“The publisher of the Sacramento Bee.”

  “Well, that makes sense in a moronic kind of way,” said Remo.

  “Instead, he chose Tammy Terrill.”

  “Yeah. And we know what happened there.”

  “Your timing was fortunate. She has been so professionally embarrassed she is unlikely to resurface again. More importantly, the Bee-Master menace is over. There has been not a single attack since you vanquished Pym. All his equipment and insects we have found have been destroyed. I have so informed the President.”

  “Well, all’s well that ends,” grunted Remo, looking out the window for the zillionth time.

  He saw a long white stretch limousine pull up. “And here’s my date. Catch you later, Smitty.”

  Hanging up, Remo started down the stairs as the doorbell chimed. He heard the door open and Jean’s smoky voice clash briefly with Grandmother Mulberry’s witch’s croak.

  A moment later, the old bat herself came rushing up, her yellowed prune face crimson as an apple.

  “How’s it going, Granny?” he asked jauntily.

  She glared at him and said, “Hope you and foul-mouth white girl marry soon. You deserve each other. Good riddance.”

  “Have a nice evening yourself,” returned Remo.

  Jean was waiting at the door, dressed in a shimmering blue nightgown.

  She took one look at Remo’s casual attire and asked, “You’re not going out looking like that, are you?”

  Remo stopped in his tracks. “Oops.”

  Jean’s frown turned into a grin as she reached behind her and hoisted into view a neatly pressed suit on a hanger.

  “I cashed in my lottery ticket. So tonight we ride in style and you dress so I’m not embarrassed to be seen in public with you. Not that I would be anyway.”

  Remo took the suit. “What’d you tell Grandma Mulberry?” he asked. “She looked like someone spanked her good.”

  “She tried to give me a hard time, so I used the line you taught me to.”

  “Dwe juhla?”

  “Yep.”

  “That got her, huh?”

  Jean smiled mischievously.

  “Well, I added ‘you old bone bag,’ too.”

  Remo grinned. “Okay, I just gotta let Chiun know not to wait up.”

  But they couldn’t find Chiun anywhere. He wasn’t in the bell-tower meditation room. Nor in the kitchen. The fish cellar was empty, too.

  Finally, Remo knocked on the door of Chiun’s private room. It fell open.

  Inside, there was no sign of the Master of Sinanju.

  But on a low taboret, Remo found a book. Recognizing the cover, he picked it up.

  The title was The Joy of Astral Sex.

  “Hey, this is the same book I caught Grandma Mulberry with!” Remo blurted.

  “So? They’re reading the same book. What’s wrong with sharing?”

  “Except I jammed her copy down the garbage disposal.”

  Remo’s face turned shock white. “You don’t suppose... Not Chiun. Not with her...”

  “Hey,” said Jean, beckoning Remo to follow her out the door, “he’s old. He’s not dead. Neither are you. And the night is young. Come on. You can change clothes in the car. I’ll try not to peek.”

  Shrugging, Remo dropped the book and followed her out, muttering, “Now I’ll never get rid of that old fishwife…”

  Read More

  IF YOU ENJOYED FEAST OR FAMINE, no one’s gonna stop you from clicking back to whatever online merchant sold it to you and leaving a nice review. Maybe with some stars attached. Do the man a solid, hey? That’s the nature of the ebook biz, sweetheart.

  Maybe you’ll like some of the others in the Destroyer series, too. There’s a lot to like, and the odds are this isn’t the first one you picked up, anyway, so you know what you’re in for. Get the straight skinny from Warren Murphy et Fils at destroyerbooks.com.

  Murder Ward

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and the Bay winds out of the Pacific whipped at him with all the fury gathered over the vast stretch of ocean. The Golden Gate spun out before him to Marin County, the gateway to the northwest. Behind him was San Francisco and going east, the rest of America.

  He stood on the guardrail, where four hundred and ninety-nine others had plunged to their deaths in suicides marking otherwise insignificant lives.

  The man was about six feet tall, normal in build. Only extra-thick wrists suggested he might be more than just an ordinary man, but there was nothing in the wrists to suggest that he could be standing there with the soles of his bare feet just touching the round railing of the bridge.

  For one thing, Volkswagens crossing the bridge in the pre-dawn darkness tended to shift as the cross-gusts buffeted them. For another, his dark pants and dark shirt whipped like flags in a hurricane. And for another, he stood upright, very casual as if doing nothing more enervating than contemplating a change of television channel in his living room.

  He smelled the salt Pacific breeze and felt the December cold that kept car windows closed and left many rear windows clouded with steam.

  The cold he handled simply, by letting his body become one with it, as he was taught. The wind he handled another way. It was not that his body fought the wind; it was that his body became stronger than the wind by becoming part of the bridge, connected by his very thoughts to the support driven deep into the bedrock that bordered the Bay.

  “Are you waiting for applause?” came the squeaky Oriental voice from behind him. “Or are you about to make a great production of a simple exercise?”

  “Thank you for distracting me. I really needed a distraction. If there’s one thing I needed standing two hundred feet above open water with a winter wind whipping at me, it’s a distraction,” said Remo, turning around to the wispy Oriental in a dark black kimono, whose strands of white hair flew in the wind like vagrant silk threads, but who stood just as securely on the pedestrian walk as Remo did on the railing.

