Misfortune Teller

After Michael Princippi’s nomination-paper drive fails, Sun’s followers abduct him and bring him to the Washington Guardian, where Sun says a force has drawn the former governor to him. Remo and Chiun move the remaining Nibelungen Hoard from Germany through the North Korean embassy toward Chiun’s ancestral village. Sun uses Princippi in Sun Source broadcasts and sends followers to take a Greek urn from the Boston Museum of Rare Arts. The urn’s yellow substance is later identified in the narrative as the Pythia, a fragment of Apollo; the story depicts the Pythia’s possession of Sun, its revenge plan, and its effort to set Remo and Chiun against one another.

At Sun’s mass wedding in Yankee Stadium, nine armed North Korean mission agents attack. Remo and Chiun fight them, but one attacker fires into the stage and kills Sunnie attendees. People remove bodies while posing as police; Smith later finds no NYPD assignment records and treats the removal as an imposture, while the attackers’ broader orders remain uncertain. A Sunnie-recruited sailor, Ensign Howell McKimsom, changes a Tomahawk’s target, kills his commanding officer and launches it at Seoul National University; the strike kills many people. In a later crisis, North Korean Captain Yun Yong Gun fires two FROG missiles, one at a target inside North Korea and another toward the Korean leaders’ convoy.

Remo and Chiun are in a standoff when a rifle shot interrupts it; Remo saves Chiun, and Chiun kills Rim Kun Soe. A missile launched from the South intercepts the incoming FROG, which Remo identifies as probably a Patriot. The Korean leaders survive and the crowd turns hostile, so Remo, Chiun and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung escape. Sun and Chiun continue to promote a unified-Korea prophecy, but it is not achieved. At Sun’s estate, the Pythia admits that it showed Sun one possible future rather than the only future. Chiun kills Sun. The yellow spirit fails to possess either Master, escapes through the ceiling, and is followed by a distant cry that the narration compares to an expiration.

Smith says the Korean situation has returned to normal; Remo’s suspicions that Sunnies served aboard ships and among the false police remain his theory, and the mailed disks are not examined. Remo empties the powder from the urn into the Atlantic and throws the stone vessel overboard. Chiun tells Remo that he has become precious to him, and the two reconcile.