Chained Reaction td-34

by Warren Murphy

145

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The DePauw mansion overpowered the neighboring West Palm Beach mansions like a two-carat blue-white set among diamond chips.

  It sat on six acres of land, surrounded on three sides by ten-foot-high white iron fencing whose bars were too close together for a human to slide between. At the back of the mansion was the Atlantic Ocean. A large powerboat, tied up to a dock, could be seen through the estate's front gate.

  Inside the gate, leaning against the white brick pillars, were two uniformed guards.

  Remo drove past the estate and parked a half block away. "It's probably best if you stay here," he told Ruby.

  "I'm going," she said. "Case Lucius is there."

  "Brave, too," Chiun said to Remo. "Not only strong and smart, but brave, too."

  "I now pronounce you man and wife," Remo said. "Will you knock it off?"

  "Ingrate," hissed Chiun.

  Remo got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. He was halfway to the DePauw mansion when Ruby and Chiun left the rented car.

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  Remo was tired to death of being pushed around, tired of having his mind made up for him, tired of being told what to do and when to do it. Thank God for the Vega-Choppa. It was the first honest dollar he had earned since he stopped being a city policeman a lot of years before.

  If he had not given Ruby his promise, he would keep walking right now, past the DePauw mansion, and never look back. Being pushed around. It was what had tired him of working for Smith and for CURE and he was tired of it from Chiun and tired of it from Ruby.

  He stopped outside the tall white gate and motioned one of the guards to come over.

  "Yes?" the guard said.

  "Look. We can do this easy or we can do it hard."

  "Easy? Hard?"

  "Just let me in," Remo said.

  "Are you expected?"

  "No. But my winning ways will soon have everybody forgetting that."

  "Then I'm sorry, sir, but..."

  "Not as sorry as you will be," Remo said.

  He reached through the bars of the gate, grabbed the guard's wrist and gently pulled him close. To the other guard, it looked as if the man had stepped forward so Remo could whisper something in his ear.

  "Now," Remo said softly. "This is still your wrist I'm holding in my hand. We can keep it a wrist or we can make it into jelly. Take your pick."

  "Wrist," the guard said.

  "Good. Now call your buddy over."

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  "Joe," the guard called out. "Come here a minute."

  "Good," said Remo. "Very good."

  "Yeah, Willie," the other guard said when he reached the fence but before he could get an answer, his left wrist was in Remo's left hand.

  "Now if you both don't want your ping pong careers ended for good, open the gate." He squeezed on Willie's wrist for emphasis and the guard's hand went to the ring of keys at his waist. He fumbled them loose, and used a large brass key to open the gate. It opened and Remo released both men momentarily, slid inside, then resumed his grip on their wrists. He walked them over to the high shrubbery alongside the brick pillars, transferred his grip to their necks, and left them sleeping underneath the japonica shrubs.

  When he stepped back to the ceramic tiled driveway, Chiun and Ruby were entering through the gate.

  "How was that?" Remo asked. "All right? Did I open the gate well enough for you two geniuses? In your wisdom, do you approve?"

  Ruby looked at Chiun. "What's wrong with him now ?" she asked.

  "I can never figure out what white people are talking about."

  "Me neither," said Ruby.

  "Yeah? Yeah?" said Remo. "White people, hah? Big friends, you two, hah? Have him tell you about how God made man and put it in the oven and kept getting it wrong. Have him tell you that, you want to find out what a tolerant warm wonderful person he is."

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  "Ignore him," said Chiun. "He knows, better than anyone else, how tolerant I am of inferiors."

  "Hah," said Remo, and walked off up the long driveway.

  The main house stood at the back of the property, its rear patio extending down to the water line and the docks. There were two small buildings on one side of the house and Remo cut across the slightly overgrown lawns to go to those buildings first.

  The first room must have been the gardener's quarters. There were two rooms, immaculately clean. And empty.

  The second building, hidden from the street by the first building, was made of fieldstone. Remo tried to look inside, but there were curtains over the windows.

