"I'd be surprised if you had. It's Lavallette's big surprise, the Dynacar. I stole it."
An envelope was pushed out the crack of the car window. "Here. I'm paying you for the Lavallette hit. I want Mangan taken out next. There's an address in the envelope. It's a woman Mangan visits every Thursday night. You can get him there."
"I haven't got Lavallette yet," the gunman said.
"You did fine. Follow the plan and take them in the order I give you. There's plenty of time to get Lavallette at the end of this. I don't mind if he's sweating a little bit."
"I could have finished him at the news conference," the gunman said. "I had time."
"You did right. I told you no head shots and you followed instructions. I want them all looking good for their funerals. It's not anybody's fault that Lavallette was wearing a bulletproof vest."
"I've got a reputation to live up to," the gunman said. "When I clip a guy, I don't like him planning press conferences later."
"We follow the plan. Take them in order. And no head shots. "
The gunman counted the money in the envelope, then shrugged. "It's your show," he said. "That letter to the paper. Was that your idea?"
The unseen driver said softly, "Yes. I thought we could raise a little smoke screen. It might make things a little tougher for you though."
"How's that?" the gunman said.
"They might be expecting you. Probably more security."
The gunman shook his head. "None of it matters to me. "
"I love dealing with professionals," the driver said. "Now get Mangan."
The tinted window sealed automatically and without any engine sound at all, the sporty black car slid up the garage ramp and out toward the street, like a fleet ghost.
The gunman who called himself Remo Williams got into his car and waited as he had been instructed to do.
It was a flaky contract and he did not like flaky contracts. They were unprofessional. He would have preferred a clean hit on a boat somewhere or under an overpass at night. Strictly business. This deal smelled too much like a personal vendetta.
He checked his watch. Five minutes had passed and he started his car and drove from the garage. There was no sense in spooking the client. By now he would be far enough away. A good professional watched out for the details. The details were everything. It would just be bad form to leave the garage right on his tail and two minutes later find yourself stopped next to him at a traffic light. Things like that made clients nervous.
The gunman had no curiosity at all to know the name of the man who had hired him to flatten four of Detroit's biggest wheels.
He did not, for a moment, believe that the client was some environmentalist nut who wanted the automakers dead because they were polluting the air. His bet would be that it was some kind of business rivalry, but it didn't matter. Not so long as he was being paid.
It was the business of not being able to shoot any of them in the head that bothered him the most. The client should have known that head shots were the most certain. You could shoot a guy all afternoon in the chest and he might not die.
The gunman had seen it himself, firsthand. It had been his first contract. The target was named Anthony "Big Nose" Senaro, a mastodon of a man who had cut into the don's numbers business in Brooklyn. Senaro had gotten word he was about to be hit and skipped to Chicago.
The gunman had found him there, working as a laborer in the stockyards. He waited until Senaro was eating lunch one day, walked up to him and fired three shots into Big Nose's massive chest. Big Nose had let out a bull roar and charged him.
He had fired his full clip at Senaro. There was blood everywhere but the big guy kept on coming, like a refrigerator on casters.
The gunman ran and for an hour, Senaro had chased him around the stockyard. Finally Senaro cornered him, put his big fingers around the gunman's throat, and began to squeeze. Just as the gunman was about to black out, Senaro gave a mighty sigh and collapsed from loss of blood.
The gunman scrambled away, losing a shoe to Big Nose's clutching hands. He never finished the hit. And Senaro eventually recuperated and went on to make a name for himself in Chicago.
The don had been understanding of the gunman's failure. "It is always difficult," Don Pietro had told him, "the first time, eh? The first time for everything is always an unhappy time."
"I will get him next time," the gunman had assured Don Pietro, even though his stomach quaked at the thought of facing the big man again.
"There will be no next time. Not for you and Big Nose. You are both lucky to live. Big Nose will not return to bother us but he has earned his life. And you, you have earned our respect. We will have much work for you."
