Remo noticed that the mark was a series of white streaks in the brown squirrel fur, and the streaks formed a lopsided W. “Somebody at the DOD is brown-nosing big-time.”

  Smith scowled. “I agree it’s foolish. I pointed out to the President that one of these units might be photographed by a White House reporter or visitor and surely attract attention. The President believes the units will keep themselves so well camouflaged there will be little opportunity for such a thing to happen.” His words trailed off, full of doubt, and he added, “The President does not believe the White House is threatened. He also does not believe that the two of you will be able to penetrate this new security perimeter.”

  Remo and Chiun both stiffened.

  “I think he is wrong on both counts, of course.”

  Remo nodded. “You want we should keep an eye on the place?”

  “For tonight, yes,” Smith said.

  “Fine. We’ll go stake out the White House.”

  Remo pushed Mark out of the office.

  “Really, Remo, I can do it myself.”

  “This is a cool set of wheels. Junior,” Remo said. “Wanna go down and try it out in one of the first-floor corridors? I bet I can get this baby up to eighty.”

  “No, thank you!”

  “I’ll take that” Mrs. Mikulka was out of her chair the moment they left Dr. Smith’s office and she muscled Remo out from behind the wheelchair with unassailable determination. Chiun chuckled.

  When Mark Howard’s office door swung open, it almost grazed the front of the massive desk that dominated the room like a hippo in a hot tub. The floor space was narrow. Mark usually had to shuffle sideways to get behind the desk to work.

  Experimentally, Mrs. Mikulka wheeled Mark inside. The foot rests wedged against the front of the desk while the rear wheels were still sticking out the door.

  “This will never do,” she decided.

  “No, no, it’ll work. It will just take a little jimmying.” Mark began wiggling the wheelchair back and forth, inching it around.

  Mrs. Mikulka huffed. “This will not work, Mark.”

  “Sure, Mrs. M. Just another minute or so and I’ll be inside.”

  ‘Then what? You’ll never get behind your desk.”

  “I’ll work on the front.”

  “There’s no room for your legs to get under. You’ll add a bad back to your medical problems.”

  “I’m sure it will be—”

  “Not another word from you, Mark Howard. I’m calling maintenance.” Mrs. Mikulka strode away. After a few more tiny movements, Mark realized he was completed wedged in. His front wheels tight against the desk, his back wheels jammed at an angle in the door frame.

  That was when he realized he needed to go to the men’s room.

  Remo was pretending to hold a cigar in one hand and a telephone in another. “Hello, room service? Send up some more room.”

  “That was the worst Groucho Marx of all time,” Mark said.

  “Seriously, who did you not sleep with to rate this closet? Aren’t there empty offices on both sides of you?”

  “They’re no bigger than this one.”

  “You just take out a few walls and you’d be in good shape.”

  “That doesn’t exactly help me right now.”

  “What do you mean? I’ll have it done before you’re back from the little boy’s room.”

  “No. Please, no, Remo. And stop invading my privacy. I don’t need to know that you know when I need to—you know.”

  “What privacy? You’re shifting around like an eight-year-old in mass. Can I at least get you unstuck?”

  Mark sighed. “That would be helpful.”

  Mrs. Mikulka returned to find Mark Howard still in his wheelchair, but the wheelchair was now four feet off the ground. It turned and emerged backward from the office. Remo gave her a smile and placed it on the ground again, giving Mark a crash-landing for the benefit of the elderly secretary.

  “Unstuck. You could stand to lose a few, Mark. I think I pulled my back.”

  “Maybe we have some wheelchairs at Folcroft that are more narrow,” Mark said.

  “Mark, you are not going to try to cram yourself inside of that office,” Mrs. Mikulka declared. “Not until you are ambulatory again. Come with me, please.” Remo almost had hold of the wheelchair handles, then found himself facing a mask of maternal determination that sent him into retreat. Mrs. Mikulka wheeled Mark Howard right back to Mr. Smith’s office.

