None of which mattered in the least to Senator Baculum, whose dander was most definitely up. "iVenga aqui, Lupe!" he said, opening his huge powerful arms to her.
Lupe let out a yelp and ran over the bed in her pink Reeboks, trying to reach the hallway door and, she hoped, safety.
Lud was too quick for her. He blocked the exit with his massive body.
"Come to me, my little frijole negra," the senator cooed.
Lupe had no intention of doing anything of the kind. She dashed back over the bed and through the bathroom door. She slammed the door shut, shot the bolt and started yelling for help at the top of her lungs.
The senator booted the heavy door off its hinges with a single kick, then walked over the fallen door. The maid was nowhere in sight. At first, he thought she might have escaped out a window. But behind the frosted glass of the huge shower stall, he saw her shadow. She cowered there, too scared to utter a sound.
When Lud jerked open the door and stepped in, Lupe slumped down the wall to the floor, covering her head with her arms. She was sobbing, her black hair falling around her shoulders.
"Don't cry now, Lupe," Lud said in a soothing voice. "I'm not one of your wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am Latin lovers. I'm from the old school of romance. I believe in foreplay, foreplay, foreplay...."
With that, he dragged her bodily from the stall by her hair, sank his three teeth into her shoulder blade and started shaking her around the room like a terrier with an old knotted sock.
"FREEZE!" said a voice behind Remo and Chiun as they mounted the low, broad steps to the mansion's side entrance. The command was followed immediately by "Get your hands up!"
Remo turned to face a very excited young man with a very stubby machine pistol. The mini-Uzi's red laser-sight dot jitterdanced across the breast of his black T-shirt.
"Please don't point that thing at me," Remo said, lifting his hands. "It makes me nervous."
"Shut up!" The young Fed shifted his aim to Chiun. "You, too. Get 'em up!"
The red dot played over the Master's scrawny throat and brushed his smiling lips.
"What're you grinn-?"
Before the federal agent could finish the word, let alone his sentence, it was over.
He had been rendered unconscious by what appeared to be a wave of a hand, a gesture that never actually made contact with the side of his head. The vacuum, the back draft created by Chiun's movement, had caused the young man's skull to lurch violently sideways and his brain to slam into the walls of that bony chamber.
After disarming the agent, Remo and Chiun entered the mansion. At once, they heard a woman's screams. "Sounds like old Lud's at it again," Remo said. And then came the sound of heavy running feet. The running feet belonged to the rest of the mansion's security staff. Remo and Chiun were confronted by four more machine-pistol-toting Feds and a trio of Koch-Roche's personal bodyguards. The latter pointed blue-steel .40-caliber SIG-Sauer pistols at them.
"Stop right there!" shouted the Fed in charge. "Stop where you stand or we'll fire."
Remo raised his hands above his head. "We aren't going anywhere," he said. "Aren't you going to check out those screams? Or don't you understand Spanish for 'Please don't kill me'?"
"You are our only problem at the moment," the Fed said. A pair of big, mirror-surfaced aviator sunglasses was perched on top of his head. "Cuff 'em, Roberts."
"Somebody's getting murdered in the next room, and you're worried about a couple of gate-crashers?" Remo said in disbelief.
"Somebody's going to get killed in this room if you don't zip it in a hurry, pal."
Roberts gestured for Remo and Chiun to face the flagstone wall that framed the enormous fireplace. "Lean forward, hands on the wall and spread your legs," Roberts directed.
Remo and Chiun obeyed the man's order and allowed themselves to be quickly frisked.
"Okay," Roberts continued, "put your right hands behind your backs."
Even though the other six men had their weapons trained on the two suspects, even though they were watching as intently as was humanly possible, the little Oriental seemed to vanish. One second he had his hand behind his back, in an off balance and totally vulnerable position, and the next second he was simply and totally gone.
As Roberts spun around to face his colleagues, he looked up. "Shit!" he exclaimed. He was the only one who could see the old man, and there was nothing he could do about it. Chiun was hurtling through the air, the hem of his robe brushing the top of the twenty-foot-high ceiling. He soared past the lineup of security specialists, whose attention was still focused on where he had been, not where he was.
Then something hit Roberts in the side of the neck, and for him, everything went black.
At the same instant some fifteen feet away, the Master of Sinanju landed lightly on the balls of his feet and, once firmly grounded, roamed freely among the defenseless backs of his adversaries.
Everything soft and fluid.
Blows that started off hard as iron and ended at their targets as near caresses.
Without the all important follow-through, such strikes were not lethal-unless, of course, one of the men happened to have a steel plate in his head, in which case even the muted impact would have set it spinning like the blade of a runaway table saw.
As Remo carefully eased Agent Roberts to the floor, across the room armed men were falling like howling pins. Between them, Remo could make out flashes of blue brocaded silk and the afterimage of a smile.
"All asleep," Chiun announced, slipping his hands back into his cuffs.
A piercing cry echoed through the mansion. "Not all," Remo said.
Chiun nodded. "When the little head rules the big one, trouble cannot be far away."
"And Trouble Is Us...."
Remo led the way through the big house, following the sounds of struggle through the ground floor to its source.
Like a snowstorm spilling into the hall, kapok fluff floated out of the doorway to the master bedroom. Remo entered first, low and quick. For a moment, he couldn't even see the woman, dwarfed as she was by the hugely muscled naked man who bent over her on the savagely ripped, partially de-stuffed mattress.
Then Remo caught sight of the soles of her Reeboks on either side of Ludlow Baculum's massive buttocks. The woman was furiously kicking her attacker and to some effect-there was pink smeared on the white treads of her traction soles.
"Senator?" he said.
Ludlow Baculum's ancient head snapped around on his corded, powerful neck. He smiled, and there was blood on his three teeth and tongue. He had the little woman's wrists pinned to the bed. Her clothes hung in tattered strips all around her.
"Go away!" Baculum snarled. "I haven't finished."
"Oh, yes, you have."
"I can't be bothered with this," the senator snarled. He called to the other room. "Roberts! Atkins! Get your butts in here!"
"You'll get no help from your hired hands," Remo said. "They've all been subdued."
Ludlow Baculum pointed a warning finger in the maid's face and said, "Don't you move. Not a muscle." Then he let her go and turned on the bed to handle the intruders by himself.
Remo noted the overlapping tread marks that ran across the senator's hips and thighs. "Man, oh man," he said with a laugh, "that little lady danced a stone flamenco on your doodle."
Baculum was not amused.
Sensing her opportunity, the half-nude maid shot off the bed and out the door.
"I'm going to kill you for that," the senator told Remo as he hopped to the floor. "I can bend steel bars with my bare hands. I can kick through solid walls."