Smith and Howard gave him the same look the other orphans gave him when he stood up in class and answered that Henry Ford flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk. “Okay, Remo is dumb.”
“You don’t understand the scope of the losses, Remo,” Mark said, trying not to sound too condescending. “The Hong Kong economy has been devastated already. It will take them years to recover from the damage they’ve already sustained. The economy of China has suffered a serious blow. The world economy is affected. If the data pipeline went down for an extended period, every business in Hong Kong would go bankrupt, and probably the PRC, and the world economy would probably be pushed into global recession.”
Remo shrugged. “That would be bad, all right. Can I go to Hong Kong now, before I say something even dumber?”
Smith pursed his lips, which gave them wrinkles like the lips of old movie starlets in too much pancake makeup. “Yes,” he decided. “Remember, please, that discretion is the word.”
Remo shrugged. “It is a word.”
“We shall remain invisible,” Chiun stated formally as he rose to his feet. “As always.”
Chapter 25
“I’ve had enough death to last me a lifetime,” Remo said. He sounded bitter. He felt bitter. All those people who had been cheering in the streets of the capital city were now lying dead in those same streets. They were dead in their cars, and in the parks and everywhere people ought to be alive.
The Marines in the helicopter that air-lifted them into Ayounde from Sierra Leone had been wearing big suits that made them look like the marshmallow man who got toasted all over New York City in some old movie. They had been worried about Remo and Chiun going in without suits. They asked Remo time and again to change his mind. He ignored them. The old man, they thought, couldn’t even understand what they were even saying.
They smelled the dead from sixty miles outside the city, and by the time they touched down it was an overpowering stench. This was equatorial Africa. In twenty- four hours the decay was well under way; Remo didn’t want to think what this place would be like in a week.
‘It’s too quiet,” Remo said. “Makes my flesh crawl.”
“It disturbs me, as well,” Chiun remarked. “But there is death and there is death.”
“Don’t start.”
They walked. The place shouldn’t be far from the park where they had been deposited. They found the Ayounde National University and let themselves inside the building that called itself the College of Natural Sciences.
The research labs had air-conditioning. The corpses here smelled less.
Remo’s skin adjusted itself to the temperature of his environment, just like that of other people only more so, so the machine-cooled air wasn’t more comfortable to him, or to Chiun. Still, the place felt more like a human environment. It made the presence of so many dead people even more unnerving.
“This is not the work of a proper Master,” Chiun said.
“You go find some survivors to kill, then,” Remo said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Somebody got up on the wrong side of the mat this morning.”
Remo halted. “Yeah, that’s it, exactly, Chiun. I’m just having a bad day. Has nothing to do with this, or the hundreds of others like him.” He thrust an open hand at some particularly gruesome remains against a hallway wall. “Her. Whatever he or she used to be. Why the hell did you say that?”
Chiun looked impassive. “Making conversation.”
“You don’t make conversation. You were trying to provoke me.”
“You are mistaken.”
Remo gave up. “Here. Ready?”
Chiun nodded. The lab door was locked from the inside. Remo applied a little extra wrist and the knob spun easily, metal bolts shearing off inside, and they stepped into a tiny research lab that was as cold as a meat freezer.
Remo shut the door, then he and Chiun stood inside and exhaled slowly, as if they were underwater, without breathing in. They allowed themselves to become cold.
Chiun thought this was a curious sensation, and he even felt a little foolish for doing it—but he didn’t dare to tamper with the unnatural horror that threatened them. He understood what they were up against, and he knew that it was probably in the room with them.
So he allowed himself to become cold. Being a skilled Master of Sinanju, he could control his body to acclimate it to his environment. He had walked under the blazing desert sun without discomfort. He had traveled above the Arctic Circle with only a windbreaker to protect him from the cold. He did this by adjusting the natural functions of his human body, but adjusted them to a greater degree than most human beings could ever believe possible.
Now, in a kind of perversion of this skill, he was purposely lowering the temperature of his skin. They could not allow their body temperature to melt, and thus free, any of the microscopic devices that they suspected were here.
Before, in Scotland, Chiun had encountered the things. One of them had looked at him, and the feeling of it was more unnatural than the feel of any demonic presence.
On the table in the tiny lab was a beaker of water, cloudy and frozen solid, and a binocular microscope was beside it. Sitting on a stool was a researcher, also frozen. His stomach was open and the blood had made scarlet icicles.
Chiun nodded at the puddle. Remo understood. Whatever had chewed its way from inside the lab technician was in the blood, which puddled on the floor and froze to a shiny surface.
When Remo felt his skin had become as cold as he could make it without killing his own dermal layer, he stepped over the frozen puddle of blood. The lab technician was still holding the phone to his ear. “I’ll take it.” Remo extracted the phone from the man’s hand. “Hello?”
“Remo?” asked Mark Howard.
“Yeah. Now what?”
“Dr. Alcieni had identified the city water source as the contaminant carrier and was trying to make an identification of the pestilence when he died. He called a fellow microbiologist in Flagstaff, a man he knew was a specialist in infectious diseases, and he was on the phone with him until he died, working until the last minute.”
Remo gave the corpse another glance. Dr. Alcieni could be just another corpse with a crater in his stomach the size of a kumquat. He wondered if anybody would every really recognize the man’s heroism. Remo felt very, very cold.
“He told Dr. Palamas in Flagstaff that he had set the air-conditioning system low to preserve the samples.”
“The doctor and his sample are frozen stiff.”
“Okay.” Mark Howard was breathing hard. “You have got to be careful here, Remo.”
“I know.”
“If Dr. Alcieni did what he hoped he was doing, he preserved whatever contaminant was in the water. That means it’s virulent when thawed.”
“I know.”
“If you warm it up—”
“I know.”
“Look into the microscope.”
Remo hated it; he felt inadequate to look into a microscope. Dammit, he didn’t know what he was looking for in a frigging microscope! You were supposed to have scientists to look into the damn microscope! But here he was, Remo Williams, Sinanju Master and well- known dim bulb, and it was up to him, of all people, to look in a microscope and describe what he saw.
What he saw sent a chill through him. How that was possible he didn’t know.