"A thousand apologies, my lord."
"He was beautiful."
"There are many beautiful men in your country."
"He was special," said Lord Philliston with a sigh. The Cold War was hell.
Remo knew Lord Philliston was gone and did not bother to stop him. He did not stop him because he heard a woman groan just around the curving stone staircase. And he wasn't sure what it was. It was not pain. And it was not fear. It certainly was not joy.
What he did not realize was that it was practiced. Kathy O'Donnell had been practicing this groan since her freshman year at college. Her roommates had told her how. You made sure you started the groan while the man was working toward his climax. Often, if you groaned properly, that would precipitate his release. And then it would be over sooner. Kathy O'Donnell gave Dimitri this groan as his face contracted and his body tensed, and then he was done. Tragically, he had been no better than the others after all.
"Wonderful, darling," whispered Kathy to the man who had shown so much potential, and because of that been such a failure.
She heard a commotion heading toward the room. A man came hurtling in against the stone wall with a knife still in his hand. He hit like old china in a burlap bag. You could feel his bones break. Blood shot out of his mouth in one spurt and nothing moved.
Now Kathy's body began to tingle the way it had at Malden. Dimitri moved off her, steadying himself, reaching for a lamp. Another body came into the room, headfirst. The body followed an eighth of a second later. She, felt her thighs become hot, sticky hot. Her nipples tightened. Two hard slaps against stone, unmistakably people being crushed. An impossibly tantalizing caress seized her, and drove her beyond control as she lay there alone on the bed.
A somewhat thin man emerged from the passageway. Dimitri's thick muscled body had him by at least fifty pounds. Dimitri squatted, waving the heavy brass lamp, then he charged, a nude man coming in for the kill. She could see Dimitri's muscles perfectly drive the heavy macelike lamp into the thin man, but then, catching all his force, the thin man flipped Dimitri like a frisbee into a wall. The crack made his back into a rubber band and he fell without a twitch. He was dead.
And then the man spoke to her. "Dr. O'Donnell," said Remo.
The answer was a groan. Not like the ones before. Kathy O'Donnell, on hearing Remo's voice at that moment, suddenly found out what all her friends were taking about. She had just enjoyed her first orgasm.
Finally with her body glowing in completed ecstasy, Kathy said, with the most girlish of smiles: "Yes."
"We've got to get out of here. Are you all right?" said Remo.
All right? She was magnificent. She was delirious. She was exalted, thrilled, triumphant, ecstatic.
"Yes," said Kathy weakly. "I think so."
"What were they doing to you?"
"I don't know."
"Can you walk? I'll carry you, if you're having trouble. I've got to get you out of here."
"I think so," she said. She reached out weakly and thought she was pretending to be unable to stand. But the man said:
"You're all right. Get dressed. Let's go." So he knew her body, she realized.
"Yes. I am all right."
She noticed that his movements appeared slow but he got things done quickly. She thought he might be aroused by her nude body, but she sensed he was only as interested as one might be if a platter of hors d'oeuvres was served to someone nibbling all day. He might take her, but he wasn't thrilled. He said his name was Remo. He said he had come to rescue her. He said terrible things were happening because of an experiment in which she was involved.
"No," said Kathy. She covered her mouth as though shocked. She knew how to pretend innocence because she had had a lifetime of practice.
A noise came down the passageway. And then she saw what this man could do. It was no accident of ferocity that had gotten him through all those armed men.
With a slow breathing balance he seemed to run his hand along a five-foot-high stone that must have weighed three to four tans. Then he simply cocked a knee into it, and it seemed to come out of the wall on him, resting on his knee. But the strange thing about it was that it seemed so absolutely un-strange. It seemed so incredibly normal the way the stone rested on the vertical thrust of his body. He simply plugged the passageway.
Only when the stone went in did she realize the massive force Remo had exerted. Several stone stairs splintered into dust.
"That was the only way out," said Kathy.
"Shh. It'll work," said the man.
"What will work? You've plugged our only escape," whispered Kathy.
"C'mon. Shh," said Remo.
"We can't get out of here," she whispered. What a fool. Was this Remo like all the others after all?
"I want to get you out of here. I could go up those steps and make it out in one piece, but you couldn't. So shut up."
"I don't know what you're doing," said Kathy. Beyond the heavy stone she heard noises. Men were beginning to heave at the stone.
"Do you want to know?" said the man. He guided her to a side of the stone, not even bothering to look at her, but concentrating on the blocked passageway.
"Yes," she said.
Remo gave it to her exactly as he had learned it. "What language is that?" she said angrily.
"Korean."
"Would you mind translating it?"
"Sure, but it loses something in the translation. It means 'the strong flower never grows to its food but lets its food come to it.'"
"That makes absolutely no sense," said Kathy, putting on her blouse and smoothing her skirt.
"I told you it lost something in translation," said Remo.
He moved her against the wall, and then when the bodies started to drop, she realized what he had been talking about. To move the stone, several men in the passageway had to put their shoulders into it. And when the stone came rumbling out, she saw that the men had guns. Those guns might have killed her. When she observed the smooth speed of Remo's execution of the guards, she realized he might have easily escaped the gunfire. What he had done was let the danger to her mass itself outside the stone and come in with a rush, clearing the tunnel of danger to her. He took her quickly up the passage where only a single last guard stood at the upper level. It was a yeoman warder who did not know who was who, apparently, but who did see a stranger and, in stout British tradition, attacked same stranger. Also in tradition, he gave his life for Queen and country.
Outside, after they had run through the squares and tunnels, Remo found the car was gone. Eluding several bobbies, they finally came to rest in a charming Italian restaurant off Leicester Square. There, Kathy asked Remo how he knew his plan would work.
He seemed puzzled by that question.
"They were . . ." He didn't quite have an English word for it, but the closest ones were: "too anxious. Too bunched up. They were set on going in. I guess when the tunnel was blocked they had to surmise they couldn't get in and forced it."
"Yes. But how did you know they were going to do that?"
"I don't know. I just knew. Look, grab a bite. And let's get to the source of your experiment. Do you know the whole world may be wiped out?"
I already have been, thought Kathy, looking at this magnificent dark-eyed man who killed so well and easily and smoothly.
"No," she said. "That's awful."
Then she heard how their fluorocarbon stream had somehow panicked another country, and was believed by some American agency to be threatening to destroy the world by removing the entire ozone shield. She could have told him that that danger was past. She could have told him they had solved that problem with the short duration of the shield opening. The blue light that bothered this man was really the shield closing again.
Rather, she told him that all she knew about the experiment was that it came from a company in America. She gave him the phony cover address she had given to the British.