Destroyer 020 - Assasins Play-Off

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THE DESTROYER: ASSASSINS PLAY-OFF
Warren Murphy
He who plays with the sword shall succumb to him who works with the willow branch.
HOUSE OF SINANJU.
CHAPTER ONE
He had paid $8,000, all that was in his family's savings account, and had promised
$12,000 more in three years of monthly installments to be sitting in the drafty main
room of this Scottish castle in the drizzly, bitter chill autumn of the highlands, his
knuckles on the floor, his weight on his knees in a position of respect.
They had remodeled the room, they said. A new wooden floor, polished to a high gloss.
New rice-paper tapestries with the symbols of Ninja—the night fighters—of
Atemi, the fist methods; of Kung Sool, the archery; of Hsing-i, the boxing; and many
others he did not recognize.
But they had not taken away the draft from Kildonan Castle, north of Dundee and south of
Aberdeen, inland from the Firth of Tay. Only the Scots, thought William Ashley, could
create a structure that was drafty without being ventilated.
And even the Koreans couldn't overcome it.
The large room smelled of pungent sweat mixed with fear and perhaps it was the chill
that made Ashley's knees ache and his back feel as if someone were tightening a garrote
on his spinal column. Not since he was a novice in the little commercial karate dojo in
Rye, New York, had Ashley felt the pain in the position of respect, knees on floor,
hands extended outward so that you rested on both feet and hands. It was in that little
dojo after work that he learned respect for himself in the conquest of his body. Learned
to control his fears and his passions, learned that it was not the yellow belt or the
green belt or the brown belt or even the highest—or what he thought was the
highest then—the black belt, that was important; no, what was important was what
he became with each step taken toward a perfection far off in the distance.
And it was precisely this striving for perfection that had brought Ashley to the
highlands with his family's savings and his three-week annual vacation.
He had initially thought that perfection was an unattainable goal, a thought that kept
men rising and improving, a goal that when you were closest you realized was farther
away. A place and a thing beyond where you would ever be. It was a direction, rather
than a destination.
Which is what he had said in the Felt Forum of Madison Square Garden last month. Which
was why he was here, $8,000 poorer and telling himself, like all those who really
understand the martial arts, that body pain must eventually diminish.
He had made the remark about perfection being unattainable to a Korean who had come to
the annual martial arts exhibit and who had commented somewhat complimentarily on
Ashley's performance.
"Almost perfect," said the Korean, who wore a dark business suit with white starched
shirt and a red tie. He was young but somewhat fleshy around the jowls.
"Then I am happy," said Ashley, "because no one is perfect."
"Not so," said the Korean. "There is perfection."
"In the mind," said Ashley.
"No. Here on earth. Perfection you can touch."
"What school are you with?" asked Ashley, who himself was karate but knew of kung fu,
aikido, ninja, and many other fighting methods of the body.
"Perhaps all schools," said the Korean. Ashley looked at the man more closely. He could
not be older than his thirties, and such arrogance in one so young surely meant
ignorance rather than competence. He reminded himself that not all Orientals knew the
martial arts any more than all Americans knew rocketry. The man had obviously come to
the Felt Forum to see what the martial arts were about and just as obviously was a
windbag. There were Orientals who talked through their hat, too.
The Korean smiled.
"You doubt me, don't you, William Ashley?" he said.
"How do you know my name?"
"Do you think your name is a secret?"
"No, but I am surprised that you know me."
"William Ashley, thirty-eight, computer programmer for Folcroft Sanitarium, Rye, New
York. And you think because you are a grain of sand on the beach, I should not be able
to tell you from any other grain of sand on the beach, and you are surprised that I know
you."
"Very," said Ashley who knew what to do in situations like this. He was supposed to call
Folcroft Sanitarium and report it because the information he worked with at the
sanitarium was top security. The sanitarium walls were just a cover. He, along with two
other National Security Agency programmers, had been sent there seven years before, and
so secret was their work that no one man could tell, even if he were forced to, about
the scope and nature of any project he worked on.
But something about this Korean made Ashley hesitate.
"If you are surprised, you have a very poor memory."
Bill Ashley slapped his thigh and laughed.
"Of course. I remember. Last year. Just before Christmas. You had been in some sort of
accident, with crude oil, I think, and had suffered skin burn. Severe, if I remember.
