Blood Ties td-69

by Warren Murphy

  "Like hell," Tringle snapped, and fired. He didn't bother to check where the laser dot was pointed. At this range it would not matter.

  But it did matter. Bullet holes peppered the walls, but the patient was not even touched. He was laughing aloud.

  "You can't laugh at the FBI that way," Tringle cried, tears of frustration welling in his eyes.

  "No? What way can I laugh at the FBI?"

  Tringle did not answer. He was busy trying to yank the empty clip from his gun so he could ram home a fresh one. In training, he had consistently performed that operation in less than 2.5 seconds and had received a commendation for that speed.

  He found, though, that it meant very little in actual practice because before he got the old clip out, the gun began falling apart and he was left holding a finely machined piece of junk. The laser targeting system still worked however. Tringle knew this because he could see the red dot dancing on the unconcerned face of the patient, who was holding portions of Tringle's gun in his right hand and who was raising his left hand slowly to the FBI agent's weeping face.

  Then there was nothing more to see because Tringle was on the floor, unconscious.

  Remo put the two agents in a closet and covered them with blankets because it was cold in the closet. In a few hours, they would be clear-headed enough to receive official reprimands for dereliction of duty and only Remo would know that they were not at fault. There had been only three of them and three was not enough.

  Remo entered the unlocked door of Room 12-D. Hubert Millis lay wide-eyed on the bed, tubes plugged into his mouth, his nose, and his arms. His breathing was barely noticeable amid the beeping and blipping of electronic monitoring devices.

  Remo passed a hand over the man's eyes. There was no reaction, not even a dilation of the pupils to interception of the light. Remo could sense that the man was very close to death. A quick thrust to the temple might be more mercy than murder.

  He reached his right hand toward the man's head, then withdrew it. He had killed many times but this was different. This man was not a criminal, not someone who deserved death, but just a businessman who happened to wind up on somebody's hit list.

  But Remo's own father had asked him to kill the man. His own father.

  Slowly he raised his right hand again.

  The EKG machine suddenly stopped beeping. Another machine kicked into life; the sound it made was a long, drawn-out, tinny "screeeeee."

  Alarm horns rang out in the corridor. Somewhere, someone was yelling. "Code blue. Room 12-D.

  A team of doctors burst into the room. They ignored the bullet- shattered corridor walls and pushed past Remo as if he were not there.

  A nurse stripped the nightshirt from the scrawny chest of Hubert Millis. A doctor touched a stethoscope to the man's chest and shook his head.

  Someone passed him a pair of disks, attached by cable to a wheeled machine.

  "Clear," the doctor yelled.

  Everyone stepped back. When the disks touched Millis' chest, his body jumped off the bed from the shock. Then it lay still.

  Three times the doctor reapplied the shock procedure, one eye cocked at the EKG machine, whose steady line of light indicated no heart action.

  Finally, the doctor dropped the disks and stepped back.

  "That's it. He's gone. Nurse, prep him for removal." And still without noticing Remo, the doctors left the room.

  The nurse still stood by the bedside and Remo took her arm.

  "What happened?" he asked urgently.

  "He flatlined."

  "That means he's dead, right?"

  "That's right. Heart failure. You were in the room with him. Who are you?"

  "Never mind that. What killed him? I have to know."

  "His heart just gave out. We half-expected it."

  "It wasn't the excitement, was it?" Remo asked. "Excitement didn't kill him?"

  "Excitement? He was in a coma. He wouldn't have got excited in a car bombing."

  "Thanks," Remo said.

  "Don't mention it. What were you doing here anyway?"

  "Wrestling with my conscience," Remo called back.

  "Who won?"

  "It was a draw."

  Chapter 24

  When Remo returned from the hospital, he found the older man slouched in a chair, watching an episode of The Honeymooners.

  "How'd it go?" the gunman asked, without taking his eyes from the screen.

  "Millis is dead," Remo said.

