"Hey, fellas—"
The other two each took one of Billy's arms, and following the first boy, they led him down an alley that had been specially chosen for its purpose.
"Hey, guys, come on—" Billy was stammering, his tough-guy front vanished.
The others ignored him, and as he increased his efforts to escape, his captors increased the pressure of their hold on him.
"This is far enough," the first boy said, turning. The others released Billy's arms and pushed him violently toward the back of the alley. He lost his balance and sprawled on the dirty ground, skinning his hands and knees.
Pushing himself to his feet, he watched the three boys approach him and then heard three barely audible sounds— snik! snik! snik!— as three sharp blades appeared in their hands as if by magic.
"Aw, guys—" he started, backing up with his hands raised in front of him.
Two of the boys stepped forward and swung their blades, and blood began to gush from each of Billy's palms as he cried out from the pain.
"Please—" he shouted, but his plea fell on three sets of deaf ears.
All three boys stepped forward now, and their blades were a blur of motion that Billy tried to follow until a veil of blood fell over his eyes, and he could no longer see. It was several moments before his ability to feel went too, and that was when the three boys stepped back and retracted their blades with the same three smacking sounds.
One boy briefly checked Billy for signs of life. Failing to find any, he nodded to his companions and led the way out of the alley.
The Billy Martin who lay on the filthy cobblestones of the alley, strips of flesh flayed from his bones, bore little resemblance to the little pissant who had clubbed his parents to death without a second thought while they slept.
Billy Martin died as he had lived— a repulsive little toad who never had a chance to ascend to the higher rank of full-fledged snake.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo, and people had to be taught that only he could get away with murder.
Murder belonged in the hands of someone who could do it right, for the right reasons, and that someone was Remo. He was in the resort town of Little Ferry, Virginia, to teach this lesson to retired police chief Duncan Dinnard.
Chief Dinnard had built up a fortune at the expense of the residents and tourists of Little Ferry and had now retired to sit back and enjoy it. He had turned the small Virginia town into the kind of place where if you had enough money— and paid him enough of it— you could literally get away with murder.
"Don't be fooled by the fact that he's retired," Dr. Harold W. Smith had told both Remo and Chiun. "He still rules that small town with an iron hand. It's time he was retired for good."
Smith could be no plainer than that.
* * *
Duncan Dinnard had no fear. He was a multimillionaire, with a mansion and a yacht, both of which suited his position. In addition, his property and his person were protected by the best people and the best security devices that money could buy.
At the moment, the obese Dinnard was in his mansion, entertaining the best female companionship that money could buy. The farthest thing from his mind was his own death.
If need be, he could buy that off too.
"Very impressive setup," Remo said to the wispy-haired Oriental beside him as they examined Dinnard's defenses.
"It is not necessary to compliment a man whom one is about to assassinate," the elderly Korean said loftily. "It is considered bad form."
"Oh, I see," Remo said. "Murder's okay, but tackiness can never be forgiven."
Chiun snorted. "If that were true, you would have no friends at all. Please proceed." He waved an imperious hand at the front gates. "I wish to dispense with this trivia quickly."
"What's the matter? Afraid you'll miss one of your TV soaps?"
"The Master of Sinanju no longer wastes his time on sex-laden daytime dramas."
"Oh, no?"
"No," Chiun said. "As a matter of fact, I've just begun work on an epic poem. An Ung poem. The finest piece of Ung since the Great Master Wang." The old Oriental swaggered as he walked. "It is about a butterfly."
"Oh," Remo said.
"I've already completed the first one hundred and sixty-five stanzas of the prologue."
"That's okay, Chiun. I'm sure it'll flesh out in the final draft."
"Insolent lout. I should have known that a white boy untrainable in the subtle arts of Sinanju would lack the refinement to appreciate beauty as well."
"I'm as refined as the next white lout," Remo said.
Chiun's complaints about Remo's shortcomings no longer bothered him. He had been hearing the same complaints for more than ten years, since the first time Remo was introduced to the old master in a gymnasium in the sanitarium where Remo found himself the morning after he died.
Actually, he never died in the first place. It would have been nice if someone— anyone— had gone to the trouble of informing Remo that he wasn't really going to die in the electric chair he was plugged into, but bygones were bygones.
During those terrible moments in the chair, Remo's life didn't flash before his eyes. The only thing that did register was the ridiculous, laughable injustice of recent events. Remo Williams had been a rookie cop with the Newark Police Department, who had been sentenced to fry in an electric chair because a drug dealer he'd been chasing had had the misfortune to die. Remo hadn't killed the pusher, but he'd been the most convenient person to blame at the time. So he'd gone to the chair and tried not to think about anything too much, and when he woke up, he was in a windowless hospital room in a place called Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
For a brief moment Remo thought he must be in heaven, but the face peering into his own disabused him of any otherworldly notions. It was Harold W. Smith's face, a pinched, lemony face spanned by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and a permanent scowl. Dr. Smith was, as always, wearing a three-piece gray suit and carrying an attaché case. He never asked Remo how he felt about coming back from the dead. He didn't have to. Dr. Harold W. Smith had engineered everything, from the false arrest on.
Remo complained that since he was officially dead, he had no identity. Dr. Harold W. Smith seemed pleased. At least, he had shuffled his papers with a little more gusto than before. It was as close as Smith got to acting pleased.
He took Remo to the gymnasium to meet Chiun. The eighty-year-old Oriental would, he explained, make a new man of Remo. And he did: Remo became, through the years, a man who could live under water for hours at a time. Who could catch arrows in his bare hands. Who could climb up the sheer faces of buildings without the aid of ropes or ladders. Who could count the legs on a caterpillar as it inched across his finger. Who could walk with no sound and yet hear the heartbeat of a man a hundred yards away. For what Chiun taught him was not a technique or a trick, but the very sun source of the martial arts.
The old Korean was the Master of Sinanju, and possibly the most dangerous man alive. Harold Smith had hired him to train a man for a mission so secret that even Chiun himself could not be told about it. The mission was to work as the enforcer arm of an organization so illegal that its discovery could well mean the end of the United States. CURE belonged to America, but America could not claim the organization because CURE worked completely outside the Constitution. CURE blackmailed. And kidnaped. And killed. Because sometimes those methods were necessary in fighting crime.
Remo Williams was trained to kill. Silently, quickly, invisibly, as only a master of Sinanju could kill. Harold W. Smith directed Remo to the targets, and Remo eliminated them.
The target this time was Duncan Dinnard, whose mansion loomed now in front of Remo and Chiun. The house was surrounded by guards, obviously armed.
"Okay, everybody up. Rise and shine," Remo shouted, clapping his hands and whistling.
"Who goes?" one of the guards called out, holding his handgun in firing position.
"White garbage," Chiun said under his breath.
'What did he say?" the guard demanded.