Chapter 10

“You can’t go to Piccadilly. There’s a bleeding riot going on there!”

“Just drive.”

“What?” The cabbie turned on his passenger, not believing what he was hearing. “People are getting killed!”

Another man got in the cab. The newcomer was as small as a child and as old as any human being the cabbie had ever seen. His beard consisted of a few threads of pale whiskers on his chin, and there were tufts of hair over each ear. The old man was Asian, wearing a bright robe.

The American gave him a look. The Asian clearly didn’t understand how taxicabs worked in the Western world. You don’t just go getting into other people’s taxis.

“Hey, Little Father,” the American said, and the cabbie realized they knew each other. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“The Emperor has requested I hasten to your side. I boarded the first available aircraft for London.”

“Huh,” the American responded, not sounding happy about the news. “Let’s go, mac,” he said to the cabbie.

“Look, fella, I am not gonna take you into a war zone. People are dying.”

The elderly Oriental man was sitting still as a statue, his hands in his sleeves, obviously as deaf as a post. The younger man sighed.

“Look, I have a job to do. My patience is gone. Now, drive this cab to Piccadilly or I will.”

The cabbie was infuriated. “Mate, think of the poor old bloke at least. Those bangers will beat him up just for looking like an old Jap gigolo.”

The cabbie briefly glimpsed the American reaching over the seat—fast—and then he was propelled through the door, out of the cab and onto the curb. He scrambled to his feet just in time to see half of his driver’s seat back topple out of the open door. It had been sliced down the middle. The old man’s hand was being withdrawn from the open space.

It couldn’t be what it looked like. Because it looked as if the old man’s fingernails had just done a machete number on the car seat—steel springs and all.

“I think a thank-you would be in order,” the American said as he walked around the car and sat in what was left of the driver’s seat. “I did just save your life.”

“My cab!” the cabbie started to say.

“You really want to get back in with the Jap gigolo sitting right behind you?”

“No …”

“Maybe you want to try to forcibly remove the Jap gigolo …”

“Stop saying that!” the tiny Asian squeaked.

The cabbie couldn’t answer and the cab was gone. He picked up the half of the seat back and held it close, like a frightened child with his most comforting stuffed animal.

“You just can’t do that—that’s all there is to it. Killing people indiscriminately attracts attention. There are some ethical reasons, too.”

“You heard what he said of me,” Chiun replied icily.

“But he wasn’t even saying that he thought you looked like a—” Remo stopped when Chiun glared at him menacingly in the rearview mirror. “Whatever he said, it was what he thought the gangbangers were going to think you looked like. So he was really doing you a favor.”

“And I was doing the world a favor by removing another English bigot from the population of procreators. It was you who committed a crime against humanity by preventing me from it.”

“I give up. Anyway, you’ll get plenty more chances to bloody your fingernail pretty soon.” Remo turned on the radio.

“They’re having a go at it twenty years from now,” exclaimed the disk jockey over a fading Toyah Wilcox track. “Bodies are piling up in London. There are reports that more than a thousand Scots have converged in Piccadilly to do battle with riot police. Scotland Yard spokesmen earlier said they’re pleased that the gangs are coming together of their own accord as it will make it easier to take them under police control. But the latest reports say the riot squads are being driven back and British army commandos are going in to do the job. Proof positive that the twenty-first century is completely blinking mad! We recommend you stay right here with us, in good old 1985!”

A synthesizer began repeating a soulless two-chord progression.

“I believe the announcer is delusional,” Chiun observed.

“Sounds like the Mad Scots aren’t lying down easy.”

“I do not believe it. The Scottish could never threaten Britain’s stability.”

“We’ll see in a minute,” Remo said. He balanced on the seat with half a back and considered Smitty’s dire warnings. The growing agitation all over the world had resulted in city-wide riots. The problem was that the agitation was general. Sure, a bunch of Scottish thugs were causing all the trouble now, but there had been reports of Londoners turning aggressive. And not just the lowlifes. Regular, middle-class English citizens were starting to join the fight against the Scottish invaders. If those numbers grew, the battle could consume the city and shut down the British government for days—or indefinitely. Even Remo was having a hard time buying into it.

