Identity Crisis td-97

by Warren Murphy

  But the old guy acted as if he were picking apart the petals of a rose. Smith's jaws parted. He hacked.

  Keeping the jaws apart with one hand, the tiny Asian reached into his mouth to get at the obstructing object lodged deep within.

  "You'll need to Heimlich him to get it out, whatever it is."

  "Silence! I need silence to save this man."

  Then the old guy began massaging Smith's angular Adam's apple with a caressing thumb.

  Smith heaved out a violent hack, and something seemed to pop up from his mouth. It was white, and Koldstad tried to track it with his eyes. He lost it as it sailed past the old doctor's shoulder. Koldstad blinked. It seemed to disappear in midair. He approached, face quizzical. He hadn't heard the sound of the white object falling to the floor. The floor was polished pine. There should have been a click.

  While Koldstad was searching the floor, Harold Smith subsided.

  "Speak, Smith."

  "Kikk-"

  "Swallow. It will ease your throat." "Here's some water," said Koldstad, handing over a cup filled with water. Smith swallowed. There were tears in his eyes. The first word he got out was "Kill..."

  Koldstad asked, "What did he say?"

  "I do not know."

  ". . . me. . ." added Smith.

  "Hush, Smith. You are distraught. You require rest."

  "Kill me," said Harold Smith. "Please." His gray eyes were locked with those of the old Asian. They pleaded.

  "Did he just ask you to kill him?"

  "He has been under great strain of late. We must get him to his bed to rest."

  "Not before I finish official business," Koldstad said, looming over the stricken man. "Harold Smith, I am seizing this hospital for willful failure to pay income taxes, concealing income from the Internal Revenue Service, violating the Money Laundering Control Act of 1983 by illegally importing into this country income in amounts exceeding ten thousand dollars and failing to pay the lawful taxes thereon."

  Smith suddenly fainted. He collapsed onto the floor as if defeated. There was no warning. He had started to sit up when the old Asian simply touched the center of his forehead as if to flick a bead of sweat away. Instead, Smith all but fell apart under the touch.

  "Damn," said Koldstad.

  The old Asian arose. "Summon a doctor to take him to his bed of rest."

  Koldstad narrowed suspicious eyes. "I thought you said you were his doctor."

  "You misunderstood. I am his adviser."

  "Financial adviser?"

  "Adviser. I am called Chiun."

  Koldstad whirled on his men, red faced. "Somebody confirm this. Drag that weepy secretary in here."

  Mrs. Mikulka was brought in trembling.

  "Why are you people doing this?" she asked tearfully. "Dr. Smith is one of the-"

  "-lowest forms of life on the planet today," Jack Koldstad said harshly. "A suspected tax evader."

  "Suspected! Is that any reason to come into a hospital with drawn guns?"

  "Where tax revenue is concerned, Uncle Sam doesn't take prisoners." Koldstad pointed to Chiun. "Do you know this man?"

  "Yes, that is Mr. Chiun."

  "So you know him?"

  "Yes. He is a former patient who often returns to Folcroft."

  "Patient?"

  "I understand he is completely cured of his delusions."

  "What delusions?"

  "I don't know exactly. But he has been known to refer to Dr. Smith as 'Emperor.'"

  "Emperor of what?"

  "Of America, of course," replied the old Asian named Chiun.

  All eyes went to him. Koldstad strode up to the tiny Oriental, towering over him. "Did you say America?"

  "Yes. Smith secretly rules this land."

  "What about the President?"

  Chiun shrugged his black silk shoulders. "A mere puppet. Disposable and unimportant."

  "And you're his adviser?"

  "I stand by his throne and protect him from his enemies."

  "Get a real doctor in here!" Koldstad shouted. "Fast. And place this little yellow nut under arrest."

  "Catch me if you can," squeaked Chiun.

  And in a swirl of skirts, he turned, making for the door.

  "Stop him!"

  The IRS agents at the door gave it their best. Their best involved dropping into a crouch, hands splayed as if to catch a fumbled football. It looked like a good strategy. But they were playing the wrong kind of ball.

