“So? I go in and crack skulls. Warn them off. The Mafia will understand that. It’s their language.”

  “No. This calls for surgery.”

  “Speaking of surgery, this lump on my forehead is starting to worry me. It won’t go away. In fact, I’d swear it’s growing.”

  “Perhaps it is time we take care of that too,” said Smith crisply. “While we consider a fresh plan of attack.”

  “What about that computer? We can’t just leave it.”

  “You mentioned earlier that the voice coming from the other room asked for a Japanese technician.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Perhaps Chiun will be able to accomplish what you could not.”

  Remo laughed once shortly. “Smitty, there is only one problem with that little scheme.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Convincing Chiun to pass as Japanese long enough to pull it off. It’s a complete impossibility.”

  “Return to Folcroft, Remo,” said Smith sharply.

  “Can I come in the front door this time?”

  “As long as you do it before daybreak. I will be here.”

  “On my way,” said Remo, hanging up the pay phone and looking around for a taxi.

  The taxis of Boston seemed to have gone into hibernation, so Remo decided to walk to the airport, which was not far away. He did not look forward to facing Chiun. It was funny how quickly he had fallen back into his old habit of taking the Master of Sinanju for granted. For over three months, Chiun had been believed dead and Remo had been like a lost child without him.

  Remo decided to throw himself on Chiun’s mercy. What was the worst he could do?

  · · ·

  At Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold Smith replaced the blue contact telephone and turned his leather chair around to face the Master of Sinanju.

  “He is on his way back,” said Smith.

  Chiun regarded Harold Smith with brittle hazel eyes.

  “What must be done must be done,” he intoned.

  “Are you certain he will not be harmed by the operation?”

  The Master of Sinanju shrugged his thin shoulders. “He is Remo. He is unpredictable. Who can say how he will react?”

  “Then you agree this is the only way?”

  “You are the emperor. Remo is your tool. It is your privilege to shape your tool as you see fit.”

  “I am pleased you see it that way.” Smith reached for the intercom. “It is time to alert the surgeon.”

  Chiun intercepted Smith’s hand with his own.

  “Before this is done, allow me to present you with several sketches I have made, the better to guide the skilled hands of the physician as he goes about his important work.”

  From one sleeve of his kimono Chiun withdrew a sheaf of parchments rolled tightly together. With a flourish, he presented them to Harold Smith.

  Smith spread them open on the desk. After a quick examination, he looked up.

  “I hardly think Remo would be happy with any of these faces,” Smith said with dry disapproval.

  Chiun shrugged. “Remo is determined to be unhappy, whatever comes. What matter the degree of his unhappiness?”

  “I would prefer a more Caucasian look. For operational reasons, of course,” Smith added quickly.

  Chiun snatched up the parchment drawings.

  “Racist!” he spat.

  “I do want you to monitor the operation, Master Chiun,” said Harold Smith hastily, adjusting the knot in his tie. “To ensure that all goes smoothly.”

  “Perhaps the surgeon of plastic will see the wisdom of my selections.”

  “I somehow doubt it,” said Smith, clearing his throat.

  “It is possible.”

  “He will be under strict instructions to resculpture Remo’s features, not change them utterly. But I am concerned with the lump on Remo’s forehead.”

  Chiun’s eyes narrowed. “It is the eye of Shiva. Now closed. Remo does not suspect it for what it is.”

  “Does Remo have any idea of his recent personality...uh...change?”

  “None. His mind is a blank. It is always a blank, of course, but this time the blankness is total. He remembers his days of slavery to the goddess Kali, but prefers not to speak of this.”

  Harold Smith regarded the wispy figure of the Master of Sinanju. He hesitated to probe further. When he had taken on the awesome responsibility of CURE, he took on with it the operational obligation to obliterate the organization and all traces of it–including all personnel–should CURE ever be compromised.

