King's Curse td-24

by Warren Murphy

  "How about material witness in a murder, fella? How about material witness, if not suspect, in the murder of a United States congressman investigating coverup operations? How does that thrill ya, fella?"

  "Because I tried to make a phone call, I'm a murder suspect?"

  "Because you tried to reach that phone number, fella. Now we know that number appeared on an FBI voucher no one seems to know about. We know that in the last three months of the investigation, only one person has called that number. You. We know there was a congressman looking into that computer network and intelligence money hidden in federal budgets. And we know that he's dead now with his heart ripped out of his body. It's not just any phone number anymore, fella."

  "It's a gazelle?" asked Remo innocently.

  "You know we can hold you as a material witness," said the second lawyer.

  "Feel free," said Remo, and he gave the cover name and address, which was proper procedure for arrest. When this name and address was forwarded to FBI files to check for any previous arrests-a routine police function-the FBI clerk would find a forwarding number listed on it, and within twenty minutes the computers at Folcroft Sanitarium would spin out orders to another government agency to get Remo released officially from wherever he was being held in the United States.

  The whole process, Smith had assured him, would take no more than two hours, possibly three if the jail were relatively inaccessible. The fingerprints, of course, would check with nothing in the vast FBI files. Not with a service record, a security clearance, or an arrest, because they had been permanently deposed of by the FBI itself more than a decade ago. They did not keep fingerprints of dead men.

  So when Remo was told he had his last chance to shed some light on the telephone number he had dialed from the luncheonette in Nag's Head or the horror killing of the congressman who had been investigating covert government operations, Remo said they could throw away the key if they liked.

  The cell was small with fresh gray painted iron bars set into the normal flat iron frame that locked by pushing a steel stud, click, into a receiver socket. It looked formidable if you did not understand it in the Sinanju way.

  Remo sat down on the hard cot suspended from the wall and remembered the last cell he had been in more than a decade before.

  He had been waiting for death then when a monk entered his cell to give him last rites and told him to swallow a pill at the end of the crucifix, right at the moment he was strapped into the electric chair. He did and passed out, and when he recovered there were burns on his arms and ankles, and the first people he'd found yet who believed he had not committed a murder were talking to him. They believed that because they had framed him, a neat plan by Harold W. Smith, director of CURE.

  "Never heard of it," Remo had said and the lemony-faced Smith allowed that if Remo had heard of it, the country as they knew it would be finished. CURE had been set up because regular government agencies could not deal effectively with growing chaos within the constitution. CURE provided the extralegal help the country needed to survive. It lacked only one thing-a killer arm. Remo was it, the man who didn't exist for the organization that didn't exist. As one who had just been electrocuted, he was a nonperson. Dead men had no fingerprints.

  At first Remo had thought he would just escape at the first opportunity. But one mission led to another, and then there was the training with Chiun, through which he really became someone else, and each day the person he had been before he was electrocuted died a little bit more. And he stayed on the job.

  Now, more than a decade later, Remo Williams waited in the southern jail cell for the computers at Folcroft Sanitarium, CURE'S nerve center, to spin off their untraceable orders for his release. Two hours, three at the most.

  So he waited. Two hours, three hours, four hours, as the water dripped into the sink and a lone fly made its erratic energized way up the cell block and down toward a fan that spun slowly enough to keep the air placid, hot, and steamy. Humidity droplets formed on the slick gray paint of the bars, and a drunk in the next cell with body odor pungent enough to rust aluminum began philosophizing about life.

  "Enough," said Remo and joined two fingers of his left hand on top of the square metal lock. He felt the warm wetness of the slick paint against the skin grooves of his fingers. Beginning ever so lightly, for the rhythm of the pressure was the key to this move, he lowered the skin of the paint downwards, crushing the thin layer of rust underneath. More pressure and the frame strained at its hinges. The fly lit on a bar and popped off as if stung by electricity. A bolt of the bar frame lost a thread with a crack, and then the lock snapped with a dull snap like a piece of lead falling on a stack of mimeograph paper. Remo pushed the door open and it squealed off its bottom hinge.

