"I'm fine," he insisted, waving her onward. Blinking seemed to help. The world was beginning to come back into focus. "What is this place anyway?"
She tore her eyes from Remo, turning her full attention back to the underground road.
"A poorly kept secret," she explained. "After the Gulf War, Iraq continued its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Everyone knew the labs were probably being hidden under these palaces. It was like a big shell game. This is where Iraq's assassin is going to finish you off."
"Him and what Republican Guard?" Rerno grunted.
They had come to the end of the road. Buried deep beneath the mountains was a complex of offices and labs. Metal catwalks surrounded the man-made cavern. It looked like a James Bond set on a Roger Corman budget.
"This is it," Rebecca said, stopping the Jeep. They had gone through the same drill in a half-dozen countries. Rebecca would drop him off to be attacked by the latest assassin, then swing by to pick him up later.
This time as Remo got out of the vehicle something felt different. Rebecca didn't seem right.
Probably not her. More than likely it was Remo. His senses were still recovering. And then it was there. Her dazzling smile. Plastered across her beautiful face.
"Good luck," she said.
Blaming everything on the strange disorientation he was still feeling, Remo shut the door of the Jeep. "See you in a few," he said.
Rebecca nodded tightly. Without a word she turned the Jeep around and headed back up the long road. Alone in the subterranean chamber, Remo shook his head once more. "Thanks a lot, guys," he muttered.
Turning, he headed deeper into the complex. As he walked, he slowly began to extend his senses. It was like flexing sore muscles. He had spent so much time focusing around the spirits of men who weren't there that everything was out of whack. Still, he could feel his body adjusting.
It took another minute for his senses to return to normal. Once they did, he frowned.
"What the hell?" Remo grumbled.
There were no life signs. The cavern was a few hundred yards around. Except for the road in, he couldn't detect any other tunnels or chambers. It was small enough that he should have been able to sense an enemy. But there wasn't so much as a single heartbeat in the entire underground complex.
"I'm warning you," he called, "if there's a smelly Russian monk floating around down here, this time I'm harvesting eyeballs."
With great disappointment he suddenly remembered he'd left his eyeball-poking stick on Rebecca Dalton's plane.
"Crap," complained Remo Williams.
And in response there came a loud animal roar. The sound came from the direction of the tunnel. For an instant Remo thought Iraq had sent a herd of stampeding elephants to kill him. He wondered briefly if elephants were legal to use as tools of assassination in the Sinanju Time of Succession.
And then the choking dust cloud rolled in along with the growing, terrible roar, and Remo realized that it wasn't a herd of elephants after all, but an explosion so massive that it rocked the ground beneath his feet.
And in the same instant Remo realized who Iraq's hired assassin probably was, but it was too late to do anything about it because the roaring dust cloud was upon him.
OUTSIDE THE COLLAPSED entrance to the tunnel, Rebecca Dalton neatly tucked the tiny silver antenna back inside her cell phone. It had taken just a three-digit number and the pound key to set off the explosives buried in the rock above the tunnel. The shafts in which the bombs had been placed were drilled down from the mountain above so that there was no evidence of them inside. Men trained in Sinanju had amazing abilities of perception. She hadn't wanted to take the risk of drilling up from the inside.
Marveling at the technology available to assassins in this modern age, Rebecca tossed the phone into the big pocket of her beige desert jacket and drove over to a small shed that sat away from the palace. There was no one inside.
Rebecca sat down before a computer monitor. An old-fashioned microphone that looked as if it had been scavenged from Walter Winchell's attic sat beside it.
The keyboard and screen commands were in Arabic. That didn't matter to Rebecca Dalton. Like the pro that she was, Rebecca began typing swiftly at the keyboard. At the far end of snaking tendrils of wire, unseen locks popped open.
On the monitor a dozen red warnings flashed. That was all there was to it.
Brushing a little desert grime from one leg of her pants, Rebecca reached for the microphone. While there was still time to talk to the man she had just murdered.
ELECTRIC FANS successfully removed most of the dust from the air. They whirred for a few minutes before a second pair of explosions-these much smaller than the one that had sealed the tunnel-brought them to a spluttering stop.
A gasoline-fueled generator continued to chug in the distance, feeding power to dull lights. In the yellow glare, Remo found huge boulders blocking the tunnel a dozen yards along. Soft groans and puffs of dust rose from the newly formed wall.
Remo could sense no other openings. The chamber was completely sealed off from the outside world. It would take hours-maybe days-for him to dig through all that rock back up to ground level. "Great," Remo groused.
Tiny glass-enclosed laboratories were built into the walls on either side of the cave. Panes of glass had been carefully removed from each of the rooms, compromising what were supposed to be sealed environments.
As Remo stood in the middle of the chamber, he heard various pops coming from each of the rooms. Vaporous clouds began hissing out the open windows and into the main cave.
Remo instantly shut down his pores. Darting from the main section of the chamber, he raced up the tunnel. The wall of fallen rock stopped him dead.
He launched a fist into a rock, sending a shudder through the cavern walls. A fissure appeared along the broad face of the largest boulder. Another pummeling fist and the rock cracked in two. Wrapping his fingers around the edges, he pulled it free, hurling the half-ton piece of rock back into the chamber. It landed with a thunderous boom.
He was spinning back to the wall when he heard a voice behind him.
"Don't bother," Rebecca Dalton announced, her voice distorted by microphone feedback. "It's half a mile out through solid rock. You'll never make it." Remo didn't turn. He felt the waves from a video camera directed at his back.
His hand smashed the remaining section of rock, flinging it back in two large chunks.
"Let me guess," he grunted. "You work for Iraq."
"More or less," she replied, her voice as calm and sweet as ever. "They were the ones who hired me initially. But I'm getting a double salary for this. One from Iraq, the other from Benson Dilkes."
By her tone it was clear she thought the name should mean something to Remo.
Remo had moved on to the next rock. It was slow going. All the while he felt the tendrils of something soft and sinister moving through the air at his back. "Never heard of him."
"He was one of the best," Rebecca's echoing voice said. "Present company excepted, of course." Her tone was light, laughing. "Benson taught me a lot. Retired for a while, but he's back in the game again. He's got contacts around the world. More than anyone else in the business I've ever known. Benson is the one who's been pulling all the assassins before you could meet with them."
He knew it. There was a conspiracy. "Why?" he asked as he worked.
Even with fans off, shifting air currents within the underground chamber had continued to lazily circulate. Remo felt the first of the cloud-now invisible-roll over him.
Whatever was in the air was far more deadly than the simple poison gas Thomas Smedley had used against him in London. Remo's skin prickled hot. He redoubled his efforts.
"I don't know," Rebecca replied. "A job. A big one, by the way he sounds. Benson doesn't give much away. But it seems he's hiring an army of death to take over that village of yours. He's got a new employer who must really have it in for you. But they didn't want you to get too frustrated too soon, so Benson hired me to keep you busy. He'll be so proud that I was able to do more than that."
"Don't count on it," Remo said. He was thinking of Chiun. Alone in Sinanju. An Army of Death-wasn't there some ancient prophecy about that?
One thing was certain. Remo's threats were hollow. He was feeling it. Whatever was in the air was all over him. Crawling on his skin, burrowing in. Burning hot. His breathing low, he felt the heat in mouth and nose.
His movements were growing slower. He threw out another rock, climbing inside the opening. It was narrow, confining. He had barely tunneled a few feet. Not enough.