The Head Men td-31

by Warren Murphy

"We talk about seeing," said Chiun. "Now what is moving differently ground here?"

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  Viola looked around. People were screaming. One had passed out in front of a small hydrant. A large crowd was forming. A car nearby slowly pulled out into the street, quite evenly and quite smoothly.

  "I know this sounds crazy but that car is different."

  "Exactly," said Chiun. "It does not respond to the hysteria around. You might point out in your book that an amateur assassin does not notice these things. Cheap help never notices these things. I know you are a craftsman and should not be told how to do your work but in your book you might want to describe this as 'The Master of Sinanju cast his glorious gaze upon the sea of milling whites, scurrying helpless in their confusion. "Lo," he cried. "Fear not for Sinanju is among you."' You can use your own words, of course," Chiun said helpfully.

  Viola saw Remo take off after the car she had noticed. He didn't run like other men she had seen. Others pumped their legs. They strained and jammed. This was more of a float.

  She did not see his lean figure start. Eather she knew he was running after he had begun to move. At first she thought he was going very quickly for someone who was running so slowly and then she realized that he wasn't running slowly at all. There was just such an economy of motion, it appeared slow.

  Remo met the car like someone becoming glued to the side of it and then pop, bang, and out came a door and one man went crashing into a fire hydrant. The hydrant didn't move. The man moved a little. He let the blood flow out of the big hole in his chest that had met the hydrant. It had ap-

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  peared as if he were shot out of the car by hydraulic compression.

  "Wow," said Viola.

  The car stopped. A thick-wristed hand beckoned to Viola and Chiun.

  "Wow what?" asked Chiun. "Why are you excited?"

  "It looked like he was shot out of that Buick Electra."

  "What is a Buick Electric?"

  "Electra. That car your friend just threw that guy out of."

  "Oh," said Chiun. "Come. Let us go. He beckons."

  "How did he do that?" asked Viola.

  "He put out his hand and waved for us to come. It is a signal we use. Anyone can do it. Just wave your hand," said Chiun.

  "No. Throw that guy out of the car so hard. How did he do that?"

  "He threw," said Chiun, trying to pinpoint her wonder. When one properly did what one was taught and it was correct for the situation, one could hit almost any object with a person. Perhaps she was amazed that Remo had hit the American street water device so accurately. "If the car is moving, you have to lead the target so that you will hit it and not miss," Chiun said.

  "No. The force of it. How'd he do that?"

  "By listening to the wisdom of the House of Sinanju," said Chiun, who was still not altogether sure what Miss Poombs meant. Often people who lacked control of their bodies and their breathing were amazed by the simplest thing the human body could do when it did things properly.

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  Chiun guided Viola into the rear seat. A man with his hand on a .45 caliber revolver sat in the far corner of the rear seat. The gun lay on his lap. He had a small smile on his face. Very small. It was the sort of smile one gives when one realizes he has done something very stupid. In the case of the man with the .45 on his lap, the stupid thing was trying to fire the gun at the man with thick wrists who had invaded the car.

  His life had ended mid-attempt. There was a small concavity above his left ear, just enough to compress the temporal lobe back into the hy-pothalamus and optic chiasma. Those were parts of the brain. The message the brain got when the temple stopped caving in was "All over. Stop work, fellas." It had been a very fast message. The heart had given two reflexive pumps, but ' since the vital organ of the brain had stopped, it stopped too.

  The kidneys and liver, not getting blood from the heart to make them function, were preparing to shut down also. This general strike of the body was known as death.

  "It's all right, Miss Poombs," said Chiun. "He won't bother you."

  "He's dead," said Viola.

  Remo, sitting with his arms over the front seat, next to a driver who was exercising an overwhelming call to be incredibly cooperative with the man who had emptied the car of all other living things, took offense at Miss Poombs' tone.

  "He's not dead. He will live in the hearts of those who make stupid moves forever."

  "What did he do that you killed him?" asked Miss Poombs. That man with the gun was dead.

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  Totally dead. Forever, unchangeably dead, and what did he do, other than be in a car that drove away from a killing scene at a controlled, smooth pace?

  "Do?" asked Remo. "He did what will get you killed almost always, sweetie. He didn't think. His second biggest crime was not moving quickly enough with that gun. Stupid and slow are the two crimes in this world that are always punished."

  Chiun pressed a reassuring hand on Viola Poombs' trembling arm.

  "Miss Poombs, that man died because he offended our honor," said Chiun. He watched her face. It still looked as if someone had jammed two electrodes into her ears. She was terrified. She inched away from the body in the corner and her neck was very stiff as though if she did not keep it that way, she might look to her left where that was. Where it was. That thing. And Viola didn't want to look to her right either, because that was where the Oriental was who thought there was nothing wrong with any of this.

  "Miss Poombs, he offended your honor violently. He has been killed in honor of the great artist who will write the story of Sinanju."

  ''I want to get out of here," cried Viola. "I want to go back to Poopsie. To hell with money for books on assassins."

  "We killed him because he had bad thoughts in his head about the way the world should be run," said Chiun, trying something he thought would appeal to the white mind.

