It was the reteaching.
Three decades of experience with this pupil had confirmed his belief that whites could not retain knowledge for more than a few days. Of course, they could remember their Social Security numbers, their last names and the necessary procedure for opening a tube of toothpaste. The important things, the subtle things, were beyond their ability. Like breathing. And running. Perhaps it was time to once again drag out the long sheets of rice paper for poor Remo. First, he would have to relearn to walk barefoot over the flimsy stuff without tearing it. Then to run over it. And finally, to run in the ridiculous, stiff-soled Italian shoes he chose to wear.
Being the world's only teacher of Sinanju was a job requiring infinite patience, complete dedication and daredevil aplomb. In other words, Chiun thought, it was right up his alley. The problem was, and had always been, the pay.
There was never so much as a nugget of extra gold for all the overtime his student's limitless shortcomings forced upon him. No, it never counted when negotiations came up for a new contract and the payment in gold. They always divided the amount Chiun wrangled from Smith. Not an equal division, of course-what need did Remo have for gold when he enjoyed the honor of working with the Reigning Master of Sinanju? Also, Chiun had a greater responsibility-his birthplace, the entire village of Sinanju.
Years and years ago, at the start of Remo's training, the Master had tried to talk his employer into discarding the idea of his taking on a pupil. Chiun had argued that a pupil was redundant, that for the right price the Master himself could do all the assassinations. But Emperor Smith had foreseen a problem with Chiun's moving unnoticed through a society of whites-something an assassin had to do in order to succeed. Today the Emperor's wisdom had proved itself once again. It was because of Remo's overwhelming, all-reflective whiteness that Chiun had blended in so well with the reporters out front.
It was said that an acceptance of one's fate was the first step on the road to serenity. Though Remo had completed the rites that prepared him to be a master, he had lapses. Clearly, the fate of Chiun was to be joined at the hip to a perpetual student. Such a thing was not unheard-of in Korean culture. In the celebrated Pansori novels of his homeland, every noble hero was balanced by a comic footman, a Chongr-wook.
That was Remo. His Chong-wook.
With all due haste, the Master closed the distance between himself and the door that led from the warehouse to the training center proper. To the right of the door, set at chest height in the wall, was a ten-key touch pad that controlled the lock. It was very much like the keypad of his treasured Star Trek Next Generation Phaser TV remote control. Above the rows of numbers was an LED readout. Chiun held his palm close to, but didn't touch the keys. He moved his hand back and forth slightly, as if heating it over a candle flame.
"What are you doing?" Remo asked as he finally arrived behind the Master. "You couldn't have seen the code that guy used."
Chiun didn't waste time on a reply. The razor tip of his crooked fingernail clicked on the plastic pad. He tapped on three of the keys.
The warm ones.
"This could take all day," Remo complained as the words "No admit" blinked on the LED screen. Chiun tapped in the same three numbers, but in a different sequence.
"No admit. No admit. No admit."
"We don't have all day, Little Father." On the fourth try, the lock shot back.
"Dumb luck," Remo snorted.
Chiun shook his head. "Luck had nothing to do with it."
"Then how did you open it?"
"It would take me ten years to explain it to you, and a week later you would have forgotten it all. Instead of wasting time on lessons too complex for the simple whiteness of your brain, let us proceed to do as the Emperor has commanded."
Inside the training center, the halls were wide and low ceilinged. There were no windows to the outside, only doors leading to interior rooms. Some of the doors were made of glass. On the trot, Remo and Chiun passed a small surgery and an extensively equipped X-ray room. Beyond that was a hydrotherapy center. Remo looked through the porthole in the door. Two of the half-dozen stainless-steel tubs were occupied, but the player they sought was not there.
As they moved by an open office door, the man inside glanced up from the pile of papers on his desk. He wore the white uniform of a physical therapist. He looked startled to see them. They were already forty feet down the hall when they heard the sound of a chair scraping back. The therapist stuck his head out the door for a second, then ducked back in his office.
