. He had something else, after all. For among the thousands of stars gleaming in the summer sky, one shone above all the others. Gullikona, with its golden fire, burned only for him.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Master‘s Challenge, 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 Master’s Challenge, maybe you'll like Encounter Group, too. It’s the next novel in the Destroyer series, and should be available wherever truly fine e-books are sold.

  Encounter Group

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and shoes annoyed him.

  He was standing on the burning roof of a burning building. Tar on the rooftop was bubbling from the heat, and now the soft live leather of his shoes was starting to give off little puffs of steam, and the soles were sticking into the tar. Like strolling through quicksand, he thought.

  So he kicked off the soft Italian loafers, stood in the hot tar in his bare feet and looked around through the thick haze of smoke for the man he had chased up to the roof.

  He saw him on the far edge of the building. D. Desmund Dorkley was poised on the roof’s edge, looking over, looking for some way to escape being roasted alive.

  He obviously hadn’t counted on Remo Williams. No one ever counted on Remo Williams. Who would count on a dead man?

  Once he had been patrolman Remo Williams, a beat cop in Newark, New Jersey, who expected to retire on a police pension if he made it to age 55. Until he became one of the last persons to be sentenced to die in the electric chair, for the murder of a drug pusher Remo hadn’t killed. He had been framed, and it wasn’t until he woke up with slight electrical burn marks on his wrists and was informed that the chair had been rigged not to kill him, that Remo Williams learned who had set him up.

  It had been the United States government—or, rather, a secret organization within that government known only as CURE. Remo had been chosen as America’s secret enforcement arm to handle an out–of–control crime situation before that situation swamped American democracy.

  “Then I’m not dead?” Remo had asked.

  “Yes, you are,” he was told. “For all intents and purposes.”

  And he was. Remo Williams, an orphan, had officially ceased to exist. He became just Remo, whom CURE had code–named “the Destroyer,” and so began intensive training designed to make the ex–cop a human weapon. Remo had had no choice, but he went through with the whole deal, and it had changed him in ways even Remo didn’t always understand. But all that was long ago, and all D. Desmund Dorkley knew was that a skinny guy with very thick wrists was running barefoot toward him, and there was no expression of pain in the man’s eyes as there should have been. The eyes just looked dead.

  For D. Desmund, it was to have been an ordinary torch job. A pile of rags in a corner of an old warehouse, a can of gasoline and a flick of a Bic. No problem.

  Until the unexpected Remo Williams stepped out of the shadows and asked, “Got a light, pal?”

  That was just as the rag pile went orange with a whooosh! D. Desmond, who never carried a gun because loud noises frightened him, dived out the nearest exit, which unfortunately led to the roof. It was a fundamental mistake. You do not go up into a building that is about to go up. You get out. But something about the cold, dead eyes of Remo Williams unnerved D. Desmund. So, he made his first professional mistake.

  It was to have been an ordinary job for Remo Williams, too. He hadn’t counted on the arsonist getting the fire started, but Remo was delayed because his trainer had insisted on accompanying him on an ordinary hit.

  “Damn Chiun,” Remo muttered as he shifted to a less hot part of the warehouse roof, where the tar wouldn’t stick to his feet. There, the roof was only hot enough to broil a steak, not cook the skin from his feet in sliding chunks. Remo wore a black T–shirt that left his arms bare. It was the lesser evaporation of sweat from his left arm that told Remo that it was cooler to his left, and so he veered left.

  Remo could do these things because of his training. It worked this way: Remo ran in a long–legged stride in which only one foot touched the ground at a time. The principle depended entirely on rhythm, which is what made Remo’s movements look so graceful, as if his feet floated from motion to motion. The rhythm demanded that Remo keep moving and that one foot remain in the air for the exact length of time the other touched the hot roof surface. With each step, Remo felt the brief flash of heat signaling contact, but only long enough to touch, find traction, and propel him forward another step. Then the other foot took over. Yes, Remo felt the heat but, no, Remo’s feet were not burned. They were not in contact with a heat source long enough to be burned. As for the pain, what little Remo felt in the soles of his bare feet was drawn up his legs, through the nerves, where it was diffused into a tingling sensation. Correct breathing technique enabled Remo to handle pain in this manner.

