"The sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can get back to your TV," Remo said.
"Can we make the eleven o'clock update?"
"Maybe."
"Stop dawdling," Chiun commanded, slicing through the water like a torpedo.
Dawn was rising in Anatola, casting pink halos around the white sun-baked buildings. Below the halos, the city's fat flies were beginning to stir, preparing themselves for another day's feasting in a land that seemed created just for them. They buzzed into the fetid streets, stopping to drink at the stagnant, sewage-laden streams that ran freely along the narrow walkways. They lit undisturbed on the delicious three-day-old cow meat, already veiled with the thick scent of decay, hanging from the hawkers' stands. For dessert, they swarmed over a tempting display of rotting fruit that would eventually be fed to the children of the wealthy after the flies had taken their fill. Another good day.
Remo swatted at the flies that buzzed in the city square like a cloud. The meat hawker scurried over to them, waving a stinking gray slab and burbling something through a mouthful of loos© brown teeth.
"You've got to be kidding," Remo said, and walked on. Chiun was silent. At the gates to the city, he had slowed his breathing to a point that wouldn't even register on a life-support system. He explained that it was preferable to experiencing Zadnia and the Zadnians at full consciousness.
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In the distance, the twelve towers of the Palace of Anatoia stood out like needles against the reddening sky.
"Guess that's where we're going," Remo said. "You might as well bring yourself up to capacity, Little Father."
"I'd rather not," Chiun croaked.
A high wail punctuated the endless drone of the flies. At first Remo thought it was one of the vendors on the street, beginning his day's supplication to whatever idiots were desperate enough to buy the food in Zadnia, but it wasn't the call of a Middle Eastern sales-pitch. It was a cry of terror, and it was coming from inside the walled boundaries of the palace.
"He can't shoot me," the voice cried. "It's not fair. I've done everything he wanted. Be reasonable. Take the hundred. Please."
As Remo listened, a second voice, high and singsong, came from within the wall. "When you dead, we take hundred dollah anyway. We take rings off finger. We take gold from teeth. You not have to pay us now, very welcome."
Remo scaled the palace wall and peered over. Facing the wall were twelve men in Zadnian uniforms, their weapons pointed at the solitary blindfolded figure in front of them.
"Ready," squeaked the commanding guard. The men raised their rifles.
"Inside line?" Remo whispered.
Chiun shook his head. "A waste. There are only twelve of them. We use the double-spiral air blow series."
"What for? That's a trick, shot."
"Aim."
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"All right," Remo sighed. "Whatever you say." He vaulted over the wall.
"Fi-aghhh." The commander's windpipe lodged into his nose as he twirled end over end above the heads of the firing squad.
"Higher," Chiun said. He grasped the rifles of two of the guards and, with a flick of his wrists sent their owners hurtling upward before they could release their weapons. The guards, looking like khaki-colored pinwheels, flew in two different directions up to twenty feet before their trajectory curved into two huge parabolas. They met head-on in the air, their skulls cracking on impact. Chiun smiled. "A little art," he said.
"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Remo said, hefting the fattest soldier he'd ever seen into the air, while another attacked him from behind. "Personally, I'm getting a hernia." An inside line would have been so much easier, he thought as a soldier charged him with his AK-47. At the moment when the machinegun would have made contact, Remo was behind the guard, and then the guard was shooting forward and smashing into another, and then with a light blow to the man in front they were both airborne. Three others spiraied into the air like footballs, deflating as they impaled themselves on three of the palace's towers.
"You see now the double-spiral air blow is not so easy," Chiun said with smiling triumph.
"Who said it was," Remo grunted, propelling another guard into the palace walls.
"You did. You told all those people that I was not responsible for the beautiful attack on the two men at Shangri-la. You gave me no credit whatever."
"Chiun, look out!" Three men stood directly behind the old Oriental, their rifles leveled.
"It was masterful work," Chiun groused on without
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missing a beat, as the weapons in the hands of the soldiers were suddenly buried in the dust and the men sailed upward, one after the other, in a giant oval. As each of them neared the ground, Chiun struck him upward again, bringing each blow in faster until the three men were nothing more than limp, boneless pulps, which Chiun juggled like boiled eggs.
"Okay, it's a tough attack," Remo panted, conceding the point. He flung an arm into the oval and the men crashed into a fleshy pile on the ground.
"What's going on?" came a muted, panic-filled squeak from in front of the wall.
Remo went to Foxx and pulled off the blindfold and the ropes that bound his wrists. Foxx took a look at the carnage in the courtyard, then at Remo. "You," he said, awestruck. "But I thought you were going to kill me."
"Naw," Remo said. "What's a little murder, treason, and assassination between friends? Your next target was only going to be the president of the United States. A little money in your pocket, a new government for America, run by a terrorist. What the hell?"
"I'm glad you see it that way," Foxx said, smiling.
"Just one question. Where's the procaine formula manufactured these days?"
Foxx winced. "Well, there's just a teeny problem with that," he said apologetically. "The lab in Switzerland that was producing it burned down three weeks ago. But we can get around that. Smali amounts of the drug can be extracted directly from certain people. Horses, they're called, people with-"
"Yeah, I know. Like Irma Schwartz."
"Exactly." Foxx's face brightened. "They're rare, but not that rare, and it only takes six or seven bodies to produce the extract used in the mixture. It's easy,
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really. We can make it right at Shangri-la. I was planning to, anyway. The Schwartz woman was the first. With your skills, we can have the rest in no time."
"Great to hear," Remo said. "Just knock off a few strangers, and there you have it."
"The fountain of youth."
"Except for the poor suckers you murder just to get at the juices in their bodies."
"Nobodies," Foxx said dismissively. "Never be missed. What do you say?"
"I say there are too many amateur assassins in this world," Chiun said.
"I agree," Remo said.