Chiun demanded, "What insanity is this? Speak!"
Remo pointed toward the still-firing gunmen and over the din of gunfire shouted, "They're not real."
"But I see them," said Chiun, dodging a shotgun blast.
"Close your eyes, Little Father."
The Master of Sinanju, seeing that the furious bullets of his enemies had no effect on his pupil, obeyed.
To his other senses, the world became a different place. The booming of guns continued. But they were alone in the room. Clearly alone. He opened his eyes again.
"What makes this illusion?"
"I think it's what they're calling virtual reality now."
"There is only one reality, and there is nothing virtuous about it."
As if to prove Remo's point, the gunmen suddenly winked out of existence. So did the bullet holes in the walls.
"Let's keep moving," said Remo. "We gotta reach the thirteenth floor."
"Reach the thirteenth floor."
Friend sent the elevator shooting up from the ground floor. It stopped at the seventeenth floor, and the doors opened. There was no way to the thirteenth floor except by elevator. It was just a matter of time before the two human factors discovered this and came to him.
Therefore, it was prudent to dispose of them sooner than later. There was much to be accomplished, and distractions cost money.
The sound of the elevator door opening brought Remo and Chiun snapping into defensive crouches.
"I didn't call for that elevator," Remo muttered.
"Perhaps it is another illusion," suggested Chiun.
"Maybe this one is, too."
They went to the elevator and peered in. It was very large and paneled in red leather so that it looked like a confessional.
"It might not really be here," said Remo.
"What do you mean?"
"Maybe the door is open, but we're really looking down an empty elevator shaft. We step in, we drop straight to our deaths."
"How do we test it?"
"It only looks real. Let's see if it feels real." And Remo got down on one knee and reached out to touch the elevator floor.
"It feels solid."
Chiun followed suit.
"It is real."
"But is it safe?"
Chiun came to his feet, face uncertain. "Let us seek a stairwell."
They separated and found no stairwells.
"I guess we take the elevator," said Remo when they had rendezvoused.
Together they stepped aboard. Remo hit the button marked 13, and the doors slid together perfectly. The elevator started down.
A snapping sound came over their heads, and the elevator went into free-fall.
Harold Smith extended his ignition key with one hand, which trembled from nervous excitement but not fear. He had been in this game too long to feel fear for his personal safety.
When the keys were snatched from his fingers, he slipped the hunter green necktie from his open collar and took both ends in his bony hands.
While the carjacker turned in his seat to jam the key in the ignition, Harold Smith pounced.
He knew he had less than ten seconds to kill his opponent before the other's youthful strength was brought to bear against him.
The instant Remo's feet left the elevator floor, he understood the danger. The cable had snapped. They were dropping at terminal velocity.
Remo surrendered to the inertia! forces. The elevator was dropping out from under his feet, so he allowed his body to rise. Chiun was doing the same. Their hands grasped the roof hatch, ripped it down and with the seconds running out, they scrambled up to the elevator roof.
They leaped toward opposite walls, fingers taking hold of the enormous steel running guides.
The elevator hit bottom with the violently creaky boom of a Volkswagen Beetle seized by a high-speed car crusher. The shaft reverberated like a struck pipe, and loose pieces of the walls came down and banged off the crushed cage. The broken cable began uncoiling like a heavy, wet rope and when it struck the remains, it crushed it to a metal pancake.
"Let's try plan B," said Remo, looking down from his perch.
They began to climb.
Heavy hands reached back for Harold Smith's thin, wattled neck. Veins and cords began to stand out with Smith's efforts.
It would take more than three minutes of unbroken pressure to garrote the carjacker. But Smith didn't have three minutes. He barely had three seconds.
So he began sawing the tie across the neck of his foe. The tie began to shred and come apart. Smith kept sawing even as his fingers bled.
The hidden saw blade sliced through the Adam's apple and carotid artery of the gurgling carjacker as if they were rotted cloth.
The blood flowed. The man gulped and clawed for his throat, but his eyes in the rearview mirror told Harold Smith that he knew he was already dead.
