Power Play

He inspected the soft rubber grip of the putter.

"Do you know what a drag it is being able to one-putt every green?" he said. "I liked golf better when I used to miss a shot once in a while."

"You know, Yank," the colonel said with a faint sneer. "When this is all over..."

"If you guard yourselves the way you guarded Pruiss in that hospital," Remo said, "when this is all over, you'll be lucky to be alive."

"You Americans are always pushy," the colonel said. He fingered the stock of his submachine gun. "When this is over, just you and me."

Remo smiled at him, then putted another ball across the floor. It stopped, touching the first practice putt.

"You don't seem worried, Yank," the colonel said.

"I told you," Remo said. "I never miss. One putt all the time."

"I'm not talking about your bleeding golf game," the colonel said. "I'm talking about big things. Life and death."

"If you want something big, you ought to try a twenty-dollar Nassau with presses on the back nine," Remo said.

"Life and death," the colonel insisted. "You know how many men I've killed?"

Remo putted another ball. It stopped touching the first two.

"I've seen what you killed," Remo said. "Untrained ni

The colonel took a step forward and put his foot in the line of Remo's putt.

Remo dropped another ball on the floor and putted it across the carpet, with a chopping up and down stroke. The ball squirted off the putter head and skidded across the floor. When it reached the colonel's shoe, the back english took effect and the ball hopped into the air, over the shoe, and stopped dead still on the far side, next to the three other balls.

"Will you put that bloody putter down?" the colonel snarled.

"Don't have to," Remo said.

The colonel growled in anger, reached down and snatched one of the golf balls from the carpet. He flung it across the ten feet of space separating himself and Remo. The white, rock-hard ball sped in on Remo's face. He turned his body slightly toward the left and raised his left hand in a buzz-saw motion. The ball was intercepted by Remo's hand. It hit the hand without a sound and seemed to hang on the side of Remo's open palm for a moment. Then he dropped his hand and two halves of the golf ball fell to the floor, sliced neatly in two as if by a surgical laser beam.

The three men looked at the golf ball in shock.

"Guard outside," Remo said again softly.

They turned toward the door.

"Colonel," Remo said. The mercenary officer, his face drained of color, turned to meet Remo's eyes.

"That was a good ball," Remo said. "A Titleist DT. I'm docking your account a dollar thirty-five."

Theodosia had put Remo in a bedroom on one side of Wesley Pruiss and Chiun in a room on the other. Her room was down past Remo's and Rachmed Baya Barn's was the farthest down the corridor.

When Remo got upstairs, the Indian had already gone to bed because he said his nerves had been shattered by the American propensity for violence. He could easily, sirrr, have been killed before his mission in life had been accomplished.

Chiun hissed to Remo, "That means as long as there is still a dollar loose in this country."

Theodosia had put Pruiss to sleep and Remo and Chiun headed for their separate rooms.

"Which one of you is staying with Wesley?" she asked.

"I don't like sharing a bed," Chiun said. "I sleep on my mat."

"But somebody's got to stay in his room," she said. She looked at Remo helplessly.

"No, we don't," Remo said. "Nobody can get within a hundred feet of this room without us knowing it. Don't worry about it."

She did not look convinced.

"Look, if you want to do something," Remo said, "pull down the shades in his bedroom. If that makes you feel better."

When she came back out of Pruiss's room, she told Remo: "You forgot your weapons."

"No, we didn't."

"Where are they?"

"They're always with us," Remo said.

"Show me," Theodosia said.

"They're secret," Remo said. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black chinos.

"Let me have a good night's sleep," she said. "What kind of weapons do you use?"

Chiun paused at his bedroom door.

"The most deadly weapons known to mankind," he said. He went inside.

Theodosia looked at Remo.

"The same weapons we used to get through those steel windows at the hospital," Remo said.

"You've brought them?"

"Yes. Never travel without them," Remo said.

Theodosia looked at him suspiciously. "You're sure you can tell if Wesley's in any danger?"

"Sure I'm sure. If it makes you feel any better, I'll sleep with my door open tonight."

He smiled and she shrugged.

"I hope you're worth what I'm paying you," she said. She sounded sure he wasn't.

He took his hands from his pockets and held her soft hands in his, stroking the knuckles with his thumbs.

"More," he said. "Go to sleep. It's been a long day."

Almost reluctantly, she started down the hall, then stopped and went back to Pruiss's room and peeked inside.

"He's sleeping," she told Remo.

"Good," said Remo.

"I want you to kill anybody who tries to go into that room tonight," she said sternly.

"You got it," Remo said. "Go to sleep."

He entered his own room, undressed and lay on the bed. There had been a time, years before, when he had had trouble sleeping. Going to bed was just another struggle in a day filled with struggles and he would turn and toss on his bed until his drained and exhausted body reluctantly accepted sleep.

But that had been years ago, back before CURE, back before Chiun had transformed him into something different by giving him control of his own body, able to make it do what he wanted it to do.

He had once mentioned the change in his sleeping habits to Chiun, who laughed one of his infrequent laughs.

"You have always been asleep," Chiun had said.

When Remo finally came to understand the gifts Chiun had given him, he reflected that the ancient Korean was correct. He had been asleep, never in touch with his body. Most men used only a small fraction of their bodies and an even smaller fraction of their senses. Remo was man pushed toward the ultimate, using almost all his body, almost all his senses. And Chiun? Chiun wasthe ultimate. The secrets of centuries of Sinanju were stored in his mind and body and it explained why that frail old man, less than five feet tall, weighing under a hundred pounds, could bring physical forces to bear that had to be seen, and still were disbelieved.

Now, for Remo, sleeping was just another function of living and Remo was in control of those functions. He slept when he wanted to and for as long as he wanted to and the totality of rest he twisted from sleep was so great that a few minutes rest to him was the same as hours of sleep to a normal man.

And to go to sleep was the simplest thing of all. It did not require consciously willing the body to sleep. It simply meant letting the body do the natural thing, which was to sleep. "A lion never has insomnia," Chiun had once said. Sleeping became a thing done more by instinct than by conscious desire. But Remo controlled the instinct.

He thought of none of these things as he lay on the bed, because one moment he was awake, and the next moment he was asleep. Not the "little death" of sleep that most men suffered through. Because Remo lived a life without tensions racking his mind and body, because he was not in conflict with himself during the day, he did not have to escape that conflict at night in the deep coma that most people called rest.