Chiun stepped out of the crater and stood stoically watching, his hands tucked in his sleeves.
Remo started scooping handfuls of sand out of the crater, flinging it so fast that it scoured a pile of rusted metal scraps, which shone like chrome before the sand covered them.
“So I have to do everything. I always have to do everything. When I was training I did everything. When I was a Master I did everything. Now I’m Reigning Master and I’m still doing everything!”
“When you finally accept a pupil of your own, you may order him about willy nilly. For my information, do you plan on doing this any time soon?”
“Why, you looking forward to retirement?” Remo asked as he unearthed a body.
“Perhaps?”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m gonna wait twenty years before I get a pupil.”
“Thank goodness. I dread living in that dank and drafty cave.”
“I’m getting a pupil right away. First kid I see, I’m drafting him on the spot.” Remo gingerly lifted out the corpse and peeled off the blanket that was wrapping it. “Okay,” Remo corrected himself. “Not that kid.” She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, and had once been exquisite. Death transformed her into a horror of bulging, sightless eyes and a gaping white mouth. She was nude, with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt wadded at her feet. Remo took her slim pink wallet.
Chiun stepped into the empty grave, testing the consistency of the soil between his fingers. “The ground was not dug deeper than this,” he declared.
So Fastbinder wasn’t dug up this way,” Remo said. “I guess that doesn’t mean anything, if the new-model earth drill could have tunneled in from anywhere,” Chiun nodded, but he didn’t say anything. Chiun had perfected the art of the silent treatment, and Remo had been the artist’s canvas. He knew when Chiun had a real reason for keeping his mouth shut.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Remo announced. ‘I don’t know why. You know why?”
“No, and yet I have likewise acquired these creeps.” Remo turned slowly in a circle, looking for something. He didn’t know what. Chiun was doing the same thing, but standing perfectly still, allowing his senses to probe the environment.
“There’s nothing here,” Remo argued. “Just all the same junk as before, right?” His eyes searched the rubble he and Chiun had created, and he found nothing new except assorted vermin. There was no hum of power in the wiring, no visual security system watching them.
“Is there some sort of an electrical gizmo still fritzing around in the wreckage or something?”
“Let us leave this place.”
“No way, Chiun. If there’s something here, then we need to know what it is. I know what you’re thinking and it’s not that. If one of those Proton Annihilation Rays was activating in here, then there’d be all kinds of electrical stuff.”
“Unless it is disguised, or unless it is another trap prepared especially for us. Remo, these people may have our measure.”
“No way.”
A heartbeat later his words became a mockery.
The blond kid skidded into his workshop in blue jeans and bare feet and landed on the chair, rolling eight feet to a perfect stop under his primary workstation. A window had sprung up with a digital video loop of a smiling, vivacious Nancy Fielding repeating, “There’s somebody here!”
Boy, what a hot-looking babe! He had taken plenty of video to remember her by, some of it X-rated. Nancy hadn’t known about all the hidden cameras, of course. She was as smart as a tack, but gullible, too, it turned out.
Nancy had helped Jack Fast hide out after the destruction of his father’s museum and workshop, but she began getting suspicious when Jack told her that he was building a new mechanical mole so he could rescue his father. Nancy knew Jack was a genius, and she’d seen him engineer amazing devices, but a manned earth drill was beyond her ability to believe. Nancy had gently suggested that Jack was in severe denial over the death of his father. This scenario in which Jacob Fastbinder III escaped into the earth in a mechanical earth drill and was now waiting for Jack’s rescue was nothing but fantasy.
So much for Nancy Fielding. Jack thought it was a real drag when people he liked didn’t have faith in him anymore. Jack had to break up with her.
But Nancy was still useful. He rigged her up with the most benign and undetectable sensor he could think of—because the guys he was after seemed to carry around the best field equipment ever. His sensor was a simple thread of woven glass fibers—a silicon trip wire buried in the silicon-based sand of the soil. Even ground-penetrating ultrasound wouldn’t find that! He buried the lead in the soil inches below Nancy—boy, had she been surprised!—and used a telescoping rod to extend the lead forty yards down. Later he burrowed in under the lab, found the silicon thread and attached it to mechanical amplifiers, all made from glass. There wasn’t a trace of metal in the whole system until the wire reached the alarm electronics a half mile from the place.
“This is overkill,” his father had said.
“Hey, Pops, you and I both know these guys have got some serious human amplification going on,” Jack had said emphatically. “I don’t want to take any chances of warning them off before they’re right in the middle of my trap.”
Time and again the alarm had sounded, the result of the weight changes occurring to the decomposing body of Nancy Fielding. “Hey, doll,” he said in discouragement as he monitored another alarm, “you’re just right. You don’t need to lose an ounce.”
“Who does not need to lose weight?” Fastbinder had said, popping into Jack’s workshop.
Jack grinned oafishly. He hadn’t exactly told his dad about Nancy Fielding’s role in the experiment, but he was a first-class obfuscator. “The soil’s compacting under the old lab and setting the thing off.”
But there hadn’t been a false alarm in four days.
“I got a good feeling about this one, Pops!” Jack exclaimed as Fastbinder entered the lab. A rearview mirror, originally from a 1956 Harley-Davidson, was now mounted on his monitor. He didn’t like people surprising him.
“So? Let’s see if this is zee real thing,” Fastbinder challenged.
Jack bit his lower lip excitedly while turning on his monitoring cameras. They were mounted on the museum billboard and tapped into the security light power, thoughtfully provided by the State of New Mexico. The wide-angle focus showed them a parked car.
“All right, Pops, we got a bite!” The sandy-haired teenager was practically jumping up and down in his seat. “I’m zooming in.”
The image adjusted smoothly as it zoomed in on the dark blotch in the distance—the laboratory and former home of Fastbinder and his son was set back almost a quarter mile from the museum and the famous Route 66.
“This is a good zoom, eh?” Fastbinder asked. “Not a digital?”
“Naw, it’s a Zoom-Nikkor 200-400 mm. Cost me seven grand for all that glass. Don’t worry, I had Nancy order it for me.”
“Do you trust this girl to keep your secrets. Jack?” Fastbinder said. He was looking at the video loop still playing, muted in a background window on the monitor.
“She’s not gonna be talking to anybody. Pops.” Jack chuckled.
Jacob Fastbinder almost said something, then was distracted by the image on the screen. “Stop zee zooming a moment, Jack.”
“Huh? What for?”
“Just stop it. Now move pan down to zee ground.” Jack was sitting up straight. “You see something I don’t. Pops?”
“I don’t see footprints.”
Jack screwed up his freckled nose and zoomed in close onto the dirt, then swept the camera left and right. “What the hell? That drift sand’s looser than my mom on a Friday. Where’s their prints?”
“Maybe they brushed them away behind them,” Jacob Fastbinder said.