Last Drop td-54

by Warren Murphy

  "I am Chiun," Chiun said, bowing politely.

  "Chiun is one of the biggest businessmen in Korea," Remo explained. "He's here to see Mr. Donnelly about some exporting business."

  "Yeah," the secretary said enthusiastically. "It's all coming back to me now. And you're his assistant, right?"

  "Jackpot," Remo said. "I'm Remo. Remo—"

  "Wang," Chiun finished.

  Remo looked at him. "An appropriately common name," Chiun explained.

  "Remo Wang," the secretary said. "Pleased to meetcha, Mr. Wang. I'm Darcy Devoe. It used to be Smith, but I changed it. I always say—"

  "Is Mr. Donnelly in?" Chiun interrupted.

  "Sure. I told him about you when you called. He can't wait to see you. His office is..." She turned in a slow circle, scanning the walls with bewildered eyes before they came to rest on the only inner door in the office. "Through there!" she said, pointing triumphantly.

  "Thanks," Remo said. "That's got to be the ditziest broad in Washington," he added in Korean as they knocked on Donnelly's door.

  Chiun shrugged. "She is white."

  Donnelly was a broad man with heavy features and expansive gestures. "Mr. Williams?" he asked, smiling at Remo.

  "Wang," Remo said.

  "Wang? Oh, I beg your pardon. My secretary must have got the name wrong. She's a little disorganized at times."

  "She is to be excused," Chiun said graciously. "She is—"

  "And this is Chiun," Remo said loudly.

  "Ah, yes." Donnelly managed an awkward bow in what he evidently believed to be an Oriental manner. "Mr. Chiun of..." He quickly pulled a note card out of his jacket. "Sinanju. Did I pronounce that right, Mr. Chiun?"

  "Perfectly," Chiun said. "And 'Chiun' will suffice. As I am the Master of Sinanju, who rides in airplanes with no other passengers, no other title is necessary."

  "The Master of... I see," Donnelly said. "Well, sit down, sit down. I'll get us all a drink."

  Chiun folded his hands inside his sleeves. "That will not be necessary. And I prefer to stand. My associate will explain the purpose of our visit."

  "Yes, of course," Donnelly said. "Are you looking for some American goods to import into Sinanju? I don't believe we've dealt with your— um— province before."

  "You know what we want," Remo said. "Coffee."

  "Coffee?" The look on Donnelly's face was expectant.

  Remo lifted the suitcase in his hands and opened it. Inside, it was stacked with hundred-dollar bills. "A hundred thousand dollars."

  "Oh, that coffee."

  "We've heard that it makes people happy," Remo said.

  "Very happy," Donnelly agreed.

  "Well, a little happiness is just what the Master of Sinanju is looking for. He's having a morale problem with his people. You see, they've been starving and slaving for three hundred years, and their productivity is beginning to lag."

  "Tut, tut," Donnelly said.

  "Besides, the Master thinks he can turn a nice profit off the dirtbags."

  "It'll happen every time," Donnelly said, smiling. "With this good American coffee—"

  "Unh-unh. Not American. The coffee from Peruvina. That's what we've come for."

  The smile vanished from Donnelly's face. "How do you know about Peruvina?" he asked cautiously.

  "I've spent the evening with your son, Arnold."

  Donnelly brightened again. "Oh, you know Arnold. Well, that puts a whole new light on things. Are you friends?"

  "Oh, I could hardly bring myself to leave the plantation," Remo said.

  "He's got a good head on his shoulders," Arnold's father said proudly.

  "Um... he did, yes."

  "As a matter of fact, he's coming here. Got a call this morning. To tell the truth, that's why I'm in the office so early," he added with a chuckle. "Usually I don't get in at the crack of dawn, but this way we can spend the day together, my son and I. Did you meet my wife, Esmeralda?"

  "Yes," Remo said. "But she had to leave unexpectedly. She was flying."

  Donnelly nodded. "I see. Well. To the business at hand. I suppose Arnold told you about our plans?"

  "Some," Remo said. "He said you were planning to expand into world markets with your coffee. What Chiun would like to know is, how can you get the coffee to us all the way out in Sinanju, when it's been banned right here in the United States?"

