The 476 Hotel was a luxurious establishment that took pains to stay low-key. This included a number of highly exclusive suites for politicians and VIPs. The penthouse was a retreat for politicians, mostly Juber Club members, who needed to lay low for a while. Happened all the time. Whiteslaw rented it for a week, with Fastbinder footing the six-figure bill.
Which he let Jack know about in no uncertain terms.
“I certainly hope this works, Jack,” Fastbinder said frostily when he arrived to monitor the ambush.
“Don’t sweat it. Pops.” What Jack had really wanted to say was—
The elevator reached the penthouse suite. The controls opened the doors, then closed them again, and Jack mouse-clicked the start button. The doors to the elevator burst into brilliant flame that raced along the seam. The phosphorous hidden in the rubber seals burned hot enough to weld the steel doors together in seconds.
The suite filled with the clanking of the chain as the elevator plummeted, its dismantled emergency brakes rattling noisily, until the building shook with the inevitable crunch when it hit bottom eight floors below.
By then, the proton beams began blasting the interior with wave after wave.
“Hey! Hey!” Somebody was pounding on the walls.
A thousand miles away, and three miles down, Jack didn’t hear it because he hadn’t turned on the audio - pickups yet. They wouldn’t have survived what was about to come. He clicked the button called Light & Noise just as the proton beams powered down.
The hotel suite became a sickening miasma of strobing yellow light and noise that was guaranteed to create instant nausea, dizziness and lack of coordination in anybody who wandered into it.
Jack chuckled and clicked the baked-potato button on his screen.
The magnetron in the walls of the hotel turned the suite into a house-sized microwave oven. The magnetrons rotated behind the metal deflectors that spread the microwaves thoroughly. You didn’t want to have cold spots. Jack hated it when his mac ’n’ cheese dinner came out of the microwave with steaming edges and a frozen middle.
The computer made a happy
Jack powered down, brought up the recharged proton chisels and added a crowd-dispersing pain beam for good measure, and finally powered up the cameras, which emerged from behind their protective metallic shields in the walls of the penthouse suite.
Jack saw human remains and whooped happily.
But Fastbinder frowned. Jack’s pleasure was dampened instantly.
“It is just one man—and not one of zee assassins.” Fastbinder said.
Jack stared at the screen and zoomed in on the smoldering corpse—it was the Juber Club concierge.
The microphones picked up the sound of his sizzling flesh.
“Missed again,” Fastbinder said disapprovingly, even mockingly.
Jack wouldn’t look at the old man, his face hot with shame.
“Something warned them that there was danger in zee room,” Fastbinder pointed out.
Jack knew what the old man was really saying.
Then the screwup became even worse as the image on the screen grew brighter, as if somebody had just opened the drapes. Panning up. Jack saw a new hole in the wall—right where one of his proton-beam dispersers was installed. Nearby another hole came into being, and briefly his camera picked up the flying remains of the proton chisel that had been there. A face appeared in the hole.
“Jack, I’m home!”
It was the stalker, the young one, grinning like a moron. He disappeared, and Jack adjusted the camera with growing dread. His worst fear was realized when his third and last proton-beam chisel popped out of the wall, propelled by a clenched first.
“It’s like popping big nasty zits!” said the assassin through the hole. “You oughta know all about zits, Jack.”
“How is he doing that?” Jack demanded. “It’s fifty feet up! I put the chisels in the exterior wall just so’s he couldn’t get at them!”
“He is standing on zee ledge,” Fastbinder said with a shrug.
Jack tried to picture the ledge wrapping around every floor of the 476 Hotel—-just a shallow brick protrusion. “It’s three inches wide.”
“Yes, these men are very resourceful,” Fastbinder said morosely.
“How’d they get up there so fast—it’s impossible!”
“It is not impossible, because they did it.”
Jack would have laid the old man flat, right then and there, just to shut him up, but the assassin on the computer screen caught his attention.
“I’ve had about enough of you and your weird science experiments, Jack.” The man bashed his way inside, through brick and plaster. Jack could swear he used his bare hands.
“You’re not very good, Fast,” said the dark-haired man. “Not too bright, know what I mean? Kind of a dim bulb, huh?”
“Shut up!” Jack Fast exploded at the screen.
