Remo just hoped that he hadn't picked a tube that fed directly into an incinerator.
IF IT WASN'T for that damn figure skater with the big teeth, Godfrey Grant would not have been consigned to the bowels of Utiliduck. That much he knew.
Oh, how the world had come to love her clean, graceful body as it flashed and swirled over Olympic ice. Her face graced endless magazine covers and cereal boxes and billboards.
And Godfrey Grant had come to hate her guts. And her damn jumbo teeth.
Grant's downfall had begun when the figure skater had been whacked in the knee by dimwits in the pay of a rival figure skater. Overnight she had became an object of sympathy the world over. America clung to her sobbing, piteous, plaintive "Why me's?" until miraculously she had recovered enough to challenge her rival at Lillehammer.
Godfrey Grant had cheered her on even when she won only the silver. At least she had left her rival in the dust. Or the ice. Or whatever.
When the greeter-overseer had come to Grant the next day and informed him that he would sit beside her in the post-Olympics parade through Sam Beasley World, Grant was ecstatic. The fact that he would be encased in a polyurethane Monongahela Mouse greeter's outfit didn't matter at the time. He was going to share the spotlight for all the world to see. If only his girl and his immediate family knew it was him wearing the lollipop ears, that was okay. It was enough.
Came the glorious day, and the figure skater climbed into the pink-and-purple Mousemobile for a turn around the Enchanted Village.
The cameras were rolling. They were waving to the cheering crowd. That part was fine.
But some idiot in publicity had miked the Mousemobile and caught the damn figure skater, a two-million-dollar Sam Beasley check stuffed down her flat ice-princess chest, complaining to beat the band.
"This is cornball city," she had muttered for all the world to hear. "I can't believe I'm sitting next to a giant mouse and people are taking it seriously. Puhleeze!"
Under his mouse head, Godfrey Grant had gone white. He knew how image sensitive the Mouseschwitz High Command was. So he gave the figure skater a gentle nudge in the ribs.
A harmless nudge. That's all it was supposed to be. A nudge and a whispered suggestion to cool it while you're a guest of Sam Beasley World.
Trouble was, the Mongo Mouse head didn't afford much peripheral vision. Grant couldn't see as clearly as he should. And the gentle nudge in the ribs became a hard elbow to the temple.
With a yelp the figure skater dropped right off the back of the Mousemobile, where a team of Clydesdale horses clopped all over the ungrateful bitch, mashing fingers, breaking teeth and most unfortunately shattering the very same kneecap the moron with the collapsible steel baton had failed to even dent.
The figure skater's career was over.
Godfrey Grant's career with Beasley would have been over, too.
Except for the fact that they had miked the Mousemobile.
When he was summoned before the Beasley overseer, Grant expected they'd want his head. The rodent head. And his resignation.
They took the head, all right. But instead of firing him, they consigned Grant to Utiliduck duty, the lowest niche in the the Beasley food chain.
"You're not firing me?" he had asked.
"Normally you'd have been out on your curly tail in a flat minute," the overseer had barked. "But you lucked out. The networks picked up the bitch's whinings and broadcast them clear to Tokyo."
"That's why I tried to nudge her," Grant had protested. "To keep her quiet. I knew the company wouldn't want people to hear. It would spoil the moment."
"The moment," the overseer had shot back, "is not only spoiled, but the bitch is suing us. The cameras caught it all, so she'll probably triple her fee for that one stupid ride."
"I don't get it."
"The big cheese saw and heard it all. He thought she deserved to have her kneecap broken for mouthing off like that. In fact, he was distinctly heard to say that it was too bad the horses didn't bust both of them and put her in a wheelchair."
"That's why I'm not fired?"
"That's why you're not fired," the overseer had said, handing Godfrey Grant a long-handled push broom and saying, "Now get to sweeping."
So Godfrey Grant got to sweeping. A year of sweeping had not endeared him to the job or Utiliduck or mouthy ingrate figure skaters, but in these hard times a job was a job and the truth was that between the heat and the bratty kids, being a greeter could be murder.
