A week later, the London media exclaimed. EACH OF THE THREE-DOZEN FASTBINDER MASTERPIECES IDENTIFIED AS ART LOOTED FROM JEWS BY NAZIS!Even Fastbinder had to smirk when he read it. The “masterpieces” in question had, in actuality, been the least valuable works of art in the entire lot—which Fastbinder had liquidated for more than thirty million euro after his father finally kicked the bucket.

  In the end, Fastbinder Machine Werks settled with the former owners of the paintings. The sum was nine times their value—Fastbinder knew this since he had the paintings expertly appraised before deciding to sacrifice them to the cause.

  The sacrifice was worthwhile, he decided, when the financial toll on Fastbinder Machine Werks became apparent. The company leaned in the direction of bankruptcy. Amazingly, the U.S. division was suddenly profitable as Jacob Fastbinder III’s patents began selling hugely. It was the only thing keeping the firm alive and yet every dollar was a slap in the face. The company sent squadrons of lawyers to New Mexico to plead with Fastbinder to temporarily rescind his rights to half the patent profits. The U.S. division was now propping up the rest of the firm but was not quite enough to keep it from looming bankruptcy. Even the executive director of the board of directors appeared one afternoon on his doorstep. Fastbinder laughed in his face and shut the door, letting the man stand out there in the ninety-five-degree heat. The executive director lost his cool and started pounding on the door.

  “We will make you director again!”

  Fastbinder opened his front door on a security chain, laughing. “Did you get that, Mr. Hippolwythe?” he called.

  The executive director was shocked to see a man come from around the corner, holding a miniature cassette tape recorder. He also had a camera and took a photo of the sweating, pitiful mess of a man.

  “This man is a reporter for my favorite newspaper in zee United Kingdom,” Fastbinder explained to the executive director.

  The story was perfect fodder for the U.K. tabloids. The paper the next morning had a narrow front-page photo, so tall it went from the top of the page to the bottom, showing the sweat-stained, rumpled executive director of Fastbinder Machine Werks with his mouth gaping open. It was an ugly image. The headline next to it screamed. PATHETIC HEAD OF MACHINE WERKS COMES CRAWLING BACK TO FASTBINDER HEIR BEGGING HIM TO RESUME CONTROL OF CRUMBLING COMPANY!

  Oh, if only the executive director would have blown his brains out or jumped off a building. Instead he put on a fresh shirt and suit, tidied his hotel room in Albuquerque, and took 112 assorted prescription tablets. He was still sitting there, hand neatly on his lap, when the maid came in to clean up. She gave the tabloid a quote, but “He left the room so spotless, I didn’t even need to sanitize!” was not quite inflammatory enough for their tastes.

  Oh well, the rest of it made fine reading. Fastbinder had the articles laminated and hung in his bathroom.

  Chapter 29

  The gods rewarded Jacob Fastbinder III for his skillful deeds. They presented him with the gift of a son.

  “Weren’t you an intern last summer at zee headquarters in Tucumcari?” Fastbinder asked the teenager who showed up on his doorstep.

  “Yep. Wanted to check you out. You’re an impressive dude. Pops.”

  “I seriously doubt I am your sire,” Fastbinder said, and began to close the door in the boy’s face.

  “Remember when you were scouting New Mexico for the new U.S. division? Like about sixteen years ago?” the kid blurted. “Remember the blond real-estate agent with the huge hooters? That’s my mom. I turned fifteen last Thursday. You do the math.”

  Fastbinder did the math. Yes, that was about right. “Hey,” the kid grinned “I know it’s gotta be a real humdinger of a development. You probably wanna do a DNA test.”

  “Yes.” Fastbinder was quite thoughtful. “That would be best.”

  “What would you like? Blood? Urine? Sem—?”

  “This will be sufficient.” Fastbinder snatched out a small handfull of the boy’s shaggy blond hair.

  “Jeez Louise, Pops!” The kid grabbed his head. “That smarts!”