  Donnelly guffawed and slapped Remo on the back. "But that's the beauty of it! Let me explain." He removed his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves, indicating in his bureaucrat's way that he was really getting down to work.

  "You see, the American market was only a test to see if the general population of a country would drink the coffee. There are far too many regulations here to allow anything as appealing as our Peruvinian coffee to continue being sold indefinitely. But in more enlightened nations such as yours, Chiun, we don't have to bother with a lot of unnecessary restrictions. The coffee was meant for export in the first place."

  "Through this office," Remo said.

  Donnelly nodded. "Exactly. I am the Assistant to the Undersecretary of the Interior in charge of Regulations Concerning Importation of Agricultural Products. There won't be any red tape getting the coffee to you in Sinanju. Or anyplace else."

  "But what about the Secretary of the Interior?"

  Donnelly sighed patiently. "Mr. Wang, you've got to understand Washington politics. The Secretary of the Interior is a busy man. He's got whole coastlines to destroy. His time is taken up with selling wilderness areas to commercial concerns. It's not easy to obliterate the entire ecological balance of the Western Hemisphere. The Secretary's got his hands full."

  "I see," Remo said. "And the Undersecretary?"

  "The Undersecretary is busy doing what the Secretary would be doing if he didn't have all that noncommercial land and clean water to contend with. He's got to go to the luncheons, talk to the ladies' dubs, party at the White House.... The Undersecretary's job is never done."

  "Sounds like a heavy load," Remo agreed.

  "And for less than ninety thousand a year, too. But then, we are public servants. Sacrifices have to be made when you're serving your country."

  "I guess so."

  Donnelly grunted in satisfaction. "So you see, I have a relatively free hand in the business of exporting American goods."

  "Like wheat to Russia?" Remo said.

  "Oh, Darcy takes care of most of those details."

  Remo recalled the stack of moldering papers on Darcy's desk and the girl's vacant expression. "Her?" he asked, pointing toward the doorway leading to Darcy's office.

  "Somebody has to do those things," Donnelly said briskly.

  "And what do you do?" Chiun asked.

  Donnelly straightened out importantly. "Why, any good executive's main priority is to think. Keep his mind limber for big decisions. Get enough rest, eat right, that sort of thing."

  "I see," Chiun said.

  "And visiting coffee warehouses?" Remo said quietly.

  Donnelly looked up, surprised. "My, you and Arnold did get chummy, didn't you?"

  "We're talking about a lot of money, Mr. Donnelly. Or should I say Mr. Brown?"

  Donnelly guffawed. "Say, you're a sharp one."

  "So you are George Brown?"

  "Nobody's George Brown. That's just a name sheI mean I made up. Printed up some cards. We had to get the coffee into the warehouses somehow. Darned good idea, I think. Set the business off to a good start."

  "Is it your business?" Remo asked. "Your private business?"

  "Well," he faltered. "I do have partners. My son, for one. He developed the coffee, you see, but he's usually in Peruvina, and... another partner—"

  "Your wife's dead, Mr. Donnelly," Remo said.

  Donnelly hesitated for a moment. "Dead? Are you sure?"

  Remo nodded.

  Slowly, Donnelly reached for the intercom on his desk. "Darcy, Esmeralda's dead," he said.

  There was a short pause at the other end. "Do you
want me to fix you up with somebody for the weekend?" Darcy's voice said at last.

  "No, just check out the will." He released the connection. "Terrible," he said to Remo. "Poor woman."

  "Arnold killed her. I saw him."

  "She was lovely," Donnelly said.

  "So now you only have one partner," Remo said.

  "What? Yes, I suppose so. Just Arnold and me."

  "He mentioned something about Indiana."

  Donnelly waved it away. "Oh, that's nothing. A two-acre tract of land with a shack on it in some hick town. On paper, the coffee comes from there. That way, I can slide the whole thing through as an American export."

  "Very clever," Remo said.

  "Too clever," Chiun mumbled.

  The intercom buzzed. "Your wife has left the Peruvian estate to you and your son, sir," Darcy said.

