Skin Deep td-49 Page 8

Then, without warning, the ground gave way beneath him, and Smith tumbled with a wrench of his back into what felt like a deep, wide hole. He stood up as quickly as he could and held out his arms for the girl.

  "Watch it, Chiun," he whispered when Ana was safely to the ground.

  Chiun slapped Smith's outstretched hands away. "Do I not have eyes?" he said irritably.

  "Well, I didn't see the drop," Smith said.

  Chiun snorted in reply.

  The bubble of earth they were standing in led to a curving passage. This one was taller than the narrow tunnel where they had crawled for so long. Smith followed the curve around a long S, then stopped short.

  He saw light.

  "The Hall," the girl said.

  His heart thudding, Smith scrambled to the jagged entrance, keeping close to the wall. From well within the shadows, he took in the great portraits of Hitler and his generals, and below them, the orderly formations of Lustbaden's secret army, the SPIDER corps.

  Someone shouted an order. Smith threw himself against the wall, but he had not been spotted. The soldiers marched away from the center of the Hall and stood at attention, waiting for some unseen presence.

  Then it appeared. The F-24, majestic and silent, rolled through the Great Hall toward the main exit from the cave as Lustbaden's soldiers acknowledged it with a stiff-armed Nazi salute.

  Smith felt himself being dragged back into the past— Warsaw, Dimi, Auschwitz... With one salute, all the buried terrors of a terror-filled war uncovered themselves and hurtled despairingly into the present.

  "Good God," he whispered as the plane rolled past. And then one of the soldiers saw him.

  The rest happened so fast that Smith saw it only as a disconnected series of events. A sudden rush of uniformed men, the girl's harsh, high scream, bodies flying like pieces of shrapnel as Chiun began his defense against the attackers. Then a cold blade whistled in the air and pressed against Smith's throat so tightly that he gagged. He felt the cut from the small motion of his throat reflexes.

  "If you move, old one, your friend is a dead man," came a softly accented voice out of the chaos.

  Chiun's arms dropped.

  Don't stop, Smith tried to say, but no sound would come. Chiun looked back at Smith as he was led into the electrified mesh prison, where Remo's face was barely visible. The old Oriental's eyes, which usually showed nothing, held a look of deep alarm. With slow recognition, Smith realized that the spreading pool of warmth on his chest, invisible to him below the soldier's knife, was probably his own blood.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stocky man with white hair walk leisurely past the group of soldiers. The man stopped in front of Smith and faced him. He tapped once on the knife at Smith's throat. "Very sharp," he said, smiling with his half-moon lips.

  Thirty-six years.

  Lustbaden clasped his hands behind his back and paced for several minutes, his eyes never leaving Smith's face. The doctor frowned, shook his head, chuckled, and then laughed aloud, his belly jiggling with mirth. "Well, well, Smith. We meet at last," he said. "My men spotted you as soon as you reached the shores of our lovely island. We've watched you every step of the way. It's Colonel Smith, isn't it? Or have you been promoted?"

  Thirty-six years of a chase that always ended with the quarry's disappearance. Thirty-six years of hunting a ghost. There had been times when Smith himself wondered if Lustbaden were real. But he was real; he was alive; the hunt was ended.

  Smith felt a perverse kind of relief in watching Lustbaden crow over his capture. For he had seen the face of his elusive enemy, and even if this was to be the last sight of Smith's lifetime, he was grateful to have it.

  He had found the Prince of Hell.

  "Oh, you tracked me well. Kept me on my toes, so to speak. Buenos Aires was a close one. And persistent!" Lustbaden threw up his arms in mock frustration. "But you should have given up while you could," he said quietly. "Because in the end, you see, the OSS, the CIA, and even Harold W. Smith himself are no match for SPIDER. Or for me."

  "No!" the girl screamed, struggling in the arms of two soldiers who held her. "You won't kill anymore! My people will stop you. We'll kill you first, you and all your trained monsters—"

  "Nie wieder!" Lustbaden shouted, and the girl collapsed in pained shrieks and convulsions.

  Lustbaden flicked his hand lazily at the girl. The soldiers dragged her away.

