It looked exactly the way he remembered it. Before it had fallen into the biggest sinkhole in Florida history, that is. Pennants chattered in the wind, and colorful bunting everywhere proclaimed Have a Beasley Christmas.
Two years ago an armed invasion of Cuba had brought Remo to the Cuban-exile community of Miami on the trail of the mastermind attempting to destabilize the island nation. The trail led, of all places, to Sam Beasley World, where Remo had discovered an underground installation in which preparations were under way for a second assault using animatronic soldiers under the command of the legendary animator and theme-park operator, Uncle Sam Beasley.
It was hard to judge which was more fantastic: that the Sam Beasley Corporation, with theme parks in several nations, would try to overthrow the Castro government in order to establish a tax-free world headquarters and theme park in the Caribbean; or that the mastermind was none other than Uncle Sam himself, who was supposed to have died in the mid-1960s.
Eventually Remo and his mentor, Chiun, had gone to Cuba to head off the second invasion. In the process they had captured Uncle Sam alive. Normally disposing of a problem like Uncle Sam would have been easy. Remo was sanctioned to kill in the name of national security. Except that Remo had grown up watching "The Marvelous World of Sam Beasley" and had been a huge fan. The Master of Sinanju, too, had a soft spot for the defrosted animation genius.
So they had spirited him to Folcroft Sanitarium, the CURE cover installation, where Uncle Sam was stripped of his hydraulic hand and cybernetic eyeball. Then he'd been installed in a rubber room to live out the rest of his natural life, which, considering that he had been given an animatronic heart in addition to the other cyborg parts, could mean a hundred years or so.
Uncle Sam had recently escaped, and for three months Dr. Smith had been trying to track him down. No luck. The CURE computers were down, leaving the organization virtually blind except for human intelligence.
So every few weeks Remo would infiltrate a part of the Sam Beasley empire looking for him. Now that it was completely rebuilt, it was time to hit Sam Beasley World in Furioso, Florida, once again. It was no fun, but it beat putting up with the snotty French at Euro Beasley.
Remo parked in the lot and bought a ticket at the entrance. He walked down Main Street, which was bedecked with silvery tinsel and other Christmassy decorations, eyes and ears alert for signs of trouble. The last time he was here, the cartoony greeters had been put on alert and issued weapons. They had been told they were repelling terrorists.
Instead, Remo and Chiun had gone through them like buzz saws. Back then, the entire park had been honeycombed with snares and booby-trapped attractions. Remo had no reason to think the rebuilt attractions were any different.
As he melted through the crowds, Remo pretended not to notice the greeters whispering into their snouts and fuzzy paws.
"He's here," whispered Gumpy Dog into his paw.
"The one with the thick wrists," added Missy Mouse.
"He's headed toward Horrible House," said Mucky Moose into his drooping foam antlers.
Remo overheard them tracking him. No response seemed to come back. Maybe Beasley was here, maybe he wasn't. If he was, there was only one place he would be. Utiliduck.
Casually Remo sauntered over to a great plastic hippopotamus with a yawning mouth. A sign hung on the hippo's lower tusks. It said Trash.
As people passed by, they tossed their empty soda cans and candy wrappers into the hippo's mouth. When the hippo's belly got full, it shut its mouth and, with a whoosh, emptied its trashy guts into a pipe that led from its fat gray rump to somewhere underground.
Remo watched the hippo's mouth reopen. So did a greeter dressed as Mongo Mouse. He was pretending to ignore the curious questions of a little ponytailed girl while trying to act nonchalant.
Instead, he looked like a human radar dish with those ridiculous ears zeroing in on Remo Williams.
Remo ignored him and waited for the mechanical pink mouth to yawn its fullest. When the little girl with the ponytail tugging on his spun-glass tail succeeded in distracting Mongo for a moment, Remo dived into the hippo's mouth.
The hippo, stomach counterweights responding to Remo's lean one hundred fifty-five pounds, promptly shut its happy jaws.