  "Thank you." A deep flush of satisfaction rose in Donnelly's cheeks as he tried vainly to suppress a smile. "Just terrible about Esmeralda," he said.

  "And Peruvina. It's burned to the ground by now."

  Donnelly's face drained instantly of color.

  "Arnold did that, too. Some kid you raised."

  With a trembling finger, Donnelly reached for the intercom again. "Darcy. Darcy," he called. "I need you."

  "Just a sec. I got a hangnail."

  "Peruvina's gone?" he whispered. "That was going to be where I retired after this coffee business got started. Now it's gone...."

  "So's Arnold," Remo said. "He killed himself."

  "Darcy!" Donnelly roared.

  There was no answer.

  "You killed him! You must have."

  "Nope. Cross my heart," Remo said. "He tried to kill me often enough, though. And speaking of killing, I suppose you're the one who's been murdering everyone I've talked to."

  "What's that you're saying? You're the killer, not me."

  "Let's say George Brown was the killer," Remo said, rising. He walked slowly toward Donnelly. Donnelly backed away. "And that scheme to blow up the plane that you cooked up with your dear departed wife backfired, too."

  "What plane?"

  "Oh, cute. Arnold called you from Peruvina. He knew exactly what was going on."

  "You're not making any sense. Darcy! Miss Devoe, get the police, for God's sake," he yelled.

  The door opened. Darcy tossed a Browning .38 to him. "Your gun, sir," she said.

  Donnelly backed up to the wall, the revolver trembling in his hand. "Clear out," he shouted, his voice quavering. "Clear out, or I swear I'll shoot you."

  Remo stepped forward. Donnelly fired.

  The bullet passed through the exact location where Remo had been standing when he fired, but Remo was no longer there. Remo was next to Donnelly, and the revolver was turning into gravel in Remo's bandaged hand while in his other palm, Donnelly's skull was turning into something resembling oatmeal.

  "Dar—"

  "Gotta go, boss. Coffee break," Darcy said as she flounced away.

  Remo and Chiun stared for some moments at Donnelly's body. "It's funny," Remo said. "I didn't mind that time. Killing him, I mean. I didn't mind at all."

  "I did," Chiun said.

  "Huh?"

  "Your elbow was bent, as usual," Chiun said resignedly.

  "Well, I guess that's all of them. Esmeralda, Arnold, Donnelly. We'd better look for Smith's case." Remo began methodically to take apart the bookcases and file cabinets.

  "It will not be here," Chiun said.

  "Why not?"

  Chiun said nothing. Together they searched both the inner and outer offices down to the bare walls. There was no trace of Smith's case.

  "My son," Chiun said. "Upon receiving word from the Emperor, I will be forced to kill you, as part of my contract with him. The case is not here. Now, you tell me. To save us all. Why is it not here?"

  Remo was silent for a long time. "Something wasn't right," he said.

  "What?"

  "Donnelly didn't want to shoot me. He was afraid. Afraid to fire the gun. Whoever killed those people and sabotaged the plane I was in wasn't afraid to kill."

  "What else?"

  "He wasn't smart enough. Thinking up the George Brown business, routing the shipments through Indiana... He just didn't seem to have the intellect to come up with ideas like those. He didn't even run his own office...."

  The words caught in his throat.

  ?Chapter Twenty

  Smith let himself easily into the house on the outskirts of Saxonburg, Indiana. It was a tumbledown place consisting of one vacant room. Never more than a shanty in its finest hour, the house showed signs of vandalism, from the crushed beer cans on the floor to the childish graffiti on the walls. A threadbare carpet, stinking of urine, covered the creaking floorboards.

  This had to be the place, Smith thought. The Folcroft computers didn't make mistakes.

  Unless he had been completely wrong. If he had been, then the killer was still an unknown, the attaché case was gone forever, and CURE had come to its inevitable end.

  But he couldn't be wrong. There was too much coincidence for him to be wrong. The coffee plantation in Colombia, its direct link to Donnelly, the house in Saxonburg— it all added up under his premise. Even the computers had given him a 91 percent probability. No, he couldn't be wrong. The case was here, somewhere.

