“I suspect he cannot. But as you know, the window faces the Sound. It is not visible except to boaters. Yet this bee appears fascinated by it.”

  “Maybe it’s trying to head-butt his reflection.”

  “Perhaps. But it seems very determined to enter my office.”

  “Got any bug killer?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” said Smith.

  “When you do, look up the Korean translation for ‘F you.’”

  “I am not going to ask why you need that information,” Smith said thinly.

  “Good. Because I’m not going to tell you.”

  Smith hung up and buzzed his secretary.

  “Yes, Dr. Smith?”

  “Have maintenance bring me an insecticide fatal to bees.”

  “Yes, Dr. Smith.”

  It wasn’t long before the maintenance man set the can of Deet on Smith’s desk, and Smith dismissed him.

  Then Smith went up to the Folcroft roof and, getting down on his stomach after doffing his gray jacket and vest, looked down over the roof combing.

  The bee was still hovering at the window not four feet below. Smith could see its back clearly. It was brownish black, except for the fuzzy yellow-and-black midbody, where the wings were rooted. The fuzzy thorax was marked with a distinct skull whose tiny black hollows stared sightlessly upward.

  Smith aimed the can, steadying himself, and released a jet of noxious spray.

  The stuff spurted down, enveloping the bee. It bobbed off to one side. Smith redirected the spray at it. It dropped, came level and continued to buzz the window.

  The can ran empty before the bee got annoyed. Then, like a tiny helicopter, it abruptly shot up to Smith’s eye level.

  Smith gave it a last shot and the bee, its multifaceted eyes turning white, retreated a dozen feet, blinded.

  Discarding the useless can, Smith dashed back to the roof trapdoor and dropped it after him on his way down the ladder.

  When he returned to his office, he was shaking.

  And the bee was still there. Its tiny face was dripping foamy insecticide now. Otherwise, it was unbothered. The eyes were clearing.

  “No normal bee could survive what I just subjected you to,” Smith said in a low voice.

  He lifted the blue contact receiver and decided that this was a crisis that required the intervention of his enforcement arm…

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Tammy Terrill expected a big rambling Victorian out of The Addams Family. Or a long white lab building. Maybe even a rustic ranch or adobe fort.

  She didn’t expect a mud hut.

  Actually, it wasn’t a hut. It was too big. It was more like a wasp’s nest, but it was made from dried mud. Not piled mud, but sculpted and smoothed mud. Its flowing skin was blistered with strangely shaped windows like bug eyes made of glass. If not for the fact that it was the same color and texture as a Mississippi riverbank, it might have been beautiful in a weirdly futuristic way.

  “Can you believe this place?” she whispered to her new cameraman, whose name was Bill. Or maybe Phil. He had come down from the Baltimore affiliate.

  “Takes all kinds,” said the cameraman.

  “Okay. Let’s see what we can see.”

  They circled the hive. It was dotted with glass blisters. There was a front door and a back. In back, there was some kind of shed made of steel. From the shed was coming a strange humming.

  “Sounds like bees,” whispered Tammy.

  “Sounds like sick bees.”

  “Or killer bees who haven’t been able to kill as much as they like,” suggested Tammy.

  “Better leave it alone, then.”

  “I’m more interested in what’s inside this big hive thing.”

  “I want no part of any break-in.”

  “No law against shoving a camera up against somebody’s window and taping away,” Tammy argued.

  Bill—or Phil—shrugged. “I’ll go along with that.”

  They picked a window at random. Creeping up to it, they pressed their faces against the chicken-wire-reinforced pane.

  What they saw inside made their eyes grow round as saucers and their jaws fall open.

  “Damn! Frankenstein’s lab wasn’t this weird,” the Fox cameraman mumbled.

  “If this isn’t the story of the century, I’ll eat shit and like it. Now, get to taping before Wurmlinger shows up…”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The bumblebee had moved to the main entrance of Folcroft Sanitarium by the time Remo drove the rental car through the stone gates with their foreboding lion heads on either side.

