The picture of British reserve, Allessandro Cote strolled to the next oversize control panel. There were three chunks of jagged, unpolished quartz crystal set into the panel, each one the size of a teacup. Cote placed his hand against a hard, cool crystal—the purplish one on the end.

  The door on the far end of the ballroom burst open.

  “It’s stronger, Little Father,” Remo said.

  “I feel it in my bones,” Chiun said.

  They had moved fast through the endless, opulent rooms of the old section of the ancient mansion, but the strange sensation was intensified now. Remo felt his limbs becoming heavier.

  “How far?” Remo asked, realizing his sense of direction was askew.

  Chiun yanked open a door that was hand carved, the figurines around the door latch smoothed by centuries of contact with human fingers. “Beyond the next door,” Chiun stated.

  Remo wondered how Chiun could sound so sure of himself when Remo’s own disorientation was escalating and this room looked just like all the others, musty and packed with a lot of well-polished antique furniture.

  “How many freaking parlors do you freaking need?” Remo demanded.

  “This is it,” Chiun announced at the next set of extra-wide double doors. He looked at Remo, and Remo saw the old man thinking hard. “I shall enter alone.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “You shall remain here and assess the nature of this anomaly.”

  “No way in hell.”

  “It is foolish for both of us to walk into danger!”

  Remo cocked his head. “Right you are, and I decide who.”

  “I am the Master Emeritus!” Chiun stamped one foot, but it was a gesture without vigor.

  “I’m Reigning Master and what I say goes and I say I go.”

  He never gave the old Korean time to reply before he bashed his shoulder into the doors. They squeaked open and the sensation increased to a shrill pitch. Remo imagined he heard some sort of supersonic sound that assaulted him, drained him of vitality, confused his thinking. It was all he could do to hold himself upright and walk with feigned energy across the huge, open room.

  The ceilings were high and set with iron-filigreed frames around frosted glass, and the floor was ancient, polished wood planks. The walls were decorated with bigger-than-life-size murals of Spanish royalty, the paintings separated by red-velvet-upholstered panels.

  The room was entirely empty except for flashing, multicolored banks of electronic controls and screens on the far side of the room and the pair of formally dressed men who stood watching him.

  “Sorry. Didn’t know it was black tie.” Remo felt that he had to shout to be heard above the chaos that was attacking him. The pair in the money suits seemed unaffected.

  “May I ask who you are and what business you have?” asked the younger man.

  Remo’s confusion grew. Was he mistaken, or was the man trying to force a hackneyed British accent on top of his native Spanish accent?

  “Which of you is Al Cote?”

  “I am Mr. Cote. And you are?”

  “Annoyed. Remo Annoyed.”

  “Not as annoyed as I am, to be sure,” the younger man said. Remo realized the acoustics of the room were allowing them to speak normally despite the distance between them. He seemed to be having trouble walking at a normal pace.

  “Which old movie set did you steal, anyway?” Remo asked. “Was it Logan’s Run? Now, that was a stupid-looking computer.”

  Cote looked as if he was trying to stifle an outburst. “Not science fiction! Think secret agent.”

  “Huh?” Now he was really confused. The movie crack had been just that—a crack, a joke. “You mean, like James Bond?”

  “Exactly!” Suddenly Cote was beaming.

  “You mean, you really did model your little command console after something out of a James Bond movie?”

  Cote looked like an excited corgi about to go walkies. “Not just this, but all of it! Look around you!”

  Remo stopped where he was in the middle of the room, hoping a pause would restore some of his waning strength. He looked around the empty old room, trying to make sense of what Cote was saying.

  “What?”

  “Think about it! Think about what this would look like if we were in a motion picture right now.”

  Remo was trying to follow the thread. “Like, a James Bond movie?”

  “Yes!” Cote was ecstatic.

  “So this is like, the big set where the climax takes place?”

  “Yes! Yes! You are exactly right!”

  “Uh-huh.” Remo’s mind chewed on this, looking for a nugget of logical filling. If he were thinking straight, would this sound just as stupid? “So you’re like the evil genius, right?”

