Impelled by some irresistible urge he could not explain, Remo approached the executioner.
"Please take a seat," the executioner said solemnly. His feet were enveloped by low-lying ground fog, like a ghost.
"I know your voice," Remo said. Impulsively he reached for the hood. It came away, leaving the craggy, soft features of Harold Haines. But there was something wrong with the face. It didn't match the voice. Remo pulled at the man's suddenly obvious false nose. The face came away, and the hair. A mask. And behind it were the austere features of judge Harold Smith.
"No!" Remo shrank from Smith's cold, unhuman eyes. He made a break for the gate. The old Oriental bounded to intecept him. He took the gates in his tiny hands as if to hold them in place against Remo's assault.
Remo shouted in mid-course, feeling the ground pushing against his running toes. He ran into the stone wall and up the side, his toes shifting from the soft horizontal ground to the hard vertical wall as easily as from sand to blacktop.
At the top, Remo paused, read the distance to the ground, and jumped. He floated to the grass as if weightless. Remo ran past the old Oriental, away from judge Harold Smith's grasping hands, and into the building. An elevator took him to the second floor and the door marked DIRECTOR. Remo pushed the door in.
A man sat in a cracked leather chair behind a Spartan oak desk. The chair was turned to a big picture window that framed a large body of water, so that only the back of the man's head was visible over the high seat back. His hair was white.
Then the chair slowly swiveled and the sharp profile came into view, continued until the shaky fluorescent lights made the round rimless eyeglasses momentarily opaque, and then the gray eyes looked at him reprovingly.
Remo's eyes jumped to the nameplate: "Harold W. Smith, Director."
Without a word, Smith pressed an intercom button and suddenly Remo was surrounded by burly orderlies in hospital green. They grabbed Remo by the arms and the legs and wrestled him to the floor, trying to force his arms into a straitjacket. Only after they had succeeded in locking Remo into the strangling garment did he see the electrical connectors on the jacket front. Then, to his horror, they were pushing into the office a complicated electronic device on a wheeled stand. Swiftly, grimly, they plugged heavy old-fashioned jacks into the connectors, and the voice of Harold W. Smith, as astringent and pitiless as lemon dishwater detergent, was asking Remo a doleful question. "Do you have any last words?"
His last word was to scream the name "Chiun" in an anguished voice. And then a grinning orderly threw an antiquated knife-switch.
"What's wrong?" Smith asked over Remo's howl of fear.
"The damned jacks," the orderly barked. "We connected them wrong. Have to try again."
"Do it!"
Remo snapped awake. He was breathing like a drowning man. He couldn't see past the cold sweat that dripped down his forehead and into his eyes. His T-shirt was soaked. And cold. It stuck to his skin.
Remo rolled out of bed. None of it made sense, but it was adding up in a weird way. Dreams and reality. They were mixed up in his mind. What was real? What was it Popcorn had said? Dead Men dream deepest.
After Remo got a grip on himself, he walked over to the cell door. He placed his fingers against the electronic lock. It had worked in the dream. He started tapping. He felt foolish as he varied the rhythm of his fingers. He closed his eyes, trying to remember exactly how it worked in the dream.
Almost at once, he felt something. A current, a vibration. He keyed into it like a concert pianist playing a half-forgotten chord.
Miraculously, the door rolled aside. Remo stepped out into the corridor. He walked low, keeping to the far wall. The lights were out, which made it easier. He came to the first section-control door, found the lock with his fingers, and started tapping. He crouched under the glass window of the door.
The door rolled aside. There were no guards visible beyond.
A gasp came from a cell. Another man snored. A third crept to his cell bars for a better look. Remo met his eyes in the darkness.
The man shot Remo a thumbs-up sign and said, "Good luck, Dead Man."
Remo nodded and moved to the next door. Beyond the third door was a control booth. Remo peered up and saw that the guard on duty was sitting behind the Plexiglas reading a newspaper. His face was turned toward the corridor. But Remo had gotten this far. He had to go on.
The door rolled open after a brief manipulation. Remo froze, exposed. In a dream, he remembered Chiun's exortation to stay still whenever he was within range of a man's peripheral vision. Remo waited till the guard finished the paper and looked up. The door had rolled shut automatically, and only when the guard was staring directly at him through almost impenetrable darkness did Remo advance on him.
For some reason, Remo could see through the darkness like a gray haze. He moved on the booth like a jungle cat stalking, feeling the freedom in his muscles, feeling something else he hadn't felt since the day he woke up on Florida's death row: confidence.
Remo saw that the only door to the booth was on the other side of the wall. There was no way in from this corridor.
He decided on the bold approach and walked right up to the glass. Remo knocked on the Plexiglas. The guard jumped nearly a foot.
Remo smiled at him disarmingly, as if nothing was wrong. He opened his mouth and made shapes with it, but no words. The guard's "What?" was dim but audible through the Plexiglas.
Remo repeated his pantomime, pointing back toward the row.
The guard gave him a terse, "Wait a minute," and stepped through the exit door. Remo waited tensely.
A corridor door rolled back and the guard hurried in, demanding, "What is it?"
Remo decked him with a sharp fist to the jaw. Swiftly he stripped the guard and exchanged pants with him. He donned his jacket over his apricot T-shirt. Then he ducked back, not bothering to hide the body. He knew that the quickest way out was through Grand Central, and beyond that, the yard. It was also the most dangerous way out of the facility.
Walking with an easy grace, Remo moved from door to door, until he was in the cathedrallike Grand Central. The tiers of C Block towered above him like medieval dungeons designed by a condo-mentality architect.
He kept to the shadows until he got to the door leading to the yard. It gave under his tapping fingers and Remo found himself on the threshold of the yard, and freedom.
Out there, the lights were too bright for shadows to exist. He took a deep breath.
Confidently Remo stepped out, knowing that his guard uniform would buy him a minute. Maybe more than a minute.
He got only four paces when a searchlight swiveled in his direction. Remo shielded his face with an upraised forearm, a natural eye-protecting gesture that also concealed his identity.
"Who goes there!" a voice called down.
"It's me!" Remo said in a gargling voice. "Pepone."
"What's the problem, Pepone?"
"Dead Man on the loose. We got him cornered in the shower room. Warden says to watch the outside walls for a car or accomplice."
"Right," the guard returned. The searchlight obligingly swiveled out of Remo's eyes and began to rake the grass beyond the fence.
Remo stepped back into the exit door, and then, after a pause, he sprinted out for the wall.
He ran stiffly at first, and then something in him clicked over. He hit the inner fence like a monkey going up, vaulting over the razor wire to drop to the narrow dirt corridor between it and the outer fence. He raced to the outer fence. A bullet spanked a rock beside his shoes.
"Halt!" an emotion-charged voice ordered.
Remo knew that the guards had standing shoot-to-kill orders-his uniform notwithstanding-for anyone caught where he was now. Going up the fence was suicide, so he went through the fence. He didn't think about what he was doing. It was as if his body was on autopilot. His hands took hold of fistfuls of chain link until he had a group that felt soft. He twisted violently. To his astonishment, the fence unraveled vertically, like a poorly knit sweater.
Remo dashed through the opening. Shots cracked behind him. No one came close. He ran zigzag fashion, the way he had been taught in the Marines. Distantly a shotgun boomed once. Twice.
Remo grinned wolfishly. He knew shotguns. At this range, the guard could shove the close-range weapon up his own ass for all the good it would do him.
Remo could hear the cars starting up. The gate was ordered opened. Electric motors hummed as the gates rolled aside. The escapee warning siren started yowling.