They emerged on a busy street and practically into a converging swarm of red-striped white police Renaults whose blue bubble-top lights flashed angrily.
"We're screwed!" Rod Cheatwood moaned.
Remo tapped the brake, sent the wheel turning right, then left, then right again. The car, responding, performed a seemingly impossible maneuver that caused it to spin in place.
Suddenly it was facing the other way and rocketing forward.
A long line of police cars was coming the other way. Remo warned, "Hang on," and prepared to hang a U-turn designed to bring the two converging groups of vehicles at one another.
But the approaching police cars suddenly turned off the boulevard and disappeared from sight.
Remo drove past, saying, "What was that all about?"
In the rearview mirror the pursuing cars also turned up that road. It was marked A4.
"Where does that road go?" Remo asked.
"It goes," Dominique said thinly, "to ze eastern suburbs."
"Euro Beasley lies that way, doesn't it?"
"It does," said Dominique.
"It was pretty quiet when we left it," Remo said.
A line of military helicopters skimming the low skyline also broke eastward.
"Something's up out there. Something big."
Remo turned on the dash radio.
He immediately got an excited crackle of French that didn't sound like a disk jockey speaking.
"What's he saying?" said Remo.
Dominique listened intently. Her face began to come apart like a house of cards.
From the rear Chiun spoke up. "He is saying that reactionaries have attacked Euro Beasley."
"Whose reactionaries?"
"The American reactionaries who fomented civil war."
"Reactionaries! You don't mean reenactors, do you?"
"It is possible I meant that."
"What the hell are Civil War reenactors doing attacking Euro Beasley?" shouted Remo.
When no one offered a ready answer, he pulled over to a pay phone and called America.
"Smitty, Remo. We got the Beasley guy, but something's up."
"I am receiving sketchy reports of soldiers dressed in the uniforms of the old French Second Empire Army breaching the quarantine line surrounding Euro Beasley. What can you add?"
"Try Civil War reenactors."
"What!"
"That's what the French radio is reporting."
"It all fits," Smith said in a dull, barely comprehending voice.
"Not to me," said Remo.
"No, I mean the Beasley employees-transportation charges. They entered France via the Chunnel."
"So what's their game? There's already a Beasley park over here."
"Remo, my reports are the French forces were routed by very strong colored lights."
"We wrecked those controls before we left."
"I wrecked them," Chiun called from the car.
"The reenactors were obviously carrying their own devices," Smith said briskly. "Remo, this has gone too far. The Beasley Corporation is controlling those Civil War units. I have no doubt of that. And what they have done is nothing less than an act of war."
"Okay, but that's between Beasley and France, right?"
"I do not think that distinction can be made here. In the eyes of much of the world, the Beasley Corporation is America."
"Every time that idiot Beasley launches a plan, he ends up dragging us to a hot war somewhere," Remo said bitterly.
"Remo, if you have to kill every Civil War reenactor at Euro Beasley, you will do this. Do you understand?"
Remo hesitated.
"Remo," Smith said, his voice like flint. "We cannot have a war with France over an entertainment company's mindless plans for global expansion. I want you to break their backs to the last man."
"All right."
"And if Uncle Sam Beasley is anywhere in that place, you will render him completely and totally immobile. Do you understand?"
"You want me to kill him."
"I want him destroyed to the last atom."