Killing Time td-50

by Warren Murphy

  Killing Time

  ( The Destroyer - 50 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  America's beautiful people are playing follow-the-leader with their latest guru, diet doctor Felix Foxx. As Foxx's disciples are dropping pounds, however, U.S. military leaders are dropping like flies. Coincidence? Maybe. But CURE's been counting causalities, and Remo and Chiun are being dispatched to muscle in and settle the score. They arrive too late at Foxx's fat farm - a fool's paradise where the wealthy go to buy time. And where, it appears, the smart set are losing a lot more than cellulite . . . Our heroes stumble onto an insidious plot - one that's eating away at the very core of Western civilization. And even racing against time, they've got a slim chance of stopping it . . .

  : KILLING TIME

  Copyright ® 1982 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

  First printing, October, 1982

  ISBN: 0-523-41560-5

  Cover illustration by Hector Garrido

  Printed in the United States of America

  PINNACLE BOOKS, INC.

  1430 Broadway

  New York, New York 10018

  KILLING TIME

  Chapter One

  The vintage 1940 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow glided noiselessly through New York's Central Park, its smoked windows sealing off the lilting strains of Pachelbel's Canon from the humdrum sounds of the city.

  inside, behind the liveried chauffeur, sitting in a sea of velvet the color of his dark wavy hair, Dr. Felix Foxx sipped at a daiquiri from a glass of cut Baccarat crys­tal. He pressed a button on the partition between the front and rear seats.

  "Any joggers?" he asked the chauffeur.

  "No, sir."

  "Keep looking," Foxx said in richly modulated tones, and switched the microphone off.

  Ah, this was the life, he thought as he sniffed a rose in its Lalique bud vase. He finished his drink and set the glass back into the small lacquer bar built into the Rolls. He slid his hand over his $55 tie from Tripler and the flawlessly tailored lapels of his $1200 Lanvin suit. He looked down at his Botticelli shoes, gleaming a dark mahogany against the white plush of the carpet­ing.

  A perfect life.

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  The rear speakers buzzed to attention, "Joggers, sir."

  Foxx's eyes narrowed into hard little slits. "Where?"

  "Ahead and to the left, Dr. Foxx."

  He peered through the darkened glass. Ahead, run­ning alongside the road, were a man and woman dressed in running clothes, their Adidas sneakers kicking up the dust behind them. Their faces were flushed and glistening with sweat.

  "Get into position," he said.

  The car sped up alongside the joggers, then spurted slightly ahead. "Ready?' Foxx asked, a small spark of lust coming to his eyes.

  "Ready, sir."

  Through the smoked windows of the Rolls, Foxx took a good look at the joggers. They were sparkling with good health, two fine specimens flirting with one another. "Now," he growled.

  The car zoomed forward, kicking gp a cloud of dirt and pebbles onto the astonished joggers. Through the rear window, Foxx could see them coughing and sputtering, their shiny perspiring faces coated with soot.

  "On target," he yelled, laughing uproariously.

  "Yes, sir," the chauffeur said.

  "Shut up." He slammed off the communications system and chuckled while he took out a silver vial from his vest pocket and snorted a noseful of cocaine from a tiny silver spoon.

  He hated joggers. He hated health. If it weren't for the miilions brought in from Running & Relativity and Live Free On Celery-Foxx's two books concurrently on the New York Times bestseller list-he'd see to it that runners, hikers, dancercisers, tennis players,

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  ski bunnies, and all the assorted other health nuts of the world were put on priority lists for euthana­sia.

  The car swept out of the park and pulled up slowly beside the curb. "It's two blocks to the television stu­dio, sir," the chauffeur said.

  Foxx sighed and put away the cocaine vial with a growl. "All right, all right," he said with the resignation of the doomed. "Hand them over."

  The sliding partition behind the driver slid open, and the chauffeur handed him a neatly stacked pile of clothing. There was an undershirt, a pair of pale blue custom-tailored sweatpants, and a jacket to match. Foxx unfastened his own clothing reluctantly and handed it up to the driver, then put on the running clothes with a grimace. He hated the feel of them.

