Destroyer 031 - The Head Men

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DESTROYER #31: THE HEAD MEN

For Hank nocte dieque incubando

CHAPTER ONE

This death threat made him think.

It had that real quality about it, as if it weren't so much a threat as a promise.

The caller had sounded so much like an authentic businessman that Ernest Walgreen's

secretary had put him right through.

"It's a Mr. Jones."

"What does he want?" asked Walgreen. As president of DataComputronics in Minneapolis,

Minnesota, he had learned to rely on his secretary, so much so that when he met people

at business functions he would instinctively look for her to tell him which person he

should warm up to and which he shouldn't. It was a simple question of not bothering to

use his own judgment because his secretary's had proved so much better over the years.

"I don't know, Mr. Walgreen. He sounded like you were expecting his call. He says it's a

somewhat private matter."

"Put him on," Walgreen said. He could work while he talked, reading proposals, checking

out contracts, signing documents. It was an executive's attribute, a mind that could be

in two

places at once. His father had had it; his own son did not.

Walgreen's grandfather had been a farmer and his father had owned a drugstore. Walgreen

had thought there was a natural progression, from farm to pharmacy to executive suite,

and on to possibly president of a university or perhaps the clergy. But, no, his own son

had bought a small farm and had returned to growing wheat and worrying about the

frequency of the rains and the price of crops.

Ernest Walgreen had thought the progress of the Walgreen family was a ladder, not a

circle. There were worse things than farming, but few that were harder, he thought. But

he knew it would be of no avail to argue with his son. The Walgreens were stubborn and

made up their own minds. Grandpa Walgreen had once said, "The purpose of trying is

trying. It ain't so damned important to get somewhere as it is to be on your way."

Young Ernest had asked his father what that meant. His father said, "Grandpa means it

isn't how you put it in the bottle, but what you put in."

Years later Walgreen realized that that was just a simple contradiction of what Grandpa

had said, but by then he didn't have too much time to think about it. He was too busy,

and before Grandpa died he commended Ernest Walgreen for using his very modest skills,

"to become one of the richest little pissers in the whole damned state. I didn't think

you had it in you." Grandpa Walgreen talked like that. All the Walgreens made up their

own minds.

"Mr. Walgreen, we're going to kill you," came

the voice over the telephone. It was a man. A steady voice. It was not the usual sort of

threat.

Walgreen knew threats. His first ten years out of the university were spent guarding

President Truman in the Secret Service, a career which, despite its promised promotions

for one as bright and thorough as Walgreen, did not go as far up the ladder as Walgreen

had intended to take himself and his family. But because of that he knew threats and he

knew most of them were made by people who couldn't carry out real physical harm on their

targets. The threat itself was the attack.

Most of the real dangers came from people who never sent any threat at all. The Secret

Service still checked out the threateners and had them watched, but it was not so much

to protect the President as to protect the department in the unlikely event that a

threatener actually went out and tried to do something about his hatred. Eighty-seven

percent of all recorded death threats made in America over a year were made by drunks.

Less than three-hundredth's of one percent of those threats ever resulted in anything.

"You just threatened my life, didn't you?" said Walgreen. He put aside the pile of

contracts and his desk, wrote down the time of the call, and buzzed his secretary to

listen in.

"Yes, I did."

"May I ask why?"

"Don't you want to know when?" said the voice. It had a twang, but it was not midwest.

Walgreen placed it somewhere east of Ohio and south. Virginia in the west, possibly. The

voice sounded in the late forties. It was raspy. Walgreen wrote down on a small white

pad: 11:03

a.m., twangy voice, South. Virginia? Male. Raspy. Probably a smoker. Late forties.

"Certainly I want to know when, but more than that I want to know why."

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," said Walgreen.

"In due time. What are you going to do about this?"

"I'm going to report it to the police."

"Good. And what else?"

"I'll do whatever the police tell me."

