A shot broke his paralysis. It came from inside the house. Hoarse shouting followed. The FBI man! He lived!
"Tom! I out here!"
Another shot. A window broke, and from within the house another voice, guttural and harsh, spoke one word in Chinese: "Sagwa!"
Zhang Zingzong's eyes were pulled from the house back to his stalker. Abandoning his sure pantherlike approach, the man in black raced for the front door, going through it like an ebony arrow.
That was all Zhang Zingzong needed. Slipping and sliding, he ran down the streets of the foreign land of America, where he had thought he would be safe, and was not.
As he stumbled around a corner, he wondered why the guttural voice had called him sagwa. He was a college student.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he really, really knew his rice.
"Let me have a bag of that long white, and some brown," he told the blond at the health-food store. "Got any Blue Rose?"
"I never heard of Blue Rose," the blond admitted. She was tall and willowy. Her long straight hair looked as if it had been ironed. Remo didn't think anyone ironed her hair anymore. Not since Janis Joplin.
"Grows only in Thailand," Remo told her. "Has kind of a nutty taste."
"Really?" the blond said, her deep brown eyes growing limpid. "Maybe I can special-order some."
"In that case, put me down for as much as you can get."
"You must like it a lot."
"I eat a lot of rice. A lot of rice. When you eat as much rice as I do, variety is important."
"I'll bet."
"In fact it's critical," Remo went on. "If I had to go on just domestic Carolina, I'm not sure my sanity would survive."
"Sounds tres New Age," the blond prompted.
"It's not," Remo said flatly. "How about Patna? Got any of that?"
"That's another one I never heard of," she admitted. "Are you some kind of rice connoisseur?" "I didn't start out that way," Remo admitted glumly, his eyes scanning the shelves of glass containers with their heaps of hard rice grains. Most of them contained the usual boring domestic lowlands, California Carolo's and Louisiana Rexoro's and Nato's. "Let's see . . .
"How about wild rice?"
Remo frowned. "Not really." He was going to say that wild rice was no more rice than white chocolate was true chocolate. But why bother? Only another rice connoisseur would appreciate the distinction.
"Guess I'll take some short-grain white," Remo said. He pointed at one container and said, "Let me see that one."
The container came down off the shelf and Remo lifted the lid. As the blond watched, he took a pinch of grain to his lips and tasted it carefully.
"Pearl," he pronounced with the authority of a wine taster. "Grown in Java."
The blond's eyes widened in surprise. "You can tell that by tasting?"
"Sure. It has that iron tang. Goes away in the cooking-unless you undercook it, of course."
"I'll bet your wife never, ever undercooks your rice."
"Absolutely correct," Remo said, disposing of the tasted grain in a wicker wastebasket.
The blond acquired a slightly sad pout.
"Since I don't have a wife," Remo finished.
The pout jumped back into her mouth and her lips curved into a smile.
Her reaction was not lost on Remo Williams. He pretended not to notice it as the blond busied herself scooping quantities of rice into clear plastic bags, tying them with twister seals and making small talk.
"Hope you're not planning to carry all these home on foot," she quipped.
Remo jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "That's my car out front."
The blond looked up, her brown eyes curious to see what kind of car a rice authority would drive. Her curiosity froze.
"What car?" she asked.
"The blue one," Remo said absently, scanning rice labels.
"Shouldn't it be waiting for you?"
Remo turned. There was no blue car parked out front.
Came a screeching of tires and a blue Buick Regal suddenly jumped into view, going in the opposite direction it had been pointing when Remo had parked it minutes before.
Hunched behind the wheel was a black man Remo had never seen before.
"Damn!" he bit out. Remo raced for the door as the car picked up speed. The blond followed.
"Should I call 911?" she gasped, her eyes fever-bright.
"No," Remo said grimly. "I'll handle it."
"You will?"
Remo Williams began running. He started off with an easy, joggerlike pace, his bare forearms up, fists not loose-fingered, but tight. His thin, just-this-side-of-cruel mouth was grim.
He hit his stride at forty-five miles an hour, his mouth slightly parted. If he was exerting himself, there was no sign of strain on his high-cheekboned face. Only tight determination showed in his deep-set brown eyes.
He caught up to the Buick at a stoplight.