His last word was to scream the name "Chiun" in an anguished voice. And then a grinning orderly threw an antiquated knife-switch.
"What's wrong?" Smith asked over Remo's howl of fear.
"The damned jacks," the orderly barked. "We connected them wrong. Have to try again."
"Do it!"
Remo snapped awake. He was breathing like a drowning man. He couldn't see past the cold sweat that dripped down his forehead and into his eyes. His T-shirt was soaked. And cold. It stuck to his skin.
Remo rolled out of bed. None of it made sense, but it was adding up in a weird way. Dreams and reality. They were mixed up in his mind. What was real? What was it Popcorn had said? Dead Men dream deepest.
After Remo got a grip on himself, he walked over to the cell door. He placed his fingers against the electronic lock. It had worked in the dream. He started tapping. He felt foolish as he varied the rhythm of his fingers. He closed his eyes, trying to remember exactly how it worked in the dream.
Almost at once, he felt something. A current, a vibration. He keyed into it like a concert pianist playing a half-forgotten chord.
Miraculously, the door rolled aside. Remo stepped out into the corridor. He walked low, keeping to the far wall. The lights were out, which made it easier. He came to the first section-control door, found the lock with his fingers, and started tapping. He crouched under the glass window of the door.
The door rolled aside. There were no guards visible beyond.
A gasp came from a cell. Another man snored. A third crept to his cell bars for a better look. Remo met his eyes in the darkness.
The man shot Remo a thumbs-up sign and said, "Good luck, Dead Man."
Remo nodded and moved to the next door. Beyond the third door was a control booth. Remo peered up and saw that the guard on duty was sitting behind the Plexiglas reading a newspaper. His face was turned toward the corridor. But Remo had gotten this far. He had to go on.
The door rolled open after a brief manipulation. Remo froze, exposed. In a dream, he remembered Chiun's exortation to stay still whenever he was within range of a man's peripheral vision. Remo waited till the guard finished the paper and looked up. The door had rolled shut automatically, and only when the guard was staring directly at him through almost impenetrable darkness did Remo advance on him.
For some reason, Remo could see through the darkness like a gray haze. He moved on the booth like a jungle cat stalking, feeling the freedom in his muscles, feeling something else he hadn't felt since the day he woke up on Florida's death row: confidence.
Remo saw that the only door to the booth was on the other side of the wall. There was no way in from this corridor.
He decided on the bold approach and walked right up to the glass. Remo knocked on the Plexiglas. The guard jumped nearly a foot.
Remo smiled at him disarmingly, as if nothing was wrong. He opened his mouth and made shapes with it, but no words. The guard's "What?" was dim but audible through the Plexiglas.
Remo repeated his pantomime, pointing back toward the row.
The guard gave him a terse, "Wait a minute," and stepped through the exit door. Remo waited tensely.
A corridor door rolled back and the guard hurried in, demanding, "What is it?"
Remo decked him with a sharp fist to the jaw. Swiftly he stripped the guard and exchanged pants with him. He donned his jacket over his apricot T-shirt. Then he ducked back, not bothering to hide the body. He knew that the quickest way out was through Grand Central, and beyond that, the yard. It was also the most dangerous way out of the facility.
Walking with an easy grace, Remo moved from door to door, until he was in the cathedrallike Grand Central. The tiers of C Block towered above him like medieval dungeons designed by a condo-mentality architect.
He kept to the shadows until he got to the door leading to the yard. It gave under his tapping fingers and Remo found himself on the threshold of the yard, and freedom.
Out there, the lights were too bright for shadows to exist. He took a deep breath.
Confidently Remo stepped out, knowing that his guard uniform would buy him a minute. Maybe more than a minute.
He got only four paces when a searchlight swiveled in his direction. Remo shielded his face with an upraised forearm, a natural eye-protecting gesture that also concealed his identity.
"Who goes there!" a voice called down.
"It's me!" Remo said in a gargling voice. "Pepone."
"What's the problem, Pepone?"
"Dead Man on the loose. We got him cornered in the shower room. Warden says to watch the outside walls for a car or accomplice."
"Right," the guard returned. The searchlight obligingly swiveled out of Remo's eyes and began to rake the grass beyond the fence.
Remo stepped back into the exit door, and then, after a pause, he sprinted out for the wall.
He ran stiffly at first, and then something in him clicked over. He hit the inner fence like a monkey going up, vaulting over the razor wire to drop to the narrow dirt corridor between it and the outer fence. He raced to the outer fence. A bullet spanked a rock beside his shoes.
"Halt!" an emotion-charged voice ordered.
Remo knew that the guards had standing shoot-to-kill orders-his uniform notwithstanding-for anyone caught where he was now. Going up the fence was suicide, so he went through the fence. He didn't think about what he was doing. It was as if his body was on autopilot. His hands took hold of fistfuls of chain link until he had a group that felt soft. He twisted violently. To his astonishment, the fence unraveled vertically, like a poorly knit sweater.
Remo dashed through the opening. Shots cracked behind him. No one came close. He ran zigzag fashion, the way he had been taught in the Marines. Distantly a shotgun boomed once. Twice.
Remo grinned wolfishly. He knew shotguns. At this range, the guard could shove the close-range weapon up his own ass for all the good it would do him.
Remo could hear the cars starting up. The gate was ordered opened. Electric motors hummed as the gates rolled aside. The escapee warning siren started yowling.
In the darkness, Remo doubled back. They would never expect that. He eased into the shelter of the gatehouse as one of the two guards on duty ran out, rifle in hand, and hopped into the first patrol car tearing out of the gate.
While a procession of cars roared out and the siren wailed from the control tower, Remo slipped into the guard box and up behind the unsuspecting guard. He took the man's throat in both hands and squeezed until the blood to the brain was choked off long enough to cause unconsciousness. He couldn't remember where he'd learned that trick, but as he lowered the man's limp body to the floor, it was obvious he'd learned it well.
Remo waved to the cars as they continued spitting out of the prison gates. Hours later, after they still had not returned and dawn was a smoky red crack on the eastern horizon, Remo casually picked up a workman's lunchbox and walked up the prison road as if going home after a long night of work.
None of the tower guards bothered him. In his black and gray guard's uniform he was virtually invisible.
It was the morning before his execution, but Remo felt, for the first time in a long time, like a free man. His first order of business, he decided, was to find out how long that had really been....
Chapter 14
The Master of Sinanju sat in the House of the Masters, surrounded by the yellowing scrolls of his ancestors.
Somewhere in these histories, inscribed by hand by one of his ancestors-the guardians of the House of Sinanju-there must be a hint or clue as to how to deal with the problem of Remo.
Chiun sighed. After many days of careful study, he had not found the answer he had returned to Sinanju to seek. It would have been so much easier to blame this on Remo's whiteness. He was the first white ever to be trained in the art of Sinanju. His foreign birth, his mongrel heritage, excused much of what was wrong with Remo Williams, his pupil and the only heir to the Sinanju tradition other than Chiun himself.