"I'm running twenty-six miles tomorrow, David." Merrick tried to smile but it was wasted on the back of his son's head. "Isn't that pretty good?"

"Yeah, Dad." Merrick felt some relief sweep over him.

"The Six Million Dollar Man did that tonight in an hour," David said.

Merrick saw the tide go out.

"Well, not really an hour, that was what they said it took him, but it was more like five minutes. In slow motion. Wow."

As his son ran around the room in slow motion, Merrick pictured himself on a cold beach and his eyes became as vacant as the horizon.

He'd show them. He'd show them all.

While Merrick had dressed the morning of the race, feeling everything was going to be perfect, Remo had awakened knowing things were perfect and it disgusted him.

It was wrong. It was wrong to sleep perfectly. To get up perfectly. To always be in perfect health. Misery, he decided, was the only thing that made life worth living.

Remo looked into his dark eyes in the bathroom mirror, then let them flick over his tanned face with its high cheekbones. His lean body, even with its extraordinarily thick wrists, gave no hint of the killing machine Remo had become.

Remo had watched himself shave. No wasted motion, easy smooth strokes.

Perfect.

Disgusting.

Why didn't he ever nick himself? Why didn't he get dragon mouth in the morning like everyone else?

Once upon a time he had. He remembered the cold stinging touch of the styptic pencil when he nicked his face shaving. But that had been years before, back in another life, when Remo Williams was just another patrolman in the Newark Police Department.

That was before he had been framed for a murder he didn't commit, and revived after a fake electrocution to work for a secret agency as its enforcer arm-code name Destroyer-in a war against crime.

That had been a long time ago and suddenly he did not want to look anymore at the plastic hotel room he had been staying in for three days. He did not want to speak to Chiun, the aged Korean assassin who was now motionless, asleep on a mat in the middle of the suite's living room floor.