  When, years ago, he had framed Remo Williams for a murder he had not committed, it had been to create an untraceable and expendable enforcement arm. Remo had been placed in Chiun’s hands to be taught the rudiments of Sinanju, to create the perfect assassin. A man who no longer existed.

  It was a perfect plan. As conceived. Chiun would return to his village after training Remo, a critical link in the CURE chain forever severed. Chiun had been eighty then, twenty years ago. With his eventual death, there would be one fewer brain housing the knowledge of CURE, which was limited to Smith, Remo, and the incumbent President.

  But an unexpected thing had happened. Chiun had grown to care for Remo. The teacher had become a part of CURE. Not because Smith had wanted it that way, but because there was no way to prevent it. Chiun had insisted that training a white man in the fundamentals of Sinanju was a fifteen-year commitment. Minimum.

  Thus Smith had acquired two enforcement arms, paid for by an annual shipment of gold to the desolate village of Sinanju, on the coast of forbidding North Korea.

  The bond between Remo and Chiun had been something Smith had not always understood. There had been a prophecy in the annals of the House of Sinanju, a legend that foretold of a Master who would one day train a white man, the dead night tiger, who would be the avatar to Shiva, known to the followers of Hinduism as the God of Destruction.

  Chiun believed Remo was this foretold Sinanju Destroyer. Smith had never accepted any of it.

  But recent events had proved to Smith that Remo was more than Remo now. More, perhaps, than even Sinanju. It was clear that he was subject to personality shifts. Shifts he never seemed to remember.

  Smith no more believed in Shiva the Destroyer than he did in the jolly Green Giant, but something was bubbling deep within Remo’s psyche. Something that threatened to one day break free and overwhelm him.

  Such a prospect threatened not only CURE but also the world. Smith had seen the awesome power of the unleashed Remo for himself. There would be no controlling him should the Remo aspect of his personality ever be totally submerged.

  Smith had to know. Even if the truth meant shutting down CURE, terminating Remo. And incidentally swallowing a cyanide pill that would also extinguish his own life.

  “Do you foresee this event recurring?” Smith asked the Master of Sinanju carefully.

  “Before the Great Lord Shiva surrendered Remo’s body, he told me...”

  Smith’s gray eyes made circles of surprise. “He spoke to you?”

  “Yes. And he said that the hour would one day come that he would claim Remo as his throne. But that hour was far off, he also said.”

  “Er, how far?”

  “Shiva did not say.”

  Smith’s prim mouth tightened. The Master of Sinanju caught the thinning reflex.

  “I know what you are thinking, Emperor,” said Chiun.

  “You do?”

  Chiun nodded. “You are thinking that this spirit which Remo harbors may threaten your realm.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Smith admitted. He was not comfortable with Chiun’s repeated references to his emperorship, but Masters of Sinanju had served as royal assassins going back to the days of the pharaohs. Since Chiun served America through Smith, Smith must therefore be addressed as an emperor.

  “And you wonder if you should not extinguish Remo in order to prevent this calamity from coming to pass,” Chiun continued.

  “My responsibilities–” Smith began.

  Chiun raised a wise finger. “Then know this. Shiva grows within Remo. In the past, he has been roused only when Remo’s existence was threatened. Should you attempt to harm my son, Shiva will return to protect his own. It is better that you stay your hand, otherwise you will precipitate the very calamity you seek to avoid.”

  “I see,” Smith said slowly. “But what about you, Master Chiun? Remo is as much as a son to you. He is the heir to the House of Sinanju. Does Shiva not threaten the line?”

  Chiun bowed his head in the dimness of Smith’s Spartan office.

  “He does. But I am an old man who has been blessed with the greatest pupil any Master of Sinanju ever had. Yet I am also cursed to know that in my accomplishment I have sown the seeds that doom all I hold dear. But what can I do? I am an old man. You are my emperor. And Remo is Remo. But Lord Shiva is more powerful than us all.”

