Unpopular Science

Chapter 11

They were on their final approach into Barcelona when Mark Howard said to Remo, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, about how Freya had learned so much from Sunny Joe Roam.”

“Yes?” Remo didn’t look away from the window. He wasn’t keen on revisiting this topic again.

“She said goodbye to you. You know what, she was really saying goodbye to her dad. Really.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you see, Remo? She wasn’t faking it. You’re her dad and she knows that and she believes it in her heart Sunny Joe is her grandfather and maybe her mentor and maybe even her adopted father in some ways, but you’re her dad. You could hear it.”

Remo tried to think about the rather mundane event of leaving the village of Sun On Jo. He had gone in and kissed her goodbye and then she’d come to the door. “’Bye, Daddy!” she’d said, while Mark Howard stood there seeing little red hearts and stars.

Now that he thought about it, it sounded very true. He smiled.

Remo Williams felt happy. Despite all the weirdness and horrific events that had brought Freya to where she was, despite Remo’s absence from so much of her life, she saw Remo as her dad.

What could be better than that?

Mark Howard deemed it worthwhile to make himself useful. He drove the rental Mercedes, easily finding the way to the home of Allessandro Cote.

“He’s a well-known arms distributor, working mostly through legitimate channels,” Dr. Smith informed them after he researched the name briefly. “He’s known to have been a primary benefactor of the flood of arms out of Iraq after the last war. At least a thousand Kalashnikov rifles went through his system to end up in the hands of street gangs on the West Coast, mostly Los Angeles. Another five to eight thousand AKs are suspected to have been shipped into Colombia on both sides of the conflict. On the other hand, he’s done enough legitimate trade with enough legal entities around the world that he’s created a safety net. Not many people seem eager to prosecute his occasional indiscretions.”

“I am,” Remo said. “But he’s a reseller, so who did he resell the Gee-DAM to?”

“Watch your language when speaking to your emperor and his regent,” Chiun warned.

“What I don’t understand is why he bought the plans in Morocco at all,” Mark Howard added. “I mean, the Gee-DAM was stolen by a professional arms trade outfit, we assume. Cote is also a professional arms trader. What did they need with the bazaar in Casablanca?”

“That puzzled me, as well,” Smith said over the speakerphone. “The answer is that they would not. It was clearly a ploy, maybe designed to give them adequate warning of your arrival in Barcelona. They may have an ambush in mind.”

“Their trap will fail,” Chiun declared.

“They obviously know something of our activities,” Smith pointed out. “You saw the videotape. Master Chiun?”

“They know one of us wears a kimono. Who doesn’t?” Remo pointed out. “Remember the press conference in Washington a few months ago?”

“We locked it down. We know of no media feeds made public from that event,” Mark said.

“Yeah, but did you notice that there were maybe forty reporters on the scene? They’d remember a guy in a kimono. That’s just the latest public appearance by the Man in the Silk Pajamas. He’s a tough one to miss in your average crowd of non-kimono-wearing Americans.”

“Enough!” Chiun snapped. “I dislike being discussed as if I am not present.”

‘I’m just saying, is all.” Remo shrugged. “You’ve been spotted, taped, broadcast and publicized. How many times I can’t even guess.”

“My garments, perhaps, but my face is still unknown,” Chiun insisted.

“Thousands of people have seen you over the years, Chiun,” Remo said. “Face it, you attract people’s attention. Now somebody remembers seeing you, and maybe he has decided you work for some sort of a government agency, and is trying to draw you out”

“Shush, imbecile!”

“I’m afraid Remo may be correct. Master Chiun,” Smith said.

“This conversation is designed to intimidate me into giving up my traditional garb,” Chiun said accusingly.

“No,” Smith said, but he allowed the word to linger a little too long. “This conversation is intended to warn you to a possible danger in Barcelona: We do not know what they know, but it appears they have baited us here for some reason.”

“We’ll stay frosty,” Remo assured him.

“I shall not stay frosty.” Chiun glowered.

“You’ll stay grumpy.”

“Fah!”

The neighborhood Allessandro Cote called, home dated back at least two centuries. The homes were small castles erected on vast estates looking out over the Mediterranean Sea.

“I guess selling murder is good business,” Remo said. “Or was he born to the wealthy parents and sells guns as a hobby?”

