churning, steaming water. The material of their lab coats was tinted slightly brown.
Roote left them to bob in the waves. He stepped over the upper lip of the tank and climbed down the ladder.
Walking, not running, he crossed the big room toward the open door. His wet feet left a fading trail of prints on the concrete floor.
A moment later, he was gone.
The monster had escaped.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was fighting gravity. And winning.
Actually, as he strolled along the thin wire eight stories above the dark alley in Providence, Rhode Island, Remo realized that
"fight" was not the proper term for what he was doing. Tightrope walkers and trapeze artists fought gravity. Every step or swing
they took flouted the simplest law of nature. Remo was no mere circus performer. For him it was not so much a fight as it was a
stalemate.
Gravity was there. Remo was there. Both knew it, but each pretty much ignored the other.
The cool breeze brought the scent of the Providence River in from the east. The slight shift in wind would have caught a mountain
goat by surprise, flinging it into the black abyss below. Remo merely shifted his weight and he continued to balance delicately as
he stepped, one foot casually over the other, toward the distant wall.
To fight gravity would be to lose, Remo knew. One might just as well have tried to wrestle the sun from the heavens. If he taunted
nature, he would plummet like Icarus to the hard, unforgiving ground. Instead, Remo became a force of nature unto himself.
Remo was a Master of Sinanju. The latest in a long line of heroes stretching back into the mists of prehistory. To be a Sinanju
master was to be in total control of one's physical and mental abilities.
Feats that seemed extraordinary to normal mortals were second nature to the men of Sinanju. Dodging bullets, scaling sheer walls,
the ability to lift many times their own weight all came easy to those in harmony with the forces of the cosmos.
But Sinanju was not just a philosophy. The name derived from the poor North Korean fishing village from which the first master
had come more than five millennia ago. Remo was the pupil of the Reigning Master, the last in the original pure bloodline.
Remo had not expected to become a Sinanju master. In fact, Remo-like most people-had never even heard of the most deadly of all
the martial arts.
A lifetime before, Remo had been a Newark beat cop. One night a pusher had been found beaten to death, Remo's badge clutched in
a hand tight with rigor mortis.
The trial had been incredibly, suspiciously, fast. Remo lost. He was executed for a crime he had not committed. When the electric
chair didn't work, Remo awoke to find his old life was over and a new one just beginning. Technically dead, but still very much
alive, Remo was placed in the skillful hands of the Master of Sinanju. From that moment on, Remo had been taught how to
become all that he could be.
"Be all that you can be," Remo sang lightly as he stepped along the clothesline-thick insulated cord.
He wasn't aware he had spoken in more than a whisper until he heard the surprised voice before him.
"Hey! Whoa, hey, what the crap?"
The voice came from the flat roof. When he looked, Remo saw a broad, puzzled face peering from the deep shadows just above the
upper roof ledge. It turned quickly away, calling into the darkest shadows in a husky rasp.
"Gino, get over here. You gotta see this." Another face joined the first. This new face, presumably Gino's, grew as surprised as the
first when it spied Remo standing on the impossibly thin wire out in the middle of nothing. The alley below lurked dark and