  “Dr. Smith has more room than he needs,” she announced, and when they entered the director’s office she explained the difficulties down the hall. “You’ll be more than happy to have Mark as a roommate temporarily, won’t you?”

  “Nod, Smitty,” Remo called from outside the door after an uncertain moment.

  Smith nodded. “Yes. Of course. That’s an ideal solution. You’ll need a desk.”

  Mrs. Mikulka stepped aside as an upended desk rolled into the office, followed by a Folcroft maintenance worker who manned the dolly. “Afternoon, Mrs. M. Where’d you like this?”

  Remo couldn’t tear his eyes away as Mrs. Mikulka supervised the arrangement of the new office layout, careful to allow plenty of room for Mark’s wheelchair. Phones arrived and were installed by another maintenance worker. Dr. Smith seemed resigned to the chaos, but in reality it was handled with great efficiency. When the door closed twenty minutes later, Mark was firmly ensconced.

  “Just like old times.” Mark grinned sheepishly. “I’m sorry to have this thrust on you. Dr. Smith. Don’t think you were given much choice.”

  “It’s perfectly acceptable, Mark, but I have to admit, I’ve rarely witnessed Mrs. Mikulka in such a take-charge mode.”

  ‘I’d say this pack has a new alpha male,” Remo remarked.

  “Are you finished?” Chiun asked, slipping through the door. “I have been waiting in the rental car.”

  “I thought you told me you were going to the cafeteria for a burger and fries,” Remo protested. Chiun’s look would have curdled yak milk. “Well, my supervision here is done.”

  Remo felt oddly ebullient as they departed, despite his current less-than-affectionate relations with Dr. Smith. In the outer office he made a big thumbs-up. “Good work, Mrs. M.”

  Mrs. Mikulka crinkled her wrinkles. “Why, thank you, Romeo.”

  Mrs. Mikulka watched them go, mulling over the odd pair that had just left. She’d watched them come and go for so many years they had become a part of the scenery.

  But she had never been too clear on who they were. Relatives of Dr. Smith, she had been told more than once. She didn’t know if that was true, and she didn’t really care. But two things she had picked up over the years. They ate a lot of rice and they hadn’t aged much. Why, she herself looked older now than the Asian gentlemen, and he had seemed ancient to her at one time.

  What was their strange attachment to Folcroft Sanitarium? And what about Dr. Smith’s late nights, and the two men coming at all hours? What was actually going behind those always-closed doors, anyway?

  As always, when these thoughts began getting dark and suspicious, a pleasant puff of distraction floated into her mind as if from nowhere to whisk them away. Which was fine, really. Mrs. Mikulka wasn’t sure what was crouching in those dark corridors of suspicion and she would just as soon not know.

  Chapter 31

  Playing security guard was always boring work. Didn’t matter if it was an office building in Dayton, Ohio, or the White House. You basically just kind of stood there waiting for something to happen.

  The security around the White House was always good enough by most standards, but never very good by Remo’s.

  “This false president has little respect for us,” Chiun noted as they slipped along the outside of the White House grounds, skirting the cameras and sensors that watched the place.

  “He doesn’t know anything about us,” Remo answered.

  “You should not talk. Traitor of Sinanju!”

  “Come on, Chiun, I’m not a traitor.”

  “You have disposed of fifty centuries of learning and tradition.”

  “I haven’t disposed of anything. You’re overreacting.”

  “Overreacting? How dare you!”

  “I dunno, how?”

  “I never overreact!” Chiun snapped explosively.

  “Sorry, I must have been thinking of somebody else.”

  They slipped past the concealed military patrol and stepped up to and over the fence, which, at something like fifteen feet high, didn’t appear easy to step over.

  “Keep an eye out—this is FEMbot turf,” Remo said.

  “You are worried about these mechanical vermin?”

  “No.”

  “Do they not constitute some new and unassailable threat?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? They are computerized! They have radio waves and mobile telephones built right in! Surely they will neutralize and nullify the Masters of Sinanju and all their skills.”

  Remo stopped in the evening shadow of one of Washington, D.C.’s famous cheny trees. “Little Father, I know why you’re pissed off.”

