Rust spots on hood, roof and fenders bled through the silver blue paint of the 1978 Celica two-door, which had replaced the three-year-old Saturn he'd sold in order to fund his primate study. Opening the driver's door, he leaned in and put the cooler and backpack on the rear bench seat, beside a small canvas suitcase. As he carefully folded himself into the blue-faux-furcovered bucket seat, the top of his skull brushed the headliner, disarranging his thready comb-over. The Celica was a tight fit for him--even with the front seat as far back as it would go, his knees bracketed the steering wheel. The windshield resembled the view slit of a World War II artillery bunker.
After an uncomfortable forty-minute drive, Sternovsky arrived at the Philadelphia airport. He parked the Toyota by the curb, in the passenger-unloading tow-away zone. As he entered the terminal, he dropped the car keys into a trash can. Once inside, Sternovsky followed the overhead signs to the Pan Asian Airlines ticket counter. There was no one ahead of him in the roped-off queue.
On the other side of the service counter a button-cute Oriental female in a blue blazer chirped a sneeze into a Kleenex before asking for his travel documents. She displayed efficient two-handed work at the computer keyboard, cheerily confirming his seat assignment and checking through his small suitcase. Sternovsky, the smell-leper, was not used to such cordial treatment from strangers. It made him feel a bit giddy.
The ticket clerk handed him his passport, export papers and boarding pass. Despite her heavy head cold, she smiled brightly and said, "Enjoy your visit to Taiwan."
Chapter 1
Naked but for a gargantuan jockstrap, Bradley "the Fighting Vehicle" Boorntower stood in front of his spanking-new locker. Its hooks and shelves held the tools of his trade: shoulder pads, knee pads, elbow pads, a selection of size-18 cleated athletic shoes, a pumpkin orange helmet and matching uniform shirt with the number 96, front and back, and ninja black uniform pants.
The garish team colors, also evident in the locker room's paint and carpet, were no mere accident of bad taste. The owners of the L.A. Riots, professional football's most recent expansion franchise, had shelled out big bucks in order to develop an organizational image that was marketable right out of the box. The Halloween theme was further underscored by the team's official motto, Trick Or Treat.
With two hours until kickoff, Boomtower's fellow Riots were obsessively focused on "Trick." As harried trainers taped up their ankles, wrists and hands, they bellowed dire threats against the opposing players. This while Boomtower drifted, alone and oarless, in "Treat." On the floor at his feet lay a pile of crumpled plastic wrappers and a litter of green-and-white waxed-paper boxes. The sides of the boxes read Manteca, a Spanish word that sounded much classier, and more dietetically correct, than the English equivalent. Boomtower's eyes slitted with pleasure as he sucked at the nub end of what had once been a one-pound block of white lard.
Between muttered mantras and reciprocal helmet-to-helmet head-bangs, the other Riots stole furtive looks at Number 96. Over the course of a week, Bradley Boomtower had undergone a most startling physical transformation. The six-foot-five-inch, 370-pound nose tackle, whose midsection-circling, jiggling mass of blubber had been a personal trademark since his college days, had gained more than a hundred pounds. Strange, yes.
Unheard-of, yes.
But stranger still was the fact that in just seven days his more than thirty percent body fat had all but disappeared. With his skin suddenly shrink-wrapped over layers of bulging muscles, Boomtower had acquired the "cut" look of a world-champion bodybuilder. Only he was bigger. Hugely bigger.
Beyond Mr. Universe. Beyond Animal.
During the week's final practice, there had been no stopping his pass rush. It didn't matter if he was triple- or even quadruple-teamed. Like a man playing with small boys, he mowed down the offensive line. He did it so many times that the head coach had to yank him from the scrimmage for fear someone might be seriously hurt. Since then, for the very same reason, the L.A. Riots had given their nose tackle an extrawide berth.
As gametime approached, only Boomtower's locker neighbor, a high-draft-pick, rookie running back, had the nerve-or lack of good sense-to directly address the changed man. Unable to restrain his curiosity about all the green-and-white boxes, Regional Parks said, "Hey, F.V., what's that nastylooking stuff you're eating?"
By way of answer, Boomtower toed one of the empty cartons toward the running back. Parks picked it up. When he read the label, his jaw dropped.
"Man, have you lost your mind?" the star running back exclaimed. "This crap is nothing but sweepings. It's the hog fat that falls on the butcher-shop floor."
