"Too bad. DEA owes IRS a few scalps. Who did?"
Agent Phelps hesitated. He swallowed. "It was-"
"Out with it."
"It was the butterfly, Mr. Brull."
"We all saw it, Mr. Brull," another agent blurted out.
"It was real. Honest," added a third.
"It killed those three DEA agents, and the rest took off," Phelps finished.
Dick Brull's head swept from side to side, his icy black eyes boring into those of each man. One shuddered and turned away. Another sobbed.
Then his eyes fell on the colorless orbs of Harold W. Smith.
"Who the fuck are you?"
Smith strode over and stopped toe-to-toe with Dick Brull. Their eyes met and locked, Brull's looking up, Smith's glaring down.
Harold Smith stood exactly six feet tall, but looked taller because of his elongated Ichabod Crane frame.
Dick Brull's brush-cut black hair came up to Harold Smith's lower ribs. Brull had to step back two paces in order to hold Smith's cold gaze.
"You responsible for what happened here?" Brull demanded.
"No," Smith said coldly. "You are."
Hearing this, the IRS agents gasped.
"You can't talk back to him like that. He's Dick Brull."
"I don't care if he is the President of the United States," Smith said, not looking away. "This outrage is his responsibility."
"Kiss my ass," Dick Brull yelled.
"I won't dignify that with an answer."
"Then answer this. Where is the gold?"
An agent piped up. "In the basement, sir."
"Shut the fuck up! I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to this lying sack of shit."
Harold Smith's patrician face turned a smoldering crimson. His prim mouth thinned to a bloodless line until he looked like a reverse color negative of an unhappy clown.
"Why don't you see for yourself?" he said bitingly.
"Let's all do that." Brull looked at Smith's trembling-with-rage hands. "Why isn't this man in irons?"
"We thought he was paralyzed."
"Bring him with us. I want to see the look on his sad-sack face when we shove his lying nose into the gold."
Strong hands took Harold Smith by the arms. Smith shook them off, saying, "I can walk under my own power."
"That's what we're afraid of. That you'll try walking out of IRS jurisdiction. Let's go, Smith."
Harold Smith allowed himself to be escorted to the waiting elevator. He and the other agents crowded aboard. The door closed. The elevator began to descend.
Smith looked around, frowning. "Where is Brull?"
"Here, beside you," a voice growled from somewhere in the pack of brown and gray suits.
Smith looked down. Dick Brull's bristly hair floated in the vicinity of his elbow like a hairy jellyfish.
"I see," he said.
The elevator ride was a one of the longest in Harold Smith's memory. He wondered how he would explain what was in the basement. Then, remembering that the Master of Sinanju was lurking somewhere on the premises, he wondered if he would have to.
"HARK," the Master of Sinanju cried. "Smith comes!"
Remo listened to the elephant stampede of feet over the hum of opening elevator doors one floor above and said, "Smith? How can you tell?"
"The creaking of his knee."
Remo focused his own hearing. Harold Smith had an arthritic knee that creaked when he walked. It was a sound Remo had come to associate with the CURE director.
The familiar creaking was audible over the stamping of many feet, but only because Remo's sensitive Sinanju-trained hearing enabled him to pick it out of the din.
"It's Smith, all right," he muttered.
"He walks under duress. Let us free him."
"Let's fade into the woodwork. We'll take our cue from Smith."
They retreated into the deep shadows far to the rear of the basement and waited, immobile and attentive.
HAROLD SMITH was holding his breath as he was marched into the dimly lit basement. They marched him down the stairs as the lights came on and across the sloping floor to the white-painted concrete vault that was CURE's most inviolate secret.
As Smith approached, he saw the door was ajar. Even though he was prepared, his heart leaped like a game fish and a splash of stomach acid seared his esophagus.
Other than that, Smith felt calm. This surprised him. Perhaps he was still numb from the shock of these lightning-fast events.
Big Dick Brull marched up to the door and took hold of it with one musclar hand. "How," he asked, "do you explain this?"