"Rasputin," growled the monk. It was the same funereal voice that had come from the downstairs speaker.
"Yeah, that's it. You him?" The eyes bespoke the truth.
The monk didn't respond to Remo. His words were directed at Chiun's retreating back.
"The night," Rasputin called to the Master of Sinanju. "Beware the night. Beware the false day. Beware the hand that reaches from the grave. Beware, Masters of Sinanju."
Chiun had been headed for the hall. When he heard the monk's words, he froze in his tracks.
"He ain't exactly Little Mary Sunshine, is he?" Remo asked, glancing over his shoulder.
He was surprised to see that a strange look had descended on his teacher's face. It was a look he had seen only rarely in all the many years they had been together.
It was a look of fear.
"Chiun?" Remo asked, suddenly worried.
But the Master of Sinanju wasn't listening to his pupil. He took a few cautious steps back across the room.
"Speak, monk," the old Korean demanded.
"What is it?" Remo questioned. "What's wrong?"
"Hush," Chiun commanded.
The monk's disembodied eyes floated in the black shadows. "The night draws near for you both," Rasputin warned. "Darkness comes from the cold sea."
"And the splendor falls on castle walls," Remo said, beginning to lose patience. "Can I kill him again, please?"
But Chiun was peering intently at the shabby Russian.
"What do you see, monk?" he demanded.
"What do you mean what does he see?"
"He is a healer, a hypnotist and a mystic," Chiun hissed impatiently. "The monk sees more than other mortals. He predicted the murders of the Romanov family."
"Fat lot of good it did them. Don't let him spook you, Little Father."
But Chiun would not budge. "Tell me more, monk."
The wide eyes remained fixed within the shadows. "You are stalked by death," Rasputin warned, his voice a croaking dirge. "Two from your order. Two will die. One will take your place. Another is dead already. Another lives who was dead. When comes the end, two Masters of Sinanju will die. Master and student, father and son."
Remo felt his own blood run cold. He shot a glance at his teacher. Chiun's eyes were as unblinking as the monk's. He stared in rapt attention at the man in the shadows.
Rasputin's voice was growing fainter.
"Two will die.... Two will die.... Two will die...."
The eyes faded. Flickering candles. "Two will die...."
The oversized orbs winked out.
Remo felt an emptiness swell in the darkness. He passed his hand through the shadow. There was no substance to it. Rasputin was gone.
"What the hell was that all about?" he asked. But when Remo turned a questioning eye to the Master of Sinanju, he found that he was alone. Chiun was gone.
Far off the apartment door clicked quietly shut.
Chapter 14
"Merci," Benson Dilkes said into the telephone. The word was a grunt in the dark of his Florida apartment. His own voice sounded odd to his ears. The foreign words sat heavy and out-of-place on his fat Virginian tongue. Nothing was right any longer. The entire world was out of alignment. Spinning out of control. Dilkes replaced the phone. Carefully.
With equal care he picked another red tack from the plastic case. The lid was open now. The way things were already going, he saw no reason to close it.
He stepped over to the corkboard map of Europe. The new thumbtack went in, this time in Paris. Jean-Pierre Sevigne.
The assassin had been good. A freelancer who split his time between government and the private sector. Sevigne didn't discriminate. He went wherever the money was.
He also knew of Sinanju. Dilkes had hosted him several times in the 1990s when work brought the French assassin to Africa. Talk inevitably turned to the reason Dilkes had left the United States years before. They talked of Sinanju.
The Frenchman was disdainful of most in his profession, but, like Dilkes, he held the House of Sinanju in high regard. He had heard of what was to come. Unlike Dilkes, the Frenchman looked forward to this time. Hoped he lived long enough to see it. Sevigne saw it as the ultimate challenge. He knew that he could not hope to best the greatest assassins in the world with weapons or brawn. He insisted that it would be cleverness, trickery, not guns or gadgets, that would finally overcome the vaunted assassins from the East.
His greatest fear was that he would falter. That he would somehow tip his hand.
"In no circumstance have I ever been nervous. Not in my entire career," Sevigne had said one lazy summer evening in the gazebo of Dilkes's Zimbabwe ranch.
The two men sat with their brandies and watched the African sky burn away to smoldering ash.
"But these men from Sinanju," Sevigne continued, shaking his head in awe. He took a deep, thoughtful breath. "There was a young American performer a few years back. He wanted nothing more than to sing in front of his idol, Frank Sinatra. It was his lifelong dream. If and when the moment came, he thought it would be magical. He became successful and, as fate would have it, ended up performing on a stage in front of Sinatra. It was not a magical night, Benson. He forgot the words. He stumbled, he stammered. He made a nervous fool of himself. That is my greatest fear. I am not afraid of meeting the men from Sinanju. I am afraid I will make a fool out of myself when I do."
Dilkes had dragged on his pipe, blowing a lazy smoke ring to the warm gazebo ceiling.
"Your fear is misplaced," he warned. "Fear them, and not what you'll do to embarrass yourself in your dying moments. Because if this legend comes to pass and we're all forced to meet them, there's no doubt that they will be your dying moments."
In the end Dilkes was right.
Jean-Pierre had tried being clever. But all clever got him was a belly full of acid and a thumbtack stuck in a shopworn corkboard map.
The futility of cleverness had already been proved to Dilkes months ago. Olivier Hahn had been particularly clever. The high-tech Swiss assassin was a Dilkes protege. For a time he was like a son to Benson Dilkes. The younger man loved to build elaborate traps for his prey.
Hahn's thumbtack was stuck in the Swiss Alps where his frozen body had been discovered in a remote cabin.
Clumsy, low-tech didn't seem to have an effect, either.
Dilkes had gotten a report out of London a few hours after England's two Source agents were killed. A third body. Killed by an explosion over the Thames.