Unpopular Science

Chapter 31

Playing security guard was always boring work. Didn’t matter if it was an office building in Dayton, Ohio, or the White House. You basically just kind of stood there waiting for something to happen.

The security around the White House was always good enough by most standards, but never very good by Remo’s.

“This false president has little respect for us,” Chiun noted as they slipped along the outside of the White House grounds, skirting the cameras and sensors that watched the place.

“He doesn’t know anything about us,” Remo answered.

“You should not talk. Traitor of Sinanju!”

“Come on, Chiun, I’m not a traitor.”

“You have disposed of fifty centuries of learning and tradition.”

“I haven’t disposed of anything. You’re overreacting.”

“Overreacting? How dare you!”

“I dunno, how?”

“I never overreact!” Chiun snapped explosively.

“Sorry, I must have been thinking of somebody else.”

They slipped past the concealed military patrol and stepped up to and over the fence, which, at something like fifteen feet high, didn’t appear easy to step over.

“Keep an eye out—this is FEMbot turf,” Remo said.

“You are worried about these mechanical vermin?”

“No.”

“Do they not constitute some new and unassailable threat?”

“No.”

“Why not? They are computerized! They have radio waves and mobile telephones built right in! Surely they will neutralize and nullify the Masters of Sinanju and all their skills.”

Remo stopped in the evening shadow of one of Washington, D.C.’s famous cheny trees. “Little Father, I know why you’re pissed off.”

“I am angry for many reasons. Almost anything you say has a good chance of being correct.”

“Look, Chiun, I know the real reason.”

“I doubt it.”

“You think I’m sullying the Sinanju reputation and hurting future business.”

Chiun stared at him.

“I’m right, aren’t I? It doesn’t matter that we’ve had our batteries drained and our butts kicked. All you care about is that I admitted as much to Mark and Smitty. You think they’ll somehow communicate this information to the kings and queens and despots that hire assassins like us.”

Chiun looked away and fluttered his hand in the night. “If only you had come to realize this before you spoke to Smith.”

“I did.”

“Liar.”

“First of all, Smitty’s not going to gossip about it on the heads-of-state grapevine.”

“He will.”

“Second, we’ve had our ass kicked once or twice before. The Sinanju reputation hasn’t suffered.”

“How would you know?”

“I know we’re getting paid an obscene amount of gold for doing this job, and it’s more than we were paid under the last contract,” Remo said. “Our fee keeps going up, so our value must be increasing.”

“Our value to other emperors is what matters,” Chiun lectured. “We do not know when Smith’s gold will run out, and we must take into account our value on the market.”

Remo nodded distractedly. “Let’s talk about it later, okay? We’re about to face down our first FEMbot.”

Chiun said nothing, putting his hands in his sleeves. Remo was more wary, but it was tough to be worried about a contraption that announced its presence the way the FEMbot did, with a rhythm of low-grade whining sounds from internal drive motors and the clicking of relays and the popping of minuscule air-pressure actuators.

The sound was below the level of most human hearing, but to Remo it was as loud as the beeper on a garbage truck in reverse. It didn’t look real, either.

“Is it my imagination, or is that squirrel goose-stepping?” he asked Chiun. “Maybe it is a Nazi android squirrel FEMbot.”

The FEMbot was aiming at their tree. Remo lowered his skin temperature to fool its thermal sensors and he stood more still than most people would have found possible. He and Chiun conversed in a low, steady drone of sound that would lose itself in the ambient noise of the evening. Whatever the FEMbot used to look for intruders, it wasn’t working. The fake squirrel never gave them a second look.

“That thing probably cost the taxpayers ten million,” Remo said as the squirrel laboriously dug its claws into the tree and scissored through the branches.

“All that good money for a device that falls apart at the slightest touch,” Chiun said, batting the FEMbot on the top of the head. The FEMbot was instantly transformed into so much scrap metal in a bad nylon fur coat, which slammed into the earth so hard it imbedded itself.

“I’ll take this side, you take that side,” Remo said. “Try not to do that anymore, okay? There’s probably a keeper on the premises who’ll come looking for his malfunctioning Nazi android squirrel FEMbot.”

“Then the robot rodents should keep their distance from Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus.”

“Yeah. I’ll spread the word.”

That was when the boring part of the job set in. Remo kept moving, kept an eye out and found himself ridiculously at his ease when it came to stepping around cameras and sensors, making himself unseen to the Secret Service patrols, and making himself generally nonexistent as far as the FEMbots were concerned. He circled the entire building every half hour, invariably finding Chiun tailing one of the executive defense squirrels. Chiun would toss cherry twigs onto the lawn around the robot, making it turn sharply, then turn again, until he had it spinning in circles. This was apparently not good for the drive systems that moved the stiff little legs. The squirrel would eventually jerk and come to a halt, internal Servos whining, and there would be a burning smell.

