He washed the blood from his hair and hands— his own, the sacrificed birds', the blood of the alien gods from their distant world. They were all one in the water, as the Olmec believed past and future to be one.

Past and future. The priest would change the future and thus alter the past for all the ages of man to come. He had stilled the voice of the gods. The prophecy would not come to pass. And now he would find the gods' weapons and with them lead the Olmec to eternal triumph.

He rose from the water and looked toward Bocatan. The fire mountain was sleeping now, as it had slept for a hundred years, its burning orange floods contained within it. Beyond it lay Yaxbenhaltun, the vast kingdom of the enemy, the kingdom prophesied to rule over the entire world, causing all others to perish in its wake.

The kingdom of the Maya.

The priest looked back once on the poison fields that surrounded the Olmec camp. Their legacy of death. Then, naked, he walked toward the enemy kingdom beyond the mountain.

?Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he was squeezing water from a stone— or trying to. A four-foot-high mound of fine sand stood beside him in silent testimony to his failure. Since before midnight he had been collecting rocks off the stony floor of the Mojave desert, handling each to test for shape and weight, pressing, concentrating the pressure evenly over every part of his hand so that the rock imploded, giving up what moisture it had.

Except that the rocks in this desert held no moisture. It was August, and even the first breaking rays of sun in the red-dawned morning were hot enough to redden the skin of a normal white man.

Not that Remo was normal. An entire government organization had been devised to make Remo as abnormal as possible. The organization, CURE, had taken a young policeman, framed him for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced him to die in an electric chair that didn't work, declared him dead to the world, then set about retraining his muscles and nerves and mind so that Remo was, in his own body, the most effective fighting machine in the employ of the government of the United States.