"Not if you're an ass man," Remo said.
"Who was that you called?" Pamela asked.
"My mother," Remo said. "She worries when I'm out of town too long. She worries about rain and snow and gloom of night keeping me from the swift completion of my appointed rounds."
"That's the post office again," she said.
"Don't nitpick," Remo said.
Mr. Hamuta was alone in the Carmel house, built overlooking the ocean on the town's fourteen-mile-long scenic coast drive. The entrance to the house was down a long winding pathway that began at the home's heavily locked front gates.
When Buell and Marcia had left, the redhead had asked, "Should we leave the front gate open?"
"No," Buell said.
"Why not?"
"Because the gate won't stop him whether it's locked or unlocked. But if we leave it unlocked, he might suspect a trap. Don't you agree, Mr. Hamuta?"
"Most wholeheartedly," Hamuta said. He was in an upstairs bedroom. The large windows had been opened and, sitting back from the glare of daylight, he was hidden from sight but commanded a total view of the walk and the gate and the roadway beyond.
"Suppose he comes from the ocean side?" Marcia asked.
"Mr. Hamuta has a television monitor," Buell said. "He can watch the ocean side." He pointed to the small television set which he had hooked up in the room, which showed a continuous panning shot of the Pacific.
"It is all quite adequate," Hamuta said. He was wearing a three-piece suit. His vest was tightly buttoned, his tie immaculately knotted and held in place by a collar pin on his expensive white-on-white shirt. "You choose not to remain for the entertainment?"
"Where we're going is hooked up to the house monitors here. We'll watch it on television."
"Very good. Will you tape it for me?" Hamuta said. "I would like to look at it when I return to Britain."
"You just love blood, don't you, Mr. Hamuta?" Buell said.
Hamuta did not answer. The truth was that he regarded the young American as too crass and too vulgar for words. Blood. What did he know about blood? Or about death? The young Yank designed games in which mechanical creatures died by the tens of thousands. What could he have experienced that would bear any resemblance to the feeling of exhilaration that came when a perfectly placed bullet brought down a human target so that other bullets, perfectly placed also, could carve him like a Christmas goose?
Had Buell ever held his index finger on a trigger and looked down the length of a perfect weapon and for the moment it took to apply the fractional ounce of pressure to the trigger, experienced the knowledge that one was not, at that moment, a mortal anymore but a god, infused with the power of life and death? What did this insignificant creature know about such things, he with his childish visions of fantasy games?
Mr. Hamuta thought these things but said nothing and watched silently as Buell and the woman-- a strange one, that, and much brighter than she appeared to be-- walked up the long curving walkway toward the road where a parked car waited.
Hamuta was glad to be alone, to savor the pleasure of the upcoming moments in silence, thinking to himself how he would place the bullets and where. The man was the important target so he would take the man first. He would put a shot in the knee. No, the hip. A hip shot caused more pain and would immobilize the man. Then he would simply remove the woman with one shot and then go back to the man and carve him up with bullets. It was so much more fun that way. Buell was wrong. Hamuta was not interested in death for death's sake. He was interested in killing for killing's sake. The act of the kill was pure and worthy.
When the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, Hamuta took a telescope from a velvet-lined box and carefully mounted it atop his rifle. Using a magnifying glass, he lined up a series of marks atop the scope with matching marks on the rifle frame itself, locking the telescope into the correct firing focus. The scope was a light-gathering instrument of a highly complicated personal design but it was able to render objects seen in dim light as highly illuminated, as if they were being viewed at high noon under a bright sun.
Then, telescope in place, again he sat, the rifle cradled in his arms like an infant, and waited.
The man first. It would definitely be the man first.
Three thousand miles away, Harold W. Smith looked at the printed report that his computers had spewed out on Abner Buell.
Brilliant. Unquestionably brilliant.
But unstable. Unquestionably unstable.
The computer issued a list of properties held by Buell and companies in which he was an investor. The dry tedium that makes up a person's life, Smith thought.
There was one small item buried at the end of the report. It said that a British computer had malfunctioned and almost resulted in Great Britain announcing it was leaving NATO and signing a friendship pact with Russia. Access to the British computers was by satellite signal from the United States, the computer report stated. Probability of Buell's involvement: sixty-three percent.
A wacko, Smith thought. A wacko tired of playing game-games and now ready to start World War III, the biggest game of all.
He hoped Remo would be in time to stop him.
Remo had tried to dump her by the side of the road when he stopped at a gas station and said he had to use the bathroom. As he expected, she said she did too. He went into the men's room, then darted right back out, jumped in the car and drove away. But something didn't feel right and he figured out what it was just before Pamela stuck her head up from the back seat, where she had been hiding on the floor, and said, "If you try that again, Yank, I'll plug you."
So now they were standing in front of the locked gate of Buell's Carmel mansion and Remo snapped open the lock and pushed the gate open. It swung soundlessly, well-oiled, no squeak.
"You shouldn't come in," he said.
"Why not?"
"It might be dangerous."
"This is California. You think it's not dangerous for me to sit in a car by the side of the road? I'm coming in," she said.
"All right. But you be careful."
"I have my gun."
"That's what I want you to be careful of. I don't want you to go shooting me by accident."
"If I shoot you, it won't be by accident," Pamela Thrushwell sniffed, then followed him down the short flight of steps that led to the twisting flagstone path.
* * *
It was perfect.
The two were off the steps now, onto the path, and Hamuta raised the rifle to his shoulder. The telescope intensified the dim light and brightened the images of the two people walking toward the house.
Perfect.
First the man. A bullet in the hip to drop and immobilize him. Then the woman. Then return to the man.
Perfect.
"Don't look now," Remo said, "but there's somebody in that upstairs window."
Pamela started to look up and Remo pulled her toward him by the wrist. "I said, don't look up."