  And Harold Smith, who had personally seen the Master of Sinanju tear through a small army like a buzz saw, felt a thrill of supernatural fear course down his spine.

  Chapter Ten

  Remo Williams sent his rented car into a copse of poplars several hundred yards short of the gates of Folcroft Sanitarium. He made his way to the closed gate on foot.

  There were two stone lions atop the gate. They seemed to stare down at him like sentinels excavated from some half-forgotten civilization.

  Grinning, Remo simply leapt sixteen feet into the air and landed atop the right-hand lion.

  He paused and seemed to float to the ground on the other side.

  There was a security guard at a lobby desk, his face buried in a newspaper. Remo slipped in and, staying out of the guard’s peripheral range, his movements contained so that he made no attention-getting motions, made his way to the elevator and the second floor.

  Remo walked into Harold Smith’s office unannounced.

  Harold W. Smith looked up from his computer, a startled expression on his face. Reflexively he stabbed a stud hidden under the oak rim. The desktop terminal retreated into his desk well like a shy plastic skull.

  “Remo, you startled me,” Smith said, flustered.

  “Sorry,” Remo said, looking around. He sensed another presence.

  He pulled the door back and peered behind it. He saw only a blot of shadow. Empty.

  “Is Chiun here?” Remo asked suspiciously.

  “He is in the building,” Smith said evasively. “He expressed an interest in monitoring the operation.”

  “Okay,” Remo said, stepping in. “But before we get to it, let’s establish some ground rules.”

  “I am listening.”

  “I’m going under the knife. But only to get rid of this freaking lump, whatever it is.”

  “That is the purpose of the procedure,” Smith said.

  “Not to have my face lifted.”

  Smith said nothing.

  “You’re a man of your word, Smith. So before we get to it, I need you to raise your right hand and swear on a stack of computer printouts that the doctor isn’t going to get fancy with my face.”

  Smith swallowed.

  “Is that a guilty look I see?” Remo asked suddenly.

  “No, I, er, was just wondering if I had a Bible in the office.”

  Remo frowned. “Bible?”

  “You do want me to swear an oath, do you not?”

  Concern made Remo’s cruel mouth quirk up. “Yeah. But–”

  “It is properly done with a Bible.”

  “We could skip the Bible part,” Remo started to say.

  “Without it, there would be no true oath.”

  “Okay, then we hunt up a Bible,” Remo said with sudden impatience. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”

  “Perhaps,” said Smith, reaching into a desk drawer, “perhaps I might have one in my desk.”

  The odd strained tone that had come into Harold W. Smith’s lemony voice was enough to tip off Remo that something was not quite right.

  He started for the desk, his features darkening.

  “What’s with you, Smith?” Remo demanded, once he reached Smith’s side. “You’re acting more Henny Penny than usual.”

  Smith’s mouth opened to protest. And froze.

  Remo heard no sound. He sensed nothing out of the ordinary. He had a momentary impression of the unfamiliar, but that was all.

  It was just beginning to register on Remo that the strangeness was the cool breeze coming in through the unreplaced plate-glass window when a long-nailed hand the color of old ivory reached out of the impenetrable night to take him by the back of the neck.

  Fingers like the bones of a skeletal hand squeezed inexorably.

  The last thought that went through Remo’s startled helpless mind was: Nice move, Remo. You fell for an old one!

  · · ·

  The Master of Sinanju slipped over the windowsill, trailing the skirt of his black kimono. He regarded his pupil with an austere countenance.

  “He is ready,” he intoned.

  “Thank you, Master Chiun,” said Smith, looking down. “It would have been awkward had I been forced to promise Remo immunity from the plastic surgeon’s scalpel.”

  Chiun bent down and gathered up Remo’s sleeping form like that of an overgrown child. He started for the open door.

  “Come. It will be awkward enough when Remo awakens with a new face.”

  · · ·

  Dr. Rance Axeworthy was tired of waiting.

