Remo sat on her bed, his eyes toward the slightly-opened bathroom door, waiting, thinking that butchers always seemed to enjoy their work. And Lithia Forrester was a butcher. There had been Clovis Porter and General Dorfwill and Admiral Crust. The CIA man Barrett. And how many others had died because of her? How many had Remo himself killed?
Lithia Forrester owed America at least her own life. Remo Williams had come to collect.
The sound of the shower stopped, Lithia Forrester sang more softly to herself now in the bathroom. Remo could imagine her toweling the tall rich body that instilled in every man a satyr’s dreams.
He began to whistle the melody. “Super-kali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious.”
He whistled it louder. She heard it, because she stopped singing and the bathroom door flew open.
Lithia Forrester stood there, naked and golden, the bathroom light from behind her casting an aura around her flaxen hair and peach body.
She was smiling in anticipation, but then she saw Remo sitting on her bed, only eight feet away, and she stopped. Her eyes widened in horror and fright. Her mouth hung open.
“Expecting someone else?” Remo said.
Then she was embarrassed. She turned her body slightly away from Remo and thrust an arm across her breasts.
“Too late to be shy,” Remo said. “Remember? I turned off your lights last night? I’ve come to do it again.”
Lithia paused, then dropped her arm and turned her full body toward Remo. “I remember, Remo. I remember. You did turn off my lights. And it was never better. I want you to do it again. Right now. Right here.”
She walked forward until she was only inches from Remo. His face was at the level of her waist. She reached behind his head and pulled him forward until his face was buried against her soft, still-damp belly.
“What did you do last night, Remo?” she asked. “After you left me.”
“If you mean did I kill Admiral Crust as you told me to, no. Did I fall into the trap you set for me and get killed by Crust’s men, no. Did I stop Crust from ramming his ship today into the Statue of Liberty, no.” He spoke softly as if confiding a secret to her stomach. He reached his hands slowly around her back, resting them on her firm smooth cheeks, and then he reached both hands up and grabbed two handfuls of long blonde hair and yanked her head back with a snap.
He jumped to his feet and spun Lithia Forrester around and tossed her onto the bed.
“I got cheated all around, sweetheart. And now I’m back for a refund.”
She lay on the bed, momentarily frightened. Then she slid one leg up and turned slightly onto her side, a white pool of sensuality on the blackness of the bed. “Shall I wrap it or will you have it here?” she asked with a smile. Her teeth made her skin look dark. She reached her arms up toward Remo invitingly and her breasts rose toward him, pointed and inviting. Then Remo was over her and then he joined her.
He had never seen a more beautiful woman, Remo thought, as he paused over her before their bodies melted together in a confluence of passion.
And then Lithia Forrester was a dervish, bucking and rocking spastically under Remo, and Remo had no chance to do to her all the things he wanted to do because he was too busy hanging on.
She hissed and groaned and gyrated her way across the bed in a passion that was curiously without passion and then, from the corner of his eye, Remo saw her arm reach up to the bedside end table and fumble in the drawer and come out with a pair of scissors.
Remo was filled with fury at this woman who killed remorselessly and in whom he had not found a spark of honest passion or love and he began to grind her down, matching her artificial frenzy with an even greater frenzy of his own—a frenzy of hatred. Then she was pressed up against the headboard. Remo ploughed on, inexorably, and she was moaning, but it was a moan of pain, not pleasure. Behind his back she joined both her hands on the handle of the scissors and raised her arms high in the air over Remo’s broad back.
Then she brought her hands down, scissors point first, as Remo slid out from under her arms. The scissors whizzed past the top of his head and buried themselves deeply in Lithia Forrester’s chest.
She felt too much shock to feel pain. Then a look of blank stupidity crossed her face and she looked at Remo with kind of a quizzical hurt in her eyes as he pulled away from her. He watched the blood send trails down the sides of her golden body as the handle of the scissors throbbed cruelly in the light from the single lamp, shuddering with each weak beat of her dying heart.
“That’s what I meant by turning off your lights, sweetheart,” Remo said and backed away to stand at the bottom of the bed, watching Lithia Forrester die. He anointed her going by whistling, “Super-kali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
DR. HAROLD K. SMITH SAT BEHIND his desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, his back to the piles of papers, and stared out the one-way glass at the calm waters of Long Island Sound, waiting for the telephone to ring.
Since CURE had been founded years before to help equalize the fight against crime, Folcroft had been its secret headquarters. Now Smith found himself wondering how secret it still was. Some of its security had been breached; the attack on Remo had proved that. Unless Remo were successful, there was no way to tell just how high up that breach might have occurred. Smith shuddered at the thought, but it could have come right from the Oval Office of the White House.
If that were the case, there was an aluminum box down in the basement in which Harold K. Smith was ready to lock himself; to take to his grave all the secrets of a nation’s last desperate fight against crime and chaos.
Unless Remo somehow could remove the threat; unless the Destroyer could again make America safe against those overseas forces who would buy its government to turn it to their own ends.
But why didn’t the telephone ring?
