Ground Zero td-84

by Warren Murphy

  His trembling head swiveled toward Remo. "Do you think that because I am approaching the venerated age, I have grown too infirm to accompany you on Emperor Smith's business?"

  "It's not that," Remo protested. "It's just that you've been moping around the house ever since we got back from California. I don't think you're in the best frame of mind to-"

  "Do not lie to me, Remo Williams. I know only too well how whites treat their aged. They hide them in terrible homes, as if ashamed of those who gave them life. I will not be so treated. No tiresome home will be my fate."

  "Retirement," Remo corrected. "Retirement home."

  "No retirement home will be my fate," Chiun repeated, coming to his feet like uncoiling colored smoke. "I will accompany you."

  "Age before beauty," Remo said jokingly, bowing so Chiun could precede him out the front door.

  The Master of Sinanju slammed the door after him so hard Remo couldn't get it open again and, cursing himself, had to exit the house through a window.

  Chapter 20

  Sky Bluel couldn't make up her mind.

  Should she wear the fringed buckskin jacket over torn blue jeans or go for the peasant-blouse look?

  The limousine was due any minute. Her latest neutron bomb sat in the bathroom, every shaped plastique charge in place and locked so no one could mess with it. She wore the only key around her neck. Without it, the bomb could not be neutralized. But her thoughts weren't on the bomb, which was almost twice the size of the previous device. Instead, Sky tried to decide what kind of statement she wanted to make. Fringed buckskin evoked the sixties of draft-card-burning. The peasant blouse was more Age of Aquarius sixties. Not nearly radical enough.

  She modeled the buckskin in front of the full-length bathroom-door mirror, humming the theme from Hair and looking forward to leaving the hotel. Even if it was for a stuffy TV studio.

  Finally she decided to go with the buckskin. That important choice made, the only remaining question was whether to go with body paint or a copper peace symbol mounted on a rawhide headband. Body paint seemed tacky, but maybe it would take the edge off the buckskin.

  Barry Kranish had it narrowed down to the white limousine idling in front of the network building or the black limousine parked around back.

  He knew Sky Bluel was not in the building itself. Kranish had found this out in a most direct manner. He had walked up to the main-entrance guard, flashed his business card, and announced he had a subpoena for Sky Bluel.

  "And unless your network wants to be slapped with a lawsuit for obstruction of justice," he had said darkly, "somebody had better produce her." For effect, he waved his rental-car agreement under the guard's nose. There was no subpoena.

  The desk guard summoned the head of security, who in turn called down a network vice-president.

  "The person you are seeking is not in the building," the vice-president informed him stiffly. "At present."

  "Where is she, then?" Kranish had demanded.

  "I can't reveal that without jeopardizing the First Amendment rights of the press and possibly toppling the republic."

  "This is not over," Kranish warned, storming from the building. On his way out, he bumped into a casually dressed man loitering by the door.

  "Excuse me," the man said in a tone that carried no apology.

  "Shove it," Kranish said, brushing past the man. He had security written all over him. Or maybe private heat. The coplike eyes and thick-soled brogans were dead giveaways.

  The fact that the man abruptly stubbed out his cigarette and left the building a few paces behind him clinched it.

  Barry Kranish had not gotten the answer he'd hoped for, but he had gotten the one he expected.

  Sky Bluel was not in the building. That only meant that she soon would be.

  As he waited in his rental car on the busy Manhattan street, Kranish decided on the white limousine. The liveried chauffeur at the wheel looked impatient. He was probably waiting to be told where to pick up the girl. So he settled down to wait. He noticed the private security guard now loitering by the studio entrance, smoking casually and eyeing both the idling limo and Barry Kranish with shifty half-intelligent eyes.

  Kranish decided to keep his eye on him too. No telling where he might fit in when things started happening. Not that he was worried about a private dick. He had hired enough of them to get dirt on his political enemies to understand the breed.

  Calvin Taggert sucked down a hot cloud of smoke and blew it out one nostril, paused, and then emptied his lungs through the other. It was a trick he had learned watching forties movies.

