"Where are you getting that information?" demanded Anna Chutesov, blinking furiously.
"From the computer files of the Glavnce Razvedyvatelnoe Uprevlenie," Smith said nonchalantly.
"You ... you have access to GRU files!"
"Normally, no," Smith admitted. "I am usually rebuffed by the obstructive passcodes placed over the files. But knowing the codename Sword of Damocles makes it possible to penetrate this particular file."
"When did you obtain this capability?"
"Recently. I've been working on it in my spare time. Oh, don't worry. I'm sure you'll inform your superiors, and they'll enter new buffers. Just be certain you don't tell them about my operation."
"And if I do?"
"You know I could not allow you to live under those conditions," said Smith without hesitation.
"I will not allow this woman to be killed until she has fulfilled an obligation which she has incurred with the House of Sinanju," said Chiun sternly. "Afterward is a different matter."
"What obligation is that?" asked Remo.
"It does not involve you," said Chiun, eyeing Anna Chutesov and shifting his gaze to Remo suggestively. Anna came over to Chiun's side and whispered in his ear. "What would you have me do?"
"Remo liked you before," Chiun breathed back. "Get him to like you again. Offer him anything, but extract from him a promise to remain in service to America."
"I will do my best," said Anna. She drifted over to Remo, who had been watching the exchange with open-faced curiosity.
"Hi!" said Anna Chutesov breathily. She smiled. Remo smiled back tentatively.
Anna placed her slim hands on his bare biceps and almost purred. "I was thinking that when this is over we should get reacquainted."
At the familiar stroking, Remo felt a delicious tingling deep within him. Memories of Anna Chutesov, the soft Anna Chutesov, the one who was a tiger in bed, rushed back to him.
Suddenly Anna Chutesov felt her hands clutching themselves instead of Remo's hard arms.
"Bad idea," Remo said sheepishly.
Anna allowed herself a moment of puzzlement, then pressed closer.
"Perhaps we could discuss this outside," she breathed.
"I can't," Remo pleaded.
"Yes, you can. Help him overcome his shyness," said the Master of Sinanju. "He has grown very shy lately."
"Little Father, did you put her up to this?" Remo asked.
"Never," said Chiun.
"How could you say such a thing, my Remo?" asked Anna Chutesov. She had met Remo's earlier indifference with scorn. That had not worked. She had ignored him and he had ignored her back. She had insulted him, to no avail. Now she was throwing herself at him. That never failed.
Until now.
"Look, things are different with me now," Remo said.
"I will make them right again," said Anna, playfully tugging on Remo's belt. She laughed. Her pink tongue darted out from between perfect teeth and her blue eyes sparkled mischievously.
At his desk, Smith's face flushed and he craned his head closer to the computer screen.
Remo backed away, his hands held palms-up before him, as if Anna Chutesov were some species of poisonous fruit.
"I'm engaged," Remo blurted out. "To be married."
"So?" asked Anna Chutesov.
"I love her."
"You will have all the rest of your life to love her. Love me now."
"Could you please take this out in the corridor?" asked Smith exasperatedly. Open displays of affection embarrassed him. Naked lust such as Anna Chutesov was portraying upset him even more.
"Yes, it is disgraceful," said the Master of Sinanju, who hoped that in the privacy of another room, it would be even more disgraceful.
"I don't want any part of this," said Remo. "I'm going to be a happily married man soon."
"I do not believe you," protested Anna Chutesov.
"Look, don't take it personally," said Remo. "There's just someone else now."
Anna Chutesov looked at Remo, his hard-muscled arms, his lean stomach, and that face that could be so cruel but now had that little-lost-boy look, and experienced a sinking feeling deep within her. Remo no longer wanted her.
Suddenly, clearly, Anna Chutesov realized something that had been true for a long time, but which she had pushed deep into her subconscious.
She wanted Remo Williams. She wanted him sexually, wanted him so badly it made her throat dry and her heart pulse hotly in her neck, and if he were not stronger than she was, she would have flung herself at him, tearing at his clothes until she got what she wanted. Worse, she thought she loved Remo Williams.
Remo Williams, who did not want her.
In one moment of shocked recognition, the entire psychological mindset that had enabled Anna Chutesov to rise to political power crumbled like a sand castle before the inrushing tide.
Anna looked at Remo with uncomprehending eyes. "I want you, but ... but you do not want me," she said hollowly.
"I'm sorry. Really," Remo said, meaning it.
Biting her lower lip like an injured child, Anna Chutesov walked stiffly out of the room.
"You both saw that," Remo said. "I tried to break it to her gently, didn't I? It's not my fault she couldn't handle it."
"You gave her the back of your hand," said Chiun angrily. "And after all she has meant to you."
"She'll be back," said Smith hopefully.
"No, she will not," said the Master of Sinanju, folding his hands into the oversize sleeves of his jacket. "She wanted only two things, Remo and Gordons. Remo has spurned her. She will go directly to Gordons and take her bitterness out on him."
"How can she?" asked Remo. "She doesn't know where to find Gordons any more than we do."
The Master of Sinanju shook his aged head. "Not so. She has the insect thing."
