"You don't eat red meat, so it couldn't possibly be you."
"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence," Remo said. "Given our present location, though, that nasty aroma could be coming from anyone or anywhere."
"This is no ordinary smell," Chiun countered. "It's like what rises from a low clump of bush after a gentle spring rain."
"You mean cat pee?"
Chiun glided ahead and turned the corner into the weight room, which was big enough to accommodate the entire Riots team. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the floor was taken up with great steel contraptions and racks of dumbbells and barbells. As Remo followed Chiun through the doorway, the starting offensive line of the L.A. Riots looked up at them from the bench-press area. Sweaty, towering men, whose combined weight was somewhere around three quarters of a ton.
Remo smiled at the men in orange and black. Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Chiun, "Johnson had said they were bigger and meaner than the security staff. He forgot to add younger."
A guttural growl came from beyond the offensive players. At the squat rack, a monster man held an Olympic bar balanced on his impossibly wide shoulders. The heavy steel bar was bowed in the middle by the tremendous weight at both ends. Bradley Boomtower let eight hundred pounds of iron crash to the deck.
"He is the one who smells," Chiun announced, pointing an imperious finger at the offender.
"Just the guy we want to see," Remo said.
As the second-most-dangerous man in the world took a step forward, the two guards, two tackles and the center spread out to block his path. A grove of redwood trees in numbered, XXXL sweatshirts.
"We've got business with your big guy, there," Remo said.
"And what exactly is your business?" the center said, testing the heft of a seventy-pound dumbbell.
"A glorious and time-honored trade," Chiun answered at once. "We are assassins."
Remo gave the Master a look of dismay.
Behind the offensive line, Boomtower howled with rage and began to advance.
"Stay back, F.V.," the right guard said, holding up his hands. "You're in enough hot water already. You get in any more trouble and you'll be out of the lineup next week."
"We need you against Portland, man," the right tackle said. "That Parakeet air attack will pick us apart without your pass rush."
The offensive linemen edged closer to Remo. "Our time in the gym is very special to us," the center said, still armed with the dumbbell. "We don't like being gawked at by geeks and gooks in our most private moments. You guys sound like you might be crazy, fucking escapees from Atascadero, but that doesn't cut you any slack with us. My friends here are going to hold your arms and legs down while I beat your heads to mush with this. From the chin up, you're gonna be nothing but a red stain on the carpet." He waggled the dumbbell.
"Hey, Chiun, I might need a little help here," Remo said. "Chiun?"
The Reigning Master of Sinanju slipped his hands inside the loose sleeves of his robe. A gesture that needed no further explanation.
There were only five of them.
The pupil was on his own.
"That's it, old-timer," the left guard said, "you just wait there, nice and still, and we'll see to you in a minute."
Remo meanwhile had picked up a football from a bin on the floor. Thick wrist flexing, he gripped it with his fingertips on the laces. His knuckles whitened, and his fingers dug deeply into the ball.
It exploded in his hand like a party balloon, only much, much louder.
The noise made the offensive line pause in their advance.
"Is that little trick supposed to scare us?" the left tackle said.
Remo selected another ball from the bin. "I'm asking you real nice to clear a path," he told them.
"What're you gonna do, hurt our ears again?" the center said, laughing.
Remo dropped back to pass, pumped once. The Riots didn't take the fake, so he let fly.
The offensive line thought it was another fake. Only Chiun saw the ball leave Remo's hand. It traveled twenty feet before the pointed end made contact with the middle of the center's heavy-boned chin. Again the ball compressed until its seams exploded. The impact snapped back the huge man's head, driving him into a watercooler, which tipped over as he dropped to the carpet. His fellow players ducked and used their hands to deflect the flying pigskin shrapnel.
Remo picked up another ball and slapped it into his open palm.
The right guard bent over the center. "Louie's out cold," he said. "That skinny little punk KO'd him with a pass. Jesus, he's spitting teeth."
"Assassinate this," the right tackle snarled, scooping up the object the center had dropped.
Remo ducked, allowing the seventy-pound dumbbell to fly over his head.