  He was the finest knife man in Beverly Hills. It was bad enough that he had been compelled to fly all the way across the country to perform a simple face lift. Normally his patients came to him.

  It was bad enough that he was told by the man who ran the institution–the lemon-voiced Smith–that he would not be allowed to consult with his patient before performing the operation. That was unheard-of, if not unethical. As the plastic surgeon to the stars, he was used to ignoring professional ethics.

  But to be kept waiting in the operating amphitheater was unconscionable. He had been gowned and washed forever.

  Even if he was being paid triple his typically exorbitant fee.

  Dr. Axeworthy understood that the patient was a candidate for the witness-protection program. It was intriguing. He had never before worked on a crime figure–unless one counted the odd drug dealer. Not a crime figure in his sphere of activity. Drug dealers were simply entrepreneurs forced to operate on society’s fringes because of the stupid laws of this unprogressive nation.

  So Dr. Axeworthy had come. But that didn’t mean he would wait around all night. He needed a hit of crank.

  When the operating-room doors opened, Dr. Axeworthy looked up from his copy of Variety.

  Under his bushy black eyebrows, his jet eyes widened.

  “What on earth!” he exclaimed.

  There were three of them. A gray-faced man in an equally gray suit, some sort of costumed Asian person, and a prone figure that had to be the patient.

  The patient lay on a wheeled gurney.

  “Are you people sterile?” he demanded angrily, instantly asserting dominion over the operating room.

  “Hold your tongue, plastic physician,” squeaked the tiny Asian. “You are here to perform a service, not ask personal questions.”

  Dr. Axeworthy blinked. He started to say something else, but professional interest in his patient diverted his attention.

  The old Oriental shook off his long colorful sleeves and took up the patient as if he were hollow. The patient was deposited on the stainless-steel operating table with studied gentleness.

  Axeworthy’s professional instincts took over.

  “Hmmm. Good pronounced cheekbones. Strong nose. I like the chin.”

  “Can you fix the eyes?” asked the Asian man worriedly.

  “In what way?” said Axeworthy, lifting each eyelid in turn, noting the irises were dark brown, almost black. The whites were unusually clear and devoid of visible veining.

  “In this way,” said the Asian, slapping away the doctor’s hand and using his fingers to draw the outer corners of the patient’s eyes more tightly.

  “You want me to make him Chinese?” asked Dr. Axeworthy, lifting his own eyebrows.

  “I would sooner you give him the nose of a pig,” spat the Asian.

  “Then what?”

  “I am Korean. So should this man be Korean.”

  Frowning, Dr. Axeworthy compared the patient’s eyes to those of the tiny Asian. They were hazel, an unusual eye coloration in Asians.

  “It can be done,” he said after a long silence.

  “But it won’t be,” said the man in gray. Axeworthy instantly recognized the voice. It was the lemony Dr. Smith.

  “Smith?”

  Smith nodded. “This must be done immediately,” he said brittlely. “I do not care about the particulars. But I want him unrecognizable. And Caucasian. Is that understood?

  “Absolutely,” said Dr. Axeworthy, for the first time noticing the odd lump on the patient’s forehead. “Is this a tumor?”

  “Yes,” said Smith.

  “No,” said the Asian.

  Axeworthy looked at the pair quizzically.

  “It must be removed as well,” Smith added.

  Axeworthy felt the odd protuberance carefully. “It appears fibroid. Probably precancerous. At least, one trusts so. Oncology is not my field.”

  “The patient has been rendered insensate by nonchemical means,” Smith said coldly. “I am assured that he will remain in this state for the duration of the operation. Any use of anesthetic is strictly forbidden.”

  Dr. Rance Axeworthy nodded. “Allergic. I understand.”

  “If you fail, you will be punished severely,” warned the Asian man.

  Dr. Axeworthy drew himself up stiffly. “I resent that! What do you think I am? A butcher?”

  “No,” said Smith hastily. “You are the finest plastic surgeon in the country, if not the world.”