"What your lawyer's damn name?"
"Alan Dershowitz. And don't let him tell you any different."
Remo walked out of the airport and into the morning humidity of Florida, whistling. He was a tall lean man with dark deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, a cruel mouth and wrists like railroad ties.
The car was waiting for him, and to the horror of the lot attendant, Remo stacked the red leather tourist luggage in the back seat until it resembled a Lucite luggage rack, put on his yellow Welcome to Florida baseball cap and drew the colorful Sam Beasley World T-shirt over his own.
"Sir, I would not recommend doing that."
Remo slid behind the wheel. "Which is I-4?"
The attendant pointed to an exit. "That one. Whatever you do, don't take it into the city dressed as you are. Take International Drive or the Beeline Expressway."
"Thanks," said Remo, tooling the car out of the lot and onto Interstate 4.
He drove slowly, taking his time. After all, he had two or three hours until Sam Beasley World opened, and there were more interesting things to do than sit around a stuffy hotel room.
Like his job.
As he cruised along I-4, Remo wondered what his job was anymore.
He hadn't filled out a 1040 since the day over twenty years ago when the state of New Jersey had pronounced a death sentence on him and taken away his past life with a single jolt of low-amperage electricity while he sat strapped in the electric chair, a Newark cop convicted of a murder he had never committed. After that day Remo Williams ceased to exist, to his friends and the Internal Revenue Service alike.
Had he been obliged to fill out a 1040 every April, Remo would have written "assassin" in the space designated occupation.
He was no run-of-the-mill assassin. He was America's secret assassin-or had been until he had quit CURE, the supersecret government agency that had framed him in the first place. His job-when he had been employed-was to serve as the sanctioned killer arm of CURE, an organization that had been set up in the early 1960s by a young President who, ironically enough, had himself succumbed to an assassin's bullet.
Remo was not an assassin the way the man who had murdered that President had been an assassin. That guy was a loner, a loser and flake. And he used a rifle.
Remo carried no weapon. He was a weapon. His entire body had been trained to the ultimate in human achievement. The key was the human brain. Scientists had long ago figured out that the average person used barely ten percent of his brainpower. It was like using one lobe of one lung to breathe-which is how most people actually breathed when you got right down to it.
Long before there were scientists to discover this deficiency, the head of an obscure fishing village in what was now called North Korea had discovered this truth and learned to unlock the limitless potential of the human machine.
He had been the first Master of Sinanju. His descendants, of whom Remo was a spiritual if not blood heir, had been trained by the Masters of Sinanju who followed in his awesome footsteps.
The House of Sinanju had been the secret power behind the great thrones of the ancient world, and now in the modern world it stood unknown, unseen and unstoppable beside the leader of the greatest nation in human history in the person of Remo Williams, who had been trained by the last pure-blooded Master.
For twenty years, he had served America and its Presidents, good and bad, honest and not, through CURE, a secret offshoot of the executive branch.
No more. There were some loose ends to tie upnamely the question of his own ancestry, since Remo had been an orphan-but after they were taken care of, he was a free agent. No more CURE. No more Harold W Smith, who ran it. No more running his tail off dealing with America's increasingly unsolvable problems.
Of course, there were some problems Remo considered worth solving.
Like the problem of tourist murders in Florida.
It has gotten so that every week there was a new dead Florida tourist. It was bad for America's image, the President had complained to the press. Bad for Florida tourism, the governor had added. Remo Williams didn't care about America's image or Florida's tourist industry any more than he cared about John Wayne Bobbitt's prospects for romantic bliss.
Innocent tourists he cared about.
Which is why, since he was already on his way to Sam Beasley World to tie up a loose end, Remo didn't mind dealing with it.
Trouble was, no one was taking the bait. Remo turned on the radio and found some Barry Manilow music and cranked it up full blast. Maybe that would draw flies. It sounded treacly enough.
