Mob Psychology td-87 Read online

  Nothing moved in the LCN computer room. Nothing could move because in each corner of the ceiling, boxy devices resembling security cameras looked down. Instead of lenses, tiny wafers of supersensitive quartz silently scanned the room, ready to trigger an alarm at the slightest breeze or change in air pressure.

  And in his armored room, Carmine Imbruglia blinked at his personal terminal and stabbed at the keyboard with two stubby fingers, pausing often to correct mistakes, confident that he was as untouchable as Eliot Ness.

  It was while updating his ever-burgeoning sports book that he experienced his first brush with computer trouble.

  For some reason, the words and numbers on the screen began to duplicate themselves, repeating endlessly until they filled the screen like a million tiny amber spiders swarming behind the glareproof glass.

  When the black screen had turned a solid amber, large black letters appeared against the warm brilliant glow.

  "What the fug is happenin' now?" snarled Don Carmine Imbruglia, pounding the suddenly dead keys.

  Chapter 39

  Remo pulled into the deserted parking lot of the Manet Building and remarked, "Bruno said the don's holed up on the fifth floor with an old tommy gun, no less. There's only one way in or out. So tell me how we're going to sneak up on him? Zip through the motion-sensitive field really fast?"

  "That would be too easy," said the Master of Sinanju, arranging the skirts of his sable-and-gold kimono. "For you require a lesson that will stick in your white mind."

  "You're too kind," Remo said dryly, looking at the silverblue building facade and thinking that it looked like it had been faced with old mirrored sunglasses. "How?"

  "It is simple, Remo. Instead of blundering in, we will take our time."

  "Okay," Remo said good-naturedly. "Lead and I will follow. "

  They popped a window on the ground floor. It was held in place by a black aluminum frame. No studs or fasteners.

  As Remo watched, the Master of Sinanju simply laid one flat hand against the center of the pane. It began to bulge inward.

  Just when it looked like it was about to shatter from the strain, the Master of Sinanju spoke a single word and stepped back.

  The word was "Catch."

  Remo saw the mirrored pane explode toward him like an abstract arrow released from a bow. He faded back, bringing both hands up and held flat before his face.

  When the raised surfaces of his palms made contact with the slickness of the glass, Remo pivoted in place.

  Surface tension, acting as a glue, brought the glass around with him. When it was at the apogee of its turn, momentum transferred in the opposite direction and the pane let go and knifed into a patch of salt marsh like a square blade.

  The Master of Sinanju bowed mischievously and gestured for Remo to precede him.

  "Youth before excellence," said Chiun, beaming.

  "You made your point," Remo said, hoisting himself in through the opening.

  "Perhaps," said Chiun, floating in after him. "Perhaps not. "

  They found themselves in a room that might have been transplanted intact from Atlantic City. There were roulette wheels and black jack tables and other gambling fixtures. They passed through this into the deserted lobby.

  "Okay," Remo undertoned. "Now we hit the fifth floor. So how do we do it?"

  The Master of Sinanju stabbed the up button beside the gleaming steel elevator door.

  "By taking the elevator," said Chiun.

  Remo frowned. He didn't like the cavalier attitude the Master of Sinanju had been taking to a dangerous situation. He decided to play along, and take control if necessary.

  They stepped off on the fifth floor into a nondescript curving corridor, except for the undersmell of garlic.

  The room they wanted was clearly marked. It said

  "COMPUTERTRY. "

  "Okay, tell me the trick," Remo hissed.

  Instead of replying, the Master of Sinanju took hold of the doorknob. He turned to his pupil.

  "You must be very, very patient. And quiet. Can you be both?"

  "Sure. "

  "Then we will begin. You will do as I do. Nothing more. And nothing less."

  Remo watched the Master of Sinanju. But Chiun did not move, or appear to move. His eyes on Remo, his hand on the doorknob, he simply stood there. Several minutes passed. Five. Then ten. Remo frowned. He opened his lips to speak.

  Chiun's free hand came up to his dry lips so fast it seemed there was no intervening motion. The hand was at his side. Then it was before his lips, admonishing Remo to silence.

  Remo held his tongue. His dark eyes darted to the door. To his surprise, he saw that it was open a crack. He kept watching, interest dawning on his face.

  Five more minutes passed. The door was slowly being drawn open-so slowly that even Remo could not detect motion. Only a slow elapsed-time result.

  When finally the door was open enough to admit them, Chiun beckoned with a quiet gesture. Beckoned for Remo to follow.

  It was twenty minutes later before the Master of Sinanju had eased himself through the door. Remo matched his movements, pacing himself to the extreme slow motion of his teacher's body language.

  For Remo it was excruciatingly, agonizingly, painstakingly boring. It was so boring, his back started to itch.

