Roote crouched down on his haunches at the edge of the churning pool. Tipping his head, he ran a lazy index finger through the cold water.
The second man had swum blindly up to the edge. He snorted mucus-filled water from his mouth and nose as he scrabbled at the plastic platform. His hand recoiled when he brushed against Elizu Roote's foot.
Skittering sideways, the scientist blinked chlorinated water from his eyes as he looked pleadingly up at the man who had been his test subject. He panted in fear.
"Do you want to beg for your life now?" Roote asked. His soft Southern drawl was mockingly soothing.
Halfway across the tank, the other scientist had made it to the submerged isolation box. He grabbed at the feeding tubes, trying to pull himself from the water. He slipped on the first attempt, splashing back into the big tank.
"Elizu, be reasonable," the nearer scientist begged.
"I don't think I can do that," Roote replied calmly. "That's why you all picked me. You shoulda kilt me. Shoulda kilt me when you had the chance. That box weren't no way to leave me."
"Think, Elizu, think. Try." Hot tears mingled with cold tank water on the scientist's face. "You were uncontrollable. What would you have done if you were us?"
Roote had to think for only a moment. As he rose to his full height, his eyes clearly registered his conclusion. Without another moment's hesitation, he aimed all ten fingers at the choppy surface of the wide pool.
In the water, the scientist shook his head in horror. "No!" the man screamed.
The power surge from Roote's fingers was incredible. It coursed through the water in an instant. The man across the pool had been halfway out of the water and up the rubberized monitor line. The blue electrical surge seemed to reach up from the surface of the tank and tug him back in. He struck water with a fat splash.
In the tank, both men jumped and crackled like batter-coated fish in a deep fryer.
On the plastic platform, Roote gently closed his eyes, rhapsodic, as the energy poured out of him. He let it run for a full minute, until he sensed the drain within his hips and shoulders. Only when he knew his internal supply was too low to continue did he cut off the power supply. By then, the men in the pool were long dead.
The crackling continued for a few moments afterward. The pair of white-coated backs bobbed lifelessly on the surface of the churning, steaming water. The material of their lab coats was tinted slightly brown.
Roote left them to bob in the waves. He stepped over the upper lip of the tank and climbed down the ladder.
Walking, not running, he crossed the big room toward the open door. His wet feet left a fading trail of prints on the concrete floor. A moment later, he was gone.
The monster had escaped.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was fighting gravity. And winning.
Actually, as he strolled along the thin wire eight stories above the dark alley in Providence, Rhode Island, Remo realized that "fight" was not the proper term for what he was doing. Tightrope walkers and trapeze artists fought gravity. Every step or swing they took flouted the simplest law of nature. Remo was no mere circus performer. For him it was not so much a fight as it was a stalemate.
Gravity was there. Remo was there. Both knew it, but each pretty much ignored the other.
The cool breeze brought the scent of the Providence River in from the east. The slight shift in wind would have caught a mountain goat by surprise, flinging it into the black abyss below. Remo merely shifted his weight and he continued to balance delicately as he stepped, one foot casually over the other, toward the distant wall.
To fight gravity would be to lose, Remo knew. One might just as well have tried to wrestle the sun from the heavens. If he taunted nature, he would plummet like Icarus to the hard, unforgiving ground. Instead, Remo became a force of nature unto himself.
Remo was a Master of Sinanju. The latest in a long line of heroes stretching back into the mists of prehistory. To be a Sinanju master was to be in total control of one's physical and mental abilities.
Feats that seemed extraordinary to normal mortals were second nature to the men of Sinanju. Dodging bullets, scaling sheer walls, the ability to lift many times their own weight all came easy to those in harmony with the forces of the cosmos.
But Sinanju was not just a philosophy. The name derived from the poor North Korean fishing village from which the first master had come more than five millennia ago. Remo was the pupil of the Reigning Master, the last in the original pure bloodline.
Remo had not expected to become a Sinanju master. In fact, Remo-like most people-had never even heard of the most deadly of all the martial arts.
