Smith headed a secret organization called CURE, which was developed years before by an-

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other President, now dead, to control crime by functioning outside the Constitution.

Swift and secret, CURE's one weapon was a thin man with thick wrists, an orphan with no past, a former Newark, New Jersey, police officer framed for a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. He was a man trained for more than a decade by the most accomplished master assassin in the world, a practitioner of the martial arts disciplines of Sinanju, a Korean village that had produced master assassins for thousands of years. Deadlier than any weapon, this man, an American, was known to the President only as "that special person."

"That special person," dispatched to Sister Evangelica's to eliminate the gun runner who was supplying arms to the complex, was juggling his seven captured bullets high overhead as he waited for more gunfire.

Remo looked for more bullets from the broken windows of the battle-scarred tenement apartment. There were none. He reasoned that the gangs with the guns had declared a cease-fire for their morning heroin break.

"Hey, what's going on?" he called into the silent courtyard. "I need forty-three more bullets." There was no answer. "Sheesh," he said. "There's never a gunman when you need one."

He walked past the rusted elevators, which hadn't worked since 1973, and down six flights of blown-out cement steps strewn with bullet-riddled rats. "Jose 181"—a message admonishing visitors to 181st Street to visit a hospitable per-