Remo and Chiun exchanged tight glances. It was Remo who gave voice to their shared unspoken thought.
"Us?" he asked.
The old Korean nodded. "He knew of Sinanju," Chiun agreed with a puzzled frown.
"And he saw what happened to us when he fired that thing," Remo said with a scowl. "Who the hell is this guy, and what's his beef with us? We can't get within a country mile of him, and he knows it."
Gary Jenfeld looked anxiously at the rest of the Barkley city council. Fear filled their grubby faces. "You have to figure out something," Gary said desperately to Remo. "I mean, Feyodov's gone psycho. It's like he's got a death wish or something."
"He has," Anna Chutesov said. "But he is too cowardly to do the deed himself. He has seized this opportunity in order to get someone else to do it for him."
"That's one problem I'll gladly help him with," Remo said. "But first Chiun and I have to figure out a way to snip the wires on that thing without frying our circuitry."
He turned to Gary. "Where exactly is it hidden?" For an instant Gary's troubled eyes flicked over his shoulder.
An ominous black figure loomed far in the distance.
In the greasy gray sky of predawn, Remo saw the top of the far-off Huitzilopochtli statue in Barkley's town square peeking over the tops of the nearby trees and houses.
Remo wheeled back on the Barkley council. "You hid it inside Mr. Slate?" he complained.
"It worked, didn't it?" Gary said anxiously. Remo frowned. The truth was, it had. As a community Barkley had been so famously screwed up for so many years, he'd automatically dismissed a huge, four-story statue as just another part of the lunatic landscape.
Remo turned to Chiun. "How do we play this?" he asked.
"It is difficult," the old man said, thoughtfully stroking his thread of beard. He was studying the frozen face of Huitzilopochtli. The statue's black eyes stared coldly at the breaking dawn. "Does the power emanate from the stone god's eyes?" the old man asked Gary Jenfeld.
"You mean the particle stream?" the ice cream man asked. "The statue's hollow, and the top of the head is wide open. The mirrors that focus the stream are just below eye level."
"We could use explosives to destroy it," Anna offered.
Chiun's face fouled at the suggestion.
Gary shook his head. "It might look like a statue on the outside, but the thing's built like a missile silo. You couldn't drive a tank through the side of it. I don't think a bomb would make much of a difference."
"What if we got a helicopter?" Brandy suggested to Remo and Anna. "If the head's open like he says, we could fly over and drop a bomb inside."
Remo shot the FBI agent a skeptical look. "They're shooting down satellites that are a million miles away and you want to try hovering over ground zero?"
"Oh," Brandy said, dejected. "Hadn't thought of that."
"But the hollow-head thing could work for us," Remo said thoughtfully. "Chiun and I can't get close, but we can sure as hell lob something inside from a distance."
Brandy cast a dubious eye at the statue. "You must have one hell of a pitching arm," she said.
Remo ignored the FBI agent. "Anyone here know how to make a bomb?" he asked.
The entire Barkley city council with the exclusion of Gary Jenfeld raised their hands.
"Why did I even ask?" Remo grumbled. "Okay, put what's left of your brain cells together and come up with something that'll go boom. Preferably not in your hands."
"That'll be hard to do," Gary whined. "We banned explosives in town a few years back, along with all guns. And now the Russians are the only ones who have any weapons at all." He put on a pouty face. "They were supposed to protect us and now they've made us prisoners."
"And that's never happened before," Remo said dryly.
"We can come up with something," Brandy promised. "We'll have to swing by the hardware store. Let's go."
When the crowd turned to the curb, Remo took note of the ratty old van the city council had arrived in.
"Someone probably should go on the magic bus with the Doodletown Pipers," he said.
"Do not look at me," Chiun sniffed.
"I will go with them," Anna said.
Brandy took the wheel of Anna's rental car. Chiun and Remo slid into the seat beside her. Three members of the Barkley city council got into the back. Anna climbed into the van with the remaining council members. As the other car drew away from the curb, Gary Jenfeld was pulling his ample belly in behind the van's steering wheel.
The ice cream man was turning the key in the ignition when he felt something hard press against his neck. When he turned to see what it was, his face locked in paralyzed fear.
Anna Chutesov was sitting in the seat beside him.
To Gary's shock the Russian agent had drawn her automatic. The open mouth of the barrel tickled the graying whiskers that sprouted just below his ear.
Neither hand nor eyes wavered as she pressed the gun barrel harder into flesh.
"Now, idiot, take me to Boris Feyodov," she commanded.
And her steady voice was as cold as the Siberian Arctic.
Chapter 28
All through the night, he waited. When day finally broke, he watched the light from the rising sun crawl down the hollow interior of the Huitzilopochtli statue.
When the fools from Barkley had first approached him a year ago, Boris Feyodov had given them the structural requirements that would be necessary for the device he had sold them. They had been as excited as all bomb-wielding anarchists on the day they presented him with the plans to the complex they intended to build.
A network of tunnels beneath the city hall and under the main town square would be built for the guts of the weapon. If anyone became curious, the construction would be explained away as structural maintenance on the old town hall building.
Looking at the blueprints, Feyodov saw no designs for the silo that would house the hardware and mirrors that focused the particle stream.
"These plans are incomplete," the general had said to Zen Bower, the de facto head of the Barkley city council.
"You didn't look at the page underneath," Zen replied with a wicked grin.
When Feyodov lifted the thick top paper, he found another blueprint. Schematics for the proposed Huitzilopochtli statue were drawn out in full. There was even a cross section of the statue in which tiny men had been sketched hard at work on the four levels of catwalks.
"You are joking," Feyodov said. But when he pulled his gaze away from the architect's rendition of the South American god, he found a look of sincere determination on the ice cream man's face.