Warren Murphy: Blue Smoke and Mirrors

Chiun caught the receiver as it fell.

"We are too late," he said angrily.

"Give me that," Remo said, taking the receiver away from him and clapping it to one ear. He listened anxiously as Robin Green, reloading a smoking automatic, stepped into the room.

"You lied to me," she said harshly. "You tricked me!"

"Quiet," Remo said, listening. He heard crackling static, and under it, the steady ringing of a telephone on the other end.

"Great," he said, punching a button on the telephone. He got another line and pressed the pound button continuously. A relay triggered an automatic dialing sequence, and soon Remo was hearing another phone ringing.

The receiver was picked up on the other end.

"Yes?" a dry voice said.

"Smitty. He got away from us. But he's coming your way."

"I know. The special phone is ringing," Dr. Harold W. Smith said.

In the background, Remo heard a telephone jangling.

"Yeah, I can hear it too," Remo said. "What do you want us to do?"

"I will handle this," Smith told him. "Tie up any loose ends and return to Folcroft." The line went dead.

In his office at Folcroft Sanitarium Dr. Harold W. Smith replaced the receiver. He turned his attention to another telephone, one which sat beside it. It was a

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standard AT&T desk model, unusual only in that it had no dial or push buttons. But this wasn't the dialless telephone that was Smith's direct link to the White House. That phone was red. This one was gray. The gray telephone kept ringing. Smith ignored it and turned in his cracked leather swivel chair.

He stooped at the baseboard where the ringing telephone connected to a wall jack. Smith took the round plug in his hands and pulled the prongs from the jack.

Abruptly, the gray telephone stopped ringing.

Smith returned to his desk, his thin lips quirked into a rare dry-as-dust smile.

"You turkeys tricked me!" Robin Green repeated.

"Hey, you had your chance," Remo told her defensively.

"I almost didn't get out from behind my mirror. It was supposed to shatter at a single blow."

"Gee, mine shattered the first time," Remo said in a dubious tone. "How about yours, Little Father?"

"My mirror broke easily," Chiun said smugly.

"I meant a normal blow!" Robin shouted, face flushed. "I kept pounding and pounding. Finally, I had to shoot my way out."

"Everyone knows that women are weak," Chiun sniffed. "I am sure that had you been born a male, you would have had no trouble breaking your mirror."

Robin Green looked at them with smoldering blue eyes. Her knuckles whitened on the butt of her automatic. Remo thought for a moment that she was going to open up on them. Instead, she sucked in a deep breath, as if to get control of herself. A button on her dress-blue uniform popped and hit the floor noisily.

She looked down at it. "Oh, I give up," she said in a small defeated voice. She slumped up against the wall. "Just tell me what happened here, okay?"

"You saw it through your two-way mirror," Remo said, returning the button, "just as we did. The

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Krahseevah panicked. He thought the suit wasn't working, so we went for him while he was switching back and forth."

"And you were too slow," Chiun said shortly.

"Hey, I touched him. I hurt him," Remo retorted. "Which is more than I can say for some people around here."

"If you are referring to me, my place of concealment was further away from that creature than yours. You had an unfair advantage. No doubt you were abetted by the whites who constructed this snare under Emperor Smith's direction."

"Same distance. We measured them, remember? You insisted."

Robin stamped her foot suddenly.

"Will you two stop it!" she scolded. "We lost him. Probably for good, this time. All I want is something plausible to put into my report. Maybe I can still salvage what's left of my career."

"Uh-uh, not for good," Remo said. "I'll admit I would have preferred to capture him with my bare hands, but Smith knew that that was an iffy proposition at best. So he had a backup plan in place."

"Whoa, go back two squares. What about this?" Robin asked, pointing to the model.

They crowded around the model aircraft.

"Go ahead, touch it," Remo suggested.

Her brows puckering, Robin Green reached out with both hands. They passed through the model as if it were a mirage.

She looked at Remo in slack-jawed amazement. Remo indicated the ceiling lights with a finger.

"It's a hologram," he explained. "A three-dimensional image projected by lasers. It's not real. Never was."

"You could have told me that before you sealed me behind that chickshit mirror."

Remo shrugged. "No time. Besides, you're still re-

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covering from the car crash. We couldn't risk you getting hurt."

"Hey. I'm as good as any man. I've proved that."

The Master of Sinanju walked over to a corner where a little brass censer squatted. Stooping, he sprinkled white powder onto dimly smoldering coals. With a noxious puff of smoke, the coals went out.

Chiun brought the censer back to the pedestal and presented it to Robin Green with a twinkle in his hazel eyes. She accepted it wordlessly.

"What's this?" she asked at last. "I don't understand."

"There was a little bit of a problem with the laser image," Remo explained. "We tested it before we brought it here and it flickered like film going through a bad projector. We didn't know what to do until Chiun came up with a solution."

Chiun's papery lips broke into a satisfied smile.

"Blue mirrors and smoke," he explained, gesturing through the haze to the shattered blue-tinted mirrors whose dangling shards framed closetlike wall recesses. "You had it backward, which is typical for someone who has had the misfortune to be born both white and female."

"He's teasing you," Remo told Robin.

"About what? Being female or the other nonsense? And why are you grinning?" Robin demanded, looking for a place to put the censer down. She tried to set it to one side of the aircraft model, but there was no room. Finally she muttered, "Oh, the hell with it," and set it squarely atop the hologram aircraft. The combined object looked like a brass bowl with glass wings.

"Because it's all over," Remo said pleasantly.

"What do you mean, all over? He got away. Again."

"Nope," Remo said, escorting her to the wall telephone.

"Did you ever hear of a telephone being installed in a nuclear-weapons storage bunker?" Remo asked.

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"No. I may be a service brat, but I didn't exactly grow up in one of these things."

" 'Brat' is the word," Chiun sniffed.

"Another piece of Smith's handiwork," Remo said, picking up the receiver. "No matter which number you dial"-he demonstrated by hitting several keys at random-"it's programmed to ring only one phone in the entire world. A special one on Smith's desk."

"Oh, he has a desk, does he?" Robin said sarcastically. "And here I thought he lived in a padded room with all the other lunatics who think they're Napoleon. Don't think I missed Charlie Chan here calling him emperor. Or you calling him Little Father. I must have been crazy to try to work with you two. No, I take that back. I must be the only sane one around here. Just give me that."

Robin took the receiver. Brushing away a bit of hair, she put it to her ear.

"I don't hear anything," she said.

"That's good," Remo said. "It means Smith disconnected the phone at the other end."

Robin blinked as the significance of Remo's words penetrated.

"Disconnected?"

"Yep," Remo said with a self-satisfied grin.

"So where's the Krahseevah?'' Robin asked uncertainly.

"Got me," Remo said casually, hanging up the phone. "But he didn't come out on Smith's end. He didn't come back. My guess is that he's somewhere in the coils of Ma Bell. You know, I once saw a commercial that claimed there are billions and billions of miles of cable in our telephone system. I think our Krahseevah's in for a long, long roller-coaster ride."