"What's your point?" Boomtower said as he inside-outed the plastic wrapper so he could lick it clean.
"Jeez, everybody knows it's artery-clogging poison. It's heart-attack city."
"Nah, it's energy food."
Number 96 mopped his grease-ringed mouth with an orange-and-black towel, then pulled his L.A. Riots jersey over his head. Since high school, his XXXL uniform shirt had always been stretched as tight as a sausage casing. It still was, only now it conformed to a different shape. Instead of hanging like a halfinflated truck tire around his waist, the main mass of his torso had taken a two-and-a-half-foot jump to his chest and shoulders. Under the tortured Lycra-blend orange fabric, the topography of monstrous lats, delts, abs and pecs was clearly visible.
With the ice broken by the rookie, other players in various stages of battle dress began to gather around the nose tackle's locker, admiration and awe on their faces. At five hundred pounds-stripped weight-Bradley Boomtower was easily the heaviest man ever to play professional football. And in football, heavy was good, if not God. The more you weighed, the harder you were to move or deflect-by the fourth quarter of a game, a ten percent weight advantage could reduce opponents to quivering lumps of jelly.
One of the linebackers pointed at the gear still hanging in Boomtower's locker. Half-laughing, he said, "Say, F.V., didn't you forget something?"
All eyes shifted from the locker to Boomtower's shoulders. Given his grossly overdeveloped deltoid muscles, it was difficult to tell whether he was wearing any protection under the jersey.
"Fuck the pads, you know what I'm sayin'?" Boomtower replied.
The L.A. Riots exchanged uncomfortable glances. The physical transformation they'd witnessed was not natural. Boomtower had to be taking something. As professional athletes, they knew all about performance-enhancing drugs and their side effects, which included irrational behavior.
As Boomtower reached for his uniform pants, the fearless running back pointed at his backside and said, "What's that stuck on your butt? It looks like a time-release patch. Are you on some new kind of steroid? Human growth hormones?"
Boomtower patted the two-by-two-inch square of pink adhesive bandage, "It's magic, you know what I'm sayin'?"
"What kind of magic is that?" Parks asked.
The players edged in closer, straining to hear. "Cutting edge. I eat nothin' but fat and I get thin. The more fat I eat, the thinner I get. Thinner and bigger. And I got my mind on the game, you know what I'm sayin'?"
"Uh, not exactly," the rookie admitted.
Moving quick as a cat, Bbomtower provided a demonstration. He snatched hold of a 275-pound defensive end by the back of his trouser waistband. Then, with one hand and a seemingly effortless upward thrust, like he was hoisting nothing more substantial than a broomstick, he bashed the man's unhelmeted head through the gridwork of orange acoustic ceiling tiles. With nightcrawler-sized veins popping out on his massive right arm, Boomtower held the guy trapped there while he helplessly thrashed and kicked. "Now, do you know what I'm sayin'?" he asked his teammates.
There was a stunned silence in the locker room. Boomtower carefully set down the defensive end. Flecks of orange paint stuck to the man's face, and a trickle of blood from a cut on his forehead ran down and off the tip of his nose.
"Who'd you score it off?" the Riots' center asked.
&n
bsp; The Fighting Vehicle shook his head. "That's a secret. "
"You got any more?" demanded the confettispeckled, bloody-faced defensive end.
"Yeah, I got more, but this stuff ain't cheap, you know what I'm sayin'?"
"How much?"
"Twenty-five hundred a pop. One pop a day. Run you around one mill a year to stay on the program." The players made a mad dash for their respective lockers. In a matter of seconds, thick wads of cash appeared from all sides; Boomtower's teammates fanned him with greenbacks like an Oriental emperor.
"Fuck that shit!" said Regional Parks as he removed both of his diamond ear studs. He slapped the pea-sized gems into Bradley Boomtower's open palm and said, "I'll take all the extra magic you got."
Chapter 2
His name was Remo, and he knew he was being stalked.
A late-model, four-door gray sedan crept along the city street thirty yards behind him. Relying on his years of training in Sinanju, the oldest of the martial arts, Remo crossed with the traffic light, taking the briefest of sideways looks as he passed the car. There were four heads inside, and beneath the heads were four extremely large bodies. In that same blink of an eye, his mind registered the car's proximity to the pavement, a function of overloaded shocks and springs.