  There was a hasp on the outside of the front door for padlocking the small building from the outside, but the door itself was unlocked.

  The three stepped into one large room, twenty-five feet square. Thin metal bunks, covered with bare striped ticking mattresses, lined one wall. In a corner was an open toilet bowl and a sink. On another wall, chains had been installed at about the height of a man's shoulders.

  Ruby counted the metal bunks. Thirteen. But fourteen men had been kidnapped.

  Remo heard a sound.

  "You hear it, Chiun?" he asked.

  Chiun nodded.

  Ruby strained but heard nothing.

  "What is it?" she asked. "What do you hear?"

  "Some kind of machinery whirring," Remo said.

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  He began to look around the room carefully. The sound was loudest near the wall of the building, next to the main DePauw house.

  There was a ragged rug under Remo's feet. He kicked it aside and found a trap door with a large sunken ring cut into the wooden floor.

  He pulled up on the ring and the trap door lifted noiselessly.

  Now Ruby could heard the sound, too. It was a slow, steady whirring. She stood alongside Remo and looked down into the open well. Steep wooden stairs had been erected against the wall, and Remo led the way down.

  They were in a tunnel seven feet high and not that wide. It stretched ahead of them for thirty feet and ended at a door. There was a piece of black plastic covering the door's windows on their side. Remo peeled a piece of it away and they lifted it slightly to peer in.

  They saw a long conveyor belt and thirteen men standing alongside it. The first seven of them wrapped metal bands around sticks; the last six removed the metal bands and brought the sticks and bands back to the front of the line so the cycle could start over again.

  All the men were black. They wore white cotton sleeveless undershirts. The room was illuminated by bare overhead bulbs.

  Ruby sipped in her breath.

  She started to cry out, but Remo clapped his hand over her mouth.

  "What?" he said.

  "That's Lucius."

  "Which one?"

  "The first one on the left side."

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  Remo watched for a moment. There seemed to be nothing to distinguish Lucius from any of the other dozen men working at the conveyor table.

  At the end of the conveyor belt, on a small platform, stood a wiry man with red hair. He wore a white suit and a white hat and metal-tipped boots and carried a long whip coiled in his right hand.

  On the far side of the room, six feet up the wall, there was a door, and, as the three of them watched, the door opened.

  Striding out onto a raised platform that looked over the room was Baisley DePauw. Remo recognized him from the newspaper photographs. Baisley DePauw dedicating the liberation library. Baisley DePauw sending his personal jet to Algeria to bring back exiled black Americans. Baisley DePauw opening his heart and his checkbook to every crack-brained anti-American movement that had come up in Eemo's remembrance.

  "How are they doing?" DePauw called out to the overseer.

  "All right, sir. They get faster every day," the man called back. He had a deep tomb of a voice and Remo thought it odd that for his overseer, DePauw had hired someone obviously from the streets of New York City.

  "I've got another inspection today," DePauw said. "I want
them singing. Slaves should sing to show how happy they are."

  The whip went singing out over the men's heads, cracking sharply in empty space.

  "You heard the massa. Sing."

  Without slowing down their work, the slaves looked at each other.

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  "Sing, I said," the overseer shouted.

  The men were still silent.

  "You, Lucius. You start it."

  Ruby's brother looked up and smiled a fetching grin.

  "What should I sing, massa boss ?"

  "I don't know. Sing anything you know."

  "I don't know many songs," Lucius said.

  "Sing what you know. Something with a beat so you can speed up your work."

  Lucius opened his mouth and the first halting words came out:

  Disco Lady.

  Will you be my baby?

  Saturday night

  to Sunday's light,

  Be my baby, Disco lady.

  "Stop it," DePauw roared, just as the other men began to join in the singing.

  "That's not exactly what I had in mind," DePauw said. "I'll have some words printed up and they can memorize them. Something inspiring, like 'All God's Chilluns Got Shoes.'"