You came to our dojo and you were recuperating and our sensei said you were a great
master. Your name was, don't tell me, I remember, I remember, I remember…"
"Winch."
"Right. Winch," said Ashley. "How do you do, sir. It is an honor to meet you again. Oh,
I'm sorry." Ashley put his hand down. He remembered the man did not shake hands.
Together then, they watched an exhibition of monkey fighting, a peculiar form in which
much leverage was claimed, but Winch pointed out to Ashley that there was no leverage at
all, just the illusion of power.
When one of the fighters knocked the other off the mat, Ashley said that looked like
plenty of leverage to him.
"Only because they were both monkey style, balancing on a single foot, instead of
thrusting from that foot. Anyone with feet wide apart who got close so that he could see
the little lines on the teeth could, with a push, make any monkey fighter look like a
fool."
"I believe it because you say it, but they are both fifth dan black belts."
"You do not believe it, but you will," Winch said and rose from his seat. In a language
Ashley assumed was Korean, Winch spoke to several of the monkey fighting masters who
looked shocked, then angry.
"Put on your gi," said Winch. "You will make the monkey boxer look like a fool."
"But they are all very famous here in the New York area," said Ashley.
"I have no doubt. Many people are famous here. Just keep your feet wide apart and get
very close and push."
"Perhaps a more forceful attack?" said Ashley.
"A push," said Winch.
"What did you tell them?" asked Ashley, nodding past Winch toward the black belt experts
who were staring at him.
"What I told you. That you will make any monkey boxer look like a fool and that they
should be ashamed that true Koreans would lend their presence to such silliness."
"Oh, no. You didn't," gasped Ashley.
"Go," said Winch.
"What about humility?"
"What about truth? Go. You will shame that monkey boxer if you do as I say. Do not box.
Do not attack with feet or slashing or chopping blows. Get close and push. You will
see."
When Ashley, in his two piece gi, entered the ring, he heard snickers from the black
belts. He saw several smile. The monkey boxer chosen to take care of Ashley smiled. He
was about the same age as Ashley, but his body and even his skin was harder, more alive,
for he had been training since he was a child. Ashley had started when he was twenty-
eight.
Ashley bowed his respect before the match, but the monkey boxer, apparently angered by
Winch's derision, stood rocklike, unmoving, ungiving of respect. A low murmur went
through the crowd around the ring. This was not to be done. This was twice that
tradition had been broken. First with the open insult from Winch, and then with the
monkey boxer's failure to honor his opponent.
It was then that Ashley, looking at his opponent's face, knew the man meant to kill him.
It was a smell as much as anything, his own body emitting something that told him he
held his own life in his hands and he did not want it there.
Ashley desperately wanted to assume some known form of defensive position he had
learned, but a greater force took over. His mind. He knew he should not be on the mat
with this expert in the first place. Nothing he had ever learned would be good enough to
compete with this man staring hate from his brown slanted eyes, the face twisted, the
teeth bared, the body rising on the tips of the toes, and then one foot leaving for the
spring. Only something Ashley had never tried before might work. He was committed to
what Winch had told him.
The lights were hot overhead and the crowd seemed to disappear as he forced his
unwilling body to approach the master, as he forced his feet wide for a solid
stance—and then, as he saw the flash of the monkey boxer striking at his eyes, he
also saw the tiny lines of ridge on the man's teeth, and Bill Ashley pushed forward, his
hand coming to the boxer's chest.
Later he would tell people he did not know what happened. But there, in the heat of the
center of the mat, he felt his hand go into the hard chest of the monkey boxer, and the
boxer's blow forced his own body around Ashley's hand like the spoke of a wheel moving
around the hub, and the monkey boxer hit the mat with a thwack. Ashley's hand was still
out there in front of him. The boxer twitched and a drop of blood reddened the white mat
under the dark black oriental hair.
"I just pushed. Not hard," said Ashley.
A few hands clapped and it became applause and a doctor ran up into the ring, and Ashley
kept telling everyone he had just pushed. Really, that was all he had done.
He bowed to the ring, now full of desperate nervous men.
"He'll live," said the doctor. "He'll live."
"He'll live," announced the chairman of the event.
"It may just be a concussion," said the doctor. "Stretcher. Stretcher."
And that was how it had begun. Ashley had dinner with Winch and learned about a new
concept in perfection, frightening in its simplicity.
