Ghost in the Machine, page 18
The Master of Sinanju didn’t reply. His face a knot of concern, he bounded for the helpless figure of Cheeta Ching.
“Do not fear, child. I am here.”
Cheeta seemed not to hear. She was staring at her legs as they vanished into the lobby marble, taking the rest of her with them. Her arms were lifted high. They trembled.
The Master of Sinanju reached out to help her. His thin fingers grasped solid flesh, only to come away empty.
“Remo!” Chiun said in a horrified voice. “I am helpless!”
Remo jumped to his side, but found he could no more touch Cheeta Ching than the Master of Sinanju. He said, “Get down to the basement and catch her there.”
Chiun flew off. Remo hit the revolving door. It was as solid as it looked. So were the steps. He took them in one leap.
At the last step, Remo reached out for the crying IRS man. He accepted Remo’s outstretched hands gratefully. Remo pulled him to solid ground, then got down on his knees.
He was too late. Delpha Rohmer’s kicking feet vanished like popped soap bubbles.
“Damn!” he muttered, rising again.
Along Fifth Avenue, passersby gawked and shouted. They made the same sound as silent movie actors. Which is to say, none.
“What in God’s name is happening?” the IRS man moaned.
“Halloween decided to stick around an extra day,” Remo said, pushing the man back up the steps.
Back in the lobby, Remo left the man to his fellow agents and went in search of the stairs to the basement.
On the way down, he felt weird again. His teeth chattered briefly, and his vision blurred. The sensation reminded him of the vibrating floor-plates in carnival fun houses he had visited as a boy.
“Now what?” he growled.
· · ·
IRS agent Gerard Vonneau had gone through the thirteenth floor twice without finding the hidden office. On his third run-through, he decided to be scientific about it.
He located a suite where the phone sounded loudest. In the adjoining suite, it was equally loud. He stormed across the hall. Softer. Definitely softer.
So Vonneau went back to the first suite. Then it hit him. There was probably a connecting suite. Sure enough, what he had taken for a closet door opened on the most immodest office Vonneau had ever seen in a twenty-year career of auditing large corporations.
The telephone was a sophisticated model. He raced to it, snatched up the receiver, and shouted “Hello?” before the entire universe turned white and his right ear was filled with a roar that made him dream of diesel locomotives crackling with static electricity.
It was twenty minutes before the shock wore off.
By that time the floating, white, manlike thing had merged with the ceiling, like a melting ice cream bar. His dangling wrists and limp fingers were the last things to disappear from sight.
· · ·
Yuli Batenin was seated on the wide, warm bed in his fourteenth-floor suite, watching the latest bulletin with his fellow Shield operatives.
The American anchorman Don Cooder was framed in the screen, looking, to Batenin’s eyes, like a well-barbered water buffalo.
“As yet there has been no explanation for the mysterious reversing of the Rumpp Tower situation. Less than twenty minutes ago, a sharp-eyed National Guard helicopter pilot noticed what no one else had–that his rotor blades were causing the trees decorating the lower building to sway. A team of rescue firefighters braved possible death to enter the building and liberate the people trapped on the ground floor. Efforts are now under way to evacuate the entire building before the uncanny events of Halloween Eve can recur. Of the man at the heart of the controversy, Randal Rumpp, ominously, there is no word.”
Captain Igor Gerkoff turned to Batenin, his bulldog face dully curious.
“What does this mean, Batenin?”
“I do not know, but we must watch carefully. All channels.”
“There is more than one channel on American TV.
Batenin nodded. “There are hundreds.”
And the men of Shield laughed at the hilarious joke. Until Batenin began running up and down the dial with sure clicks of his remote control.
A Russian muttered thickly, “It is no wonder we lost Cold War.”
Gerkoff slapped him and Batenin settled on another channel, saying, “Go to other room and watch other televisions. They will bring Brashnikov out. That is when we will strike.”
“By then it will be too late.”
