"You were talking to a computer, Daddy."
"So?"
"You don't get it, do you?"
"No," Vinnie shouted. "And I want you to forget it. You didn't hear that phone call, you don't remember it, and you won't mention it to anybody. Even your mother. Especially your mother. You understand?"
"I'm not a child, Daddy."
"As long as you love a man with pointed ears and green skin, you're a child."
Viki giggled. "Whatever you say, Daddy." She hung up.
Vinnie Angus smiled in spite of himself, thinking of the big luscious girl in tight jeans and sweater and harboring the strong suspicion that she had outgrown Star Trek a year earlier but still played at it just to annoy him. Why not? Daughters had done stranger things. Vinnie finished cleaning his weapons and after his wife had left the kitchen made two bologna-and-cheese sandwiches with pickles. He packed them in a bag with four cans of Uptown Soda, left out his red-and-black woolen hunting cap, and went to bed at 10.
The alarm buzzed at 3:58 a.m. His wife snored on as Vinnie slapped the buzzer off and got up quickly. He dressed rapidly, got his gear together, walked down the hall past Rebecca's room, the sewing room, Victoria's room, picked up his bag in the kitchen, went down the front steps, opened the garage door, started the Monte Carlo, drove off on his hunting trip, and never came back.
Parker Morgan, an old retired architect, was walking his dog, an old retired bloodhound, in the woods around his home.
He loved the trees in the winter, standing out starkly in the cold clear air. Morgan broke off a dead branch from a fallen limb and threw it with all his strength.
The dog puffed laboriously after the stick, up over a small rise and out of sight. Parker Morgan watched his own breath condense and soon the dog came back, the twig in his teeth, two white splashes of carbon dioxide puffing out his nostrils.
Morgan kneeled down and the dog planted his paws on the man's knee and stomach, waiting for the branch to be taken and thrown again. Morgan took the stick, stood up, and then frowned.
On his knee and stomach were two bright red pawprints. He looked at the dog who quivered with anticipation. The dog's four paws were red. The old architect examined the dog but could find no cut or injury.
"C'mon, boy, show me where the stick was." He started moving up the hill, the dog dancing around his side.
Morgan stopped when the hard frozen ground gave way to a patch of cold, moist earth. He touched the ground. His fingertips came up red. He smelled, then touched his tongue to his fingers, hoping desperately for the taste of berries. It was blood.
Parker Morgan stared at his hand. A small red drop splattered onto the bridge of his nose from above. He looked up in surprise, and saw trouser legs hanging down from the tree branch over his head. His eyes continued rising, until he stared into the empty sockets of the skeleton in bloody hunter's clothing.
America's quadrennial exercise in civility had just ended and the country had a new President.
All around Washington, D.C., the last few moments of the inaugural ceremonies were like a starter's pistol, marking the beginning of a string of parties that would culminate later that evening in a dozen or more formal balls.
But the new President of the United States was not yet party-bound. Instead, he sat in one of the private offices of the White House, facing the former President across a large wooden coffee table, sipping lukewarm coffee from a pair of white paper cups.
The new President was on the edge of his chair, uncomfortable because there were no aides or Secret Service men in the room. But the former President slouched back on the sofa, his feet crossed under the coffee table, his balding, moose-jawed head looking in repose for the first time the new President could remember.
"This office is yours now," the balding man said, bitterly munching a canned macaroon. "The world is yours now and you have to learn to use it."
The new President shifted a little bit, coughed, and said dully, "I'm gonna try my best." He had taken speech lessons once to get rid of the Southern accent but they hadn't taken and his speech still was marked by the soft slurred vowels of the South.
"I'm sure you will," the former President said. "We all do." He nonchalantly pulled his feet out from under the table to rest them on top of the wooden surface, but he caught the rim and overturned his container of coffee.
Some of the liquid splattered onto the rug from the table and the balding man knelt down by the couch and with his pocket handkerchief sopped up the coffee from the rug and then blotted the table dry. He threw the handkerchief in a wastepaper basket.
"You know what's going to be the nicest thing about not being President any more? It's moving into a different house where we're going to have linoleum on the floor and washable indoor-outdoor carpeting, so when I spill a frigging cup of coffee, it can be wiped up with a paper towel, and I don't have to worry about some commission telling me 10 years later that I destroyed a national rug treasure."
"I guess you didn't ask me here to talk about rugs," the new President said.
"Very perceptive," the older man said drily. "No, I didn't. You remember, in one of our debates, I said the President had to keep options open. Because he was the only one with all the information available to him?"
"What debate?" asked the new President.
"What the hell difference does it make? I don't know. The one where I made the stupid mistake and you spent all your time not answering questions. Anyway it doesn't matter. I asked to meet with you now to give you some of that inside information that only the President knows. Some of the duties of the job that you won't find out about listening to Congress or the New York Times, the bastards."
The new President sank back into the soft chair. He nodded. "Yes sir, I'm listening."
"Do you remember that convention that had all those people killed in Pennsylvania?" The former President waited for a nod. "Well, there was never any question about what killed them. They were poisoned."
