Remo had hoped he was wrong. But with the look on his teacher's face, his worst fear was confirmed. "Watch him," Remo snapped.
In a shot, he was up on the windowsill. Loafer soles disturbed not a single fragment of glass as he launched himself outside.
He hit the backyard at a sprint.
It was mostly rotting leaves on scraggly weeds. Howard's attacker would have been easier to track through fresh grass, but there was no back lawn to speak of.
Here some leaves had been recently overturned. Over there something had kicked a stone.
Judith White was good. Judith White would not leave big, blundering tracks.
By the time Remo reached the tree line, he knew it was hopeless.
There were tracks in and out of the woods. Some a few days old, some as new as that day. White's creatures probably used the woods as cover for their nightly forays to the local dairy farms. He found a path that looked as if it could have been broken recently.
No, not her. Too old. Too clumsily formed. Maybe with Chiun they could each go in a different direction. Expand their range by fifty percent.
But Chiun had his hands full. Remo was forced to admit defeat.
Running back to the building, he bounded back through the broken window.
Chiun was kneeling on the floor beside Mark Howard. The cushion had been removed from Owen Grude's office chair. The Master of Sinanju had tucked it gently under Howard's head. A nasty red welt was rising on the young man's temple.
"She got away," Remo said, slipping up beside Chiun. He crouched beside his teacher.
"We must hie to Fortress Folcroft at once," the old Korean intoned solemnly.
"You put him under?"
Chiun shook his head. "There was no need. The Regent sleeps for now. But he is gravely afflicted." As if to offer proof, a withered finger brushed Mark Howard's right eyelid. Folding back the thin flesh, the old man exposed an orb of twitching brown. All the green in the young man's iris was gone. When Chiun looked up once more, his mouth was a razor slit of worry.
On the floor, a soft sound came from the back of Mark Howard's throat. It was a contented purr.
Chapter 29
Dr. Lance Drew had seen much that was strange during his tenure at Folcroft Sanitarium.
There had been the time many years before when the old Asian-who was either an acquaintance of Director Smith or a former patient; Dr. Drew could never figure out which-had succumbed to a hitherto unknown viral infection. Somehow he had been miraculously cured by a simple electric shock.
That was one for the medical books.
Then there were those dark days ten years back during a highly stressful IRS raid when mass hallucination had caused people within Folcroft's ivy-covered walls to see purple pterodactyls and pink bunnies. Dr. Aldace Gerling, head of psychiatric medicine at Folcroft, had wanted more than anything to present that episode at a national conference. His request had been denied. Folcroft's privacy policy.
Then there was the comatose girl whose brain showed no signs of synaptic activity whatsoever. Even so, the night she was brought in, Dr. Drew swore he heard her muttering in a voice that sounded like that of a thousand-year-old man. Not only that, her body reeked of a sulfur stench that would not wash away. And to compound the strangeness of that case, for a time the girl's body had released clouds of noxious yellow smoke. That had long since stopped, but the girl was still on the premises. Clearly she was a candidate for the supermarket tabloids. Any one of them would have made her their cover story.
In that as in each case, Dr. Smith would hear none of it. The families of Folcroft's patients, Smith maintained, had not entrusted the care of their loved ones to Folcroft so that their tragedies could be exploited or sensationalized.
There were times in the past when this stubbornness of Dr. Smith had almost driven Dr. Drew to resign. Nowhere else in medicine were healers forced to sign a draconian gag order like was required of the medical staff at Folcroft. At any other institution, he would be able to talk and write freely. But, unfortunately for a man as intellectually curious as Dr. Lance Drew, there was no other place he knew of on the planet that offered such fascinating cases as Folcroft Sanitarium.
And the best benefit of all, for the most part when he left work at the end of the day, he could put it all behind him. The sanitarium ran with such efficiency, thanks to its priggish director, that rarely was Dr. Drew bothered by work at home.
Folcroft Sanitarium was far from his mind as picked up the jangling kitchen phone in his Milford, Connecticut, home.
"Hello," he said absently. With the tip of his tongue he stabbed at the tiny bits of steak and corn that were stuck between his front teeth.
Dr. Drew had just picked up a new Barbecue King 3000 at the local hardware store. He had been enjoying a late supper with his wife, burned with his own two doctor hands.
He had assumed it was one of his grown children. Drew was surprised by the voice on the other end of the line.
"Dr. Drew, there is an emergency at Folcroft," the tart voice of Harold Smith said. "I need you here immediately."
Lance Drew could not remember Director Smith ever calling him at home before. Drew had been helping his wife do the dishes. When he glanced at her, she saw the look of concern on his fleshy face. "What's wrong?" Drew asked into the phone.
"I'll tell you when you arrive. Please hurry." The phone clicked in Drew's ear.
Lance Drew felt a tingle in his ample gut. Another odd case. Had to be. It was the only explanation for Smith's troubled tone and the fact that the Folcroft director was personally calling him back to work.
"Sorry, hon," Drew said, tossing the wet dishrag in his hand to the counter. "Duty calls."
Grabbing up his jacket from the hallway coat rack, he hurried out the front door.
FORTY MINUTES LATER, Dr. Drew was on the sprawling side lawn of Folcroft, Director Smith at his side. Smith's rimless glasses were trained on the southern midnight sky.
It had gotten much cooler since Drew had left work at five. Long Island Sound churned cold and foamy white at the shore. Drew could just see the old boat dock behind the building. It rose and fell with the waves.
Wind whipped across the water and up the back lawn of the sanitarium to where the two men stood. Dr. Drew's hands were shoved deep in his pockets. He was wiggling his cold fingertips when the rumble finally sounded in the distance.
The wind almost covered it. When the Navy helicopter appeared over the dancing trees, it did so in a shock of sound. Claws of yellow searchlights raked the grass.
As soon as the lights found Director Smith and Lance Drew on the side lawn-a pair of orderlies waiting with a stretcher behind them-it lowered quickly to the ground.
Even as the aircraft settled to its wheels, Dr. Smith was running toward it. The howling downdraft from the rotors blew his thinning hair wildly.
Dr. Drew and the others hurried in behind him. Before any of them could reach the helicopter, the side door slid open. Two men Drew recognized from his years at Folcroft jumped to the ground. One was a young Caucasian; the other was the ancient Asian who had suffered the mysterious viral infection years before.
"It looks bad, Smitty," the younger one said. Although he didn't seem to shout, his voice was crystal clear over the helicopter noise.
The sanitarium director barely acknowledged the presence of the two men.
"Stand back," Smith demanded, straining to be heard over the roar of the blades. He waved for the orderlies to hurry.
The patient was lying inside the helicopter. Scampering inside, the two Folcroft attendants strapped him to the collapsible stretcher. Only when the man was brought out onto the lawn did Dr. Drew get a good look at him.
His jaw dropped. "It's Mr. Howard," he gasped. Folcroft's assistant director was unconscious. A large purple welt colored one temple. His wide face twitched with spastic tics.
Smith's steel-gray eyes fixed on Drew's. "Treat him," he commanded.