  But it worked. He found himself inside the room in a little less than ninety minutes. He took no steps. His feet simply crept along the carpet, a micro-inch at a time, neither lifting nor stepping, but achieving a kind of flat-footed sliding locomotion that the ceiling-mounted quartz motion detectors could not detect because although Remo and Chiun were displacing the still air in the computer room, they were not disturbing it.

  Remo was glad Chiun had made him remove his silk suit and shirt at the construction yard. The fine hairs along his bare arms acted as sensory receptors, enabling him to pace himself so he didn't trigger warning eddies of air.

  Since it was taking them literally hours to cross the room, Remo had plenty of time to take in the computer screens arrayed in work stations on either side of the corridor leading to the blank door behind which Don Carmine labored under a false sense of security.

  He noticed that one by one the screens began to fill up with symbols that crowded and overlapped themselves like wire-frame jigsaw puzzles. Like amber cataracts forming on cyclopean eyes, the screens turned a uniform blind amber.

  Then big black cut-out like letters appeared.

  Remo wondered what a "hard dynamic abort" was.

  He had a lot of time to think about it. They had entered the Manet Building just after one o'clock in the afternoon. It was approaching six-thirty now and there remained a good twenty feet between them and the blank door. It was dark. The sun had set.

  It was like walking underwater, except without the water. So as to keep his metabolism cycled down, Remo had to keep breathing in a shallow way that was almost suffocating. He wanted to scream, to unleash the frustrated pent-up energy that was coursing through his body.

  But Remo knew the Master of Sinanju was testing his patience as well as demonstrating his own superior skills. Remo would not allow himself to fall short. Even if he did strongly suspect Chiun of moving even more slowly than neccessary to prolong Remo's ordeal.

  As they made their slow way through the computer room, Remo spent most of his time staring at the translucent skin of the back of Chiun's bald head. He thought about all the difficult times that lay behind them. The long months of separation. The terrible battle Remo had fought in the Middle East without the Master of Sinanju by his side. And how badly he had botched his mission, without Chiun there to guide him. And he remembered why he had been so concerned about his mentor. Chiun was a century old. And he looked it, even if he did not act it.

  Remo expressed a thought.

  I love you, Little Father.

  And in the dimness of his mind, he seemed to hear a reply.

  You should.

  Remo would have grinned, but the mere act
of smiling was apt to trigger air currents. He held the warm feeling inside him for the remainder of the passage it seemed as endless as Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe-across the room.

  The door was inching closer. A mere dozen feet away, or less than an hour at their current pace.

  Don Carmine Imbruglia would never know what hit him.

  They would have made it except that the blank panel abruptly acquired a dozen black eyes created by .45-caliber slugs punching out through the veneer and steel.

  Alarm bells began to ring.

  Remo lunged forward to pluck Chiun out of the myriad bullet tracks.

  He was hopelessly late. The Master of Sinanju dropped in place, as if a trapdoor had opened under his feet. The bullets snarled over his aged head. Coming at Remo.

  Remo slipped off to one side, just in time to evade the outer edge of the spreading spray of slugs.

  All over the room, computer screens shattered and gave up smoke and hissing blue-white sparks. Then the long room went completely dark as, in unison, the rows of amber screens winked out.

  As his eyes adjusted to the utter lack of light, Remo detected the shadowy form of the Master of Sinanju coming to his feet and sweeping purposefully toward the bullet-riddled door.

  He barely paused at the door. His fingers went into convenient bullet holes. Then the Master of Sinanju turned. The door was suddenly wrenched off its hinges and hurled backward, where it flattened a dead terminal to a mass of plastic and mangled circuit boards.

  Chiun stepped into the room.

  Remo moved in, hard and fast.

  And stopped dead at the threshold. Inside, Don Carmine Imbruglia had reared up from his chair, the smoking tommy gun dangling in the crook of one muscular arm. His tiny eyes glared at the ruin of a terminal on the Formica card table before him.

  It had been the target of Don Carmine's violent outburst, Remo realized.

  "I was robbed!" he was howling. "The fuggin' computer's completely busted."

  "Nice shot," Remo said in the darkness.

  "Who's that? Who's there?"

  "Call me Remo."

  "I call you dead, cogsugger," said Don Carmine, yanking back on the charging bolt of his weapon.

  "And what do you call me, Roman?" came the squeaky voice of the Master of Sinanju.

  In the act of bringing his tommy gun up to bear, Don Carmine turned toward the unexpected sound.

  "I know that voice. You're the fuggin' Jap thief "

  "Don't call him-" Remo started to say.

  Don Carmine Imbruglia never completed his turn. A sandaled foot grazed his kneecaps, turning them to powder. A long-nailed hand took hold of the muzzle of his weapon.