When Chiun saw the three big men in orange-and-black T-shirts charging down the hall toward them, he knew the man in white had called for help. The security guards filled the corridor as they lumbered, shoulder to shoulder. When they stopped a few feet away, the one in the middle raised a small black object to the side of his face and spoke into it.
"Yeah, we got 'em. Nah, we can handle it."
The security guard in charge was, even by the standards of his hirsute race, notably hairy. His pale face, except for a patch of forehead and the area under the eyes, was covered by a curly black beard, trimmed close. The hair on his head was long on the sides and in back, after the fashion of the new-country-music stars of the glorious Nashville Network. The hair on his forearms looked like his beard, but was untrimmed.
"What do you and Kung Fu there think you're doing?" the large hair-covered man demanded of Remo. The question immediately put Chiun's back up. "What does he mean by 'Gung Fu'?" the horrified Master asked his pupil. "Does he mistake me for a Chinese? Is he blind? How could he mistake this for the wide-nosed face of a barbarian?"
"I mistake you for a dumb shit," the security guard informed him. "About to be a dead shit."
"Kung fu's a Chinese martial art," Remo explained. "My friend here's Korean. To him, it's a big deal. Something to do with a thousand years of invading armies, domination, rape and pillage. Go figure..."
"Put a lid on the double-talk," the head guard said. "You two are trespassing on private property of the L.A. Riots. A crime punishable by the kicking of your butts."
"Look," Remo said, "we just want a word with one of the players. Two minutes and we're out."
"Buddy, you're already out."
At a silent signal, the other two security men closed in on Remo, a pincer move calculated to sandwich and overpower him. They didn't bother protecting themselves in a serious way, as they outweighed their target by a hundred pounds each. Because of the size differential, they were willing to absorb a punch or two in order to get their big hands on him.
Giving Remo first crack was their mistake.
And they only got one.
At the same moment, both guards lunged. It looked like a football play they had practiced thousands of times. Only they ran it at what seemed to be one-quarter speed. When the guards' fingers closed, they snatched only thin air. For an instant, the two men stood frozen, unable to grasp why they hadn't grasped the intruder's neck. With their arms extended straight out from the shoulder, the lengths of their torsos, from armpit to waist, were open to attack.
Ribs snapped like bread sticks, dry and crisp. Both guards dropped to their knees. As they clutched their sides, foreheads pressed to the floor, they wheezed and gasped for breath.
"Too slow," Chiun commented. He wasn't referring to the fallen guards, whose fighting skills were laughably childlike. The comment was directed at his pupil, Chong-wook, the ironic footman. Then the Master unleashed what might have been his ultimate insult. "If they had been Gung Fu," he told Remo, "they would have caught you."
"Hey, now, that isn't fair...."
The big hairy guy leaped, glomming onto Remo's back. Using all his weight, the security guard tried to drive the dangerous trespasser into the orange-and-black Congoleum.
"Whoop!" Remo said, twisting at the waist. Not a power twist. A timing twist.
The hairy guard flew over his shoulder and slammed headfirst into the wall with a mighty thunk. As the man's body slipped to the floor, it revealed
a face-shaped indentation in the Sheetrock.
Chiun didn't give the remarkable depth of the concavity so much as a glance. "We've wasted enough time here," he said, stepping over the unconscious body.
"The weight room must be just up ahead," Remo said to the Master's slender back. "Hear the iron plates clanking? And the rap music?"
Chiun stopped short.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked him.
"An evil smell." Chiun fanned a hand in front of his slender nose. "It is the stink of a fatty-red-meat-eating urine-dribbler."
"Don't look at me like that."
"You don't eat red meat, so it couldn't possibly be you."
"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence," Remo said. "Given our present location, though, that nasty aroma could be coming from anyone or anywhere."
"This is no ordinary smell," Chiun countered. "It's like what rises from a low clump of bush after a gentle spring rain."
"You mean cat pee?"