A lifetime before, Remo had been a Newark beat cop. One night a pusher had been found beaten to death, Remo's badge clutched in a hand tight with rigor mortis.
The trial had been incredibly, suspiciously, fast. Remo lost. He was executed for a crime he had not committed. When the electric chair didn't work, Remo awoke to find his old life was over and a new one just beginning. Technically dead, but still very much alive, Remo was placed in the skillful hands of the Master of Sinanju. From that moment on, Remo had been taught how to become all that he could be.
"Be all that you can be," Remo sang lightly as he stepped along the clothesline-thick insulated cord.
He wasn't aware he had spoken in more than a whisper until he heard the surprised voice before him.
"Hey! Whoa, hey, what the crap?"
The voice came from the flat roof. When he looked, Remo saw a broad, puzzled face peering from the deep shadows just above the upper roof ledge. It turned quickly away, calling into the darkest shadows in a husky rasp.
"Gino, get over here. You gotta see this." Another face joined the first. This new face, presumably Gino's, grew as surprised as the first when it spied Remo standing on the impossibly thin wire out in the middle of nothing. The alley below lurked dark and menacing.
The cable swung gently in the breeze. Remo swung with it.
"You know dat guy, Ennio?" Gino asked his partner.
"What, do I look like I know him?" Ennio scoffed. He smacked Gino in the side of the head.
They turned their attention back to the man on the wire, Gino rubbing his smarting head.
Remo was of average height and build. His only unusual features, besides his obvious ability to root to a swaying cable in defiance of gravity, were his abnormally thick wrists. They were as thick around as coffee cans. Though it was cool, he wore a black cotton T-shirt and matching chinos. A pair of expensive Italian loafers were the only things between the wire and the soles of his feet.
"What are you doin' out there?" Ennio demanded.
Remo paused in midstep. "Just out for a quiet little walk." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and glanced around. His dark features grew puzzled. "Hmm. Guess I must have taken a wrong turn in Albuquerque."
"Oh, a smart guy," Ennio mocked. "Hey, we got a smart guy standin' eight friggin' stories in the air."
"How you doin' that?" Gino pressed, ignoring Ennio.
"You boys ever hear of gravity?" Remo questioned.
"What are we, morons?" Ennio demanded. "Dat's what makes things fall."
"Close enough for government work," Remo said. "How about super-conductivity?"
Ennio and Gino looked at one another, each apparently unwilling to admit he didn't know. They looked relieved when the floating stranger let them off the hook.
"No matter," Remo said. "That's a tough one. What I do, see, is I meet the force of gravity with an equal repulsive force. It only looks like I'm walking on the wire. In point of fact, I'm a fraction of a millimeter above it."
There was a spark of genuine curiosity in Gino's eyes. He opened his mouth to speak but was suddenly interrupted.
"What the hell is dat?"
A new voice. This one came from behind Remo. He glanced over his shoulder, back to the neighboring building. Three new angry faces peered over at him from just above the spot whe
re the cable snaked into the old brick building.
"He was just tellin' us!" Gino hollered across the alley to his compatriots. "Somethin' about supercondominiums or somethin' !"
Remo rolled his eyes. "Could you yell a little louder? I don't think they can hear you in East Providence."
Gino wasn't paying attention to the others. He was staring at Remo's feet. They seemed anchored to the swaying line as firmly as if it were a broad concrete sidewalk.
"So it's like wit two magnets," Gino ventured.
"Sort of," Remo admitted, tearing his eyes away from the new arrivals. "But the repulsion isn't that intense. It's equal parts repel and attract."
Gino was clearly fascinated. Ennio, less so. With the appearance of the other three men, he had taken on a more authoritarian demeanor.
As Remo watched, a lightweight SMG swung into view, its collapsible skeleton stock already locked in place. Ennio aimed the barrel of the gun at Remo.
"I don't care about no supercondominiums or any of dat gravity bullshit."
