Warren Murphy: Missing Link

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sault before landing. When he stopped on his feet, he threw his arms out to his sides at shoulder height.

"Always playing games," Chiun said.

"Just practicing for the Olympics," Remo said. "Anyway, nothing wrorjg with showing a little class."

"Economy is everything" Chiun said. "If one turn is needed, do one turn. Anything more is for show, mere show."

"You're just jealous."

"As the sun envies the candle," Chiun replied. "This way."

Jessica Lester had parked her car and sat in the front seat while she blackened her face with water-soluble makeup. Ordinarily, the high fence would have given her a moment's worry. But she had asked the pilot who flew her into Newport to go low over the estate and she had seen the rail lines glinting in the moonlight. There had to be an opening in the fence for a railroad car to get through.

She followed the fence to the far western edge of the property where it turned north, then followed the fence for five hundred yards in that direction. She had left her white trench coat in her automobile, parking in the shrubs, back off the main road, out of sight. Her light blonde hair was wrapped now and hidden in her black bandanna.

In the deepest part of the night before the onset of dawn, she moved quickly and surely toward a spot in the fence fifty yards away where she saw the twin lines of railroad track glistening in the moonlight.

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Closer up, she could see the gap in the fence. As she expected, there was a guard on duty in a small shack next to the fence opening.

She moved away from the fence, traveling a large semi-circle in the blackness, which finally brought her back to the fence behind the guard's shack. Cautiously, she peered in through a window.

The guard was sitting on a stool, dozing. She reached behind her for her pistol and moved to the front of the shack where the door was ajar. Then she changed her mind. If she killed him and he was required to make certain check-in calls, it might trigger an alarm and alert the camp. She did not need to kill him. She moved away from the shack, through the opening in the electrified fence and vanished quickly in some shrubbery which bordered the rail line. The guard being alive might make it more difficult for her to get out with Bobby Jack Billings in tow, she realized, but she would blow up that little bridge when she came to it.

Still she felt a tinge of nervousness. Thank God, she thought, that this is the last mission. When the nerves went, a spy had nothing left, except perhaps guile and intelligence and experience. But without nerve, those things counted for less than nothing. Nerve was the key—and she was nervous and didn't like the feeling.

She wished it were all over before she made a mistake.

In a small room in an underground chamber farther down the railroad track, two men sat looking at a panel on which Jessica Lester's mistake was clearly visible.

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She had correctly figured that the weakness of the compound was the train entrance. But the designers of the security procedures at The Spring had realized that human guards had human failings, like falling asleep at night. They had installed a backup system of invisible electric eyes, beginning twenty feet from the guard's shack. The system was installed on bushes two feet off the ground so it would not be triggered accidentally by a rabbit or a raccoon. So when the red warning light flashed on in the control room, the two men who sat in the room drinking coffee and watching the instrument panel were instantly alert. They knew someone had broken into the camp.

The two men wore military type khaki uniforms, with holstered sidearms on their hips. One of the men pressed a button which flashed small warning signals in one of the buildings in which the security staff of the compound slept. The small beeping sound instantly woke one of the men, who slept in his clothes. He got up from his bed and shook awake four other men who quickly dressed, strapped on guns and ran from the building.

Back at the underground control center, another red light flashed as Jessica Lester triggered another electric eye.

"Headed this way," the man said.

"I wonder if he killed Cooley," the second man said.

"Serves him right if he's sleeping again. Where are those guards?"

"Don't worry. They're coming. I wonder who this guy is."

"Don't know," the second man said. He was

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short, with a build like a top-loading washer. "There's some funny stuff going on up at the big house. The maids tell me they're not allowed into the west wing. The old man brings in food himself. Most of it comes out not even touched. But they keep shipping in two cases of beer a day."

He stopped speaking as a third light lit on the panel. The lights were arranged in concentric rings. The new light lit on the third inner ring.

"Definitely heading for the big house," the man said. "I guess it's time."

The two men went outside the guard's control room and met five other men. They spoke quietly.

"He's heading up toward the big house," the husky short man said. "Well cut him off up there."

He opened a door that led down a dark flight of steps. The men ran down the steps, closing the door behind them. At the bottom of the steps was a tunnel cut under the ground to the main building. The tunnel was lightly illuminated by low-wattage bulbs but the men were able to see well enough to run at full speed.

The tunnel exited at ground level from a shedlike structure attached to the rear of the main mansion. Next to the shed was a private railroad car sitting on a siding directly behind the rear patio entrance to the mansion. The men took up predetermined posts around the building and waited.

Jessica Lester took her pistol from behind her waist. From her pocket, she took a silencer and screwed it onto the barrel. As she moved near the big house now, she could see the first fingers of lightness growing in the pre-dawn sky. She would

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have to move quickly or the same costume that provided protection in darkness would make her stand out like a beacon light.

She was surprised that there were no significant signs of security. It made no sense to shelter a kidnap victim and have no security but a fence with a hole in it. She put the thought out of her mind. So the mission was a piece of cake. After all these years, she deserved an easy one for her valediction.

Just a few minutes more, she hoped.

"There are electronic devices," Chiun said to Remo as they moved swiftly toward the big house. "Do you feel them?"

"No," Remo said. "But I figured there were 'cause we didn't see any guards."

"There are," said Chiun flatly. Remo did not need to ask Chiun how he knew there were electronic sensors. Remo knew how Chiun knew. It required exerting a force around one's body so that anything intruding on that force was registered by direction and strength. Remo could do it most of the time, but it took a conscious effort of will for him. With Chiun, it was an instinctive and continuous process.

They were only a hundred yards from the big house.

Jessica paused at the edge of the trees leading to the clearing on which the house sat. She looked around carefully. She could see no lights and no guards. To the rear of the house, to her left, was a private railroad car. The twin steel track led away

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from the house through the big encampment. Instinctively, she went toward the rear of the building. Entry would probably be simpler there. She stepped cautiously over the railroad tracks. She didn't understand third rails and electricity but she had come too far to blunder now.

She saw that that railroad car sat next to a large patio with glass doors that led into the rear of the building. She straightened up and ran toward the doors. Just as she reached the flagstone patio, she felt arms tackling her about the ankles. She tried to aim the gun at her tackier, but the pistol was snatched from her hand.