Fool's Gold (18 page)

The tiny pulses in his temple were beginning to throb again.

The bull stood his ground. Remo, Chiun, and Terri looked at the big animal, then suddenly, the tunnel behind them was bathed in bright light. Remo glanced over his shoulder. The giant doors behind them leading to the sunlit arena had been opened, and standing in the center of the sand-floored arena, framed in the rectangle of the doorway as if it were a camera viewfinder, were a matador and two picadors on horseback.

Remo looked back at the bull and Chiun said, "Remo, please dispose of that thing."

"You never showed me how to do bulls."

"You can't see things. You can't do bulls. What good are you?" Chiun asked.

"I'm good in bed," Remo said.

"Will you two stop bickering and do something about that beast?" Terri said.

Remo stepped forward in the tunnel and called out, "Heyyyy, toro." He turned to Terri. "How do you like that? I saw it once in an Anthony Quinn movie."

Terri turned toward the sunlit entrance to the tunnel. "I'm getting out of here," she said, but Chiun reached out, took her arm and stopped her.

"We do not know what is out there. Someone brought us here. Someone may wait out there for you."

"Damned if I do and damned if I don't," Terri said, just as the bull charged.

Spencer was in the front row of seats, just behind the high wooden fence. He put a hand atop the thick wooden boards and lightly vaulted over the rail, dropping the eight feet into the sand of the arena below.

The crowd saw him and let out a surprised hiss, then began chattering nervously to themselves as Spencer marched across the sand toward the open doors of the tunnel.

The matador ran up to stop him, but without breaking stride the Englishman backhanded him across the face and he dropped into the sand as if felled with an axe. Then the Englishman in the dark-blue suit reached the tunnel entrance and stepped inside.

Remo was showing off. The bull had pulled up in its charge and Remo had dropped down on his knees so that his nose touched that of the giant creature.

From the side of his mouth, Remo said to Terri, "Wheeew, some breath. How do you like this?"

But Terri did not answer. Another voice did, a man's voice. Spencer stood in the archway, and said with a voice surprisingly devoid of malice, "Not bad, Yank. Too bad you won't have time to pursue it as a career."

With one smooth motion, Spencer slipped off his jacket and dropped it onto the floor of the tunnel, then pulled the doors shut behind him.

Strapped to each shirt-sleeve was a thin, eight-inch-long bomb that looked like a fireworks rocket. Spencer peeled one from the snap holder around his left forearm, then laid it over his arm and aimed it down the tunnel toward Remo. He twisted a small pin at the back of the missile and with a whooshing hiss, it flamed off down the tunnel.

Remo rose and turned, but he had no time to raise his arms or react to the weapon. Before it struck him, Chiun flashed across in front of Remo, his yellow robe a blurring fuzzy sun in the semilit tunnel. The side of his hand touched the rocket and it soared over Remo's shoulder to explode against the rear wall of the tunnel.

Without looking, Remo reached behind him and rapped the bull between the eyes with the side of his hand.

"Go to sleep, Ferdinand," he said. The bull moaned and fell onto its side, unconscious. Remo took a step toward the Englishman in the doorway, but Spencer had already ripped the second missile loose from his right forearm. Chiun grabbed Terri and ran down the tunnel and Remo followed.

Behind him, he heard the high-pitched sound of Spencer's vicious laughter.

Chiun hissed, "I know these boom-shooters. They seek out the heat of the human body."

They passed under the small light bulb that illuminated the far end of the tunnel. A thick iron door blocked their way out of the maze which wandered under the arena's stands. When they turned, their backs to the stone wall, Spencer was moving toward them. He stepped over the unconscious downed bull.

"Just step toward me, Missie," Spencer said to Terri. "I don't want to have to hurt you, you know."

Terri said, nodding dumbly, "I understand."

Remo said, "You understand? He's trying to kill us and you understand? Lady, put your oars in the water."

Remo looked toward Chiun. He knew the two of them could take off through the iron door and escape but Terri would be too slow, too vulnerable. Their fleeing would cost her her life.