  It was a good break, he decided, that he had overheard that lawyer pump the front guard about Sky Bluel. After repeated attempts to buy off assorted security and maintenance people, he had come up with nothing. Time was wasting. Once the girl got on TV, she would become the focus of every reporter from here to Alaska, and a thousand times harder to snatch.

  He figured the white limousine idling by the door was there to pick her up.

  So he settled down to wait, noticing that the lawyer was up to the same thing. But Calvin Taggert wasn't worried about the lawyer. Still, he would keep an eye on him too. His eyes looked a little feverish, like he was on drugs or something.

  When it came, the break he had hoped for practically stepped up and shook Calvin Taggert's hand.

  It was twenty minutes to eight, twenty minutes to air time for Twenty-four Hours. He was starting to wonder if he should check the back when Don Cooder himself emerged from the studio building and stepped up to the chauffeur, who sat patiently behind the wheel.

  "Okay," he said, leaning down to speak in the chauffeur's ear, "it's the Penta. Go get her."

  Cooder gave the roof an urgent slap, and the limousine pulled away from the curb. Calvin Taggert raced to his rental car and threw himself behind the wheel. He cut off a Federal Express truck and sideswiped a taxi getting the car into the flow of traffic. Despite this, he managed to position himself only three car lengths behind the limousine. He spotted the lawyer's car jockeying behind the limo. That didn't worry him. What was a lawyer going to do? Threaten him with the sharp edge of a subpoena?

  Sky Bluel had just finished daubing a passion-purple peace symbol on her right cheek when the hotel-room phone rang.

  It was the front desk. "Your driver is here, miss."

  "Fab, send him up," Sky said, closing her paintbox. The daisy she intended to adorn the tip of her nose would have to await a better time.

  The man who buzzed was not a chauffeur, Sky saw as she opened the door. Instead of a chauffeur's uniform, or even a suit, he wore green work pants and a jersey.

  "You're my driver?" she said doubtfully.

  "Not me," the man rumbled. "I'm a studio stagehand. The driver's downstairs." His gorillalike arms dangled loose at his sides. He looked like a dockworker, not a TV person, Sky thought.

  "I guess you get to carry my pride and joy," Sky said, stepping aside. "It's in the tub."

  "Thanks." The big guy lumbered into the bathroom, where he found the neutron device balanced across the porcelain rim. Wrapping huge paws around either end of the electronics-studded breadboard mounting, he lifted it straight up.

  Carrying it like an oversize serving dish, he duck-walked out into the corridor.

  "What the hell is this thing?" he complained as Sky closed the door behind them.

  "It's a neutron bomb, okay? So don't drop it."

  "You have my solemn word on that," he said in a thin voice.

  As the elevator descended, Sky Bluel had stars in her eyes. She had stars on her face too, but she absently scratched her chin and obliterated both of them.

  After tonight, she thought, a whole generation would march behind her, in lockstep, into the future.

  "You remember the sixties?" she asked excitedly.

  "Not me. I lived through them."

  "Well, the sixties are coming back, and I'm going to be the next Jane Fonda. Isn't that absolutely boss?"
/>   The studio worker stifled a laugh. Sky frowned. Maybe "boss" was more fifties slang. She would have to ask her father when she got home.

  There were no parking spaces.

  "Damn!" Calvin Taggert said bitterly, circling the block with reckless disregard for pedestrians. The white limo was still outside the Penta Hotel, still idling, still empty. But time was running out. He would have to start making moves soon or he could kiss that nice Missouri retirement home good-bye.

  He passed the lawyer's car. The lawyer was a real amateur. He was staring out the windshield, craning his head to keep the hotel entrance in sight. For some strange reason, he had smeared his face with brown jungle camouflage paint or something. He was so obvious, he might as well have worn a neon cowbell.

  Taggert flipped him the finger in passing.

  Barry Kranish clutched the steering wheel in a brown-knuckled death grip. His knuckles were brown because that was the color of the river mud he had plunged them into before slapping his face into a ball of unrecognizable gunk. In his heart he swelled with newfound respect for his fallen Dirt First!! comrades. For one thing, the smell would make a maggot puke.

