“About the damn calc test! I cannot fail another damn calc test!”

  “Maybe you should study,” Jack suggested. Cescepi knew Goodwin had no intention of negotiating with Fast. He was simply psyching himself up to attack the boy. Eventually, Goodwin raised a fist.

  “Knock it off, Neil! There’s no need to get into a fight about this.”

  Cescepi shook his head, amazed. That kid was still smiling as if he didn’t know what was about to hit him.

  Then Goodwin struck. Nancy screamed. Jack Fast raised his own arm to defend himself, but his arm moved extraordinarily fast, knocking Goodwin’s punch back the way it had come.

  “Aw, gee, I’m sorry, Neil,” Fast said.

  “You broke my fucking arm! You son of a fucking bitch, you broke my fucking arm!”

  Cescepi couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Goodwin’s right arm was indeed wobbling at an unnatural angle. He was on his knees on the artificial turf, holding it. “Oh, that’s terrible,” Fast said. “It’s an elbow break, too.”

  “You’re hyperextended,” Nancy pointed out helpfully. “The whole joint failed. You’re going to need to have the joint replaced.”

  “Huh?” Goodwin grunted, confused and in pain.

  “They can work miracles with stainless steel,” Nancy said. “Three or four surgeries, maybe eighteen months of physical therapy, and you’ll be able to write your name again.”

  “I guess you’re not gonna get that football scholarship, though,” Fast said regretfully.

  Goodwin looked as if he had been slapped, understanding dawning in his mulelike eyes.

  Of course. No college was going to give a football scholarship to a kid who couldn’t play football. Even if he could pick up a ball again in eighteen months, there would be no place to play, so he’d never get a chance at another scholarship.

  Neil Goodwin’s future had been crushed and ruined along with his elbow joint.

  Goodwin launched himself at Jack Fast, rising off the turf with a bellow that was part pain, part rage, and his ruined arm flopped at his side while his good arm sought Fast’s throat.

  Jack Fast blocked Goodwin, just as he had before, but the forearm blow was so powerful it sent Goodwin’s arm flying around his back, shattering most of the bones of his forearm and wrist. Goodwin collapsed, moaning.

  Goodwin’s friends were getting agitated.

  “Maybe one of you should call an ambulance,” Nancy suggested.

  The boys looked at one another, then one of them remembered his cell phone. He yanked it out, then looked at Nancy questioningly. Actually, he was looking at the slight scoop in the very low front of her low-ride jeans.

  “Nine,” she suggested.

  He looked up at her face, then at his phone, nodded and poked a button.

  “One,” Nancy said.

  He nodded again, poked the phone, looked at Nancy.

  “One.”

  “I already did one.”

  “You need to do another one.”

  “Oh.”

  He poked it and began conversing with the emergency dispatch. Goodwin’s moans were becoming sobs.

  “That was a pretty good block, Jack,” said one of Goodwin’s buddies.

  “Thanks, Larry.”

  “Maybe you should have played football.”

  “Aw, jeez, thanks, but I’m not that good.”

  “Okay,” said the boy with the cell phone. “Thanks a lot. No, no hurry.” He closed the phone and looked triumphantly at Nancy. “They’ll be here in a while.”

  “How long?” Goodwin gasped.

  “I don’t know. They’ve got some real emergencies to get to first. Not like you got anything else to do— for the rest of your life.”

  The boy guffawed and gave Nancy a thumbs-up. She rewarded him with a smile that he never forgot, then Jack said, “Sorry we can’t stay. We’ve got a 7:30 movie to catch.”

  “Jack, wait!”

  Dean Cescepi jogged up as they were getting into Jack’s car.

  “I was up in the booth. I saw what happened.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Nancy Fielding exclaimed. “You’re not going to get all legal on him, are you?”

  Cescepi smirked. “Ms. Fielding, Jack was only defending himself from Mr. Goodwin’s assaults, as I plainly witnessed. But I have got to know, Jack—” Cescepi was grinning conspiratorially “—how’d you do it?”

  Jack smiled. “East German judo.”

  Cescepi’s grin faltered.

