The fence was a bow that launched him like an arrow back across the deck.
At a speed even his teacher could not follow, Remo was out through the doors. The shaken world leaders who stood with the old Korean felt little more than a hiss of violent wind as he zoomed through their midst.
Down the path he flew, banking up along the inside of the chain-link fence. He was up the stairs and in the control room even as Jack James was still registering his disappearance from below.
When the cult leader saw Remo appear before him the instant after he had seen Remo disappear from down below, his eyes grew wide. He fell back, shocked.
"You can't be alive," James gasped.
"Said one dead man to another," Remo replied. "In your case what say we make it official?"
And he lifted the cult leader off the floor.
Jack James saw the control-room window come toward him very fast. The glass shattered and he was out in empty air. And like a god, Jack James soared on angel's wings.
He flew until he fell.
All at once the lights of the Vaporizer, which had been distant, grew very large all around him.
And Jack James looked into one of the lights, and that light became very bright, and Jack James was flying toward it. And then he was one with the light. A god propelled forward on a stream of pure energy in a tunnel that was warm with the heat of his creation. For an instant Jack James was the god he always knew he was.
Then the mouth yawned open at the far end of the magnificent, light-filled tunnel.
It was not heaven waiting on the far end. For Jack James it was an altogether other place.
And in one terrible instant, a lifetime of all the pain and anguish he had ever inflicted on others was heaped upon him. And in the first moment of his ultimate fall from grace, the wonderful path of light to the kingdom that was never his collapsed behind him, sealing the distinctly ungodly Jack James in misery and torment for all eternity.
FROM THE CONTROL BOOTH, Remo watched the lights of the Vaporizer splutter and die. The pit went dark. The power hummed silent beneath his feet.
Jack James was gone. The Jamestown cult leader had disappeared in the instant just before the lights went dark.
Alone, Remo nodded satisfaction. "Garbage in, garbage out." Turning, he headed back out the door.
Chapter 31
It was all over.
He could tell from the shouts and from the activity out near the Vaporizer. He could see it all through the tiny window in his little cinder-block shed. Security personnel from dozens of countries were swarming in. Tires squealed. Dignitaries were being hustled out to waiting cars.
Yes, it was over. At least for now.
He would find another. There was no doubt that he could. He had skills that the shadow world would pay dearly for. Jack James had been a client. Not a partner, not a visionary, not anything. There were plenty of other clients out there just like James.
The man who was thought to be a janitor, but who had been the real mind behind the Vaporizer, hastily stuffed a few items in a knapsack. A few floppy disks, some schematics. He had already destroyed his hard drives. All of the data he had stolen. He could use it to re-create his work here. Or adapt it in other ways the world would not expect.
This last thought flitted through his racing mind even as his hand brushed across an item on his workbench.
It looked like a soldering gun with a miniature satellite dish attached to the end. He picked it up to put it in its special case when a voice from behind startled him.
"You stupid fool. You stupid, stupid fool."
The woman's voice was flat with cold contempt. Keeping his back to her, he looked up only with his eyes. He saw her reflection on the screen of his dead monitor. The beautiful woman with the blond hair was framed in the open doorway of the shed. In her hand was some sort of pistol. She had it aimed at his back.
"Did you even care what might happen?" she asked. She spoke in his native language. "I read the data. Shifting atoms like this is dangerous on a small level. An accident where a single atom materializes inside another could cause a nuclear explosion. With what you have been doing here, we are lucky all of South America wasn't blown into orbit. Or worse. You knew this, yet you did not care."
His hand still rested on the strange-looking gun on his desk, shielded by his body. Unseen by his guest, he lifted it, a smile brushing his pale features.
"I was paid handsomely for my skills," he admitted. "But I was not paid to care." And he whirled.
He squeezed the trigger once. But only once. He had fired wide. Anna Chutesov did not. Anna's bullet caught the janitor square in the chest. With a shocked look on his face, he spun on one heel. He died sprawled across his workbench. Still scowling, Anna crossed to check the man's pulse. Satisfied that he was dead, she holstered her weapon. When she heard scuffling feet behind her, she glanced up.
"Director Chutesov!" Petrovina Bulganin exclaimed from the door. She noted the janitor's body. "Is that him?"
Anna nodded. "I came just as this confusion began," she said, aiming her chin to the bedlam out in the parking lot. "They were all more interested in spiriting their charges to safety. No one saw me come here."
She began collecting the janitor's things. She would destroy everything the first chance she got. "Those men are here," Petrovina said. "The ones who know about your amnesia. They both seem to know you."
"Your phone?" Anna asked as she hurriedly worked.
"The old one still has it as far as I know."
"Good." The last thing Anna picked up was the strange gun the janitor had used against her. With careful blue eyes she followed the path the fired weapon had taken.
A hole as big around as a coffee mug was visible in the door frame. There was no splintering of wood. No bullet had been fired. Beyond, in the same path of the fired weapon, a similar hole had been bored through the trunk of a tree.
Anna's eyes narrowed as she studied the strange phenomenon. "I was never here," Anna Chutesov announced.
Tucking the gun into its box and tucking the box up under her arm, Anna hustled past Agent Petrovina Bulganin. And was lost in the growing confusion.
Chapter 32
They drove a government Jeep up into the hills. Mike Sears was behind the wheel, a bloody bandage wrapped around his injured head. Remo sat beside him. Chiun and Petrovina sat in the back. When the guards at the booth saw Sears, they obediently opened the gates to the special road above the Vaporizer.
It was nearly a two-hour drive, from paved road to treacherous dirt path. All along the side of the road, even in dense jungle, ran telephone poles. Black lines of cables stretched up from far below, sometimes hidden by the jungle canopy, sometimes breaking out into stark sunlight.
"What happened to the people who put up the poles?" Remo asked Sears as they drove.
The scientist looked sickly. "I don't know," he admitted. "When they were done, they just sort of vanished. Maybe they work for a utility company in town?" His look of hope faded when he saw Remo's hard expression.
The ravine between the mountains brought them to a vast valley. Sears stopped the Jeep on a plateau above.
A sea of rotting garbage stretched out before them-every scrap of trash that had been processed through the Vaporizer from the first moment it had been switched on.
In the back seat, Petrovina turned to the scientist. "It was all hoax," she accused.
Sears nodded. There was shame on his face. "It would have taken years to fill this valley. We had plenty of room. I always figured it would be found out sooner or later, but by then everyone would be in the habit of sending their trash here and wouldn't stop. I mean, it didn't matter where it ended up as long as someone was willing to take it, right? But I guess that wasn't the plan at all." He still seemed shell-shocked from the events below. "See, the Vaporizer doesn't disintegrate trash, it just sort of moves it."