The End of the Game td-60

by Warren Murphy

  He could not know that Abner Buell was frantically trying to call off the Russian attack. Buell had used the games to work his way into Michenko's computers and had given them the firing order. He only wanted the missile command to take the preliminary steps before being called off by Moscow.

  But now he found the Russian equipment was no longer picking up his command signals.

  There was only Michenko's terse good-bye.

  Abner Buell had miscalculated. The world was going to be destroyed-- and ahead of schedule too.

  "There it goes," said Abner.

  "There goes what?" said his date for the evening, an exquisite European redhead who had to learn to look stupid for lipstick ads.

  "You'll see," Buell said. He had a lukewarm smile.

  The redhead was exuding from a shiny lame swimsuit.

  "What will I see?" she asked.

  "Do you like mushrooms?"

  "Only to chew, not to eat," she said.

  "Good. You're going to be seeing a lot of them over the horizon. Great effects. Multicolored clouds. Sunrises all over."

  The redhead inhaled a string of white powder. Abner Buell had the best cocaine on the Coast. He never used it; it bored him.

  "You ought to try this. This is mean mother coke," said the model.

  "Won't be time for that," Buell said. He was sure they would be able to see the naval base at San Diego go up in an intense orange ball.

  In Michenko's missile station, World War III was getting under way. All the buttons went, one after another, triggering other stations in an entire massive Russian response. Automatically, the first and second waves of missiles were ignited, their loads of death primed and ready. Michenko poured flagons of vodka for every man in the station, then pressed the fire button.

  He led a toast to Mother Russia. He drank to the people of their great country. He drank to the Communist party. He even drank to the old czars.

  Then a sergeant spoke up.

  "Shouldn't we have felt the ground shiver from the thrust of the rockets?"

  "I don't feel anything," said a lieutenant. "I haven't since the first toast."

  "But, comrade lieutenant, I remember when we all fired the practice missile into the Pacific."

  "The one that landed in the Antarctic?"

  "Yes, comrade officer. The one aimed at the Pacific."

  "Yes. I remember."

  "Well, the ground shook," the sergeant said.

  "Yes, it shook. Our boosters are powerful. Russia is powerful."

  "But we just fired all our rockets and we didn't feel one little shake," the sergeant said nervously.

  The officer slapped the sergeant.

  "Are you saying we failed our duty?"

  "No, comrade lieutenant. We never failed our duty. The Jews failed us. The Germans failed us," said the sergeant, referring to the purge from the Missile Command of any Russian who had German or Jewish lineage. They were considered untrustworthy to defend Mother Russia. Only White Russians operated the missile bases.

  "That's possible," said the lieutenant.

  "They didn't go off," said Marshal Michenko. "They didn't go off."

  He attempted to reach Moscow again. There was an answer this time. No, there had been no attack on Moscow, and no, there were no orders to fire missiles. Why? Had any been fired?

  Michenko sent officers out to the silos. They peered into each one.

  "No. Not one has been fired," Michenko was able to report.

  Nor had the other nineteen main bases fired a missile.

  The horror of it struck home.

  The main wave of Russia's missile defense did not work.

  A major strategic decision now faced the leaders in the Kremlin.

  When they had shot down the Korean passenger liner over eastern Russia, they had signaled a warning four times to the airplane. Four different radio stations had warned the passenger jet. Unfortunately, the four different stations had used Russian radios and it wasn't until the aircraft had been shot down that the Russian commanders had realized that the Koreans weren't ignoring the commands; they just hadn't received them.

  The question then for Russia was whether to admit the weakness of their instruments or to accept the moral outrage of the world. That was a simple question and the Kremlin decided immediately to let the world believe it had coldly blown three hundred civilians from the skies with no provocation.

  But this was a harder decision to make.

  They could let the missiles sit uselessly in the silos and let the world keep believing that Russia still had the capability of using them.