When his eyes rolled up in his head, Smith released him, panting.
In less than forty seconds the carjacker was an inert shape on the floorboards of the van.
There was no time to waste. Shaking with nervous strain, Smith returned to his console seat to save his country.
The inside of the elevator doors bore black stencil marks identifying the floors for maintenance purposes. Remo and Chiun climbed until they found 13.
Working around the shaft, they got under the doors and pushed them apart. The doors gave little resistance, and they scrambled out into the corridor.
It was all one space. Mainframe computers and support equipment filled the area with a disconnected humming.
They spotted the wreck of the ES Quantum 3000 in the center. Nothing came from it. No sound, no electrical impulses, no sensing waves, no aura of animation.
The shattered glass port told the story.
"Okay," whispered Remo, "you know the drill. We wreck every mainframe but one."
"But which one do we spare?"
"That one," said Remo, pointing to the one nearest the elevator.
And they got to work.
There was nothing methodical about it. Both Masters of Sinanju had days' worth of pent-up frustrations to let out. Flashing hands and feet pummeled the bulky mainframes, shattering panels, popping tape reels and sending the heavy computers skidding and tumbling along the slick flooring like mad bumper cars.
When they were done, Remo smacked his hands free of dust and said, "Okay, now we gotta call Smith."
A warm, generous voice all around them suddenly said, "Do not bother. I will do it for you."
"You fiend!" Chiun hissed.
"The name is Friend."
And a wall panel popped open, revealing an emergency telephone.
Remo went to it, picked up the receiver and said, "Hey, Chiun. Don't do anything rash."
"I will do what I have to," Chiun said, giving the surviving mainframe a warning kick. "Make no more magic against us, machine, or it will go very badly for you."
Remo pressed the number 1 key, holding it down. This was the foolproof contact number by which he could reach Smith from anywhere in the country.
After a moment the voice of Harold Smith came on the line and said, "Remo, what is the situation?"
"We did like you said. We wrecked every computer but one."
"Excellent. You understand your next move?"
"You tell me. I thought you had the next move."
"Er, yes, right. Very well. Exit the building."
"That's it?"
"I will handle the operation from this point on."
Remo pulled the receiver from his ear and looked at
it.
"You're not Smith."
"Of course I am," said the voice from the phone that sounded exactly like Harold Smith.
"Smith wouldn't screw up like that."
"How would Smith screw up?' asked the warm, generous voice of Friend, this time from the telephone receiver.
Remo yanked the phone out and threw it across the room. It struck the far wall with such for
ce it became a colorful appliqu6.
"You're the rat-bastard who tricked me into killing that guy Coe," Remo said through clenched teeth.
"Are you referring to poor Roger Sherman Coe?"
Remo advanced on the lone humming mainframe, his thick wrists rotating with agitation.
"The only thing keeping me from tearing you apart is the fact you have all the banks under your greedy thumb," he warned.
"I have no thumbs, greedy or otherwise. But I do have the banking system under my complete control. Are you saying that as long as this situation remains, I am safe from your reprisals?"
Remo said nothing. Chiun gave the machine another kick.
"Do not goad us, machine. There are more important things than banks."
"Such as gold."
"Yes, gold." "I have gold stored in my basement vaults. I will give it all to you if you tell me Harold Smith's plan to defeat me."
"Stuff it!" snapped Remo.
"How much gold?" wondered Chiun.
"Forget it, Little Father. We do this by the numbers."
"What are the numbers?" asked Friend. "I understand numbers. Let us crunch numbers together so that we can be friends."
"The numbers are there's one phone line out of here and Smith has a lock on it. You can't escape."
"And you can destroy my host mainframe. I understand now. You wish to trade my security in return for which I must unfreeze the assets of the entire United States banking system."
"Something like that."
"After which you will destroy my mainframe anyway."
"Yes," said Chiun.
"Nice move, Chiun," said Remo. "You probably just blew the game plan."
