Three seconds and the guard went limp. Remo propped him against the tree he had been standing under and moved off toward the elevator platform under the stage.
On the steps on the far side of the stage, Gunner Nilsson took his pistol from his doctor's bag and dropped down onto the platform floor. Slats shielded him from the view of the audience, but he could see through the audience clearly. He poked the barrel of the revolver through one of the slats and zeroed the weapon in on Chiun, who sat placidly, continuing to talk, lecturing the young people around him.
Where was the white man? That Remo? Nilsson looked through the slats, left and right, but saw no sign of him. Well, no matter. He would not be far away. First the Oriental.
He aimed the point of the barrel at Chiun's forehead, just testing. But the forehead was not there. It was to the left. He moved the barrel of the gun again slightly to the left and fixed it on the forehead. But the forehead was again gone. It was below the line of his fire. He lowered the barrel. How could this be? The Oriental had not moved. Gunner was sure of that. And yet, he was never in the line of Gunner's fire.
That told him something, something out of the dim history of his family. What was it? A saying. He searched the corners of his mind but he could not find the answer. What was that saying?
Then he had no chance to think. The loudspeakers blared with a sound like God announcing the arrival of Judgment Day.
«Friends,» a voice screeched. «People. Human beings all. We give you Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice.» The last six words were delivered in a scream so amplified it could have brought a Latin American country to a halt.
Gunner held the revolver at his side and stood up. On the stage smoke was rising heavily, Gunner could see, from chemical pots hung under the stage surface. The smoke began to cover the stage, heavy clouds of red, yellow, green, and violet, all merging smoothly in the hot still summer air. Gunner could hear machinery start. The lift below the stage was rising. He continued to watch the stage.
There was another sound. A giant vacuum began to suck away the smoke. It cleared almost instantly and there, standing on the stage, were Maggot and the three Lice. Behind them was Vickie Stoner. She would be last, however, Gunner thought to himself.
The girl backed away from the four-man group and suddenly, with a screech, Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice were into their first song. «Mugga, mugga, mugga, mugga,» they wailed. The audience screamed, drowning out the amplification, making it impossible for anyone to hear the musical group the quarter of a million persons had traveled what came to millions of miles to hear.
Remo's ears pounded. He moved under the platform toward the steps on the left and hit them lightly on his way up.
Eight feet above Remo, Gunner Nilsson felt the boards shake. It was not the vibrations of the music, because he had already registered that sensation and filed it in his mind. It was a different kind of vibration; Gunner turned and looked down. Eight feet below him, at the bottom of the steps, was the American, that Remo.
All right. The American would be first.
Remo took a step up the stairs.
«Your brother blinked, you know,» he said.
«Yes, but that was my brother,» Nilsson said. He slowly raised the pistol on a line with Remo's chest
No one saw; all eyes were on Maggot and the Lice.
Remo came up another step.
«He cleared his throat too, when he was ready to make his move.»
«Many people do,» Nilsson said, «but I do not.»
«Funny,» Remo said taking another step. «I kind of thought it was a family trait. You know, one of those weaknesses that are bred in and eventually wind up killing everybody.»
«Anything that is bred in can be trained out,» Nilsson said. «I do not have my brother's bad habits.»
He smiled slightly as Remo came up another step. The American fool thought he was being so clever advancing slowly on Gunner Nilsson. Did he think for a moment he would have advanced if Gunner Nilsson had not chosen to let him?
There was a thing he wanted to know. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the roar of music.
«How did you kill him?» he called. «By his own gun?»
«Actually, no,» Remo said. «I didn't kill him at all. Chiun did.»
«The old Oriental?» That confirmed what the black had said, but Gunner still could not fully believe it.
«Yes,» Remo said. «I think he took him out with a toe thrust to the throat, but I can't really be sure because I wasn't there.» Another step.
«That is a lie. Lhasa was too big for the old man to handle alone.»
«Wrong, Nilsson,» Remo said. «That's the trouble with you squareheads. You never learn anything. I should think you'd have learned your lesson by now. It's not the first time you've faced the old man.»
Nilsson searched his brain. «Chiun?» The name meant nothing. «Never have we met him.»
«But his ancestors,» Remo said, taking another step. «At Islamabad. The Master of Sinanju.»
Nilsson's face paled. «I have heard of such a one. It is now only a legend.»
«He lives and breathes,» Remo said. Another step.