  Or they could fix them. If they fixed them, the Americans might find out something was wrong. If they didn't fix them, the Americans might still find out, and then everyone could kiss foreign policy good-bye.

  They decided to fix.

  And in the crisis, they needed people totally familiar with the American technology they had stolen. There was only one country to turn to.

  The Japanese had three hundred technicians in Moscow by midnight. Not only could they guarantee that the missiles would work, but they were willing to redesign the silos and make construction cheaper and upgrade the nuclear fallout to include such virulent carbon poisons that even plants wouldn't grow in America for two hundred years.

  They demanded a fast answer from the Russians, because the leaders of their delegation had to return to Japan to prepare Hiroshima Day, protesting America's use of atomic weapons on Japan to end a war Japan had started.

  Before American intelligence found out about the missile failures, the Japanese had the missiles all working better than they ever had and had established four car dealerships in Missile Base Michenko to boot.

  The cars, somehow, would be the only ones that worked well in the Siberian winter.

  When there were no mushroom clouds and when San Diego remained unlit far down the California coast, Abner Buell realized something had gone wrong. He went to work rechecking his program and found the Russian missile flaws before they did. The weapons had all been designed and set up correctly, but there had been no upkeep on them and in the harsh Siberian winter, their metal parts had corroded. The Russian missile commanders had pressed useless buttons.

  The redheaded model whose name was Marcia was still in the house, leaning over his shoulder as he manipulated his computers, and when he told her that the world wasn't going to be destroyed right away, she looked disappointed, and Abner Buell thought he might be in love.

  "Why are you disappointed?" he asked.

  "Because I wanted to see the explosions and the dead."

  "Why?"

  "Because everything else is boring."

  "You'd be dead too," he said.

  "It'd be worth it," she said.

  "Take off your clothes," he said.

  Later, he tried to decide who he would like to fire the first salvos, America or Russia.

  He couldn't make up his mind, and to pass the time, he decided to finish off that New York problem. He was bored with Pamela Thrushwell and that bodyguard she now had, the one whose fingerprints didn't show up anywhere. The one who had refused to take money from the bank machine. Maybe something elemental would be real good, he thought. Maybe a fight to the death.

  He turned to Marcia. Her clothes lay on the floor where she had dropped them.

  "Would you like to see two people horribly murdered?" he asked.

  "More than anything else in the world," she said.

  "Good."

  In the computer vaults of the Wall Street bank, Pamela Thrushwell had let out two screams. One of them was for the victory in getting into the vaults; the other was for the shock of seeing all the bank records vanishing before her eyes.

  Even as she searched for the source of the commands that operated the money machines, the records were being erased. The source was defending itself and taking the bank's entire memory with it.

  Two of the vice-presidents were having heart attacks. The others tried climbing over
Pamela to get to the keyboard to somehow preserve the records.

  "You have backups, don't you?" she asked indignantly.

  "That's the backup. Going right now," said a pale and shaking vice-president.

  "My God, we're going to have to go back to paper," said another.

  "What's that? Paper?" another one asked.

  "It's flat stuff like dollar bills but it isn't green and you make marks on it."

  "With what?"

  "I don't know. Things. Pens, pencils. Wedges."

  "How do we know who owns what, though?" another asked, and all the vice-presidents looked accusingly at Remo and Pamela.

  Pamela sat in front of a large television monitor as names and numbers flashed by her in a lightning-fast parade on their way to computer oblivion.

  There was one final message. It lingered on the screen for a moment.

  "ALL RECORDS CLEARED. GOOD NIGHT MALIBU."

  And then the machine went blank.

  The vice-presidents who were still standing groaned.

  "I guess we've really done it," Pamela said.

  "Would an apology do?" Remo asked. The three bankers who had been able to withstand myocardial infarctions at seeing an entire banking system disappear in a series of green blips all shook their heads numbly.

  "We're ruined," one said. "All ruined. Thousands of people out of jobs. Thousands of people bankrupt. Ruined. All ruined."