  “Yes, precisely!” He was so worked up that Cote actually started coming toward Remo as if to shake his hand.

  Then Cote stopped, stiffened and pulled down on the vest of his three-piece suit. “And now, Mr. Annoyed, I think it is time I give you the welcome you deserve.”

  Cote’s hand was resting on a big purple chunk of crystal that was pulsing from a hidden light When he depressed it, the quartz began to glow steadily and the knob recessed into the control panel.

  The red-velvet panels around the room shifted, making unnecessarily loud servomotor sounds, then each door began to lift, each on a pair of heavy pneumatic cylinders.

  Remo realized he was still standing there and he didn’t think he could move another step. There was a black cloud seeping around the edges of his vision…

  Whatever it was behind the doors, which were taking forever to open, how would he be able to run from them, let alone defend himself?

  “Hey, Blofeld, laying it on a little thick, aren’t you?”

  “Au revoir, Mr. Annoyed. Or perhaps I should say goodbye.”

  Remo Williams looked around, found he couldn’t take it all in at once, and concentrated on a single hidden chamber as the doors halted in a fully raised position. He still didn’t think he was seeing it correctly. Was he hallucinating?

  It was a man in a wheelchair. The man was silver, grinning easily with a massive chrome grin. Its head rotated ninety degrees left, then right, before turning to face Remo Williams. Red lights came on in its eye sockets.

  “Allow me to introduce my dear friend,” Cote said grandly.

  “Mecha-Stephen Hawking?” Remo asked.

  “I am Mr. U.,” said the thing in the wheelchair.

  “Mr. Who?” Remo asked, trying to make his feet function, trying to make his vision clear, trying to think.

  He looked at the next open space in the wall. Inside was…a rocking horse. He squeezed his eyes, forcing his tunnel of vision to focus itself, and then saw it was a mechanical jumble with legs bolted to a small tank tread on either side. It still resembled a rocking horse. Its surface was composed of dull gray metal shingles and its doglike head ended in a nose with a gun barrel jutting out of it. In the next cubicle was a steel rack mounted with four wheeled devices, like aluminum bread boxes with many long needles sticking out of their skin.

  There must be fifteen or twenty open doors, and if Remo could trust his vision, each one of them contained its own unique glowing, blinking contraption.

  “Now, Mr. Annoyed, you die,” said Cote with well-rehearsed understated flair.

  “Mr. U. die or you die?” Remo demanded.

  “You die, I said,” Cote retorted.

  “You?”

  “Not me, you!”

  “Him?” Remo pointed at the wheelchair droid with the red eyes.

  “Shut up!”

  Remo couldn’t help but smirk. “Sorry if I’m not playing the right part in your little scene.”

  “You will act out the most important part of the scene, have no fear,” Cote said and, almost casually, he depressed the next pulsing crystal, the pink one.

  There was a whirring of multiple small motors and Remo saw a connection on a mechanical arm separate from the back of the chrome-toothed Mr. U. The same connection was severed from every cubicle as all the devices were freed of their umbilicals, and at that moment Remo felt the debilitating sensation—stop.

  It didn’t fade, it didn’t decrease, it just stopped. Whatever had caused it had been turned off when all the devices were released from their umbilicals. Remo watched his tunnel of vision expand, felt the current of life surge into his limbs.

  Mr. U, came at him wearing a wicked smile, and Remo moved out of its path. Now he saw it more clearly and found it was a sort of battering ram on wheels, a sculpted chrome demon head perched-atop a mass of steel arms and claws. The shivering floor attested to its great weight.

  Regardless of Mr. U.’s huge mass, it moved fast on its wheelchair, and when Remo moved, Mr. U. altered course to intercept him. Remo moved faster, pushing his wobbly legs, trying to force them to recover faster. Cote and his butler were just standing there, so who had the joystick?

  Mr. U. stopped where it was and turned in a circle, rotating, and raised its palm. An inch-wide barrel opening appeared, and Remo braced himself.

  Mr. U. fired its weapon and a tiny rocket screamed in Remo’s direction on a tail of blue fire. It wasn’t even a bullet. It was slow. He could dodge this thing. A rocket was just bullet, and a bullet was just a rock, and anybody could dodge a rock.

