“This is the safest place for you. Trust me.”
“I’ll never trust a Mexican secret agent!” Paul Pirie shouted defiantly. “Don’t try to deny it!”
“Stupid gringo, we’re not Mexicans, are we, Little Father?”
“Certainly not,” squeaked a voice out of the darkness where the old one had been standing idly as the young one pulled the pod above the waterline. “The Mexicans could never stand against us.”
“Besides, this place has belonged to us way longer than the Mexicans.”
Pirie thought hard. The Mexicans’ ancestors were the Spanish who first claimed the Americas for the civilized world. The only quote-humans-unquote who were here before that were the—
“You’re redskin Indians!”
“Exactly,” Remo agreed.
“I am not!” protested the old man.
“You’re trying to take it all back for the Cherokee nation!”
“Cherokees are kitty cats compared to us. Now we go kick-um some heap big paleface butt. Don’t wander off.”
The malnourished-looking man with the long face was shouting accusations, the scraggly woman was proclaiming her willingness to perform various services and the other captives were simply trying to scream their fool heads off. The sound followed them for a mile.
“Guess they didn’t want to be left behind,” Remo said. “Can’t say I blame them.”
“It would have been deadly for them to accompany us, for I would have annihilated them myself.”
They had beached the pod when they felt eddies of air swirling back in their faces, potent with albino smell. Knowing Jack Fast and Jacob Fastbinder, there would be nasty surprises awaiting them. It was better to leave the captives behind and retrieve them later. Hopefully. Now they walked along the river’s edge.
Thousands of years ago a massive river carved a wide tunnel, then the water flow dwindled. The reduced river created a much smaller channel on the floor of the old tunnel during the next age of erosion, leaving walkable banks on both sides. The signs of albino foot traffic showed that they used it regularly.
“Chiun,” Remo said, and lifted the glow stick. Above their heads, where most eyes would have seen only pitch-blackness, they could make out a man-size access tunnel and a bundle of explosives affixed to the ceiling. More bundles stretched across the roof in an arch.
“I don’t get why they’d close up the river tunnel,” Remo said. “Unless they thought they could bring it down on top of us.”
“If so, they missed,” Chiun observed. “That is not a mistake I would expect of this young madman.”
“Yeah. So what’s he planning?”
“I know not, but he will have a plan,” Chiun said confidently.
As they followed the river, walking shoulder to shoulder, Remo conjured the image of a beautiful garden grove on the Mediterranean shore of Spain. “What troubles you?” Chiun asked.
“I was thinking of Barcelona. We knew there was something out of the ordinary waiting for us inside that mansion. That was the first time we had a run-in with the Fastbinder arsenal of doodads and gizmos, and we got our asses kicked.”
“It was the proton-emitter device that weakened us. Without it, all the silly army toys would have been ineffectual,” Chiun said.
“Doesn’t matter. The emitter was there and we almost got whacked.”
“This, perhaps, is not the best time to discuss the results of the emitter.”
Remo smiled. “When we went into the hotel room in D.C. those emitters were just as strong, but they didn’t give me the same sort of a mind-suck. I’ve grown calluses in my head.”
“You don’t know this.”
“Yeah, I feel it.”
“You cannot trust this intuition.” Chiun said. “You must not take foolish risks. What if you are wrong?”
“I went beyond the Void,” Remo declared flatly.
“Talk not of this now,” Chiun said quietly.
“There was nothing, Chiun. All my senses were stripped away from me. It was an absence of everything. It was the greatest agony I could imagine.”
“Remo, what is the purpose of this? Let us discuss it another time.”
“I’m not gonna live my life dodging it.”
“But why now?” Chiun demanded. But he could see that Remo had closed his eyes.
“Stop, young fool!”
Remo was conjuring the darkness of the Void in his memory, and then he beckoned to the absence of darkness that was beyond it. He felt the darkness drift away, replaced by nothing.
“Stop, imbecile! You would obligate me to drag your comatose white body back to the world above?”
Chiun’s discordant singsong faded away, and was replaced with the rush of blood in Remo’s own skull, and then that too went away, until there was nothing.
The rhythm of the river flow, the cool, aged scent of the rock and the water, these dimmed and were gone, and Remo was once again in nothingness. In this place he had spent days that felt like years. He remembered it now. It was endless. He had been unthinking but miserable. There was nothing for him to sense and even his memories were wiped away and inaccessible. He had nothing to cling to.
Then a voice came through the nothingness beyond the Void. The voice was not real sound, nor real words, but was a glimmer of something. He clung to the sweetly spoken words, and centered his entire being on them until, by the force of his will, he clarified the words.
It was a gentle, exquisite voice, a young woman, and the memory she spoke of was—-just the same. The floodgates opened and Remo was filled with memories of Freya, his daughter.
Vividly he saw beautiful Freya, the brilliant summer sun, the landscape of Arizona. He smelled the desert perfume, he heard the breeze and the voice of Freya as she spoke to the coyote she held in one hand….
That was how the emptiness beyond the Void was driven away, and now, as Remo Williams allowed himself to descend into the emptiness yet again, he conjured his memory of a memory.
He opened his eyes, surprising Chiun.
“I beat it, Little Father. It took me once, but I escaped it, and now I will always know how to escape it.”
“Cretin. You aged me ten years.”
“Don’t you see. Little Father? Going beyond the Void wasn’t all bad. It sucked at the time, but it made me strong in a new way. The nothingness won’t get me again.”
“Going into the nothingness cannot be a good thing.” Chiun declared.
“But it wasn’t fatal.”
Chiun looked away from his protégé. “You mean to comfort me, but you do not know how close it came to being fatal. For I did not know how to summon you home.”
But someone did, Remo Williams thought, and he heard again, like a waking dream, the sweet voice of Sarah Slate.
Remo crushed the glow stick and stepped off the trail into the water when they saw the first twinge of light filtering upriver, then they drifted with the current until they saw the sallow moon where the river emerged. They were at Fastbinder’s underground city.
“Chiun, remember how we thought this proton gizmo was some new kind of weapon that would neutralize us? A weapon custom-made for fighting Sinanju?”
“You were quite wrong. I said so when you first postulated this ridiculous notion and I say so now.”
“But for a while there you believed it, too,” Remo maintained.
“You are mistaken.”
“Whatever. What I’m trying to say is, if Fastbinder starts microwaving us with proton beams, let me handle it.”
“Glory hound,” Chiun sniffed.
The earth suffered a spasm at that moment, then behind them they heard the crash of a massive explosion, followed by the collapse of a thousand tons of solid rock.
Chapter 44
“What have you done?” Fastbinder demanded, storming into the command center looking over the city.