  "I'll make sure they learn it, Mr. DePauw."

  DePauw nodded and went back inside through the door, which he closed tightly behind him.

  "What do you think?" Remo asked Ruby.

  "They're working pretty good," she said. "I might put a line like that in my wig factory. Turn up the work."

  "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Remo said.

  "I won't make them sing," Ruby said.

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  "I don't like that disco music either," Remo said. "Anyway, Lucius looks all right."

  "He looks better somehow," Ruby said.

  "Maybe work agrees with him," Remo said.

  "Maybe. I wouldn't know. I never saw him work before."

  Through this, Chiun had been silent. Remo looked at him and saw the hazel eyes burning with an intensity that Remo had rarely seen.

  "What's wrong, Chiun?"

  Chiun waved a hand at the door. "This," he said. "This. It is degrading. It is evil."

  Remo cocked his head. "This from the man with all the stories of how everybody is inferior to those from Sinanju?"

  "It is one thing to understand men as they are, to know their weaknesses, and to deal with them thusly. It is something else to treat man as less than man. Because he who does that defies the glory of God's creation."

  Just then the whip lashed again in the slave's workroom. The overseer bellowed, "Faster," and Chiun could take no more.

  "Hold!" he cried and with anger fueling the power of his awesome art, he slammed a hand against the hinge side of the huge oaken door and the heavy wood panel shivered, and fell onto the floor in the room.

  And like a yellow-robed wraith, Chiun whirled into the room and shouted again, "Hold, animal."

  The overseer looked to him with a face torn between shock and anger.

  The slaves looked up, hope on their faces, expecting a deliverer. But all they saw was a small yellow man in a yellow robe, looking like a doll,

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  whirling into the room, his eyes twisted in anger, glaring at the overseer.

  The big man with the white hat and white suit and the pistol at his side, jumped down from his platform, whirled his whip over his head and lashed it out at Chiun.

  Just as it reached Chiun, his practiced hand gave it a snap, to move the weighted tip into supersonic speed that created the whip's crack.

  But there was no crack. Like a meat slicer, Chiun's right hand moved up alongside his head and as the whip reached him, he sliced off a neat six inches with the side of his palm.

  The overseer drew back the whip again behind him, dragging it on the ground, readying an overhead slash that could slice a man's shoulder down to the bone. He brought the lash up over his head with the full power of his sinewy arm, but the lash stopped at Chiun, and then the red-haired man felt himself being pulled across the floor toward the small Oriental. He tried to let go of the whip but it was attached to his wrist with a thong. As he was being dragged, he reached to his side with his left hand to pull out his pistol.

  He got the gun out, cocked it with his thumb, but never had time to pull the trigger before an almost-gentle appearing blow from an index finger pushed his lower mandible back into his spinal column with a total, terminal snap.

  Chiun looked down as the final breath left the body on the floor, his eyes still glistening with intensity.

  The slaves cheered and Chiun whirled toward them; his countenance so fearsome that they stopped in mid-cry and wondered for a split

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  second if their salvation might be more fearful than their imprisonment.

  Chiun hissed at them. "Remember you this. He who will not be a slave cannot be a slave. You disgust me, all of you, who outnumbered this vile thing and yet took his lashes in silence."

  The men looked away as Remo and Ruby came into the glare of the high-ceiling'd room.

  "Ruby," called Lucius.

  "You all right?" she asked.

  "Just tired," he said. "But all right."

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Remo vault up to the platform leading to the door to the main house, the platform on which they had seen DePauw.

  "Just wait here a little bit longer," Ruby said to Lucius. "We be right back." She hauled herself up onto the platform and followed Remo through the door he forced open. Behind her came Chiun and as he left the slave's workroom, the men gasped, because at one moment he was standing on the floor at the base of the little platform, and then an instant later, his body had lifted into the air onto the platform. And none of them had seen him jump.

