“The auction is over.”
“Hey, we didn’t get a chance to place our bids.”
“Go away, stupid foreigner.”
“I don’t want to talk to you, anyway. Who’s the real man in charge?”
The speaker came toward them, waving his automatic rifle. Everybody had an AK-47 these days, ever since the Iraqis stopped needing them by the hundreds of thousands and began their new lucrative export business. This one was brandished threateningly in Remo’s direction. “I am in charge!”
“You? You’re a twerp.”
“I am the commander of all these men and you are dead!”
“Don’t think so.” Remo reached out, and out, and out, and the Casablancan with the AK made a spluttering noise. The American seemed to be stretching his arm to inhuman lengths.
“Actually, I’m just light on my feet,” Remo said as he stood in his original position and gripped the shocked gunner by the collar.
“And in the head,” Chiun added.
“You really are the guy in charge?” Remo demanded.
“No, it is not I!”
“No, it’s okay, I believe you now, twerp.”
The man tried to get his AK leveled between him and his assailant. This was difficult to do while hanging by the shirtfront, toes just grazing the earth. The Casablancan suddenly felt himself being shaken.
His body rattled, his limbs jounced and a few blackened tooth chips joined his AK on the old cobblestones..
“Tell the Twerp Team to back off,” Remo said.
“They’ll kill you if you kill me!”
“Or not, I don’t care. Hold on.”
The Casablancan was suddenly on his own two feet. He squinted for focus and found himself staring at the tiny Asian in the outlandish robe.
“Your dwelling smells of offal,” the smiling Asian said in perfect Berber. Not city Berber, but the old traditional Berber of his great-grand-uncle.
Then he saw the white man, who was moving like a sentient shadow from man to man, crossing several yards in a heartbeat, and every time he reached one of them the man fell. Then, just seconds after he had been freed, the leader found himself being lifted again in the fist of the white man.
Off to the side he heard the collapse of the last body, and he knew his army of Casablancan street fighters was no more.
“Sorry, twerp, no more Team.”
“I talk.”
“Yeah, you just did something else, too,” Remo said in disgust, holding his captive far away where he couldn’t drip on him. “Who’s the broker?”
“Broke her?”
“Who sold the plans?”
“I did.”
“You just hosted the auction, you didn’t own the merchandise.”
“No, it was my merchandise.”
“You’re sort of the Christie’s of Morocco, hmm? Sony if I find it hard to swallow. I think you better come clean.”
Chiun smirked.
“The man will kill me if I say anything,” the captive whined.
“Like I won’t.”
The captive ran frantically, but all the leg-pumping in the world would get him nowhere without having his feet on solid ground. Eventually he went limp. “Barcelona,” he admitted.
“Good fish in Barcelona,” Remo noted.
“Arms man there. Cote. Allessandro.”
“An arms merchant in Barcelona named Cote Allessandro.”
“No, Allessandro Cote.”
“Okay. Good. Thanks.”
“So you won’t kill me?” The captive’s face broke into a hideous smile.
“Yes, I will. I was being sarcastic,” Remo explained. “The world need arms auctioneers like I need another old bossy guy telling me what to do.”
As they were leaving, Chiun said, ‘I forgive the casual insult because your earlier remark was amusing, however unintended ‘Better come clean.’ Heh!”
Through the door came the freckle-faced teenager with the dirty scrub-brush hair. He grinned and waved. “Hiya, Pop!”
“You bring in half zee desert vith you.” The older man was scowling, his voice heavy with a German accent. “You know what sand vill do to my electronics?”
“Nothing, Pop, not with my weather-proofing. You could take the roof off this place in a sandstorm and you wouldn’t so much as short a power supply.”
The kid never stopped grinning and his father never stopped scowling, but the old man reached out and scrubbed the kid’s crew cut with his knuckles.
“Hey! You nut! Cut it out!” The kid scrambled away and made for the tiny kitchen at the far end of the low building, where he bent at the waist with his head inside the refrigerator as if he intended to remain there for the duration.
The older man peered at his screen until he felt the cool breeze reach him, more than forty feet away. “Trying to cool zee whole building?”
The kid emerged with a bag of bread covered in a rainbow of dots, a package of bologna and a half-gallon squeeze bottle of bright yellow mustard. He set it up next to his father’s monitor and watched the screen as he laid out five bread slices, squeezed a thick puddle of mustard on the first four, then layered them with slices of pale meat from the package. He stacked them atop one another, putting the fifth slice of doughy white bread on top, and carefully compressed the sandwich until the mustard just barely began oozing out the sides. He took a huge bite and noticed his father watching him with unconcealed distaste.
“Train wreck,” the kid said, and opened his mouth wide to display the half-chewed contents.
“Disgusting.” The older man turned back to his display.
“Casablanca?” the kid asked.
“Yes.”
“Find the right plane?”
“Perhaps. How was school?”
“I got a B on a science quiz.”
“You are joking?”
“Nope.”
The older man waited for the punch line. It was impossible for his son to get a B on a science exam. “Teacher error?”
“Yeah. I set her straight. She was cool about it.”
“Cool as in not perturbed.”
“Yeah. You know. Not ticked off or anything because I was right and she was wrong. She changed it to an A.”
“Cool,” the older man said, his concentration on the screen.
The kid chewed loudly in his ear for a full minute as they watched the stark, high-contrast video images displaying in three small windows.
“Your possibles?” the kid asked.
‘Yes. This is the only aircraft I have traced so far.” He tapped the small window showing the looming profile of a sleek jet. The image, like the other two, seemed to be shot from extremely low to the ground, as if someone had dropped a video camera a few paces from the aircraft and it was looking up. The legend beneath the video feed identified the aircraft as originating in the State of Florida in the United States.
The kid rubbed the tip of this freckled nose contemplatively, then tapped another window. “Let me see this one.”
The older man expanded the window with the next aircraft, also videotaped from very low to the ground but from farther away. The long sweep of tarmac that dominated the image moved slightly as the camera seemed to creep slowly toward the aircraft.
“Nah. Forget that one.”
“Why?” the older man asked. ‘You don’t even know its origin.”
“I think it’s a Saudi jet. See this?” He tapped the blur of green on the tail. “Saudi flag, I bet. Plus, that’s a Cessna Citation X, no special retrofits apparent, which means it’ll cruise 1,500 nautical miles on a full tank. Not what you’d use for crossing the Atlantic.”
The father nodded and used the mouse to adjust the camera, zooming in on the blurry image of the flag and tapping out a command that made the window freeze. A moment later a high-resolution digital photo of the blur of color resolved itself laboriously on the screen until it was a square of green with white Arabic letters underscored with a white sword. The image next to it was a logo or family insignia of some kind.