Remo got all the way into the city of Furioso without being rammed from behind, sideswiped or car-jacked. The disappointment showed on his strongboned face.
He found a turnoff and sped back to the airport.
"I have a complaint," Remo told the rental parking-lot attendant as he got out.
"The car is not satisfactory?" said the attendant, who didn't know what surprised him most, the complaint or the fact that the customer was still living.
"It is not."
"What appears to be wrong with it?"
"Too inconspicuous," said Remo.
The lot attendant blinked.
"Sir?"
Remo looked around the lot. He pointed. "I want that one."
In a far corner of the lot was a car identical to the one Remo had just driven back, except that it was Christmas red.
"It's the same."
"I like the color better."
"Oh, I can't let you have that one. It has an old tag on it."
"Looks fine to me," said Remo.
"But, sir, the tag says Mavis Rental Agency. You'd stick out like a sore-"
The attendant looked at Remo in his Day-Glo outfit, the red leather luggage that crammed the entire back seat, and swallowed the rest of whatever he was going to say.
"I want it," Remo insisted. "I'm the customer, and the customer-"
"-is always right," the attendant echoed. Wearily he handed Remo the keys.
"Mind transferring my luggage?" asked Remo. "I forgot to buy paint."
The attendant was only too happy to comply and help a tourist in the last sweet minutes of his foolish life, and when Remo came back he stood idly by while Remo shook a can of orange safety paint and inscribed the word TOURIST on the sides and rear window of the rental car.
Remo stepped back, admiring the way the vibrant orange letters clashed with the red body paint.
"How's that look?"
"Loud," the attendant said. "But it suits you, actually," he added with a glassy smile.
"See you on the trip back," said Remo, getting in.
"It's the Christmas season, and miracles do happen," the lot attendant said weakly as Remo drove off again, fodder for the next morning's tragic headlines.
This time Remo had no problems. He hadn't gone an eighth of a mile when a blue Camaro, shedding a purple neon glow from tubes bolted under the Chassis, blasted in behind him and accelerated.
Remo relaxed a fraction of a second ahead of the jolt of bumper meeting bumper. Most people tensed up. That was how bones were broken. Remo's fully working brain, one of only two in these last years of the twentieth century, told him to relax. And he moved in his seat with the jolt, breaking nothing.
A massive arm gesticulated by his side mirror.
"You! Pull over. Gotta exchange insurance papers witchu. "
"Happy to oblige," Remo said to himself, and pulled off an exit and into a gas station that had succumbed to urban blight. There were no pumps, plywood covered the windows, and weeds grew up from cracks in the broken asphalt.
Two probable urban predators popped out of the Camaro. Remo tagged them as probable because they came out holding Tec-9s, one hand on the grip and the other clutching the lower end of a ruler-straight 50round clip jutting from the magazine receiver.
They held the pistols before them like mechanical scythes.
"Give us whatchu got!" one grunted.
Out of the open pa
ssenger window sailed Remo's baseball cap and the can of orange safety paint. They landed at the feet of the armed youth.
"Your wallet, fool!" one snarled.
"My wallet's mine," said Remo, opening the door and stepping out. "And you wouldn't shoot a guy over his wallet."
"Wrong. We gangstas!" the other spat.
One Tec-9 came up to shoulder height and began popping.
Remo wove wide of the sudden storm of bullets. The weapons were equipped with hellfire switches that sprang the triggers back into firing position, giving the ticky-tacky weapons an extra edge.
Which in this case was absolutely none at all.
While the hapless rental car began collecting washerlike perforations along its paint job, Remo swept in on the blind side of the nearest definite urban predator. In the strict sense, all sides were blind sides when a ordinary man armed only with a bullet-spewing handgun took on a Master of Sinanju.
The first attacker was still looking at the afterimage of his intended victim poised before the open car door when Remo's right index finger entered his left temple and came out again in a single pumping motion.