“His father was a bus driver in Madrid,” Mark explained as he drove them along the manicured, semiprivate drive that meandered behind the seafront estates. “He bought the house from the government after the owners went bankrupt.”

“We’ll call you when we need a ride home,” Remo said.

Howard was about to ask where they wanted to be left off, but heard the brief thunk of car doors and realized that he was alone. He had never even slowed down. He looked in the rearview mirror and never saw Chiun and Remo, but he knew they must have entered a nearby decorative row of Mediterranean trees.

He rolled down the window and continued driving down the isolated road, enjoying the fragrant semitropical breezes.

The old brick home looked like something medieval, like an old church, but it had been augmented in recent decades with a white stucco addition the size of a small shopping mall. The walls were freshly whitewashed. The clay-tile roof would have been quaint if there weren’t acres and acres of it. The addition had probably tripled the square footage of interior space in the home, and it descended with the mountainside, halfway to the shore below.

The pair of shadows slipped among the cultivated gardens of temperate-climate plants with less noise than the salt-laden breeze.

Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus, smelled the fragrant salt air and the gentle sea breeze and became cold inside.

“Nice digs,” Remo said when he and Chiun stood unseen in the shadows of a palm tree grove adjoining the structure. “Let’s move here after we kick out the Boomstick Baron.”

Chiun said nothing.

“What’s with you?” Remo asked.

“Have you embraced your speck, Remo?”

“What speck?”

Chiun pierced him with a glare.

“Oh, my fear speck,” Remo said. “I haven’t forgotten what we talked about, Little Father.”

“Good.”

“But I don’t know what these creeps could throw at us that we can’t handle.”

“That is right, you do not know,” Chiun snapped. “And yet, wicked men are innovators in the ways of poison and torture and murder. Most of their efforts are no more dangerous than the rocks lobbed by baboons, but we do not know what is in this house.”

Remo was getting worried now. “Chiun, this isn’t like you. Do you know something I don’t know?”

Chiun shook his head. “There is something. Perhaps.” He held out his hands, as if warming them at a campfire. “It is strange.”

Remo frowned and held out his hands, too. He tried to feel whatever it was that had upset Chiun.

He shook his head and opened his mouth, to say he felt nothing, and then it was there, like a flicker of movement just outside his vision.

“You felt it?” Chiun asked.

“I felt something. I don’t know what.”

“Yes.”

“Seems sort of familiar. Sort of like a pressure shift or a temperature change or something.”

Chiun nodded. “But not those things.”

“I don’t know. It came and went so fast I couldn’t get a taste of it.”

It wasn’t often that he and Chiun ran up against something foreign to their experience, and now he was worried. “You’ll be pleased to know I found the speck.”

Chiun didn’t look pleased.

Allessandro Cote paced through the ballroom where once the aristocrats of Barcelona had met to dance and make merry. The aristocrats were dead. Their progeny had failed to sustain their wealth or dignity. They were back among the rabble as they deserved to be, surrendering the symbols of prestige to those who had earned, rather than inherited, a place of importance in the world.

“This won’t do,” Allessandro Cote complained. His accent was British with effeminate Spanish undertones. “Jenkins!”

The impossibly gaunt man who came through the servants’ entrance at the rear of the ballroom was dressed in a butler’s formal coat and tails. He could not have looked more uncomfortable in the get-up.

“Yes, Mr. Cote?”

Normally, Cote would have relished the perfection of the performance. Gomez had done an admirable job of learning his new role, as much as he had complained about it.

“Ring Fastbinder for me, will you, Jenkins?”

“Si. Yes!” Gomez swallowed the mistake and put back on his supremely bored face. “Certainly, suh, I’ll ring him at once.” Gomez/Jenkins walked slowly and deliberately to the rear of the room and through the servants’ entrance.

“I’ll have to dock the old git’s wages if he can’t learn to speak properly,” Cote complained, sipping his tea, which was actually coffee.

Jenkins relaxed into Gomez when he was out of the ballroom. He, too, was muttering to himself, words of encouragement and self-recrimination, all in his native Spanish. “You can do this. It’s just playing a part. You’ve played tougher roles than this.” He took the antique phone, sterling silver with ivory inlay, and lifted the original metal dial to expose the touch-pad that had been retrofitted into it. He poked out the number for Fastbinder in the United States and got the kid instead.