"Poisoned? By whom?" asked the new President.
"I'll get to that. They weren't the first cases-either, but they were the most serious ones. Before that, for months, we were picking up reports of big groups of people getting sick. A party here. A wedding reception there. A church outing. Well, we put the medical boys on it right away, and they nailed it down quickly. It was poison. But the problem was that they didn't know what kind of poison or how it was administered."
"Why was nothing ever said about this?" asked the new President. "I don't remember ever reading…"
"Because you can't run the government of 220 million people out on Page One. Not unless you're willing to risk wild panic that you can't control. What do you do? Tell millions of people that someone out there's trying to poison all of you but we don't know who or how or why, now go to sleep and don't worry about it? You can't do that. Not and try to find any answers to those questions. Just listen, will you please? So there were all those poisonings but nobody died and it didn't seem like the end of the world when our guys couldn't find out the cause of the poison. And then came that business in Philly and all those people dead. And that made it something else. More serious."
"I'm surprised at you. I was briefed by the FBI and the CIA and all the federal agencies and departments and I was never told a word of this," the new President sniffed. "I'm surprised they withheld it from me."
"They didn't withhold anything. They just didn't know about it was all. Now let me finish. So after all the deaths in Pennsylvania, we had scientists come up with a vaccine that could offset the poison."
"Well, why haven't you given it to the American people? I can't understand any of this. This delay. This deception."
"We tried to give it to all the American people. Remember the swine-flu program?"
The new President nodded.
"Well, there's no such thing as swine flu. We invented that just to have a reason to inoculate the whole country against this poison. And then the goddam press shot down the swine-flu program with their harpi
ng about a few meaningless statistical deaths. So our asses are back in the sling." The big balding man rubbed his hand over the top of his head and scratched himself behind the right ear.
"Well, then make it mandatory that everyone gets a shot," the new President said. "Put it into law."
The ex-President smiled thinly. "Can you imagine the roar about trampled rights? After Watergate? The lawyers would break down our doors and string us all up as fascists. And I just don't think you can go ahead and tell the American people that there's a deadly poison somewhere in their food chain and we don't know where it is. Especially since there haven't been any more deaths since that convention. Maybe whatever it was passed off, and it's over now."
The smaller Southerner looked trapped in his chair, as if the full responsibility of his job was weighing on him for the very first time.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"What do you do?" answered the ex-President. "You're the President now."
"One thing I don't understand. A minute ago, you said the FBI, nobody, knew anything about this. How'd you manage that?"
"I was just coming to that. Take a tight grip on your cup and let me fill you in."
The balding politician sat back and began to tell the new President about a secret government organization named CURE, begun back in the early 1960s to fight corruption and crime, outside of the constitution, before corruption and crime destroyed the constitution.
Only the Presidents of the United States knew of the organization that was so set up that it did not even take orders from the President. The President could suggest assignments but CURE did its own thing.
"You've got no controls on it then," said the new President.
"You've got the ultimate hammer," the balding man said. "Tell it to disband and it disbands. Gone, forgotten and no one ever knows it was there." And the ex-President continued, telling how the organization had always been headed by a Dr. Harold W. Smith, and only Smith and one other man, their enforcement arm, knew what the organization did.
"Who's this enforcement arm?"
"I don't know," the President said. "I met him once. A surly looking thing. I don't know his name. His code's The Destroyer."
The new President had begun shaking his head as if grieving over what the older man had told him.
"What's all that cluck-clucking for?" asked the ex-President.
"It's true. I always knew it was true. There's a secret damned government in this country, secret intelligence people running around, trampling civil rights, abusing law-abiding Americans, and I'm just not going to have it. I wasn't elected to tolerate that kind of thing."
"You weren't elected either to tell the American people that someone is trying to poison them but you don't know who or why but tune in tomorrow and you'll keep them posted. When 30 of our best European spies get killed by the Russians inside four days and we're left defenseless in Europe, well, maybe you'll just want to tell the American people all about it. My decision was to respond in kind. I called this organization CURE and let them handle it." He stood up and smiled down at the smaller man. "You know, it's not really a matter of integrity. It's a matter of intelligence. Of running the country the best way you can for the largest number of people. CURE can help you. But you do what you want to do. If you want them to get off this poisoning business, that's up to you. All you've got to do is tell them to disband. Of course, if the deaths start up again next week, I don't know who you'll turn to then." He smiled sadly. "Because that's the first thing you're going to learn in this job. When the shit hits the fan, you're alone. Your cabinet, your family, your friends. Forget 'em. You're alone. CURE helps. But it's all up to you."
The ex-President walked to the door.
"I don't like it," the new President said. "I just don't like secrets."
"Do what you want. There's a red phone in the bottom right hand drawer of that cabinet. Just pick it up. They'll answer."
He opened the door to the hallway, then turned around and let his gaze run around the room.
"This is your office now. Enjoy it. And do the best job you can."
Then he turned his back and walked out into the hall, closing the door behind him.