  "I said I'm sorry," Remo said. "What do you want from me?"

  In Strategic Air Command headquarters deep within the Rocky Mountains, a safety report reached its ominous conclusion: nuclear war could not be avoided because someone or something had gotten into the command systems for both Russian and American missiles and was-- there was no other way to say it-- "playing around."

  The President listened to his cabinet discuss the crisis and remained mute. Then he used the red dialless telephone in his bedroom to reach Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  "Where do we stand on this-- this-- this thing with the atomic bombs?" he asked.

  "We're on it, sir," said Smith. He looked carefully at his left hand. It was numb and could not move. He was still in a state of shock because only minutes before a publishing house in New York City had telephoned him. They asked him to verify a story about Folcroft Sanitarium being the training place of a secret assassin.

  Smith had forced himself to chuckle. "This is an insane asylum," he had said. "It sounds like you've been talking to one of the inmates."

  "It sounded crazy. People who had been killing others for thousands of years and then coming to America to work to train a secret assassin. Nice old man though. Was he a patient?"

  "Might have been," said Smith. "Did he think he was Napoleon?"

  "No. Just a Master Assassin."

  "We have nine of those," Smith said. "I've got fourteen Napoleons, if that helps. Would you like me to talk to the man?"

  "He's gone. Left his manuscript though. It's real exciting."

  "Are you going to publish it?" Smith had asked.

  "Don't know," said the editor.

  "I'd like to read it," said Smith with all the control he could muster. "Of course, you know we would have to sue if you mentioned our name."

  "We thought of that. That's why we phoned."

  That was when the left hand went numb. The world was liable to go up in atomic dust and he couldn't reach Remo, who might not have understood the assignment to begin with, and now he couldn't reach Chiun, who might have understood the assignment, but couldn't be bothered with it because he was out trying to peddle his life story.

  Chiun's autobiography. And just a few months before, it had been Chiun trying to create a national organization dedicated to "Stamping Out Amateur Assassins."

  Either way, CURE would be compromised. The only redeeming thought was that probably no one would be around anymore to care whether one small band of men had tried to save America from slipping away into the darkness of lost civilizations. You couldn't be compromised when there was no one left to know.

  Smith looked out over the sound behind his office. Despite the dimming effect of the one-way glass, the world was so incredibly sunny, so alive, so bright. Why did the world have to be so beautiful at this moment? Why did he have to notice it?

  Because all he could do was notice. As with everything else. He was sitting atop the most powerful, most sophisticated agency in the history of mankind, served by two assassins who were beyond anything the West had ever produced, and he was helpless. He remembered for a moment about smelling the flowers as you go by. A golfer had told him that once: smell the flowers as you go by.

  He hadn't done much of that. Instead, he had dedicated his life to making the flowers safe for others to smell.

  Smith massaged his numb hand and arm. He had a pill for that. He had a pill for everything.

  His body was going and now the world was going too.

  Smith tried one more time to reach Remo or Chiun at all the possible access numbers. All he got was a hotel in New York City and an unanswered ringing telephone in a room.

  Smell the flowers. He never liked smelling flowers. He liked succeeding. He liked his country being safe. He liked doing his job. He wouldn't even have flowers in his office. Waste of money. Belonged in a field somewhere. Or a vase.

  "Where are you, Chiun?" he muttered. "Where are you, Remo?"

  Like a prayer answered, the telephone rang.

  "Smitty," Remo said, "I can't make head or tail out of this."

  "Out of what? Where are you? Where is Chiun? What's going on?"

  Remo simulated a referee's whistle. "Hold it, hold it. Time out. Me first."

  "All right," Smith said. "What have you got?"

  "We started to get close last night to whoever's messing with the computers and all, and he erased some bank records on me. The last message said 'Good night Malibu.' What do you think that could mean?"

  "Malibu as in California?" Smith asked.

  "Right. Just 'Good night Malibu.' Any ideas?"

  "You think the person behind this might be in Malibu?" Smith asked.