At Ennio's lead, the three men opposite raised their weapons. Remo felt the telltale pressure waves of the three barrels aimed at his back. Before him, Gino reluctantly aimed his gun as well. All five of them were a hair away from firing.
In both directions, the men were too far away for Remo to reach before they fired. In the cross fire, with the added difficulty of having to stay balanced on the wire, Remo was at a minor disadvantage. There was only one alternative.
As five hairy fingers tightened against five separate triggers, Remo was already flashing forward. Bending double, he gripped the cable with his right hand, slashing downward with the left.
Bullets sang into the vacant air where his chest had been a split second before. Even as the sheets of hot lead soared in either direction, Remo's hand sliced through the cable. Holding one smoothly cut end, he swung dramatically to the nearest building. For added flair, he let loose his best Tarzan yell as he slapped into the grimy brick facade.
Using a variation on his wire-walking technique, Remo scrambled up and over the side of the building. The gunfire was rattling to a stop even before he crested the wall. He saw why the instant he hit the sheet of black tar.
The gunmen were dead. All three of them. "Oops," said Remo.
Looking away from the bodies that had been mowed down accidentally, he glanced over to the adjacent building-the building he was supposed to be on. Ennio's startled face stared back at him. Gino was nowhere to be seen.
"What the frig!" Ennio snarled across the vacant alley space.
"Wrong building," Remo called back sheepishly. "Don't move."
Scampering back over the ledge, Remo climbed, spiderlike, down two stories. As Remo moved, Ennio took frequent potshots at his speeding form. He missed every time.
Puffs of brick and mortar dust burped into the fetid alley air.
Remo found the fire escape. Landing on the rusted upper platform, he raced down the remaining six flights of crisscrossing stairs to the street.
Ennio stopped shooting at him by the time he'd reached the fifth floor. All was silence by the time Remo broke into the alley. He crossed over to the next building and began climbing rapidly up the grimy wall.
He should have gone up this building to begin with. He had used the elevator in the first building so that no one would see him in the second. Now everyone had seen him. This was what he thought as he climbed. If his employer wasn't always so damned concerned with security, he would have just gone in, done his job and got out.
Remo had worked up a good head of steam by the time he reached the top of the eight-story building eleven seconds later. He climbed quickly over onto the roof.
As he had expected, Gino lay dead on the black surface. Circles of red kissed his crumpled frame. Killed in the cross fire.
Remo found the stab of weak yellow light from the roof door. He entered the well, climbing down the narrow flight of stairs to the top floor.
The two buildings he'd visited this night, and indeed most of the structures on the block, were owned by the Patriconne crime family of Rhode Island. The eighth floor of this particular apartment building was left vacant for Mob use. The man Remo was looking for was somewhere on this floor.
He stole down the corridor, listening for heartbeats beyond closed doors. He found what he was looking for at the end of the hallway.
Remo kicked in the second to last door. The steel buckled, exploding into the room amid a hail of plaster dust.
Two goons were waiting in ambush. As the ruined door was bouncing atop the sofa and sliding to the floor, they were already firing.
Bullets savaged the wall behind him. Remo moved through the storm of leaden missiles as if they were no more than raindrops in a spring shower.
The anger on both his assailants' faces melted to fear as Remo strode purposefully up to the two men, unfazed by the deafening blast of auto fire. They continued to target their weapons, hoping that a single shot would drop the seemingly unstoppable man before them.
Their fingers continued to tense on their triggers even after Remo had reached them. A tactical error. With a final pirouette, Remo danced between the blazing barrels, slapping both up with either hand.
Bullets ripped through two chins and into two brains, splattering blood and gore on the white plaster ceiling.
Remo spun away from the falling bodies. There was a closed door at the end of a short hallway that ran off the living room. As Remo was making his way swiftly toward the door, he heard another pop from an autopistol.
He picked up the pace, hitting the door at a run. Remo sailed into the room amid the shattered sections of door.