The other hits had gone down better. The gunman had made a name for himself too. Using head shots. That one restriction still bothered him. It was unprofessional.
But the client was always right. At least for the time being.
Drake Mangan was on a conference telephone call with James Revell, president of the General Auto Company, and Hubert Millis, head of American Autos.
"What are we going to do?" Revell said. "That lunatic Lavallette has rescheduled his press conference for tomorrow and we're all invited. Do we go?"
Millis said, "We've got to. We can't look like we're afraid of Lavallette and his damned mystery car. Freaking thing probably won't start anyway. "
"I don't know," Mangan said. "I'm afraid someone will start pegging shots at us."
"The security people will take care of that," Millis said. "You know what sticks in my craw?"
"What's that?" said Mangan.
"At one time or another, Lavallette worked for all of us and every one of us fired him," Millis said.
"Damned right. The guy said to take the fins off the Cadillacs," Revell said. "A damned moron. He deserved firing. "
"No," said Millis. "We shouldn't have fired him. We should have killed the son of a bitch. Then we wouldn't be having all this grief."
Mangan chuckled. "Maybe it's not too late," he said. "It's agreed then. Tomorrow, we'll all be at Lavallette's press conference."
The other two men agreed and Mangan disconnected his conference call.
He'd go, but he'd be damned if he'd go without the old Oriental. If the President of the United States said that the old gook could protect Mangan, well, that was good enough for Drake Mangan. What's-his-name . . . Chiun could accompany him anywhere.
Except where he was going tonight.
The old maniac had a way with labor relations, though. Drake Mangan had to admit that.
After Mangan had evacuated the office, Chiun had decided he wanted something painted on the door. He had the secretary send up the head of the auto-body-painting division.
The door was open and Mangan heard the conversation from outside, near his secretary's desk.
"You will paint a new sign on the door," Chiun had said.
"I don't paint doors," the division head had said.
"Hold. You are a painter, are you not?" Chiun had said.
"Yes. I'm in charge of body finish on cars."
"This will be much easier than painting a car," Chiun had said.
The division head snapped, "No. Never. I don't paint doors."
"And who has given you these instructions?" Chiun asked.
"The union. I don't paint doors."
"Those instructions are no longer operative," Chiun had said. "You are now in charge of painting doors for me. Starting with this one."
"Who says? Who the hell are you anyway?"
"I am Chiun."
"I am leaving," the division head said. "The union's going to hear about this."
From his spot outside, Mangan heard a muffled sound. He craned his neck and peered through the door. The old Oriental had the division chief by the earlobe.
"I would like gold paint," he had said.
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir," the man had said. "I'll be right back with the paint."
"Five minutes," Chiun had sa
id. "If you do not return in five minutes, I will come looking for you. You will not like that."
The division head had scurried from the office. When the elevator did not answer immediately to the button, he went running down the stairs.
Drake Mangan was impressed. Twisting ears. He had never tried that in dealing with the auto union. It was never too late to learn new things in the complicated field of labor relations.
Now the door to the office that Chiun had commandeered was closed. The division head knelt on the floor in front of it, painting the last few letters of the legend Chiun had given him.
It read: "HIS AWESOME MAGNIFICENCE."
Mangan guessed Chiun would not come out until the painting was done, so he ran over and pressed the elevator button.
"Leaving, Mr. Mangan? I'll tell Master Chiun."
"No. Don't do that."
"But he's your bodyguard."
"Not tonight. I have a very important appointment tonight. Tell him I'll see him first thing in the morning."
The elevator door opened and as soon as Mangan stepped inside, his secretary hit the intercom button.
"Master Chiun, Mr. Mangan has just left. I thought you should know."
Chiun opened the door. He paused to read the almostfinished sign on the door, then patted the painter on the head.
"You do reasonably good work," he said. "For a white. I will keep you in mind if I have other tasks to perform. "
"Okay, okay. Just no more ear-twisting, all right?"
