No one took a shot at him as he crossed to the veranda and stepped into the great French colonial villa. Remo pushed open one of the double entrance doors and heard a distinct click.
Instinctively he grabbed the hand grenade that dropped off its spoon that had been held to the door with bungee cord.
Pivoting on one foot, Remo relaxed his fingers when he felt the grenade's mass tug at the top of his throw. The steel egg flew nearly fifty yards and let go in midair. Hot steel went in all directions, breaking windows and setting tiny fires in the dry grass.
One fragment arced toward Remo, its velocity nearly spent.
Casually he broke a spindle off the veranda and used it to bat the grenade fragment away.
Then he entered.
The place echoed with no sounds. Remo shut his eyes. He sensed no living beings-unless the mice skittering in the partitions counted. They didn't.
Remo swept up the great staircase that looked as if it had come out of Gone with the Wind and found the presidential office.
The room was empty. Every room was empty. He opened every door to make sure. He encountered no more boobytraps until he tried a cleverly concealed trapdoor in the downstairs kitchen.
It was a solid piece of carpentry, invisible except for the faint imprint of human oil left by four fingers on the floor where the last person to go down had braced himself while dropping the trap shut after him.
Remo got down on one knee and looked for a catch or keyhole. He found none. So he punched a finger into the hard wood and curled it.
When he retracted his arm, the trap came up, something mechanical coughed and an ironwood spear with a barbed point ripped through the spot where he would have been had he opened the trapdoor normally.
It impaled the ice dispenser of an imported avocado Hotpoint refrigerator. Ice cubes clattered out.
Remo let the trap clank back and, ignoring the wooden steps that might be booby-trapped, dropped into the space.
There was a concrete conduit that smelled of heavy air, and Remo padded along it to a room at the other end.
There was no door, only a bead curtain, and Remo passed through it without rattling the beads. There was an open trapdoor in the center of the floor, showing a tunnel. There was no gold in the room. In fact, there wasn't anything in the room expect the square hole in the center of the concrete floor.
Anyone else would have turned back, but the faint hum of electricity reached Remo's sensitive ears and made the hairs on his bare forearms lift slightly in warning.
The south wall. It was faced with crude planks, resembling barn-board. Remo attacked the boards and exposed a dirt wall. But the wall looked wrong. The dirt was too dry. This deep in the humid ground, it should have been moist and busy with insects and rootlets.
Plunging a finger in, Remo felt a hard surface behind the dirt that was plastered to it like dried mud. The catch was actually a small hole near the floor. Remo poked his fingers into it, there was a click and he jumped straight back and down the convenient hole in case it was wired to blow.
It was. Clods of dirt and wood shards went flying. Some showered down into the hole.
When the concussion waves abated, Remo climbed up and took stock.
The explosion had revealed the ponderous face of a time vault that would have done credit to Chase Manhattan Bank.
Remo approached. The mechanism was locked. There was a digital window that silently counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to April 28, 1999.
"Oh, great," said Remo in the echoing, post-blast silence.
Making a fist, Remo drove it into the door. The steel rang like a bell.
And deep behind the door, someone rapped in response.
Remo hit the door again. Harder this time. He got another response. There seemed to be more than one person inside, because the return rap was a confused tattoo of overlapping sound.
Feeling around the thick edge of the door, Remo sought weak points. When he had something, he dug his fingers into the flange.
He yanked. The door groaned slightly. Remo moved in, finding another place. He yanked again. Each time, the door groaned slightly. And as he moved his hands around the dial of the door, the hard, thick steel began to look frilly.
Three times around the dial Remo worked, each time making the steel looser and looser.
When the safe door resembled some bizarre, giant frilly flower, Remo had the edges of the two great hinges partially exposed. After that it was easy. He just hammered at it with the edge of one hand until the steel, vibrating higher and higher, succumbed to Sinanju-induced stress fatigue.
The door toppled out and hit the floor with a ringing clang.
Remo peered into the space beyond.
Three dark faces stared back. They were pretty faces, and the eyes in those pretty faces were almond shaped and exotically beautiful.
Until they went wide at the sight of his unfamiliar white face.
Then they lit up their Kalashnikovs.
Chapter 12
Three screaming bullet tracks converged on the same point, where the white intruder stood.
They collided and began ricocheting wildly, bouncing off steel, burying themselves in planks and bringing screams from the three African women who had unleashed them.
"Where is he, the white one?" asked Persephone, blinking dully into the hanging gun smoke.
"I do not know," said Eurydice, yanking out a clip and inserting another into the receiver.
"Maybe we have shot him to tiny white slivers of flesh," suggested Omphale.
But when they stepped out of the vault to see, there wasn't a solitary drop of blood on the concrete floor to show that a man had stood there a moment before.
"We have missed...." Eurydice hissed venomously. "How could we miss? These are Russian-made Kalashnikovs, not shoddy Chinese rip-offs"
"That's 'knockoffs,' foolish one," said Persephone. A commotion from the vault brought them swinging around.
It was the white man. He was opening the apple crates that filled the vault. The amazing thing was that they were nailed shut by ten-inch nails driven by pneumatic nail guns.
Yet the white was lifting each lid with no more effort than a child peering into a cookie jar. Except the nails screeched. They screeched like tortured Stomiqui dissidents. It brought nostalgic smiles to the three sisters' fine-boned faces.
Persephone screeched, too. "Get away from our father's crates!"
"He lock you up in this vault?" asked the white, not looking up from his investigations.
"Oui. And we are sworn to protect his property with our very lives."
The white pulled out a can of pina colada mix. "I don't think he left you enough food," he said. "Get away or we will blow you to Chicken McNuggets, white meat," Omphale boasted.
"You tried that already. Remember?"
"Oui. So why are you not dead?"
"It's not my time."
"You are protected by Shango?" asked Eurydice.
"Who's Shango?" asked the white, reading the label on a tin of imported Bulgarian caviar and making a face.
"Shango is our god. After our father, who is more than a god to us, having given us life."
"Guess he felt he could take it away any time he pleased, too," the white said with casual disinterest.
Persephone demanded, "Why do you say such a blasphemous thing?"
"You've got around three weeks' supply of food here."
"That is none of your damn business, stringy chicken meat."
"Maybe not, but it's yours if you thought it was going to last you till 1999."
"What does he mean?" Eurydice asked Omphale.
"Oui, what do you mean?" Persephone asked the white who was now hovering dangerously near the gold.
"Check the time clock."