"Good thing this isn't an earthquake zone," he muttered to himself as he surveyed the halfcrumbled wall.
The structure he was trying to find was somewhere east of Grotewohlstrasse beyond the location of the old Wall.
Remo's best course of action would have been to stay on the ground and head east until he ran into a helpful pedestrian. But there were two very important reasons why he couldn't ask directions. The first was simple enough: Remo didn't speak German. The second reason was a bit trickier. The number of bodies Remo had been leaving in his wake lately had begun to attract undue attention. He had been given explicit instructions to eliminate only those who were absolutely necessary.
Of course, all of this would be simpler if Chiun hadn't stopped coming along with him. He understood German. If Remo's teacher had come with Remo rather than sitting like a Korean lump in their Berlin hotel room, the two of them would probably be back home by now.
Thanks to Chiun, Remo's only hope was to find the place himself. And so here he was, standing alone amid the seemingly limitless sea of cheap, Communist-era buildings.
With a put-upon sigh, Remo climbed gingerly atop the crumbling four-foot wall that rimmed the roof.
He was an average-looking man with deep-set eyes and dark hair. He wore a dark green T-shirt and a pair of tan chinos that fluttered in the early-winter breeze. Although the thermometer hovered around the forty-degree mark, Remo seemed unaffected by the cold.
Just beyond the toes of his loafers was a five-story drop into a filthy alley. Thirty feet across the empty air was an identical roof.
Remo hopped over to it.
It was an impossible jump even for an Olympic athlete. Remo made the leap with ease.
One instant he was standing; the next he was airborne. He landed atop the neighboring roof a second later.
Even though he had dispersed his weight in flight so that upon landing he would be no heavier than a handful of feathers, the mortar promptly crumbled beneath his weight. He hopped down to the main roof just as the avalanche of bricks and mortar slipped out from underneath him, landing with a terrible crash in the alley far below.
An angry shout rose up from one of the apartments beneath him. He ignored it.
Remo continued forward.
He picked up speed, running to the edge and leaping for the next building. As he ran, he glanced all around, looking for something in particular. Something the last man he had killed told him would be there.
Building, alley, leap. Run.
Building, alley, leap.
He covered blocks in a matter of minutes.
While he leaped from rooftop to rooftop, Remo found himself thinking of the city's recent history. It was pretty disheartening.
First the fascists, then the Communists. Which was worse? It was a testament to the utter evil of both philosophies that he had a hard time deciding.
Remo finally chose the fascists as being the worst of the two. After all, they were a better reflection of the dark souls of the indigenous population. The Communists had ruthlessly seized control after the Second World War. The Nazis had been voted in.
Remo was above a street parallel to the main concourse of Unter den Linden, leaping to the next building, when something far ahead caught his eye.
Movement. Briefly, he spied someone with a gun. Remo landed softly and skittered crab-like over to a massive vent cap. Twirling slowly in the soft wind, the cover resembled a tin chef's hat.
He peered out from behind it.
Remo didn't know where precisely his leapfrogging had taken him. The man he saw was several buildings away. For all he knew, it could be a guarded government or bank building. It wouldn't help the low profile he was supposed to be keeping for him to assault a few innocent bank guards. Upstairs would blow a gasket.
Remo waited until he spied what he was after. The man turned slowly away from him, scanning the rooftops to the north.
There it was. In plain daylight.
A red armband was wrapped tightly around the armed man's biceps. Within a white circle on the crimson band, the crooked black lines of a swastika were clearly visible.
No doubt about it. This was the place.
He came out from behind the vent cover and strolled casually across the roof. At the edge, he hopped over to the next building. He continued his harmless amble toward the distant rooftop.
Remo didn't want to alarm the sentry. If the man saw him too soon and Remo was running like a maniac in his direction, the neo-Nazi might have time to warn others. This way, as long as Remo wasn't spotted actually jumping from one building to the next, he would look like nothing more than an underdressed apartment dweller who had gone up to fix his antenna.
As it was, the sentry failed to see Remo until after the final leap from the adjacent roof.
Remo dropped down directly in front of the startled neo-Nazi. He smiled.
"Hi. I'm here to kill Gus. Is he in?" Shock.
The young neo-Nazi immediately swung the barrel of his machine gun in Remo's direction. He tried to pull the trigger but was stunned to discover the gun was no longer in his hands. Looking desperately for the weapon, he found to his astonishment that it had somehow ended up in the hands of the strange intruder.
"No, no, no," Remo admonished, as if speaking to a toddler who had just scribbled crayon cave paintings all over the living-room walls. "Mustn't make boom noise."
As the neo-Nazi watched in horror, Remo took the gun barrel in two hands and twisted sharply. There was a quick groan of metal as the barrel bent in half.
A six-foot-high section of wall nearby was dotted with ancient rusted hooks that had been once used to secure lengths of clothesline. Remo hung the U-shaped gun barrel around one of the hooks. Immediately a large section of the wall collapsed under the relatively light weight of the gun. Some of the debris fell to the alley. Most fell to the roof. When they hit the roof's surface, the slabs of concrete continued downward. They crashed through the rooftop, landing in a heap in the apartment directly below.
"Well, crap," Remo griped, peering down into the hole.
There was shouting from the apartment. Through the dancing dust, a wide, pale face peered up through the opening. When he saw Remo, the man grew panicked. The face hastily withdrew.
Since landing on the roof, Remo had been between the guard and the stairwell door, which was rusting on its hinges in an alcove beyond the toppled wall. With Remo's attention redirected momentarily, the guard made a break for the door.
Remo grabbed the man by the back of his brown shirt collar before he could take two steps. He held the man several inches off the roof. "Hold up a second, Frankenfurter," Remo said.
"No, no!" the young man screamed in heavily accented English. "Let me go! Let me go!!"
"In a minute," Remo promised. "First things first. Where's Gus Holloway?"
"I do not know a Gus Holloway."
"That is a lie," Remo said simply. "Every lie gets a whack. In case you were wondering, this is a whack."
Whirling, Remo slammed the neo-Nazi's forehead into the remains of the half-toppled side wall. A square section of mortar shattered from the force of the blow, toppling to the alley far below.
When Remo brought the neo-Nazi back from the wall, his frightened face was caked with dust. He coughed, and a puff of concrete powder gusted into the chilly air. A streak of blood trickled down his dirty forehead.
"My next question is surprisingly similar to my first. Where is Gus Holloway?"