  “Freedom-fighters in East Germany developed it in the 1960s. My dad taught it to me.”

  “East German judo?”

  “Okay, how did you really do it?” Nancy asked when they were driving away.

  Jack held out his right arm. “Pull off my sleeve.”

  Nancy pulled the sleeve of his windbreaker off and gasped. Jack’s arm looked artificial, smooth and plastic and swollen to twice its normal girth.

  “What is it?”

  “Human amplification technology. I found the plans on the MIT website.”

  Nancy stroked the arm. “Pneumatics?” she asked.

  “No. Too slow and bulky. It’s magnetic fibers in flexible resin. Electrical currents make the fibers constrict. You bunch them together to imitate muscles.”

  “Wow,” Nancy said, enjoying the feel of the arm. “What other kinds of human amplification can you do with this stuff?”

  “Any kind,” Fast said, but it took him a few seconds to see where she was heading. “Oh!”

  They never made it to the 7:30 showing of Charlie’s Angels in the Matrix.

  Chapter 11

  They were on their final approach into Barcelona when Mark Howard said to Remo, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how Freya had learned so much from Sunny Joe Roam.”

  “Yes?” Remo didn’t look away from the window. He wasn’t keen on revisiting this topic again.

  “She said goodbye to you. You know what, she was really saying goodbye to her dad. Really.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you see, Remo? She wasn’t faking it. You’re her dad and she knows that and she believes it in her heart Sunny Joe is her grandfather and maybe her mentor and maybe even her adopted father in some ways, but you’re her dad. You could hear it.”

  Remo tried to think about the rather mundane event of leaving the village of Sun On Jo. He had gone in and kissed her goodbye and then she’d come to the door. “’Bye, Daddy!” she’d said, while Mark Howard stood there seeing little red hearts and stars.

  Now that he thought about it, it sounded very true. He smiled.

  Remo Williams felt happy. Despite all the weirdness and horrific events that had brought Freya to where she was, despite Remo’s absence from so much of her life, she saw Remo as her dad.

  What could be better than that?

  Mark Howard deemed it worthwhile to make himself useful. He drove the rental Mercedes, easily finding the way to the home of Allessandro Cote.

  “He’s a well-known arms distributor, working mostly through legitimate channels,” Dr. Smith informed them after he researched the name briefly. “He’s known to have been a primary benefactor of the flood of arms out of Iraq after the last war. At least a thousand Kalashnikov rifles went through his system to end up in the hands of street gangs on the West Coast, mostly Los Angeles. Another five to eight thousand AKs are suspected to have been shipped into Colombia on both sides of the conflict. On the other hand, he’s done enough legitimate trade with enough legal entities around the world that he’s created a safety net. Not many people seem eager to prosecute his occasional indiscretions.”

  “I am,” Remo said. “But he’s a reseller, so who did he resell the Gee-DAM to?”

  “Watch your language when speaking to your emperor and his regent,” Chiun warned.

  “What I don’t understand is why he bought the plans in Morocco at all,” Mark Howard added. “I mean, the Gee-DAM was stolen by a professional arms trade outfit, we assume. Cote is also a professional arms trader. What did they need with the bazaar in Casablanca?”

  “That puzzled me, as well,” Smith said over the speakerphone. “The answer is that they would not. It was clearly a ploy, maybe designed to give them adequate warning of your arrival in Barcelona. They may have an ambush in mind.”

  “Their trap will fail,” Chiun declared.

  “They obviously know something of our activities,” Smith pointed out. “You saw the videotape. Master Chiun?”

  “They know one of us wears a kimono. Who doesn’t?” Remo pointed out. “Remember the press conference in Washington a few months ago?”

  “We locked it down. We know of no media feeds made public from that event,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, but did you notice that there were maybe forty reporters on the scene? They’d remember a guy in a kimono. That’s just the latest public appearance by the Man in the Silk Pajamas. He’s a tough one to miss in your average crowd of non-kimono-wearing Americans.”

  “Enough!” Chiun snapped. “I dislike being discussed as if I am not present.”

  ‘I’m just saying, is all.” Remo shrugged. “You’ve been spotted, taped, broadcast and publicized. How many times I can’t even guess.”

