Destroyer 006 - Death Therapy

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DEATH THERAPY
WARREN MURPHY
CHAPTER ONE
The shot heard round the world had been stilled for almost two centuries when an Iowa
banker did something far more significant for American independence than fire a single
musket ball at the Redcoats.
He mailed a manila envelope from Lucerne, Switzerland, to his office in the Treasury
Building in Washington, D.C.
It was not an unusually large envelope, nor were its contents voluminous. There were ten
typewritten pages produced in a rush that morning in his Lucerne hotel suite. Many of
the words were incorrectly spelled in a haste of typing fury. He had not used a
typewriter since his days at Harvard Business School nearly forty years before.
What the ten pages said was that America still had a chance to retain its independence,
but that chance was not very good at all. He estimated his country's prospects of
survival at only slightly better than his own, which, in his opinion, were nil.
The ten pages were a memorandum to the President of the United States, but the banker
did not dare mail the envelope directly to him. Nor did the banker, who was also an
undersecretary of the treasury, dare mail the envelope to his official superior, the
Secretary of the Treasury.
No. If what Clovis Porter, undersecretary of the treasury for foreign affairs, had
discovered was true-and he knew as sure as Iowa mud that it was true-then his memorandum
would never reach the President if mailed directly to the President's office.
For access to the President of the United States was part of the horrifying package for
which the international bidding would soon get underway. And Clovis Porter had been just
the person to track it down.
It could have been hidden from practically any intelligence agent in the world, even if
that agent knew what he was looking for. Which he undoubtedly would not have. But the
secret could not have been hidden from a banker. And because Clovis Porter was a banker
and because he had discovered what was so terrifyingly obvious to him, he was going to
die. And there was no one from his own country he could trust to protect him.
Clovis Porter waited, trying not to look too impatient, as the postal clerk pounded the
envelope with an ink pad stamp. The clerk asked in French if the gentleman wished to
send the envelope registered mail.
No, answered Clovis Porter.
Did the gentleman wish the envelope sent first class?
Not especially, came the casual answer from Clovis Porter.
Air mail?
Uh, yes, why not?, answered Clovis Porter absently as he casually glanced around the
small post office. He was not being followed. Good. He would not be this safe in
Washington. But Lucerne? A better chance indeed.
And how is the gentleman enjoying Switzerland?
"A lovely country," answered Clovis Porter, shoveling some franc notes across the
counter at the clerk. "I think I'll stay another two... maybe three... weeks."
Clovis Porter told this to the manager of the hotel also. He mentioned his vacation to
the Swiss bankers with whom he had had lunch. He mentioned it in the car rental office
where he hired a Mercedes Benz for two weeks.
Then in his hotel room, he placed a call to his wife in Dubuque, and while waiting for
it to be completed, printed in his own hand a message to a bright young man he had met
three months before in an office in Langley, Virginia.
The message read:
Mr. A. C. Johnson,
Cormider Road,
Langley, Va.
Dear Mr.Johnson. Stop. Large money movements apparent result of market fluctuations.
Stop.
Nothing unusual. Stop. Just normal. Stop. Am vacationing for two weeks. Stop. Sorry I
could find nothing unusual. Stop. Wasted three months. Stop.
C. Porter.
Then Clovis Porter took off his gray suit, white shirt and dark tie and folded them
neatly into one of the three valises he travelled with. He was middle-aged, yet of such
stature that when he dressed in casual touring clothes, slacks and open-necked shirt, it
appeared as if he had spent his entire life out of doors.
Perhaps because banking had become something he had forced himself to like, his real
love had always been the flat fields of Iowa and the American plains. It would have been
nice, he thought, to have spent his last days on the plains with Mildred, perhaps even
to have his children and grandchildren by his bedside when his time to depart came.
But that was not to be. He had become a banker, then a Republican fund-raiser and then
an undersecretary of the treasury. And if he had wanted that strongly to live his life
with the land, he would not have gone to Harvard Business School In the first place.
Clovis Porter donned his soft Italian leather walking shoes, and, making sure to take
his hotel room key, brought his pencilled note downstairs to the manager of the hotel.
