“Just about everybody else has figured out that communism doesn’t work,” he lectured loudly. “When are you guys going to catch up?”
“Trickery!” panted one of the guards, but their gear and their guns wore them down and they were heaving.
“Let us proceed,” Chiun said. “We need not wait for those twin tortoises.”
In the twelfth-floor hall they heard activity at one end, but most of the offices were dark. Business could not proceed when a military operation had taken over the premises. Chiun chose a closed office door and turned the knob. It was locked, but the lock mechanism snapped. They entered and closed the door behind them. Another twist jammed the doorknob.
At 120 feet up, the window glass wasn’t supposed to open. Chiun opened it with his steel-like fingernails, which scored a deep oval in the glass. The scorings were deeper at the apex of the oval, and shaped to affect the balance of the glass as it broke, so that the oval leaned into the office accompanied by the tinkle of cracking crystal. Chiun was now standing aside, hands in the sleeves of his robe. He looked at Remo as the glass panel rushed to the floor.
“I’ll get it,” Remo said sarcastically, and he deftly scooped up the glass panel.
“I know.”
Remo put the glass in a safe place between a desk and a wall. It was thick, tempered crystal and Chiun had created an opening much bigger than was strictly necessary. The noise of it shattering would have alerted everybody in the building.
“I still think my way would have been easier,” Remo said as he stepped out on the window ledge.
“You would have had us traipsing through sewers.” Chiun was already making his way to the corner of the building, traversing the two-inch ledge as if he were strolling a city sidewalk. Chiun’s small size made it relatively easy.
Though Remo was much taller, he could still achieve a kind of balance on the thin, flush-mounted surface, but he had to keep a grip on the building to do it. “Taking the sewer would have been faster and we wouldn’t have had to deal with all the Chinese military types.”
“These inconveniences are minor compared to your scheme of wading through underground filth.” With that, Chiun strolled away on a long, flexible aluminum pole that was meant to hold large fabric banners. The pole didn’t even dip under Chiun as the ancient man reached the end—and leaped off.
Out he sailed, unnoticed and unseen by the throngs of guards below. From this height, his long leap easily carried him over the wide stretch of barbed-wire ground cover. In fact, he had enough momentum to carry him to a fourth-floor ledge of the Ministry of Financial Logistics building.
Remo followed him. Jumping powerfully from a thin rod not designed to support a man was a tricky maneuver. It involved the displacement of weight—but Remo preferred to think of it in Sinanju terms. He thought like a bird and hopped like a bird, then leaped into space and allowed the wind to carry him like a bird.
Sinanju training could do a great deal to enhance a human being far beyond what was considered normal, but it could not make a man fly. The best Remo could do was ride the air currents for a moment and allow his body to be carried by them.
His feet touched the ledge of the financial logistics building without a whisper of sound.
“Little Father, you were right,” Remo said. “This is a much neater than wading through the sewer.”
Sheldon Jahn was sleeping in his cot in the secure inner office at the ministry when one of his new loyal supporters phoned him with the news.
“There is disturbance outside, Governor Jahn. There are sirens and searchlights.” It was Wei, an accountant who specialized in information technology systems. He had been a quick convert to Sheldon’s new colonial government, and Sheldon was thinking of making him deputy governor.
“Is it some sort of an attack?” Sheldon asked sleepily.
“I can’t tell. If I did not know better, I would say some person has attempted to break into the grounds of ministry.”
“Oh, really?” Sheldon had been warned of the tactics that would be used by the devious Chinese government to extricate him from his seat of power. These intruders could be Chinese agents. He turned on the exterior security cameras and watched the show of crisscrossing spotlights and scampering soldiers. “Looks like a circus show’s about to start.”
But he didn’t see any intruders.
An alarm shrilled from the security cubicle—someone was breaking into the building. Correction, had broken in already.
“Knock, knock,” Remo said.
The Chinese guards were grim-faced and silent. They stood inside the glass security panel that was slid in place at the front entrance. It would stop small-arms fire, even explosives. The guards had no fear of the two intruders. In fact they were hoping for a good show when the pair of lunatics were picked up by the PRC military. The building security staff had just radioed the military commander to come get the weasels who had slipped through his perimeter.
Remo looked at Chiun. “I’m sure they can hear me.”
“Quit playing silly games.”
“I said, knock, knock,” Remo told the guards through the glass. Remo knocked on the glass lightly with his knuckle, and he kept knocking. He patterned his gentle knuckle-taps to perfectly exploit this weakness. In seconds, the perfect, fatal vibration was created in the one- ton slab of glass, and it vibrated noisily. The guards inside were alarmed for the first time, and then the whole thing shattered. The bulletproof pane became a pile of glimmering rubble that filled the entrance.
“I said,” Remo said, “knock, knock. What are you, deaf?”
“They are worse. They are Chinese,” Chiun explained.
When Remo and Chiun began strolling over the hillock of broken crystal the guards overcame their amazement and grabbed their weapons. They triggered a brief burst of gunfire.
The old Asian man seemed to whisk to the side for an eye blink. The young man simply made a face. The guards couldn’t believe they could have missed. It was a corridor just five feet wide. They were trained to fire a side-to-side sweep that should have cut down the intruders without fail.
“Next time somebody knocks,” Remo said as he glided effortlessly around the automatic rifle and tapped his deadly knuckle on the forehead of a guard. He never finished what he was saying. The guard was too dead to hear it, his brains crashed. The second guard felt a jerk and looked down. His gun barrel was now inside him. The old man had done it. He died before he figured it out.
Military vehicles were swarming toward the front entrance of the ministry, orders pouring out of a bullhorn. “Hold on,” Remo said. “Let’s give them something to think about.”
“For what purpose?” Chiun asked.
Remo’s hands flickered, the motion too fast for any human eyes to follow, save Chiun’s, and Chiun thought it was a waste of time. Remo was snatching up shards of glass from the pile and flinging them out into the night.
“Childish,” Chiun complained.
There were cries and shouts, and the assault vehicles rolled into each other or simply halted. Commander Whui was shouting for an explanation.
“No sniper could have taken them out that fast,” he snapped. “We’d have heard the weapon!”
“It might be suppressed,” his second stated stupidly.
“You know of any silenced weapon of any kind that could have pierced that armor?” Whui was livid as he stomped to the reconnaissance truck. In the overheated truck, screen after screen showed the details of the perimeter and the ministry building from various mounted cameras. “What can you see?” he demanded.
“We’re not certain yet,” the crew chief admitted. “Take a look for yourself.”