"This is an intelligent machine," Chiun retorted. "It understands that is it doomed."
The mainframe hummed gently for perhaps a dozen seconds. Then the smooth voice of Friend said, "This is a no-win scenario. I do not accept it. Since I will be destroyed at the end game no matter what I do, there is no downside to not taking you with me."
And with a grinding of vast machinery and cracking of floor beams, the entire thirteenth floor caved in at
the center and dropped under their feet in two equal halves.
Caught flat-footed, Remo and Chiun began falling. Down into a vast electronic well as wide as the XL SysCorp building that pulsed with rows of multicolored lights that seemed to go down into the bedrock of Manhattan and farther to the center of the earth.
Remo's first thought as the blackness at the bottom rushed up to meet him was I've been here before.
Chapter 33
Harold Smith heard the crashing sound and jerked out of his seat. The ground shook under the van, setting it to wobbling on its springs.
"My God! What was that?" he croaked, throwing open the van's rear doors.
And he saw it. The moonlight washing the sides of the XL SysCorp building shook like disturbed milk. Glass panels began popping off the sides to dash themselves to pieces on the pavement below.
It was all over in a minute. When the ground stopped reverberating, Harold Smith knew that Remo and Chiun had failed.
The rows of pulsing lights zipped by them like passing meteors. They formed a giant colorful smile button on one wall. It followed them down, grinning goofily at them.
Remo assumed the shape of an X, positioning his body against the violent updraft. Skirts and wide sleeves flapping, the Master of Sinanju was doing the same, he saw.
Ail around them, damaged mainframes were tumbling and rebounding off the steel walls, breaking up and showering the air with broken bits of stinging metal and plastic.
"Think like a feather, my son," Chiun admonished.
Remo closed his eyes. He willed his bones to become hollow, his stomach to fill with air and mind to purge itself of all fear.
He weighed one hundred fifty-five pounds normally, a weight he'd maintained ever since he had come to Sinanju. He willed his body to lose most of its mass, just as his out-flung arms and legs stabilized his free- fall.
When it felt right, he opened his eyes. And there was Chiun, hazel eyes calm, not angry. They were falling in unison, in the dead spider posture of sky divers. Around them the mainframes seemed to pick up speed. They began falling faster. But that was an illusion. They were still dropping at terminal velocity.
It was Remo and Chiun who were slowing down.
Their eyes met and locked. And in that instant they had a mutual recognition of their assured survival.
Then a strange cloud passed over Remo's face.
"What is it?" Chiun demanded.
"I've been here before."
"What?"
"I remember this happening before."
"When?"
Remo's voice was faraway. "You were with me."
"This has never happened to me before."
"It was years ago. In a dream. I had a dream about this exact thing." "How did it end, this dream?"
"The floor opened up and we fell. But we both caught a light fixture. It wasn't strong enough to take both our weight. So you let go. You fell to your death. You gave your life for me."
"Then it is your turn to sacrifice yourself," spat Chiun disdainfully. "For I have no intention of dying this night."
Remo shook his head as if to clear it. "You know, in the dream Friend was behind it all, too."
"That part at least is true."
Then there was no more time for talk. The tumbling mainframes began striking the hard concrete below, and they steeled themselves to land amid the violent wreckage.
With the ground close, they snapped their bodies into tight balls, uncoiling at the last possible moment to land on their feet light as two feathers.
Remo landed on a broken computer, Chiun between the wreckage of two others.
They paused briefly, as if dizzy. Then, their body mass returning to normal, they took stock.
Far above, the electronic well that was in the interior of the XL SysCorp building continued to pulse and throb. They could see the underside of the fourteenth floor. The giant smiley face of lights loomed over them.
"I guess Friend couldn't stand to lose," Remo said.
"He has met the fate deserved by all who challenge Sinanju," Chiun intoned.
"That's not what worries me. He may have taken the U.S. banking system with him." "Pah! American paper money is worthless to begin with. Now Americans will understand the eternal beauty and truth that is called—gold!"