The body was just slumping to the desk, a single bullet wound to the side of the head. Ennio stood above the dead man. As Remo strode across the room, the killer swung his pistol in Remo's direction. Remo didn't even look at the weapon.
"Dammit, what did you do that for?" he complained.
"I had my orders," Ennio sneered, the words a challenge.
"So did I," Remo protested. "Did you even stop to think-did you even care that someone other than you might have had orders, too?"
"..."
"This is just swell," Remo continued, unmindful of Ennio's dumb expression. "That's Hy Solomon, I presume. Or was."
Ennio had actually begun to feel guilty for a moment. He shook away the sensation.
"Hey, it ain't my fault. I was just doin' like I was told, dat's all." He crossed his arms defiantly, but his gun got in the way. He remembered why he had the gun in the first place and pointed it at Remo.
Remo frowned. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!" he snapped.
His instructions from Upstairs had been explicit. No fuss. Few deaths. Solomon alive. So far, he had a major fuss, bodies up to his armpits and one dead Mob accountant.
"My boss wanted me to get him out alive," Remo griped as he stared angrily at the corpse.
"He was the top accountant or something for the whole Patriconne crime family. He could have brought down everyone in Rhode Island."
"My boss told me I should kill him for the same reason," Ennio replied. "Only if there was trouble," he added.
Remo looked at him, face puckering angrily. "How much do you know?" he demanded. Ennio suddenly appeared horrified.
"I don't know nuthin'," he admitted.
"You'd better get an education fast," Remo warned. "Because you're going to turn state's evidence."
"No way," Ennio insisted. "I do what I'm told and I don't rat out nobody. Ain't you never heard of omerta?"
As he spoke, he waggled a finger at Remo. It rattled. Remembering his gun once more, he again aimed it at Remo.
Remo wasn't up for an argument. Things had gone horribly wrong on this assignment. He had no choice but to improvise.
He plucked the gun away. Ennio was left grasping at air. Grabbing Ennio by the scruff of the neck, Remo dragged the big man back up to the roof, where he dropped the thug to his back. He pressed a foot against Enni
o's chest to keep him from scurrying away. As the mafioso wiggled beneath his loafer, Remo reached over the building's side and pulled up the nearest section of wire he'd severed.
Remo lashed the wire around one of Ennio's fat ankles. He rolled the man to the edge of the building. Remo paused, holding the man in place at the edge of the precipice. The soft wind toyed at the gangster's dark hair.
"One last chance," Remo offered. "Testify or fly."
Ennio looked at Remo. He glanced down at the darkness below. His breathing was ragged. Sweat glistened across his face, accompanied by a nervous reddish rash.
"Screw you," Ennio panted.
Remo shrugged. "Bombs away."
He gave Ennio's belly what seemed like a gentle push. The Mob killer rocketed out into the alley like a startled pigeon.
He hung there impossibly for a moment, suspended in air directly across from Remo. All at once the bottom seemed to drop out from beneath him. He dropped.
Ennio fell only two stories before the wire dug into his ankle.
"Ouch! Ouch! Son of a bitch! Ouch! Dammit!" His head bounced half a dozen times against the wall.
Above, Remo leaned his chin on one hand. He jiggled the wire, causing the mobster's thick head to bounce a few extra times. In all, he was suspended above the alley for no more than sixty seconds. But they were the most horrifying sixty seconds of Ennio's life. He was upside down. Blood rushing to his head. Swinging, bouncing. Six stories of nothing between him and the too-solid alley far below.
When Remo dragged him up over the edge of the building a minute later, the Mafia killer looked to be coated in sweat. Much of what seemed like perspiration was actually the wetness of his released bladder, which had run up and around his greasy hair while he was dangling in space.
"Enjoy your flight?" Remo asked sweetly as he dumped Ennio back to the rooftop.
"Oh, man... Oh, man..." Ennio panted. On hands and knees, he attempted to kiss the roof's surface. Something was in the way. He kissed anyway.
"Get off my shoes, you idiot," Remo complained, kicking Ennio away from his loafers. "Change your mind?"
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