  It was not much different from the way Hindu fire walkers moved over hot coals—except that they had the technique secondhand and were sometimes burned. Remo had the technique from its originators, which is to say he had it in its pure form and not the Hindu style, which depended in part on the heat–absorbing properties of human sweat and sometimes on artificial salves. And he knew that as long as only one foot touched at a time and he didn’t break stride, he could run across the burning roof safely.

  Remo knew how to make the technique work, but he didn’t understand how it worked. His trainer understood, but Remo had a long way to go before he completely mastered the art of Sinanju, of which fire walking was but a part. On the other hand, he had only a short way to go across the roof, and he got to the cooler edge just as D. Desmund Dorkley, with a horrified scream, tried to jump out and down to the next roof.

  “Uuurk,” said D. Desmund, when he found himself hanging in midair by his green jacket collar, his yellow bow tie looking like a bright, vampiric butterfly at his throat.

  “Let me go. Let me go. God, put me down,” D. Desmund screeched. His legs kicked like a swimmer’s over empty space, and his blond hair was limp with sweat. He didn’t look like a man who had torched a museum, a church, two office buildings, a fast food restaurant and a school for the blind in just three weeks, and all in the Baltimore area, which showed up on CURE’s computers as an aberration significant enough to call for drastic attention. Those same computers had worked out a probability pattern that pinpointed the warehouse as the arsonist’s next target so that Remo Williams could be there.

  And now Remo, who had simply extended his hand and caught D. Desmund’s coat collar, stood on the edge of the roof and held the arsonist out at arm’s length. Although Remo did this casually, it didn’t seem possible. For one thing, Remo’s arm was too thin and held at too awkward an angle for him to be able to stand on a precipice and hold up a struggling man without both of them toppling over the edge.

  If D. Desmund hadn’t been scared completely out of his mind, he would have realized that fact and possibly pointed this out to Remo Williams.

  Remo, had he been so inclined, might have informed him that his arm really wasn’t holding up a 200–pound man by main strength. No, it just looked that way to Western eyes because Westerners always thought in terms of just using their arms and then only the muscles in those arms, as if muscles alone provided strength and weren’t really simply a system of pulleys—which was exactly what a muscle was when you thought about it. A pulley.

  No, Remo was holding D. Desmund up with Remo’s entire body—from the strong toes, which hooked over the roof edge for purchase, to the straight legs and locked knees; and to the stiff spinal column, which provided a fulcrum for the arm, which was held in position by muscle tension, but whose strength really came by the bones within that arm. Balance had something to do with it all. Balance was important in Sinanju, but strength came from the correct alignment of bones that interlocked and spread the dragging weight of D. Desmund’s body throughout Remo’s body. Balance, bones, muscles, and breathing. All of Remo functioning in perfect harmony with its parts and creating a unity which was greater than the sum of those parts, tapping Remo’s inner potential. This was Sinanju.

  And so D. Desmund did not fall to his death, taking Remo with him.

  When D. Desmund finally stopped screaming and flailing, and said, “Oh dear God almighty” once weakly and shut his eyes, Remo hauled him back to the roof edge, careful not to disturb the harmony of his own body.

  “I want the truth,” Remo said, after his captive again opened his eyes.

  “Sure,” D. Desmund said. “You got it. Any truth you want. Just name it.”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re being cooperative. Why did you set that fire?”

  “I didn’t set any fire,” D. Desmund told him.

  “I saw you, remember?”

  “Oh. That’s right.”

  “Now, why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t,” D. Desmund said with a straight face.

