The image adjusted smoothly as it zoomed in on the dark blotch in the distance—the laboratory and former home of Fastbinder and his son was set back almost a quarter mile from the museum and the famous Route 66.
“This is a good zoom, eh?” Fastbinder asked. “Not a digital?”
“Naw, it’s a Zoom-Nikkor 200-400 mm. Cost me seven grand for all that glass. Don’t worry, I had Nancy order it for me.”
“Do you trust this girl to keep your secrets. Jack?” Fastbinder said. He was looking at the video loop still playing, muted in a background window on the monitor.
“She’s not gonna be talking to anybody. Pops.” Jack chuckled.
Jacob Fastbinder almost said something, then was distracted by the image on the screen. “Stop zee zooming a moment, Jack.”
“Huh? What for?”
“Just stop it. Now move pan down to zee ground.” Jack was sitting up straight. “You see something I don’t. Pops?”
“I don’t see footprints.”
Jack screwed up his freckled nose and zoomed in close onto the dirt, then swept the camera left and right. “What the hell? That drift sand’s looser than my mom on a Friday. Where’s their prints?”
“Maybe they brushed them away behind them,” Jacob Fastbinder said.
“Naw, Pops, those are drifts. Smooth as a baby’s butt. You see anything that looks swept?”
“Maybe they air-dropped onto the roof.”
“Pops, come on, think about it! There’s a car in the lot!” The grin was gone from Jack Fast’s face. He did not like being stymied. He opened another window and brought up a thermal image.
“You have a night-vision camera up there, as well?” Fastbinder asked.
“Look! The car’s hot, see? Just got there.”
“But they are not in the laboratory. Jack, unless they move by levitation.”
The teenager was thinking furiously as the video camera moved in on the laboratory again as tight as it could go. The lens picked up a vivid image of the front door, wedged open as it had been for weeks, but there was no sign of movement inside.
“I’m going to deploy,” he declared.
“If you are wrong, you will need to travel all the way back there to reset all that equipment,” Fastbinder warned.
“These guys are slippery as snakes. Pops. If there is a chance they’re inside, I gotta give it to ’em now.” Jack clicked back onto the alarm window and the sound returned. “There’s somebody here!” Nancy Fielding teased.
“Okay, doll,” Jack Fast said, “go get ’em!”
He clicked Nancy, right on her pretty little mouth.
Remo Williams felt a hot surge of radiation over his head, outside the building, then he was assaulted from every side. Power coursed through the building, and electric devices blinked to life in every corner. Explosive puffs opened holes all over the ceiling, enabling electronic devices to drop into position on scissors brackets. There were cameras, microphones, who knows what But worst of all were the thirteen simultaneous proton discharge events, which spun up various miniature generators like tiny ramjets and speared Remo with pinpricks of horror. His senses felt deadened, and the darkness of sensory erasure ate swift holes in his consciousness.
In a heartbeat the charges were done and Remo felt blessed normalcy. He had taken another proton discharge without succumbing to the blackness. Chiun shook off the unpleasantness and looked sharply at him.
‘Everything’s okay,” Remo assured him.
“There’s somebody here!” the dead girl said, proving Remo wrong. She lifted her head.
“Remo, let us
“Yeah.” But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She sat up suddenly, her neck distended, then stood with her arms and legs dangling and flopping lifelessly underneath her.
“There’s somebody here!” Her gaping mouth never moved, and the sound seemed to come from the back of her head. She swayed abruptly toward Remo and Chiun with her dangling toes dragging on the floor and crashing into debris.
Remo and Chiun were on the move, and Remo was already cursing himself for falling for the distraction when the air filled with flying metal.
Remo snatched at the bullet-fast chunks flying at his body and threw them back the way they had come. They didn’t go far before whipping back at him. At the same moment he felt the curious sensation of his shoes trying to levitate.
“Magnets.” Chiun cursed as his hands plucked away at the fitter of jagged metal that could have tom them to pieces.
“Electromagnets,” Remo added as the hand-hammered shoelace eyelets tore off and flew across the room.
A hundred miles away and 3.6 miles below the surface of the earth, Jacob Fastbinder watched in awe. The corpse of Nancy Fielding was jumping and dancing, limbs flopping everywhere.
One of the displays tracked how the powerful electromagnets were being manipulated by the fight-sensitive motion detector. Every two seconds, the electromagnets were pulsed to the opposing side. The two figures were being bombarded with ferrous metal scraps, then bombarded again, while the scarecrow, cadaver flew around the room trying to keep up.
“I suppose that is your girlfriend.”
