“What has happened?” Chiun said. “Who has done this thing?”

  Remo didn’t answer. He lifted his hand from Circe’s cheek and closed her eyes.

  Smith arrived, panting. “This is it,” he said. “This is the room—” He took in the scene. “Oh, no,” he said softly, going over to the girl.

  Remo stepped away. Then, moving wordlessly along the walls, he smashed every panel systematically, splintering the wood with blows so powerful, they shook the floor.

  “Come to your senses,” Chiun snapped abruptly.

  “I have,” Remo said. “The bastard was in a wheelchair. You would have seen him if he’d left through the door. Remember Big Ed?”

  “Big Ed?” Smith asked.

  “A hoodlum in Florida,” Chiun said. “He used a false floor to escape from us. But this—”

  “Circe did say something to me about the house being full of secret passageways,” Smith said, looking over at the dead girl. “Did you know her, Remo?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did, too.” Smith walked over to her body.

  “Forget it,” Remo said harshly. He smashed through a panel into dead space. “Here it is. Help me, Chiun.” In less than a minute the boards were cleared away.

  The opening led into another chamber, also empty, covered with soundproof tiles and hung with a half-dozen black-screened television monitors. A moving camera was stationed in the corner. On the far wall was a digital chronometer that kept time to the second. It was 11:52:45.

  “But this room wasn’t even on the blueprint,” Smith said, bewildered. “I’m sure of it. It pinpointed the location of the transmission area as the room we just came from.”

  “What are you talking about?” Remo growled as he tapped the walls. “Abraxas said something about showing himself to the world.”

  Smith explained about the projected midnight broadcast. “He can’t be permitted to transmit that message,” he warned.

  “Look, I want him, too,” Remo said levelly.

  Suddenly all six of the monitors hanging from the ceiling flashed into focus. On them were a half-dozen closeups of the disfigured face of Abraxas. He was smiling, his scarred lips twisting grotesquely around his teeth. Smith gave a sharp cry at the sight.

  “Admirable, fellows,” Abraxas said, the voice box at his throat quivering with sound. “Especially the young one. Why, you should have been killed back there, Remo. Massive electric shocks do that, you know.”

  “I think you’ve done enough killing.”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “However, I think that after my broadcast, three new burials will be in order. Four, if you count Circe. Pity.”

  “You’re not going to make any broadcast,” Remo said.

  Abraxas laughed. “I beg to differ with you. In seven minutes, the god of the new order will come to his people. The name they have been calling in worship will show himself. Not a lovely face for a man, you may say, but sufficiently fearful for the god of good and evil, don’t you think?”

  “You’re a fraud and a murderer,” Smith said.

  “Ah. The righteous Dr. Smith. You were the thorn in my side I never counted on. Whoever would have taken you for a troublemaker? Well, no matter. My computers were loyal to me even if you weren’t.”

  Smith looked up to the monitor in amazement.

  “Oh, yes, I saw you, through a hidden camera, in the computer center trying to unscramble my transmission codes. Very amusing. And the blue-prints, as you see, were false. My whereabouts are out of your reach. In fact, nothing that you, or your genius with computer software, or the remarkable endurance of your young friend Remo can do could ever touch the all-seeing mind of Abraxas.”

  “You actually believe that garbage of yours, don’t you?” Remo said.

  “I have every reason to believe it. I am invincible, you see.” His face stared at them eerily from the monitors. “I have planned for everything.”

  “The floor,” Remo shouted. He was on his hands and knees, bending over the tiled floor. “There’s another passageway here.” He ripped off the tiles. Beneath them was a floor of solid cement, etched with a four-by-four-foot square.

  “Very good,” Abraxas said. “This is indeed the entrance. It is powered by a three-thousand-pound hydraulic lift. The cement itself weighs half a ton.”

  Remo grunted as he tried to slip his fingers into the hairline crack separating the trapdoor from the rest of the flooring.

  “As I was saying, I have planned for everything. Dr. Smith, why don’t you try to unscramble my transmission codes? I give you permission.”

  “You know the access to them is limited to your voice print,” Smith said.

