American Obsession td-109

by Warren Murphy

  Chapter 30

  Remo had no complaint about the directions he'd been given by the bilingual car-rental clerk at the airport. After an hour and a half of driving on a two-lane road that ran straight as a string through miles of open farmland-pancake flat, diked and about half of it flooded for the cultivation of rice-the lights of Family Fing Pharmaceuticals had come into view. In the distance, he could see the white towers of the plant complex rising up out of the blackness of the plain. The feeling of dread he got every time he looked at them was very intense.

  Up until this point, he and Chiun had had the luxury of confronting the hormone-altered killers one at a time. The last one, old Ludlow Baculum, had nearly had Remo's guts for garters, and would have succeeded if Chiun had not intervened at the last second. In the area of sheer physical power, Remo had never encountered foes quite like these. The idea that he would have to confront them en masse, and very soon, sent a chill down the back of his neck.

  Chiun sat in the passenger seat, apparently unconcerned about what danger might lurk in the white complex ahead. Under the glow of the map light, he was flipping through the fax Dr. Smith had sent them along with their plane tickets in L.A. As well as the particulars of the layout of the pharmaceutical complex, he'd included photos of all the prime players he'd identified. It was this group of faces that the Master was so intently studying.

  "Sheesh, haven't you memorized those stupid mug shots by now?" Remo asked him.

  When Chiun looked up from the series of black-and-white pictures, he wore an expression that Remo knew all too well: the mask of Masterly disappointment. Which immediately put the pupil on the defensive.

  "What?" Remo said. "What?"

  "How do you intend to find our targets?" Chiun asked. "By their noses? Or perhaps their ears?"

  "How about the happy confluence of same?" Remo said. "It's called a face. Everybody's got one."

  Chiun heaved a sigh before he continued, in lecture mode. "The truly skilled assassin looks deeper than the superficial," he said. "He looks inside, for tendencies, for relationships. Only in this way can he anticipate what the man he hunts will do in a given situation, and use that knowledge to be waiting, ready to strike at exactly the right moment."

  "You can tell that from a picture? A bad picture at that?"

  "All this can be seen in the position of the brow in relation to the nasal meridian. The circular flow of energy around the eyes. And in other ways..."

  "Such as?"

  "Take this one," Chiun said, tapping at the top page with the tip of a razor-sharp fingernail. "Here we have a man of about seventy years, who pretends to be much younger. He is willful. He is vain. He is greedy and ruthless. A typical Chinese."

  "Did the width of his nose give him away?"

  "No," Chiun said. "It was his name-Fing. But that is not important. What is important is what the picture tells me of his true nature. This is a man who will not fight his own battle unless he is cornered. This is a man who cares nothing for the lives of others, not even those of his own flesh and blood. He would sacrifice anyone to keep what he has. What he has is what defines him."

  "And how is this going to help us kill him?"

  "Are you not listening?" Chiun asked. "This man will hold on with his teeth, if necessary, to keep his possessions. They are the center of his life. His anchor." The Master paused for dramatic effect, then said, "They are his gallows."

  "That's all very nice and poetic," Remo said, "but what if your friend Fing has already made liquid most of his assets? What if he can walk away from that white monstrosity over there without ever looking back?"

  "You still do not understand, and it pains me deeply," Chiun confessed. "I sometimes think you pretend to be stupid in order to cause me, your teacher, grief. I who have with great patience and care brought you so far from your truly pathetic beginnings-"

  "Look, Chiun, you're making about as much sense as mud. The whole idea behind an explanation is that it explains something."

  "Ah-hah!" the Master said, pouncing on his student's words. "Now we are getting to the basis of your problem."

  "That I expect you to be rational?"

  "That you expect to be given an answer." Seeing the blank look on his pupil's face, the Master sighed again, this time even more tragically, as if the entire weight of the world were pressing down on his deceptively frail appearing form. That weight took the form of his own, personal Chong-wook.

