No Contest

Mrs. Mikulka was having a chat with young Mark’s lady friend, Sarah, a lovely girl. The phone interrupted them.

“Hi, Mrs. M. It’s Romeo. I need to talk to Dr. Smith. Would you believe I lost his phone number?”

Mrs. Mikulka pursed her wrinkled lips. “Oh, Romeo, of course. I will put you through to Dr. Smith.”

She buzzed the call through, then hung up, a curious frown. “You know, you would think he would have memorized Dr. Smith’s direct line by now. That Romeo has been a good friend of Dr. Smith’s for so many years. But I’ve always thought he might be a little flighty.”

“Romeo?” Sarah asked deadpan. “Like on The Ladies’ Man?”

Mrs. Mikulka tittered. “Can you imagine that Romeo on some TV show about, you know, seduction? I don’t think so.”

“He’s not a ladies’ man?”

Mrs. Mikulka made a face. “I think he spends all his time waiting on his father, hand and foot. He’s very devoted, I’ll give him that. But he’s no ladies’ man.”

Dr. Smith switched the call to a secure line as Mark Howard penetrated the encryption code guarding the remote control of the explosives in the ice wall.

“Cleverly done,” Howard admitted. “There’s an Extreme Nuggets Web site hosted in New Zealand by MacBisCo. It gets pinged from Battle Creek ten times a second. The commands for the explosives get to New Zealand masked as a ping, then go over standard phone lines to a transmitter mounted on the mountain face across from the ice wall.”

“I see,” Remo said.

“You do?”

In MacGregor’s office, the computer window showed the two technicians being helicoptered off the winner’s summit. The one who had climbed back to the summit was treated at the scene by paramedics. The other one got just a few moments of attention with a stethoscope, then his face was covered.

“So, what did you win today, Sherm?” Remo demanded. “Or was that just you having a little fun?”

MacGregor looked at his lap.

“Well? Was it fun after all?”

MacGregor didn’t answer.

“Let us render this device unusable,” Chiun said impatiently as the helicopter left with the technicians. “Cornmonger, if I detonate the little booms far away, they will forever after be harmless. Is this not so?”

“Right,” MacGregor said.

Chiun reattached the mouse and unceremoniously clicked the cursor on the remaining red spots. The ice bulged and cracked where the last charges went off, and all the red spots turned to black Xs.

“I have never seen a more cowardly way to kill,” the old Master of Sinanju declared.

“Now we call the foreman,” Remo announced. “You ready to track him down?”

“We’re ready,” Mark Howard said from the phone speaker.

Remo used the speed dial on MacGregor’s mobile phone—just click, click, nothing to it—and held it to the ear of the cereal magnate.

Sherman MacGregor tried to relax, to make his voice natural when he talked to the foreman.

The line rang, and rang, and stopped.

Chapter 41

The foreman dropped the stack of blue jeans and tube socks. The moment his mobile phone started ringing, the fear had come. They were close to him. They were on to him. They were calling him.

He looked at the phone display. It was Sherman MacGregor calling. They had caught the son of a bitch. He’d squealed and fingered the foreman.

These people were something out of the ordinary. The foreman had been in close scrapes before, but he never had the feeling of fear that he had right now, and that he had when he cowered in the toilet in the Auckland airport.

He didn’t know what they looked like, but he knew what they sounded like. Two men, and one of them called the other one Little Father. The one who was Little Father had a high-pitched, almost a singsong, voice. They were terrifying. If the foreman lifted the cover on his mobile phone, those two, or whoever they worked for, would immediately pinpoint the foreman in the All-Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The foreman slipped the battery off the back of his phone. The shrill screech of his nerves immediately dissipated.

They were calling from Battle Creek, Michigan, but they might have all sorts of resources at their disposal. The foreman forgot about his new clothes. He just left, fast.

He drove out of Baton Rouge and didn’t stop until he was into Alabama, where he purchased rubbing alcohol at a truck stop. He rubbed down the phone with the rubbing alcohol, then burned it on the roadside with the rest of the alcohol.

He got in his car and drove for hours, then burned the car, too, in the bay of an unattended do-it-yourself car wash in St. Louis. He walked through the night until he reached a bank on the opposite side of the city. His safe-deposit box was there with papers for a new identity.

But he was still the foreman. That’s all he ever really was, no matter what the paperwork claimed. The foreman was famous and yet the foreman was like a shadow. He was too good, too clever, too gifted with his own special sense of self-preservation.

He could never, ever be caught.

Chapter 42

“He’s in Baton Rouge,” Mark said. “He disabled the phone. Must know the jig is up.”