Political Pressure td-135

by Warren Murphy

  Chiun nodded, his expression without judgment. "In my village," he said, "there were many families, and no fishing or work. All the village relied on the income that came from foreign rulers. When the money did not come—" he shrugged simply "—then there was no food."

  "Oh, my."

  "It is a sad thing to see a child die slowly from starvation," Chiun said. The blood drained from the face of the big woman. "It is sadder still to see the mother or the father grow gaunt because they sacrifice their share of what little food there is to their children."

  The big woman's lower lip trembled.

  "And it is not a mercy to prolong the life of a starving child," Chiun intoned in a low, matter-of-fact voice. "If there is no hope of food, then why allow the little one to suffer more than is necessary?"

  "I don't..." She couldn't say anything more.

  The lawyers for the state were now giving their opening arguments, "...we will show federal tax returns as evidence that, far from being destitute, the fired state employees have annual family incomes ranging from five hundred thousand to three million dollars, and that does not include the salaries they would have received had they continued working for the state."

  The big woman wasn't listening to the lawyers, her attention riveted on the mild little Korean man who spoke almost in a whisper.

  "In fact, it is an act of mercy to end the suffering of the babies, for their sake and for the sake of the village."

  The woman's heavily painted eyes brimmed with tears.

  "We live on a bay, you see, and we call this act of mercy sending the babies home to the sea."

  Then Chiun did something amazing. Astounding. He produced a tear. It rolled down the ripples in his ancient face, and he allowed his mouth to tremble.

  The hippopotamus woman gasped and sobbed loudly. She thrust her great rear end off the seat and grabbed her millionaire husband, Raymond. She towed him out of the courtroom, blubbering and sobbing all the way. The trial proceedings had halted and only slowly did people begin to react to the display.

  Chiun sat back in his seat and couldn't hide the slight upturn of his mouth.

  Remo couldn't stop being amazed. "Little Father," he whispered finally, "that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen you do."

  "Heh-heh-heh."

  "How long has it been since Sinanju actually sent any babies home to the sea? Like three thousand years?"

  "Heh-heh-heh."

  The trial began in earnest, Remo fought the inevitable boredom that came whenever he was in court—not that he was in court often in the past, well, couple of decades. When he was a cop in New Jersey, there had been regular court appearances. Then, of course, there was his own trial for murder. He had been framed and the trial was rigged and Remo Williams was found guilty. Next thing he knew, wham, bam, sizzle, he was in the electric chair.

  The entire trial and execution were orchestrated by CURE, which then consisted of Harold Smith and Conn MacCleary, who had once been an agent alongside Smith in the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Which got Remo wondering again about his current endeavor and why he was doing it. Everywhere you looked, there was corruption. Somebody was removing the perpetrators of the corruption. Was that really a bad thing to do?

  And what was the difference really between these guys and CURE?

  Maybe stopping the corruption vigilantes was actually the wrong thing to do.

  Chiun had moved down and was speaking to a well-proportioned but meaty middle-aged woman whose husband keep shushing her. The former governor had given the man an accounting supervisory position that took him away one afternoon a week from his nine-to- five job as comptroller for a three-billion-dollar airline.

  "My people have long faced starvation," Chiun intoned sadly.

  "We're not exactly starving," said the wife, who giggled in a desperate attempt to move the conversation away from all this negativity.

  "You are an extremely fit woman," Chiun said approvingly.

  This was more like what she wanted to hear. Older than dirt or not, she had a hankering for the vivid little Asian man. "Why, thank you."

  But Chiun shook his head morosely. "Your fat stores are insufficient to support you during starvation."

  She frowned, unable to decide if this was complimentary or not

  "And, of course, there is very little stored fat in your plasticized udders," Chiun added with such seriousness the woman took a few seconds to believe she had heard what she thought she heard. "They will fail to sustain you as you begin to starve. Soon your flesh will become paper thin and cling to your bones, and then your fleshy protuberances will be a mockery to your agonized wasting."

