Remo flicked hard enough to send nose cartilage and some of the bony nose bridge careening into the man’s head, cutting a path through the brain tissue. The third man slithered silently to the ground.
“Very skillful indeed, but also quite reprehensible.” Remo looked at the guard who was covering him with a whopping big machine gun.
“Shouldn’t that be mounted on a Hummer or something?” Remo asked distractedly, eyes on the building.
“Usually, but I knew you were coming,” Franco noted.
“Oh, yeah, what do you know?”
“I know you are a killer of immense skill. You are an assassin who moves like a bird or a shadow. But you are also a man who does not respect death.”
“Say what?”
“I should say, you do not give your customers a respectful death.”
Franco couldn’t help but notice that the American was hardly paying attention, focusing instead on the front door.
‘You are not even listening.”
“Sorry, did you say something?”
“I’m talking about respect for death! Do you know about respect?”
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T. What is inside of this place, anyway?”
“I will tell you nothing.”
“You don’t know what’s in there?”
“Of course I do!”
“Liar.”
“I do know, but what I don’t know is what kind of a man you are. Imbecile? Moron?”
“Guess I’m such a moron I don’t know if I’m an imbecile. I’ve been called both a hundred times, just since breakfast. Is there some sort of a secret laser weapon in there or something?”
Franco frowned and shook his head in disappointment. “Put these on, please.” He tossed a pair of selflocking manacles to Remo—extra-heavy-duty, meant for veterinary use on terrified zoo creatures like gorillas.
“No, thanks,” Remo answered, and tossed them back.
Franco saw them flash at him like a yellow fluorescent bolt of lightning. They twisted around his wrist and the machine gun like a bolo, but driven by such force that they wrapped themselves with crushing force.
Franco staggered, tried to shake off the machine gun that was now a part of his arm, then the excruciating pain hit him. Why, of course there would be pain. The arm was all but smashed flat, with bloody gore extruding through the trigger guard.
He was opening his mouth to scream and was aware that the killer was standing in front of him. He must have moved impossibly fast.
Then Franco’s good hand was closed into a fist and inserted into his open mouth, just in time to cork the scream.
“With all due respect, sir,” Remo said, and stuffed the fist in even further.
Remo let the goof wander around the football-field-size front yard while he wandered on, his concern mounting. None of the guards on the outside seemed to know what was happening inside, and all the weapons they had were conventional. Maybe whatever was in there wasn’t even a weapon, but now that he was this close to the house, he felt the strangeness unmistakably. It was a black wave of static that reached out and numbed him.
Another pod of dimwits with AKs stood at a side entrance, near the big section of the structure in the middle. Chiun was just finishing up with the final dimwit when Remo joined him. Chiun was barely paying attention to the job at hand, his emerald-green eyes locked on the oversize section of the building.
“It is familiar.” Chiun said.
“But still strange,” Remo added.
Chiun simply nodded slightly. “We go into the unknown.”
“Every day, every minute we venture into the unknown, Little Father.”
Chiun gave him a rare and sincere smile, although it was a little one.
They went back to the front door and walked in without knocking.
“The front door? Don’t tell me it’s them? Coming in the bloody front door?” Allessandro Cote was livid. “That’s just wrong!”
“Perhaps one of our men entered mistakenly without keying in his PIN, suh,” Jenkins said hopefully.
Cote jogged to the keyboard at the bank of monitors. There were only thirty keys or so, all dramatically oversize. They were lighted, too, and when Cote began pressing them they made tiny electronic mews and burps.
“Where’d that overpaid monk go to?” Then one of the monitors switched to an image from the front yard, and there was Franco.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Cote exclaimed.
Jenkins gasped. There was Franco, all right, with one arm sunk into his mouth up to the elbow, the other squashed and bloody and somehow adhered to his weapon. The man was staggering to the road that ran in front of the house, maybe looking for a passing ambulance. He dropped to the grass, never to rise again.
“Suh!” Jenkins said, and indicated another monitor. One of the guards in the video feed lay on his back, his severed head wobbling nearby.
“The front door must have been them, suh. The killers.”
“All my goons are dead? Every bleeding man jack of them?”
“I suggest you power up the defenses, suh.”
Allessandro Cote stood up straight, looked down his nose at his butler and tightened his lips. “Quite right, Jenkins,” he said, fully in control once more. “These—” he waved at the screens “—were just extras, anyway.”
“Of course, suh.”
The picture of British reserve, Allessandro Cote strolled to the next oversize control panel. There were three chunks of jagged, unpolished quartz crystal set into the panel, each one the size of a teacup. Cote placed his hand against a hard, cool crystal—the purplish one on the end.
The door on the far end of the ballroom burst open.
“It’s stronger, Little Father,” Remo said.
“I feel it in my bones,” Chiun said.
They had moved fast through the endless, opulent rooms of the old section of the ancient mansion, but the strange sensation was intensified now. Remo felt his limbs becoming heavier.
“How far?” Remo asked, realizing his sense of direction was askew.
Chiun yanked open a door that was hand carved, the figurines around the door latch smoothed by centuries of contact with human fingers. “Beyond the next door,” Chiun stated.
Remo wondered how Chiun could sound so sure of himself when Remo’s own disorientation was escalating and this room looked just like all the others, musty and packed with a lot of well-polished antique furniture.
“How many freaking parlors do you freaking need?” Remo demanded.
“This is it,” Chiun announced at the next set of extra-wide double doors. He looked at Remo, and Remo saw the old man thinking hard. “I shall enter alone.”
“No, you won’t.”
“You shall remain here and assess the nature of this anomaly.”
“No way in hell.”
“It is foolish for both of us to walk into danger!”
Remo cocked his head. “Right you are, and I decide who.”
“I am the Master Emeritus!” Chiun stamped one foot, but it was a gesture without vigor.
“I’m Reigning Master and what I say goes and I say I go.”
He never gave the old Korean time to reply before he bashed his shoulder into the doors. They squeaked open and the sensation increased to a shrill pitch. Remo imagined he heard some sort of supersonic sound that assaulted him, drained him of vitality, confused his thinking. It was all he could do to hold himself upright and walk with feigned energy across the huge, open room.
The ceilings were high and set with iron-filigreed frames around frosted glass, and the floor was ancient, polished wood planks. The walls were decorated with bigger-than-life-size murals of Spanish royalty, the paintings separated by red-velvet-upholstered panels.
The room was entirely empty except for flashing, multicolored banks of electronic controls and screens on the far side of the room and the pair of formally dressed men who stood watching him.