The Southerner stood up and walked around the room nervously rubbing his hands together. But each circuit of the office brought him closer and closer to the cabinet that held the phone and finally he stopped, opened the bottom right-hand drawer, reached in, and lifted the red telephone without a dial.
As the telephone reached his ear, he heard a clear voice which he immediately categorized as lemony, say "Yes, Mr. President?" No hello, no question, no welcome. Just "Yes, Mr. President?"
The new President paused.
"About this poison thing," he said.
"Yes?"
The new President paused again. Then quickly, as if it could not be a mistake if spoken quickly, he said: "Keep on it."
"Yes, Mr. President."
The man with the lemony voice hung up. The new President looked at the telephone for a moment, then replaced the receiver on the cradle, and closed the drawer.
He looked around the office, then through the windows, out toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
As he walked toward the door, he allowed himself a comment on his newfound knowledge:
"Sheee-it."
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the drunk tank smelled. The stench of vomit and booze-breath and whisky-soaked clothing would have been enough to asphyxiate any normal man. So Remo closed down his nasal passages and breathed thinly and waited for his case to be called.
The cops in Tucston, North Dakota, had found him wandering down the middle of the street wearing a black T shirt and black slacks, ripping the hubcaps off cars, and singing "Blowing in the Wind." When they shoved him into the back of the squad car, they failed to notice that he wasn't shivering, even though he was only lightly clothed and the temperature was fourteen below zero, Fahrenheit.
And Remo hadn't said anything. He had presented his New York identification listing him as Remo Boffer, former cab driver, and been booked and waited in his cell.
And waited.
And waited for Judge Dexter T. Ambrose Jr. "Hanging Dexter," they called him. And they were right, just so long as the defendants before him weren't part of organized crime or well connected or had a buck. Because those people somehow found a softer, more gentle side of Dexter T. Ambrose Jr., whose steel and acid was reserved for the poor, the unrepresented, the flotsam that floated through his courtroom. .
It was 9 a.m. Remo knew without looking at a watch, and his plane would be leaving in two hours, and he hated time pressure and he hated hurrying. He had spent most of the early part of last night trying to find Judge Ambrose, but had had no luck. The man wasn't home and wasn't at his mistress' house, and wasn't at any of his regular haunts, and Remo realized that the fastest way to find him was to present himself at Ambrose's regular court session in the morning.
He had been standing now for six hours, leaning against the cinderblock wall of the cell, ignoring the grunts, the belches, the attempts at conversation of the nine other drunks in the tank.
Most of them had slept it off by now and they were a contrite, dirty band as they waited for their day in court and their one-way ticket to the county jail.
One of them woke up yelling. He was a big red-faced cowboy type in a yellow plaid shirt and jeans and a heavy hip length sheepskin coat. And when he had finished screaming his protest at the start of another day, he had struggled to his feet, looked around the cell, and marched upon Remo.
"You," he said. "Give me a cigarette."
"Don't smoke," Remo said.
"Then get one," the big cowpuncher said.
"Walk in the water until it covers your head," Remo said.
"Hold on a minute, skinny. You telling me you ain't giving me a cigarette?"
"I'm telling you I wouldn't give you a cigarette if I was P.J. Lorillard. Now go eat a cow."
"You too sk
inny a sumbitch to talk to me like that," the cowboy said, hitching up his belt.
"Right," Remo said.
"I'm too big to have to listen to that kind of crap from you."
"Right," Remo said. He heard footsteps coming down the stone corridor toward the cell.
"I'm gonna bust you up good."
"Sure. Swell, right, okay," Remo said.
The cowboy drew back his right arm and threw a punch at Remo's face. But the fist never landed. It found itself wrapped around by one of Remo's hands, and then there was pressure and the cowboy could feel the bones clicking, almost mechanically, as they were broken by the steady squeezing pressure of Remo's hand. Click, click, click came the fractures. The cowboy started to scream. Remo's other hand covered his mouth to silence the scream, then touched a clump of nerves on the left side of the man's neck, and the big cowboy slipped down on the floor, unconscious.
A policeman walked up to the front of the cell.
"All right, you stewbums," he said. "This is the order. Masterson, then Boffer, then Johnson"… he kept reading out all 10 names.
Remo walked to the front of the cell. "I'm Boffer. Take me first. Masterson's still sleeping it off."
He pointed to the big cowboy sprawled out on the floor.
The guard looked at the big man, then at his list, then nodded. "Okay. Let's go, Boffer. The judge doesn't like to be kept waiting."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Remo said.
The guard unlocked the cell, let Remo out, then carefully relocked the door behind him.
"This way," he said, and as he walked with Remo down the corridor, he asked, "You don't seem like the regular kind of drunk. What are you doing here?"
"Just lucky I guess," said Remo.
"If it makes you happy to be wise ass with me, you go ahead," the guard said, his feelings hurt. "But dontcha try that with the judge or you'll be spending the rest of the year making little ones out of big ones."
"Tough judge, huh?" asked Remo.
"The toughest."
"I always heard he was kind of easy on the big boys. You know, people with money to spread around."
The guard went on his defensive. "I wouldn't know anything about that."
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