REMO WILLIAMS felt along the wall. It was of sheet steel. Rock solid. An excellent conductor of vibrations. His ears caught the padding of feet made heavy by the weight of awkward weapons. He counted seven in ambush at three separate points just ahead and four more trying to pace him a turn in the corridor behind.
The steel wall grew warm. He was near the hothouse control room that Uncle Sam Beasley would naturally favor because, even after two years out of the cryogenic capsule that had sustained his body until the animatronic heart could be developed, he had not shaken the chill from his old bones.
A tiny whir told Remo that he was being tracked by a camera. He ignored it. As the wall under his brushing fingertips grew warmer, Remo paid attention to the sounds coming from the ambush zone ahead.
Heartbeats began to pick up. Shallow breathing all but stopped. He was close. They were getting ready to spring out.
At the moment just before they would have jumped, Remo set the fingernails of his right hand against the wall and scratched them like nails on a chalkboard.
His nails, hardened by years of diet and exercise, scored the steel with a harsh high-speed screech.
In that paralyzing second when human eyes blinked in startled response, Remo zipped ahead, flashed by the blinded ambush teams, and one hand held flat before him hit a warm blank door.
It caved in, driven as much by the hard column of air Remo was pushing before his flat palm as it was by the hand itself.
It was a sliding door. So one side buckled completely while the other held. But one side was enough.
Remo stepped into a short entryway that shouldn't have been there, so he kept going.
A sharp plate of steel like a guillotine dropped behind him, stirring the hair on the back of Remo's head.
"Too late," Remo told Maus, whose finger had just stabbed the button that had released the descending blade.
"Damn!" Maus muttered.
The voice of Uncle Sam Beasley barked from behind his chair. "What's wrong with that ambush team?"
"I don't know, Director."
"Time to go back to the happy home," Remo called to the back of the console chair. Uncle Sam didn't bother to turn. One hand reached out to stab a button. The good one.
"Never," he snapped.
Remo stepped toward the chair, spun it around and looked into the cold eyes of Uncle Sam Beasley.
One eye exploded like a camera flashbulb. Too late. Remo had already heard the click of the cybernetic relay in the eyeball and shut his own eyes. The insides of his eyelids turned a brilliant laser-beam red. Aiming from memory, he drove his right index finger into the prosthetic eye.
The eye imploded. The animatronic heart kept beating as usual.
A flat click to his rear brought Remo spinning around.
Captain Maus had a gun. An Uzi, a mouse head stamped on the butt. He was holding it steady on Remo.
"Shoot me," Remo warned, "and Uncle Sam buys it, too."
Maus hesitated.
Behind Remo, Uncle Sam growled, "Shoot anyway."
Sweaty faced, Maus said, "But, Uncle Sam-"
"Shoot, you toady!"
The pale trigger finger turned to bone, and Remo, astonished, started to move in on Captain Maus. He cleared the room in less than three seconds, wove left to avoid a fistful of bullets snapping at him and struck Maus in the temple with a hard slap.
Maus went flying into the console, not dead but chastised to the point of multiple fractures.
Remo whirled.
The back of the console was dotted with vicious black holes. Uncle Sam's one good hand flopped off the console and swung loose like a hinged stick.
Remo crossed the room and spun the chair.
Uncle Sam Beasley sat folded in his chair, his head hanging down between his knees in the prescribed airline-crash position. He wasn't moving. Not even his dead dangling arms.
Horrified, Remo said, "Uncle Sam!"
Remo grabbed the broken figure by his collar and lifted the bloodless face into view. It was intact, the good eye rolled up until only the white showed, the frosty mustache seeming to droop in death.
Remo's ears told him that Uncle Sam's animatronic heart beat no more.
"Damn," he said under his breath. "Damn, you're dead."
A familiar voice boomed above Remo's head. "No. You are."
Remo looked up. The main monitor was filled with the age-seamed visage of Uncle Sam Beasley.
"Didn't think I'd let you get that close to me again?" Uncle Sam gloated.
The inert body in Remo's hand suddenly snapped back to life, and a hydraulic hand with snapping steel fingers sought his throat.
Chapter 5
For years after, everyone remembered where they had been when they heard the chilling news bulletin that the President of the United States had been shot.
Republican Congressman Gila Gingold was addressing the House of Representatives.
"Once again the big-spending, big-government side of our government has concocted a so-called healthcare reform package. I can tell you as House minority whip that I will do everything in my power to see that this bill goes down in defeat, just like all the other harebrained attempts to governmental- medical care in this country the Democrat in the White House has tried to jam through Congress."
A House page slipped him a note. Gila Gingold glanced at it, and his emerald green eyes went wide in his flushed face. "I-I have just had word that the President has been shot."
A hush fell over Congress.
Gila Gingold gathered his thoughts and wondered if he should call for a moment of prayer or finish what he'd started. Sensing a golden opportunity to do both, he decided to improvise.
"Even as we speak, our fallen President is undoubtedly being tended to by the finest private physicians available. Were universal health care to become law, he, like all Americans, would have to take potluck. We can't afford potluck medicine in America. So I ask you to join me in saying a resounding no to this latest travesty even as we bow our heads in prayer for the fallen author of said travesty."
IN NEW YORK CITY, in the studios of the Tell the Truth radio network, broadcaster Thrush Limburger was taking calls.
"Go ahead, caller. You're on the air."
"Roger, Thrush."
"And Roger right back to you. What's on your mind?"
"What do you think of this latest health-care proposal?"
"It's a naked grab for control of a multibilliondollar health-care industry, perpetrated by the unthinking but temporary occupants of the White House."
"They keep coming up with these bills, Thrush. Every time one gets shut down, they pop up with another. Is there anything we can do to stop it?"
"Well," Thrush said, and chuckled, "we can pray for divine intervention. Maybe God will vote this President out of office a year early, if you catch my drift."
A frantic waving hand from the control room caught Thrush Limburger's eye. His assistant, Cody Custer, had slapped a big sheet of paper against the glass. The Magic Markered words froze Thrush Limburger in midguffaw: President Shot in Boston.
"Ahem," Thrush said, rustling a commercial script between his thick fingers. "Of course, I don't actually mean that. I may be on the other side of the fence, politically speaking, from this President, but we both want the same thing. A better world."
Thrush tapped a chime and said, "Now for a word about my favorite beverage, Tipple."
PEPSIE DOBBINS, Washington correspondent of American Networking Conglomerate News, was at her desk working the phones when an aide popped his head into her cubicle and said, "The President's been shot!"
" What!"
"He stepped out of his limo, and a sniper took the top of his head off."
Pepsie Dobbins clutched the edge of her desk, slim fingers going white at the knuckles. Her face froze. Her eyes teared. She bowed her expertly coiffed shag.
"Did-did we get film?" she choked out.