Chiun was staring straight ahead at the burly Englishman but the stare was one of neither threat nor fear. It was a curious, dead stare as if Chiun were embalmed, the look of a man dead, but with his eyes wide open and staring. The color had drained from Chiun's face and in the flickering overhead light; he looked ghostlike.

He stepped forward to meet Spencer.

The Englishman had stopped twenty feet from them. Behind him, Remo heard the sound of the trumpet blaring again from the bull arena.

Now Chiun was only three feet from Spencer.

"Out of the way, old man," Spencer said.

Chiun shook his head, sadly and with finality. Remo noticed how stiffly Chiun moved, as if the life already had gone from him. What was he doing?

"Have it your own way, sir," Spencer said.

From only three feet away, he aimed the missile at the center of Chiun's forehead. Then he twisted the firing mechanism on the back of the rocket. It shot forward with a hiss, but then, seemingly by magic, it veered upward and exploded against the overhead lightbulb.

Terri inhaled her breath noisily as Chiun slowly extended a finger toward Spencer and touched the Briton's cheek.

"It's cold," Spencer said. "You're cold."

Remo nodded. Of course. The only defense against bombs that sought out the heat of a human body was an inhumanly cold body.

"Cold," Spencer said again.

"As you soon will be," Chiun said slowly. "Remo, remove this one."

"You're there," Remo said. "You do it."

"You need the practice," Chiun said.

Remo sighed and released Terri's arm.

"All right, I'll do it. But I'm getting tired of being the schlepp around here. Wait. We ought to question him. Find out what's going on with these phony inscriptions. Good idea, Chiun. I'll do it."

"I don't think either of you will be doing anything quite so easily," Spencer said. "You ever see one of these before?" He pulled a small black ball that looked like a regulation handball from a clip on the back of his belt.

"Naaah," Remo said. "Chiun, you ever see one of those before?"

"No," Chiun said. "Ask him if it plays Space Invaders."

"I don't think it does," Remo said. He moved past Chiun as the old man went back to guard Terri.

"It's a deadly fragmentation bomb," Spencer said. "Blow you to bits, Yank."

"Naaah," Remo said. "That stuff never works. It never goes off and if it does go off, it busts up windows and nothing else."

He heard Chiun behind him. "The British always used toys. That is why they never amounted to anything."

"I know, Little Father," Remo said.

Spencer's face reddened in anger. "We will see," he said. Softly, underhanded, he tossed the fragmentation bomb at Remo, then ran back toward the entrance to the tunnel. Remo picked up the bomb and held it in his hand. He could feel it whirring. There was an explosive charge inside of it, and when it went, it would break through the metal covering, which was already scored to break apart in jagged-edged pieces. But just as water could not rush into an already-full vessel, an explosive force could not explode against a containing force that was exactly its equal.

It would be stalemate: an irresistible force pushing an immovable object, neither giving way until the power of the force just passed its vibrations off into the stillness of the surrounding air. Remo felt the bomb still whirring inside his hand. He stretched his fingers to see if his hand could contain the entire sphere, but it was slightly too large. Some parts of the metal remained uncovered and the explosive force would break through there, and then the whole bomb would blow apart, taking Remo's hand with it.

He cupped his left hand over his right. The delicate flesh of his hands felt the coldness of the metal held inside. He softened his hands, relaxing his muscles, until he was sure that the entire surface of the spherical bomb was touched by his flesh. Then he began to exert pressure. That was the tricky part— to have the pressure forcing inward exactly equal to the pressure blasting outward at the moment of explosion.

He felt a click as the bomb's firing mechanism went off. Inside his hands, he felt the sudden buildup of pressure against his left ring finger and his right pinky. Instinctively, he increased downward pressure of those two fingers. His hands held and the explosion stayed muffled in his hands.

He could feel the pressure waves of the dissipating force vibrate the air around his hands and then the waves reached his face. He could see them shimmer against the light from the partially open doorway at the end of the tunnel. For a split second his arms twitched in the eddy of the force currents. Then the blast slowed down and in another second, the force had leaked harmlessly into the air.

Remo opened his hands and looked at the pure, unbroken black sphere. He tossed it toward Spencer.

