CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and the Bay winds out of the Pacific whipped at him with all the fury gathered over the vast stretch of ocean. The Golden Gate spun out before him to Marin County, the gateway to the northwest. Behind him was San Francisco and going east, the rest of America.

He stood on the guardrail, where four hundred and ninety-nine others had plunged to their deaths in suicides marking otherwise insignificant lives.

The man was about six feet tall, normal in build. Only extra-thick wrists suggested he might be more than just an ordinary man, but there was nothing in the wrists to suggest that he could be standing there with the soles of his bare feet just touching the round railing of the bridge.

For one thing, Volkswagens crossing the bridge in the pre-dawn darkness tended to shift as the cross-gusts buffeted them. For another, his dark pants and dark shirt whipped like flags in a hurricane. And for another, he stood upright, very casual as if doing nothing more enervating than contemplating a change of television channel in his living room.

He smelled the salt Pacific breeze and felt the December cold that kept car windows closed and left many rear windows clouded with steam.

The cold he handled simply, by letting his body become one with it, as he was taught. The wind he handled another way. It was not that his body fought the wind; it was that his body became stronger than the wind by becoming part of the bridge, connected by his very thoughts to the support driven deep into the bedrock that bordered the Bay.

"Are you waiting for applause?" came the squeaky Oriental voice from behind him. "Or are you about to make a great production of a simple exercise?"

"Thank you for distracting me. I really needed a distraction. If there's one thing I needed standing two hundred feet above open water with a winter wind whipping at me, it's a distraction," said Remo, turning around to the wispy Oriental in a dark black kimono, whose strands of white hair flew in the wind like vagrant silk threads, but who stood just as securely on the pedestrian walk as Remo did on the railing.