  "Viola," said Remo coldly, "shut up. He's dead because he tried to kill me. This car was the connection to that man who killed the woman and

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  child. Those deaths were ordered from this car. So were our deaths. They made a mistake. They weren't successful. They died because they failed to kill us. That's why they're dead."

  "I like politics better. Nobody ever got hurt by taking off their clothes for an American congressman."

  "Viola," said Remo, "you're in this thing. When it's over, you can leave."

  Chiun tried to calm Miss Poombs but when the body fell forward, she buried her head in her hands and sobbed.

  Remo talked to the driver. There were a few friendly questions. They were answered with great sincerity. And with no information. The driver had been hired that afternoon from Megargel's Rent-A-Car. And he was scared. Shitless. As he proved.

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  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The first three times the President had sat in the White House, with television cameras peering in, to take telephone calls from the American public, the ratings had been pretty good. But the fourth and fifth times had been disasters. They had been outdrawn in New York by a rerun of The Monte-fuseos and in Las Vegas by the 914th showing of-Howard Hughes' favorite movie.

  A network executive explained it to a presidential aide. "Face up to it. In viewer interest, this phone bit ranks somewhere between watching grass grow and watching paint dry. Say about equal to watching water evaporate. So we're not going to televise any more of these things. Sorry you feel that way, old buddy. So's yours."

  The presidential aide explained this to the President. "Jus" don't seem like no point in goin' on with it," he said.

  "We'll do it," the President had said, without looking up from the foot-high stack of papers on his desk. Bureaucrats always seemed to complain about the massive amounts of paperwork connected with their jobs. But paperwork was information, and information sustained the presidency.

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  The country could survive a wrong, even a stupid, decision; it was harder to survive an ignorant,
uninformed decision, because the latter all too often became administration policy. This was the first President who loved paperwork, because he was the first since Thomas Jefferson to understand the scientific method and the need for data,

  "But sir?"

  The President carefully put his yellow Number Two Excellent Pencil into a silver cup on his desk and looked at his aide.

  "First, I take these phone calls to stay in touch with America, not for TV coverage. If I want the television people to get interested in me, all I've got to do is put on a tutu and practice ballet dancing on the west lawn. Just tape the program and maybe someday we'll find some use for it." He looked at the aide with a blank expression that did not contain a question, a request for confirmation, but only a demand for silence.

  The aide nodded and smiled. "Good politics, sir."

  The President picked up his pencil again and began to jot numbers into the margin of a report on overseas food distribution. "Good government," he said.

  The aide looked crestfallen and chagrined as he walked to the door. He heard the President's voice and turned.

  "And good politics," the President added with a large warm smile. After the aide left, the President allowed himself a sigh. The toughest part of any leader's job was always the personal relationships. Even men who had been with him for years still took disagreement for disapproval, still felt that if the President did not do what

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  they thought he should do, it somehow made' them less worthy.

  He thought that if he didn't have to spend so much time and energy stroking his staff, stroking the Congress, even stroking his own family, why . . . why he could read even more papers. He smiled grimly and went back to his work.

  So it was that four nights later, he sat at a desk in another part of the building, punching buttons in the base of a telephone and talking to Americans who had called the White House to talk to their leader and had survived the screening of three separate White House staffers.

  "A Mister Mandell, sir. One Two. With a question on energy."

  The President punched the second button on the base of the telephone.

  "Hello, Mister Mandell. This is the President. You wanted to talk about energy?"

  "Yes. You're going to run out of it."

  "Well, yes, sir, we all face that danger unless we reduce our ..."

  "No, Mr. President. Not we, you. You're going to run out of energy. On Saturday."

  The death threat, if that's what it was, made him think. There was something in the voice that said this was no crank. The voice lacked zealous intensity, the high pitch that hate callers always had. This voice was matter of fact, laconic. It sounded like a control tower operator or a police radio car dispatcher.

  The President made a note. "Fortyish. Touch of twang. Maybe Virginia."

  "What do you mean, sir?"

  "Remember Sun Valley, Utah? Your turn comes Saturday. You're going to die and I'm go

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  ing to tell you where. On the steps of the Capitol. I warned you this would happen if you didn't pay."

  The President waved his hand to one of his staffers to get off their own calls and pick this one up. He hoped they had enough cross-checking procedures on calls to trace where this call had come from.

  "What do you mean, sir, by Sun Valley?" the President said.

  "You know very well what I mean. That man thought he was protected too, and we killed him just to show he wasn't. We thought the lesson wouldn't be lost on you. But instead you brought in extra personnel. They can't help you, though. You're going to die."

  "Suppose we offer to pay what you want?" the President asked. He caught the eye of his aide who was already talking into another telephone, putting the federal crime fighting apparatus in motion to go wherever that phone call was being made from and to collect the telephone caller.

  "It's too late for that now, Mr. President," the phone caller said. "You're going to die. And I won't be at this location long enough for your people to get to me, so don't waste your time or mine. You might however leave a note for your successor. Tell him we do not like being ignored and when we call him-next Sunday after he's President-he had better not turn us down. Goodbye, Mr. President. Until Saturday."

  The telephone clicked dead in the President's ear.