  "Very well," he said, "though I know it is a mistake to coddle you, I will explain my meaning. The Western concept of liquidity, of invisible wealth, of electronic millions, does not compute in this man's mind. Look here, at these shallow lines radiating from the corners of his mouth. They are from many years of sucking on his own tongue. Like this..."

  In the greenish glow of the dashlights, Remo could see that Chiun had his lips slightly puckered, and his cheeks drawn in, as if he were nursing on, a cough drop.

  "I take it that somewhere under your noble beard you're sucking your noble tongue," Remo said.

  "This habit denotes a man of a grandiose and pompous type," Chiun told him. "Such a man often builds great monuments to himself. Ugly monuments that he alone finds beautiful."

  "And this tongue sucker," Remo said, "you're saying he won't abandon his work of art?"

  "Only when all hope is lost."

  "So, we must allow him to hope until we have him in our noose," Remo offered. "Happy?"

  The Master frowned.

  "What's wrong now?"

  "The airplane food has filled me with a terrible wind. How could portions so small have such a violent effect?"

  "That is a mystery for the ages," Remo said. "I'll roll down my window."

  As he did so, the floodlit entrance to the Family Fing complex loomed before them. The plant's grounds, which appeared to stretch on for miles, were ringed by a twelve-foot-high hurricane fence. The fence was topped with steel branches on which were strung garlands of razor wire. The road ended at a counterbalanced steel pole of a gate and a guard hut. Remo slowed as he approached. The barrier was down, barring the way onto the grounds.

  When Remo stopped, a white-helmeted guard stepped out of the hut. He took one look at the car's occupants, immediately stepped back into the hut and picked up a phone.

  "I don't like this," Remo muttered.

  After a very brief conversation, the guard hung up and advanced on the driver's side of the car. He had drawn his service revolver out of its holster, and his finger was on the trigger. He spoke to Remo through the open car window in blindingly fast Chinese.

  After a moment or two, Remo raised open palms in the universal gesture of helplessness, then pointed over at Chiun, who waved the guard around to his side of the car. Believing that the ancient Oriental was going to converse with him, the guard walked around the front end of the vehicle, his weapon held along his hip.

  As the Master of Sinanju cranked down his window, the guard leaned forward slightly, holding the pistol aimed through the door at the old man. On the other side of the gate, alongside the towering white tanks in the near distance, four men with white helmets were piling into a jeep, and almost instantly the jeep was roaring their way.

  When the guard repeated the question he'd asked of Remo-which was "What is your business here?"-Chiun replied with a blow. His hand flicked out through the window like a head of a snake; the fist was closed but soft. So quick, so devastating was the strike that the guard couldn't even pull the trigger by reflex. He dropped to his butt on the asphalt, helmet thunking as his head hit the ground.

  Remo jumped out and raised the gate as fast as he could. But by the time he got back in the car, the jeepful of reinforcements was barreling straight for them. And two more jeeps from opposite ends of the complex had joined the party. They were racing across the open courtyard toward the gatehouse.

  There was nowhere to go, and no time to get there. The first jeep screeched to a halt right in front of the rental car. The other two angled in from eit
her side. Four security guards, armed with M-16s, piled out of each vehicle, their weapons leveled at Remo and Chiun through the rental car's windshield.

  One of the dozen newcomers, a guy with a pencil mustache and sideburns, immediately started shouting something at them.

  "What's he saying?" Remo said. "He's talking too fast for me. I can't make heads or tails of it."

  "He says for us to get out with our hands up," Chiun told him.

  Remo surveyed the semicircle of autorifle muzzles. "I think we'd better do what he says." He stuck both his hands out the driver's window, opened the car door from the outside, then very slowly exited the car. Chiun did the same.

  The man in charge continued shouting a mile a minute. He seemed very agitated.

  Chiun spoke once more, quite distinctly and with great dignity. Remo got the gist of what he said. The Master suggested that the man with the mustache should speak less rapidly so his stupid white companion could understand what he was saying without the necessity and bother of Chiun's making a running English translation of every word.

  As if he were talking to a very slow three-year-old, the man in charge told Remo to step to the left. Which he did.

