"It's all right," Smith said.

"Are you sure?" Remo asked Smith. "You know, we could let a tiger out or something and try again."

"Let us just leave," Smith said.

"All right. Our car's just over there in that lot," Remo said.

"No car for you, meat-eater," Chiun said. "You are in training. You will run behind the vehicle."

As they strolled away, four guards with tranquhzer rifles ran up and stopped. Among them was the guard Remo had talked to earlier.

"Well, where's Brian?" one asked.

"He was here," the guard said. "I swear. Hey, Mac. You see the gorilla?"

"Sure," Remo said. "He's in his cage. But you better fix that door. He might get out."

44

CHAPTER FIVE

The seven runners on the luxurious, multimillion-dollar running track at Emerson College in Boston were wearing, among them, a total of $840 in running shoes with special air-lite paper-thin uppers and all-surface, all-weather Tiger-Paw spikes for better traction, and $700 of running clothes, including skintight shorts and tank-top shirts, aerodynamically designed to cut wind resistance in an amount that the manufacturer said might improve performance by as much as one tenth of one percent. In a mile race of 230 seconds, this could mean a faster speed of 23 hundredths of a second, and that might be the difference between so-so and a world's record.

And then there was Remo Black, the newcomer. Nobody had heard much about him, except that he had won pre-Olympic elimination races in Seattle, Portland, and Denver. He walked onto the track last. He was wearing black chinos and soft hand-made black Italian loafers. He wore a black cotton t-shirt with printing on the front. The shirt's legend read: I AM A VIRGIN.