He told the manager that the telegram was urgent, read it to the manager with clerks
listening, made a small scene about the secrecy and urgency of this message that said
all was well. Then, having gathered the focus of attention truly on himself, he stormed
away from the manager, not quite accidentally knocking the handwritten message off the
counter in the hotel lobby.
Naturally, the manager was forced to retrieve the message from the floor, muttering
about "these stupid Americans." Anyone following Clovis Porter could not help but
discover what the message said.
He returned to his hotel room and waited for the phone call to get through to Bubuque.
In ninety minutes by his wristwatch, it did.
"Hello, hello," came his wife's voice, and hearing that voice, Clovis Porter's strong
composure suddenly melted and he gripped the night table, fighting for control of tears
he suddenly discovered he still had.
"Hello, darling," he said.
"When are you coming home, Clovis?"
"In about two weeks, Mildred. How are you? How are the children? I miss you."
"I miss you too, dear. Maybe I should meet you in Switzerland?"
"No. Not here."
"Clovis, if I didn't know you better, I would swear you're having an affair with another
woman."
"Maybe. You know at this time of life what they say about last flings."
"Clovis, I don't know what's going on, but I can't wait for it to be over."
"It will be soon. I'm just going to relax for a couple of weeks here in Switzerland. How
are the kids?"
"They're fine, dear. Jarman is finding himself for the third time this week and
Claudia's second child is still expected around late November. We're all fine and we
miss you. And we all want you home as soon as possible."
"Yes, yes," said Clovis Porter, and because his knees were becoming very weak, he sat
down on the bed. "I love you, dear," he told his wife. "I have always loved you and you
have given me a very good life. I want you to know that."
"Clovis? Are you all right? Are you all right?"
"Yes, dear. I love you. Goodbye."
He hung up the telephone and checked out of the hotel. He drove his rented car towards
the village of Thun at the base of the Alps. It would be good to breathe the clean
mountain air. It would be a good place to die, far from any place where he might
endanger his wife and family.
The manila envelope had a chance, just a chance, to reach the President. And then
America had a chance, although for the life of him, he did not see how the President,
even knowing what was happening, could halt the inevitable flow of events. After all,
whom could he trust to stop them?
Still, inevitable events were funny things and to know what was happening was the first
step toward changing their inevitability. His secretary, Miss T. L. Wilkens, would get
the envelope within a few days-apparently office instructions. That is what the covering
memo said:
To: T. L. Wilkens From: C. Porter Re: Office Procedure
I wish alterations in the formulation of interoffice memoranda. I think you should
change to the pattern we used back at the bank in Iowa. You will see from the attached
message that you will take it to the chief executive of the country, showing it to no
one but himself under any circumstances. We will use monarch-sized stationery in the
future and Number 9M envelopes...
An agent giving the message a fast nervous perusal might just take it at face value as
new office instructions. One had to read the whole note to see that it was more than
just a collection of banking instructions. But it contained the message to the
President, and if Miss Wilkens held to her guns, refused to leave the note with the
President's secretary but waited outside with the stubborness of the Iowa farmer blood
that was in her too, there was a chance. And that was something.
Driving along mountain roads bothered Clevis Porter. The picturesque postcard towns
clustered at the foot of mountains bothered Clevis, just as winding, tree-shaded roads
bothered Clovis.
He wanted to drive on a straight road, straight as a plumbline, and see flat, unending
God's country. He wanted to see corn again, the shoots, then the rising stalks making
the plains a forest of green. He wanted to see the wheat again, flowing like a golden
sea as far as the eye could reach.
He wanted to sit on a man's porch and shake hands on a seed loan, the man's character
being his collateral.
But because of his education and his experience in international finance during the
second world war, Clovis Porter was made an undersecretary of the treasury for foreign
affairs, when it came time to reward Republicans for faithful service.
It had seemed like a career-topping situation. Four, maybe eight, years in Washington,
then back to Iowa, knowing you'd done something big, and then spend the last days with
friends.
Then there had been Washington and no amount of hiking or group discussions or even that
silly encounter group he had joined when the city just got to him too much...none of
those things seemed to replace the vitality a man could feel, standing on good Iowa
earth and talking to friends.
So when that innocent little phone call came three months before, it did not seem so
unattractive to take a world trip, ostensibly to examine international monetary
fluctuations for an economic report. That was his cover story.