  He replaced the telephone on the receiver and stood up behind his desk. He wore a light blue

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  cardigan sweater with the sleeves pushed up past his ample farmer's wrists.

  "I don't feel like taking any more of these calls," he said. The men near him moved forward. His closest aide was still leaning over his own telephone, his back to the President, talking.

  The aide put the telephone down angrily and turned back to the President. He shook his head 'no.'

  "Keep on it," the President said.

  Before leaving the room, he whispered into the aide's ear. "Nothing to the press. Nothing at all. Not until I get a chance to think this through."

  "Yes sir. Are you feelin' all right?"

  "I'm fine. I'm fine. I've got to go upstairs now. I've got my own phone call to make."

  Sylvester Montrofort hunched forward in the wheelchair behind his desk, ostensibly listening to Remo, but his eyes locked, as if by radar, on a point midway between the two foremost promontories of the Viola Poombs' anatomy.

  He had started the meeting with the three strangers by sitting dead level with their eyes. But the overhang of the desk restricted his view of Viola's bosom and belly and legs and surreptitiously, inch by inch, he had raised his chair, until now he towered a foot over the rest of them, staring down at Viola.

  She was busy taking notes. Like most people to whom writing is not a natural function, she accomplished it in bursts of enthusiasm, by fits and starts, and each start set off tiny movements in her chest, and gave Montrofort fits.

  "This Pruel was one of yours," Remo said. "So what happened to him?"

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  "I don't know," said Montrofort, without changing the direction of his glance. "He had just come back from a mission in Africa. He was distraught, don't you know. Like a woodchuck who goes back to his hole and finds it filled with snakes. He wanted to resign. He said he had enough years of killing and worrying about killing."

  "What did he have to do with killing?"

  "Slow down," Viola said to Remo. She lifted her head to look toward him. "You're going too fast." Her breasts rose. Montrofort agreed. "Yes. Slow down. I've got plenty of time."

  Remo shrugged. "What. Did. He. Have. To. Do. With. Killing? Got that?"

  "Almost," said Viola.

  "He was in the business of security. We provide security for people," Montrofort said. "Heads of state, wealthy men, men that somebody is always out there, planning to pick off like a year-old scab."

  "Now you're going too fast," Viola said.

  "Sorry, my dear." He paused to let her catch up, and waited till her eyes lifted and met his with a slight nod. "Also, Pruel had been in the Secret Service for many years dealing with presidential security. All our people have. That puts a lot of pressures on them. I guess the pressure finally got to him. You know how it is."

  "He knows how it is," said Chiun. "He reacts very badly to pressure himself."

  Remo looked disgusted. "And these two men in the car? They worked for you, too."

  "Actually, they were on my payroll but they worked for Pruel. They were part of his personal staff. This here has got me as confused as a fly in

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  a cup of soup. I don't know why Pruel might have been trying to kill you. What reason? I don't know. And these other two, they must have been trying to help him. Don't ask me why. Maybe they just didn't like your looks. Maybe you frightened them, old buddy."

  "Highly unlikely," said Chiun. "Look at him. Who could be frightened of that?"

  "Hush," said Remo.

  "Slower," said Viola. "I only got up to 'unlikely.' "

  "I have it all in here," Montrofort s
aid. He opened his desk drawer and brought out a small tape recorder. "When we're all done, why don't you stay and you can transcribe from the tape."

  "Couldn't you just give me the tape?" she said.

  "I'm sorry, dear. I can't do that. Company policy. But I'd be glad to help you copy it down if you wished."

  "Well, maybe..."

  "Sure," said Remo. "That's going to be good for you. And Chiun and I have other things to do."

  "If you think it's all right," Viola said.

  "Nothing could be righter," Remo said.

  At the doorway, Remo stopped and turned to Montrofort who had returned his wheelchair to floor level and was moving around the side of the desk toward Viola.

  "One thing, Mr. Montrofort. Did you know Ernest Walgreen ?"

  "One of our clients. Another ex-Secret Service man. We lost him. First client we ever lost." While he spoke he was staring at Viola's breasts and moving inexorably nearer and nearer to them. Suddenly he looked up at Remo. "Walgreen

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  was Pruel's case, too. Do you think all of this is tied up somehow?"

  "Never can tell," Remo said.

  Outside the forty-story glass-sided office building, Chiun said, "He lusts, that one."

  "I feel kind of sorry for him," Remo said.

  "You would."

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  CHAPTER NINE

  "The President has been warned that he will be killed on Saturday." Smith's voice had sounded as if he were the telephone company's tape-recorded weather report, minus the fire and passion that precipitation probabilities carried with them.

  "Where?" asked Remo.

  "Outside the Capitol. He is supposed to address some rally of the young Students United against Oppression Overseas."

  "Simple," said Remo. "Tell him to stay home."

  "I already have. He refuses. He insists upon going to that rally."

  "Screw him then," Remo said. "He's not as-smart as I thought he was."

  "I'd rather try to protect him," Smith said. "You don't have anything?"

  "Don't have anything? I've got everything. I've got too much and none of it goes anywhere."

  "Try it on me," Smith said. "Maybe the two of us might see something you overlooked by yourself."