“Sweetheart, I can’t make him not do anything.” Vespana felt the sweat break on her brow and trickled, stinging, into her eyes. Remo was whistling, and the sound cut like scissors into her brain. It was the song “25 or 6 to 4.”
“Stop it!” she hissed.
“Well said,” said the old man behind her.
Remo puckered and began whistling, “Color My World.” Vespana used to love that song, but now it was the last straw as she descended into blind panic. “I’ll talk if you just stop that infernal whistling!”
Her paralysis was removed with a quick touch, and she was too relieved to worry about the consequences of her betrayal as she led them to the scene of Senator Whiteslaw’s mysterious escape.
The Juber Club was a Washington, D.C., institution, and its members were, too. No first-generation politicians or millionaires were invited to join, and the club had stopped taking new members anyway in the 1970s. There were more than enough members and their sons to sustain the Juber Club, and these days—as in the past forty years—even the private clubs were pressured to desegregate. Closed membership made that a nonissue.
Blacks? Jews? In the Juber Club? No, thank you very much.
Asians? Women? Never. That was the message the concierge communicated as he strode into the reception foyer.
“Don’t even start, Jeeves.” The one member of the trio who was at least acceptable in terms of race and gender was dressed like a truck driver.
“I must ask you to—” The concierge found himself walking with the man in the T-shirt. No, not walking. His feet weren’t touching the ground.
“We lost him here,” said the woman, who looked worried, but the concierge knew her now. Secret Service. She had been here yesterday. “While we were coughing up ID for Mr. Stick up the Butt, Whiteslaw slipped around this corner and into the library—we thought,” Vespana explained. “When we finally got inside, no Whiteslaw.”
Remo considered that, examining the short hall, then he idly bounced the concierge up and down. “Does that help you think?” Chiun asked.
“Pay attention.” Remo loved it when he had the chance to say such things to Chiun. As the wide-eyed concierge was bobbled, his shoes clattered on the marble floor. Remo was greatly satisfied to see Chiun nod in understanding.
“Female, did you hear the despicable senator’s shoes clop down this hallway? Are you not trained to notice such things?”
Vespana had a smart-mouthed response ready, then it occurred to her that she hadn’t heard the sound of receding footsteps.
“Proves nothing” she declared.
“Except that he probably did go into the library after all.” Remo entered the library and locked the door behind them. “I bet there’s a secret passage in this place. What do you say, Chiun? Sign out front says it was built in the 1850s, and even I know everybody would have been getting edgy about the slavery thing, so there had to be a lot of paranoid spies and politicos hanging around.”
“Wherever there are politicians, you can be assured there will be a means of escape,” Chiun agreed.
Remo tapped on the bookshelves until he found the section without a wall behind it, then tapped again until the tactile response led him to the instrument used to open the door. That took all of fifteen seconds, but for another minute he pushed it, lifted it, prodded it and yanked it. The wall wouldn’t open.
“Little help?” he asked Chiun.
“I was not even invited.”
“Okay, you, then,” Remo said to the concierge; “Open it.”
“Never, sir.” The concierge, even dangling helplessly, felt he had bested his attackers. They would never learn the secret code that activated the door’s mechanics.
“It’s your library.” Remo shrugged and tapped again, disintegrating the handcrafted bookshelves. The splintered cherry wood still smelled fresh, even 150 years after the bookshelves’ construction.
The concierge was too shocked to notice he was being carried into the passage at amazing speed, down and then east under Front Street and then up again.
The building across the street from the Juber Club looked like just another federal office building, but when they ascended again to ground level they were in a windowless secret section, just wide enough for the elevator. When the elevator opened, there was just one button inside.
Chapter 35
Alarms were ringing all over the system. Jack Fast knew the rats were finally in his trap. The old man was going to eat his words.
It was a real bummer when people stopped thinking you were the greatest. The old man gave Jack some serious attitude when Jack claimed the proton-beam chisel couldn’t be adapted for a sustained firefight. Why not, Jack? Losing your touch, Jack? As if Jack hadn’t already engineered the proton-beam chisel way beyond what those doctoral types at Singapore City U ever dreamed of.
Now Jack was going to hit the assassins with souped-up proton-beam chisels that worked in series. This was the most outrageously hostile hotel room on the planet—at least, as far as these assassins were concerned.
They were in the elevator now. Jack was monitoring the normal electronic controllers for the elevator, so there wouldn’t be any extra sensors to alert the assassins. There were no cameras in the elevator because the assassins hated cameras—but there would be cameras in the hotel room. By then the assassins would be helpless and begging for mercy, and Jack was going to love watching that.
The 476 Hotel was a luxurious establishment that took pains to stay low-key. This included a number of highly exclusive suites for politicians and VIPs. The penthouse was a retreat for politicians, mostly Juber Club members, who needed to lay low for a while. Happened all the time. Whiteslaw rented it for a week, with Fastbinder footing the six-figure bill.
Which he let Jack know about in no uncertain terms.
“I certainly hope this works, Jack,” Fastbinder said frostily when he arrived to monitor the ambush.
“Don’t sweat it. Pops.” What Jack had really wanted to say was—
The elevator reached the penthouse suite. The controls opened the doors, then closed them again, and Jack mouse-clicked the start button. The doors to the elevator burst into brilliant flame that raced along the seam. The phosphorous hidden in the rubber seals burned hot enough to weld the steel doors together in seconds.
The suite filled with the clanking of the chain as the elevator plummeted, its dismantled emergency brakes rattling noisily, until the building shook with the inevitable crunch when it hit bottom eight floors below.
By then, the proton beams began blasting the interior with wave after wave.
“Hey! Hey!” Somebody was pounding on the walls.
A thousand miles away, and three miles down, Jack didn’t hear it because he hadn’t turned on the audio - pickups yet. They wouldn’t have survived what was about to come. He clicked the button called Light & Noise just as the proton beams powered down.
The hotel suite became a sickening miasma of strobing yellow light and noise that was guaranteed to create instant nausea, dizziness and lack of coordination in anybody who wandered into it.
Jack chuckled and clicked the baked-potato button on his screen.
The magnetron in the walls of the hotel turned the suite into a house-sized microwave oven. The magnetrons rotated behind the metal deflectors that spread the microwaves thoroughly. You didn’t want to have cold spots. Jack hated it when his mac ’n’ cheese dinner came out of the microwave with steaming edges and a frozen middle.
The computer made a happy ding! and Jack grinned up at Fastbinder. “I coulda roasted a bison herd.” Fastbinder didn’t share his enthusiasm.
Jack powered down, brought up the recharged proton chisels and added a crowd-dispersing pain beam for good measure, and finally powered up the cameras, which emerged from behind their protective metallic shields in the walls of the penthouse suite.