  “I am angry for many reasons. Almost anything you say has a good chance of being correct.”

  “Look, Chiun, I know the real reason.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You think I’m sullying the Sinanju reputation and hurting future business.”

  Chiun stared at him.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? It doesn’t matter that we’ve had our batteries drained and our butts kicked. All you care about is that I admitted as much to Mark and Smitty. You think they’ll somehow communicate this information to the kings and queens and despots that hire assassins like us.”

  Chiun looked away and fluttered his hand in the night. “If only you had come to realize this before you spoke to Smith.”

  “I did.”

  “Liar.”

  “First of all, Smitty’s not going to gossip about it on the heads-of-state grapevine.”

  “He will.”

  “Second, we’ve had our ass kicked once or twice before. The Sinanju reputation hasn’t suffered.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I know we’re getting paid an obscene amount of gold for doing this job, and it’s more than we were paid under the last contract,” Remo said. “Our fee keeps going up, so our value must be increasing.”

  “Our value to other emperors is what matters,” Chiun lectured. “We do not know when Smith’s gold will run out, and we must take into account our value on the market.”

  Remo nodded distractedly. “Let’s talk about it later, okay? We’re about to face down our first FEMbot.”

  Chiun said nothing, putting his hands in his sleeves. Remo was more wary, but it was tough to be worried about a contraption that announced its presence the way the FEMbot did, with a rhythm of low-grade whining sounds from internal drive motors and the clicking of relays and the popping of minuscule air-pressure actuators.

  The sound was below the level of most human hearing, but to Remo it was as loud as the beeper on a garbage truck in reverse. It didn’t look real, either.

  “Is it my imagination, or is that squirrel goose-stepping?” he asked Chiun. “Maybe it is a Nazi android squirrel FEMbot.”

  The FEMbot was aiming at their tree. Remo lowered his skin temperature to fool its thermal sensors and he stood more still than most people would have found possible. He and Chiun conversed in a low, steady drone of sound that would lose itself in the ambient noise of the evening. Whatever the FEMbot used to look for intruders, it wasn’t working. The fake squirrel never gave them a second look.

  “That thing probably cost the taxpayers ten million,” Remo said as the squirrel laboriously dug its claws into the tree and scissored through the branches.

  “All that good money for a device that falls apart at the slightest touch,” Chiun said, batting the FEMbot on the top of the head. The FEMbot was instantly transformed into so much scrap metal in a bad nylon fur coat, which slammed into the earth so hard it imbedded itself.

  “I’ll take this side, you take that side,” Remo said. “Try not to do that anymore, okay? There’s probably a keeper on the premises who’ll come looking for his malfunctioning Nazi android squirrel FEMbot.”

  “Then the robot rodents should keep their distance from Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus.”

  “Yeah. I’ll spread the word.”

  That was when the boring part of the job set in. Remo kept moving, kept an eye out and found himself ridiculously at his ease when it came to stepping around cameras and sensors, making himself unseen to the Secret Service patrols, and making himself generally nonexistent as far as the FEMbots were concerned. He circled the entire building every half hour, invariably finding Chiun tailing one of the executive defense squirrels. Chiun would toss cherry twigs onto the lawn around the robot, making it turn sharply, then turn again, until he had it spinning in circles. This was apparently not good for the drive systems that moved the stiff little legs. The squirrel would eventually jerk and come to a halt, internal Servos whining, and there would be a burning smell.

  “I asked you to leave them alone,” Remo said in a whisper that didn’t distract the canine sentinel that was almost within arm’s reach. A hundred feet away, Chiun smiled and waved, showing no sign he heard Remo’s admonition.

  “Oh, great,” Remo told the Rottweiler. “Now the old goat’s going deaf on top of everything else.”

  The Rottweiler was oblivious to both intruders and continued his Because-He-Can activity. Chiun, however, sneered. “On top of what else, Remo Williams?”

  “I knew you could hear me. I asked you not to touch the FEMbots.”