"Not enough, Mr. Walgreen. Now you're a rich man. You should be able to do more than

just phone the police."

"Do you want money?"

"Mr. Walgreen, I know you want to keep me talking. But I also know that even if the

police were sitting in your lap, you would not be able to trace this call in less than

three minutes . . . and considering they are not, the real talking time is closer to

eighteen minutes before you could trace this call."

"I don't get death threats every day."

"You used to. You dealt with them all the time. For money, remember ?"

"What do you mean?" asked Walgreen, knowing exactly what the caller meant. The caller

knew Walgreen had worked for the Secret Service, but even more important knew exactly

what Walgreen's job had been. Even his wife didn't know that.

"You know what I mean, Mr. Walgreen."

"No, I don't."

"Where you used to work. Now, don't you think you could provide yourself some good pro-

tection with all your friends at the Secret Service and with all your money?"

"All right. If you insist, I'll protect myself. Then what?"

"Then we'll kill your ass anyway, Ernie. Hahaha."

The caller hung up. Ernest Walgreen wrote down the last note on the sheet. 11:07- The

caller had spoken for four minutes.

"Wow," said Walgreen's secretary, bursting into the office. "I got down every word he

said. Do you think he's for real?"

"Very," said Ernest Walgreen. He was fifty-four years old and he felt drained that day.

It was as if something in him were crying about the injustice of it. As if there were

better times for death threats, not when his son's wife was about to give birth, not

when he had bought the ski lodge in Sun Valley, Utah, not when the company he had

founded was about to have a record year, not when Mildred, his wife, had just found a

consuming hobby of pottery that made her even more cheerful. These were the best years

of his life and he found himself telling himself that he was sorry this threat didn't

come when he was young and poor. He found himself thinking, I'm too rich to die now. Why

didn't the bastards do it when I had trouble with the mortgage payments ?

"What should I do ?" asked his secretary.

"Well, for the time being, we'll move you down the hall. Who knows what these lunatics

will do and there's no point getting anyone killed who doesn't have to be."

"You think they're lunatics?"

"No," said Walgreen. "That's why I want you to move several offices away."

To his sorrow, the police also thought it was a call by a lunatic. The police gave him a

lecture that came right out of a Secret Service manual on terrorists. Worse, it was a

dated manual.

The police captain was named Lapointe. He was roughly Walgreen's age. But where Walgreen

was lean and tanned and neat, Lapointe's fleshy expanse seemed held together only by his

uniform. He had condescended to see Walgreen because Walgreen was an important

businessman. He spoke to Walgreen as if addressing a ladies' tea on the horrors of

crime.

"What you've got is your lunatic terrorist, unafraid to die," he said.

"That's wrong," Walgreen said. "They all say they're willing to die, but that's not the

case."

"The manual says it is."

"You are referring to an old Secret Service manual which was acknowledged as incorrect

almost as soon as it came out."

"I hear it all the time. Just on television, a commentator said terrorists aren't afraid

to die. I heard it."

"It's still wrong. And I don't think I am dealing with a terrorist."

"The terrorist mind is cunning."

"Captain Lapointe, what I want to know is what are you going to do for the protection of

my life?"

"We're going to give you thorough police protection, weave a defense web around you on

one hand and try to identify and immobilize the terrorist in his lair on the other

hand."

"You still haven't said what you are going to do."

"I most .certainly have," said Lapointe, har-umphing indignantly.

"Be specific," said Walgreen.

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," said Walgreen.

"It's very technical," warned Captain Lapointe.

"Go ahead."

"First we pull files looking for an MO, which is..."

"Which is modus operand! and you're going to find out all the people in this area who

have phoned other people threatening to kill them, and you're going to ask them where

they were at 11:03 today and when you find a few who give funny or contradictory

stories, you will annoy them until they tell you something that the city attorney is

willing to prosecute on. Meanwhile, the people who are going to kill me will have killed

me."

"That's very negative."