  “The code is triple zero three one eight zero.”

  “But why…”

  “Because I enjoy the edge of challenge. And because, even with help, you still cannot stop me. I told you, I have planned for everything.”

  A small noise sounded, low and musical at first, then rising higher in pitch and volume until it became a piercing, painful shriek.

  “Everything,” Abraxas whispered before the word was drowned in the terrible noise.

  “What’s that?” Smith shouted, covering his ears.

  The noise grew worse. Smith fell to his knees, convulsing. In an instant, Chiun was at his side, dragging him through the broken wall. He took Smith into the other room to the door and flung it open.

  The noise stopped.

  A crowd of people, delegates from the conference, waited outside. At the sight of Smith, they burst into jeers and angry shouts.

  “Everything,” Abraxas cackled from the monitors.

  “Traitor!” the former secretary of state screamed.

  “Betrayer!”

  “Heretic!”

  Through his blurred vision, Smith recognized the advertising man named Vehar. He stepped forward out of the crowd, hefting a rock, and flung it at Smith. The blow took him on the side of his face, scraping off the skin.

  “Get me to the computer room,” Smith said.

  “Yes, emperor.” Chiun lit into the crowd like a moving propeller. Vehar spun upward and landed against the corridor wall with a splintering thud. Others threw rocks, but Chiun deflected them with whistling motions of his hands. “Go,” he said softly. “I will protect you.”

  Smith limped away toward the computer room, like a man twice his age. The wound on his face wasn’t deep, but the pain made his head throb.

  “Triple zero one three eight zero,” he chanted aloud. The eardrum-shattering sound had made him dizzy. Vomit rose in his throat. He forced it down, pushing himself ahead, one foot in front of the other. “Triple zero one three eight zero.”

  Behind him Chiun was warding off the stampede of delegates, shielding the two of them from their crude weapons. When at last they reached the computer center, Chiun held up a hand to the crowd. “Hold,” he ordered. “I am Chiun, Master of the Glorious House of Sinanju, and I warn you—come no farther, or fear for your mortal life.”

  “He’s nothing but a crazy old man,” someone shouted from the rear.

  “Yeah, and a gook, too.”

  Vehar pushed his way through the crowd. His jacket was torn. The crystal of his watch was shattered from its impact against the wall. He stepped ahead of the group now, his eyes filled with hate.

  “Say, grandpa. I don’t think you’re so tough.”

  “Do not use threats lightly,” Chiun said. “You should have learned your lesson.”

  “You got lucky,” Vehar said. From his pocket he pulled out a small pistol. The crowd gasped. “And now you’re going to get unlucky.” He took a quick step forward.

  “Forgive me, emperor, but this is necessary,” Chiun said. He twisted in the air and, in one deft motion, cracked Vehar’s spine and then his skull. The body arched wildly, then fell. Vehar’s fingers were still wrapped around the gun.

  Smith stood at the console, his eyes riveted on the lifeless body on the floor.

  “Work,” Chiun commanded the man he called emperor.

  “You have four minutes,” Abraxas announced, as if Remo were a contestant on a game show who couldn’t come up with the right answer.

  Remo didn’t pay him any attention. He was scrabbling at the cement, his fingertips bloody. Already he had broken off almost enough small pieces to gain a handhold. That was all it would take. But the trap was flush with the floor, and the cement, he guessed, was at least a foot thick.

  “Let me save you the effort,” the voice said smoothly. “Even if you do get through the trap door—which you won’t—you won’t be able to reach me. I am an invalid, you see, and don’t possess the normal use of my limbs. For this reason, I have had to invent certain architectural designs to assist me. The room you’re in is one; I had the trap built. But the room where I am is much more sophisticated. It is closed off from the passageway by a special electronic door housing a million volts of electricity. No one can survive that kind of shock, Remo, not even you. Oh, you surprised me time and again with you strength. The electric jolt from my chair, the high-frequency noise—not a wince from you. Very commendable. But I assure you, the entrance to this room is much more deadly than the parlor tricks I have shown you thus far. Much more. Am I clear?”

