They fought back.
The cabdriver had a slight stomach ache as he waited for another fare that never came. He picked a deserted lot, parked and stretched out in the back seat for a restorative nap, and soon he was in agony, clutching his stomach.
He had consumed only a tiny number of the devices, so they had to work for some hours before they ate through his stomach lining and eventually out of his body. He saw the hole in his gut open up and then he died, thankfully.
A half mile down the road Miss Maluuna was sitting on the bench in front of the Burger Triumph, getting a little irritated at the tardiness of her date. She sipped her soda—she got them for free, one soda a day. Well, she’d give him five more minutes and then, forget it.
Chapter 22
The first time that Mark Howard had the pleasure of meeting the white Master of Sinanju, Remo Williams, he was pretty sure he was in the presence of some sort of assassin, and he was pretty sure the man had skills beyond the ordinary and he was pretty sure the oddly talented killer was about to assassinate Mark Howard. He was scared.
Now he felt that kind of scared again.
“Is it the stuff from Scotland?” Remo asked for the second time, and for the second time, Harold W. Smith said he didn’t know.
“Find out.” Remo said the words and he pointed with his finger. This was a man who could kill with his finger. He looked mad enough to kill Smith and Howard and just about anybody else who got in his way.
Remo was very, very angry.
“There is no way to know for sure,” Smith replied. “Figure out a way to know for sure.”
“How am I supposed to do that, Remo?”
“Listen, Smitty, you figure out a way. Because if it is the stuff from Scotland, the stuff that you wouldn’t let me go back to make sure was gone, then I’m going to get really angry.”
Angrier than this? Mark Howard thought.
“And I’m going to take it out on you. If you don’t figure it out, I’ll assume it is. Got it?”
“Calm down, Remo.”
“Calm down?” Remo said, not loudly but barely in control. “You turn on the TV today, Smitty? You see what’s happening?”
“I’ve seen it.”
‘People are dying.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Lots of people. If it’s the stuff from the burned-up castle in Scotland, then it is blood on my hands and yours.”
“Not true,” said Chiun, coming into the office in a hurry. Yet he appeared at Remo’s side as if he had been standing there quietly for five minutes. “The blame lies not with you or with Emperor Smith.”
“If it’s the shit from the castle, the blame lies with both of us. I’ll have to kill us both.”
“Remo!” Chiun squeaked, but there was a strange lilt to his voice. “Such words are for fools and madmen.”
“I’m pretty fucking mad.”
“And yet you are mistaken.”
“You don’t know that. Smitty doesn’t know that. Smitty didn’t know what was left in the castle when he told us not to go back there. I didn’t know that when I went along with him. What I should have done is say ‘Go to hell, Emperor Smitty, I’m going back to Scotland to clean up the mess.’”
“Instead, you went to Sa Mangsang, to clean up a mess you were certain existed,” Chiun exhorted. “This is the wise choice.”
“Wise?” Chiun called him a lot of things, but wise was a new one and it took the wind out of his sails.
“It was wise to attend to the catastrophe at hand rather than the catastrophe that might come on the morrow,” Chiun said. “From whence comes this anger?”
Remo fell into a chair carelessly. “Have you looked at the television? It’s like Africa’s 9/11. Only with commercials, because it’s only Africa. Not nearly as important as Americans. And all the reporters are getting the hell out, because you know, they’ll hang around to report on an American in distress but they’re not going to risk their necks on some Africans.”
“And the blame falls to me?” Smith asked.
Remo considered that. He couldn’t come up with a way to blame Smith for that one. Come to think of it, why was he trying to blame Smith for that?
Remo sighed. “We’re responsible. If this stuff came out of that pile of rocks in Scotland where they were brewing nanobots, then we let them get out. We should have stopped it from happening.”
“And how would you have done so?” Chiun asked. “How would you have known if these things were spirited away from Loch Tweed Castle prior to our arrival? Recall that when we arrived there were none of the researchers even left alive. There were only the local rabble, infected with the sickness caused by Sa Mangsang.”
Remo glowered.
“What of secret chambers?” Chiun asked.
“What of them?” Remo asked. “We didn’t find any. We didn’t have a lot of time to look, either, before it got too hot to stick around.”
“The explosives staged at the scene were put there as a safety precaution. They were designed to destroy everything in the lab,” Smith explained. “Including the antechamber.”
“If it worked right,” Remo muttered. “If nobody screwed up and put a tube in the wrong cabinet. If all the bombs went boom exactly how they were supposed to.”
“What if they had?” Smith asked. “The castle site was sterilized soon after the fire. I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say, the very soil upon which Loch Tweed Castle sits was heated until it melted. Nothing could have survived that, Remo, and if it did, it’s encased in a block of glass as big as a city block.”
Remo nodded. “And before that? After the fire, before the place was sterilized?”
“There was a window of opportunity. If someone knew something was there, knew it would not be consumed in the fire, knew it would be accessible after the fire, if they knew all those things and were prepared to go in and take it, then it could possibly have been taken. All those possibilities are unlikely.”
“Are you forgetting that the place self-destructed when it wasn’t supposed to, Smitty?” Remo said. “Somebody blew it up, on purpose. It wasn’t the lab people who worked there. They were all dead. It wasn’t the morons who killed the lab people, because Chiun and I killed them. It wasn’t you, which leaves a very small number of people in the world who even know the place existed, if you were straight with me at the time. The President? The prime minister of England?”
“Not even them,” Smith admitted.
“Who else could have done it?”
“Unknown.”
“You’re right, Remo, somebody could have somehow known of these weapons and triggered the self-destruct charges with you inside and come back to take an overlooked stash of nanobots,” Mark Howard said. “What would you have had us do about it?”
“Anything is better than nothing, Junior.”
“We dispatched the sterilization team to the site without Pentagon authorization so we could get it done faster,” Mark Howard said. “You were dealing with the threat in the Pacific. That was more important at the time. And we don’t know that this threat is caused by the nanobots.”
Remo said nothing. He did know. There were no germs involved, according to the earliest reports, and the scientists who studied the cause, who were on the scene and dying on their feet, reported evidence of active, mechanical-looking organisms in the city water. They even managed to get off hard data before their own guts were opened up from the inside.
This had all come just after the incendiary announcements from London. Parliament had finally approved the official disapproval of the Proclamation of the Continuation of the British Empire and the recolonization movement, though the initiative was being undermined by some members of parliament even before the prime minister could make the authorized announcement to the world. Still, British law was now officially governing Ayounde, Newfoundland and New Jersey, and the United States, for one, had launched its gunships and ground troops minutes later.