"Captain Lapointe, I don't think these people are in your files. What I would like is a

team surveillance and some access to people who know how to use weapons. With luck, we

might foil the first attempt on my life and be able to find out possibly who the killers

are. I think it's more than one which gives them more power but also makes them more

liable to exposure, especially at their linkages."

"Secondly," said Lapointe, "we're going to send out an all points bulletin . . . that's

an APE . . ."

Walgreen was out of Lapointe's office before the sentence was finished. No help there,

he thought.

At home he told his wife he was going to Washington. Mildred was at her small Shim-oo

pottery wheel. She was centering a reddish mound of clay and the spring heat had given

her skin a healthy flush.

"You've never looked so beautiful, dear."

"Oh, c'mon. I'm a mess," she said. But she laughed.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think more and more how right I was to

marry you. How lucky I was."

And she smiled again and in that smile there was so much life that the great death he

knew he was facing, made no less great by its commonness to all men, was, in that smile

of life, made less fearful for a moment.

"I married a beautiful person too, Ernie."

"Not as beautiful as I did."

"I think so, dear. I think so."

"You know," he said, trying to be casual but not so casual that Mildred would see the

effort and suspect something, "I can finish up a Washington project in three weeks, if .

.."

"If I got away on a trip," she said.

"Yes," said Walgreen. "Maybe to your brother's in New Hampshire."

"I was thinking of Japan."

"Maybe we'll both go, but after your brother's."

She left without finishing the pot. It would be two days before he found she had spoken

with his secretary and knew how seriously he had taken that telephone threat. He would

realize later she knew why she was being sent away and did not let on so he would not

carry the extra burden of worry. When he did realize it would be too late.

She took an afternoon flight to New Hampshire and the last picture Ernest Walgreen would

remember of his wife was how she fumbled with her purse for her ticket, as she had

fumbled with her purses since he had met her so very long ago when they were young

together, as they had remained until that airport, young together, always.

At Secret Service headquarters in Washington, when Ernest Walgreen got through the lower

functionaries to finally speak with a district man, he was greeted by:

"Well, here comes the big rich businessman. How ya' doing Ernie? Sorry you left us,

huh?"

"Not when I buy a new car," Walgreen said and added softly, "I'm in trouble."

"Yeah. We know."

"How?"

"We keep track of our old people. We do guard the President, you know, and we like to

know what our old friends do all the time."

"I didn't think it was still that tight."

"Since Kennedy, it stays that tight."

"That was a helluva shot that guy got from the window," Walgreen said. "Nobody can stop

that kind of stuff."

"You know better than I do. When you're bodyguard to the President, nobody measures your

success by how many assassination attempts fail."

"How much do you know about me?"

"We know you think you're in trouble. We know that if you stayed with us, you would have

gone to the top. We know some local police are making noises and moves on your behalf

that

you're supposed to be unaware of. How good are your locals, Ernie?"

"Locals," said Walgreen.

"Oh," said the district man. It was a gray-fur-nitured office with the antiseptic

cubicity of those who have very specific jobs and need not be expansive to the public.

Walgreen sat down. It was not the kind of office that even old friends offered each

other a drink in. It was more a file cabinet drawer than an office as Walgreen knew it,

and he was very glad he had left the Secret Service for carpets and drinks and golf

dates and all the cozy amenities of American business.

"I'm in trouble, but I can't dot the 'i' on it. It was just a phone call, but the voice

... it was the voice. I don't know how much you know about business, but there are

people you know who are just for real. It's a calmness in their voices, a precision. I

don't know. This one had it."

"Ernie, I respect you. You know that."

"What are you driving at?" asked Walgreen.

"A phone call isn't enough."

"What do I have to do to get you guys in on it? Be killed?"

"All right. Why does this person want to kill you?"

"I don't know. He just said I should get all the protection I could."

"Were you drinking?"

"No, I was not drinking. I was working."