  “You’re an ass,” Remo said. With a sharp jab he wedged his left hand into the small crevice he had made. It was tight. The cement rubbed his fingers raw.

  “A most worthy opponent,” Abraxas said with a certain warmth. “Alas, I have to leave you. I would have liked to see your progress, as well as your untimely end. Unfortunately, my broadcast is due to begin. The world is about to undergo the most profound change since the discovery of fire, and I go to lead its people into the new age. So farewell, my doomed adversary. Enjoy your stay in eternity.”

  He turned profile to the camera. The face was not so much that of a god as of a gargoyle, Remo thought, a repugnant creature about to spread its slime over the earth.

  The monitor faded to black. Remo was alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE CHRONOMETER ON THE WALL read 11:58:36. Less than three minutes to go.

  He dug his hand deeper into the broken cement. The raw flesh scraped, down to the bone, it seemed. He stifled the urge to cry out with the pain.

  11:58:59.

  Circe. Abraxas had called her his enchantress. But the girl lying dead in the next room had been nothing but a madman’s pawn, discarded without thought, murdered with the casual brutality of swatting a fly.

  I don’t want to belong to him anymore, she had said. Still, she had kept the name he had given her.

  Remo didn’t even know her real name.

  So this is how it ends, he thought. The twisted trail leading from another death of another pawn named Orville Peabody ended here, with the girl dead and the monster she had hoped to escape safe behind his electric walls.

  “You won’t belong to him,” Remo said. “I promise you, Circe.”

  He had made a promise to her before, and had not been able to keep it. In shame and rage, he wrenched his arm upward. He felt two bones in his hand crack and give under the weight of the cement, but the slab loosened. With a spray of dust, it spat out of the floor, crashing on the other side of the room.

  Beneath the removed cement was a twelve-inch pole extending so far downward that its base couldn’t be seen. The hydraulic lift.

  11:59:01.

  There was no time to find how to operate it. Remo guessed that the controls were on Abraxas’s wheelchair, anyway. Keeping his broken hand carefully out of the way, he wrapped his arms and legs around the pole and slid into the darkness.

  The bottom was dank and suffocating, exuding the same musty smell of the cave where Remo had lain with Circe. It brought back memories so recent and painful that he felt them physically, like pinpricks in his chest.

  But he wouldn’t think of her now. He couldn’t permit himself the luxury of self-pity.

  From the pinpoint opening at the top of the empty shaft, he guessed that he was more than a hundred feet below ground level. He searched in the darkness of the narrow square for a passageway, trying to enlarge his pupils enough to catch what faint light there was.

  He saw nothing. No opening, no electric door, no route to Abraxas. Only the blackness of a four-by-four-foot prison.

  Panic crept up on him. What if Abraxas had been lying? True, the cement trap in the floor had been just as he’d described, but a mind as sick as Abraxas’s was capable of devising an elaborate obstacle like the trap to serve as nothing more than a diversion for intruders. It was possible that Abraxas was nowhere Remo could reach him before the precious minutes were up. On the other side of the house, perhaps…or the island.

  I have planned for everything.

  More than a minute had passed since Remo began his descent down the lift shaft. Abraxas would have to be reached soon, or not at all. If Abraxas had tricked him, as the sickening feeling in the pit of Remo’s stomach told him he had, time had already run out. The world would belong to Abraxas, and Circe—beautiful, scarred enchantress—had died for nothing.

  “You idiot,” Remo spat out at himself, kicking the cement-lined wall. His foot swung into air.

  Air.

  He bent down. It was there, the passageway. Abraxas, in his vanity had told the truth. There was a route leading out of the lift, but it was less than three feet tall—designed for a man in a wheelchair.

  Flushed with excitement, he ran, stooped, through the dark corridor. There was utterly no light here. Racing blindly, like a bat, he followed the tunnel, ticking off the seconds in his head.

  58. 57. 56.

  He pumped his legs harder. The pain in his hand throbbed sharply with each footfall. For Circe, he said to himself. Not the poor suckers watching their televisions, waiting for God to come to them like some glorious prime-time evangelist; he didn’t give a damn about humanity. It was for Circe alone. Dead, defeated Circe, who had begged for help and got none.

