"No. Not that one. An older one."
" 'Twas built on an old Norman road, sir," said Constable Blake.
"Bit older. How many roads north do you have?"
"Quite a few."
"What's the oldest?"
"I wouldn't rightly know, sir."
The subject, Remo, was followed to the roads north. He looked at every one of them and walked around, a bit confused. He asked several passersby how long a stadium was, and was told by a young schoolgirl the exact distance.
The schoolgirl also knew which was the old Roman road. She pointed out little white posts about a foot high along the side of the road. She told Remo:
"These are Roman mileposts. They left them all over their empire. Any idiot knows that."
"I'm an American," Remo said as Scotland Yard prepared to remove the girl from danger-if that were possible, considering the strange powers of this intruder.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Just follow the white posts. Can you count?"
"I can count. I just didn't know which was the old Roman road, that's all."
"Yes, of course. That's all right. You really can't be expected to know all these things. Just follow the white posts."
"Lots of people don't know Roman mileposts."
"Yes. Many don't. If you get lost, ask for help from a bobby," said the little girl, age nine.
"I can find it," said Remo, who could count the number of men watching him in surveillance, who could even sense the monitors on him sending signals back to their headquarters.
"I'm sure you can," said the sweet little girl with the separate teeth, schoolbooks, freckles, braids, and all the other usual accoutrements of an English schoolchild. "Just don't walk in the middle of the road, sir. Cars are dangerous."
Remo cleared his throat. "Cars are not dangerous. I'm dangerous."
"Well of course you're dangerous. You're a very dangerous man," she said, humoring him the way children sometimes do with adults. "But please do stay on the side of the road."
Remo saw a police van parked along the side of the road. It was the one containing the cameras watching him.
He sauntered over to one headlight and unscrewed it. Along with the tires, the man at the wheel, the wheel, and finally with a great roaring rip, the roof. "Dangerous," said Remo.
"Destructive," said the British schoolgirl.
The Scotland Yard detectives poured out of the van without a roof.
"Stay where you are. I'm going to get you your prime minister. Just don't crowd me."
"Do stay near him," said the girl. "He can be violent, of course, but he does seem like a dear sort, don't you think?"
"I'm not a dear sort," said Remo. "I'm an assassin. I kill people. I kill lots of people."
"Well then, they must be nasty people, but do please stay on the side of the road, and do be careful whom you let offer you a ride."
Remo shot the onlooking police a dirty glance. He could hear one of them say into a telphone: "Subject identified self as dangerous assassin." Remo blew a raspberry at the police, and one at the little girl, and counted his way up the old Roman road for as many white posts as the girl said.
He knew the road had to be underneath him.
That was how roads worked- They built new roads on top of old roads, and they just layered the pathways. Or wore them down as the case might be. It was the same thing they did with cities. They just kept piling the new city on top of the old one.
Remo reached the correct milepost and looked around. To his right was a field of grain. To his left was a flock of sheep. Stone walls surrounded the road, and far off was a little cottage billowing smoke.
There was no ruin of a mansion. Not a hint of an old Roman building. Nothing. British countryside and nothing.
"He's stopped just where they left the Prime Minister's car. He's looking around," came a voice that was supposed not to carry as far as Remo could hear.
"He's turning around now, looking back here, putting a finger over his mouth. By Jove, the man can hear me a half-mile away down the road."
If Remo could not get quiet, he would have to make it around him. A thrush called at a distance, idling motors chugged far off, wind blew through the grain, and Remo inhaled, tasting first the odors of the earth, moisture, rich soil, old gasoline fumes, and then from skin to bone he became quiet in himself, selecting the sounds and noises and scents and closing them off one by one until he was in a silence of his body.
He could taste the harsh macadam road through his shoes. There was stone under that road, deep and heavy stone. The earth was interrupted by it. A half-mile off was a little grassy hillock.
Remo remembered Chiun pointing out an old building in Judea once. He said when buildings were in countrysides, if the site was not maintained, it would grow over. And if it grew over for more than a few centuries, the plants and earth would build a small hill around it. Only recently in modern times had archaeololgists learned to recognize these hills as tels, good digging sites for old cities and such.
Remo walked over the stone wall and through the field of golden grain to the green hillock. He stood there and knew there was lots of stone underneath. He walked wherever he felt stone until he saw where the earth had been cut. Usually grass was hacked away, but this cut was done with something as smooth as a scalpel cutting a line the length of a coffin low in the hill. It was a patch, a patch of earth cut and replaced and now beginning to grow back.
Remo dug into it with his hands and peeled it back. He heard the constables back at the road say he had found something. He saw loose dirt underneath. Someone had recently dug here, and it was easy to follow. It took him only a few minutes to reach the first minor stone baffle in the outer wall of the old home of Maximus Granicus, sent early to his reward by the hand of Sinanju.
Hazel Thurston was tired of threatening that her captors would never get away with this. Besides, she didn't believe it anymore herself.
They were going to get away with it. They had kidnapped her just outside Bath in the quintessentially British county of Avon, and they had gotten clean away with it. They hadn't left the country, and yet she was in a strange stoite room with earth piled up outside the windows.
They had been here three days now, and the water was tepid, the food old, and as she suspected, the air was getting stale.
"Do you think they buried us without air?" asked the intelligence aide.
"Must be a big place if we could last until now."
"Looks like we're lost, yes?" said the aide.
"I'm afraid so."
"What do you say we overpower the guard?"
"Certainly. But what for? Where are we going to run?"
"We can start digging."