Under similar circumstances, a normal person would have been alarmed, if not panicked. What with its indigenous ethnic gangs and freelance psychopaths, Los Angeles had a well-deserved reputation for violence, senseless and otherwise. Yet this Remo, this wiry man in a faded black T-shirt and baggy tan chinos, strolled through Koreatown as if he didn't have a care in the world. With his whole being, he sucked in the beautiful, mild October evening and admired its smog-created, fire-orange-and-turquoise sunset. Along the parking strip to his left, 50-foot-tall palm trees jutted up from rectangular openings in the sidewalk, like widely spaced hairs on a concrete scalp.
Remo turned into a small strip mall that divided the block of two-story apartments and cut through the small parking lot. From the accumulation of stains on its asphalt, the mall was, by mall standards, ancient. No amount of scrubbing by the shopping center's current owners could remove the rainbow residue of decades of illicit midnight oil changes. The signs above the freshly repainted, chain-link-fenced storefronts were all written in Korean ideograms. The minimall housed a dry cleaner, a discount-jewelry-and-electronics store, the Kimchi Noodle Palace and Mr. Yi's fish market.
"Ah, the venerable pupil of the venerated Master of Asian cooking," said Yi as the second-greatest assassin on earth entered his narrow, spotlessly clean shop. The fishmonger had decided that these two customers were master chefs, and neither of them bothered to correct this misconception. He was short and squat, with a perpetual smile on his face. Yi smiled even when he was angry. His thick black hair was stuffed under a white golf cap; his uniform and apron were likewise white. A totally assimilated resident of central Los Angeles, he wore a belt holster clipped to the small of his wide back, and in the holster was a compact, 8-shot pistol. Like ninety-five percent of his fellow citizens, Yi had no aspirations to assassinhood; he just wanted to survive to see the weekend.
It was always cool inside Yi's shop, thanks to the white tile floor and the open beds of heavily iced seafood along the walls. The smell was of salt, bleach and iodine. Behind the glass of the refrigerated display case sat heaps of whole and filleted tuna, bonito, mackerel, sole and sea bass. Stuck in each pile of fish was a little plastic sign with Korean characters on it. In addition to the standard fare, Yi stocked some of the oddities of the Asian table. Sea cucumber. Urchin. Bloodworm. A selection of chichi bottom-crawlers for the quesadillas and frittatas of discerning, jaded Los Angelinos.
In the reflection of the refrigerator case's glass, Remo saw the gray sedan pull into the mall's lot and stop, parking sideways across the painted stripes on the asphalt. All the car doors opened, and its occupants piled out, on the run.
"I put aside for you something special," Yi told him, opening a stainless-steel cooler behind the display case. As he turned back with the prize, he said, "Today fresh from Yellow Sea."
The pewter-colored sea creature the fishmonger held up so proudly was more than three feet in length and weighed less than two pounds. But for the greenish fin that ran from behind its head to the tip of its pointed tail, it would have looked like a snake. A snake with a wicked set of upper and tower fangs and an underslung bottom jaw.
"You like for Master's dinner?" Yi said, showing Remo the firm white belly, then smoothing his hand along it.
The cutlass-fish, or hairtail, was a stone bitch to clean-imagine trying to fillet the meat from a shoestring-but it was one of Master Chiun's special favorites. The skinny fish was native to the waters around Sinanju, the Korean village where the Master had been born, nearly a century ago. Even in the late sixties, before the Korean government's rapid push to industrialization, the vicious, delicious predator had been plentiful. Due to the current availability and quality problems, the two assassins' mostly rice-and-fish diet rarely featured Yellow Sea hairtail.
Remo looked over the entire skin, checking for telltale clear blisters and weeping, bloody ulcers, evidence that the fish had been taken from polluted waters. And, to his delight, found none. "I like very much," he said to the fishmonger. "Please wrap him up."
With a matador flourish, Yi tore a sheet of white butcher paper from a big roll mounted on his cutting table. "You make Master happy meal tonight," he said as he passed the long, slender package over the counter.
As Remo stepped out of Mr. Yi's fish market, a gruff baritone voice barked, "Hold it right there."
Remo stared down the barrel of a blue-steel Beretta. It gleamed with fresh oil. Three more men stepped up on the storefront sidewalk, bracketing him with raised weapons. One held a snub-nosed nickel-plated revolver, another had a stubby-barreled combat-type pump shotgun, and the last brandished a Taser stun gun. All four were Baby Hueys, big and doughy, and dressed in what looked like official SWAT uniforms-black armored vests, black skintight leather gloves, black T-shirts and BDU pants. They had communications headsets clamped on their wide heads, and shiny gold badges hung on cords around their thick necks.
