Power Play

Wesley Pruiss buys Furlong County to make his proposed film Animal Instincts while presenting the purchase as a solar-energy project. After a knife attack leaves him unable to walk, Smith assigns Remo and Chiun to protect him. Theodosia hires them, posing as a devoted assistant; she is eventually exposed as the employer of the knife assassin who deliberately injured Pruiss. She pays Rachmed Baya Bam to encourage Pruiss through a false sun-healing act, keeps blaming fuel interests, and persuades Pruiss to make her his beneficiary. Separately, fuel-lobby executive Will Bobbin recruits Flamma and Reverend Higbe Muckley to publicize Pruiss’s earlier film plans, concealing Bobbin’s role and fabricating Flamma’s religious conversion.

A bomb destroys arriving solar collectors; its planter is not identified, though Chiun later says Theodosia anticipated the explosion. The Wa assassin kills the three original guards and Muckley. Chiun connects him with an inherited feud in an attributed account of Sinanju’s past. Theodosia then orders Pruiss’s death and lures Remo away, but Chiun recognizes the deception and remains to stop the attack. Remo kills the Wa with his own knife. Chiun reports that Theodosia’s medicine maintained Pruiss’s paralysis; after Chiun discards it, the narrator reports Pruiss regaining movement and walking within two weeks. Pruiss returns the county, announces a private solar foundation, and starts an Ung-poetry magazine.

The final ironic account reports Theodosia, Rachmed, and Bobbin killed at the airport with the Wa’s distinctive knives. Remo’s responsibility is strongly implied by his preceding intention to deal with them and the description of a nearby man, but the killing is not directly depicted or explicitly attributed to him.