  His breath came quick and ragged. The passageway was long, longer than he’d pictured the house to be. He’d gone nearly a half-mile as it was, and still nothing lay ahead but more blackness and the growing heaviness in his chest.

  What accounted for that, he thought, heaving. He never breathed hard. Not even during his exercise runs under Chiun’s supervision, in which he forced himself to run at full, leg-wrenching speed over hills so tall that vegetation disappeared at their peaks, had he lost his wind. But now, in this tunnel, he was gasping for breath like a chain smoker in the Boston Marathon.

  Still running, crouched and cramping, he attuned his senses to the pressure of the air. He felt it in his ears. Slowly, every fifty feet or so, the pressure increased infinitessimally.

  He was running downhill.

  And there was a smell permeating the damp cement lining of the tunnel, something pungent, vaguely fishy…

  His head shot up with a start. He was heading south, far beyond the reef of the island. What he smelled was the sea. He was underwater.

  And going deeper. Abraxas’s transmission center was somewhere in the depths of the ocean, protected against unwanted visitors by a million volts of electricity.

  26. 25. 24.

  Then he saw them, the doors rising out of the blackness like steel monoliths. He could never beat his way through them without electrocuting himself. Even the ways he’d learned for dealing with electric fences wouldn’t work with voltage of the magnitude Abraxas had described.

  He was unarmed. He looked around helplessly. A piece of cement, maybe, thrown fast enough, could puncture the steel doors, but how much time would that take? He had lost most of the skin on his hand trying to pry loose a small piece of the flooring in the house. It would take even longer to chip a large enough hunk off a smooth wall. Besides, he thought, the hand was broken now. It would be next to useless. No, there was no way through the doors.

  Well, one way…

  He swallowed. Kamikaze had never been his forte. If anything but the soles of his shoes touched those doors, he’d fry in seconds.

  He jarred to a halt some twenty feet away from the massive doors. From the size of them, he calculated it would take some six thousand pounds of thrust to break through the electrified metal. Given his weight, that meant that he would have to travel at roughly half the speed of sound to slap on enough pressure to break them down.

  Nobody, not Remo, not even Chiun, had ever moved so fast even at full height. Remo was doubled over in the squat passageway. He would have to run, skittering, like a crab.

  Impossible, he decided. It was too big a risk. He’d never live.

  He crouched back into the passageway where he’d come, trying to think of alternatives. He forced his mind to a blank. But this time no legends came, no cryptic stories carrying hidden solutions. There was only Circe’s face, crying out in the darkness.

  Abraxas had won.

  “Help me,” Circe had said, her remembered voice echoing a memory of a face flickering in candlelight. He had promised to help. Now she was dead, the promise broken.

  “Help me…”

  12. 11. 10 seconds.

  “What the hell,” Remo said. Maybe he had lived long enough, after all.

  He spun around quickly, before he had time to change his mind, and charged the doors.

  His arms hung at his sides like an ape’s, flying upward behind him as he gathered speed. His feet burned, literally. The heels of his shoes gave off thin wisps of smoke. He felt the flesh of his face flattening, distorting with the speed.

  8. 7. 6.

  Another image came to mind to replace Circe’s face. It was something he’d seen on television once, news footage of an airplane wreck on the Potomac. In the film, a man in a crowd watched from the river’s edge as the plane went down. He was an ordinary man, from the looks of him, Mr. Average, football on weekends, maybe a few rounds of cards with the boys on Thursday nights. Nobody would have taken him for a hero.

  With the other passersby, he watched the plane crash and burst into flames. Like the others, he heard the screams of the dying. He may have felt pity; the others surely did. Or he may have gone a little crazy at the moment when he took in the sight of the icy river tainted with human blood. No one could say. But what he did at that strange, pivotal moment was so peculiar, so brazen, so unreasonable, that the whole country stopped what it was doing to watch, stunned, as the man did what everyone else had been too sensible to do: He jumped in.