Assassins Play Off td-20

by Warren Murphy

  His fingers brought her to life. Her eyes opened wider and she began moving on him faster, wilder, and it was better, better than the pain in his arms, and he wasn't thinking of the pain anymore. The pain had come from two people who had tried to disable him before killing him, and the next blow would be someone coming after one of his legs, but he couldn't, he wouldn't think about that now.

  Lynette was sitting up straight, and she threw her head back and laughed, a loud rolling laugh, and then she looked down at him, and for the first time Remo focused on her eyes and saw the meaning in them, and she let her body fall forward, her head toward his face, but she caught herself with her two hands, slamming them against his shoulders, like an athlete doing pushups.

  The pain shot through his body and Remo screamed. And she twisted her arm muscles and the hard heels of her hands ground into his shoulder joints. She laughed again and leaned her face close to his.

  He felt his face was wet. She was crying? No, he was crying, crying in pain.

  "You killed my husband," she said. It was not a question.

  "And you killed Wetherby," she said. She twisted her hands again into his shoulders.

  Hurt. Hurt. Have to get away.

  "But they damaged you. And I'm going to damage you worse. And the little bit that's going to be left of you will go to Nuihc. In a bag."

  Nuihc? She knew. Lynette was the third kamikaze. The third shot was hers. Did she know that Nuihc planned for her to die? That Remo was supposed to kill her? But he couldn't kill her. He couldn't move.

  "You know Nuihc?" Remo gasped.

  "I serve Nuihc," she corrected. "Hawley was a fool. Wetherby was a brute. But Nuihc is a man. He loves me. He said the best blow in Scotland was mine. I was the best."

  She continued moving the lower half of her body up and down, using Remo as an instrument for her pleasure and his pain, and all he could do was keep his fingers going inside her thighs.

  "Mr. Winch is a man," she said.

  He felt her voice soften and her muscles begin to tense, then relax, in an unconscious rhythm she could not control.

  "The kind of man you might have been. Ohhh. Ohhhh."

  She was bucking on Remo now like a bareback cowboy on a crazed horse. He was pinned and powerless and in pain from her hands on his shoulders. She screamed a heavy gasping scream of pleasure and said "Oh, Nuihc, Nuihc," and when she stopped, she said, "You could have been a man, too. If you had lived."

  And then her creamed wet body moved up off Remo and he could feel the blessed relief of her small fists withdrawing from the points of pain on his shoulders and he could open his eyes again. He saw her standing on the bed, looking down at his body below her bare legs, and he saw her curl her left leg up under her, standing as if she were a flamingo, and then she drew the other leg up, too, and her body crashed down, armed at the long rope of muscle in the front of his right thigh, and even before she landed, Remo could sense what the excruciating pain would be like, and then her body hit, and it seemed to land in slow motion. First there was the touch of contact, then pressure, then pain as her weight and skill tore open the long lifting muscle of the thigh.

  "First you," she yelled, "and after you, the old man."

  Purely by reflex, purely by training, purely by instinct, knowing it meant nothing because he was going to die, Remo rolled his left leg toward the far wall, so the knee was pointing outward, then with all the effort and strength he had left, he rolled the knee back inward toward his own right leg, toward Lynette Bardwell, who knelt on his right leg, her face exultant with the glow of victory, and he drove the knee across his own body and heard the crack as it found her temple bone.

  Lynette still smiled. She looked at Remo, smiling, and then, for just a brief second, the smile turned into a look of pain, and in that moment Remo knew that she suddenly suspected that Nuihc, whom she thought loved her, had guessed that she would die here, and then she could no longer worry about things like that because her thin temple bones were driven into her brain by the force of Remo's driving knee, and the smile and the look of pain both withered, like a time-lapse photo study of a flower's life and death, and Lynette fell forward onto Remo's chest and died.