"Ernie, that's a standard crank call you got. That's a standard. They tell you to get a

gun, to put on extra men, 'because, buddy, I'm gonna blow your brains out.' Ernie.

Please."

"It was for real. I know standard crank calls. You're lucky you've got computers

nowadays to

keep track of them. I know crank calls. Moreover, I think you know I can tell the

difference. This voice was not a crank. I don't know the why of it but, between you and

me, this one's for real."

"You know I'm helpless, Ernie."

"Why?"

"Because in a report, it doesn't have Ernie Walgreen looking me in the eye like you're

looking now and me knowing, right where you know it, that these people are for real.

Knowing it in the gut."

"Got any suggestions ? I've had a lot of practice making money."

"Use it, Ernie."

"With whom?"

"After Kennedy got shot out from underneath us, there was a big shakeup here. Pretty

quiet but pretty big."

"I know. I had something to do with it," Walgreen said. The district man looked at him

with mild surprise.

"Anyway," the district man said, "it didn't do anything because there was no way we

could have stopped a guy getting in a shot like Oswald did, but we had to look like we

made some changes so we could tell Johnson that the Secret Service that lost Kennedy

isn't the same as the one guarding you now. In the shakeup, some good men, really good

men, quit. They were very bitter. And I can't blame them. They have their own security

agency now . . ."

"I don't need some retired policeman in a blue uniform to discourage shoplifting."

"No, they're not your normal corporate security. They do super stuff for super people

and I'm talking about protecting foreign heads of

state too, designing their palaces and everything. They're even better on protection

than we are because their clients don't have to go running around to every airport crowd

shaking hands. God, that terrifies me. Why couldn't a Howard Hughes hermit be '

President instead of some damned politician? It's always a politician." He paused.

"What'd you mean, you had something to do with the shakeup?" he asked.

Walgreen shrugged. "I did some work for the President," he said, "in the security area."

"Which President?"

"All of them. Until this one."

The firm name of retired Secret Service people was Paldor. He said the Secret Service

had sent him and he was ushered into the kind of offices he was used to, a touch of

strong elegance with a good view.

Cherry blossoms and the Potomac. A friendly Scotch on the rocks. A sympathetic ear. The

man's name was Lester Pruel and Walgreen knew something about him. He was six feet one,

tanned and healthy, with sharp, discerning blue eyes. He had a comfortable smoothness

about him that government employees, in contrast, seemed to lack, the sort of manner

that indicated he made decisions. The decision he made for Ernest Walgreen was 'no.'

"I'd like to help you," said Pruel. His gray-blond hair was marcelled in a very dry

look. "And we do go out of our way for old friends from the Service. But fella, it's one

frigging phone call."

"I've got money."

"We charge a hundred thousand for just a

look. Now that's for sending some people out to figure out what we'd really charge you

when we get down to work. We're not sending a bunch of cadoodles in blue uniforms and

tin badges, two steps off the welfare rolls. This is real security."

"That's a lot of money."

"Fella, we'd do it for nothing, if we thought it was real. We like our contacts with our

kind of people. We'd even like you, Walgreen, to come to work for us. Except you look

like you're doing pretty well for an old service man."

"I'm going to die," said Walgreen.

"Have you been sort of light on sex lately? I mean, sometimes at your age we lose a

sense of proportion about things. Now both you and I know from training that one phone

call . . ."

The next night, Ernest Walgreen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was flying to Manchester

Airport in New Hampshire to identify the body of his wife.

A syringe had been pressed thoroughly into her temple, as if somebody had attempted to

inject something into her brain. Except this was a veterinarian's syringe and it had

been empty. What had been injected into the brain was the large needle to make the brain

stop working.

And, as an added measure, a good dose of air. Air in the bloodstream killed. The body

was found in the back seat of her brother's car, with no telltale fingerprints on the

car, none on the syringe. It was as if someone or something had come into this little

northern community, done its job, and left. There was no known motive.

The casket with her body was already at the Manchester Airport when Walgreen arrived.

