Brain Drain

by Warren Murphy

  The commercials were on again, so Chiun commented: “Is this your Fourth of July? If so, why did I not see many fat women with children?”

  “No,” said Remo. “How come you didn’t complain about Smitty interrupting your show?”

  “Complain to an emperor?” said Chiun, shocked. “It was your job to see that he left before my meager pleasures were intruded upon. I was left without your help when I needed it most.”

  “You didn’t miss anything. You could come back to one of those shows five years from now, and you wouldn’t miss anything. Rad Rex will still be wearing that silly doctor’s smock, still trying to discover a serum that can teach him how to act.”

  But Chiun was rock silent. The commercials fed into the soap opera and he folded his long fingernails and like a gently settling petal lowered himself to the floor.

  The two stars of this soap opera, Val Valerie and Raught Regan were talking in bed. They were not married.

  “Disgusting,” said Chiun, and he did not talk again until late afternoon when all his shows were over. By then, Remo had heard that a man was seriously injured in town. A little boy on a bicycle shared the gossip.

  “Yeah. He was a doctor, too. From New York. The police said he ran a sanitarium there in someplace that’s named after bread.”

  “Whole wheat sanitarium?” Remo said.

  The boy shook his head.

  “Rye?” said Remo.

  “That’s right. He ran a sanitarium in Rye.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE HOSPITAL SMELLED OF ETHER TRACES and constant scrubbing. The woman at the information desk said yes, a gentleman had been admitted in serious condition. Yes, the explosion victim. His wife had been notified. The name was Dr. Harold Smith, and no, Remo could not be allowed to see him because he was in the intensive care unit.

  Remo smiled boyishly, told the plump middle–aged information woman that she had beautiful eyes, caught her left hand like a fluttering bird and then, as if he were absentminded, moved the pads of his fingertips sensuously along the underside of her wrist. They looked into each other’s eyes and discussed the weather and the hospital, and Remo saw a red flush creep up her neck.

  In the middle of her halting dissertation on the coming Cape Cod summer, she allowed that while the young man couldn’t get permission to enter the intensive care unit, no one ever stopped anyone from entering if he just walked in wearing a white coat. There were white coats in the laundry in the basement and no one ever stopped anyone from taking laundry. Where was the young man going? Would he be back? She was getting off work at eight o’clock. They could meet in a motel. If not a motel, then a car in the parking lot. What about a stairwell? An elevator?

  For some reason, the laundry room was locked. Remo pressured the handle straight back, and the door popped open. The pressure looked as though he merely pushed open an unlocked door. He stepped into hospital whites and was out in the hallway looking for ICU. He rode an elevator up with two nurses and an X–ray technician. One of the nurses gave him one of those smiles. Why was it, thought Remo, that now that he had this sort of attraction, he didn’t have that strong desire to make any use of it? What he could have done with his Sinanju training when he was eighteen.

  Smith was under a tent, tubes going into his nostrils, the left side of his head in gauze and sanitary white tape. He breathed heavily but not without the solid life throb of a body waging a successful struggle for its existence. He would be all right.

  “Smitty,” said Remo softly. “Smitty.”

  Smith opened his right eye.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello yourself, dummy. What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Smith said. “Where are my clothes?”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Remo said, looking at the tubes running to tanks beside the bed. It was as if Smith himself were a part of this bed unit and to move him would rip him away from his life support system.

  “I know that,” Smith said. “The Tucson program was in my jacket pocket.”

  “I’ll get it. I’ll get it. How did this happen?”

  “Well, there was this very tasteful piece of sculpture in the town square. Sort of a bicentennial art celebration, and I went close to examine it. Really very nice, and then it exploded.”

  “Sounds like some sort of trap. You think there’s some connection with the people at Bay State?”

  “No, no. They were just another group of disturbeds, who got together with Arnold Quilt. He wanted to make money, they wanted to make revolution. No, they were just a small unconnected unit. You finished it.”