  "Sweat," he commanded morosely.

  Obediently, the driver handed him an atomized bot­tle of Evian Tonique Refraisant, which Foxx dutifully sprayed over his face to simulate perspiration.

  It was hell being a health guru. "Anyone around?" he asked.

  "Coast is clear, sir." The chauffeur slid out of his seat and came around to open the door for Foxx.

  "Pick me up in an hour," Foxx said. He retched once and trotted away.

  By the time he reached the WACK studios, the retching had subsided and the expression of bitter resolution on his face had changed to one of radiant cheer. He waved to onlookers outside the studio en­trance. He joked with the receptionist in the studio. He told funny stories to the other guests waiting to go on the "Frank Diamond Show" in the studio's green room. He jogged triumphantly on stage.

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  On camera, he was greeted with shouts and cheers. Frank Diamond introduced him as "Feiix Foxx, the Phantom of Fitness."

  Smiling warmly, he admonished the overweight housewives of the nation to find happiness through fit­ness and his books. Audience members gave testi­mony to the life-changing effects of Dr. Foxx's inspira­tional talks. Middie-aged women screamed in ecstasy as he demonstrated jumping jacks. Fat girls threw their candy bars into the aisles with the fervor of zealots.

  At the stage door exit after the show, a group of adoring fans thrust copies of Running & Relativity and Live Free on Celery at him to sign. Among the flapping pages was a pair of oversized breasts thinly covered by a tight pink sweater. Foxx followed the breasts up­ward to a Shirley Temple face beneath a mop of curly blonde hair.

  "Hi," the girl breathed, causing her sweater to stretch almost beyond endurance. "I think you're just fabulous, Dr. Foxx," she whispered. Her lips quiv­ered.

  "Oh?" Foxx said. She looked like the sort of girl who could accommodate him. Not many could. The last had been a screamer. Screamers were out.

  "Have you read my books?"

  "No. I'm waiting for the movie to come out." She pushed ahead of her a frowzy redhead with a road map face covered by thick layers of pancake. "This here's my roommate Doris. We live together. She thinks you're cute, too."

  "Really," Foxx said, aghast. As he signed more au­tographs, he contemplated the blonde girl's mouth. It curved upward, like a new moon. There were bruises on her neck. "Where did you get those?" he asked,

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  brushing his hand languidly along her throat as the au­tograph seekers moaned in longing.

  "Oh. My boyfriend," she giggled. "He gets kind of rough sometimes. It turns me on."

  That was it, Foxx decided. She would do. "You'd better get a doctor to look at that," he said.

  "Oh, it's nothing," the girl gushed. "Just a bruise. I get them all the time." Doris poked her in the ribs. "Oh. Did I say something wrong? Doris says I'm al­ways saying stupid things."

  "My dear, you're enchanting," Foxx said. "Let me look at those bruises."

  Her eyes rounded. "You mean you're a real doctor? Like on 'G
eneral Hospital'?"

  "That's right." He eased her through the crowd to­ward the Rolls parked outside. "That's all, ladies," he said charmingly to the throng. "I've got a small emer­gency to take care of."

  The women sighed in disappointment. One of them shouted that she loved him. He took the woman's hand and squeezed it. "Be the best you can be," he said earnestly. The women squealed with delight.

  Inside the car, Foxx offered the blonde a glass of champagne. "I just love this fizzy stuff," she said. "Once I broke my arm. I took an Alka Seltzer. It felt wonderful."

  "Your broken arm?"

  She laughed wildly. "No, silly. The fizz. The arm didn't feel like anything at all."

  Foxx stiffened. "Wasn't there any pain?"

  "Nope. A guy I knew once-he worked in a car­nival-he said there was a name for people like me. You know, people who don't feel pain. It's weird, I was always like that. ..."

  "A horse," Foxx said, staring fixedly at the girl. She

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  was everything he wanted. Everything. And more.

  "Hey, that's right. A horse. That's what he said. Maybe you know him. Johnny Calypso, the Tattooed Man."