  "It's a possibility," Remo said. "I don't know."

  "What time was this? What time did it all happen?" Smith asked. "Try to be exact."

  "At exactly five-fifty-two A.M." Remo said. "Think you can do anything?"

  "I'm going to try."

  "Good," Remo said and gave him a New York City telephone number where he could be reached. "Try to get me a lead."

  "All right," Smith said. "I'll work on it. Do you know where Chiun is?"

  "Probably back at the hotel room. Or in Central Park cleaning up candy wrappers. You never know. Why?"

  "Because, Remo-- because-- well, dammit, he's trying to publish his autobiography," Smith said, his voice crackling with intensity.

  "Let's hope we're all around to read it," Remo said as he hung up.

  sChapter Seven

  Reigning Master, Glory of the House of Sinanju, Protector of the Village, Holder of the Wisdom, Vessel of Magnificence, Chiun himself had entered the office of the senior editor of Bingham Publishing, then demanded to be escorted out.

  "I said 'senior editor,'" said Chiun, disdaining the small cubicle with the manuscripts piled on chairs and the single plastic couch. There was hardly room to stand, let alone to move.

  In the time of the first great Master of Sinanju, Wang the Good, when he served one of the greater dynasties of China, a punishment for a minor official was to move him from his office into a cubicle in which one step in any direction would have him nose-first against a wall. Some Confucian scholars took their own lives rather than be humilated in such an office.

  "Mr. Chiun," said a pleasant woman with a southern drawl that could smother a sidewalk. "This is the senior editor's office."

  Chiun looked around once more, very slowly, very obviously.

  "If this is the senior editor's office, where do the slaves work?"

  "Golly, we are the slaves," laughed the woman and called in s
everal other editors to hear the comment made by this absolutely wonderful old gentleman.

  Everyone thought it was funny. Everyone thought the absolutely wonderful old gentleman was funny. Everyone thought the book was absolutely wonderful. The editor most of all. She had some wonderful suggestions for this wonderful manuscript. Just wonderful.

  She talked like one of those young women Chiun had seen wearing pompoms. Lots of enthusiasm. There probably had not been so much enthusiasm since Genghis Khan went through his first Western army in less than an hour and thought all Europe was his.

  There was even an editor who had cried at the end when she read about the ingratitude of the first white ever to learn Sinanju and how forgiving Chiun was and how much Chiun had endured.

  "I have told few," Chiun said in quiet righteousness, content that lo, now after these many years, the full story of the injustices imposed on him by Remo would be shown to the world, so the whole world could see how Chiun would properly forgive Remo. The difficulty in forgiving Remo in the past had always been that Remo so often failed to realize that he had done anything wrong.

  Now he would have to know. The history of Sinanju and Chiun's reign would be in print.

  The senior editor, her little fists punching in the air, couldn't get over how much she loved this wonderful book. She could hardly go to sleep, she loved it so much. It was wonderful and she had just a few wonderful suggestions.

  "Sub Rights has this wonderful idea to increase sales," she said. "Could we make the assassins crazed killers let loose on the world? That would be even more wonderful."

  Slowly, Chiun explained that the House of Sinanju had survived precisely because the Masters were not crazed killers.

  "Golly," sounded the editor, again punching the air like a cheerleader. "You've got more than fifty assassins and every one of them is nice. There have got to be some bad assassins. Some real rotters. Someone the reader can hate. Do you see?"

  "Why?" asked Chiun.

  "Because you have too many nice guys. Too many. We don't need all these assassins. Let's have one. One single focus. One assassin and he is crazed. Let's make him a Nazi."

  A red pencil flew through the manuscript.

  "Now that we have the Nazi murderer, we've got to have the good guy chase him. Let's make him a British detective. Let's have a single focus of place too. What about Great Britain? Let's have something hang in the balance. World War II. Got a Nazi, got to have World War II." The red pencil flew again. "Golly, this is wonderful."