Chiun interrupted his thoughts. “We are instructed to bypass the peccadillo in Piccadilly.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with that bird,” Remo said. “Did you just say something dirty?”

“No. Emperor Smith requests us to not engage the street thugs in London. Instead, we are to go directly to the Scottish castle.”

“Why?” Remo demanded.

“The Emperor will explain it all when we are on the helicopter.”

“What helicopter?”

Chiun’s breath control was perfect. He didn’t need to sigh, but he did sigh, the sound of a man who has endured unfathomable irritation for an eternity. “The helicopter that will take us to the castle in Scotland.”

“Where are we supposed to catch the helicopter?” Remo asked. “Wouldn’t the airport have been a likely place?”

Chiun explained as if he were teaching a child to keep his hand away from the open flame. “The Emperor did not see much chance that I would intercept you at the airport. Therefore he bade me to travel to the Piccadilly battle zone and locate you there. The helicopter is standing by.”

“Got it,” Remo said. “So Smitty’s not expecting us to phone in right away. We’ve got some extra breathing room.”

“I do not require extra breathing room. I breathe perfectly.”

“I’m pretty good at it, too. Here we are.”

The streets were deserted and they soon began showing the telltale signs of battle. Destruction. Bodies. Remo stopped the cab when they reached the outskirts of the violence.

Troublemakers in bloodstained kilts had a scraggly band of riot police trapped against a brick wall. The cops’ riot gear was now in the hands of the Mad Scots, who were using the clear acrylic shields to bash the London police in the head and face. There were only a couple of survivors left; bodies were everywhere.

“Watch this!” barked a happy killer as he brought the shield down on the face of a riot cop who was begging for his life. The cop’s face flattened against the shield. The bloody, crushed expression was vivid for a moment, then the face slid off and the man collapsed in a pile. “Lookit that! Haw!”

“Let me try.” Another Mad Scot raised his shield over his head, but his would-be victim wasn’t cooperating. He protected his head with both arms.

“Put your face up, bobby.”

The riot cop was mewling wordlessly.

“I said, show me your fucking face!” The Scot kicked the cop in the back. The cop went rigid, grabbing for his back, and the Mad Scot brought the shield down on his momentarily exposed face.

The cop whined and his assailant barked happily, and then everything went into a wild reversal. The shield changed direction and flattened against the face of the Scot who was holding it.

But this time the face really flattened, like a soft clay face under a rolling pin.

“Hey, wank, he was one of us,” complained another Mad Scot.

“But I’m not one of you,” Remo explained.

“He’s a Yank, not a wank! Get ready for sleepy time, piece of American shit.”

“I’m ready, but first I just have to ask. What’s this all about?”

“What do you care?”

“Yes, what do you care?” Chiun stood on the sidelines looking peeved.

Remo opened his mouth, closed it. “Even if one of them did give me an answer, it wouldn’t mean anything, really.”

“You have gained great wisdom,” Chiun said, and he stepped forward, striking out in both directions. His hands seemed to reach three times their length, and his fingernails plunged into living flesh and bone like dipping into a bowl of tepid water. He rotated his wrists with a flick and was back standing where he had been.

Two Mad Scots lost perfectly circular sections of bone, heart muscle and meat, as if the cavity had been formed with the sharp end of a sawed-off beer can. Blood flooded out and their bodies collapsed into it.

Remo moved into the attackers with deft, efficient movements. Some he touched lightly on the chest and neck, and they dropped hard. Others he pushed and shoved with finesse, sending the Mad Scots flying into garbage cans, walls and each other. They hit with such tremendous force they were crushed or broken beyond repair. In seconds there was nothing left living in this small corner of London except for a few cowering riot police.

The Masters of Sinanju strolled along the street, intercepting pockets of fighting that amounted to nothing more than one-sided cop beatings. Remo’s ire was rising with every murdered policeman he counted.

“You know what?” he announced. “I changed my mind again. I do care.”

He was talking to a Mad Scot whose tartan was sodden with blood. Blood oozed from his sash. Blood trickled from his skirt. It dripped from his farm boots to the ground, which was a long way down. Remo had one hand flattened against the gangbanger’s massive stomach with such force it kept him firmly pinned against the wall of a clothing store.