  The passageway ended at a solid wood and plaster wall. Ruby saw Remo look for a hidden switch to open the door, but instead Chiun put his hands against the two-by-four framing of the wall, pressed right, then left, determined that the hidden door slid left, and pushed against it with more force than seemed to exist in his frail, aged body.

  There was a croaking sound as the locking

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  mechanism surrendered and the door panel slid smoothly to the left. They were looking into a large hallway on the main floor of the DePauw mansion.

  Facing them at the end of the hall were two men. They wore neat business suits, but under the suits were the beefy bodies of athletes. They reached for their guns inside their jackets.

  "Hold it right there," one of them called.

  "Back in the passage," Remo told Ruby and she stepped back behind the safety of the wall.

  She did not see what happened next. She heard a whooshing sound, and later realized it had been Chiun and Remo moving. Then she heard two faint thudding noises. There were no shots and no groans.

  "All right," Remo called.

  She peered around the edge of the wall. The two guards were at the end of the hallway, lying in a crumpled pile. Their hands were still inside their jackets, still reaching for their guns.

  Remo answered the unspoken question in Ruby's eyes.

  "Slow, slow," he said. "They were slow. And slow is the second worst sin, next to sloppy."

  "He knows we're here," said Ruby.

  She pointed up toward the ceiling. In the triple junction of the two walls and the ceiling was a closed circuit television camera, with a red light on under the lens. There was another at the other end of the hallway.

  "Good," said Remo. "He'll have time to pray." He looked up to the camera, pointed to it as if to say "you" then put his hands in the steeple position of praying.

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  Behind the guards, a large curving .staircase led to the mansion's second floor.

  In the back of the building they found De-Pauw's suite of offices. In the outside office was a small man in a neat brown suit, with a graying crew cut, and a face that looked as if it had spent the weekend at a convention of vampire bats.

&
nbsp; As the three came into the room, he stared at them in total horror. Ruby saw on his desk a television monitor that flashed from scene to scene from the cameras around the house. He had seen Remo and Chiun enter downstairs. He had seen the guards reach for their guns, and shout for them to stop. He had seen Ruby duck back behind the wall. But he had not seen Remo and Chiun move. He had not even seen the blur of speed. Instead, he had simply seen Chiun and Remo reappear at the other end of the hall as if by magic and he had seen the two guards drop, their hands still reaching for their guns.

  "Where is he?" asked Remo.

  The man was not about to argue. He pointed to a heavy wooden door.

  "In there," he said. "But the door's locked from the inside. I heard Mr. DePauw bolt it."

  "Yeah, right," said Remo.

  As Ruby watched, Remo tossed himself at the door. He should have bounced off like a tennis ball rebounding from a brick wall. But when his shoulder hit against the door, he seemed to cling there, off his feet, pressed against the wood, and Ruby heard the ripping sound of lumber as the door broke loose and swung open smoothly.

  Remo winked at her. "Don't tell anybody how I did that," he said. "It's a secret."

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  "A secret how he does it without denting his head," Chiun said.

  DePauw's inner office was empty. But as they stepped into the room, a mechanical voice spoke out.

  "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "Come out, come out wherever you are," said Remo.

  Chiun pointed toward a high shelf of books. The sound had come from a speaker hidden there.

  Remo moved to the back windows of the office, past a desk that was filled with advertising proofs. Ruby glanced at the stack. Each ad bore the S-L-A-V-E slogan at the end and her quick glance showed clearly the design of the advertising program. It was a carefully calculated orchestration, starting with the promise of a solution to America's unrest, moving into a massive march on Washington, and ultimately to a national referendum on "Security for Blacks, Safety for Whites." Bleech's army up in Gettysburg had been trained to fight, but if DePauw's mind-bending program worked, not a shot would be fired, and Bleech's troops would merely lead fifty million people toward Washington, D.C. to force a vote on the slavery referendum.

  The amplifed voice spoke again in the office. "Who are you?"

  Remo gestured Chiun to the windows. Below, they could see Baisley DePauw on the back of the power boat, its motors running, a microphone in his hand.