"He churns his own butter, won't turn on a light and has dressed like that for how long and you're just noticing?" Remo asked dryly.
The door opened into a separate room off the side of the basement. A few rectangular windows pulled streaks of daylight down to the dirt floor. When the three of them entered the long, dark corridor, Amanda's nose rebelled at the smell. The dirt floors and stone walls had suppressed it in the outer room.
"That's oil," she complained. A thought suddenly occurred to her. "Oil," she repeated. "Oh, my." They were passing by another open room. An old furnace hummed away in the dark recesses. A much newer device had been attached to the front of the ancient furnace.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked.
"Oh," Amanda said. "Maybe nothing. "It's just that when I first started at the CCS I remember seeing schematics for an underground system of oil tanks in Dr. Carlin's office. I thought it was strange because most of the power around here is hydroelectric. I didn't know why he'd want to store that much oil. The tanks were huge."
"Your point being?" Remo asked.
"The tanks were built into the side of a mountain. This is the side of a mountain. And this used to be Dr. Carlin's house when he was at the CCS." Remo stopped dead.
"Oh," Amanda said when she saw the look on his face. "You think it might be something? I only remember because it was right after that prediction he made during the Gulf War. When he said those oil well fires would burn for months and change the environment of the entire Gulf region for years to come." She grew more worried when she saw Remo's expression grow even darker. "They didn't," she added hopefully.
"We should leave," Chiun said evenly.
Remo was thinking of the pressure waves from the surveillance equipment they'd both sensed coming from Lake Geneva. He suddenly felt like a mouse just before the steel bar snapped shut.
"Right behind you, Little Father," he said. Shepherding a suddenly very worried Amanda Lifton before them, the two Masters of Sinanju began to cautiously retrace their steps back out to the main cellar.
REMARKABLE!
Hahn watched the infrared monitor image through excited, unblinking eyes.
They were heading back up the basement hallway. Could it be? Could it possibly be that they had guessed what was in store?
The three green blobs were back in front of the open door that led to the furnace. They were coming back out.
Maybe they had seen the modified furnace. Hahn had rigged it for Sage Carlin years ago. Activated it just this afternoon. Could they know?
He wished he could have asked them, but of course that was impossible. It was time for them to die. The silver antenna was already up on the remote transmitter. It was aimed across the deck of Hahn's boat at the magnificent chalet nestled among the lower Alps.
A cold wind blew across the lake, swirling through the open cabin door, cutting Herr Hahn to the bone. Eyes on the chalet, Herr Hahn flicked the toggle switch.
The monitor flashed bright, consumed from corner to corner and top to bottom by a wash of brilliant green.
And in the rocks above Lake Geneva, an orange fireball vomiting up from the very bowels of Hell itself erupted from the smoking crater where Hubert St. Clair's house had been.
Chapter 10
The click saved their lives.
They heard it as they passed the open door to the furnace room. It was a soft thing that became inaudible in the ensuing roar.
A brilliant orange flash burst from the black mouth of the dark room. A wall of searing flame and heat whooshed forward, erupting into the hall.
When the click sounded, Remo and Chiun went from a walk to a sprint. They tore down the slender passage a heartbeat ahead of the blast.
Chiun had scooped up Amanda. In his arms the world around her seemed to slow, then freeze.
Not enough time to make it out into the main cellar. Frozen flames, locked in time, rocketing in at impossible speed.
Amanda suddenly airborne. Remo's arms encircling her waist. Chiun, flames licking at the hem of his kimono, launching himself up at one of the dirty basement windows.
The glass shattering. Then flying at Amanda. No way to avoid it. She was a deadly human spear, fired at speeds greater than the explosion or the flames, faster even than conscious thought.
Out! In the cold mountain air, with bony hands grabbing her once more.
Running.
Time tripping back to normal speed.
The house exploded. Windows burst, scattering diamond fragments across the Swiss hillside. The wood splintered apart and spread like burning matchsticks as the ball of orange flame burst from Earth's ruptured molten core.
The intense heat chased them down the driveway and out into the street. Still Chiun ran, Amanda thrown over one shoulder. Even when he stopped, he danced through falling fragments of Hubert St. Clair's chalet.
Chiun set Amanda to the street. She reeled in place as she tried to get her bearings.
It all seemed to have happened in an instant. In a fiery blur she'd gone from standing in the cellar to dodging flaming house chunks out beyond Dr. St. Clair's twisted front gate.
The heat from the oil-fed fire pushed them back. Acrid smoke poured out of the jagged hole where the upper story had been. The roof had been blown off completely.
Amanda fought the fire for oxygen, panting to catch her breath. For a moment, her Lifton pretensions burned away. The money, the cars, the hotelsnone of it seemed to matter as much as her life. She looked gratefully at the two men who had saved her.
She saw only Chiun. Worry formed deep in the lines of his weathered face as he watched the fire. "Where's Remo?" Amanda asked.
She glanced back at the chalet. The bottom-floor walls were starting to collapse into the central crater. Flames of orange crackled and danced.
"He did get out, didn't he?" she asked, her voice growing very small.
Chiun didn't reply. His expression carved in stone, he watched impassively as perdition claimed the sunny Swiss mountainside.
HERR HAHN KEPT his eyes off the thermal-imaging unit from the moment he pressed the toggle switch. With that much heat exploding into light, if he'd seen it he would have been blinking away stars for the rest of the week.
He watched out the boat's cabin window as a thick curl of angry black smoke rose from the hills above the cold waves of Lake Geneva.
Thanks to all that oil buried in the underground tanks, the fire would burn for hours.
An oil-well fire in the Alps.
As the hired killer of the Congress of Concerned Scientists, Hahn had found the notion intriguing. It gave him the opportunity to test his engineering and technical skills. Of course it was an extravagant way to demolish the chalet, but the CCS wasn't lacking for donations. And this method had one side benefit, unknown when the tanks were first installed. The two men who had survived the CCS greenhouse could not possibly have made it out alive.
They along with the pesky girl-who was his true target-were cinders by now.
Savoring the victory over the only interesting targets he had ever encountered, Hahn gathered up his binoculars from the table in his boat cabin. There was a plate of pfeffernuesse next to them. Hahn blew powdered sugar from the lenses before aiming the binoculars at the hillside.