“Can’t breathe,” the fat Scot gasped.

“Neither can that guy. Or that guy. Or those guys in the gutter. Answer the question.”

Chiun waited in repose.

“Don’t know what yer talking—”

“Don’t be stupid. It’s a simple question and I want a simple answer. Why?”

“Why what?” the fat man gagged.

“Hands off, Yankee fucker,” ordered one of the fat Scot’s friends.

Remo wondered if the Mad Scots accepted only chronically obese members.

“Fine,” Remo snapped, and took his hands off the four-hundred-pounder, but not before giving him a little extra bit of a shove—which smashed his abdomen with force akin to being rolled over by a big truck. The four-hundred-pounder made a grotesque noise, then his body fell heavily and permanently.

“You fu—”

Remo snatched the leader of the Fat Pack by the face and held it tight—so tight the others heard the cracking of skull plates. The leader swung his crowbar and his handgun at Remo’s arm, but Remo shook him by the head with enough force to render him semiconscious. He hung, suspended by his face.

“Are any of you not as stupid as you are fat?” Remo demanded.

“Fuck—”

Another foulmouthed fatty was on the verge of triggering his 12-gauge at Remo from ten paces away. Remo crossed the distance, flipped the gun, nudged the man’s trigger finger and returned to the fat leader before the leader fell six inches. The shotgun blast disemboweled the gunner.

“I want an answer and I don’t want to hear the word ‘fuck’ again. Got it? Now answer.” He aimed one deadly finger at the closest Fat Scot.

“What’s the question?” the gangbanger stuttered.

“Why. The question is why.”

“Why what?”

The stuttering Scot was backhanded with such ferocity he never saw it coming and he never felt it hit. The others saw it. They saw the crushed head detach messily and arch into the night.

The rest of them ran but they didn’t run far. Something pummeled into them and sent them sprawling onto the bloody streets. It was the body of their huge leader.

“You. Answer,” Remo ordered the fallen leader.

Dimly aware of what was going on around him, the leader of the Fat Pack said, “We’ve been wronged. The British enslave us.”

“Not good enough.” Remo pulled him to his feet by his head and twisted it 180 degrees. “See those cops? They’re dead. You murdered them. I used to be a cop. I don’t like it when people murder cops. I especially don’t like it when they murder cops without even having a good reason. Now I want to know why.”

The leader had lost his ability to speak—or breathe or think—when his spine was twisted out of its socket. He was dumped and Remo went to the others, who were now lying paralyzed among heaps of the dead police.

“Well? Got an answer? You give me a good answer and I’ll let you live. How ’bout you? No?” Remo snapped his palm into a skull and broke it. “Next! You?”

“Uh—uh—uh—”

“If I had a dime for every time I heard that answer from a politician and/or murderer,” Remo replied acidly, and then he snapped out the killer’s lights.

“By reason of insanity!” the next man shouted.

“That I believe,” Remo answered.

“So you won’t kill us?”

“Not kill you? Crazy or not, you’re a piece-of-shit cop-killer. Bye.”

He grabbed the man off the ground and dropped him on his last surviving buddy. Dropped him hard. Dropped him with such force that the bodies could never be separated.

A band of less corpulent Scotsmen homed in on the battle, looking worried. They didn’t understand how the slim white man in the T-shirt was annihilating their brethren. They also didn’t understand the little old man in the silly dress, but he was harmless, at least.

“Get that fu—”

“I too have heard enough of your unimaginative foul-mouthery,” Chiun explained as he used the Scotsman’s momentum to steer him into the wreckage of a nearby car. The Scotsman was moving so fast that the wreckage tore him apart. Chiun grabbed the next pair by the wrists and pulled. Their arms didn’t just dislocate—they detached. Chiun stepped among the growing numbers of attackers as the gunfire started. He spun and drifted around the spray of bullets, dancing gracefully out of it. Bullets peppered the other Scotsmen, but the old Korean was untouched. Chiun came up to the gunners and killed them by tapping on their chest. It was a pattern that fluctuated the pulse until the heart began beating wildly and uncontrollably. The victims rolled on the streets as their hearts beat themselves to death.