  "Sumbitch," yelled the drunk foggily. "They don't make 'em the way they used to. Can you open mine?"

  And with two fingers pressing just on the lock, Remo released the second cell door. The drunk rolled his feet off the cot to the floor, and seeing he would have to take at least three steps to get out of his cell, decided to escape later. He thanked the generous stranger and passed out.

  A guard poked his head into the corridor and, realizing what had happened, slammed the iron corridor door. He was bolting it when it slammed right back at him as if a jet plane were coming through it. Remo walked over him and down a long approach corridor until he found a door. It led to the police station. A detective looked up, startled.

  "I didn't like the accommodations," said Remo and was off, down another corridor before the detective could get his gun out. He slowed to a casual walk, asked an officer filling out a form where the exit was, and was out of the building by the time someone shouted: "Prisoner escaped."

  Nag's Head was not the sort of town in which one could get lost in a crowd, so Remo chose backyards and high palmettos, becoming one with the green and sandy landscape under the blood red sun of the late afternoon.

  At the motel, Chiun was gazing at the Atlantic churning custard tops of foam as it came into the long white sandy beach, spread out flat, then slipped back into itself again, to come back in another green and white wave.

  "We've got to run," said Remo.

  "From whom?" Chiun asked, astonished.

  "The local police. We've got to get back to Folcroft."

  "Run from police? Does not Emperor Smith rule the police?"

  "Not exactly. It's sort of complicated."

  "What is he emperor of then?"

  "The organization," Remo said.

  "And the organization has no influence with the police?"

  "Yes and no. Especially not now. I think he's in trouble."

  "He reminds me of a Caliph of Samarkand who was so afraid to show weakness he would not even confide in his assassin, who was, of course, at that time a Master of Sinanju. When fortune turned against this Caliph, the Master was unable to help him. So too with Emperor Smith. We have done what we could do and we can help him no longer."

  "He's in deep trouble."

  "Because he did not confide in you," Chiun said, "and therefore it is not our responsibility. You have done everything you could for this silly man and now you must take your talents where they are properly honored. I have always thought that Sinanju was a waste for this man."

  "As there are some things you cannot get me to understand, Little Father," Remo said, thoughtfully, "so too are there things that I cannot explain to you."

  "That's because you are stupid, Remo. I am not stupid."

  Remo looked at the large lacquered steamer trunks.

  "We won't have time for those. We'll have to get them later."

  "I am not leaving my meager possessions to go looking for an unworthy emperor who has not trusted the House of Sinanju."

  "I'm sorry," Remo said. "I'll have to go myself."

  "You would abandon a gentle aging man in the twilight of his golden years?"

  "What twilight? What golden? What gentle?" asked Remo. "You're the deadliest assassin on earth."


  "I provide honest service for honest proper tribute," said Chiun.

  "Goodbye," said Remo. "See you later."

  Chiun turned away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Undoubtedly there would be roadblocks and a statewide search for him, so Remo decided to use a passing tractor trailer until he was out of South Carolina.

  He rode in between new Chromacolor televisions and automatic defrost refrigerators in the back of the trailer, black as a cave. He could not hear the driver in the motor cabin up front, and the driver had not heard him enter. Once out of the state there was little chance he would even be stopped. To a saddeningly large degree the only way fugitives got caught nowadays was if they told someone who they were and where they were, or if they were collared committing a major felony, and their fingerprints were checked out properly with FBI files in Washington.

  Once in North Carolina, there would be no worry.

  Remo listened to the crates of appliances straining against their metal strappings. Something was wrong with the organization, terminally wrong, if it could not even get him out of a little jail cell.

  That first frantic phone call over an open line to his motel room, that really had been Smitty's voice, and that was something Smitty never would do unless all his other channels had fouled up.