Mongo Mouse looked up and muttered, "Shit."
"Don't say bad words, Mongo," the little girl cautioned. "Uncle Sam might be listening."
"Get lost," Mongo Mouse growled, striding toward the hippo and whispering into his snout mike, "I lost him. Anybody see where he went?"
"Not me," reported Screwball Squirrel.
"Not me," said Gumpy Dog.
Remo heard all this through the hippo's gray polystyrene shell. Then the pneumatic pipe at his feet irised open, and with a whoosh he was sucked down.
The pipe was narrow, its sides slick Teflon. Remo just went with the flow, legs straight, arms flat to his sides as he was drawn into the massive trash-moving ductwork of Utiliduck, the underground complex that housed the dark underbelly of Sam Beasley World, the place where the refuse was processed, power and electronics were generated, and the other systems needed to keep the park operating year-round were hidden.
Remo just hoped that he hadn't picked a tube that fed directly into an incinerator.
IF IT WASN'T for that damn figure skater with the big teeth, Godfrey Grant would not have been consigned to the bowels of Utiliduck. That much he knew.
Oh, how the world had come to love her clean, graceful body as it flashed and swirled over Olympic ice. Her face graced endless magazine covers and cereal boxes and billboards.
And Godfrey Grant had come to hate her guts. And her damn jumbo teeth.
Grant's downfall had begun when the figure skater had been whacked in the knee by dimwits in the pay of a rival figure skater. Overnight she had became an object of sympathy the world over. America clung to her sobbing, piteous, plaintive "Why me's?" until miraculously she had recovered enough to challenge her rival at Lillehammer.
Godfrey Grant had cheered her on even when she won only the silver. At least she had left her rival in the dust. Or the ice. Or whatever.
When the greeter-overseer had come to Grant the next day and informed him that he would sit beside her in the post-Olympics parade through Sam Beasley World, Grant was ecstatic. The fact that he would be encased in a polyurethane Monongahela Mouse greeter's outfit didn't matter at the time. He was going to share the spotlight for all the world to see. If only his girl and his immediate family knew it was him wearing the lollipop ears, that was okay. It was enough.
Came the glorious day, and the figure skater climbed into the pink-and-purple Mousemobile for a turn around the Enchanted Village.
The cameras were rolling. They were waving to the cheering crowd. That part was fine.
But some idiot in publicity had miked the Mousemobile and caught the damn figure skater, a two-million-dollar Sam Beasley check stuffed down her flat ice-princess chest, complaining to beat the band.
"This is cornball city," she had muttered for all the world to hear. "I can't believe I'm sitting next to a giant mouse and people are taking it seriously. Puhleeze!"
Under his mouse head, Godfrey Grant had gone white. He knew how image sensitive the Mouseschwitz High Command was. So he gave the figure skater a gentle nudge in the ribs.
A harmless nudge. That's all it was supposed to be. A nudge and a whispered suggestion to cool it while you're a guest of Sam Beasley World.
Trouble was, the Mongo Mouse head didn't afford much peripheral vision. Grant couldn't see as clearly as he should. And the gentle nudge in the ribs became a hard elbow to the temple.
With a yelp the figure skater dropped right off the back of the Mousemobile, where a team of Clydesdale horses clopped all over the ungrateful bitch, mashing fingers, breaking teeth and most unfortunately shattering the very same kneecap the moron with the collapsible steel baton had failed to even dent.
The figure skater's career was over.
Godfrey Grant's career with Beasley would have been over, too.
Except for the fact that they had miked the Mousemobile.
When he was summoned before the Beasley overseer, Grant expected they'd want his head. The rodent head. And his resignation.
They took the head, all right. But instead of firing him, they consigned Grant to Utiliduck duty, the lowest niche in the the Beasley food chain.
"You're not firing me?" he had asked.
"Normally you'd have been out on your curly tail in a flat minute," the overseer had barked. "But you lucked out. The networks picked up the bitch's whinings and broadcast them clear to Tokyo."