“I am only pointing out the fact that the entrance is not at this place!” the guard exclaimed, unsure if he should be extremely worried or simply amused. “Speak to my superior officer, please.” He summoned them to the nearby financial office building, now requisitioned as a field headquarters. They guard spoke hurriedly to the building guards, who phoned ahead.
“We will take them,” growled the headquarters guard, who led Remo and Chiun to the stairs.
“Elevator not working,” the guard explained. “Chief of this operation just twelve floors up.”
“They lie about the elevator,” Chiun whispered in Korean too soft for their escorts to even hear. Their escorts were talking Chinese and chuckling. “They seek to play a cruel joke on an old man,” Chiun translated.
“They’re really going to have mud on their faces when we reach the twelfth floor and you’re not even breathing hard.”
“Someone will be breathing hard,” Chiun said, and he was gone.
One of them happened to glance back as they plodded up the concrete fire stairs. “Where did the old man go?” he queried.
“He couldn’t stand waiting for you slowpokes. He went on ahead.”
“That is a lie!”
“Now, why would I lie?”
“How much longer shall I be forced to stand waiting for lazy Chinese soldiers?” called a distant squeaky voice. The Chinese soldiers peered incredulously up through the stairwell, where they caught a flash of Chiun’s red-accented robe.
“It is a trick!”
“Naw, it’s just that you guys are so slow. It’s another side effect of communism.”
“Untrue! Chinese soldiers are very fit. This is a trick.”
“Oh, yeah—want to race?” Remo glided up the stairs before the guards could answer. In seconds he was standing alongside Chiun listening to the stamping of combat boots.
“Just about everybody else has figured out that communism doesn’t work,” he lectured loudly. “When are you guys going to catch up?”
“Trickery!” panted one of the guards, but their gear and their guns wore them down and they were heaving.
“Let us proceed,” Chiun said. “We need not wait for those twin tortoises.”
In the twelfth-floor hall they heard activity at one end, but most of the offices were dark. Business could not proceed when a military operation had taken over the premises. Chiun chose a closed office door and turned the knob. It was locked, but the lock mechanism snapped. They entered and closed the door behind them. Another twist jammed the doorknob.
At 120 feet up, the window glass wasn’t supposed to open. Chiun opened it with his steel-like fingernails, which scored a deep oval in the glass. The scorings were deeper at the apex of the oval, and shaped to affect the balance of the glass as it broke, so that the oval leaned into the office accompanied by the tinkle of cracking crystal. Chiun was now standing aside, hands in the sleeves of his robe. He looked at Remo as the glass panel rushed to the floor.
“I’ll get it,” Remo said sarcastically, and he deftly scooped up the glass panel.
“I know.”
Remo put the glass in a safe place between a desk and a wall. It was thick, tempered crystal and Chiun had created an opening much bigger than was strictly necessary. The noise of it shattering would have alerted everybody in the building.
“I still think my way would have been easier,” Remo said as he stepped out on the window ledge.
“You would have had us traipsing through sewers.” Chiun was already making his way to the corner of the building, traversing the two-inch ledge as if he were strolling a city sidewalk. Chiun’s small size made it relatively easy.
Though Remo was much taller, he could still achieve a kind of balance on the thin, flush-mounted surface, but he had to keep a grip on the building to do it. “Taking the sewer would have been faster and we wouldn’t have had to deal with all the Chinese military types.”
“These inconveniences are minor compared to your scheme of wading through underground filth.” With that, Chiun strolled away on a long, flexible aluminum pole that was meant to hold large fabric banners. The pole didn’t even dip under Chiun as the ancient man reached the end—and leaped off.
Out he sailed, unnoticed and unseen by the throngs of guards below. From this height, his long leap easily carried him over the wide stretch of barbed-wire ground cover. In fact, he had enough momentum to carry him to a fourth-floor ledge of the Ministry of Financial Logistics building.
Remo followed him. Jumping powerfully from a thin rod not designed to support a man was a tricky maneuver. It involved the displacement of weight—but Remo preferred to think of it in Sinanju terms. He thought like a bird and hopped like a bird, then leaped into space and allowed the wind to carry him like a bird.
Sinanju training could do a great deal to enhance a human being far beyond what was considered normal, but it could not make a man fly. The best Remo could do was ride the air currents for a moment and allow his body to be carried by them.
His feet touched the ledge of the financial logistics building without a whisper of sound.
