The hands were gone, as was the gun. Replaced by twin stumps of spurting red blood.
As he looked down in dull amazement at his lifeblood pumping onto the ground, the assassin became briefly aware of his gun. The barrel was pointed back in his direction and was floating gently toward his face.
Wait.
Not floating.
Hurtling.
In fact, zooming in faster than the fastest thing he had ever seen.
The bone-crushing impact of his own weapon a split second later was the last thing the killer would ever feel.
Remo dumped the body with the gun sprouting from its forehead onto the ground. He was picking his way back through the carnage when a voice exploded on the PA system.
"As I have foretold, so it has come to pass!" the booming voice of Man Hyung Sun announced proudly.
Remo could not believe it. Sun was actually going on with the ceremony.
"I am the seer of legend. I augur great things for the chosen few. Revel in the Sun Source, disbelievers! Let Man Hyung Sun be your guide to blessed pyon ha-da! Great shall be the rewards for him who joins our righteous cause!"
"Sun! Sun! Sun!"
The crowd began to chant his name once more.
It was almost as if there had not been an attempted assassination a moment before. For all anyone knew, there were still killers lurking amid the crowd.
The Sunnies didn't care. The bodies strewed around the rear of the stage did not matter. They screamed and chanted with religious zeal, eyes wild with righteous fire.
Hands waved pink saris like trophies. As Remo came around to the front of the stage, he fought his way through the waving streams of silk, still searching for the last of the Korean hit squad.
"One has come to deliver us to that which I have foretold!" Sun screamed, quieting the frenzied crowd.
Remo stumbled on the last body. It was at the base of the stage. Every bone beneath the robe appeared to have been pounded to dust. Chiun's handiwork.
He glanced around, looking for the Master of Sinanju in the sea of Sunnie faces.
"It is he who saved your sacred leader! He of the Sun Source whose arrival I have presaged!"
There it was again. Sun Source. The most ancient description of Sinanju, known only to a handful of people. For some reason, it angered Remo to hear the cult leader speak the words. Coming from a fraud like Sun, it was almost a desecration.
"He will help lead us to glory!"
Remo half heard the words.
Chiun was nowhere to be seen. From the direction Remo had taken, there was really only one place the old Korean could have gone.
"Speak that we may hear your words, Great Protector!"
A thought struck Remo. It dropped like a lead ball into the pit of his stomach.
Limbs stiff, face unreadable, he turned to the stage.
The wizened form of the Master of Sinanju stood high on the platform next to the Reverend Man Hyung Sun. The cluster of wrinkles on his parchment face bunched into a tight fist of pleasure as Sun twisted the microphone over to Chiun.
"All hail the Sun Source," the Master of Sinanju's squeaky voice boomed out over the public-address system.
As the world spun and twisted and finally dropped out from beneath Remo's feet, the crowd of Sunnie disciples burst into frenzied cheers.
Chapter 14
The men wore the blue uniform of the New York City Police Department. Hip radios squawking, they forced their way through the crowd of mingling Sunnies to the pile of three bodies lying on the infield of Yankee Stadium.
Remo was gone. He had seen the police arriving at the very end of the mass wedding ceremony and had taken off in the opposite direction with Chiun. The two Masters of Sinanju had left with the Reverend Sun's entourage.
It was a testament to the brainwashing techniques the Sunnie cult employed that the men and women could ignore all the corpses lying around their makeshift chapel.
Chatting among themselves in the postwedding euphoria, they paid little attention as the police slipped the first trio of bodies into black zipper bags.
Oddly enough, there were no homicide detectives on the scene. Stranger still, the police who were present used no gloves when handling the corpses. They merely stuffed the remains into the bags, zipped them up and moved on to the next bodies. They could have been state workers collecting litter at the side of the highway.
Not one question was asked of the Sunnies.
Not one fingerprint was taken.
Not one hair or fiber or blood sample was lifted from any of the bodies, the ground or the stage.
Nothing besides the actual collection of the corpses seemed to interest the police.
It took little time for them to bag up the assassins, as well as the Sunnies who had fallen victim to the single successful gunman.
The nine bodies of the hit squad were placed in the back of an unmarked van. The remains of the more than one dozen slaughtered Sunnie cult members were put in the back of another nondescript vehicle.
Without a single siren or light to herald their way, the trucks took off in different directions.
The bodies of the Sunnie victims turned up over the course of the next two days, scattered in a wide area around the East River near Riker's Island and in Flushing Bay near LaGuardia Airport.
The remains of the Korean hit squad showed up in a completely different place.
Chapter 15
It was the beginning of his second full day of work back behind his familiar desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, and Harold W. Smith felt like a new man.
The winter sun reflected brightly on Long Island Sound, dappling in shades of white and yellow the waves that lapped at the rotting dock behind the private sanitarium's administrative wing.
Though the calendar had lately crept into December, a substantial snowfall had yet to come. The crispness of the air and lack of icy buildup on the ground erased images of the deep winters of years past. Residents of the Northeast were enjoying the guiltless lie that this was merely an extended autumn. True winter was still far off.