He took the steps three at a time.

Remo turned on the landing and started up after him, but then stopped.

So did Nilsson. At the top of the stairs stood the ancient Oriental, serene and placid in his yellow robe, a smile on his face.

Remo could not hear his words, but it looked as if Chiun had said, «Welcome, Mr. Nilsson. Welcome to your famous house.»

Nilsson thought to overpower him. Remo watched and smirked as he saw Nilsson's shoulders tense up for the charge he would make. Trying to charge Chiun was like trying to bite an alligator in the mouth. Nilsson roared again, lowered a shoulder and rammed forward against Chiun. The old man gave way, and Nilsson was past him. Remo shook his head in shock for a moment, then darted up the stairs after Nilsson.

Vickie stood behind Maggot and the band, watching them, tapping her foot. She turned and saw Nilsson racing toward her. Her eyes opened in fright as she registered the look on his face. She backed away.

Remo was at the top of the stairs now, but he saw only a flash of saffron robe moving across the stage. Nilsson's arms were extended in front of him, reaching for the girl.

The Viking roar rose again in his throat. It died in a curdled squeak as an iron-hard hand came from behind him. Nilsson's last thoughts were those of a physician, not an assassin. He recognized the crunch of temple bones breaking, the piercing pain as shards of bone sliced like knives into his brain, and then the slow feeling of lazy warmth as death overtook his body.

He turned toward Chiun, searching those hazel eyes for meaning, but there was only respect. He turned again and staggered out onto the stage in front of Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice, who kept playing despite the intrusion. In his death throes, Nilsson weaved toward the edge of the stage, collapsed and rolled off, dropping the fifteen feet to the ground, landing on the shoulders of one of the guards who began to punch Nilsson's dead body, calling his friends to help him teach the troublemaker a lesson.

Up on the stage, Maggot shouted:

«Heavy, man. Dead Meat Lice rule over all.»

Down below, the guards piled on Nilsson's helpless corpse. The cordon of protection between the bandstand and the audience disappeared.

It was a girl who made the first charge. One lone girl moving quickly across the grass toward the stage. Several others watched. When she was not stopped, a few more came, a trickle at first, then a wave, then a tsunami. Maggot stopped in the middle of a note. He saw the crowd rushing toward the platform and him. Hundreds of people. With unwashed hands. Greasy fingers. Dirty fingernails. Tobacco-stained knuckles. Trying to touch him. He hit the switch under his foot on the stage and smoke immediately began to pour up again from the machine underneath.

The music slowed and stopped. The sudden silence was like an invitation to charge. Baying like a pack of hounds, the entire audience seemed to surge forward toward the bandstand.

«Vickie, quick,» Maggot yelled, he hit a second switch and under cover of the smoke, the lift in the center of the stage began to descend. The

Lice jumped onto the platform with Maggot. Remo put an arm around Vickie Stoner and helped her down onto the descending platform. Next to him, Remo saw Chiun.

A moment later, they were all in the helicopter and it was lifting away, just out of reach of hundreds of fans, who had engulfed the craft but had the sense to stay away from its whirling blades.

As if on cue, the helicopter rose, and heavy drops of rain began to fall, the fat heavy drops that typify mountain summer showers.

«You all right, Vickie?» Maggot was asking.

«Yes, Calvin,» she said. Remo was surprised. Her voice was clear, strong, unmuffled, undrugged.

«What's with you?» Remo said. «Run out of pills?»

«No, straight man. I'm off that. I got a new high.»

«What's that?»

«Calvin,» she said, touching Maggot's arm. «We're getting married.»

«Congratulations,» Remo said. «Name the first one after me.»

«We will, even though straight shit is a funny name for a boy baby.»

Remo grinned. He looked out at the Darlington farm below. It had been raining only a few seconds but already the field was puddling and muddy in the cloudburst. People scurried back and forth, fights broke out all over the site. It looked like an aerial view of a Harlem riot. Anyone studying entropy, the principle of maximum confusion, would have recognized the field as a textbook illustration.

Remo felt Chiun's face next to his, peering out the chopper window.

«Tell me, Remo,» Chiun said. «Is this a happening?»

«A what?»

«A happening.»

«I guess it is,» Remo said.

«Good,» Chiun said. «I have always wanted to be at a happening.»

The helicopter continued to circle the farm for a few minutes and then one of the Lice said to the pilot, «Better take it out of here, man, some of them cats may be packing heat.»

The pilot tipped the nose forward and the craft swooshed off, back toward the town and the motel.

«I can't wait to get back,» Vickie said.

«Why?» Remo said. «Anything special?»

«No. Just to call my daddy. Tell him I'm all right.»

«Your father? You call him?»

«Every day. Just so he knows where I am and that I'm safe.»

«This is the father you're going to testify against?»

«Yeah, but that's business. This other is personal, my calling him. I have to. He's just so depressed. Every time he hears my voice, he says, 'Oh, it's you,' like it's the end of the world.»

«I understand,» Remo said and for the first time, he did. He understood who had put out the contract on her life, and why there was so much money backing it up, and now he understood why the assassins always seemed to know exactly where Vickie Stoner was.

He understood a lot of things now.

He looked across the cabin at Chiun, who looked less queasy than he usually did when he was on a helicopter.

«You understand now, do you not?» Chiun asked.

«I do.»

«In time, even a rock learns to be worn away by the water.»

«Have you ever heard the sound of one hand clapping?» Remo asked.

Paul Stoner, Vickie's father, was easy.

He lived in a quarter-million dollar townhouse in New York's east Sixties, and his scream of death was just another on a block so used to screams that no one paid any attention to them anymore.

But before he died, he wrote a suicide note for Remo, implicating the other companies and financiers who had been involved in the Russian grain swindle which had driven the price of bread in America up by fifty percent.

Remo arranged the suicide to look like a suicide, then with the note in his hand, dialed Dr. Smith at the 800-area-code free-from-anywhere number.

«All over, Smitty,» he said.

«Oh?»

«Yeah, Stoner's dead. He confessed everything in a suicide note. You want the note?»

«No. Leave it there. I'll make sure federal agents find the body. That way the note won't get lost.»

«It says here in fine Japanese braille,» Remo said sarcastically.

«Just leave the note,» Smith said. «Anything else?»

«I guess Vickie won't have to testify now.»

«No,» Smith said. «Not with the note. That should cover everything.»

He stopped and Remo waited, but neither spoke.

«Don't you think you owe Chiun an apology?» Remo finally asked.

«For what?»

«For not having any faith in his ability to handle the Nilssons?»

«Does he want the apology or do you?» Smith asked.

«Well, now that you mention it, I guess we both deserve it.»

«When your paychecks aren't on time, then I'll apologize,» Smith said.

«As ever, you're gracious to a fault. I hope your yogurt curdles,» Remo said and hung up.