Warren Murphy - Waste Not, Want Not

"Step away!"

James wheeled.

Petrovina Bulganin stood in the control booth, her pistol trained on the infamous Jamestown cult leader. James smiled a twisted grin of triumph.

"Too late!" he cried, laughing maniacally. "You can shoot me if you want, but you are all dead! They told me the machine needs to remain perfectly balanced. With the door missing, it's not. When it goes off, the Vaporizer will consume itself, this hill, these grounds and every last one of us. I've won."

For an instant Petrovina Bulganin weighed her options.

Abruptly she turned the barrel of her gun from James, aiming it at the upright computer nearest the Mayanan president. Petrovina unloaded her clip into the hard drive.

Sparks exploded in the small room. There was a spluttering hiccup in the swelling hum of power. "No!" James flew to the window. He didn't care that the Russian woman whom he'd carelessly left alive back at his presidential palace turned and ran from the control room. Didn't care about anything but his failed act of vengeance.

He had been too slow. As he watched, the lights in the upper level dimmed. The newer section would shut down first. The lower level still glowed brilliant white.

Not that it mattered. The deck was clear.

He saw something rocketing toward the pit. It had the blurry shape of a man.

For an instant as it struck the fence that surrounded the lower level, James saw a face frozen in time. The dark eyes of the Angel of Death himself stared deep into the cold black soul of Jack James.

The fence bowed out over the pit.

The lights still glowed bright. There was a flash. And the man with the face of doom promptly disappeared. Vaporized into oblivion.

Chapter 30

The force needed to hurl the final world leader out to safety created an opposite reaction that had to be channeled somewhere. Remo used it to propel himself back toward the fence that surrounded the deep Vaporizer pit.

Up and out into empty air.

The soles of his loafers hit the chain link, bowing it out over the pit. Brilliant white lights glowed beneath him. The charge of ionized particles filled the air. But the true forces of nature could not be known to mere machines.

Remo was a full Master of Sinanju, his body trained to the perfection that lived unrealized in all men.

Out over empty air, the vast blackness of certain death stretched out beneath him, Remo Williams, Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju, felt the world flood his senses. And to every last atom, all was right and perfect.

The fence was a bow that launched him like an arrow back across the deck.

At a speed even his teacher could not follow, Remo was out through the doors. The shaken world leaders who stood with the old Korean felt little more than a hiss of violent wind as he zoomed through their midst.

Down the path he flew, banking up along the inside of the chain-link fence. He was up the stairs and in the control room even as Jack James was still registering his disappearance from below.

When the cult leader saw Remo appear before him the instant after he had seen Remo disappear from down below, his eyes grew wide. He fell back, shocked.

"You can't be alive," James gasped.

"Said one dead man to another," Remo replied. "In your case what say we make it official?"

And he lifted the cult leader off the floor.

Jack James saw the control-room window come toward him very fast. The glass shattered and he was out in empty air. And like a god, Jack James soared on angel's wings.

He flew until he fell.

All at once the lights of the Vaporizer, which had been distant, grew very large all around him.

And Jack James looked into one of the lights, and that light became very bright, and Jack James was flying toward it. And then he was one with the light. A god propelled forward on a stream of pure energy in a tunnel that was warm with the heat of his creation. For an instant Jack James was the god he always knew he was.

Then the mouth yawned open at the far end of the magnificent, light-filled tunnel.

It was not heaven waiting on the far end. For Jack James it was an altogether other place.

And in one terrible instant, a lifetime of all the pain and anguish he had ever inflicted on others was heaped upon him. And in the first moment of his ultimate fall from grace, the wonderful path of light to the kingdom that was never his collapsed behind him, sealing the distinctly ungodly Jack James in misery and torment for all eternity.

FROM THE CONTROL BOOTH, Remo watched the lights of the Vaporizer splutter and die. The pit went dark. The power hummed silent beneath his feet.

Jack James was gone. The Jamestown cult leader had disappeared in the instant just before the lights went dark.

Alone, Remo nodded satisfaction. "Garbage in, garbage out." Turning, he headed back out the door.

Chapter 31

It was all over.

He could tell from the shouts and from the activity out near the Vaporizer. He could see it all through the tiny window in his little cinder-block shed. Security personnel from dozens of countries were swarming in. Tires squealed. Dignitaries were being hustled out to waiting cars.

Yes, it was over. At least for now.

He would find another. There was no doubt that he could. He had skills that the shadow world would pay dearly for. Jack James had been a client. Not a partner, not a visionary, not anything. There were plenty of other clients out there just like James.

The man who was thought to be a janitor, but who had been the real mind behind the Vaporizer, hastily stuffed a few items in a knapsack. A few floppy disks, some schematics. He had already destroyed his hard drives. All of the data he had stolen. He could use it to re-create his work here. Or adapt it in other ways the world would not expect.

This last thought flitted through his racing mind even as his hand brushed across an item on his workbench.

It looked like a soldering gun with a miniature satellite dish attached to the end. He picked it up to put it in its special case when a voice from behind startled him.

"You stupid fool. You stupid, stupid fool."

The woman's voice was flat with cold contempt. Keeping his back to her, he looked up only with his eyes. He saw her reflection on the screen of his dead monitor. The beautiful woman with the blond hair was framed in the open doorway of the shed. In her hand was some sort of pistol. She had it aimed at his back.

"Did you even care what might happen?" she asked. She spoke in his native language. "I read the data. Shifting atoms like this is dangerous on a small level. An accident where a single atom materializes inside another could cause a nuclear explosion. With what you have been doing here, we are lucky all of South America wasn't blown into orbit. Or worse. You knew this, yet you did not care."

His hand still rested on the strange-looking gun on his desk, shielded by his body. Unseen by his guest, he lifted it, a smile brushing his pale features.

"I was paid handsomely for my skills," he admitted. "But I was not paid to care." And he whirled.

He squeezed the trigger once. But only once. He had fired wide. Anna Chutesov did not. Anna's bullet caught the janitor square in the chest. With a shocked look on his face, he spun on one heel. He died sprawled across his workbench. Still scowling, Anna crossed to check the man's pulse. Satisfied that he was dead, she holstered her weapon. When she heard scuffling feet behind her, she glanced up.

"Director Chutesov!" Petrovina Bulganin exclaimed from the door. She noted the janitor's body. "Is that him?"

Anna nodded. "I came just as this confusion began," she said, aiming her chin to the bedlam out in the parking lot. "They were all more interested in spiriting their charges to safety. No one saw me come here."