William Ashley had, all his life, simply believed the opposite about what perfection
was. He had believed it was something martial artists moved toward. But it was the other
way around. Perfection was what they all came from.
As Mr. Winch explained, there was a method, a way, that had to do with the way things
moved and were, that was perfect execution of the art. There was one martial art at the
beginning, in the deep, deep past of the Orient. From this one art came all the others
with all their codes and all their disciplines. And, inasmuch as they differed from this
sun source, they were less.
"Could I learn it?" asked Ashley. They were eating at Hime of Japan, a restaurant on the
other side of Manhattan from Madison Square Garden that served a more than passable
teriyaki. Ashley maneuvered his chopsticks with skill, creating little crevices with his
rich brown meat and vegetables to catch the pungent sour sauce. Winch had only a
spoonful of rice, which appeared to take forever for him to finish.
"No," said Winch, answering Ashley's question. "One cannot put the ocean into a brandy
snifter."
"You mean I'm unworthy?"
"Why must you make a moral judgment? Is a brandy snifter unworthy of the ocean? Is it
not good enough for the ocean? Is it too evil for the ocean? No. A brandy snifter is a
brandy snifter and will take a brandy snifter full of salt water. If you must moralize,
it is good enough for a brandy snifter of the ocean. But for no more."
"I have a confession to make," said Ashley. "When I saw the monkey boxer first strike
canvas, I hoped he was dead. I kept saying that I only pushed, but I had this sort of
fantasy, well, that I had killed him, and I honestly hoped I had killed him, and that it
would make me famous."
Mr. Winch smiled and leaned back in his seat. He placed his stubby yellow hands with the
slightly long fingernails on the table.
"Let me tell you about perfection. All these forms that you have learned come from the
killing forms. But they are not a game, as you and the others make of them. A man who
makes a game of these things will succumb to a child who does things properly. You were
right in your feelings, right to wish that the monkey boxer were dead, because that is
what the sun source of the martial arts was designed to do. To kill."
"I want to learn perfection."
"What for? You don't need it."
"I want to learn it, Mr. Winch. I need it. I need to know it. If I have but one life and
I do one thing in it, then I would know this perfection."
"You have not listened, but then you are a brandy snifter, and I know brandy snifters
and what brandy snifters will do. So let me say now, the cost is high."
"I have savings."
"The cost is very high."
"How much?"
"High."
"In money?"
"In money," said Mr. Winch, "twenty thousand dollars. That is the money price."
"I can give you nine thousand now and pay off the rest."
"Give me eight thousand. There is some traveling to do."
"I can't go out of the country without clearance. It's sort of a job requirement."
"Oh. Are you in the CIA?"
"No, no. Something else."
"Well, then, brandy snifter, we'll have to forget it. Just as well, too. There is a very
high price."
"Couldn't you teach me here?"
"That's not the point," said Mr. Winch. "The point is I am not doing it here. I teach at
a place in Scotland."
"Out of the country. Damn. Still, it's this side of the Iron Curtain and maybe, just
maybe, my people will think Scotland is secure."
"They will, brandy snifter, they will. English-speaking peoples have a well of trust
that is bottomless. For other English-speaking peoples. I will see you at Kildonan
Castle with your eight thousand dollars, brandy snifter."
Bill Ashley did not tell his wife about the $8,000, and he hid the savings book so that
she would not find out. He did not know what he would say when he eventually told her.
He would have to tell her, he knew, but he would take care of that after he had seized
his share of perfection, as much as he could absorb.
The job was something else. While the National Security Agency only used Folcroft as a
cover for the information bank Ashley worked on, he still had to get vacation permission
from the director of the sanitarium, Dr. Harold W. Smith.
Ashley was always careful to maintain his cover precisely when talking to the crusty old
New Englander who thought the information banks contained data on some sort of mental
health survey. Ashley always read from the looseleaf notebook on what he was allegedly
supposed to be working on before he entered Dr. Smith's office.
One thing had always struck him as odd, though. Dr. Smith, who was not supposed to be
that concerned with what his staff was specifically doing, had a computer terminal to
the left of his desk, and unless the NSA had done some clever short-circuiting, that
terminal appeared as if it could get a readout from every computer core in the
sanitarium.
