Warren Murphy: Missing Link

She felt herself tossed over, roughly, onto her back. When she looked up, two men stood over her. One had a handgun pointed at her. Five more men ran up behind them. They all wore khaki uniforms, and had their weapons out of their holsters.

The man nearest her reached down and ripped her bandanna roughly from her head. Her long blonde braids fell out in stark contrast to her blackened face.

"Well, well, well. What have we here?" he said. "It's a woman, I do believe." He placed the open palm of his hand on her chest. "Yes, indeed. A woman."

He grabbed her hair and yanked her head around as he knelt down alongside her. "Some answers to some questions," he said. "And fast."

'Tou're hurting me," Jessica said. Her mind was working quickly. She twisted her body as if in pain, trying to work up the pants on her left leg. She wanted to get the gun in her hand. She knew she

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stood no chance against seven armed men but with the pistol in her hand, the crowd might thin out and she might have a chance of escape.

In the meantime, she had to take what they gave until they tired of their sport and took her to their boss. These six men in military uniforms were not responsible for the kidnapping of Bobby Jack Billings. Uniforms carried out plans; they didn't devise them.

Her long braids were caught in the husky man's hand, and as he rose to his feet he yanked her up to a standing position. Her hand pulled away from the gun strapped to her leg.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"The Avon Lady. I like to get an early start."

He backhanded a slap across her face and pressed his right arm up behind her back.

"Last chance," he said. "Who are you?"

"She's with us," came Remo's voice.

T

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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I

The seven uniformed guards turned toward the end of the flagstone patio as Remo and Chiun came around the corner of the house and moved toward them.

Jessica Lester's heart surged again as she saw them. She had been sure that Remo was dead; she had never felt happier to see anyone before.

The guard holding Jessica's arm said, "What the hell is this, a convention?"

"Just let her go," Remo said, "before I peel your

eyeballs."

"Why, sure," the guard said. "Itll be my pleasure. I prefer working on men anyway."

He released Jessica's arm and then, with a looping swing of his right arm, tried to bury the butt of his heavy automatic between Remo's eyes.

He missed, although Remo had not seemed to move. His action triggered the other guards into movement. The quarters were too close to consider firing their weapons, so they leaped forward on Remo and Chiun, swinging their guns, pummeling

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with their fists, a surging pile of humanity that seemed to swell and throb with a life of its own.

Jessica, forgotten for the moment, watched only a split second of the battle, then turned, opened the large French doors at the end of the patio and ran into the house. She was close to mission's end, she thought. It was worth a try. Perhaps if the diversion lasted long enough, she could find Bobby Jack Billings and spirit him off before anybody thought of her.

Buried under a pile of bodies, Remo and Chiun remained motionless for a moment, giving the surging guards a chance to create their own uniform rhythm of movement. They absorbed the rhythm as their own and then, slowly at first, but increasingly faster, they began to move, at first in time with the movement, but then more and more in counterpoint to it. Remo flicked a weapon from a hand, and Chiun flicked a hand from a wrist. Moving in circular forms now against the straight line force of their attackers, they sliced through them as if they were working in a different dimension of time and space. One guard raised the butt of his weapon over his head and smashed it down toward Remo's skull. But Remo had been in his zone of power only for a fleeting instant and when the gun butt struck skull, it was the skull of one of the other guards who dropped to the flagstone without a sound.

Remo circled, beneath and within the other men, but curiously untouched by them. He felt the spatial power of Chiun behind him, working the Golden Circle of Sinanju. Remo reached out a hand and found a guard's belly at the end of it. The

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guard whooshed out an explosion of air and found death before he dropped.

The only sounds on the patio were the muffled curses and grunts of the guards and the heavy metallic tinging as their steel weapons were knocked from their hands and hit the stone.

There were only three guards still standing. All were without weapons and in that brief instant of lucidity that sometimes comes in the middle of great stress, they saw that they were being systematically slaughtered. The three turned and ran. Two of them never made it from the patio before they were clipped from behind, at neck level, by Remo and Chiun's feet. The last sound each heard was the cracking of their spinal columns.

The last survivor, the burly square-built guard, was running away down the railroad tracks. Remo and Chiun looked around and Remo saw a power switch on a panel next to the entrance of the house. He pushed it up into the "on" position. Beneath his feet, he could hear the start-up whirring of a powerful generator.

Chiun bent down and picked up one of the heavy automatics. He held it by the barrel end, then with a backhand flip, let it fly. Like a boomerang it soared from his fingertips, out on a line parallel to the railroad tracks. Quickly, it was out in front of the fleeing guard, then slowly, it described a banana-shaped arc in the air, turned back, and swooped down on the guard like an eagle diving from the sky on a hapless rabbit. The spinning gun buried itself deep in the guard's throat. The force of the impact stopped his running and lifted him

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off his feet, dumping him onto his back. In his final throes, his body revolved. His hand, flung out over his head, touched the third rail from which the rail cars got their electric power. The man's body sparked and sizzled. It twitched along the ground until one involuntary movement broke it free from its electrical connection and it lay still and incinerated between the two lines of tracks. "Good shot," Remo said.

"Thank you," Chiun said. "Where is the woman?" They saw the open patio doors and raced toward them.

Jessica Lester found Bobby Jack Billings in a second-floor room.

She had heard voices while standing in the hall and she withdrew her .22 caliber pistol from the holster on her calf. She paused outside a heavy door for a moment, took a deep breath, then pushed the door open and stepped inside.

"Hiya, little black girl. Have a beer."

Bobby Jack Billings looked at her and smiled. He was sitting in his skivvy shorts and a ragged tee shirt on an antique upholstered armchair. The chair was darkened by beer stains. The Oriental carpet around the chair was littered with empty cans. Billings had a small insipid smile on his face as he waved his beer can at the woman.

There was another man in the room. He wore a brocade bathrobe over silk pajamas. The man's hair was jet black and his skin bore the signs of massage and expensive care. He could have been any age from forty to sixty. He was sitting in a

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chair facing Bobby Jack's. On the delicate hand-carved end table by his right side was a small fluted glass of sherry.

He looked up at Jessica and said, "Just who are you and what do you want here?"

"Mr. Slimone, I presume."

"You presumes right, girl," Bobby Jack said. "My old buddy, Earl Slimone. I'd introduce you right but I don't know your name."

"Name's not important," Jessica said. "I've come to rescue you."

Billings laughed. Slimone suppressed a slight smile. "Rescue him from what, my dear?"

"Don't play dumb," Jessica said. "It's not becom-