  The Master of Sinanju struck them like a black bowling ball. They cartwheeled in midair like tenpins, only to fall clutching one another in the mistaken impression they had grabbed their intended target.

  Koldstad stepped over them and looked up and down the corridor. Something reached up and pulled him down by his navy blue necktie. His face struck the floor with so much force he bounced back to a standing position and had to be helped over to a couch.

  "Dammit, what kind of madhouse is Smith running here?" Koldstad barked through bloody fingers that clutched his bruised nose.

  "This is a sanitarium," Mrs. Mikulka pointed out timidly.

  Chapter 5

  Remo Williams noticed the circling birds first.

  There was something wrong about the birds. He couldn't put his finger on it as he drove up the wooded road to Folcroft Sanitarium, but the birds were wrong. Very wrong.

  His senses had been developed to the pinnacle of human achievement and beyond. His eyes could spot a deer tick making its way along its host from a distance of half a mile by the near-imperceptible movement of the deer's guard hairs.

  The birds circled Folcroft in high, lazy spirals like condors. Remo thought of condors. Condors were not native to North America, so they couldn't be condors. Vultures, probably. Their wingspreads were too great for hawks, their bodies too small for sea gulls.

  As Remo negotiated the winding road, his eyes kept going to the circling birds. They were black against the rising sun, and that made it harder for even his eyes to make out their color and nature.

  Vultures, Remo decided. Vultures for sure. But why were they circling Folcroft as if it was dead?

  As he got closer, he began to smell blood. The metallic tang hung in the early-morning air. There were other smells-death smells. Sinanju had not taught him to proceed cautiously when he smelled them. He had learned that as a Marine, back in Nam.

  Pulling over to the side of the road, Remo got out. There were leaves underfoot. Without having to look down, his feet avoided them perfectly. That he hadn't learned in Vietnam. That was Sinanju, and so deeply ingrained it was second nature.

  Remo moved on to the trees, easing from bole to bole until he found an oak tall enough to do him some good. He went up it.

  Half the leaves were gone, but there was foliage enough to conceal him provided he didn't move.

  From the branches Remo spotted the unguarded gate to Folcroft. There was a sign on one of the brick gate pillars. It read:

  NO TRESPASSING

  GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

  SEIZED BY ORDER OF THE

  INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

  The black block letters were printed over the IRS seal.

  "Damn, damn, damn," Remo said.

  In the early days of his work for CURE, the supersecret agency that didn't exist, there had been a number of standing orders. Paramount among them was what to do if Folcroft was compromised in any way: disappear. Since Remo was CURE's enforcement arm, his very existence was a security secret.

  In the old days Remo had taken security seriously. The years had taught him differently. He had been officially dead more than two decades now. Although thanks to the succession of plastic surgeries and the strange effects of his Sinanju training, he looked almost exactly the same now as he did then. For all intents and purposes, Remo hadn't aged. That very fact meant that if any old friend from his past ever came across him, knowing Remo had been executed by the State of New Jersey, he would naturally have leaped to a logical conclusion: Remo was his own son.


  Remo had never had a son. Had never been married. But the days when he had to stay away from New Jersey and his past were long over. No one would assume that Remo Williams was above ground. Even if they did, the world wouldn't come to an end. Remo could be in the witness-protection program for all anyone knew. It was all Harold Smith bullshit.

  Remo had had enough of Smith's bullshit. That was why he had quit CURE the week before. Technically he was a free agent, but he had agreed to stick around for the duration of Chiun's next contract on one condition: that Smith use CURE's massive computer outreach to help Remo locate his parents, living or dead.

  Smith had agreed. Chiun, surprisingly, had gone along with it all. But Remo was serious this time. A year hence he would kiss Harold Smith, CURE and Folcroft Sanitarium goodbye. Forever.

  Chiun, he would worry about then.

  But as he hung in the crown of the oak, Remo understood that something unexpected had happened, something that promised to cheat him out of the one chance he had to unearth his roots.

