These units had come to the ballroom, and they were, so to speak, on the hunt. But surely they should not be hunting Mr. Cote! Jenkins knew for a fact that they were programmed to never, ever put Mr. Cote at risk. What Jenkins didn’t know, what Allessandro Cote didn’t know, was that Fastbinder and his son had executed the KTA routine.
The KTA routine was the surest way of eradicating their enemies, because the KTA routine called for eradicating everybody.
If you Kill Them All, you’re bound to kill the right ones.
Jenkins soon realized that the collection was on a spree, for whatever reason. Allessandro Cote was blasted with cyanide darts from a lighter-than-air gunship even as a rolling keg of gasoline spurted a tongue of fire at his legs. A ninety-year-old mechanical cannon that looked like an end table on wheels, and was actually constructed largely of wood, belched black smoke from the deck-mounted gun. It blasted half of Cote’s abdomen away. Allessandro Cote’s corpse was then sliced to ribbons by an old-time gas-powered tree trimmer, almost eight feet long and counterbalanced on a hat stand that was itself mounted on a power mower deck.
The alligator rolled into sight, just outside the door, and Jenkins knew he was dead. Buck up, old chap, he thought, the alligator will be a quick death, clean and neat. Certainly better than the dragonflies.
Nothing could be worse than the dragonflies, right?
The bronze alligator put on a burst of speed and its head rotated sideways, then its hinged jaws snapped open, revealing a hundred and forty teeth made from stainless-steel blades salvaged from an abattoir. Very effective, indeed, Jenkins thought, as the massive jaws slammed shut on pneumatic pistons, biting his legs clean off just below the knees.
The alligator backed off. Jenkins collapsed to the ground but didn’t feel it. He saw his bloody feet still standing there, and the neatly severed calves tumbled out of the creature’s maw when it opened its jaws and spun its head in a full circle, first this way, then that. The gears clanked and rattled in its neck.
Now free of obstruction, it came at Jenkins again, closing its jaws on his torso and arm. Not very neat, Jenkins thought. There was a big mess of tom tissue when the alligator pulled back. Very messy.
Very painful, too.
But better than the dragonflies.
Chapter 14
The strange phenomenon that leeched their energy stopped. Their strength came back. Remo and Chiun felt their vigor seeping into them again, step by step, as they descended through the levels of rooms that clung to the hillside. Finally they came to an elegant sunroom that was all glass, walls and ceiling. The Mediterranean sea was golden in the lowering sun, and long shadows cooled the lawns outside.
There was no one in the sunroom.
There was no one outside.
They were halfway through the room when they felt - it again. Still stumbling with weakness, Remo felt his knees buckle almost immediately, and he grabbed for a wicker chair back to hold himself up.
He didn’t have the strength to be as angry as he wanted to be.
“Shush,” gasped Chiun, giving him a warning look, adding in Korean, “Act natural.”
“There are more of them coming, Chiun,” Remo insisted.
“Then this phenomenon will cease and we will deal with whatever weapon materializes,” Chiun said. “Meanwhile, we are being watched.”
Remo tried hard to stand up straight, as if the reason he had stopped was simply to watch for whatever danger would present itself. What Chiun called a phenomenon had been slightly different with each experience. Now it was as if there were many, many small sources, maybe hundreds, and they came from the very earth outside the sunroom.
Then it stopped.
Once again Remo felt the intense relief as the energy began to elevate rapidly into his body, but he wasn’t fooled this time. He wasn’t free of it. Not yet.
“Must we stand here and await an attack?” Chiun complained in English, obviously wanting their voyeurs to hear.
“Nice place for it,” Remo said. His recuperation was slower than it had been previously. Would he get his strength back before the attack came? Would he get it back ever?
If they ran for it now, weakened and exhausted, they wouldn’t get far.
A tiny shadow passed over the window. A pair of dragonflies darted about one another just outside the glass.
Another pair.
Then the dragonflies began billowing out of the bushes, forming a storm cloud of insects that seeped over the glass until they were thick on it, hovering outside, waiting.
Thousands of them.
Remo moved closer to the. glass, fascinated. “They’re mechanical. They’re freaking robots.”
“Yes.”
‘Think they’re poisonous or something?”
“No poison,” said the tiny voice from a small, wall-mounted speaker. “But they nip.”
Remo looked around the room, finding the small black speaker grille and the shining glass eye of a lens. “They nip? Sounds downright disagreeable, Mr. Whoever-the-fuck-you-are.”
“Look at it as being pricked with a pin.” He spoke English with a thick German accent.
“Not even worth a Band-Aid.”
“Think about being pricked with four or five thousand pins, one after another. A drop of blood here, a drop of blood there”
“I get it,” Remo said. “It adds up until you run out.”
“Exactly.”
“Unless the batteries run out,” Remo said.
“They won’t.”
“Sure, they will. I don’t care what you’ve got in there. Duracells. Everreadys. DieHards from Sears. No battery lasts forever.”
“There are no batteries, Mr. Remo Annoying. Your name is apt, by the way. They have electric power cells that provide any amperage needed for an extended period.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Stalling for time worked on that idiot Cote but it won’t work on me.”
“Are you sure, idiot?” Chinn asked.
“I am sure, Korean. It is I who have been stalling you. As you can see, the swarm is ready to break in.”
Remo and Chiun cast about until they noticed the swarm cloud grow blacker directly overhead, then the dragonflies dived in a steady stream at the window, their tiny, sharp needle heads hitting the glass and bouncing off. The number was so great it was like the sound of serene rainfall.
The pace of the onslaught increased. Every tiny bug removed just the tiniest chip of glass and yet it was enough to erode the pane in seconds.
“If we stay here, they shall eat us alive,” Chiun remarked.
“Ditto if we go out there.”
“Remo,” Chiun said somberly, “I will not get far.”
“Don’t give me the feeble-old-man shit, Chiun. I’m in sad shape myself. But I think running is better than staying.”
“Run if you like,” said the voice from the speaker. “They’ll chase you all the way to France.”
“Chiun,” Remo whispered in Korean, “I bet those bugs can’t swim. We can. Maybe.”
Chiun nodded and said, “Race you to the water.”
At that moment the pane of stormproof glass had been worn so thin it began to spiderweb under its own weight, and as Remo and Chiun emerged from the rear of the sunroom, the glass fell in and the dragonflies began swarming inside, while thousands more descended on the Masters of Sinanju from above, and Remo felt them began to nip at his flesh. They dived at him, swarmed over him, touched him like raindrops and then fell away.
He was too weak to outrun them or to harden his flesh against them for long. Another ten minutes, maybe, and he could have simply run away, or let them prod him incessantly without penetrating his flesh. Even as he felt stronger every second, he felt weaker every second, exhausted from his exertions. The blood was dappling his skin, then it became a sheen of red underneath the smokelike swarm of dragonflies. He tried waving them off but it was like trying to shove away the incoming tide.