Les-

ter Pruel was standing next to the casket. His face was grim.

"We're all sorry. We didn't know. We'll give you everything. Again. I'm sorry, I'm

sorry. We thought, well, it was just a phone call. On the face of it, you've got to

admit . . . look, we can't bring her back but we can keep you alive. If you want us to."

"Yes, I do," said Ernest Walgreen. Mildred would have wanted that, he thought. She loved

life. Death was no excuse for the living to give up on it.

She was buried at Arcadian Angels cemetery, outside Olivia, county seat of Renville,

amid the rich farmlands where Walgreen's father had been born and where his own son now

plowed with tractor the ground that Walgreen had once plowed with horses.

It was. the strangest funeral Olivia, Minnesota, had ever seen. Well-dressed men stopped

mourners coming to the graveside to ask them what the metal object was in their pockets.

They would not let them go near the grave unless they first showed what the metal was.

An Olivia businessman, an old friend of the Walgreen family, said the strangers must

have devices somewhere like airports had that detected metal on people.

A nearby hilltop was scoured and a hunter was told to move on. When he refused his gun

was taken. He said he was going to the police. The men told him, "Fine, but after the

funeral."

The car Ernest Walgreen drove up in was also strange. While other tires left the pattern

of their rubber-gripping tread in the fresh spring earth, these dug in a good four

inches. The car was a heavy one. A youngster who got through the men

always surrounding the limousine said the metal "didn't make no hollow sound, like

usual."

It wasn't a car. It was a tank with wheels designed to look like a car. And there were

guns. Hidden under suitcases, behind newspapers, inside hats, but guns to be sure.

Eesidents wondered whether Ernest Walgreen had gone into crime.

"The Mafia," they whispered. But someone pointed out that the men didn't look like Mafia

types.

"Shoot," said someone else in a rare bit of wisdom, "the Mafia's probably as American as

you and me."

Someone else remembered that Ernest Walgreen had once worked for the government. At

least that was the rumor.

"It's easy. Ernie must have become a spy for the CIA. He must be one of those fellas

what has to be protected 'cause he shot up so many of them Russians."

Walgreen watched Mildred's white ash coffin being lowered into the narrow hole and

thought, as he always did at funerals, how narrow the holes were and how small the last

space was. And thinking of Mildred going down into that hole, he broke. There was

nothing left but tears. And he had to tell himself it was not his wife disappearing, but

the body. She had gone when the life went out of her. And he remembered her one last

time, fumbling with her purse at the airport, and he thought: All right, let them end it

now. Whoever it is. Let them finish me now.

So deep was his grief, it demolished hate and any desire for revenge.

The Paldor security team decided his home was too exposed to risk. Too many blind

entrances and exits.

"It's an assassin's delight," said Pruel, who had personally taken over Walgreen's

protection.

For Walgreen, it was a relief to leave that house because Mildred was still there, in

every part of it, from her potter's wheel to the mirror she had cracked.

"I have a vacation cabin in Sun Valley," said Walgreen. "But I need something to do. I

don't want to think. It hurts too much."

"We'll have plenty of work for you," said Pruel.

The Sun Valley house proved to be an ideal fort, with what Pruel called a few

modifications. Paldor refused to take any payment. To keep Walgreen's mind occupied, Les

Pruel explained the latest techniques in top security.

"For all history, you've had imposing stone forts and moats and men standing around with

weapons. That is until a new technique came about. Maybe it was stumbled on, I don't

know, but it changed everything. And what it was is sort of magic."

"Mystery."

"No, no. Magic like Houdini. Like magicians. Illusion. In other words what you do is

present something that isn't there. It sounds risky but it's the safest damned thing

that ever was. It's absolutely one hundred percent foolproof. If Kennedy had it, he

never would have been assassinated in Dallas. Never. Oswald wouldn't have known where to

shoot."

