The puffy billows built up like smoke bombs at a rock-and-roll show or a nuclear explosion climbing the sky until a figure came leaping out from the very heart of the cloud. A dark-haired, thin man with thick wrists came bounding up into the room.
Remo Williams, the Destroyer, soul intact, dropped lightly to the floor as the smoke swirled around him.
Charlie dropped to his knees, his mouth open, his knuckles white gripping the protective railing, and Eddie Cantlie had fallen back on the stairs, staring at him between two rungs of the bannister.
And Remo intoned, "I am created Shiva the Destroyer, the dead night tiger made whole by Sinanju. What is this dog meat that now stands before me?"
Eddie Cantlie felt his pants go wet and he tried to scramble back up the stairs. Remo walked over and punched the bottom stair. The entire revolving stairwell began to vibrate. Remo punched it again. The stairs began to shake until the internal strength of the steel could no longer stand the unnatural vibration and began to break up.
Remo took a step back and lightly tapped the bottom stair with his heel, as if by an afterthought. The top stair disconnected from the balcony. The bottom stair ripped up from the floor and the entire structure toppled with Eddie Cantlie in the middle.
Eddie seemed to hover momentarily in the air as the heavy stairwell crashed to the floor. He collided with the bannister, then the structure bounced. Eddie hit the center beam, then bounced himself to fall face first on the concrete floor. He never felt the floor.
Remo turned to Charlie. Charlie turned to run and then screamed. Before him stood Chiun. In each hand Chiun held large liquid-looking bean bags. Except these bean bags had faces. They were stretched and lumpy faces, as if every bone in them had been squashed into sand, but still, they were faces. They were Yat-Sen and Gluck's faces. Charlie Ko fell to his knees.
Chiun looked down at Charlie and then to the two hulks he held in his hands. He screwed his face in disgust.
"Amateur help," he said. Then he threw his two human bean bags over the railing onto the floor before Remo. They hit the ground without bouncing. They just wiggled like so much jello.
"Don't kill that one," Remo called up. "I need to talk to him."
"The others are not dead," said Chiun. "I brought them here to be killed by you. It is written that Shiva shall put down the second coming of the undead and my ancestor's disgrace."
Remo looked at the two blobs of barely existing matter that lay before him. He could not imagine how Chiun had managed to walk through downtown Houston with one on the end of each hand.
"Where does it say that Shiva will put down the undead?" he asked.
"It is written," said Chiun. "But do not worry. They are not truly of the undead."
"How do you know?"
"How do you know?"
"They entered my room unbidden. I was deep in the throes of the Final Death when they came in without permission. It was then that I realized that they could not be truly of the Creed."
Remo remembered when the mist came over him in the freezer. Chiun must have done what he had done when he realized that he had been tricked. Remo remembered how his stomach knotted and numbness had crept throughout his body.
It was the same sensation he had the last two times he had been poisoned. So he did what he did then. He upped the oxygen content in his blood to assimilate the poison. Then he concentrated his entire essense on his stomach. The center of all life and death. Then when all the oxygen and blood and poison rushed into his stomach, he threw it up and out.
In the freezer now was a little pile of frozen green, red and black. Just below Viki Angus' broken body.
Remo kneeled down on one knee between the quivering piles" of Yat-Sen and Gluck.
"I'd like to make this painful, guys, but I don't have the time."
He drove the first knuckle of each hand into their respective heads. What was left of their respective heads. He felt his digits sink deep into their whole and intact brains. Then he threw their carcasses into the freezer to join the puke.
Remo looked up to where Chiun stood before a quaking Charlie Ko. Remo's eyes met the old man's and there flashed an emotion between them. It was the love of father for son, and son for father.
Charlie Ko made his move. His legs straightened and he whipped his long-nailed right forefinger out in front of his hurtling body directly in line with the soft, thin, unprotected layer of flesh below Chiun's jaw. He felt the solid rush of adrenalin that came from knowing that he could take the old man's head clean off.
If it was still there to take. Suddenly the yellow body before him was gone and Charlie felt himself flying through empty air. Then there was a yellow flash from below, a tug at his wrist, and Charlie Ko stopped in midair on his feet.
His hand didn't. His hand, still with his forefinger out, still with his other four fingers clenched, spun across the metal balcony, teetered on the edge, and dropped over.
Blood began to spurt out of his right arm trunk as Remo leaped up onto the balcony and gripped the back of Charlie's neck and his right forearm in such a way that the bleeding stopped but the blinding pain didn't.
"Okay, fella," Remo said. "You want to talk now or wait till after lunch?"
Charlie poured out his soul, knowing that this was the end and that, somehow, his talking would make the incredible pain end more quickly.
"We were hired by this old man to kill every non-vegetarian in the country."
"How?"
"We used this two-part poison the old man gave us. One part went into the meat, one part went into the gas."
"Why?"
"Because the authorities would have been able to locate the poison easily and develop an antidote if any one part were toxic. The part in the meat is kind of weak. But the gas activates it, makes it deadly."
"How did you get it in the meat?"
"Eddie… he was the one on the stairs. He was the government inspector at this plant. We put it in the USDA ink."
Smith had been right. Remo returned his attentions to Charlie.
"Where's Mary?"
"She went to report to the leader."
Chiun looked at Remo.
"Where's he?"
"At the Sheraton. Room 1824."
"Good year. Anything else?"
"Yeah, yeah. Mary is going to the airport and spread the gas over the city."
Remo dropped Charlie in disgust. The pain behind his neck stopped, but the blood started coursing out of his stump again.
"Come on, Little Father, let's go," said Remo.
"No, my son, you must kill the man yourself."
Remo turned back. "Why?"
"It is written that you will deliver the blow that avenges my father's disgrace."
"Where does it say that?"
"Just do it," spat Chiun. "Must you always bicker?"
Remo moved toward Chiun and Charlie's contorting body. "How many times do I have to go through this thing?" he complained. "Every time we get a new assignment, it's written here that I'll do this, it's written there that I'll do that. Can't we just go?"
"It is written," said Chiun. "That the son of the son of the father must do the deed."
"I never read that," said Remo. "Was that part of the fine print?"
Charlie Ko looked up at the two and screeched, "Please."
"All right," said Remo. "If you put it that way." He moved in and with one stroke ended Charlie's torture permanently.
Chiun beamed. "My son, I am proud of you."
"Proud?" said Remo. "You're proud of me? Proud? Of me, the white man, the pale piece of pig's ear?"
"Well, perhaps proud is a little excessive," Chiun said. "Highly tolerant is more correct. After all, it has been many days and still my manuscript is not delivered onto television. Important things like that are not easily forgotten."