"Why two days?"
"Because it's been worked out that two days is an ideal time in a run pattern like this, and I don't have time to explain.
"Why can't I just book a six-hour flight out and a six-hour flight back if you want me to keep travelling for twelve hours?"
"Because a scheduled flight is like an elevator. In something like this it functions like a stationary room that keeps you locked in. Take my word. This is best."
"I'm not afraid of Gene, darling."
"I am. Move." Remo kissed Chris on the cheek and nodded to the cab driver. He made obvious a check of the cabbie's identification, not that he would remember it. He just wanted the man to believe that he would be remembered and vulnerable if anything should happen to the girl.
April 17 was a hot day in Chicago, the muggy, skin-soaking kind of morning that makes you feel you've worked a full day when you get up. Remo hadn't slept. He could make do with twenty minutes rather easily, and with this intention he headed back to his hotel.
He did not get rest. As he entered the marble-floored lobby, he saw a man ease a rifle barrel in his direction. Automatically he did not respond to this man who had taken the rifle out of a golf bag leaning against a lobby sofa. As he had been trained to do, he first checked—in an instant—the entire pattern he was in. Other guns came out. From suitcases, from a carton, from behind the registration clerk's desk. Ambush.
Remo would work it left to right. Not bothering to feint, he was into a rugged man who was squeezing the trigger on a Mauser. The Mauser did not fire. It was jammed up into the solar plexus, taking part of a lung with it. The man vomited his lungs, and Remo continued to work right so that his being in the right firing pattern prevented the center and left from getting him without shooting into their own men.
A woman screamed. A porter jumped for cover, catching a wayward bullet in the throat. Two young children huddled against a sofa. Remo would have to work the line of fire away from the children. But if he could not, whoever might have fired the shots that injured the youngsters would not die quickly.
The right side was too bunched. Amateurs. Remo thumbed a side of a head, and interior-attacked a thin man with a .357 Magnum. It was held too close to the body, as though the man were working a snub-nose at close quarters. The trigger finger was squeezing off a shot so the gun went first. With a wrist. Then the head caved in and Remo was moving towards the center, going under a rifle line to come up under it when a shot cracked passed his head. He felt it in his hair.
Double layer. Remo finished the driver through the rifleman, taking off his testicles. The man would be stunned until dead. He spun back to where the second level of fire came from, another bullet narrowly missing him from the center. He was now in cross fire. Very stupid move on his part.
He quickly put a post between him and center left, taking that line into the dining room, whence the second-level fire came.
They were using tables here as cover. One man got a table top, tablecloth and all, in his mouth. Down through a vertebra. A nervous, wildly chattering machine gun ended its chirp with the barrel in its user's mouth, still firing from a trigger finger that could no longer receive messages to stop. The bullets took skull fragments and brain into the ceiling.
Remo's body wove and jerk-ran into a free space that suddenly had a bullet in it, taking flesh from Remo's right side. Minor wound.
Without thinking, Remo reacted. His body reacted as it had been taught to react in the painful, pressing hours of training, reacted as Chiun had taught it despite Remo's protests, despite Remo's conscious begging for surcease, despite the long hours and high temperatures.
As it had been taught and no other way. Scarlet Ribbon for the three times three times three. It was not only the only defence, but against this combination it was invincible. Back toward the center he moved, keeping lines of fire within the ambush itself. He did not attack men anymore because that would remove them, and the Ribbon depended upon the men to destroy themselves, like using the greater mass of a body against itself.
He brushed the center and spun back, careful not to let any close shots, which were the easiest to avoid, get him. The distant, more dangerous, shots were now no worry because there would be other men in their line.
With incredible, balanced speed, Remo, like a darting flash of light brought down from the heavens, spun his ribbon in the three-layered defence. Guns silenced when the speeding body disappeared among other men of the ambush, then resumed in the fleeting second he was visible. Wild shots. Hesitant shots. The target was no longer the center of the ambush. The target was part of it.
Through the registration desk, back up through the triple layer left, over the staircase, keeping close and unhittable to the confused and now panicked men, Remo worked to third layer center, second layer center, picked off a first layer center only for the rebound back to third layer right.
Bullets cracked into light fixtures spraying the lobby with a shower of glass. Mindless screaming and yelling whipped the panic still further. An elevator door opened and a maid was cut in two by a shotgun blast. On the final spin of the ribbon, Remo took care of the man who fired the shotgun. He creased the man's eyes with his fingernails, leaving two blood-gushing sockets in the skull.
Then fast up the middle, picking up the two children from the couch, then a reverse into the dining room, out again and behind the third layer that did not know he had penetrated up the steps, and wait. Standing on the steps, waiting. The gunfire continued. The two children stared at him, confused.
What had happened was natural. Instead of acting like professionals, the men in the parts of the ambush catching fire, returned it. The men were fighting for their lives against each other. The Scarlet Ribbon had woven the blood curse of fear and confusion into the ambush. It would never recover. If Remo wished, he could wait to the last spurts of firing, and move in for the final kill. But that was not his purpose. The only thing he wanted from the ambush was to get through it alive.
The little girl looked stunned. The boy was smiling.
"Bang, bang," said the boy. "Bang, bang."
"Your mommy and daddy around here?" asked Remo.
"They're on the third floor. They told us to play in the lobby."
"Well you go back up to your parents' room."
"They said we shouldn't come back until 9.30," said the girl.
"Bang, bang," said the boy.
"You can't go downstairs again."
Rifle fire cracked sporadically in the hallway. Sounds of far-off sirens could be heard filtering into the stairway where Remo stood with the two children.
"All right. But would you come with us?" said the girl.
"I'll come with you."
"And tell my mommy and daddy that we can't play in the lobby."
"I'll do that.'"
"And tell them we didn't do the trouble downstairs."
"I'll do that."
"And give us a dollar."
"Why give you a dollar?"
"Well, a dollar would be nice, too."
"I'll give you a quarter," said Remo. "A nice shiny quarter."
"I'd rather have a dirty old dollar."
Remo brought the two youngsters to their parents' room. His shirt was bloody and his pants were beginning to darken. It was uncomfortable, but not serious.
The father opened the door. He was bleary-eyed, a face of anguish, a face of alcohol-damaged brain cells, the damaging process of which was pleasant, and the results painful.
"What trouble did you kids cause now?"
"They didn't cause any trouble, sir. Some madmen went amok with guns downstairs, and your children might have been killed."