One by one the hundreds of thousands of minuscule tapes began to wind and thread. The orbital receivers rolled upward, registering a life form the memory banks identified as Human, Adult Male.
UTILI7.ATION OF LIFE FORM NECESSARY . . . PROTECTIVE OUTER COVERING MANDATORY FOR ASSIMILATION . . . SURVIVE . . . SURVIVE ...
"Get out, Marco," Verbanic said evenly, backing slowly away from the smoking crater at the center of the rubbish mound.
Gonzalez was crying. "Lew . . . Lew . . ."
"Get out. Now!" he commanded.
They were the last words Lew Verbanic spoke. In a fraction of a second, a metallic hand shot out of the hole and clutched Verbanic's ankle as he tried to run. He screamed as the bone in his leg pulverized to dust inside the flesh. Still screaming, he was spun in the air like a limp rag while the metallic creature rose from the crater in the mountain of trash.
13
Gonzalez watched the scene with horrified, immobile fascination, weeping. Strings of spittle dribbled through the gap left by his missing teeth and down his chin.
The thing holding Verbanic stepped onto the crest of the hill, looldng, in the deceptive light of the moon, like an ancient conquering knight. Verbanic remained in the thing's right hand, his leg twisted unnaturally at the ankle, his foot stationary as the rest of him looped again and again in the air. Verbanic's wails keened grotesquely in the night. Even at a distance, Gonzalez could see the bulging whites of his eyes, terrified and pleading for death.
Then the creature's left hand rose slowly upward to catch Verbanic by the neck. Lew's head snapped back with a force that sent a splash of blood arcing from his mouth to the ground. Then j he lay still, pulled taut between the creature's two arms, a trophy of war.
Gonzalez stood rooted to the spot where he ; stood. The metallic thing threw Verbanic's body j on the ground, where it bounced down the : mound of rubble to lie sprawling on the earth below.
Gonzalez wanted to run, but he was unable to move. Creaking and trembling, the thing walked toward him.
Gonzalez whispered, "Please." But the metal monster kept moving closer. Drained of will, Gon- j zalez fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands.
The night was silent except for the sound of Gonzalez's uncontrollable weeping. Then the
14
scream of splintering metal sliced through the air. He opened his hands. The thing was at the garbage truck, tearing off one of its front fenders. For a moment, Gonzalez thought the thing hadn't seen him. Then it turned around, a small pile of bolts in one metallic hand, and focused its luminescent eye-orbs directly at him.
What the creature did next filled Gonzalez with bewilderment. Taking one bolt at a time, the thing lifted each bolt to its face and began screwing them into itself. Its movements were slow and deliberate, and it never shifted its position or its unblinking gaze.
"What are you?" Gonzalez whispered, the loathing thick in his voice.
The creature's jaw worked silently, like a mechanical toy's.
"What are you?" Gonzalez repeated, screaming it this time. His senses were returning. It was too late to save Verbanic, he noted unhappily, but maybe he could save himself.
Beside the spot where he knelt lay a rock the size of his hand. Slowly he crept his fingers toward the rock until they were entwined around it. Then, as swiftly as he had ever moved in his life, he ran toward the creature, the rock held high overhead for attack.
The thing watched him without expression. It exhibited no intention to run or fight. Just as Gonzalez reached the thing, it flashed out a hand and sent the rock spinning out of sight.
"Madre Dio," Gonzalez said, cowering, but still the creature made no move toward him. Instead, it continued to screw bolts into its face. Another,
15
#
and then the last, between the metallic ridge of a nose and the place where a lip would have been on a human. It began to hum, flat and tinny, like synthetic music. Then the sound modulated wildly up and down, from ultrasonic shrieks to low rumbles like gears grinding.
It opened its mouth again.
This time it spoke.
"Hello is all right," it said.
16
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he was catching bullets.
He was catching them in his palms the way some people with very fast reflexes could catch flies. Bullets came at you a lot faster than flies did, but the principle was the same. See them. Slap them down at a 90 degree angle at exactly the speed they're traveling. Smack them from below with a high bounce to cool them off.