  When Don Carmine collapsed, his hands were empty.

  The Master of Sinanju made short work of the tommy. The barrel came loose like a pipe being separated from an elbow joint. The drum broke open, raining bullets. Various pieces of the breech and stock were reduced to wood shavings and metal filings under the friction of Chiun's high-speed manipulations.

  "What the fug happened?" came the dull voice of Don Carmine, looking at his stung, empty hands.

  "You called him a Jap," Remo pointed out.

  "Well, he is, ain't he?"

  "Oops! You did it again."

  Don Carmine felt something like steel darning needles take up his wrist. They squeezed inexorably. Don Carmine screamed. The pain was frightening, like being injected with dozens of acid-filled hypodermics.

  "You can't do this to me!" howled Don Carmine through his agony. "I know my rights. You got nothing on me without my computers, and they just took a dive. So there. Go peddle your papers elsewhere. I'm the fuggin' Kingpin of Boston. "

  "And here's your fuggin' crown," said Remo, picking up the bullet-riddled IDC terminal and jamming it over Don Carmine's head like an astronaut's helmet.

  A muffled cursing came from within the terminal.

  The Master of Sinanju took hold of the terminal to steady it, Don Carmine's head with it. He separated his hands, then brought them together.

  Runkk!

  Don Carmine's futuristic head was suddenly two feet narrower and half afoot higher. It hovered in the darkness, balanced on the mafioso's thick neck for long moments.

  With a last guttering spark and hiss, it fell across the table legs. Don Carmine's limbs twitched a little, as if feeding off the electricity in the terminal. Then he lay still.

  In the darkness, Remo looked up at Chiun.

  "We were supposed to find out if anyone else knew how to run the LANSCII program," Remo pointed out.

  Chiun shrugged shadowy shoulders. "He called me an unforgivable name." His smile came dimly. "Also, he was the last to labor under that misconception. I could not allow him to slander the Master of Sinanju further. What would my ancestors think?"

  Remo searched his mind for an appropriate comeback. He never found it. Instead, he said quietly, "They would be proud of you, Little Father. As I am."

  And in the darkness, the two Masters of Sinanju bowed to one another in mutual respect.

  From a pay phone in the foyer of a nearby Chinese restaurant, Remo was explaining what had happened to Harold W. Smith.

  "Just to make sure, we shattered every computer in the place," Remo was saying. "Believe me, there were a lot of them."

  Thorough but unnecessary," said Smith approvingly. "But they were already useless. I had programmed the LANSCII disk Chiun stole with a computer virus called a time bomb. Once Don Carmine had it reinstalled, it has been silently replicating itself over and over until it filled all available memory in every system in the LCN network, literally paralyzing it."

  "Was that the hard dynamic abort I saw?" Remo asked.

  "It was."

  "Well, it set Don Carmine off. He shot up his own system when he couldn't get it working. He nearly nailed Chiun and me while we were moving in on him."

  "Without knowing how much memory we were dealing with," said Smith, "there was no way to predict when system-wide paralysis would be achieved. Besides, you and Chiun are too quick to be stopped by mere bullets."

  "Not at that particular moment, we weren't," said Remo, noticing the Master of Sinanju through the glass doors. "Okay, that's a wrap. I've gotta get Chiun back to civilization fast. "

  "Why do you say that, Remo?" Smith wondered.

  "He's found out how cheap real estate is up here. If I don't get him across the state line soon, he's going to have us living here. "

  "It is not a bad idea, Remo."

  "It is a terrible idea, Smitty. Put it out of your mind."

  "We have several important matters to address," Smith said levelly. "Your new face. The disposition of your home. The-"

  Remo hung up, saying, "The sheer pleasure of our wonderful working relationship."

  He joined the Master of Sinanju outside the restaurant. Chiun was gazing across a busy artery, his eyes fixed on a tall condominium complex with unlighted windows.

  " I am given to understand that that entire building is for sale at a reasonable price," Chiun said.

  "It must be practically free for you to call it reasonable," Remo said dryly. "It's ugly, too."

  "But cheap," Chiun pointed out.

  "More ugly than cheap," Remo countered.

  "You have not heard the price."

  "Tell you what, Little Father. I'll agree to take a look at it if you come clean with me."

  The Master of Sinanju lifted his wrinkled little face up to his pupil's own, his expression quizzical.

  "Tell me what you had the plastic surgeon do to my face," Remo said.

  The Master of Sinanju passed a pale hand the color of a pecan down his wispy beard, his hazel eyes thoughtful.

  "You are right, Remo," said the old Korean flatly. "It is ugly."

  Remo blinked. "The building or my face?"

  "Both."

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