  There was nothing to search. No furniture, no books, no shelves. The closets had no hidden exits. Even the walls, once covered with cheap flowered paper, now all but stripped bare down to cracking plaster, contained no hollow spots, no secret recesses. He even went over them with a miniature electronic sweep. No bugs, no electronic devices of any kind had been installed. The place was as insecure as a public street.

  He reached high with the sweep to get a reading in the upper corners. It was a one-story building with no attic that he could see from the outside, but you could never tell. Nothing.

  His side aching from the strain of lifting his arm, he made his way around the room once more. Halfway along the third wall, he tripped over a dusty wine bottle and fell sprawling to his belly.

  The jolt of pain was tremendous. Vomit rose in his throat. Smith lay there for several minutes, panting, breathing the acrid stench of the carpet, before trying to work his way back to his feet as the room slowly came back into focus.

  The sweep was lying in the middle of the carpet. He crawled to it. As he approached, he heard something. The faint click-click of the sweep.

  The floor, he thought, unaware now of the burst stitches in his side. He scrambled to the edge of the room and began to roll back the stinking rug, debris and all. Sweat poured off his forehead and splattered onto the ancient floorboards in fat drops. The blood from his wound had soaked through his bandages and was straining his white shirt a bright red.

  He scarcely noticed. For dead in the center of the bare floor was the hole he had expected, a neat square trapdoor with a padlock fitted into a small recess.

  Taking from his jacket a small leather case filled with fine tools, he picked the lock. The tools were meant for dismembering a computer, but they worked just as well for burglary. Smith had picked enough locks in his career to be able to take one apart with a tiepin, but the tools made it easier. The hasp opened in a matter of minutes.

  It should have occurred to him, he thought later, that anyone hiding electronic equipment in a place as vulnerable as the shack in Saxonburg would have placed other precautions besides an ordinary padlock over the point of entry, but he was too overcome with his small triumph of finding the trapdoor, too eager, too racked by the pain from his injury to think about it. Or to take notice of the scratching, scuffling sound beneath the trap as he opened it and a thousand fat black rats poured over him in a screaming wave.

  He cried out low, recoiling from the creatures as they rushed out of the hole and seemed to fill the room. For a moment, his mind went blank in senseless terror. Then, shaking like a palsy victim, he brought himself under control.

  Nothing. It's nothing, he t
old himself. A trick to scare off curious children.

  A damn good trick.

  Slowly he made his way to the front door and opened it. The rats scurried outside. Breathing deeply to calm himself, Smith went back to the trap and lowered himself inside. Another level lay three feet below the first. Smith crouched on his hands and knees in the darkness, feeling his way along the platform with the electronic sweep.

  About four feet to the right of the trap, the sweep went crazy. Smith's right hand found a sharp edge in the wood. A hole. A plain hole.

  Be careful. He pulled his hand back quickly. Don't get caught again.

  He removed his tie with its metal clip. Dangling it from his fingers, he approached the hole again and let the end drop through the opening. There was a sharp crack as the platform was suddenly bathed in brilliant, erratic white light shooting in zigzags across the opening.

  Electricity. Enough to kill a horse, from the display of light emanating from the small hole.

  He felt better. A flood of rats was and always would be an alien terror to Smith, but defusing an electric security shield was familiar ground. He searched for the switch in the darkness, made suddenly darker by the brief onslaught of bright light.

  To the left of the hole he felt a raised metal disc with a jagged line running through the center. A keyhole.

  Just right, he thought. I would have used a key switch myself. Removing a long instrument of flexible steel from his tool packet, he worked on the keyhole. Despite the desperateness of the situation, he was beginning to feel something like admiration for the killer. The security measures were good. Simple but efficient. And hidden, the way all security ought to be. They were the work of a fine, clear mind that paid attention to detail.

  The whole scheme, from the distribution of the coffee to the theft of Smith's case, had been a beautifully orchestrated piece of work, the product of a mind that missed nothing, that could organize disparate elements into a workable whole.

  A mind, in fact, quite like his own.

  The instrument turned in the keyhole. Smith dropped his tie down the hole again. There was no reaction. He lowered himself into the opening, catching his foot on the step of a ladder, and let himself down.