Ashley was sure however that NSA was not about to do some dumbass thing like let the
cover know what it was covering. Still, it was disconcerting to see it there,
disconcerting to just entertain the possibility that the director of a sanitarium might
have access to highly classified secrets, information so sensitive that no single
programmer had access to work outside of his own, and no two were allowed to socialize.
"So you wish to take a vacation?" said Smith. "Early, I see."
"A bit. I feel I could use it, sir."
"I see. And where are you and your wife going?"
"Well, I sort of thought I'd go alone this time. A real vacation. I need it."
"I see. Do you often take vacations alone?"
"Sometimes."
"Oh. When was your last vacation alone?"
"In 1962, sir."
"You were a bachelor then, weren't you?"
"Yes. If you must know, sir, I'm having trouble with my wife and I just want to get away
from her. I've got to get away for a little while."
"Do you think your work will suffer if you don't?" asked Smith.
"Yes, sir."
"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get a rest. Let's say at the end of the month."
"Thank you, sir."
"You're welcome, Ashley. You're a good man."
Bill Ashley smiled when he shook hands, for how would Smith know if he were a good man
or an atrocious misfit? Peculiar fellow, that Smith, with his fear of the sun. The only
other one-way windows Ashley knew of were at the Langley headquarters of the CIA and
Washington headquarters of NSA.
With the Smith formality taken care of, Ashley put in the proper forms to his real boss
in Washington. The answer was yes.
As was custom, he was taken off sensitive matters right away and just did garbage work
waiting for his vacation. On the day before departure he transferred his savings account
into his checking account. He would have liked to have given Mr. Winch the cash
directly, but if his real boss got word—and they had people who would give them
the word—that Ashley had withdrawn $8,000 from his savings in cash just before his
vacation out of the country, there would be more government people around him than ants
on a piece of sugar. He was sure Mr. Winch would take a check. He would have to. That's
all Ashley had.
"Brandy snifter," said Mr. Winch when Ashley was shown into the coldest heated room this
side of outdoors—the lord's chambers of Kildonan, it was called—"you must
first wait until your check clears. A check is a promise of money. It is not money."
When the check did clear, Ashley quickly wished it hadn't, so badly did his back and
arms hurt from waiting in the position of respect on the cold wooden floor. And for
$20,000 he wasn't even getting a private lesson. There were three others in the class.
They were a bit younger than Ashley and a bit more athletic and much more advanced. Mr.
Winch made Ashley watch. Their strokes seemed familiar, yet much simpler. The circling
motions were much tighter than Ashley had seen anywhere else, not so much a fixed circle
but the forcing of a turn around an opponent.
"You see, Mr. Ashley, you were trained to practice you circling motions around an
imaginary point," Winch explained. "Your method was learned from someone a long time ago
who watched this method in practice, probably against someone who didn't move. Sometimes
it works, sometimes it doesn't. That is because it is derivative. All the derivative
arts have their flaws because they copy the externals without understanding the essence.
And there are other reasons. Witness the kung fu masters who attempted to fight Thai
boxers. Not one survived the first round. Why?"
Just to relieve the building pressure on his back from the fixed position, Ashley raised
a hand. Mr. Winch nodded.
"Because they had not been trained to fight but to pretend to fight," said Ashley.
"Very good," said Mr. Winch. "But more importantly, the boxers were hard men winnowed
from the soft. The boxers had used their skills for their living. The boxers were at
work; the kung fu at play. Up, Ashley, on your feet. Assume a position."
"Which position, Mr. Winch?"
"Any position, brandy snifter. Stand or crouch or hide. You'd be better off with a gun,
probably, and perhaps two hundred yards distance. That is, if you had a gun, which I
wouldn't give you."
"What am I supposed to be learning?"
"That a fool and his life are soon parted." Mr. Winch clapped his hands and a large,
blond, crewcut man, with a hard face and ice blue eyes and hands with knuckles meshed
together, danced forward and came into Bill Ashley hard. He also came fast. Ashley
didn't see the blow, and he knew he had been hit only when he tried to move his left
arm. It wouldn't.
The next man, a big bear of muscle and hair, giggled as he took out Ashley's right arm.
It felt as if his shoulders had two hot knives attached to them, and suddenly Bill
Ashley realized he needed his arms for balance. It was very hard to stand, and then it
was even harder when the left leg went and he was down on the floor writhing and moaning
his agony, after the third trainee had delivered the leg blow.
