Market Force td-127

by Warren Murphy

  "But someone is broadcasting it, Remo," Smith said. "Someone has your image to broadcast. Who could have it? I have been so careful. Who could know about us?"

  "I don't know," Remo admitted. "I'd say Purcell, but he hasn't been out long enough to cook up something like this. Plus it's not really his psycho style. It's gotta be someone else. But the good news is these images fade for people who see them. Shittman said the words he saw were already disappearing. If I can track the source and stop them, their heads will be clear of me in a couple days."

  "No, Remo," Smith said firmly. "A couple of days is unacceptable. If what you've said is true, then we have to disband now, before we become known publicly."

  "Smitty, something is known to somebody," Remo argued. "But whatever they know, they're not running to the New York Times with it. They obviously have a way to broadcast it, but they haven't held a press conference. They didn't go on the evening news or break into the middle of prime time with a news flash. All they did was put my picture up in a way that even the people who've seen it don't know they've seen it."

  This was nearly too much for the CURE director to digest. He tried to swallow, but his throat had dried to dust. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.

  "No," Smith said weakly. "We cannot go on after this."

  There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the line before Remo sighed.

  "This might not even be a CURE thing," Remo admitted reluctantly. "It could be a me thing." Smith couldn't miss the guilty concern in the younger man's voice.

  "Why?" the CURE director asked. Some of his fear was instantly replaced by suspicion. "What have you done?"

  "Not me," Remo said. "Chiun. Something strange happened when we were in Europe a couple days back. I didn't tell you because I figured it was gonna cause me enough grief in the future without getting an earful from you right now. Remember that fat Swiss assassin we went after?"

  Smith remembered all too well. The killer in question had dogged Remo and Chiun from Europe to South America, setting several elaborate booby traps in the path of the two men. They had traced him back to his hideaway in the Alps.

  "Olivier Hahn," Smith said. "What of him?"

  "It's not him, exactly," Remo said. "See, Chiun's been mailing out some kind of top-secret letters for the past few months. He's been real mysterious about them. Every time I ask, he tells me to take a flying leap. When we went to punch that Swiss guy's ticket, the guy had one of those letters in his house. I recognized the envelope. Chiun grabbed it up before I could take a look at it. I think it has something to do with me becoming Reigning Master of Sinanju. So maybe this picture of me on TV is connected to the same thing."

  Smith was trying to digest Remo's words.

  "Could Chiun be so careless?" the older man breathed. He knew the truth even as he posed the question. If history was an indication, the answer was a resounding, unequivocal yes.

  "Not Chiun exactly," Remo replied. "But I don't know what those letters said or who got them. This stuff in Harlem could be connected to Sinanju and not CURE at all."

  "Ask Chiun," Smith demanded tartly.

  "I could, but I doubt he'd give me a straight answer. He wouldn't before and he's kind of ticked at me right now."

  "Put him on the phone."

  "I can't," Remo said. "He stormed out of here. I'm standing in an empty Harlem police station. Which, by the way, I should get out of before the cops come home."

  Smith sat behind his big desk, quietly fuming. The Master of Sinanju had been unconcerned about security in the past. It was entirely possible that they had been brought to the brink of ruin because of the old Korean's carelessness.

  Smith allowed his grip on the phone to loosen. "Those weren't typical rioters," he mused. "They had the opportunity to attack the former president at any time in the hours they had his building surrounded but they did not. It's possible that whoever gave them their orders was merely trying to draw you in."

  "Shittman said he was watching 'Winner' when he zonked out," Remo explained. "You know, that show where they strand a bunch of people I wouldn't trust to lick the sticky side of a stamp out in the middle of nowhere."

  Smith frowned. The name triggered something in his recent memory. He couldn't place it.

  "I am not familiar with the program," he said.

  "No surprise there," Remo said. "Do you even own a TV?" He forged ahead. "It's on BCN. Shittman said the BCN guy who's been passing out free palm TVs has set up shop in the cellar of his church. I'll go check him out."

