The chain clanked and the elevator started rising toward them.
“This becomes tiresome,” Chiun announced. He released the chain and allowed himself to fall back to the elevator roof. Remo landed beside him, and they hurtled toward the ceiling, where the building designers had overlooked including any sort of safety hollow to keep hapless elevator topsiders from being crushed.
The elevator rose to its apex with a brake-squealing halt, its rubber bumpers thumping against the interior roof. Remo and Chiun were already inside again. Before the elevator could descend, Remo hauled open the interior door, then curled the exterior doors inward. The elevator groaned but the interior doors were heavy steel. They weren’t budging.
“You want to take me to the pilot?” Remo asked the surprised gunners, whose guns were being removed from their hands and returned, mangled.
“Even I don’t know what silliness you spout,” Chiun said. “More novelty?”
Remo just shrugged. “Where’s the pop star?”
One of the guards pointed down the hall on the right.
The two Masters glided into the corridor, their senses tuned to whatever final assault would come their way, and stopped, shoulder to shoulder. They could feel the electric charge building up in the wall in front of them. The wall was metal. The decorative copper inlay wasn’t there for decorative purposes. Something was wrong.
Remo’s mind whirled. What was he missing? There was some sort of an electric charge in the wall. It would strike them if they ventured between the copper electrodes. He sensed it and Chiun sensed it, but something was wrong. Chiun looked at him curiously, sensing his tension, and Remo made the connection. There had been copper discharge plates in the adjoining hall and through the surge of static coming from ahead of them he felt the trickle of another charge building behind them. In the heartbeat it took for him to experience his doubt and understanding, it became too late to flee, but he tried anyway. He bolted, signaling Chiun to come with him, and they moved like swift shadows toward the elevator again, where the uncertain guards saw nothing more than streaks of color.
Then the world filled with blinding, sizzling electricity. The guards were directly in the middle of the twin-mounted pair of discharge plates and they were grabbed and shaken and cooked alive by the extreme voltage. When the artificial lightning bolts vanished, the guards dropped with their flesh sizzling and gaping pits where their eyeballs had been. Then nothing moved but the wafts of steam rising from the corpses.
Chapter 30
His flesh crawled. But he was alive.
There had been no time to figure out how to channel the electricity, and channeling it would have been impossible. It had come like lightning strikes, dancing erratically, and the jagged bolts had crisscrossed simultaneously from all four copper panels.
Remo and Chiun sped down the hall and around the corner into the intersecting hall, where Remo half expected to see a third pair of copper electrodes. But there was none. This hallway should be outside the danger zone, more or less. The static bolts ricocheted in the main hallway and seemed to turn corners, like deadly white fingers seeking them out. It shocked Remo’s system and took him down hard. Now he straggled into a sitting position, his head reeling.
What about Chiun? Had he taken a worse hit? In fact, where was Chiun?
“Little Father?” Remo croaked, turning, leaping up and into the intersection of halls in front of the elevator. There was a flash-roasted pile of security guards, but no old Asian. “Chiun!” Remo exclaimed in rising panic.
“Here.” Remo’s gaze was drawn up, where Chiun was casually gripping the framework of the ceiling panels with his fingers and the toes of his sandals.
“What are you doing up there?” Remo demanded.
“Enjoying the spectacle and avoiding the shock.” Chiun dropped noiselessly to the floor. “You would have been well-advised to come up, too.”
“Didn’t even occur to me. Were you hit at all?”
“Just a few stray twigs of lightning came my way.”
“Huh.” Remo was still reeling from the hit. His skin felt like it wanted to crawl off his body, and there was a persistent sizzling in his ears. “You could have suggested it.”
“There was no time. I thought you would understand the ground-loving nature of the beast and come up with me.”
“I’ll pay closer attention next time.”
“A wise ambition,” Chiun said seriously.
Sheldon Jahn had one last tool under his control, and he threatened to use it. “Don’t touch that door or I’ll shut down the entire Chinese financial system, for good.” The knocking on the door turned to pounding—three fast blows by the bare fist of the young one. The old man was just watching. The steel high-security door cracked up the middle. Sheldon saw it all on the security camera. Then, live and in person, the security door crashed inside the Information Technology Center in two pieces and the pair of agents strolled in.
“Hard to hear you through that door,” Remo said. “Don’t touch what, now?”
“Not one step closer! I’ll pull the switch and shut down the entire system. It’ll take days to get it running again. The PRC will lose billions.” Sheldon paused, then asked breathlessly, “Who are you people?”
“I’m Benny. He’s Daniel.”
“The guards are all dead. It’s you who should be dead!”
“We’re still standing. As for you—”
“Goodbye, English imbecile,” Chiun said, removing Sheldon Jahn’s finger from the controls and slinging it into the corner.
“My playing hand!”
“Who’s pulling your strings?” Remo asked.
“No one!”
“Somebody is handling the logistics of your little nightmare. Who?”
“I don’t know!”
Chiun grabbed the pop star’s hand and removed a second finger.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Remo inquired.
“It hurts like the devil! I don’t know who’s behind it! I swear to God! Please don’t let him cut off more of my fingers!”
“You’ve gotta know something,” Remo said impatiently. “Was he British?”
“Yes!” Sheldon exclaimed. “English royalty, sounded like, from the way he talked.”
“One man?” Chiun asked.
“I only spoke to one man, but he always talked like he was the head of a large movement.”
“Which was named what?” Remo asked.
“I don’t know that.”
“Do you know anything about any of this or are you just a dimwit pop star who became famous for his onstage foppery?”
“Oh, well. The foppery. To be honest, it was the foppery. And the songs! The songs were good!”
“Somebody else wrote them, though,” Remo said.
“I write some of the words. Sometimes.”
“Doesn’t qualify you to be the governor of Hong Kong,” Remo pronounced.
“But being a knight of the realm does qualify me,” Sheldon protested. “It’s a part of British law.”
“Blah, blah, blah. I’ve had enough of you knights and your rights to last me forever. Tell me something meaningful. You’ll live longer if you do.”
Sheldon Jahn was struggling to make his brain offer any tidbit of knowledge that would earn him a reprieve. He didn’t know any names or anything. Except, wait. “Rowester.”
“Rowester?” Remo asked. “Who’s that?”
“Not a who, but a place. That’s where the bloke is from, I think. The one I talked to all the time. The one who set this up for me and gave me all the instruction manuals and such. He called me a hundred times and the number was always blocked so I never knew where he was calling from, right, but two times he happened to call me from a phone in Rowester. Sounded like a house phone. Your man lives in Rowester, I bet.”