“No. We could not hope to succeed. There are too many people. Too many cameras.”
“So? We kill them all. We have bullets.”
“No. It cannot work. We will allow Brashnikov to show himself, and we will find him later. This is a so-called open society. It will be easy.”
“I am in charge here, Batenin.”
“And I am only one who is certain to recognize Rair Brashnikov when he shows his face.”
Captain Gerkoff jumped to his feet angrily. Batenin stiffened where he sat.
The agents of Shield arrayed about the room perked up. Their two senior officers were about to settle a dispute over operational seniority. They licked dry lips, hoping to see blood spilled.
Instead, Major Yuli Batenin suddenly grew a third hand in the middle of his chest.
· · ·
The hand was white, blurry, and seemed to sprout from the center of Yuli Batenin’s breastbone.
Major Batenin, stiffening in anticipation of the fight of his life, seemed unaware of the phenomenon. The hand grew a wrist and, like some fast-growing, leprous vine, continued to emerge from the unaware ex-KGB major’s person.
“Sukin syn!” Gerkoff swore, his eyes growing wide.
They had to point to the thing coming from Batenin’s chest before the petrified major looked down and saw the phantom appendage.
The howl Batenin gave was like a hot needle piercing their eardrums. He scrambled off the bed as if it were afire, became tangled up in the loose bedding, and thrashed around on the rug.
“Brashnikov!” he screamed. “He is here!”
Of that, there was no doubt. A luminous white figure, its limbs spread like a crippled white starfish, continued to rise out of the mattress. It was still as death.
“What do we do, Batenin?” Gerkoff sputtered.
“We must capture him.”
This proved difficult. They threw blankets on the slowly rising figure. They fell flat on the bed without impeding the thing in the least.
Each Shield man carried a white silk strangling scarf under his shirt, which was imprinted with key commands in Russian and translations in the major NATO languages. They pulled these out and tried to ensnare the stiff limbs of the ghostly corpse of a thing.
They might as well have been attempting to capture moonbeams.
Gerkoff looked back, his face twisted in anger and superstitious fear. “Batenin, what do we do?”
“We pray.”
“Why?”
“Because there is nothing we can do, and if Brashnikov’s power is drained while he is in contact with physical object, it will be just like Chernobyl, but much worse.”
This galvanized the men of Shield. They drew Tokarev handguns, P-6 silent pistols, and short-barreled AKR submachine guns from hidden holsters and opened fire on the untouchable apparition.
“Nyet nyet nyet!” Batenin screamed over the din. “You will awaken entire hotel and ruin mission!”
But the Shield men didn’t hear. Or if they heard, they didn’t care. They peppered the thing that threatened them with nuclear disaster, as if the sheer volume of their fire could affect this untouchable thing they could not understand.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The lowermost floor of the Rumpp Regis Hotel was the storage subbasement. It was crammed with the historical castoffs of the nearly century-old hotel. Everything from old brass mantel clocks to spittoons littered the dusty shelving.
It was dark. Remo closed his eyes and listened for the sound of a heartbeat he knew better than anyone’s on earth. Chiun’s.
He zeroed in on it and simply moved in the direction his ears indicated, oblivious to the solid-looking obstacles he breached with each step.
He passed through antique highboys and turn-of-the-century dining tables like a phantom wading through the history of furniture.
His bare arms felt the body warmth of two people.
Remo opened his eyes to see the frantic figure of the Master of Sinanju, bending over the prostrate figure of Cheeta Ching.
Apparently, Cheeta was drowning on the concrete floor. At least, that was the impression her body language gave Remo. She had landed on her back, and now strained to keep her mouth and wildly flaring nostrils above the level of the floor. Her hands threshed the air, and when her mouth came up above the floor level, it made shapes Remo mentally called “inarticulate.”
Remo looked down at his feet. The floor supported his feet perfectly. It gave Remo a creepy feeling.
The Master of Sinanju was fussing helplessly.
“Remo! I cannot help Cheeta!”