“Hiya, Jenkins,” said the kid. “How’s the butler bit going for you these days?”

“Fine, Master Jack. May I have your father, please?”

“It’s for you. Dad! He’ll be here in a minute, Jenkins.”

“That will be fine.”

“You know, you need some sort of a gimmick to complete the image, Jenkins.”

“A gimmick, Master Jack?”

“You know, Oddjob. He had the hat that sliced people’s head off?”

“I don’t have much call for slicing off heads.”

“There was Jaws, you know, the big guy with the steel teeth? Or there was the one movie with the babe who was into pain.”

“I fear I am not following you. Master Jack.”

“Point is, Jenkins, all the bodyguards have some sort of special feature or trick.”

“Yes?”

“So I started thinking about shoes. What if I gave you shoes with dart guns in them? It’d be real easy. All we’d need is a compressed-gas cartridge in the sole of the shoes and a series of firing tubes in the soles. Maybe make one a long-distance, high-accuracy projectile, one a fast-acting poison, maybe pack the others with flechettes. You know, little barbed suckers that would bury themselves into skin?”

“I don’t see this as truly necessary. Master Jack.”

“It’s no trouble. Then we’d have a series of switches inside the shoe. A certain combination of toe work would turn off the safety, then you could fire at the enemy as needed.”

“Listen, kid, cut me some slack, would you, por favor?” said Jenkins, dropping the act and becoming a sad-looking Gomez. “I’m going loco trying to play the British-butler routine as it is. I don’t think I could pull it off if it got any more complicated.”

“Read you loud and clear, amigo,” the kid said, just as cheerful as ever. “You ever change your mind, you let me know. I’ll work up some nice offensive footwear weaponry for you.”

“Sounds great,” Gomez said.

“Here’s Dad.”

Gomez wrenched himself back into the Jenkins persona when Fastbinder came on the line.

“Allessandro?”

“No, suh. One moment, suh.”

“Gomez, do not tell me he has you serving up the phone.”

‘Yes, suh. Exactly, suh.” Jenkins had the receiver on a silver tray with a starched white linen doily. He carried the tray to the servants’ entrance, trailing the cord for the phone behind him. The cord was eighty yards long—it had to be to reach from the small servants workstation to the far side of the ballroom.

“Hurry it up, at least, will you, Jenkins?”

“I am proceeding swiftly, suh.”

Gomez the Spanish street thug, murderer and occasional actor had endured a number of trials as he learned to become Jenkins, the English butler for the formal British household of Mr. Allessandro Cote.

He knew Allessandro Cote was really just a piece of Madrid street trash no better than any other piece of Madrid street trash. He started as beggar, became a nightclub bouncer, became a small-time gun-runner, and lucked into a big-time arms distribution deal. Along the way he’d managed to make friends with every organized crime figure west of the Basque region and, somehow, earned himself the nickname Captain Goat Fucker. Gomez/Jenkins had heard only the faintest whispers about the origin of the nickname. Spreading those rumors was a crime punishable by death. Gomez/Jenkins didn’t need to know the story. The nickname was pretty self-explanatory.

Fucking goats was something Gomez could understand. After all, Spanish goats were among the most attractive and spirited goats in all of Europe. It was Cote’s infatuation with all things British that Gomez found puzzling.

But he was willing to play along. Every time he started getting fed up with the British-butler routine he’d get another paycheck and all his doubts would be swept away.

“I could get myself a genuine British butler, but I need somebody who can handle himself in a tough situation,” Cote had explained, apparently entirely unselfconsciously. “I’ve seen you handle yourself on the street, Gomez. I know you’ve got the soldier skills I’m looking for. You speak excellent English. I’ve also seen you perform. You were quite good as Oberon.”

Gomez was flabbergasted. None of the street toughs in his loose-knit Madrid gang of drug dealers and protection racketeers had ever seen him act.

“Thank you, Mr. Cote!”

Still, Gomez hadn’t understood. It took days before he really grasped the scope of the role he was to play.

“This will be a formal, aristocratic British household, and I need a formal British butler to run it. I have a consultant coming from London to train you if you take the job.”

When Gomez heard the salary, he took the job. Weird as was, it wasn’t too weird.

