"Including disciples and students," the Oriental said. "And bushes."
Bushes? Had Wimpler heard right? But they couldn't have seen him. He must have misunderstood what the small, yellow man had said. And why was he waiting? It was time to remove these two.
He was ten feet behind them, in the blackness. As he cocked the compressor, there was a small hiss as gas from a carbon-dioxide cylinder flooded the drum from which the skull-crusher got its power.
Elmo cocked it and stepped out from behind his cardboard bush and moved stealthily toward the two men. He extended the compressor to accommodate the taller man's head.
As he did, he was startled to see the Oriental's hand, moving through the darkness, reach behind his own head and grasp one of the arms of the compressor.
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How could he have done that? The compressor was just as invisible as he was.
A coincidence, but one the old man would pay for. He would be minus his fingers.
Wimpler pulled the trigger, releasing the trapped compressed air, but the arms of the compressor did not move.
A malfunction.
Impossible.
He pulled the trigger again, but again the arms of the crusher did not work. Then there was a strange ripping sound as the inner workings of the machinery rebelled against not being able to do what they were built to do and they ruptured.
Wimpler dropped the compressor and ran back toward the safety of his ersatz bush. He heard the men stand at the bench, and suddenly he feared that he would not be safe, even behind the bush, even cloaked in invisibility in this blackness.
"That way," he heard the Oriental say.
The two men were coming toward him. He peered out from behind the bush. Then he heard the sound and saw its cause. Fifty yards across the Sheep Meadow, eight men were racing toward them. They were carrying knives. Several of them waved them over their heads.
The taller man and the Oriental turned to look and Elmo scrambled away from behind his bush, running hard, back into the deeper darkness of the night.
When he was fifty yards away, hidden in the shadow of a tree, he turned. What he saw made his blood chill inside his body. The eight men with
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knives had surrounded the Oriental and the American with the hard face.
There was a sudden flurry of activity and then three of the armed men were down and motionless. For some reason, Wimpler knew they were dead, although he had not seen the tall man and the Oriental do anything.
He watched again. The five remaining men moved in, all attacking at the same time. Then two more of them were down. And Wimpler still had not seen the two potential victims move.
The three attackers who remained paused for a moment. This time, Wimpler was sure that the taller man did not move at all. He thought he caught a slight touch of movement on the part of the Oriental, and then three more men were down and the only ones left standing were the Oriental and his companion.
Wimpler didn't wait. He turned and ran as fast as he could deep into the park. He would not stop until he came out the other side.
Those two were far more dangerous than he could ever have imagined.
He hated them. For they had, this night, brought back the wimp, even if only for a few moments.
They had destroyed his compressor and worse, his sense of invulnerability.
He thought about it as he ran. It must have been luck. The Oriental could not have seen him. He had not even been looking in Wimpler's direction.
Elmo was still an invisible man, and he would respond as the new Elmo Wimpler.
With hatred and with power.
He hated those two men, the tall-thin one and the
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old Oriental. They would pay for what they had done tonight to mess up his plan. He had two contracts scheduled and now both were gone.
He would devise a new skull-crusher. The two men might even have done him a favor exposing the malfunction in his weapon. But they had not done themselves a favor.
They had done themselves great harm.
They had put themselves at the top of Elmo Wimpler's must-kill list.
He continued running. He had another meeting scheduled.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Chiun looked down at the dead bodies surrounding them. Remo's head was in the air as if sniffing.
He returned to Chiun.
"I know," Chiun said. "He's gone."
"You let him get away," Remo said. "You knew he was there and you let him get away. Didn't you?"
"A terrible error of judgment," Chiun said.
Remo had picked up one of the knives from the eight dead men on the ground. He felt the bone and leather handle. "It doesn't look like an American knife," he said.
"It cannot be," Chiun said. "The handle has not yet fallen off."
"I wonder who sent these clowns," Remo asked.
"And the other two back at that house. It seems we are not only hunters but hunted."
"Yeah," said Remo. "But you tell Smith you let Wimpler get away. You tell him."
Chiun touched his arm. Remo looked across the Sheep Meadow and saw a woman coming toward them. He recognized the hair and the walk even before he focused on the face.