“Tell her to stand up,” Remo told Chiun casually.
“I did!” Chiun squeaked. “Cheeta cannot hear me!”
Remo folded his arms. “Oh, that’s right. We can’t hear them and they can’t hear us. In this case, it’s a blessing.”
Chiun stood up. His wizened face was beseeching. “Oh, Remo, what do we do?”
“Look, she’s not going to drown. She just thinks she is. Give her time. She’ll figure it out.”
Chiun stamped an angry foot. “Heartless one!”
At that moment, Remo felt the vibration again.
“Oh-oh. Don’t look now, but the building’s becoming glued again.”
“Quickly! Cheeta will be trapped. Help me!”
“Help you how?”
“Take one precious hand.”
“If you insist...”
Remo reached down. Chiun did the same. Their fingers attempted to capture the incapturable.
In a flash of a second, the insubstantial hands of Cheeta Ching grew palpable. Remo and Chiun each grabbed a flailing bunch of fingers.
“Now!” Chiun cried.
They heaved. Cheeta came up out of the floor. They set her on her feet.
In the darkness, Cheeta Ching swayed like tightrope walker.
“You okay now?” Remo asked.
“What? What? What?” Cheeta gulped. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” Remo said.
“Frodo?”
“She’s okay,” Remo said.
“She is not!” Chiun flared. “She has been traumatized by machines. Cruel, white, oil-drinking machines.”
“Fine,” Remo said, starting off. “You comfort her. I’m going to look around.”
“I am coming with you.”
“You bring that barracuda, and there will be complications,” Remo warned.
“Chico, don’t leave me!” Cheeta pleaded.
At that, the Master of Sinanju rendered Cheeta Ching insensate with a simple application of pressure to a neck nerve. She collapsed with a rattly sigh.
Bearing the limp figure, Chiun followed Remo Williams back up to the lobby level.
“In her hour of need, she spoke your name!” he hissed.
“Technically, no,” Remo pointed out.
“I am humiliated.”
“Wait’ll she names the baby.”
“Argh!”
They found the Rumpp Regis lobby in an uproar.
The desk clerk was screaming at the IRS men, saying “They’re shooting up the fourteenth floor! Do something!”
“Call the police,” suggested one IRS man.
“But you’re government agents!”
“Yeah, but we’re tax collectors, not enforcers. We don’t carry guns. Call the police.”
Remo turned to Chiun. “The Russians are up on the fourteenth floor.”
“Then that is where they will perish,” said Chiun, placing Cheeta on a divan. She immediately rolled over and began snoring.
“There they are!” one of the IRS men shouted. It was the one Chiun had imprisoned in the revolving door. “You, stop!”
“Let’s go, Little Father!” Remo urged. “The last thing we need now is tax trouble.”
“Woe to him who touches the Master of Sinanju’s trunk!” Chiun hurled back.
They flashed to the elevators, Remo racing and the Master of Sinanju floating along in an effortless series of leaps.
Three revenue collectors hit the closing elevator doors and bounced off like ping-pong balls.
Remo and Chiun piled out on the fourteenth floor and ran into a wall of frightened hotel guests, who pushed past them in a blind panic and commandeered the elevator.
“They will surely hinder pursuit,” Chiun remarked, as the elevator started down.
“Follow me,” Remo said grimly. “I know exactly what door to knock on.”
· · ·
Captain Rair Brashnikov floated in the middle of a bullet storm. He knew it was a storm, because all around him the fine gold-leaf molding and framed pictures were cracked and coming apart as assorted Soviet-made ammunition took their toll.
Assorted rounds pierced his brain, his lungs, and other major organs with no effect, other than to cause him to blink when the stray bullet crossed his retina.
Otherwise, it was quite peaceful up here under the ceiling. Much like the bathhouses of his homeland.
He faced an interesting dilemma. He knew that he could not float here forever. Yet to deactivate the vibration suit would be to become vulnerable to the angry bullets.
