Before he got to go, Mark Tolan had kicked his way through the unlocked door into the fortune cookie factory. Wo Fat turned at the noise and caught a fragmenting bullet in the middle of his forehead. He slumped behind the counter, his hand dragging the bag of fortune cookies onto the floor.

Through the door to the kitchen, Tolan saw the mound of white powder and realized that was the cutting room where the heroin was mixed with powdered sugar into a smaller, weaker dosage for sale on the streets.

He raced toward the door. Behind him, Gregory, Baker and Lizzard came into the loft. When Lizzard saw Wo Fat's body with his head blown away, he vomited on the floor. Baker put his gun in his pocket, determined not to use it under any circumstances, except to shoot Tolan. They followed Gregory back toward the kitchen where Tolan had entered.

The Exterminator had met the rest of Wo Fat's family coming toward the door to investigate the sound of the first shot.

"Yellow peril," he screamed. "Angels of the Mafia devil. Die!" Firing with both hands, he cut down Mrs. Wo Fat and then their three young children. When the four bodies lay motionless on the floor, Tolan looked down at them, smiling the satisfied smile of the redeemed avenger. He saw the white powder on their hands and for good measure, emptied his guns into their dead bodies.

The three other men joined him.

"Oh, God," said Lizzard, wiping the retch from his mouth.

"Looney," said Baker. "Frigging looney."

Gregory was silent. Tolan pointed toward the pile of powder. "There it is. The heroin," he said. He looked around. "Got to set this place afire," he said. "Destroy that heroin so no one else gets it."

He saw several jars of cooking alcohol and sprinkled it over a pile of paper boxes in the corner. He lit it with a match and the boxes flared and the fire almost instantly began spreading to the old dry wooden walls.

"It'll go in a flash. Better get out of here," Gregory said.

Behind him, Al Baker touched a finger to the pile of white powder and placed it in his mouth. Just as he had feared. It was flour, used to make fortune cookies. He had been wrong. He felt sick.

He had no chance to mention it because the other men were running back toward the front door.

Suddenly Tolan stopped.

"Forgot something," he said. He reached into the back pocket of his pants and took out a handful of yellow pencils which he had taken from the box he had obtained for Gregory the day before.

He snapped a half dozen of them in his hands and threw the eraser ends at the Chinese bodies in the kitchen doorway.

"There," he said happily. "Let them know The Eraser and the Rubout Squad were here. And The Exterminator."

Then he followed the other three men down the steps. They ran across the street and fled in their rented car.

The mayor's regular driver was still in the hospital having tests made to determine the extent of nerve injury suffered in his right arm, so Remo was driving the limousine. Chiun and Rocco Nobile were in the back seat. Remo had given Chiun strict orders, which he had couched as a humble request from the Emperor to the all-knowing, all-noble personage of the Master of Sinanju that Chiun not tell Rocco Nobile anything about CURE or Harold W. Smith or secret organizations. Without knowing it, Rocco Nobile had been working for CURE for almost five years and if he had gone that long in the dark, it was probably best to keep him there. Remo knew that Smith wanted to be sure that, in case Rocco Nobile's cover was ever blown, the man would be in no position to drop anything dangerous about CURE.

Remo had explained all this to Chiun. Chiun had agreed that he would not utter a word to Rocco Nobile.

Now as Remo drove, he heard Chiun in the back seat say to Nobile:

"I know something you don't know."

"Chiun," Remo said.

The car radio crackled on.

"Fire in progress at 612 River Street."

"Let's go over there," Nobile said.

"You like fires?" Remo said, glad to change the subject from what Chiun knew that Rocco Nobile didn't.

"Not really," Nobile said, "but I guess the mayor ought to be around for one."

They parked in the street behind a fire engine. Flames were spitting from the second floor window of the old loft building. Firemen were standing on the street pouring water into the building. Another crew was on top of a cherry picker, fifty feet in the air, pumping water down onto the roof of the low building, and also spraying adjoining buildings to try to stop the fire from spreading to the other old wood structures.

Remo and Chiun followed Nobile up to a fire officer wearing a white helmet with a gold medallion on the front.

"Anybody in there, Chief?" Nobile asked.

"We don't know. We can't get in yet."

Chiun looked at Remo and Remo nodded. The two men drifted away from the mayor and the chief who stood staring up at the building. Licks of flame began to spit through the roof. The two men moved around the crews of firemen and then darted toward the ground level doorway.

"Hey, you can't..." one firemen shouted. But Remo and Chiun were already inside. He turned to the man next to him.

"Two guys went in that building."

"Whaaaa?"

"Two guys went in. You didn't see them?"

"No. I didn't see nothing. You sure?"

"Sure, I'm sure," the fireman said. He thought for a moment of what he had seen. A skinny white man with a black T-shirt and black trousers. A tiny old Oriental wearing a gold brocade kimono.

A gold brocade kimono? At 9 a.m.? In Bay City?

He shook his head. Not likely.

"I think maybe the smoke's gotten to me. I'm getting some oxygen," he said and walked back toward the emergency wagon where oxygen demand tanks with masks were propped up against the rear tire.

Remo and Chiun slid through flame up the sway-backed wooden steps toward the second floor.

"In there," Chiun said, pointing toward Wo Fat's factory. "It started there."

As Remo opened the door, a whoosh of hot air and flames flared out at their faces. After the first surge had subsided, they moved inside and Chiun closed the door behind them to seal off the draft. The entire second floor was ablaze. Flames burned up off the wooden floor. The old wooden walls were on fire and tongues of flame poured through the doorway of the kitchen area in the back.

Remo ran toward the kitchen, but as he passed the counter, he saw Wo Fat's body, so far untouched by flames. On its chest, he saw the broken half of a pencil and picked it up.

Inside the kitchen door, they found the partially burned bodies of Wo Fat's wife and three children. The two men saw where the slugs had bitten into their bodies. Flames chewed around them like some giant insidious dragon tongue.

Remo saw several charred pieces of wood lying near the bodies. He picked them up and stuck them in his shirt pocket.

"We should get these bodies out of here," he hissed at Chiun.

The old man shook his head.

"No. Let them be victims of the fire."

Remo thought for a split second and realized Chiun was right. Five members of a family killed in a fire was a tragedy, but five people shot to death might just blow everything CURE and Smith and Nobile were trying to do in Bay City.

The fire was crackling in the ceiling over their heads and Chiun looked up. Through the wood panels, he could see a sliver of blue sky.

"We best go," he said. He pointed to the roof.

As Remo looked up, the first of the beams burned through and a large panel of roof ripped loose with a wrenching tear and came down at them, pouring plaster and wood and tons of water at them. The two men darted back as the massive pile hit near their feet, shuddering the fire-weakened floor and causing it to creak ominously and tilt.