The other players followed suit and started chucking dumbbells at him. Remo didn't even try to get out of the way. As the heavy objects rained down on him, end over end, he swept them aside, deflecting them right or left with the backs of his wrists. Dumbbells clanged on the floor and bounced, rolling every which way as the Riots emptied the racks of weights.
"Get the fucker!" the left tackle cried, rushing over to the stacks of iron plates. "Flatten his ass!" He picked up a thirty-five-pound plate like it was a pizza pie and sent it spinning, discus style, across the room at Remo.
But to Remo, the plate moved through the air so slowly that even a small child could have avoided it. The spectacle bored Chiun. There was no subtlety to it. He withdrew his hands from inside his sleeves and covered his shell-like ears to protect them from the crash of weights hitting the floor. As the four big men used up all the metal plates, they grew visibly weaker. Patches of sweat appeared on their chests and under their arms. Their breathing became labored. They leaned on the steel contraptions for support. Chiun carefully watched the man Emperor Smith had sent them to interrogate. Number 96. Animal Man. Chiun had never seen a creature quite like him. A creature with such density of muscle. The corded flesh on the backs of his arms looked like the mooring lines of a freighter. And the covering skin was almost blindingly shiny, stretched tight, almost to the splitting point. Nothing the least bit subtle there, either; as such, he was hardly a worthy opponent for a Master of Sinanju.
Chiun could sense Number 96's desire to enter the fray. The man was chomping at the bit. What held him back? Not fear, certainly. Like the others, he was too ignorant to be afraid. Perhaps another desire, a more powerful one, kept him in check?
Even from across the room, Animal Man's smell was overwhelming. That Remo couldn't detect it didn't surprise Chiun. A man who had once indulged in the cheesy burger, the Camel, the Budweiser, couldn't be expected to have an undamaged sensory system. The aroma Number 96 gave off wasn't the smell of a human, not even a dirty human. This puzzled Chiun.
In point of fact, the Master hadn't paid much attention to the background details of the mission as laid out by Emperor Smith. Something about a drug. Such things were usually unimportant, mere trifles when compared with the truly significant-how he could leverage upward the gold payment for the next negotiation.
When Bradley Boomtower suddenly turned on his heel and headed for the nearest exit, Chiun was after him like a shot.
"Hey, get that guy!" the right guard wheezed. Before the offensive line could respond, the Master had slipped past them.
Chapter 11
Bradley Boomtower let the eight-hundred-pound load roll off his shoulders and crash to the weight-room floor. His intention was to snatch hold of the two intruders who had violated his territory with their ghastly fish smell and then tear their soft bodies into thin, bloody strips. His outrage at their presence inside his domain was too terrible to be held in check by the threat of league banishment or by the upraised hands of his fellow players. Boomtower could no longer think in terms of the future. As far as he was concerned, next week's game might as well have been next century's. There was no longer a barrier between what he felt like doing and what he did. The barrier that kept human society from ripping itself apart. In a way, what he possessed, or what possessed him, was absolute freedom; in another way, it was absolute slavery.
To get his hands on those who muddied his urine-marked perimeter, Boomtower would have thrown aside his teammates. He would even have killed them if they had tried to stop him.
The enormous nose tackle took a step forward, then hesitated as another, even more powerful need filled him. All around the squat rack were heaped empty boxes of Manteca. It had been eight minutes since his last "energy" snack. And already the hunger pangs were starting up again. These were no sudden cravings for a particular food. He wasn't responding to mouth-watering mental images of pork chops or rib roast. The feelings of aching emptiness were so intense that they were impossible to ignore. The inside of his belly clanked and shuddered like a length of steel chain caught up in the blades of a madly revving lawn mower.
A small bit of the pre-WHE Bradley Boomtower remained, self-aware, imprisoned in the giant body. And that man, who had earned a business degree from a Big Ten college, who had over eight million dollars in cash stashed in a Cayman Islands bank, was frightened by the intensity of the urge. And by the fact that he was eating more and more, and was never satisfied. Only for a second did this fragment of his original personality surface, then it was sucked under, down into the whirlpool of wolverine neuropeptide.
Boomtower spun away from the spectacle of flying dumbbells and pushed out the weight room's exit. Ahead of him was the Riots' deserted practice field. As he loped across the five-lane track that circled the playing area, he sensed someone or something behind him.