Death Check

by Warren Murphy

  Remo looked at him, then smiled with only his lips.

  “Checkmate,” he said. And walked away.

  The rest was easy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  ANNA STOHRS WAS STILL NAKED. She was just placing the negatives of Remo into a metal card file containing the other negatives when Remo walked into the darkroom.

  She looked up, and her eyes opened wide in horror, when she saw him there.

  “He lost,” Remo said.

  She tried to kick him but Remo, laughing, ignored the effort, and flipped her left arm up behind her back. Then he whispered into her right ear, “Your father said just before I killed him that the one thing he really enjoyed was seeing you perform. But he never wanted to let on, because you might stop.”

  Then he killed her and left her body sprawled over the giant photo dryer. The sweat on her naked body sizzled as he dropped her over the stainless steel drum. Then Remo burned the negatives, and set fire to the house.

  He took a doughnut from the cupboard on his way out, and left a few minutes before the arrival of the first fire company.

  The cool of evening chilled the air, and suddenly it became incredibly cold for August, then hot, then Remo felt nothing and just kept walking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  THE ROAST BEEF AT HENRICI'S in Dayton was good. It had been good for the last two Wednesday nights and Remo looked out of the windows down on the Miami valley, with blinking lights on the outskirts of Dayton, and farther off the small towns surrounding it. The restaurant was on the top of the hotel and for Dayton provided exquisite dining. In New York, it would be just another good meal.

  He cut into the rich red beef, which shivered slightly, emitting a reddish pool which flowed into the mashed potato mountain, making its base pink. Good beef, someone had once said, was like a hearty woman. It must be taken with gusto. Who said it? It obviously had not been Chiun, who while he once allowed that all women are beautiful but not all men are capable of seeing it, also felt that red beef was like a subtle poison. You enjoyed your destruction because it was comfortable and slow.

  Remo enjoyed the beef. In fact, Chiun might be very bright about the poison. Being some place at a certain night regularly, a certain place someone else knew, made you a perfect setup for that someone else. The beef could be poisoned. He could be poisoned without his poisoner ever seeing him. CURE was good at that. In fact, if it wanted to, the poisoner might not even know it was poison. Breaking links wherever you can.

  But he was alive and every day he lived probably meant that he was being kept there to stew. The punishment would be waiting to be killed. If he waited, though, it would also show them that he could be trusted again.

  What had he really done that was so bad? Talked back? That could be attributed to the long peak. What counted was not what he said but what he did. And what he did was to follow orders. He had headed for Deborah’s cottage and then he went to Dayton.

  How he had gotten to Dayton, he forgot. There was the path, the tiredness, the oppressive heat, and then, what he remembered of it, he was in the Dayton Airport just outside Vandalia, with an incredible sunburn, money from what must have been cashed traveler’s checks and no identification. He had probably gone through the necessary go routine automatically.

  He had noticed how weak he had become, but the rest improved him daily. When he returned to training, he would be well ready for it. But he would never again allow them to keep him at that level. He would explain this if he ever got to Smith again.

  Deborah, of course, had gotten her man. He knew she would, but it was a sloppy job. He had heard about it in a bar. Father-daughter fight. But why would the woman choose suicide by photo-drying? Funny, it sounded like something he might do. The Israelis were supposed to be a bit neater. Yeah, he might do it. No, it just wasn’t fast enough. For punishment, it would do. But Remo, however, was not in the punishment business.

  Some day, if they should ever meet, he would tell Deborah how sloppy she had been.

  He looked out over the valley, gazing for miles. It was a clear night, yet there were no stars, and for reasons he could not fathom, he felt deeply lost, as if he had found something so necessary to his life, then lost it without knowing what it was.

  It was then that Remo created an original line of sentiment and felt proud of it. He thought of Deborah’s freckles and said to himself, waiting to use it publicly to advantage some day, “A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.”

  Remo looked around the restaurant for a woman with freckles. He had to try out his original line. He saw only a man in a suit with a briefcase. The reason he saw only this was that the man was standing three inches from him.

  “Enjoying yourself? Pleasant thoughts?” asked the man. It was a bitter thin voice. Remo looked up. It belonged to a bitter, hateful face.

  “Good evening. Sit down. I wondered why you kept me waiting so long.”

  Remo watched Harold W. Smith take the other side of the table. He put his briefcase on his lap.

  Smith ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. The waitress said, “We have something with tomatoes and bacon and… ”

  “Just grilled cheese,” he said.

  “And make it unpleasant,” Remo added. Ah, the waitress had freckles. He would devastate her.

  The waitress hid a smile from all but the corner of her mouth.

  “Be off,” Smith said to the girl, and turning to Remo said: “My, you’re in fine fettle. Did you enjoy yourself on your last business trip?”

  “Not really.”

  “I never knew you liked to freelance.”

  “What?” Remo looked confused.

  “You’ve forgotten little details?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Smith leaned over the table and peered intently at Remo’s forehead, where his peeled skin was still taut and shiny, and his eyebrows were just growing back.