  The kid showed up again three days later. “Heard you rushed it through the system,” the kid announced. “I’m legit, huh, Pops?”

  Fastbinder was still feeling thoughtful. “Yes, zee tests confirm you are my progeny. How do you know I rushed it through zee system?”

  “Pops, your email is totally unsecure. I’ve been eavesdropping on you for months! Nice to meet you. Dad, by the way.”

  Fastbinder abruptly found himself in a wiry, unbreakable bear hug.

  After that, Fastbinder played nice, inviting the kid inside.

  “So, then, how is your mother?” He struggled to recall her name. He could not even remember her face, although the image of her lace-clad bosom was forever burned into his memory.

  “Carla. She’s fine.”

  “Er, and your name?”

  “Jack. Jack Fast. Like it?”

  “I am not certain.”

  “My mom’s last name is Ashland, but she made my last name Fast. After you.”

  “All right, Jack Fast, let us be frank with each other. What is it you want from me?”

  Jack Fast looked disappointed. “Aw, Pops, I don’t want nothing from you, I mean, not like money or anything. I just wanted to get to know my old man. After all, you impress the heck out of me.”

  Fastbinder became even more suspicious.

  “Besides, if I was after cash or something, well, I wouldn’t go yanking your chain with all this family reunion stuff. I’d just head straight into extortion.”

  Fastbinder glared.

  “You know, the Culbreadth Control.” The kid laughed. “Whatsamatter, Pops, I throw you for a loop?”

  Fastbinder was thrown for a loop. Maybe several loops. “How do you know about it?”

  “Listen, Pops, you’ve done some really swift stuff, but you know diddly about internet security. You know that there’s all these electronic trails out there linking you to Culbreadth? It’s gonna get your ass into a serious sling if anybody ever starts looking. See, this guy Culbreadth comes to you with the control, right? That’s twenty-one months ago. You see the potential and make an offer, but Culbreadth wants way too much. So you hit-and-run him.”

  ‘It was not me who ran down Mr. Culbreadth,” Fastbinder retorted defensively.

  “Whatever. The good news is, he’s met his maker, and you’ve still got his hard-copy files, so all you have to do is make sure the files in his computers are erased. Right? Which you did, fine, and you overwrote them really good and the hard drive was all shot and everything. But here’s what you forgot, Pops—there’s an electronic record of you getting into his system over the Net.”

  “Where is this record!”

  “Where ain’t it, Pops? Your ISP. His ISP. Every damn place between here and Albuquerque, and over the internet that can be like a hundred places.”

  With that, the kid showed Fastbinder how to hack into the records of his internet service provider. To his astonishment, there was a complete record of every keystroke his computer made while he was tied into the remote PC belonging to Mr. Culbreadth. “Here’s where you overwrote all his CAD files. Here’s where you overwrote all his email. Here’s where you visited Tits of the Week. Don’t worry, though. I’m Jack the Hacker. I make it go away.”

  With that, the teenager opened up a high-level Telnet connection into the servers and began tapping out commands that Fastbinder didn’t know. He watched the lines of his activity records evaporate. “Watch the record of the CAD file go away,” the kid said. They disappeared. “Now watch the email files erase command.” They vanished.

  Fastbinder looked at the kid, who was looking cagey all of a sudden. “What about zee last one. You know, zee Tits of zee Week?”

  “Oh, I’ll erase it, Pops,” the kid said seriously. “But that one is gonna cost ya.”

  Fastbinder stared at the boy in disbelief. The kid exploded into hyena howls of hysteria. “I’m kidding, you dope!”

  “I see.”

  “Wow, Pops, you have got one humungous stick up your butt!”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “You need somebody like me around to help with butt-stick removal.”

  “And to assist in butt-sling avoidance,” Fastbinder added. “By zee way, I like zee haircut.”

  The grinning kid felt his new crew cut. “Had to do something. I had a big empty patch. Can I move in with you? Cause Carla is heading for Vegas.”

  The kid moved in and Fastbinder went through culture shock, but the rewards far outweighed the annoyances. Jack Fast was as independent as they came. Fastbinder found himself with a son he didn’t have to be responsible for.

