“Too big an area to search. But you wanna go frisk some flounder, hey, be my guest.”

  A wall of glass panes lined the deck. One was a sliding door, which Remo pushed open.

  Amanda noted as Remo and Chiun slipped inside that the two men failed to make a single sound as they walked. She tried to follow their catlike lead but found the hardwood floor creaking underfoot as soon as she followed them inside.

  Amanda cringed at the sound. When Remo caught the look on her face, he shook his head.

  “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Nobody’s here.”

  “Yes,” the Master of Sinanju agreed. “However someone has been here recently.”

  Remo sniffed the air. “Smells like lard and sausages. One of the rooms back at the CCS smelled like that, too.”

  Chiun nodded agreement. “A German,” the old man concluded darkly. “There was a time, Remo, back during the days of that little man with the funny mustache, when all of Europe smelled like this. To this day there are still corners of France that smell like Germany.”

  “No wonder,” Remo said. “They fling open the door and throw up their hands every time some mailman in Dusseldorf hammers a new spike in his helmet. Still, stinking like a German beats stinking like a Frenchman any day of the week.”

  “Shouldn’t you two be quiet?” Amanda whispered. She was glancing nervously around the big living room.

  There were a few pictures on the walls. Remo could tell by their weird Sage Carlin-inspired uniforms which men worked for the CCS.

  “I told you, no one’s here,” Remo said as he tore his gaze from the pictures.

  He had detected another scent in the house. Nose in the air, he tracked it like a bloodhound to the cellar stairs.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked when Remo stopped at the top of the staircase.

  “I smell ammonia,” Remo replied. “Back home I’d think it was just the laundry room, but since this is Europe, where washing day comes only after a good healthy round of black plague…”

  Voice trailing off, Remo headed down the stairs.

  Herr Hahn watched the three glowing figures descend.

  They managed to amaze him yet again. There was no searching of the rest of the house, as Hahn had expected. No trial and error of any kind. They entered the house, steered a beeline for the cellar door and went down.

  Their certainty was unnerving. It was as if all the old rules were gone. All of his understanding of human behavior and ability, honed by years of experience, didn’t apply to these two.

  Yet as troubling as it was, it was also exhilarating. To be the best in his field meant so few challenges. Feeling a melancholy twinge for what he was about to do, Hahn placed his chubby hand on the portable console that sat on the map table in the cabin of his boat.

  As he watched the silhouettes of the men and woman creep deeper into the basement, one fat finger lovingly caressed a gleaming silver toggle switch.

  “This is where he stored them,” Remo said.

  Amanda saw nothing but a dirt cellar floor. An empty floor. But even she could now smell the thin odor of ammonia that lingered in the musty air. “Judging by the marks in the earth, there were more than thirty sacks stored here,” the Master of Sinanju concluded.

  “Burlap sacks,” Remo said. “Big ones.”

  “That would probably be enough to hold all the seeds from the greenhouse plants,” Amanda said. She shook her head in disbelief. “But he couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have.”

  “I thought we were past that,” Remo said. He was looking at something in the corner. “Did he use that?”

  Amanda saw that he was nodding to an antique wooden butter churn. Souring milk was slopped on the tarp on which it sat. Remo noted an old oil lamp hanging next to the churn. Both appeared to have been used recently.

  “Hubert has a thing about machines,” she explained. “I don’t think he’s really comfortable with technology. He uses all kinds of excuses just to get other people to turn on his lights or answer his phone for him.”

  “Not too crazy,” Remo muttered.

  His eyes strayed to the rear of the main cellar room. He saw something lying in the dirt near an open door. Going over, he picked up the tiny blue seed.

  “That shouldn’t be out of the CCS complex,” Amanda said, coming up beside him. “God help us, he has gone insane.”

  “He churns his own butter, won’t turn on a light and has dressed like that for how long and you’re just noticing?” Remo asked dryly.

  The door opened into a separate room off the side of the basement. A few rectangular windows pulled streaks of daylight down to the dirt floor. When the three of them entered the long, dark corridor, Amanda’s nose rebelled at the smell. The dirt floors and stone walls had suppressed it in the outer room.

