Howard had ordered the police and FBI out of the apartment. The assistant CURE director was alone. As he walked past the sofa he could hear footfalls on the roof. Men in boots were still tiptoeing around with wire cutters, looking for anything they might have missed. The ceiling creaked.
The walls of the apartment were gutted. Wires that had been carefully threaded up inside the wallboard had been harvested and left on the floor.
The walls had been packed with explosives. Vans built to carry bombs had been hauling material away from the apartment building's kitchen loading dock for hours.
The Miami bomb-squad captain had insisted to Mark that he had never seen anything like it.
"The whole place was wired," the man had said, still pumped from adrenaline and fear. "The whole goddamn place. I mean, holy shit. I've never seen a place wired like this. If you hadn't warned us, we would have gone in through the door. It would have taken half the building down with it. How did you know?"
Mark hadn't answered. He simply thanked the man and left him to sift through his wires and switches. The truth was, Mark didn't know how he knew. He just did.
After arriving in Miami, Mark had driven to the King Apartments in Boca Raton. In the lobby he got on board the elevator and rode straight up to the sixteenth floor.
At least he thought he did.
He realized that he'd pressed the wrong button only when the doors opened on the seventeenth floor. Before he could press the 16 button and ride back down to the right floor, something clicked in his brain.
He wasn't quite sure why, but he got off the elevator and walked to the window at the end of the hall. It offered a good view of the city. High enough up that Mark could see the ocean.
The building narrowed one floor below. From his vantage, Mark could see out over a flat roof.
That was how he noticed the gleaming silver wire that shouldn't have been there.
That was why he looked for-and found-other wires, carefully threaded all around the pebbled roof. Which was why he called Dr. Smith, which was why the FBI was summoned, which was why Mark Howard wasn't scattered in tiny little bits around the smoking crater that had once been the King Apartments, reasonable rates, lovely view, within driving distance to beaches and most nightspots.
The shambles of the living room fed into a narrow hallway. Only half the wall was torn down here. The mess of shattered wood and particleboard extended into the large bathroom on the right. To the left were two bedrooms. Both rooms remained largely intact.
The first room appeared to be used mostly for storage. There were old suitcases and Army Surplus trunks stacked in tidy piles. There was also an arsenal.
Weapons of every kind neatly lined the walls. Machine guns to flamethrowers, guns large and small. Rifles in and out of cases. Boxes and boxes of ammunition.
Along one wall was a long table spread thick with bomb-making equipment. The police and FBI had already picked through everything, defusing whatever they could and carting away the rest.
Some mail from a local P.O. box had been left at the end of the table. It was addressed to a Mr. Mandell. Mark knew that was just a Dilkes alias.
When he saw the mail, Mark felt his heart rate quicken.
Glancing back to make certain he was alone, he thumbed rapidly through the mail.
He found what he was looking for at the bottom.
With great relief he slipped the envelope into his pocket.
Patting his pocket, Mark went back out into the hall.
The next room down looked like a normal bedroom. With one exception.
"Holy cow," Mark mused as he looked at the row of colored maps. They had been set up on easels and lined up on the far side of the bed near the shuttered windows.
The maps were turning brown from age. The countries had been painted in different primary colors, but the colors had begun to fade. Some of the corkboard at the corners was rotting.
There were tiny red thumbtacks all over the floor. It looked as if someone had come through and swiped them from where they had been stuck into the maps. Mark stepped through the tacks.
He blew a soft whistle as he tracked the maps from left to right. They started with North America. The second easel skipped to Western Europe. As he walked, he passed his fingertips along the rough surface of the corkboard, feeling the slight indentations where once had been pins.
Sometimes he could get a sense of something just by touching it. But as he felt his way around the world, Mark felt nothing but crumbling old corkboard.
Almost nothing.
There was something there. As usual, something impossible to define. A frustrating sense of not knowing.
He passed through Central Europe to Asia. When he got to the Korean peninsula, he stopped dead.
"Uh-oh," Mark said to himself.
The last easel was tilted slightly. He hadn't seen the two red pins buried deep on the West Korean Bay. But that shouldn't surprise him, should it? He knew the reputation of the man who owned these maps. Knew what he had been hired to do. And yet Benson Dilkes had disappeared. There was no trace of the assassin, not under his own name, nor under any of his known aliases.
Maybe he was off plying his trade. Maybe this was just how he conducted his business. Get the job and go undercover until the job was completed.
But for Mark Howard, there was the Feeling. Before he knew what he was doing, Mark was stretching out a hand to one of the red pins.
He felt it at once. A strange sense of cold dread as he reached for the pin. Stronger than the usual sense he got.
For an instant he felt strangely light-headed. The room seemed to take on a sickly glow.
Mark took a step back, blinking.
It was just a pin sticking into a rotting old map. An inanimate object. Alone in a killer's apartment that, until a few hours before, had been one big bomb, Mark Howard felt foolish letting himself be rattled by something as trivial as a little plastic tack.
He reached up and pulled it out. And instantly regretted doing so.
The color flew at him. It was as if he were suddenly standing on train tracks, the train barreling down on him. Whistle blowing, light growing bigger, bigger. No way to move. Paralyzed to inaction. Knowing there was no way to avoid it, knowing he was going to be struck.
There was a shock, as if touching the pin had sent a jolt of electricity coursing through his body.
The color came in a flash. Bright, brilliant purple. Then the images.
Flashes of nightmares.
An owl taking flight. A twisted winter tree. A man lying in a hospital bed. The same man standing on an outcropping above a bloodred bay, blond hair spilling down around his shoulders like a Norse god.
The nightmare turning real.
Mark saw the same man now. In the corner of Benson Dilkes's Boca Raton bedroom. Hovering in the shadows. A demented glint in his electric-blue eyes.
The eyes flashed. The shock of blue that flew from them seemed to envelop the room. But Mark knew that the color he was seeing was only in his mind. And then the flash of blue was overtaken by a wall of impenetrable darkness.
Mark reeled, stumbling against the map of the Far East.
He knew. Mark Howard knew.
The maps tumbled into one another, falling over one by one like colored dominoes.
Remo and Chiun. The danger. It was his fault. They didn't know. He had to warn them.
But it was too much.
Even as he tried to fight it, Mark Howard surrendered to the blackness. As the maps fell, so did he. When he struck the floor, a few of the dropped tacks bit the soft flesh of hands and face. By then Mark didn't even feel the pain.
Air hissing from his lips, his eyes fluttered shut. The pin that represented one of the two true living Masters of Sinanju dropped from his opening fingertips. It rolled under the bed.