  “They had gotten into our computer system.”

  “No. Just Quilt had. He found the revolutionaries; they didn’t find him.”

  “Where did he get the readout that called me recalcitrant, unstable, and idealistically confused?”

  “From the computer bank, of course.”

  “I mean, who fed it in?” Remo asked.

  “The computer had a list of humans it was supposed to analyze, and that was its own judgment. So that people could be continually measured against what they used to be. You’d be interested in knowing that ten years ago the computer declared you recalcitrant, unstable, and idealistically confused. You haven’t changed at all.”

  “Nobody interviewed Chiun about me?”

  “No. Is something wrong?”

  “No,” lied Remo. “You and I both know computers are big, dumb adding machines. I mean, you know me and, uh, it’s just a silly readout. I’m not going to be offended by a computer readout.”

  “Get the clothes and the program, please. I’m going to rest. I feel awful.”

  “No drugs?”

  “I refused them. I can’t go under drugs, Remo. You know that.”

  “There’s something that can help a bit. Not much, but a bit. Pain is really the body letting you know it’s fighting to survive.” Remo slipped his left hand between Smith’s perspiration–wet white hair and the coarse fabric of the pillow, and where the spinal column met the skull, he applied light pressure.

  “Now, breathe in slowly, like you’re filling up your body with air. White air. Feel the white air come into you. Like the sun, it’s light. Feel it? Feel it?”

  “Yes. It’s better now. Thank you.”

  “No dipwiddle computer can do that,” Remo said.

  He walked into the hallway, still resenting the computer that had insulted him steadily over the past ten years, and met a nurse outside the door who reminded him of a computer.

  Her uniform was precisely starched and creased. She had a bland unresponsive face, and when she smiled, it was one of those plastic testimonials to overbite that you saw on television toothpaste commercials. Yes, she knew where Dr. Smith’s clothes were. He had been asking for them before, which was peculiar because they were bloodied and shredded and his wallet and money were put by his bed to make him feel better. But he didn’t seem satisfied. Almost as if he didn’t care for the money or driver’s license. Just wanted his clothes, no matter what shape they were in.

  “Give him whatever he wants in the future,” Remo said, flashing the sexy smile and exuding manhood around the nurse like a warm wet fog.

  “Certainly,” said the nurse unmoved. She flashed a small smile in return, sort of a hello acknowledgment to someone on the street you don’t really want to talk to. But Remo did not really pay attention. His mind was on Smitty and the clothes and the computer that had insulted him.

  The business office of Cape Cod General had the clothes in a plastic bag. And would the doctor like anything else?

  “No, thank you,” said Remo. Funny, the nurse outside Smith’s room hadn’t called him doctor.

  In the stairwell, Remo searched the jacket pockets of the blood–moist clothes. His hands felt the stiff paper with the holes along the edge. The program. He took it out to check. There were the payroll figures with the little pencil marks that the late Arnold Quilt had put on them.

  But ther
e were no more white edges to the paper. The edges were red. The paper had been photocopied. Someone had gotten into the hospital and made a copy of that program. The sculpture that went boom had been no accident.

  Remo took the stairs to Smith’s room. He opened the door and was stunned. The bed, the support systems, all were gone. Only the black cord with a button to call the nurse hung uselessly from the wall. The room was empty.

  “Nurse, what happened to my patient?” said Remo to the plastic, smiling nurse whom he had asked to give Dr. Smith everything he wanted.

  “He’s been removed.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Down the hall,” said the nurse, pointing. Her hand moved funny, something most people wouldn’t notice because they had not been trained to understand that even the bending of the finger involved the whole body. No part could move without the other parts adjusting. Yet this pointing hand just came up with its finger stuck out as if it weren’t connected to a body, but a wall. Remo, senses sharp, noticed it. Perhaps the nurse had suffered some sort of nerve damage. That might explain why she had not responded to his overtures before.