  "Good. You do good work, kid. Sit down and watch some TV."

  "I think I'll go to sleep," Remo said.

  "Sure, son. Whatever you want, you do it."

  "We going to be leaving town soon?" Remo asked.

  "Hold your horses. I got some things to do yet," the gunman said.

  "Like what?" Remo said.

  "Business. I got business. You gonna pester me? I want to watch this. Ed Norton just knocks me out."

  "I thought Millis was your business."

  "He was," the gunman said.

  "Well, Millis is dead."

  "What do you want? A freaking medal? You owed me that hit 'cause you screwed it up on me before. Now we're even and get off my case. I got other things to do."

  Remo had gone into the bedroom and lain down, but he had been unable to sleep. His entire adult life had been spent yearning for a family, but maybe having a family was not all it was supposed to be.

  He meant nothing to his father, out in the other room, laughing uproariously at the rerun he had probably seen a dozen times. And that was family.

  Chiun, on the other hand, for all his carping and complaining, cared about Remo. And Chiun wasn't family, not real blood family anyway.

  Was "family" just a label, meaningless unless there was sharing and trust and love involved? Remo didn't know. He lay on the bed groping for something to say to his father. But all the important questions-who Remo was, where he was born, all the rest-had been answered and now there were no more questions to ask and Remo felt empty.

  He heard the telephone ring in the other room and focused his hearing on the gunman's voice when he heard him say hello. Most people could not hear properly because untrained ears were not able to filter out all the background noise and concentrate on what a person wanted to hear. Most people lived in a world of static, but Remo could direct his hearing in a narrow range so he was able, without real effort, to hear both sides of a telephone conversation.

  He heard his father say, "When are you going to pay for the Millis hit?"

  "As soon as you get Lavallette," a voice answered.

  "Wait a minute. This is supposed to be pay as you go, remember?"

  "Millis isn't even cold yet and this is an emergency. I can't explain it now. I want Lavallette hit and I want him hit right away."

  "That's not our agreement," the gunman said.

  "I'll pay double for Lavallette," the voice responded.

  "Double? You really do want Lavallette hit, don't you?"

  "Was there any doubt?"

  "I guess not. Okay, I'll do it."

  "He'll be at his office at eight o'clock this morning. One last thing. No head shots. You get him in the face or head and you don't get paid."

  "I remember."

  "But this time it's especially important. I have my reasons. "

  The gunman hung up the telephone and in the empty room, Remo heard him say, "I guess you do. Damned if I can figure out what they are, though."

  At his apartment, Lyle Lavallette hung up the telephone and laughed nervously.

  The game was almost over. This was the last risk and when he got through this one, he was the big winner. Who would have thought it over the last twenty years? Who would have thought it when all three of those ungrateful bastards had fired him from their auto companies? Well, now, it was payback time and the Dynacar was the way to do it. Within a month, Lavallette expected that he would be the head of all three of America's major car manufacturers. He would control the industry as no man before
him, not even Henry Ford, had ever done.

  And who knew what was next? Maybe Washington.

  Maybe the White House itself.

  Why not? Everything else had worked perfectly so far. It was a master stroke to have hired a killer and then to have named himself, Lyle Lavallette, as the first target. That way, when the other car moguls were removed, no one would think of pointing a finger at Lavallette.

  And it had worked. He had panicked the other car companies and they were all coming around.

  The only loose end left was the killer. He didn't want that man around, maybe to be arrested, maybe to talk. Even though he didn't know who had hired him, it was possible that some smart investigator might be able to get him singing and put two and two together.

  The assassin had to go, so Lavallette had called him and told him when the target would be vulnerable.

  The killer would come in the morning.

  And be met by Colonel Brock Savage and his mercenaries. End of the gunman. End of the problem.

  It was perfect.

  Lavallette put a hairnet over his sprayed hair and got carefully into bed. He wanted a few hours' sleep. He wanted to look good when he went before the TV cameras tomorrow and told the world that the crazed Detroit assassin had been killed.