  Guerrilla ectotage was scarier than he'd thought. He wondered what would happen to him if he were captured. Who would bail him out? Maybe he would be forced to defend himself. He shivered.

  While he was turning the dire possibilities over in his mind, the hotel's massive revolving door started to turn.

  Kranish reached for the car-door lever. Then the girl stepped out, looking like a walking LSD flashback, followed by the liveried chauffeur.

  "The bomb!" Kranish moaned, pounding the steering wheel. "Where's the damn bomb?"

  Calvin Taggert turned the corner and his heart leapt up into his throat, forcing a curse out ahead of it.

  "Shit! There she is."

  He looked frantically for a parking slot. Since the hotel faced Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station, parking was almost impossible. He sent the car around for a final pass. The girl was walking to the limo now. Once she got inside, it would be infinitely harder to nail her.

  Then the side door opened and a beefy man carrying an oversize electronic device backed out. Clumsily he turned around and almost lost his balance. His face went white.

  "Be careful!" Sky Bluel shouted. "Don't break it! You'll ruin everything!"

  The chauffeur came to the rescue. He leapt to the other man's side and lent a supporting hand.

  "Okay, I got it," the beefy man said, gingerly lugging the device to the open trunk of the waiting limousine.

  "Looks like it's now or never," Taggert muttered, pulling a rayon stocking over his head.

  When the neutron bomb almost slipped from the beefy guy's hands, Barry Kranish made his move. Dripping mud, he plunged from the car carrying a railroad spike by its pointed end. He lifted it high.

  Then a car suddenly screeched out of traffic and lunged up on the wide sidewalk, heading right for the chauffeur.

  "Stop!" the chauffeur bleated.

  The car didn't stop.

  Before he knew what had hit him, the car grille picked up the chauffeur and carried him right into the unyielding hotel facade. He bounced off and his upper body landed on the hood, broken legs pinned between the bumper and the building.

  Sky Bluel screamed. She called to the beefy stagehand from the studio.

  "Don't just stand there, do something!"

  No answer. She tore her eyes away from the body and looked back.

  The beefy guy lay sprawled on the sidewalk, his head spurting red fluid like a spasmodic squirt gun.

  "God, this is worse than Kent State!" she moaned.

  Another man had the neutron bomb, Sky saw to her mounting horror. Holding one end up by both hands, he was dragging the board along the sidewalk. There was mud everywhere.

  "Stop! That's my bomb. What are you doing with my bomb?"

  "Get a generation," the man called back, spitting brown droplets.

  Desperate, Sky Bluel looked around for help. A man in a rumpled suit stepped from the car that had pinned the chauffeur. He looked like some kind of plainclothes cop, so Sky swallowed her pride and said, "See that man? That's my property he's stealing."

  "Too bad," the man said in a cold voice. He was balling a handkerchief up in one hand. The other held a clear bottle, which he unscrewed with the flick of a strong thumb.

  Looking fierce, the man capped the bottle with the cloth and upended it. It reminded Sky of old movies where the bad guy would chloroform an intended victim. They were pre-sixties movies and the women always acted helpless and screamed. It was too regressive for words, so Sky had always changed the channel at those parts. Consequently, she had no idea how to react now.

  She decided to run. Too late.

  The man caught her by the braided rawhide thong around her neck. The handkerchief jammed into her mouth and nose and the smell was like a really bad trip. Although the colors were interesting.

  Sky Bluel fought the mounting odor that filled her lungs. She clutched at the strong hand. It might as well have been stone. Struggling, she snapped the rawhide thong, but by then it was too late. Far too late.

  Sky was unconscious before the man gathered her up in his arms and threw her into the passenger seat of his car. He slid behind the wheel. The car backed up, hurling the dead chauffeur to the sidewalk, where he sustained several posthumous contusions, and vanished in traffic.

  It went north. The car being driven by Barry Kranish went west. When the police arrived several minutes later, the overlapping descriptions of the fleeing cars they got from passersby tied them up a solid hour while they sorted it all out.

