Assassins Play Off td-20

by Warren Murphy

  Bill Ashley smiled when he shook hands, for how would Smith know if he were a good man or an atrocious misfit? Peculiar fellow, that Smith, with his fear of the sun. The only other one-way windows Ashley knew of were at the Langley headquarters of the CIA and Washington headquarters of NSA.

  With the Smith formality taken care of, Ashley put in the proper forms to his real boss in Washington. The answer was yes.

  As was custom, he was taken off sensitive matters right away and just did garbage work waiting for his vacation. On the day before departure he transferred his savings account into his checking account. He would have liked to have given Mr. Winch the cash directly, but if his real boss got word—and they had people who would give them the word—that Ashley had withdrawn $8,000 from his savings in cash just before his vacation out of the country, there would be more government people around him than ants on a piece of sugar. He was sure Mr. Winch would take a check. He would have to. That's all Ashley had.

  "Brandy snifter," said Mr. Winch when Ashley was shown into the coldest heated room this side of outdoors—the lord's chambers of Kildonan, it was called—"you must first wait until your check clears. A check is a promise of money. It is not money."

  When the check did clear, Ashley quickly wished it hadn't, so badly did his back and arms hurt from waiting in the position of respect on the cold wooden floor. And for $20,000 he wasn't even getting a private lesson. There were three others in the class.

  They were a bit younger than Ashley and a bit more athletic and much more advanced. Mr. Winch made Ashley watch. Their strokes seemed familiar, yet much simpler. The circling motions were much tighter than Ashley had seen anywhere else, not so much a fixed circle but the forcing of a turn around an opponent.

  "You see, Mr. Ashley, you were trained to practice you circling motions around an imaginary point," Winch explained. "Your method was learned from someone a long time ago who watched this method in practice, probably against someone who didn't move. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That is because it is derivative. All the derivative arts have their flaws because they copy the externals without understanding the essence. And there are other reasons. Witness the kung fu masters who attempted to fight Thai boxers. Not one survived the first round. Why?"

  Just to relieve the building pressure on his back from the fixed position, Ashley raised a hand. Mr. Winch nodded.

  "Because they had not been trained to fight but to pretend to fight," said Ashley.

  "Very good," said Mr. Winch. "But more importantly, the boxers were hard men winnowed from the soft. The boxers had used their skills for their living. The boxers were at work; the kung fu at play. Up, Ashley, on your feet. Assume a position."

  "Which position, Mr. Winch?"

  "Any position, brandy snifter. Stand or crouch or hide. You'd be better off with a gun, probably, and perhaps two hundred yards distance. That is, if you had a gun, which I wouldn't give you."

  "What am I supposed to be learning?"

  "That a fool and his life are soon parted." Mr. Winch clapped his hands and a large, blond, crewcut man, with a hard face and ice blue eyes and hands with knuckles meshed together, danced forward and came into Bill Ashley hard. He also came fast. Ashley didn't see the blow, and he knew he had been hit only when he tried to move his left arm. It wouldn't.

  The next man, a big bear of muscle and hair, giggled as he took out Ashley's right arm. It felt as if his shoulders had two hot knives attached to them, and suddenly Bill Ashley realized he needed his arms for balance. It was very hard to stand, and then it was even harder when the left leg went and he was down on the floor writhing and moaning his agony, after the third trainee had delivered the leg blow.

  And then the right leg went when Mr. Winch immobilized it with a disdainful kick.

  Ashley screamed when they took off his white gi. The bones must be broken, he thought. This was wrong. You didn't break someone's bones in training. That was wrong training. He saw a rice paper banner flutter from the ceiling, and he knew by the cold at his back that someone was opening a window. It was not his imagination. It was getting colder. He knew his clothing was off, but he could not look. His head had to stay exactly where it was or his joints felt incredible pain, as if someone were shredding his ligaments with a rasp.

  He saw the banner on the ceiling float down, a lopsided upside-down trapezoid with a vertical line through it. A simple symbol he had never seen before.

  "Why? Why? Why?" moaned bill Ashley, softly, for loud talk made his arms move slightly.

  "Because you work at Folcroft, brandy snifter," he heard Mr. Winch say. It was too painful to turn his head to look at Winch.

  "Then it wasn't for my money."

  "Of course it was for your money."

  "But Folcroft?"

  "It was because of Folcroft, too. But money is always nice, brandy snifter. You have been poorly taught. From your very hello to the world, you have been coming to this day because you were poorly taught. Goodbye, brandy snifter, you were never made for the martial arts."

  There was one blessing to the chill that overcame his bare body on the new wooden floor in the lord's chambers of Kildonan Castle. It was going to make everything better. Already, his pain was numbing and soon it would all be gone. The temperature fell further at night and Ashley slipped into a deep darkness, only to be disappointed by weak light in the morning. But when the room was most light, about the time of the high sun, Ashley slipped again into the deep darkness, and this time he did not come out.

  He was found six days later by a detective from Scotland Yard acting on a tip from a telephone caller who would later be described as having a "vaguely Oriental" voice.

  The yard also got Ashley's New York State, U.S.A., driver's license in the mail without a note.

