Remo saluted the camera with his middle finger even as he ducked and dodged the raindrops. He was right. They drizzled out to almost nothing at the edge of the greenhouse. The nozzles were concentrated in the center of the room.
There was an artificial randomness to the rainfall. Remo's body tuned to the mechanical pattern. Twirling and skittering at the storm's edge, he managed to avoid the fat raindrops.
He found the emergency switch on the third column. A padlock and chain secured it in place. Remo snapped the chain and pulled the switch.
When he glanced back, he saw that the switch hadn't worked. Chiun was still crouched before the doors. Standing next to the Master of Sinanju, Amanda Lifton was growing frantic.
"Stupid geniuses," Remo muttered.
From where Remo danced amid the raindrops, he had a clear view of the roof that was protecting Chiun and Amanda. It was held in place by twin bands angled to the wall. Pooling acid was burning away the securing braces. Even from this distance, his keen eyes could see the metal dissolving.
"Damn," he grumbled. "Chiun, that thing's gonna-"
He never finished. Even as he was shouting, a band snapped.
The roof twisted to one side, spilling a wave of acid. A split second after the first band broke, the second followed suit and the entire overhang collapsed.
Remo could only stand and watch, helpless, as the Master of Sinanju was buried beneath a ton of hissing metal.
He took a step forward. But the room seemed to anticipate his move.
All around him the storm seemed to find sudden focus. The spitting nozzles shut down on the far side of the greenhouse. All at once, they opened up above him. And as Remo stood alone and defenseless on the greenhouse floor, a downpour of acid washed down from above like liquid fire.
Chapter 6
Herr Hahn knew death. He knew it up close. Had kept quiet company with it for years.
The blood, the anguish, the final screams. He knew all the familiar faces of his old companion. He wasn't some dime store philosopher who would have claimed death as a friend. Herr Hahn had no friends.
No, death to him was not a friend, but an ally. It had worked with him, at his side since his youth. In one sense it was a protector, for without the deaths he inflicted on so many others, Herr Hahn would surely have himself died long ago.
To some he was known as an assassin. He rejected the term. These days an assassin conjured up images of maniacs with political or social motives. The trade, as practiced by Herr Hahn, had no such pretenses. Someone could hire him to kill a president or a plumber. Hahn wouldn't care either way. Of course, the money was the same in each case. For this expensive reason he rarely found work killing plumbers.
In such a skilled profession as his, Herr Hahn was unique, for he was content to be called a murderer.
After all, a murder was a pure and honest-sounding thing.
Professional murder had paid the bills a long time now. And as long as his old ally death continued to see to it that others died instead of Herr Hahn, he would be murdering for many more years to come. Dealing death was on his mind this day.
Herr Hahn was tucked safely away in the security room of the Congress of Concerned Scientists building in Geneva. On closed-circuit TV, Hahn watched as the drama unfolded within the big greenhouse.
Herr Hahn had set up the elaborate greenhouse system for his employers here at the CCS. As he watched the three people in there now, he realized he might have been unintentionally sloppy. Of course, he couldn't be blamed. After all, these visitors deviated from the norm.
When Hubert St. Clair had instructed Herr Hahn to oversee the death of the woman, Hahn didn't anticipate anything interesting. Even with the addition of the two others he didn't expect anything other than the usual. They'd all three cower underneath the overhang for a time. Eventually and inevitably the acid would do its work, and that would be that.
It should have been the same as the rest of the scientists he'd eliminated. Perhaps this was a little more dramatic than some of the others, but the end result would be identical. Boring and inevitable.
Yet as he studied the monitor, he was finding things a little less predictable than he had come to expect.
These three were lasting longer than he ever would have thought.
When the young one suddenly raced out from beneath the overhang, Hahn sat up straight.
This was new. Such behavior went against every survival instinct Hahn had seen in his many other victims. To leave an area of safety-even a temporary one-ran contrary to normal human behavior.
It was panic. Had to be. Sheer, blind panic. That was the only logical explanation.
In such circumstances panic always killed. The young one would soon die in the artificial storm. When he didn't, Herr Hahn felt the first tickle of some strange alien emotion deep in his round belly. The young one seemed unharmed by the growing storm. More incredibly, he had cleared one of the trees of limbs, lifting it with seeming ease. Without a sign of strain on his face, he'd raced back to the others.
Hahn had no great control over where the rain fell or lightning struck. The random program that controlled the storm was intended to mimic the real thing so as to give the trees the closest thing to a natural environment as possible.
All Hahn could do was ratchet up the acid output in certain quadrants. He did. As the liquid sprayed from specially designed nozzles through which water ordinarily flowed, the two intriguing men in the greenhouse were already ramming their log against the thick plastic door.
It was incredible to watch.
They were obviously possessed of physical strength far greater than appearance indicated. They had the perfect camouflage, these two men. Nothing about them would indicate anything extraordinary. And yet here they were, battering the door to their final prison.
Their great efforts wouldn't matter. The doors and walls had been designed to withstand pressure greater than any mere mortals could produce. Even men as unique as these two obviously were.
Hahn watched them work, almost grateful that he hadn't met them some other way. Although he was the best at what he did, these two could present-
A light flashed on his monitor. Blinking disbelief, Hahn leaned forward in his chair.
The door to the greenhouse was open. Just a hair so far-and so far the seal was still secure-but these two had somehow managed to do something the engineer of the greenhouse had insisted would be impossible. And Hahn trusted this particular engineer's word, for it was Herr Hahn himself who had designed the room for the CCS.
On the monitor Hahn saw that they'd pried the edge of the trunk between the doors. The old Asian attacked the inflating hermetic seal with his long fingernails.
For the first time in his professional career, Herr Hahn felt his certainty in his inevitable success begin to fade.
This couldn't be. They had to die.
As Hahn watched, the Lifton woman suddenly pointed back out across the greenhouse.
She obviously knew where the emergency switch was. Not that it mattered. Yes, he had gone out to get the log, but the young male would never go back out again.
Hahn watched, stunned, as the young American darted back out into the greenhouse. He grew even more shocked when the thin man with the abnormally thick wrists threw an obscene gesture toward Herr Hahn's security camera.
How could he possibly have known he was being watched?
The American made it to the switch. The acid had to have chewed through the lock and chain, because he simply plucked them off and threw them to the floor.
Others in his business thought Herr Hahn cautious in the extreme. Today, Hahn was grateful for his care and planning. He had disabled the emergency switch before his targets had even entered the greenhouse.