"Through a bargain with their emperor," Chiun replied. "The occupation troops withdrew, and Hirohito was permitted to survive."
"What took so long?"
Chiun's expression conveyed disappointment. "You still think like a white man when it comes to time. What is thirty-five or forty years compared to all eternity? The immortal House of Sinanju had more-important tasks than dealing with a few barbarian usurpers of the throne."
"Like earning gold?"
"The second-most-important task of any Master."
"And the first?"
"Pursuit of personal enlightenment," said Chiun, "about Sinanju."
At the moment, Remo would have settled for enlightenment about his current mission, but the final show-and-tell would have to wait a bit, until he met the others at the Shangri-la. Meanwhile, he had some time to kill before that rendezvous, and it would help to put his mind at ease if he could satisfy himself that he hadn't picked up a tail within the past two hours.
The Frumps would help him there, and all they had to do was be themselves.
The contract was a relatively simple one. It called for one dead round-eye, half the payment in advance, the rest when Sing Hop Ma returned with proof of execution.
Easy.
It could even be a pleasure.
He had picked up half a dozen Malay thugs to do the dirty work and make the hit seem like a random street crime. The police were strict about this sort of business, and the locals worked for pocket money—what the Yanks called chicken feed. If they were caught, he trusted them to keep their mouths shut, out of fear and the survival instinct.
Sing Hop Ma had been a red pole—an enforcer—for the local Ben Hoa Tong these past eleven years, since he turned twenty-one. He was a Malay-born Chinese whose father and grandfather served the tong before him, raising Sing to honor the traditions of his clan. The first time he had killed a man, at seventeen, he had been feted by the tong and welcomed to their brotherhood with open arms, a celebration that had nearly made his father weep with pride. Now, as a full-time soldier for the tong, he handled jobs and problems that required a certain killer instinct. Most arose from matters of internal discipline or economic competition, but a few—like this job—were accepted on a contract basis from outside. Another family, or even round-eyes, could procure the services of an assassin if they had sufficient cash in hand.
The target this time was a nondescript American. Six feet, dark hair, brown eyes, no visible tattoos or scars. Sing had a candid photo, taken from a distance at the airport as the target passed through customs, but it told him nothing of the stranger. He looked fit enough, without the bulging muscles that would mark a bodybuilder in the States. Only his wrists looked unusual, huge and sturdy. Perhaps he was a businessman or lawyer, dabbling in some enterprise that earned him lethal enemies.
It made no sense for Sing to speculate. He had no personal investment in the contract, other than the payoff for successful execution. Sing wasn't concerned with what may have provoked the killing, or the impact it would have on foreign shores. His reputation was at stake, dependent on attention to the technical details, but he had supervised this kind of work a hundred times before.
He was sure that nothing could go wrong.
His mark was staying at the Hotel Merlin, one more piece of information from his sponsors to facilitate the work. It had been simple for the Malay thugs to follow him when he went out, along Jalan Ampang, beside the river, walking south until he reached the central marketplace. Most round-eyes hired inexpensive taxis to conserve their energy, but this one liked to walk. He browsed in several shops, paused now and then to speak with sidewalk vendors, but he purchased nothing, even waved off the advances of a stylish prostitute on Market Street.
It would be best to kill him in or near the central market, Sing decided, passing the instruction to his Malay go-between and watching as the man slipped off to find his soldiers in the crowd. The kind of mugging Sing envisioned was uncommon, but it happened. Deaths were rare—the random murder of a round-eyed tourist almost unheard-of—but the only fair alternative would be a manufactured accident, and Sing Hop Ma did not trust his associates to pull it off. That kind of ploy would force him to recruit more soldiers from the tong, and thus reduce his private income from the contract. Better to be happy with the Malays, keep it simple and collect his payoff when the contract was fulfilled.
He could have done the job himself, enjoyed it for the rush of pride he felt whenever he was able to defeat a round-eye, but he didn't care to risk his life and freedom on a mission that had no importance to the family. If this man had done something to invite the wrath of the tong, it would have been a different matter. There would be no need for payment, nothing but a word from his superiors to send him on his way. Sing Ma still executed contracts on his own from time to time, when summoned by the hill chief of his tong, but that was always family business, when the master wished to send his enemies a special message. This was something else, a job for hire, and no sworn member of the tong would soil his hands if it could be avoided. Let the Malay mongrels do it for him, while he split the cash with his superiors.
He was a businessman, no different than a banker or attorney, with the sole exception that his stock-in-trade sometimes included sudden death.
What difference did it make? The men and women he had killed were all deserving of their fate, sworn enemies of Sing Ma's family. They were informers, turncoats, thieves, assassins, spies for the authorities—no good to anyone, themselves included. As for contract killings hired from the outside, he reckoned there must be an urgent motive—fear, perhaps, or hatred, even jealousy—to make a stranger part with so much cash.
Sing Ma was watching when his target fell in step behind the two obese Americans. They weren't friends, from what the tong enforcer could discover, watching from his vantage point across the street. In fact, they didn't speak at all, the two in front ignoring Sing Ma's target absolutely while they bartered with a sidewalk vendor over trinkets.
Three could make the job more difficult than one, if they were fighters, but a passing glance was all it took for Sing Ma to dismiss these bloated round-eyes as potential threats. In this case, he suspected that their presence might prove beneficial. Afterward, when it was done, police would think his hirelings had gone trolling for Americans in general, instead of picking out a special target from the crowd.
