Schumar suddenly caught sight of a cluster of seeds.
The seeds. St. Clair had thousands of seeds.
Dr. Brice Schumar's lungs pulled one last time at the oxygen that was no longer there, and he tipped over onto the plain dirt floor of the CCS greenhouse.
IN THE SAFETY of the control room, Hubert St. Clair looked at the digital clock buried in the console. He kept his distance from the device. He liked clocks about as much as he trusted the buttons on the control panel.
"Precisely thirty-one minutes," he announced to himself. "Now who's the real scientist?" His proud smile evaporated. "Oh. Wait." He scrunched up his face as he examined the clock. "Or was it forty-one? Oh, damn, I lost count."
He pulled his eyes away from the clock. Like most digital devices, looking at it made him extremely uncomfortable.
With an angry frown he wrapped his finger in his hankie once more. Reaching for the control panel, he began to vent the alien atmosphere from the greenhouse.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was trying to do his good deed of the day. But, to his increasing annoyance, the day was stubbornly refusing to cooperate.
The sidewalks of New York were packed with people. A steady stream filled the slushy walkways and flooded the crosswalks. Cars clogged the streets, all spewing smoke and honking horns and cursing drivers. Unlike the people, the cars never seemed to move. They were part of the backdrop, like the towering buildings or the glimpses of grimy gray sky that lurked above the entire scene like the billowing cape of some wintry phantom.
Remo wasn't watching the sky or the buildings or the cars. As he strolled along the sidewalk, he was watching the people. Few pedestrians returned his gaze. Most were too wrapped up in the holiday bustle to give a stranger a second glance. Not that there was anything extraordinary about Remo to warrant more than a single quick look.
Remo was a thin man of indeterminate age. He was of average height with short, dark hair and a face that regularly skirted the line between ordinary and cruel.
The only two things outwardly odd about him were his abnormally thick wrists-which he rotated absently as he walked-and his clothes. In spite of the fact that it was mid-December, Remo wore a thin black cotton T-shirt and matching chinos. Odd, yes, but in New York City, odd was fairly easily accepted. After all, there was a lot worse than Remo.
And so the man in the T-shirt was either seen and dismissed or not seen at all as he glided alone up the packed sidewalk.
As a general rule Remo didn't like Manhattan. Worse was Manhattan at Christmastime. The whole holiday rush was a nightmare he would have just as soon avoided altogether. But the circumstances of his life had conspired to plop him down into the busiest city in the world at the absolute worst time of the year.
Remo was a Master of Sinanju. On the verge of becoming the Reigning Master of Sinanju, the titular head of the most ancient house of assassins in the history of mankind.
He thought he had already become Reigning Master two months ago. After all, the time had felt right. And he had been told that every Master knew instinctively when the time was right. So that should have been that. But things never worked out so easily for Remo Williams.
He soon learned that he was technically the Transitional Reigning Master. There were obligations prior to his ascension that would have to be met before he could officially assume the title of Reigning Master and all of the awesome responsibilities the position entailed. One of those things, which had brought him to Manhattan this day, seemed to be at odds with everything he had been taught.
Sinanju assassins were the pinnacle of the profession. Only two existed per generation-Master and pupil-and the training regimen they endured endowed them with abilities that seemed superhuman to the average man. The fear and mystery that surrounded the very thought of the Sinanju Master had been carefully cultivated over five millennia. Remo sometimes thought the perception had as much to do with marketing hype as it did with the truth.
The one constant that had persisted throughout the ages was that Masters of Sinanju were consummate professionals. They were paid handsomely for their services, since only fools and amateurs worked free. And yet, here was Remo Williams, professional assassin, looking this day to deliver a freebie.
Just what he had to do, he had no idea. But according to his teacher, he had to do something nice for someone. Of course, his teacher didn't come right out and say that. No. That would have been easy. Instead, he had prattled on for three hours about honor and obligation, duty and commitment, before finally getting around to the point. And so after three hours-180 of the longest, most painful minutes he had endured in years-Remo had culled the word nice.
Maybe it was something simple. As he walked along, face drawn in a deep frown, he noticed a woman struggling near the curb. In her arms she balanced a stack of boxes wrapped in shining green-and-red Rudolph paper. A cab was parked near her. The driver sat at the wheel, refusing to help.
Remo trotted up to the sweating woman. "Can I give you a hand, ma'am?"
He was amazed at how fast she moved.
