Shock Value td-51

by Warren Murphy

  "You have four minutes," Abraxas announced, as if Remo were a contestant on a game show who couldn't come up with the right answer.

  Remo didn't pay him any attention. He was scrabbling at the cement, his fingertips bloody. Already he had broken off almost enough small pieces to gain a handhold. That was all it would take. But the trap was flush with the floor, and the cement, he guessed, was at least a foot thick.

  "Let me save you the effort," the voice said smoothly. "Even if you do get through the trap door— which you won't— you won't be able to reach me. I am an invalid, you see, and don't possess the normal use of my limbs. For this reason, I have had to invent certain architectural designs to assist me. The room you're in is one; I had the trap built. But the room where I am is much more sophisticated. It is closed off from the passageway by a special electronic door housing a million volts of electricity. No one can survive that kind of shock, Remo, not even you. Oh, you surprised me time and again with you strength. The electric jolt from my chair, the high-frequency noise— not a wince from you. Very commendable. But I assure you, the entrance to this room is much more deadly than the parlor tricks I have shown you thus far. Much more. Am I clear?"

  "You're an ass," Remo said. With a sharp jab he wedged his left hand into the small crevice he had made. It was tight. The cement rubbed his fingers raw.

  "A most worthy opponent," Abraxas said with a certain warmth. "Alas, I have to leave you. I would have liked to see your progress, as well as your untimely end. Unfortunately, my broadcast is due to begin. The world is about to undergo the most profound change since the discovery of fire, and I go to lead its people into the new age. So farewell, my doomed adversary. Enjoy your stay in eternity."

  He turned profile to the camera. The face was not so much that of a god as of a gargoyle, Remo thought, a repugnant creature about to spread its slime over the earth.

  The monitor faded to black. Remo was alone.

  ?Chapter Eighteen

  The chronometer on the wall read 11:58:36. Less than three minutes to go.

  He dug his hand deeper into the broken cement. The raw flesh scraped, down to the bone, it seemed. He stifled the urge to cry out with the pain.

  11:58:59.

  Circe. Abraxas had called her his enchantress. But the girl lying dead in the next room had been nothing but a madman's pawn, discarded without thought, murdered with the casual brutality of swatting a fly.

  I don't want to belong to him anymore, she had said. Still, she had kept the name he had given her.

  Remo didn't even know her real name.

  So this is how it ends, he thought. The twisted trail leading from another death of another pawn named Orville Peabody ended here, with the girl dead and the monster she had hoped to escape safe behind his electric walls.

  "You won't belong to him," Remo said. "I promise you, Circe."

  He had made a promise to her before, and had not been able to keep it. In shame and rage, he wrenched his arm upward. He felt two bones in his hand crack and give under the weight of the cement, but the slab loosened. With a spray of dust, it spat out of the floor, crashing on the other side of the room.

  Beneath the removed cement was a twelve-inch pole extending so far downward that its base couldn't be seen. The hydraulic lift.

  11:59:01.

  There was no time to find how to operate it. Remo guessed that the controls were on Abraxas's wheelchair, anyway. Keeping his broken hand carefully out of the way, he wrapped his arms and legs around the pole and slid into the darkness.

  The bottom was dank and suffocating, exuding the same musty smell of the cave where Remo had lain with Circe. It brought back memories so recent and painful that he felt them physically, like pinpricks in his chest.

  But he wouldn't think of her now. He couldn't permit himself the luxury of self-pity.

  From the pinpoint opening at the top of the empty shaft, he guessed that he was more than a hundred feet below ground level. He searched in the darkness of the narrow square for a passageway, trying to enlarge his pupils enough to catch what faint light there was.

  He saw nothing. No opening, no electric door, no route to Abraxas. Only the blackness of a four-by-four-foot prison.

  Panic crept up on him. What if Abraxas had been lying? True, the cement trap in the floor had been just as he'd described, but a mind as sick as Abraxas's was capable of devising an elaborate obstacle like the trap to serve as nothing more than a diversion for intruders. It was possible that Abraxas was nowhere Remo could reach him before the precious minutes were up. On the other side of the house, perhaps... or the island.

