"If people want to drive Japanese cars, that's their business."

"Have I not heard you refer to them as rice burners?"

"The cars, yes. The people, no."

"Reverse racist!" Chiun spit.

"I am not a reverse racist."

"You do not hate the Japanese as you should. Therefore, you are a reverse racist."

"There's no reason for me to hate the Japanese," Remo insisted, an edge creeping into his voice. Abruptly Chiun whirled to his feet, his face a wrinkled web of rage. He shook a fist.

"I am forced to wear this to hide my shame. Is that not reason enough?"

More calmly than he felt, Remo got to his feet and faced the Master of Sinanju.

Chiun stood only five feet tall, but his rage seemed to fill the close confines. He shook a fist like a yellowed ivory bird claw. Abruptly he opened it.

His extended fingers looked even more like bird talons. His nails were long and curved to glittering points. Except the right index nail. It was capped by an ornate nail protector of imperial jade.

"Only till it grows back," Remo contended, trying to keep calm.

He stood exactly six feet tall, and the only thing he and the Master of Sinanju had in common was the leanness of their limbs. Chiun looked seventy, but was a century old. His face was a wrinkled map of Korea. His eyes were hazel almonds.

Remo was white. In him, only a hint of Chiun's almond eye shape was noticeable, and then only from certain angles-a fact that Remo always denied and that never seemed apparent to him no matter how much he stared into the mirror. Remo could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. His skin was stretched tight over high cheekbones, and his dark brown eyes lay deep in the hollows of his skull. His wrists were unusually thick. Otherwise, he looked outwardly ordinary.

But he was not. Neither man was. They were Masters of Sinanju, practitioners of the formative martial art called Sinanju, from which all other Eastern killing arts had been struck, like transitory sparks off a spinning flintstone.