lighter than a feather. It was as though the crowbar had substance, but no weight.
'Now, can you bend it?' von Breslau asked.
The man laughed. 'Sure. No problem.' He placed his hands approximately two feet apart on the bar and twisted. There was an angry cry of protesting metal, and when he was finished, the bar had a U-shaped bend.
There was a gasp from the room. But not from either von Breslau or Newton. An enraged voice cried out from near the door.
'Thieves!' it shrieked.
Newton turned. Von Breslau puckered his lips, his eyebrows rising in annoyance.
The Master of Sinanju stood in the doorway, his bony hands clenched in balls of white-hot rage. Tight hazel eyes shot charged streams of fury with laserlike intensity at the pair of men across the cold laboratory floor.
'Fiends! Barbarians! Plunderers of greatness! Prepare to pay for your venal pilfering in blood.' And like the angry driving wind propelled at the fore of a furious tempest, the Master of Sinanju whirled der-vishlike into the laboratory.
Remo had decided his time might best be served trying to locate Lothar Holz.
Holz was a vice president, Remo knew, so it seemed logical he'd be wherever it was vice presidents hung out. Since the building didn't seem large enough to house an eighteen-hole golf course, Remo opted to check the executive office suite.
He abandoned the R&D level and took the stairwell at the end of the hallway up to the offices.
He found the place swarming with tanned, trim executives, just a hair or two on the younger side of middle age. Their expensive suits were tailored to perfection, and as they walked past Remo, he over-heard them discussing everything from actuarial tables to market placement to on-line strategy. It was worse than any image of hell the nuns at Saint The-resa's Orphanage had tried to instill in him.
Remo assumed that someone along the way would try to stop him. He wore his usual black T-shirt, black chinos and loafers. In this sea of suits, Remo thought he stuck out like a sore thumb. What he didn't realize was that in a company used to many computer-related projects, he wasn't dressed unusually when compared to any of the computer
programmers on staff. It was assumed by everyone that Remo was just another programming nerd.
Everyone, that was, except for Lothar Holz's secretary. 'Hello, there,' the girl purred when Remo entered the office at the end of the hall. She placed an emery board she had been drawing languidly across her index fingernail into the top drawer of her desk.
'This is Holz's office?' he asked.
'Uh-huh,' she said. She leaned forward. 'Can I do anything for you? Anything at all?'
'You can cool your jets. I'm here for Holz.'
Remo headed for the door, but the girl was quick.
She leaped from behind her desk and plastered herself against the inner-office door.
Her body was pressed between Remo and the
door.
'Mr. Holz isn't in right now.'
'I can hear his heart beating through the door.'
'That's mine.' She grabbed Remo's hand and placed it on her chest. 'Let's go someplace and talk,' she urged.
Remo didn't have time for this. He tapped the woman lightly on the inside of her wrist. She gasped once loudly, her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed sideways onto the office sofa. A broad smile stretched across her overly made-up features.
Remo popped the flimsy door lock and entered the inner office.
The pain from the Dynamic Interface System signal was immediate and intense. It was far more powerful than it had been the day before.
It felt as if someone were dragging his brain and spinal cord out of his body through a raw hole in the back of his neck.
Then all at once, the pain receded.
Lothar Holz was seated behind his desk. A row of tinted windows behind him overlooked a grassy courtyard. Beyond the courtyard was the matching PlattDeutsche building, reflecting its sister structure in its glassy facade.
Remo tried to lunge for Holz, but was rooted in place. He heard the door behind him close and saw Holz's male assistant step out from his peripheral vision and move across the office to stand behind his boss.
4'Don't bother to struggle. You know how pointless that is.'
Remo gritted his teeth. 'Not as pointless as you might think.'
He was surprised to find that, unlike the previous day, the impulses weren't arrested when he tried to speak.
'We've eliminated certain aspects of the program.
Speech, most involuntary responses. The pickup time is greatly increased. You can thank Dr. Smith for that. His input—so to speak—has helped us a great deal. He delivered you over to us in every sense of the word.'
Holz grinned triumphantly.
Remo felt foolish. He wanted to say something like You 7/ never get away with this, but the fact was he had already experienced the futility of trying to battle the powerful radio signal. He had tried for hours the last time and had failed. He screwed his mouth tightly shut and stared stonily ahead.
Holz tapped a pen on his desk. 'When the interface van didn't check in, the entire building was wired yesterday for your eventual return. Sort of a Sinanju frequency. I don't suppose you'd want to tell me where the van is.'
'Go goose a gorilla.'
'Your cooperation is irrelevant—we will find out what we want to know easily enough.'
Remo remained silent.
'Understand this, Remo, your consciousness may still be yours, but your body now works for me.'
Holz turned to his assistant.
'The interface van is at the sanitarium in Rye. Get it.' The man nodded and move toward the door.
Holz called after him. 'If Smith attempts to stop you, kill him.'
Remo heard the door close behind him.
'It became necessary to import assistance on your unique case,' Holz said. 'You might be curious to see how we're progressing.' He called downstairs on his office phone and instructed the technical staff to move Remo down to the fourth floor. Holz then went over to the broken office door and pulled it open.
Remo felt his legs kick in automatically. Woodenly. Again he felt the sensation of some outside power forcing its will upon him.
Though he tried to stop it, he felt the interface signal coursing into his brain, seeping down into his limbs. In spite of his determination, he knew it was no use. He followed Holz out the door.
The expression on Holz's face was insufferably smug.
Remo wanted to rip the smile right off his smarmy face. And unbeknownst to Holz, he still had one chance. One thing the man hadn't bargained on.
Remo prayed the Master of Sinanju would be able to locate the source of the signal and stop it once and for all.
They had nearly been killed.
Von Breslau seemed to be taking the whole thing in stride, but maybe he didn't understand what a close call it had been. Only Dr. Curt Newton knew that they had made it by the skin of their teeth.
The old Asian had blown into the room like a man possessed.
His hands flailed; his legs pumped. Jaw clenching furiously, he had swooped toward them.
He was halfway to them when his actions began to slow.
The signal had kicked in automatically, as it had been programmed to do, but there was a time lag.
The Dynamic Interface System signal hadn't been able to cerebellum lock as quickly as usual. If the mainframes hadn't already been programmed with the information obtained from the younger one, they would never have stopped the Asian.
