“I am,” Remo said. “But he’s a reseller, so who did he resell the Gee-DAM to?”
“Watch your language when speaking to your emperor and his regent,” Chiun warned.
“What I don’t understand is why he bought the plans in Morocco at all,” Mark Howard added. “I mean, the Gee-DAM was stolen by a professional arms trade outfit, we assume. Cote is also a professional arms trader. What did they need with the bazaar in Casablanca?”
“That puzzled me, as well,” Smith said over the speakerphone. “The answer is that they would not. It was clearly a ploy, maybe designed to give them adequate warning of your arrival in Barcelona. They may have an ambush in mind.”
“Their trap will fail,” Chiun declared.
“They obviously know something of our activities,” Smith pointed out. “You saw the videotape. Master Chiun?”
“They know one of us wears a kimono. Who doesn’t?” Remo pointed out. “Remember the press conference in Washington a few months ago?”
“We locked it down. We know of no media feeds made public from that event,” Mark said.
“Yeah, but did you notice that there were maybe forty reporters on the scene? They’d remember a guy in a kimono. That’s just the latest public appearance by the Man in the Silk Pajamas. He’s a tough one to miss in your average crowd of non-kimono-wearing Americans.”
“Enough!” Chiun snapped. “I dislike being discussed as if I am not present.”
‘I’m just saying, is all.” Remo shrugged. “You’ve been spotted, taped, broadcast and publicized. How many times I can’t even guess.”
“My garments, perhaps, but my face is still unknown,” Chiun insisted.
“Thousands of people have seen you over the years, Chiun,” Remo said. “Face it, you attract people’s attention. Now somebody remembers seeing you, and maybe he has decided you work for some sort of a government agency, and is trying to draw you out”
“Shush, imbecile!”
“I’m afraid Remo may be correct. Master Chiun,” Smith said.
“This conversation is designed to intimidate me into giving up my traditional garb,” Chiun said accusingly.
“No,” Smith said, but he allowed the word to linger a little too long. “This conversation is intended to warn you to a possible danger in Barcelona: We do not know what they know, but it appears they have baited us here for some reason.”
“We’ll stay frosty,” Remo assured him.
“I shall not stay frosty.” Chiun glowered.
“You’ll stay grumpy.”
“Fah!”
The neighborhood Allessandro Cote called, home dated back at least two centuries. The homes were small castles erected on vast estates looking out over the Mediterranean Sea.
“I guess selling murder is good business,” Remo said. “Or was he born to the wealthy parents and sells guns as a hobby?”
“His father was a bus driver in Madrid,” Mark explained as he drove them along the manicured, semiprivate drive that meandered behind the seafront estates. “He bought the house from the government after the owners went bankrupt.”
“We’ll call you when we need a ride home,” Remo said.
Howard was about to ask where they wanted to be left off, but heard the brief thunk of car doors and realized that he was alone. He had never even slowed down. He looked in the rearview mirror and never saw Chiun and Remo, but he knew they must have entered a nearby decorative row of Mediterranean trees.
He rolled down the window and continued driving down the isolated road, enjoying the fragrant semitropical breezes.
The old brick home looked like something medieval, like an old church, but it had been augmented in recent decades with a white stucco addition the size of a small shopping mall. The walls were freshly whitewashed. The clay-tile roof would have been quaint if there weren’t acres and acres of it. The addition had probably tripled the square footage of interior space in the home, and it descended with the mountainside, halfway to the shore below.
The pair of shadows slipped among the cultivated gardens of temperate-climate plants with less noise than the salt-laden breeze.
Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus, smelled the fragrant salt air and the gentle sea breeze and became cold inside.
“Nice digs,” Remo said when he and Chiun stood unseen in the shadows of a palm tree grove adjoining the structure. “Let’s move here after we kick out the Boomstick Baron.”
Chiun said nothing.
“What’s with you?” Remo asked.
“Have you embraced your speck, Remo?”
“What speck?”
Chiun pierced him with a glare.
“Oh, my fear speck,” Remo said. “I haven’t forgotten what we talked about, Little Father.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know what these creeps could throw at us that we can’t handle.”
“That is right, you do not know,” Chiun snapped. “And yet, wicked men are innovators in the ways of poison and torture and murder. Most of their efforts are no more dangerous than the rocks lobbed by baboons, but we do not know what is in this house.”
Remo was getting worried now. “Chiun, this isn’t like you. Do you know something I don’t know?”
Chiun shook his head. “There is something. Perhaps.” He held out his hands, as if warming them at a campfire. “It is strange.”
Remo frowned and held out his hands, too. He tried to feel whatever it was that had upset Chiun.
He shook his head and opened his mouth, to say he felt nothing, and then it was there, like a flicker of movement just outside his vision.
“You felt it?” Chiun asked.
“I felt something. I don’t know what.”
“Yes.”
“Seems sort of familiar. Sort of like a pressure shift or a temperature change or something.”
Chiun nodded. “But not those things.”
“I don’t know. It came and went so fast I couldn’t get a taste of it.”
It wasn’t often that he and Chiun ran up against something foreign to their experience, and now he was worried. “You’ll be pleased to know I found the speck.”
Chiun didn’t look pleased.
Allessandro Cote paced through the ballroom where once the aristocrats of Barcelona had met to dance and make merry. The aristocrats were dead. Their progeny had failed to sustain their wealth or dignity. They were back among the rabble as they deserved to be, surrendering the symbols of prestige to those who had earned, rather than inherited, a place of importance in the world.
“This won’t do,” Allessandro Cote complained. His accent was British with effeminate Spanish undertones. “Jenkins!”
The impossibly gaunt man who came through the servants’ entrance at the rear of the ballroom was dressed in a butler’s formal coat and tails. He could not have looked more uncomfortable in the get-up.
“Yes, Mr. Cote?”
Normally, Cote would have relished the perfection of the performance. Gomez had done an admirable job of learning his new role, as much as he had complained about it.
“Ring Fastbinder for me, will you, Jenkins?”
“Si. Yes!” Gomez swallowed the mistake and put back on his supremely bored face. “Certainly, suh, I’ll ring him at once.” Gomez/Jenkins walked slowly and deliberately to the rear of the room and through the servants’ entrance.
“I’ll have to dock the old git’s wages if he can’t learn to speak properly,” Cote complained, sipping his tea, which was actually coffee.
Jenkins relaxed into Gomez when he was out of the ballroom. He, too, was muttering to himself, words of encouragement and self-recrimination, all in his native Spanish. “You can do this. It’s just playing a part. You’ve played tougher roles than this.” He took the antique phone, sterling silver with ivory inlay, and lifted the original metal dial to expose the touch-pad that had been retrofitted into it. He poked out the number for Fastbinder in the United States and got the kid instead.