"Is," Remo said. "And unless you want all of us to be was, you'll get out of the way."
Numbly, Amanda backed to the wall.
Chiun grabbed the smoking end of the log. The two Masters of Sinanju steered the blunt end into the greenhouse door. It struck with a wall-rattling thump. They brought the log back, slamming it into the plastic once more.
Behind them, the rain was opening up. Heavy droplets splattered the ground, fizzing and popping wherever they struck.
Remo and Chiun steered the log at the space where the two doors met. On the third try, Remo thought he felt movement. They brought the trunk back, pounding again and again. The log began to splinter. Blue slivers of bark sheered away, revealing powder-blue pulp.
"It isn't working!" Amanda insisted. She was watching them work, eyes darting now and then out to the greenhouse.
The storm was worsening. Sloppy acid droplets spattered onto the trunks of the felled trees. The wood steamed as holes ate through the tough bark. Amanda jumped when an acid raindrop struck the floor near her foot.
"This roof won't hold if it gets worse," she said, troubled eyes directed up at the small overhang. Remo and Chiun brought the log back, slamming it forward one last time. The room shook and Remo heard a tiny hiss.
"That got it, Little Father," he said.
The Master of Sinanju nodded curtly. As Remo held the log in place, Chiun hurried to the door. The seal had cracked. Chiun attacked the opening. As he pried the space larger, the inner seal inflated to fill it.
"What the crap?" Remo groused. He jammed the end of the log into the space between the doors.
"It is attempting to seal itself," the Master of Sinanju said tightly even as he began assailing the securing lip with his long fingernails.
"That's a special security feature," Amanda explained. "To keep the environment pure."
"You know, lady, I'm getting pretty tired of hearing that," Remo griped. "By the sounds of it, you thought of everything except how to get out of this goldfish bowl."
His words sent a cold shock of memory through her fear-rattled brain. "There's an emergency switch that opens the door!" Amanda announced frantically. "I forgot all about it." She shrank from Remo's glare. "We never needed it in our work," she explained hastily. "I don't think anyone on the team even knew it was there. I only found it when I was studying the greenhouse schematics after Dr. Schumar's death."
"Where?" Remo snapped. He glanced around the door. All he could see was the speaker.
"There." She pointed across the greenhouse floor to a series of support columns that rose from the floor, stretching to the vaulted ceiling.
"It's on the third or fourth column," she said. Remo wheeled on the Master of Sinanju. The old man was still trying to pierce the inflated seal between the doors.
"Go," Chiun commanded. "But have a care." Remo nodded tightly.
The acid was splattering mostly the main floor. If he hugged the walls, he might be okay. A rumble of thunder shook the greenhouse, and a desperate crackle of lightning screamed into the pile of C. dioxas as Remo slipped out from under the protective overhang.
As he moved, he felt the telegraphing waves of something familiar zeroing in on him. A video camera.
Somewhere in the dank depths of the CCS building, Hubert St. Clair was watching him.
Remo saluted the camera with his middle finger even as he ducked and dodged the raindrops. He was right. They drizzled out to almost nothing at the edge of the greenhouse. The nozzles were concentrated in the center of the room.
There was an artificial randomness to the rainfall. Remo's body tuned to the mechanical pattern. Twirling and skittering at the storm's edge, he managed to avoid the fat raindrops.
He found the emergency switch on the third column. A padlock and chain secured it in place. Remo snapped the chain and pulled the switch.
When he glanced back, he saw that the switch hadn't worked. Chiun was still crouched before the doors. Standing next to the Master of Sinanju, Amanda Lifton was growing frantic.
"Stupid geniuses," Remo muttered.
From where Remo danced amid the raindrops, he had a clear view of the roof that was protecting Chiun and Amanda. It was held in place by twin bands angled to the wall. Pooling acid was burning away the securing braces. Even from this distance, his keen eyes could see the metal dissolving.
"Damn," he grumbled. "Chiun, that thing's gonna-"
He never finished. Even as he was shouting, a band snapped.
The roof twisted to one side, spilling a wave of acid. A split second after the first band broke, the second followed suit and the entire overhang collapsed.
Remo could only stand and watch, helpless, as the Master of Sinanju was buried beneath a ton of hissing metal.
He took a step forward. But the room seemed to anticipate his move.
All around him the storm seemed to find sudden focus. The spitting nozzles shut down on the far side of the greenhouse. All at once, they opened up above him. And as Remo stood alone and defenseless on the greenhouse floor, a downpour of acid washed down from above like liquid fire.
Chapter 6
Herr Hahn knew death. He knew it up close. Had kept quiet company with it for years.
The blood, the anguish, the final screams. He knew all the familiar faces of his old companion. He wasn't some dime store philosopher who would have claimed death as a friend. Herr Hahn had no friends.
No, death to him was not a friend, but an ally. It had worked with him, at his side since his youth. In one sense it was a protector, for without the deaths he inflicted on so many others, Herr Hahn would surely have himself died long ago.
To some he was known as an assassin. He rejected the term. These days an assassin conjured up images of maniacs with political or social motives. The trade, as practiced by Herr Hahn, had no such pretenses. Someone could hire him to kill a president or a plumber. Hahn wouldn't care either way. Of course, the money was the same in each case. For this expensive reason he rarely found work killing plumbers.
In such a skilled profession as his, Herr Hahn was unique, for he was content to be called a murderer.
After all, a murder was a pure and honest-sounding thing.
Professional murder had paid the bills a long time now. And as long as his old ally death continued to see to it that others died instead of Herr Hahn, he would be murdering for many more years to come. Dealing death was on his mind this day.
Herr Hahn was tucked safely away in the security room of the Congress of Concerned Scientists building in Geneva. On closed-circuit TV, Hahn watched as the drama unfolded within the big greenhouse.
Herr Hahn had set up the elaborate greenhouse system for his employers here at the CCS. As he watched the three people in there now, he realized he might have been unintentionally sloppy. Of course, he couldn't be blamed. After all, these visitors deviated from the norm.
When Hubert St. Clair had instructed Herr Hahn to oversee the death of the woman, Hahn didn't anticipate anything interesting. Even with the addition of the two others he didn't expect anything other than the usual. They'd all three cower underneath the overhang for a time. Eventually and inevitably the acid would do its work, and that would be that.
It should have been the same as the rest of the scientists he'd eliminated. Perhaps this was a little more dramatic than some of the others, but the end result would be identical. Boring and inevitable.
Yet as he studied the monitor, he was finding things a little less predictable than he had come to expect.
These three were lasting longer than he ever would have thought.
When the young one suddenly raced out from beneath the overhang, Hahn sat up straight.