Unpopular Science

But he wasn’t as sharp as the thin man in the gray chinos, the fine leather shoes and the inappropriate undershirt. The thin man came around the front of the building and took out the guard detail fast, his arms slipping through the air and snatching up heads like a pair of frog tongues, snatching up buzzing flies. Then the heads came together so hard they were crushed together into a single mass. The pair of corpses flopped onto the granite tile of the circular exterior entranceway to the house, still joined.

“An undignified technique,” Franco observed.

The guard detail had been three men, with Franco stationed in the hedges twenty yards away. The third man raised his automatic rifle and squeezed the trigger, only to find his hands empty. The rifle clattered in pieces on the granite. Before the third man could say the Spanish equivalent of “Hey, you jerk!” the thin man flicked him in the nose.

Remo flicked hard enough to send nose cartilage and some of the bony nose bridge careening into the man’s head, cutting a path through the brain tissue. The third man slithered silently to the ground.

“Very skillful indeed, but also quite reprehensible.” Remo looked at the guard who was covering him with a whopping big machine gun.

“Shouldn’t that be mounted on a Hummer or something?” Remo asked distractedly, eyes on the building.

“Usually, but I knew you were coming,” Franco noted.

“Oh, yeah, what do you know?”

“I know you are a killer of immense skill. You are an assassin who moves like a bird or a shadow. But you are also a man who does not respect death.”

“Say what?”

“I should say, you do not give your customers a respectful death.”

Franco couldn’t help but notice that the American was hardly paying attention, focusing instead on the front door.

‘You are not even listening.”

“Sorry, did you say something?”

“I’m talking about respect for death! Do you know about respect?”

“R-E-S-P-E-C-T. What is inside of this place, anyway?”

“I will tell you nothing.”

“You don’t know what’s in there?”

“Of course I do!”

“Liar.”

“I do know, but what I don’t know is what kind of a man you are. Imbecile? Moron?”

“Guess I’m such a moron I don’t know if I’m an imbecile. I’ve been called both a hundred times, just since breakfast. Is there some sort of a secret laser weapon in there or something?”

Franco frowned and shook his head in disappointment. “Put these on, please.” He tossed a pair of selflocking manacles to Remo—extra-heavy-duty, meant for veterinary use on terrified zoo creatures like gorillas.

“No, thanks,” Remo answered, and tossed them back.

Franco saw them flash at him like a yellow fluorescent bolt of lightning. They twisted around his wrist and the machine gun like a bolo, but driven by such force that they wrapped themselves with crushing force.

Franco staggered, tried to shake off the machine gun that was now a part of his arm, then the excruciating pain hit him. Why, of course there would be pain. The arm was all but smashed flat, with bloody gore extruding through the trigger guard.

He was opening his mouth to scream and was aware that the killer was standing in front of him. He must have moved impossibly fast.

Then Franco’s good hand was closed into a fist and inserted into his open mouth, just in time to cork the scream.

“With all due respect, sir,” Remo said, and stuffed the fist in even further.

Remo let the goof wander around the football-field-size front yard while he wandered on, his concern mounting. None of the guards on the outside seemed to know what was happening inside, and all the weapons they had were conventional. Maybe whatever was in there wasn’t even a weapon, but now that he was this close to the house, he felt the strangeness unmistakably. It was a black wave of static that reached out and numbed him.

Another pod of dimwits with AKs stood at a side entrance, near the big section of the structure in the middle. Chiun was just finishing up with the final dimwit when Remo joined him. Chiun was barely paying attention to the job at hand, his emerald-green eyes locked on the oversize section of the building.

“It is familiar.” Chiun said.

“But still strange,” Remo added.

Chiun simply nodded slightly. “We go into the unknown.”

“Every day, every minute we venture into the unknown, Little Father.”

Chiun gave him a rare and sincere smile, although it was a little one.

They went back to the front door and walked in without knocking.

“The front door? Don’t tell me it’s them? Coming in the bloody front door?” Allessandro Cote was livid. “That’s just wrong!”

“Perhaps one of our men entered mistakenly without keying in his PIN, suh,” Jenkins said hopefully.

Cote jogged to the keyboard at the bank of monitors. There were only thirty keys or so, all dramatically oversize. They were lighted, too, and when Cote began pressing them they made tiny electronic mews and burps.

“Where’d that overpaid monk go to?” Then one of the monitors switched to an image from the front yard, and there was Franco.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Cote exclaimed.