  CURE was under stress as the result of an effort by an old enemy-a superintelligent artificial-intelligence microchip called Friend-to destroy the organization. Friend, whose programming was dedicated to the mindless making of profit and the unremitting accumulation of wealth, had struck at CURE in a brilliant three-prong attack calculated to render the agency nonfunctional.

  It had come at a critical time. Chiun had just negotiated the contract for the coming year. The gold had been shipped to the village of Sinanju on the West Korea Bay by submarine. A renegade North Korean frigate captain had commandeered it, destroying the sub and seizing the gold. Without gold, the contract was void. Without gold, the Master of Sinanju had withdrawn his services, along with Remo's.

  At the same time Friend had struck at Remo indirectly. By a subtle manipulation of the data in the CURE computer system, a man's name had bubbled up to catch Smith's attention. A fugitive hit man, long wanted by the authorities. Exactly the kind of hit that Remo routinely handled between higher-priority assignments.

  Remo had tracked him down on Smith's orders. And killed what was later discovered to be an innocent man in front of his wife and daughter. Their horrified faces still haunted Remo, shocking him enough to question his role as a secret assassin for an even more secret arm of the United States government.

  When Chiun had balked at another year's service because of the missing shipment of gold, Remo already had one foot out the door.

  The trouble continued piling up from there. CURE's computers became unreliable. Something somehow had managed to sever Harold Smith's direct telephone line to the President of the United States. CURE was cut off from the one US. official who knew it existed.

  It was a masterful plan, and CURE should not have survived. But it had. The gold had been recovered. Friend had been deactivated as he was consummating a brilliant attempt to blackmail the U.S. government through computer manipulation designed to paralyze the federal banking system.

  But the damage had been done. CURE had been hobbled, and all Remo cared about now was uncovering his past. The future would take care of itself.

  And now this.

  Remo wondered if the President had had something to do with this. Smith hadn't been getting along with the new President. They were like oil and water. And Friend had managed to divert the last of CURE's operating funds from its offshore bank. Smith had been trying to trace the lost taxpayer funds for over a week now. The President had not been happy to hear about that. The very existence of CURE offended him.

  Maybe, Remo mused, he had decided to lower the boom this way.

  Stepping to the ground, he decided to find out.

  Moving low, Remo made his way to the sound. He eased into it, the cool water swallowing his bare feet. He had stepped out of his Italian loafers. The water drank his thighs, his waist and, after his dark hair dipped into the cool blue surface, the water regathered as if he had never been there.

  No disturbance marked Remo's progress. He swam effortlessly, arms trailing loosely, feet kicking easily. So quiet was his progress that a sunfish failed to notice him until Remo had already passed his line of sight. Then it twisted away in staring-eyed panic.

  When the rotting piles of the Folcroft dock-a relic of some long-ago period before Folcroft had been built-came into view, Remo arrowed toward the ground.

  He came out of the water like a seal, on his stomach. The entire operation was soundless.

  Lying on the mud, Remo lifted his head.

  The smell of blood was still strong. Over the L-shaped brick building that was the headquarters for CURE, the three circling birds still described their tight looping pattern. Remo focused on them.

  For the first time since he had embraced the sun source called Sinanju, his eyes failed him. The birds remained black against the sky of the new day, like living shadows. Remo couldn't make out their true color, never mind their markings and distinguishing features.

  Not sea gulls, not vultures, not really like any birds he knew.

  The skin along his bare forearms tightened with a vague fear.

  Remo shifted his gaze to the window he knew was Harold Smith's. He didn't expect to see into it. The opacity of the one-way glass defeated even his sharp eyes.

  The window was broken. Through the angular hole in the pane, Remo spotted figures moving about. Men in suits. Men who didn't belong in Harold Smith's office.

  There was no sign of Smith.

  Remo shifted his gaze. The water was draining from his clothes, and he was willing his body temperature to rise by fifteen degrees. That would take care of the remaining dampness in his clothes.

  There were Cigarette boats beached in the mud not far from him. They were empty. The ground around the rise when the mud became high ground had been chewed up by feet and something more vicious.

