"No, I guess you won't," Windlow said. He sank back in the soft sofa. "Got any more Amaretto?"

"No," said Nobile. "I see no point in lengthening this meeting unnecessarily since I find it uncomfortable. You resign next Friday. By the following Monday, I want you to be moving to your house at the New Jersey shore." Nobile smiled. "You know. The house which is secretly owned in your wife's maiden name."

Windlow sighed heavily and nodded. He stood up. "You don't mind, I suppose, if I don't shake your hand," he said bitterly.

"Not while I wear expensive rings on my fingers," Nobile said. "Good day, Mayor."

As Windlow reached the door, Nobile called to him.

"Mayor, I think that no one should know about this until you submit your resignation at next Friday's meeting of the City Commission. And of course you will simply cite health reasons for your decision."

"Of course. What about that notebook?"

"I will hold onto it," Nobile said, "against the day when you might foolishly think of attempting a political comeback." He walked to his bar and poured himself another glass of Amaretto. "But of course you won't do that, Mayor. Will you?"

The mayor nodded and walked from the room.

Rocco Nobile sipped his Amaretto casually while looking out the large glass windows toward the small unused port of Bay City. He finished the glass and set it down on the windowsill and went to a telephone on the desk in the corner of the room.

He dialed a New York number and waited until the telephone was answered.

Nobile said simply, "It's ours." He paused, listening. "That's right. The whole city. We own it."

His name was Remo and he owned nothing.

He had no automobile. When he needed one, he rented it, and when he was done with it, he just left it at the side of the road, because it gave him pleasure to imagine the face of his superior when the bill came in.

He bought clothes when he needed them, using a variety of credit cards in a variety of names, and when the clothes were dirty, he generally just threw them away.

He owned no house. He had spent the last ten years in hotel rooms, and he had no name, no family, no friends, no past and no future.

Definitely no future.

He told himself that as he sat in the fork of an oak tree, twenty-five above the ground, looking through the big picture windows of a secluded lakeside home waiting for all the guests of honor to show up.

Fifteen had arrived, but there were still two more due. Remo would wait. He wanted them all. He thought about that for a moment, and then realized he did own something after all. He owned his self-respect and that came from pride in doing his job well.

But no friends. Another car came up the driveway of the home and parked at the side of the long row of Cadillacs and Mercedes. Two men got out and walked toward the house. Remo recognized one as the man he had been expecting. The second man was obviously his lawyer because he had a gold pen and pencil set in his outside jacket pocket and only lawyers carried pens and pencils there.

One more guest to go.

No friends. The closest thing to a friend Remo had was Chiun, the eighty-year-old Korean who was the latest Master of Sinanju, an age-old house of assassins. But he wasn't a friend. He was Remo's trainer and a confidant and like the father that Remo had never had. But not a friend.

There was Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret organization CURE that had trained Remo to kill America's enemies. But Smith was no man's friend. Who could love Smith? Maybe Mrs. Smith. Maybe his accountant, who was taken by the CURE director's passion for neatness. Nobody else.

There was Ruby Gonzalez, the one-time CIA agent who now worked as Smith's head assistant in CURE — the only person besides Remo and Smith and the President of the United States who knew what CURE was. And even Ruby wasn't a friend. Remo respected her brains and her toughness, but the young black woman came from a world different from Remo's, and your friends were usually those who had shared the springs and summers of your life.

That was it. Everybody else Remo knew or met were people he had been ordered to kill.

Another car arrived, kicking up gravel on the roadway beneath Remo's feet as he sat in the tree. It was a Continental Mark Four, which the owner had seemed determined, by sheer tastelessness, to promote to a Mark Ten. The auto was littered with chrome and rabbit tails and pinstripes and special hood medallions. The driver was alone. He had a red face and sandy hair and Remo recognized him as the last guest, Lee-Bob Barkins, who had killed his wife with a chainsaw and then tried to use her body for chum while sharkfishing off the Alabama coast. Unfortunately, while he had been using her left hand for bait, a passing boat had snagged his line and ripped off the hook and hand. Lee-Bob Barkins had fled, but the other boat had gotten his boat's ID number and police were able to identify the dead woman from some identifying scars on her left hand, suffered three years earlier when Lee-Bob, a good old boy in a bet with some other good old boys, had taken to her with a hunting knife.

Lee-Bob at his trial had claimed he was framed, but he had been convicted of murder, sentenced to life, but then was pardoned after serving fourteen months, as an outgoing governor turned the jails loose.

He had released rapists and murderers and arsonists and kidnappers and terrorists. All had one thing in common. They had money.

Seventeen of the worst were now inside, in the lakefront home of Sam Speer, the outgoing governor's closest adviser, friend and confidant, for which, Remo knew, in politics you read bagman.

Seventeen men and Speer. That was tonight's assignment. There were also ten assorted lawyers who might get in the way, but that didn't bother Remo. There were too many lawyers anyway. Nobody ever got criticized for killing a lawyer.

Remo pushed himself out of the fork of the tree and dropped the twenty-five feet to the ground. He landed without a sound, his feet moving in a walking motion even before he touched ground.

He looked in the picture window in time to see the men raising champagne glasses in a toast.

Fragments of conversation drifted out to Remo's ears.

"…act of mercy and charity."

"...in case of an investigation, don't say anything."

"…charity, my ass... cost me two hundred thousand."

"…cost us all two hundred thousand."

"…let anybody hear that and you'll be back in."

Remo recognized Sam Speer, the outgoing governor's right-hand man. He was a big, fattish man with a simian swoop of dark hair growing low across his forehead and hooded eyes that made him look as if he were just ready to doze off.

He was the governor's friend, Remo thought. Even that governor had a friend. And these seventeen animals in the Sam Speer living room. They probably had friends too. Somebody at least thought enough of them to put up two hundred thousand dollars each to get them out of jail. Maybe they had families as well as friends.

And Remo had neither.

He didn't think it was fair. Some guys had all the luck.

He thought about that while he walked around the back of the house and down to the lake, where he idly tossed stones into the water. Remo wore black trousers and a black T-shirt and he knew that, from the house, he would be lost in the shadows and invisible. He was a thin man with dark hair and eyes as deep as night and the only sign that he might have been something unusual were his thick wrists, which he frequently flexed and rotated as if they caused him discomfort.

Family and friends.

He had been recruited into CURE just because he had no family. He was an orphan, a cop on the Newark police force, and then one night he was framed for a murder he didn't commit, sent to an electric chair which didn't work, and when he woke up, he had been told he was working for CURE, a secret agency set up to fight crime. If he didn't want to work for CURE, they would just have finished the job the electric chair was supposed to have done.