  Remo moved fast on legs of rubber, judged the approach of the missile, judged his own speed and knew he wasn’t going to make it. He pushed harder and lurched into a violent, ungraceful twist.

  He felt the heat, and then the rocket was gone. He heard the small burst and turned too slowly to see what was hit, but he knew it was one of the other robots. By the time he had his head turned there was nothing except some collapsing mechanical rabble, enough to fill a bathtub.

  Remo didn’t know what the deal was, but he had a pretty good idea that all the rolling, buzzing, whirring doohickeys were of the injury-causing variety. He needed to buy himself some time to get his strength back, then take them on.

  “What is all this, Cote?” he demanded loudly, hoping to get the supercriminal wannabe talking again. “I don’t get it.”

  “These are my tools of domination, Mr. Annoying.” Cote was now sitting in a throne that looked like a big aluminum champagne glass with a doughnut cushion. The slender stem disappeared into a slot in the floor.

  “World domination, I assume.”

  Cote was wearing his smuggest look yet. “Perhaps not world domination. I do know, of course, that Remo Annoying is not your real name. What is your real name, pray tell?”

  “Hell if I know. So, why not world domination?” Remo could see Cote’s interest was piqued. He had to play this guy’s game for a while—and Cote was more than willing. Cote relaxed against the back of his chair and tried not to reveal the fact that his hands were working a tiny joystick on the side of the doughnut cushion. The chair moved, with a whirring of motors under the floor, carrying him to the front of his banks of obnoxiously bright and flashy controls.

  “I don’t know if I am prepared yet to dominate the planet. Someday, perhaps. For now I’ll settle for Europe.”

  “With these guys you want to conquer Europe? Mr. U. is cool-looking and well-polished and everything, but does he have what it takes to defeat whole nations?” Remo’s eyesight was restored fully and he turned casually right and left, taking in the vast array of mechanical creatures that surrounded him, all poised as if to strike. The always-smiling Mr. U. adjusted its position by the millimeter to keep the aim of its distended arm- launcher locked on Remo.

  Remo had guessed Cote right. He was into his spy-movie super villain role, and the last thing he wanted was for it to be over within a blink of an eye. Cote began explaining the self-replicating properties of the various autonomous vehicles in his menagerie, and Remo put on his best shocked-and-awed expression while he evaluated his body. He felt much better, but he didn’t feel he was back to one hundred percent yet. Maybe it would take hours or days. Maybe he was scarred permanently.

  But did he have what it would take to fight off the mysterious Mr. U.?

  How good were these contraptions anyway?

  “They might be able to replicate themselves in body, but not in mind,” Remo asserted. “You don’t have robots to build Gee-DAMS.”

  Cote’s sonorous speech, delivered in a booming stage voice, faltered at the interruption and his face clouded. He advanced on Remo, but the last feet of track was not aligned well and the chair began to shimmy as the mechanics ground together, under the floor. Now Cote was even angrier, his face flushing as he grabbed onto the sides of the seat and held on until the chair managed to come to a halt, tipping a little to one side.

  Remo chuckled.

  “What is so humorous?”

  “What isn’t? Cote, you’re about as much a supervillain as I am George Lazenby. You’re a clown.”

  “What?”

  “Look at you. You’re a clown. A stupid fake. You’ve got everything wrong. You don’t even know what stupid game you’re trying to pretend at.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what’s with the British accent? Most of the supervillains weren’t British. They were Eastern Europeans or whatever. So what are you trying to do, be the British secret agent and the supervillain at the same time? Can’t play both sides of the fence, Cote.”

  “I know what I am doing,” Cote retorted.

  “And the accent sucks anyway. I mean, I’ve heard junior high-school kids from Detroit doing Monty Python skits and they’re way more genuine than you.”

  “My good man—”

  “Also, what’s with the retro look? I mean, okay, if you’ve made the commitment to be a pseudo-supervillain, and you’ve already committed some horrific crimes—and you have—and you’ve got a few million in disposable cash to outfit your new supervillain stronghold, then why in God’s name would you go retro? It makes you look stupider than you already look.”