  "Please do," Smith said. "And find out if Master Chiun is involved in this. If his irresponsible behavior is to blame, at least he can tell us exactly what we're dealing with. In the meantime I will check into the BCN angle. Call back as soon as you know anything more."

  Smith hung up the phone. His hand pained him from gripping the receiver too tightly.

  This was a catastrophe in the making. Events in Harlem might have been engineered to draw Remo out, but it was just as likely it had been done to draw CURE into the light. There was no way of knowing right now, no way to stop an unknown foe with unknowable intentions.

  One thing was certain. Whoever it was, CURE's faceless enemy was possessed with incredibly dangerous technology. What Remo had described was clearly dissociative behavior. The separation of an idea of activity from mainstream conscious thought. They had discovered a way to make people do things divorced from the societal or personal boundaries of morals and ethics.

  The name of the program that had triggered the dissociative response in Minister Shittman and the others still seemed familiar to Smith. He assumed he had come across it as part of his daily work as CURE director.

  Right now that didn't matter. He had more pressing things to deal with.

  He turned his attention to his computer.

  As the clock ticked down to zero on what might very well be the last minutes of both his life and the life of the agency he led, Dr. Harold W. Smith began to steer a steady course through the troubled rapids of cyberspace.

  Chapter 10

  Remo swiped an abandoned cop car from the street in front of the station house. There was a hat on the front seat. He put it on and pulled it low over his eyes.

  The hat fit. For an instant it gave him an odd, old feeling. In the rearview mirror he saw that the face looking back at him could have been that of the same Remo Williams who had been a Newark beat patrolman a million years before.

  But he wasn't the same. The world was different and they were all going to have to come to grips with it.

  He started the engine.

  Remo found the Master of Sinanju marching down the sidewalk halfway back to their car.

  "Want a lift?" he called, slowing next to the elderly Korean.

  Chiun gave him the briefest of hateful looks before sliding in the passenger seat beside his pupil.

  "I suppose you are worried now to let me walk the streets for fear I might be mugged," the Master of Sinanju sniffed.

  "Little Father, I'd be worried for Harlem if it tried to mug you," Remo replied honestly. "And I didn't mean to insult you back there. The place was going nuts, and I did have a reason to be concerned about you. It happened to you once before. Remember that head case Abraxas who wanted to take over the world years ago? You didn't realize back then you were seeing his subliminal signals."

  "How fortunate for me that in my dotage I have you to remember the most embarrassing moments of my life," Chiun said, his tone enough to chill the already cold winter air.

  "I'm not trying to embarrass. I'm just saying you-we-need to watch out. This stuff they're using is sophisticated as all hell. It's not just a name flashing on a screen like it was back then. Whoever's doing this is using the signals to make people do things that go against their nature."

  "Perhaps I have already fallen victim to these signals, Remo," the Master of Sinanju said. "For it is against my nature to train an ingrate fat white with oatmeal for brains in the art of Sinanju. Y
et there sits bloated, oatmeal-brained you. Yes, Remo, you are right. Clearly, I am old and senile and in need of special attention."

  "Sue me for being concerned," Remo grumbled. "And as long as I already pulled the pin out of the grenade, Smitty wanted me to ask you if this was connected to those letters you've been mailing out."

  So slowly did the old Korean's head turn, not a single hair stirred around his parchment face. His hazel eyes burned laser holes in Remo's skull.

  "You told Smith?" he asked, voice low with accusation.

  "Not really," Remo said. "I can't very well give him specifics about something I don't know about. I told him there were envelopes and how one already showed up out of the blue in the house of someone who was trying to kill us. I thought maybe my picture on TV was connected somehow."

  "It is not," Chiun said firmly.

  "It'd help Smitty to make sure about that if you told me just what the hell they were for," Remo said. But the Master of Sinanju became uncommunicative. Turning from his pupil, he stared out at the potholed street.

  "Why me, Lord?" Remo muttered.