He knew now that he should have followed his instincts. Turn down the assignment and
return to Iowa. But he couldn't; he owed it to the Republican party and the country to
stay.
That was just the logic used on him to send him into the world's money markets looking
for the thing that could not be hidden from a man of his sort. And when he found it, he
knew he was a dead man and that the best place to die was away from his loved ones,
where they could not get hurt.
Dammit, it had started so simply with a phone call from the intelligence people who
needed some advice on international currency. Fine. Glad to help. Just a casual
questioning. Nothing formal, nothing to bother the Secretary of the Treasury with. Just
a word or two of background.
So on that winter day, he drove from the slush of Washington into the snow-dappled
countryside of Langley, Va., where he entered a new office building and met a rather
pleasant, clean-faced young man named A. G. Johnson, who asked him a very engaging
question:
"What does a billion dollars mean to you?"
Clovis Porter had barely finished depositing his coat on a hanger when he began to
answer the question.
"In dollars, land, project budgets or what?"
"In gold."
"It doesn't mean much," said Clovis Porter, sitting down. "Only a handful of countries
in the world have that much gold. And those that have it don't use it. They just keep it
in a warehouse someplace, and let it maintain the value of their currency."
"Why would a country try to gather up a billion in gold?"
"Just habit," Porter said. The question intrigued him. "In dealing between countries,
the dollar is as good as gold. But people have been collecting gold for so long, they've
just got the habit. So have countries."
"What could a country buy for a billion in gold?"
"What couldn't you buy?," Clovis Porter said.
"If something were for sale for a billion dollars in gold, could you find out what it
was? And who was getting ready to buy it? I mean, could it be kept secret?"
"To anyone who knew what he was looking for, it would stand out like a blizzard in
July."
"I take it you would know what you're looking for?"
"Yes sir, I would," Clovis Porter said.
"I'm glad you said that," the young man answered, "because we need a little favor."
And that was it. Clovis Porter, who was tired of Washington anyway, went out into the
marketplaces of the world. And he found out which countries were suddenly trying to
build stockpiles of gold, and how they were doing it.
And because he was a banker and because he was willing to liquidate all his assets-even
$2.4 million took a frenzied three weeks to turn into cash-he found out why they needed
the gold.
They were going to bid in an auction. And one billion dollars in gold was the opening
bid. And when he found out what was going on the auction block, he knew that America had
only a slim chance of survival and that he could not even trust the young Intelligence
man who had given him his assignment.
And he also knew that when it was discovered that he had used his personal fortune to
learn what was going on, he would be very much a dead man.
So Clovis Porter mailed the envelope to Miss T. L. Wilkens, then drove out into the
Swiss countryside waiting for them to kill him, hoping that they thought his family was
unaware of what he knew.
He would be discovered three days later, nude, having attempted, apparently, to swim
upstream in the sewer system. Official cause of death: drowning in the excrement of the
good people of Thun. There were witnesses, all of whom thought it odd that a man could
be walking around the town, incessantly humming a strangely happy song, and then only
minutes later take his own life.
The body would be returned to Dubuque for burial, but Miss T. L. Wilkens would not be
there to pay last respects to her employer of the last two decades. She would be running
for her life, because of a seemingiy nanmess telephone conversation she had had with
Clovis Porter the day before his death.
It was long distance from Switzerland, and before she picked up the call, Miss T. L.
Wilkens, a bosomy solid woman with graying hair and bone spectacles, took a freshly
sharpened pencil from a tray in front of her.
"Yes, Mr. Porter. Good to hear from you."
"Did you get the manila envelope I mailed?"
"Yes, sir. Came in this morning."
"Good. Good, It was office instructions and I've been thinking that I want to rewrite
them. So why don't you just tear it up, throw it away, and I'll prepare a new one when I
get back. All right?"
Miss T. L. Wilkens paused and, in a flash, she understood.
"Yes, Mr. Porter. I'm tearing it up right now. Want to hear?"
"Did you read it yet?"
"No, Mr. Porter. Haven't gotten to it yet."
"Well, as I say, just tear it up."
Miss T. L. Wilkens slipped some blank paper from a drawer and tore it neatly down the
middle in front of the phone receiver which nestled under her ample chin.
"Good," Porter said. "See you in a few days. Miss Wilkens. Bye."
