Warren Murphy - Waste Not, Want Not

She began collecting the janitor's things. She would destroy everything the first chance she got. "Those men are here," Petrovina said. "The ones who know about your amnesia. They both seem to know you."

"Your phone?" Anna asked as she hurriedly worked.

"The old one still has it as far as I know."

"Good." The last thing Anna picked up was the strange gun the janitor had used against her. With careful blue eyes she followed the path the fired weapon had taken.

A hole as big around as a coffee mug was visible in the door frame. There was no splintering of wood. No bullet had been fired. Beyond, in the same path of the fired weapon, a similar hole had been bored through the trunk of a tree.

Anna's eyes narrowed as she studied the strange phenomenon. "I was never here," Anna Chutesov announced.

Tucking the gun into its box and tucking the box up under her arm, Anna hustled past Agent Petrovina Bulganin. And was lost in the growing confusion.

Chapter 32

They drove a government Jeep up into the hills. Mike Sears was behind the wheel, a bloody bandage wrapped around his injured head. Remo sat beside him. Chiun and Petrovina sat in the back. When the guards at the booth saw Sears, they obediently opened the gates to the special road above the Vaporizer.

It was nearly a two-hour drive, from paved road to treacherous dirt path. All along the side of the road, even in dense jungle, ran telephone poles. Black lines of cables stretched up from far below, sometimes hidden by the jungle canopy, sometimes breaking out into stark sunlight.

"What happened to the people who put up the poles?" Remo asked Sears as they drove.

The scientist looked sickly. "I don't know," he admitted. "When they were done, they just sort of vanished. Maybe they work for a utility company in town?" His look of hope faded when he saw Remo's hard expression.

The ravine between the mountains brought them to a vast valley. Sears stopped the Jeep on a plateau above.

A sea of rotting garbage stretched out before them-every scrap of trash that had been processed through the Vaporizer from the first moment it had been switched on.

In the back seat, Petrovina turned to the scientist. "It was all hoax," she accused.

Sears nodded. There was shame on his face. "It would have taken years to fill this valley. We had plenty of room. I always figured it would be found out sooner or later, but by then everyone would be in the habit of sending their trash here and wouldn't stop. I mean, it didn't matter where it ended up as long as someone was willing to take it, right? But I guess that wasn't the plan at all." He still seemed shell-shocked from the events below. "See, the Vaporizer doesn't disintegrate trash, it just sort of moves it."

The telephone poles fanned out in either direction, forming a semicircle around the near end of the valley, connected by cables. At the top of each pole a black box that looked like a miniature outdoor speaker was directed down into the valley.

"The demolecularized trash we sent up from the Vaporizer traveled the cable and was redirected back out through those," Sears explained. As the four of them climbed out of the Jeep, he pointed up at the boxes on the poles.

In the distance some trash had materialized on trees, bending them low. In most places it had obliterated the local flora. The valley floor was a growing mountain of trash. Seagulls flew above while rats played on the piles.

"Your great work," Remo said acidly.

"I didn't invent it," Sears said defensively as he looked down on the valley. "They brought the technology to me. They needed a public face to keep the secret. I learned enough to keep it running, but I didn't come up with it."

"Yes, your secret," Petrovina spat. "That you did all this with technology stolen from Russia." Remo had kept quiet on the subject for the ride up. He shook his head firmly.

"Only after Russia stole it from Japan," he insisted.

He spoke with utter certainty. Both Sears and Petrovina saw the confident cast of his face. As he looked out across the valley, Chiun nodded agreement.

"What are you talking about?" Petrovina demanded.

"Russia doesn't do complex, Petrovina," Remo explained. "Russia does clumsy. Tanks and trucks and missiles that rattle apart as soon as they're driven off the showroom floor. Russia can't build a toaster small enough to fit in your garage. If they can't build it with hammers, they can't build it. This was the Japanese. If you want specifics, it was the Nishitsu Corporation that came up with all this."

Both Sears and Petrovina knew the company well. Nishitsu was huge. Like most people in the West, they each owned several Nishitsu appliances.

"How do you know?" Petrovina asked skeptically.

"Because we've had experience with this stuff," Remo replied.

And he told them about a man both Remo and Chiun had encountered before. A man who wore a suit that could compress atoms and redirect them through telephone lines. The suit had been developed in Japan by Nishitsu and stolen by the Russians. Twice Remo and Chiun had gone up against a Russian in the suit. One time they had met a Japanese who worked for the corporation that had developed it.

Petrovina remained skeptical, but Mike Sears was nodding with growing enthusiasm.

"The suit," he said excitedly, eyes wide with interest. "You actually saw it? I mean, you saw it work?"

"It was a thing of evil," Chiun said coldly. He made a point of tucking his long fingernails deep inside the sleeves of his kimono.

"Wow," Sears said. "I never saw it myself. It was in the specs he brought. There were schematics and everything. We were able to reverse-engineer the technology from the data he stole and adapt it to the Vaporizer."

"You are saying this is true?" Petrovina asked.

"It's basically the same thing," Sears said, nodding. "Only on a much bigger scale. We were redirecting a lot more matter than is present in a single human being. No sweat, because the fiber-optic lines gave us much more capacity than even we needed. The only real problem was that the suit was built to protect the wearer. It reconstructed on the far end after transport because the matter was contained. Our open version couldn't reconstruct like that. Not a problem for inanimate matter, but for organic material..."

His voice trailed off. He had seen the look on Remo's face.

Remo was peering down into the valley, his expression dark with disgust. Wordlessly he left the others, taking off down the hill.

"Where are you going?" Petrovina asked. She started after him, but Chiun held her back.

"Leave him be," the old Korean cautioned. "He cleans up the mess Russian meddling has wrought." Remo found his way down the stone slope to the valley floor. The trash stretched up high before him. He had spotted the deformed bundles from above. They decorated the nearer slope of the trash heap.

The Russian sailors from the Novgorod looked like mutated mockeries of human beings. Misshapen white bones jutted out like armor-plated spines on deformed dinosaurs. Uniforms were intermingled with flesh. Buttons were fused to the exposed radius of one man's twisted forearm.

From the mound of garbage, Remo heard a pathetic wheezing. He quickly scaled the pile. Gennady Zhilnikov had survived the process. The Russian submarine captain was deformed almost beyond recognition. Yet there was a glimmer of human intelligence in his pleading eyes. He held his arms out in prayer.

Remo killed him gently, mercifully.

Afterward he went through the others, checking for signs of life. No more had survived.

Just to be certain he searched for the body of Jack James. He found the Mayanan executive president lying dead on a rotting heap of trash, his head haloed by his own twisted limbs.

Turning, he hiked back up the hill. The others were waiting for him in the Jeep.