  He found his leased car where he'd left it.

  The kids who had been stripping it had made a valiant effort to put it back together. It seemed, however, that they were more adept at destruction than construction.

  The car looked as if it was falling apart at the seams. Lined up on the sidewalk beside it was a row of anxious black faces. Hanging high above them was the kid Remo had suspended from the light pole.

  "Didn't any of you take shop class between arrests?" Remo growled at the kids as he got out of the cop car.

  Remo kicked the light pole. The vibrations knocked the hanging kid loose. He screamed all the way to the ground. Remo snagged him from the air just before he went splat.

  "Go scare your teachers."

  The kids didn't need to be told a second time. In a pack, they hightailed it down the street.

  Remo's car rattled along the streets of Harlem. With every turn, something new seemed to drop off in his wake.

  On Malcolm X Boulevard they passed a familiar building.

  Remo had first been to the seventeen-story skyscraper on an assignment years before. Back then the XL SysCorp building was a gleaming tower of polarized glass. In the intervening years it had fallen into such disrepair that even the homeless were afraid to find shelter inside.

  Thinking dark thoughts of the events of that time, Remo drove silently past the ruins.

  Hal Shittman's Greater Congregation of the Lord Church was located just off George Washington Carver Boulevard.

  Remo knew he'd have trouble questioning the BCN representative who had set up shop in the minister's basement as soon as he drove up the street.

  Reporters crammed the road and sidewalk. It looked as if they had come over directly from covering the unrest outside the former president's offices.

  Remo left the Master of Sinanju in the car. Avoiding police, he fell in with a crowd of people who were watching the activity around the Harlem church. "What happened?" Remo asked.

  "White dude shot hisself," one man replied. "He call all the press here and when they all gots they cameras going, dude shoots himself right there. Whole world watching. It just terrible." He shook his head, dark face miserable.

  Although it meant the loss of his only lead, Remo was at least a little heartened to find someone who actually cared about the loss of fellow human life.

  "Dude was givin' away free pocket TVs and I missed out," the man continued morosely.

  "What a white man doing in Minister Shittman's church anyway?" asked a hugely overweight woman. Her fingernails were very long and extremely purple and couldn't help but make one wonder why a person so obsessed with one part of her physical appearance wouldn't spend less time at the nail salon and more time at the gym.

  "Spying for the CIA," replied the man.

  "CIA," echoed a chorus of voices with utter certainty.

  Remo frowned at the crowd. "Paranoia is a lot more fun than taking responsibility for our own actions, isn't it?" he announced to those gathered.

  He left the scene.

  For a time the crowd discussed the rude white man. They did this while the sheet-draped body of the BCN network executive who had apparently been doing secret studies on the television viewing habits of the black man was being brought up from the basement of Minister Shittman's church.

  Eventually they all agreed he had to be yet another CIA agent sent into the black community to promote unrest.

  "Won't be the last time," they said knowingly.

  THREE BLOCKS OVER, on the vacant lots that were home to the current season of Winner, Cindee Maloo sat alone in a gloomy production trailer. On the monitor before her played the images collected by her cameraman that morning.

  She couldn't be certain. But then, her instructions had been clouded in mystery. Besides, she was pretty sure.

  An old Korean and a young white.

  The Korean wasn't on the tape. Even though her cameraman had tried to get him, he had failed. It was as if the wisp of a man could make himself invisible.

  The other one had worked out a little better. He was at least on the tape. But at the same time he wasn't there.

  She had carefully viewed the scant footage. On all of it, Remo's face seemed out of focus even though the rest of his body was crystal clear. He somehow had managed to shake his head in such a way to make his features unrecognizable.

  It made Cindee dizzy just watching him.

  When she could take it no more, she finally spit the tape out of the machine and plugged it into the special unit she'd been sent the previous day.

  She pressed Send. With a whir, the image went out at high speed over the satellite feed.

  The process was over in less than ten seconds. Once it was done she popped the tape, tugged it in black spools from the casing and dropped it in the trash.