"Gordons' bug? How?" demanded Smith.
"She picked it up, pretending it was a splinter. Did neither of you notice? She was so obvious about it."
"You could have mentioned it, Little Father. Now we have to follow her."
"We do not need the insect device. I know where Gordons is."
"You do?" Remo and Smith said a beat apart.
"Yes. Gordons wishes to make all persons barren. He will thus go to the only place where he can accomplish this easily.
"Where?" asked Smith.
"The one place in all the world where all Americans and non-Americans go. Or hope to go."
"Where?" asked Remo.
"I will not tell you. I will show you. Emperor Smith, I will ask you to make travel arrangements for Remo and myself "
"I would like to know exactly where you are going," said Smith.
"The matter between Gordons and the House of Sinanju is a matter of honor," Chiun said gravely. "Remo and I will handle it."
"Very well," agreed Smith. "I will make the arrangements. Just let me know the necessary details."
Just then, the red telephone rang. Smith picked it up.
"Yes, Mr. President. You picked an appropriate time to call. I have just confirmed the fate of the Russian shuttlecraft."
Smith listened.
"No, it is not intact, exactly," he said uncomfortably. "Actually, the crew is already in Air Force hands. No, the Air Force hasn't quite realized this as yet. I know it sounds strange, sir. In fact, the whole matter is strange. Please bear with me while I try to explain. And by the way, Mr. President, are you sitting down?"
Chapter 15
Carl Lusk loved sex. He loved it in all its splendiferous variety. In an age of AIDS, herpes simplex, herpes complex, and more traditional social diseases, he moved unafraid through the dating bars and computer love services. Carl Lusk was twenty-three and believed that AIDS only happened to fags and heroin addicts and that only stupid people caught social diseases. While he was young he was going to sleep with as many women as possible. Sometimes as many as five in one day. The trick, he believed, was not to sleep with the same woman twice. He knew the chance of c
atching any social disease from a one-night stand was slim, but it went up with each subsequent encounter. As Carl saw it, monogamy was like playing Russian roulette with five of the six chambers loaded.
Carl Lusk was not completely reckless. There were some encounters he did avoid. Dogs, children, and men were at the top of that list. But that didn't mean that he couldn't fantasize about these things. To that end, he put together one of the world's largest collections of taped and print pornography to facilitate his fantasizing.
Carl was a baggage handler at Denver's Stapleton Airport. It was not the most glamorous job in the world, but it enabled him to copy off women's names and addresses from the luggage he loaded. It was better than a computer dating service. Cheaper, too. Carl Lusk was ferrying a load of luggage to a waiting 747 when the garbage truck that would change his entire attitude toward sex rolled past him.
Carl knew right away there was something strange going on.
First, garbage was not picked up on the runways, where the jets sat.
Second, there was no one driving the garbage truck. The driver's seat was empty.
Carl spun the baggage truck around and lost the rear cart of the baggage train, but he didn't care. He was sure the garbage truck was out of control and he wanted to see where it ended up. Carl also liked to stop at major traffic accidents.
The garbage truck went around a corner to the area where private planes were hangared, and Carl had visions of Piper Comanches flying in all directions.
When Carl negotiated the same corner, he was surprised to see that the garbage truck had come to a full stop.
Carl came to a full stop too.
The garbage truck had stopped behind a Lear jet, its front bumper touching the tail assembly.
Then the garbage truck reared up on its back wheels. The wheels spun and the garbage truck lurched like a rogue elephant. It came down on the Lear jet, squashing the tail and pushing its nose into the air. The garbage truck began to shake furiously. The Lear quivered like a fish caught in a net.
Carl Lusk watched in rapt awe. Under his breath, he said the first thing that came to mind. "Oh, my God, they're screwing!"
Carl Lusk got down on the runway and tried to look under the garbage truck's chassis. He had never seen a garbage truck screw a corporate jet before. He wondered what the garbage truck-which was obviously the male-had for equipment. Details like that fascinated him.
As he watched, gravel digging into his cheek, Carl heard the truck's hydraulic equipment start to grind. "I wonder if that means it's coming?" he asked himself. Then he saw it. A silver ball, like a perfectly round egg, dropped from the garbage truck's undercarriage and was absorbed by the jet. The jet's aluminum skin just opened up and swallowed the silver ball.
The garbage truck, suddenly quiescent, fell over on its side, rear wheels smoking and spinning impotently. The Lear jet suddenly whined into life and rolled onto the runway.
As it passed, Carl Lusk saw that there was no one piloting the aircraft. Not only that, but the crumpled tail was returning to its normal shape like a plant recovering after being stepped on.
After the Lear jet had vaulted into the sky, Carl Lusk summoned up enough nerve to approach the garbage truck.
The driver's seat was vacant. But he knew that. The truck smelled of week-old trash and tiny bugs crawled out from the smeary edges of the hydraulic door, which hung open and empty.
"It's dead," Carl Lusk whispered. And then he thought about what he had just said. Funny that he would think of the garbage truck as dead. Garbage trucks did not live. Garbage trucks also did not copulate with other machines, but this one had.