  “That’s oil,” she complained. A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Oil,” she repeated. “Oh, my.” They were passing by another open room. An old furnace hummed away in the dark recesses. A much newer device had been attached to the front of the ancient furnace.

  “What’s wrong?” Remo asked.

  “Oh,” Amanda said. “Maybe nothing. “It’s just that when I first started at the CCS I remember seeing schematics for an underground system of oil tanks in Dr. Carlin’s office. I thought it was strange because most of the power around here is hydroelectric. I didn’t know why he’d want to store that much oil. The tanks were huge.”

  “Your point being?” Remo asked.

  “The tanks were built into the side of a mountain. This is the side of a mountain. And this used to be Dr. Carlin’s house when he was at the CCS.” Remo stopped dead.

  “Oh,” Amanda said when she saw the look on his face. “You think it might be something? I only remember because it was right after that prediction he made during the Gulf War. When he said those oil well fires would burn for months and change the environment of the entire Gulf region for years to come.” She grew more worried when she saw Remo’s expression grow even darker. “They didn’t,” she added hopefully.

  “We should leave,” Chiun said evenly.

  Remo was thinking of the pressure waves from the surveillance equipment they’d both sensed coming from Lake Geneva. He suddenly felt like a mouse just before the steel bar snapped shut.

  “Right behind you, Little Father,” he said. Shepherding a suddenly very worried Amanda Lifton before them, the two Masters of Sinanju began to cautiously retrace their steps back out to the main cellar.

  Remarkable!

  Hahn watched the infrared monitor image through excited, unblinking eyes.

  They were heading back up the basement hallway. Could it be? Could it possibly be that they had guessed what was in store?

  The three green blobs were back in front of the open door that led to the furnace. They were coming back out.

  Maybe they had seen the modified furnace. Hahn had rigged it for Sage Carlin years ago. Activated it just this afternoon. Could they know?

  He wished he could have asked them, but of course that was impossible. It was time for them to die. The silver antenna was already up on the remote transmitter. It was aimed across the deck of Hahn’s boat at the magnificent chalet nestled among the lower Alps.

  A cold wind blew across the lake, swirling through the open cabin door, cutting Herr Hahn to the bone. Eyes on the chalet, Herr Hahn flicked the toggle switch.

  The monitor flashed bright, consumed from corner to corner and top to bottom by a wash of brilliant green.

  And in the rocks above Lake Geneva, an orange fireball vomiting up from the very bowels of Hell itself erupted from the smoking crater where Hubert St. Clair’s house had been.

  Chapter 10

  The click saved their lives.

  They heard it as they passed the open door to the furnace room. It was a soft thing that became inaudible in the ensuing roar.

  A brilliant orange flash burst from the black mouth of the dark room. A wall of searing flame and heat whooshed forward, erupting into the hall.

  When the click sounded, Remo and Chiun went from a walk to a sprint. They tore down the slender passage a heartbeat ahead of the blast.

  Chiun had scooped up Amanda. In his arms the world around her seemed to slow, then freeze.

  Not enough time to make it out into the main cellar. Frozen flames, locked in time, rocketing in at impossible speed.

  Amanda suddenly airborne. Remo’s arms encircling her waist. Chiun, flames licking at the hem of his kimono, launching himself up at one of the dirty basement windows.

  The glass shattering. Then flying at Amanda. No way to avoid it. She was a deadly human spear, fired at speeds greater than the explosion or the flames, faster even than conscious thought.

  Out! In the cold mountain air, with bony hands grabbing her once more.

  Running.

  Time tripping back to normal speed.

  The house exploded. Windows burst, scattering diamond fragments across the Swiss hillside. The wood splintered apart and spread like burning matchsticks as the ball of orange flame burst from Earth’s ruptured molten core.

  The intense heat chased them down the driveway and out into the street. Still Chiun ran, Amanda thrown over one shoulder. Even when he stopped, he danced through falling fragments of Hubert St. Clair’s chalet.