  "Do you have any idea what these guys have in mind for us?" Remo asked Chiun.

  As the Master also sidestepped, hands raised in the air, he said, "Why would I?"

  "I don't know. I thought you might be able to read their energy levels or something. The guy giving the orders sure looks like a teeth grinder to me. Doesn't that tell you something?"

  "Only that once again you have failed to grasp a fundamental concept."

  The flash suppressors of the twelve M-16s tracked them as they moved past the gatehouse to a stretch of open fence, directly under one of the floodlights. Then the head guy yelled at them to stop.

  The other guards lined up on either side of Mr. Mustache, switched their fire-selector switches to full auto and shouldered their weapons.

  The man in charge barked a single word. A Chinese word that Remo understood.

  The word was "Ready."

  Still in denial, big-time, Remo found himself puzzling over the guy's inflection. Had he heard wrong, or hadn't the end of the word risen in pitch? Which would have made it a question, not a statement. If it was a question, it might damned well mean anything. Ready to take a break? Ready to let these guys go? Ready for a little Macarena?

  His scant hopes vanished altogether when the mustachioed guard spoke again.

  The word this time was "Aim."

  Chapter 31

  The Fings, their tiny lawyer and the entire staff of the medical wing stood transfixed by the images on the video monitors.

  "They are bigger," one of the nurses gasped.

  "Hugely bigger," an orderly corrected her.

  "You're letting your imagination run away with you," Fillmore told them. "We've all worked practically around the clock. It's just the power of suggestion acting on our tired minds...."

  Though Fillmore mouthed the words, he couldn't put any conviction behind them. They were a half-hearted, ill-considered and totally transparent attempt to quiet the panic he could feel building around him. Obviously, the test subjects were bigger.

  In the space of half an hour, while the Fings and their employees had looked on, the patients had increased their muscle mass by fifty percent. And Sternovsky, the deserter, had been right about something else, too. The test subjects no longer looked human.

  Even without the shaggy fur or the tails, the density of their muscles made them look like some other, as-yet-unidentified species. There was enough meat on the hooded fan of a single test subject's latissimus dorsi to make ample backs for three normal-sized Homo sapiens. And with the newly added bulk came a return to the insensate fury of their pre-peanut butter time.

  The romance writer, her tail curled into a tight spiral behind her back, booted the inside of her door with the sole of her bare foot. The impact shook the walls and sent glassware crashing to the floor all along the corridor.

  "Oh, my God," Koch-Roche said, steadying himself against the side of the golf cart.

  The noise awakened an army of related devils. The other five test subjects began kicking their doors, too. In the narrow hall, it sounded like volleys of rolling cannon fire. And the force they unleashed against door frames and walls set the floor trembling, rippling as if from an earthquake. Glass walls everywhere shimmied and shattered, sending cascades of fragments whooshing across the hallway floor. The window in front of the wolverine's enclosure likewise dropped away in a spiderwebbed sheet, leaving the test animal stunned, blinking and extremely mad.

  "The doors aren't going to hold much longer," Farnham warned. He pointed at the nearest door frame, which was already beginning to splinter away from the wall. The steel door was itself bowing out in the middle from the full-power kicks Toshi Takahara was raining on it.

  At the far end of the hallway, the attendants abandoned their posts and started running in the direction of the bank-vault door. As they ran, they yelled at the tops of their lungs.

  It was a nightmare come to life.

  A horror dream so unthinkable that it froze the Fings, their lawyer and the surrounding medical personnel where they stood.

  It did not freeze Dewayne Korb, though. The computer billionaire jerked his head out of the drum of peanut butter, his hair and face smeared with the stuff, his eyes wide with alarm. Thanks to his overdose on synthetic hormone and dietary fat, he had arrived at a new and advanced animal state. Every fiber of his being told him that much bigger dogs than he were about to break loose. It also told him that when these big dogs did free themselves, he stood no more chance against them than the frail, petrified humans. Before anyone else could blink, the billionaire took off, high-kicking. By the time the others regained their wits, he was out the heavy door and gone.

