His world had begun to cave in shortly after an incident concerning a PlattDeutsche executive secretary.
Luckily for Stern, when his darkest hour had been upon him he had found an ally in the R&D vice president. Holz put the entire muscle of the legal-affairs division into defending the "poor innocent man." The prosecution crumbled. In less time than it took to bring the charges, Ron Stern was a free man. And Lothar Holz had the programmer in his back pocket. After that, the lines between right and wrong further blurred to Ron Stern as Holz, his sav-ior in his most desperate time of need, used him to deal with any niggling extralegal thing that came up.
Unbeknownst to Stern, most of these problems were manufactured, in a deliberate manipulation to train him to unquestioning obedience and make him feel more and more indebted to his boss.
And it had worked. Stern didn't question the motives of Mr. Holz when he was given his special instructions to return to the sanitarium in Rye with his
"special cargo."
The others who had been sent along with him wouldn't be a problem. They had all had similar help at one time or another from Lothar Holz. The only thing that really worried Stern were the computers.
He hoped they were up to the challenge.
They had parked outside the high walls of the sanitarium. One of the men had scrambled up to the roof and attached the rotating transmitter array to the coupling behind the cab. The curved black mesh looked like some kind of miniature Pentagon missile tracker.
It would boost the signal so that they wouldn't have to enter the grounds of the sanitarium.
Ordinarily this wouldn't be necessary. The wide beam of the system was usually all it took. And the machines themselves were preprogrammed to handle hundreds of ordinary people automatically. It was virtually idiot proof. But this was a special case.
They needed all the focus they could get just to hold on to one man. And Stern had permission to access the satellite if it became necessary.
In the rear of the van, three technicians operated the motion-coordinating terminals. Stern and two others worked the keyboards on the other side of the truck.
It was a go. Stern saw two people in the same rear office they had isolated earlier in the day. The thermal sensors outlined the men in red.
"One of them is that guy from the bank. We still can't get a lock on him."
"Doesn't matter," Stern said. "Mr. Holz wants them both dead."
He watched as another lone figure, also outlined in red, moved swiftly through the corridors of the administration building. And as the men behind him typed madly away, the spectral shape drew closer to the rear office.
They would have expected him to come in through the window. Or to explode in through the office door.
Maybe to ambush them in the parking lot. What they wouldn't have expected was for Remo to saunter in through the doorway as if nothing was wrong. So that was exactly what they had programmed him to do. "Hi, Smith. Hi, Chiun. How's it going?"
"Remo?" Smith asked, confused. Chiun raised a warning hand. "Do not trust your senses, Emperor."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Remo aske< His face scrunched up in a flawless computer creation of puzzlement.
"Come no closer."
"What? I waste half the night escaping from those goons you turned me over to and that's the welcome I get? Thanks a lot."
His words sounded sincere, but Chiun could see the look of anguish deep within his pupil's eyes.
knew that Remo still didn't control his own actions.
Smith looked at him, his staid features puzzled.
He opened his mouth to ask for some enlightenment.
Unexpectedly, Remo sprang toward Chiun. His feet and hands lashed out like a manic windmill. The movements were much more fluid than they had been earlier in the day. Whoever controlled Remo had obviously been practicing.
Chiun blocked the arm blows with his forearms.
In the move Remo used, the arms were not the primary means of assault. They were meant only as a distraction to the target. The real killing blows were focused in the legs.
Chiun dared not attempt to stop Remo's legs. Jje leaped up and over them, his skirts billowing as he landed to Remo's right.
The next attack was instantaneous, as if Remo had anticipated Chiun's first move. He whirled and struck out with the heel of his hand. Another millisecond, and he would have shattered the Master of Sinanju's windpipe.
Chiun no longer stood beside Remo. He was behind, then above him as his spindly legs flashed out, knocking Remo off balance. The instant Remo struck the carpet, Chiun was on him, his tapered fingers searching out the spot at the base of Remo's skull that would paralyze him.
When he was satisfied that Remo could no longer move, Chiun stood.
Amazingly Remo flipped over, thrashing out at Chiun once more. Chiun was stunned. This should not have been possible. Whatever this outside influence was that tampered with Remo's mind, they had no idea what their ham-fisted tinkering could do.
They might irreparably damage Remo's delicate nervous system if they continued to override his body's instincts for preservation.
"Fiends," Chiun hissed, dodging Remo's lightning-fast hands.
Again he knocked Remo down and again he
placed pressure on the top of the spine. On the floor, Remo grew rigid.
"Come here, Smith," Chiun said, beckoning to the CURE director.
Harold Smith stepped uncertainly from behind his desk and crossed over to the Master of Sinanju.
"Here." Chiun grabbed Smith by the wrist and pulled him down to Remo's prone form. "Place your fingers here, at the top of his spine." Smith did as he was instructed. Chiun rose, leaving Smith squatting on the floor beside Remo.
"What now?" Smith asked.
Heading for the door, Chiun called back over his shoulder, "Do not waver for an instant, or I fear Remo will kill you."
"Where are you going?"
"The vehicle that poisons Remo's mind is near."
"But you said the van was not here."
"It was not. Now it is. And in a moment, it will be no more."
And leaving Smith crouching uncomfortably on the office floor beside Remo, Chiun slipped out the door.
"Where did the little guy go?" Stern demanded in the van.
The man beside him shrugged. "One minute the heat sensors had him, and the next minute he was gone. It was like he turned off his body heat."
"Maybe our guy killed him."
"And his body temperature switched off the minute he died? Not very bloody likely. He must've found a way to shield himself from the thermal sensors."
"Can't you use the interface signal to find him?"
The man smirked. "We can only focus the signal, Ron. And we need a target to focus it on."
"Can we use the satellite link to Edison? Maybe we can use the extra boost to widen the search area."
"We'd be searching for a ghost."
"Right, right," Stern said, shaking his head at the foolishness of his own question. He didn't like this.
He was only a programmer. He shouldn't be in charge here. "Why haven't you gotten control of our guy yet?" Stern demanded of the row of hackers on the other side of the van.
"We've been locked out of the system," one of them complained.
"Manual override," said a second.
"Yeah," the first one agreed, nodding. "Manual override."
"This never happens when I play Riven," the first opined.
The man beside Ron Stern gave up tapping at his keyboard. Their operative wasn't responding to the, interface lock, the other man in the office couldn't be controlled and the third—who might be somewhat controllable—had vanished. He crossed his arms and looked up at the leader of this expedition. "So, what do we do now, Ron?" he asked sarcastically, folding his arms across his chest.
His question was answered by a horrible wrenching of metal. The van rocked on its shocks.