Others died from quick slashes across the throat or brain-stopping insertions of his spikelike fingers.

Remo glowered malevolently at Chiun’s side as the last of the horde fell over. He was eyeing another band of hesitant Scots down the street. One of them began firing an automatic weapon. Remo didn’t flinch, but he grabbed an iron cover from a sewer inlet and deflected the bullets upward. The automatic weapon ran dry. The band became more worried—and more agitated.

As they began storming angrily across the street, a torrent of deformed automatic rifle bullets rained down on them, knocking one man unconscious and gouging a few others before they fled.

Chiun and Remo moved down the middle of the street, observing the last surviving remnants of the riot police withdrawing from the battleground, leaving scores of dead behind them. The gunfire from the crowds turned on the hovering news choppers, and then a growing chorus of voices began closing in from the side streets.

The Londoners were fighting back. Angry mobs of civilians, young and old, poured into Piccadilly from all directions, brandishing tire irons, handguns, chains and at least one pitchfork. The Mad Scots were overjoyed. The two sides clashed and the blood began to fly.

“It’s a circus,” Remo said morosely.

“Let us leave them to their entertainment. The Emperor expects us to move on to more important things.”

“I’d rather stay and deal with these thugs.”

“In your dreams, bloody American swine!” The Scotsman who attacked was a true classic—he had the tartan sash and the kilt and his weapons came from the antique golf bag on his back. He chose a five-iron for this particular Master of Sinanju, but the five-iron left his hands and went around his neck. It was a fine old set of clubs, and the hand-forged steel shaft should have been unbendable. Sure enough, when he tried to unbend it from his neck, it wouldn’t budge.

They left the golfer gasping for his last breath.

Remo found the folded Post-it note in the last place he looked—in the back pocket of his chinos. There were sixty or seventy numbers on the note—it seemed that many, anyway. How could anybody be expected to poke out that many numbers without messing up even one of them?

“Pork Emporium.”

Problem number two: if he did get the wrong number, how was he supposed to know it? Smitty had reinstituted the system that screened out wrong numbers. Remo was supposed to talk to whatever computer-simulated character picked up the line. Eventually the computer would verify his identity and patch him through to CURE.

“Need to order some pig parts,” Remo said. “Feet. Pickled. What’ll a gross run me?”

“Plain or extraspicy?”

“Plain, of course. Nobody in their right mind would want to cover up the natural taste of pig’s feet.”

“Okay, but plain’s extra. We delivering?”

“Wait, there’s more to the order,” Remo said. “Pork rinds. I need six pallets. Extrafried.”

“Son, ah never heard of extrafried pork rinds.”

“Really? You ain’t et till you et extrafried pork rinds,” Remo said.

“What?” Harold W. Smith asked. “Remo, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Don’t give me that,” Remo answered. “It’s your screening system, not mine. Incidentally, I still don’t believe they’re fake. I can even hear their breathing. Anyway, this thing in England is bigger than you thought.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. The latest news coverage shows the city falling into mob rule, and there are reports of a growing organized resistance by London civilians. What’s your estimate, Remo?”

It was odd—not so much the question as the tone of voice. Smith was asking Remo for his honest opinion, as if the answer would be actually credible. Remo responded by making a genuinely straightforward answer.

“This end of London is in the crapper, all right. But there’s one thing wrong with what you heard. You said ‘organized,’ right? Trust me, there’s nothing organized about any of this. The maniacs in kilts are nothing more than maniacs in kilts. They don’t know why they’re running amok—they’re just enjoying it while it lasts. The civilians? My guess—wait.” Remo dropped the phone and stepped up from the sidewalk to the top of the eight-foot red phone box, where he observed a few warring bands fly violently and heedlessly into one another. He stepped down.

“Yeah, the Londoners are just as nutty. If it weren’t for the kilts you couldn’t begin to tell the two sides apart. Oops. Hold on a sec.”

Dr. Smith held the telephone to his ear and watched the windows of muted news feeds coming through to the large LCD monitor mounted under the glass desktop. It was unreal, the raw footage of so many scenes of violence—as if someone had edited together the shots of conflict from an entire season of a police reality show. How could it all be happening at the same time, right now?

