Was she in love with him? Surely not Probably not She was attracted to him, and caring for him while he recovered from his wounds was the least she could do. But she wasn’t in love. Was she?
And what if she was? Mark worked for some sort of a secret organization. The funding had to be substantial if they employed the Sinanju Masters. Mark had hinted that the organization was tiny and she would be in grave danger if she ever learned much about it. Mark was concerned that she already knew too much.
But Chiun would protect her from harm.
Chiun. She smiled in the darkness. Maybe it was Chiun she was in love with. “You’re the Korean grandfather I never had,” she had told him. He had been momentarily ecstatic until she explained she had been joking—she wasn’t really Korean.
Chiun had her eating rice morning, noon and night. “It will keep you healthy,” he told her.
“Is rice the secret to Sinanju?”
Chiun smiled, eyes shining. “Some secrets of Sinanju have been stolen, but they are never given away. Eating rice is simply common sense.”
“So why do the Sinanju villagers roast pigs?” Remo had interrupted, just before Chiun dismissed him.
Then there was Remo. He didn’t seem interested in her, and yet there were times when she would run into him and feel an almost overwhelming physical attraction to him, however brief.
“Oh, sorry,” he said once when they met in the hall. “Still trying to figure that out.”
What had he meant by that?
Sarah had heard conversations indicating that Remo was the Reigning Master. A white American Reigning Master of Sinanju? She had sparse secondhand knowledge of Sinanju, but it still didn’t seem likely. Maybe it was a joke. Chiun never behaved as if Remo was the one with the authority, that’s for sure. The two bickered incessantly.
And yet there was such great love between them, like the strongest bond between any father and a son. Sarah would never forget the sorrow in the old man’s eyes when he thought Remo was gone forever. Nor would she forget the joy she saw when Chiun knew Remo was on the road to recovery.
Just remembering it made her smile as she drifted off to sleep again, in Mark Howard’s private suite, deep in an isolated wing of Folcroft Sanitarium. Her last thought was of Chiun. When would he return?
“Cheer up,” Remo told the albino. “A little crushed dignity never hurt anyone.”
The albino flinched and squatted, groveling with pitiful mews and grunts. “Oh no, you don’t. Get up. Come on. Go home. Go.”
The albino whimpered.
“Don’t make me bring out my finger again, Whitey,” Remo warned, holding out his hand as if to flick the albino’s ear. The creature squeaked and fled down the corridor. Remo and Chiun followed.
“He thinks he still has ears.” Remo grinned. “Wonder what he thought he was eating for dinner.”
“Enough,” Chiun said. “I prefer not to remember it, thank you.” Remo had subdued the murderous albino by snapping his ears repeatedly until the confused creature was too terrified and exhausted to fight anymore. By then his ears had been flicked away in tiny chunks of flesh. The albino wasn’t so beaten that he didn’t sniff them out and pop them in his mouth as he was herded away from the grotto. Hours later, the albino was nearly dead, and Remo knew he’d pass out on his feet from exhaustion before long.
“Might as well sleep,” Remo decided. “Who knows how much farther we’ll have to go.”
They found an ideal spot soon enough, with a wide, shallow lake being fed by cool and thermal springs. The albino fell panting on the warm stone floor. Remo waded into the water up to his waist, waited a minute, then snatched up a couple of eyeless fish.
“Cousins of yours, Whitey?” Remo asked. The fish were albinos, too, just as colorless as their captive, who sniffed at the fish smell and began salivating.
“This must be a rare delicacy among you No-Seeing Friend-Eaters,” Remo said, tossing the first gasping fish into the air and snicking at it with economical hand movements. His one extended fingernail made quick work of the fish, severing the head and tail, slicing it up the middle, scooping out the insides, and depositing a neatly butterflied pair of fillets in his hand.
The cast-off parts landed inches from the albino’s face and he devoured them in seconds.
“I may be fast, but you, my friend,
“You failed to remove the skin,” Chiun sniffed.
“I failed on purpose.” Remo walked on the slippery boulders to the steaming hole that fed hot spring water into the lake. It was amazingly clean, with just a touch of sulfur smell. He quickly stuck the folded fillets inside on a natural rock shelf, waited a few minutes and snatched them out again.
“Steamed and clean,” he announced. “Now the skin comes off and you’ve a nice fish with only a trace of stinky stuff in it.” He deposited a cooked fish on a boulder near Chiun, who sniffed it, shrugged and ate the steaming morsels with his neat fingers.
“Not bad, eh?”