  "Don't you think we should go, too?" Jimmy Koch-Roche said.

  When no one replied, the lawyer turned around. It was only then that Filmore and Farnham had already come to that same conclusion. And acted on it. Their golf cart was speeding for the exit, with Fillmore driving. They had left poor Fosdick slumped on the hallway floor, broken wrist and all, to fend for himself. Mixed in with the sounds of the wrecking-ball chorus were the shrieks of lag bolts as they were ripped out of two-by-fours. In their frenzy to escape, the test subjects were pulling the wing down around them. The door closest to Koch-Roche buckled, bowing out so far that a hairy hand was able to thrust through the gap between door and jamb, out into the hall. Ten furry fingers fought to get just the right grip and proper leverage to pop the lock bolt out of its striker plate.

  Everyone was running toward Koch-Roche and the exit. Running and falling as the floor shuddered and shifted underfoot. The panicked medical staff crashed down onto the heaps of broken glass, struggled up, only to fall as the floor heaved again.

  The attorney had seen more than enough. But before he could climb into the remaining golf cart's driver's seat, the vehicle was commandeered by a pair of burly male nurses. The cart started to scoot away at once. Koch-Roche jumped for the back of the vehicle and managed to get a grip on one of the canopy posts. He hung on like grim death.

  Behind him, the doors to the test subjects' rooms began to burst open. Dark, hairy monsters surged out into the hall.

  And began to tear the terrified staff to shreds. "Faster!" the attorney screamed.

  As they zipped past the wolverine's open cage, he got a brief glimpse of the experimental animal. It had managed to pull down some slack in the bundled wires and was gnawing through the connections, one by one. The cut electrical wires hung down from its shaved scalp like rainbow-colored strands of shoulder-length hair.

  "Faster!" Koch-Roche howled.

  But the golf cart was redlined. And to make matters worse, the test subjects seemed to lock on to and pursue anything that was running away. Like giant Airedales, a pair of them dashed down the hall after the cart, their mouths hanging open, their tongu
es lolling, their bare feet pounding the corridor floor. Behind them down the hall, Koch-Roche could see flying human bodies. The other test subjects were chasing down the fleeing medical personnel and bowling them over. Once the staff members were bowled, some of the beasts stood on their supine torsos and pulled off the limbs. Some just stomped a few times and then ran on. The ruined hallway was thick with huge, dark, darting shapes.

  When the attorney looked ahead to try to gauge the distance to the heavy door and safety, he saw that the Fings had stopped their cart on the other side of the barrier.

  And they were closing the door!

  Realizing what was at stake, the driver of KochRoche's cart stomped on the accelerator with both feet, trying to urge a little more speed from the motor. The other nurse knew the only way to go faster was to lighten the load. To this end, he began pounding on Koch-Roche's head and shoulders with his fists, trying to dump him off the back of the vehicle.

  But the lawyer would not be moved. He knew that to fall off meant falling into the hands of the beasts that were quickly gaining on them.

  His refusal to let go doomed them all.

  Forty feet ahead, the bank-vault door slammed shut with an ear-splitting clang. The driver of the cart hit the brakes, sending them into a four-wheel, sideways slide. The cart crashed nose-first into the wall and bounced off. Koch-Rache was thrown clear, over the driver's compartment, hood and solidly against the selfsame wall.

  For a moment, he was thankfully unconscious. When he awakened, it was to hot wetness splashing over his legs. He opened his eyes and saw the two test subjects-it was no longer possible to tell who they were, or whether they were male or female-tearing the nurses to ribbons with their bare hands.

  One of the beasts looked up from its gruesome game and saw Koch-Roche, leaning there against the bottom of the wall, alive. For an instant, their eyes locked. The beast's mind was an open book. It was thinking, More fun.

  The attorney didn't think. He reacted. In front of him, the bumper of the golf cart had caved in the metal grate over a ventilation duct. As Koch-Roche scooted for it, he felt a hairy hand graze the back of his knee.