The consultant turned out to be a seventy-six-year-old butler who had served most of the British royal family during his long career. At their first session, the old man, who never went by any name other than Robert, dressed Gomez in his stiff butler uniform and stuck a slender, dried meter of wood down the back of his shirt.

“Stand straight, don’t break it.”

Within minutes Gomez broke the wooden stick. Robert emotionlessly replaced it with another.

Robert taught Gomez how to stand stiffly, how to walk at half his usual speed, how to maintain a droll and emotionless demeanor at all times. By the end of the week Gomez could walk around for hours without breaking the stick in his shirt. He knew he could do this job.

But acting a role and actually living it, day after day, was taking its toll. He was horrified to discover that Gomez was going away and Jenkins was becoming the dominant, personality.

He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it before he either gave up and became Jenkins, the living, breathing cliché role to last a lifetime, or flee Cote and his formal British household and his extravagant paychecks and go back to distributing heroin in shantytowns around Madrid.

There was a lot to be said for shantytowns.

Jenkins made the deliberate and lengthy walk across the ballroom with the silver platter and the antique telephone, as if it were a crown on a felt pillow he were presenting.

“Mr. Fastbinder on the line from America, suh,” he intoned to his employer.

“Ah, terrific.” Cote snatched up the receiver lying on the doily aside the phone. “Fastbinder, how are you, old man? Fastbinder? Oh, bloody hell, he rang off.”

“Allow me to get him on the line again, suh,” Jenkins said, turning back for the servants’ entrance. Inside he was screaming—the walk was six minutes round trip, not counting the time it would take to get the kraut on the line. He didn’t know if he could stand it.

“Bugger it!” Cote blurted, snatching a mobile phone from his pocket, pressing a button and getting Fastbinder in seconds. “There you are, old man! Where’d you run off to then?”

“Your grasp of British frippery is excruciating, and I find your whole act repulsive,” snapped Fastbinder. “Please don’t make me a part of your fairy tale.”

“Hang on, old chap.” Cote lowered the phone. Jenkins took his cue.

“Will there be anything else, suh?”

“Not right now, Jenkins, thank you.”

Jenkins turned and began pacing back to the servants’ service room.

“All right, Fastbinder, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. So where’s our little ducks, eh?”

“They landed thirty-six minutes ago and had a car waiting for them,” Fastbinder reported.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all I know,” Fastbinder said.

“That’s all you know? What happened to all your whiz-bang technology you’ve been going on about?” Cote demanded.

“Surveillance isn’t my specialty. Besides, Spain is your realm, not mine. What have your spotters reported?”

“My spotters couldn’t find their arseholes even if you stuck a lit signal flare up in ’em,” Cote exclaimed. “They somehow managed to miss seeing who it was that got off the aircraft and into the car.”

“We’ve been told these men are fast and elusive.”

“Poppycock! What I want to know is when the bastards are coming here.”

Fastbindertsked. “Really, Allessandro. Poppycock? Did anyone ever really use the word?”

“When, Fastbinder? When?”

“Soon enough,” Fastbinder said. “You’re drinking far too much coffee today.”

“I’m drinking tea.”

“I can see the tea service, Allessandro, and I watched your poor imitation butler brew coffee.”

Cote swore silently. He’d forgotten Fastbinder had the place set up for intense data gathering, including audio, video and a scattering of other sensors he couldn’t begin to understand. “It’s not the coffee, it’s the whole bloody setup. I don’t even know how much risk there is.”

“Very little.”

“So you say.”

“You get the Gee-DAM schematics as a reward— you’ll make millions, Cote. Besides, it’s too late to back out now. Everything is in place.”

Cote said, “Yeah.” He stood in the middle of his ballroom and slowly walked in a circle. He saw wooden panels painted in the late eighteenth century. He saw stained glass and a polished marble floor. There wasn’t a hint as to the location of Fastbinder’s equipment.

“How can I be sure your mechanical contraptions won’t mistake me for one of your special agents?”

“You’ve got your pocket watch?” Fastbinder asked. Cote withdrew the old gold-plated pocket watch provided him by Fastbinder and his son when they’d outfitted the great old Spanish house just days before. It supposedly served as a beacon that Fastbinder’s equipment could sense. As long as he had the watch, he wouldn’t be targeted—in theory.

“What I said was, how do I know?”

“Little late to be asking now,” Fastbinder replied. Leaving Cote not at all reassured.