  I have planned for everything.

  More than a minute had passed since Remo began his descent down the lift shaft. Abraxas would have to be reached soon, or not at all. If Abraxas had tricked him, as the sickening feeling in the pit of Remo's stomach told him he had, time had already run out. The world would belong to Abraxas, and Circe— beautiful, scarred enchantress— had died for nothing.

  "You idiot," Remo spat out at himself, kicking the cement-lined wall. His foot swung into air.

  Air.

  He bent down. It was there, the passageway. Abraxas, in his vanity had told the truth. There was a route leading out of the lift, but it was less than three feet tall— designed for a man in a wheelchair.

  Flushed with excitement, he ran, stooped, through the dark corridor. There was utterly no light here. Racing blindly, like a bat, he followed the tunnel, ticking off the seconds in his head.

  58. 57. 56.

  He pumped his legs harder. The pain in his hand throbbed sharply with each footfall. For Circe, he said to himself. Not the poor suckers watching their televisions, waiting for God to come to them like some glorious prime-time evangelist; he didn't give a damn about humanity. It was for Circe alone. Dead, defeated Circe, who had begged for help and got none.

  His breath came quick and ragged. The passageway was long, longer than he'd pictured the house to be. He'd gone nearly a half-mile as it was, and still nothing lay ahead but more blackness and the growing heaviness in his chest.

  What accounted for that, he thought, heaving. He never breathed hard. Not even during his exercise runs under Chiun's supervision, in which he forced himself to run at full, leg-wrenching speed over hills so tall that vegetation disappeared at their peaks, had he lost his wind. But now, in this tunnel, he was gasping for breath like a chain smoker in the Boston Marathon.

  Still running, crouched and cramping, he attuned his senses to the pressure of the air. He felt it in his ears. Slowly, every fifty feet or so, the pressure increased infinitessimally.

  He was running downhill.

  And there was a smell permeating the damp cement lining of the tunnel, something pungent, vaguely fishy....

  His head shot up with a start. He was heading south, far beyond the reef of the island. What he smelled was the sea. He was underwater.

  And going deeper. Abraxas's transmission center was somewhere in the depths of the ocean, protected against unwanted visitors by a million volts of electricity.

  26. 25. 24.

  Then he saw them, the doors rising out of the blackness like steel monoliths. He could never beat his way through them without electrocuting himself. Even the ways he'd learned for dealing with electric fences wouldn't work with voltage of the magnitude Abraxas had described.

  He was unarmed. He looked around helplessly. A piece of cement, maybe, thrown fast enough, could puncture the steel doors, but how much time would that take? He had lost most of the skin on his hand trying to pry loose a small piece of the flooring in the house. It would take even longer to chip a large enough hunk off a smooth wall. Besides, he thought, the hand was broken now. It would be next to useless. No, there was no way through the doors.

  Well, one way....

  He swallowed. Kamikaze had never been his forte. If anything but the soles of his shoes touched those doors, he'd fry in seconds.

  He jarred to a halt some twenty feet aw
ay from the massive doors. From the size of them, he calculated it would take some six thousand pounds of thrust to break through the electrified metal. Given his weight, that meant that he would have to travel at roughly half the speed of sound to slap on enough pressure to break them down.

  Nobody, not Remo, not even Chiun, had ever moved so fast even at full height. Remo was doubled over in the squat passageway. He would have to run, skittering, like a crab.

  Impossible, he decided. It was too big a risk. He'd never live.

  He crouched back into the passageway where he'd come, trying to think of alternatives. He forced his mind to a blank. But this time no legends came, no cryptic stories carrying hidden solutions. There was only Circe's face, crying out in the darkness.

  Abraxas had won.

  "Help me," Circe had said, her remembered voice echoing a memory of a face flickering in candlelight. He had promised to help. Now she was dead, the promise broken.

  "Help me..."

  12. 11. 10 seconds.