Then, making it feel more unreal, Smith was provided with a soundtrack to accompany the video. The phone relayed curses and exclamations in brogues and Cockney and even an “I say.” There were also the sounds of crunching bones, smashing bodies, breaking glass.

“Wouldn’t you know?” Remo said. “We were at ground zero for a second, but then everybody decided to give peace a chance.”

Smith could picture it. Remo in the telephone box, Chiun calmly standing nearby and the ground littered with fresh corpses.

Mark Howard nodded to Smith from across the room. He had been waiting for the call from Remo. He had traced it and dispatched the waiting helicopter to the exact location.

“Chiun’s probably told you that the trouble’s becoming serious in the Highlands,” Smith reported. “My fears about the Scottish target are confirmed. We’re getting you on-site ASAP. I asked Chiun to join you, in case the situation becomes extremely serious.”

“Not sure how much worse it can get,” Remo said.

“It can get much worse,” Smith replied.

The U.S. Navy helicopter loomed out of the London sky and settled its skids on the garden at the center of a roundabout.

A quartet of Navy SEALs popped out and swept the street with their submachine guns. They were experienced SEALs. They’d been everywhere. They’d done all that. Except this.

“Hi,” said the slim, dark man in a beige T-shirt, chinos and expensive-looking leather shoes. He was following a silent figure who was as small as a young boy, but as old as Stonehenge.

Around them was a charnel house. The SEAL team commander had never thought he would actually see the gutters running with blood but that was certainly the case here.

“What happened?”

“There was a fight,” said the younger man. “Maybe you noticed the folks of London town having it out.”

“Yeah, but not like this. Who won?”

“Nobody won. They wiped each other out completely.”

“You mean no one got away? Not one person?”

“Don’t think so. Anybody escape, Little Father?”

“I let no one escape,” squeaked the old Asian man indignantly. “You insult me.” The tiny senior citizen stepped from the street into the Sea Hawk, five feet off the ground. He made it look effortless.

“Is he saying he killed all these people?” the commander asked.

“Humor him,” said the younger one. “He’s very, very old and—” The younger man finished by twirling one finger in the vicinity of his ear.

“You should live to be as old and half as wise,” retorted the old Asian, who was now out of sight inside the rumbling helicopter. The old man couldn’t possibly have heard what the young man said.

The SEAL commander couldn’t make any of this fit together. None of what his eyes saw meshed with any explanation he could muster. And the implication that the old man had wiped out this crowd of rioters—impossible! This pair wasn’t even armed.

And yet they were VIPs who rated a personal and immediate U.S. government transport, even when all British-based equipment and personnel were supposed to be helping the U.K. in their time of crisis.

“They ain’t shot,” murmured one of his SEALs.

The commander didn’t know what his man was talking about, then he gave a last glance at the field of the dead and understood. There were some gunshot wounds, but nearly all the dead had been killed—quite obviously—by some form of horrific manual damage. A head torn off. A chest cavity smashed in. Lots of cut throats and foreheads with unnatural-looking holes in them.

Was the old man telling the truth? Had he truly, honestly wiped out all those rioters barehanded?

The SEAL team leader got into the helicopter and called for the pilot to take off, then sat and examined his two VIPs as he would have watched a pair of poisonous snakes. This lasted until the old man said something to his companion in a language the SEALs didn’t know.

Remo sighed. “He says take a picture, it will last longer.”

The SEAL team leader was startled. After all, Chiun had his back to the SEALs, so how could he know he was being stared at? The SEALs began looking at everything except Remo and Chiun.

“That is not what I said,” Chiun added, speaking in Korean. “You failed to relay my promise of decapitation.”

“They got the message and you’re not supposed to decapitate SEALs, remember?” Remo also spoke Korean, the only language besides English in which he was fluent.

“I am certainly permitted to act in self-defense,” Chiun sniffed.

“Since when is being looked at an attack?”

“It is an affront.”

“An affront is not the same as an attack.” Remo thought it over and added, “Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Next time, deliver your own threats.”