  “Well, the reports said it was there, so I suppose I’ll buy it. And I do have Chiun’s explanation.”

  “Buy what?” Smith smiled and Remo knew that he was not supposed to ask.

  “When did you recover your memory? I mean fully?”

  “Tell you what,” Remo said, “you tell me how I got this sunburn because I’m sure you know and I’ll tell you when I recovered my memory.”

  “You’ll tell me when you recovered your memory.”

  “At the Dayton Airport.”

  “That’s about right,” Smith said. He looked around him and said, lest anyone be listening, “You left your wallet in my room this morning.” He handed Remo a well-worn wallet containing, as Remo knew, who he would be and where he would go and what he should look for that would tell him where he would meet Smith again.

  “What about the sunburn?”

  “Someday ask Chiun. I can’t even understand it, much less be able to explain it.”

  Smith surveyed the fine surroundings and added: “You know, if the tables weren’t so close together, I’d like to see you eating the next time in an automat.”

  “You would,” said Remo, placing his wallet and new self in the pocket of the new suit he had bought for cash.

  The waitress was back, putting the grilled cheese sandwich in front of Smith.

  “You know,” Remo said as she bent over, “a girl without freckles is like a night without stars.”

  “I know,” she said. “My boyfriend tells me that.”

  And Smith took obvious delight in Remo’s obvious deflation.

  “I swear it,” Remo said to Smith. “There is not an original line in the world. Whatever you make up has been made up before. I had made that up. It was mine.”

  “Rubbish,” said Smith with the quiet contentment of seeing another soul return from the clouds to the daily level of discontent. “A mutual friend of ours used to use it all the time. Little girls, old women, anyone he could bamboozle. When he was sober enough to talk.”

  And Remo, who knew whom Smith was talking about, d
ropped his fork in the potatoes and said, with thorns of outrage, “I remember every word that guy ever said to me. And he never told me that.”

  “If you say so,” said Smith biting into the yellow goo of his sandwich.

  And Remo leaned back. “I don’t care if you don’t believe me. At least I know I have poetry in my heart. You know. Heart, sensitivity, people, human beings.”

  He did not now feel like eating and he watched the Miami valley, the moving lights of the cars, the dots of lights that were far-off homes.

  “All right. I really believe you made that up originally. It’s possible. Now finish your dinner. We’re paying for it.”

  Remo continued to look out into the dark waiting for a similar inspiration to come to him so he could prove himself on the point. But the inspiration was not there.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed Death Check, maybe you'll like Chinese Puzzle, too.

  It’s the third Destroyer novel, now available as an ebook.

  Chinese Puzzle

  HIS NAME WAS REMO.

  He had just laced the skin-tight black cotton uniform around his legs, when the telephone rang in his room in the Hotel Nacional in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

  He picked up the receiver with his left hand while finishing the cork-blackening of his face with his right. The telephone operator told him there had just been a long distance call from the Firmifex Company in Sausalito, California. The woman at Firmifex said that the shipment of durable goods would be arriving in two days.

  “Yeah, okay.” He hung up and said one word: “Idiots.”

  He turned off the lights and the room was dark. Through the open window, the sea breezes blew off the Caribbean, not cooling Puerto Rico but swirling away and redistributing some of the autumn heat. He walked out onto the open balcony with its round aluminum tube railing supported by curved metal spokes.

  He was about six feet tall and the only hint of muscle was a slight thickness around the neck, wrists and ankles, but he hopped the railing to the ledge as though it were a horizontal matchstick.

  He leaned into the sea-slick brick wall of the Hotel Nacional, smelling its salty wetness, and feeling the cool of the ledge at his feet. The bricks were white but they appeared gray close up in the early morning darkness.

  He tried to concentrate, to remember to press into the building, not away from it, but the telephone call rankled him. A 3:30 a.m. telephone call to inform him of manufacturing deliveries. What a stupid cover for an alert. They might as well have advertised on prime time. They might as well have put a spotlight on him.

  Remo looked down the nine stories and attempted to spot the old man. He could not. Just the darkness of the tropical shrubbery, cut by the white paths, and the rectangular splotch where the pool was, midway between hotel and beach.

  “Well?” came the high-pitched Oriental voice from below.

  Remo dropped from the ledge, catching it with his hands. He hung there for a moment, dangling his feet down into space. Then he began rocking his body back and forth, picking up the where of the wall, speeding his rocking, and then he opened his fingers and let go.

  The swinging of his body threw him against the hotel wall, where his bare toes slid against the smooth white brick. His fingers, tensed like talons, bought a hold on the surface of the stones.

  The lower half of his body rebounded out again from the wall of the hotel, and as it began to swing back in, he released his hands, and his body dropped. Again his feet braked his descent against the wall of the hotel, and again his powerful, charcoal-coated fingers pressured like talons against the wall of the Hotel Nacional.

  His fingers felt the slimy Caribbean moistness on the wall. If he had tried to hang on, even momentarily, he would have plunged to his death. But he remembered the injunction: the secret is in, not down.

  Remo’s mind concentrated furiously on the position of his body. It must keep moving, constantly, but its force must always be inward, overcoming the downward pull of nature.