  Fastbinder also discovered his kid was brilliant— like no other Fastbinder before him. “All of us were nothing but reverse engineers. You’re the first creative genius we’ve ever had,” he told Jack a few months later.

  “Aw, jeez, Pops,” Jack said. “I just like fiddling with stuff is all.” He closed the small aluminum door on the power unit. “It’s just a proton beam chisel, really. Not even an accurate one.”

  “This could be the greatest leap in portable power technology in decades,” his father insisted. “No one knew that proton beams could be used for this. They are too busy using zee technology to carve computer chips out of old porcelain teacups.”

  “Let’s see if it works before you get all gushy,” the kid protested. But the proton beam generator worked very well. That was the thing about Jack—whatever he set his mind to create, he created. He told Fastbinder how, when he was eight, he had formed a boys club that played unbelievably sophisticated jokes on the townsfolk. The other boys couldn’t hold an interest in the club and girls at the same time, so it all fell apart when puberty hit the group. Jack had been more or less a highly sociable loner since seventh grade.

  With access to Fastbinder’s desert workshop, Jack went into creative overdrive, churning out amazing— and sometimes amazingly useless—technological creations. Like his father, he loved old mechanical junk.

  Fastbinder had brought all of the marvels from the old family home in Cologne, and for years he had been accumulating more antique apparatus through a global network of buyers. His collection was vast.

  When Fastbinder saw the potential in the boy, he started coming up with funding. He even bought the boy a proton beam chisel, an obsolete experimental model that had to be shipped from Singapore. The shipping cost was more than the device, which the National University of Singapore Research Center for Nuclear Microscopy considered to be scrap.

  The research center had enabled a whole new realm of microscopic chiseling to be performed with its research, but Jack Fast made it into something else entirely. His miniaturized devices, based on the technology from Singapore, created a microscopic burst of high-speed subatomic particles channeled into a tiny electric generator, converting it into large quantities of available electricity for extended periods.

  “Will you patent it?” his father asked.

  “Nah ” Jack said. “I’m keeping it a secret.”

  “For what purpose?” his father asked.

  “Pops, think about it. Ironhand will run for months with this baby inside him. Think what he could do. He could walk all the way to White Sands without needing a battery change. All the way and back.”

  Chapter 30

  Remo sat in the chair as Chiun stood near Smith’s desk.

  “Ignore him, Emperor. His brain has jellied,” Chiun proclaimed.

  “My brain is fine,” Remo protested.

  “It is sad indeed when a teacher discovers his pupil has learned nothing despite a lifetime of education. He was a simpleton when I found him and a simpleton he remains.”

  “Go eat a cow.” Remo responded.

  “See the disrespect? Witness the lack of understanding?”

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with Master Chiun this time, Remo. You’ve demonstrated poor judgment recently.”

  “And you can go to hell. You have no clue what’s been happening, Smitty. This is a weapon we might not be able to overcome. It’s not a rock or an arrow or a bullet or a bomb. We’re not slithering around it or dodging it or outrunning it.”

  “Every weapon is a hurled rock,” Chiun responded without emotion. “Once I had thought my pupil listened to my teachings. Now I know he was hearing the words but not understanding their meaning.”

  “Every weapon is not a rock,” Remo said. “This time the weapon is something different. For once, being a Master of Sinanju is a disability.”

  “Fah!” Chiun swiped the words out of the air. There was a knock, then Eileen Mikulka, Smith’s longtime secretary, opened the door and rolled Mark Howard into the room in his wheelchair, clucking all the while.

  “Thank you, thank you so much, Mrs. Mikulka,” Howard kept saying, until she was satisfied that he was comfortably situated, had a full cup of water and was not in need of medicine, Kleenex or other items or services. She finally closed the door behind her.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Mark said. “What did I miss?”

  Chiun glared disapprovingly at Mark’s bandaged ankle. Remo watched the Long Island surf roll in. Harold Smith was in a rare state of indecisiveness.