  Maybe it was better anyway that the organization was coming apart. What had it done? Put a temporary crimp in a landslide that was taking the country with it anyhow? Maybe you couldn't change history. As Chiun had so often said: "Your greatest strength is knowing what you cannot do."

  When the truck stopped and Remo heard two drivers get out talking about food, he slipped from the trailer and saw he was in the outskirts of a large city.

  It was night and the offensive odor of greasy meat frying felt like it came from an aerosol can. He was near a large diner, and as he stopped a cab was just pulling out. The painted sign on the side of the taxi said, Raleigh, North Carolina.

  "Airport," said Remo, and within twenty minutes he was at the small Raleigh-Durham airport and within an hour on a Piedmont Airlines flight to New York City, where he rented a car at LaGuardia, and by three A.M. he was approaching the high stone walls of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.

  The one-way windows of Smith's office overlooking Long Island Sound seemed like dull yellow squares in the early morning blackness. The lights were on. No guard stopped him at the gate. The door to the main building was open. Remo skipped up a flight of darkened stairs and down a corridor to a large wooden door. Even in the darkness, he could see the staid gold lettering:

  "Dr. Harold W. Smith, Director."

  The door was unlocked. It led to a room of desks where Smith's secretaries worked during the day. Remo heard a familiar high-pitched voice come from Smith's inner office. It vowed eternal support in these times of trouble. It lauded Emperor Smith for his wisdom, courage, and generosity. It promised a bloodbath for his enemies.

  It was Chiun.

  "How'd you get here so fast?" asked Remo in Korean. Chiun's long fingernails stopped in the midst of an eloquent gesture. Smith sat behind the large, well-polished desk, his dry face precisely shaved. He wore a dark suit with vest and a fresh tie and a spotless white shirt.

  Three a.m. The man was facing an obvious disaster and he looked as if he had only paused for a coffee break in a Wall Street office. He must have been the only baby ever to toilet train himself in the first week of life. Remo never remembered seeing Smith without a crease in his pants.

  "It is of no importance how I got here. I must extricate you from this idiot emperor and his disaster," Chiun answered in Korean.

  "What about your trunks?"

  "I have more invested in you. Ten arduous years without so much as a mite of repayment for the great gifts of knowledge I have bestowed upon you. I will not let you just run off with my investment."

  "If I may interrupt," said Smith, "I think we have important business. I don't understand Korean."

  "Neither does Remo, really," said Chiun in English. "But it is our thing to know things to serve you better."

  "Thank you," said Smith. "Remo, I have what may be shocking news to you. We're not only just in trouble but I've had to-"

  "Shut down most of the systems," Remo interrupted.

  "Let him finish," scolded Chiun.

  "Shut down most of the systems," said Smith.

  "You see," said Chiun to Remo. "Now you know."

  "We're virtually inoperative," Smith continued. "We could have survived those ignorant investigations of the CIA and FBI where we have linked systems that they don't know about. But after that gruesome insanity with the congressman, they started looking all over and they stumbled onto a few of our systems. I phoned you direct, hoping you wouldn't rely on one of our special phone numbers."

  "I did."

  "Lucky you didn't get picked up."

  "I did," said Remo.

  "Kill anyone?"

  "Of course," said Chiun.

  "No," said Remo.

  "Good," said Smith.

  "Of course not," said Chiun. "Peaceful as a monk. Awaiting only your word to slay your enemies."

  "I'm, afraid that just eliminating someone won't do here," Smith said. "It won't relieve the pressure on us. You've got to find out who or what did that killing of the congressman and then make it clear to the world. Have it or them confess or be convicted. That should take the pressure off this investigation."

  "Are there any leads?"

  "None," said Smith. "The congressman's heart was ripped out. And they didn't even find it."

  "By hand?" asked Remo.

  "Not exactly, as far as we could tell. It appeared like some very crude knife."

