open wrought-iron gates and up the main driveway. He headed directly to the main sanitarium building.
Remo noticed a strange white van sitting in the no-parking zone in front of the large stone staircase to the main building. Its engine purred almost imperceptibly. He guessed it to be some kind of utilities truck, since his heightened senses detected a lot of electrical equipment inside the back.
Veering away from the main entrance, Remo took the narrow flight of stairs near the employee parking area up to Smith's office.
Smith's outer office was deserted. Remo considered that a stroke of good luck. Mrs. Mikulka, Smith's secretary, must have been away somewhere on an errand. Remo was pleased that he didn't have to contend with the older woman. She sometimes took her job as the personal secretary to the head of Folcroft Sanitarium far too seriously.
He moved across the outer office on silent, gliding feet.
Remo paused at the door to the office. There was someone else inside with Smith. He didn't know why his senses told him this; he just knew. Maybe this was the reason for Smith's urgency on the phone.
Without hesitation, Remo popped the heavy lock on the inner office door and slid stealthily inside. He hadn't passed more than a foot into the Spartan office before he felt a huge pressure on the back of his skull. The pain was intense and immediate. It was as if someone were compressing the fused bones of his skull in a vise. His ears itched. Remo reeled at the pain.
Smith sat behind his desk. The other man, a stranger Remo somehow found familiar, sat in a chair across from Smith. The stranger turned to Smith as Remo staggered in pain near the still-open doorway.
'This man is white.'
'That is true, obviously.' Smith's eyes darted over to Remo.
There was a hint of concern etched in the deep recesses of his flinty gray eyes.
'The Masters of Sinanju have always been Orientals. Koreans, specifically.'
'Remo was able to absorb the training when no Asians could.'
The man's tone became threatening. 'It would be regrettable if I discovered you have been lying to me, Dr. Smith.'
By the door, Remo was attempting to regain his equilibrium.
It felt as if someone had jammed two rusty ice picks in his ears.
The itching had moved inward. It now felt as though a starving rat were trying to claw its way out of his skull.
With a colossal effort, Remo forced his jaw and larynx to work.
'What is going on, Smitty?' Though he was able to speak, the words were labored, sounding as though they were spoken by a stroke victim.
Dimly Remo recognized the man as the one he had seen on the news the previous evening. A look of mild surprise spread across the man's regal features.
'Unusual,' he said. He nodded approvingly, as if Remo had just passed some private test.
Remo decided he didn't like him. The way he looked at Remo was maddeningly condescending. He wasn't going to wait for the order. He'd settle this guy's hash and then ask Smith what the hell was going on.
The look of surprise on the face of Lothar Holz became one of shock as Remo took a hesitant step toward him.
'Curt,' the man said to no one in particular.
'You don't have a lock yet.' There seemed to be a nervous crack in his usually calm demeanor.
Remo took a second step. Though he moved like a marionette with hopelessly tangled wires, he was closer to Lothar Holz.
Holz stood. His face grew more concerned and he spoke urgently.
'Curt, he is moving.'
For the first time, Remo noticed a small device pressed into the man's ear. It was no larger than a hearing aid. Apparently he was giving and receiving signals from some outside source.
A second later, Remo had forgotten about the transmitter-receiver. With no warning, Remo's left hand moved in a deadly arc.
It whipped up and around, slashing down solidly onto the back of an old oak office chair. The chair protested, but only for an instant.
All at once the legs buckled, the back and seat shattered apart and the entire chair collapsed into an unrecognizable pile of splinters.
The hand continued its vicious arc and slapped audibly against Remo's thigh. It rested there as Holz looked on, wide-eyed.
Holz wasn't the only one who was shocked. Remo looked at the pile of debris, a dumbfounded expression on his twitching face.
Something was profoundly wrong. He had been focused in on Smith's visitor. He hadn't told his body to shatter the chair. It had acted independently, exerting some foreign will over him.
The tingling at the base of his skull grew more intense.
'Mr. Holz, I have acceded to your demands.
There is no need for random acts of violence,' Smith said.
Holz. The man from the bank. The stunt with the interface system. And all at once, Remo knew. It was some sort of mind-control device. Smith had sold him out. To Holz. Remo fixed the man with a deadly glare.
'He is not under control,' Holz snapped at Smith.
He tapped the receiver in his ear. 'Newton! Newton!' Frightened and cornered, he backed up against Smith's desk.
And though he moved with an uncertain, jerky motion, Remo still had his body partially under his control. With a look that would have inspired terror in hell's most stone-hearted demon, Remo took another step toward the cowering intruder.
'What on earth was that?'
'Autonomic response.'
'From the peripheral system?'
'That's just it. This guy has no peripheral nervous system. It's all autonomic.'
'That's impossible.' In the back of the van, surrounded on all sides by various scientists, technicians and programmers, Dr. Curt Newton was having an impossible time figuring all this out.
He had been overjoyed to learn that Harold W.
Smith had been contacted and even more delighted when he learned that Holz had set up a meeting with the doctor at Smith's place of business. But he didn't know why Holz wanted him to bring the interface van from the New Jersey complex.
'We have someone special I want you to download,' Holz had said.
This was troublesome in and of itself.
There was a problem with the ethics of duplicating the contents of a person's mind when that person hadn't given prior consent. Indeed, Newton had learned earlier in the morning that some of the people at the bank were threatening PlattDeutsche with lawsuits—so Newton had assumed that they were going to put a hold on this aspect of the project. Curt Newton didn't have much of a problem with that. They had already demonstrated to the world that the process worked. Surely the government contracts would start rolling in now.
But Holz had been insistent, and so Dr. Curt Newton had loaded everything into the van and driven up to Rye to await the 'someone special' he'd been promised.
The man had arrived at the building mere moments before. He had been a problem right from the start.
Not only did his synaptic and neural patterns not match anything the computers had on file, but something as simple as a cerebellum lock was proving to be near impossible. The man was going into some sort of nervous- system overload. Where they should have gotten control of him the moment the heat sensors picked him up in the rear office—which was where Holz had arranged for his meeting—the man was proving virtually impossible to detain. His acetylcholine levels were off the charts. Some rogue spark had just caused him to destroy a piece of furniture. Who knew what he'd go after next?
'Why haven't you gotten a lock yet?' Newton demanded of his panicking staff.
'He's resisting.'