And because Miss T. L. Wilkens had indeed read the entire memorandum, she proceeded
directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and would not leave the President's outer office
until at 11:00 that night, at her urgent insistence, the President agreed to see the
secretary of the undersecretary of the treasury for two minutes. He spoke with her for
two hours. Then he said:
"I wish I could offer you the protection of the White House, but as you know that may
not be worth all that much anymore. It's probably the worst place. Do you have any money
for travel?"
"I have credit cards."
"I wouldn't use them if I were you. Wait a minute. I haven't carried cash for years. A
strange job." The President rose from his seat and went to an outer office. He was back
in a few minutes with an envelope.
"There's a few thousand in there. It should last you for a couple of months. And by then
you'll know if you can surface again."
"Probably never, sir. It looks pretty bleak."
"Miss Wilkens, we're not out of the box yet. Not by a long shot. We're going to win."
And he ushered the surprised woman to the door and wished her good luck. She was
surprised because of his confidence, and in her Iowa farmer's way, she wondered if he
were not just acting for her benefit.
But what she could not know was that someone's brilliant, perfect and thorough plan had
a flaw. Precautions had been taken to prevent every existing American agency that could
stand in the way of success from even reaching the President's office. But the plan
could not take into account an organization that did not exist-and a man who was
officially dead.
And now, if the President faced danger from unknown quarters and was unable to trust
anyone, let his enemies be blissfully unaware. Because he was still able to unleash upon
them the most awesome human force in the nation's arsenal.
The President bounded from his office with new energy and soaring confidence. He went to
his bedroom but instead of getting undressed for bed, he took a red telephone from a
drawer in his dresser. He dialed a seven-digit number, just as if it were an ordinary
telephone.
"Doctor Smith here."
"It's me," the President said.
"I assumed as much."
"You must see me as soon as possible here. I will leave word that you are to be brought
in to me as soon as you arrive."
"I don't think that's wise, sir. We could eventually be compromised and knowledge of us
could compromise the government."
"That might not matter very much anymore," the President said. "You must see me
immediately. Your group may be the last hope of this government."
"I see."
"I guess you'll be putting that person on alert, Dr. Smith?"
"I'll have to see what we're dealing with first, sir."
"This is the greatest national emergency we have ever faced. You will find that out as
soon as you arrive. Now, put that man on alert."
"You are talking to me, sir, as if I work for you. I don't. And in the agreement that
established us and the ensuing modifications, you cannot order the use of that person."
"I know you will agree," the President said.
"We'll see in a few hours. I will leave immediately. Is there anything else?"
"No," said the President.
There was a click on the other end of the phone. The man had hung up his receiver. And
the President was sure that when that man discovered what had happened to the government
of the United States and what was in the process of happening, he would unleash that
person.
The President returned the phone to the drawer and then from his pocket took the ten
sloppy pages of typing given by Miss Wilkens before. He again read the entire contents.
"Well, all right," he said softly to himself.
"They asked for it. Now they're going to get him."
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo.
And when he stepped up to the first tee of the Silver Creek Country Club in Miami Beach,
he was mad. Not a raging anger, but a solid, definite annoyance that would not leave.
It was 5:30 a.m., and the reddening dawn sky was just breaking into light as he whacked
his drive down the empty fairway and handed the driver to the bushy-haired caddy in the
bell bottoms. The caddy was still rubbing his eyes, apparently not planning to wake up
until noon.
He did not speak to the caddy as he marched toward the ball. He did not really even need
a caddy, but if golf was his relaxation before his morning exercises, then, by god, he
was going to enjoy it like a normal human being.
He had some rights after all, even if normal procedure was violated at will every time
upstairs got a hair up its ass.
He took the next club from the caddy and, barely setting himself, popped the ball toward
the hole. Then he exchanged the club for the putter, walked to the green, banged in the
ball and took his driver again.
One would think, what with the awesome resources, the massive computers, the far-ranging
network, that upstairs would once, just once, come into something not as a loosey-
goosey, the world's going to end, top maximum priority, be ready by tomorrow-screwball
pack of squawking geese. The man named Remo slammed the drive to the green. When he
walked, he seemed to float. His movements were smooth and his golf swing was smooth, the
club moving with what he had been told was incredible slowness.
