“Rubin. No more playing around. We're hardball now. Do you know why we have to run?”
“We're going to go to jail if we don't,” said Rubin. “The forces of negativity are after us.”
“We have to run because we haven't been tough enough. We've played by their rules, not ours. Our problem is we've been too nicey-nice and not tough enough. No more games. We're going for it all. We're going for our own country. Then let them try to convict us. If you run the country, you can't violate laws. You make the laws.”
One of the young bodyguards Beatrice favored ran into the room.
“There's something at the front gate. He didn't take no for an answer.”
“What do you mean, 'something'?” asked Rubin.
“What do you mean he didn't take 'no'?” asked Beatrice.
“Well, we have Bruno and the dogs at the front gate. And you know how tough they are,” said the bodyguard.
“I do,” said Beatrice with a pleased smile.
“A guy came up to them, had a Powie with him. The Powie kept pointing toward here, saying you and Beatrice lived here. Said it was the spiritual home of the world.”
“What was her name?” asked Rubin.
“I don't know, they're all alike. All that trust and stupidity. Anything you tell them, they go and figure out how it makes sense. You know.”
“Who cares,” said Beatrice.
“Well, Bruno says they can't come in, and this guy throws the dogs halfway up the lawn like footballs with everything but a spiral and then tells Bruno he'll do the same thing to him. Well, Bruno panics. I know this because he's pressing the alarm and I'm listening in to this gate outpost and he's promising everything to the guy if he will just ask for it nicely.”
“Did the negative intruder have thick wrists?” asked Rubin.
“Wrists? Who cares about wrists?” Beatrice laughed. “What can you do with a wrist?”
“You saw the monitor. Did he have thick wrists?”
“I think so,” said the bodyguard. “Dark eyes. High cheekbones.”
“The negative force, Beatrice,” said Rubin. “The ultimate negative force has come after us. I've said it a thousand times. If you're good, they'll attack you. The better you are, the more they'll attack you. And if you're representing ultimate good, then ultimate evil will find you out.”
“Well then, kill him! Is that such a problem? What's the problem here?” said Beatrice. “Is there any reason that man has to live? Do I hear a reason? Do I see a hand?” Beatrice looked around the room, as though expecting to find an answer. “Thank you. Please shoot the trespasser.”
“Well, Bruno tried that,” said the bodyguard.
“And?” asked Beatrice.
“Bruno sailed past the dogs up the lawn. He isn't moving too much.”
“Bruno never moved too much,” said Beatrice.
“I could have told you guns wouldn't stop him. We've already tried guns. Our faithful Mr. Muscamente had many guns himself, and succumbed to the negative force. I have tracked this man across America. I have seen what he can do.”
“We're packed, let's go,” said Beatrice.
“No. I want to cover our retreat. I want to end this evil person now.”
“Rubin, I like that in you,” said Beatrice. “I'll go through the back way, and you can join me.”
“No. I'll set up everything and we'll both go.”
“How long will that take?”
“Three seconds. I have been expecting this. Miami airport proved that bullets cannot stop the man. And given that people cannot escape him, I came to the conclusion that the only way to destroy such a force—”
“Just do it, Rubin,” said Beatrice, and to the bodyguard added:
“If it weren't for me he would still be wasting reams of bond paper putting his silly ideas on them.”
“This will not miss,” said Rubin, and he went to the basement to activate the system he had arranged. Since it took twenty more seconds than the three he had promised, he found himself alone in the mansion, and had to run to catch up to the car the bodyguard was packing in the rear of the house.
“Don't drive away. Don't let him see us escaping. If he goes after us, my trap won't work.”
“I wouldn't mind being caught by him,” Beatrice laughed. She tickled the bodyguard's thigh. He was at the wheel.
“Yes you would,” said Rubin. “He obviously works for the President.”
“That bastard,” said Beatrice.
“Just wait. Let him get into the house. Turn off the motor and let the trap work.”
Remo slowed his walk to keep pace with Daphne. It was a good half-mile from the gate to the mansion and they had only gone a hundred and fifty yards when they passed the gate attendant named Bruno lying very still on the rolling lawns of the grand estate.
“You sure you can identify him? You sure he doesn't look like any of his pictures?” asked Remo.
“Yes. It was his inner light that remained constant. He could have stayed younger than I am, but he chose to allow himself to experience the suffering of aging. However, he is going to start getting younger when he chooses.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Do you believe Sinanju?”
“Sinanju works,” said Remo.
“Before Poweressence I was a desperate young woman seeking any solution that would work. But now I have found what works, what I have been looking for. You should try it. You wouldn't have to be so negative.”
“Have you ever heard of being able to make people forget things?”
“No,” said Daphne. “You have to remember your hurts and past life injuries so that you can deal with them, and release your problems into the universe instead of harboring them.”
“I like to harbor,” said Remo. “And I feel fine.”
“Why do you argue with your sweet father?”
