"I am serious. You will be shot."
"Beats being stuck here," said Remo, looking around for the cab. It was no longer in sight. He turned to Dominique. "Parked around here?"
"I will nevair reveal where."
"Never?"
"Nevair!"
Then a hand Dominique never saw drifted up to tweak one earlobe.
Dominique screamed. She thought she screamed so loudly that half of Paris must have heard her. But when she paused for breath, she realized she was emitting no noise, only pain. And when she realized that, she began nodding frantically, hoping that the unseen power that had inflicted such exquisite agony would release her.
"I think she's changed her mind, Little Father," said Remo to the unseen force.
Then the pain withdrew.
Clapping a hand over her throbbing earlobe, Dominique whirled to confront the force.
She caught a glimpse of the Master of Sinanju's long fingernails as his hands sought the black velvet tunnels of his closing kimono sleeves and understood.
"Now you know how it feels," Rod Cheatwood told her tauntingly.
"I am parked in ze garage," she admitted.
They walked down the street where she was pointing and came to the main garage door. It was closed, but there was a foot-wide space beside the door, completely unguarded and large enough to admit a thin person.
"Wait here," said Remo to Chiun, and guided Dominique into the garage.
Not a minute later the door rolled aside, and they came out in a diamond blue Citroen, stopped, and the car doors opened for the Master of Sinanju and Rod Cheatwood.
"Dominique agreed to drive us to the airport," said Remo.
"I 'ave no choice," Dominique said in a pouting voice.
"We take our agreements any way we can."
"I am confident we will nevair get to ze airport," Dominique said, slipping into traffic. She took her foot off the gas momentarily and touched a floor button that cut in the hidden microphones that would broadcast their conversation back to DGSE HQ. "We will be intercepted."
"We don't intercept easily," Remo said airily.
"I am certain ze airport will be surrounded by tanks and other vehicles. And soldiers."
"Won't be the first time," said Remo, noticing through the window that they were taking down a street sign that said Rue Edgar Allan Poe and replacing it with one which that said, Rue Auseuil.
The wail of French police sirens came all at once. It seemed to be all around them.
"Voila!" Dominique cried triumphantly. "Just as I 'ave told you. It is time you ended zis charade."
Remo took a sudden left up a street that was posted with a short white bar in a red circle.
"You idiot! That sign meant no entry."
"Sue me. I can't read French."
"That was not French. It was a sign. It is iconography."
"Can't read that, either," said Remo, leaning on the rude horn so the oncoming cars knew enough to get out of the way.
They emerged on a busy street and practically into a converging swarm of red-striped white police Renaults whose blue bubble-top lights flashed angrily.
"We're screwed!" Rod Cheatwood moaned.
Remo tapped the brake, sent the wheel turning right, then left, then right again. The car, responding, performed a seemingly impossible maneuver that caused it to spin in place.
Suddenly it was facing the other way and rocketing forward.
A long line of police cars was coming the other way. Remo warned, "Hang on," and prepared to hang a U-turn designed to bring the two converging groups of vehicles at one another.
But the approaching police cars suddenly turned off the boulevard and disappeared from sight.
Remo drove past, saying, "What was that all about?"
In the rearview mirror the pursuing cars also turned up that road. It was marked A4.
"Where does that road go?" Remo asked.
"It goes," Dominique said thinly, "to ze eastern suburbs."
"Euro Beasley lies that way, doesn't it?"
"It does," said Dominique.
"It was pretty quiet when we left it," Remo said.
A line of military helicopters skimming the low skyline also broke eastward.
"Something's up out there. Something big."
Remo turned on the dash radio.
He immediately got an excited crackle of French that didn't sound like a disk jockey speaking.
"What's he saying?" said Remo.
Dominique listened intently. Her face began to come apart like a house of cards.
From the rear Chiun spoke up. "He is saying that reactionaries have attacked Euro Beasley."
"Whose reactionaries?"
"The American reactionaries who fomented civil war."
"Reactionaries! You don't mean reenactors, do you?"
"It is possible I meant that."
"What the hell are Civil War reenactors doing attacking Euro Beasley?" shouted Remo.
When no one offered a ready answer, he pulled over to a pay phone and called America.
"Smitty, Remo. We got the Beasley guy, but something's up."
"I am receiving sketchy reports of soldiers dressed in the uniforms of the old French Second Empire Army breaching the quarantine line surrounding Euro Beasley. What can you add?"
"Try Civil War reenactors."
"What!"
"That's what the French radio is reporting."
"It all fits," Smith said in a dull, barely comprehending voice.
"Not to me," said Remo.
"No, I mean the Beasley employees-transportation charges. They entered France via the Chunnel."
"So what's their game? There's already a Beasley park over here."
"Remo, my reports are the French forces were routed by very strong colored lights."
"We wrecked those controls before we left."
"I wrecked them," Chiun called from the car.
"The reenactors were obviously carrying their own devices," Smith said briskly. "Remo, this has gone too far. The Beasley Corporation is controlling those Civil War units. I have no doubt of that. And what they have done is nothing less than an act of war."
"Okay, but that's between Beasley and France, right?"
"I do not think that distinction can be made here. In the eyes of much of the world, the Beasley Corporation is America."
"Every time that idiot Beasley launches a plan, he ends up dragging us to a hot war somewhere," Remo said bitterly.
"Remo, if you have to kill every Civil War reenactor at Euro Beasley, you will do this. Do you understand?"
Remo hesitated.
"Remo," Smith said, his voice like flint. "We cannot have a war with France over an entertainment company's mindless plans for global expansion. I want you to break their backs to the last man."
"All right."
"And if Uncle Sam Beasley is anywhere in that place, you will render him completely and totally immobile. Do you understand?"
"You want me to kill him."
"I want him destroyed to the last atom."
"Got it," said Remo, hanging up. He walked back to the car with his eyes strange, and when he got behind the wheel, his voice was thick.
"We've got our marching orders," he said, pulling away.
"Yes?" said Chiun.
"Waste the reenactors."
"Then we will waste the reenactors. "
"And kill Uncle Sam Beasley forever," Remo added.
"That will be your task."
"Why me?"
"Because you are afraid to do this, and you can only conquer that fear by doing the very thing that you dread."
And as they drove toward Euro Beasley, Remo knew that was exactly what be was going to have to do.
He just wondered if he could do it. Years ago he had been one of Uncle Sam's biggest fans.
TASK FORCE GROUP LEER Marc Moise moved among his Zouaves.
It was the beginning of the second hour of the retaking of Euro Beasley, and now that the French soldiers and the crowd had been scattered, they seized the ring of tanks and APCs that surrounded the park. In effect, they were expanding their sphere of control.