Brain function ceased immediately, and he fell on his weapon.
This put the second man at Remo's mercy. He had started firing late and so still had a quarter clip left. Remo hated to see all those bullets go to waste so he slipped up and under the popping barrel that was threaded to accept a silencer and turned the soft part of the gunman's throat into an organic silencer.
The barrel lifted suddenly, came into contact with the underside of a slack jaw, and seven Black Talon rounds entered soft flesh and removed the upper quadrant of the man's head in a single mass like a raspberry pie.
The rest of him fell flat. He landed on his back, and after a few seconds the falling top of his head snacked his face.
Remo returned to the perforated rental car after spraying an orange safety circle around the two dead bodies and then bisecting them with a diagonal slash of paint. A minute later he was back on the highway.
A mile farther along a battered gray van pulled up alongside Remo's car, and a voice insisted that Remo's wallet be tossed into the broad palm that floated between both vehicles.
"If I throw it, I might miss," said Remo.
"Don't miss, else I won't miss," a broad face behind the broad hand growled, displaying the perforated barrel of yet another Tec-9.
"That's a popular make around these parts," Remo commented.
"She be made in Miami."
"Always buy American, I say."
White teeth flashed in the broad face, and the broad palm shook for emphasis.
Remo shrugged and said, "I didn't know my wallet was so popular."
"Fuck the wallet. It's what be in it. And I want it in my fucking hand."
Remo slipped the wallet from his pocket, fingered out the money and ID cards and slapped the empty billfold into the hovering hand.
The hand looked strong enough to support a two-by-four, never mind a soft leather wallet, but the wallet somehow slipped to the speeding highway. Two of the man's four fingers slipped with it, along with his severed thumb.
The man screamed with dull shock as he realized he was shy three fingers and a stranger's wallet.
"My damn fingers! Where'd they go to?"
"If you turn around quick," Remo said helpfully, "you might get them to the hospital in time to get them sewn back on."
"They sew fingers back on, too? I thought that only worked with dicks."
"If you don't hurry, they're going to have to sew your dick onto one of those stumps for a thumb."
The broad man began shouting at his driver, "Turn around! Damn it! Turn around before my damn fingers get run over. I don't want no fucking dick for a thumb."
The van accelerated, and Remo decided to let them both live. Advertising usually paid.
The next attempt to rip him off came disguised as a silver Cadillac. It was shiny with chrome and meticulously kept up. So when it veered in front of Remo and abruptly slowed down, rather than break slowly to minimize an unavoidable crash, Remo accelerated.
The entire rear deck crumpled. Remo backed up, and as the driver jumped out screaming his rage, Remo jammed it again for good measure, destroying the vestigial spare tire.
"Look what you done to my fucking damn car!" the driver screamed.
"You stopped short in front of me," Remo pointed out politely.
"I stopped short just to hold you up, motherfuck. Not to total my wheels. I just stole this baby today."
"Tough. You do the crime, you gotta do the time."
"Time? This ain't about time! Oh, man, lookit my damn wheels."
And while the driver was all but tearing his hair out, Remo took the can of orange spray paint he had recovered from the gas station grounds and carefully drew the circle-and-diagonal-slash "No" sign on the undamaged hood of the Cadillac.
The driver gaped at this casual act of vandalism with disbelieving eyes.
"What you do that for?" he blurted.
"It's my mark," Remo said casually.
"What're you, fucking Zorro?"
"Don't use profanity in the same sentence as Zorro. The Sam Beasley people might overhear and sue you for defamation of copyright."
"You're paying for that."
"If you want my wallet, the last dipshit probably has it by now."
A knife came out. Remo was almost disappointed. The thief might as well have pulled a plantain. But Remo let him take his best shot.
The definite urban predator came in low, going for Remo's seemingly exposed belly. It would have been a perfect disemboweling stroke, a lateral rip calculated to split Remo's abdominal wall into a clown grin, letting his tightly packed intestines come tumbling out.