“Because he's argumentative,” said Remo. He looked up at the house. It had that sense of defense, that quietness of danger, of the moment before things would spring out. With the vast green lawns, the sun sparkling off windows, the air so filled with warm life, it reminded Remo most of all of some especially beautiful and deadly insect. The deadly ones, Chiun had said, advertised their power by having attractive colors.
When he thought of Chiun, he was sad. He did not know why the President might have to die, but he trusted Smith. Over the years he had learned that the one thing that could not be questioned was Smith's loyalty to the country. Remo was loyal to the country. He could never explain to Chiun what that meant. More and more as he became Sinanju he understood why. Yet even though he understood how Chiun felt, he did not feel the same way. He was caught between two worlds, and both of them were inside him.
He knew that quite soon he might be leaving the country he loved and had served so long. He wondered if he could ever adjust to serving some dictator or tyrant. He needed to serve what he felt was right. Chiun felt only Sinanju was right, and in the sense of how the human body worked, he was right. But not for governments. Not for people.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Daphne.
Remo pushed her to the side of the road. Metallic objects were secreted under the pathway. The soft green lawn was safer.
“I was thinking about Sinanju,” said Remo.
“Does it give you the absolute freedom of power that Poweressence does?”
“No. Frankly, little lady, it confuses me,” said Remo.
“If it confuses you, how can it work?” asked Daphne.
She found herself in the air turning over and over, seeing Remo beneath her, way beneath her, perhaps twenty feet beneath her. Then she started coming down again. Apparently he had flipped her like he had the man at the gate, but she had hardly felt it, and most certainly did not see his hands. She only realized they were touching her when she was already in the air. Now she was coming down again. She screamed.
But the hands caught her again, quite softly. She landed with no more force than if she had
just taken another step.
“That's how Sinanju works,” said Remo.
“It's beautiful,” said Daphne. “It's what I've been looking for all my life. It's dynamic. It's forceful. It's alive.”
“It's a pain in the neck,” said Remo. “Don't step there!”
“Where?”
“Just move over to the right a bit.”
“Why?”
“There was something that could go off under the ground.”
“You knew it was there?”
“It's not a big thing.”
“It's magnificent. Teach me.”
“You'd have to change your whole life.”
“I'd love to,” said Daphne Bloom. “I've been doing that all my life. I changed from est to Scientology, to Sedona, to Universal Reunification. My father was a Reform Jew.”
“How long did you give Judaism?”
“A half-hour,” said Daphne. “I found it wanting. I want Sinanju. I think it's what I need. What I've been missing. What does it cost to join?”
“You don't join, it joins you.”
“That's beautiful.”
Remo realized that Daphne probably joined these organizations to find people to listen to her life. He found it extremely tiring after a few minutes. He also found that if he just said “uh-huh” every few minutes she would keep on talking happily. By the time they reached the entrance to the mansion Remo had said “uh-huh” seventy-three times and Daphne was sure that he was the wisest man in the world.
“You have an understanding that surpasses even my first five therapists,” said Daphne, ringing the doorbell. “You have a—”
Remo found himself suddenly enjoying Daphne's silence. She was smiling. Then she collapsed by the door, but she was uninjured. She curled up into a ball on the doorstep, at first cooing and then stopping completely. Her eyes shut, and she looked as though she were floating somewhere.
Daphne Bloom had returned to the womb.
And Remo had found the substance. He looked at the doorbell. There was a thin coating of an oily substance. He could always take the doorbell, but if they could smear it on the bell, there probably was a larger amount inside.
Remo focused on the door, sensing the wood and brass as much as seeing it. Nothing there. He pushed it open. As he did, a spray mist filled the room. He backed out, letting it settle, and walked to the corner. As Chiun had said, never enter a building through the front. He couldn't dodge the mist, but he wouldn't have had to. If it were the same substance, he could keep it on his outer layer of skin until it could be removed.
The skin breathed like every other part of the body, and since he had controlled his breathing through lungs, he naturally could move it to the outer layer also. It was not something that was done but something that came about through the proper breathing in the first place.
But it was that breathing, the refinement of it up to Sinanju standards, that he was still having some trouble bringing into correctness.
And the second floor had to be safer. He put one foot on the windowsill and propelled himself easily to the second floor, where the window was locked and reinforced. He pressured the frame to crumbs and entered. The room looked like a child had thrown a fit, with glass scattered about and fine furniture broken.
Clothes had been thrown on the bed as though someone were hastily packing.
He heard voices downstairs, strange voices. They were grown-up voices but saying baby things, crying out for their parents. There was desperation in those voices. Remo moved downstairs quickly and found that off the main entranceway was a series of rooms. One man in a diaper was drowning inside a large white tub.
It was not water that filled the tub, but an oil substance. He had found it. The man was wriggling like a sperm and not bothering to breathe. Remo had to reach in to save him.
He let the air become one with his breathing, let his breathing try to find itself and its own center, then quickly plunged his hands into the solution, lifting the man in the diaper out of the tub and then pressing the substance from the man's lungs, pressing down, trying to get the breathing apparatus to work. But strangely, it didn't. The eyes didn't focus. The body did not respond; it was dead. And not from drowning.