"Told you. You can't trust these things."

Spencer recoiled as the bomb hit the stone floor in front of him and rolled harmlessly away.

The Englishman reached down to the back of his shoe, snapped a pellet from the back of his heel, and tossed it onto the ground in front of Remo. It popped, almost a firecracker's pop, and a dark billow of smoke rose, surrounding Remo's face. He stopped breathing, in case it was poison. Spencer pulled a throwing knife from the back of his belt, raised it over his head, and propelled it at the center of the smoky mist, at the spot where Remo's chest would be.

An ordinary man would have been defenseless, unable to see to protect himself against the razor-sharp blade flying toward him. But mist and smoke, Remo knew, were not just one thing; they were a bundle of bits, just as television was not one picture, continuously moving, but a series of still pictures flashed at the rate of thirty per second. It took the cooperation of the average person's mind and eyes to make them into a moving picture.

So with smoke. It did not have to blind or obscure if a person simply realized that it was made up of separate particles. Then he could focus on the particules with primary vision, changing the fog and smoke to a transparent drizzle, and then use secondary vision to see the object behind the smoke.

This Remo did and saw the knife flying toward his chest.

Spencer saw the knife disappear into the column of smoke that was Remo. He expected the usual thud and scream when it bit flesh, but there was no thud and no scream.

Instead there was silence. Then a snap, a hard, metallic cracking sound. And then two halves of the knife, the handle and the blade, came flying back from the mist to land on the stone floor at Spencer's feet.

"Oh, bloody, shit," said Spencer.

Wissex had warned him that these two were dangerous but had not prepared him for this. It was time for Old Reliable. As the smoke dissipated and Remo's form again became visible, Spencer reached into a shoulder holster and withdrew a Pendleton-Sellers .31 caliber semimag automatic with the Bolan augmented armature. The pistol fired a shell that exploded into fragments a foot away from the muzzle of the gun. Anything in the immediate area would be downed. It could level a cocktail party of people faster than Norman Mailer talking prison reform could level common sense.

Spencer pulled the slide back to put a shell into the firing chamber. As he did, he backed away from Remo, lest the crazy American make a suicidal lunge.

"Don't back up any more," Remo said.

"An old trick, Yank."

"I'm warning you. Don't go any further."

"You're the one who's going, pally," said Spencer.

Too late, Spencer heard the roar. He wheeled just as the bull rammed into him. The beast's large, curved horns dug deep into the Englishman's belly and the bull lifted him, impaled on the horns, up over his head. The bull stopped and looked at Remo as if he recognized him, then turned and crashed away down the tunnel toward the partially open doors.

The trumpet player was in full throat but his music died in a squawk as the bull broke out into the sunshine, his cargo of dead Englishman avast on his horns.

The crowd screamed.

Remo walked back to Terri and Chiun.

"Damn," he said. "I wanted to get some answers from him."

"He was very brave," Terri said.

"Your dream man, huh? Good. The next one to come after us, I'll let him have you," Remo said.

"You didn't have anything to do with it," Terri said. "His bomb didn't go off. And his knife fell apart before it hit you. And the bull got him before he could shoot you."

"Lady," Remo said.

"What?"

"You're an asshole." Remo turned his back on her and said to Chiun, "I wish I knew who sent him."

"I know who sent him," Chiun said.

"You do? Who? How?"

"Did you not see the crest on his jacket?"

"No."

"Then you did not see the crest on the jackets of the others who tried to kill us?" Chiun said.

"No."

"The same crest will be on that knife," Chiun said.

Remo trotted back down the tunnel and picked up the hilt of the knife. He looked at it as he walked back to Chiun. A lion, a sheaf of wheat, and a dagger.

"What is it?" Remo asked.

"The House of Wissex," Chiun said.

"Who the hell are they?"

"Some upstart Englishmen," Chiun said. "I thought we had taught them a lesson." He shook his head sadly. "But some people never learn."

Chapter Fifteen

"Here's a big one." Hank Bindle was looking at the pictures in Variety's International Film Annual and he stopped to point out a full-page ad to Bruce Marmelstein.