And then the right leg went when Mr. Winch immobilized it with a disdainful kick.
Ashley screamed when they took off his white gi. The bones must be broken, he thought.
This was wrong. You didn't break someone's bones in training. That was wrong training.
He saw a rice paper banner flutter from the ceiling, and he knew by the cold at his back
that someone was opening a window. It was not his imagination. It was getting colder. He
knew his clothing was off, but he could not look. His head had to stay exactly where it
was or his joints felt incredible pain, as if someone were shredding his ligaments with
a rasp.
He saw the banner on the ceiling float down, a lopsided upside-down trapezoid with a
vertical line through it. A simple symbol he had never seen before.
"Why? Why? Why?" moaned bill Ashley, softly, for loud talk made his arms move slightly.
"Because you work at Folcroft, brandy snifter," he heard Mr. Winch say. It was too
painful to turn his head to look at Winch.
"Then it wasn't for my money."
"Of course it was for your money."
"But Folcroft?"
"It was because of Folcroft, too. But money is always nice, brandy snifter. You have
been poorly taught. From your very hello to the world, you have been coming to this day
because you were poorly taught. Goodbye, brandy snifter, you were never made for the
martial arts."
There was one blessing to the chill that overcame his bare body on the new wooden floor
in the lord's chambers of Kildonan Castle. It was going to make everything better.
Already, his pain was numbing and soon it would all be gone. The temperature fell
further at night and Ashley slipped into a deep darkness, only to be disappointed by
weak light in the morning. But when the room was most light, about the time of the high
sun, Ashley slipped again into the deep darkness, and this time he did not come out.
He was found six days later by a detective from Scotland Yard acting on a tip from a
telephone caller who would later be described as having a "vaguely Oriental" voice.
The yard also got Ashley's New York State, U.S.A., driver's license in the mail without
a note.
Since it was addressed to the detective who got the tip, he assumed the body belonged to
William Ashley, 38, 855 Pleasant Lane, Rye, N.Y., five-feet-ten, 170 pounds, brown eyes,
brown hair, mole on left hand, no corrective lenses.
It not only checked out, it became known as the "Kildonan Castle Murder," and the
detective appeared on the telly describing the gruesomeness of the death and how the
yard was looking for a madman.
Ashley had died of exposure, not of the broken limbs, each shattered at the joint, he
said. No, there were no clues. But the murder scene was horrid. Frightfully horrid. Yes,
he could be quoted on that. Frightfully horrid. Never seen anything like it before.
It was when he had finished his second daily press briefing that the man from British
Intelligence had all those questions.
"Did this Ashley fellow take long to die?"
"Yessir. He died of exposure."
"Were any papers found on him?"
"No sir. The bloke was stark raving nude. Exposure will kill faster than thirst or
hunger."
"Yes, we're well aware of that. Was there any indication that he was tortured for
information?"
"Well, sir, leaving a person with four crushed limbs naked on a bare, cold floor in a
drafty highland castle is not exactly a comfort-inducing experience, wouldn't you say,
sir?"
"You don't know, is that right?"
"Correct, sir. Was this chap important in some way?"
"Really, now, that's not something you'd expect me to answer, is it?"
"No, sir."
"Did you find out who had title to the castle?"
"British government, sir. Castle was abandoned for taxes years ago. Owner couldn't keep
it up, so to speak."
"Which means what?"
"Unoccupied, sir."
"I see. Are you telling me ghosts did it?"
"No sir."
"Very good. We'll get back to you. And forget you spoke to me, would you please?"
"Forgotten already, sir."
The report by British intelligence to the American Embassy in London was brief. Ashley
had come to England as a tourist, had proceeded directly to Scotland, spent one evening
at a small inn and was then discovered more than a week later in a condition of
semidismemberment.
It was a closed coffin funeral in Rye, New York. Which was an excellent idea since the
body was not that of William Ashley but a derelict from the New York city morgue. The
Ashley body was in a medical school just outside Chicago where a doctor who thought he
worked for the Central Intelligence Agency was examining the limbs. The blows, more than
likely, had been made by some sort of sledgehammer. The joints were too shattered for
the human hand to have inflicted the damage. Ashley had indeed died of exposure,
contracting pneumonia with the lungs filling and causing death somewhat akin to
drowning.
