Smith interrupted. “Those kangaroos were aggressive, but they weren’t trying to eat the runners.”
“It was just stimulants. Amphetamines, adrenaline, painkillers.”
“So they were rabid, violently aggressive and unaware of their own injuries. I guess that explains it,” Remo said. “Bees?”
“Remotely detonated smoke bombs with insect-specific neural stimulant,” Petyr explained.
“You thought of everything,” Remo admitted. “Now, who signs the paycheck?”
“The one who hired me was the foreman. I worked with him before. I don’t know his name. An American who subcontracts to skilled professionals like me.”
“You must know more than this,” Chiun accused. “Speak now!”
“I know nothing! I was paid half up-front, in cash. I never knew what we were doing or why. That’s all I know, I swear it!”
“Were you in the U.S. a few days ago?” Remo asked. “Messing with naked people on skateboards? Using your ray gun to heat up ice skates at the Extreme Bad Babes on Ice event?”
Petyr shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?” Chiun demanded.
Petyr gaped like a fish on a sidewalk until Chiun stopped squeezing, then he explained. “It is my technology, but I have turned it over to the foreman for a fee. He has hirelings to do the work at such events now. I do not know any more about this!”
“Who were the other six runners on the do-not-chew list?” Remo asked.
Petyr listed the names, a glimmer of optimism in his eyes. Maybe he’d survive his interrogation. Or was that unrealistic? No, they were Americans. Americans didn’t kill people. Americans locked you up and questioned you again and again for weeks, but they didn’t snuff you out.
“Anything you’d like to add?” Remo asked the Russian specialist.
“That’s all I know, I swear.”
Remo shrugged. “I believe you.”
“Can I go now?”
“What do you think, dim bulb?”
Petyr’s hopes crashed to the earth. Chiun made a fluid sweep of his hand, then Petyr himself crashed to the ground with tiny fingernail punctures in his forehead.
“So, Smitty, make anything of it? I sure didn’t,” Remo said loudly.
“You do not need to bellow for Emperor Smith to hear you,” Chiun remonstrated.
“We’ll work on those names. See if we can ID this foreman. What’s all the noise?”
“It is Remo’s respiration,” Chiun explained helpfully. “Every breath he takes is like the snort of an angry bull.”
“I breathe perfectly,” Remo protested.
“It sounds like screaming,” Dr. Smith added.
“Probably static,” Remo said. “Maybe a bird on the wires.” He slipped through the flap so as not to show the world the fresh corpse inside the tent. He needn’t have bothered. The running and shouting guests were focusing their attention on the wriggling ground. Remo focused on the fresh air and sunshine, then became aware of Chiun falling in step beside him.
“Smitty make anything out of that nonsense about drugs and rabies?”
“He will investigate further,” Chiun said with a hint of sarcasm.
The local constable and his extra security staff, hired especially for the marathon, wandered among the tents with shotguns aimed into the grass. There was a boom nearby and a voice yelled, “I got another one!” An Extreme Sports Network van rolled drunkenly onto the road, packed with bodies. More people were on top crowding together tightly and kicking at more frantic campers trying to scramble aboard.
“Shuttle bus is overloaded,” Remo observed.
The thick crowd was less terrified and more angry the closer it got to Quimby Summy’s Tent City business office. His card table was strewed with the corpses of serpents, and his customers were demanding refunds by the dozens.
“You guaranteed no King Brown snakes!” shouted a man from a British sport tabloid. “Look what I found nesting in my knickers!” The writer thrust out a limp serpent with a smashed skull.
“But there hasn’t been a snake here in twenty years!” Quimby exclaimed. “I can’t refund all that money!”
The response from the crowd was vicious, and Quimby relented. He began processing credit-card refunds and sobbing plaintively as the queue grew longer by the minute.
“See what happens when you’re not nice and try to rip people off, Little Father?” Remo said. “Maybe we should get a refund, too.”
“That would be dishonest, Remo. We have seen no snakes. At least, I have not. Have you?”
Remo nudged a wriggling tree branch from under the front wheel of their rental car. “Nope,” he said, carefully stowing the last trunk in the rear of the vehicle. The trunk was no longer hissing even a little.
Chapter 27
The foreman was preoccupied, but he was the consummate professional. He didn’t miss the drop-off by an instant. There was his contact, a local hired by an acquaintance of the foreman’s. Not many people had underground contacts on New Zealand’s South Island, but the foreman wasn’t your run-of-the-mill operator.
The contact parked his car outside the Invercargill City Frog ’n’ Firkin Café. The foreman was inside munching a quick lunch, wondering why New Zealanders put fried eggs on burgers. The contact never looked at the foreman, but he scratched the sides of his nose in the correct sequence: left once, right twice, left once, right three times.
The foreman chucked the rest of his meal and strolled to the car. The keys were in it. He drove away.
A half an hour outside Manapouri he pulled onto the shoulder of the deserted highway and inventoried the trunk. The rifle was there. The ammunition was there.
The foreman knew it would be. His contacts were professionals. He was a professional. But double-checking was the professional thing to do.
He went back to chewing on his problem. The Russian was dead. Killed by a snakebite, apparently. Lots of snakebites going on in Jaiboru Junction—a bunch of King Brown snakes had swarmed the campground and caused a riot. Several bites, but only one death—Petyr the Russian.
There were a lot of advantages to Petyr being dead right now. He’d provided the foreman with all the microwave technology at his disposal, and the foreman really had no more use for him. Petyr being out of the picture meant one less salary to pay and one less security concern.
But Petyr being dead made no sense. Petyr was a professional, too. He worked with venomous snakes. He had been a sort of snake wrangler of the underworld. To have been killed by a snake was unthinkable. Still, Petyr was dead. Found in his tent at Jaiboru, puncture marks in his forehead, of all places, and a King Brown lounging on the cot.
“I think somebody’s hot on our trail,” the foreman told his employer on the secure phone when he was on the island hopper from Auckland to Christchurch. “I think we’d all be dead or captured if we hadn’t left there an hour ahead of schedule.”
“You’re making too much of this,” his employer said.
“I’m changing our strategy anyway. I dismissed the team. There’s nothing for them to do in New Zealand, anyway. It’s all done except for the shooting.”
“Sure. Fine. Just make sure your shots are good.”
The foreman curled his lip. “I’m a professional. My shots will be perfect.”
The foreman didn’t share his employer’s lack of security concerns. Somebody was closing in on him—maybe. Usually, whenever he was in danger of being apprehended, his instincts kicked in like police sirens going off. It was a gift. Some said it was ESP or precognition or some sort of bullshit, but the foreman didn’t go for that crap. He just knew somehow when somebody was closing in on him.
Right now his instincts were giving him mixed signals, and he didn’t know what they meant. What he did know was that he was one step ahead of his pursuers, and he was going to stay there. That meant he had to get into the mountains, perform his sniping duties and get out.