  Chiun set Amanda to the street. She reeled in place as she tried to get her bearings.

  It all seemed to have happened in an instant. In a fiery blur she’d gone from standing in the cellar to dodging flaming house chunks out beyond Dr. St. Clair’s twisted front gate.

  The heat from the oil-fed fire pushed them back. Acrid smoke poured out of the jagged hole where the upper story had been. The roof had been blown off completely.

  Amanda fought the fire for oxygen, panting to catch her breath. For a moment, her Lifton pretensions burned away. The money, the cars, the hotels—none of it seemed to matter as much as her life. She looked gratefully at the two men who had saved her.

  She saw only Chiun. Worry formed deep in the lines of his weathered face as he watched the fire. “Where’s Remo?” Amanda asked.

  She glanced back at the chalet. The bottom-floor walls were starting to collapse into the central crater. Flames of orange crackled and danced.

  “He did get out, didn’t he?” she asked, her voice growing very small.

  Chiun didn’t reply. His expression carved in stone, he watched impassively as perdition claimed the sunny Swiss mountainside.

  Herr Hahn kept his eyes off the thermal-imaging unit from the moment he pressed the toggle switch. With that much heat exploding into light, if he’d seen it he would have been blinking away stars for the rest of the week.

  He watched out the boat’s cabin window as a thick curl of angry black smoke rose from the hills above the cold waves of Lake Geneva.

  Thanks to all that oil buried in the underground tanks, the fire would burn for hours.

  An oil-well fire in the Alps.

  As the hired killer of the Congress of Concerned Scientists, Hahn had found the notion intriguing. It gave him the opportunity to test his engineering and technical skills. Of course it was an extravagant way to demolish the chalet, but the CCS wasn’t lacking for donations. And this method had one side benefit, unknown when the tanks were first installed. The two men who had survived the CCS greenhouse could not possibly have made it out alive.

  They along with the pesky girl—who was his true target—were cinders by now.

  Savoring the victory over the only interesting targets he had ever encountered, Hahn gathered up his binoculars from the table in his boat cabin. There was a plate of pfeffernuesse next to them. Hahn blew powdered sugar from the lenses before aiming the binoculars at the hillside.

  The sound of emergency vehicles already rose in the distance. Sirens howled over the cold wind. What was left of the wooden house was engulfed in flames. As Hahn watched, the burning walls fell into themselves.

  It would be days before fire officials learned about the oil tanks, days before they realized why the fire had taken so long to put out. By the time it was extinguished, there wouldn’t be so much as a tooth or scrap of bone left of Herr Hahn’s latest victims.

  Herr Hahn was about to lower the binoculars when he caught a brief flash of movement near the driveway of St. Clair’s chalet.

  Fire and police officials wouldn’t be there already. Probably gawking neighbors.

  Hahn shifted his great bulk in his creaking chair, backtracking with the glasses.

  When he found the source of movement, Herr Hahn shot to his feet as if someone had wired his chair. The pfeffernuesse plate tumbled to the floor along with a stein of thick German beer. The plate shattered, and little cookie balls rolled across the cabin floor.

  It couldn’t be.

  The old Asian stood at the mouth of the driveway. Along with him was the Lifton woman. As Hahn watched in shock, the Asian ran back up the driveway.

  The old man rounded the ruins of the house. The heat from the fire should have been unbearable. Yet he seemed unmindful as he ran.

  Hahn’s brain could not reconcile this with the world he knew.

  He couldn’t have gotten out. Hahn had tracked them with the thermal sensors to the last possible instant. They were trapped in the basement. He had detonated the explosive cap attached to the furnace when they were standing in front of the door. In Herr Hahn’s world, men did not outrun explosions.

  Maybe there were two old men. Another woman who resembled Amanda Lifton. He didn’t see the younger man. Maybe he didn’t have a twin. Maybe the sole young one had been properly killed in the blast that had obliterated the twins of the old Asian and Amanda Lifton.