  "What the hell," Remo said. Maybe he had lived long enough, after all.

  He spun around quickly, before he had time to change his mind, and charged the doors.

  His arms hung at his sides like an ape's, flying upward behind him as he gathered speed. His feet burned, literally. The heels of his shoes gave off thin wisps of smoke. He felt the flesh of his face flattening, distorting with the speed.

  8.7.6.

  Another image came to mind to replace Circe's face. It was something he'd seen on television once, news footage of an airplane wreck on the Potomac. In the film, a man in a crowd watched from the river's edge as the plane went down. He was an ordinary man, from the looks of him, Mr. Average, football on weekends, maybe a few rounds of cards with the boys on Thursday nights. Nobody would have taken him for a hero.

  With the other passersby, he watched the plane crash and burst into flames. Like the others, he heard the screams of the dying. He may have felt pity; the others surely did. Or he may have gone a little crazy at the moment when he took in the sight of the icy river tainted with human blood. No one could say. But what he did at that strange, pivotal moment was so peculiar, so brazen, so unreasonable, that the whole country stopped what it was doing to watch, stunned, as the man did what everyone else had been too sensible to do: He jumped in.

  He jumped into the freezing, debris-littered water, without any thought for what would happen during the next moment, to rescue a woman who would have died without him.

  He lived.

  Remo would not live, he was almost sure of that. He was better trained than the man standing on the river's edge, and in a condition superior to any athlete's. But the odds were still a million to one against him that he would approach the exact speed at exactly the right time, that the impact would be perfect, that the handicaps of a broken hand and excessive air pressure and a snail's posture wouldn't hinder him.

  And, somehow, it didn't matter.

  Suddenly Remo knew how that man on the river's edge felt, knew as surely as he knew his own name, during that dive into the icy water. There was no heroism involved, no glory, no anticipation, no fear. There was only the air in front of him, and the nerves in his muscles snapping automatically, and the moment he had thrust himself into, pure and free, unconnected with either future or past, moving, soaring, stilled in time.

  The doors loomed up ahead of him. Remo grinned. It was going to be one hell of a fine way to go.

  Five feet in front of the doors, he propelled himself into a horizontal triple spin. His knees bent instinctively. His hair crackled behind him, lighting the dark tunnel with bright sparks. Then, working purely on reflex, he set himself up for the blow.

  The moment had come.

  Three. Two. One.

  The doors flashed with a boom like a dynamite explosion. Abraxas, seated in his wheelchair facing the camera, looked up in horror.

  The room was round and domed. One huge curving window covering half the enclosure looked onto the ocean floor, where primitive dark sting rays fluttered near sponges and red fire coral.

  Remo never stopped moving. Rolling into the circular room, he crossed to the curved window in a fraction of a second.

  The light on the camera glowed red. Abraxas forced himself to turn toward it. "My— my people," he whispered weakly, his eyes on Remo.

  Remo threw himself against the glass, kicking out with every ounce of strength he could muster. All he saw now was Circe's face, smiling at him from the past. So there was a past again, he thought. And a future. He had lived.

  The moment was over.

  The glass of the windows starred and burst outward with the impact from Remo's hurtling body. The sea, in a fury, rushed into the transmission dome.

  He eased his way through the current, his breath suspended. The water, at this depth nearly as dark as the tunnel, burst into blinding light as it reached the electrified doors and set them to fizzling in a wild fireworks display.

  In the sudden brightness he saw Abraxas, first screaming in terror as the ocean rushed toward him, then pitching with the force of the water. He gripped the arms of his wheelchair as it sputtered and bled white sparks. His one eye rolled back into its socket, the eyelid quivering spasmodically as the metal plates on his face and neck blistered and bubbled and steamed in the water. The last thing Remo saw of him was the black voice box falling from its brace.

  Then the lightning stopped, and a ray floated lazily into the wreckage.

  ?Chapter Nineteen

  Smith was still working frantically at the computer console when Remo arrived back at South Shore. Chiun was standing in the corner, banging at the static-filled television monitor overhead.

