According to Smith, there were seven potential targets—bridges crossing into Illinois out of St. Louis. Of those, he ruled out the McKinley, the Eads, and the Martin Luther King bridges because they were on state roads used largely for local traffic. The two outermost bridges—the Chain of Rocks and the Jefferson Barracks bridges—were bypasses, taking traffic around the city rather than through it.
But two bridges were on major interstates. Interstate 64 passed over the Poplar Street Bridge, and Interstate 70 traffic used the newer Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge.
“Of all the targets presented,” Smith had said, “these would seem the most likely. The collapse of either would cripple interstate commerce. Both would be catastrophic. And if the two bypass bridges were to fall as well…” Smith closed his eyes and removed his glasses to wipe the lenses with the cloth handkerchief he carried. “It would be a deathblow to the economy.”
Remo Williams and Master Chiun were on a direct flight to St. Louis within the hour, then caught a taxi straight to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, more commonly known as the Gateway Arch.
“I shall take the bridge to our right,” said Chiun. “You may have the one to the left.”
“The one to the left isn’t on our list,” Remo said.
“The one past that, I mean,” Chiun said dismissively.
Remo looked past the Eads bridge to the Martin Luther King. “Not that one either.”
“Then the next one,” Chiun said with exasperation. “Honestly, must I hold your hand always?”
“No, but I can’t help but notice that you’ve opted to take care of watching the bridge right here, while I’m being sent three miles away,” he said, hooking a thumb at the twin alabaster pylons of the Stan Musial bridge.
Chiun’s shoulders stooped dramatically. “Okay,” he said. “You may stay with this bridge, and I shall make my way to the other. Just because I am old does not mean I am incapable of walking a little way.” He turned north and began to shuffle slowly.
Remo rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Stay with this one. I don’t care. I just wanted you to know I knew you knew you were being, well, you.”
Chiun smiled. “Always I am being me,” he said. “And always, you are being you. Alas, some things even Sinanju cannot change.”
“Give me time,” Remo said, turning north and heading toward the other bridge. “When I’m your age, I’m sure I’ll be a pain in the ass to my pupil.”
“You should live so long, heh heh,” the old Master chuckled as he settled onto the ground to keep a watchful eye over the interlocking metal beams that supported the traffic of Interstate 64 traveling over the river.
As Remo walked from the Arch grounds to the Stan Musial bridge, two things happened.
First, Remo was held up at gunpoint three times. Only one of these encounters got a mention on the news, when the mother of one of the muggers eventually realized her almost-honor-roll student was missing, blamed the police, and set up an online collection account to fund her favorite charity—herself.
Second, Khinzir Yuntun and Majnun Yatim left their hotel rooms on foot, each carrying a backpack and a cell phone.
· · ·
The Stan Musial Bridge was a cable stay bridge, with two pairs of large alabaster pylons, to which were strung dozens of cables. From a distance it appeared that a giant harp had been broken and thrown into the river.
Remo arrived at the base of the west end. Skirting the embankment, Remo hiked up onto the side of the interstate, then began to pick his way across the bridge, angling for the nearest set of pylons. The pylons inclined at an 80-degree angle on either side of the highway until they met overhead. His plan was to scale one of them, to get a vantage point of the whole bridge from the top. However, upon reaching the interior side of the pylon, he found luck to be with him: the builders had conveniently placed a maintenance door there. Grasping the steel ball doorknob with one hand, he gave the keyhole a thump with the thumb of his other hand. The lock rattled as the tumblers came crashing down. Remo let himself inside, taking the dizzying stairway to the topside hatch.
He looked to the north side of the bridge first, watching the approach from the airport, and then turned to look south toward the trio of downtown bridges—just in time to see a man fly.
· · ·
Khinzir Yuntun had placed his backpack against the foundation of the Poplar Street Bridge when the wrinkled old man in the black satin kimono spoke to him. He was a human antiquity, with just two little tufts of yellowing hair blowing about his temples, and another lightly swaying from his chin. He was sitting lotus on a flat rock on the sidewalk. Khinzir wondered how he could have missed him earlier, particularly since the man wore a shiny black kimono emblazoned with two white tigers facing each other.