Catching them was the easy part. Anyone who could move his arm at 870 feet per second could catch the bullet from a .38 Colt Special. It was seeing them, without seeing the motion of the trigger that released them, that made the exercise interesting, especially since the light wzzz sound produced in the bullet's wake came after the bullet itself. Rely on the sound, kid, and you're one dead assassin, Remo reminded himself.
He held five in his right hand now, their gray
17
metal melted smoothly toward their charred rims. There were three bullets in his left hand.
Chiun was right. Remo did favor his right hand. That would have to be corrected.
Damn it, Chiun was always right, Remo said to himself as he flicked one of the bullets upward on his fingernail. It embedded itself in the plaster of the ceiling.
"Oh, hell," he said aloud. Now he only had seven bullets. And he had forgotten whether the one in the ceiling had come from his right or left hand.
Chiun. Eighty-year-old men were supposed to be senile and doddering. That's what all the magazines and TV commercials said. Hadn't Chiun ever heard about irregularity? Or dentures, or tired blood? Didn't he know there were such things as arteriosclerosis and arthritis and gout and plain old age?
Of course not. All Chiun knew was how to kill people and how to be a pain in the ass to Remo.
Fifty bullets. That was what the old man wanted. "Boom droppings," he called them, as if Remo were in this ghetto hellhole on pigeon patrol instead of real business.
"Real business, pah," Chiun had said when Remo's assignment came in. "Unwashed amateurs with boom shooters."
"Guns, not boom shooters," Remo corrected. "And they kill people."
"Slow people."
"Maybe. Still, I'm supposed to stop them."
"You will never stop them," Chiun argued. "Louts with boom shooters are like fruitflies. No
sooner does one send them into the void, than a whole new generation appears to take their places."
"It's my assignment, Little Father," Remo said.
The old Oriental sighed. "Ah, yes. Emperor Smith. Well, if you must satisfy the whims of your mad employer, then go to his sister's house as he wishes. But remember the boom droppings. At least you can exercise a little on this worthless mission. Twenty-five droppings in the left hand, twenty-five in the right. Balance, always."
Remo explained that Sister Evangélica was nobody's sister, but the name of an apartment complex where the main pastime among the tenants was murder. The casualty toll for the complex was in the hundreds, and the corridors of Sister Evan-gelica's served as an active war zone for every punk in the city who had access to an illegal handgun.
For years the metropolitan police had been unable to curb the violence, and the number of killings had risen sharply in recent months.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, Remo's employer, had learned that the reason for the increase in violence was that regular shipments of handguns and ammunition were coming into the complex. Whereas before merely a handful of hopped-up muggers had sported in Sister Evangelica's, now virtually every man, woman, and child was packing a pistol and shooting at anything that moved. It was full-scale war.
Smith headed a secret organization called CURE, which was developed years before by an-
18
19
other President, now dead, to control crime by functioning outside the Constitut
ion.
Swift and secret, CURE's one weapon was a thin man with thick wrists, an orphan with no past, a former Newark, New Jersey, police officer framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. He was a man trained for more than a decade by the most accomplished master assassin in the world, a practitioner of the martial arts disciplines of Sinanju, a Korean village that had produced master assassins for thousands of years. Deadlier than any weapon, this man, an American, was known to the President only as "that special person."
"That special person," dispatched to Sister Evangelica's to eliminate the gun runner who was supplying arms to the complex, was juggling his seven captured bullets high overhead as he waited for more gunfire.
Remo looked for more bullets from the broken windows of the battle-scarred tenement apartment. There were none. He reasoned that the gangs with the guns had declared a cease-fire for their morning heroin break.
"Hey, what's going on?" he called into the silent courtyard. "I need forty-three more bullets." There was no answer. "Sheesh," he said. "There's never a gunman when you need one."