  The air was thick with stale gunpowder smell, Remo noticed. Digging his fingers into the tiny burrow in the mud, he pulled out an intact 9mm round.

  Someone had attacked Folcroft by boat. That much was clear. But who had fought them back? Although Folcroft was technically one of America's most secret installations, Smith had never installed sophisticated security systems. There was only a single lobby guard, no barbed wire or electrified fences, no motion-sensing detectors or other such safeguards. Smith believed that installing such trappings would merely serve to advertise Folcroft's importance. He might as well string up Christmas lights that spelled out Secret High Security Installation. Do Not Enter.

  It was Smith's New England sensibleness that betrayed him. Folcroft had been assaulted and taken. It had never happened before.

  When Remo's clothes were dry enough to leave no dripping trail, he got up off his flat stomach and started to reconnoiter.

  There were men standing about the Folcroft entrance, men in black fighting suits with various assault weapons slung from shoulders and belts. They smoked nervously. The way they hung their heads and slumped their shoulders jarred.

  Their bodies screamed failure, not victory.

  Remo spotted the letters DEA on the back of one man's jacket.

  It didn't exactly clarify the situation, so he moved off to the southern exposure.

  He knew Chiun had been sleeping in the Folcroft basement, guarding the gold he had wrangled from Smith until arrangements to ship it to Sinanju could be finalized. The Master of Sinanju had not let Remo forget it. Remo was supposed to take the day trick. And he was a half hour late.

  Remo figured Chiun would be with the gold. When he found Chiun, he would start to find some answers.

  Remo made it to the freight entrance without being spotted. Once he passed a DEA agent pissing behind a parked car. The man never so much as smelled the odor of sea salt clinging to Remo's clothing.

  The corrugated freight door looked as if King Kong had punched his fist through it. The force was clearly outward, not inward. Chiun leaving. Only the Master of Sinanju could split corrugated steel so neatly down the middle before forcin
g the hole open.

  Remo went in anyway.

  The basement was dim and musty. The concrete floor sloped downward. There were no sounds or smells of intruders.

  Remo reached Chiun's sleeping mat, found the hastily discarded sleeping kimono on the floor and understood that the assault had come with the dawn. Chiun had been lying here when the shooting had started and flung his sleeping kimono aside in his haste. Normally the Master of Sinanju was too fastidious to toss it aside so carelessly.

  Remo went to the triple-locked door in an otherwise blank concrete wall. In the dark his eyes saw true. The locks were secure, the door closed. That meant the gold was safe. It was probably the chief reason those DEA agents were lounging about the front lawn and not floating as dismembered body parts on the sound being nibbled at by the fishes.

  From behind the door came a bitter tang. Not blood. Certainly not gold, which hadn't a specific smell, although Chiun had long insisted that he could smell gold at a distance of six Korean ri-about three miles.

  Remo eased up to the door. He retreated suddenly, holding his nose. The smell was burned plastic. Smith's computers. He had destroyed them. Not a good sign. Smith would sooner take the poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his vest than destroy his precious mainframes.

  The realization hit Remo then. "Damn!"

  Reversing, he made for the stairs. The worst had happened. Smith was by now either dead or dying.

  "Damn that Smith," Remo hissed. "What the hell's wrong with him? The IRS isn't the KGB."

  He glided up the stairs.

  There goes my last hope of tracking down my parents, Remo thought bitterly.

  An IRS agent was standing guard at the top of the stairs. He made the mistake of challenging Remo.

  "Halt. Who goes there?"

  Remo went for his wallet, intending to flash one of his many fictitious ID cards supplied by Smith. He was wondering if he should try to outrank the IRS agent with his Remo Eastwood Secret Service badge or bluff him with his Remo Helmsley IRS special agent's card.

  The point became moot when the agent pulled out a 9 mm Glock.

  Remo yanked the Glock out of the agent's hand and inserted the blunt barrel into his mouth. The IRS agent looked surprised, then bewildered, then a thin golden stream began to come out of his left pant cuff to cut into the high polish of his cordovans.