  Chapter 25

  "So that's the Dynacar. When do you go into production?"

  Lyle Lavallette looked at the new public-relations counsel he had hired and said, "Don't worry about that now. More important things take precedence."

  They were standing inside the large garage of the Dynacar Industries building. The public-relations man was confused because he had gotten the impression from watching the news broadcasts that Lavallette was ready to begin construction of the revolutionary car immediately. But the inside of the Dynacar plant was as barren as a baseball stadium in December. There were no workers, there was no assembly line, there were no parts or equipment. It was just a big empty warehouse.

  "I'm not sure I follow you, Mr. Lavallette," the public-relations man said. He had been a newspaperman for fifteen years before getting into public relations "to make some real money," but his newspaper background gave him the uneasy feeling that he was involved in some kind of scam.

  Even looking at the sleek black Dynacar which stood in solitude in the middle of the plant's floor did not dispel that feeling.

  "Listen and I'll make it simple for you," Lavallette said. "I've been planning to go into production, but now with that crazy killer running around loose, things have changed."

  "How?" the public-relations man said.

  "First of all, when Mangan got shot, the directors of his company started reaching out for me to take over their company and consolidate it with the Dynacar production. Right?"

  "Right."

  "And that story you planted yesterday about American Autos reaching out for me to do the same thing is going to work. They'll be on the telephone before the morning's over. "

  "How does that explain why you're not building Dynacars?" the P.R. man said.

  "Wait. I'm not done. Now we all know that Revell from General Autos has gone on vacation because he's scared for his life. What we want to do is to plant some stories; get General Autos to ask for me too."

  "To run their company?" the P. R. man asked.

  "Exactly."

  "You mean, you want to run all three big auto companies as well as Dynacar?"

  "Now you've got it," Lavallette said.

  "Nobody's ever done that before."

  "There's never been a Lyle Lavallette before. And that explains why we're not doing production here. If I'm going to merge my company with the Big Three, I'll use their production facilities to build Dynacars. That way, in a year, I'll be able to do what it'd take me a century to do here by myself. I'll have a Dynacar in every garage. You understand now?"

  "Perfectly," the P.R. man said. What he understood was that Lyle Lavallette, the Maverick Genius of the Auto Industry, was as loose as ashes. Who would believe that the Big Three of the auto business, who lived to compete among each other, would all turn to the same man to head their companies? It sounded like something that might be considered in Russia, but not in the United States. "Good," Lavallette said. "So keep planting stories about mergers. How with the new Dynacar, only I can save the Big Three. Maybe you can call me the Maverick Savior. That might be good."

  "Okay," the P.R. man said. Why not? The money was good.

  "And one important thing." Lavallette said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Try always to photograph my left side. That's my best side. "

  "You got it, Mr. Lavallette. Does this car really run on garbage?"

  Lavallette shook his head. "Refuse. Not garbage. We always say 'refuse' around here. If we get this thing tagged as the garbagemobile, we could run into a lot of public resistance. Refuse." He smoothed a hand over his hair. Good. Everything was in place. "And to answer your question, it runs like a charm and it's the greatest discovery in automobiles, maybe since the wheel. Try to get that printed somewhere. The greatest thing since the wheel."

  "You got it, Mr. Lavallette," the P.R. man said.

  In the White House, the President of the United States was sipping coffee in his bedroom when an aide came in holding a scroll of paper that contained a brief report on the overnight news events.

  The top item reported that Hubert Millis, president of American Automobiles, had succumbed at 1:32 A.M. in Detroit.

  The President excused his aide, opened the drawer of the nightstand, and picked up the receiver of a dialless phone that was hidden beneath two hot-water bottles and a copy of Playboy.

  He waited for the voice of Harold Smith to come on the line. The President had decided, and it was time-time to order the dismantling of America's ultimate shield against chaos.

