“Little Father, you were right,” Remo said. “This is a much neater than wading through the sewer.”
Sheldon Jahn was sleeping in his cot in the secure inner office at the ministry when one of his new loyal supporters phoned him with the news.
“There is disturbance outside, Governor Jahn. There are sirens and searchlights.” It was Wei, an accountant who specialized in information technology systems. He had been a quick convert to Sheldon’s new colonial government, and Sheldon was thinking of making him deputy governor.
“Is it some sort of an attack?” Sheldon asked sleepily.
“I can’t tell. If I did not know better, I would say some person has attempted to break into the grounds of ministry.”
“Oh, really?” Sheldon had been warned of the tactics that would be used by the devious Chinese government to extricate him from his seat of power. These intruders could be Chinese agents. He turned on the exterior security cameras and watched the show of crisscrossing spotlights and scampering soldiers. “Looks like a circus show’s about to start.”
But he didn’t see any intruders.
An alarm shrilled from the security cubicle—someone was breaking into the building. Correction, had broken in already.
“Knock, knock,” Remo said.
The Chinese guards were grim-faced and silent. They stood inside the glass security panel that was slid in place at the front entrance. It would stop small-arms fire, even explosives. The guards had no fear of the two intruders. In fact they were hoping for a good show when the pair of lunatics were picked up by the PRC military. The building security staff had just radioed the military commander to come get the weasels who had slipped through his perimeter.
Remo looked at Chiun. “I’m sure they can hear me.”
“Quit playing silly games.”
“I said, knock, knock,” Remo told the guards through the glass. Remo knocked on the glass lightly with his knuckle, and he kept knocking. He patterned his gentle knuckle-taps to perfectly exploit this weakness. In seconds, the perfect, fatal vibration was created in the one- ton slab of glass, and it vibrated noisily. The guards inside were alarmed for the first time, and then the whole thing shattered. The bulletproof pane became a pile of glimmering rubble that filled the entrance.
“I said,” Remo said, “knock, knock. What are you, deaf?”
“They are worse. They are Chinese,” Chiun explained.
When Remo and Chiun began strolling over the hillock of broken crystal the guards overcame their amazement and grabbed their weapons. They triggered a brief burst of gunfire.
The old Asian man seemed to whisk to the side for an eye blink. The young man simply made a face. The guards couldn’t believe they could have missed. It was a corridor just five feet wide. They were trained to fire a side-to-side sweep that should have cut down the intruders without fail.
“Next time somebody knocks,” Remo said as he glided effortlessly around the automatic rifle and tapped his deadly knuckle on the forehead of a guard. He never finished what he was saying. The guard was too dead to hear it, his brains crashed. The second guard felt a jerk and looked down. His gun barrel was now inside him. The old man had done it. He died before he figured it out.
Military vehicles were swarming toward the front entrance of the ministry, orders pouring out of a bullhorn. “Hold on,” Remo said. “Let’s give them something to think about.”
“For what purpose?” Chiun asked.
Remo’s hands flickered, the motion too fast for any human eyes to follow, save Chiun’s, and Chiun thought it was a waste of time. Remo was snatching up shards of glass from the pile and flinging them out into the night.
“Childish,” Chiun complained.
There were cries and shouts, and the assault vehicles rolled into each other or simply halted. Commander Whui was shouting for an explanation.
“No sniper could have taken them out that fast,” he snapped. “We’d have heard the weapon!”
“It might be suppressed,” his second stated stupidly.
“You know of any silenced weapon of any kind that could have pierced that armor?” Whui was livid as he stomped to the reconnaissance truck. In the overheated truck, screen after screen showed the details of the perimeter and the ministry building from various mounted cameras. “What can you see?” he demanded.
“We’re not certain yet,” the crew chief admitted. “Take a look for yourself.”
Whui gargled his rage as the screen before him changed to a close-up of the stalled assault team. The vehicles were crippled by flattened tires and the drivers were dead in their seats. The tires and the drivers were identically impaled with glittering daggers of shattered glass.