  By the time they realized they were dealing with two separate assailants driving two different cars, the trail had gotten too cold to pick up.

  When Don Cooder received the news from the pair of stone-faced police officers that not only had he no neutron bomb to stun the nation on tonight's Twenty-four Hours, but also his featured guest, Sky Bluel, had been abducted, he did not flinch.

  He told the two police officers who had come to question him, "Could you excuse me for a moment, please?" and went into his office.

  Twenty minutes later, the impatient police barged in.

  They found Don Cooder hiding under his desk, a shell-shocked expression on his face, repeating something unintelligible over and over in a thick voice. He was unintelligible because he had his thumb in his mouth.

  "What's that he's saying?" one cop asked the other.

  "Sounds like 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "

  "Sounds like we came to the wrong place," Remo whispered to Chiun as he absorbed the police account of the double abduction.

  "There are more wrong places than this," Chiun said coldly.

  They had been at the studio more than an hour. After slipping into the building and ascertaining that Sky Bluel was not there, they had decided to wait in the concealment of a darkened morningshow set.

  The arrival of the police and the commotion that followed-particularly the anguished cries of a program director when he realized he had neither star, nor guest, nor material for the evening broadcast of Twenty-four Hours-made them realize something had gone wrong.

  "What is the meaning of 'What is the frequency, Kenneth?' " Chiun asked as they exited the studio unseen.

  "One of the two early-warning signs of an impending nervous breakdown," Remo explained.

  "And what is the other?"

  "Finding yourself dead last in the ratings."

  They went immediately to the Penta entrance, which was only then being cordoned off with yellow police-barrier tape.

  There they mingled with the crowd, picking up snatches of overheard exchanges between newly arrived detectives and witnesses. A detective was dropping a rawhide cord into a clear evidence bag.

  "Sounds like they got Sky and the bomb," Remo muttered.

  "Who are 'they'?" Chiun asked darkly.

  "Damned if I know," Remo spat. "Maybe Cooder
set this up. Anything is possible with that guy."

  "This is obviously the handiwork of the same perpetrators as before," Chiun said, regarding the sprawled bodies. Both were draped by sheets, except that the head of one had been uncovered by a medical examiner for the benefit of a morgue photographer.

  "How?" Remo said. "The Dirt Firsters all bit the dirt-so to speak. Except that screwball lawyer, Kranish. And this isn't his style. It must have been someone else. Terrorists who saw the news promo, or the Dirt Firsters' military connection."

  "Behold that dead man, Remo," Chiun intoned, indicating the body with the exposed face. "Does he not remind you of someone?"

  Remo looked. "No"

  "Look closer. At his forehead."

  Remo did. He saw a faint line circling the man's brow.

  "Hey! Just like the dead guy we found in Missouri. See, Chiun? That proves it. He was a Dirt Firster. He musta lost his headband when he got run over."

  "Then whose cap is that?" Chiun asked pointedly.

  Remo followed Chiun's pointing finger. He saw the plain brown cap lying crushed on the sidewalk.

  "Is that a military cap?" he asked.

  "I do not think so. There is no insignia."

  "I gotta check this out," Remo said, stepping over the police-barrier tape.

  None of the detectives noticed him as he picked up the cap and stepped up to the corpse. The morgue photographer had gone over to the other body.

  "Excuse me, pal," Remo told the corpse politely, whipping the sheet away. His eyes blinked at the sight of a chauffeur's brown livery. "Chauffeur?" he muttered blankly. To be sure, he lifted the man's inert head and tried out the cap. It was a perfect fit.

  "Damn," Remo muttered, standing up. "A freaking chauffeur."

  That got him noticed by the police.

  "Hey! Who the hell are you?" the plainclothes detective with the evidence bag demanded.

  "FBI," Remo said, offering a card from his wallet.

  "This card says you're an EPA investigator," the detective said belligerently, "and I say you're under arrest."

  "You got me," Remo said, offering his thick wrists.

  The detective reached into his coat for his handcuffs. Somehow he got tangled up and found himself on the sidewalk, his left wrist cuffed to his right ankle.