  This ludicrous speculation flitted through Herr Hahn’s brain in a shocked instant. All such conjecture ended the moment Hahn saw a new figure race out from behind the wall of flame.

  It looked as if the fire was holding on to him, but Herr Hahn soon realized that the young one’s shirt was ablaze. He stopped, did a little pirouette, and the flames winked out. It was as if that simple move had created a vacuum, extinguishing the fire.

  The old Asian raced up to the young American. Sharp hands slapped furiously at the back of the young one’s shirt.

  They appeared to argue for a moment, the young one pushing away the old one’s slapping hands. But then the attention of both seemed to be drawn in another direction. Like two heads controlled by a single mind, the two men turned their eyes down the hill.

  They didn’t search the waters of Lake Geneva. There was no uncertainty. No hesitation at all. It was as if they were possessed with an ability to focus in like laser beams on something that was breaking into their conscious sphere.

  They found the boat.

  They found the man on the deck of the boat. Together, they stared down the binoculars of Herr Hahn.

  And then they began loping down the hill toward him.

  “You didn’t have to slap me like that,” Remo complained as they bounded down the steep hill toward the distant lake.

  “True,” Chiun replied. He leaped over a boulder, landing at a sprint. “I could have left you to cook like a pig on a spit.”

  A broad black rock surface appeared suddenly on the hill before them. Remo’s legs split like a hurdler’s as he soared over an angled crevice in the rock face. Chiun bounded down after him. They continued on. “I was already out,” Remo snarled.

  “I thought I saw an ember.”

  “Ember shmember. You were ticked because you thought I’d got myself blowed up real good. If Amanda had slowed me down a second more, I might have.”

  “Do not blame the woman,” Chiun said, leaping down over a knot of pines that was growing up from a sheer rock face on the mountainside. “And if I am upset with anything, it is your new habit of causing every dwelling we enter to spontaneously combust. Really, Remo, how do you expect me to get home insurance for any future Castle Sinanju if you persist in playing with matches?”

  Remo ignored him.

  The mountain angled flat. Remo vaulted a hedge, landing in someone’s backyard. Chiun floated in after him.

  They flew past another chalet set into the hill and exploded out onto a narrow road. The lake was closer than it had been, but it was still too far away. More rooftops peeked from pine trees below. Beyond, the boat still sat in the cold waters of Lake Geneva. The man with the binoculars was no longer on the deck. Both boat and lake vanished as they raced into another grove of trees.

  “That wasn’t St. Clair,” Remo said. “If he’s the one at the greenhouse, too, I can’t wait to get my hands on him.”

  “We may not get the chance,” the Master of Sinanju pointed out.

  In spite of an area of over two hundred square miles, Remo’s keen ears isolated the same, lone sound Chiun had detected over all the other lake noise.

  It was the sound of a boat engine misfiring. Remo’s face grew grim. Feet flying over treacherous rock, the two men continued racing down the steep slope.

  “Start, damn you, start!” Herr Hahn snapped.

  As a rule, he rarely spoke. But with no one around to hear him, it didn’t matter. And right now, maintaining his habitual silence was the least of his troubles.

  A choking splutter sounded at the rear of the boat. He stabbed the ignition switch. Nothing. No time to check the engine. The last he had seen, they were halfway down the hill. The two men were still three-quarters of a mile up on rough terrain, darting in and out of tree cover and between tidy Swiss homes. But the speed at which they were descending was inhuman.

  In the boat cabin, Hahn’s round face glistened with sweat. His armpits were moons of freezing perspiration.

  “Start, start, start…”

  The boat engine coughed and spluttered but wouldn’t turn over. Herr Hahn didn’t believe in prayer, but at that moment he said a silent entreaty to every thief, pirate and murderer who had come before him to deliver him from the two men who were running at him with death in their eyes.

  Holding his breath, Hahn struck the button again. The engine coughed once and roared to life.

  Hands shaking, he grabbed frantically at the steering column and the throttle stick. Shoving the throttle to the max, he sent the boat bobbing and zooming across the frothy waves of Lake Geneva.