Political Pressure

5

Remo hardly allowed his feet to brush one head before he was on to the next. A small ripple formed in the audience as the diagonal line of people looked up to see what had swept over them.

Remo moved fast, like a harsh wind, and he knew it wasn't fast enough when he saw the silhouette in the skybox crystallize into a man aiming a heavy rifle. As he bounded off the main floor and maneuvered up the balcony over the backs of chairs, over shoulders, over heads, he saw the muzzle-flash and heard the heavy thump of the weapon being fired. The picture window now had a jagged round opening about the size of a rice bowl. An inch of the gun barrel jutted through the hole and fired again, but that was when the sniper spotted Remo coming at him over the heads of the balcony audience. It spoiled his aim.

Remo was moving fast when he spun and slammed his back into the shatter-proof glass. The window was designed to withstand beer cans and Frisbees and all kinds of objects thrown in the auditorium during ball games and rock concerts, but not this. Remo transformed the solid sheet of glass into hundreds of thousands of tiny shards of crystal that flew inward in a deadly hail.

The sniper briefly understood that he was seeing death come at him, too fast to even squeeze his eyes shut.

Remo grabbed the sniper in an unaffectionate embrace and propelled them both toward the rear of the sky- box, feeling the crystal shrapnel chasing him. He and the sniper went into the door with all the grace of a wrecking ball going into a Vegas hotel, then Remo twisted hard, spinning himself and the sniper out the open door frame. The hailstorm of glass came too fast to avoid completely, but Remo moved so fast that the glass skidded across the flesh of his forearm like the grit of a sandstorm and failed to penetrate. Then he and his burden were clear of it, and the sound was like rushing water for a moment until the glass splinters sprinkled to the floor.

"Ah, crap," Remo muttered as he saw the condition of the sniper. The man's body was broken up by the brutal manipulations and he slumped to the floor, his eyeballs rolling up. The man was wearing a white balaclava, and around his mouth it was now soaked with blood. Remo ripped off the hood. "Hey, gun boy, you still with me?"

The sniper forced his eyes to focus, and when he tried to speak he leaked a lot of red stuff. His head rolled to the side.

"Help him," Remo ordered to the skybox waitress who had just arrived with a tray of bottled beer and water. She just stared.

Remo left her to figure it out on her own. Not that it made a difference to the sniper, who was dying too fast even to answer questions.

Remo went back through the skybox, bare except for its fresh carpet of crystal. The sparkling glass was like snowfall, and Remo went over it without even making it crunch beneath his feet. He slithered into the crowd, which was still trying to figure out exactly what was happening up on stage.

Governor Bryant had pulled some wild stunts in his abbreviated, controversial stint as governor, but this one was the most dramatic and attention-getting. Unfortunately for him, it involved most of his head flying around the stage in little chunks.

Chiun watched Remo speed away and his vision turned back to the stage, only to momentarily polarize under the glare of the usher's flashlight. He slapped the usher's hand. The crushed flashlight was airborne for thirty feet before it hit a concrete support column. The usher took a moment to realize his hands were in the same condition as the flashlight, then came the pain of many broken hand bones. As he was inhaling to yowl, he couldn't help but notice that the little old man had vanished.

Chiun seemed to flutter over the heads of the crowds like a butterfly and he zeroed in on the idiot governor, only to see the flash of red flying from the governor's shoulders. With that priority nullified, he leaped onto the stage and snaked around the corner of the fifty-foot-tall stage curtains, emerging and vanishing from the view of the audience so swiftly that no one could swear they even saw him—and most were paying attention to the spectacle of the collapsing, half-decapitated governor.

Chiun ignored the rising tide of collective horror coming from the crowd and trained his senses into the stage wings, where he hugged the shadows. First a knot of law- enforcement officials tromped onto the stage from the opposite end of the stage, their guns drawn. Chiun could see in their faces that their adrenaline was peaking so swiftly they might start directing their boom devices at die crowds.

