"Looks like the orange growers got hit by a frost."
"Frost does not burn."
"No," Remo said patiently. "But the growers have millions of dollars tied up in their orchards. They can't afford to lose them to frost. So they burn smudge pots and use electric heaters to save the crop."
"This works? Smoking the fruit?"
"Usually. If the frost doesn't go on too long."
The Master of Sinanju grunted. "Did I ever tell you of the Master who was so foolish that he performed a service for a solitary orange?"
"No. And I think you're making it up."
"I do not make up legends. It was in the time of Cathay. Oranges were unknown to Sinanju, and an emperor of . . ."
Remo tuned out Chiun, and the singsong tone in which he was relating a possibly true story of the early days of the House of Sinanju. He was in no mood for it. All he wanted was for the trail to end and the bodies to start piling up.
Miles short of the outskirts of Furioso, Florida, the fugitive taillights dimmed, flared, and winked out.
"Damn," Remo said.
Chiun pointed into the night. "I see him. Follow."
Remo pulled off the road-he had no idea what road, or where he was exactly-and onto a sandy access road that was nothing more than a knot of switchbacks rank with kudzu weed.
Either side was lined with old billboards. Mostly ads for local theme parks. The kudzu was working its way up those, too.
"This isn't a posted road," Remo said.
"It is a road," Chiun countered. "That is enough."
For nearly a mile they negotiated the road. Ahead, the night horizon was a jagged line of strange shapes.
Chiun examined this critically. "What vista is this?"
"Search me," Remo said.
Chiun pouted his lower lip, his hazel eyes thoughtful.
The road came to a dead halt at the end of a pond bordered with wilting pink camilla blossoms.
Remo eased to a stop in time to keep the front tires from slipping into the water.
"What the hell?" he muttered. "Where'd he go?"
They got out, shades of black in a deeper blackness.
"See anything, Little Father?"
"No," Chiun said thinly.
Remo looked for tracks. There were none. In fact, his own car had made no impression in the sand. Remo knelt. The sand, he found, was actually glued in place. Glued over asphalt.
"Well," Remo said, standing up. "we know Zorilla wasn't driving a submarine car." He looked up. "I don't see anything in the sky, either."
"Come," said Chiun, moving back the way they had come.
Remo followed.
"What are we looking for?" he asked, curious.
"We are looking for nothing. We are smelling the air."
Remo focused on his nostrils and drew in a sip of air. The air passing over his sensitive olfactory receptors was reasonably clean, for all its proximity to the sprawling city of Furioso.
"I don't smell anything," Remo complained.
"But you will."
Remo did. He picked up the tailpipe emission from Zorilla's car a quarter-mile back. It went off to the left.
Remo spotted the crushed-down kudzu on one side of the artificial road.
"Must have missed it in the darkness," he said.
They moved into the kudzu. The carbon monoxide vapor, odorless to most noses, was heavy in theirs, so they switched to breathing through their mouths. It made their thoughts heavy.
Against a low hillock, they found it. A concrete bunker, nearly buried in the dirt and obscured by kudzu. The door was a big slab of steel, painted brown and green to blend in with the surroundings.
There were no signs. No guards, no anything.
"Looks military," Remo said quietly.
Chiun nodded. "We have found the lair of the plotters."
"All we have to do is get in."
"All we have to do is get in," came the voice over the overhead loudspeaker.
"Director, we have a security breach."
The Director looked up from his console, where he had been wireframing three touching circles. He was in the act of commanding this remarkable newfangled computer to "draw" a pair of eyes in the large bottom circle when the word came.
He turned in his swivel chair to the overhead monitor, cursing the eye patch that restricted his vision and adding another for the stupid doctor who could have saved the eye-if only he had had the gumption to stick to his guns.
He saw two men moving through the stark highcontrast image transmitted from the infrared scanner.