In Rye, New York, an agent who believed he was working undercover for the FBI, posing as
an agent of a federal reserve board, saw to it that the $8,000 missing from the Ashley
savings account was redeposited with no record that it had ever been withdrawn.
And the only person who knew exactly what all these men were doing and why sat behind a
desk in Folcroft Santarium, looking out his one-way windows at Long Island Sound, hoping
Ashley had indeed been a victim of robbery.
He had ordered the $8,000 put back into the account because the last thing this incident
needed was more international publicity with Ashley's wife crying about missing money.
The National Security Agency had been a bit lax in not having reported the transfer of
Ashley's funds from savings to checking, but by and large it was the most thorough and
accurate of all the country's services.
Dr. Harold Smith, the man whom Ashley thought was his cover, was the only man who knew
what Ashley did for a living. Including Ashley.
He reviewed the man's program files. Ashley had been in charge of storing information on
East Coast shipping. He had thought he was heading an information sorting, which tried
to detect foreign penetration of national shipping, always a key spot for espionage. But
Ashley's real function, which he could never see because he only performed half of it,
was tabulating real shipping incomes versus ladings.
It was part of an overall formula Dr. Smith had worked out years before that showed,
when ladings began to exceed income, that organized crime was gaining too much control
over the waterfronts.
Smith had found out years before that he could not end crime's influence on the
waterfront, which included everything from loansharking to the unions. But what he could
do was to keep crime from controlling shipping. When the formula showed that that was
becoming a danger, a district attorney would suddenly get proof of kickbacks at the
ports or the Internal Revenue Service would get xeroxed copies of bills of sales for a
shipping executive who bought $200,000 homes on a $22,000 a year salary.
Ashley never knew this. He just worked on feeding the computer core. His terminal
couldn't even get a readout without registering it up in Dr. Smith's office. Smith
checked the records. The last time Ashley had requested a readout of the computer was
six months before, and that was merely to check the accuracy of some data he had fed in
the day before.
Going over it for the last time, Smith had to conclude that if William Ashley had been
tortured to the last secret hiding place of his mind, he could not tell his captors what
he did for a living. He simply could not know.
No one in the organization knew what it was that he did for a living—no one, but
two.
It had all been carefully arranged like that years before. It was the essence of the
organization, formed more than a decade before by a now dead president who had called
Smith to his office and told him the United States government did not work.
"Under the Constitution, we cannot control organized crime. We cannot control
revolutionaries. There are so many things we cannot control if we live by the
Constitution. Yet, if we do not extend some measure of control, they will destroy this
country. They will lead it to chaos," said the sandy-haired young man with the Boston
accent. "And chaos leads to a dictatorship. As surely as water falls over a dam, a lack
of order leads to too much order. We're doomed unless…"
And the "unless" that Smith heard was an organization set up outside the Constitution,
outside the government, an organization that did not exist, set up to try to keep the
government alive.
The organization would last for a short while, no more than two years, and then
disappear, never seeing public light. And Smith would head it. Smith had a question. Why
him? Because, the President had explained, in his years of service, Smith, more than any
other manager in the Central Intelligence Agency, had showed a lack of prideful
ambition.
"All the psychological tests show you would never use this organization to take over the
country. Frankly, Dr. Smith, you have what can be uncharitably described as an
incredible lack of imagination."
"Yes," Smith had said. "I know. It's always been like that. My wife complains
sometimes."
"It's your strength," said the President. "Something amazed me though, and I'm going to
ask you about it now because we will never see each other again, and you will of course
forget this meeting…"
"Of course," Smith interrupted.
"What puzzles me, Dr. Smith, is how on earth you could flunk a Rorschach test. It's in
your aptitude records."
"Oh, that," Smith said. "I remember. I saw ink blots."
"Right. And in a Rorschach test, you're supposed to describe what the blots look like."
"I did, Mr. President. They looked like ink blots."
And that was how it had started. The organization was supposed to be an information-
gathering and -dispensing operation, providing prosecutors with information, letting
newspapers get stories to embarrass corrupt officials. But early on it became apparent
that information was not enough. The organization that did not exist needed a killer
arm. It needed a killer arm the size of a small army, but small armies had many mouths
and you didn't very well convince a hit man he worked for the Department of Agriculture.