  Since it was addressed to the detective who got the tip, he assumed the body belonged to William Ashley, 38, 855 Pleasant Lane, Rye, N.Y., five-feet-ten, 170 pounds, brown eyes, brown hair, mole on left hand, no corrective lenses.

  It not only checked out, it became known as the "Kildonan Castle Murder," and the detective appeared on the telly describing the gruesomeness of the death and how the yard was looking for a madman.

  Ashley had died of exposure, not of the broken limbs, each shattered at the joint, he said. No, there were no clues. But the murder scene was horrid. Frightfully horrid. Yes, he could be quoted on that. Frightfully horrid. Never seen anything like it before.

  It was when he had finished his second daily press briefing that the man from British Intelligence had all those questions.

  "Did this Ashley fellow take long to die?"

  "Yessir. He died of exposure."

  "Were any papers found on him?"

  "No sir. The bloke was stark raving nude. Exposure will kill faster than thirst or hunger."

  "Yes, we're well aware of that. Was there any indication that he was tortured for information?"

  "Well, sir, leaving a person with four crushed limbs naked on a bare, cold floor in a drafty highland castle is not exactly a comfort-inducing experience, wouldn't you say, sir?"

  "You don't know, is that right?"

  "Correct, sir. Was this chap important in some way?"

  "Really, now, that's not something you'd expect me to answer, is it?"

  "No, sir."

  "Did you find out who had title to the castle?"

  "British government, sir. Castle was abandoned for taxes years ago. Owner couldn't keep it up, so to speak."

  "Which means what?"

  "Unoccupied, sir."

  "I see. Are you telling me ghosts did it?"

  "No sir."

  "Very good. We'll get back to you. And forget you spoke to me, would you please?"

  "Forgotten already, sir."

  The report by British intelligence to the American Embassy in London was brief. Ashley had come to England as a tourist, had proceeded directly to Scotland, spent one evening at a small inn and was then discovered more than a week later in a
condition of semidismemberment.

  It was a closed coffin funeral in Rye, New York. Which was an excellent idea since the body was not that of William Ashley but a derelict from the New York city morgue. The Ashley body was in a medical school just outside Chicago where a doctor who thought he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency was examining the limbs. The blows, more than likely, had been made by some sort of sledgehammer. The joints were too shattered for the human hand to have inflicted the damage. Ashley had indeed died of exposure, contracting pneumonia with the lungs filling and causing death somewhat akin to drowning.

  In Rye, New York, an agent who believed he was working undercover for the FBI, posing as an agent of a federal reserve board, saw to it that the $8,000 missing from the Ashley savings account was redeposited with no record that it had ever been withdrawn.

  And the only person who knew exactly what all these men were doing and why sat behind a desk in Folcroft Santarium, looking out his one-way windows at Long Island Sound, hoping Ashley had indeed been a victim of robbery.

  He had ordered the $8,000 put back into the account because the last thing this incident needed was more international publicity with Ashley's wife crying about missing money. The National Security Agency had been a bit lax in not having reported the transfer of Ashley's funds from savings to checking, but by and large it was the most thorough and accurate of all the country's services.

  Dr. Harold Smith, the man whom Ashley thought was his cover, was the only man who knew what Ashley did for a living. Including Ashley.

  He reviewed the man's program files. Ashley had been in charge of storing information on East Coast shipping. He had thought he was heading an information sorting, which tried to detect foreign penetration of national shipping, always a key spot for espionage. But Ashley's real function, which he could never see because he only performed half of it, was tabulating real shipping incomes versus ladings.

  It was part of an overall formula Dr. Smith had worked out years before that showed, when ladings began to exceed income, that organized crime was gaining too much control over the waterfronts.

  Smith had found out years before that he could not end crime's influence on the waterfront, which included everything from loansharking to the unions. But what he could do was to keep crime from controlling shipping. When the formula showed that that was becoming a danger, a district attorney would suddenly get proof of kickbacks at the ports or the Internal Revenue Service would get xeroxed copies of bills of sales for a shipping executive who bought $200,000 homes on a $22,000 a year salary.

  Ashley never knew this. He just worked on feeding the computer core. His terminal couldn't even get a readout without registering it up in Dr. Smith's office. Smith checked the records. The last time Ashley had requested a readout of the computer was six months before, and that was merely to check the accuracy of some data he had fed in the day before.

  Going over it for the last time, Smith had to conclude that if William Ashley had been tortured to the last secret hiding place of his mind, he could not tell his captors what he did for a living. He simply could not know.

  No one in the organization knew what it was that he did for a living—no one, but two.

  It had all been carefully arranged like that years before. It was the essence of the organization, formed more than a decade before by a now dead president who had called Smith to his office and told him the United States government did not work.

  "Under the Constitution, we cannot control organized crime. We cannot control revolutionaries. There are so many things we cannot control if we live by the Constitution. Yet, if we do not extend some measure of control, they will destroy this country. They will lead it to chaos," said the sandy-haired young man with the Boston accent. "And chaos leads to a dictatorship. As surely as water falls over a dam, a lack of order leads to too much order. We're doomed unless…"

  And the "unless" that Smith heard was an organization set up outside the Constitution, outside the government, an organization that did not exist, set up to try to keep the government alive.

