Poulette's eyes narrowed. "Are you certain you're with the USDA?"
"Let's see the killing room," Remo said quickly.
"Very well," Poulette said. He had long since given up hope that his security roosters would come to his aid. "There is no individual who performs any of the more . . . ah . . . distressing duties. Nearly everything in the system is automated," he added, stepping to a bank of controls. His fingers took hold of a trak-ball mouse and joystick.
"From here they are carried into the Kill Room, where their naked, helpless throats are expertly slit by mechanized knives," he went on. Tears began to course down his cheeks. "Oh, the poor, poor creatures." At the same time some sort of craving came into his rapidly blinking eyes, and Poulette began to spin the trak-ball and stab blinking buttons.
A limp line of jiggling fryers began to march through a forest of glittering blades. The blades went whisk-whisk as they sliced open wattled throats. Spittle began to drip from the corner of Henry Cackleberry Poulette's mouth. His eyes shone.
Chiun drew his pupil to one side.
"Look at him, Remo," the Master of Sinanju whispered. "He feigns grief for his charges, while secretly reveling in their slaughter."
"Hey, Poulette!" Remo called.
Henry Poulette continued his frantic manipulations. Blood spurted. Snapping knives severed chicken heads.
Remo yanked the Chicken King away from the control board, saying, "What happened to automated?"
Poulette turned sharply to Remo. "And let someone else have all the-" He caught himself, swallowed twice. "This is the backup," he said meekly, the blood-lust draining from his eyes. "Just in case." He paused, smiling sheepishly. "I see that my birds are treated more humanely than by any poultry man in history."
Indicating the blood-spattered Kill Room, Remo growled, "It shows."
"Better me than someone without my love for them," Henry Poulette said in an injured tone. He straightened his tie. "Please follow me."
When they reached the next area, Remo and Chiun were forced to breathe through their mouths. The glass and doors were thick, but still the stench from below poured up into the narrow walkway.
"As you can see, the bleed tunnel is below." Poulette's eyes had become glassy and distant once again. "The red, red blood drains from their gutted throats in a vat of scalding water, which loosens their festering quills. Those clawlike instruments there automatically pluck the plumage from the unfortunate birds. What is left is then singed off by the hell-bath."
Remo and Chiun watched as the naked bird carcasses paraded past in a gruesome line, being drained, plucked, and flame-denuded all at once.
"Yours is a depraved society," Chiun sniffed.
"This setup is pretty sick," Remo agreed.
"Sick? Every time a chicken dies, a part of me dies with it," Poulette said. "No matter what those misguided protestors say." He made a noise that started off as a giggle but became a cough. He balled his fist before his face and hacked several times. To Remo, it sounded for all the world as if Poulette were cackling.
When he had composed himself, the tour continued. Remo shot Chiun a confused glance, but the Master of Sinanju seemed to be regarding Henry Poulette more intently than ever. As if he could read the man's innermost thoughts through the back of his eggshell skull.
"Coming up is my pride and joy, Mr. MacLeavy," Poulette announced. The words were followed by another cackle, which Poulette then tried to pass off as a cough with some more throat-clearing noises. "The Eviscerating Room!" he said in triumph. "Here the dead birds are gutted and disemboweled by our machines before being graded by government inspectors."
"And the ducks?" Chiun demanded.
"They pass through here as well," Poulette explained, pressing his nose against the glass like a five-year-old at an aquarium. As he stared below at the images of slaughtered chickens spilling their internal organs from their bloody body cavities, his bald pate began to perspire and his breath came in short, orgasmic gasps.
"Where?" Chiun commanded.
Henry Poulette was drawing the tip of his pointed tongue delicately across his nub-like teeth. "Huh?" He pulled himself away with difficulty. "Oh, over there." He pointed to the far wall, where a much smaller conveyor belt carried freshly gutted carcasses into the inspection area. "The duck wing isn't very big, so every bird passes through this common area."
Chiun peered intently through the thick glass. Remo joined him at his side. "What are you looking for?" he asked.
"Your accomplice," Chiun replied.
Before Remo could reiterate his innocence in any scheme to do away with the Master of Sinanju, he was silenced by Chiun's gasp of triumph.
"There!" he pointed, his voice rising to a victorious pitch.
"Where?" Remo and Henry Poulette asked in unison. Both followed the direction of Chiun's delicately aimed finger.
The line of USDA inspectors was busily scanning and stamping what remained of the birds as they streamed past. At the very end, a burly inspector was glancing guiltily from side to side. On the work area before him he, like the other inspectors, had a cloth which could be used to wipe his hands. Except he was wiping the cloth onto his hands.
A subtle difference many would have failed to detect.
As the carcasses paraded past, he would draw his hand across the cloth and then stick his index finger into the yellow breasts of several of the birds. After each cycle, he would drag his hand across the cloth once more and begin anew.
"Behold, the fiend!" Chiun proclaimed loudly.
"Allow me," Remo said, moving forward.
They were next to one of the metal doors that rested in the Plexiglas wall, and the force Remo exerted against its handle nearly exploded it off of its hinges. Hooking his heels along the sides of the metal ladder that extended from the opening, he slid the thirty feet to the main floor and hit the ground running.
Oblivious, the fiendish inspector continued his work. Rag, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, rag. He looked like an automaton. He continued to glance from side to side, but there was something odd about his movements, as if he were an animatronic construct rather than a living human being.
When Remo grabbed the man's powerful shoulder and spun him around, there was nothing in the inspector's eyes to indicate that he was frightened in the least.
The man had a dark complexion, five-o'clock shadow two hours early, and coarse hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils. His nose looked like it had been broken at least a dozen times. His hands were thick and callused. Their backs and knuckles were covered with thick black fur. He kept his right hand clutched oddly in at his chest.
"Time to crow, pal," Remo said.
The inspector only smiled vacantly. The eyes continued to scan the room. Something about this bothered Remo. The look should have been that of a cornered animal-indeed, there was something not human in the man's face-but fear was not mirrored in the eyes. The eyes were . . .
"Gweilo." The word sounded even stranger emanating from those rubbery lips.
"That anything like paisan?" Remo asked.
A hand flashed toward Remo's exposed neck, the guillotine-shaped nail of the index finger glimmering in the light.
It was traveling in a flawless arc, and Remo had not yet registered the move. According to all of Remo's experience, this thug who reeked of garlic and onions could not possibly be moving that quickly. Only one trained in Sinanju could.
The nail was a hair away from slicing into Remo's throat when another hand shot into view. Remo was propelled backward through the slimy procession of duck carcasses as the Master of Sinanju descended on the poisoner like a typhoon.
Chiun clutched the thug's wrist in his hand. The man continued to thrust with his sharpened fingernail, but Chiun's vise-like grip held it at bay. The nail made futile circles in the air.
"I release you from your walking death," Chiun whispered into the man's cauliflower ear, and drew his own sharp nail across the bogus inspector's throat.
A puff of Halloween-orange smoke shot from the man's nose, as if from an angry bull, and still more escaped in a dryice film from the bleeding neck wound. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but before he could his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed to the floor of the plant.