He walked past the rusted elevators, which hadn't worked since 1973, and down six flights of blown-out cement steps strewn with bullet-riddled rats. "Jose 181"—a message admonishing visitors to 181st Street to visit a hospitable per-
20..
son named Jose—was a popular theme on the graf-fit-streaked walls of the stairwell. "For a good time, call Delphine" was another.
Remo found the advertisement touching. Amid all the squalor and death of Sister Evangelica's, stouthearted Delphine was apparently still having a good time and willing to spread cheer to one and all.
At this point, Remo thought, with only seven bullets in his pocket and no gun runner to be found, he wouldn't mind having Delphine show him a good time. She'd probably be better company than Chiun, with his stupid exercises.
By the time Remo reached the bottom of the stairwell, the courtyard was filling up with people. Old men on crutches, toddlers with their arms in slings, bandaged mothers huddling small children near them, walked serenely over the pitted, bullet-scored concrete, talking and waving in neighborly fashion to one another.
It was certainly a far cry from the trench warfare of ten minutes before. Even the gangs—some Irish and freckled; some black; some Hispanic, speaking Spanish softly—seemed subdued and pleasant, tipping their caps for women without so much as a wiggle toward the women's pocket-books.
Remo couldn't figure it out. He spotted an old white man hobbling with a cane toward a bench. When the old man sat down, Remo walked up to him.
"Hold it right there, sonny," the wrinkled crone said as he hoisted a Browning .9 millimeter from his vest with palsied hands.
21
"Where'd you get that gun?" Remo asked.
"Found it. One step closer and I'll shoot."
"Shoot," Remo said as he reached out and crumbled the pistol into black gravel. It sifted between his fingers to the ground.
"Okay. You asked for it," the old man said, tightening his trigger finger on empty air. "Hey, what'd you do?"
"I took your gun away," Remo said. "It's on the ground if you want it."
The man looked at the pile of crushed metal. Tears came to his eyes. "Oh, Lord," he said.
"Did you really find that gun?"
"Yep," the old man said softly. "Old George next door had it. He got killed. I found it next to his
body."
In the distance, schoolgirls were chanting as two preteens with only minor lacerations skipped Double Dutch with a clothesline.
"What's your name?" Remo asked awkwardly.
The man was weeping openly. "Archie," he
said.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Big deal," Archie said. "What about them?" He pointed at a Puerto Rican gang loafing near a defunct fountain bearing Delphine's message of hope. "Or them?" He nodded toward the cluster of white boys. "Or Mrs. Miller? She's a killer, that one. Got twelve notches on her belt already."
"Who's Mrs. Miller?"
The old man stopped weeping long enough to point out a fat lady in a polka-dotted dress, who was carrying a bag of groceries. "Oh, Lord," Archie said.
22
"Maybe it's over," Remo suggested, staring at the eerily quiet scene around him.
The old man laughed. "How long you been here, son?"
"I sort of just moved in."
"Well, move right back out if you can. Quick, before the mayor goes shopping."
"The mayor?"
"The mayor. She's a dipshit. She been here three weeks now. Living with us. Can you believe that? Wednesday's her shopping day. That's why we're getting us this little rest. Uh-oh. Too late, boy. Here she comes now. Coffee break's over."
The doors to one of the complex's entrances creaked open, and two dozen uniformed policemen marched out four abreast. There was a gap in the formation, followed by another six rows of officers.
"Where'd they come from?"
"That's her bodyguard," Archie said. "They come in a couple of minutes ago. That's why the shooting stopped. They come to get her."
"Who?"
"The mayor, boy. There."
In the center of the sea of policemen walked a small, reed-slim blonde woman with flinty green eyes and a smile for all the residents of Sister Evangelica's.
"You see how much better things are since I've moved in, you impoverished darlings?" she called pleasantly to the tenants. "Police protection, better conditions. That's what a mayor's for."
"She don't see the killing that goes on," Archie
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confided. "It all stops when she comes around, but the minute she leaves, it's back to the shit."