  He smelled rather than felt the breezes, as he again rocked off from the wall with his legs, and dropped another five feet, before his toes and hands slowed his descent against the wall.

  Fleetingly, he wondered if he really was ready. Were his hands strong enough, his timing keen enough, to overcome gravity, by the disjointed rocking technique perfected in Japan by the Ninja — the warrior wizards — more than ten centuries ago?

  Remo thought of the story about the man who fell from the 30th floor of a skyscraper. As he passed the 15th floor, someone inside yelled, “How are you?” “So far, so good,” he answered.

  So far, so good, Remo thought.

  He was moving rhythmically now, an irresistible pattern of swing out, drop, swing in, and slow against the wall. Then repeat. Swing out, drop, swing in, and slow against the wall, defying gravity, defying the laws of nature, his smoothly muscled athlete’s body using its strength and timing to bring its force inward against the wall, instead of down where death waited.

  He was halfway down now, literally bouncing off the wall, but the downward pull was growing stronger, and as he rocked off the wall, he applied upward pressure with his leg muscles to counteract the pull.

  A black speck in a black night, a professional doing professional magic, moving down the wall.

  Then his feet touched the curved tiled roof of the covered walk, and he relaxed his hands, curled and rolled his body through a somersault, landing noiselessly on his bare feet on the concrete slab behind the darkened hotel. He had made it.

  “Pitiful,” came the voice.

  The man was shaking his head, now clearly visible because of the strands of long white beard coming down from his face, the thin, almost babylike hair dotting his balding Oriental head. The whiteness of the hair was like a frame shimmering in the early morning breeze. He looked like a starvation case brought back from the grave. His name was Chiun.

  “Pitiful,” said the man whose head barely reached Remo’s shoulder. “Pitiful.”

  Remo grinned. “I made it.”

  Chiun continued to shake his head sadly. “Yes. You are magnificent. Rivalled in your skills only by the elevator which carried me down. It took you ninety seven seconds.” It was an accusation, not a statement.

  Chiun had not looked at his watch. He did not need to. His internal clock was unfailingly accurate, although as he approached eighty, he had once confided to Remo that he was miscalculating as much as 10 seconds a day.

  “The hell with ninety seven seconds. I made it,” Remo said.

  Chiun threw his hands up over his head in a silent appeal to one of his innumerable gods. “The lowliest ant of the field could do it in ninety seven seconds. Does that make the ant dangerous? You are not Ninja. You are worthless. A piece of cheese. You and your mashed potatoes. And your roast beef and your alcohol. In ninety seven seconds, one can go up the wall.”

  Remo glanced up at the smooth white wall of the hotel, unbroken by ledges or handholds, a shiny slab of stone. He grinned again at Chiun. “Horsecrap.”

  The elderly Oriental sucked in his breath. “Get in,” he hissed. “Go to the room.”

  Remo shrugged and turned toward the door, leading into the darkened rear section of the hotel. He held the door open, and turned to allow Chiun to pass through first. From the corner of his eye, he saw Chiun’s brocaded robe vanish upward onto the top of the roof over the walkway. He was going to climb up. It was impossible. No one could climb that wall.

  He hesitated momentarily, unsure if he should attempt to dissuade Chiun. No way, he realized, and walked inside rapidly and pushed the elevator button. The light showed the elevator was on the twelfth floor. Remo stabbed the round plastic button again. The light still read 12.

  Remo slid into the doorway alongside the elevator, leading to the stairs. He started running, taking the stairs, three at a time, trying to gauge the time. It had been no more than 30 seconds since he had left Chiun.

  He raced at full speed up the stairs, his fee
t noiseless on the stone slabs. At a dead run, he pushed open the door leading to the ninth floor corridor. Breathing heavily, he walked to his door and stopped and listened. It was silent within. Good, Chiun was still climbing. His Oriental pride was going to get kicked.

  But what if he had fallen? He was eighty years old. Suppose his twisted body lay in a heap at the base of the hotel wall?

  Remo grabbed the door knob, twisted, and pushed the heavy steel door back into the room, and stepped in onto the carpet. Chiun was standing in the middle of the floor, his hazel eyes burning into Remo’s dark brown eyes. “Eighty-three seconds,” Chiun said. “You are even worthless for climbing stairs.”

  “I waited for the elevator,” Remo lied, lamely.

  “The truth is not in you. Even in your condition, one does not become exhausted riding the elevator.”

  He turned his back. There was the infernal toilet paper in his hand.

  Chiun had removed a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom, and now he rolled it across the heavy rug of the hotel floor. He smoothed it down, and then reentered the bathroom. He returned with a glass of water in his hand and began pouring it over the paper. Twice, he went into the bathroom to refill the glass, until finally the toilet paper was soaked with water.

  Remo had closed the door behind him. Chiun walked over and sat on the bed. He turned to look at Remo. “Practice,” he said. Almost to himself, he added: “Animals need not practice. But then they do not eat mashed potatoes. And they do not make mistakes. When man loses instinct, he must regain it by practice.”