  The woman struggled to decide how to react. Remo enjoyed watching her, but he heard something that made him forget her entirely.

  Chiun heard it, too.

  "Front and back. I'll go front," Remo said.

  Chiun nodded and then the two of them were bounding over the rows of wooden benches while the court erupted into pandemonium.

  14

  Remo cursed himself and cursed Chiun. If he had been listening more closely to what was going on around them, instead of eavesdropping on Chiun's game-playing with the rich idiots with the lawsuits, maybe he would have heard the guns earlier.

  No. That wasn't fair to either of them. There were people all over this place. Cops and media and interested public and lawyers and court personnel. The gunners had taken their positions outside the rear entrance to the courtroom and in the judge's chambers, and only then did they extract their weapons and create the distinctive noise of firearms.

  The gunners weren't wasting time and they weren't taking chances. The crew in the judge's chambers started shooting without even opening the door, and the torrent of bullets mangled the bolt and shoved it open.

  There were two gunners, one crouched and one standing, and when they saw the flash of movement coming straight at them they concentrated their gunfire on it.

  Remo dodged and spun and slithered around the bursts of autofire, moving as fast as he dared without intercepting one of the rounds himself. It took just an instant to reach the gunners, but how much gunfire had he allowed to spray into the crowded courtroom?

  The two gunners were too slow to think about the bullet-dodger before he struck them dead. One expensive Italian shoe shattered the skull of the crouching man while the standing gunner got the finger. The finger penetrated the bridge of his nose and opened a channel into the brain itself. Remo's finger found the brain switch and turned it from on to off.

  There was another gunner just behind them, where he had failed to see all that Remo did. The bodies of his companions had only started collapsing before he found his submachine gun removed from his hands and twisted with a groan of metal.

  The gunner faced not a man but a dervish. A whirlwind. A creature too fast to be human tossed the gun into the wall, where it embedded itself, then grabbed the commando by the hair and began slashing him with a knife, but the knife moved too fast to see.

  The commando's battle harness, his handgun holster, his blacksuit and white gloves and mask—all were shredded and seemed to disintegrate from his body like water flowing off him.

  The commando found himself standing stark naked in the judge's chambers.

  Remo snatched up the items that resulted from his quick disrobing of the gunner. He came up with a handgun, a knife, a magazine for the rifle and a walkie-talkie. He twisted the gun, dismantled the radio and snapped the knife. No explosives. Hidden in the bullets? Seemed unlikely.

  "Where's the suicide charges?" he demanded.

  "The what?" the naked man asked.

  "They've got you rigged to blow up if you blow the job, Dinky," Remo said. "Didn't you hear about yesterday's screwup?"

  The naked commando looked blankly at Remo. "Huh?"

  "Very helpful." Remo didn't have time to deal with it. Maybe this guy didn't have a self-destruct mechanism, but that didn't mean the two corpses weren't booby-trap
ped.

  "Come on, Dinky." Remo lifted the commando by his hair and propelled him into the courtroom. Chiun was nowhere to be seen, and crowds crammed to get out the back entrance of the courtroom. Almost nobody noticed Remo until the bailiff swung in his direction, his revolver in a two-handed grip that meant serious business. The judge cowered behind him.

  "Who the hell are you?" the bailiff queried.

  "Justice Department," Remo blurted, since he couldn't remember what kind of ID he was carrying today. "Get the judge away from here—those bodies are rigged to blow."

  "What the hell are you doing with that guy?" the bailiff cried at the sight of the naked guy.

  "Dammit, get to the back!"

  "I don't trust you for shit!" the bailiff shot back.

  "Fine, I'll handle it. God forbid anybody lift a finger but me!" Remo slipped into the bailiff's personal space in an eye blink, batted the revolver skyward and snatched the officer of the court by the collar and belt.

  The bailiff grunted, then heard, "Bailiff coming!"

