As Roberts spun around to face his colleagues, he looked up. "Shit!" he exclaimed. He was the only one who could see the old man, and there was nothing he could do about it. Chiun was hurtling through the air, the hem of his robe brushing the top of the twenty-foot-high ceiling. He soared past the lineup of security specialists, whose attention was still focused on where he had been, not where he was.
Then something hit Roberts in the side of the neck, and for him, everything went black.
At the same instant some fifteen feet away, the Master of Sinanju landed lightly on the balls of his feet and, once firmly grounded, roamed freely among the defenseless backs of his adversaries.
Everything soft and fluid.
Blows that started off hard as iron and ended at their targets as near caresses.
Without the all important follow-through, such strikes were not lethal-unless, of course, one of the men happened to have a steel plate in his head, in which case even the muted impact would have set it spinning like the blade of a runaway table saw.
As Remo carefully eased Agent Roberts to the floor, across the room armed men were falling like howling pins. Between them, Remo could make out flashes of blue brocaded silk and the afterimage of a smile.
"All asleep," Chiun announced, slipping his hands back into his cuffs.
A piercing cry echoed through the mansion. "Not all," Remo said.
Chiun nodded. "When the little head rules the big one, trouble cannot be far away."
"And Trouble Is Us...."
Remo led the way through the big house, following the sounds of struggle through the ground floor to its source.
Like a snowstorm spilling into the hall, kapok fluff floated out of the doorway to the master bedroom. Remo entered first, low and quick. For a moment, he couldn't even see the woman, dwarfed as she was by the hugely muscled naked man who bent over her on the savagely ripped, partially de-stuffed mattress.
Then Remo caught sight of the soles of her Reeboks on either side of Ludlow Baculum's massive buttocks. The woman was furiously kicking her attacker and to some effect-there was pink smeared on the white treads of her traction soles.
"Senator?" he said.
Ludlow Baculum's ancient head snapped around on his corded, powerful neck. He smiled, and there was blood on his three teeth and tongue. He had the little woman's wrists pinned to the bed. Her clothes hung in tattered strips all around her.
"Go away!" Baculum snarled. "I haven't finished."
"Oh, yes, you have."
"I can't be bothered with this," the senator snarled. He called to the other room. "Roberts! Atkins! Get your butts in here!"
"You'll get no help from your hired hands," Remo said. "They've all been subdued."
Ludlow Baculum pointed a warning finger in the maid's face and said, "Don't you move. Not a muscle." Then he let her go and turned on the bed to handle the intruders by himself.
Remo noted the overlapping tread marks that ran across the senator's hips and thighs. "Man, oh man," he said with a laugh, "that little lady danced a stone flamenco on your doodle."
Baculum was not amused.
Sensing her opportunity, the half-nude maid shot off the bed and out the door.
"I'm going to kill you for that," the senator told Remo as he hopped to the floor. "I can bend steel bars with my bare hands. I can kick through solid walls."
"That must be nice for you," Remo commented mildly.
"I'm going to rip your head off your shoulders and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine."
"Love to tussle with you, Lud, I really would, but I think you should play with somebody your own age."
When Remo looked around, the Master was nowhere in sight.
"I'd rather play with you," Baculum said.
Then the plundered mattress hit Remo square in the face. Before he could move to escape, the senator threw his body against the other side of the mattress, sandwiching Remo against the wall. From head to heels, he was not only held fast, but slowly being smothered.
"Now I've got you," Lud said as he dug in his toes, using his shoulder to wedge his victim tighter to the wall. With his free hand, the senator started ripping open the underside of the mattress, over the unmoving lump that was Remo. Through the hole he'd made in the ticking, he plucked away big clumps of kapok stuffing.
Soon to be big clumps of Remo.
"Pucker up, Buttercup...." the senator cooed.
Chapter 18
Having taken to heart Remo's caution about the loss of a valuable source of information, and how dimly Emperor Smith would view a repeat of the football incident, Chiun was determined to capture their quarry alive. He recalled the ancient Korean proverb, "You can catch more bloodworm with fish paste than you can with bitter gall."
In search of fish paste, the Reigning Master of Sinanju padded into the mansion's kitchen, which resembled that of a modestly sized upscale restaurant. Everything was made of stainless steel. Sinks. Countertops. Range tops. The refrigerator doors set in a row along the wall.
Chiun opened all the refrigerator doors and stepped back to survey their contents. "If I were Animal Man," he asked himself aloud, "what would soothe my savage breast?"
He stroked his scraggly beard as he considered the problem.
There was meat aplenty on hand, cooked and raw. Cold standing rib roast, virtually intact. A partially dissected turkey. The nether quarters of a suckling pig. Mounds of aged steaks and chops.
He lifted the cover from a ceramic tureen. Duck!
He took a tender leg from its congealed bed of sauce and nibbled daintily. Most excellent, he judged. Even cold, and perhaps four days old, it was far superior to Remo's meager cuisine. Try as he might, the man simply could not make a decent sauce. How many Saturday afternoons had Chiun made his pupil observe the magicians of the cooking channel? How many pages of notes had Remo taken down? All for nothing, it seemed. Remo's sauce was either thin as water or thick as glutinous rice. It either swam away from the dish it was supposed to adorn, or choked it, like so much concrete.
As Chiun gnawed the moist, dark meat from the bone, sucking it absolutely clean, he decided that flesh, even the fattiest kind of flesh, would not do the trick for Animal Man.
He turned his attention to the refrigerator that held a selection of high-calorie desserts. A wide array of flaky pastries, mousses and elaborate whipped cream cakes stood on the shelves before him. Yet something told him that even a five-layer Black Forest cake was not enough.
The job required something even more artery clogging.
Something so purely, so totally fat laden that the beast-senator could not possibly turn it down. Chiun found what he was looking for in the kitchen pantry, which was jammed with various sacked, canned and jarred comestibles. The ten-gallon glass jar he sought stood on the pantry floor, its off-white contents the quintessence of fat. Bending his knees, he picked up the heavy jar and carried it back toward the master bedroom.
The Master could hear the sounds of violent struggle as he lumbered down the hall with his burden, and as he approached the open door to the bedroom, once again he saw bits of mattress fluff drifting out like snow. He stopped at the doorway, unscrewed the big metal lid and discarded it.
When Chiun entered the bedroom, his pupil was nowhere to be seen. The old man with a young man's body was holding the mattress against the wall with one hand and ripping at it with the other. Under the mattress was a man-sized lump.
A Remo-sized lump.