“Sorry. Didn’t know it was black tie.” Remo felt that he had to shout to be heard above the chaos that was attacking him. The pair in the money suits seemed unaffected.
“May I ask who you are and what business you have?” asked the younger man.
Remo’s confusion grew. Was he mistaken, or was the man trying to force a hackneyed British accent on top of his native Spanish accent?
“Which of you is Al Cote?”
“I am Mr. Cote. And you are?”
“Annoyed. Remo Annoyed.”
“Not as annoyed as I am, to be sure,” the younger man said. Remo realized the acoustics of the room were allowing them to speak normally despite the distance between them. He seemed to be having trouble walking at a normal pace.
“Which old movie set did you steal, anyway?” Remo asked. “Was it Logan’s Run? Now, that was a stupid-looking computer.”
Cote looked as if he was trying to stifle an outburst. “Not science fiction! Think secret agent.”
“Huh?” Now he was really confused. The movie crack had been just that—a crack, a joke. “You mean, like James Bond?”
“Exactly!” Suddenly Cote was beaming.
“You mean, you really did model your little command console after something out of a James Bond movie?”
Cote looked like an excited corgi about to go walkies. “Not just this, but all of it! Look around you!”
Remo stopped where he was in the middle of the room, hoping a pause would restore some of his waning strength. He looked around the empty old room, trying to make sense of what Cote was saying.
“What?”
“Think about it! Think about what this would look like if we were in a motion picture right now.”
Remo was trying to follow the thread. “Like, a James Bond movie?”
“Yes!” Cote was ecstatic.
“So this is like, the big set where the climax takes place?”
“Yes! Yes! You are exactly right!”
“Uh-huh.” Remo’s mind chewed on this, looking for a nugget of logical filling. If he were thinking straight, would this sound just as stupid? “So you’re like the evil genius, right?”
“Yes, precisely!” He was so worked up that Cote actually started coming toward Remo as if to shake his hand.
Then Cote stopped, stiffened and pulled down on the vest of his three-piece suit. “And now, Mr. Annoyed, I think it is time I give you the welcome you deserve.”
Cote’s hand was resting on a big purple chunk of crystal that was pulsing from a hidden light When he depressed it, the quartz began to glow steadily and the knob recessed into the control panel.
The red-velvet panels around the room shifted, making unnecessarily loud servomotor sounds, then each door began to lift, each on a pair of heavy pneumatic cylinders.
Remo realized he was still standing there and he didn’t think he could move another step. There was a black cloud seeping around the edges of his vision…
Whatever it was behind the doors, which were taking forever to open, how would he be able to run from them, let alone defend himself?
“Hey, Blofeld, laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”
“Au revoir, Mr. Annoyed. Or perhaps I should say goodbye.”
Remo Williams looked around, found he couldn’t take it all in at once, and concentrated on a single hidden chamber as the doors halted in a fully raised position. He still didn’t think he was seeing it correctly. Was he hallucinating?
It was a man in a wheelchair. The man was silver, grinning easily with a massive chrome grin. Its head rotated ninety degrees left, then right, before turning to face Remo Williams. Red lights came on in its eye sockets.
“Allow me to introduce my dear friend,” Cote said grandly.
“Mecha-Stephen Hawking?” Remo asked.
“I am Mr. U.,” said the thing in the wheelchair.
“Mr. Who?” Remo asked, trying to make his feet function, trying to make his vision clear, trying to think.
He looked at the next open space in the wall. Inside was…a rocking horse. He squeezed his eyes, forcing his tunnel of vision to focus itself, and then saw it was a mechanical jumble with legs bolted to a small tank tread on either side. It still resembled a rocking horse. Its surface was composed of dull gray metal shingles and its doglike head ended in a nose with a gun barrel jutting out of it. In the next cubicle was a steel rack mounted with four wheeled devices, like aluminum bread boxes with many long needles sticking out of their skin.
There must be fifteen or twenty open doors, and if Remo could trust his vision, each one of them contained its own unique glowing, blinking contraption.
“Now, Mr. Annoyed, you die,” said Cote with well-rehearsed understated flair.
“Mr. U. die or you die?” Remo demanded.
“You die, I said,” Cote retorted.
“You?”
“Not me, you!”
“Him?” Remo pointed at the wheelchair droid with the red eyes.
“Shut up!”
Remo couldn’t help but smirk. “Sorry if I’m not playing the right part in your little scene.”
“You will act out the most important part of the scene, have no fear,” Cote said and, almost casually, he depressed the next pulsing crystal, the pink one.
There was a whirring of multiple small motors and Remo saw a connection on a mechanical arm separate from the back of the chrome-toothed Mr. U. The same connection was severed from every cubicle as all the devices were freed of their umbilicals, and at that moment Remo felt the debilitating sensation—stop.
It didn’t fade, it didn’t decrease, it just stopped. Whatever had caused it had been turned off when all the devices were released from their umbilicals. Remo watched his tunnel of vision expand, felt the current of life surge into his limbs.
Mr. U, came at him wearing a wicked smile, and Remo moved out of its path. Now he saw it more clearly and found it was a sort of battering ram on wheels, a sculpted chrome demon head perched-atop a mass of steel arms and claws. The shivering floor attested to its great weight.
Regardless of Mr. U.’s huge mass, it moved fast on its wheelchair, and when Remo moved, Mr. U. altered course to intercept him. Remo moved faster, pushing his wobbly legs, trying to force them to recover faster. Cote and his butler were just standing there, so who had the joystick?
Mr. U. stopped where it was and turned in a circle, rotating, and raised its palm. An inch-wide barrel opening appeared, and Remo braced himself.
Mr. U. fired its weapon and a tiny rocket screamed in Remo’s direction on a tail of blue fire. It wasn’t even a bullet. It was slow. He could dodge this thing. A rocket was just bullet, and a bullet was just a rock, and anybody could dodge a rock.
Remo moved fast on legs of rubber, judged the approach of the missile, judged his own speed and knew he wasn’t going to make it. He pushed harder and lurched into a violent, ungraceful twist.
He felt the heat, and then the rocket was gone. He heard the small burst and turned too slowly to see what was hit, but he knew it was one of the other robots. By the time he had his head turned there was nothing except some collapsing mechanical rabble, enough to fill a bathtub.
Remo didn’t know what the deal was, but he had a pretty good idea that all the rolling, buzzing, whirring doohickeys were of the injury-causing variety. He needed to buy himself some time to get his strength back, then take them on.
“What is all this, Cote?” he demanded loudly, hoping to get the supercriminal wannabe talking again. “I don’t get it.”
“These are my tools of domination, Mr. Annoying.” Cote was now sitting in a throne that looked like a big aluminum champagne glass with a doughnut cushion. The slender stem disappeared into a slot in the floor.