Others came into the wings behind the law-enforcement officers and on Chiun's end of the stage, with more controlled purpose. They materialized into knots of ridiculous-looking soldiers in black, skintight suits. Blacksuits were worn by the not-very-special forces of the world, Chiun was well aware, and this was a technique borrowed from the Japanese ninja, who had stolen every useful gimmick they knew from the sun source of all the world's martial arts, Sinanju.

But this particular group had augmented the traditional blacksuit in ways both foolish to look at and foolish strategically. They wore masks of white, and gloves of white! The white gloves made their weapons especially vivid to Chiun's eyes, and he floated through the darkness to intercept the nearest foursome as they aimed their stocky machine guns across the stage.

Before the first finger tightened on a trigger, there was a blur of vivid color and the point man felt his arm grow lighter. He stared at the fountains of blood where his hands had once been firmly attached.

His neighbor saw the gaudy swirl and tried to line up his weapon on the whirlwind of color, then felt a jolt as the stock of his weapon rammed into his abdomen and crushed his organs, killing him before he thumped to the stage.

The other two gunners were turning their weapons on Chiun, and he regretfully pulled the blows he delivered to each of their heads. Their skulls collided loudly, although with none of the bone-shattering quality that would have been satisfying to the old Master. He knew Smith would want survivors for interrogation, and that bumbler Remo was likely to kill any antagonist who didn't sit on the floor calmly with his hands folded in surrender.

Chiun felt the pressure waves that rippled through the air ahead of a stream of bullets and he moved himself out of their way. As the gunfire flew across the stage from the wings on the opposite side, Chiun advanced on the gunners like a phantom.

The man with the binoculars almost whooped for joy when he saw the splash of color that marked the end of the worst governor in the United States. Perfectly dead. Wonderful!

Then he heard the crash and his binoculars traveled to the enclosed booth where his sniper had been stationed. The window was gone. The skybox was empty. The safety glass was supposed to remain intact even when a shot penetrated it, but the window had clearly disintegrated from the gunfire. His gunman had to have run out to avoid falling glass.

Then his binoculars picked up a dark, fleeting figure that floated from the skybox and disappeared into the crowd. He lowered the glasses and peered at the crowd, trying to find the ghost that he knew was not his sniper.

The man was traveling over the sea of people faster than most men could run on open ground. Gunfire started on stage, but the man with the binoculars knew something was missing. He should be hearing eight mini-Uzis. Was half the team tardy?

The figure traveling over the crowds never hesitated, as if he couldn't even hear the gunfire and couldn't see the contortions of murder occurring on the stage. There was something else, too, another fluttering ghostly figure, this one a blur of color that danced among the flying machine-gun fire and never slowed before vanishing into the wings. Then the figure from the crowds gained the stage with a single leap and was gone.

The gunfire halted.

The man allowed the binoculars to dangle on their strap, feeling his shock turn to dread, and he thumbed his radio. "Come in, Team Justice. Justice Leader, do you copy?"

Something flew out of the wings and plopped onto the stage. One of the mini-Uzis. A pair of hands with bloody stumps still gripped it.

"Team Virtue, come in," the man radioed, already aware it was a lost cause. Still, he tried, opening the channel. "All White Hands, report in!"

Nothing.

"Report in, all White Hands!"

"White Hen reporting in," the radio crackled. "You must be the top chicken."

The man stared at the stage, then snarled into the radio. "Who the hell are you?"

"Just one of your little White Hens."

"That's White Hand, idiot!"

"Not very white hands if you ask me," the radio said. "Kind of red and messy hands."

"You're going to pay, whoever you are," the man seethed into the radio. "You will not obstruct our righteous work!"

"Wrong again, Mr. White Hen," the radio said. "Can't say I can find a lot of fault in your work so far, you understand. The guy in the cement mixer this morning, who's to say he didn't deserve it? Not me, that's for sure."

The man was ready to interrupt the babble on the radio when he saw the blur of motion across the chaos of the crowds. It was the same color as the figure that had crossed the stage. Damn it! He stood there letting the fool on the radio distract him while his partner came to get him. And he had almost allowed it to happen.

Almost. Now it was time to start acting smart again.