  Mark got a whiff of the ill will in the room and said, “The doc gave me the okay to get back to work. Where should I start, Dr. Smith?”

  “We’re still trying to get a full profile put together on Archibald Slate and the original Ironhand, as well as trace the history of the antique robot samples you brought back from Spain,” Dr. Smith said. “Our top priority, however, is to find out everything we can about the system used to charge the robot power supplies. Unfortunately we have a lot of possibilities. The technology was either stolen from the Soviets or developed independently. If stolen from the Soviets, it might have occurred any time in the last fifteen years. If developed independently—well, it could have been anywhere.”

  “Like the Pentagon,” Remo said.

  “We’d know if it came from the U.S. military,” Mark answered.

  “You didn’t know about Ironhand.”

  “That’s different. He was classified and forgotten seventy years ago. The proton discharge device has to be a lot newer than that.”

  Remo sighed. “What did you get from Sarah?”

  Mark Howard looked startled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, about Ironhand. What happened to him? Where has he been all this time?”

  “I haven’t learned anything like that.”

  “Bringing her to Rye was a bad decision,” Dr. Smith remarked, addressing Mark. “Allowing her to come to Folcroft was also foolish.”

  “That’s my doing,” Remo announced before Mark could open his mouth. “Being here doesn’t mean she’ll learn anything about CURE. She’s the best link we have to the old Ironhand.”

  “I do not see her as a reliable intelligence source.”

  “Got news for ya—she’s the only intelligence we got.”

  “Remo,” Chiun remonstrated, “you shall not insult the emperor to whom you owe your contractual allegiance.”

  Remo looked up at Chiun. “If it’s true it’s not an insult. Where are the Ironhand arms?” Remo asked finally.

  “Under analysis.”

  “Any idea where Ironhand ran off to last night?”

  Dr. Smith shook his head. “No trace of him. We’re also tracking the robot that was his accomplice. This Clockwork. We have not determined if it is the original machine used in the television program, or if there was more than one built. Until we learn more, our best course of action will be for you and Master Chiun to police the possible upcoming attacks.”

  Remo waited.

  “The Department of Defense is in a unique state of high alert. Vital military research projects all over the country are being relocated, but the emphasis is on secrecy. The President insists on it. If the American people come to think die highest levels of their military are worrying about burglars—public faith in the government would suffer.”

  “And the President’s popularity would go into the toilet,” Remo added. “Up for reelection, isn’t he?”

  Smith didn’t acknowledge the comment. “There is one research project that has not been relocated. It is FEM, the Full-spectrum Environmental Monitoring.”

  “Kind of girly name,” Remo noted.

  “It protects the White House. It is made up of thirty miniaturized mobile units, patrolling the grounds in shifts of fifteen and relaying data to command computers and into the subterranean command centers. They have sound, motion, thermal, vibration and atmospheric sensors. They’re Gee-DAM controlled, of course, but also have a high degree of information processing and the ability for independent decision-making. If they detect intruders with guns, they can call for ground troops. If they detect biological or chemical agents, they can call for HAZMAT. One of the units can perform any and all these functions.”

  “How come we’ve never seen them?” Remo asked. “We’ve been to the White House.”

  “It has been up and running just a few weeks,” Smith explained. “The units still call in a number of false alarms, but the programming is being tuned daily. It could emerge as the most capable defensive system for any sort of a secure site.”

  “If the White House shares it,” Remo clarified.

  Dr. Smith slid an eight-by-ten photograph onto the desk, appearing slightly sheepish. “The current FEM unit configuration.”

  Remo examined the photo.

  “A robotic rodent?” Chiun sniffed.

  “It’s a cyber-squirrel,” Remo observed.

  “Its a FEMbot,” Smith explained.

  “Say again?”

  “Full-spectrum Environmental Monitoring robot. FEMbot.”

  “1 see.”

  “To the casual observer, the only way to distinguish it from a genuine White House squirrel is the markings. All the FEMbots have the same forehead markings.”