  The organization would last for a short while, no more than two years, and then disappear, never seeing public light. And Smith would head it. Smith had a question. Why him? Because, the President had explained, in his years of service, Smith, more than any other manager in the Central Intelligence Agency, had showed a lack of prideful ambition.

  "All the psychological tests show you would never use this organization to take over the country. Frankly, Dr. Smith, you have what can be uncharitably described as an incredible lack of imagination."

  "Yes," Smith had said. "I know. It's always been like that. My wife complains sometimes."

  "It's your strength," said the President. "Something amazed me though, and I'm going to ask you about it now because we will never see each other again, and you will of course forget this meeting…"

  "Of course," Smith interrupted.

  "What puzzles me, Dr. Smith, is how on earth you could flunk a Rorschach test. It's in your aptitude records."

  "Oh, that," Smith said. "I remember. I saw ink blots."

  "Right. And in a Rorschach test, you're supposed to describe what the blots look like."

  "I did, Mr. President. They looked like ink blots."

  And that was how it had started. The organization was supposed to be an information-gathering and -dispensing operation, providing prosecutors with information, letting newspapers get stories to embarrass corrupt officials. But early on it became apparent that information was not enough. The organization that did not exist needed a killer arm. It needed a killer arm the size of a small army, but small armies had many mouths and you didn't very well convince a hit man he worked for the Department of Agriculture. They needed an extraordinary single killer who didn't exist—for an organization that didn't exist.

  It was really rather simple at first.

  The organization had found the man it wanted working in a small police department in New Jersey, and it had framed him for a murder he didn't commit, and it had electrocuted him in an electric chair that didn't work, and when he came to he was officially a dead man. Such was his nature, which had been scrupulously checked out before, that he took well to working for the organization and learned well from his Oriental trainer, becoming—but for a few small character flaws—the perfect human weapon.

  Smith thought about this as he watched a storm brew darkly over the Long Island Sound. He fingered Ashley's file. Something did not fit. The method of killing was so insane, it just might have a special purpose and meaning.

  Everything else about the case had seemed orderly, even to the withdrawal of the money. The killing came after the check had been cashed through a Swiss bank account in the name of a Mr. Winch. Smith examined again the report from British intelligence. Ashley had been killed on a freshly finished wooden floor. So heavy machinery had not been used to crush his limbs because its marks would have showed on the floor. Perhaps light machinery? Perhaps the killer was a sadist?

  For a man who not only did not believe in hunches, but could not quite remember ever having one, Dr. Harold W. Smith felt a strange sensation when thinking about the Ashley death. There had been a purpose to the way he was killed. Smith didn't know why he thought that, but nevertheless he kept thinking it.

  Through his evening meal of codfish cake and lukewarm succotash, he thought about it. Through his perfunctory goodnight kiss to his wife, he thought about it. In the morning he thought about it even while processing other matters.

  And since it was beginning to interfere with his other duties, which could lead to disruption in the entire organization, it therefore demanded an answer.

  And it had to be quickly because, of the two men who might be able to answer the riddle of Ashley's death, one was on an assignment and the other was preparing to return home to a small village in North Korea.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and the fresh snow fell on his open hand and he felt the flakes
pile up. At the edge of the tall pine tree, across the three hundred yards to the yellow light coming from the cabin, was fresh, white, even snow, not even drifting in the windless late autumn evening in Burdette, Minnesota.

  Remo had walked to the edge of the clearing, circling the cabin until he was sure. Now he knew. The perfect clearing in the Minnesota woods was an open field of fire. The assistant attorney general had made sure of that. If he didn't see anyone coming, then his dog would smell them, and from that cabin, anyone coming across that open blanket of white, by ski, by snowshoe, foot by foot, anyone would be almost a stationary target in the yellow light cutting the November night.

  For some reason, Remo thought back to a night more than a decade before when he was strapped into an electric chair, when he thought he had died, and then had awakened to a new life as a man whose fingerprints had gone into the dead file, a man who did not exist for an organization that did not exist.

  But Remo knew something that his boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, did not know. He had died in that electric chair. The person who had been Remo Williams died, because the years of training had been so intense that even Remo's nervous system had changed and he had changed, so that now he was someone else.

  Remo noticed the snow melt in his hand and he smiled. When you lost concentration, you lost it all. If he let the whole thing go, he would next feel chill in his body and then, out here in the freezing Minnesota snow, he would surrender his body to the elements and die. Cold was not a fixed point on a thermometer but the relationship between the body and its environment.

  An old children's trick was putting one hand under hot running water and the other hand under cold water, and then plunging both hands into a bowl of lukewarm water. To the hand which had been hot, the lukewarm water felt cold. To the hand that had been cold, the lukewarm water felt hot. So too with temperature's effects on the body. Up to a certain point, it was not the temperature of the body, but the difference between the outside temperature and the body's temperature. And if the body temperature could be lowered, then a man could stand subfreezing weather in a light white sweater and white gym pants and white leather sneakers, and a man could hold a snow-flake in his hand and watch it not melt.