And there was one other man who knew about CURE, a former cop who was officially executed in an electric chair for a crime he did not commit, to begin a new life as the enforcement arm for the secret organization, a life spent in the most arduous training known to all the centuries of mankind to make him a human weapon more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

His name was Remo.

Remo Williams.

The Destroyer.

Remo brought under control the almost over-

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whelming impulse to rid the young man in the five and ten cent store of the burden of existence and decided Harold W. Smith was a pain'in the ass.

Killing forty-three men in broad daylight at a union rally was okay. Knocking off a fake army installation, with the arms and legs of a complete squadron of trained thugs flying dismembered through the breeze like link sausages, was peachy. But let Remo Williams pop a snotty dune store floorwalker in his acned cauliflower nose, and Smitty would be on Remo's case with razorblades for words.

Remo picked up another bag, weighing eighty-eight pounds. He picked up a third. It was also leaking. As he moved from one bag to the next, the floor beneath his loafers took on the appearance of Iowa farmland. The seventeenth bag emptied its contents at Remo's feet before it was two inches off the ground.

"This is ridiculous," Remo said. "These bags are all torn."

"You're not supposed to handle them so rough, lunkhead," the man sneered to Remo, who could count the legs on caterpillars as they walked over his hands, whose fingers had been exercised by catching butterflies in flight without disturbing the pollen on their wings. "You're just clumsy. Now look at this mess you made. You've wrecked my display. It took me three hours to set this up."

"To set me up, you mean. You knew these bags had holes in them."