Unpopular Science

The neighborhood Allessandro Cote called, home dated back at least two centuries. The homes were small castles erected on vast estates looking out over the Mediterranean Sea.

“I guess selling murder is good business,” Remo said. “Or was he born to the wealthy parents and sells guns as a hobby?”

“His father was a bus driver in Madrid,” Mark explained as he drove them along the manicured, semiprivate drive that meandered behind the seafront estates. “He bought the house from the government after the owners went bankrupt.”

“We’ll call you when we need a ride home,” Remo said.

Howard was about to ask where they wanted to be left off, but heard the brief thunk of car doors and realized that he was alone. He had never even slowed down. He looked in the rearview mirror and never saw Chiun and Remo, but he knew they must have entered a nearby decorative row of Mediterranean trees.

He rolled down the window and continued driving down the isolated road, enjoying the fragrant semitropical breezes.

The old brick home looked like something medieval, like an old church, but it had been augmented in recent decades with a white stucco addition the size of a small shopping mall. The walls were freshly whitewashed. The clay-tile roof would have been quaint if there weren’t acres and acres of it. The addition had probably tripled the square footage of interior space in the home, and it descended with the mountainside, halfway to the shore below.

The pair of shadows slipped among the cultivated gardens of temperate-climate plants with less noise than the salt-laden breeze.

Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus, smelled the fragrant salt air and the gentle sea breeze and became cold inside.

“Nice digs,” Remo said when he and Chiun stood unseen in the shadows of a palm tree grove adjoining the structure. “Let’s move here after we kick out the Boomstick Baron.”

Chiun said nothing.

“What’s with you?” Remo asked.

“Have you embraced your speck, Remo?”

“What speck?”

Chiun pierced him with a glare.

“Oh, my fear speck,” Remo said. “I haven’t forgotten what we talked about, Little Father.”

“Good.”

“But I don’t know what these creeps could throw at us that we can’t handle.”

“That is right, you do not know,” Chiun snapped. “And yet, wicked men are innovators in the ways of poison and torture and murder. Most of their efforts are no more dangerous than the rocks lobbed by baboons, but we do not know what is in this house.”

Remo was getting worried now. “Chiun, this isn’t like you. Do you know something I don’t know?”

Chiun shook his head. “There is something. Perhaps.” He held out his hands, as if warming them at a campfire. “It is strange.”

Remo frowned and held out his hands, too. He tried to feel whatever it was that had upset Chiun.

He shook his head and opened his mouth, to say he felt nothing, and then it was there, like a flicker of movement just outside his vision.

“You felt it?” Chiun asked.

“I felt something. I don’t know what.”

“Yes.”

“Seems sort of familiar. Sort of like a pressure shift or a temperature change or something.”

Chiun nodded. “But not those things.”

“I don’t know. It came and went so fast I couldn’t get a taste of it.”

It wasn’t often that he and Chiun ran up against something foreign to their experience, and now he was worried. “You’ll be pleased to know I found the speck.”

Chiun didn’t look pleased.

Allessandro Cote paced through the ballroom where once the aristocrats of Barcelona had met to dance and make merry. The aristocrats were dead. Their progeny had failed to sustain their wealth or dignity. They were back among the rabble as they deserved to be, surrendering the symbols of prestige to those who had earned, rather than inherited, a place of importance in the world.

“This won’t do,” Allessandro Cote complained. His accent was British with effeminate Spanish undertones. “Jenkins!”

The impossibly gaunt man who came through the servants’ entrance at the rear of the ballroom was dressed in a butler’s formal coat and tails. He could not have looked more uncomfortable in the get-up.

“Yes, Mr. Cote?”

Normally, Cote would have relished the perfection of the performance. Gomez had done an admirable job of learning his new role, as much as he had complained about it.

“Ring Fastbinder for me, will you, Jenkins?”

“Si. Yes!” Gomez swallowed the mistake and put back on his supremely bored face. “Certainly, suh, I’ll ring him at once.” Gomez/Jenkins walked slowly and deliberately to the rear of the room and through the servants’ entrance.

“I’ll have to dock the old git’s wages if he can’t learn to speak properly,” Cote complained, sipping his tea, which was actually coffee.