Remo and Chiun had entered through the side door of the hilltop packaging plant, with the Master of Sinanju leading the way.
"We will surprise the dastardly poisoners," he had promised.
"If we do," Remo growled, "I promise you ruddy duck every Sunday for the next year."
"You are either foolhardy or very addled."
"How about confident we're quacking up the wrong tree?"
"Then why do you follow, round-eyes?"
"My round eyes want to get this silly wildgoose chase over with as soon as possible, okay?" said Remo, checking his reflection in a nearby window. His eyes did look kind of squinty.
On the packaging floor, Chiun accosted the first employee they came across. This was a man of about forty, with a tangled mass of hair and a dull look on his face. He had a tag on his chest identifying him as "Stan." The name fit him about as well as his flannel shirt, which had burst three buttons in the vicinity of his expanding gut. The fourth was straining to the breaking point.
"I would speak with someone in authority," Chiun said.
"Hey, I'm shift supervisor," Stan replied. "At your service."
"Where are your poisons?" Chiun demanded loudly.
The potbellied man snorted, swatting at a pesky fly. "You've come to the wrong place, man. Three-G is all healthy and all natural."
"A transparent subterfuge," Chiun spat.
Remo looked around, and saw only wilted flower children stacking bundles of Fru-Nutty Bars into cardboard boxes for shipment to discriminating palates everywhere. The very air smelled of chrysanthemum sugar, which Remo had read was healthier than cane sugar even though it was the color of coal tar.
"Chiun, come on," he said. "It's some kind of candy factory, for crying out loud."
"Not candy, Mr . . . ."
The voice was silky and lilting, and came from behind Remo.
As Remo turned, he half expected to see a halo. The woman was that much of a vision. She crowded her loose-fitting blouse, and looked as if she'd been poured into her modest, calf-length skirt. Her hair was a reddish-blond nimbus, like follicle fire. A light dusting of freckles danced lightly across her nose and cheeks, just under the incongruous mirror shades. They were green, and made her resemble a pretty insect.
Her lips parted, in a smile that showed off a row of dazzingly white teeth. They matched her shoes.
"Call me Remo," Remo supplied.
The vision took a step forward. "You can go back to work, Stan," she said quickly. "I will attend to our guests."
Chiun stepped between his pupil and the bewitching redhead. "You are in charge?" he asked.
"I am executive vice-president of Three-G, Incorporated," she answered. "Mary Melissa Mercy is my name."
"Show me your poisons," Chiun demanded. He crossed his arms in punctuation.
"If your body craves poisons, Three-G is not where you will find them I'm afraid, Mr . . . ." She paused once more, but the Master of Sinanju made a deliberate point of not answering. Covering, she said, "We have nothing here that is not wholesome and natural."
"A likely story," Chiun said. "I will investigate myself."
"Feel free," Mary Melissa waved. "We're open to public inspection here. We've nothing at all to hide."
"I will be the judge of that," Chiun said, storming off.
Mary Melissa watched him go, her head tipped pensively to one side. "An interesting man," she remarked. "He reminds me of someone I know."
"Then I feel sorry for you," Remo growled. "He's a freaking time-waster."
One eyebrow shot up above the top edge of her mirror shades. "You do not wish to be at Three-G?" she asked.
"Lady, it wouldn't be my first choice," Remo said.
"Oh?" Mary Melissa raised a second eyebrow.
Remo took in Mary Melissa Mercy's perfect figure. "Maybe second choice," he admitted.
She laughed. Remo liked the way her chest moved with her humor. He was searching his mind for an appropriate one-liner, when she resumed speaking.
She took a mock-serious tone, saying, "Really? I wonder what could be more important than the two of us getting to know each other better?"
"Getting through the day without having him drop a guilt trip on my head the size of Mount Everest."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
"That makes two of us."
Mary Melissa Mercy hooked her arm in Remo's. There was something exciting about her touch. It was more than mere warmth. It was almost electric. But Remo did have one question.
"What's with the gloves?"
Things had gone terribly wrong. More wrong, in fact, in the past year than at any time in the Master of Sinanju's long life.
It wasn't only that he had missed his kohi-although that calamity was something that Remo deserved to hear about, and would as long as Chiun had anything to say about it.
It was after that, when the tables had been turned and Chiun had thought he'd lost Remo to the toils of the demon goddess Kali, during what the whites in their ignorance celebrated as "the Gulf War." That had been a wrench to his spirit that the Master of Sinanju had had a hard time dispelling from his thoughts. It was a subject he and his pupil had mutually chosen to avoid. Remo, because it represented a blank period in his life he would rather not have revealed, and the Master of Sinanju because, without Remo, he understood that the Sinanju line would end with Chiun.
It was not any of these things singly, but all combined. It was as if every force in nature-physical, natural, man-made, supernatural-had combined to send the ancient house of assassins spinning into oblivion.
And now this . . .
He had almost lost Remo again. The slashing fingernail would have inflicted a more-than-mortal injury. Remo had not even seen it coming, and he still did not realize how close he had come to a walking death.
The Master of Sinanju slid along the corridors of the ultramodern Three-G building in silence, his sandaled feet making not so much as a whisper on the highly waxed floors, his elongated shadow a stab of black behind him in the scald of light burning down through the huge glass walls.
It would have been too familiar, what had nearly befallen Remo. Painfully familiar.