  Remo tossed the man with a quick flick of the wrists and sent him careening down the center aisle of the court. Budget cuts had made floor waxing and polishing a less-than-monthly event, and the bailiff screeched as the friction heated his flesh through his shirt and trousers and instantly burned his forearms.

  "Judge coming next," Remo warned even as the bailiff bowled into the legs of the crowd and brought down eight gawking bystanders. Remo knew a seven- ten split when he saw one and he whipped the judge right down the middle of the aisle, giving the throw just enough English to send the judge into a last-second swerve that brought him lengthwise, taking out more of the panicking rabble. The judge's robes at least protected him better from friction burns.

  "Sorry, Dinky," Remo announced to the shell- shocked, clothing-optional commando.

  The man was a soldier, veteran of Gulf War Version 1.0, Bosnia and Afghanistan, and he had laughed at death, but now, finally he knew utter terror. He saw the burned arms of the bailiff and knew his own immediate future.

  He tried to run, but the madman that was Remo Williams snatched him off his feet and got him the hell out of the blast range as fast as he knew how to do.

  The commando was screaming even before he hit the floor at roller-coaster speed. He didn't slide on the unpolished floor so much as scorch across it, every inch an agony of fire as the great speed and the inordinate amount of exposed human flesh resulted in skin-peeling heat and friction of a massive degree.

  Remo would have liked to watch, but he didn't have time. In all the chaos and screaming and movement, Remo had sensed something that didn't belong.

  It took him two precious seconds to realize what it was. Air shifting, not ventilation, something strange and out of place, something from above.

  A commando was looking down from the roof, where an opaque plastic skylight bubble had been removed. The commando was taking action—he had a remote control.

  "Grenade!" Remo shouted, because he couldn't think of anything to better mobilize this herd of morons.

  As he shouted, he leaped away from the rear of the courtroom where the two commando corpses were sprawled in the door to the judge's chambers. He saw the flash of light come from that direction a microsecond before the shock wave rolled into him and he plummeted into the third row of the court benches. As the crunching impact of the blast traveled across the courtroom, Remo wondered if maybe, just maybe, the commandos were booby-trapped with explosive suppositories.

  Far-fetched, yes, but dammit if that wasn't the way his luck had been running of late.

  He filed away the thought, unpleasant for more reasons than he could count, and his hands came away from the bench back in front of him holding a foot-long splinter of shattered wood. It was two inches thick at the base.

  Remo leaped to his feet, spotted the commando on the roof aiming his weapon at the crowd at the rear of the courtroom and let the splinter fly. It seared the air, moving at bullet speeds, but Remo's luck had wandered away a heartbeat earlier in search of somebody more deserving. The man at the skylight pulled away fast, never seeing the missile until it missed his sternum and penetrated clean through his pectoral muscle.

  Remo heard the scream and followed it.

  15

  The bloody puddle had collected at the base of a maintenance ladder, and the drops vanished at the curb next to a No Parking sign.

  Remo consoled himself with the knowledge that he still had one surviving commando.

  Dinky was a mess. The entire front of his body was seared, black, bloody and blistered. Large chunks of flesh had been literally dragged off him in the high-powered slide to safety.

  "Guess I should have slid you on your back instead of your front," Remo commented.

  The commando's eyes rolled in opposite directions but seemed to focus for a moment on Remo.

  "Can't even call you Dinky anymore, can I?" Remo said with a grimace. "I'll call you Ken, okay?"

  "Kill me kill me kill me," Ken rasped.

  "Oh, that's too good for ya."

  "Jesus, where's your compassion?" blurted the arriving paramedic, who seemed unfazed by the extensive burns.

  "Don't waste any compassion on this guy, uh, Shorley," Remo said reading her name tag.

  "It's Shirley, moron, and this is a human being in terrible agony." She turned to her partner and started ordering up injectables.