«Not for long,» said Nilsson, but his face turned white as he remembered the saying he had been searching his brain for. It had been handed down through generations of Nilssons.
«Where walks the Master from the East, let all other men give way.»
Remo saw the blood drain from Nilsson's face. «You sure you don't blink or clear your throat? Or what's your weakness? From the looks of it, perhaps you just have a coronary.»
Another step. He was too close now. Nilsson closed his finger about the trigger. It went off with a crash, loud, piercing, but still unheard against the rumble of the music. The white man dropped. He was dead. No, he was not. He was moving. He hit the steps, rolled forward over his shoulders and with his feet, plucked the pistol from Nilsson's hand and dropped it over the railing.
And then the white man was on his feet, smiling, moving again toward Nilsson.
«Sorry,» he said. «That's the biz, sweetheart.»
Nilsson roared, deep down in his throat, a roar of generations of Viking raiders.
Perhaps, he thought. Perhaps the curse of Sinanju was on the Nilsson family. But he could still give meaning to Lhasa's death by fulfilling the family contract. He turned from Remo and bolted up the stairs. The girl. He would rip her throat out.
He took the steps three at a time.
Remo turned on the landing and started up after him, but then stopped.
So did Nilsson. At the top of the stairs stood the ancient Oriental, serene and placid in his yellow robe, a smile on his face.
Remo could not hear his words, but it looked as if Chiun had said, «Welcome, Mr. Nilsson. Welcome to your famous house.»
Nilsson thought to overpower him. Remo watched and smirked as he saw Nilsson's shoulders tense up for the charge he would make. Trying to charge Chiun was like trying to bite an alligator in the mouth. Nilsson roared again, lowered a shoulder and rammed forward against Chiun. The old man gave way, and Nilsson was past him. Remo shook his head in shock for a moment, then darted up the stairs after Nilsson.
Vickie stood behind Maggot and the band, watching them, tapping her foot. She turned and saw Nilsson racing toward her. Her eyes opened in fright as she registered the look on his face. She backed away.
Remo was at the top of the stairs now, but he saw only a flash of saffron robe moving across the stage. Nilsson's arms were extended in front of him, reaching for the girl.
The Viking roar rose again in his throat. It died in a curdled squeak as an iron-hard hand came from behind him. Nilsson's last thoughts were those of a physician, not an assassin. He recognized the crunch of temple bones breaking, the piercing pain as shards of bone sliced like knives into his brain, and then the slow feeling of lazy warmth as death overtook his body.
He turned toward Chiun, searching those hazel eyes for meaning, but there was only respect
. He turned again and staggered out onto the stage in front of Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice, who kept playing despite the intrusion. In his death throes, Nilsson weaved toward the edge of the stage, collapsed and rolled off, dropping the fifteen feet to the ground, landing on the shoulders of one of the guards who began to punch Nilsson's dead body, calling his friends to help him teach the troublemaker a lesson.
Up on the stage, Maggot shouted:
«Heavy, man. Dead Meat Lice rule over all.»
Down below, the guards piled on Nilsson's helpless corpse. The cordon of protection between the bandstand and the audience disappeared.
It was a girl who made the first charge. One lone girl moving quickly across the grass toward the stage. Several others watched. When she was not stopped, a few more came, a trickle at first, then a wave, then a tsunami. Maggot stopped in the middle of a note. He saw the crowd rushing toward the platform and him. Hundreds of people. With unwashed hands. Greasy fingers. Dirty fingernails. Tobacco-stained knuckles. Trying to touch him. He hit the switch under his foot on the stage and smoke immediately began to pour up again from the machine underneath.
The music slowed and stopped. The sudden silence was like an invitation to charge. Baying like a pack of hounds, the entire audience seemed to surge forward toward the bandstand.
«Vickie, quick,» Maggot yelled, he hit a second switch and under cover of the smoke, the lift in the center of the stage began to descend. The
Lice jumped onto the platform with Maggot. Remo put an arm around Vickie Stoner and helped her down onto the descending platform. Next to him, Remo saw Chiun.
A moment later, they were all in the helicopter and it was lifting away, just out of reach of hundreds of fans, who had engulfed the craft but had the sense to stay away from its whirling blades.
As if on cue, the helicopter rose, and heavy drops of rain began to fall, the fat heavy drops that typify mountain summer showers.