"As long as you behave," Chiun said. "Don't forget to put stars under the words. I like stars."
"You've got stars. Count on it. You've got stars." Drake Mangan parked in front of the high-rise apartment building near St. Clair Shores, as he had almost every Thursday night since he had been married.
He rode the elevator up to the penthouse apartment he rented for his mistress. Over the years, the mistresses had changed but Mangan had kept the same apartment. He chalked it up to tradition. In his heart, he told himself, he was just a traditional sort of man.
He shut the apartment door behind him with the heel of his shoe and called out, "Agatha?" The penthouse was decorated in the worst possible taste, down to zebra-striped furniture and black velvet paintings of clowns on the wall, but the softly lit atmosphere was redolent of Agatha's favorite perfume, a musky scent that even smelled lewd. Just sniffing it made the cares of the day fall away like dead skin and Mangan could feel the juices stirring deep inside his body.
"Agatha. Daddy's home." There was no answer. "Where are you, baby?"
He shucked off his topcoat and draped it over one of the offending black-and-white sofas. The door to the bedroom was open a crack and a warm light, softer than candlelight, seeped out.
She was in the bedroom. Great. No sense wasting half the evening in small talk. He could get small talk at home. It was the only thing he ever did get at home.
"Warming up the bed for me, Agatha?" He pushed the door open.
"There you are. Come to Papa."
But Agatha did not rise from the bed. She lay on her back, dressed in red silk pajamas, staring at the ceiling. One arm was casually tucked under her wealth of blond hair. A leg hung off over the edge of the bed.
She looked like she was watching the fly that buzzed her generous chest.
But she wasn't. Mangan knew that when he saw the fly alight on the tip of her long nose. She didn't twitch. She didn't even blink.
He stepped forward and said, softly, "Agatha?"
The door slammed shut behind him. Before he turned, Mangan finally saw the hole in the red silk of Agatha's pajama top. It looked like a cigarette burn hole but the center was the livid color of raw meat and he saw a deeper red splotch surrounding it, deeper even than the red of the silk.
The man who had slammed shut the door behind him was tall and lean, with a long scar down the right side of his jaw. In one of his gloved hands he carried a black pistol, its long barrel pointing directly at Mangan's chest. The automaker's heart started beating high in his throat, and he felt as if it were going to choke him.
"Who the hell are you? What's going on here?" Mangan snapped.
The man with the scar smiled a cruel smile.
"You can call me Remo. Sorry I had to ditch the girlfriend but she wouldn't cooperate. Kept trying to call the police."
"I don't even know you. Why are you . . . why did...?"
The gunman shrugged. "It's nothing personal, Mangan. You're just a name on a list."
Slowly his finger tightened on the trigger. Mangan could not stop staring at the barrel. His mouth worked, but no sound came out.
There was a sudden screech, loud, unearthly, like a high-speed diamond drill scoring glass. It was followed by a shattering of glass that turned both the gunman's and Mangan's heads as if they were attached to a single yanking string.
Entering through a perfectly circular hole cut in the window with a long fingernail came Chiun, Master of Sinanju, a cold light in his eyes.
"It's him, Chiun," cried Drake Mangan. "The assassin. Remo Williams."
"Wrong both times," said Chiun. He looked at the gunman and said, "Lay down your weapon and you may win a painless death."
The gunman laughed, turned his pistol on the frail Oriental, and fired twice.
The bullets shattered what was left of the window behind Chiun. He had not seemed to move, yet the bullets missed him, somehow striking points that were on a direct line behind him.
The gunman took his pistol in both hands and dropped into a marksman's crouch. He sighted carefully. The little man did not even flinch. The gunman fired.
A section of the wall cracked and still the Oriental stood immobile.
Another shot and the same result. But this time, the gunman thought he saw a faint afterimage of the old Oriental, as if he had moved to one side and returned to his place in the quicksilver interval between the time the bullet left the gun barrel and the moment it buried itself in the wall.
