But the front gate was open.
Not wide, just enough for a man to slip through. The guard looked at his control panel. It was dead. The switch controlling the electrical gate was not open as it should have been with the gate like that. He tried closing the gate electrically. The switch was inoperative. The guard went running out.
The gate was frozen. It would not roll free.
He knew it was the work of the man at the gate. But he could not understand how. It would have taken superhuman strength to force the closed gate open even a few feet. It would have been easier if the power had been cut. But the man with the thick wrists could not have done that either. All power sources were inside Graystone Prison, not outside. And a man attempting to penetrate the prison would hardly sneak in and disable the power just to go back to the gate and open it.
Unless of course the man had disabled the power so he could get through the gate on the way out.
The guard knew one thing. He could not close the gate and he could not ignore the security problem it presented. He hit an alarm switch.
Sirens wailed all over Graystone. A squad of guards came running on the double.
The guard met them halfway. "I think we may have had a break," he said uncertainly. "The main gate is jammed open."
A swift search of the prison revealed that no prisoners were missing. The gate was jammed because the generator that powered it was disabled. According to the electrician's report, the gate had been wrenched open with such force that the mechanism blew out. No one could imagine how the truck that had done it had not also destroyed the gate as well.
Finally, hours later, when the gate was again operative someone noticed that Dexter Barn was missing. Because he was not technically a prisoner, there was no immediate concern. Barn was free to come and go on his own recognizance. But it was strange that no one had seen him leave.
"He'll be back," the warden said confidently.
"I wouldn't count on that," said the gate guard, who refused to explain his remark.
After forcing the main gate to roll back two feet, Remo Williams squeezed in through the space and hugged the wall, moving where the shadows of the dying sun were strongest. He was for all intents and purposes invisible to the guards in the corner turrets. They were more concerned with the sky anyway, where the modern prison escape method, the hijacked helicopter, could be seen coming.
Remo preferred more traditional methods.
He found the house trailer parked on the basketball court. It was new, clean, and it looked comfortable. Remo could almost imagine himself living in one, and wondered, for the first time, why he hadn't asked Smith for a house trailer years ago. Working for CURE had demanded that he not live in any one place very long, but a mobile home would have solved that problem.
Remo shrugged inwardly and moved on the home. The idea was too little, too late.
Remo knocked on the trailer door. He had decided on the direct approach. It usually unnerved his targets. The man who poked his weather-beaten face out the trailer door did not look like a man who would rape a thirteen-year-old girl, and when he was done, remove her arms and legs with a fire ax and then leave her for dead in an abandoned house. He wore a frayed checked shirt. A pale blue fisherman's hat sat crumpled on his head, throwing his watery blue eyes into shadow.
"What can I do for you, young feller?"
"You're Dexter Barn?"
"You tell me."
"You're Dexter Barn," said Remo solemnly. The man cackled in his face. He was about sixty, but he looked as worn as an eighty-year-old. Five years in prison had done that. But five years did not seem like much of a punishment for a man who had ravaged an innocent girl's life. No punishment seemed appropriate.
"I understand you're having trouble readjusting to life on the outside," Remo said solicitously.
"Not me," said Dexter Barn. "It's them others. They don't want me."
"Can you blame them?" Remo asked. He had thought he would feel something facing the man. He had felt anger when he first heard the news story about the rapist's plight. He had felt horror when he learned that the man had been pardoned after only five years. But the man did not look like a vicious rapist. He looked like anybody. He might have been an old salt sitting in the sun on a Gloucester wharf, or an Idaho dirt farmer, or any number of other mundane things.
"Well, I don't know," said Dexter Barn. "I paid my debt to society. I deserve to be left alone. People don't understand. A man just wants a home of his own. It really hurts to be spit upon and called names. It cuts deep, son."
"Almost as deep as an ax," said Remo bitterly.
"I feel for that little girl," said Dexter Barn, shaking his head dourly. "I really do. I saw her at the trial. In a wheelchair, with hooks for arms and all that. Terrible pity. It would have been a better thing if she had died, you know that? A better thing."
Remo looked at the man. Something cold and terrible welled up inside his stomach. He repressed it. Anger, Chiun had always said, had no place in an assassin's art. No place at all. It robbed the judgment, and led to mistakes.
Remo swallowed once. When he spoke, his voice was still a croak. "I've decided," he said.
"Decided what, young feller?"
"Decided that killing's too good for you."
Dexter Barn recoiled from Remo's words. He tried to slam the sheet-metal door in Remo's hard face, but Remo's hand stopped it easily.
Dexter Barn backed into his comfortable mobile home while Remo Williams followed him in, his eyes as dead and uncaring as the heads of old nails.
"I just want a place to call home," Dexter Barn pleaded.
"You got it," promised Remo, paralyzing the man with an openhanded thrust to his wattled throat.
The clerk at the shipping agency at first refused the crate.
"Can't accept it," he told Remo Williams, who had walked into the agency with a large wooden crate slung easily under one arm.
"Why not?" demanded Remo.
"Regulations. That package is too large for its weight. I can tell by the easy way you carried it in here." Remo deposited the crate on the counter. The counter shook, rattling the floor and the clerk's leg bones so hard his teeth chattered.
"Oh," said the clerk, running his fingers over the edges of the crate appraisingly. "Seems heavy enough."
He looked at Remo's exposed biceps wonderingly. They looked awfully skinny.
"I want to send this to Iran," Remo said. "Where in Iran?"
"It doesn't matter. Wherever the Ayatollah lives, I guess."
"I see," said the clerk, pulling out a preprinted international shipping form. "What are the contents?"
"Garbage," said Remo Williams, hoping that Dexter Barn would not wake up until the crate was well on its way.
"Garbage?"
"Yeah. I'm sending garbage to Iran to protest their government's terrorist policies."
The clerk grinned appreciatively. "I understand that. We had a few of those after the last hijacking. Okay, now we just need one more thing."
"What's that?"
"A return address."
Remo frowned.
"Look," explained the clerk. "I'd like to help you, but without a return address, this thing will end up back here if the Iranians refuse it."
"I see your point," said Remo. He considered giving the man the address of his former boss, Harold W. Smith, but decided that even Smitty did not deserve to be stuck with such a package. After some thought, Remo came up with a solution.
"The return address is Tripoli, Libya," he said.
"That'll do," said the clerk, grinning as he marked the crate.
After Remo had paid the man, he started out the door, thinking that he had forgotten some little detail. He ducked back into the building.