  He was going to tell Smith that CURE must disband. The agency had failed and it was time to go back to more traditional law-enforcement agencies, like the FBI. He had always liked the FBI, especially since he had once played an FBI man in a movie.

  But no one answered the phone.

  The President remained on the line. From past experience, he knew that Smith was seldom away from his headquarters and when he was, he carried a portable radiophone in his briefcase, hooked up to the private line in his office.

  He waited five minutes but there was still no answer. The President hung up. He decided he could give the order after lunch as easily as before lunch. A few hours' difference wouldn't matter.

  It wouldn't matter at all.

  Chapter 26

  Chiun, Master of Sinanju, allowed the doorman of the Detroit Plaza Hotel to summon his conveyance.

  When the taxi pulled up, the doorman, wearing a uniform that reminded Chiun of those worn by the courtiers to the throne of France's Sun King, opened the door for him, then closed it gently after Chiun was seated in the rear.

  Then the doorman leaned into the cab window with an expectant smile.

  "You have done well," Chiun said. "Now remove yourself from my field of vision."

  "You must be new to our country, sir," the doorman replied, still smiling. "In America, good service is usually rewarded with a tip."

  "Very well," said Chiun. "Here is a tip. Do not have children. Their ingratitude will only cause you sorrow in your declining years."

  "That wasn't the kind of tip I had in mind," the doorman said.

  "Then here is another," Chiun said. "People who delay other people who must be off on important business often have their windpipes ripped from their throats. Onward, driver. "

  The cabby pulled into traffic and said, "Where are you going, buddy?"

  "To the place of the carriagemaker. Lavallette."

  "Oh. The Dynacar guy. Sure. Hang on."

  "In what direction is his place?" Chiun demanded.

  "Direction? Oh, I'd say west."

  "Then why are you driving north?"

  "Because I have to drive north to catch the interstate that goes we
st," the cabby replied good-naturedly.

  "I am familiar with the tricks of your trade," Chiun said. "Do not drive north. Drive west."

  "I can't do that."

  "You can. Simply point your wheels west and proceed."

  "In a straight line?"

  "I am paying only for the miles driven to our destination. The west miles," Chiun said. "I will not pay for unnecessary deviations from our route."

  "I can't drive in a straight line. There are little things in the way like skyscrapers and trees."

  "You have my permission to drive around such obstacles. But west, always west. I will keep track of the west miles for you," said Chiun, resting his eyes on the clicking digital meter.

  The driver shrugged and said, "You're the boss, buddy."

  "No," said Chiun. "I am the Master."

  "Just as long as I'm still the driver."

  As they drove, Chiun kept his eyes on the meter but his mind was on Remo.

  He had not lied when he had told Smith that Remo was lost to Sinanju. The appearance of the older Remo Williams-Remo's natural father-had torn Chiun's pupil in another direction, away from Sinanju. Chiun had hoped to prevent this difficulty by killing the gunman before Remo had ever known of his existence. But it did not work that way.

  However, Chiun had lied when he told Smith that Remo was dead. In a sense, it was true. Without Chiun to guide him, without someone to keep him on the path of proper breathing and correctness, Remo's powers would atrophy and perhaps fade entirely. It had happened to Remo before without Chiun and it would probably happen again. Remo would cease to be Sinanju.

  But what Chiun had feared more was that if Smith knew that Remo was still alive, no longer under Chiun's control, Smith would order Remo's death and Chiun would be bound by contracts to obey that order.

  It was not time for that. There was still a chance to bring Remo back into the care of Sinanju.

  Which was why Chiun journeyed through the cool dawn to the place of the carriagemaker. Not for the carriagemaker and not for Smith and not for a moment to benefit this stupid land of white people who were all ingrates.

  Chiun traveled in the hope that if there were another attempt on the life of Lyle Lavallette, his would-be assassin would not come alone. He would bring Remo.