Stopping on the lawn, Remo pulled a single white ball from his pail and dropped it to the neatly trimmed grass. He toed it around a few times as groups of people walked by. Straightening, he tapped the ball back and forth, trying to get the feel of both club and ball.

That a nonmember could somehow make it this far into the exclusive Westchester Golf Club was a minor miracle. That he could stand out on the green, in full view of actual members, fecklessly toying with a ball was unheard-of.

Remo wasn't surprised that no one paid him any mind. He had spent much of his adult life dancing at the fringes of people's consciousness, never fully stepping out into the spotlight. By now it was second nature.

And it was a good thing, too. In his line of work, being noticed meant being dead.

Remo was an assassin. No, check that. By today's definition he was much more than that. In the previous century the term assassin had been gutterized, applied to every gun-wielding maniac or bomb-planting psycho.

Remo was the Apprentice Reigning Master of Sinanju, heir to an almost superhuman tradition, the origins of which evaporated far back beyond the edges of recorded history.

Most people used less than ten percent of their brains. That meant that ninety percent of the mush in their skulls was dormant. As a Master of Sinanju at the peak of his awesome abilities, Remo harnessed one hundred percent of his brain. Trained to perfection by the Reigning Master of the most ancient and deadly of all martial arts, he was able to focus that energy into physical feats that seemed to work in complete defiance of the limited human form.

Disappearing into shadows, pulverizing bones to jelly, climbing sheer walls. These were skills long known to the men from Sinanju. Hiding where everyone should be able to see him-on the sprawling lawn of the Westchester Golf Club-was as easy to an individual trained in Sinanju as breathing.