Air raid, p.15
Air Raid, page 15
“Whatever señor wants, see to it he gets it, with the compliments of the management,” the manager called loudly.
The bellman nodded. At Chiun’s urging he quickly led the three of them to a door between the front desk and the gift shop. The long corridor beyond was lined with doors.
He stopped at an unmarked room halfway down.
Remo sensed nothing living inside as Chiun advanced on the door.
“Careful, Chiun,” he warned.
He didn’t have a chance to get farther before the Master of Sinanju was airborne.
“Aiieee!” the old man cried.
The metal-reinforced door exploded beneath the soles of Chiun’s sandals. The metal crunched and caved at the center, tearing from the frame. It flew into the room, Chiun along with it. The Master of Sinanju disappeared into the room, a raging storm of green silk.
“Like I said,” Remo muttered. “Let’s throw caution to the wind.”
As the shocked bellman ran off to report to the manager, Remo and Amanda trailed Chiun into the security room.
At the sight of the security guard’s body, Amanda covered her mouth.
“Oh, my,” she said. “Is he dead?”
“That ain’t ketchup,” Remo replied. “And don’t be so shocked, Amanda. If your work’s a success, we’ll all be wishing we checked out this easy.”
The security man’s suit jacket was draped over the back of a chair. Remo tossed it over the guard’s face.
Other than the body, the room was empty. Chiun whirled, planting hands to hips.
“He has fled,” Chiun complained.
The monitor on which Hahn had watched Chiun was still trained on the parking lot. The car was gone.
Chiun’s wrinkled face was puckered into an angry fist. But when he saw the vacant parking space, some of the harshness drained away.
“He had presence of mind enough to flee in his own vehicle,” the old man said. “He knew to go where I had been and not to run in the opposite direction, as would be the instinct for most men.”
“Yeah, you’ve got to hand it to those Germans,” Remo said, annoyed at missing out on catching the killer. “Sure, they try to take over the world every few decades, but they’re cool as ice under pressure.”
“No, they are not,” Chiun said, brow furrowed. He was looking thoughtfully at the security monitor.
“So I guess we’ve hit another dead end,” Remo sighed.
The old man was shaken from his reverie. “Speak for yourself, round eyes,” he said.
From the sleeve of his kimono he produced a small sheet of yellow carbon paper.
“After being lured to the vehicle by the stench of pretzeled bread, I discovered this.”
He handed over the paper. Remo saw that it was a receipt from a car-rental agency.
“Olivier Hahn,” Remo read. “Hahn? Isn’t that the name you just mentioned upstairs?” he asked Amanda.
“Hmm?” Amanda asked. She had been staring at the partially covered body on the floor. “Oh, yes. Yes. But I told you, he’s Swiss, not German.”
“Maybe our noses are on the fritz,” Remo said. “I’ll have Smith check into it.” Paper in hand, he looked around for a phone.
“I also found these,” Chiun intoned gravely. Once more he reached into his kimono. When his bony hand reappeared, it opened delicately, fingers unfurling like flower petals. In his wrinkled palm were a half-dozen small blue seeds.
Amanda snapped alert.
“C. dioxa seeds,” she gasped.
Chiun let the seeds drop to the floor one by one. He crushed them under the heel of his sandal. They made a lumpy blue smear on the worn carpet.
“You have created a thing of evil,” the Master of Sinanju accused, hazel eyes dark. “All that happens from this point forward rests on your foolish head.”
His gaze penetrated deep into her troubled soul.
“I—I didn’t mean to.” She stopped, unable to go on.
Tears welled in her eyes. Her proud jaw quivered.
These weren’t the self-pitying tears she was used to.
Daddy, Mother, Abigail, the whole Lifton dynasty—all the power, all the millions—no one and nothing seemed to be as important as it had been just the day before.
She looked down at the body on the floor.
So very, very still. Like they would all soon be. Even her estranged family. In spite of all their Lifton money.
Remo had found a phone. He had already dialed. To Amanda, his voice echoed like distant thunder.
Chiun turned his back on her.
The tears came. Not wild and emotional. They stung hot as they rolled down her pretty face.
She had been comforting herself her past few years in exile by repeating over and over that everything would be okay. She knew now she was wrong on a scale far greater than she’d ever imagined.
Everything was not going to be okay.
She looked at the body on the floor.
Only the first of many.
The world was doomed.
And it was all her fault.
Chapter 18
Hubert St. Clair wasn’t worried so much about who would take the blame for destroying all life on Earth. He was more concerned about who might try to take the credit.
The problem of just exactly where the accolades would fall had been weighing heavily on his mind for months. It bothered him slightly less today. This was largely due to the distraction of the infernal mechanical whine and the constant rattling that made him feel as if his teeth would fly out of his head.
The head of the Congress of Concerned Scientists was sitting in the copilot’s seat of an old West German antitank helicopter. The jungle canopy below the belly of the craft was thick and green as the chopper raced over the treetops that crowded the upper Amazon.
Most people would have found the view breathtaking. In a few short years, when these same forests were blue and the sky was adjusted back to pre-primordial, those who thought the rain forest breathtaking would be literally correct.
