The sobbing sound came out of the woman on the floor, but it was the last sound she was ever to make. Her gaze froze, surprised—Remo Williams's arrival was the last thing she would ever see. A face-up corpse sprawled beside her had once been a middle-aged man, and nearby was a police officer, sprawled on his face on the desk. Their throats had been cut.
"Messy," Remo commented to the trio prepared to spring on the intruder who would come in around the room divider. They all turned fast, fumbling into one another.
"Messy," Remo told the one who still wore his white mask. The others had removed the masks but still wore the now-familiar blacksuits and white gloves.
The man triggered the Uzi, but by the time the brain command reached his fingers the Uzi had gone missing. He relocated it as the hand grip inserted in his mouth, and the stock and barrel were bent around his head, tight.
The gunner's skull was wearing a new kind of hood, but it was steel and it was one size smaller than his head and part of it was gagging him. He clawed at the curled Uzi, then felt himself shoved. He slammed into the wall and crumpled, semiconscious.
Remo snatched the guns out of the hands of the other pair and shoved one man fast enough to spin him to the floor, which kept him occupied while Remo created handcuffs for his partner. The Uzi stock bent easily enough around the gunner's wrists, and the gunner stared at the results as his partner was lifted from the floor and given similar treatment.
Chiun could have been a colorful ghost, for he seemed to glide rather than run, and the long skirts of his kimono hid most of his knobby legs. To the pair of blacksuited, white-hooded killers he came out of nowhere to appear in the narrow alley behind the politician's headquarters.
"Stop right there, Grandpa." Two machine guns pointed at his stomach.
"I am sorry, gentlemen."
"Sorry for what?"
"That I cannot kill you right away. You see, there is a pale piece of a pig's ear who has become quite bossy of late. If I kill you now, I will be forced to endure his complaints for days."
The gunners snorted through their white masks. "A batty old chink."
Chiun smiled. "Come with me, please."
He floated into their midst like a swan floating on the surface of a still pond, but came so fast they didn't have time to squeeze their triggers. The weapons lifted out of the gunners' hands and slid into the hands of the old man as if he had the assistance of invisible spirits. A moment later the four pieces of the two Uzis dropped to the pavement, and the gunners became prisoners of the old Asian man in the most embarrassing manner possible.
He was holding on to their earlobes, though the tiny little man had to reach above his head to grasp them. The gunners felt hundreds of muscles clench in a head-to- toe spasm of agony.
"Please accompany me inside so that you may meet the pale piece of a pig's ear about which I was telling you."
The gunners felt as if they were in a state of living rigor mortis, but the pressure on their earlobes decreased, just slightly, and they were able to walk where the little man led them. He guided them to the narrow rear doorway to the politician's office, which stood open. The little man went through, but the gunners went into the brick wall on either side of the door.
"You are being uncooperative," Chiun admonished the two. "I may have to kill you after all."
The gunners found themselves maneuvered through the door, walking sideways. The pain emanating from the earlobes was so mind-boggling they didn't even notice the shattered facial bones.
The five thugs were lined up on the floor, where they could stare at their handiwork. The man was the state representative Griffin. The woman was his assistant. The cop was just some cop who happened to get nosy at the wrong time.
"I want answers, I want them now and I want no dicking around. Who's your boss?"
There was stony-faced silence from the killers.
Remo moved from one man to another. He twisted the Uzis a little tighter, and he pinched the wrists of the paralyzed pair from the alley.
The thrashing and screaming went on and on, and for the five killers their lives could be divided into two halves: the time before the pain and the time of pain.
"Raise your hand if you want me to make it stop," Remo called.
There were no words in all the screaming and shouting, and the only one of them physically capable of raising his hand was the one with the Uzi skull clamp. He managed to stop trying to pry the thing off long enough to shove his hand in the air.
"Okay," Remo said, and he loosened the Uzi just enough. The others also received a temporary reprieve. "Who's the leader of this band of idiots?"
"General Kough. Him in the middle."
"Okay, Kough, I'll ask you. Who do you take your orders from?"
"I never knew his real name," gasped the one named Kough.
"This is why you had me waste time not killing them? So you could ask them questions they cannot answer?" Chiun stood behind the line-up, irritated.
"You never know. Kough was never told the man's name, but that doesn't mean he can't make an intelligent guess. What about it, Kough? Ever have a hint about who your boss was?"
"No."
"Sure?"
General Kough wasn't exactly general material by most Army standards. He was whining. "Maybe!"
"Ah," Remo said. "Maybe?"
"Orville Flicker," the general admitted. "I heard his name a couple of times when I was on the phone with him, and once, when we met in person, his beard fell off. I got a good look at his face and I thought I recognized him. And he said we were a part of the great new movement in American politics. Then, when I saw him on TV today, I knew it was the same guy."
Remo grinned at Chiun. "See, Little Father? Now we're getting somewhere."
"So get on with it."
"Anything else you'd like to add?" Remo asked the general.
"I know a target—not one of our targets but another one. A big one."
"Let's hear it."
"I want a guarantee. I don't get killed."
Chiun frowned at the idea.
"We're assassins, pal. You want to make us look bad?"
"That's the deal—take it or leave it."
30
"I took the deal," Remo reported.
"Did you honor it?" Mark Howard asked hesitantly.
"Course. He'll live."
"Meaning?"
"Accident. He'll be a deaf-and-dumb quadriplegic. But he'll live. Better than he gave the senator and his assistant and some poor cop who happened to be in the neighborhood." A moment later Remo added, "Hello?"
"I'm still here," Mark said, feeling slightly queasy. He was no stranger to violence, but still, the ease with which the CURE enforcement arm did its job could be disturbing. "Give me the list of targets he provided before his accident."
There was rustle of the phone and a female voice in the background said something in a stilted voice like a badly acted hussy from a 1950s movie. "Sorry. Stewardess," Remo said. "Here's the list."
Mark Howard tapped out the names provided by Remo, and was disconcerted at the lack of activity on the screen. The Folcroft Four, the mainframes in the basement that handled the vast data-crunching activities for CURE, should have automatically sought out all available information on the names. It was a function they performed as a matter of course for any intelligence entered by Howard or Smith. Full profiles of the first names should have been assembling in background windows even as Howard was finishing entering the last of them.
Then he realized that the names were some of the names he had expected to see on the list, but so badly mangled, mispronounced and transposed that the ID routine wasn't matching them to their actual names. Howard sighed and rekeyed the names he recognized. Gerhard Slippers became Gerald Cypress, the mayor of one of the wealthiest coastal cities between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Lizette Gambino became Elizabeth Gamby, a high-profile judge in the Federal Circuit Court, based in Sacramento. Some of the others fell in place, but a couple of the names would take research to decipher. "Remo, I wish you would be more careful when gathering intelligence," Mark Howard said.