  Remo moved quickly down the hallway, but not so fast as to attract attention. A doctor running down a hall in the hospital would terrify any onlooker. Remo opened a door. There was a tent and the tubes going into a nose. But the face was wrinkled and surrounded by faded blonde hair. The patient was an old woman holding onto her last note of life. It was not Dr. Smith.

  Down the hall behind him, the smiling plastic nurse pointed at Remo and said, “That’s him.”

  Two overweight policemen nodded and waddled down the hall, their hands on their holsters. The nurse disappeared into a stairwell.

  “You there, halt,” said one officer. “Who are you?”

  “I’m looking for a patient.”

  “So are we. Let’s see your identification.”

  “I’m looking for a patient in the intensive care unit. Middle–aged man. Have you seen a bed with support systems?” asked Remo.

  “We want to know who you are.”

  Remo slipped through them and opened the next door. Another intensive care room, but no Smith.

  “You there, stop. What are you doing? We’re officers. You’ve got to stop.”

  Remo checked the next ICU room. A child. Not Smith.

  “You know you’re avoiding arrest?”

  “Later,” said Remo. The next room was an old man. Then the empty room where Smith had been, and, finally, in the last room in the corridor, a middle–aged man. But not Smith.

  “All right, buddy, you’re under arrest,” said the officer, out of breath from following Remo.

  “Good,” said Remo, not listening. “Fine.” He looked for the nurse. The stairwell was empty. He looked for another nurse. None to be found. In an intensive care unit, to boot, not one nurse in sight. There was a gray metal swinging door that led to another corridor. More rooms. A maternity ward. No Smith.

  “If you don’t stop, I’m going to shoot,” gasped the perspiring officer. His partner leaned against a wall, catching his breath at the other end of the corridor. Remo saw an elevator. Maybe the bed had been rolled into the elevator. He pressed the button. The elevator doors opened. Two green–coated men with green hats stood beside a table on wheels. The patient was covered by a sheet. Remo looked under the sheet while rubber–gloved hands tried to stop him. The head was bandaged. People yelled furious things at him while he made sure it wasn’t Dr. Smith under the bandages. It wasn’t.

  The officer pointed the gun. Remo flicked on the safety catch of the .38 police special while the officer squeezed the trigger. Then Remo felt a fatty burden on his back. The officer was trying to wrestle him to the ground.

  Remo put the officer outside the elevator doors and pressed “up.” The men in green were on him. They went into the soft side padding of the elevator. The elevator was very slow. At each floor, Remo asked if anyone had seen an intensive care unit bed with a middle–aged man. No. Thank you. One of the green–coated men said he was a surgeon and demanded to be taken to the second floor. It was an emergency, and who was this lunatic, anyway?

  “Shhhhhh,” Remo said. “I’m busy.”

  When they reached the second floor, after checking the sixth, seventh, eighth, fourth, and third, Remo let them out with their patient. Even the basement with the laundry room was bare. When Remo left through the parking lot, squad cars with brightly lit cherries on top were pulling in. Two patrolmen, guns drawn, ran into the hospital. Remo took their car and sped out into the town streets. The gear stuck in low. Other police cars skidded around and followed Remo.

  He crashed through a barrier onto the beach. Churning sand, he drove the car into the surf, where he could slip out into the cool evening waters. The salt water enveloped his body, his legs and arms moving with the flow. The discarded doctor’s robe floated, and he moved down to where the sand brushed his chest, his whole body snapping with the sharp rhythms of some large fish. In this way, he swam parallel to the shore and was seventy yards north when he surfaced and moved quietly to the darkened beach. Men fired plinking shots at the floating white coat back where he had left the car. Bathers on the beach saw the police firing, saw the coat floating and began shouting “Shark. Shark. Shark.” By tomorrow the shark sighting would be covered by the press coast–to–coast, and the tourist business at Cape Cod would boom like it never had before.

  “We’re in trouble,” said Remo, when he reached the small white cottage.