  Folcroft was in a state of lock-down. No one could get in or out. And through the car telephone, Harold Smith was sounding nervous.

  “Find that thing and crush it!” Smith was saying. “We cannot afford to call attention to the organization.”

  “Relax, Smitty. You run a sanitarium and you have an extermination problem. The exterminators are here. We’ll take care of it.”

  “Hurry,” said Smith.

  Remo drove up to the main door, and the hovering bee seemed to take almost instant notice of Remo and Chiun.

  It was completely white now, carrying a coat of drying insecticide as if it had just emerged from a happy bubble bath.

  It flitted before their windshield, regarding them with what looked like cataract-glazed eyes.

  “Okay,” said Remo, “let’s take this guy.”

  Chiun lifted a calming hand. “Wait. Let us observe it for a time.”

  “What’s to observe? It’s another of those superbees. Our job is to kill it and turn the body over to Smith.”

  “No, our task is to survive our encounter with this devil in the form of a bee.”

  “That, too,” Remo agreed. Turning off the engine, he settled back in his seat.

  They watched as the bee grew increasingly curious, zipping to Remo’s side window, around the back, then to Chiun. It butted its head against the glass at several points.

  “It wants in,” Remo muttered.

  “No, it desires us to step out.”

  “Just say when.”

  Chiun was stroking his wispy beard. “We must foil its evil intentions, Remo.”

  “Hard to believe a bee has any intentions, evil or whatever.”

  The Master of Sinanju said nothing. His eyes were intent upon the hovering bee. They studied one another for several moments, then gradually, imperceptibly, Chiun slipped his fingers up to the small wing window on his side of the car.

  “Remo,” he undertoned, not moving his lips.

  “Yeah?” said Remo, equally stiff lipped.

  Chiun wrapped ivory fingers around the window latch. “When I say jump, you will jump from the vehicle as quickly as you can, taking care to slam the door behind you, also as quickly as you can.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  Instead of answering, Chiun flipped open the wing window and squeaked, “Jump!”

  Three things happened in very quick succession. Remo jumped from the car. The bee slipped through the open window, and the Master of Sinanju simultaneously shut the window behind it and exited the vehicle.

  So perfect was their timing that both doors clunked shut with one dull sound, and the bumblebee found itself trapped in the vehicle with no escape. It went into a frenzy of aerial acrobatics and glass-butting.

  Harold Smith came down to see it for himself.

  “Behold the fruits of your power, O Emperor,” proclaimed the Master of Sinanju in a lofty voice. “The assassin that sought your life awaits your tender mercies.”

  Smith frowned with all his lemony intensity. “It should be dead.”

  “This can be arranged,” said Chiun.

  “Yeah,” added Remo. “We’ll just push the car into the water and drown it.”

  Smith shook his head. “No. I need to examine it.”

  “That’s going to be a trick,” said Remo. “It was a trick getting it in there. Getting it out safely, I don’t know about.”

  “There must be a way.”

  “There is,” said Chiun.

  Remo and Smith looked at the Master of Sinanju with studied interest.

  “But I do not know what that way is—as yet,” Chiun admitted thinly.

  All three men gave it considerable thought.

  Smith said, “Insects breathe by diffusion, which means air comes in through their bodies. It is not possible to suffocate it in the normal sense.”

  “Insecticide is out,” added Remo. “You tried that.”

  “Ah,” said Chiun.

  “Ah?”

  The old Korean flitted into the building and returned moments later carrying the separate parts of a Pyrex cake holder in his long-nailed hands, undoubtedly scavenged from the Folcroft cafeteria.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work, Little Father,” Remo cautioned.

  “Ordinarily, what I have in mind would never work,” Chiun allowed. “But you are not undertaking the task at hand, but me. I will make it work.”

  Addressing Smith, he said, “Emperor, seek a place of shelter from which you may enjoy this display of the power you control so artfully.”

  Smith retreated to a position behind the glass door and watched intently.

  “Remo, when I say open the door, you will open the door,” Chiun said, eyeing the agitated bee.

