"Smitty, don't burst a blood vessel," Remo said. "Chiun and I will deal with it first chance we get."

"Do it now."

"Isn't there anything else more pressing?" Remo begged.

"No," Smith insisted.

In their encounter with the neo-Nazi organization, Smith had been attacked and injured. At the moment he was hospitalized after undergoing emergency surgery to remove fluid from around his brain. With nothing urgent on the table for his two field agents to handle, the recuperating Smith had given Remo and Chiun time to move the Hoard from Germany to Chiun's ancestral village of Sinanju in North Korea. Smith, however, did not offer to help in any way. He did not want to create an international incident that could in any way be traced back to the United States. CURE's participation in the smuggling operation was to be strictly hands-off.

Remo had no idea how much their share of the Hoard came to. Millions, certainly. Billions, probably. That much raw wealth in the wrong hands could spell disaster if dumped into a single nation's economy. An economic domino effect could even go on to topple the world economy. This was Smith's real concern, Remo knew.

Fortunately, both Smith and Remo knew that Chiun had as much of a chance of spending the vast stores of Nibelungen wealth as he had of parting with the rest of his ancestors' five thousand years' worth of accumulated spoils that were even now languishing in the Master of Sinanju's Korean home. That was to say, there was no chance whatsoever.

Chiun's personal riches did not dissuade him from studying every nook and cranny in the storage sheds to make certain not a single ingot of the Hoard had been left. Since they had climbed into the truck cab, Chiun had been eager to return the last meager portion of gold to his tiny village.

Driving without a break for several hours now, they had just come upon a dreary, sprawling industrial city.