Carl Lusk retreated to his baggage cart and decided not to mention what he had seen to anyone. On the way back to his terminal, he decided to burn his pornography collection. It would be tough to live without it, but maybe there was such a thing as too much sex after all. That left only the future course of his sex life to be decided-monogamy or celibacy? It was a grim choice. Perhaps he would flip a coin.
When the unauthorized Lear jet landed at Burbank Airport in California, it taxied to one end of the main runway and whined to a stop.
Because it had refused radio contact, did not ask for landing clearance, and came down the wrong way, the tower naturally assumed it had been hijacked.
Airport security was immediately mobilized. The first man on the scene was Officer Andy Ogden, who drove his car to the jet and got out cautiously. He did not draw his gun. He assumed that a drawn gun would be a signal for violence and he was trained to defuse violent situations, not make them worse.
As he approached the jet, Andy Ogden heard a loud metallic sound, like a titanic punchpress. There was no explosion, so he knew it was not a terrorist grenade going off.
A man came out from under the far wing. He jumped down as casually as if he had stepped from a barber's chair. The man walked up to Officer Andy Odgen.
He was not armed, so Andy Ogden did not pull his weapon. Pulling his weapon would have been an overreaction. And Andy Odgen was trained not to overreact.
And so when the man with the strange silver suit and the fixed face approached him with an outstretched hand and said, "Hello is all right," Andy Ogden accepted the hand in relief as much as in friendship. When he saw that the man's face was a cluster of wires and circuits with glassy blue eyes and an armrest ashtray for a mouth, it was too late to draw his weapon because the man had squeezed his hand to a blood-soaked pulp and had started to work on his other hand.
His last thought was a strange one. Why did the man have a round porthole in the middle of his chest?
When the main security team reached the Lear jet, they did not think twice about having passed Andy Odgen on the way. Officer Ogden was driving his car, which for some reason had a great silver ball mounted on the roof. He was probably going for help. When they found the body on the runway, skinned raw, they forgot about Andy Odgen and drew their guns.
They recognized that there were times to overreact. They moved under the Lear jet's wings, looking for an open hatch.
They did not find an open hatch, exactly.
What they found was an opening in the far side of the hull. The opening was six feet tall, in the rough shape of a man, like the chalk outline usually made at murder scenes to indicate where the victim fell. It led directly into the ship.
They climbed in through the man-shaped opening and found that the plush passenger section was deserted. Going forward, they found that the cockpit had been vandalized. Most of the flight controls-the navigational instruments and on-board computers-were missing. They did not find the missing hull section, which should have been impossible to miss. Not only was it shaped like a gingerbread man, but there should have been a porthole in the middle of the thing.
The only other oddity was a television set built into one wall. It was on, showing a popular children's cartoon program. The chief of the security team turned it off and led his men back out to the body on the ground.
"Wonder who that thing was?" one of the others said. The security chief looked at the inhuman carcass for a moment. He saw the gleam of white gold on the man's left ring finger and suddenly sat down on the runway.
"What?" he was asked when they saw his stricken expression.
"The ring. Look at the ring. That's Andy's ring!"
"You sure?"
"Look," the chief of security said in a sick voice. One of the men looked. He saw the silver monogram A. 0. mounted on an onyx setting. Bits of skin clung to the edges of the band, indicating that the epidermis had been torn off around the ring.
He too sat down on the runway. He threw up into his lap and didn't bother to clean himself off. He just sat there.
"That wasn't Andy we saw a minute ago," he said.
"I won't say anything if you don't," said the security chief.
The security team all sat down in a circle on the runway and made a pact that they would not mention the man they had seen fleeing the area who looked like their fo
rmer colleague but was not. They cut their thumbs and pressed them together so that it was a blood oath.
Then they waited. But they didn't know what they were waiting for.
Anna Chutesov drove to the Soviet embassy in New York City. She drove over the speed limit because she felt that if she slowed down or stopped it would all catch up with her.
It caught up with her in New Rochelle. She pulled over to the side of the road and buried her face in the steering wheel and, for half an hour, sobbed uncontrollably.
When she sat up at last, her face was drawn and her eyes were dry. She was again the Anna Chutesov who had risen from the Komonsol to a position of supreme responsibility in the Kremlin.
She was in love. And the man whom she loved was not only an American agent but also, more damningly, he did not want her. It was the ultimate humiliation for a woman who had never before allowed herself the luxury of acknowledging deep feelings for any man. The consul general was not surprised to see Anna Chutesov. He had been informed that she was in the country, and because he knew all about the missing Yuri Gagarin-as did the whole world by now-he assumed that the shuttle's recovery was her mission. "Comrade Chutesov," he greeted unctuously. Instead of speaking, Anna Chutesov took her thumb between her teeth and ripped at the skin. She dug at the tear with a colorless fingernail and attacked it again with her teeth,
"Here," she said, spitting a black plastic whisker into the doubtful consul general's hand. "This is a highly sophisticated homing transmitter. If there is a way to pinpoint the source that is receiving its transmissions, do so immediately and inform me once you have that information."
"Of course, Comrade Chutesov. Where might I reach you?"
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