"Lost!" Chiun squeaked, flouncing up. "My precious trunk cannot be lost!"
"I didn't say lost," the skycap repeated.
"He didn't say lost," Remo said quickly. "It's probably misplaced."
"The lackey who misplaced my trunk would do better to misplace his head," Chiun said in a stentorian voice.
"He talks that way sometimes," Remo told the skycap. "Let me handle this."
"Remo, I will not countenence this," Chiun warned.
"And you won't have to."
"And if my trunk is truly lost?"
"We'll get it back. Come on, let's find a way into the luggage loading area."
"Follow me," Chiun said, and stepped into the dead conveyor belt. He passed through the fall of leather straps and as Harold Smith called his name in a frightened voice, Remo ducked in after the Master of Sinanju.
The other side was a maze of chutes, tunnels, and self-propelled luggage trucks.
Chiun looked around, his clear hazel eyes cold.
"Uh-oh," Remo said. For one man was driving one of the trucks away from the area. A glossy blue trunk sat in back. Unmistakably Chiun's.
"Thief!" Chiun called. And flashed after the truck in a flurry of scarlet silk.
"We don't know that," Remo said, hurrying after him.
But they knew it for the truth a moment later. The man stopped the truck beside an open van. Two other luggage handlers were shoving stuff into the back of the van. Shoulder bags. Cameras. Videocams. Even a boxed VCR.
The man with Chiun's trunk got off and motioned for the others to give him a hand.
They noticed Chiun at that point.
"Hey!" one shouted. "This is a restricted area. Get out of here!"
"Thief!" Chiun cried. "To touch that trunk is to die!"
"And he means every word," Remo called.
The Master of Sinanju looked like a harmless wisp attired in his silk robes. His age could have been anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty, but in fact he had passed the century mark some time back.
The three luggage pilferers ranged from perhaps twenty-five to thirty-eight years. They were tall, and muscular from hoisting heavy luggage forty hours a week.
But the Master of Sinanju fell among them like a crimson typhoon hitting a palm oasis.
The man who had frozen with his hands on the trunk suddenly took his hands into his mouth. Not by choice. Choice had nothing to do with it.
From his personal perspective. his own hands had acquired a life of their own. Like frightened pink tarantulas they leapt into his own mouth for protection against the crimson typhoon.
The man had a big mouth. But his hands were bigger. Still, they went down his gullet as if the bones had melted-where they clogged his windpipe so completely that his last ninety seconds of life consisted of hopping about in circles trying to yank his hands out of his mouth and trying to breathe through nostrils that no longer functioned.
In a way, he was lucky. He lived longer than the others, who made the mistake of drawing personal weapons.
Remo and Chiun gave them no time to use them.
"In for a penny, in for a pound," Remo muttered and took the nearest man by his head. Remo simply grasped and began shaking the man's head as if it were a milkshake container. He got about the same result. The man's brain, having the natural consistency of yogurt, was pureed in the receptacle of his skull.
He dropped his box cutter, never having gotten the blade extended.
It was quick, silent, and actually painless to the victim. Remo dropped the limp-boned man to the oil-stained concrete and caught the last few seconds of the third man's death throes.
The man had producted a switchblade. He used it with great skill. The blade darted toward the Master of Sinanju-and abruptly changed direction to carve out a flowing script on the wielder's own forehead.
Then it split his nose clear to the brain pan.
The man was on his back, dead, before the word THIEF began oozing blood off his forehead.
"Now you did it," Remo said, looking around at the carnage.
Chiun's hands clasped his wrists. Interlocked, they retreated into the joined sleeves of his kimono. "I did nothing. It was their fault. These carrion started it."
"Smith is gonna to have a shit fit."
"I will reason with Smith. Come."
And the Master of Sinanju floated away.
Grumbling, Remo brought the trunk up on his shoulder and hurried after him.
"This whole trip had better be worth it," he muttered.
When Remo emerged from the baggage area, Harold Smith's complexion looked as gray as a battleship. And as lifeless. His eyes were staring.
"All is well, Emperor Smith," Chiun said in a loud voice, and went on to recount the other thirteen piled trunks.
"We gotta move fast, Smitty," Remo said, adding the blue trunk to the stack.
"What happened?"
"Luggage thieves."
"They're not-"
"Alive? No. Definitely not."