St. Clair didn’t much think of the scenery, either present or future. He was too busy gripping his seat, trying to swallow the terror that had massed in his throat.
It wasn’t the helicopter’s fault. St. Clair would have been just as afraid in a car or truck or, Lord help him, a bus. He had taken heavy sedatives just to get on the plane from Geneva. The truth was, Hubert St. Clair had a deep and abiding hatred of all things technological.
Hubert St. Clair was a Luddite before he even knew what the word meant. Technology had always been something to view with suspicion and dread. Even as a child, he had never felt truly comfortable with everyday appliances. At home he was deathly afraid of getting his hand caught in the toaster or blender or of getting locked in the refrigerator. The sound of the electric can opener sent him running from the room. Outside it was elevators and automobiles. Once he had passed out just from walking by an amusement park. The lights and the screams and the tilt-a-whirl had just been too much.
While many environmentally conscious individuals applauded the use of public transport, Hubert St. Clair couldn’t be counted among them. Trains were terrifying metal death tubes that propelled human beings at speeds God had never intended. Buses were just plain evil.
It was odd that a man with his particular phobia had chosen a career in science. He mostly had his father to thank for the path he had taken in life.
“What is the matter with you, Hubert?” was his father’s favorite phrase in summer. “It’s only a lawn mower.”
“What is the matter with you, Hubert?” his father would often say in winter. “It’s just a snowblower.”
“It’s perfectly safe to get in the car, Hubert,” the elder St. Clair had said more times than he cared to all year round. “It’s just a car and cars can’t hurt you. Now, get out of the goddamn bathroom before I break the door in.”
Hubert’s problem with technology was evident early on. It didn’t get better over time.
His father knew that if Hubert followed the course he was laying out for himself, he was certain to wind up as an underachieving agrarian farmer or forest ranger. Worse, if he could get over his fear of hammers and mistrust of buggies, he might even turn Amish. His father couldn’t allow it. Rather than let his only offspring choose his own path in life, the elder St. Clair had chosen for Hubert.
It took years of browbeating and threats. Money held back, money as reward. Handholding through college and graduate school. His father taught Hubert many important things. Not the kinds of things that a father would ordinarily teach his male child, but important things nonetheless. Like that if you hit a light switch really fast and don’t look at the bulb, you can pretend lamp light is really sunlight. Or how car trips could be endured if you closed your eyes and blocked your ears and pretended you were sitting on a wobbly bench.
The advice his father gave was probably not the best he might have gotten. With such a deep-rooted, irrational phobia, some sort of psychiatric help was probably called for. But psychiatrists were for crazy people, and there was nothing really terribly wrong with young Hubert when you came right down to it. And, no, cameras don’t really steal part of your soul and extension cords don’t slither into bed and strangle you in your sleep.
The elder St Clair was a physics professor at a prestigious New England university. Once Hubert was finished with school, he made sure his son got a job teaching.
Surprisingly, the academic life seemed to suit Hubert. At least, he didn’t seem to complain.
He lived within walking distance of the campus, so he didn’t have to drive to work. He turned lights in his office and classrooms on and off without apparent concern. His father was delighted when he visited his son’s office and found an automatic coffeemaker in the corner.
By all outward appearances it looked as if Hubert St. Clair had conquered his childhood demons.
When Hubert was offered a job as technical adviser to a public-television show in the 1970s, his father was no longer surprised. Why couldn’t Hubert go into a television studio like anyone else? There was no reason that he should be afraid of all the cameras and lights and sound equipment. His son was normal, and normal people did things like that all the time.
A week after Hubert got his new job, Professor St. Clair suffered a massive stroke. In his mind, he died a happy man. But he also died never knowing the truth.
For although Hubert had been able to put up a good front for years, those childhood technology fears had not only stayed with him, they had grown to nearly uncontrollable proportions.
Fortunately, the program he had been chosen to work on was hosted by none other than Sage Carlin, perhaps the most famous opponent of the technological revolution on the face of the planet. That job had changed Hubert’s life.
When his PBS program ended its run, Sage Carlin had welcomed Hubert St. Clair onto the board of directors of the Congress of Concerned Scientists. It was there that Hubert finally found men like himself.
The men of the CCS hated technology. They didn’t quite fear it in the way Hubert did. But they were convinced that every machine invented was intrinsically evil.
Hubert delighted in the various reports the CCS would periodically issue. He was standing right there as the Congress railed against oil tankers and fast-food sandwich containers. Microwaves and missiles. He signed every worrywart petition by every flighty scientist on every dubiously argued subject that appeared in the New York Times.
At the CCS, Hubert St. Clair finally began to get his revenge against the science he hated so much.
Largely due to his passion, he climbed the ranks quickly, until eventually he was second only to Sage Carlin himself. At this point Carlin was at the end of his life and looking for a legacy that would give his existence the meaning he craved
Sage Carlin wasn’t quite the same as Hubert. Whereas St. Clair wouldn’t have minded if the whole world was forced to go back to living in moss-lined caves, Carlin had always favored deindustrialization for everyone but himself. But in the end, with his own bright light winking out. Sage Carlin seemed to come over to Hubert St. Clair’s way of thinking.