The woman wheeled like a street fighter. "This is my cab," she snarled, even as she flung her precious packages to the snow. From her pocket she whipped out a can of pepper spray which she proceeded to squirt at Remo's eyes.
Remo ducked away from the spray. "Geez, lady, I was only offering to help," he complained.
Behind him, the squirted stream struck a hapless pedestrian square in the face. Screaming in pain, the unlucky businessman dropped to the ground in the fetal position. The moving crowd didn't even see him. People stepped right over him and continued down the sidewalk.
Before Remo, the woman scowled. She wasn't used to missing a target. "Stand still," she commanded.
Another squirt hit a superthin, impeccably dressed female pedestrian in the side of the face. Yelping in pain, the injured woman whipped out her own can of pepper spray. The two women proceeded to spritz each other like gunslingers at the OK Corral.
Remo danced lightly between them. Other pedestrians caught in the cross fire weren't so lucky. "Mine, mine, mine!" the first woman screamed.
Half-blinded now, she whipped the door open and began flinging packages inside the back of the cab. The second woman hadn't even wanted a taxi, but the unprovoked attack, as well as the first woman's loud proclamations, had triggered some base territorial urge. She suddenly decided that she wanted the cab, too. When Remo turned away, the second woman had the first in a bear hug around her ample middle while the first whacked her over the head with a roll of infant-Jesus Christmas paper.
"Try to do something nice for someone," Remo muttered.
Shaking his head in disgust, he headed down the street.
On the corner, a man dressed as Santa rang a bell for charitable donations. As Remo approached, he saw a scruffy-looking pedestrian grab Santa's donation bucket from the metal tripod where it hung. The man took off.
As Father Christmas yelled obscenities, the mugger ran down a nearby alley.
Remo was off like a shot. The crowd seemed suddenly charged with some electrical current that repelled them from Remo's path. They split instinctively up the middle as he raced down the sidewalk. Remo flew past the still screaming Saint Nick and ducked down the open end of the dark alley.
He caught up with Santa's mugger twenty yards in. The man was still running full-out.
"You know," Remo said as he grabbed the startled man by the scruff of the neck, flinging him into a grimy wall, "as stupid crimes go, it's pretty dumb to rob a guy who keeps a list of who's been naughty or nice."
The mugger spun on Remo, a demented gleam in his eye. Dropping the bucket he'd pinched from Santa, he clicked open a switchblade.
"I'd say assault with intent to commit bodily harm falls into the naughty category, too," Remo advised him. "You're bucking for a lump of coal in your stocking, pal."
The mugger lunged at Remo's belly with the knife. Dodging the blade, Remo snagged the man's wrist between two fingers, guiding the thrusting hand toward the alley wall.
In a twinkling, the solid brick seemed to go soft. To the mugger's amazement, the blade of the knife somehow managed to penetrate deep into brick before coming to a stop at the hilt. When he tried to pull it free, he found it stuck more firmly than Excalibur in the stone.
With a look of fear washing over his pale face, the mugger backed away from Remo. He bumped the wall behind.
"Not that nice is all it's cracked up to be," Remo grumbled. "Here I am, supposed to do something nice, and I don't even know the what or the who." He shook his head. "It's always the same thing. Always about tradition. First he says I've become Reigning Master just because I say I'm Reigning Master, then he pulls all this traditional rite-of-passage crapola out of his pocket. And not even right away. Oh, no. That'd be too painless. He eases into it during the month of hell I spend recovering from third degree burns. That's what he's like. Korean water torture. Drip, drip, drip."
"He who?" Santa's mugger asked anxiously. His eyes darted to the mouth of the alley. It seemed very far away.
"The pain in the ass who taught me," Remo said. "And don't think I haven't spent the last I-don't-know-how-many years of my life trying to figure out if he's an okay guy who's also a pain the ass or if he's a pain in the ass who just happens to sometimes be okay. On days like this, I just think he's a plain old everyday run-of-the-mill pain in the ass, and that's that. End of story."
"Yeah. Wow. That's too bad," the mugger commiserated. He would have begun inching to the street, but this wacko with the flashing hands and the fingers that could stick steel through brick was standing right in his path.
"It is, isn't it?" Remo agreed. "So I'm supposed to be Reigning Master, right? Wrong. Now I've got this whole Master Nik tradition to deal with."
The mugger's face brightened hopefully. "Nick?" he asked. "That's my name." He smiled, hoping to establish some kind of a connection with this crazy man.