«You all right, Vickie?» Maggot was asking.
«Yes, Calvin,» she said. Remo was surprised. Her voice was clear, strong, unmuffled, undrugged.
«What's with you?» Remo said. «Run out of pills?»
«No, straight man. I'm off that. I got a new high.»
«What's that?»
«Calvin,» she said, touching Maggot's arm. «We're getting married.»
«Congratulations,» Remo said. «Name the first one after me.»
«We will, even though straight shit is a funny name for a boy baby.»
Remo grinned. He looked out at the Darlington farm below. It had been raining only a few seconds but already the field was puddling and muddy in the cloudburst. People scurried back and forth, fights broke out all over the site. It looked like an aerial view of a Harlem riot. Anyone studying entropy, the principle of maximum confusion, would have recognized the field as a textbook illustration.
Remo felt Chiun's face next to his, peering out the chopper window.
«Tell me, Remo,» Chiun said. «Is this a happening?»
«A what?»
«A happening.»
«I guess it is,» Remo said.
«Good,» Chiun said. «I have always wanted to be at a happening.»
The helicopter continued to circle the farm for a few minutes and then one of the Lice said to the pilot, «Better take it out of here, man, some of them cats may be packing heat.»
The pilot tipped the nose forward and the craft swooshed off, back toward the town and the motel.
«I can't wait to get back,» Vickie said.
«Why?» Remo said. «Anything special?»
«No. Just to call my daddy. Tell him I'm all right.»
«Your father? You call him?»
«Every day. Just so he knows where I am and that I'm safe.»
«This is the father you're going to testify against?»
«Yeah, but that's business. This other is personal, my calling him. I have to. He's just so depressed. Every time he hears my voice, he says, 'Oh, it's you,' like it's the end of the world.»
«I understand,» Remo said and for the first time, he did. He understood who had put out the contract on her life, and why there was so much money backing it up, and now he understood why the assassins always seemed to know exactly where Vickie Stoner was.
He understood a lot of things now.
He looked across the cabin at Chiun, who looked less queasy than he usually did when he was on a helicopter.
«You understand now, do you not?» Chiun asked.
«I do.»
«In time, even a rock learns to be worn away by the water.»
«Have you ever heard the sound of one hand clapping?» Remo asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Paul Stoner, Vickie's father, was easy.
He lived in a quarter-million dollar townhouse in New York's east Sixties, and his scream of death was just another on a block so used to screams that no one paid any attention to them anymore.
But before he died, he wrote a suicide note for Remo, implicating the other companies and financiers who had been involved in the Russian grain swindle which had driven the price of bread in America up by fifty percent.
Remo arranged the suicide to look like a suicide, then with the note in his hand, dialed Dr. Smith at the 800-area-code free-from-anywhere number.
«All over, Smitty,» he said.
«Oh?»
«Yeah, Stoner's dead. He confessed everything in a suicide note. You want the note?»
«No. Leave it there. I'll make sure federal agents find the body. That way the note won't get lost.»
«It says here in fine Japanese braille,» Remo said sarcastically.
«Just leave the note,» Smith said. «Anything else?»
«I guess Vickie won't have to testify now.»
«No,» Smith said. «Not with the note. That should cover everything.»
He stopped and Remo waited, but neither spoke.
«Don't you think you owe Chiun an apology?» Remo finally asked.
«For what?»
«For not having any faith in his ability to handle the Nilssons?»
«Does he want the apology or do you?» Smith asked.
«Well, now that you mention it, I guess we both deserve it.»
«When your paychecks aren't on time, then I'll apologize,» Smith said.
«As ever, you're gracious to a fault. I hope your yogurt curdles,» Remo said and hung up.
Later, back in their hotel room, he asked Chiun:
«One thing I don't understand, Little Father. When we saw him in the theater lobby, how'd you know that the old guy was Gunner Nilsson?»
«It is a strange thing about Swedish people,» Chiun said.
«What is?» Remo asked.
«They all look alike.»
Remo grunted. «At Darlington, how come he was able to put a shoulder into you?»
«I allowed him to.»
«Why?» Remo asked.
«Because I promised his brother I would treat Mm with respect.»
Remo searched Chiun's face. «Good for you,» he said. «Toop, toop, toop.»
«What is this toop, toop, toop?» Chiun asked. «The sound of one hand clapping, of course.»
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Acid Rock td-13 Page 15