  He felt the warm sticky ooze from her head drip onto his chest. It felt warm. Warm. And warm was good and he wanted to be warm, so he didn't have chills. And the pain in both shoulders and the pain in his right thigh all hurt, and he closed his eyes and decided it would be nice to sleep.

  And if he died that would be nice, too, because then he would always be warm. And he wouldn't hurt anymore.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Remo woke.

  He had slept to forget something, and now he remembered it. The pain in his shoulders and arms.

  And there was something wrong with his legs.

  A weight was on them. He looked down toward his legs, but he couldn't see them. Right under his chin, grinning up at him, was the wide-eyed, open-mouthed, bloodied head of Lynette Bardwell.

  Remo remembered.

  "Hi, toots," he said. "Read any good karate books lately?"

  Carefully, Remo slid his left leg out from under the woman, then with his left leg he pushed her. Her body rolled down from his right leg onto the bed, then slipped onto the floor where it hit with a brittle, cold thump.

  Remo swung his body around, extended his legs to the floor, stood up, and collapsed onto the gray tweed rug as his right leg buckled under him.

  And just that much effort brought back the pain, like a toothache that seems to have been cured by a night's sleep, but starts throbbing before you get out of bed.

  Remo crawled toward the wall and then using the wall as a brace managed to get himself into an upright position. Trying to put no weight on his right leg, using it just for steering, he hobbled to the bathroom and, hammering with his powerless arms, was able to get the shower turned on.

  He hoisted himself into the shower and stood there a long time, unable to soap himself, but letting the water wash Lynette Bardwell's dried blood off his body.

  The warm water washed away some of his pain, too, and Remo was able to think. Nuihc was coming after him. The next attack, the fourth blow, would be deadly.

  He got out of the shower, leaving the water running. He stopped in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at his own image. "You're kinda young to die," he told the face that looked back at him. But the face didn't seem frightened; it seemed puzzled as if it were trying to remember something. Looking at the face was like looking at a stranger, and that stranger was puzzled. There was something in the back of his mind, some tiny memory that he knew he should remember. But what was it?

  Remo dragged on his pants and congratulated himself on wearing a button-front shirt because at least he could slip his arms into it. Yesterday's pullover would have been out of the question.

  What was it?

  Something Lynette had said. Something.

  What?

  What?

  "After you…" After Remo, what? What?

  "After you," she had said. "After you," and then he remembered as the words jumped back into his ears as if someone were shouting at him.

  She had said:

  "After you, the old man."

  Chiun.

  Remo hobbled to the telephone. He was able to cradle the phone between left ear and shoulder and, thanking God for pushbutton dials, banged out an 800-area code toll-free number.

  "Yes?" came the lemony voice.

  "Remo. What time is it?"

  "It's two-twelve P.M., and this is an unauthorized time for you to call. Don't you remember that…"

  "I need help. I'm hurt."

  In Folcroft Sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith sat up straight in his chair. In ten years he had never heard those words from Remo.

  "Hurt? How?"

  "Muscles torn. I can't drive. Send someone for me."

  "Where are you?"

  "Home of Lynette Bardwell. Tenafly, New Jersey. You can tell me from Lynette 'cause I'm still aliv
e."

  "Are you in any danger of compromise?" asked Smith.

  "That's it, Smitty. Good for you. Up the organization. Worry about security."

  "Yes," said Smith noncommittally. "Is there any danger?"

  "I don't know." Remo sighed. It hurt to talk and now the telephone was hurting his shoulder where it rested. "If the security of this operation depends on me, start looking for a new job."

  "Stay where you are, Remo. Help is coming."

  Smith listened. There was no joking, no wisecracking in Remo's voice this time, as he said: "Hurry."

  Smith rose, carefully buttoned his jacket, and walked from his office. He told his secretary he would be gone for the rest of the day, which announcement she greeted with open-mouthed astonishment. Dr. Smith, in the past ten years, took off only every other Friday afternoon, and on those days he arrived early in the office and worked through his lunch hour, so he had already put in his full eight hours before leaving for his golf date at the nearby country club. A date which, she had one day learned, he kept with himself, playing alone.