  "Mmm. 1 doubt it," Foxx muttered. It was going to be a wonderful evening.

  The Rolls pulled up in front of an awning in the ex­pensive section of Fifth Avenue, and a doorman strode forward to help them out. "Oh, by the way, my name's Irma," the girl said. "Irma Schwartz."

  "Lovely," Foxx said.

  Irma was a dynamo. Foxx started with clothespins and graduated steadily through needles, ropes, whips, chains, and fire. "Does it hurt yet?" Foxx wheezed, exhausted.

  "No, Doc," irma said, swigging from the bottle of champagne she'd brought with her from the car. "I told you. I'm a horse."

  "You're a sensation."

  "So are you, Foxie. Running changed my life. Really. Last week. Before that, I was into roller skat­ing, only I broke my nose. I couldn't smell too good out of it, so I got it fixed. Before that, I was into rolfing. And est. Only I quit that 'cause ! didn't like people calling me an asshole. I mean, getting beat up by your boy­friend's one thing, but when a total stranger calls you an asshole, you know-"

  "Didn't the broken nose hurt, either?" Foxx asked, yanking at her hair.

  " 'Course not. I told you, I don't feel nothing. Then be­fore that, the est I mean, I was into Valiums. But I started eating a lot. Doris, my roommate, told me how the guys at the Metropole was saying I was getting fat."

  "Metropole," Foxx muttered as he dug his teeth into Irma's shoulder.

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  "That's where I work. I'm a go-go dancer. They couldn't believe it when I wrote down on the applica­tion how old I was. Bet you can't guess, either."

  "I don't care." He was on his way to paradise again.

  "Go ahead. Guess."

  Foxx sat up with a sigh. "All right. Twenty? Twenty-five?"

  "Forty-three."

  Foxx inhaled deeply. "Forty-three?" There were no lines on her face, no trace that Irma Schwartz had been on the planet longer than two decades. "You really are a horse," he mused. "The rarest kind of horse."

  "I read a thing about it once in Ripley's Believe It or Not. There's some kind of drug in me. Not that I put it there on purpose or nothing, it's just there. Doctors call it propane."

  "Procaine," Foxx corrected abstractly. His mind was racing. Irma Schwartz was too good to be true. What she possessed was worth more than all the nookie in the world. It would be selfish to keep her to himself. She belonged to the world.

  "Yeah, that's it. Procaine."

  "You're very lucky," he said. "People pay thou­sands of dollars for what you've got. A lot of forty-three-year-old women would like to look like they're twenty. It's an age retardant. Procaine's been used by the military for years. In small amounts, it wards off pain. It's related to Novocaine and to cocaine, only the human body produces it. In larger quantities, the drug can slow down the aging process. Theoretically, it can actually stop aging completely, allowing people to stay young for their entire lives. Of course,.that's only theory. It's much too rare to use in quantities like that."

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  "Well, how do you like that?" irma said, "i got something floating around inside me that's worth money."

  "Lots of money," Foxx said. "Any clinic in Europe would pay a fortune for the procaine in your system."

  "Yeah?" Irma brightened. "Maybe I can sell some. I mean, I got lots, right?"

  Foxx smiled. "I'm afraid that would be impossible. You'd have to be dead to donate it."

  Irma giggled. "Oh. Well, I guess it's back to dancing at the Metropole."

  Foxx dug his thumbnail into her ear in a gesture of endearment. Irma giggled. "Be right back," he said. He returned a moment later.

  His hands were sheathed in rubber gloves. In his left hand was a brown, medicinal-looking bottle. In his right, a thick wad of cotton.

  "What's that?" Irma asked.

  "Something to make you crazy."

  "Like drugs?"

  "Like." He poured some of the contents of the bot­tle onto the cotton wool. The fumes stung his eyes and made his breathing catch.

  "You're really good to me, you know that?" Irma tit­tered. "I mean, champagne, now this. ..."

  "Breathe deeply," Foxx said.

  She did. "I'm not getting off."

  "You will."

  "This the new thing at the discos?"