  “You’re wearing my patience, Mr.—”

  “Even if you ignore all that, you forgot the most important part of being a supervillain.”

  “I forgot nothing!”

  Remo shrugged. “Fine.”

  “What? What did I forget?”

  “You forgot that every supervillain fails,” Remo said.

  Cote applied the smug British smile to his sweaty Spanish face. Remo could see, from maybe thirty long paces away, that the man’s respiration was slowing again, his heart rate becoming steady. He was relaxing in a moment of self-confidence. Now was the time to make his move, with Cote’s reflexes slowed. “That is where I have revamped the character, whoever you are,” Cote explained.

  “Sorry, old chap.” Remo smirked. “You’re nothing but a Dr. No and away you go.”

  Remo charged.

  But he attacked Cote as Cote had never been attacked before. Instead of running him down in a flurry of flying legs, Remo Annoying seemed to slip and slither and glide across the ballroom with more grace than any dancer had ever moved, and faster than any human being was capable of moving.

  Cote had been told to expect extraordinary skills and speed, but this was inhuman. He stabbed at the nearest control, a fat orange plastic square, and across the room one of the automatons shot into motion. Mr. U. was already activated and it rotated quickly, its body quivering as if it had a bad case of nerves, but it was actually the minute and precise maneuverings of the aiming mechanism—and yet Mr. U. failed to lock on to its target.

  Remo Williams slipped around the room in sporadic fits, but he closed in on Cote fast. The man yelped in astonishment when something clamped on to his neck and he became a statue, frozen in his seat. He could only watch what happened around him.

  Remo circled the laughably huge computer and zipped out the other side to find Mr. U. bearing down on him. He felt the pressure waves of the next igniting rocket even as it shot from the barrel in Mr. U.’s palm.

  It was a different projectile, slightly stubbier, and as he moved out of its path, it moved to intercept him. He stopped, watched it burn the air directly at him, then nodded his head forward when it was just inches from crashing into him.

  There was a powerful scream from the second robot, an eight-legged spider of jointed brass legs, and for a moment Remo had an ugly flashback.

  But this wasn’t that mechanical spider, just a bunch of hollow tubes for legs, pneumatic cylinders for muscles and tiny discs positioned on every square inch, spinning fast, creating a drone like the buzzing of steel bees. This spider specialized in wasted motion but it still came fast, clattering on the wood, and the sharpness of its tiny rotary saws was made evident by the cloud of sawdust it raised.

  The little rocket managed to recover itself before crashing into the walls or floor, spinning wildly in the upper air of the ballroom, then veering into a dive. Remo ran at the spider robot, which turned to catch him by reaching out with four front legs. Remo faked it out by going low, then jumped over the whizzing tubular limbs, and the spider reared up in a vain attempt to tag him.

  Remo hit the ground and glided back the way he’d come, under the raised spider legs and around the rear of the spider, moving too fast for the spider to match— but not too fast for the motion-sending rocket, which homed in on Remo without knowing or caring what was in its way. The spider was still balanced on its rear end when the tiny rocket slammed into it as Remo fell and rolled. The explosion was an intense pressure burst, and Remo exhaled fully and let it roll over him.

  When he got to his feet he was pleased to see that the spider had been splatted and another nearby automaton was damaged, the pair of round cylinders that made up its body shifting on positioning motors while its wheeled feet adjusted like a circus clown on a ball, trying to get balanced.

  Remo stepped up and gave the thing a nudge with his foot, and the two-tank robot raced across the room at Mr. U., who was lining up to fire again. Mr. U.’s grin became less cheerful when it swung away fast to avoid the impact.

  It wasn’t fast enough and the twin-tanked robot broadsided Mr. U., toppled on its side and spritzed a yellow liquid out of its mangled barrels. A stream of it tinkled on Mr. U., enough to start smoking.

  Whatever was in those tanks was dangerous stuff. Another nearby honeycomb rack of blinking, smallwinged robots was coated with it. They and their metal rack began to collapse in on themselves.