  “I did not touch it,” Chiun sniffed. “And if I had?” He nudged the robot with his foot. The robot vanished, but not so fast Remo missed seeing it go.

  He also witnessed Chiun’s quick slice-and-snatch, but didn’t comment on that, either. Just sighed and resumed his patrol.

  When the FEMbot reached an altitude of twenty-seven feet, it entered the EDS MUAV LAWZ, and that, naturally, sent the military into a tizzy.

  The door burst open. “Mr. President!”

  The First Lady was instantly awake and sitting up in bed, eyes wild. “What’s happening?”

  “Haven’t I told you folks to knock first?” the President asked.

  “Security emergency! Get up, please. You, too, ma’am.”

  “What kind of security emergency?” the President demanded, putting down the legal pad on which he had been journaling.

  The Secret Service agent tried not to look, but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the notepad for a fraction of a second-just long enough to read the words “Octet of Evil” doodled in big, block comic-book letters. There were many explanation points after it. He looked away quick. “There’s been a breakdown in the FEM system. Please come with me.”

  “Whoa, partner.” The President put his hands up. “A breakdown is not an alarm.”

  “There’s been an anomalous event,” the second Secret Service agent explained.

  Dammit! the first agent thought. He hated it when the Chief Executives started getting cocky. And they all did, right around the third year. But he also hated rookie Secret Service agents. Didn’t he know—you never, ever give the President too much information.

  “Describe anonymous in this pretext,” the President added.

  “Context, dear,” the First Lady said, still frightened.

  “We think we’ve got a micro-unguided air vehicle in the vicinity of the White House,” the agent informed him.

  “This follows an aberrant malfunction in the fielded FEM units,” the rookie added detrimentally.

  “Stay here with the First Lady.” The President swung his legs out of bed and dragged on his long flannel robe, scuffed and patterned to look like suede.

  “We’re here to escort you below.”

  “You will stay here with my wife. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Mr. President—!”

  “Agent,” the President interrupted, “there’s a certain senator whose husband used to be Chief Executive, and this senator is requesting an increased Secret Service guard be assigned to her. Interested in a transfer?”

  The agent began to tremble visibly. “No, thank you, sir. I’d prefer death by fire ants, Mr. President.”

  “Then stay with my missus, Agent, she’s quite nice by comparison.”

  The President made a quick jog to the Oval Office, brushed off the aides and agents who tried to get his attention and slammed the door behind him. A fine powder of plaster crumbled down from the ceiling. The President snatched a phone out of his desk.

  “Yes, Mr. President?” answered the director of CURE.

  “Your boys on the property?”

  “I would assume so, sir.”

  “You told them what I said, didn’t you? That they couldn’t beat my robo-rats, and they took it as a challenge?”

  “Er, that is possible, sir. I’m monitoring the alerts on the Executive Defense System Micro Air Unmanned Vehicle Low Altitude Watch Zone. The signal that caused the alarm was from a small object that was, in fact, traveling away from the White House.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Its mass makes it, possibly, a FEMbot.”

  “But you’re not a hundred percent sure? What if it isn’t your boys?”

  “Do I appear as a boy to you?”

  The President shouted and leaped to his feet. It was the old man, who was standing before the desk as if he had been waiting there patiently for minutes. But the President knew he would have noticed an unexpected senior citizen when he first entered the Oval Office. Especially one with severe sunburn.

  “Is that Master Chiun? May I speak to him?” Smith asked.

  “He may not,” Chiun answered.

  The President hung up. “Why you been havocing up my artificial wildlife?”

  “Because they are a hindrance to the safeguarding of this symbolic domicile and the figurehead who dwells within.”

  “Yeah, well, you busted some of them up. They’re eleven million each.”

  Somehow, there was now on the President’s desk a pile of brown hairy things with wires coming out the end. Squirrel tails! The President sputtered as he counted them. “That’s 122 million U.S. tax dollars down the drain! How’d you like it if I took that out of your salary? I get the impression you’re paid handsomely for your occasional contributions—”