Chiun glided ahead and turned the corner into the weight room, which was big enough to accommodate the entire Riots team. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the floor was taken up with great steel contraptions and racks of dumbbells and barbells. As Remo followed Chiun through the doorway, the starting offensive line of the L.A. Riots looked up at them from the bench-press area. Sweaty, towering men, whose combined weight was somewhere around three quarters of a ton.
Remo smiled at the men in orange and black. Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Chiun, "Johnson had said they were bigger and meaner than the security staff. He forgot to add younger."
A guttural growl came from beyond the offensive players. At the squat rack, a monster man held an Olympic bar balanced on his impossibly wide shoulders. The heavy steel bar was bowed in the middle by the tremendous weight at both ends. Bradley Boomtower let eight hundred pounds of iron crash to the deck.
"He is the one who smells," Chiun announced, pointing an imperious finger at the offender.
"Just the guy we want to see," Remo said.
As the second-most-dangerous man in the world took a step forward, the two guards, two tackles and the center spread out to block his path. A grove of redwood trees in numbered, XXXL sweatshirts.
"We've got business with your big guy, there," Remo said.
"And what exactly is your business?" the center said, testing the heft of a seventy-pound dumbbell.
"A glorious and time-honored trade," Chiun answered at once. "We are assassins."
Remo gave the Master a look of dismay.
Behind the offensive line, Boomtower howled with rage and began to advance.
"Stay back, F.V.," the right guard said, holding up his hands. "You're in enough hot water already. You get in any more trouble and you'll be out of the lineup next week."
"We need you against Portland, man," the right tackle said. "That Parakeet air attack will pick us apart without your pass rush."
The offensive linemen edged closer to Remo. "Our time in the gym is very special to us," the center said, still armed with the dumbbell. "We don't like being gawked at by geeks and gooks in our most private moments. You guys sound like you might be crazy, fucking escapees from Atascadero, but that doesn't cut you any slack with us. My friends here are going to hold your arms and legs down while I beat your heads to mush with this. From the chin up, you're gonna be nothing but a red stain on the carpet." He waggled the dumbbell.
"Hey, Chiun, I might need a little help here," Remo said. "Chiun?"
The Reigning Master of Sinanju slipped his hands inside the loose sleeves of his robe. A gesture that needed no further explanation.
There were only five of them.
The pupil was on his own.
"That's it, old-timer," the left guard said, "you just wait there, nice and still, and we'll see to you in a minute."
Remo meanwhile had picked up a football from a bin on the floor. Thick wrist flexing, he gripped it with his fingertips on the laces. His knuckles whitened, and his fingers dug deeply into the ball.
It exploded in his hand like a party balloon, only much, much louder.
The noise made the offensive line pause in their advance.
"Is that little trick supposed to scare us?" the left tackle said.
Remo selected another ball from the bin. "I'm asking you real nice to clear a path," he told them.
"What're you gonna do, hurt our ears again?" the center said, laughing.
Remo dropped back to pass, pumped once. The Riots didn't take the fake, so he let fly.
The offensive line thought it was another fake. Only Chiun saw the ball leave Remo's hand. It traveled twenty feet before the pointed end made contact with the middle of the center's heavy-boned chin. Again the ball compressed until its seams exploded. The impact snapped back the huge man's head, driving him into a watercooler, which tipped over as he dropped to the carpet. His fellow players ducked and used their hands to deflect the flying pigskin shrapnel.
Remo picked up another ball and slapped it into his open palm.
The right guard bent over the center. "Louie's out cold," he said. "That skinny little punk KO'd him with a pass. Jesus, he's spitting teeth."
"Assassinate this," the right tackle snarled, scooping up the object the center had dropped.
Remo ducked, allowing the seventy-pound dumbbell to fly over his head.
The other players followed suit and started chucking dumbbells at him. Remo didn't even try to get out of the way. As the heavy objects rained down on him, end over end, he swept them aside, deflecting them right or left with the backs of his wrists. Dumbbells clanged on the floor and bounced, rolling every which way as the Riots emptied the racks of weights.
