The Ultimate Death

Three-G founder Gregory Green Gideon is murdered by the blind gyonshi Leader and Mercy, who name Poulette Farms as their next target. In Newark, Remo breaks up a confrontation between the Spanish Spiders and Allah’s Swarm at the Rialto, then tries to make up with Chiun for missing his centennial kohi by serving him a ruddy duck. A fatal chicken-borne illness spreads from the Cahill family picnic to Tennessee Barbecued Chicken restaurants. At Folcroft, Harold W. Smith accepts chicken soup; a later chapter establishes that he became ill after eating it. The duck leads Remo and Chiun to Hinomaru and Poulette Farms. At the farm, Dr. Saul Silverberg diagnoses S.E.; Henry Cackleberry Poulette privately kills chickens despite his public anti-S.E. campaign.

Protesters gather at the farm, and Remo enters it. Sal Mondello is exposed contaminating the birds among the USDA inspection line; the narrative calls him a bogus inspector. Chiun kills him as he attacks Remo. Poulette tells Remo and Chiun that Don Pietro Scubisci arranged to place Sal at the farm; Poulette only speculates that Three-G may be involved. At Three-G, the Leader explains his intended Final Death and revenge on Sinanju. Mary Melissa Mercy reveals herself as the company’s executive vice-president and recalls her nursing work at Houston General: she helped the Leader leave under the name “Mr. Nichols,” leaving an elderly Chinese patient as a substitute.

Chiun finds Gideon’s skeleton rooted inside a garden oak. Remo and Chiun then pursue the mob connection; Remo kills Don Pietro during a raid, while Chiun identifies gyonshi among the Chinatown shopkeepers. A Taoist called Won Sik Lung treats Chiun, then betrays him; Remo kills Lung. At Folcroft, Smith and the doctors mistake the substituted patient for the original Leader. That patient punctures Smith, while the real Leader’s influence takes hold; Smith’s body later becomes the Leader’s vessel. The novel’s shifted viewpoints reveal the slaughter at Three-G and at Poulette Farms, but distinguish characters’ suspicions from what they know: Elvira first presents herself as a survivor before attacking Remo as a gyonshi.

Remo fights the attackers using the gyonshi burial site and Gideon’s bones. Chiun’s poisoning carries him through an internal landscape involving his father and dead nephew Nuihc; Remo appears there as part of Chiun’s mind, not as a bodily traveler. At Folcroft, Dr. Lance Drew uses electrical resuscitation when Smith suffers cardiac arrest, and orange smoke leaves Smith. At Three-G, Remo escapes a walnut-processing trap, discovers Mary’s black mist is produced by a grate, shocks her until orange smoke leaves, and kills her after she cuts her own throat; the exact form of his final blow is unstated. Remo confronts the Leader, whose death/disappearance is not physically explained.

Chiun’s inner struggle ends with an imagined Remo defeating the Leader, after which Chiun wakes. Two weeks later, the public account attributes the poultry outbreak to Poulette Farms and portrays the deaths at Poulette Farms as revenge by vegetarians. Smith secretly removes the Three-G victims and maintains that the group closed after taking revenge on Poulette. Remo and Chiun discuss electricity as a way to expel the virus, and Remo calls the gyonshi a sham while accounting for the earlier imagery as imitations. In the final scene, the Leader’s stripped skeleton hangs in the oak and his preserved brain is placed before Chiun, who crushes it.