"Put a lid on the double-talk," the head guard said. "You two are trespassing on private property of the L.A. Riots. A crime punishable by the kicking of your butts."
"Look," Remo said, "we just want a word with one of the players. Two minutes and we're out."
"Buddy, you're already out."
At a silent signal, the other two security men closed in on Remo, a pincer move calculated to sandwich and overpower him. They didn't bother protecting themselves in a serious way, as they outweighed their target by a hundred pounds each. Because of the size differential, they were willing to absorb a punch or two in order to get their big hands on him.
Giving Remo first crack was their mistake.
And they only got one.
At the same moment, both guards lunged. It looked like a football play they had practiced thousands of times. Only they ran it at what seemed to be one-quarter speed. When the guards' fingers closed, they snatched only thin air. For an instant, the two men stood frozen, unable to grasp why they hadn't grasped the intruder's neck. With their arms extended straight out from the shoulder, the lengths of their torsos, from armpit to waist, were open to attack.
Ribs snapped like bread sticks, dry and crisp. Both guards dropped to their knees. As they clutched their sides, foreheads pressed to the floor, they wheezed and gasped for breath.
"Too slow," Chiun commented. He wasn't referring to the fallen guards, whose fighting skills were laughably childlike. The comment was directed at his pupil, Chong-wook, the ironic footman. Then the Master unleashed what might have been his ultimate insult. "If they had been Gung Fu," he told Remo, "they would have caught you."
"Hey, now, that isn't fair...."
The big hairy guy leaped, glomming onto Remo's back. Using all his weight, the security guard tried to drive the dangerous trespasser into the orange-and-black Congoleum.
"Whoop!" Remo said, twisting at the waist. Not a power twist. A timing twist.
The hairy guard flew over his shoulder and slammed headfirst into the wall with a mighty thunk. As the man's body slipped to the floor, it revealed a face-shaped indentation in the Sheetrock.
Chiun didn't give the remarkable depth of the concavity so much as a glance. "We've wasted enough time here," he said, stepping over the unconscious body.
"The weight room must be just up ahead," Remo said to the Master's slender back. "Hear the iron plates clanking? And the rap music?"
Chiun stopped short.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked him.
"An evil smell." Chiun fanned a hand in front of his slender nose. "It is the stink of a fatty-red-meat-eating urine-dribbler."
"Don't look at me like that."
"You don't eat red meat, so it couldn't possibly be you."
"Thanks so much for the vote of confidence," Remo said. "Given our present location, though, that nasty aroma could be coming from anyone or anywhere."
"This is no ordinary smell," Chiun countered. "It's like what rises from a low clump of bush after a gentle spring rain."
"You mean cat pee?"
Chiun glided ahead and turned the corner into the weight room, which was big enough to accommodate the entire Riots team. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the floor was taken up with great steel contraptions and racks of dumbbells and barbells. As Remo followed Chiun through the doorway, the starting offensive line of the L.A. Riots looked up at them from the bench-press area. Sweaty, towering men, whose combined weight was somewhere around three quarters of a ton.
Remo smiled at the men in orange and black. Out of the corner of his mouth he said to Chiun, "Johnson had said they were bigger and meaner than the security staff. He forgot to add younger."
A guttural growl came from beyond the offensive players. At the squat rack, a monster man held an Olympic bar balanced on his impossibly wide shoulders. The heavy steel bar was bowed in the middle by the tremendous weight at both ends. Bradley Boomtower let eight hundred pounds of iron crash to the deck.
"He is the one who smells," Chiun announced, pointing an imperious finger at the offender.
"Just the guy we want to see," Remo said.
As the second-most-dangerous man in the world took a step forward, the two guards, two tackles and the center spread out to block his path. A grove of redwood trees in numbered, XXXL sweatshirts.
"We've got business with your big guy, there," Remo said.
"And what exactly is your business?" the center said, testing the heft of a seventy-pound dumbbell.
"A glorious and time-honored trade," Chiun answered at once. "We are assassins."
Remo gave the Master a look of dismay.
Behind the offensive line, Boomtower howled with rage and began to advance.
"Stay back, F.V.," the right guard said, holding up his hands. "You're in enough hot water already. You get in any more trouble and you'll be out of the lineup next week."
"We need you against Portland, man," the right tackle said. "That Parakeet air attack will pick us apart without your pass rush."
The offensive linemen edged closer to Remo. "Our time in the gym is very special to us," the center said, still armed with the dumbbell. "We don't like being gawked at by geeks and gooks in our most private moments. You guys sound like you might be crazy, fucking escapees from Atascadero, but that doesn't cut you any slack with us. My friends here are going to hold your arms and legs down while I beat your heads to mush with this. From the chin up, you're gonna be nothing but a red stain on the carpet." He waggled the dumbbell.
"Hey, Chiun, I might need a little help here," Remo said. "Chiun?"
The Reigning Master of Sinanju slipped his hands inside the loose sleeves of his robe. A gesture that needed no further explanation.
There were only five of them.
The pupil was on his own.
"That's it, old-timer," the left guard said, "you just wait there, nice and still, and we'll see to you in a minute."
Remo meanwhile had picked up a football from a bin on the floor. Thick wrist flexing, he gripped it with his fingertips on the laces. His knuckles whitened, and his fingers dug deeply into the ball.
It exploded in his hand like a party balloon, only much, much louder.
The noise made the offensive line pause in their advance.
"Is that little trick supposed to scare us?" the left tackle said.
Remo selected another ball from the bin. "I'm asking you real nice to clear a path," he told them.
"What're you gonna do, hurt our ears again?" the center said, laughing.
Remo dropped back to pass, pumped once. The Riots didn't take the fake, so he let fly.
The offensive line thought it was another fake. Only Chiun saw the ball leave Remo's hand. It traveled twenty feet before the pointed end made contact with the middle of the center's heavy-boned chin. Again the ball compressed until its seams exploded. The impact snapped back the huge man's head, driving him into a watercooler, which tipped over as he dropped to the carpet. His fellow players ducked and used their hands to deflect the flying pigskin shrapnel.
Remo picked up another ball and slapped it into his open palm.
The right guard bent over the center. "Louie's out cold," he said. "That skinny little punk KO'd him with a pass. Jesus, he's spitting teeth."
"Assassinate this," the right tackle snarled, scooping up the object the center had dropped.
Remo ducked, allowing the seventy-pound dumbbell to fly over his head.
The other players followed suit and started chucking dumbbells at him. Remo didn't even try to get out of the way. As the heavy objects rained down on him, end over end, he swept them aside, deflecting them right or left with the backs of his wrists. Dumbbells clanged on the floor and bounced, rolling every which way as the Riots emptied the racks of weights.
"Get the fucker!" the left tackle cried, rushing over to the stacks of iron plates. "Flatten his ass!" He picked up a thirty-five-pound plate like it was a pizza pie and sent it spinning, discus style, across the room at Remo.