  “What about shutting it again?” Remo asked.

  “It will not be necessary.”

  And the Master of Sinanju stationed himself at the side door where the bee was most active. Remo grabbed the door handle and set himself.

  Chiun lifted the cake holder and its Pyrex bell in either hand like a musician about to clash together a pair of cymbals.

  “Now!”

  Remo yanked open the door.

  The bee obligingly bumbled out. And was captured.

  It was a near thing. The cake-holder sections came together with an unmusical crack. But when Chiun uprighted the cake holder, the bee was buzzing around the interior in angry, frustrated orbits.

  Smith came running back down, and Chiun presented the cake holder to him. Smith took it gingerly in both hands.

  “Thank you, Master Chiun. Now come inside.”

  They took the elevator to the administration floor, and Smith informed his secretary to inform the guard staff that all was well.

  “The killer bee has been captured,” he said, rather unnecessarily inasmuch as Mrs. Mikulka’s wide eyes followed the Pyrex-protected bee until the point it disappeared into Smith’s office.

  Inside, behind closed doors, Smith set the cake holder on his desk.

  The still-dripping bee orbited a few more moments, then settled down to stand tensely on its multiple legs.

  “It looks like an ordinary bumblebee,” Smith was saying as he took a red plastic object from his desk. He flipped it, and a red-ringed magnifying glass slipped out. Holding it by the combination lens protector and handle, Smith trained it on the quiescent bee.

  As if equally curious, the bee obligingly stepped closer—giving Smith a better view. Its foamy feelers quivered and dripped.

  “This is a bumblebee,” Smith said.

  “Wurmlinger said it was a drone,” said Remo.

  The bee turned around once and mooned Smith. The gesture of disrespect was entirely lost on Smith.

  “I see a stinger,” he breathed. “Drone bees do not possess stingers.”

  “That one does,” Remo declared.

  “Clearly,” said Smith, returning the magnifying glass to his desk drawer and shutting it.

  Dropping into his ancient, cracked leather executive’s chair, Harold Smith addressed Remo and Chiun while not taking his eye off the bee, which had turned around to regard him with tiny blind-looking orbs.

  “This is not an African killer bee or any genetic mutation of one. It is a common honey bee drone equipped with a stinger.”

  “And a brain,” added Chiun.

  “Not to mention a death’s-head on its back,” Remo said.

  Smith frowned deeply. “Somehow, this bee was sent here to spy on me. The only way this could have happened is if it were able to communicate with the bee you killed in California.”

  “Get that body yet?”

  “No. It has not been recovered from the crashed 727.”

  “I don’t see how bees can talk across three thousand miles of country,” Remo said.

  “Somehow, there is a way they do.”

  “Don’t bees talk to one another by touching antennae?”

  “You are thinking of ants,” said Smith.

  “I thought bees operated the same way.”

  “No, they communicate by giving off chemical scents, as well as via aerial acrobatics such as the honey dance.”

  “Where did I get the idea they touched feelers?” Remo wondered aloud.

  “I do not know. Nor can I imagine how we will discover the truth.”

  “Why not ask the bee?” suggested the Master of Sinanju.

  They looked at him, their faces growing flat as plaster.

  “You speak bee?” countered Remo.

  “No, but if the bee was able to read the address of Fortress Folcroft in California and impart this intelligence to the bee we have captured, they must speak American.”

  “That’s crazy!” exploded Remo.

  “If you do not care to try, I will,” sniffed Chiun.

  Remo backed away with an inviting bow and flourish of one arm. “Be my guest.”

  The Master of Sinanju hiked up his golden kimono skirts and addressed the bee in the bell jar.

  “Hearken, O foiled one. For I am Chiun, Master of Sinanju, royal assassin to the court of Harold the First, current Emperor of America, in whose merciless toils you have found yourself. Before you are consigned to the cruel fate you so richly deserve, I demand you divulge all you know of the plot against Smith the Wise. Failure to do so will result in a beheading by a dull, rusty headsman’s ax. Cooperation will grant you the boon of a sharp blade and a swift, painless death.”

