Sheer walls were just things to climb. Fortresses were built from match sticks. Armies, merely toy soldiers.

The skills displayed by Sinanju Masters involved muscle and brain and bone. Breathing, conscious and unconscious thought.

Remo had long ago stopped trying to figure out exactly what made him different from other men. Better would have been the word his teacher used. Remo didn't think he was better. Just different. Of the world, yet apart from it.

And so Remo had one day realized that the man he had been was, in fact, dead after all.

Even though acceptance for him had been a long time coming, it had been far easier for the rest of the world to come to terms with the death of Remo Williams. Part of the reason for that was the grave on which he now sat.

The headstone was a simple no-frills number. Just a granite slab with a plain carved cross and his own name etched into the smooth, cold surface. The edges of the letters had begun to wear with age.

Remo had rarely found the need to visit what-to the world-was the final resting place of Remo Williams. There were only two other instances where he had stood above this grave and contemplated its significance.

Six feet below the spot where Remo now sat was a body. Little more than a few scattered teeth and bones by this point in time. Some faceless indigent who thirty years ago had unknowingly become Remo's stand-in so that Remo might be free to pursue his new calling.

America had been at a crossroads. Social and political upheaval were threatening to tear the nation apart. Down one path led anarchy. Down the other, a police state. In order that the republic could survive, a third option had to be tried, a new and treacherous trail blazed.

A new agency was created by a young President who would himself become an eventual victim of the incipient anarchy that plagued his nation. Called CURE, the organization would work outside the strait jacket that was the United States Constitution in order to preserve the very document it subverted.