At least down in Utiliduck, it was cool and quiet and not much happened to spoil a man's workday.
So Grant was surprised when the white ceiling lights suddenly turned yellow. He had never seen that before. A moment later they shaded to orange, and section control doors began slamming shut.
The lights then became red, and a Klaxon started hooting.
"What's going on?" he asked a squad of security men as they pounded his way.
"Intruder alert."
"Someone trying to sneak in for free?"
The team leader stopped. "Can you handle a gun?"
"Gun?"
And he handed Grant a machine pistol with a mouse-head silhouette stamped on the buttstock.
"Be on the lookout for a guy in a T-shirt with thick wrists. If he comes this way, shoot on sight."
"Shoot?" muttered Godfrey Grant. "Who'd try to sneak into Utiliduck that would need shooting?"
The security team leader didn't reply. They kept running as if they were on a deck of an aircraft carrier during a strafing attack.
So Godfrey Grant tucked his machine pistol into his belt and went back to sweeping the trash that periodically dropped from the nest of ceiling pneumatic terminals.
It was his job to push the incoming trash into the waiting valve of a floor trash compactor. It would have been just as simple to have the stuff go directly into the compactor, but that was Beasley World up above. Anything could come dropping down with the trash. Wristwatches. Wallets. Guns. Medicine. Even cranky baby sisters who kept their older brothers from the Buccaneers of the Bahamas ride.
So Godfrey Grant maneuvered his push broom through the trash, keeping an eye peeled for valuables and inconvenient children.
When a pair of loafers dropped from above, bringing with them a tall skinny guy with thick wrists and the deadest eyes Godfrey Grant had ever seen, he dropped his broom and stammered, "You're the guy."
"What guy?"
"The guy with the thick wrists everybody's looking for."
The man seemed unperturbed. "That's me."
"I'm supposed to shoot you," said Grant.
"Go ahead."
"But I don't want to," Grant admitted.
"Suit yourself," the guy with the thick wrists said in a bored voice. He looked around, saw he was in a white room with slick walls and asked, "Where's Uncle Sam?"
Grant hesitated. "Beasley?"
"Yeah."
"He's been dead longer than I've been alive."
"They don't tell the custodial staff very much around here, do they?"
Grant looked blank.
"Where's the warmest room down here?" asked the man.
Grant frowned. "Warmest?"
"You heard me," said the guy with the thick wrists, drifting up to Grant. Grant backed off, thought he succeeded, but then his machine pistol was suddenly in the guy's right hand. He brought his other hand up, and the machined steel began complaining. It squeaked. It barked. It began coming to pieces as if it were made out of stale sugar cone.
"There's a room two lefts down that corridor, that no one's allowed to go into," Grant offered. "When people come out, they're usually sweating like pigs."
"Sounds about right."
"They're going to make me pay for that broken gun."
"Between you and me and the wall, I don't think anyone's going to be counting guns after I'm through."
And when the thick wristed guy was gone, Grant looked up. He could have sworn the tube he'd come out of was too narrow for
a full-grown man. Although the guy was on the skinny side.
Shrugging, Godfrey Grant reached down to retrieve his long-handled push broom and resumed sweeping. After all, he was paid to push a broom, not deal with security problems.
Not to mention the skinny guy with the wrists had treated him better than his bosses ever did.
"FIRE that fuck, Maus."
"At once, Director."
"No, not at once, you idiot. That lumber-wristed meddler is running around loose. Swat him first. Then fire that fuck."
In the perpetually steamy Utiliduck control room, Captain Ernest Maus strode to the console and punched up the ceiling camera in the corridor approach.
The man with the thick wrists was walking purposefully along the corridor.
He hit a key and barked, "Intruder in Corridor G. Repeat, intruder in Corridor G. Approach and neutralize."
"This ought to be good," chuckled the voice from the high-backed console chair.
Maus nodded. "They'll get him in a cross fire and chip his skeleton to pieces."
