"She is afraid of a chair." And he stamped his sandaled foot against the floor a second time, causing the wood chair to skitter to one side. Chiun cackled.
Anna Chutesov gave the Master of Sinanju a bilious stare. But when she sat down, she availed herself of another chair.
"Gordons was missing one critical element," Remo went on. "Creativity. He didn't have any. He could reason in a simple way, but he was unable to think original thoughts-kind of like a Hollywood producer. It drove him crazy. He kept trying to figure out ways to become creative. One time, he killed a bunch of artists and scooped out their brains for study. It didn't work. The last time we saw Gordons, he had assimilated a NASA artificial intelligence computer. And, bingo, instant creativity."
"But he was still stupid," said Chiun.
"Slow, anyway," Remo amended. "But he was still dangerous, and we had to chase him all the way to Moscow to recover the computer."
"Gordons was in Russia?" Anna Chutesov said.
"Do you remember the Volga missile?" Remo asked her.
Anna Chutesov said nothing. She realized her mouth was gaping, and she clicked her teeth shut.
"That is one of the greatest secrets of my government. How did you know about it? How could you know?"
"Your people had a doozy of an idea. They couldn't land a man on the moon, even after the U.S. showed them how. And they were afraid that we'd claim the moon for America one day. So they created a deadly germ that could breed in space and infiltrate spaceships and spacesuits, and then loaded it aboard a moon rocket called the Volga. The idea was to poison the moon so no one could claim it."
"I know the plan," said Anna Chutesov hotly. "It was insane. But it was a previous regime. The current leadership had nothing to do with it."
Remo shrugged as if that were a minor detail. "Chiun and I followed Gordons to Moscow. The Russians had captured him because in order to launch the Volga, they needed the artificial intelligence computer he had absorbed. We made a truce with Gordons, and convinced him to ride the Volga into outer space and send it off course. The moon was saved and Gordons was out of our lives. A happy ending, we thought. Until today."
"There were strange rumors surrounding the Volga's fate," Anna Chutesov said slowly. "The men in charge of the project were blamed for the failure and executed."
"That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said.
"I do not understand how this Gordons could attach himself to the Yuri Gagarin. The Volga was lost in deep space."
"That part I can't explain," admitted Remo.
Smith suddenly looked up from his terminal. "Oh, my God," he whispered.
"Smitty?" said Remo.
"Gordons knew where to find us."
"Yeah, he's creative now. He probably looked us up in the Yellow Pages."
"No. That isn't it." Smith turned in his chair to face the others. "Even lost in space, Gordons wasn't entirely helpless. He probably fabricated some kind of propulsion system from the Volga's parts. It would be easy for him. But finding earth would be next to impossible without specific navigational programming. Unless Gordons had a signal to home in on."
"What's so hard about that? There's plenty of earth radio transmissions he could have locked in on," said Remo.
"Not from Rye, New York. Not from Folcroft."
"From where, then?" asked Remo.
"Do you remember the transmitter Gordons planted on you that last time?"
The memory made Remo absently scratch his back. "Yeah, he stuck a little thing into my back no bigger than a bee sting. I didn't even feel it, but it threw my body out of whack. I couldn't stop hopping like a jack-in-the-box until Chiun pulled it out."
"You never could sit still," Chiun said unkindly.
"I took possession of the device after you returned from Moscow," Smith said. "It later disappeared. I can remember thinking it must have fallen off my desk and I had accidentally swept it up during a cleaning."
Anna Chutesov came to her feet.
"If this Gordons homed in on this office, it would explain why he landed in this area," she said.
"Yes, it would," Smith agreed.
"Then the transmitter must still be here. Where did you see it last?"
Smith considered. "Right ... here," he said, placing a finger on a packet of printouts. "I placed it on a set of computer forms. I always put my printouts on this quadrant of the desk."
"Believe him," said Remo. "At home, he's probably got individual compartments in his sock drawer."
"Then the transmitter is still here," said Anna. Everyone got down on the floor and looked for the transmitter, except the Master of Sinanju, who muttered something about closing the barn door after the horse. Only he didn't say "horse," he said "ox."
After several minutes, Remo got to his feet and said, "I don't see anything."
"Nor I," admitted Smith.
"It does not seem to be here," said Anna Chutesov. And remembering that Remo had called it a bee sting, she ran her hands along the floorboards. She was rewarded by a tiny stinging sensation in the ball of her thumb.
"Ouch!" she said deliberately.
"You all right?" asked Remo solicitously.
"A splinter," Anna said, getting to her feet. "Here, let me . . ."
"I am fully capable of extracting a splinter from my own hand," she said sternly. Turning to Smith, she asked, "Is there a washroom where I can clean the wound?"
Smith handed her a brass key. "Use my private washroom," he said. "It's out in the hall."
"Thank you," said Anna Chutesov.
In the washroom, she held her thumb up to the bare ceiling bulb. As she had hoped, the splinter was black, insectlike. It had penetrated at a shallow angle so that it was clearly visible under the translucency of her epidermis. The transmitter.
Anna washed a droplet of blood from the point of entry and, without removing the transmitter, she rejoined the others.
"Find it?" she asked brightly.
"No," said Smith.
"Uh-uh," seconded Remo. "I don't think it's here."