“I would not hide anything valuable there,” the old man said. “This town is overrun with worthless street thieves who think nothing of taking your property. Look,” he said, gesturing at all the graffiti spattering the retaining wall behind them. “They announce their presence with a vulgarity in which they take great pride.” He shook his head ruefully.
Khinzir tried to play it cool. The old man might have a phone and call the police, and he could not set off his explosives until Majnun was in place. The plan called for their explosions to be set off above and below, in roughly the same place, so that the competing blasts would successfully penetrate the west end of the bridge.
They would be doing this now, except that Majnun had decided the night before that he would try the local pizza. He had been intrigued by the fact that it was sliced into unmanageable squares instead of sensible wedges. He had chosen this delight to be his last meal before he would ascend into the bosom of Allah, but it had been a poor choice, and had sent him jogging on two separate detours to find public toilets as they walked together to the bridge. After the third detour, Khinzir said he would continue alone and await Majnun there.
“That is good to be knowing,” Khinzir said in his most friendly voice.
Chiun sniffed. “I perceive you are from Persia,” he said.
Khinzir tilted his head. How old was this man? he wondered. “I am from Kuraq, yes,” he said. “I am here on a work permit.”
Chiun sniffed again. “I am surprised at this,” he said. “First, that Persians have resumed working again since Nebuchadnezzar’s fall, and secondly that the Americans are stupid enough to permit a Persian to work with boom powders. But then, I suppose very little about American stupidity should surprise me.”
“I’m afraid I do not understand what you mean.” Khinzir felt as though he should be insulted, but the old man spoke in circles. Still, he detected not just the tone of an insult, but also an underlying hint that perhaps the contents of his backpack weren’t such a secret after all.
“Of course you do not,” Chiun said. “I am Korean, and you are a Persian.”
“But we are both speaking English,” Khinzir replied. He grinned lopsidedly, never dreaming he would be spending his last moments on Earth with an old Asian fool. He briefly wondered if martyrs were accompanied throughout eternity by the souls they brought with them.
“We are speaking the same language, but we understand it at different levels,” Chiun said. “Naturally, my understanding is at the utmost level, but being a Persian you would not understand that.”
Khinzir checked his watch. Where the devil was Majnun, anyway? He was more and more ready to be leaving this existence the longer the old man prattled.
“You must also understand that I do not care if you blow up this bridge,” Chiun said.
“What?” Khinzir replied, startled. “Why do you think I am here to blow up this bridge?”
“Because that is what you are here to do,” Chiun said, looking at the terrorist as though it should have been obvious, even to a Persian. “But I care nothing for that. It is a bridge, and America is full of them, many even less artfully-constructed than this one, if one can believe such things.”
Khinzir turned away from Chiun, choosing to look out across the levee and the river. He looked at the concrete pillars supporting the base of the span across the Mississippi, and thought about how glorious it would be if they just had a few more martyrs who could have assisted, blowing all those columns and making the final explosion that much more glorious.
“Of course, even though I do not care, I cannot let you do it.”
Khinzir turned and was shocked that the old man now stood inches from him, his arms folded and hidden in the folds of the black kimono.
“While I care nothing for the bridge, my son would feel obligated to stop you,” Chiun said mildly. “Alas, he must attend to another matter, one for which he is actually being paid, and I cannot allow him to risk the honor of the House of Sinanju wasting time on you with no gold in return.”
Khinzir opened his mouth to rebut the old man’s arrogance, but found that when he did so, blood flowed out over his chin. Mouth and eyes gaping, he looked down and saw a small spot of blood on the front of his shirt, growing wider from underneath before the blood overflowing from his mouth obliterated the effect. Suddenly the old man was falling backwards away from him, and then he realized the old man was still standing, and it was he who was falling, his last vision being the filthy, graffiti-covered underside of the Poplar Street Bridge.
As he fell away, Chiun lifted his head and sniffed the air. “Another Persian,” he muttered, floating up the retaining wall as though he were pulled on wires, flipping himself over it, flying through the air, and pulling himself over the edge of the bridge and onto the maintenance walkway.
· · ·
Majnun Yatim walked briskly, his pack slung over one shoulder. Khinzir was going to be very upset with him, but he hadn’t tried the awful pizza last night, and could not understand the pain it caused his digestive system. He held his phone, attempting to pull up Khinzir’s number, and definitely not the number of the phone in his pack wired to the explosives he carried—at least not until he was in his proper place on the bridge.