  “My garments, perhaps, but my face is still unknown,” Chiun insisted.

  “Thousands of people have seen you over the years, Chiun,” Remo said. “Face it, you attract people’s attention. Now somebody remembers seeing you, and maybe he has decided you work for some sort of a government agency, and is trying to draw you out”

  “Shush, imbecile!”

  “I’m afraid Remo may be correct. Master Chiun,” Smith said.

  “This conversation is designed to intimidate me into giving up my traditional garb,” Chiun said accusingly.

  “No,” Smith said, but he allowed the word to linger a little too long. “This conversation is intended to warn you to a possible danger in Barcelona: We do not know what they know, but it appears they have baited us here for some reason.”

  “We’ll stay frosty,” Remo assured him.

  “I shall not stay frosty.” Chiun glowered.

  “You’ll stay grumpy.”

  “Fah!”

  The neighborhood Allessandro Cote called, home dated back at least two centuries. The homes were small castles erected on vast estates looking out over the Mediterranean Sea.

  “I guess selling murder is good business,” Remo said. “Or was he born to the wealthy parents and sells guns as a hobby?”

  “His father was a bus driver in Madrid,” Mark explained as he drove them along the manicured, semiprivate drive that meandered behind the seafront estates. “He bought the house from the government after the owners went bankrupt.”

  “We’ll call you when we need a ride home,” Remo said.

  Howard was about to ask where they wanted to be left off, but heard the brief thunk of car doors and realized that he was alone. He had never even slowed down. He looked in the rearview mirror and never saw Chiun and Remo, but he knew they must have entered a nearby decorative row of Mediterranean trees.

  He rolled down the window and continued driving down the isolated road, enjoying the fragrant semitropical breezes.

  The old brick home looked like something medieval, like an old church, but it had been augmented in recent decades with a white stucco addition the size of a small shopping mall. The walls were freshly whitewashed. The clay-tile roof would have been quaint if there weren’t acres and acres of it. The addition had probably tripled the square footage of interior space in the home, and it descended with the mountainside, halfway to the shore below.

  The pair of shadows slipped among the cultivated gardens of temperate-climate plants with less noise than the salt-laden breeze.

  Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus, smelled the fragrant salt air and the gentle sea breeze and became cold inside.

  “Nice digs,” Remo said when he and Chiun stood unseen in the shadows of a palm tree grove adjoining the structure. “Let’s move here after we kick out the Boomstick Baron.”

  Chiun said nothing.

  “What’s with you?” Remo asked.

  “Have you embraced your speck, Remo?”

  “What speck?”

  Chiun pierced him with a glare.

  “Oh, my fear speck,” Remo said. “I haven’t forgotten what we talked about, Little Father.”

  “Good.”

  “But I don’t know what these creeps could throw at us that we can’t handle.”

  “That is right, you do not know,” Chiun snapped. “And yet, wicked men are innovators in the ways of poison and torture and murder. Most of their efforts are no more dangerous than the rocks lobbed by baboons, but we do not know what is in this house.”

  Remo was getting worried now. “Chiun, this isn’t like you. Do you know something I don’t know?”

  Chiun shook his head. “There is something. Perhaps.” He held out his hands, as if warming them at a campfire. “It is strange.”

  Remo frowned and held out his hands, too. He tried to feel whatever it was that had upset Chiun.

  He shook his head and opened his mouth, to say he felt nothing, and then it was there, like a flicker of movement just outside his vision.

  “You felt it?” Chiun asked.

  “I felt something. I don’t know what.”

  “Yes.”

  “Seems sort of familiar. Sort of like a pressure shift or a temperature change or something.”

  Chiun nodded. “But not those things.”

  “I don’t know. It came and went so fast I couldn’t get a taste of it.”

  It wasn’t often that he and Chiun ran up against something foreign to their experience, and now he was worried. “You’ll be pleased to know I found the speck.”

  Chiun didn’t look pleased.

