"We're looking for a little girl. Blond. About twelve.
"Thirteen," Chiun corrected. "Golden of hair and blue of eye. Like her mother, who lies here dead. Where is she?"
"I know nothing of any little girl," the Secretary-General of the UN protested.
Remo found the leash with his toe, dug under it and snapped his foot. The free end of the leash whipped into his waiting hand. He tugged hard.
Fisheries Minister Gilbert Houghton was yanked off his hands. "Urrkk," he said.
"What about you?"
"I have seen no little girl and I have been Mistress Kali's slave for many weeks now."
"I am crushed, desolated," said Anwar Anwar-Sadat. "I thought she loved only me. And now she is dead."
"She never loved you. But she scorned me. I was the object of her scorn," Houghton snarled.
"Both of you shut up," Remo ordered. Turning to Chiun, he said, "I'm going to find Freya if I have to tear this place apart brick by brick."
"And I will help," vowed Chiun, girding his skirts.
"But first we deal with these two."
"We are instructed to intimidate, not dispatch these two."
"Accidents happen," Remo growled. "You got that one. I'll take the other."
Remo stood the Canadian fisheries minister up against a wall while Chiun immobilized the UN Secretary-General with a painful twist of the Egyptian's ear.
"You're behind all this?" Remo accused Gilbert Houghton.
"I admit nothing."
"And this is about fish?"
"No comment."
"That's your answer? No comment?"
Gil Houghton gulped like a goldfish. "No comment."
Sweeping his hands out, Remo brought them together with a sudden loud clap. Gilbert Houghton's head happened to be caught between his palms in the thunderous instant Remo's palms came together.
When Remo stepped back, hands returning to his sides, Gil Houghton's head sat on his neck like a sunfish's. Flat with eyes set on opposite sides of what had been a round mammalian skull.
The surprised whites filled with blood, and the pursed lips seemed to be kissing empty air-then he pitched forward, dead.
Remo turned.
The Master of Sinanju had one sandal on the Egyptian's heaving chest. Anwar Anwar-Sadat attempted a protest. Chiun quieted it with a sudden pressure of his foot.
While Anwar Anwar-Sadat unwittingly watched his last breath leave his dry, open mouth, Chiun calmly took hold of his dusky mandibles and lifted his head off his spinal cord.
It came off with a popping suck of a sound like a head off a plastic doll. As simply as that.
Tossing the head in a corner, the Master of Sinanju faced his pupil in expectant silence. His chin lifted.
"It wasn't your fault," Remo said.
Chiun bowed his aged head. "I accept responsibility for my rash actions."
"You were just trying to protect me," Remo said distractedly.
"And I have wounded you deeply, for which I am deeply regretful."
"If we find Freya okay, it will be all right. Let's find Freya. Just find Freya and everything will be forgiven."
Remo's cracking voice told the Master of Sinanju that their future together hinged on finding alive the daughter Remo had lost once and could not bear to lose again.
"I will not fail you, my son," Chiun vowed.
Carefully Remo went over to the splayed body of Jilda of Lakluun and carried it to a stone shelf that ran along one wall. He laid it on the ledge, arranged the leather-clad limbs modestly and touched her gleaming hair briefly.
Then they went in opposite directions.
Under their feet the gurgle and splash of troubled waters came intermittently. The flooring was a continuation of the anteroom floor. It was like a hard black mirror that reflected everything above it, yet it seemed ready to pull them down into an abyss blacker than universal night.
Remo's sensitive ears turned this way and that, hunting sounds.
Somewhere deep in the building he heard a constant clicking. It came in bursts and spurts, yet was steady as a dry hail.
"This way," Remo said, looking for a door.
He found not a door but a narrow niche in a wall behind a heavy wall hanging.
"What do you make of this?" Remo asked, snapping off the hanging.
Chiun examined it. "A passage."
"Too small for a grown-up."
"Perhaps it is meant for a dwarf. Or a child. This was constructed for the use of one who wishes to remain undisturbed."
Remo felt the edge of the stone. "We can chop through this easy."
Chiun indicated the arch over them. "Look, Remo. A keystone. If you break the sides, it will all coming tumbling down."