He was about six feet tall and average in build. Only the extraordinarily thick wrists
set him apart from other men. His face was healing from his last operation and now, with
his angular cheekbones and cruel, self-indulgent smile, he looked like an up-and-coming
Mafia underboss.
It was the new face after each assignment that got to him. He didn't even have a choice.
He would go to a small hospital outside Phoenix, leave with bandages, and then two weeks
later, eyes blackened from the operation, facial muscles sore, he would see what sort of
face upstairs had decided to give him. Or maybe it was just left to the whim of the
doctor. It was anyone's choice but his.
The putter was in his hands; feeling the roll of the green, he sent the ball on its way
toward the cup. Before he heard the plunk, he was on his way to the next tee.
Whack. Remo drove the ball down the fairway, hooking it from the long dog leg left. He
flipped the driver behind him and heard the caddy catch it.
It was truly the new faces that bothered him. But dead men can't be choosers, can they,
Remo, he told himself. He waited by the ball as the caddy puffed his long way from the
tee. The caddy's breathless plodding rush toward Remo should have told him something,
but he ignored it. The green rose 170 yards ahead. When the caddy reached him, Remo
said: "Check out the flag placement, will you?"
The caddy trudged off toward the green. Remo whistled softly to himself. The caddy
seemed to take forever.
Why was upstairs always in a rush? His shoulder hadn't even healed yet from that scrawny
mobster in Hudson, New Jersey, who had passed out before Remo's floater punch could
land. Remo's hand kept going and so did his shoulder. Now it was just completing its
healing. Upstairs must have known that.
The night before, when he had made his evening check from his hotel room, he had dialed
the correct number on the scrambler attachment after hearing the first ring, and then he
heard something that sounded as if the line were still scrambled.
"Remo. Be at peak by tomorrow afternoon. I'll meet you at 10 p.m., main restaurant,
Dulles Airport in Washington. No time for new identity. Come as you are."
"What?" said Remo, checking the scrambler dial again.
"You heard me. Ten p.m. tomorrow night. Dulles Airport." Remo looked at the phone again.
It was working.
He stood, clad only in his undershorts, by the bed in his hotel suite. In the next room,
he could hear the television blaring. Chiun was still in his third hour of soap operas.
The air conditioner hummed almost noiselessly.
"Doctor Smith, I presume," Remo said.
"Yes, of course. Who the hell else would answer this number?"
"I had cause for wonder," said Remo. "For one, I don't peak, not even fast peak, in less
than two weeks. And you haven't even put me on alert yet. Two, you yourself arranged the
Mickey Mouse switching of identities everytime I go to the John. Three, if we're going
to run pell mell into everything, why do we have to bother with the plastic surgery? And
four, the next operation I get returns me to something like what I looked like before I
got suckered into this lashup. And that's the last one."
"Chiun says you can function below peak and work to it."
"Chiun says."
"Yes."
"What about what I say?"
"We'll talk about it tomorrow night. Goodbye."
Then the click of the phone. Remo gently removed the plastic and aluminum scrambler
device and with his right hand slowly squeezed until the circuits began to pop under the
cracking plastic. He kept on squeezing until what he held in his hand was a solid rod of
crushed electronics.
Then he went to the next room where the television was on. Sitting two feet from the
set, in a lotus position, was a frail wisp of an Oriental in robes, his white beard
flowing from his parched face like the last strands of pale cotton candy.
He was watching Dr. Lawrence Walters, psychiatrist at large. Betty Hendon had just
revealed to Dr. Walters that her mother was not really her mother, but her father posing
as an upstairs maid in the house of Jeremy Bladford, the man she loved, but could never
marry because of her teenage marriage to Wilfred Wyatt Homsby, the insane recluse
billionaire, who was even now threatening to close down Dr. Walters' new clinic for the
poor, "Chiun," yelled Remo. "You tell Smith I could function below peak?"
Chiun did not answer. His bony hands remained crossed in his lap.
"You wanna get me killed, Chiun? Is that what you want to do?"
The room was silent but for Dr. Walters' peroration on why it was important for people
to accept themselves as people and not as others expected them to be.
"I'm gonna unplug that set, Chiun."
A slender finger with a delicately tapered nail of almost equal length rose to the old
man's lips.