Not LAPD, Remo thought.
Stenciled in bright yellow across the front of their body armor were the words Bail Recovery Enforcement Agent.
Bounty hunters.
"Don't move," said the guy aiming the cocked 9 mm pistol at the middle of Remo's forehead. The bounty hunter's own skull was shaved to the skin, leaving a dark shadow of receding hairline. He sported a black goatee, and the tattoo on his hairy forearm bragged I Make Shit Happen. From a distance of six feet, he smelled like a cross between a burned-out coffeepot and an old cigar butt.
Remo smiled at him. Not an inscrutable smile-mask like Mr. Yi's; this baby came straight from the heart, radiating generous sympathy and warmth, and a patience that matched the serenity of the evening. Sometimes, once in a while, he found himself slipping into this persona and he wasn't quite clear why. But it made him feel as though he were floating above all problems, without taking anything from his lethal edge.
While the other three covered Remo, Goatee referred to a flimsy sheet of fax paper, holding it up to compare the blurred, virtually useless photo with the thick-wristed, 160-pound guy holding the long package. "William M. Ransom," he said.
"That's not me," Remo told him. "Whatever this is about, I think you've made a mistake."
The bounty hunter with the .357 snub-nose got a chuckle out of that.
"According to the bench warrant, Mr. Ransom," Goatee went on, "you're wanted in the state of Oregon for a little over twenty-three thousand dollars in outstanding traffic tickets. Seems you skipped bail. The contract you signed with the bondsman, a Mr. Tretheway of Portland, authorizes us to return you to that jurisdiction, by force if necessary."
"You've got the wrong guy. I'm not a bail jumper."
"You drive a 1994 white Camaro Z28 with the personalized Oregon license plate WEIRD
MAN."
"No, I don't."
Goatee flicked at the fax with his Beretta's muzzle. "The police report's all right here in black-and-white. Your whole rap sheet. Says you fancy yourself some kind of big-time Dungeons ole-player." Grinning, he aimed the pistol at the parcel under Remo's arm. "What've you got in there, Ransom? Is it your Singing Sword?"
"Maybe it's his Magic Wand," the bounty hunter with the Taser stun gun snickered. "Ooooooh, Mr. Wizard, are you going to turn us all into toads?"
"Unfortunately," Remo said, "somebody's beat me to it."
"For a skinny little shithook, you've got a real smart mouth," Pump-gun snarled. He wore his black ball cap backwards, and the adjustable white plastic tab cut deep welts into the meat of his forehead, after the style of the day. "Smart mouth's something we can fix...."
"Why don't you take a look at my ID?" Remo suggested. "That'll straighten everything out. It's in my hip pocket."
Goatee deftly removed his wallet, scanned the New Jersey driver's license, then passed it over to his colleagues.
"Well?" Remo said, holding out his hand to the last man for the return of his property.
Taser made no move to give the billfold back. "This license looks like a phony to me, and not a very good one," he said. "And the last names on these credit cards are all different. 'Remo Ito,' `Remo Kalin,' 'Remo Barbieri.'" He checked the driver's license again. "Why don't you explain what that means, Mr. Remo?"
"Means we just scored a grand apiece," Pump-gun chimed in gleefully.
Remo felt the first stirrings of annoyance intrude on his calm. Of course the license and credit cards were fakes. They had to be. That was one of the problems with being declared dead prematurely: your real name got buried along with the empty coffin. Officially, Remo Williams was a former Newark cop who had been electrocuted more than two decades ago by the state of New Jersey for a murder he didn't commit. Electrocuted and then resurrected so he could serve as a roving hitman for CURE, an ultrasecret, virtually autonomous intelligence-gathering, crimefighting organization. The fact that the ID he now carried was so laughably poor could be laid at the feet of his one and only boss for all those years. Recently, Dr. Harold Smith had refused to pay for any more top-quality documents, accusing his assassin-employee of going through assumed identities "like Milk Duds." Remo suspected that Smith had started doing the forgery himself, to save money. To make matters worse on the annoyance front, the long package was starting to leak; hairtail slime was slowly dripping down the inside of Remo's arm.
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