  He boarded a medical helicopter on the sanitarium grounds and was flown to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey where he rented a Ford Mustang, even though a Volkswagen was cheaper and there would be one available in just an hour or so and he liked the Volkswagen's gas economy.

  With the help of a telephone directory and the driver of a mail truck, he found the Bardwell house. He parked behind a brown Ford in the driveway and went to the side door leading to the kitchen. No one answered his knocking. The door was unlocked.

  Smith entered a kitchen filled with plastic clocks that looked like fried eggs sunnyside up, cooked too long, and with ceramic spoon rests that looked like smiling babies, and with coffee, sugar, and flour canisters that looked like overgrown soup cans, and a room in which everything looked like something else.

  Smith had no mind for philosophy so it did not occur to him that a vast portion of America made its living by making things look like other things, and that this was a little strange because it might have been better to make the first things good-looking enough so that they had no need for disguises.

  The lean pinched-face man moved quietly through the first floor of the house, efficiently searching the rooms, the kitchen, dining room, the living room, the bath, the television room in the back, decorated with a shelf holding a collection of plaques and trophies from karate competitions, set up in rows, that looked like nothing so much as an advancing army of Oriental men and women fighting their way through unfriendly air to reach their enemies.

  He found Remo upstairs on the floor of the bedroom, lying next to the bed. Next to him was the body of a naked blonde woman, her face and head caked with dried brown blood.

  Smith knelt quickly next to Remo and put his hand inside Remo's open shirt. He saw Remo's mouth move into a grimace of pain. Smith looked at his watch. He counted the heartbeats for fifteen seconds. Twelve. He multiplied by four. Remo's pulse was forty-eight.

  If that had been Smith's pulse rate, he would have rushed to a cardiologist. But Smith, who read his medical bulletins on CURE personnel like a financier read the stock market tables, knew that for Remo a pulse of forty-eight was in the normal range.

  "Remo," he said.

  Remo's eyes opened slowly.

  "Can you walk?" Smith asked. "We've got to get out of here."

  "Hi, Smitty. Keep an eye on the paper clips. Every time you turn your back, someone's stealing them."

  "Remo, you've got to get up."

  "Get up. Right. Got to get up. Can't go lying down on government time."

  He closed his eyes again.

  Smith put his left arm under Remo's thighs and his right arm across the top of Remo's right arm and under his back and hoisted Remo into his arms. He was surprised, despite himself, at how light Remo was. He had weighed two hundred pounds when the organization had found him ten years ago, and Smith had known that his weight had come down some forty pounds, but like all gradual weight losses it had not been visible.

  Leaning backward to counteract Remo's weight in his arms, Dr. Smith descended the steps to the first floor. Every time he reached his foot down to touch a new step, the slight jar to his body brought a squint of pain into the corner's of Remo's closed eyes.

  In the kitchen, Smith deposited Remo into a chair at the kitchen table, then went outside to start the car's motor and drive it up as close as he could to the kitchen door.

  He opened the passenger's door. When he got back into the kitchen, Remo's eyes were open.

  "Hi, Smitty. Took you long enough to get here."

  "Yes."

  "I must have called you hours ago and here you are, taking your time about things, while I'm feeling rotten."

  "Yes," said Smith.

  "How'd I get to the kitchen?" asked Remo.

  "You probably walked," said Smith. "Just as you're going to walk to that car outside."

  "I can't walk, Smitty."

  "Hobble then. You don't think I'm going to carry you, do you?"

  "Not you, Smitty. That's laborers' work. Do you WASPS go to a school where you learn to be obnoxious?"

  "When you finish feeling sorry for yourself, I'll be out in the car," Smith said coldly. "I suggest you hurry up."