  "The latest. They say it's like dying and going to heaven."

  "What's it called?" Irma asked, her eyes rolling.

  "Prussic acid."

  "Groovy," Irma Schwartz said before she died.

  Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and he was climbing an electrified fence. He'd had trouble before with electric­ity, but after the old man had shown him how to con­quer it, the matter of scaling a twelve-foot high screen of electrified mesh was no problem. The trick was to use the electricity.

  Most people fought against the current, just as they fought against gravity when trying to climb. The old man had shown Remo long ago that gravity was a force too strong for any man to fight, and that was why most people fell off the sides of buildings when they tried to climb them. But Remo never fell off a building because he used gravity to push him forward, then re­directed the momentum generated in his body by the gravity to push him upward.

  It was the same with electricity. As he neared the top of the fence around the compound, he kept the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet exactly parallel to the surface of the fence, inches away from the steel frame. He kept in contact with the electric current, because that was what kept him suspended in air, but never varied his distance from the fence.

  That contra! had taken him time to learn. At first,

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  during his practice sessions, he'd come too near the fence, and the electricity had jolted him, causing his muscles to tense. Then he was fighting electricity, and it was all over. No one fights electricity and wins. That was what the old man said.

  The old man's name was Chiun. He had been an old man when Remo first met him, and he had known him most of his adult life. When the electric current felt as if it were going to fry Remo alive, Chiun had told him to relax and accept it. If anyone else had told him to hang loose while a lethal charge of electricity coursed through his body, Remo would have had words with the person. But Chiun wasn't just anyone. He was Remo's trainer. He had come into Remo's life to create, from the expired form of a dead police officer, a fight­ing machine more perfect than anything the Western world had ever known. Remo had been that police­man, framed for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't quite work.

  Not quite. But bad enough. Years after the morning when he had come to in a room in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, the burns still fresh on his wrists, he remembered that electric chair. Long after he'd met the lemon-faced man who had personally selected Remo for the experiment and introduced him to th
e ancient Korean trainer named Chiun, he remem­bered. A lifetime later, after Chiun had developed Re­mo's body into something so different from that of the normal human male that even his nervous system had changed, the fear of electricity stiil lurked inside Remo.

  So when Chiun told him to relax, he was afraid. But he listened.

  Now he made his way up the fence, the fringe-ends of the electric current in contact with his skin. His

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  breathing was controlled and deep, his balance auto­matically adjusting with each small move. The current was the force that kept him aloft. Using it, never break­ing contact, he slid slowly up the fence, moving his arms in slow circles to generate the friction that pro­pelled him upward. At the top of the fence he broke suddenly, pulling his legs backward and over his head and somersaulting over the top.

  The compound he was in was an acre or more of snow-covered gravel and frozen mud set in the far reaches of Staten island. Rotting wooden crates, rusted cans, and soggy sheets of old newspapers lit­tered the ground. At the rear of the compound stood a large, dirty cinderblock warehouse, six stories tall with a loading dock at the right end. A truck was parked at the loading dock. As Remo neared, he saw three burly men packing crates into the truck.

  "Hi, guys," he said, thrusting his hand into a crate on the dock. He pulled out a five-pound bag of white powder encased in plastic. "Just as I thought," he said.

  "Huh?" One of the dock workers pulled out a Browning .9mm automatic. "Who are you, mister?"

  "I'm with the Heroin Control Board," Remo said through pursed lips. "I'm afraid this won't do. Sloppy packaging. No brand names. Not even a yellow plastic measuring spoon, like the coffee boys give out. No, this just isn't up to par. Sorry, boys." He yanked open the plastic bag and dumped its contents into the wind.

  "Hey, that stuff's worth half a million dollars," the man with the Browning said.

  "Do it right, or don't do it, that's our motto," Remo said.

  "Move out of the way, fellas," the man holding the gun said two seconds before he fired. He was one sec-

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  ond late. Because one second before he fired, Remo had coiled the barrel of the Browning into a corkscrew, and by the time the bullet left it, it was spinning toward the dock worker's chest, where it came to rest with a muffled whump.