It never landed, because Remo drove the heel of one shoe into the man's definitely exposed belly.
The man stopped, grunted and turned green. He dropped his knife, the better to clutch his stomach. It felt strangely hollow in his mauling hands, the strong abdominal wall flapping like a loose plastic window shade. He doubled over.
When the awful smell emanating from the seat of his pants reached his quivering nose, the knife man muttered, "I think I done shit my pants."
"Better check to be sure."
"I ain't shit my pants since I was little."
The knife man was definitely greener now and still doubled over. He hobbled over to the side of the road, where he gingerly removed his soiled pants.
When he turned around, the knife man saw the gray slimy ropes hanging out his backside and asked, "What's my damn guts doing on the outside of me?"
Remo shrugged casually. "You tried to disembowel me. I returned the favor."
"I didn't see no knife."
"There's more than one way to disembowel a cat," said Remo, finishing the job by driving a knuckle into the empty cavity of the knife man's stomach and shattering his lower spine.
The knife man made a messy pile when he sat down forever.
Whistling, Remo painted a circle around his body and ran the diagonal slash across it, intestines and all, before driving off.
"Remo Williams," he said in a bright announcer's voice, "you just snuffed half the car-jackers in Furioso, Florida. What are you going to do now?"
In his own natural voice, he replied, "I'm going to Sam Beasley World."
Chapter 3
Flanked by a running roadblock of caterwauling blue-and-gray Massachusetts State Police cars, the Presidential motorcade raced away from the University of Massachusetts at high speed, lights flashing in alternation. Scurrying traffic crowded to the side of the road. Police and Army helicopters buzzed overhead like protective dragonflies.
No one noticed the weaving white Ford Aerostar van as it scooted down the opposite lane to turn up the UMass access road.
If they had, they couldn't have failed to notice the driver. Or the bulky virtual-reality helmet encasing his head like a sensory-deprivation sphere.
Despite the f
act that he couldn't see past the helmet's blank eyephone goggles, the driver slid up the curving access road without scraping a fender.
"You're almost there," a voice inside the VR helmet said softly.
"This is so neat," the driver burbled. "It feels exactly like I'm driving a real car in the real world in real time."
"Pay attention to the mission, not the technology, " the soft voice told him. "You are in a totally immersive experience which requires absolute concentration."
"Got it. What was all that commotion back there?"
"You have entered the action phase of the experience."
"Great. No offense, but except for the high-res graphics, it's been a pretty uneventful ride so far."
"Did you notice anything unusual about the motorcade?"
"Yeah, they were hauling ass to beat the band."
"The President has just been shot."
"Damn."
"You and only you can find the assassin hiding in the brick buildings directly ahead of you."
"Good game concept."
"That is the parking-garage entrance on your left. Drive in there."
"Shouldn't I be making my own decisions?"
"You can try the branching nodes later. The clock is ticking. Here is the game scenario. Rogue CIA and Secret Service elements are trying to get to the assassin first. If they succeed, the cover-up will begin and the American people will never know the terrible truth."
"Count on me," said the driver, flooring the accelerator.
It was incredible, from the authentic sound of a racing six-cylinder engine to the acoustics that changed as soon as he slid into the virtual-reality underground parking garage beneath the illusionary University of Massachusetts.
"This is really cool," he blurted. "I actually smell stale car exhaust."
"The Jaunt VR System has a forty-thousand-facsimile olfactory library. We call the process 0lfax.
"Olfactory library. Sensurround sound. Vehicle simulation. Your guys have put together the VR system for the twentyfirst century here. Damn! Everything looks, smells, sounds and feels real. Really real."
"The Jaunt System has achieved seventy-five million polygons per second of resolution. Mere reality is estimated at eighty million polygons."
"Let me tell you," the driver said, parking the car in the nearly empty garage. "You can't hardly notice those missing five million polygons."
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