“I asked you to leave them alone,” Remo said in a whisper that didn’t distract the canine sentinel that was almost within arm’s reach. A hundred feet away, Chiun smiled and waved, showing no sign he heard Remo’s admonition.

“Oh, great,” Remo told the Rottweiler. “Now the old goat’s going deaf on top of everything else.”

The Rottweiler was oblivious to both intruders and continued his Because-He-Can activity. Chiun, however, sneered. “On top of what else, Remo Williams?”

“I knew you could hear me. I asked you not to touch the FEMbots.”

“I did not touch it,” Chiun sniffed. “And if I had?” He nudged the robot with his foot. The robot vanished, but not so fast Remo missed seeing it go.

He also witnessed Chiun’s quick slice-and-snatch, but didn’t comment on that, either. Just sighed and resumed his patrol.

When the FEMbot reached an altitude of twenty-seven feet, it entered the EDS MUAV LAWZ, and that, naturally, sent the military into a tizzy.

The door burst open. “Mr. President!”

The First Lady was instantly awake and sitting up in bed, eyes wild. “What’s happening?”

“Haven’t I told you folks to knock first?” the President asked.

“Security emergency! Get up, please. You, too, ma’am.”

“What kind of security emergency?” the President demanded, putting down the legal pad on which he had been journaling.

The Secret Service agent tried not to look, but his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the notepad for a fraction of a second-just long enough to read the words “Octet of Evil” doodled in big, block comic-book letters. There were many explanation points after it. He looked away quick. “There’s been a breakdown in the FEM system. Please come with me.”

“Whoa, partner.” The President put his hands up. “A breakdown is not an alarm.”

“There’s been an anomalous event,” the second Secret Service agent explained.

Dammit! the first agent thought. He hated it when the Chief Executives started getting cocky. And they all did, right around the third year. But he also hated rookie Secret Service agents. Didn’t he know—you never, ever give the President too much information.

“Describe anonymous in this pretext,” the President added.

“Context, dear,” the First Lady said, still frightened.

“We think we’ve got a micro-unguided air vehicle in the vicinity of the White House,” the agent informed him.

“This follows an aberrant malfunction in the fielded FEM units,” the rookie added detrimentally.

“Stay here with the First Lady.” The President swung his legs out of bed and dragged on his long flannel robe, scuffed and patterned to look like suede.

“We’re here to escort you below.”

“You will stay here with my wife. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Mr. President—!”

“Agent,” the President interrupted, “there’s a certain senator whose husband used to be Chief Executive, and this senator is requesting an increased Secret Service guard be assigned to her. Interested in a transfer?”

The agent began to tremble visibly. “No, thank you, sir. I’d prefer death by fire ants, Mr. President.”

“Then stay with my missus, Agent, she’s quite nice by comparison.”

The President made a quick jog to the Oval Office, brushed off the aides and agents who tried to get his attention and slammed the door behind him. A fine powder of plaster crumbled down from the ceiling. The President snatched a phone out of his desk.

“Yes, Mr. President?” answered the director of CURE.

“Your boys on the property?”

“I would assume so, sir.”

“You told them what I said, didn’t you? That they couldn’t beat my robo-rats, and they took it as a challenge?”

“Er, that is possible, sir. I’m monitoring the alerts on the Executive Defense System Micro Air Unmanned Vehicle Low Altitude Watch Zone. The signal that caused the alarm was from a small object that was, in fact, traveling away from the White House.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Its mass makes it, possibly, a FEMbot.”

“But you’re not a hundred percent sure? What if it isn’t your boys?”

“Do I appear as a boy to you?”

The President shouted and leaped to his feet. It was the old man, who was standing before the desk as if he had been waiting there patiently for minutes. But the President knew he would have noticed an unexpected senior citizen when he first entered the Oval Office. Especially one with severe sunburn.

“Is that Master Chiun? May I speak to him?” Smith asked.

“He may not,” Chiun answered.

The President hung up. “Why you been havocing up my artificial wildlife?”

“Because they are a hindrance to the safeguarding of this symbolic domicile and the figurehead who dwells within.”

“Yeah, well, you busted some of them up. They’re eleven million each.”

Somehow, there was now on the President’s desk a pile of brown hairy things with wires coming out the end. Squirrel tails! The President sputtered as he counted them. “That’s 122 million U.S. tax dollars down the drain! How’d you like it if I took that out of your salary? I get the impression you’re paid handsomely for your occasional contributions—”

That was as far as he got. The old Korean’s eyes were cold, deadly cold. “Surely you would not break your contract with Sinanju. No leader ever breaks a contract with Sinanju. Especially if this is his most effective alternative.” The old man nodded at the desktop full of faux squirrel tails. When the President looked up again he found himself alone.

The old Korean had a point Clearly the FEMbots were not the last line of presidential security that their Pentagon sponsor had proclaimed them to be.