Another glance around the marketplace confirmed no uniforms in evidence. Unless the Malays bungled it supremely, they should have no trouble closing in, accosting the Americans, demanding cash and jewelry. There would be a struggle, with the target trying to defend himself, and one or more of the Malays would stab him. Once would be enough, if he was working with a skilled assassin, but Sing Ma had specified no less than half a dozen wounds, to guarantee the job was done. His proof would be the fanfare of publicity attendant on the slaying of a round-eye at the central market.
Perfect.
Sing Hop Ma didn't approach the target personally, hanging back a constant fifty yards to watch from a respectful distance. There was still a possibility, however slight, that something could go wrong. The Malays would be on their own in that event, with nothing but a heartfelt guarantee of slow, protracted death if they betrayed their master. Peasants that they were, they knew the reputation of the Ben Hoa Tong and would do nothing to provoke the massacre of their extended families.
Sing Ma was ready for the trap to close.
Let the festivities begin, Remo thought. He'd felt the executioners before he picked them out by sight; nothing about their superficial looks that would have made them stand out in the crowded marketplace. If pressed for a description of the feeling, Remo might have said they broadcast raw hostility, the same way other human beings radiated fear, anxiety or confidence. It took conditioning and practice to revive the special sense that most men lacked, an edge they had surrendered quite unconsciously along the evolutionary road from "savagery" to "civilization," but the study of Sinanju opened many hidden doors.
Before they came in striking distance, Remo knew that there were six of them, all Malays, traveling in pairs. They weren't total idiots, no shouting back and forth to keep in touch, but once he had them spotted he could read the glance they exchanged while closing for the ambush.
It was fairly well coordinated: two in front of Fred and Freda Frump, two more in back of Remo, with the final pair approaching from his right, across the open marketplace. The hunters broke formation as they closed the gap, forming a semicircle that enclosed the three Americans but allowed other Malays to slip through the cordon when they recognized the danger.
It took another moment for the Frumps to realize their path was blocked, so taken were they with the handmade jewelry offered by an aging sidewalk vendor. Only when the merchant started packing up his wares in haste did either of them realize that something was amiss. They looked around the ring of hostile faces, blanching at the sight of knives and bludgeons, trembling like two effigies constructed out of Jell-O.
"Kasi kita wang segala engkau," one of the assassins ordered. Give us all your money.
So, it was supposed to look like robbery, thought Remo, with the sidewalk merchant serving as a witness for police. No matter that a daylight mugging was among the city's rarest crimes. Assassination would be rarer still, and it required at least a nominal diversion if the killers meant to stay at large.
He tried to picture Fred and Freda as the targets, but dismissed the thought at once. They were innocuous, despite their violation of prevailing fashion codes, and they didn't look prosperous enough to make six hardened thugs risk prison for their pocket change. If anything, bad luck had brought them to their present circumstance.
Which meant the killers had been sent for Remo. That, in turn, suggested strongly that his cover had been blown, but he couldn't address that problem at the moment.
Not until he dealt with more-immediate concerns.
"Kasi kita wang segala engkau," said the leader of the thugs once more. He punctuated the command by jabbing with his wavy-bladed kris in the direction of the Frumps. They squealed in stereo and clutched at one another, sweating through their polyester outfits with the sudden rush of fear.
"Don't move," said Remo, stepping forward to confront the ersatz muggers as he spoke. His next words were addressed to the apparent spokesman for the group. "You're making a mistake."
The blade man stared at Remo, took a moment to absorb the warning and dismissed it like the oaf he was. His forward lunge was telegraphed by twitching muscles in his jaw and the shift of balance to his forward leg before he struck. It was too late to save himself, once he committed to the strike.
One moment, he was thrusting forward, on the verge of burying the kris in Remo's gut; the next, his striking arm was twisted out of shape, the elbow shattered, shoulder dislocated, forming crazy angles, and the blade he meant for Remo slid between his sixth and seventh ribs. The man was dead before he knew it, lurching several steps past Remo, toward the cringing Frumps, before he fell.
The others rushed Remo then, and while his physical reaction was instinctive, nothing but a blur to those who watched dumbfounded from the sidelines, Remo's senses broke the action down and analyzed each movement as a master choreographer reviews a complicated dance routine.
The two goons on his left were close enough to merit an immediate response, one brandishing a dagger, while the other swung a length of chain. He crushed the blade man's larynx with a floating strike that killed him where he stood, continuing a single fluid motion as he spun the standing corpse around and used it as a shield. The oily chain whipped out to wrap itself around the dead man's skull, and Remo met his startled adversary with a snap kick to the face, explosive impact shattering the lower jaw and driving bony needles deep into the soft flesh of his palate.
That left three, and he was ready for them as they tried to mob him, getting in each other's way. He hardly seemed to touch them—Fred and Freda would babble to the police that their attackers almost seemed to turn on one another, it had taken place so quickly—but dramatic roundhouse punches aren't required to kill. A fingertip behind the ear will manage very nicely, or an open palm below the chin, delivered from perhaps a foot away.
The work was done in fifteen seconds, give or take a heartbeat, then Remo stood perfectly composed amid the bodies of his fallen enemies. He faced Fred and Freda, stepping close enough for them to smell his aftershave.
"What did you see?"
Fred blinked at him behind his horn-rimmed glasses. "Hell if I know, mister. It was all so fast."
"So fast," squeaked Freda, echoing her man.
"That's fine."