Walgreen followed every step and as each new

device was installed, he realized the genius of the new technique of illusion. It was

not to stop an assassin from trying. Rather you wanted him to try because that was the

greatest trap.

First the windows in the house that appeared to be normal see-through glass were changed

so that what you saw inside was really three or four feet off. You really saw

reflections from the polarized glass.

And there were two access roads that were opened wide. Or so it seemed. But the roads

were wired and if cars didn't stop when ordered to by someone who appeared to be a

forest ranger but was really a Paldor agent, the road would suddenly open up at a

specified point, leaving two ditches in front and in back of any car which refused to

stop.

The slope of the hill housed another electrical system that picked up urine odors of any

human body. It had been developed in Vietnam. And all the surrounding hills were cabined

by people who appeared to be just vacationers when in reality they were Paldor agents.

The illusion was that Ernest Walgreen's country cabin was a country cabin, instead of an

electronic trap. It worked on the assassin's mind so that when he saw Walgreen puttering

around in his garden from a nearby hill, he would think: I can kill that man just by

driving up and putting a bullet in him. I can kill that man anytime I want. And I'd

better do it now because he'll never be so open again.

Now if some assassin had a rifle on that nearby hill, a woman fixing her fence would tap

an electronic signal and the assassin would not only fail

to get off a shot but would in all likelihood end up with a bullet himself.

There was no way, Walgreen realized, that anyone could reach him and he was sorry he had

not had this earlier so Mildred could share this safety with him. The pine cabin was

protected from every angle of approach. And on August fifth, as the heat crossed the

great American plains backing the midwest, the foundation of the cabin rose. And when

the temperature hit 92 degrees, a very volatile explosive, waiting in the foundation

since spring, spread the house in one very loud bang across the Sun Valley recreation

area.

Along with its sole occupant, Ernest Walgreen.

In Washington, this matter was called to the attention of the President of the United

States. An Annapolis graduate and a physicist, he was not about to be panicked.

"Murder seems like a local crime," he said.

"It's not just murder, sir," said his aide in a thick Southern drawl, so syrupy most

Northerners drummed their fingers waiting for the man to get through the vowels and on

to those rare consonants Southerners occasionally allowed to enter their speech.

"What is it then?" asked the President.

"It was an assassination that might be a warning for us. We believe it is."

"Then give it to the Secret Service. They're responsible for my protection. I'm fairly

certain this man didn't have as good protection as I do and besides, assassination is

always with a President of this country. It's part of the job."

"Well, sir, this isn't just any old assassination,

You see, sir, it wasn't that he had worse protection that you. The Secret Service tells

us he had better. And the people who killed him . . . well, they say you're next, sir."

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he was exercising. Not the way a high school coach would exercise

a team did this man exercise. He did not push muscles or strain ligaments or drive his

wind to the breaking point so that the breaking point would be farther back next time.

Straining and pushing were things long past, only dim remembrances of how other men used

their bodies incorrectly.

Nothing fighting itself ever worked to its utmost. But that which did what was attuned

to itself was the most effective it could be. A blade of grass growing and reaching for

light could crack concrete. A mother, not reminding herself she was a woman and

therefore incapable of strength, could-to save her baby-lift the rear end of an

automobile off the ground. Water falling with gravity cut through rock.

To be most powerfully human required divesting oneself of that which was most human, a

pure undiluted thought. And Kemo was one with himself as he moved out smoothly and his

body, with the snap of his toes extended out and restful with the gravity, let the

forty-five feet of air be-

tween him and the sidewalk below take him down from the building ledge.

There were forces that acted on the body in free-falling flight, that if one allowed

fear-triggered adrenalin to dominate, could crush the bones of the body as it collided

with the pavement.

What one had to do was to be able to coordinate the meeting with the pavement ... to

make the fall slower at the bottom.

It would not be really slower, any more than baseballs pitched to the great hitter Ted

Williams were slower than those pitched to anyone else. But Ted Williams could see the

stitches on the pitched baseballs and therefore could hit the ball with his bat more

easily.