He swiftly thumbed open the plastic control panel in the base of his radio, flipped on the arming switch and jabbed the red fire button the instant it illuminated. He was pleased to hear the distant blasts of small charges coming in quick succession.

Then he inserted himself into the terrified crowds.

Remo Williams dropped the radio and moved away from the fallen gunners in a single leap. In quick succession the radios belonging to the four gunners on his side of the stage erupted. Two of those gunners had still been alive, but they most definitely were not now.

A moment later Chiun returned, shaking his head. Whoever it had been, he had blended with the thousands of panicking people before allowing himself to be spotted.

"So much for our intelligence coup," Remo bemoaned.

"What are they doing?" Chiun asked, nodding at the stage, where the surviving convicts were brawling amid the bodies of dead police and the dead governor.

Remo smirked. "Trying to collect their commutations. It's the governor's signature that frees them."

Chiun looked at Remo without saying a word, but even the look was unnecessary. Remo was already marching onto the stage, where he began snatching rolls of paper in blue ribbons out of the hands of killers and rapists.

"Sorry, this ceremony is canceled," he announced.

A hugely obese figure with a mop of sandy brown straw hair stared at his empty hands in dismay, then his face inflated with indignation. "That is my document, and you got no legal right to remove it from my person."

"Sue me," Remo said, his hand snatching paper rolls at lightning speed and adding them to the crushed wad in his other hand. He found a small wastebasket under the podium and used that for convenience' sake.

The fat man stepped gingerly through the mess of gubernatorial gray matter and waddled at Remo defiantly. Remo ignored him as he sped in pursuit of a pair of identical twin slimeballs who were making a run for it. They didn't get more than five paces before the commutation decrees were slipped from their fists.

"Stop there, little boy! I got matters to discuss with you!" The fat man was breathless from his five-yard dash.

Remo ignored him as he counted the rolls in his wastebasket, then counted the angry mob of convicts moving into position around him. Finally he stood on his toes to count the convicts who had been gunned down in the melee.

"What's thirty-three plus eighteen?" Remo asked the fat man.

"Them's our tickets to freedom. Hand 'em over, little boy," the fat man said, his tone reasonable but determined.

"First answer the question, scumbag," Remo insisted. "Thirty-three living scumbags plus eighteen dead scumbags is how many total scumbags?"

"Little boy, don't play games with me! That's my life you got there in that can!"

Chiun appeared at Remo's side. "Perhaps you should carry a calculator."

"The sisters always said I might need to use math some day, and I never believed them. And they were right, what do you know?"

Chiun sighed. "The answer is fifty-one scumbags."

Remo smiled and waved his wastebasket at the convicts. "Good, then I got all of them!"

"And you best be returning them to us directly, little boy," the fat man said threateningly.

"Certainly, thief, return them at once!" Chiun squeaked, and yanked the wastebasket from Remo. Chiun shoved one hand into the wastebasket, whirling his hand inside like some sort of industrial food-preparation machinery. His fingernails were as sharp as razors and strong enough to cut steel pipe. They worked well on paper, too.

"Here you are," Chiun announced, and flung the contents of the wastebasket at the convicts as if he were dumping a bucket of water on a barn fire.

The fat man was engulfed in a cloud of paper particles too small to be called confetti. He roared in fury, but made the mistake of inhaling afterward, coating his lungs with particles.

"You're breathing my commutation!" accused a tiny Puerto Rican with an Elvis bouffant, who placed a hard right into the obese man's stomach. The blow didn't penetrate the fat layer, and the little man next rammed the fat man with his head, hard, disappearing to his shoulders in the spongy blubber. The hacking fat man gagged up bile and collapsed with the Puerto Rican underneath him. The Puerto Rican cracked and went limp, and the fall raised a fresh billow of paper particles that the other convicts scrambled after, trying to scoop them out of the air in their cupped hands.

Remo and Chiun were long gone, but the clouds were still hanging in the air when the city SWAT teams stormed the auditorium and cuffed every single person on stage, alive or dead, including the deceased governor.

Nobody on the SWAT teams had really liked that governor.