"Serve the bastard right. Lock me in a damn rubber room for two years, will he?"
The main monitor on the other side of the room covered Corridor G. Satellite monitors showed Utiliduck security teams regrouping to take up positions of attack at turns of the branch corridors.
"They're in position, Director. The intruder seems oblivious to them."
"What's that he's doing to the wall?"
"Touching it with his fingertips," Captain Maus reported.
"After he takes that next turn, he'll be touching the face of God."
REMO WILLIAMS felt along the wall. It was of sheet steel. Rock solid. An excellent conductor of vibrations. His ears caught the padding of feet made heavy by the weight of awkward weapons. He counted seven in ambush at three separate points just ahead and four more trying to pace him a turn in the corridor behind.
The steel wall grew warm. He was near the hothouse control room that Uncle Sam Beasley would naturally favor because, even after two years out of the cryogenic capsule that had sustained his body until the animatronic heart could be developed, he had not shaken the chill from his old bones.
A tiny whir told Remo that he was being tracked by a camera. He ignored it. As the wall under his brushing fingertips grew warmer, Remo paid attention to the sounds coming from the ambush zone ahead.
Heartbeats began to pick up. Shallow breathing all but stopped. He was close. They were getting ready to spring out.
At the moment just before they would have jumped, Remo set the fingernails of his right hand against the wall and scratched them like nails on a chalkboard.
His nails, hardened by years of diet and exercise, scored the steel with a harsh high-speed screech.
In that paralyzing second when human eyes blinked in startled response, Remo zipped ahead, flashed by the blinded ambush teams, and one hand held flat before him hit a warm blank door.
It caved in, driven as much by the hard column of air Remo was pushing before his flat palm as it was by the hand itself.
It was a sliding door. So one side buckled completely while the other held. But one side was enough.
Remo stepped into a short entryway that shouldn't have been there, so he kept going.
A sharp plate of steel like a guillotine dropped behind him, stirring the hair on the back of Remo's head.
"Too late," Remo told Maus, whose finger had just stabbed the button that had released the descending blade.
"Damn!" Maus muttered.
The voice of Uncle Sam Beasley barked from behind his chair. "What's wrong with that ambush team?"
"I don't know, Director."
"Time to go back to the happy home," Remo called to the back of the console chair. Uncle Sam didn't bother to turn. One hand reached out to stab a button. The good one.
"Never," he snapped.
Remo stepped toward the chair, spun it around and looked into the cold eyes of Uncle Sam Beasley.
One eye exploded like a camera flashbulb. Too late. Remo had already heard the click of the cybernetic relay in the eyeball and shut his own eyes. The insides of his eyelids turned a brilliant laser-beam red. Aiming from memory, he drove his right index finger into the prosthetic eye.
The eye imploded. The animatronic heart kept beating as usual.
A flat click to his rear brought Remo spinning around.
Captain Maus had a gun. An Uzi, a mouse head stamped on the butt. He was holding it steady on Remo.
"Shoot me," Remo warned, "and Uncle Sam buys it, too."
Maus hesitated.
Behind Remo, Uncle Sam growled, "Shoot anyway."
Sweaty faced, Maus said, "But, Uncle Sam-"
"Shoot, you toady!"
The pale trigger finger turned to bone, and Remo, astonished, started to move in on Captain Maus. He cleared the room in less than three seconds, wove left to avoid a fistful of bullets snapping at him and struck Maus in the temple with a hard slap.
Maus went flying into the console, not dead but chastised to the point of multiple fractures.
Remo whirled.
The back of the console was dotted with vicious black holes. Uncle Sam's one good hand flopped off the console and swung loose like a hinged stick.
Remo crossed the room and spun the chair.
Uncle Sam Beasley sat folded in his chair, his head hanging down between his knees in the prescribed airline-crash position. He wasn't moving. Not even his dead dangling arms.
Horrified, Remo said, "Uncle Sam!"
