"This is my father," said Helena. "Mr. Thebos."
Remo snapped his fingers. "Oh. You're the one who gave the party."
Thebos nodded.
"You ought to he ashamed of yourself," Remo said.
"Ashamed?" said Thehos. "Helena, who is this person?"
"Ashamed," Remo said. "Giving these people a party is encouraging them. Ashamed."
"Who is this?"
Thebos, Helena and Remo had kept moving slowly forward, up the large, wide, automatic escalators, surrounded by guards. The guard who had put his hands on Remo's shoulders was left far behind, still staring at his hands, unable to move them and unable to see anything wrong with them. Thebos turned and stared at Remo, trying to recognize the face.
"I'm Remo," said Remo.
"He is Remo," said Helena. She shrugged her shoulders,
"That is all hardly illuminating." Thebos had to skip as the escalator reached the top deck. Helena stepped out easily. Remo just kept sliding as the escalator deposited him on the thickly carpeted floor. Without moving his feet, he slid forward smoothly for three feet before resuming walking.
"I work here," Remo said. "I'm with Iran. That's what they call it now. Chiun, though, he calls it Persia. I think I would have liked it better when it was Persia. The melons were great, Chiun says."
Thehos stopped.
"You are Remo," he said, as if he had just heard the name for the first time.
"That's how it comes out," Remo agreed.
"And you are with Iran?"
Remo nodded, then looked up to see Thebos' cold eyes on him. They were hard, gray eyes, as deep as glacial ice, and they measured Remo by the inch, weighed him by the ounce, sized him up for the minutest trace of character, and apparently found him wanting.
"Guards," Thebos called out. "Remove this person." He smiled at Remo. "I'm sorry," he said, almost apologetically, "but Helena and I must leave now and you are bothering us."
"I'm not bothering her," Remo said.
"He's not bothering me," Helena said.
"You are bothering me." Thebos backed away as the guards reached Remo. Well trained, they moved at him from the front, back, and both sides as Thebos pulled Helena away to give them working room.
Remo vanished in the mass of black suits that converged upon him. The suits seemed to rise up like a healthy dough in which the yeast had just begun to work. The suits pulsated once, then moved down again into a heap. Thebos and Helena could see arms flying, legs winding up to deliver kicks, grunts of exertion.
Then Remo was standing alongside them, looking back at the guards. He nodded to Thebos. "Nice fellas. Come on. I'll take you where you're going."
He grabbed Helena's elbow gently and steered her away from the mass of scuffling guards. Thebos followed. Every step or two, he turned and looked back at the bodyguards who were still battling with each other.
"How did you do that?" Helena asked.
"What?" said Remo.
"Escape from them."
"Oh. That. Well, there's really nothing to it. You see, you wait until they move in a rhythm and then you join the rhythm, and it kind of like pulsates and when it goes outward, you go outward with it, but they go back in and you keep going and you're gone and most people's senses aren't good enough to realize there's one less person in the pileup. Leave 'em alone, they'll be fighting a long time before they find out I'm not there. It's like a bullet, you know. You can't get hurt by a force when you're moving in the right rhythm with it. If you moved in the same path as a bullet, just as fast as it moved, it wouldn't hurt you. You get hurt when a bullet's going one way and you're not going with it. You could even catch a bullet if you wanted to. But I don't recommend that because it takes practice."
"How much practice?" Helena asked.
"Fifty years. Eight hours a day."
"You're not even fifty years old."
"Yeah, but I had Chiun for a teacher. That takes forty years right off the top."
The main deck was more than a hundred feet above the waters of the Atlantic. Remo looked around for steps to take them down to the Thebos launch tied up alongside the huge ship and while he did, Thebos quickly pushed Helena into an elevator on the deck and it started down toward the platform just above the level of the water.
"Good night, Remo," called out Helena, as the elevator sank below the deck railing and her face disappeared from view. Her face seemed wistful and disappointed.
Remo leaned over the railing and watched the elevator move rapidly down the side of the ship toward the launch.
Thebos and Helena stepped out onto a platform that led them onto the boat. Dammit, Remo wanted to talk to her. She or her father might have some idea of what Skouratis was doing with this ship; why he might have built all those secret passages and rooms.
The crew of the Thebos launch untied and with a whoosh of powerful inboard engines moved away from the Skip of States toward the Thebos yacht, sailing slowly along five hundred yards away.
On the main deck, even a hundred feet above the water, Remo could taste the wet salt droplets on the tip of his tongue. His face felt damp from the thin ocean spray, so diffused at the great height that it had no more substance than wet fog.
Beneath him, the Atlantic looked black and cold. The brilliantly painted white launch disappeared into the blackness of the night as it powered away from the United Nations ship and its lights.
Damn, thought Remo.
He kicked off his black loafers, and vaulted the rail. On the way down to meet the Atlantic, he slowed his breathing and forced the blood flow of his body away from the skin's temperature and deeper into his internal organs. His skin temperature dropped as he dropped, while he made sure the cold surrounding blanket of ocean water did not suck the life-preserving heat from his body.
He knifed into the Atlantic feetfirst, plunged down twenty feet, then arced his body so he turned a large, lazy, underwater somersault and came up swimming toward the Thebos yacht. Ahead of him, he could hear the launch's engines.
Helena Thebos sat in a deck chair at the rear of the launch. Alongside her, Thebos answered her unspoken thought.
"He is a very attractive man, I suppose," Thebos said. "But very dangerous."
"Some say that of you," Helena said.
"But, of course, in my case, it is incorrect," said Thebes, with a small chuckle. "Unless you are unlucky enough to be a pretentious Greek shoeshine boy who has never learned not to insult his betters through his pretensions. This Remo is something else though. There have been many deaths on that ship because of him."
"How are you aware of that, Father? You have not been on the ship until tonight."
"I have heard stories," Thebos said vaguely. "And do not forget that eight of our best men are back on that ship. Seven of them are trying to catch each other. One of them cannot move his hands or his arms. He is dangerous, this Remo. Believe me."
Helena Thebos was silent. Her fingers rested on the polished chrome railing of the launch. She felt a light moist pressure on her fingers as if a damp minnow had leaped from the water and brushed her hand. She pulled her fingers away.
"You speak of Skouratis," she said. "I do not understand what you intend with him, Father."
"Nothing, dear," said Thebos.
He looked straight ahead and Helena recognized the look. He was staring ahead, through days, weeks, months or years to some uncharted future that only he could see. A small smile played along the sides of his mouth. She put her fingers back on the railing and recoiled almost immediately when it was touched again by something damp. She looked at her fingers, then leaned toward the railing and looked down at the water, expecting to see a loose rope flapping against the side of the launch. Instead, she saw Remo's teeth. He was smiling at her. Then he raised a finger to his mouth for her to be quiet.