"Shhhh," said Chiun.
Fortunately, the fadeout organ music came on and an obnoxious child jumped on screen,
breaking up her mother's card game to tell her about the state of her teeth. The mother
seemed pleased. So did the other players, all of whom had four of a kind, and they
demanded to know what dentifrice the child used.
"You need not be at peak all the time, any more than a car must drive at ninety miles an
hour all the time."
"When a car's in a race, it helps to be able to move fast."
"Depending upon what or whom one is racing," Chiun said. "A car need not run fast to
beat a turtle."
"And the whole world's my turtle?"
"The whole world is your turtle," Chiun said.
"But suppose I run into a very fast turtle?" Remo asked.
"Then you pay the final dues of our profession."
"Thanks. It's always a comfort having you around. I'm into an assignment by tomorrow
night."
"Work the walls then," Chiun said. "And a word of caution, my son."
"Yeah?"
"Anger will destroy you faster than any turtle. Anger robs the mind of its eyes of
reason. And you live by your mind. We are weaker than the buffalo and slower than the
horse. Our nails are not so sharp as the lion's. But where we walk, we rule. The
difference is our minds. Anger clouds our minds."
"Little father," interrupted Remo.
"Yes?"
"Blow it out your ears."
Remo turned from the sitting room, back into the bedroom, and began to work the walls,
first running toward one, then bounding back, then toward another and bounding back,
then off a wall in a corner and onto the adjacent wall, and back and forth, from wall to
wall, building speed, until finally he was moving like a blindingly fast tapeworm,
around the room, on the walls, his feet not touching the carpeted floor.
It was a good exercise. It was a good way to work off energy and anger, Remo thought.
Chiun was right as he had always been right. The difference was the mind. Most men could
use only a small percentage of their coordination and strength. At peak, Remo could use
almost 50 per cent. And Chiun, elderly Chiun, the master of Sinanju, the trainer of Remo
and the father Remo never had, could muster more than 75 per cent of his capabilities.
It was merely doing all the time what most men were capable of doing only in rare
instances.
Remo waited for the caddy to plod his way back. He could not see the flag on the raised
green, surrounded by the deep sand traps. The wind was moving left to right and the
grass smelled deep and rich and good from the constant care. To the left of the fairway
a few twigs cracked, as though crushed by a heavy animal. The noise came from a clump of
trees bordered by hedges.
The caddy returned. He was breathing heavily and barely got out the words.
"Eight feet behind the lip of the green, just along the line of the sand trap. The
green's fast and the grain is toward you. The green slopes away from you downhill."
The caddy made a slanted motion with his hand indicating the angle of slope.
"It's a hundred and seventy yards. The way you been shooting, you ought to take a
pitching wedge."
And then Remo realized he had not been playing his game. In anger, he had just been
shooting for score, instead of carefully placing the ball in a sand trap here or in the
rough there, and intentionally putting for imaginary holes several feet from the real
hole. He had been playing his best possible game and in front of a witness.
"You're something else, Mr. Donaldson," the caddy said using Remo's latest name.
"Give me the four iron."
"The way you been shooting, Mr. Donaldson? I've never seen anybody shoot like you."
"What are you talking about?" Remo asked casually.
"Well, eagle-eagle is a pretty good start."
"You must be hung over," Remo said, taking the four iron. "You're not awake yet. I got a
bogey and a par. I know what I shot. What were you smoking last night?"
Remo set his feet very carefully and took two awkward backswings. Then he sliced a sweet
curving shot 170 yards-70 yards forward and 100 yards into the next fairway.
"Damn," said Remo, throwing his club ahead of him in the plush fairway. "And I had a
good game going."
The caddy blinked and Remo carefully watched his eyes to see if the caddy would forget
those first two holes. The answer would be in his eyes.
But the eyes said nothing, because they were no longer there. A red gash splashed
through them to his skull, and Remo had heard the whirring of the bullet before he heard
the crack of the shot from the clump of trees bordering the fairway.
The shot spun the boy around, club bag spilling the irons and woods wildly onto the
fairway. Remo ducked behind the spinning body, using it as a sandbag. When the boy hit
the ground, Remo hit the ground simultaneously, flattening to the contours of the young
man. Two more high-power slugs thwapped into the boy's body. No crossfire, Remo thought.