  As she was leaving the small Harlem trailer, the images Cindee Maloo had beamed into the heavens were already being scrutinized on the other side of the world.

  Chapter 11

  Ominous black clouds rolled in from the east across the Great Dividing Range, casting an otherworldly pall over the Great Artesian Basin in Queensland, Australia. Beneath the scudding clouds, Kenneth Robert MacGulry's Land Rover bounced along a long flat road that sliced through the broad desert.

  MacGulry-who the world knew as "Robbie" had taken one of his personal helicopters across New South Wales to the spot where the Darling River split into the jagged threads of the Warrego and Culgoa. The Land Rover and its driver met him at Wyandra.

  A long haul out into the middle of nowhere. A colossal effort for mere sport. But Robbie MacGulry managed to carve out so little time for recreation these days. To his intense displeasure, he found that his trip into the outback was being ruined by his incompetent driver.

  "Faster, you idiot!" MacGulry roared. So thick was his native Australian accent, the word came out "fastah."

  The driver understood only too well, dutifully pressing harder on the gas. Speeding up, the Land Rover tore at the ground, throwing clouds of choking dust in its wake.

  Riding shotgun, Robbie MacGulry fumed.

  Oh, it wasn't all the driver's fault-although the worthless wanker would be out of a job once they got back to Wyandra. It was living that boiled his blood. Life itself bothered Robbie MacGulry. Bile was the force that drove him.

  MacGulry was in his late sixties. His pugnacious, suntanned face was drawn into a perpetual scowl. Flinty eyes glowered from behind thick, black-framed glasses. A flattened nose was testament to the great many fists Robbie MacGulry had encountered in his youth. He liked to be called a fighter. So much so, he made sure his many newspapers around the world worked it into any articles about him.

  And why not? It was the truth.

  Robbie MacGulry had never been one to shy away from a fight. This was one thing friend and enemy alike could agree on-although MacGulry was first to admit that there we
re very few friends and a great many enemies. One did not become the most powerful media figure on the face of the planet without racking up an extensive list of foes. At the moment, however, his greatest enemy was the nong ocker who was steering his Land Rover like a frightened Sheila.

  "Pull up beside them, you bloody bludger!" MacGulry bellowed.

  The Land Rover had nearly pulled alongside the mob of hopping kangaroos. Running full-out, the animals were clearly terrified. Huge feet stomped in furious rhythm against the hard-packed earth. Although fast over short distances, the animals were no match for the Land Rover. MacGulry's driver drew beside the stragglers at the rear of the stampeding kangaroos.

  Musky rat kangaroos were more common in the northeastern part of Australia, but their small size made them less fun to hunt. MacGulry always liked to keep a healthy stock of the much larger gray kangaroos on all his ranches.

  Standing on his seat, the world-famous media mogul reached in back. A moment later, the barrel of an elephant gun stuck out the open window. Bracing it on the door, MacGulry took careful aim.

  A wicked smile carved his chapped lips the instant before he pulled the trigger.

  The explosion was deafening. The driver jerked the wheel in time with the recoil and the Land Rover skidded sideways. A simultaneous eruption of red burst beside the speeding vehicle. Thick bright blood splattered the dusty hood and windshield. Chunks of warm kangaroo bits splashed the young driver's bare arms and knees.

  Robbie MacGulry grinned delightedly. "Woo-hoo!" he screamed. "Bagged the bugger!" His rugged face was flecked with blood. His shoulder ached where the gun's padded stock had hammered the joint.

  As the billionaire media mogul wiped blood on the sleeve of his bush jacket, his driver struggled to keep from vomiting up the poached eggs and Foster's beer he'd had for breakfast.

  MacGulry whooped a wicked, snorting laugh as the driver regained control of the Land Rover. They raced back up alongside the thundering mob.

  The kangaroos had shifted direction. The panicked animals were tiring. Mouths foamed, noses twitched as the Land Rover pulled abreast.