The instant the figure appeared, there came a flash of brilliant orange.
The bullet struck Brian Turski in the right side of the chest, spinning him. His feet went out from underneath him, and he went sprawling into the pool of black oil. Crude flooded into his gaping mouth. Another shot, followed by another.
Brian pulled his face up, spitting thick oil. The pain in his chest was blinding.
Joe Abady was sliding to a stop next to him, a nickel-size hole in his forehead.
Men screamed and ran. Another flopped on his side in the oil pool, blood streaming from his open mouth. More gunshots crackled off across the desolate Alaskan wilderness. And all around, bodies fell.
A few men tried to clamber back up the hill. Bullets found backs. The pipeline workers slipped and rolled back down to the valley floor.
Back near the pipe, panicked and bleeding, Brian struggled to get up. His arms were too weak, and he dropped back to the ground.
The oil was thick on his clothes, filling his mouth and nose. Spitting, he flopped over onto his back. Using the heels of his boots and pressing one hand to his bleeding chest, he slid back against a metal support member.
The gunfire had stopped.
The dead lay all around him. Steam rose from gaping wounds and slack mouths.
To Brian Turski, they were already a distant thing. As if he were viewing the landscape through a fuzzy telescope. His legs were growing numb. Already there was no feeling in his right arm. He let it flop to the ground.
Something rose before him.
It was as if the tundra had come to life. The figure was streaked with whites and browns.
Others appeared behind it. Phantoms of earth and snow.
No. Not ghosts.
Crude oil caked one eye. Squinting with the good one, Brian Turski peered at the figure.
His dying lips formed a surprised O.
It was just a man. The blurry figure carried a smoking automatic rifle. The other white-and-brown shapes became men, too. They fanned out around the area, kicking over bodies with the toes of their boots.
Sitting in the shadow of their leader, Brian took his last deep breath.
This time, he didn't smell the cold or the crude or the hint of blood carried on the frigid air. He smelled chocolate-chip cookies. Hot out of the oven. With the gooey brown chips that burned his numb fingertips.
A growl.
The man above Brian was speaking. The pipeline worker didn't understand the language.
Tasting chocolate, Brian looked up.
An angry rifle barrel stared down at him.
It didn't matter. Death could come and claim him if it wanted. Brian had finally gotten his wish. His belly warm and full, he gently closed his eyes.
He was already dead before the bullet popped his head open like a paint-filled water balloon.
As his body slumped into the pool of black slush, the shadows slipped away. One after another the stealthy figures disappeared, swallowed up by the Alaskan wasteland until all that was left behind were the bodies of the dead and the endless, desolate wind.
Although Brian Turski hadn't understood the words that were the last to reach his living ears, the language was not new to the Last Frontier. If he had understood them, they would only have confused him in his final moments of life.
For the actual words spoken by Brian Turski's killer-loosely translated-were a notice of eviction.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he stared out at the world of the living through a dead man's eyes.
There was a time when Remo would have fought the notion that he was dead. For a long time he had insisted that his dying was nothing more than a ruse. After all, he breathed and walked and ate and loved just like the next nondead man.
But with the passage of time came a realization-like a hole finally worn through rock by a single, remorseless water drip. In spite of his early protestations, Remo one day realized that he was not like the next man after all.
Yes, he breathed. But it was not a process that involved gasping lungs straining to supply oxygen to a sluggish bloodstream. Remo breathed with his entire body. Every cell alive, alert and aware.
He walked, but it was without the effort of normal men. Remo's gait was a comfortable glide that flowed naturally. Entirely unlike the rest of the human race, which seemed always to move as if it were wading through wet concrete.
His diet was no longer loaded with fats and sugars-slow poisons all. The food he ate was specific and minimal. Just enough to fuel the perfect machine that was a body in tune with the forces of the universe. The last thing-love-was something that definitely no longer had a home in the soul of Remo Williams as it did for other men. Not that he was incapable of the emotion. Far from it. It was just that his profession didn't exactly lend itself to the notion that he might one day link arms with the woman of his dreams and go tripping tra-la through a field of summer daisies.
Remo was an assassin. Trained by the Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju-the most deadly line of assassins ever to ply the trade. Feats seemingly superhuman were just a day at the office for the men from Sinanju.
In days gone by Masters of Sinanju dodged hurled spears and rocks. These days it was bullets. All the same.
Sheer walls were just things to climb. Fortresses were built from match sticks. Armies, merely toy soldiers.
The skills displayed by Sinanju Masters involved muscle and brain and bone. Breathing, conscious and unconscious thought.
Remo had long ago stopped trying to figure out exactly what made him different from other men. Better would have been the word his teacher used. Remo didn't think he was better. Just different. Of the world, yet apart from it.
And so Remo had one day realized that the man he had been was, in fact, dead after all.
Even though acceptance for him had been a long time coming, it had been far easier for the rest of the world to come to terms with the death of Remo Williams. Part of the reason for that was the grave on which he now sat.
The headstone was a simple no-frills number. Just a granite slab with a plain carved cross and his own name etched into the smooth, cold surface. The edges of the letters had begun to wear with age.
Remo had rarely found the need to visit what-to the world-was the final resting place of Remo Williams. There were only two other instances where he had stood above this grave and contemplated its significance.
Six feet below the spot where Remo now sat was a body. Little more than a few scattered teeth and bones by this point in time. Some faceless indigent who thirty years ago had unknowingly become Remo's stand-in so that Remo might be free to pursue his new calling.
America had been at a crossroads. Social and political upheaval were threatening to tear the nation apart. Down one path led anarchy. Down the other, a police state. In order that the republic could survive, a third option had to be tried, a new and treacherous trail blazed.
A new agency was created by a young President who would himself become an eventual victim of the incipient anarchy that plagued his nation. Called CURE, the organization would work outside the strait jacket that was the United States Constitution in order to preserve the very document it subverted.
The existence of CURE was known to only four men at any given time. Remo was one of those four. And in order that the secret be preserved, all traces of his former existence had been eliminated, including his life itself.
Framed for a murder he did not commit, honest beat cop Remo Williams had been sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. Only when he awoke in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York-the secret home to CURE-had Remo learned the truth of what his lifework would be.
After a rocky start, he had accepted his destiny fairly easily, all things considered. He had even agreed with the bulk of the rules governing his behavior as set forth by Upstairs. At least in principle.