"This ought to be good," chuckled the voice from the high-backed console chair.
Maus nodded. "They'll get him in a cross fire and chip his skeleton to pieces."
"Serve the bastard right. Lock me in a damn rubber room for two years, will he?"
The main monitor on the other side of the room covered Corridor G. Satellite monitors showed Utiliduck security teams regrouping to take up positions of attack at turns of the branch corridors.
"They're in position, Director. The intruder seems oblivious to them."
"What's that he's doing to the wall?"
"Touching it with his fingertips," Captain Maus reported.
"After he takes that next turn, he'll be touching the face of God."
REMO WILLIAMS felt along the wall. It was of sheet steel. Rock solid. An excellent conductor of vibrations. His ears caught the padding of feet made heavy by the weight of awkward weapons. He counted seven in ambush at three separate points just ahead and four more trying to pace him a turn in the corridor behind.
The steel wall grew warm. He was near the hothouse control room that Uncle Sam Beasley would naturally favor because, even after two years out of the cryogenic capsule that had sustained his body until the animatronic heart could be developed, he had not shaken the chill from his old bones.
A tiny whir told Remo that he was being tracked by a camera. He ignored it. As the wall under his brushing fingertips grew warmer, Remo paid attention to the sounds coming from the ambush zone ahead.
Heartbeats began to pick up. Shallow breathing all but stopped. He was close. They were getting ready to spring out.
At the moment just before they would have jumped, Remo set the fingernails of his right hand against the wall and scratched them like nails on a chalkboard.
His nails, hardened by years of diet and exercise, scored the steel with a harsh high-speed screech.
In that paralyzing second when human eyes blinked in startled response, Remo zipped ahead, flashed by the blinded ambush teams, and one hand held flat before him hit a warm blank door.
It caved in, driven as much by the hard column of air Remo was pushing before his flat palm as it was by the hand itself.
It was a sliding door. So one side buckled completely while the other held. But one side was enough.
Remo stepped into a short entryway that shouldn't have been there, so he kept going.
A sharp plate of steel like a guillotine dropped behind him, stirring the hair on the back of Remo's head.
"Too late," Remo told Maus, whose finger had just stabbed the button that had released the descending blade.
"Damn!" Maus muttered.
The voice of Uncle Sam Beasley barked from behind his chair. "What's wrong with that ambush team?"
"I don't know, Director."
"Time to go back to the happy home," Remo called to the back of the console chair. Uncle Sam didn't bother to turn. One hand reached out to stab a button. The good one.
"Never," he snapped.
Remo stepped toward the chair, spun it around and looked into the cold eyes of Uncle Sam Beasley.
One eye exploded like a camera flashbulb. Too late. Remo had already heard the click of the cybernetic relay in the eyeball and shut his own eyes. The insides of his eyelids turned a brilliant laser-beam red. Aiming from memory, he drove his right index finger into the prosthetic eye.
The eye imploded. The animatronic heart kept beating as usual.
A flat click to his rear brought Remo spinning around.
Captain Maus had a gun. An Uzi, a mouse head stamped on the butt. He was holding it steady on Remo.
"Shoot me," Remo warned, "and Uncle Sam buys it, too."
Maus hesitated.
Behind Remo, Uncle Sam growled, "Shoot anyway."
Sweaty faced, Maus said, "But, Uncle Sam-"
"Shoot, you toady!"
The pale trigger finger turned to bone, and Remo, astonished, started to move in on Captain Maus. He cleared the room in less than three seconds, wove left to avoid a fistful of bullets snapping at him and struck Maus in the temple with a hard slap.
Maus went flying into the console, not dead but chastised to the point of multiple fractures.
Remo whirled.
The back of the console was dotted with vicious black holes. Uncle Sam's one good hand flopped off the console and swung loose like a hinged stick.
Remo crossed the room and spun the chair.
Uncle Sam Beasley sat folded in his chair, his head hanging down between his knees in the prescribed airline-crash position. He wasn't moving. Not even his dead dangling arms.
Horrified, Remo said, "Uncle Sam!"
Remo grabbed the broken figure by his collar and lifted the bloodless face into view. It was intact, the good eye rolled up until only the white showed, the frosty mustache seeming to droop in death.
Remo's ears told him that Uncle Sam's animatronic heart beat no more.
"Damn," he said under his breath. "Damn, you're dead."
A familiar voice boomed above Remo's head. "No. You are."
Remo looked up. The main monitor was filled with the age-seamed visage of Uncle Sam Beasley.
"Didn't think I'd let you get that close to me again?" Uncle Sam gloated.
The inert body in Remo's hand suddenly snapped back to life, and a hydraulic hand with snapping steel fingers sought his throat.