  “If your mind is a slave to every noise, do not blame the noise for your subservience,” said Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. “It is not a master that makes a slave, but a slave who makes those about him a master.”

  “Thank you for a very merry Christmas, Little Father.”

  “If your heart remains with a white man’s holiday, then perhaps I should stand on that bar with you lest you fall, for truly, not even the House of Sinanju can overcome treasured bad habits.”

  “Well, I’m not going ga-ga over the Feast of the Pig.”

  “It is not called the Feast of the Pig,” said Chiun. “It is a day when those who feel obligated to someone who has given them much wisdom return some small little offering of thanksgiving.”

  “You’re not getting Barbra Streisand,” Remo said. “We don’t give women like that around here.”

  “She would be good for bearing children. And seeing your shoddiness of performance, the House of Sinanju needs another male.”

  “She’s not Korean, Little Father. She’s as white as I am.”

  “For beauty, one makes an exception. The blood of Sinanju should overcome any inadequacies. And then I would get a pupil without learned bad habits and arrogance and talkativeness. Even the greatest of artists has difficulty molding hardened clay.”

  Remo turned back to the cold wind. He knew its sound was there but he did not hear it. He knew the cold was there but he did not feel it. He knew the bridge was beneath him and around him but he did not sense it. He was moving along a thin bar at an outside angle above dark waters and his thoughts and feelings were the center of his balance. He could run for days like this, he felt, and though he was aware of the lights of cars moving at him and beside him, they were not in his world. His world was passing them faster and faster and as his world approached the far side of the bridge, he reversed it in a spin that stopped not with his feet because his bones could not support that sort of jarring pressure, but with the very stopping of his world. And then he was moving back toward Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.

  It had all started so simply a decade before with exercises that caused pain that he had never known his body could endure. But then the pain became different and the exercises that were at first difficult became easy, until his body knew what to do from distant memory and his mind moved on to other things.

  It was more than a change in the quality of his skills; it was a change of his very nervous system and his being. And if he had been truthful with Chiun, he would have admitted that most of his loneliness at Christmastime had left years before and he was now in his soul more a descendant of Sinanju, that tiny village in North Korea which had through the centuries produced assassins for the kings and emperors whose gold supported the rocky village where nothing seemed to grow.

  Remo was the first Caucasian to be taught the secrets of Sinanju. For in hiring himself to “Upstairs,” Chiun had agreed to train, instead of perform, and Chiun once admitted that he had given Remo more than what he called “the little tricks” of kung fu, aikido, and tae kwan do. He had given Remo the source of them all—Sinanju. And Upstairs had its white assassin who could move freely in a white society. Neat.

  Remo’s world moved back to Chiun, standing almost invisible on the walkway, and then Remo stopped, still motionless, still in perfect harmony with the deep-sunk bridge supports.

  “You may begin,” said Chiun.

  “Begin? I’ve finished, Little Father.”

  “Did you really? I was not watching. I was thinking about my home across the waters. In the cold mornings, I think of Sinanju. I think of how there would be a gift waiting for me if I were home. I do not know what the gift would look like, or if she would be as gracious as the singer of songs, but it is not the size of the breast or hip, but the thought that counts. Oh, if I were but home.”

  “I can’t give you a human being, Little Father.”

  “Who am I to expect a little nothing of a remembrance from one who has received so much from me?”

  “If you want something warm, I’ll get you a cow,” said Remo.

  “I already have a cow. He talks back to me,” said Chiun, and Remo heard that cackle that indicated this saying would be coming back at him for several days. Along with the cackle.

  “I have a cow already. He talks back to me,” Chiun repeated. As much to get away from the tinkly laugh as anything else, Remo ran the Golden Gate again. This time he heard voices yelling, intruding into his moving world.

  “That’s him. Stop him. My God. He’s going sideways. I don’t believe it. Look at how fast he’s going. He’s going to jump. There. That guy on the bridge. Stop him.”

  When he returned to Chiun, he received a nod of recognition and hopped down from the railing.

  “In Persia, the shah would have given a Master of Sinanju his own daughter. In Rome, the emperor once made an offering of a captured queen. In the great Seleucid empire, ah, the great Seleucid empire, they knew truly how to treat a Master of Sinanju. In Africa, the Loni showed before your very eyes the proper respect paid to a Master of Sinanju. But in America, in America, I get a cow. A cow who talks back to me.”

  “Fish again for the meal, Little Father,” said Remo, referring to the day meal that was several hours away, but might change the subject.

  “If the fish does not talk back to me,” said Chiun. “Heh, heh, heh.”

  A patrol car, its bubble light flashing, dashed past them toward the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “I attracted some attention back there, Little Father.”

  “Clumsiness always wins an audience. True perfection is a quiet, hidden thing.”

  “Thank you once again, Little Father, for a merry Christmas.”