The C. dioxa project had been in its infancy when Sage Carlin passed away. Since it would no longer affect him where he was going, his plan was to make the changes to the world he knew were necessary. Afterward, when Hubert St. Clair ascended to the top spot at the CCS, he pressed the project even harder than had his predecessor.
The greatest moment in all his life came that day when he realized the C. dioxa team had actually succeeded. Hubert St. Clair had dared to dream big, and now that amazing, wonderful dream was going to come true.
His vision was of a new world.
It was good timing, because he had gotten to a point in his life where he simply could not bear the old one any longer. This brave new world wouldn’t be afflicted with the Bronze, Industrial or Technological ages. All of the terrors that had been thrust down around his frightened technophobic ears would become things of the distant past.
Not that he wanted the planet to end. Far from it.
There was a future for Earth. Even on a planet where C. dioxas thrived and cloud-clogged skies rained ammonia fire, the building blocks of the new age would still be there.
Eventually, the planet would evolve to support other life. It had done so before. Inevitable climactic shifts would force the extinction of the C. dioxa. Those plants that mutated would evolve whole new species. The trees had been engineered using genetic material that existed on this current version of Earth. In them would be carried the key to all future life. Life that would emerge once the clouds receded and the sun returned.
Yes, it would be a few billion years from now, but science was nothing if not patient.
When the new Earth dawned, there might very well be a new dominant animal life-form that would succeed man. And with any luck those creatures that eventually climbed up from a future cold pool of primordial sludge would choose farming as a way of life and have sense enough to steer clear of blenders, fax machines and automatic supermarket doors.
As Hubert’s helicopter whipped over an endless sea of green leaves, he wondered briefly if he shouldn’t leave some kind of message for the future stewards of creation. After all, there was no way he wanted Sage Carlin to get credit.
The other potential glory hogs were gone. Out of necessity to protect his plan, he had thinned the herd of CCS scientists as soon as they’d completed work on the C. dioxa. None of them could try to take credit.
Well, actually there might still be one.
The only holdout was that irritating Amanda Lifton. The head of the project, Dr. Brice Schumar, had insisted she was brilliant. St. Clair couldn’t see it. All he ever saw—beyond those truly eye-popping knobs—was an emotional train wreck of a woman who had spent large chunks of her day sitting in her office blubbering. She would have been eliminated already if that millionaire father she was always whining about hadn’t gone out and hired some outside protection for her.
This was the real baffler. There were only two of them. And one of them looked like he was a million years old.
When he was looking to permanently terminate the C. dioxa team, Hubert St. Clair had done some quiet checking around. The consensus in the Swiss underworld was that a man by the name of Olivier Hahn was the best at handling these kinds of delicate jobs. He was a little too fond of technology and had an odd quirk of not wanting people to use his first name, but he had certainly lived up to his hype. Until now.
The last Hubert had heard from Hahn, Amanda Lifton and her two bodyguards had escaped the fiery destruction of his Swiss chalet.
It should have been impossible. When it was his home, Sage Carlin had kept some of the early C. dioxa information there. Before he died he had rigged the place so that, if it became necessary, he could obliterate all the data and half the hillside at just the touch of a button. Apparently he had done, all this—Hubert St. Clair later learned—with the help of Herr Hahn.
The explosion that destroyed the chalet was huge. St. Clair had even seen mention of it in Brazil that morning in one of the local English-language papers. Yet, maddeningly, Amanda Lifton had gotten through it in one piece.
“You better not try to steal my thunder,” Hubert St. Clair muttered under his breath.
For a moment as he thought about her, St. Clair forgot about the terrifying flying death machine he was sitting in.
The helicopter had been converted to civilian use after being donated to the Congress of Concerned Scientists by the Netherlands. There were no longer missiles hooked to the lateral outriggers. Instead, the riggers had been outfitted with a series of simple metal tubes. An extra-large fuel tank had been installed at the back of the craft, allowing for greatly extended flight time.
The area that was intended to be used for the transport of military personnel had been remodeled. A large stainless-steel hopper filled the back of the helicopter. It tapered to a narrow funnel at the base. The end of the funnel extended through a hole in the floor.
As they flew along, St Clair felt a sudden vibration in his pocket. Reaching in, he gingerly removed his cell phone.
He hated carting the thing around with him. He was absolutely convinced that the reports were right and the wretched little things caused brain, ear and eye cancer. But circumstances required that he participate in this part of the technology insanity. At least for the time being.
As the helicopter continued to whip over green trees, St. Clair tucked the cell phone under his headset. He tried his best to keep it from directly touching his ear.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other end of the line offered no salutation.
“They are still alive.”
Herr Hahn was always short on the phone. St. Clair knew his hired assassin was talking about Amanda Lifton and her bodyguards. The CCS director clicked his tongue unhappily.
Somehow that pesky woman continued to cheat death. But soon it wouldn’t matter. No matter how slippery she and her bodyguards were, they’d soon be left gasping for air along with the rest of the miserable planet.