"This is crazy," the gunman said. And then the Oriental was coming at him. It was the Big Nose Senaro hit all over again.
Drake Mangan had fallen back onto the bed to watch but now as Chiun advanced across the room, he saw his chance to make headlines: "AUTO MOGUL CAPTURES CRAZED GUNMAN; DRAKE MANGAN DISARMS ASSASSIN."
It would be great new material for the paperback edition of his autobiography when it came out.
He saw the gunman's eyes were fixed on Chiun. He got to his feet, then lunged across the floor at the man with the pistol.
"No!" Chiun shouted, but it was too late. Mangan was already in motion. The gunman wheeled toward him and squeezed the trigger, even as Chiun was trying to move between gunman and target.
The president of National Autos was hit and knocked back onto the bed by the impact. But there was no hole in his chest and Mangan groaned.
Another bulletproof vest, the gunman thought, and swiveled his pistol back on the advancing Oriental. But the old man was not advancing anymore. He was lying facedown on the floor.
The gunman saw the gleam of blood in the fringe of hair over the Oriental's ear. A ricochet. A one-in-a-million shot. The bullet had bounced off Mangan and struck the old man in the head.
The gunman laughed in relief.
On the bed, Mangan groaned atop the body of his dead mistress.
"Now for you." The gunman grabbed him by his lapel. The fabric felt stiff under his fingers.
A Kevlar suit. That explained it. The man had taken the precaution of wearing a bullet-resistant business suit. A lot of politicians were wearing them these days because they were light and reasonably comfortable, but could deflect anything short of a Teflon-coated bullet.
"What are you doing?" Mangan said when the gunman started to pull at his tie.
"They used to do it like this back in the old days.
They'd take a guy out to a secluded spot and open up his shirt before they whacked him. It used to be a tradition and I'm just bringing it back."
Th
e gunman ripped open Mangan's shirt buttons and tore a hole in his undershirt. Then he put the muzzle of the pistol to bare skin, held the struggling man down with an arm across his clavicle, and fired a single heart-stopping round.
Drake Mangan jerked like a man who'd touched a live wire, then his body relaxed.
The gunman stood up and told the corpse, "I would have preferred giving you a head shot."
Then he quietly left the penthouse, waiting until he reached the stairs before holstering his pistol and stripping off his gloves. He took his time. It was a long walk to the street but he had all the time in the world.
He wondered if he would get a bonus for the old Oriental. Probably not. He was probably just some overpriced kung-fu guy Mangan had hired to bodyguard him. Those guys were a dime a dozen.
Chapter 9
"I still can't figure out what made the earpiece explode like that," the telephone repairman said.
"It's fixed now?" Smith asked.
"Yes. I've just got to clean up around here and I'm done. "
"You're done now. I'll clean up," Smith said.
The repairman smiled. "No. We have to clean up. Part of the total service package offered by American Telephone and Northeast Bell Communications Nynex and Telegraph Consolidated Incorporated. That's the name of the new company."
"Very interesting," Smith said. The telephone rang. He walked the repairman to the office door and pushed him outside. "Thank you very much."
"I wanted to clean up."
"I'll do it. Good-bye." Smith locked the door and ran back to the telephone.
"Hail, Emperor Smith," said Chiun.
"We must have a bad connection," Smith said. "Your voice sounds weak."
"It is a minor thing," said Chiun. "I will soon recover."
"Recover from what?"
"From the shame," Chiun said.
Smith gripped the receiver more tightly. The earpiece that the repairman had just installed was loose against his ear. He twisted it tight.
"I'm sure you will recover from the shame," he said, sensing another of Chiun's con games coming on.
"The shame of this indignity," said Chiun as if Smith had asked him for an explanation. "I am only happy that the Master who trained me did not live to see this. I would hang my head before him; his remonstrances would scourge my soul."
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