  "And now, if you'll come with me, please," Zoran said equably to Smith. "I have rather a special welcome in store for you."

  From their place in the cave behind the electric mesh, Remo and Chiun watched Smith, covered with blood, being led out of the Great Hall, past the pile of bodies Chiun had left behind. The soldier holding the knife at Smith's throat kicked him in the backs of his ankles to speed him along. Smith stumbled. He never uttered a word.

  ?Chapter Fourteen

  Smith's welcome took place on the operating table of Zoran's laboratory. In The Room.

  "Tsk, tsk, a nasty cut," Lustbaden said, probing at the knife wound on Smith's neck. "But superficial. I'll take care of it immediately."

  "Don't bother," Smith croaked in a gush of blood.

  "Please. I insist." From a drawer he scooped up a handful of sparkling white crystals. Smith felt the steel bands around his wrists and ankles bite into his skin as he tried to move. "Your young friend actually broke these bands," Lustbaden said, smiling. "A very strong fellow. But they've been repaired and reinforced. You'll stay snugly in place. Now hold still. This is the remedy." He brought his cupped hands close to Smith's neck.

  "What's that?" Smith asked.

  "An old cure for bleeding." He poured it onto the wound and packed it in. It burned like fire. "Salt."

  Smith gulped and panted with the pain. Lustbaden's dead-fish eyes took in the sight with sick satisfaction. "This is just the beginning, Harold," he said. "May I call you Harold?" He held a glinting surgical instrument to the light. It was a long, thin cylinder that drew to a sharp point at the end. "I feel we've known each other for such a long time that formalities are unnecessary. Don't you agree?"

  "Of course," Smith said. "You know me and I know you. You are human slime. A fungus."

  "Now, now, Harold. Don't feel that way about it."

  "I feel nothing but contempt for you," he hissed, barely able to move his lips.

  Lustbaden waved the silvered instrument in front of Smith. The half-moon smile was forming. "Do you know what this does?" He asked teasingly. "I'll give you a hint. It corrects ear ailments."

  "Why don't you just kill me and get it over with?" Smith said.

  The half-moon broke into a wide grin. "Ah, but my dear fellow, don't you see? I don't want to get it over with. I have lived in fear of you for nearly four decades. No, I will not kill you for a long, long time, and when I do, you will bless me on your knees for the gift of death."

  "You will rot in hell first," Smith said.

  "Only after you, Smith."

  He poised the instrument near the side of Smith's head, then slowly screwed it into his ear. Smith screamed as his eardrum felt the blinding, searing pain of the knife.

  "For you," Lustbaden spat. "For your country, using its wealth and power to ruin the greatest civilization in history. For the Russians, who helped you to defeat us."

  He twisted inside the ear again. Smith lurched, turned his head, and vomited.

  "Adolph Hitler nearly saved the world from the scum you defended," Lustbaden screeched, the vapid blue eyes ablaze with passion. "You destroyed it. You and the Soviet Union. You are the murderers, not me. You killed the possibility of a perfect world."

  He drew back his hand and slashed Smith across the face with the instrument.

  "But the Reich is stronger than you think," he said, inches from Smith's face. "We are everywhere, in every country. Do you know why I stole your precious F-24? Because when your president meets the Soviet premier, it will be your F-24 that smashes into the World Trade Center, killing them. Their end
. And from it, a new beginning. We will join forces again, all of us kept alive through the years by SPIDER, and we will march into your two killer nations, sweeping your people away like the garbage they are."

  The pain in his ear faded away as Smith thought of the secret American plane, evading its own radar defenses, and then blowing up the World Trade Center building. And it would work. No one could stop Lustbaden now. Then he felt salt being packed into the cut on his face, and he screamed. He did not know if he fainted.

  Lustbaden droned on, but Smith no longer heard him. Instead, behind his closed eyes, he saw Vermont in September, crackling with dry leaves whipped by the crisp wind, the air redolent with the fragrance of running sap, the high horsetail clouds signaling the winter to come.

  He saw his wife, once again as delicate and pink-cheeked and proud as she was when she presented him with their daughter. The most beautiful child in the world, he'd thought back then, astonished that such a perfect creature could have come from him.