Remo felt the substance work in through his pores and he used the unity of his breathing to let his skin shrug it off. He sensed the room and the softness of the air, saw the stillness of the dead man in diapers beneath him. There was a strange sense of onions in the air, as though he had eaten them a long time ago and now they were coming back.
The droplets made ever-so-delicate kisses on the floor as they fell and became small pools beneath him.
The scent of the solution was in the air also. He could not breathe it. He had to stop. Everything in his body began working against it and yet somehow it had entered through his skin. But he was not without resources because the greatest thing the body could do in Sinanju was what it did by itself. He saw Chiun in front of him giving him those first lectures. He heard the voice telling him about the powers he would have if he were good enough. He knew Chiun was not there in person. He knew Chiun was in him in the spirit.
He could see himself taking that police oath when he was a young man in his twenties, just out of the Marines, thinking he was tough because his muscles were tough. He used to punch with those muscles. He had once thought he had power because he had knocked someone out with a fist.
The room seemed to close in on him, but he didn't allow his body to accept that. He forced himself to work even as he fought the invasion of the substance into his skin, fought the further invasion into his bloodstream, fought the invasion in his mind and his breathing and the last bastion of a person's power, that which was nothing but himself.
Outside, Rubin Dolomo looked at his watch.
“I guess the doorbell didn't work. There are seven other traps,” he said.
“Do you think he's stealing things?” asked Beatrice. She found the car uncomfortable. She was in the front seat with the bodyguard. Rubin sat in the back with his papers on the formula.
“You know he might not even be able to make it out of the house,” said Rubin. “When I worked with the witnesses I used only fresh solution because that was the only reliable kind. The traps were set with stored solution. Incredibly volatile. Could send a person back to a past life.”
“If you believe in them,” said Beatrice. “Go inside and see what he is doing.”
“I wouldn't survive. Nothing can survive in there. Plants are going to forget how to grow. Nothing. I have unleashed the ultimate power.”
“Put out that cigarette.”
“I can't. I'm not finished. I need it,” said Rubin.
“The secondmost-ultimate power,” said Beatrice.
“Uh-oh. Look what's coming,” said the bodyguard.
A thin man with thick wrists and dark eyes was coming out of the rear entrance toward the car. He walked easily. He had a smile.
“He should be back in the womb,” said Rubin.
“Start the car,” said Beatrice.
“The powers that negative force must have!” gasped Rubin. “How can he still walk? How can he breathe? How can he do anything?”
“He's going to kill us,” said Beatrice.
In the panic the bodyguard had shifted into reverse, then forward, then reverse again, all while pressing the accelerator to the fullest. The gears clashed, ground, and crashed.
The man made it to the car.
“We pay more than your employer,” said Beatrice.
“I will abandon the force of Yes for the force of No,” said Rubin.
“Damned car,” said the bodyguard.
“Hello,” said Remo.
“Hi, sweetheart,” said Beatrice.
“Hail to your negative influence,” said Rubin.
“Look,” said Remo. “I've got a little problem.”
“We'll solve it with you,” said Rubin.
“Not a big deal,” said Remo. He was forcing the breath
now. “I keep seeing things. Faces.”
“We have three of them,” said Rubin.
“No. Not real faces. A face. Chinese or something. With a wisp of a beard and wisps of hair. He is talking to me. Even now he's talking to me. And I don't know what he's saying.”
“He's not telling you to harm someone?” asked Rubin. “Those are the voices you cannot trust.”
“No. He's just telling me I am going to be all right. Well, I don't know what it is. I guess I'll just have to give you a ticket. Where's the ticket book? Where's my gun? Where's my uniform? Am I on vacation?”
“You're on vacation. Go back inside and enjoy yourself.”
“No. The old guy is telling me not to go back in there. He's like a mirage. Have you ever seen a mirage?”
The bodyguard stepped out of the car and took the man by the hand and in so doing got some of the substance on his own palm. It felt oily. He liked oil. He liked it when his mommy put oil on his bottom after a bath. His mommy was not here. So he cried.
Rubin saw the bodyguard cry.
“That proves it. What power the man has. You are the agent of No.”
“Is that my name?” said Remo. “I remember it as Remo.”
“Hail, No. Good-bye, No,” said Rubin Dolomo, and transferred the suitcases of money to another car, this one unfortunately with license plates that belonged to them. He had planned this escape even before the first trial began. He had the proper phony passports and a car to drive them to the airport that would not be spotted as theirs. No matter, he would have to use the large white sedan with the lettering “Power Is What Power Does.”
It was usually used to pick up franchise owners from the airport. Maybe it wouldn't be noticed at all, now that the forces of negativity were in abeyance. Maybe they could just park it at the airport and not be noticed.
Remo saw the man and woman loading a long white car with luggage. He offered to help but they didn't want him to touch anything. When he grabbed one suitcase they simply left it there and drove off without it. This was surprising because when he opened it he found bundles of hundred-dollar bills. He would have to turn it in to police headquarters. He wondered where it was. He looked around. He saw the bright sun and the rolling lawn and the palm trees. Palm trees?
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