He blew a soft whistle as he tracked the maps from left to right. They started with North America. The second easel skipped to Western Europe. As he walked, he passed his fingertips along the rough surface of the corkboard, feeling the slight indentations where once had been pins.
Sometimes he could get a sense of something just by touching it. But as he felt his way around the world, Mark felt nothing but crumbling old corkboard.
Almost nothing.
There was something there. As usual, something impossible to define. A frustrating sense of not knowing.
He passed through Central Europe to Asia. When he got to the Korean peninsula, he stopped dead.
"Uh-oh," Mark said to himself.
The last easel was tilted slightly. He hadn't seen the two red pins buried deep on the West Korean Bay. But that shouldn't surprise him, should it? He knew the reputation of the man who owned these maps. Knew what he had been hired to do. And yet Benson Dilkes had disappeared. There was no trace of the assassin, not under his own name, nor under any of his known aliases.
Maybe he was off plying his trade. Maybe this was just how he conducted his business. Get the job and go undercover until the job was completed.
But for Mark Howard, there was the Feeling. Before he knew what he was doing, Mark was stretching out a hand to one of the red pins.
He felt it at once. A strange sense of cold dread as he reached for the pin. Stronger than the usual sense he got.
For an instant he felt strangely light-headed. The room seemed to take on a sickly glow.
Mark took a step back, blinking.
It was just a pin sticking into a rotting old map. An inanimate object. Alone in a killer's apartment that, until a few hours before, had been one big bomb, Mark Howard felt foolish letting himself be rattled by something as trivial as a little plastic tack.
He reached up and pulled it out. And instantly regretted doing so.
The color flew at him. It was as if he were suddenly standing on train tracks, the train barreling down on him. Whistle blowing, light growing bigger, bigger. No way to move. Paralyzed to inaction. Knowing there was no way to avoid it, knowing he was going to be struck.
There was a shock, as if touching the pin had sent a jolt of electricity coursing through his body.
The color came in a flash. Bright, brilliant purple. Then the images.
Flashes of nightmares.
An owl taking flight. A twisted winter tree. A man lying in a hospital bed. The same man standing on an outcropping above a bloodred bay, blond hair spilling down around his shoulders like a Norse god.
The nightmare turning real.
Mark saw the same man now. In the corner of Benson Dilkes's Boca Raton bedroom. Hovering in the shadows. A demented glint in his electric-blue eyes.
The eyes flashed. The shock of blue that flew from them seemed to envelop the room. But Mark knew that the color he was seeing was only in his mind. And then the flash of blue was overtaken by a wall of impenetrable darkness.
Mark reeled, stumbling against the map of the Far East.
He knew. Mark Howard knew.
The maps tumbled into one another, falling over one by one like colored dominoes.
Remo and Chiun. The danger. It was his fault. They didn't know. He had to warn them.
But it was too much.
Even as he tried to fight it, Mark Howard surrendered to the blackness. As the maps fell, so did he. When he struck the floor, a few of the dropped tacks bit the soft flesh of hands and face. By then Mark didn't even feel the pain.
Air hissing from his lips, his eyes fluttered shut. The pin that represented one of the two true living Masters of Sinanju dropped from his opening fingertips. It rolled under the bed.
Chapter 22
There had always been the fear.
Even in life, even when he thought he was not afraid.
Even before he died.
Most would think he was still alive. An easy enough mistake to make. After all, he moved, breathed, ate. He seemed to do those things that living humans did. But those who thought that were wrong. A man was only a man who had a soul. His soul was dead.
It hadn't gone all at once, as it did for most living things. His soul had died in little pieces, bit by tiny bit. A thousand cuts, a million invisible drops of blood. It had taken years for his soul to pass into that final night. By the end, the last, lingering fragments had become a nuisance. Something to be extinguished. A disease. When it was gone completely he didn't miss it.
Back in the days when he had a soul, his name had been Jeremiah Purcell. But that was back when he could say that he was truly alive and not just a walking corpse.
He was an orphan, although it had not always been so. The early part of life-before this walking death-he had been raised on a farm in rural Kentucky.
For those first few years Jeremiah was a boy almost like any other. Until the day he killed his parents. It wasn't his fault. In his mind he had seen them die horribly. He thought they were on fire. Then it happened. When the daydream of his undisciplined mind became reality and his parents ran screaming, trying to put out the flames, young Jeremiah Purcell's soul began to shrink.
He was eight years old.
In his mind he dreamed they had died and somehow his mind had made that dream real. Impossible. He could not have killed his parents. The real world didn't work like that. Even a boy his age knew that. Things did not happen just because of an idle thought.
Even though he knew he had made it happen, there was a part of Jeremiah that stubbornly refused to believe. Through the sheriff's investigation, to the double funeral where he did not shed a tear, to the train platform where he was passed off to a social worker who would take him to a state home in Dover City, Jeremiah tried to tell himself that he hadn't done anything.
But on the train, it happened again. As he dozed in his seat, his mind misbehaved. Bent reality for all to see. He woke up to a mass hallucination of a snowstorm inside the train car. And when he woke, it stopped.
There had been chaos on that train. The astonished adults looked everywhere for the source of the snow. Everywhere but at the young boy who had made it happen. There was only one man who was looking at Jeremiah. And the way he stared, Jeremiah knew that the man in the blue business suit with the funny eyes understood the truth.
The child whose soul had not yet died had met the man who would begin to methodically murder it. The man had taken Jeremiah from the train. To the life that had been waiting for him all along. To a life of death.
Back on the farm Jeremiah had known fear. His father was a brute of a man who mistreated him. His life at home, in town, at school was filled with a hundred daily fears.
After he had murdered his parents there was new fear. The fear of being caught. Of others finding out about his special abilities. Of a new life in a state-run orphanage.
But until that chance meeting on a train, Jeremiah had not known true fear.
The man, he learned, was named Nuihc, although Jeremiah was never to call him by that name. He would be called Master. For Jeremiah it was not a term of respect, but a term of enslavement. And although his Master taught Jeremiah new levels of fear he hadn't known existed, he taught the young boy from Kentucky much, much more.
Nuihc was from a place called Korea. Jeremiah had vaguely heard of it. He was pretty certain his dead father had been in a war there at one time.