Remo grabbed the broken figure by his collar and lifted the bloodless face into view. It was intact, the good eye rolled up until only the white showed, the frosty mustache seeming to droop in death.
Remo's ears told him that Uncle Sam's animatronic heart beat no more.
"Damn," he said under his breath. "Damn, you're dead."
A familiar voice boomed above Remo's head. "No. You are."
Remo looked up. The main monitor was filled with the age-seamed visage of Uncle Sam Beasley.
"Didn't think I'd let you get that close to me again?" Uncle Sam gloated.
The inert body in Remo's hand suddenly snapped back to life, and a hydraulic hand with snapping steel fingers sought his throat.
Chapter 5
For years after, everyone remembered where they had been when they heard the chilling news bulletin that the President of the United States had been shot.
Republican Congressman Gila Gingold was addressing the House of Representatives.
"Once again the big-spending, big-government side of our government has concocted a so-called healthcare reform package. I can tell you as House minority whip that I will do everything in my power to see that this bill goes down in defeat, just like all the other harebrained attempts to governmental- medical care in this country the Democrat in the White House has tried to jam through Congress."
A House page slipped him a note. Gila Gingold glanced at it, and his emerald green eyes went wide in his flushed face. "I-I have just had word that the President has been shot."
A hush fell over Congress.
Gila Gingold gathered his thoughts and wondered if he should call for a moment of prayer or finish what he'd started. Sensing a golden opportunity to do both, he decided to improvise.
"Even as we speak, our fallen President is undoubtedly being tended to by the finest private physicians available. Were universal health care to become law, he, like all Americans, would have to take potluck. We can't afford potluck medicine in America. So I ask you to join me in saying a resounding no to this latest travesty even as we bow our heads in prayer for the fallen author of said travesty."
IN NEW YORK CITY, in the studios of the Tell the Truth radio network, broadcaster Thrush Limburger was taking calls.
"Go ahead, caller. You're on the air."
"Roger, Thrush."
"And Roger right back to you. What's on your mind?"
"What do you think of this latest health-care proposal?"
"It's a naked grab for control of a multibilliondollar health-care industry, perpetrated by the unthinking but temporary occupants of the White House."
"They keep coming up with these bills, Thrush. Every time one gets shut down, they pop up with another. Is there anything we can do to stop it?"
"Well," Thrush said, and chuckled, "we can pray for divine intervention. Maybe God will vote this President out of office a year early, if you catch my drift."
A frantic waving hand from the control room caught Thrush Limburger's eye. His assistant, Cody Custer, had slapped a big sheet of paper against the glass. The Magic Markered words froze Thrush Limburger in midguffaw: President Shot in Boston.
"Ahem," Thrush said, rustling a commercial script between his thick fingers. "Of course, I don't actually mean that. I may be on the other side of the fence, politically speaking, from this President, but we both want the same thing. A better world."
Thrush tapped a chime and said, "Now for a word about my favorite beverage, Tipple."
PEPSIE DOBBINS, Washington correspondent of American Networking Conglomerate News, was at her desk working the phones when an aide popped his head into her cubicle and said, "The President's been shot!"
" What!"
"He stepped out of his limo, and a sniper took the top of his head off."
Pepsie Dobbins clutched the edge of her desk, slim fingers going white at the knuckles. Her face froze. Her eyes teared. She bowed her expertly coiffed shag.
"Did-did we get film?" she choked out.
"Yes. The feed's coming in now."
Pepsie lowered her head, eyes squeezing tears of relief that coursed down her makeup-powdered cheeks.
"Thank God," she sobbed.
With an effort she came out of her chair and followed the lemminglike streams of staff heading for the monitor room.
"Satellite feed's coming in now," a technician said, hoarse voiced.
All eyes went to a monitor, one of many banks of monitors in the monitor room. Pepsie's eyes raced along the grid, pausing at the one that monitored CNN, which scooped them with annoying frequency.
"Hurry, hurry," she urged. "CNN doesn't have film yet."
The feed came in.
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