"Let me handle the guys at the gate," he told Chiun as they got out of the car.
The Master, still miffed, said nothing.
As they passed the pickup, Remo grabbed a rake and a limb trimmer on an aluminum extender pole from the back. "Here," he told Chiun. "Carry this." The Master accepted the rake in silence.
The two of them crossed the street and walked down the hill toward the white gates. As Remo and Chiun approached, through cascades of purple-and-pink bougainvillea, they could see the blue limo parked under the mansion's porticoed auto entrance. The huge home was without frills: modern, multilevel, with lots of glass exterior walls. They were about ten feet from the gate when the two security men on the other side moved into position.
The Fed who wore his pale brown hair in a supershort crew cut spoke crisply into his headset, "We've got a pair of bogeys at nine o'clock. Stations Red and Blue on intruder alert."
With the limb trimmer resting over his shoulder, Remo stopped in front of the gate.
"Move on," said the Fed.
"We're supposed to do some pruning inside," Remo told him.
"No, you're not. Move on, lawn boy." The security men shared a smirk.
Remo set the tip of the long metal pole on the sidewalk and stepped a little closer to the gate's bars. "My partner here," he said, gesturing at the little old Oriental with the rake, "is the world's foremost expert on the monkey puzzle tree. He's made time in his busy schedule, as a personal favor to Mr. Koch-Roche, in order to inspect a suspected fungal outbreak on a museum-quality specimen on the grounds. I don't think Mr. Koch-Roche will be amused if you turn him away."
The crew-cut Fed gave Remo an irritated look, then spoke again into his mike. "Station Yellow here," he said, sizing up the men on the other side of the gate. "We've got a couple of guys claiming to be gardeners at the gate. See if they're expected. One's an old Jap-"
Remo hadn't quite reached the optimum position for the strike he had planned-the tip of the pole was a little too far to the left-but he knew he had no choice but to go for it. Chiun had already whipped the handle of his rake around, and was thrusting it between the steel bars like a lance.
With a loud crack, the wooden handle splintered against the crew-cut Fed's body armor, but not before Chiun had delivered a paralyzing shock to his diaphragm. The Fed crumpled and dropped to his side, curling up in a fetal position on the drive.
Crew-cut's partner had his hand on his mini-Uzi when Remo made his own thrust. The long aluminum pole bowed in the middle as its butt made solid contact with the man's chin. The bend in the pole absorbed some of the blow's power, which was still sufficient to stun the Fed and make him drop his weapon.
Remo quickly scaled the gate and used the lever to open it for Chiun, who with great dignity walked through the opening and stepped over the fallen form of the crew-cut Fed.
The Master paused to kneel beside the wheezing man.
"Korean," Chiun said slowly and distinctly, as if addressing a child. "I am Korean."
Chapter 17
Senator Ludlow Baculum carefully peeled the adhesive patch from his right buttock. He observed the entire operation in the master bathroom's floor-to-ceiling mirror wall, while standing on the gold marble steps leading up to a vast, Mayan-temple-motif bathtub. Having removed the spent patch, the senator carelessly discarded it over his shoulder, mesmerized as he was by the sight of his own behind.
Ludlow's butt was monumental. Not even as a young man had it jutted so firmly, so solidly. As he walked up and down the bathtub steps, he could see the various muscle groups rippling under skin stretched thin as an overinflated balloon.
Oh, he was a manly man indeed.
Even if Koch-Roche had been charging ten million a year for the patch, Lud would have paid it gladly. The wonder drug had resurrected him from the dead. Though his mind was still razor sharp, he had been trapped in a decaying, ancient hulk of a body.
His was the tragedy of the aging horndog.
His sexual desires were still intense as ever, but he no longer had the physical wherewithal to satisfy himself or anyone else. Before he'd started taking the drug, when he had put his palsied, liver-spotted hand upon a young woman's naked body, the sensation was dim, as if he were groping through many layers of fabric. Even his sense of touch had been dulled by time.
That his continuing interest in women had become a joke, a widely circulated joke, had stung the senator most bitterly. But it hadn't stopped him from chasing women young enough to be his great-great-granddaughters. Because he was hampered by his walker and oxygen tank, Baculum's Washington, D.C., staff--comprised entirely of women under thirty-could usually avoid being cornered by him in the office. Elevators were a different story. As he slipped into his mid-eighties, Ludlow Baculum had spent many happy and profitable hours lurking in the back of a crowded car, his fingertips poised for a quick pinch or a shuddering grope.
All that was past.
Now he had a new body to match his desire. After an absence of a little more than a quarter century, Lud the Stud was back.
The senator peeled the backing off a new patch and stuck it on his other buttock. Then he did some Mr. Universe poses in front of the mirror, squinting ferociously so he could focus on his popping biceps and hulking traps without donning his specs. It didn't mat ter to him that he still had a ninety-plus-year-old face, no hair and three teeth. Thanks to more than thirty years of carefully cultivated PAC contributions, of corporate under-the-table payoffs, he was filthy rich. Pretty young women could often overlook a bit of toothless blotch face when it controlled a few hundred million in purely liquid assets. Especially the type of pretty women he was attracted to: screamers in the sack with shoe-size IQs. His taste in lady friends hadn't changed since Woodrow Wilson took office.
What Lud anticipated, now that he had a worldclass bod, was fewer serial marriages and many more casual love partners. Many more. Not only would he be faster on the grab, but given his more attractive physique, his prey would be less likely to try to escape. In the long run, the senator figured to break even on the price of the drug because the cost of his prenuptial agreements was bound to take a precipitous drop.
Lud barefooted across the marble over to the sink counter, where he had left the remains of his most recent snack. He poked around in the bottom of the translucent paper sack and came up with a tiny shard of overcooked french fry and a few grains of salt. Which he quickly consumed. Then he held the bag up to the light. It was drenched in grease. He could feel it all slimy under his fingers. Delicious but inaccessible grease.
Well, not quite.
The senator wadded the bag into his mouth and chewed and sucked the oily goodness from the paper. When he was done, to make sure he hadn't missed any, he swallowed the bolus down.
As he licked his lips, he heard soft singing from the next room.
And he smelled Woman.
In the past ten hours, his sense of smell had become most amazingly acute. Even the faintest hint of the opposite sex was for him a beacon, a Klaxon, a war cry. From her aroma, the senator judged the woman's age at twenty-two, well into the range of his target zone. And he guessed that she was Latina.
He ducked his bald, spotted head around the bathroom doorjamb.
Right on both counts.
Jimmy Koch-Roche's live-in maid was bent over the queen-size bed, fluffing up the pillows.
"Hola, Lupe!" Lud said, stepping into the bedroom.
The girl looked up from her work. The friendly smile on her face vanished as she saw that the man who had hailed her was both naked and fully aroused.
Lupe was no delicate flower. Though short in stature, she weighed a good 160 pounds. Her working clothes weren't the frilly, short-skirted French-maid outfits sold in sex-fantasy shops, but the cotton, sensible, no-nonsense, loose-fitting pants and shirt jacket of a nurse or beautician. She had no waist to speak of, and therefore no apparent hips. She wore her hair twisted up into a bun at the back of her head.