  He thought of snow and cedarwood fires and the cloying taste of his wife's inedible fudge and his daughter's face the first time she wore makeup. He'd made her take it off, telling her it was unseemly and ridiculous. She'd cried, but did as he insisted. Only much later did Smith admit to himself that Beth had looked rather attractive.

  Oh, to have a plate full of Irma's terrible fudge. Oh, for a chance to tell Beth how pretty she was.

  He heard a click and opened his eyes. Lustbaden was gone. He breathed shallowly to lessen the throbbing pains in his ear and his face.

  The spectre of CURE loomed inside him. It would all be gone soon, the computers' selfdestruct mechanism activated by the president's voiced command once Smith's death was confirmed. CURE was airtight.

  One night there would be a fire in the executive offices of Folcroft Sanitarium, contained by the solid asbestos lining in the walls and in the computer room, and the next day there would be no secret organization to fight crime in America. No one would know that CURE had ever existed, except for the President. And Remo and Chiun— if they lived.

  That was another matter. Chiun was supposed to kill Remo in the event of CURE's destruction, but Smith knew better than to believe that would happen. If they survived Lustbaden, Chiun would be all right. He would go back to his Korean village and live out his life writing poetry and telling stories to children.

  But Remo. Where did a young man with a body like a machine and no official existence go? Would he become a mercenary, marching in some foreign army to fight whomever he was told for no reason other than a regular paycheck? Would he join a circus or a carnival sideshow, demonstrating his freakish strength for giggling schoolgirls?

  Or would Remo just drift like a lost helium balloon, coming to rest in the cobwebs of dusty alleys with the rest of the world's misfit, castoff inhabitants?

  Remo. On the day of judgment, Remo Williams would be cited as Smith's greatest sin. He had been chosen almost at random to become CURE's enforcement arm, this young man with no appetite for killing, whose only wish was to live the normal life of a normal man.

  CURE, through Smith, had rendered that simple wish impossible. It had stripped away his identity, his past, his dreams. It had been for the best possible cause. Still, Remo would never be normal again.

  Is it right, Smith wondered, to change a man's destiny?

  His thoughts made his head pound with the thrust of a thousand poisoned spikes. A fever was already setting in, and his sweat ran cold. The blood and vomit in his mouth tasted foul.

  His left ear was probably gone for good. What would be next— his eyes? His limbs?

  Oh, Beth. Oh, Remo.

  So many regrets. It was the curse of middle-age, Smith supposed, to be old enough to have accumlated all of the questions of one's lifetime, and still too young to know any of the answers.

  But there was so little time for regret now.

  And so much pain.

  With a great effort, Smith closed his eyes again and remembered Vermont. In September.

  ?Chapter Fifteen

  "A fine mess you've got us in now," Chiun said.

  "If you can't be part of the solution," Remo said, "don't be part of the problem." He was on his hands and knees at the back wall of the cave, digging and probing with his fingers, trying to find a weak spot in the stone.

  "My only part in this problem was ever having anything to do with you," Chuin said. "But my ancestors have punished me. Here I am, perhaps doomed to spend the rest of my life in a cage. With you. Watching you burrow in the ground like a mole."

  "Quiet," barked one of the guards on the other side of the electrified fence.

  Chiun responded with a babble of Korean.

  Remo had found a small opening in the wall near the floor and, working quietly with his hand, chipped away some of the rock. He lay down, his face close to the rock floor of the cave, and looked inside the small hole he had made.

  His pupils, already adjusted to nearly pitch-darkness, opened even wider to take in the greenish luminosity of the slime covering every inch of the tiny passageway.

  Two dots of light, tinged with red, glowed briefly in the darkness. As Remo reached toward them, they disappeared with a scratching, scuffling sound.

  He struck out his hand blindly and grabbed onto something warm and twitching that shrieked in the blackness.

  A rat.

  With a shiver of disgust he threw it away and heard it hit with a thud and a crackle of small bones.