  Smith waited in the car, an unusual feeling of disquiet within him. He wished that he could have told Remo he was concerned about him, but he did not know how. Years of training, years of service, years of administration in that strange government underworld where a man who was your friend for years one day just stopped coming around, vanished, swallowed up, gone, and no one ever spoke of him again, as if he had never existed in the first place.

  It was just too long-standing a tradition for Smith to be able to violate.

  He watched as Remo came out onto the small kitchen porch. He tried first to hold onto the stair railing with his right hand, but he winced and gave that up. He put his right hip against the railing, then hopped down a step, landing on his left foot. Then he leaned sideways, right hip against the railing, until he was balanced and ready for his next lunge down.

  Remo made it, hopping, to the car, and slid in through the open door. Smith reached across him, pulled the door shut, and backed carefully out of the driveway. He drove as quickly as the speed laws of New Jersey permitted, out of the town, onto Route 4, heading for the George Washington Bridge.

  Only when he was on the highway did he ask Remo what had happened.

  "There was a girl in the upstairs bedroom…"

  "I saw her."

  "Right. She disabled my right leg."

  "And your arms?"

  "Shoulders, Smitty. Two other guys did that."

  "But how?" asked Smith. "I thought you were trained to stop that sort of thing from happening."

  "Suicide attacks," said Remo. "Anyway, I need something."

  "Yes. A doctor," said Smith.

  "I need a submarine."

  "What?"

  "A sub. I'm going to Sinanju."

  "Why? Remember, you're supposed to be checking out the death of one of our programmers."

  "Remember the blows he suffered that mashed his joints?"

  "Yes."

  "I've had three of them so far. The fourth is due in Sinanju."

  "I don't understand," said Smith.

  And because Remo did not understand either, did not know how he knew what he knew, he said, "You don't have to. But Chiun is in danger and I've got to go to Sinanju."

  "What good are you going to be to him? You can't even walk."

  "I'll think of something. I'd rather be near him."

  Smith drove on mechanically, not distinctively enough to be called good driver or bad driver.

  A few minutes later, he said:

  "Sorry, Remo, you can't go. I can't allow it."

  "I'll pay for the gas myself, Smitty."

  "Chiun is different," Smith explained. "He's a Korean. But you're an American. If you're captured in North Korea by the government there,
it can cause an international incident. Not to mention blowing our whole apparatus. We'll have to close down."

  "And what do you think you'll have to do if the New York Times gets a letter tomorrow listing locations, places, dates, killings, government interference? There was that business in Miami, remember? And the labor union. What will happen to you then?" asked Remo.

  Smith drove on glumly.

  "That's blackmail," he said.

  "Company policy."

  "Extortion," said Smith.

  "Company policy."

  "A naked unprincipled threat," said Smith.

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," said Remo.

  Smith pulled off the highway at a motel outside White Plains and, with a key from a ring in his pocket, opened the door of a room the organization rented year-round. He helped Remo into the room, located in the back of the building, secure from the street, helped Remo onto the bed, then left. He was back in twenty-five minutes with a man in a business suit, carrying a leather medical bag.

  The doctor examined Remo carefully.

  Remo would not cooperate. "I don't need all this," he told Smith in a hiss. "Chiun can fix me up."

  The doctor called Smith into a corner of the room for consultation.

  "This man belongs in a hospital," he said softly. "Both shoulders are separated. The major muscles in the right thigh are actually ripped. The pain must be excruciating. Frankly, Doctor, I think you overstepped yourself by removing him from the scene of the accident. He should have been carried by ambulance from the wreck."

  Smith nodded as if he agreed with the lecture. "Patch him up as best you can until I convince him to get to the hospital, please."

  The doctor nodded.

  Despite Remo's total lack of enthusiasm, he bandaged Remo's shoulders, restricting his arm movements even further, but guaranteeing that the separated muscles would have time to knit before being abused. He also bandaged Remo's right thigh heavily. His last act was to reach into his bag and withdraw a hypodermic syringe.