Warren Murphy: Mugger Blood

So they shielded everyone's eyes from what the muggers had done, and when the casket was brought from the church to Our Lady of Angels cemetery there was a large cortege. And this surprised Mrs. Mueller's daughter because she did not know that her parents knew that many people, especially men in their thirties and forties. And a few of them who asked questions.

No, her parents had left nothing. Oh, there was a safe deposit box that held only a few bonds. Trinkets. That's what one mourner said he was looking for. Trinkets. Old German trinkets.

And the daughter thought this was shocking. But what was really shocking in today's world? So a buyer wanted to do business at graveside? Maybe that was his thing? And she longed for the days when some things had been shocking, because her heart hurt fiercely and she thought of the old woman dying alone and how frightening it had been to visit her parents after the neighborhood had changed.

"No bloody trinkets, damn you," she yelled.

And that day, wreckers began taking down the apartment building where the Muellers had lived.

They moved in with an armed escort of federal marshals, each over six feet tall and karate trained. They sealed off the street. They built armor-plated barricades. They carried truncheons. The old walk-up building was taken down with surgical precision brick by brick, and the debris left the area, not by truckloads, but in large white trunks. With padlocks.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he was taking the elevator up from beneath. He smelled the heavy buildup of engine fumes embedded in the caked grease, and felt long cables tremble ever so slightly when the elevator came to a floor and that fifteen-story ripple started with a halt of the elevator and shimmied down to the basement and then back up past the fifteenth floor to the penthouse, five stories overhead.

He had a good forearm hold on a bolt that he kept just above his lean frame. People who held onto things for their lives usually tired quickly, precisely because they held on for their lives. Fear gave speed and power to the muscles, not endurance.

If one wanted to hold onto something, one became a solid part of it, extended himself out through the extruding bolt, so that the grip did not strangle but extended from what it was joined to. As he had been taught, he let the hand do the attaching lightly and forgot about it. So that when the elevator started again, his body swayed easily from the hand that was the pivot joint and up he went.

It was his right hand and he could hear people walking just above his right ear.

He had been there since early morning and when the elevator stopped at the penthouse floor, he knew he would not be there much longer. At the penthouse floor, different things happened. Remo heard locks snap, twenty stories down, twenty locks, each for an elevator door. He had been told about this. He heard the grunt of muscled men who forced themselves up through strain. They checked the top of the elevator. He had been told about that also. The bodyguards always checked the roof of the elevator because it was known men could hide there.

The roof was sealed with reinforced steel plating and so was the floor. This prevented anyone from burrowing down or up into the elevator.

The elevator to the street was the only vulnerable point in the penthouse complex of the South Korean consul in Los Angeles. The rest was a fortress. Remo had been told about that.

And when he was asked how he would penetrate this complex, he answered that he was paid for his services, not his wisdom. Which was true. But even truer was that Remo did not really know how he was going to penetrate this complex at the time and he didn't feel like thinking about it, and most of all, he hadn't felt like carrying on the conversation. So he threw out some wiseacre comment, the kind he himself had endured for more than a decade, and on the morning that upstairs wanted the job done, he sauntered over to the building with the elegant penthouse fortress and made his first move without even thinking.

One did not have to scheme too much anymore. At first, the defenses he had run into-where people locked gates or lived high up or surrounded themselves with bodyguards-had presented problems. And it was very exciting at first to solve them.

This morning, for some reason, he had been thinking about daffodils. He had seen some earlier in the spring and this morning he was thinking about these yellow flowers and how now when he smelled them, it was entirely different from the way he had smelled them before, before he had become this other person he now was. In the old days, there might have been a sweet odor. But now when he smelled a flower, he could inhale its movements. It was a symphony of pollen climaxing in his nostrils. It was a chorus and a shout of life. To be Sinanju, to be a learner and a knower of the disciplines of the small North Korean village on the West Korean Bay, was to know life more fully. A second now had more life in it than an hour had had before.

Of course, sometimes Remo didn't want more life. He would have preferred less of it.

So, thinking of these yellow flowers, he entered the new white brick-and-aluminum building with the full story-high windows and the elegant marble entranceway and the waterfall going over the plastic flowers in the Iobby, took the elevator up to the tenth floor. There, he fiddled around with the stop and emergency buttons until he got the tenth floor about waist-high, then slid under the elevator, found a bolt on the undercarriage, locked his right hand to it, until amid screaming from many floors, someone got the elevator started again. And there he waited and swung until later when the elevator went all the way up to the penthouse.

Not much thinking. He had been told so early by his teacher, by Chiun, current Master of Sinanju, that people always show you the best way to attack them.

If they have a weakness, they surround it with ditches or armor plating or bodyguards. So Remo, upon hearing of all the protection around the elevator when he got the assignment, went right to the elevator, thinking of daffodils because there wasn't really much else to think about.

And now, the person he wanted walked into the elevator, asking questions in Korean. Were all the locks on so the trip down could not be interrupted? They were, Colonel. Was the top hatch secure? Yes, Colonel. The roof entrance? Yes, Colonel. The floor? Yes, Colonel. And, Colonel, you look so splendid in your gray suit.

Most American, no?

Yes, like a businessman.

It is all business.

Yes, Colonel.

And the twenty stories of cable moved.

And the elevator lowered.

And Remo rocked his body. The elevator descending in a long slow drop of twenty stories rocked with the light human form on its undercarriage, like a bell with a swinging clapper. It picked up the back-and-forth of the rhythm-perfect sinew machine on its undercarriage, and at the twelfth floor, the elevator began banging its guide rails, spitting sparks and shivering the inside panels.

The occupants pressed emergency stop. The coils snapped to a quivering stillness. Remo took three slow swings, and on the third, hand-ladled his body up into the floor space at the door opening above him, and then, getting his left hand up into the rubber of the inner elevator door, gave the whole sliding mechanism a good bang and a healthy shove with his left side.

The door opened like a champagne cork popping into an aluminum cradle. And Remo was inside the elevator.

"Hello," he said in his most polite Korean but he knew, even with his heavy American accent, the tones of the greeting were sodden with the heaviness of the northern Korean town of Sinanju, the only accent Remo had ever learned.

The short Korean with the lean hard face had a .38 Police Special out of the shoulder holster under his blue jacket with good speed. It told Remo that the man in the gray was definitely the colonel and the one he wanted. Koreans, when they had bodyguards, thought it beneath their dignity to fight. And this was somewhat strange because the colonel was supposed to be one of the most deadly men in the south of that country with, both hand and knife, and, if he wished, the gun too.