  Remo snorted. “You can’t behead a bee.”

  “Shush,” said Chiun with a double upward flourish of his expansive kimono sleeves. “Speak now, doomed insect, and spare yourself an ugly ending.”

  The bee hadn’t moved through all of this. Not even its feelers.

  Then, after twitching its wings once, it emitted a high, tiny sound.

  It wasn’t a buzz or a drone. Nor was it the sharp ziii of a bee in flight.

  Remo and Chiun leaned in. The sound was too small for Smith’s normal aging ears, but there was something about it that touched their senses.

  “Speak louder, O bee,” Chiun instructed.

  The bee seemed to make another sound.

  “I feel like an idiot,” said Remo, backing away.

  Chiun eyed Smith and asked, “Have you a device for capturing sounds?”

  “Yes.” Smith dug out a pocket tape recorder with a suction mike attachment made for recording telephone calls.

  Chiun nodded. “Affix this device.”

  Smith attached the cup to the glass and pressed the Record button.

  “What the hell are you doing, Smitty?” Remo asked in exasperation.

  “Perhaps its sound can be identified by an entomologist,” Smith said defensively.

  Remo rolled his eyes.

  Lifting his arms like a conjurer invoking a genie, Chiun exhorted, “Speak again, O bee.”

  The tiny sound was repeated, and when it stopped, Smith hit the Stop switch, rewound and then pressed Playback.

  He fingered the volume control to the highest setting and waited.

  The tape hissed loudly. Then came a tiny, metallic voice. “Release me now, or my brethren will swarm down in deadly numbers.”

  “What!” Remo exploded.

  Gray face slack with shock, Smith replayed that part again.

  “That was you throwing your voice, wasn’t it?” Remo accused Chiun.

  “I deny this accusation,” Chiun sniffed.

  Smith hit the Record button and asked Chiun, “Inquire who it is.”

  “To whom do I have the privilege of speaking?”

  “I am but a drone in the service of the King of Bees,” replayed the tape recorder after Smith rewound it.

  “Who is this ruler?” demanded Chiun. “Speak the fiend’s name.”

  “I serve the Lord of All Bees.”

  “Is that anything like the Lord of the Flies?” grunted Remo, who couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing but went along anyway.

  Smith stared at the bee, open-mouthed and bugeyed.

  “I have a question for it,” said Remo.

  Chiun gestured him to go ahead.

  “Who told you to come here?” asked Remo.

  “My master.” This time, Remo heard the voice clearly. The tape playback verified what he had heard.

  “How’d you find this address?” asked Remo.

  The tape recorder replayed the tiny reply. “One of my brethren read the address off the package you mailed from Los Angeles.”

  Harold Smith groaned in a mixture of horror and disbelief. “Our cover is blown.”

  “To the freaking bee kingdom, Smith,” Remo said in exasperation. “It’s not like it’s going to be spread over tomorrow’s New York Times!”

  Smith eyed the bee. “Your terms are rejected.”

  “Then my vengeance will be awesome to behold. Tremble, mankind. Tremble before the awesome might of the Bee-Master.”

  “Did he say Bee-Master?” asked Remo.

  “He has been saying that all along,” said Harold Smith.

  Remo snapped his fingers. “That’s where I read about bees talking by antennae. In old comic books.”

  “It served you right for believing it,” said Smith.

  “Give me a break. I was only a kid. What did I know?”

  “Chiun, we must drown this vermin,” Smith said grimly.

  “The interrogation is over, O merciless one?”

  “Find a way to drown it. I must have the remains for analysis.”

  Bowing, the Master of Sinanju lifted up the cake holder and bore it into Smith’s private washroom.

  The bee was racing around the inside of the Pyrex dome, with all the agitated impotence of a condemned prisoner when they last saw it.

  As the sound of running water came, Remo looked at Harold Smith and Smith looked back. Smith’s face was gray and haggard; Remo’s was flat with a kind of shocked bewilderment.