"Hey, what about your friends?" called a voice from the smoking wreckage behind him. It was the stranger with the thick wrists, pulling himself onto the edge of the building with one hand while he dragged something with the other.
"How'd you get out?" the arsonist choked, unbelieving.
"I flew. I have a wonderful body," Remo said, his hands busy. "Thanks to twelve minutes of pulse-raising exercise every other day."
"Wh-what about...?" The leader edged toward the fire escape. "They alive?"
"No, they're dead," Remo said, flinging something out of the wreckage. It sailed high into the air, coming to rest with a heavy thump at the arsonist's feet, directly in front of the fire escape. It was the bodies of the two men, their limbs broken and knotted together.
"Real dead," Remo said. "And guess who's next."
The arsonist screamed.
Blubbering in fear, he pushed and pulled at the twisted mass of flesh in front of him to clear the way for his escape. But the stranger with the thick wrists had crossed the roof in one easy stride and was practically on him now. The arsonist rolled away, his teeth bared. From his pocket he extracted a squat, dark object. With a snap, the blade shot upward and gleamed in the moonlight.
"Okay," he said hoarsely, his smile twitching. "You try and get me now." He circled Remo menacingly, the blade slashing.
"First things first," Remo said. He stepped over the dead bodies and yanked up hard on the metal railings of the fire escape. It gave with a crash, bolts and shards flying as the stairway came loose and splintered to the ground. "Now, you were saying?"
The arsonist stared at him with eyes like saucers. "How'd you do that?" he cheeped.
"The same way I do this." Entering into a flying spiral, Remo left the surface of the roof in a movement that looked like a dance, except that the turns in his maneuver were fifty times faster than any dancer's. His foot shot out a full two feet away from the arsonist. Still, the knife soared, shattering in the air high above their heads. The arsonist stared at his empty hand in amazement, then at the empty place where the fire escape once stood.
"Nuh," the man blurted, rushing for Remo in a desperate tackle.
Remo picked up the kerosene can. "Catch." He tossed it in what looked like a slow underhand lob, but the impact of the can broke both the man's arms and shattered his ribs before propelling him toward the edge of the building.
"Don't kill me," the man wheezed as he tottered on the brick skirt of the roof, the kerosene can lodged in his chest.
"Now, why should I kill you?" Remo asked. He poked the can with two fingers. "Gravity's going to kill you." With that, the man careened over the edge and screamed his way to the pavement below.
"That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said, looking absently for a way off the roof.
There was only one. Straight down.
He readied himself now. The back of the building faced onto a court of sorts, a jumble of debris surrounded by chicken wire. Still, it made a better surface than concrete if you were planning to make a fifty-foot dive and come out of it alive.
He balanced on the balls of his feet, preparing. When he was in perfect balance, the muscles relaxed, the spine loose and ready, the feet in position to spring, he jumped high and wide, somersaulting in the air.
He landed on the balls of his feet, in exactly the same position in which he had started. In front of the row of burning buildings, a team of ambulance paramedics was scraping the arsonist's remains off the sidewalk.
"Anything I can do?" Remo offered as he sauntered out of the alley between the buildings.
"No, thanks," the paramedic said, pushing the body into a plastic bag. "There's nothing anybody can do for the jumpers. People get scared in a fire, they jump, you know? They don't wait for the fire department."
"Maybe they don't feel like burning," Remo said.
"Jumping's just as bad. Every fire, there's a jumper. Somebody just said he saw another one."
"A jumper?"
"Yeah. Off the back."
Remo groaned. It was a policy of Harold Smith's that anyone who could identify Remo and consequently compromise CURE had to be eliminated. Remo was tired. The last thing he was in the mood for was another death. "Okay," Remo said, scanning the crowd. "Where is he? What's he look like?"
"Old guy. Big thick glasses, can't see too good. He couldn't describe the jumper."
"Oh," Remo said, smiling.
"Don't matter, though. They all look the same after they jump." He pointed to the plastic bag. "Listen, in case you got any ideas, don't bother going back there to check. It'll just gross you out." He went back to slopping the arsonist's remains.
"Thanks for the advice," Remo said.
Chiun, master assassin of the ancient Korean House of Sinanju, was waiting for him in the motel room they shared in upper Manhattan. Remo walked in reeking of smoke. He discarded his tattered clothes in the garbage, then went to shower. Chiun was sitting in full lotus on his fragrant tatami mat in front of the television set as dramatic organ music blared into the room. When Remo came out of the shower, the old man was still in position, his eyes glued to the screen.
"Sorry I'm late. I was in a fire."
"Silence, odiferous one," Chiun said softly, his gaze unmoving. "Go bury those clothes. They smell as if you were in a fire."
"I was in a fire. I told you."
"Be still. I am concentrating on the beautiful drama unfolding before me." The picture on the television faded out with appropriately dramatic musical cascades, and was replaced by the bare hindquarters of two white infants.
Remo exhaled noisily. "Really, you'd think you'd get tired of watching 'As the Planet Revolves' after the first few hundred reruns. That soap's been off the air for five years. Rad Rex has got to be the oldest fag actor in Hollywood by now."
Chiun shot him a withering look. "I pay no heed to your disrespect. Who can expect respect from a fat white thing, anyway?"
"I am not fat."
The old man slid his eyes contemptuously up and down Remo's lean, hard frame. As usual, Remo unconsciously sucked in his stomach. "Fat," Chiun declared. "And stupid besides. Any fool could see I was not watching 'As the Planet Revolves.' It is a new drama, even more lovely."
The commercial faded into a picture of a teenager wearing a green surgeon's smock as he traipsed through a jungle wilderness. "Go do your exercises," Chiun said, staring fixedly at the television.
"Exercises? I just walked through four burning buildings."
"Next time run," Chiun said. "Running is recommended for obese persons."
The phone rang.
The connection crackled with the beeps and clicks of a telephone scrambler. These devices, Remo knew, were standard equipment on all of Harold Smith's phones, including the portable one he carried in his briefcase.
"This is a secure line," the lemony voice said.
"What difference does that make?" Remo snapped testily. "You're still going to say everything in code, and I'm still going to have to meet you in some godforsaken place—"
"There's no time," Smith said. "Three international terrorists have been killed."