Chapter 13

The Hyundai sat next to the small corrugated metal office alongside the mine entrance.

“I’m okay.”

“It was not my intention—”

“Let’s not talk about it.” Remo hastily got out of the car. He felt the sun on his flesh and allowed his skin to grow too hot, just to feel it.

Whatever had happened to him, it came on him fast. One second he was driving, talking to Chiun, and the next he was nowhere.

If there was a hell, a hell especially made for Remo Williams, Master of Sinanju, it was the place where all his senses sought input and found nothing.

It was over in seconds, and Remo found himself still behind the wheel of the car at the side of the road, shaking uncontrollably.

He had blocked it out after it happened, but talking about it brought it all crashing in on him. Remo had ignored Chiun’s concern and started driving again, hoping the memory would stay in the little brain box where he put it. Now, at the mine facility, he was determined to get down to business. He didn’t want to even think about it anymore, because thinking about it—

“Can I help you?” There was a silver-haired woman at one of the utility desks inside the metal building. Remo was standing there daydreaming.

“I’m, uh.” He got out his ID. “Sorry. Nuclear Regulatory Commissary.”

“You mean the Nuclear Regulatory Commission?”

“He is feeling ill from the road,” Chiun said, entering behind Remo. He snatched Remo’s card and shoved both their IDs at the woman. “We are here to inspect the murder scene.”

“There was no murder,” the woman snapped. “I’m going to phone these in.”

“Do so.”

Remo used the time to breathe and regain his composure. Man, he never wanted to go through that again.

“All right. Let’s go,” the woman said, slipping on a hooded sweatshirt, despite the summerlike heat outside. “You guys bring wraps?”

Remo shook his head.

“You’re gonna be cold, but not for long. Then you get real hot.” She laughed. Remo felt like she was laughing at them, not with them.

He didn’t care if he felt cold or hot, so long as he felt something.

The woman from the office took them down to a staging and machinery level in a natural cavern fifty feet below the surface. The air was chilled and circulated by a rack of blowers striving to drive the cool air into some of the lower work levels, where the temperature was again elevated. It was an odd and unpleasant place, the once-living stalactites and stalagmites now smothered and dead under the grime that spewed and seeped from the groaning, clattering diesel and electric machines.

The woman informed a supervisor that Chiun and Remo were there about “the so-called murders.”

“There were no murders,” the man said, instead of saying, “Nice to meet you,” or “Nice weather we’re having, ain’t it?”

“Let’s go,” Remo said, steering the man into the elevators that took them down again. “So what was it, then, if it wasn’t murder?”

“Oh, it’s not minder,” the man insisted. He was a sallow-faced little man with unhealthy yellow eyes and flesh that seemed too loose on his body. “There’s no way it could be murder. It’s just that some employees quit. They left.”

“Yeah. You run this, whatever it is?”

“I’ve been first shift supervisor here for three years,” the man said. “Hal Wools is the name. And you should know what this place is. It is the answer to the great problem of nuclear waste. The NCR has officially recognized it as such. As soon as we’re running at full capacity, we will be able to accept and permanently store all the nuclear waste that the U.S. ever has or ever will produce.” He tried to smile.

“Here?” Remo asked. “In this glorified root cellar?”

“Here,” Supervisor Wools insisted, “in the world’s most secure and safe storage facility for nuclear wastes.”

“Hmm,” Remo said. The elevator was rattling downward, into the blackness, and the air lost its chill. By the time they left the elevator stopped on a dingy rock platform at five hundred feet, the air was getting warm.

“Because of the depth of the shaft, multiple elevator banks are used to reach the storage facility, which is one of the deepest points ever reached by man inside the earth.” Wools tried to come across as confident.

“You sound like a tour guide being held at gunpoint,” Remo said. “Come clean with us, Wools. What happened here?”

“Exactly what I said,” Wools insisted. “They left. Quit. It’s not pleasant working in the dark at eight thousand feet down, even though we pay well enough. Sometimes our people get fed up and scram.”

‘Twelve guys, all quit without telling anybody and flee a high-security facility without being seen?” Remo asked.

“Yes, uh-huh.”

“At one point, leaving a puddle of blood behind?”

“Puddle? More like a smear. Some guy must have banged his arm or something.”

“What do you mean when you say when this place gets up and running?” Chiun ventured.

Wools’s eyes couldn’t find anything to look at in the dim light of the elevator, so he tried to look at everything at once, except Chiun. ‘You know, when we are able to start accepting full-size shipments of waste. So far we’ve got no more than a few tons of low-grade nuclear waste.”

“So you’ve been doing what for the past three years, just getting things ready?” Remo asked.

“Getting things ready? Try pulling off one of the great feats of mining engineering of all time. We enlarged a small, dry gem mine into a vast storage hub for the world’s nuclear waste. The resources have been staggering. The cost—I can tell you nuke guys—the cost is gonna be over a billion.”

Remo glared at Wools. “A billion invested dollars, right?”

“Yes. No government funds.”

“So if there was a murder down there, it means there’s another way in that you don’t know about, right?”

“That’s impossible!” Wools chuckled.

“That’s the most insincere laugh I think I’ve ever heard, and I was talking to a used-car salesman just today so you know that’s saying a lot. Bet you’ve got a financial stake here, huh?”

“Yes, and so do you!” Wools fished a roll of documents out of his pocket, peeling off a small stack each for Remo and Chiun.

“They’re worth about three thousand bucks each today,” Wools said somberly, “but if this place is even half as successful as the company projects—pow! You’re looking at a tens or hundreds of thousands!”

“Thanks, but no.” Remo handed his shares back to Wools.

Wools looked hopefully at Chiun. “No better than a check,” Chiun declared, gesturing at the shares he had discarded on the floor of the elevator.

“You always carry printed shares around with you like this?” Remo asked.

“Yeah. All the time.” Wools retrieved his documents while Chiun peered out the sides into the blackness below.

“Remo, it worries me,” Chiun said in Korean. “I fear this place might make it happen to you again.”

“Don’t even talk about it, Chiun. Let’s just leave it alone.”

“Also, I did not have the opportunity to finish my apology. It was I who brought the sickness upon you.”

“Chiun, just stop, okay? Save it for later. Like when we’re sitting at home some night with nothing better to do, then maybe we’ll talk.” Remo could hear himself being defensive. Well, he had the right to be defensive. Whatever happened out on the highway had been just terrible.

He shut off the memory, hard, and concentrated on the here and now.

“I have a bad feeling about this little rat and his billion-dollar rodent den,” Remo said, still in Korean.

“He has said almost nothing that is truthful,” Chirm agreed. “We should be prepared to encounter dangerous radiation.”

“We should be looking out for knives aiming at our backs,” Remo added, nodding at Wools, who didn’t notice. He was too busy plotting.