"It wasn't me—it was Whiteslaw!"
"Get off it. Where's security?"
Flicker broke away and jogged to the Senate floor, slipped around the uniformed guard and ran at Whites- law, who sat in his wheelchair grinning like the devil.
Flicker was ruined, but he could still exact a little revenge. He could still get away with murder. He withdrew his phone and thumbed the speed-dial for Noah Kohd. In the balcony, Noah responded.
"Here he comes," Whiteslaw said aloud, craning his neck, but couldn't find Remo.
Remo watched from behind a nearby desk. Flicker was coming fast, his eyes wild. He wasn't trying to hide his intentions. Smitty's little special-effects movie had done the trick.
But Remo was very interested in seeing how he planned to make this happen. Shoot down a senator, in cold blood, on the floor of the Senate? That took some balls.
Flicker did something with his phone, put it back and grabbed for the inside of his suit jacket again. He came out with a pair of solid chrome glasses, which he dragged over his eyes. The guy had sealed off his vision completely. At that moment an ugly, lumpy woman wearing the ID of a Senate intern came to the rail in the balcony above and swung a small sack of grenades out into the vast interior of the Senate.
Remo didn't watch. He hid his eyes in his arm, covered his ears, closing down all his highly tuned senses as completely as he could.
The grenades went off when they were ten feet above the ground, but this was no ordinary Army- issue sound-and-light grenade. The sound was no more than a quick hiss, and the light was so brilliant and so brief that it had not been successfully measured, even by the munitions expert who developed the weapon.
Remo's eyes were squeezed shut and covered by his arm and still he saw the bones in his arm and the veins in his eyelids. The light diminished in a heartbeat, but that was when the panic started. Remo risked a glance, found it safe and blinked away the lingering red spots floating in front of his vision.
He was lucky. The Senate was full of blind people. Whiteslaw was rubbing at his eyes, trying to massage the functionality back into them, and all over were senators and staff who were doing the same thing. Some tried to stand and run, eventually crashing to the floor.
Only one man still had his vision. Orville Flicker pushed the chrome glasses onto his forehead and came at the wheelchair-bound senator wearing a sick smile. He extracted a yellow plastic device from a pocket high inside his jacket, just under the collar, and pointed it at Whiteslaw.
"Hi, what's that?" Remo asked, and took the device for himself as he emerged from hiding. "Is this a gun? Never seen one like this before."
Flicker stopped, shocked yet again. He knew whom he was looking at. "You ruined me," he said accusingly.
"Hey, whoa, you handled that one all by yourself. Did a damn good job of it, too."
"What's going on?" Whiteslaw demanded, squinting at them helplessly.
"Give me that," Flicker ordered, making a grab for the weapon, only to find it pulled just out of his reach.
"It's one of those disposable guns, right?" Remo asked. "All plastic, preloaded, fire it once and throw it away?"
"Give it to me!"
"You going to shoot the senator?" Remo asked. "Not a bad idea, actually."
"What?" Whiteslaw barked.
"Well, you did sell out the U.S.," Remo pointed out. "I, for one, know that it was you on the video. Orville here knows it, too. In my book, you're a slimebag who doesn't deserve to share my air."
Flicker saw a small glimmer of hope. "So give me the gun!"
"Yeah, okay," Remo said.
"No, don't do it," Whiteslaw blurted.
"Too late." Flicker laughed, then gripped the weapon in both hands and squeezed the trigger. There was a bang.
"Oops," Remo said.
"What happened?" Whiteslaw cried, then felt the limp body of Orville Flicker collapse heavily in his lap. "Get off me! What is this? I'm soaked."
"That would be blood," Remo explained helpfully.
The blind senator tried to get Flicker off him, and in the process he accidentally grabbed something strange. Soft human tissue. Spurting blood. Exposed bone. It was a wrist without a hand.
Flicker made disgusting sounds in his throat.
"Get away from me," Whiteslaw squealed and shoved at the wrist, only to find a second one. "For God's sake, get him off me."
"You know, Coleslaw, I think you two deserve each other."
Remo left them together.
On the balcony he found a hefty corpse sprawled alongside Chiun.
"You okay, Little Father?"
"Why would I not be okay?"
"There was this bright light, you might have noticed. See all the blind people around you?" He pointed out the stumbling, blinking interns.
Chiun nodded at the corpse. "From the booms this one activated."
"Yes."
"I closed my eyes," Chiun explained.
"I see."
"In truth, the flash was less intense here than below. See, these servants are not entirely blinded." He thrust a spread palm at the face of a stumbling young intern, who dodged it with a short sound and steered away, into a wall. She landed on all fours and found crawling was a safer option anyway.
"Who's the looker?" Remo asked, nudging at the blond wig. The face, behind the heavy makeup, was that of a middle-aged male. "Benny Hill looked more attractive in drag than this guy."
"As I said, he is the boom tosser. Unfortunately, he
did not reveal his presence until I was on the other side of the balcony. Otherwise I might have prevented the booms."
"Yeah. Well..." Remo shrugged. He stood at the rail. Below, Whiteslaw and Flicker were still tangled together, covered in blood. The Senate floor was filled with shouting and sobbing, blinded senators feeling one another's faces and tripping over one another.
"What a mess," Remo Williams said.
"Yes, it is."
"At the moment, I mean."
Chiun looked doubtful.
"It's not always a mess," Remo insisted. "Greatest country in the world and all that."
Chiun said, "The men with the sunglasses are arriving. We should go."
"Okay, but maybe we should come back sometime, you know, so we can see what it's like when it's running smoothly."
"Maybe you can come by yourself."
"Maybe I will."
"Fine."
40
"I'd say the Senate has some security leaks," Remo remarked. "Government by the people or not, you'd hope they could keep out visitors with grenades."
"They're plastic, just like Flicker's disposable handgun," Smith told them. "The metal detectors weren't set off. They were hermetically sealed, so the explosives didn't alert the dogs. Inside is a magnesium mixture with granularized high-pressure hydrogen canisters. It's an experimental flash grenade that burns very bright and very fast, and no one is quite sure what the lasting effects might be."
"My stars, what will they think of next?" Remo said.
"What happened to Flicker's gun, anyway?" Mark Howard asked from Smith's old sofa, although he was sure he already knew. Remo confirmed his assumption.
"I think I might have scratched the barrel and maybe accidentally pinched the muzzle a little and the thing blew back at him, took his hands right off," Remo said. "A shame, really."
"It is a shame he did not blow off his head," Chiun said.
"One way or another, Orville Flicker is no more," Smith said. "Bled to death. The Morals and Ethics Behavior Establishment collapsed and disintegrated in a matter of hours."
"Good riddance. Any mopping up required?"
Smith looked out from under his eyebrows. "Not by you. We disseminated our intelligence to several law- enforcement agencies and the FBI. They've already picked up members of the last two White Hand cells, which have also collapsed and dissipated. They had no reason to carry on once Flicker was out of the picture. He signed the paychecks. Flicker's housekeeper is proving to be a fount of intelligence."