“Fah. Democracy is an experiment, Remo. It is like the highly polished automobiles that are created by the car companies for the one and only purpose of trying out a new kind of screw-pipe or agitator. Once the experiment is done, the car is abandoned. It was never meant to last.”
“Well, guess what, America is lasting.”
“America throws itself into chaos, deliberately, every four years for the purpose of rotating out the leaders it installed just four years before. These leaders express themselves in quips no more intelligent or meaningful than the screeches from the bird from the village of the People in Brazil.”
“True.”
“Think what would happen if the conquerors of the old British colonies were allowed to hold on to their possessions.”
“They’d rule them.”
“Yes?”
“They couldn’t possibly do a good job. A race-car driver and an archaeologist?”
Chiun opened his hands. “How are they less qualified than a professional politician?”
Remo chewed the inside of his lower lip. “You got me there. But they’re bad guys.”
“Because they aggressively took power that they wanted, using devious means?”
“Yeah.”
“And this cannot describe any elected one of the Americas?”
“Sure, it can. Now you’ve got me all confused.”
“Now I have shown you the failure of democracy and the reason why an empire might be a good thing for the world.”
“And Sinanju,” Remo said. “The bigger the empire, the more gold and the more threats that need to be dealt with to keep the thing chugging along.”
“True.”
Remo sighed. “Here we are.” They had come to the end of a street to an intersection. Across the street was a decorative chain around the vast grounds of the Ayounde Government House. It was the dwelling place of the prime minister and the place where all national government business took place. It was known that Sir Michele Rilli, self-appointed governor of the recolonized African nation, was inside the complex. So, presumably, were the hostages who ran the nation until a few days before.
“You are violating the edicts of the Emperor and this you must obey. Disturb not the colonial governor, lest more vengeance be taken upon the colonial people.”
“Must’ve missed that memo. Don’t worry. Nobody will ever know I was here.”
“Hello?” Remo called out. “It’s me! Anybody home?”
“You are certainly insuring that no one will know you are here,” Chiun said.
“Don’t worry about it.” Remo slammed the door behind him. The twenty-foot-tall brass door normally took two men to open and close. The boom reverberated through the quiet chambers. If nothing else attracted the attention of the two guards at the front entrance, that would have done it.
“Hands up!” They were in Ayounde National Police uniforms, but they spoke as if they had slunk right out of a dingy London alley. “How’d you do that with the door?”
“How’d I do what?” Remo took a single step, or so it appeared to the men in the police uniforms, and he went from being all the way across the room to being right in front of them. With a grin he snatched each by the shoulder, turned them to face each other, then clapped them together with a whack on the back.
They smashed together only after their assault rifles skewered each other, much to their surprise.
A hail of machine-gun fire came from the end of the vast, richly decorated receiving hall. Chiun and Remo slithered toward the gunners, moving deftly to avoid the bullets that ripped the air around them.
“Most ingeniously stealthy, this method of entrance,” Chiun remarked.
Chiun drifted everywhere except where the bullets were, then rose up underneath the attackers before they knew he had arrived. Chiun’s fingers pinched the gun muzzles as if he were snatching the earlobes of two rascally boys, and the guns blew back. One of the blasts was fatal. Another was less immediately fatal.
Remo questioned his own trio of victims, then finished them off by flinging them offhandedly into a convenient marble pillar. “He know anything?” Remo asked of Chiun’s lone survivor.
“Why not ask him yourself.”
The dying man gave them a general vicinity in which to hunt for the governor. Sir Michele Rilli had opted not to take up residence in the prime minister’s quarters and instead was housed in the bomb-proof emergency quarters underneath the meeting chamber of the cabinet of ministers. They left the informant to finish dying and went in search of the cabinet chamber.
“This will only result in more deaths,” Chiun pointed out. “That is why the Emperor insisted we not touch the governor.”
“Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
Chiun considered that. “Who devised this plan?”
“I did.”
“I see.”
“You
More taunts were shouted at them from a pair of machine-gun-toting toughs who were definitely not Africans. “Come and get a piece of this, you mothersucking Yank!”
Remo dodged their fusillade and snatched them by the chin, lifting and pressing them high up against the wall.