  "No trace of the heart?"

  "None."

  "Sounds like some lover's quarrel," Remo said.

  "Man didn't have a love life. He was married," Smith said, thinking of his own thirty-year marriage. "A normal happy marriage that just grinds on and on."

  "Like the incessant dropping of water," said Chiun.

  "Yes. Something like that," Smith said.

  "I had one of those once," Chiun said, "but one day she slipped on a rock near the windy bay and drowned. So you see, patience makes all things turn out well."

  "In any case," Smith said, "this congressman was clean. He didn't have any but political enemies. He was safely guarded, they thought. The man assigned to him by the Justice Department when this investigation started was outside his office door all night. He got suspicious at about five a.m., and when he checked, he found the congressman slumped over his desk. His shirt had been unbuttoned and the heart was out. Arteries and valves severed. Incredible amount of blood."

  "Amateurs," said Chiun disdainfully. "The first sign is sloppiness."

  "So you have to be careful," Smith said. "The FBI and the CIA are just as anxious as we are to get the right man. The only problem is that they think it may be us, some secret organization that they don't know anything about. If they suspect you're with our organization, they might just scoop you up."

  "I'll be careful," Remo said.

  "I'm going to start closing this place down for a while," Smith said. "The computers have been washed clean already, and most of the staff has been cut loose. In a few days there won't be a trace. Everything else is up to you."

  "Okay," said Remo.

  "More than okay," said Chiun. "We shall find this menace and destroy it."

  "Not destroy," said Smith, clearing his throat. "Identify and have him publicly convicted. This is not an assassination."

  "But of course," said Chiun. "Your wisdom is beyond that of a simple assassin. You are truly an emperor, most formidable."

  Outside in the cooler night with the salt wind coming in off the Long Island Sound, Chiun said in Korean to Remo:

  "I have always said that Smith is a lunatic, and tonight he has proved it."

  And this reminded him of a czar who, when he went insane, asked the court assassin to clean t
he stables. "That one wanted a stable cleaner, and this one wants I do not know what."

  "He wants someone convicted," Remo said.

  "Oh. A representative of justice, a speaker in the courts of law. A lawyer. I would rather clean stables."

  "Not exactly," said Remo. "We've got to find out who and then get the evidence to some prosecutor."

  "Oh, like soldiers, policemen, and detectives do?" asked Chiun.

  "Sort of."

  "I see," said Chiun. "We are looking for some one or something, but we are not exactly sure what or who, and we are not exactly sure what we are supposed to do to this someone or something, but we do know that if we don't succeed in what we do not know, Emperor Smith will suffer."

  "I know what I'm doing," Remo said. "Don't worry."

  "Worry?" said the latest Master of Sinanju. "One would have to stop laughing to worry. You whites are so funny."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mrs. Ramona Harvey Delpheen was examining a chart of bicentennial celebrations when a long yellow feather fell over a blue outlined box called "Columbus Circle Monument Parade." She looked up.

  Mrs. Delpheen was a portly woman whose flesh had been pampered by expensive oils and skilled fingers so that when she smiled it looked as if delicate creases had jumped from hiding. She smiled intensely because she was surprised by these men and also they looked rather funny.

  "What are you fellows doing in all those feathers?" she said, laughing. She thought she recognized one, a rather untalented lad who somehow had gotten control of a publishing company.

  Met him at a party or somewhere. The other men were strangers, and she was not quite sure why the butler had let them through the main door of her Fifth Avenue residence without announcing them first. There was so much trouble nowadays on the New York City streets outside that one should never allow strangers access to the house proper. She was sure that she had made this very clear to the butler.

  "We already have a group of Indians for the Columbus Circle affair," said Mrs. Delpheen. "Besides, it's an Italian-American day," she added.

  The men said nothing. The long robes of yellow feathers hung down to their knees and were open in front, revealing bare chests and white loin cloths.