Harold K. Smith, the only director CURE ever had, expected three calls and he wanted only two of them. The one from Switzerland and the one from Remo. The third? Well, he would worry about that when it came.
The phone rang and Smith spun around, hearing the squeak of the chair and telling himself to be sure to have it oiled. He picked up the phone with no trace of emotion or haste.
“Smith.”
It was one of the calls he wanted. A CURE division chief who thought he worked for the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics had finally heard from a friend in Switzerland who had been talking to his own friend, a ski instructor. And the ski instructor had told how his prize pupil, a young American secretary to a Swiss banker, was flying back to New York today. But she expected to be coming back right away because she had return tickets for tomorrow night.
The CURE division chief who thought he worked for the Bureau of Narcotics thought the Swiss banker was probably a narcotics courier and he asked Smith: “Should I have him picked up at the airport?”
“No,” Smith said. “Just have customs wave him through.”
“But… ”
“No buts,” Smith said. “Wave him through,” He hung up the phone and turned again to the window. That jibed with information they had received from diplomatic sources about chiefs of intelligence coming to the United States under false names, supposedly assigned to the United Nations Missions. They would also arrive today; CURE had learned they would be leaving tomorrow night That meant the auction would be tomorrow. But where?
Tomorrow. Time was running out… running out on CURE, running out on Remo Williams, running out on America.
Dr. Smith watched the waters of Long Island Sound lap at the rocks In front of his windows and ate his frustration. With time running out, all he could do was wait. Wait and hope.
It was almost noon when the telephone rang again. Again, Smith spun and lifted the receiver.
“Smith.”
“Remo,” the voice said. “She’s dead.”
“The auction’s tomorrow,” Smith said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “If she’s d
ead, will that cancel it?”
“Afraid not,” Remo said. “She was in it with somebody.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m still looking.”
“Then we really haven’t accomplished anything,” Smith said, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Don’t worry about it, Smitty. We’ll tie it up with a bow by tomorrow. And leave the auction to me. I’ll take care of it.”
“All right, Remo. We’re counting on you. Keep in touch.”
Smith felt buoyed by confidence after talking to Remo, even thought he did not see how even Remo could bring the whole scheme crashing down.
He stood up behind his desk, anxious to leave his office, to escape the third phone call the unwanted call when the phone rang.
With a sigh of resignation but with the decisiveness built by a life’s habit of doing his duty, Smith picked up the telephone.
“Smith,” he said, then listened as a nervous voice poured out its worries and frustrations.
“Yes, I understand,” Smith said.
“Yes, I understand.”
Finally, he said, “Don’t worry about it, Mr. President. We will have everything in hand.”
Then he hung up. How could he tell the President the truth? How? When there was no guarantee that the President himself was not under the power of the strange mind-corruptors?
Smith sat down again, deciding against lunch, and began to bury himself and his worries in routine paperwork, to hope against hope that Remo Williams could act in time.
· · ·
For all his confidence on the telephone, Remo was stumped. He had gone through Lithia Forrester’s office files three times and had found nothing. He sat in Dr. Forrester’s chair behind her desk, secure behind the locked oaken doors, papers strewn all across her desk.
Finally, in frustration and anger, he swiped all the papers off the desk, brushing them onto the floor.
He looked over the desk to the couch where Lithia Forrester’s secretary lay, bound and gagged. She had come into the office shortly after 9 a.m. and found Remo rifling through the file cabinets near Dr. Forrester’s desk.
Instead of screaming and running, she had demanded to know what he was doing. For her trouble, she was tapped unconscious, gagged and tied up on the couch.
Remo had found his and Chiun’s files. Nothing. Test results; Dr. Forrester’s observations about Remo who had aggressive fantasies. Zero. No file on Dorfwill or Porter or Barrett or Bannon.
There must be a private file, Remo thought. The secretary should know where it is.
He stood up from the desk and walked over to the couch, the secretary’s frightened green eyes blinking with every one of his steps. It would have been impossible for Lithia Forrester to find a woman who could outshine her, but she had tried. The secretary was a statuesque redhead and as Remo stood over her and looked into those deep green eyes, he could tell that she was a woman, a real woman, unlike the dead excuse for one on Lithia Forrester’s bed.
The secretary’s arms were tied behind her back, wrapped around and around with Scotch tape Remo had found on the desk, and her arms, pulled back, swelled her rich breasts out in front through the thin green sweater she wore.
Remo sat on the edge of the couch and thrust his hand under her sweater, resting it on her bare abdomen. He could feel her skin tingle under his touch. It would be easy, if only she knew something.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
She shook her head.
“I’m a murderer,” he said, enjoying the shock in her eyes. “Haven’t you ever seen my files? You should know that.”
She shook her head.
“Where is my file?” he asked.
She pointed her eyes toward the filing cabinets behind the desk, then looked back at Remo.
“It’s not in there,” he lied. “Where else does Dr. Forrester keep her files?”
The secretary shrugged and shook her head.