He carefully selected the right number, and waited for Khinzir to answer. It rang, then went to voicemail. What had happened to Khinzir? Perhaps his dinner was also having a similar effect on him? Majnun shrugged. He could not wait long. His position was more exposed, on the bridge where the traffic sped past dangerously close. He knew that it would not take very long for American authorities to arrive, answering the call about a man on the bridge, potentially preparing to jump off.
“He is not coming.” Over the sound of the traffic and occasional horn, Majnun heard a soft voice, and whirled to see a wizened old man in a black kimono. He stood there with his arms folded, hands hidden within the sleeves. He was calm, and seemed to have simply sprouted from the concrete.
Panicked, Majnun put his thumb on the dial button of his phone. Khinzir or no Khinzir, he would fulfill his mission. The old man made no move to stop him, but just smiled that irritating smile, as though he didn’t just have a secret but had all of them. Drawing a deep breath, Majnun pressed the button, and prepared to meet Allah.
He heard the electronic tone of a phone ring once, and prayed. Then he heard it twice. Then he heard the robotic voice of the voicemail attendant, and realized he had redialed Khinzir’s phone, which was still going unanswered.
Majnun fumbled to select the right number, but his phone had decided to leap off the side of the bridge. It could not have been the old man’s doing, because Majnun had not seen him move, and he still stood there like an enlightened statue. He tried to unzip the pack, but it too decided on its own that it would rather swim in the Mississippi than make a loud explosion.
Bereft of his phone and pack, Majnun did not know what to do. His training had not prepared him for hand-to-hand combat. He was simply to hold a bomb and set it off. He looked for an escape route. Should he risk running across the traffic? Charge the old man and push past him? Turn and run? Jumping over the side was out of the question. It was a long drop, and even if he survived it, he did not know how to swim.
Why then, he wondered, was he looking down at the river, flowing quickly beneath his gaze? And where had the bridge gone? He twisted in mid-air, and saw the bridge getting impossibly further away, as he travelled out and up, arching into the air, then into the churning muddy waters swirling below.
· · ·
“Who pissed off Chiun?” Remo muttered to himself as he watched the man plunge into the river. For a moment, he wondered if he should run back and save any other hapless pedestrians before Chiun found them to be too much of a nuisance to continue living. As he weighed his choices, he heard a scraping sound coming from inside a pylon, which grew into several scraping sounds.
Whoever crossed Chiun’s path was on their own. Remo lifted the maintenance hatch and peered inside. Light beams intersected the interior of the pylons. Tension cable threaded into pylon, one per hole, where the ends were bolted into place. That wasn’t going to be the case much longer, however, as Remo saw the enormous hex nuts rotating counterclockwise, as though being turned by a small army of invisible wrenches.
“Olly Olly Oxen Free,” he muttered, turning his attention from the pylon interior to the span of the bridge. His finely tuned hearing could tell the other pylons were experiencing similar activity. The traffic below was heavy. He noted two fuel tankers among the flow. “As though things wouldn’t be messy enough,” he said to himself. He tried to find Mr. Gordons, with the full realization that the shapeshifting robot could easily have been one of the vehicles below. He doubted that, though. Mr. Gordons had elected a human guise to wear at the site of at least two disasters, and the thing was predictable in certain ways.
From within the pylon he stood on, he heard the ping of bolts the size of baseball bats falling hundreds of feet, bouncing off the stairway. This was followed by the whiplike whistle of the cables releasing, flying outward over the water.
At the base of the bridge, Remo saw a slender man in beige coveralls and a white hardhat. He was standing with his hand pressed against the support beam like he was feeling for a heartbeat. Remo focused all his senses on the man. Visually, he looked bland, but Remo’s other acute senses clearly marked the figure as something that was not human. “Got you,” Remo grumbled. Then the bridge began to tremble.
Leaping from the top of the pylon, Remo’s feet found brief purchase on the dozens of whipping cables as they sprung away from the bridge. Leaping from cable to cable, Remo used them like a staircase, running in mid-air toward the threat on the bank below.