"We're going to promote you and give you a raise," said Wissex, looking up at the Gurkha. They might need many good knife fighters soon, if everything worked out as beautifully as it had in the caves of North Carolina.

When Terri recovered, she thought she heard a government man say she was going to be protected by a force so great and so secret that even the head of the department only knew that the President had given such assurance.

"The President of the United States, Terri, is personally authorizing a protection so awesome we don't even know what he's talking about. How is that?"

"How is what?" said Terri. She was fighting with all her strength to keep some broth down in her stomach.

"You are going to be protected by something only the President can authorize."

12

"Protected for what?" Terri Pomfret asked.

"You're going back into that cave," said the man.

Terri thought that was what he said. She could have sworn that was what he said. But she wasn't quite sure, however, because she was in a very comfortable, deep blackness.

Two

His name was Remo and the sun was setting red over Bay Rouge in St. Maarten as he guided his sloop to a slow anchor in the small bay.

The West Indies island was the size of a county back in the states, but it was a perfect location to beam and receive information from satellite traffic in space. That was what he had been told.

The island was half French and half Dutch and therefore, in that confusion, America could do just about anything without being suspected. It was the perfect island for a special project, except that it had too many people.

Seventeen too many.

Jean Baptiste Malaise and his sixteen brothers lived in grand houses between Marigot and Grand Case, two villages that were barely large enough to deserve that name, but which had more fine restaurants than almost any American city, and all of Britain, Asia, and Africa. Combined.