  When they returned to the Marina apartment overlooking the Bay that Upstairs had rented for them during this rest period, Remo found one of the shrubs in the front yard had been uprooted and was sitting in the middle of the rug, scattering dirt around the carpeting. On the branches of the shrub hung two punctured tennis balls, a golf ball popped open with incredible pressure and a slice of an apple. A bare yellow anti-bug light topped it all.

  Chiun smiled. “For you. For your remembered customs.”

  “What is it, Little Father?”

  “I made it for you. Since you cannot overcome your past, you might as well enjoy some of it”

  Remo pointed to the cluttered bush.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Do not make witticisms with me. It is a Christmas tree. For your enjoyment.”

  “That’s not a Christmas tree, Little Father. A Christmas tree is a pine tree and the decorations are made of glass and the lights are colored and…”

  “It looks like a Christmas tree to me,” said Chiun. “It looks just like a Christmas tree to me. It is green. It has things hanging on it. It has lights. It is a Christmas tree. I see no difference between that tree and the ones in the stores, except that I improved the form somewhat.”

  “Take my word for it. If you were an American, you would see it’s not a Christmas tree.”

  “If I were an American, you would still be a fattened senseless glob shooting guns at people, dropping explosives hither and yon and creating the chaos that is so typical of your culture. That is as good a Christmas tree as ever was, improved even, to take the discordancy away from the poor designs you seem determined to worship.”

  The telephone rang, interrupting the dispute. Remo answered it. It was Western Union. His Aunt Mildred was going to visit at 9 a.m. She was on her way already.

  “Damn,” said Remo.

  But Chiun ignored him. How could one help someone who failed to appreciate an improved design? How could one reason with such a person? How could one teach such a person? If he wanted one of those ill-formed glaring obscenities sold in stores, then he would have to purchase one himself. It was like giving diamonds to a duck. The duck would prefer grains of corn. Well, let the duck buy its own corn. The Master of Sinanju was not in the duck-feeding business.

  “Just got the code from Smitty. We’re interrupted again. Our rest period’s probably over. Chiun, do you hear me?”

  “I do not answer quackings,” said the Master of Sinanju and sat, lotus position, in a silence that Remo knew he could never break.

  “I’m sorry,” said Remo. “Thank you for the tree. It was very kind of you. Thank you again, Little Father.”

  But there was no answer, and Remo went into the bedroom and lay down for a nap, his last word before dozing being “crap.”

  He heard the outside door open and was awake as if an alarm had rung. There was some conversing outside in the living room and then a lemon-faced man in gray suit and white shirt with striped green Dartmouth tie entered, carrying a worn leather briefcase. He sat down in a chair.

  “What have you done to Chiun? How have you insulted him?” asked Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  “I didn’t insult him, and what goes on between us is none of your business, Smitty. So what’s the urgency?”

  “I’d like to advise you again, Remo, how valuable a resource Chiun is and how truly necessary it is for you two to work well together.”

  “Smitty, you don’t understand and I don’t think you ever will. Now what’s up?”

  “It is not nearly as important as your relationship with Chiun. Now, as I gather it, he gave you an important and significant gift which you not only did not receive graciously, but then you refused him some small item which he wanted very much.”

  “Did you see the bush with the junk on it in the living room?”

  “Yes. What happened? It looks like a tornado threw a shrub and some junk through the window. Don’t you have maid service? You have the money.”

  “That’s the important and significant gift. Now, have you heard of Barbra Streisand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the small item he wants in return,” said Remo.

  “For certain things,” Smith said drily, “we have no dearth of money. And considering how limited we are in personnel on our enforcement arm, we might be able to spare some small amount for Chiun’s personal pleasures. Actresses sometimes can be convinced to provide a private service. Not Miss Streisand, of course, but someone comparable.”

  “He doesn’t want to rent her, Smitty.”

  “He wants to marry?”

  “No.”

  “Then what does he want?”

  “He wants to own her.”

  “Impossible,” Smith said.

  “Right. Now stick to the things you understand, like everything else.”

  “Just a minute. You’re not going to kidnap her. I mean…”

  “No. I’m not going to kidnap her. Now what’s the latest foul-up I have to compensate for?”

  “You know, you’re getting as inscrutable as Chiun, and you were never as pleasant.”

  “Thank you,” said Remo, and he sat up to listen. It had been more than a decade since he had gotten his first assignment from this sparse, vinegary man, and in that time, unlike Chiun, he could no longer imagine working for anyone else. He had tried it once and it was a disaster.

  As a Master of Sinanju, Chiun had been trained through centuries of heritage to work for any emperor who would pay the bills of the village of Sinanju. But Remo was not the Master of Sinanju. He had been a simple Newark policeman who was executed publicly and then woke up privately to find himself in a new life. He was to be the killer arm for an organization that did not exist, to help protect a social contract that did not work.

  It was not supposed to be a long tour of duty. The organization had been set up for a just a brief, trying time in the nation’s history, that period when the country could not survive within the Constitution. The organization was called CURE. But the fight against crime had proved almost unwinnable, and now, ten years later, the secret organization still functioned, its activities known to only two persons: Smith, its director, and Remo, its killer arm. Only those two and whoever happened to be President at the time.

  Remo had once asked Smith what would happen if the President decided to stay in office forever, using the organization CURE to cement his power.