  Chiun gestured that the situation was nothing. “I forgive you for being late. If I were not capable of forgiving, I could not endure you. It is my nature to forgive. But I warn you, no Persian king will be as forgiving. A Persian king will always demand the appearance of prompt service. But you know this.”

  “We’re not going, Little Father,” said Remo.

  “Rest. You are wet from something,” said Chiun.

  “I said we’re not going, Little Father. Smith is in trouble.”

  “And what trouble is that?”

  “He’s been injured. And kidnapped.”

  “Ah,” said Chiun. “Then we must show that the House of Sinanju will not tolerate this. We will execute his bodyguards, and then we will leave for Persia.”

  “He didn’t have bodyguards.”

  “Then why are you surprised by his misfortune? It was inevitable. It is quite clear he is mad and not even the House of Sinanju could save him. You recall that thus I have already written it in the records. The archives know of the Mad Emperor Smith. There is no worry. No blame will attach to us.”

  “The organization is without a head.”

  “Beware,” said Chiun. “You are an assassin, not an emperor. You have assassin’s tools, not emperor’s tools.”

  “I don’t want Smitty’s job.”

  “Then what concern is it of yours who is emperor?”

  “It’s the organization I care about. CURE.”

  “Why should you care about this organization?”

  “Because I’m part of it, Little Father.”

  “Quite correct, and you have done your part, far beyond what anyone could expect.” The long fingers rose, making a final point.

  “It’s not enough,” said Remo. “If you want to go to Iran, go. I’ve got work here.”

  “The best thing a flower can do is bloom. It cannot plant seed or harvest seed.” But Chiun’s reasoning did not prevail. Every so often the lunacy of Western thought surfaced in this young man, and the Master of Sinanju decided he had better watch his pupil, lest in this insanity he hurt himself, squandering the wealth of knowledge that was the teaching of Sinanju.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DR. HAROLD SMITH HAD SEEN Remo go for the coat just before the nurse returned to the room.

  “We are moving you,” she had said, and he felt the bed glide to the door. The whole support system moved with him. Apparently it was a new bed, because the nurse moved it easily, as if it were a light wicker wheelchair. Th
e overhead lights in the hallway looked like fogged moons because of the distortion of the oxygen tent’s plastic. He heard elevator doors open and saw the ceiling of the elevator come over his bed. He felt the elevator lower.

  “Am I going to be operated on, Nurse?”

  “No,” came the voice from behind his head. It was flat and mechanical.

  Smith had felt fear before. The numb tension before a drop over France in World War II, when he was with the OSS. The silent scream of his mind in that Bucharest basement, when the NKVD passed overhead searching the houses, and Smith was with a professor torn between fleeing to the West and saving his life by turning in Smith. It was different fear then. Some things had still been in his control. And death could be quick.

  Now he was helpless. His mind was trapped in a crippled, pained body to which any passerby had more access than himself. He could not move his left arm, and he knew that if he tried to raise his head he would pass out. His chest felt as if it had caught a pot of boiling lye, and his left eye throbbed.

  He saw the elevator ceiling recede, and then he was in a basement of some sort. The nurse returned to the elevator, and he was alone.

  It seemed like no more than a few minutes before she returned and wheeled him out into the cool spring–evening air that felt momentarily good on his body.

  When he felt his body slip away as if he were floating under a sparkling lake, he heard cars screeching and police sirens. But that was far away. He was in a truck and the doors were shut behind him, because it was black all around him. Or was that because he could not see?

  When the lights came, the very harsh lights that even shone into his bandaged eye like leaves of exploding orange, he heard no more cars. He smelled oil nearby and heard the sound of the sea coming up against rocks. His shoulder burned again.

  “Well, Doctor Smith, I see that you are in pain.” The voice sounded like the nurse. It was very flat. Smith could not see where it came from.

  “Yes. Who are you? What am I doing here?”

  “You are here to answer questions.”