Remo, whose last name had also been Williams a long time ago but was no relation to the

ballplayer, also slowed things down by becoming faster with his mind, the most powerful

human organ but the one used least by most people. Less than eight percent of the human

brain was ever used. It had become almost a vestigial organ.

If men ever learned to use that mind, they would, like Remo-his hands extended now

before him-catch the world on the sidewalk, compress it back up so that there was no

sudden push on the body, but only a minutely accurate division of stress, until ... no

more. No stress and back up on feet and look around. Salamander Street, Los Angeles.

Empty sidewalk, just daybreak in Watts.

Remo picked up the two twenty-five cent pieces that had fallen out of his pocket and

looked around for more change. Early morning was always quiet in black neighborhoods, a

special

nothing-doing time of day, where if you wanted you could do compression dives off

buildings and no one would go running around saying:

"Hey, did you see that guy do that? Did you see what I saw?"

Remo was six feet tall with high cheekbones and dark eyes that had an electric cool

about them. He was thin and only his extraordinarily thick wrists might indicate that

here was something other than the normal decaying flesh most men allow their bodies to

become.

There had been high dives by people without full body control, but they used foam and

inflated giant pillows to absorb the smack crack of forty-eight feet so that the

material, not the diver, controlled the impact.

They also lacked control of their organs, assuming the intestines and liver acted like

independent planets. Considering what foulness they consumed for energy and how they

breathed, they were fortunate that cells were allowed to control themselves. If the

people had done it, they would hardly have lived to reach puberty.

Remo looked back at the building.

Exercise now had become a re-realization of what his body was and what he did and

thought and breathed. The flat slap of a soft rubber tire hobbled through a pothole two

blocks down. A yellow car with a light on top indicating a cab for hire slowly came up

the street.

Remo waved at him. He had to get back to the hotel. He could run it but he did not need

the running, and if he should be fortunate enough to luck into a cab at this hour and

this place, why not?

Remo waited as the cab came close. There were important things to do that morning.

Upstairs

had come up with a new wrinkle. Remo could never follow the code words and always ended

up snarling at middle-aged Dr. Harold W. Smith:

"If you can say it, say it. If not, don't. I'm not going to piddle around with letters

and numbers and dates. If you want to play with yourself, feel free. But this code

nickypoo is the pits."

Smith, who to the outside world ran a sanitarium called Folcroft on Long Island Sound,

was in the west to deliver personally something he had been unable to say in code on the

telephone. The few words Remo had understood meant that it had to do with the new

President and some safety measure. Smith was to be at the hotel for exactly ten minutes

and out again, under the rather workable and usually successful theory that if there is

something that is dangerous, one should do it as quickly as possible. Don't give

disaster a lot of operating time.

And there was always a danger in Smith meeting Remo, because to be seen with the killer

arm of CURE would be a crucial link to admitting that there even was a CURE, the

government's extra-legal organization, set up in a desperate attempt to stave off the

impending chaos of a government weakened by its own laws but still resolved to

administer them publicly.

Remo watched the cab slow down, then take off by him. The driver had seen him. Remo knew

that. The driver had looked right at him, slowed, then stepped on the gas.

So Remo kicked off the loose loafers, so that the soles of his feet could skim better

along the pavement.

He wore a tight black tee shirt over loose gray pants that snapped as the wind pressure

whipped

on the skimming, darting legs. He was moving on the cab, out into the cool morning

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DESTROYER#31:THEHEADMENCopyright(c)1977byRichardSapirandWarrenMurphyForHanknoctediequeincubandoCHAPTERONEThisdeaththreatmadehimthink.Ithadthatrealqualityaboutit,asifitweren'tsomuchathreatasapromise.ThecallerhadsoundedsomuchlikeanauthenticbusinessmanthatErnestWalgreen'ssecretaryhadputhimrightthrough....

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Destroyer 031 - The Head Men

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