He could tell by the heavy impact on the boy that whoever was in the clump of trees was
using heavy stuff. Maybe a .357 Magnum. He was also zeroing in.
The boy's body jumped again. Whoever it was, was using a single shot rifle. And because
of that he was going to die.
A pause, and the body thumped again. Remo was off. First fast, sideways without changing
directions, a bullet behind him. Stop, slow roll to the right, letting the marksman
overload. From right to left he moved, travelling the fairway like a pin-ball, closing
the distance between himself and the sniper. And then he realized that there were three.
A shot spit up mud at his feet, and then two men emerged from the bushes, one on each
side of the rifleman, their faces blackened like commandoes, their uniforms dull green,
their boots black and high and polished like paratroopers. They wore black stocking
caps, and they came out wrong, moving one behind the other. The first man held a short
machine pistol, inaccurate beyond forty yards.
The golf shoes were no help. Real speed was hindered by spikes. Change of direction came
not from equipment but from within. The great football players like Gayle Sayers had it,
doing things that seemed impossible. And they were impossible to the eyes that believed
balance was a matter of footwork. The best sole for movement was the sole of his foot,
and the spikes were slowing Remo down, as he angled to set the three men in a line so
that only one could shoot at him at a time.
A roll, a fast stop and another roll got rid of the spiked shoes with the help of short
kicks; now Remo was padding the heavy damp grass of the fairway in his stockinged feet.
Remo moved head-on into the forty-yard range of the first man, and the middle man
brushed the front man slightly in an effort to establish his own line of fire. The front
man stopped for a moment.
Remo went into a straight speed line and was on the leader in a flash, his right thumb
rigid, making a sweeping arc up as he closed in. By the time he was arms' length from
the leader, the thumb was driving and then the thumb bit deep into the first man's
groin, sending him careening back with a pathetic lip-surrendering "ooh" into the second
man. The "ooh" was very soft, which was not surprising, since his left testicle was now
adjacent to his lower lung.
With his left hand, Remo brought his fingernails up to the shin of the second man who
was trying to get off a shot with his machine pistol. The fingernails went through his
face as if it were head cheese.
And then, unbelievably, the sniper who was reloading, stood up and threw away his rifle.
He did not reach for his .45 caliber sidearm, but stood in the karate sanchin dachi,
feet curved in, pigeon-toed, arms curved slightly in front, fists rigid.
The man was tall and lean and hard, the kind of man whose face gave Texas its
reputation. His fists were the size of pound coffee cans. He towered over the hedges.
Now he waited calmly for Remo's assault, the glint of his teeth matching in brilliance
the colonel's eagles on the shoulders of his uniform.
Remo stopped.
"You gotta be kidding, Mac," he said.
"Step up, little boy," the colonel said. "Your time has come."
Remo chuckled, then put his hands on his hips and laughed out loud. He stepped back, out
of the rough. The man with the displaced testicle had passed out. The other, with the
split face, was writhing on the ground in a growing bath of blood, his khaki fatigues
darkening.
The colonel looked at the two of them, then at Remo, and then began softly to hum to
himself.
Remo took another step back and the colonel took a step forward. He moved jerkily to his
right as he moved forward, obviously in preparation for an inverted fist, low thrust.
"Who taught you that dingaling move?" Remo said, dancing backwards, but not so far that
the man could use a quick draw on his .45.
"C'mon, you traitorous punk," the colonel said. "I'm going to cleanse America of you."
"Not with an weaken shita-uchi," Remo said. "Not by you; not by that move."
"Stand still and fight," the colonel said.
"Not until you tell me who taught you that nonsense," Remo said.
"Agreed," the colonel said thinly. "The U.S. Special Forces," and then he moved forward,
sending a blindingly fast right hand snapping down towards Remo's face. Unfortunately
摘要：

DEATHTHERAPYWARRENMURPHYCHAPTERONETheshotheardroundtheworldhadbeenstilledforalmosttwocenturieswhenanIowabankerdidsomethingfarmoresignificantforAmericanindependencethanfireasinglemusketballattheRedcoats.HemailedamanilaenvelopefromLucerne,Switzerland,tohisofficeintheTreasuryBuildinginWashington,D.C.It...

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