They needed an extraordinary single killer who didn't exist—for an organization
that didn't exist.
It was really rather simple at first.
The organization had found the man it wanted working in a small police department in New
Jersey, and it had framed him for a murder he didn't commit, and it had electrocuted him
in an electric chair that didn't work, and when he came to he was officially a dead man.
Such was his nature, which had been scrupulously checked out before, that he took well
to working for the organization and learned well from his Oriental trainer,
becoming—but for a few small character flaws—the perfect human weapon.
Smith thought about this as he watched a storm brew darkly over the Long Island Sound.
He fingered Ashley's file. Something did not fit. The method of killing was so insane,
it just might have a special purpose and meaning.
Everything else about the case had seemed orderly, even to the withdrawal of the money.
The killing came after the check had been cashed through a Swiss bank account in the
name of a Mr. Winch. Smith examined again the report from British intelligence. Ashley
had been killed on a freshly finished wooden floor. So heavy machinery had not been used
to crush his limbs because its marks would have showed on the floor. Perhaps light
machinery? Perhaps the killer was a sadist?
For a man who not only did not believe in hunches, but could not quite remember ever
having one, Dr. Harold W. Smith felt a strange sensation when thinking about the Ashley
death. There had been a purpose to the way he was killed. Smith didn't know why he
thought that, but nevertheless he kept thinking it.
Through his evening meal of codfish cake and lukewarm succotash, he thought about it.
Through his perfunctory goodnight kiss to his wife, he thought about it. In the morning
he thought about it even while processing other matters.
And since it was beginning to interfere with his other duties, which could lead to
disruption in the entire organization, it therefore demanded an answer.
And it had to be quickly because, of the two men who might be able to answer the riddle
of Ashley's death, one was on an assignment and the other was preparing to return home
to a small village in North Korea.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the fresh snow fell on his open hand and he felt the flakes pile
up. At the edge of the tall pine tree, across the three hundred yards to the yellow
light coming from the cabin, was fresh, white, even snow, not even drifting in the
windless late autumn evening in Burdette, Minnesota.
Remo had walked to the edge of the clearing, circling the cabin until he was sure. Now
he knew. The perfect clearing in the Minnesota woods was an open field of fire. The
assistant attorney general had made sure of that. If he didn't see anyone coming, then
his dog would smell them, and from that cabin, anyone coming across that open blanket of
white, by ski, by snowshoe, foot by foot, anyone would be almost a stationary target in
the yellow light cutting the November night.
For some reason, Remo thought back to a night more than a decade before when he was
strapped into an electric chair, when he thought he had died, and then had awakened to a
new life as a man whose fingerprints had gone into the dead file, a man who did not
exist for an organization that did not exist.
But Remo knew something that his boss, Dr. Harold W. Smith, did not know. He had died in
that electric chair. The person who had been Remo Williams died, because the years of
training had been so intense that even Remo's nervous system had changed and he had
changed, so that now he was someone else.
Remo noticed the snow melt in his hand and he smiled. When you lost concentration, you
lost it all. If he let the whole thing go, he would next feel chill in his body and
then, out here in the freezing Minnesota snow, he would surrender his body to the
elements and die. Cold was not a fixed point on a thermometer but the relationship
between the body and its environment.
An old children's trick was putting one hand under hot running water and the other hand
under cold water, and then plunging both hands into a bowl of lukewarm water. To the
hand which had been hot, the lukewarm water felt cold. To the hand that had been cold,
the lukewarm water felt hot. So too with temperature's effects on the body. Up to a
certain point, it was not the temperature of the body, but the difference between the
outside temperature and the body's temperature. And if the body temperature could be
lowered, then a man could stand subfreezing weather in a light white sweater and white
gym pants and white leather sneakers, and a man could hold a snow-flake in his hand and
watch it not melt.
Remo felt the quiet of the snow and saw gusts of sparks come out of the chimney of the
摘要：

THEDESTROYER:ASSASSINSPLAY-OFFWarrenMurphyHewhoplayswiththeswordshallsuccumbtohimwhoworkswiththewillowbranch.HOUSEOFSINANJU.CHAPTERONEHehadpaid$8,000,allthatwasinhisfamily'ssavingsaccount,andhadpromised$12,000moreinthreeyearsofmonthlyinstallmentstobesittinginthedraftymainroomofthisScottishcastleinth...

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