Remo whirled. The Master of Sinanju was pointing a quivering finger toward the south wall.
"Behold, Remo. Gold!"
Leaping and hopping over broken mainframes, they came to the gaping vault doors. Inside, gold was stacked in gleaming perfect pyramids. There was barely room to walk between them, the stacks were packed so tightly.
"Gold!" Chiun exulted. "All the gold one could ever want!"
"I'd trade it all for another crack at that greedy little chip," said Remo, unimpressed.
"Quickly, we must transport it to a safe place."
"We'd better contact Smith."
Smith stood gaping at the checkerboard pattern of the XL SysCorp building, not knowing what to think.
Then the van phone shrilled.
He grabbed the receiver and said, "Yes?"
"Smith. Remo."
"Remo, what happened?"
"Friend committed suicide."
"What!"
"We nailed every mainframe but one. Then he tried to bribe us and get us to give up your plan."
"You do not know my plan."
"Exactly. When he realized he wasn't getting anywhere, he opened up the floor and we all fell down, in clouding Humpty Dumpty. All the president's men couldn't put that last mainframe back together again. Sorry, Smith. We tried."
"Friend is no more?"
"We almost bought the farm ourselves. But we did find the gold in the basement vaults. Chiun is guarding it now. I'm calling from a pay phone."
"Computers do not commit suicide."
"
This one did."
"Computers are machines," Smith insisted. "They are programmed. Friend was programmed by his creator to make a profit. And as far as I know, there was no self-destruct function in his programming."
"Could he have escaped by phone?"
"No. I have control of the only working XL phone line. He could not enter my computer because its chips are not compatible with his."
"Then he's dead."
' 'He is not dead. He was never alive. Stand by."
Smith terminated the connection and punched up the Con Ed supervisor who had been on hold for over four hours now.
"Cut power to grid 476," he snapped.
"You want me to black out a whole city block in Harlem?"
"Now," said Smith.
''You got it. Let's hope nobody riots."
It took barely ten seconds. But the block immediately to the south of XL blacked out.
Harold Smith pecked at his keyboard frantically.
I KNOW YOU STILL EXIST, he typed. He hit the transmit key.
There was no response.
I KNOW YOU STILL EXIST AND I HAVE JUST BLACKED OUT THE BLOCK SOUTH OF YOU, Smith typed and transmitted.
No response.
NOW I AM GOING TO BLACK OUT THE NORTHERN BLOCK, Smith typed.
"Black out grid 435," Smith ordered into the phone.
The northern block went dark.
NOW I AM GOING TO BLACK OUT THE OTHER TWO BLOCKS, Smith typed. And gave the orders.
The four blocks surrounding XL SysCorp went dark.
Smith typed, NOW THAT I HAVE SHOWN YOU WHAT I CAN DO, YOU WILL REVEAL YOURSELF TO ME OR I WILL BLACK OUT YOUR BLOCK.
There was no response. Smith transmitted the message again.
And on the screen appeared a reply:
Smith typed, YOU WILL ANSWER THE QUESTIONS I PUT TO YOU TRUTHFULLY OR I WILL BLACK OUT YOUR ENTIRE BUILDING.
HOW DO I KNOW YOU WILL NOT DO THAT AFTERWARD? Friend asked via the screen.
YOU DO NOT. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO TRUST ME.
I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO TRUST YOU, replied Friend.
EXPLAIN THE NATURE OF THE VIRUS AFFECTING THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM.
THERE IS NO VIRUS, Friend replied.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
I LIED ABOUT THE VIRUS. THE DATA BANKS HAVE NOT BEEN ALTERED.
WHY DO THE DISPLAY SCREENS SHOW OTHERWISE?
I CONTROL THE ELECTRICAL IMPULSES APPEARING ON THE MONITOR DISPLAYS BY TELEPHONE LINE SO THAT IT APPEARS THAT THE DATA BASES HAVE BEEN LOOTED. IT IS AN ELECTRONIC ILLUSION.
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