  "Your name tag says Shorley, Shorley, and this guy tried to murder a bunch of people with a submachine gun." He nodded at the efficient, quick procedures being performed by other paramedics over their blood- soaked gunshot victims. "I see four people with gunshot wounds and five people with sheets over their faces. That makes me care about this guy's suffering not at all."

  Shirley yanked at her name tag, glared at it and swore savagely. "Okay, you're right about the name tag, but this man is not guilty until the court says he's guilty. Our human conscience obligates us to ease his suffering, so you just back the hell off, asshole!"

  "Okay. See you, Shorley."

  Shirley had been about to inject a massive dose of morphine into her patient when her hand came up empty. She looked on the floor. Her syringe couldn't have gone very far.... She swore and demanded another syringe of morphine.

  "Don't you have the morphine?" her partner asked.

  "I dropped it! Give me another!"

  "What I mean is, don't you have all the morphine?

  "Cause the kit's empty. Shit, everything's gone—all the painkillers."

  Shirley knew—she knew—that the asshole smart aleck jerk had somehow just snatched all their morphine. That was so heartless. "This man is suffering! Give me something!"

  "Well," her partner said, "we have this."

  He handed her a single-dose packet of Tylenol, and it wasn't even Extra-Strength.

  Remo found Chiun standing in the hall near the blackened entrance to a men's room. No explanation was needed. Chiun had dispatched the gunners from the rear and tossed them into the men's room, then kept out the general public until the corpses blew up. Remo felt coldly despondent as he emptied the contents of several single- dose dispensers of painkillers into the water fountain.

  "You are finally quitting your nasty morphine habit, I see," Chiun commented.

  "Can it!"

  Chiun was silent while Remo poured out the morphine, rinsed the bottles, then stuffed them in the nearest garbage can. In silence, the two Masters of Sinanju left the building without being noticed. Their hotel was only six miles away, and they wordlessly agreed to walk it. The stagnant front that locked in the bad air over Denver had yet to move on, and Remo breathed dirty air. He felt the smog taint his lungs and trickle into his blood. There was no way to stop it from happening, and he felt dirtied by it.

  "These assholes are not like us."

  It was a full two minutes before Chiun said, "I agree."

  "I thought maybe we should go easy on them. Let them take out some of the garbage before we plugged them up
. But I saw a lot of dead people back there who weren't guilty of anything."

  "It is not the reason Emperor Smith would give," Chiun said, "but I think it is a better reason—as long as we're being paid anyway."

  "In a couple of hours we can go visit Ken in whatever burn unit they put him in," Remo said. "But he's probably a know-nothing grunt."

  "Did you learn more about him than his name?" Chiun asked.

  "I didn't even learn his name. I was calling him Dinky first."

  "Why?" Chiun asked.

  Remo explained and Chiun smirked.

  "But then, you know, I decided dinky wasn't accurate anymore so I switched to Ken."

  "Why? What is 'Ken'?"

  Remo once again explained.

  Chiun smirked again, and steered them in the direction of a toy store that was on the way to the hotel.

  16

  "Boudoir Fantasies," said a husky, sultry voice, "I'm Ursula."

  "Ursula, give me Harold," Remo said, feeling unfriendly.

  "We do not have anyone working here by that name," Ursula breathed. "Is he one of our customers? We have lots of men who have sensual, provocative portraits done by our professional photographers."

  "I doubt Harold would go for that."

  "Oh, yes! Here we go! We have a five-o'clock appointment for a Harold. He's booked the Tarzan studio."

  "Can't be him," Remo insisted.

  "The loincloth is silk with leopard spots," Ursula continued relentlessly.

  "Picturing it makes my flesh crawl."

  "We have a stuffed lion that the gentlemen can pose with."

  "Ursula, I'm begging you."

  "For an extra fee we can have one, two, or three topless jungle girls appear in the shot with him," she insisted. "Some of our males have the shots done in the nude themselves. Do you think your partner Harold—?"

  Remo hung up the phone with superhuman speed, but not fast enough. The message was delivered. The images were in his head, branded there forever.