A black van was parked at the curb. Two men were hurrying from the cab to the back. As McQueen watched, they popped the rear door. A dozen figures dressed in white marched down to the road with military precision. It was dark so McQueen couldn't be sure, but they appeared to be wearing some kind of domed helmets.
He lost the men behind some trees as they hurried up the sidewalk. They appeared again at the locked front gate.
He finally got a good look at them. The men were dressed in what looked like vintage NASA space suits.
In his eerily silent carriage house, Stewart McQueen distinctly heard the sound of a hacksaw.
He did some rapid calculations.
There was a gang of weird-suited spacemen at his gates, an angry android hiding out in his mansion and a pair of unstoppable assassins who could put fear into a metal heart skulking around his grounds.
This was all suddenly sounding more like one of his books than he'd bargained for.
His car was parked in a stall below his feet. A rear garage door opened on a private back road that wound through the woods and dumped out on a city access road behind his estate's high walls.
Writer's block, deadlines and The New York Times bestseller list be damned. This was now about survival.
The world-famous author spun from the window. Hobbling to beat the band, Stewart McQueen beat a hasty retreat down the back stairs of the darkened carriage house.
Chapter 25
The intense silence made it seem as if the dusty old mansion had been smothered in a ghostly fist. Although the thrumming electrical hum was gone, their eardrums still rang with the memory as Remo and Chiun crossed the threshold.
Remo glanced up the stairs down which he'd come a few minutes before. "Big house," he commented. "He could be hiding anywhere."
Chiun shook his head firmly. "Where would you go?" the old man demanded.
Remo considered. "Probably the basement. The fuse box would be there. It'd be easier to connect there if he wanted to run the whole joint. But the way Gordons is, he could hook in at any point if he had to."
Chiun was already breezing past him. "He will be in the basement," he insisted.
"I was only saying that's where I'd go," Remo insisted as he trailed his teacher.
"And you are different from an uncreative, unthinking robot in what way?" Chiun asked blandly.
He whirled through the broken remnants of the basement door and ducked down the stairs.
"Don't go on the rag with me just 'cause I'm not moving to Maine," Remo grumbled, following. Emergency lights on battery backups lit their way. In the basement Remo didn't comment on the remnants of broken wall or the twisted mechanical crocodile that lay atop the pile of bricks.
They wound around the wooden stairs and headed past the idle furnace.
The cellar beneath the mansion was huge.
In one space off the main room, Remo saw what appeared to be Stewart McQueen's bedroom. There were bookcases, magazines, a TV and a small refrigerator.
A double-wide coffin lined with dirt and shaded by a frilly overhanging canopy was the room's centerpiece. Twin feather pillows rested against the granite gravestone headboard.
"Next time I think I should be reading more, remind me this is where my money goes," Remo said. Chiun didn't respond. His brow darkening, he held a slender finger to his papery lips. He cocked an ear forward.
Remo had heard the sound, too.
It was a soft metallic groan. The noise rose and fell, like a rusted bolt being unscrewed.
Rounding a corner, the two men found the fuse box. Connected to its face was a pair of fat furry legs. The body to which the legs were attached was not visible. They extended through the air and disappeared around a corner. The granite archway into which they vanished opened into a dirt-lined tunnel.
The legs had been spinning in order to unscrew from the fuse box. When Remo and Chiun rounded the corner, the appendages detached and flopped to the floor. Without seeming to be aware of the two Masters of Sinanju, they silently retracted, sliding back into the shadowed recesses of the loamy tunnel.
Remo and Chiun trailed them to the stone arch. The long black legs slithered around the corner and disappeared.
When Remo and Chiun stepped into the archway, the legs were already several yards away. They were being absorbed into the sides of a figure who stood at calm attention in the dark depths of the tunnel.
Over the years Mr. Gordons had assumed many different forms and faces. The face he wore now was the first one they had ever seen on him. He was tall with sandy blond hair and wore a perpetual smile that was not quite a smile. His blue eyes were unblinking.
When they appeared before him, the android didn't express a hint of surprise. As his long spider's legs rolled back into his human torso, he nodded to each man in turn.
"High probability Remo, high probability Chiun. I would offer you a drink, but as it is likely that you intend to cause me bodily harm I have calculated as negligible the odds that you would accept such an offer."
Remo's face was stone.
"You got it wrong, metalman," he said icily as he stepped into the tunnel.
A hint of something that, at least on a human face, might have passed for a frown touched Mr. Gordons's brow.
"That is improbable," the android said. "Unless you have deviated from your previous pattern, you will attack me."
"My son means that we do not intend to cause you mere bodily harm," Chiun explained, circling cautiously away from his pupil. Taking the cue, Remo moved the opposite way. "We intend to dismantle you piece by piece and bury your evil parts in the four corners of the Earth."
The tunnel was wide enough that Remo and Chiun could move to opposite walls as they advanced on Gordons.
With a final whirring snap, the android's spider arms stopped retracting. Each one of them five feet long, they remained jutting from beneath the armpits of his human arms.
"Your statement is incorrect," Gordons said. As they walked toward him, he made not a move. "The Earth is roughly spherical in shape-therefore it has no corners. What is more, it is not I but the two of you who will cease to function this day."
"Sez you," Remo challenged. "So how'd you get out of the volcano, tinman?"
"My family freed me," the android replied simply.
Remo had a mental image of a bunch of toasters and VCRs lowering a knotted bedsheet down into the Mexican volcano where they'd dumped Mr. Gordons.
They were now only a few yards from the android. Remo kept as far from Chiun as possible. Difficult to do in such a confining space. Gordons seemed to realize their problem.
"Your method of attack is flawed," Gordons pointed out. "By separating you think to divide my attentions. But this passage is not wide enough for your plan to succeed."
The words had not passed his lips before he attacked.
The two spider legs whizzed forward, re-forming as they came. By the time they reached Remo and Chiun, their furry tips had been transformed into metallic spearheads.