On the other hand, he seemed to be floating toward an outer wall. This was not good, Brashnikov knew. To float into a outer wall in this bodiless state would be to float out the other side. Depending on how high this particular floor was, he might find himself floating high enough off the ground that to turn off the suit would be to risk a broken neck or a completely pulverized skeletal system.
The third option, no less terrifying, would be to wait until the suit’s battery power died. There was no telling how long that might be. He had been trapped in the American telephone system for a very long time–much longer than his reserve supply.
Somehow, the power had not been drained in all that time. This was good. What was not good was that he had no idea how long he had until the power went dead.
Then, in the tight-fitting confines of his white protective helmet, he heard an angry wasp’s buzz. Looking down toward his midriff, he saw the red warning light illuminate the core of his belt control rheostat.
Rair Brashnikov knew two things then.
One, that he had only twenty minutes of power left.
The second thing he spoke aloud in a thick voice.
“I am dead man.”
· · ·
Even if Remo Williams had not followed one of the Russians to his hotel room, there would have been no question which door they were behind.
It was the one full of punch holes, from which the occasional bullet snarled out.
Remo dodged a stray round and dropped to one knee.
A step behind him, the Master of Sinanju hugged a wall, his eyes like steel.
“Game to crash the party?” Remo asked.
“Make haste. Cheeta awaits me.”
“Never keep a hungry shark waiting.”
Remo moved on the door. He drove a half fist ahead of him. It connected with the lock, which surrendered with a metallic clank. Remo brought his other palm around and spanked the door in its exact center, sending shock waves through the thick wood.
The heavy panel flew off its ornate hinges and became a wonderfully efficient room-clearer.
It flew true, unimpeded by the natural resistance of the air, and pinned at least three unwary Russians against the far wall. Remo figured it was three because, in the instant he paused to assess the situation, that was the number of left hands he counted sticking out from the door edges.
Then Chiun bounded in.
The Master of Sinanju selected the nearest man, a Tokarev-wielding ox, and relieved him of his pistol with a high kick that shattered every bone of his gun hand, creating a kind of limp bag of bone-and-blood pudding at the end of the man’s wrist.
His scream refocused the attention of every Russian in the room. Away from the floating target, and toward the two intruders.
It was exactly what Remo and Chiun wanted.
They harvested their foes with methodical precision.
A strangling scarf descended on Chiun’s frail neck. One long-nailed finger snapped up, struck, and the heavy silk parted with a short snarl.
Two others tried to use Remo for target practice. He gave them a few seconds of his time, twisting and arching out of the way of their precise shots.
They were good. That is, they were skilled marksmen. But to Remo, they might as well have been cavemen attempting to brain a man on a motorcycle with stone hatchets.
Remo eluded each shot by sight alone. He could actually see the bullets emerge from each muzzle, compute the trajectory, and easily slide out of the bullet track.
Two shots from each man equaled two steps closer to each man. Remo didn’t need three. He took one out with a two-fingered strike to his rotator cup that sent shoulder bone spears ripping through his major organs, and dislocated the neck of the second with a light tap to the point of his chin. His head snapped back so far on his suddenly elongated neck it was crushed under his broad back when he hit the rug.
The survivors took note of the carnage and, dropping their weapons, took man-to-man fighting stances.
“Guess these guys’ taste in fighting styles matches their taste in clothes,” Remo grunted.
“We will educate them,” Chiun sniffed.
It took less than two minutes. But they cleared the room.
All except for a stark-white figure floating over their heads and another cowering behind the big television.
Chiun got under the Krahseevah and began leaping up at it, like a pit bull after a treed cat. His clawlike hands swiped futilely, and he hissed his anger.
“Nothing we can do about that one,” Remo muttered, stepping over to collect the other. He dragged the shivering form of Major Yuli Batenin out by the collar of his shirt.
“At least this one is in fashion,” said Remo, noticing his suit, “So who are you, pal?”