"Get the fucker!" the left tackle cried, rushing over to the stacks of iron plates. "Flatten his ass!" He picked up a thirty-five-pound plate like it was a pizza pie and sent it spinning, discus style, across the room at Remo.
But to Remo, the plate moved through the air so slowly that even a small child could have avoided it. The spectacle bored Chiun. There was no subtlety to it. He withdrew his hands from inside his sleeves and covered his shell-like ears to protect them from the crash of weights hitting the floor. As the four big men used up all the metal plates, they grew visibly weaker. Patches of sweat appeared on their chests and under their arms. Their breathing became labored. They leaned on the steel contraptions for support. Chiun carefully watched the man Emperor Smith had sent them to interrogate. Number 96. Animal Man. Chiun had never seen a creature quite like him. A creature with such density of muscle. The corded flesh on the backs of his arms looked like the mooring lines of a freighter. And the covering skin was almost blindingly shiny, stretched tight, almost to the splitting point. Nothing the least bit subtle there, either; as such, he was hardly a worthy opponent for a Master of Sinanju.
Chiun could sense Number 96's desire to enter the fray. The man was chomping at the bit. What held him back? Not fear, certainly. Like the others, he was too ignorant to be afraid. Perhaps another desire, a more powerful one, kept him in check?
Even from across the room, Animal Man's smell was overwhelming. That Remo couldn't detect it didn't surprise Chiun. A man who had once indulged in the cheesy burger, the Camel, the Budweiser, couldn't be expected to have an undamaged sensory system. The aroma Number 96 gave off wasn't the smell of a human, not even a dirty human. This puzzled Chiun.
In point of fact, the Master hadn't paid much attention to the background details of the mission as laid out by Emperor Smith. Something about a drug. Such things were usually unimportant, mere trifles when compared with the truly significant-how he could leverage upward the gold payment for the next negotiation.
When Bradley Boomtower suddenly turned on his heel and headed for the nearest exit, Chiun was after him like a shot.
"Hey, get that guy!" the right guard wheezed. Before the offensive line could respond, the Master had slipped past them.
Chapter 11
Bradley Boom
tower let the eight-hundred-pound load roll off his shoulders and crash to the weight-room floor. His intention was to snatch hold of the two intruders who had violated his territory with their ghastly fish smell and then tear their soft bodies into thin, bloody strips. His outrage at their presence inside his domain was too terrible to be held in check by the threat of league banishment or by the upraised hands of his fellow players. Boomtower could no longer think in terms of the future. As far as he was concerned, next week's game might as well have been next century's. There was no longer a barrier between what he felt like doing and what he did. The barrier that kept human society from ripping itself apart. In a way, what he possessed, or what possessed him, was absolute freedom; in another way, it was absolute slavery.
To get his hands on those who muddied his urine-marked perimeter, Boomtower would have thrown aside his teammates. He would even have killed them if they had tried to stop him.
The enormous nose tackle took a step forward, then hesitated as another, even more powerful need filled him. All around the squat rack were heaped empty boxes of Manteca. It had been eight minutes since his last "energy" snack. And already the hunger pangs were starting up again. These were no sudden cravings for a particular food. He wasn't responding to mouth-watering mental images of pork chops or rib roast. The feelings of aching emptiness were so intense that they were impossible to ignore. The inside of his belly clanked and shuddered like a length of steel chain caught up in the blades of a madly revving lawn mower.
A small bit of the pre-WHE Bradley Boomtower remained, self-aware, imprisoned in the giant body. And that man, who had earned a business degree from a Big Ten college, who had over eight million dollars in cash stashed in a Cayman Islands bank, was frightened by the intensity of the urge. And by the fact that he was eating more and more, and was never satisfied. Only for a second did this fragment of his original personality surface, then it was sucked under, down into the whirlpool of wolverine neuropeptide.
Boomtower spun away from the spectacle of flying dumbbells and pushed out the weight room's exit. Ahead of him was the Riots' deserted practice field. As he loped across the five-lane track that circled the playing area, he sensed someone or something behind him.
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