  Then he saw the lights again, redder this time, it seemed. But the two dots were joined by two others, and then four, and then hundreds more, piled behind and on top of one another, and they were coming closer, coming toward him. The opening behind the wall was not big enough for a man; only big enough for rats. Dozens of rats.

  He recoiled. He had nothing to fight them with but his hands and his face.

  He slapped at the ground, hoping to find a weapon. Anything— a hefty rock, a sliver of discarded wire from the mesh fence...

  There was nothing. Only the slime-caked walls narrowing into obscurity and the menacing red eyes stalking closer. Suddenly, two rats darted toward him.

  Remo drew his body back, away from the small hole he had made as the rats scurried by. Then, forcing every bit of strength he possessed into his hands, he slammed them against the cave wall.

  The rock shuddered, chipped, and then bits of it tumbled down to close the hole. He hit the walls again, and the hole was filled over. Inside it, Remo could hear the squeaking of the rats, returned again to the darkness.

  He stood up and walked back toward Chiun, wiping his hands on his black chino pants. The two rats that had fled around him now twitched, crusty and blackened, on the electric grating. As Remo looked past them into the Great Hall, the dim criss-cross pattern of light falling through the mesh netting dappled his face.

  "The walls here too are useless," Chiun said, experimenting with his long fingernails on the wires that attached the grating to the side walls of the cave. "Perhaps with time..."

  "There isn't time," Remo said angrily. He remembered seeing Smith, stumbling and grim, covered with blood, being led away by Zoran's soldiers. And he remembered the girl Ana's face, pleading with Zoran to stop his senseless killing... her pitiful threat to crush his army of trained soldiers with a village of dying lepers. He could hear her scream of pain as the Nazi doctor spat the strange command at her.

  "What did Zoran say to make the girl lose her marbles the way she did?" Remo asked.

  Chiun was flicking at the thin wires of mesh with his fingernails, making sparks fly with each small manipulation. "He said 'Nie wieder.' The chief of the village talked of foreign words Zoran uses to bend the girl to his ways. But it was an odd phrase. In German it means 'never again. "

  "Never again?" Remo was stupefied. "Never again?"

  "Yes. Why? Do those words have some special meaning for white men?"

  "It's the motto of a Jewish group. Never again. They're talking about the Na
zis killing six million people in World War Two. A strange thing for a Nazi to say."

  He saw sparks flying out of Chiun's fingertips. "What in hell are you doing?" he asked, annoyed.

  Chiun didn't look up. He worked busily with the electric netting, his fingernails tinkling against the sparking wires. "I am loosening the threads," he said.

  Remo saw at once what he was trying to do. "I get it," he said. "Knock some of the ends off, hook them onto other loose ends, and boom, a short circuit."

  "I am not concerned with circuses," Chiun said. "I wish only to stop the electricity."

  "Sure, Chiun," Remo said, smiling.

  "Ah, this will do." Careful not to expose his skin to the high-voltage mesh, he held up two frayed wire ends with his fingernails. "If this works, there should be a boom."

  "The lights'll go out," Remo said.

  "When that happens, break through the netting as soon as possible. We will use the darkness to get past the sentries and seek out Emperor Smith."

  "I'm ready when you are."

  As Remo got into position, Chiun brought the wires together. With a loud fizz and a light like the burst of a dynamite explosion, the electric portal blazed to life for an instant. Then it crashed into total darkness as the powerful lights in the cave gave out. A murmur rose from the soldiers.

  "Now, Remo."

  He thrust both hands through the netting and tore outward in a powerful breast stroke.

  The stroke was never completed.

  While Remo's hands were still clutching the mesh, the auxiliary generators of the cave were activated, and a pool of light from the Great Hall flooded into the dark prison.

  The electricity entered Remo in waves. In an instant his feet were jolted off the floor. His hands, filled with live wire, smoldered and fried, unable to let go.

  Then he was in the air, still shaking from the charge, thrust away from the electric wire by the tiny figure of Chiun, silhouetted in the spillover light from the Hall.

  He landed crouched on his feet and hands. The slime on the cave floor felt cool on his damaged skin. Even in the darkness he could make out the diamond pattern of the netting burned deeply into his palms.