Despite the breathtaking view, Melvin Horowitz couldn't enjoy it. As he held the door open for the man who was entering the office with him, the professor's troubled thoughts were elsewhere. He barely offered the girl a nod.
"Oh, hi, Dr. Horowitz," Brandy said, smiling. She was sitting in a chair beneath the high windows. If Melvin had looked hard enough, he would have seen that the young woman's smile was devoid of any real feeling. She turned her attention to the man who was stepping into the small office behind the lumpy physics professor.
He was tall and pale with black-rimmed eyes and a mouth that looked as if it would shatter his lower face if it attempted anything other than the frown he now wore.
As Melvin's companion turned his suspicious gaze on the young woman, Brandy's flat smile never wavered.
"Who's your friend, Professor?" Brandy asked.
"Him?" Melvin said, distracted. "He's with the, um, city. Where did I leave that notebook?"
Even after years in academia, Dr. Horowitz hadn't succumbed to the slovenly stereotype perpetuated by many of his colleagues. His numerous books and papers were all neatly bound and filed. But for some reason the notebook in question wasn't where he thought he'd left it.
"Notebook?" Brandy asked. Still sitting, she glanced around. She found one sitting on the edge of the photocopier. "Is it a blue one?" she asked, grabbing it.
"Yes," Melvin nodded. "Oh, there it is." He hustled over, taking the book from her outstretched hand. "I could have sworn I left it on my desk."
He waved it to his companion. "This is all I need," he said.
With a passing frown, he hurried back to the door. Melvin was rushing into the hallway when the other man called to him.
"Wait," the stranger ordered.
Professor Horowitz stopped dead in his tracks. When he spun impatiently, his mouth dropped open. The man in his office now held a gun in his hand. To Melvin's shock the barrel was aimed at the lovely young graduate student. The man's face was dead. "Your bag," he ordered Brandy. "Kick it over here." His Russian accent was thick.
Brandy's hands were raised. "Professor?" she asked fearfully. There was confused pleading in her eyes.
"What do you think you're doing?" Horowitz demanded, hustling up to the man.
"Quiet!" the Russian barked. With his free hand he shoved the professor back. The cold barrel of the weapon never wavered. "Do it now," he commanded, "or I will fire."
His back pressed against the wall, Melvin Horowitz watched the drama with utter incomprehension. To make things even more bizarre, Brandy Brand's attitude suddenly seemed to change. It was a strange, subtle metamorphosis. The flirtatious young graduate student seemed to visibly steel. The normal terror and confusion that Brandy had been displaying at the sight of the gun abruptly melted into a look of cold anger.
There was a blue knapsack at her feet. Hands still above her head, she kicked the bag across the floor. It slid to a stop at the man's shoes.
With the gun still trained squarely at her chest, the Russian stooped and unzipped the bag.
Inside, he found exactly what he'd expected. He pulled out a thick sheaf of photocopied papers. Standing, he stuffed the sheets into Melvin's hands. "Do you recognize these?" he asked.
The physics professor glanced at the papers. When he saw his own handwriting, alarm turned to bafflement.
"Yes, they're-" He looked at a few more. They were all in his writing. Many had been copied from the notebook he now clutched in his sweating hand. The notebook he swore he'd left on his desk and that Brandy Brand had conveniently found on the photocopier.
"Oh, my," Melvin said softly.
His flabby face was bewildered when he looked up at the woman sitting in his office. Melvin couldn't believe it. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time.
His fear returned when the man pulled a nickled revolver from the depths of Brandy's bag. The Russian stuck Brandy's gun into his belt.
"Who are you?" Professor Horowitz asked her, shocked.
The young woman screwed her mouth shut. With angry defiance she stared at the office wall.
"I don't have time for this now," the Russian snapped at Horowitz. "You are wanted at the site immediately. Call your campus police. Have them hold this woman until she can be transferred to local authorities."
He turned back to Brandy. For the first time something resembling a smile cracked his frozen features. "Once I have delivered the professor, I will enjoy questioning you personally."
Melvin Horowitz didn't like the sound of any of this.
With fading hope that he would ever succeed with the only romantic prospect to cross his path since his brief dalliance with a nearsighted Chinese exchange student his junior year at MIT, the physics professor hurried obediently to the office phone.
REMO WILLIAMS HAD SEEN a great many things during his time as America's official assassin. So much so that he had long assumed that he was immune to those things that might shock the faint of heart. But as this depressing day rolled on, he found the walls of casual certainty he had constructed for himself rapidly crumbling.
Remo had barely begun to come to terms with Anna's amazing return from the dead before having to cope with the reason she had come back into his life after all these years.
"Are you people nuts?" he demanded of Anna as they drove onto the campus of Barkley University.
"Russians have always been insane," Chiun observed from the back seat. "Ivan the Good was the only sane Russian, and look what it got him. Maligned by white historians with half-truths and baseless innuendos."
"Ivan the Terrible was mad," Anna said, peeved. She was trying to talk to Remo and didn't appreciate the old man's distraction.
"He had a right to be angry," Chiun sniffed. "Perhaps he knew what was in store for his nation. Tzar-hating fomenters running hither and thither, sticking their pointy beards into everyone else's bank accounts. Leave it to the Russians to find the only form of government more foolish than representative democracy. And need I remind you, Remo, that every moment we squander here, someone less deserving is acquiring the deed to the next Castle Sinanju? We should be back in the village of idiots, not this training ground."
"The party's over back there, Chiun," Remo said. "No stand-up comic wants to follow seven dead Russians and a riot. No Buffoon Aid benefit means no houses getting passed out. Not that there were any to begin with."
"This is your fault, woman," the old man accused Anna Chutesov. "You are not returned five minutes and you have already cost me my second beloved home in less than a month. I say we bind her by hand and foot and throw her on the next freighter bound for Istanbul. During Tzar Ivan's time they paid a high price for blond-haired blue-eyed slaves."
"No white slavery," Remo said firmly. "At least not until she's finished laying out this mess."
He turned to Anna, steering her back to the topic at hand. "What the hell is a particle-beam weapon?"
"It follows the same principle as a laser," Anna explained. "The beam produced is a stream of subatomic particles, which, when accelerated, is able to nearly reach the speed of light. It is like an invisible cannon with a destructive force unmatched on Earth."
"Sounds like science fiction to me," Remo grumbled.
"It is science fact," Anna said darkly. "In spite of problems early on in the development. At first the beam was bent and dissipated by Earth's magnetic field or disrupted by air molecules. But this was all eventually overcome. For our current dilemma, the worst breakthrough was miniaturization. The original design had a device two miles long, four miles wide and weighing more than five hundred tons. Thanks to the diligence of the scientific team that developed it, it was shrunk considerably. It could now be hidden in any building, wooded area or even on this campus."