"Yeah, yeah," Remo said, "that's the way." He took the lead, heading for the elevator. Once they were inside the car, he glanced at the fax. "We want the tenth floor. That's where the medical wing is." Remo had to reach around Chiun to press the floor button. As the Master's hands were up his sleeves, he could not perform the task himself.
The elevator doors opened on a deserted corridor. Chiun stuck his head out, then wrinkled his nose in disgust. "They are here," he said. "And there are many of them. The stinkers."
Remo looked at the massive, gleaming steel door that completely blocked the hallway at one end. With a carefree tone that was not entirely genuine, he said, "It appears, Little Father, that what we're looking for is behind door numero uno."
The two assassins spread out, each taking a side of the hall as they cautiously advanced on the barrier. Even Remo, whose nasal sensitivity had been compromised years ago by filthy food and a degraded Western life-style, could smell the hormone users now.
"Man, oh man," he groaned. "It's like a convention of skunks in here!"
"It would be best," Chiun told him, "to put that unpleasantness out of your mind. For as we have already seen, these are not skunks...."
Remo nodded. But how does one stop smelling something noxious? By breathing through the mouth, obviously. But Chiun had taught him that mouth-breathing was a big no-no in Sinanju. According to the Master, if you inhaled through the mouth, it made it impossible to correctly position the tongue, which was supposed to lightly touch the roof of the mouth.
Without the tongue in the correct position, the flow of chi was impeded. The choice Remo faced was between not smelling the hormone beasts or not being able to fight them. So, it really wasn't a choice at all.
Somewhere, Remo had read that after prolonged exposure, the sensors in the nose become desensitized to aromas. To hurry this end, he breathed in and out rapidly, putting as much stink on his nasal receptors as he could.
"What are you doing?" Chiun asked him. "Why are you making so much noise?"
"Trying to desensitize my nose."
"Why don't you just breathe through your mouth?"
Remembering all the months of working on nothing but proper tongue position, Remo started to complain, but caught himself. After all, what was the use?
The tempered-steel frame of the door filled the hall from side to side and floor to ceiling. Immense bolts tied the tremendously heavy unit into the steel beams that supported the building's exterior walls. The door itself might have been looted from a bank vault. On its front it had a huge lever and three sets of tumblers. It was closed and appeared to be locked.
Remo reached out and ran his fingertips down the millimeter-wide seam between door and frame. "Definitely locked," he said.
Chiun stepped closer to the door, cocked his head, then pressed his ear to the cold steel.
"What do you hear?" Remo asked him.
The Master waved an impatient hand for silence. "Shh," he said. "Listen."
Remo put his head against the door, too. Through the metal, he heard groaning sounds. Not human. Not animal. The sounds of metal being stressed, over and over.
Then there was a loud crash. Followed by a metallic shriek.
On the other side of the door, something still lived. Something that had been locked in.
Something that wanted out.
"It's pulling the guts out of the door lock," Remo said as he drew his head back. And even as he spoke, the huge steel lever on the face of the door began to move. A little wiggle at first, then a waggle, then a wide arc.
Both of the assassins took a giant step back.
The lever flipped over, and when it did, the door's many interior bolts slid back.
"We'd better find some cover, and quick," Remo said.
"There is no place to run," Chiun told him. "We must stand and fight right here."
"But we don't know how many are in there!" The seam between door and frame gaped wider as the door slowly swung out.
"There are too many," Chiun told him. "Does that make you feel any better?"
Chapter 33
Jimmy Koch-Roche didn't wait to see what the thing that pursued him looked like. By the time it had passed over the duct vent, he was around another turn, crawling as fast as he could go. His bare knees were scraped and bleeding, but that was the least of his problems.
As Koch-Roche fled in panic, somewhere in the back of what remained of his rational mind, it occurred to him that whatever the snuffling, scrabbling thing behind him was, it wasn't a hormone-enlarged human. It was something small enough to get into the duct, something small enough to move quickly and easily through it.
Then, from some hidden juncture along the winding black passage, the air pumps kicked in, blowing hot wind against his sweating back. And along with the heat, an odor swept over him.
Musky, fecal and ever so nasty.
The smell made him whimper and crawl even faster.
If he didn't know what it was, he knew one thing for sure-it was gaining on him. Over the thunk of his knees on the steel and a rasp of his own breathing, he could hear the clatter of its claws drawing nearer and nearer.
A plan, he thought. He had to have a plan. As the attorney scrambled along, he racked his brain for a solution. He certainly couldn't fight the thing in the closed confines and darkness of the air duct and hope to come out on top. But if he could get to the next vent, if he could through it, get down into a room or a corridor, even if the thing jumped down after him, he would stand a chance of escape. In a room or a corridor, there would be somewhere to hide; if he couldn't lock the thing in a room, he could lock himself in one.
The plan was feasible. The problem was, the duct ahead him was dark as pitch. A long straight stretch with no exit.
Don't look back, Koch-Roche told himself. For Christ's sake, keep on moving. His knees banged harder against the inside of the duct, making echoes boom before him.
In the darkness, he didn't see the T-branch of the tunnel. The top of his head rammed into the unyielding surface, making him see stars. He refused to let himself black out.
To black out was to die.
Shaking off the shock of the impact, the lawyer started frantically stripping off his shirt. He couldn't count on the beast not being able to locate him by smell-although how it could smell anything but itself had to be the eighth wonder of the world. But he could try to confuse it. Koch-Roche tossed his shirt as far as he could down the right arm of the duct. Then he turned the other way and hauled ass.
If his trick slowed the creature down even a few seconds, he told himself, it might be enough.
What had eluded him, due to his fear and the stress of the moment, was that his battered knees were leaving a blood trail everywhere he went. And it was his fresh blood that the creature was tracking.
The attorney's heart leaped when he saw the patch of light filtering up through a grate in the floor just ahead. Reaching it, Koch-Roche hurled himself at the mesh, ripping the grate out of its track and letting it drop through onto the floor of an office below.
At his back, the growling, snarling, scrambling thing was coming his way, fast.
If Koch-Roche hadn't looked up, he might have gotten away. But look up he did. The sight of the experimental-subject wolverine filling the duct, its multicolored electric-wire wig flopping as it bore relentlessly down on him, froze him in place.
For forty-five of his forty-nine years, Jimmy Koch-Roche had had a secret fear that something huge and hairy and powerful would get him. Get meaning grab, hurt, stomp, tear, punch, cut, even kill. This nameless thing had taken many forms in the real world. The junior-high-school gym coach. A senior classman at Hami High who used to confiscate his lunch money daily. Various thugs and toughs who, when they saw his size, thought easy pickings. Even as late as law school, he felt at times threatened by those bigger than him. It was only after he'd made his mark on the national legal scene that the terror took a step back into the shadows.
It was not gone, though.