Remo snaked his hand up under her sweater and fixed it on one of her pendulous breasts. The breast was overrated as an erogenous zone, but there were nerves that worked. He began to press with his fingers against the nerves of her breast and he leaned his face over close to hers.
“Think again. Where does she keep the rest of her files?”
With his free hand, Remo flipped loose the gag around the girl’s mouth and then covered her lips with his own before she could scream. His other hand worked her breast. Despite herself, she became aroused.
If she had had any inclination to scream, it was lost in her return of Remo’s kiss and in the workings of his meandering hand. Finally, he pulled his face away slightly: “It’s important,” he said. “Where are Dr. Forrester’s other files?”
“Some patient files are confidential,” the girl said. “I’ll be fired if I tell you.”
Remo kissed her again, gently. “Not by Dr. Forrester,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“I killed her,” Remo said and again covered the redhead’s lips with his own. His right hand now traced spirals around her breast, pausing to pinch nerves. He freed her mouth again and looked at her hard.
“I need those files. Nothing can stop me.’”
The warming fires of her own passion had weakened her and the harsh cruelty of Remo’s words crushed her.
“In the bedroom closet,” she said, “A safe built into the wall. But I don’t have a key.”
“That’s okay,” Remo said and kissed her again. As he kissed her, he transferred his hand from her breast to her neck and squeezed slightly on a major blood vessel. The girl passed out, smiling.
Remo refastened the gag and went into the bedroom, ignoring the dead body of Lithia Forrester sprawled on the bed, the blood now hardening along its courses down the sides of her body, her eyes still open wide with shock and fear. The scissors had stopped quivering.
It wasn’t much of a safe. Remo worked the lock until it snapped off under the side of his hand. He inserted a finger through the opening, popped the latch from the inside. The heavy door swung free and Remo pulled it open,
There were three racks of red cardboard folders and Remo made three trips to carry them all back out into Lithia Forrester’s sun-bright office, where he stacked them neatly on the floor against a file cabinet
They were numbered in order, starting with number one. Remo placed the first folder carefully in front of him on the now clear desk, unsure of what he was looking for, not knowing what he might find.
He found nothing. It was another patient file, just like the hundreds of others in the file cabinets Remo had rifled, this time on an assistant Secretary of Defense. A pile of test papers from the psychological battery that all new patients underwent. Then a page of notes handwritten on a yellow sheet in pencil in the small handwriting of a woman. Remo read the notes. Psychological drivel. Repressed feelings of aggression. Unhappy childhood. Resentment of authority. He grimaced to himself. Why did everybody’s problems sound alike in the hands of a shrink?
The file numbered two was the same. A Treasury Department official. More psychological problems,
Remo began to go through the folders more quickly. Number three, number four, number five. All the same. Government officials. Test results. Lithia Forrester’s impressions. Remo began grabbing them by the handful now, placing the hard red folders on the desk before him, flipping quickly through the sheets they contained.
Mountains of information—yet nothing Remo could use.
He stood up, exhaling almost in a sigh and walked from behind the desk, padding softly back and forth across the deep pile rug.
The folders must have the answer. But where was it? Now Remo knew what government officials she had under her control. That was something. But how did she do it? Who was her partner—that person she had talked to last night as Remo lay on her couch?
Keep looking.
>
Remo sat down again behind the desk and pulled another batch of red folders off the floor. More names. More government officials. More test results. More written analyses.
A Who’s Who of American government. Top policy makers. Cabinet officers. Security people. Nothing to help Remo.
Folder number 71. Number 72. Number 73.
And then there was one more folder.
It was the last one and it was not numbered. Remo opened it. No test results this time. Six pages in Lithia Forrester’s crabbed handwriting, six pages listing names of government officials. Remo skimmed the first page and groaned to himself—they were the same names he had gone just through.
Read carefully.
Each name was numbered and next to each name was the man’s government title, his telephone numbers, and a column labelled “fee schedule.”
Remo whistled to himself. Some paid $200, a day which included $100 for 50 minutes of private time. And the government was picking up a lot of the tabs. No wonder the nation was $400 billion in debt.
But under each entry was another line. It read “Potential.” The number one name was the assistant Secretary of Defense. “Potential: leak of secrets; falsification of documents.”
Number 2 was the Treasury officer. “Potential: security problems on Fort Knox gold.”
Remo read the list rapidly. All the names were there. All the things that Lithia Forrester could get them to do. Things to cripple America.
Burton Barrett: Potential: exposure of CIA agents.
Bannon: Potential: investigation; force if needed.
Dorfwill: Potential: bombing incident.
That was it. Down through all the names, through all six sheets of paper, Lithia Forrester had marked what they could be counted on to do.
From Number one through Number. 72.
Remo sighed, then carefully folded the sheets and put them in his right hip pocket. Smith could use that. Seventy-two officials who had been compromised by Lithia Forrester. There might be more than that, but at least Remo had seventy-two.
Seventy-two?
Remo glanced at the red file folders near him on the desk, then shuffled through them quickly with his hand. He found the one he was looking for. It was number 73. The folders had gone up to 73, but the list had only 72 names.
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