Behind the mayor, the final four patrolmen bolted the entrance to her building. Behind them, four white gang members pulled out brass knuckles. A few Puerto Ricans expertly zipped out switchblades. Just about everyone else in view pulled out a gun.
"Remember me on election day, darlings," the mayor sang cheerily as she strutted out of sight, the police fast behind her.
"Ain't none of us going to live to election day," Archie said ruefully. "Well, since we ain't got no guns, we best look for cover, you and me."
Remo noticed that the courtyard had nearly cleared out in a matter of seconds. Only the gang members remained, and one of them was headed straight for Remo and the old man. He was tall and burly and the color of paper bags. On his head he wore a maroon beret. In his waistband he carried a .38 Police Special. As he approached, he pulled out the .38 and pointed it at Remo.
"Hey, white boy," he said, and fired.
Remo caught the bullet. "That's eight," he said, slipping the bullet into his pocket.
"Huh?" Maroon Beret asked as he fired off another shot.
"Nine. Say, it doesn't take much to make you mad, does it?"
"I's born mad," the youth said, and fired again, fen.
Maroon Beret scowled in annoyance. "What you doin' with them bullets?"
"Look, do you want to shoot me or sit around
24
talking? I need fifty bullets, and I don't have all day."
"I want to know why them bullets not be hittin' you," Maroon Beret insisted.
"Because I'm catching them, stupid," Remo said. "Any idiot can see that."
Maroon Beret fired again.
"Eleven. Thanks. Keep 'em coming."
He fired two more shots in rapid succession.
"Twelve, thirteen . . . you're out of bullets."
"Wha' . . ." He clicked uselessly at the trigger. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead. He turned to run.
"Not so fast," Remo said, grabbing him by the ear.
"You gonna kill me?"
"Either me or somebody else," Remo said philosophically. "What difference does it make in the long run?" He squeezed Maroon Beret's ear harder.
"Don't kill me," he whelped.
"Tell you what I'm going to do. You
tell me where you got your gun, and I won't kill you now. That's not to say I'll never kill you—"
"That be fine by me. I sure will tell you where I got the gun. That be no skin off my nose. I will tell you anything you want to know. Seek and ye shall find, that is my motto."
"The gun," Remo prompted, sending a flash of pain through Maroon Beret's spinal column. To—
"Toe? His name's Toe?" Remo asked. But it was too late. Maroon Beret's body was slumped forward in front of Remo and vibrating with the im-
25
pact of a barrage of bullets. Then the entire complex exploded into cascades of gunfire. The mayor and her police battalion had left. Through wooden barricades in the windows, tenants took pot shots at the gang members in the courtyard. The courtyard group was firing back at random, both at the people in the windows and at rival gangs. Two Puerto Ricans stabbed each other to death. An old blue-haired woman cackled from her balcony as she struck down a middle-aged black man with a zip gun. As he fell from his window, the middle-aged man let fly with a wild bullet from his .32 Beretta. The bullet ricocheted off one of the buildings and killed one of the Irish gang boys. The Irish boys dropped two of the blacks in retribution. The blacks shot the old blue-haired woman.
Remo was catching bullets. Twelve in one hand, twelve in the other. "Not bad," he said.
Suddenly he was aware of a pungent odor behind him, which he recognized as fear-smell. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw the old man cowering inches from his back.
"What are you doing here?" Remo said.
"Where else is there to go? You're catching bullets in your hands. Better you in front than me, I figure."
"Can't you hide somewhere?"
"Where?" the old man asked, and his eyes looked as if he really hoped to find an answer.
"Screw the bullets," Remo said, dumping the fired slugs to the ground. "Too heavy anyway. Come with me."
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He led Archie to the basement of one of the buildings. "You'll be safe here," he said.
"Oh, yeah?" The old man gestured to a corner of the basement, where a half-dozen Puerto Ricans rose from a huddle, their guns at the ready. "What do you call them? Chickens?"
Remo squinted at Archie. "Did I ever tell you that you remind me of another old pain in the ass?" he said.
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