In the distance, a siren wailed in place, stuck in the hopeless traffic. By the time the fire engines arrived, and the police, the fire would be out of control and the arsonist long gone.

He heard a sound. In the roar of the flames licking up to the roof of the third building and the noise of the displaced tenants and onlookers below, it was hard to make it out.

He pitched his hearing lower. Control of his senses was one of the first things Remo had learned in his long apprenticeship with the old Oriental who had taught him, nearly against Remo's will, the secrets of an extraordinary physical power.

It had begun more than a decade before, when Remo was a young policeman charged with a crime he didn't commit and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work. It had all been arranged by a secret government organization designed to fight crime the way criminals fought crime— without rules. CURE operated outside the Constitution of the United States in order to protect that same document.

There were no armies in CURE. Only the president of the United States knew of it, along with two other men: Remo, the enforcer arm of the organization, and CURE's director, Dr. Harold W. Smith, a bespectacled, middle-aged man who ran the operation from a bank of the most powerful secret computers in the world. It was Smith who had arranged, so long ago, for Remo's transformation at the hands of the old Korean master, Chiun, into the most effective killing machine ever employed by a modern nation. It was Smith, in fact, who had created a master assassin from a dead man.

Nothing of that dead policeman existed anymore except for the veneer of Remo's appearance: the slim body, unusual only because of its extraordinarily thick wrists, the dark hair, the eyes some women described as cruel, and the mouth others called kind. The rest of him was a product of more than a decade's training and patience and work.