  Allessandro Cote paced through the ballroom where once the aristocrats of Barcelona had met to dance and make merry. The aristocrats were dead. Their progeny had failed to sustain their wealth or dignity. They were back among the rabble as they deserved to be, surrendering the symbols of prestige to those who had earned, rather than inherited, a place of importance in the world.

  “This won’t do,” Allessandro Cote complained. His accent was British with effeminate Spanish undertones. “Jenkins!”

  The impossibly gaunt man who came through the servants’ entrance at the rear of the ballroom was dressed in a butler’s formal coat and tails. He could not have looked more uncomfortable in the get-up.

  “Yes, Mr. Cote?”

  Normally, Cote would have relished the perfection of the performance. Gomez had done an admirable job of learning his new role, as much as he had complained about it.

  “Ring Fastbinder for me, will you, Jenkins?”

  “Si. Yes!” Gomez swallowed the mistake and put back on his supremely bored face. “Certainly, suh, I’ll ring him at once.” Gomez/Jenkins walked slowly and deliberately to the rear of the room and through the servants’ entrance.

  “I’ll have to dock the old git’s wages if he can’t learn to speak properly,” Cote complained, sipping his tea, which was actually coffee.

  Jenkins relaxed into Gomez when he was out of the ballroom. He, too, was muttering to himself, words of encouragement and self-recrimination, all in his native Spanish. “You can do this. It’s just playing a part. You’ve played tougher roles than this.” He took the antique phone, sterling silver with ivory inlay, and lifted the original metal dial to expose the touch-pad that had been retrofitted into it. He poked out the number for Fastbinder in the United States and got the kid instead.

  “Hiya, Jenkins,” said the kid. “How’s the butler bit going for you these days?”

  “Fine, Master Jack. May I have your father, please?”

  “It’s for you. Dad! He’ll be here in a minute, Jenkins.”

  “That will be fine.”

  “You know, you need some sort of a gimmick to complete the image, Jenkins.”

  “A gimmick, Master Jack?”

  “You know, Oddjob. He had the hat that sliced people’s head off?”

  “I don’t have much call for slicing off heads.”

  “There was Jaws, you know, the big guy with the steel teeth? Or there was the one movie with the babe who was into pain.”

  “I fear I am not following you. Master Jack.”

  “Point is, Jenkins, all the bodyguards have some sort of special feature or trick.”

  “Yes?”

  “So I started thinking about shoes. What if I gave you shoes with dart guns in them? It’d be real easy. All we’d need is a compressed-gas cartridge in the sole of the shoes and a series of firing tubes in the soles. Maybe make one a long-distance, high-accuracy projectile, one a fast-acting poison, maybe pack the others with flechettes. You know, little barbed suckers that would bury themselves into skin?”

  “I don’t see this as truly necessary. Master Jack.”

  “It’s no trouble. Then we’d have a series of switches inside the shoe. A certain combination of toe work would turn off the safety, then you could fire at the enemy as needed.”

  “Listen, kid, cut me some slack, would you, por favor?” said Jenkins, dropping the act and becoming a sad-looking Gomez. “I’m going loco trying to play the British-butler routine as it is. I don’t think I could pull it off if it got any more complicated.”

  “Read you loud and clear, amigo,” the kid said, just as cheerful as ever. “You ever change your mind, you let me know. I’ll work up some nice offensive footwear weaponry for you.”

  “Sounds great,” Gomez said.

  “Here’s Dad.”

  Gomez wrenched himself back into the Jenkins persona when Fastbinder came on the line.

  “Allessandro?”

  “No, suh. One moment, suh.”

  “Gomez, do not tell me he has you serving up the phone.”

  ‘Yes, suh. Exactly, suh.” Jenkins had the receiver on a silver tray with a starched white linen doily. He carried the tray to the servants’ entrance, trailing the cord for the phone behind him. The cord was eighty yards long—it had to be to reach from the small servants workstation to the far side of the ballroom.

  “Hurry it up, at least, will you, Jenkins?”

  “I am proceeding swiftly, suh.”

  Gomez the Spanish street thug, murderer and occasional actor had endured a number of trials as he learned to become Jenkins, the English butler for the formal British household of Mr. Allessandro Cote.