  "Worthless machine," he grumbled. "No dramas. No news stories. Not even a variety show featuring trained dogs. Only an ugly man being drowned. Probably a commercial."

  "What's up?" Remo asked.

  "I couldn't scramble the codes in time," Smith said despairingly. "The world got a full ten seconds of Abraxas getting electrocuted underwater. I don't know how the president will ever live this down."

  "The president?" Remo said. "What about me? The TV murderer."

  "You weren't recognizable," Smith said. "All anyone could see was a blur. How did you get to him, anyway?"

  "Well, it was..." he began. But the moment had passed. It was over. It would never be the same again, and no one would ever understand what it had been like. "It was a piece of cake," Remo said.

  A printout clacked out of the console. "I've sent word to the president about this mess by tapping into the White House computers. This must be his reply," Smith said. He read the printout silently, his face falling. "Helicopters have been dispatched to take out the delegates. Er, I'll have to explain about the casualty. The advertising man."

  Smith raised a pencil. "We'll call it an accident. The mental health of the delegates can be proved to be unstable at this point, I think."

  "An accident? An ac—"

  "The two of you had better leave the island quickly," Smith said. "No one will believe what they say about Chiun, but I don't want him spotted."

  "One does not need to see the Master of Sinanju to recognize his technique."

  "Hmmm." Smith looked stricken.

  "What's the bad news?"

  "Oh, no bad news," Smith said quietly. "The White House press secretary has sent out a bulletin to the news media calling Abraxas's broadcast a hoax. Someone's even confessed to it. Some independent film producer or something."

  "Maybe it'll get his name in the papers," Remo said. "But what about the bad vibes Peabody and the other zombies caused? You said the United Nations was up in arms."

  Smith took a deep breath. "It seems that problem is solved, too. New terrorists have come in to replace the assassinated leaders. The countries who were accusing other world powers of sabotaging their images are back to working on the terrorist problem again."

  "Back to normal, huh?"

  "Normal," Smith muttered, more to hims
elf than anyone else.

  "Of course it is normal," Chiun said. "Chaos must be maintained to balance order. It is the inviolate principle of Zen. Good and evil, yin and yang. It has existed long before the fraud who called himself Abraxas."

  "What about Circe?" Remo asked suddenly.

  "I'll arrange to have her buried. We won't be able to attend the funeral, of course."

  "Then who will?" Remo asked. "No one even knew her name."

  The room fell silent. At last Smith spoke. "It will be a civil burial, I imagine."

  "You mean a pauper's burial. Something for the bums nobody cares about."

  In the distance, carried over the sea, could be heard the faint drone of helicopters.

  "A special plane is coming to take me to Washington," Smith said crisply, dropping the subject of funerals. His silence spoke louder than words. After all, there's nothing anyone can do about her now. "I suggest that the two of you head back toward Folcroft as soon as possible. Can the boat you took me on get you as far as Miami?"

  "It'll get us as far as Trinidad," Remo said. "Also Haiti, Puerto Rico, Guadelupe, Barbados, Jamaica..."

  "Out of the question," Smith snapped.

  "I have a broken hand."

  "We'll see to it at Folcroft." He rose to turn off the computer console.

  "I also have your plans to rip off the IRS," he said.

  Smith looked over to him, gaping. "What are you saying?"

  "You heard me. It was happy hour with the dictator of the world, remember? Either Chiun and I cruise the seas until my hand gets better, or the Internal Revenue boys get a little present from Harold W. Smith."

  "That's blackmail!" Smith sputtered.

  "Hey, nobody hired me for this job because I was a nice guy."

  "You're walking a thin edge, Remo."

  "Tell it to the judge," Remo said.

  Once outside the computer room, he touched Chiun's arm. "You go back to the ship, Little Father," he said. "I've got something to do."

  The old man's face creased. "Do not punish yourself, my son. Some things cannot be helped."

  "I know," Remo said.

  He walked back to the room where Circe lay. Her body had stiffened in death. The long scar on her face stood out darkly against her white skin.