  “Right,” said Remo. “Let’s try a different approach, okay?”

  “Okay,” said D. Desmund eagerly.

  “Listen carefully,” Remo said. “You’re going to have one chance to answer this question, and then I’m going to push you off this roof. Okay?”

  “Okay,” repeated D. Desmund, who was as frightened as he’d ever been in his life, which meant he was very, very frightened.

  “Good. Stay with me, now. Here’s the big question: Did you torch all of those buildings because someone paid you or because you wanted to?”

  “Because I wanted to. I like to watch stuff burn.”

  “That’s fine. Thank you for leveling with me. Goodbye.” And Remo pushed D. Desmund off the roof.

  But D. Desmund, acting by reflex, grabbed Remo’s thick right wrist, which felt like a skin–covered girder.

  “Wait a minute—you said if I answered your question you wouldn’t push me.”

  “No, no,” Remo corrected. “You weren’t listening. I didn’t say ‘You’re going to have one chance to answer this question or I’m going to push you off this roof.’ I said, ‘You’re going to have one chance to answer this question and then I’m going to push you off this roof.’”

  “But that’s not Fa—AAAAIIIRRRR…” said D. Desmund just before he went splat on the hard pavement below.

  “That’s the biz, sweetheart,” said Remo as he jumped across to the next roof and slid down its brick surface like a spider to join the kimono–clad individual who was waiting for him.

  “Hear, hear,” said Chiun, who was Remo’s trainer and, although 80 years old, the most dangerous man on earth. “Excellently done, Remo.” He was a small, frail Korean with clear hazel eyes in a wrinkled old face to which clung tiny wisps of hair above each ear and from his chin. A black night kimono concealed most of his form.

  Remo, who was not used to praise from his teacher, nevertheless accepted the words graciously. “You do me great honor, Little Father.”

  “Yes,” said Chiun. “Your technique, especially on the burning roof, was exemplary. Your feet are not even singed.”

  “I lost my shoes,” replied Remo, who was becoming suspicious.

  “Shoes are shoes, but correct technique is art. It is beauty. It is perfection. And you only recently were given the gift of fire walking.”

  “Yeah, but the firebug managed to torch this place before I got to him,” Remo pointed out.

  Chiun shrugged. “It is unimportant in the face of your skill. Besides, this structure is ugly. Someone should burn them all.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Remo vaguely. “Can we continue this back at the hotel? The fire department will be here any minute now.”

  “Very well, then,” said Chiun, a smile multiplying the wrinkles of his old face. “Let us return home.”

  · · ·

  “We will have duck tonight,” Chiun said when they had entered the suite of their Baltimore hotel, which was one of the best in the city even though it was only two blocks away from a peep show parlor. For some reason, although the city of Baltimore had a waterfront area in which its adult entertainment establishments were congregated, there were few sections of the city not blighted by massage parlors and adult bookstores.

  “I think duck in apricot sauce would be appropriate,” Chiun added, humming happily to himself as he disappeared into the kitchenette.

  “I’ve gotta tell Smith the firebug was working on his own,” Remo said, picking up the phone. Smith was Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE and Remo’s employer, although Smith was ostensibly the director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, from which he and his batteries of computers secretly ran CURE. Because Smith was waiting in Rye for Remo’s report, Remo called a number in North Quincy, Massachusetts, which instantly rerouted his call through Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, but which rang a secure phone on Smith’s desk.

  “Remo,” Smith’s lemony voice demanded before Remo could so much as say hi. “What happened? I have a report the target warehouse was torched.”

  “Do you have a report that a body was found next to the warehouse?” Remo asked, wondering how Smith’s voice could sound as bitter as a lemon wedge and as dry as a Graham cracker both at the same time.

  “No,” Smith said.

  “Well, there was. And besides, the building was ugly. So get off my case,” said Remo before he hung up.

  When Chiun returned a few minutes later, he was still humming, so Remo decided to get to the bottom of that, too.