"I'll instruct the greeters to flush him in that direction."
"Flush, my pink ass! Lure them in. I want them dead and disposed of. We open to the public in two hours and we have a duck head unaccounted for. What if some snot-nosed brat picks it up? The lawsuits will go on into the next century."
"At once, Director."
It was too easy.
Remo slipped between the places where the skulking greeters lurked. He didn't want to kill any, but he was forced to ace the squirrel and the duck. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.
Near the Tom Thumb Pavilion, he paused. A faint whir brought his head up alertly.
Remo turned. Through a tiny window, he sensed an electrical hum. Another concealed camera. The park was riddled with them.
He used two stiffened fingers to blind this one and then moved on.
Then the patterns changed.
Up until now, Remo had been aware of every nearby stalker. Their hot breaths and clumsy walks gave their positions away.
Now, they retreated. Flat, wide eyes withdrew from windows.
Something was going on. Moving low, Remo floated down to Phantom Lagoon, where piles of papier-mache rocks hugged the artificial shore.
He slipped onto the landward side and went up the rocks.
Remo lay flat on the sun-warmed summit, looking around. The position kept him out of sight, and also distributed his body weight so that the rocks wouldn't buckle beneath him.
Beasley World looked peaceful in the morning sun. Here and there a 'toon edged around a corner, his machine pistol poked forward incongruously. There was no sign of Chiun. Which actually was a good sign.
Behind him, he heard a warning gurgle.
Remo looked over his shoulder. Just in time.
Breaking the stillness of Phantom Lagoon was a baroque purple submarine, its narwhal-nosed bow pointed in his direction.
"Uh-oh," Remo muttered, remembering the movie the attraction was modeled after.
The water bubbled and boiled-and something shot out of the sub's unicorn nose. It arrowed toward Remo's flimsy perch.
Remo bounced to his feet and kept going. He executed a slow, languorous midair backflip that took him backward, over the churning torpedo.
Remo dropped behind the armored safety of the sub's conning tower as the torpedo struck the fake rocks.
The explosion was muffled. Papier-mache flew in fiery rags, mixed with pebble shrapnel.
When the echoes had ceased reverberating, Remo stood up to look. There was a smoking pit where the "rocks" had been.
Then Remo began peeling plates off the sub's colorful hull. It was like peeling a banana with an onion skin. Every layer revealed another. Muttering, "The hell with it," he drove his fist into a point along the waterline, making a hole.
Water rushed in, and Remo rode the sub to the shallow bottom. An escape hatch blew in a boil of bubbles, and a frogman swam out. Not a man in a wet suit, but one in a rubber frog skin. Eyes goggling, he kicked his webbed feet toward the surface.
Remo caught him by the back of his green neck and held him just under the surface, until his flippers stopped kicking and the last air bubble struggled from his gasping mouth.
Then Remo let his natural buoyancy bring him back to the surface.
Remo popped up and found himself face-to-snout with a gray polyester aardvark, standing on the shore.
He didn't recognize the aardvark. There had been a lot of Beasley cartoons produced since Remo was a boy, and over the years he'd lost track.
Consequently he didn't know what to call the aardvark.
So he said, "Don't make a mistake, pal."
The aardvark didn't seem to take the advice to heart. He lowered the muzzle of his short-barreled machine pistol in the direction of Remo's dripping head.
He didn't get to use it.
Remo shot out of the water like a porpoise. He went up and, with his ankles still submerged, suddenly changed direction, veering toward his assailant. He left a modest wake and landed upright on shore, where he took possession of the pistol by yanking it from its owner's furry grasp.
The aardvark's paw came away with the weapon, trigger finger caught in the ringlike trigger guard.
"Betcha can't do this, even in cartoons," Remo said, squeezing the weapon in his steel-hard fingers. They found weak points in the metal. The weapon began shedding parts amid metallic squeals of complaint.
The aardvark cried "Tarim!" in a funny voice and turned tail. Literally.
Remo started after him.
He was easy to follow, for he waddled as he ran. Remo decided to follow him back to his hole-or wherever it was aardvarks lived. Someone had to be in charge of this insanity.
The gray 'toon bobbled and slipped among the plastic palms, looking back often as he worked his way to the Tom Thumb Pavilion. His eyes, unreal as they were, looked positively frightened.
At the pavilion entrance he turned one last time, lingered, and, when he saw Remo coming in his direction, ducked in.
"Looks like a trap," Remo muttered. "Okay," he said, shrugging. "So it's a trap."
The Master of Sinanju paused to ask directions.
"Excuse me," he inquired, of the figure standing before an old-fashioned outdoor clock resembling a numerically calibrated all-day sucker. "I seek the illustrious Mongo Mouse."
The figure, its clear eyes very bright in its homely, bearded face, ignored the Master of Sinanju.
The Master of Sinanju tugged at its sleeve.
"I said, I seek the illustrious-"
Suddenly the figure jerked to life. Only then did the Master of Sinanju recognize it as one of the previous rulers of this odd nation. He wore the royal crown of that era, known as the "stovepipe hat."